The BSD license is definitely more free to the person who accepts the source code under that license. But any freedom given to subsequent recipients of that code is strictly under the good wishes of that recipient. (I'm presuming that he's made changes that are significant enough that you can't just go to the original source.) The GPL, by disallowing the restriction of the rights of those later users is definitely restricting the recipients of the code...the restriction is that they must pass on the code (with any modifications) only if they also pass on all the rights under which they received it.
Sorry, but to me the GPL looks like a better trade-off. In most cases. It's the license that I'll use, and you can contact me if you want my code on other terms.
N.B.: MySQL did reasonably well under this arrangement for over a decade. (I don't know how much over, and I don't know whether it will weather it's current troubles.) (I picked MySQL over Red Hat because Red Hat is primarily a distributor, whereas MySQL is primarily a software author. But there *were* other choices.)
"Were a commercial interest involved, the law of gravity itself would be cast into doubt" --- (I don't know who said it, but it isn't original. Google returns no hits.)
Sorry, but you're wrong. Estimates of the costs and prices are available, but they are estimates and unreliable. In other places you can find numbers which count parts of the costs. There isn't anywhere that provides the full perspective. You can't even assemble it, because some of the actual numbers just aren't available to anyone outside of each particular company. So *NOBODY* can make an accurate statement of the costs.
PARTIAL calculations of the cost prove that the US pays more for less. But they're only counting part of the actual costs.
We're told that continually. But I've not seen numbers that I trust that back it up. And I *do* know that much of that research is directed at changing existing drugs slightly, not to work better, but rather to extend patent coverage. And other research is to prove that the drug under investigation is safe. NOTE!!!:: I didn't write "to check whether it is safe". If the research doesn't prove that it's safe, it will be buried and a slightly different research study will be conducted by different researchers.
Now I don't know what part of the "research" budget is directed to such dubious practices. I merely know they exist, and are funded. The budget details are secret. But I definitely know enough to cause me to be suspicious when I hear "our market subsidizes the rest of the world's drugs and R&D". Trusting that may be safer than trusting MS or SCOx, but there's no guarantee. The information that would be needed to prove that is carefully hidden.
I think he was being sarcastic. (A dangerous thing to do in a post, as you'll likely be misunderstood.)
Note that he did point out that the different towers handled different protocols. Probably by this he meant it would be three times as expensive to have the same coverage. I don't think he meant to imply that there were actually three times as many towers. Rather that the areas of good coverage were segmented into micro-monopolies.
Some programmers work harder than some roofers. Most probably enjoy their work more. (OTOH, most roofers would HATE to be programmers.)
Unless, that is, you have a definition of "work harder" that involves using muscles. In that case you're correct.
Note that many (not necessarily most) roofers are independent contractors, and don't work any harder than they choose. (But I really doubt that anyone likes the smell of hot tar.)
I'm sure that some people would pay more in taxes, others, perhaps, less. So how do you know into which group I fall?
P.S.: If you count health insurance, and what my employer pays in health insurance, I suspect that we pay more for less. Naturally I can't assert that as truth, as the actual numbers involved are secret. (I.e., I know what I am charged, and I know what my employer claims it pays, but I have no way to verify the claims.)
My suspicion is that with full governmental health coverage the elimination of much accounting would easily pay for any inefficiencies, and that many of those "inefficiencies" translate into better health care.
I know-for-certain that today's health care is technically better than it used to be, but the user-interaction involved in care is significantly worse than before the HMO's appeared. Doctors previously didn't limit their patient involvement time to a certain number of minutes before going on to the next patient. Now it's official policy (a policy which caused certain doctors that I have known to retire). And medical malpractice insurance makes part-time medical practice impossibly expensive. (Nurses generally seem to be less endangered by this...so far. Or perhaps they're just more willing to take risks.)
The doctors that I know seem to be on the fence about government medical involvement. Certainly they don't like the bureaucratic entanglement, but then they are already so entangled that they are close to closing up shop. That isn't why they studied to be doctors, and it's NOT they way they enjoy spending their time. So solitary medical practice is almost gone. They join into groups to hire accountants and others to deal with the out-of-control bureaucracy...but it's NOT federal or state bureaucracy. It's the medical insurance companies. And you probably don't have a clue as to how much that's costing. A cost which is a near total waste!!
Your argument is fallacious. Most people don't think either of the two candidates that have a chance fairly represent their views, but they are also aware that only those two candidates have a chance. So either they don't vote, or they vote for someone who isn't their preferred choice. Either instant runoff or Condorcet voting would be fairer, with Condorcet having an edge in fairness, and instant runoff being more understandable.
Note that this is a separate problem from the one that was addressed in this article. That was about the trustworthiness of the results, not about fairness.
OTOH, electronic voting without a paper trail leading back to the original paper ballots is, I agree, stupid. You have some of the reasons right, but there are others.
P.S.: Any plan that requires the voters to act as blocks, without consideration of their individual desires is flawed. So is any plan that assumes that there are only three or four aggregations of preferences.
I don't know that much about Beijing, or other non-US governments. So I'm more reluctant to criticize the. I *DO* know how distorted news reporting is. I've been on the site of events that I've seen reported. So I definitely don't trust reporting where all the reports can be traced to a common origin...say AP or Reuters.
I more or less trust local news. (I can usually find someone who knows something directly about anything I think of as important.) I'm much less trusting about regional news. National news is to be taken with a very large grain of salt. And international news...well, it might be more accurate than fiction.
So I'm more willing to criticize local governments about reported actions. A bit less willing to criticize State governments. Slightly less willing to criticize the federal govt. And rather reluctant to criticize foreign governments. It has to do with the degree of certainty I have towards knowledge about what's really going on.
OTOH, I'm quite willing to tell anyone what I feel is proper. That's a different matter. It's also, however, different from being willing to tell people what to do in a situation where I'm uncertain as to exactly what's happening.
Thus I can be quite certain that it was improper for a child to be beaten to death, and I can be quite certain that those who did it are murderers. This doesn't tell me how this should be dealt with, though, of course, some actions are clearly wrong...like letting them kill more children.
I'm suspicious of China precisely BECAUSE it looks like the way the US would handle it. And I am informed about the state of justice within the US system.
If you think highly of the US system, it's because you haven't been watching it. There are worse systems, but the US system is definitely not a good one, and it seems to be deteriorating. The criminal system seems to let anyone associated with law enforcement get away with murder. Even if convicted of the act the result is almost never worse than getting fired, and it doesn't usually seem to even get investigated, even when there's plenty of evidence. And as for the civil court system...let's consider the case of SCO vs. IBM. Six years, IBM has probably spent millions of dollars in defense and court filings, and SCO isn't going to pay them one red cent in damages, because they've gone bankrupt. And it hasn't produced ANY evidence worthy of the name to back up their charges. No even under a direct court order. That case should have been over within 3 months when SCO twice refused to produce evidence under a court order. (They gave excuses rather than denials, but they didn't produce it.) If IBM were the one suing, this might be excusable, but the court was ordering SCO to produce evidence showing that it had any reason for it's charges against IBM. When that wasn't forthcoming, the case should have been dropped by the court (though not IBM's counter charges. "Tortuous interference with business practices" seems an apt description of SCO. (That the case was apparently funded, at least in part, by MS, but that that hasn't been able to be investigated, is just an added bit of information as to how unjust the court system is.)
I'm told that the system isn't getting worse, it's just that I hadn't noticed before how unjust it was. This could be true, but it's definitely no guiding light by which all should be guided.
Or possibly it *was* an official camp, and the legitimacy has been retroactively removed because the government didn't like how they handled this case.
Basically, we can't know. And that's true in the US, also. I've been on the site of events that were later reported. I can guarantee that the reports were fiction "inspired by" an actual event. Most of the time they didn't lie by commission, but by omission. It's just as effective. But at least a couple of times I've noticed them actually slipping in something that was totally fabricated. Once it was for the purpose of making the news more entertaining. The other time I would need to speculate about the reason...but it did alter the emotional tone of the story.
Murderers they are and murders they remain. The court verdict just means that they won't be punished, it doesn't mean they aren't murderers.
Now if you posit that they didn't do it, then *that* would mean they aren't murders, but a court verdict is only about "Will they be punished or not?" and "Will the state act on the presumption that they did it or not?". It doesn't (necessarily) have anything to do with their state in actuality.
But if they sue you, you'll go broke defending yourself, and then they'll win a default judgment against you because you didn't show up in the new venue that you were notified about yesterday.
You miss the point. The framers of the constitution did not, in my belief, have any intention of the government being involved in the creation or regulation of the militia. That was considered the responsibility of the citizenry of each local area. The mandatory global armament authorization was to ensure the feasibility of the creation of such militias.
I was thinking of embedding tags in the bullets, not in the shells. You'd still have the problem of falsely planted evidence, but when a bullet hits something the bullet is deformed in ways that are reasonably characteristic of the thing that it hit, and they're rather difficult to reuse. Basically you'd just need to have the numbered tags written on something with a higher melting point than the rest of the matrix of the bullet. That's not too difficult. A small piece of steel, say 1mm X 1/2 mm should be able to fit into a bullet without any problem, And you could still hand load it.
It would even be possible to allow non-commercial hand crafted un-numbered bullets. The fact that most people used purchased ammunition should reduce the number of places that need to be checked by well over 90%. This isn't intended to be a perfect solution, merely one that would deal with the problem of locating who to suspect.
I don't like it either. But large cities and fast transportation mean that there's a need to eliminate large numbers of people from suspicion quickly. A better answer would be a smaller population, but birth control meets fierce resistance, and I don't favor a large-scale die-off.
What do you mean there's no test for sentience? There are several tests.
Some of the test pass things that we don't think they should pass, and some don't pass things that we think they should, but they are still tests.
E.g., Any computer + program that can pass the Turing Test (the *real* Turing Test) would be sentient. It would necessarily be much beyond the minimal grade of sentience, but it would be sentient. (It's also a very silly goal to cause the AI to have, but that's a different point.)
If you don't think that that would imply sentience, then I need to know what definition you are using. (Yes, I'm aware that Turing was saying intelligent, but it would also imply sentience.)
I'll admit that the concept of sentience gives me a lot of trouble. I generally use it as a synonym for conscious, but then I get into things like "A thermostat hooked up to a heater and a cooler shows a minimal degree of consciousness." Well, it *is* responding to sensed changes in it's environment based upon changes in it's internal state. That may just be an "atom" of consciousness. If it isn't, justify the definition that doesn't imply that it is.
I'll agree that the Singularity (in one form or another) isn't inevitable. I don't know why you so denigrate it. I'm sure that you can find many scientists who will criticize it, but I haven't found any of them that both understand the concept and provide convincing arguments that it won't happen. (Not that it may not happen. Those exist. But that it won't happen.)
I've been tracking the projections for around a decade now. Some were overly optimistic, others were underly optimistic. And there were several things that happened that nobody predicted. As well as some expected innovations that haven't yet happened.
On the balance I think we're on course for the Singularity to happen within +/- ten years from 2035. 2020 is my projection for the earliest expectable arrival. 2050 is a rather late arrival. But note that the progress towards the Singularity is a process. It's basically just a statement that things are now changing, and the rate of change is increasing, and at some point, called the Singularity, this projection will necessarily break down. The automatically self improving AI program is only ONE of the paths, though as a programmer it's the one I'm most interested in. Another branch leads through mind-reading game interfaces to electronically mediated telepathy to a group mind that acts a lot more quickly than the internet. Another branch leads through genetic engineering to modified humans with increased intelligence. There are others, and, of course, combinations.
Thinking of the Singularity as a single entity is a mistake fostered by the language. But it's still a mistake.
P.S.: Note that I didn't mention nano-technology. That will be a tool that can be used by any of the various paths, not a path towards the singularity, except that it will REALLY facilitate several of the different paths simultaneously.
I'm not suggesting that we artificially prop up a dysfunctional business model, I'm just pointing out that once it dies we may notice a gap and see the pendulum swing back as we fill it.
Unfortunately, that gap appeared quite awhile ago. I'm not willing to pay people money to lie to me. If they want to print fiction, they should label it that and sell it as fiction rather than news. As it is...they can die without loss. Local papers seem to still cover news. Not perfectly, but they try to report facts. Regional and national papers seem to presume that nobody can tell that they're lying, so why not just say anything that seems entertaining. They print stories that are appropriately labeled "Inspired by an actual event.", and they print pictures with angles so carefully chosen that they deserve the same title. (I've never actually *caught* them editing the contents of the pictures, but they've certainly picked carefully chosen angles, and then cropped them to fit into the story that they decided to write "inspired by the actual event". And, naturally, most pictures that they take end up "on the cutting room floor".
I don't think that I accept the right of a law to define the words used in the constitution. (This is an unreasonably broad definition of militia, e.g.)
The framers of the constitution clearly mean locally organized bodies of men under arms who were not controlled by the government. As such, it's in reasonable agreement with this law, but I still deny the right of a law to define what a word used in the constitution means.
One thing to notice. Those are all large cities where people are densely packed. It makes a difference.
Just the other day I was looking at a drawing of a suspected murderer on a poster, and I thought: If there were only a few thousand people in this city, that drawing might identify a unique person. But as it is, and given the rapid transportation available, it's nearly worthless. Nearly isn't totally, and the character was relatively unusual, so there are probably only a few like him. But still...there are population size effects.
I don't know the right answer, or if there IS a right answer. But to blanketly assert that gun-control is bad is too strong a statement. Maybe the ammunition should be registered. This would require that each bullet have an identifying number embedded in it, and that it be recorded (and tracked) who each bullet was sold to. It should be feasible to do, but I'm not sure it would be inexpensive. Still, most people don't use very much ammunition.
When this goes commercial, my kids are getting bunk beds. Having a holodeck in my house completely outranks the importance of them having their own rooms.
They may even agree with you....but you'll have to fight them for the use of it.
You may have noticed that two of the three languages that I mentioned are garbage collected (D and Java). This isn't entirely coincidence. Languages that implement garbage collection in their design, and reduce or eliminate the direct use of pointers seem to eliminate an entire raft of security problems. That they tend to have dynamic arrays and arrays that implement bounds checking is merely one bonus.
C++ was at one time going to implement part of this in the new standard...which has now both had features cut, and been pushed further into the future, but those were cut years ago. Add-on libraries like Boost don't solve the problem. It needs to be designed into the language so that one can count on it being in use. For that reason the STL vectors don't count as a solution to this class of problem. For that matter, I note that C (and presumably C++) now allows one to *specify* that an array as an unspecified size. (I forget the syntax, but it's merely the legitimization of an old and very insecure trick used by C programmers to allow them to implement at run-time variable sized arrays. It was always quite dangerous, and making it legitimate doesn't remove the danger.)
I'll agree that one can write dangerous code in ANY language. One doesn't need to choose a language that goes out of it's way to make it the easiest choice. (That's slightly unfair. When C was designed the effort was to get something efficient enough to replace assembler. C did that, and it was, indeed, safer than assembler. And C++ merely copied it's approach from C. Indeed, for a long time it was merely a superset of C. But that was then and this is now.)
Optimization isn't what you want here. It has a tendency to remove expensive checks, like checks that an array boundary isn't being overwritten.
There are a couple of reasonable ways to handle this, but optimization isn't one of them. (My favorite would be to re-write everything in D. I'd've mentioned Ada also, but gnat, by default, doesn't implement the array bounds checking that Ada includes. [It's there, but you've got to select a special compiler option to get it, because that check is expensive at run-time.] I could also have selected Java as an option, as I believe it defaults to including bounds checking, but an OS written in an interpreted language sort of bothers me...and gcj appears to have stalled [as of the last time I looked, about a year ago].)
It seems quite plausible that where there are large initial development costs that must be born by the developer, but which need not be born by those who copy the development, then patents with a limited lifespan may well be justifiable. And there are such cases.
The extension of patents into areas where the initial development costs are minimal (less than the cost of defending a patent suit, or prosecuting such a suit successfully) is, however, destructive to society.
Slashdot Mirror
The catch is, more free to whom?
The BSD license is definitely more free to the person who accepts the source code under that license. But any freedom given to subsequent recipients of that code is strictly under the good wishes of that recipient. (I'm presuming that he's made changes that are significant enough that you can't just go to the original source.) The GPL, by disallowing the restriction of the rights of those later users is definitely restricting the recipients of the code...the restriction is that they must pass on the code (with any modifications) only if they also pass on all the rights under which they received it.
Sorry, but to me the GPL looks like a better trade-off. In most cases. It's the license that I'll use, and you can contact me if you want my code on other terms.
N.B.: MySQL did reasonably well under this arrangement for over a decade. (I don't know how much over, and I don't know whether it will weather it's current troubles.)
(I picked MySQL over Red Hat because Red Hat is primarily a distributor, whereas MySQL is primarily a software author. But there *were* other choices.)
"Were a commercial interest involved, the law of gravity itself would be cast into doubt"
--- (I don't know who said it, but it isn't original. Google returns no hits.)
Sorry, but you're wrong. Estimates of the costs and prices are available, but they are estimates and unreliable. In other places you can find numbers which count parts of the costs. There isn't anywhere that provides the full perspective. You can't even assemble it, because some of the actual numbers just aren't available to anyone outside of each particular company. So *NOBODY* can make an accurate statement of the costs.
PARTIAL calculations of the cost prove that the US pays more for less. But they're only counting part of the actual costs.
We're told that continually. But I've not seen numbers that I trust that back it up. And I *do* know that much of that research is directed at changing existing drugs slightly, not to work better, but rather to extend patent coverage. And other research is to prove that the drug under investigation is safe. NOTE!!!:: I didn't write "to check whether it is safe". If the research doesn't prove that it's safe, it will be buried and a slightly different research study will be conducted by different researchers.
Now I don't know what part of the "research" budget is directed to such dubious practices. I merely know they exist, and are funded. The budget details are secret. But I definitely know enough to cause me to be suspicious when I hear "our market subsidizes the rest of the world's drugs and R&D". Trusting that may be safer than trusting MS or SCOx, but there's no guarantee. The information that would be needed to prove that is carefully hidden.
I think he was being sarcastic. (A dangerous thing to do in a post, as you'll likely be misunderstood.)
Note that he did point out that the different towers handled different protocols. Probably by this he meant it would be three times as expensive to have the same coverage. I don't think he meant to imply that there were actually three times as many towers. Rather that the areas of good coverage were segmented into micro-monopolies.
Some programmers work harder than some roofers. Most probably enjoy their work more. (OTOH, most roofers would HATE to be programmers.)
Unless, that is, you have a definition of "work harder" that involves using muscles. In that case you're correct.
Note that many (not necessarily most) roofers are independent contractors, and don't work any harder than they choose. (But I really doubt that anyone likes the smell of hot tar.)
Are you sure?
I'm sure that some people would pay more in taxes, others, perhaps, less. So how do you know into which group I fall?
P.S.: If you count health insurance, and what my employer pays in health insurance, I suspect that we pay more for less. Naturally I can't assert that as truth, as the actual numbers involved are secret. (I.e., I know what I am charged, and I know what my employer claims it pays, but I have no way to verify the claims.)
My suspicion is that with full governmental health coverage the elimination of much accounting would easily pay for any inefficiencies, and that many of those "inefficiencies" translate into better health care.
I know-for-certain that today's health care is technically better than it used to be, but the user-interaction involved in care is significantly worse than before the HMO's appeared. Doctors previously didn't limit their patient involvement time to a certain number of minutes before going on to the next patient. Now it's official policy (a policy which caused certain doctors that I have known to retire). And medical malpractice insurance makes part-time medical practice impossibly expensive. (Nurses generally seem to be less endangered by this...so far. Or perhaps they're just more willing to take risks.)
The doctors that I know seem to be on the fence about government medical involvement. Certainly they don't like the bureaucratic entanglement, but then they are already so entangled that they are close to closing up shop. That isn't why they studied to be doctors, and it's NOT they way they enjoy spending their time. So solitary medical practice is almost gone. They join into groups to hire accountants and others to deal with the out-of-control bureaucracy...but it's NOT federal or state bureaucracy. It's the medical insurance companies. And you probably don't have a clue as to how much that's costing. A cost which is a near total waste!!
Your argument is fallacious. Most people don't think either of the two candidates that have a chance fairly represent their views, but they are also aware that only those two candidates have a chance. So either they don't vote, or they vote for someone who isn't their preferred choice. Either instant runoff or Condorcet voting would be fairer, with Condorcet having an edge in fairness, and instant runoff being more understandable.
Note that this is a separate problem from the one that was addressed in this article. That was about the trustworthiness of the results, not about fairness.
OTOH, electronic voting without a paper trail leading back to the original paper ballots is, I agree, stupid. You have some of the reasons right, but there are others.
P.S.: Any plan that requires the voters to act as blocks, without consideration of their individual desires is flawed. So is any plan that assumes that there are only three or four aggregations of preferences.
I don't know that much about Beijing, or other non-US governments. So I'm more reluctant to criticize the. I *DO* know how distorted news reporting is. I've been on the site of events that I've seen reported. So I definitely don't trust reporting where all the reports can be traced to a common origin...say AP or Reuters.
I more or less trust local news. (I can usually find someone who knows something directly about anything I think of as important.) I'm much less trusting about regional news. National news is to be taken with a very large grain of salt. And international news...well, it might be more accurate than fiction.
So I'm more willing to criticize local governments about reported actions. A bit less willing to criticize State governments. Slightly less willing to criticize the federal govt. And rather reluctant to criticize foreign governments. It has to do with the degree of certainty I have towards knowledge about what's really going on.
OTOH, I'm quite willing to tell anyone what I feel is proper. That's a different matter. It's also, however, different from being willing to tell people what to do in a situation where I'm uncertain as to exactly what's happening.
Thus I can be quite certain that it was improper for a child to be beaten to death, and I can be quite certain that those who did it are murderers. This doesn't tell me how this should be dealt with, though, of course, some actions are clearly wrong...like letting them kill more children.
I'm suspicious of China precisely BECAUSE it looks like the way the US would handle it. And I am informed about the state of justice within the US system.
If you think highly of the US system, it's because you haven't been watching it. There are worse systems, but the US system is definitely not a good one, and it seems to be deteriorating. The criminal system seems to let anyone associated with law enforcement get away with murder. Even if convicted of the act the result is almost never worse than getting fired, and it doesn't usually seem to even get investigated, even when there's plenty of evidence. And as for the civil court system...let's consider the case of SCO vs. IBM. Six years, IBM has probably spent millions of dollars in defense and court filings, and SCO isn't going to pay them one red cent in damages, because they've gone bankrupt. And it hasn't produced ANY evidence worthy of the name to back up their charges. No even under a direct court order. That case should have been over within 3 months when SCO twice refused to produce evidence under a court order. (They gave excuses rather than denials, but they didn't produce it.) If IBM were the one suing, this might be excusable, but the court was ordering SCO to produce evidence showing that it had any reason for it's charges against IBM. When that wasn't forthcoming, the case should have been dropped by the court (though not IBM's counter charges. "Tortuous interference with business practices" seems an apt description of SCO. (That the case was apparently funded, at least in part, by MS, but that that hasn't been able to be investigated, is just an added bit of information as to how unjust the court system is.)
I'm told that the system isn't getting worse, it's just that I hadn't noticed before how unjust it was. This could be true, but it's definitely no guiding light by which all should be guided.
Or possibly it *was* an official camp, and the legitimacy has been retroactively removed because the government didn't like how they handled this case.
Basically, we can't know. And that's true in the US, also. I've been on the site of events that were later reported. I can guarantee that the reports were fiction "inspired by" an actual event. Most of the time they didn't lie by commission, but by omission. It's just as effective. But at least a couple of times I've noticed them actually slipping in something that was totally fabricated. Once it was for the purpose of making the news more entertaining. The other time I would need to speculate about the reason...but it did alter the emotional tone of the story.
Murderers they are and murders they remain. The court verdict just means that they won't be punished, it doesn't mean they aren't murderers.
Now if you posit that they didn't do it, then *that* would mean they aren't murders, but a court verdict is only about "Will they be punished or not?" and "Will the state act on the presumption that they did it or not?". It doesn't (necessarily) have anything to do with their state in actuality.
And this ISN'T a small nitpick.
But if they sue you, you'll go broke defending yourself, and then they'll win a default judgment against you because you didn't show up in the new venue that you were notified about yesterday.
You miss the point. The framers of the constitution did not, in my belief, have any intention of the government being involved in the creation or regulation of the militia. That was considered the responsibility of the citizenry of each local area. The mandatory global armament authorization was to ensure the feasibility of the creation of such militias.
I was thinking of embedding tags in the bullets, not in the shells. You'd still have the problem of falsely planted evidence, but when a bullet hits something the bullet is deformed in ways that are reasonably characteristic of the thing that it hit, and they're rather difficult to reuse. Basically you'd just need to have the numbered tags written on something with a higher melting point than the rest of the matrix of the bullet. That's not too difficult. A small piece of steel, say 1mm X 1/2 mm should be able to fit into a bullet without any problem, And you could still hand load it.
It would even be possible to allow non-commercial hand crafted un-numbered bullets. The fact that most people used purchased ammunition should reduce the number of places that need to be checked by well over 90%. This isn't intended to be a perfect solution, merely one that would deal with the problem of locating who to suspect.
I don't like it either. But large cities and fast transportation mean that there's a need to eliminate large numbers of people from suspicion quickly. A better answer would be a smaller population, but birth control meets fierce resistance, and I don't favor a large-scale die-off.
What do you mean there's no test for sentience? There are several tests.
Some of the test pass things that we don't think they should pass, and some don't pass things that we think they should, but they are still tests.
E.g., Any computer + program that can pass the Turing Test (the *real* Turing Test) would be sentient. It would necessarily be much beyond the minimal grade of sentience, but it would be sentient. (It's also a very silly goal to cause the AI to have, but that's a different point.)
If you don't think that that would imply sentience, then I need to know what definition you are using. (Yes, I'm aware that Turing was saying intelligent, but it would also imply sentience.)
I'll admit that the concept of sentience gives me a lot of trouble. I generally use it as a synonym for conscious, but then I get into things like "A thermostat hooked up to a heater and a cooler shows a minimal degree of consciousness." Well, it *is* responding to sensed changes in it's environment based upon changes in it's internal state. That may just be an "atom" of consciousness. If it isn't, justify the definition that doesn't imply that it is.
I'll agree that the Singularity (in one form or another) isn't inevitable. I don't know why you so denigrate it. I'm sure that you can find many scientists who will criticize it, but I haven't found any of them that both understand the concept and provide convincing arguments that it won't happen. (Not that it may not happen. Those exist. But that it won't happen.)
I've been tracking the projections for around a decade now. Some were overly optimistic, others were underly optimistic. And there were several things that happened that nobody predicted. As well as some expected innovations that haven't yet happened.
On the balance I think we're on course for the Singularity to happen within +/- ten years from 2035. 2020 is my projection for the earliest expectable arrival. 2050 is a rather late arrival. But note that the progress towards the Singularity is a process. It's basically just a statement that things are now changing, and the rate of change is increasing, and at some point, called the Singularity, this projection will necessarily break down. The automatically self improving AI program is only ONE of the paths, though as a programmer it's the one I'm most interested in. Another branch leads through mind-reading game interfaces to electronically mediated telepathy to a group mind that acts a lot more quickly than the internet. Another branch leads through genetic engineering to modified humans with increased intelligence. There are others, and, of course, combinations.
Thinking of the Singularity as a single entity is a mistake fostered by the language. But it's still a mistake.
P.S.: Note that I didn't mention nano-technology. That will be a tool that can be used by any of the various paths, not a path towards the singularity, except that it will REALLY facilitate several of the different paths simultaneously.
I'm not suggesting that we artificially prop up a dysfunctional business model, I'm just pointing out that once it dies we may notice a gap and see the pendulum swing back as we fill it.
Unfortunately, that gap appeared quite awhile ago. I'm not willing to pay people money to lie to me. If they want to print fiction, they should label it that and sell it as fiction rather than news. As it is...they can die without loss. Local papers seem to still cover news. Not perfectly, but they try to report facts. Regional and national papers seem to presume that nobody can tell that they're lying, so why not just say anything that seems entertaining. They print stories that are appropriately labeled "Inspired by an actual event.", and they print pictures with angles so carefully chosen that they deserve the same title. (I've never actually *caught* them editing the contents of the pictures, but they've certainly picked carefully chosen angles, and then cropped them to fit into the story that they decided to write "inspired by the actual event". And, naturally, most pictures that they take end up "on the cutting room floor".
How about linearly magnetized alnico wires?
You'd need something else for the warp (woof?) threads, but that might cause a few problems, while still being a Faraday cage.
I don't think that I accept the right of a law to define the words used in the constitution. (This is an unreasonably broad definition of militia, e.g.)
The framers of the constitution clearly mean locally organized bodies of men under arms who were not controlled by the government. As such, it's in reasonable agreement with this law, but I still deny the right of a law to define what a word used in the constitution means.
One thing to notice. Those are all large cities where people are densely packed. It makes a difference.
Just the other day I was looking at a drawing of a suspected murderer on a poster, and I thought:
If there were only a few thousand people in this city, that drawing might identify a unique person. But as it is, and given the rapid transportation available, it's nearly worthless. Nearly isn't totally, and the character was relatively unusual, so there are probably only a few like him. But still...there are population size effects.
I don't know the right answer, or if there IS a right answer. But to blanketly assert that gun-control is bad is too strong a statement. Maybe the ammunition should be registered. This would require that each bullet have an identifying number embedded in it, and that it be recorded (and tracked) who each bullet was sold to. It should be feasible to do, but I'm not sure it would be inexpensive. Still, most people don't use very much ammunition.
When this goes commercial, my kids are getting bunk beds. Having a holodeck in my house completely outranks the importance of them having their own rooms.
They may even agree with you....but you'll have to fight them for the use of it.
You may have noticed that two of the three languages that I mentioned are garbage collected (D and Java). This isn't entirely coincidence. Languages that implement garbage collection in their design, and reduce or eliminate the direct use of pointers seem to eliminate an entire raft of security problems. That they tend to have dynamic arrays and arrays that implement bounds checking is merely one bonus.
C++ was at one time going to implement part of this in the new standard...which has now both had features cut, and been pushed further into the future, but those were cut years ago. Add-on libraries like Boost don't solve the problem. It needs to be designed into the language so that one can count on it being in use. For that reason the STL vectors don't count as a solution to this class of problem. For that matter, I note that C (and presumably C++) now allows one to *specify* that an array as an unspecified size. (I forget the syntax, but it's merely the legitimization of an old and very insecure trick used by C programmers to allow them to implement at run-time variable sized arrays. It was always quite dangerous, and making it legitimate doesn't remove the danger.)
I'll agree that one can write dangerous code in ANY language. One doesn't need to choose a language that goes out of it's way to make it the easiest choice. (That's slightly unfair. When C was designed the effort was to get something efficient enough to replace assembler. C did that, and it was, indeed, safer than assembler. And C++ merely copied it's approach from C. Indeed, for a long time it was merely a superset of C. But that was then and this is now.)
Optimization isn't what you want here. It has a tendency to remove expensive checks, like checks that an array boundary isn't being overwritten.
There are a couple of reasonable ways to handle this, but optimization isn't one of them. (My favorite would be to re-write everything in D. I'd've mentioned Ada also, but gnat, by default, doesn't implement the array bounds checking that Ada includes. [It's there, but you've got to select a special compiler option to get it, because that check is expensive at run-time.] I could also have selected Java as an option, as I believe it defaults to including bounds checking, but an OS written in an interpreted language sort of bothers me...and gcj appears to have stalled [as of the last time I looked, about a year ago].)
I'm not sure you're right.
It seems quite plausible that where there are large initial development costs that must be born by the developer, but which need not be born by those who copy the development, then patents with a limited lifespan may well be justifiable. And there are such cases.
The extension of patents into areas where the initial development costs are minimal (less than the cost of defending a patent suit, or prosecuting such a suit successfully) is, however, destructive to society.