But what are the odds of someone tunneling *under* this compound to try to catch stray rays? Methinks a simple grounded welded rebar cage in the concrete underneath would be cheaper then welding the carpet down.
But my Mac runs closr to 40 watts after shutting down the CD, HD, video hardware, and monitor. Now, my Linux box, which runs continually with no power save as it is a server, consumes probably 150 watts continuous.
I'm part of the Mac observer team. My 8500 G3/400/200/1M upgrade with 120M ram does a work unit in 12 hours.
The client is pretty slick for SETI@home, and they're working on SMP clients for those G4 towers or older 604e SMP machines such as the 9600.
I think that the search is a useful thing, and, besides, it's something for the mac to do while I'm at work and the work machine to do when I'm home...
A while ago, the US Navy backed an aircraft carrier up to Seattle, I believe it was, and connected into the power grid to boost power supply when a critical plant went down.
Question: any carriers laid up in San Diego right now? Those things have mammoth power generators.
I can just see it, though: US Navy funds an increase in basic pay by selling electricity to southern California...
Wave power has the odd effect of reducing the amplitude of waves, which has been said to be an environmental problem in itself. It is also important to note that tide power has the same effect on tides, causing damage to tidal colonies through shrinkage.
Solar power simply doesn't have the energy density to power a high-rise office building. It works when there is a lot of land and people who are willing to use natural light, heating, and cooling, but in an office building, the square footage the sun hits isn't sufficient to make any major inroads on the power usage of the building for artificial lights, elevators, heat, cooling, business machines, etc.
Of course, I favor nuclear, but that just isn't done anymore...
A person who has worked for years to get that title probably has some right to having it used, although this guy did sound like an ass. There are two doctors and a masters in my family, and that little PhD is very important to them, such that it appears on all business correspondence for the simple reason that it generates respect. However, expecting that respect out of someone you are currently yelling at is idiotic.
I'd forgotten the correct term for this particular device, but it is technically a thermonuclear battery, as the breakdown of the plutonium results in thermic energy, which is converted to electricity by a very advanced thermopile.
This plutonium is glassified. Entrance into the atmosphere would likely create either single-molecular concentrations locally (remember, long way from space down to earth) or giant chunks. These giant chunks pose next to no hazard for three reasons: the radiation they generate can be stopped by a piece of paper, so if a kid doesn't eat them, you're fine. The US and other governments would be *very* interested to recover the core, as it is quite expensive and easily reusable (two known failures involving RTGs(correct term), and in one case, whole core reused, other case it broke into small pieces, but did not become dust). Three, the plutonium, after being glassified, is devilishly hard to turn into bomb-grade plutonium, as someone else has pointed out, that is a *higher* number isotope, so it can't be reduced, it must be augmented, and that is just as easy to do with Uranium-235, which is far more common. However, if one were to reduce part of this isotope to create an augmented amount, the augmented amount, assuming perfect efficiency, would still be no where near enough to create critical mass. If one were to attempt to reduce the plutonium to U-235 (I don't know if this can be done, just hypothetical), there still wouldn't be enough, because in nuclear bombs, there's no such thing as a small bomb. Even an extremely efficient multi-stage bomb uses considerably more uranium than that, not to mention the plutonium in the trigger and the deuterium and tritium needed.
The fact is that there isn't a single major risk factor associated with the use of this thing. These things have been investigated by every reputable environmental group and have been given a clean slate by all. However, future use is in doubt simply due to lobbying efforts by people who see nuke and go nuts. That's what's sad, because these things are incredibly cost-effective. The same amount of energy from a chemical source would be huge. One of these batteries can produce 500 watts for thirty years.
The actual danger of a Cassini probe accident to a given person in the probe's disaster area is similar to moving to Denver for a year. These anti-nuke guys simply hype up the fact that plutonium is toxic without taking into account the fact that the toxicology of a single particle is minute and one has to have a significant amount inhaled in order to suffer any significant result. I did a report in college on this particular matter (Cassini had not yet been launched), and my report, which I no longer have, concluded that Cassini posed no significant threat whatsoever and demonstrated that my findings were backed up by the findings of several of the less-rabid environmental protection groups.
As a matter of fact, one is far more likely to die from a meteor strike than from a failed mission with a thermo-nuclear battery.
Madeleine Allbright would be easily the most annoying personage ever to make the presidency and probably remain so for a long long time. Imagine the busybody policies such a person could enact...
Tennessee hates him and with good reason. I have a Tennessean friend, and he said of Gore, "He's no longer a native son.", so, if Gore wishes to win a senate seat, he'll have to do it on one of the coasts as a carpet-bagger.
They run against federal law insisting that the rules of the election cannot be changed after the election. Essentially, the USSC insisted that the FLSC had not clearly shown how its decision did not violate FL state law. Since such violation would trigger a violation of federal law concerning the submission of electors, it is possible that congress could refuse the FL electors based simply on this particular decision of the FLSC, so, even if the USSC had refused to intervene despite the fact that it has clear jurisdiction, the congress could throw out the FL electors based on this law. IANAL, IMHO, etc., FLSC acted very irresponsibly in their decision in the first place and the USSC has actually done them a favor by pointing this out...
The FL constitution, like most states, provides that the legislature may step in in case of a crisis, such as potential failure of FL to get its electors certified, which would mean that its votes did not count. If the legislature had stepped in that early, it would have been on shaky grounds, but now that the court challenges leave the situation in limbo, the legislature can legally declare a slate for whomever they please...
One of the *first* things I do to class MyServlet derived from Servlet, or whatever I want to name it, is to create a function 'out'. In servlets, we want to write to system.err most of the time, so that's what it does. It also checks a flag to find out if debugging is on or not so that the servlet doesn't stuff the log. Now, writing to the log is simply:
out("Object orientivity will allow you to do things you never thought possible.");
I used to be a C++ bigot until I used Java at a job, and after using Java, I no longer wish to *ever* use C++ again. It's like banging rocks to start a fire, or using Oracle. Wait, that's another flame war...
Known as graffiti or whatever is used on this thing for typing the wordy commands necessary to use Linux these days. Can just see the proliferation of shell scripts named a, aa, ab, ba, etc...
Intel's size and larger R&D budget would normally mean they could actually release *faster* chips rather than slower ones. Perhaps this new floating point system will take off, but if not, Intel just bet the farm figuratively on something that is completely untested.
Intel, like Microsoft, is a derivator. Much of what they've done is simply an adaptation of previous work. No problem; that is what everyone does. Problem starts when they release two chips in a row which are demonstrably slower than chips in the stable already, but more expensive. When the P-III came out, I remember benchmarks showing it slower than the P-II for many things. The P-IV shouldn't surprise anyone. It took forever to create a P-II that was faster than a PPro in multiprocessor configurations. None of this is really bad, but Intel proceeds to advertise as if these are a lot faster than previous models, and the fastest on the market, which is laughable.
Good golly, the Pentium-75 was probably the single most stable thing Intel ever made. By the time it came out as a 50 MHz base bus, 50MHz systems were finally stable. Then the 1.5 multiplier didn't overly tax Intels tiny cache and the fact that it was most decidedly not scalar meant that it couldn't outrun its cache, either. Oh, happy bliss, cpu mated to motherboard where cpu doesn't outrun motherboard and motherboard doesn't slow down cpu. I used to spec those things for servers even after the 166s were out because of their stability, reliability and the fact that memory bandwidth and drive bandwidth are more important to a server, anyway. Until the PPro, the 75 was my choice.
In server applications, those 75s in a good motherboard were often faster than 120s in bad motherboards, anyway. Buy the cheaper cpu and get more memory.
1. Four registers, which are really not general purpose, means the cpu *has* to be heavily memory to memory, making cache difficult.
2. Look at the lookaside buffer mess that they use to support memory to memory and speculative execution. Trust me, there are three times as many transistors in that as in the PPC system, and the PPC system can actually execute entirely superscalar, where as Intel is merely scalar.
3. One everyone seems to have forgotten: triple-sigma 386 CPUs. The old 16MHz and 20MHz 386s had a imult bug in 386 extended mode that made them useless, as imult is how addressing is done...
4. The 386 extended mode was *much* worse programmatically than 286 extended. Imagine if you took a 24-bit address space and tried to make a 32-bit address space backwards compatible. The segmentation mess isn't bad in 32 bits, but the selectors are a mess, and are divied up into lots of fields, making for only 32,000 virtual pages, if I remember right. I was looking into writing an object-oriented operating system as part of schooling, and Intel was too hard to use. PPC is much cleaner, with simpler descriptor page caching and far more deterministic prediction algorithms.
The FBI maintains gun purchase records despite a court order to stop and the clear illegality of doing so. However, the Clinton administration has never much been bothered by questions of legality, leading me to believe that should Gore manage to lie/cheat/browbeat his way into the White House, Carnivore will most definately be run with the same level of moral and legal fiber that Janet Reno has always brought to the table.
Not that I'm fond of George Bush; I voted Harry Browne, who believes, as do I, that the constitution protects one from unlawful search and seizure, and that this is defined as any search not officially sanctioned by court order, so the installation of carnivore in the first place is a violation of the fourth amendment.
See, America is trying to catch crime before it happens, and that doesn't work. Persecution of hate groups is an example: it is ok to hate the haters. I cannot imagine that the FBI, with its current record of scapegoating, would pass up a chance to blame more of the results of general incompetence in governance on hate groups and members of the "gun culture" or creators of the "culture of violence", and, as these terms indicate, you don't even have to prove that the situation exists anymore. How much longer before everyone in the US is in some sort of seditious culture?
So, the Republicans define morality into law and the Democrats define sensitivity into law and I can't complain to someone about their behaviour in an appropriate manner over email for fear of triggering Carnivore. What a world we're headed to.
Is it possible Jefferson had the same thought as Franklin? Geez. I get about three of these a week. No, I'm not absolutely certain Jefferson said it, but I've got it on good authority that he did and the fact that Franklin said a similar thing doesn't mean Jefferson didn't say it.
I think this is a great idea if they do it. Javadocs are cool, but sometimes, you have to go find the source to figure out how ther *^&$ thing *really* works. If you've ever had to do this, then having the class library source in convenient Javadoc format would be a huge boon. I really don't care if they opensource the JVM, but I really want the entire source code to the class libraries...
I am a car guy and own a V6 Camaro that I hope to trade on a Corvette in a few months. Fact is that these highly efficient devices are of little interest to car guys because they don't go fast. While I am fascinated that it would be cheap to operate, I ride a bike to the light rail and take that to work. This thing I'd have to park, and that would be more expensive.
My energy costs to operate the bike are practically nil (I'm overweight), and the train *has* to be more efficient than an air-powered car or any vehicle that carries its power generation along with it. The train runs off of a suspended wire system that is connected to the local power grid at many places and is relatively lossless. That combined with the exceptional efficiency of the electric motors that drive it makes it very efficient to operate.
As a matter of fact, I'd bet that labor, not energy, is the prime motivator of the cost structure in your average public transportation system.
I'm no real big fan of public transportation done wrong or done for political reasons, but the light rail system Denver has implemented for all the wrong reasons ended up being pretty good.
I drive my car on weekends and for the fun of it, and so an electric or compressed air or any other low-horsepower solution wouldn't be worthwhile. My V6 has 200 HP right now. The Vette I want has 385 and weighs just 3200 pounds. HP weight efficiencies like that just aren't available in alternative energy sources.
The only effect increased gun ownership has on crime is to reduce it. Crime is caused by societal factors, such as the tendency of a population to crime and the available wealth. It isn't really related to the tools available to commit crime or defend against it.
Case in point: Switzerland has both lower crime than Germany and much looser gun laws than the US.
The Nazis were fascist. The reason they didn't want to have guns was because most of the guns the populist owned were pointed at the government. Nazi Germany was incredibly crime riddled, starting with Hitler. Homicide was commonplace. The lack of guns had nothing at all to do with it.
In the same way, availability of scripts won't in any way alter the basic structure of the hacker mentality. It may actually increase the feeling of danger and thus the pleasure derived by a hacker. Totalitarian regimes and overzealous lawmakers run afoul of the same problem: the bulk of humans neither know nor care much about the law. They just do whatever they want, and if the bulk of the laws do not impinge on them, then they are fine. Laws do not now nor have they ever significantly changed behaviour. Here in the States, a decade or so of 55 MPH speed limits resulted only in more people running traffic lights. In most states, when the speed limits were raised, the average speed on the roads went down, much to the dismay of those who think that laws control people. Laws are used to identify people who are a threat to something and provide a standardized way to get them out of our hair. I don't know if hacker laws are already adequate or not, but outlawing possession has never been successful in lowering illegal acts.
Vote Harry Browne and we won't have these problems.
The numbers most recently published by the US government on the issue of gun defense show that a gun is used slightly more often for a successful self defense than for homicide. I forget what the numbers are or where they came from, so I guess it's just my word, but it is an interesting statistic because some 90% or so of homicides are actually criminal activity with another criminal. A non-criminal is a law-abiding citizen. Law-abiding citizens account for practically zero percent of homicides, yet account for almost all legal self-defense uses. A legally owned gun, such as my personal Beretta is far, far more likely to see a personal defense in which not a single shot is fired than to actually commit an illegal homicide.
Fact is that I am more likely to kill someone with my car than with my gun, hence the Ted Kennedy crack. And, yes, I will never play with a gun drunk, but wait, I've never been drunk...
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But what are the odds of someone tunneling *under* this compound to try to catch stray rays? Methinks a simple grounded welded rebar cage in the concrete underneath would be cheaper then welding the carpet down.
But my Mac runs closr to 40 watts after shutting down the CD, HD, video hardware, and monitor. Now, my Linux box, which runs continually with no power save as it is a server, consumes probably 150 watts continuous.
I'm part of the Mac observer team. My 8500 G3/400/200/1M upgrade with 120M ram does a work unit in 12 hours.
The client is pretty slick for SETI@home, and they're working on SMP clients for those G4 towers or older 604e SMP machines such as the 9600.
I think that the search is a useful thing, and, besides, it's something for the mac to do while I'm at work and the work machine to do when I'm home...
A while ago, the US Navy backed an aircraft carrier up to Seattle, I believe it was, and connected into the power grid to boost power supply when a critical plant went down.
Question: any carriers laid up in San Diego right now? Those things have mammoth power generators.
I can just see it, though: US Navy funds an increase in basic pay by selling electricity to southern California...
Wave power has the odd effect of reducing the amplitude of waves, which has been said to be an environmental problem in itself. It is also important to note that tide power has the same effect on tides, causing damage to tidal colonies through shrinkage.
Solar power simply doesn't have the energy density to power a high-rise office building. It works when there is a lot of land and people who are willing to use natural light, heating, and cooling, but in an office building, the square footage the sun hits isn't sufficient to make any major inroads on the power usage of the building for artificial lights, elevators, heat, cooling, business machines, etc.
Of course, I favor nuclear, but that just isn't done anymore...
A person who has worked for years to get that title probably has some right to having it used, although this guy did sound like an ass. There are two doctors and a masters in my family, and that little PhD is very important to them, such that it appears on all business correspondence for the simple reason that it generates respect. However, expecting that respect out of someone you are currently yelling at is idiotic.
I'd forgotten the correct term for this particular device, but it is technically a thermonuclear battery, as the breakdown of the plutonium results in thermic energy, which is converted to electricity by a very advanced thermopile.
This plutonium is glassified. Entrance into the atmosphere would likely create either single-molecular concentrations locally (remember, long way from space down to earth) or giant chunks. These giant chunks pose next to no hazard for three reasons: the radiation they generate can be stopped by a piece of paper, so if a kid doesn't eat them, you're fine. The US and other governments would be *very* interested to recover the core, as it is quite expensive and easily reusable (two known failures involving RTGs(correct term), and in one case, whole core reused, other case it broke into small pieces, but did not become dust). Three, the plutonium, after being glassified, is devilishly hard to turn into bomb-grade plutonium, as someone else has pointed out, that is a *higher* number isotope, so it can't be reduced, it must be augmented, and that is just as easy to do with Uranium-235, which is far more common. However, if one were to reduce part of this isotope to create an augmented amount, the augmented amount, assuming perfect efficiency, would still be no where near enough to create critical mass. If one were to attempt to reduce the plutonium to U-235 (I don't know if this can be done, just hypothetical), there still wouldn't be enough, because in nuclear bombs, there's no such thing as a small bomb. Even an extremely efficient multi-stage bomb uses considerably more uranium than that, not to mention the plutonium in the trigger and the deuterium and tritium needed.
The fact is that there isn't a single major risk factor associated with the use of this thing. These things have been investigated by every reputable environmental group and have been given a clean slate by all. However, future use is in doubt simply due to lobbying efforts by people who see nuke and go nuts. That's what's sad, because these things are incredibly cost-effective. The same amount of energy from a chemical source would be huge. One of these batteries can produce 500 watts for thirty years.
The actual danger of a Cassini probe accident to a given person in the probe's disaster area is similar to moving to Denver for a year. These anti-nuke guys simply hype up the fact that plutonium is toxic without taking into account the fact that the toxicology of a single particle is minute and one has to have a significant amount inhaled in order to suffer any significant result. I did a report in college on this particular matter (Cassini had not yet been launched), and my report, which I no longer have, concluded that Cassini posed no significant threat whatsoever and demonstrated that my findings were backed up by the findings of several of the less-rabid environmental protection groups.
As a matter of fact, one is far more likely to die from a meteor strike than from a failed mission with a thermo-nuclear battery.
Madeleine Allbright would be easily the most annoying personage ever to make the presidency and probably remain so for a long long time. Imagine the busybody policies such a person could enact...
Tennessee hates him and with good reason. I have a Tennessean friend, and he said of Gore, "He's no longer a native son.", so, if Gore wishes to win a senate seat, he'll have to do it on one of the coasts as a carpet-bagger.
They run against federal law insisting that the rules of the election cannot be changed after the election. Essentially, the USSC insisted that the FLSC had not clearly shown how its decision did not violate FL state law. Since such violation would trigger a violation of federal law concerning the submission of electors, it is possible that congress could refuse the FL electors based simply on this particular decision of the FLSC, so, even if the USSC had refused to intervene despite the fact that it has clear jurisdiction, the congress could throw out the FL electors based on this law. IANAL, IMHO, etc., FLSC acted very irresponsibly in their decision in the first place and the USSC has actually done them a favor by pointing this out...
The FL constitution, like most states, provides that the legislature may step in in case of a crisis, such as potential failure of FL to get its electors certified, which would mean that its votes did not count. If the legislature had stepped in that early, it would have been on shaky grounds, but now that the court challenges leave the situation in limbo, the legislature can legally declare a slate for whomever they please...
One of the *first* things I do to class MyServlet derived from Servlet, or whatever I want to name it, is to create a function 'out'. In servlets, we want to write to system.err most of the time, so that's what it does. It also checks a flag to find out if debugging is on or not so that the servlet doesn't stuff the log. Now, writing to the log is simply:
out("Object orientivity will allow you to do things you never thought possible.");
I used to be a C++ bigot until I used Java at a job, and after using Java, I no longer wish to *ever* use C++ again. It's like banging rocks to start a fire, or using Oracle. Wait, that's another flame war...
Known as graffiti or whatever is used on this thing for typing the wordy commands necessary to use Linux these days. Can just see the proliferation of shell scripts named a, aa, ab, ba, etc...
Intel's size and larger R&D budget would normally mean they could actually release *faster* chips rather than slower ones. Perhaps this new floating point system will take off, but if not, Intel just bet the farm figuratively on something that is completely untested.
Intel, like Microsoft, is a derivator. Much of what they've done is simply an adaptation of previous work. No problem; that is what everyone does. Problem starts when they release two chips in a row which are demonstrably slower than chips in the stable already, but more expensive. When the P-III came out, I remember benchmarks showing it slower than the P-II for many things. The P-IV shouldn't surprise anyone. It took forever to create a P-II that was faster than a PPro in multiprocessor configurations. None of this is really bad, but Intel proceeds to advertise as if these are a lot faster than previous models, and the fastest on the market, which is laughable.
Good golly, the Pentium-75 was probably the single most stable thing Intel ever made. By the time it came out as a 50 MHz base bus, 50MHz systems were finally stable. Then the 1.5 multiplier didn't overly tax Intels tiny cache and the fact that it was most decidedly not scalar meant that it couldn't outrun its cache, either. Oh, happy bliss, cpu mated to motherboard where cpu doesn't outrun motherboard and motherboard doesn't slow down cpu. I used to spec those things for servers even after the 166s were out because of their stability, reliability and the fact that memory bandwidth and drive bandwidth are more important to a server, anyway. Until the PPro, the 75 was my choice.
In server applications, those 75s in a good motherboard were often faster than 120s in bad motherboards, anyway. Buy the cheaper cpu and get more memory.
1. Four registers, which are really not general purpose, means the cpu *has* to be heavily memory to memory, making cache difficult.
2. Look at the lookaside buffer mess that they use to support memory to memory and speculative execution. Trust me, there are three times as many transistors in that as in the PPC system, and the PPC system can actually execute entirely superscalar, where as Intel is merely scalar.
3. One everyone seems to have forgotten: triple-sigma 386 CPUs. The old 16MHz and 20MHz 386s had a imult bug in 386 extended mode that made them useless, as imult is how addressing is done...
4. The 386 extended mode was *much* worse programmatically than 286 extended. Imagine if you took a 24-bit address space and tried to make a 32-bit address space backwards compatible. The segmentation mess isn't bad in 32 bits, but the selectors are a mess, and are divied up into lots of fields, making for only 32,000 virtual pages, if I remember right. I was looking into writing an object-oriented operating system as part of schooling, and Intel was too hard to use. PPC is much cleaner, with simpler descriptor page caching and far more deterministic prediction algorithms.
The FBI maintains gun purchase records despite a court order to stop and the clear illegality of doing so. However, the Clinton administration has never much been bothered by questions of legality, leading me to believe that should Gore manage to lie/cheat/browbeat his way into the White House, Carnivore will most definately be run with the same level of moral and legal fiber that Janet Reno has always brought to the table.
Not that I'm fond of George Bush; I voted Harry Browne, who believes, as do I, that the constitution protects one from unlawful search and seizure, and that this is defined as any search not officially sanctioned by court order, so the installation of carnivore in the first place is a violation of the fourth amendment.
See, America is trying to catch crime before it happens, and that doesn't work. Persecution of hate groups is an example: it is ok to hate the haters. I cannot imagine that the FBI, with its current record of scapegoating, would pass up a chance to blame more of the results of general incompetence in governance on hate groups and members of the "gun culture" or creators of the "culture of violence", and, as these terms indicate, you don't even have to prove that the situation exists anymore. How much longer before everyone in the US is in some sort of seditious culture?
So, the Republicans define morality into law and the Democrats define sensitivity into law and I can't complain to someone about their behaviour in an appropriate manner over email for fear of triggering Carnivore. What a world we're headed to.
Is it possible Jefferson had the same thought as Franklin? Geez. I get about three of these a week. No, I'm not absolutely certain Jefferson said it, but I've got it on good authority that he did and the fact that Franklin said a similar thing doesn't mean Jefferson didn't say it.
I think this is a great idea if they do it. Javadocs are cool, but sometimes, you have to go find the source to figure out how ther *^&$ thing *really* works. If you've ever had to do this, then having the class library source in convenient Javadoc format would be a huge boon. I really don't care if they opensource the JVM, but I really want the entire source code to the class libraries...
I am a car guy and own a V6 Camaro that I hope to trade on a Corvette in a few months. Fact is that these highly efficient devices are of little interest to car guys because they don't go fast. While I am fascinated that it would be cheap to operate, I ride a bike to the light rail and take that to work. This thing I'd have to park, and that would be more expensive.
My energy costs to operate the bike are practically nil (I'm overweight), and the train *has* to be more efficient than an air-powered car or any vehicle that carries its power generation along with it. The train runs off of a suspended wire system that is connected to the local power grid at many places and is relatively lossless. That combined with the exceptional efficiency of the electric motors that drive it makes it very efficient to operate.
As a matter of fact, I'd bet that labor, not energy, is the prime motivator of the cost structure in your average public transportation system.
I'm no real big fan of public transportation done wrong or done for political reasons, but the light rail system Denver has implemented for all the wrong reasons ended up being pretty good.
I drive my car on weekends and for the fun of it, and so an electric or compressed air or any other low-horsepower solution wouldn't be worthwhile. My V6 has 200 HP right now. The Vette I want has 385 and weighs just 3200 pounds. HP weight efficiencies like that just aren't available in alternative energy sources.
The only effect increased gun ownership has on crime is to reduce it. Crime is caused by societal factors, such as the tendency of a population to crime and the available wealth. It isn't really related to the tools available to commit crime or defend against it.
Case in point: Switzerland has both lower crime than Germany and much looser gun laws than the US.
The Nazis were fascist. The reason they didn't want to have guns was because most of the guns the populist owned were pointed at the government. Nazi Germany was incredibly crime riddled, starting with Hitler. Homicide was commonplace. The lack of guns had nothing at all to do with it.
In the same way, availability of scripts won't in any way alter the basic structure of the hacker mentality. It may actually increase the feeling of danger and thus the pleasure derived by a hacker. Totalitarian regimes and overzealous lawmakers run afoul of the same problem: the bulk of humans neither know nor care much about the law. They just do whatever they want, and if the bulk of the laws do not impinge on them, then they are fine. Laws do not now nor have they ever significantly changed behaviour. Here in the States, a decade or so of 55 MPH speed limits resulted only in more people running traffic lights. In most states, when the speed limits were raised, the average speed on the roads went down, much to the dismay of those who think that laws control people. Laws are used to identify people who are a threat to something and provide a standardized way to get them out of our hair. I don't know if hacker laws are already adequate or not, but outlawing possession has never been successful in lowering illegal acts.
Vote Harry Browne and we won't have these problems.
The numbers most recently published by the US government on the issue of gun defense show that a gun is used slightly more often for a successful self defense than for homicide. I forget what the numbers are or where they came from, so I guess it's just my word, but it is an interesting statistic because some 90% or so of homicides are actually criminal activity with another criminal. A non-criminal is a law-abiding citizen. Law-abiding citizens account for practically zero percent of homicides, yet account for almost all legal self-defense uses. A legally owned gun, such as my personal Beretta is far, far more likely to see a personal defense in which not a single shot is fired than to actually commit an illegal homicide.
Fact is that I am more likely to kill someone with my car than with my gun, hence the Ted Kennedy crack. And, yes, I will never play with a gun drunk, but wait, I've never been drunk...
That's the odd thing; same things with guns: murder is illegal, but they need to make guns illegal so it's technically not even possible...