The original Star Wars movies were great because we saw them when we were 13 years old, and they were filmed to appeal to 13 year olds. Watch it again now, and if you enjoy it that's likely due to fond memories of watching them as a child, not because they're such great pieces of filmmaking on their own.
Any remake is doomed if you expect a remake. It's also doomed if you expect to be transformed back into a 13 year old while watching the movie. All Star Wars movies are children's movies, aimed at their eras 13-year-olds. All of us adults who imagined they would be anything different were disappointed.
If you instead expect a movie that will entertain you, set in or near the original universe (but with modern filmmaking techniques and different characters,) you might put yourself in a position to enjoy it. But you'll probably enjoy it most if you bring your own child to the movie.
I don't think Microsoft was ever interested in cooperating with the NSA, but eventually they were compelled to heel. It wasn't a love affair, it was a shotgun wedding.
Regardless of why they got married, they still had an ugly kid.
That's your choice. Me, I'd rather have all kinds of options, which could include "RF watch", "NFC ring", "DNA-tester", "fingerprint recognition", or even nothing at all.
I'm certainly not worried about Mr. Radio-Shack-Equipped Burglar, because that's so far from a Realistic* argument that it's not worth discussing. (* pun intended.)
Instead of regulating the devices (which is unconstitutional and pointless) increase the responsibility for gun safety. If you own a gun that is used to shoot someone else, you go to jail for several years. Make responsibility for gun ownership be "outcome based."
This could be made adjustable. The sentence could be determined based on the facts of the case, perhaps increasing in duration based on the severity of the injuries caused (victim's age, permanent damage/disability inflicted, number of victims, recovery time, pain, etc.) Add a substantial penalty if the gun was not safely stored, such as treble the sentence. If a gun is reported lost or stolen, then sentence could be decreased based on a factor of time: if a gun is used to harm someone the day you reported it stolen, you're still fully responsible for having lost it. If it's not used for a year, the penalty could be lower; after five years it would be fully off your record.
Note that this doesn't mandate any particular protection technology. If you think a fingerprint interlock and a trigger guard is good enough, then maybe you can sleep easy leaving it on your nightstand. If you're worried that a kid might play with it, you'll probably choose a good gun safe. If you're worried that your assault rifle might be used in a shooting spree, you won't keep a dozen 50-round magazines in the house. And if you're stupid enough to let a child get killed with your gun, you can go sit in jail for a few decades.
If you're going to own a weapon, you (and nobody else) must secure it so it doesn't end up in the wrong hands.
If I were to buy a handgun for personal protection, I'd like to have the authorized user recognition technology so that the weapon couldn't be turned against me in a difficult situation. But I'd also not like it mandated. I might want a custom gun, I might want something that works with gloves, I might want something more reliable than a funky computer, I might want a non-crippled device for any number of reasons.
But I want to make that choice for myself, weighing each instance.
(Please note: I have never owned any guns, I am not a member of the NRA, I just happen to agree with them in this instance.)
Sovereign immunity doesn't apply to private corporations, and apparently Ohio's prisons have all been privatized.
So that makes two suits. The first would be the MPAA against the prisons for multiple instances of showing pirated movies for profit. This demonstrates a pattern of violations, not just a single incident. If it took place repeatedly, and at multiple prisons owned by the same firm, then it's a pattern of corruption that management has either failed to halt or possibly actively encouraged.
Then some taxpayer organization could file suit against the state for contracting with a corrupt corporation to manage their prisons - that's where the immunity would probably kick in making a suit unrealistic, but it also would become something that would go to the state's legislature. Or maybe it's not a suit, but maybe an investigation into the contract processes followed by the state.
As long as the stupid laws are on the books, and continue to be interpreted as they have been, the MPAA has clearly been wronged here, and they should file suit. I hope they do.
And yet get ready for the chorus of people who will say we should have just had a hunter-killer drone in the sky to take this guy out rather than endanger the lives of officers.
A chorus of voters.
At least that would be news for nerds. Arguing about the death of a perp who pulled a gun on a cop is just stupid.
Our brains are electrochemical, and don't run that fast in series, but they're massively asymmetrical and parallel, and running in async. We don't have clock strobe lines or addressing, and it might take millions of internal connection points to provide a fast enough interface. Even that might be six orders of magnitude slower than our AI buddies.
The retina and optic nerve might be the closest we might get, so are you willing to give up an eye for this? Go full-on Borg?
Truth. A neighbor has a small carpentry/remodeling business. His garage and house were broken into, and they used his cordless drill, hammer, screwdriver, and pry bar, and eventually opened his fire safe.
Of course he just had his corporate papers and backups in the fire safe to protect them from fire. No money, no guns, just boring business stuff. Cost him more to replace the damaged safe than anything.
You may be jesting, but my wife recently watched a show on HGTV that said moats are actually making a comeback as an architectural feature around high-end homes. They put the intruders below the window level, making it hard for them to break in anywhere but the main doors. They can have a running water feature that makes nice calming splashing noises. And unlike bars or a fence, they're invisible from inside the house, so they don't spoil your million-dollar view.
LRADs are non-lethal devices that make an area extremely unpleasant. They're meant to be used for crowd control, but in an enclosed space I'm sure they'd still be effective. They shouldn't violate the "booby trap" rule because they don't trap the bad guy, they just make him want to get away.
I think the pain-alarms are typically set to sound an alarm for the 30 seconds prior to the time the pissed-off burglar throws a lit match through your window.
It looks like something they would have to defeat in a heist movie. Of course it doesn't actually do anything other than wave red lights around like an autistic kid at a rave, but your average burglar won't know that.
Absolutely. It's a mistake to assume that just because 99% of lawyers are corrupt scumbags, that all lawyers are corrupt scumbags. For example, some stopped taking bribes after their funerals.
I doubt too many miscreants will be put off by a window decal advising them that you own a glockenspiel.
Wait a minute, he may be on to something. Notice how "Gangsta Rap" is prevalent among thieves, but you've never heard of "Glockenspiel Rap". Perhaps it serves as a really effective deterrent.
A million lawsuits aren't Google's problem. The courts would not be able to handle a flood like that, so they would enter the courts slowly, and Google could drag their feet until they actually receive a subpoena (or whatever the EU's equivalent is.) Figure that their courts could handle only hundreds per day, that limits the flood that comes into Google.
If their court system can't scale up to the impact of a million lawsuits a day, then that's still not Google's problem. It's their stupid decision, they need to live with the consequences they created. That shouldn't be Google's to deal with.
The law is fine. The law says "if you don't need the data, delete it." Great.
Google doesn't have the data in question. Google has links to the data in question. Other people have links to the data in question. Google has links to the other people's links to the data in question. The aggregation of these links yields search rankings.
If you want to enforce the right to be forgotten, the only rational approach is to go to the organization storing your faulty data and say "remove this", or "render this data unsearchable." Once it's gone, Google will have links to nothing, and they will fall in search ranking order to the point where they are not your problem.
The interpretation of the law was poor, and the faulty findings of the court are going to completely screw over the EU's ability to have effective or honest search engines. Good thing my country is trying a completely different way of screwing us all over, because your country's way is stupid.
Instead of an alarm, use an insurance policy to protect the gear. It's cheaper, and most policies are tied to the monetary value of your stuff when you bought it. But we all know tech stuff devalues over time, and much quicker than most items. So if you have a loss, your insured and replaced items are more valuable than the originals.
Where you might be more interested in security hardware is if your gear is often in a more public place: library, dorm room, etc. But you said "house".
Instead of physical protection, consider electronic detection. Install phone-home heartbeat software on your kit, so that if a thief takes it, it will reach back to your house periodically to check in. You can have APIs like GROWL alert your iPhone if a device fails its heartbeat. (Assuming you can put up with hundreds of false alerts.)
Or you can simply relax. If you can afford $50,000 worth of gear, you can probably afford to replace $50,000 worth of gear.
Cry me a river. I'm sure that we could reduce that possibility ten fold if we placed cameras and microphones inside everyone's house. Does that mean we should do it? Absolutely not.
But we already have voluntarily carried microphones and cameras into our houses, pockets, and purses. Does that mean the NSA should ignore them?
That's not really a good analogy, because your drivers have "goals", and evolution doesn't drive towards goals. It selects for adaptations that work better in the organism's environment.
Driver A isn't trying to get to Town 2. Driver A simply is trying to survive. Now, if your Driver A randomly developed a vision mutation that caused him to identify grocery store signs, that's a beneficial survival trait in his environment - he'll be big and healthy and not starving, which might make him a more successful parent. If he passes the trait of grocery-store-sign-recognition to his offspring, then it's a beneficial mutation.
Meanwhile, Driver B also isn't interested in Town 2, but she's developed a mutation that permits her to smell the pumps at gas stations, and so she can fill up her tank. She similarly passes this trait on to her children.
Let's say there are two roads between the towns. Road 1 has grocery stores nearer the first town and gas stations nearer the second. Road 2 has gas stations near the first town, and grocery stores near the second. Driver A's big-eyed kids will cluster around the grocery stores along Road 1, while Driver B's long-nosed kids cluster around the gas stations on Road 2. Driver A's kids might continue crowding each other out, and as they head further down the road, they discover gas stations. Because of their big eyes, they and their children learn to see both grocery store and gas station signs, and now have bigger, more adaptable eyes. Driver B's kids similarly get crowded down their road, and start smelling out grocery stores along with gas stations. As a result their noses grow even longer and more sensitive.
Eventually, both have offspring that end up in Town 2. If they haven't diverged too far from each other by the time they both arrive there, so they're still the same species, they can interbreed and produce children that have both big eyes and long noses that can both see better and smell better. But if it's been millions of years, the differences may be too great. You'll have two different species that arrived in the same place, doing the same things, but in completely different ways.
I think Google can't deal with this, nor should they. When Mr. Childpr0n requests removal, Google should provide a helpful link to the EU's Supreme court, and say "we don't make these decisions, they come from your courts, who have accepted responsibility for deciding. Please file a lawsuit with them, and come back when you have a judgement in your favor."
You may have a "right" to be forgotten under certain circumstances, but it shouldn't be up to Google to interpret those circumstances.
I think the answer is self-evident: alternate reality results would be just as diverse as species are today, and while they would bear superficially similar results, they would be "different animals." Commenters above have noted that vastly diverse organisms in a common environment still successfully evolve common features: they may have similar means of locomotion, means of food detection, means of sexual partner selection, and on and on, yet the specifics for any given species will be completely different from the other species.
Would the appearance of an opposable thumb on a flipper cause the lengthening of the appendage into something more useful, like an arm? Maybe, because arms are a useful advantage for food gathering; or maybe not because arms aren't as hydrodynamic as flippers. Or maybe there'd be a fork with two successful species resulting. I don't think the follow on changes would stop, they just would be different changes.
But as to the original article, why would anyone think that if we rewound the clock that a chaotic process would repeat? It's not like the universe called rand() with a common seed when it started mutating DNA.
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The original Star Wars movies were great because we saw them when we were 13 years old, and they were filmed to appeal to 13 year olds. Watch it again now, and if you enjoy it that's likely due to fond memories of watching them as a child, not because they're such great pieces of filmmaking on their own.
Any remake is doomed if you expect a remake. It's also doomed if you expect to be transformed back into a 13 year old while watching the movie. All Star Wars movies are children's movies, aimed at their eras 13-year-olds. All of us adults who imagined they would be anything different were disappointed.
If you instead expect a movie that will entertain you, set in or near the original universe (but with modern filmmaking techniques and different characters,) you might put yourself in a position to enjoy it. But you'll probably enjoy it most if you bring your own child to the movie.
I don't think Microsoft was ever interested in cooperating with the NSA, but eventually they were compelled to heel. It wasn't a love affair, it was a shotgun wedding.
Regardless of why they got married, they still had an ugly kid.
That's your choice. Me, I'd rather have all kinds of options, which could include "RF watch", "NFC ring", "DNA-tester", "fingerprint recognition", or even nothing at all.
I'm certainly not worried about Mr. Radio-Shack-Equipped Burglar, because that's so far from a Realistic* argument that it's not worth discussing. (* pun intended.)
Instead of regulating the devices (which is unconstitutional and pointless) increase the responsibility for gun safety. If you own a gun that is used to shoot someone else, you go to jail for several years. Make responsibility for gun ownership be "outcome based."
This could be made adjustable. The sentence could be determined based on the facts of the case, perhaps increasing in duration based on the severity of the injuries caused (victim's age, permanent damage/disability inflicted, number of victims, recovery time, pain, etc.) Add a substantial penalty if the gun was not safely stored, such as treble the sentence. If a gun is reported lost or stolen, then sentence could be decreased based on a factor of time: if a gun is used to harm someone the day you reported it stolen, you're still fully responsible for having lost it. If it's not used for a year, the penalty could be lower; after five years it would be fully off your record.
Note that this doesn't mandate any particular protection technology. If you think a fingerprint interlock and a trigger guard is good enough, then maybe you can sleep easy leaving it on your nightstand. If you're worried that a kid might play with it, you'll probably choose a good gun safe. If you're worried that your assault rifle might be used in a shooting spree, you won't keep a dozen 50-round magazines in the house. And if you're stupid enough to let a child get killed with your gun, you can go sit in jail for a few decades.
If you're going to own a weapon, you (and nobody else) must secure it so it doesn't end up in the wrong hands.
If I were to buy a handgun for personal protection, I'd like to have the authorized user recognition technology so that the weapon couldn't be turned against me in a difficult situation. But I'd also not like it mandated. I might want a custom gun, I might want something that works with gloves, I might want something more reliable than a funky computer, I might want a non-crippled device for any number of reasons.
But I want to make that choice for myself, weighing each instance.
(Please note: I have never owned any guns, I am not a member of the NRA, I just happen to agree with them in this instance.)
Sovereign immunity doesn't apply to private corporations, and apparently Ohio's prisons have all been privatized.
So that makes two suits. The first would be the MPAA against the prisons for multiple instances of showing pirated movies for profit. This demonstrates a pattern of violations, not just a single incident. If it took place repeatedly, and at multiple prisons owned by the same firm, then it's a pattern of corruption that management has either failed to halt or possibly actively encouraged.
Then some taxpayer organization could file suit against the state for contracting with a corrupt corporation to manage their prisons - that's where the immunity would probably kick in making a suit unrealistic, but it also would become something that would go to the state's legislature. Or maybe it's not a suit, but maybe an investigation into the contract processes followed by the state.
As long as the stupid laws are on the books, and continue to be interpreted as they have been, the MPAA has clearly been wronged here, and they should file suit. I hope they do.
Because the river runs through the middle of the city, and they don't want a bunch of guys firing guns there.
And yet get ready for the chorus of people who will say we should have just had a hunter-killer drone in the sky to take this guy out rather than endanger the lives of officers.
A chorus of voters.
At least that would be news for nerds. Arguing about the death of a perp who pulled a gun on a cop is just stupid.
Our brains are electrochemical, and don't run that fast in series, but they're massively asymmetrical and parallel, and running in async. We don't have clock strobe lines or addressing, and it might take millions of internal connection points to provide a fast enough interface. Even that might be six orders of magnitude slower than our AI buddies.
The retina and optic nerve might be the closest we might get, so are you willing to give up an eye for this? Go full-on Borg?
Truth. A neighbor has a small carpentry/remodeling business. His garage and house were broken into, and they used his cordless drill, hammer, screwdriver, and pry bar, and eventually opened his fire safe.
Of course he just had his corporate papers and backups in the fire safe to protect them from fire. No money, no guns, just boring business stuff. Cost him more to replace the damaged safe than anything.
You may be jesting, but my wife recently watched a show on HGTV that said moats are actually making a comeback as an architectural feature around high-end homes. They put the intruders below the window level, making it hard for them to break in anywhere but the main doors. They can have a running water feature that makes nice calming splashing noises. And unlike bars or a fence, they're invisible from inside the house, so they don't spoil your million-dollar view.
For my thousand-dollar view, I look at a fence.
LRADs are non-lethal devices that make an area extremely unpleasant. They're meant to be used for crowd control, but in an enclosed space I'm sure they'd still be effective. They shouldn't violate the "booby trap" rule because they don't trap the bad guy, they just make him want to get away.
I think the pain-alarms are typically set to sound an alarm for the 30 seconds prior to the time the pissed-off burglar throws a lit match through your window.
He's trying to protect "electronics". Y'know, those things that are destroyed by induced high voltage electric sparks?
Unless he wants to protect them by rendering them inert, and thus valueless to the thief, this probably isn't the best solution.
You had me at "sharks".
You can get a movie-prop style scanning laser here: http://www.homesecuritystore.c...
It looks like something they would have to defeat in a heist movie. Of course it doesn't actually do anything other than wave red lights around like an autistic kid at a rave, but your average burglar won't know that.
Absolutely. It's a mistake to assume that just because 99% of lawyers are corrupt scumbags, that all lawyers are corrupt scumbags. For example, some stopped taking bribes after their funerals.
They stole his printer!
Wait a minute, he may be on to something. Notice how "Gangsta Rap" is prevalent among thieves, but you've never heard of "Glockenspiel Rap". Perhaps it serves as a really effective deterrent.
A million lawsuits aren't Google's problem. The courts would not be able to handle a flood like that, so they would enter the courts slowly, and Google could drag their feet until they actually receive a subpoena (or whatever the EU's equivalent is.) Figure that their courts could handle only hundreds per day, that limits the flood that comes into Google.
If their court system can't scale up to the impact of a million lawsuits a day, then that's still not Google's problem. It's their stupid decision, they need to live with the consequences they created. That shouldn't be Google's to deal with.
The law is fine. The law says "if you don't need the data, delete it." Great.
Google doesn't have the data in question. Google has links to the data in question. Other people have links to the data in question. Google has links to the other people's links to the data in question. The aggregation of these links yields search rankings.
If you want to enforce the right to be forgotten, the only rational approach is to go to the organization storing your faulty data and say "remove this", or "render this data unsearchable." Once it's gone, Google will have links to nothing, and they will fall in search ranking order to the point where they are not your problem.
The interpretation of the law was poor, and the faulty findings of the court are going to completely screw over the EU's ability to have effective or honest search engines. Good thing my country is trying a completely different way of screwing us all over, because your country's way is stupid.
This.
Instead of an alarm, use an insurance policy to protect the gear. It's cheaper, and most policies are tied to the monetary value of your stuff when you bought it. But we all know tech stuff devalues over time, and much quicker than most items. So if you have a loss, your insured and replaced items are more valuable than the originals.
Where you might be more interested in security hardware is if your gear is often in a more public place: library, dorm room, etc. But you said "house".
Instead of physical protection, consider electronic detection. Install phone-home heartbeat software on your kit, so that if a thief takes it, it will reach back to your house periodically to check in. You can have APIs like GROWL alert your iPhone if a device fails its heartbeat. (Assuming you can put up with hundreds of false alerts.)
Or you can simply relax. If you can afford $50,000 worth of gear, you can probably afford to replace $50,000 worth of gear.
Cry me a river. I'm sure that we could reduce that possibility ten fold if we placed cameras and microphones inside everyone's house. Does that mean we should do it? Absolutely not.
But we already have voluntarily carried microphones and cameras into our houses, pockets, and purses. Does that mean the NSA should ignore them?
That's not really a good analogy, because your drivers have "goals", and evolution doesn't drive towards goals. It selects for adaptations that work better in the organism's environment.
Driver A isn't trying to get to Town 2. Driver A simply is trying to survive. Now, if your Driver A randomly developed a vision mutation that caused him to identify grocery store signs, that's a beneficial survival trait in his environment - he'll be big and healthy and not starving, which might make him a more successful parent. If he passes the trait of grocery-store-sign-recognition to his offspring, then it's a beneficial mutation.
Meanwhile, Driver B also isn't interested in Town 2, but she's developed a mutation that permits her to smell the pumps at gas stations, and so she can fill up her tank. She similarly passes this trait on to her children.
Let's say there are two roads between the towns. Road 1 has grocery stores nearer the first town and gas stations nearer the second. Road 2 has gas stations near
the first town, and grocery stores near the second. Driver A's big-eyed kids will cluster around the grocery stores along Road 1, while Driver B's long-nosed kids cluster around the gas stations on Road 2. Driver A's kids might continue crowding each other out, and as they head further down the road, they discover gas stations. Because of their big eyes, they and their children learn to see both grocery store and gas station signs, and now have bigger, more adaptable eyes. Driver B's kids similarly get crowded down their road, and start smelling out grocery stores along with gas stations. As a result their noses grow even longer and more sensitive.
Eventually, both have offspring that end up in Town 2. If they haven't diverged too far from each other by the time they both arrive there, so they're still the same species, they can interbreed and produce children that have both big eyes and long noses that can both see better and smell better. But if it's been millions of years, the differences may be too great. You'll have two different species that arrived in the same place, doing the same things, but in completely different ways.
I think Google can't deal with this, nor should they. When Mr. Childpr0n requests removal, Google should provide a helpful link to the EU's Supreme court, and say "we don't make these decisions, they come from your courts, who have accepted responsibility for deciding. Please file a lawsuit with them, and come back when you have a judgement in your favor."
You may have a "right" to be forgotten under certain circumstances, but it shouldn't be up to Google to interpret those circumstances.
I think the answer is self-evident: alternate reality results would be just as diverse as species are today, and while they would bear superficially similar results, they would be "different animals." Commenters above have noted that vastly diverse organisms in a common environment still successfully evolve common features: they may have similar means of locomotion, means of food detection, means of sexual partner selection, and on and on, yet the specifics for any given species will be completely different from the other species.
Would the appearance of an opposable thumb on a flipper cause the lengthening of the appendage into something more useful, like an arm? Maybe, because arms are a useful advantage for food gathering; or maybe not because arms aren't as hydrodynamic as flippers. Or maybe there'd be a fork with two successful species resulting. I don't think the follow on changes would stop, they just would be different changes.
But as to the original article, why would anyone think that if we rewound the clock that a chaotic process would repeat? It's not like the universe called rand() with a common seed when it started mutating DNA.