Segway doesn't appear to have anything to do with this other than making the machines. This is just a few entrepreneurs cashing in on the hype.
Re:Pirates
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Almost. The piece of eight (the Spanish Milled Dollar, worth eight reales) was one of the principal coins of the colonies, but the coin was not broken up. Instead, coins of values equivalent to one-half, one-quarter, and one-eighth of a dollar. One piece of eight was worth on real, eight reales to a dollar...
This is one of the reasons the Sony DRU500 drive is doing so well that they can barely keep it in stock. It reads and writes all four major recording standards (only DVD-RAM is not supported for writing, not sure about reading), so for $300, it's not a bad deal.
Many spacecraft have small jets that push them into different positions in space. Hubble has no jets because the exhaust gas from jets could damage its delicate mirrors.
Another reason that gyros are used is much more practical: fuel storage limitations. For a satellite that is to be in orbit for years and will be constantly redirected, the fuel required for something like that would be many times the mass of the satellite, and thus impossible to put into orbit.
There was continuity in TOS with the character Harry Mudd, in episodes entitled (I think) "Mudd's Women" and "I, Mudd". Aside from that, though, I don't think there was any significant reuse of any plot points or characters.
How often does the charcoal filter need to be replaced? The site talks a lot about the warranty on the permanent filter, but at $15 a piece (sold in pairs for $30), that could get annoying if they need to be replaced too often.
I also pay into the highway and air systems in the form of the taxes paid on the fuel in my car and on the tickets I book. I don't have the numbers now, but at least road users pay in a significant portion of the money that goes into maintaining the roads.
There was a recent audit that said that Amtrak has only two profitable lines, and that one of the loss-making lines (running from California to Florida) loses something like $560 per passenger. This is on top of aging cars that are more likely to be pulled off the line for maintenance, poor quality rides, and poor customer service reports. I'm all for other companies running passenger service, just like I'm all for the post office being opened up to competition.
The USPS doesn't get a dime of taxpayer money. All of what they do is paid for through postage and other services. This is why they make their annual reports of profits and losses.
Now if they could just let Amtrak do the same thing and stop throwing tax dollars at *that*...
Right now, our state legislature is talking about allowing private companies to add additional lanes to existing roads and then charge money to use those lanes so that they can recoup the cost of building them, plus make a "reasonable profit", after which time, the cost of using those lanes would be reduced. I heard about this on the news last night, and the first thing I thought of was the telecomms and all the extra bullshit they tack onto our bills.
Sounds like the toll lanes in Orange County, CA, specifically along the 91. Check out this sweet deal the toll operators got:
* State/County issue low-interest, government-backed bonds for the construction costs to be paid back by the company * Company get tax breaks, environmental waivers * Toll prices allowed to go from an initial $1 per direction at peak to nearly $5 now. Even off-peak costs (when it's pointless to use the lanes anyway because traffic is clear) is $1.25, last I saw. * Further widening of the freeway was forbidden until the free lanes reaches something like 50% over design capacity (which rarely has anything to do with reality anyway), and then only one lane in each direction could be added to the existing four lanes per side. This was part of a secret non-compete clause that was designed to prevent the toll road operators from losing business.
The Orange County Transportation Authority finally bought the lanes at the beginning of this year for $261 million. The plan is to pay off the existing bonds as quickly as possible, and then turn the toll lanes into standard carpool lanes. In the meantime, construction is set to begin in the near future on at least one and possibly two additional lanes. For once, there's no way they can go back on it and keep their jobs, because the hatred of the toll lanes, particularly once the non-compete clause became public, was universal among the 250,000+ daily users, many of whom have 50+ mile commutes that can take up to two hours to complete.
I show 92 DSL providers that can service my home according to broadbandreports.com. A random survey of some of them put them all in the $40-$60 price range for 1.5Mbps down and from 128kbps to 384kbps up. My cable service is $43 a month. A couple of those in the $60 range allow multiple IP addresses, but in general for the kinds of service you're discussing, I'd be looking at $150+. The additional $110 would go a fair way towards a good dedicated server, which I would prefer over hosting my own.
The network was inherited from Comcast when Adelphia bought the rights to the local franchise (north Orange County). Comcast ran a very tight ship, and Adelphia has managed to continue to do so for the most part. The only complaints that I have with Adelphia are a minor issue with the DNS servers (not a major problem for me since I use the nameservers at work), slow personal page load times (used only for the odd photograph when IM/IRC doesn't work), and Level I techs too dependent on the support map to be able to let me get to Level II support, which if anything is even better than the impressive support that Comcast had. During one call to them about a problem with the local gateway, I got a chance to talk to a female L2 tech, who had no problem with looking into the outage. In the meantime we talked about other things while waiting for a response from the local technicians, and I considered asking her where she lived until she mentioned her husband.:) Anyway, these are issues that come up maybe once every six months or so.
One nice side bonus to the recent uptick in speeds (which required a new cablemodem) was that for bringing the cablemodem into their office (less than two minutes from school) I got a free month of service. The rep there even modified the contract to drop the maximum replacement cost of the modem to $100 from $500. Adelphia gets a bad rap in most locations, but yes, I'm happy with them for the most part.
I work night shift, so most of my home surfing is done during the day and early evening hours when some cable users find things most clogged. I don't notice any significant hit to the transfer rates. It depends much on how well the local crews maintain the network.
That works for you since you (apparently) have a need to use it for server purposes. I don't. At home, I use it for web browsing, game playing, e-mail, and VoIP. With only a 256kbps uplink, I wouldn't want to burden the link with a server, and would prefer to pay for a dedicated server for something like that.
Most people I know on DSL are capped at 1.5Mbps, while I routinely can download on my cablemodem at home at 350KB/sec. They're also usually capped at 128kbps upload, while mine (Adelphia Powerlink in Southern California) has been raised to 256kbps. The download speed difference has been around for as long as I've had a cablemodem under Adelphia (and Comcast before that) -- about five years.
Not quite. It depends on what station. Pilot and copilot stations have changed little. Navigator, ESO, and weapons are an entirely different story. In addition, they're still using the original engines, although I believe that most of them have wings newer than the fuselage.
The re-engine plans were drawn up by Boeing, and involve replacing the existing eight engines with four from the civil lines. I forget which model, but the 757 comes to mind.
As for the nuclear engines... I don't know where you heard that, but AFAIK the only nuclear engine test was aboard a B-36 test platform, and that was scrapped due to weight issues (its entire bombload and most of the fuel) and worries about what would happen to the fuel if it crashed.
Current plans are to evaluate retirement in 2040. The hope is that a supersonic or hypersonic bomber will be ready by then.
I do wonder what the longest family crew lineage is. It's possible that there is a crewman out there whose father and grandfather were BUFF crewmen, too.
It's not just the damage caused to the species in the river. It's also the loss of habitat behind the dame for land-borne species. It's the loss of fresh water in the deltas. It's the lack of replacement sediments for the down-river areas which build up behind the dam and which eventually leads to a loss of capacity for the reservoir.
I understand the use of dams for hydroelectric power for now, for use as water reservoirs, or for a certain degree of flood control. However, when those dams have as much effect as the Hoover Dam (and the consequential 1200 or so miles of disruption and damage to river species, not to mention the devastation to the Amerind populations along the river) and the disastrous effects of the upcoming Three Rivers Dam project (which will dwarf Hoover Dam in its environmental effects), I think it is time to look at other means for power generation, and I think that nuclear power is the least damaging long-term *when the reactors are designed right*, which those in the US and western Europe are. I live in Southern California, about 70 miles north of the San Onofre nuclear power facility, and I don't have any fear of it. I'd gladly support the construction of a new reactor in my immediate neighborhood. I'd even get a cool little packet of potassium iodide pills I can show off to visitors.
I think some changes are in order, but not because it's a good idea to reduce CO2 even if the climate isn't warming. I think doing it to reduce the *other* emissions is the better idea. I have always been a skeptic about global warming, but I've tried to keep my mind open about it. However, even as that is seen as a possible problem, issues like smog and acid rain are real problems that have been around for decades and longer.
While I realize the problems of storing things like radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, I also see the benefits of their byproducts (mainly steam) compared to the environmental damage done by coal, oil, gas, and hydroelectric plants. A single nuclear plant could store the waste from its lifetime in a relatively small location (compared to the area over which fire-based emissions spread), paid for by fees on the utility company, which is well-guarded, well-built, and well-sealed. Some of it could even be fed back into newer designs to be re-used until it's at an even lower radiation level. Continue work on fusion reactors, and bring them online as soon as is practical. Compare the damage done to the environment by a well-designed reactor to the damage done by a coal plant, and I think the tradeoffs are clearly more beneficial -- IMHO.
Barring this, require better scrubbers on the plants. One of the things that gets missed is that these scrubbers also create jobs in manufacturing and R&D, both of which are relatively high-paying, which is good for the tax base. Lower emissions (and still keep working on the fusion process), more taxes coming in.... It could work.
Conceal the source or destination...so that means having an unlisted number (transmits private or no caller id info) is illegal?
I don't think it would be here, since the phone company still has records of the source and destination of a call. Even with caller ID block, for example, when you call a toll-free number, the company with the number still gets your phone number on their bill.
You're working on the assumption that they have nobody there working past the technology of a typewriter. I'm presuming that they have either a younger attorney, or else maybe a tech person there.
I'll follow it up in a few days if I have not received a response, with a phone call if necessary.
Text of the e-mail I just sent to the Michigan AG's office:
*** Subject: Questions on Michigan law, section 750.540c.amended
This new law, due to take effect on Monday, Mar 31, 2003 (likely the day this is read) has brought some concern to those of us who are technically minded. The main issue stems from this portion:
(1) A person shall not assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise an unlawful telecommunications access device or assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise a telecommunications device intending to use those devices or to allow the devices to be used to do any of the following or knowing or having reason to know that the devices are intended to be used to do any of the following:... (b) Conceal the existence or place of origin or destination of any telecommunications service.
This would seem to make illegal any hardware and software designed to make use of such technologies as NAT (Network Address Translation), which is used to allow multiple computers or other devices to access a single connection to the Internet. Specifically, the ISP will see only the information about the router, which, as a consequence of the technology, blocks any information about the original computer sending the transmission.
Another portion reads thusly:
(2) A person shall not modify, alter, program, or reprogram a telecommunications access device for the purposes described in subsection (1).
This would seem to make illegal a feature on many routers that allows a device on the outside of the private network to see a MAC address that is not the true address of the router, but rather one that matches a network card of a computer behind the router. This allows the router to be used in cases where an ISP uses the MAC address as a security feature to prevent unauthorized access to its network. It would seem that use of this feature could be combined with the above concern to result in a doubling of the penalty.
Because of the popularity of these technologies, my reading of the law would make many Michigan residents into potential criminals, and could unfairly force them into paying more for additional connections to their ISP if the ISP chooses to forbid NATs and then proceed to systematically hunt down those that would use NATs.
Is this understanding of the law as written correct in letter if not in spirit? Can you provide any information on how the Attorney General's office plans to advise the various district attorneys on conditions under which violations of this law should be pursued? For example, could an ISP demand criminal charges be brought against someone who has used NAT technologies on its network? There is a large technical community that is now worried about this.
(1) A person shall not assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise an unlawful telecommunications access device or assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise a telecommunications device intending to use those devices or to allow the devices to be used to do any of the following or knowing or having reason to know that the devices are intended to be used to do any of the following: ... (b) Conceal the existence or place of origin or destination of any telecommunications service.
This makes NAT illegal. The other sections of (1) are effectively OR statements.
(2) A person shall not modify, alter, program, or reprogram a telecommunications access device for the purposes described in subsection (1).
It's now illegal to also use the built-in function of your router to change the external MAC address to allow it to connect to the network in the first place.
Violation of either of the above is four years and/or $2000 *per* violation, meaning up to eight years and $4000 for using NAT and changing the MAC address to allow it to be used.
You're presuming a supernatural element to life, rather than looking at it as it probably should be, and that is as an incredibly complex series of chemical reactions. You may well be right, but seeing as how we have created fully-functional viruses in the lab (see the earlier mention of the creation of the polio virus), I see no reason to think that the successful creation of a cellular organism will result in anything less functional than the original, as long as there are no chemistry-killing errors in the cells.
Where would I put my new device that gives me the equivalent of a 60-foot antenna? I paid $19.95 + S/H for this sticker-- I mean, for this incredible innovation!
Even more frightening is the fact that we understand the fundamental axioms of biology way less than computer science.
This is because with computers, we've started big and worked our way down, understanding each step as we went. Here, though, we're starting at the most basic level that we know -- self-replicating molecules -- and working up. I submit to you that this would be more analogous to coding in binary, testing the results as a few more bits were added each time to see what the result was. Sometimes you might get a working effect out of it (good or bad); more often, you'd get either no function or an error. Eventually, you might get a viable BIOS -- or you might get a virulent worm. It all depends on how quickly you move.
Slashdot Mirror
Segway doesn't appear to have anything to do with this other than making the machines. This is just a few entrepreneurs cashing in on the hype.
Almost. The piece of eight (the Spanish Milled Dollar, worth eight reales) was one of the principal coins of the colonies, but the coin was not broken up. Instead, coins of values equivalent to one-half, one-quarter, and one-eighth of a dollar. One piece of eight was worth on real, eight reales to a dollar...
And now you know.
This is one of the reasons the Sony DRU500 drive is doing so well that they can barely keep it in stock. It reads and writes all four major recording standards (only DVD-RAM is not supported for writing, not sure about reading), so for $300, it's not a bad deal.
Many spacecraft have small jets that push them into different positions in space. Hubble has no jets because the exhaust gas from jets could damage its delicate mirrors.
Another reason that gyros are used is much more practical: fuel storage limitations. For a satellite that is to be in orbit for years and will be constantly redirected, the fuel required for something like that would be many times the mass of the satellite, and thus impossible to put into orbit.
There was continuity in TOS with the character Harry Mudd, in episodes entitled (I think) "Mudd's Women" and "I, Mudd". Aside from that, though, I don't think there was any significant reuse of any plot points or characters.
Actually, I have a second question on it...
How often does the charcoal filter need to be replaced? The site talks a lot about the warranty on the permanent filter, but at $15 a piece (sold in pairs for $30), that could get annoying if they need to be replaced too often.
From the Oreck link:
Uses the same clean-air technology that U.S. Navy submarines use.
Any submariners in here that can attest to this?
I also pay into the highway and air systems in the form of the taxes paid on the fuel in my car and on the tickets I book. I don't have the numbers now, but at least road users pay in a significant portion of the money that goes into maintaining the roads.
There was a recent audit that said that Amtrak has only two profitable lines, and that one of the loss-making lines (running from California to Florida) loses something like $560 per passenger. This is on top of aging cars that are more likely to be pulled off the line for maintenance, poor quality rides, and poor customer service reports. I'm all for other companies running passenger service, just like I'm all for the post office being opened up to competition.
The USPS doesn't get a dime of taxpayer money. All of what they do is paid for through postage and other services. This is why they make their annual reports of profits and losses.
Now if they could just let Amtrak do the same thing and stop throwing tax dollars at *that*...
Right now, our state legislature is talking about allowing private companies to add additional lanes to existing roads and then charge money to use those lanes so that they can recoup the cost of building them, plus make a "reasonable profit", after which time, the cost of using those lanes would be reduced. I heard about this on the news last night, and the first thing I thought of was the telecomms and all the extra bullshit they tack onto our bills.
Sounds like the toll lanes in Orange County, CA, specifically along the 91. Check out this sweet deal the toll operators got:
* State/County issue low-interest, government-backed bonds for the construction costs to be paid back by the company
* Company get tax breaks, environmental waivers
* Toll prices allowed to go from an initial $1 per direction at peak to nearly $5 now. Even off-peak costs (when it's pointless to use the lanes anyway because traffic is clear) is $1.25, last I saw.
* Further widening of the freeway was forbidden until the free lanes reaches something like 50% over design capacity (which rarely has anything to do with reality anyway), and then only one lane in each direction could be added to the existing four lanes per side. This was part of a secret non-compete clause that was designed to prevent the toll road operators from losing business.
The Orange County Transportation Authority finally bought the lanes at the beginning of this year for $261 million. The plan is to pay off the existing bonds as quickly as possible, and then turn the toll lanes into standard carpool lanes. In the meantime, construction is set to begin in the near future on at least one and possibly two additional lanes. For once, there's no way they can go back on it and keep their jobs, because the hatred of the toll lanes, particularly once the non-compete clause became public, was universal among the 250,000+ daily users, many of whom have 50+ mile commutes that can take up to two hours to complete.
Fight this in your state if you can.
I show 92 DSL providers that can service my home according to broadbandreports.com. A random survey of some of them put them all in the $40-$60 price range for 1.5Mbps down and from 128kbps to 384kbps up. My cable service is $43 a month. A couple of those in the $60 range allow multiple IP addresses, but in general for the kinds of service you're discussing, I'd be looking at $150+. The additional $110 would go a fair way towards a good dedicated server, which I would prefer over hosting my own.
But to each his own.
The network was inherited from Comcast when Adelphia bought the rights to the local franchise (north Orange County). Comcast ran a very tight ship, and Adelphia has managed to continue to do so for the most part. The only complaints that I have with Adelphia are a minor issue with the DNS servers (not a major problem for me since I use the nameservers at work), slow personal page load times (used only for the odd photograph when IM/IRC doesn't work), and Level I techs too dependent on the support map to be able to let me get to Level II support, which if anything is even better than the impressive support that Comcast had. During one call to them about a problem with the local gateway, I got a chance to talk to a female L2 tech, who had no problem with looking into the outage. In the meantime we talked about other things while waiting for a response from the local technicians, and I considered asking her where she lived until she mentioned her husband. :) Anyway, these are issues that come up maybe once every six months or so.
One nice side bonus to the recent uptick in speeds (which required a new cablemodem) was that for bringing the cablemodem into their office (less than two minutes from school) I got a free month of service. The rep there even modified the contract to drop the maximum replacement cost of the modem to $100 from $500. Adelphia gets a bad rap in most locations, but yes, I'm happy with them for the most part.
I work night shift, so most of my home surfing is done during the day and early evening hours when some cable users find things most clogged. I don't notice any significant hit to the transfer rates. It depends much on how well the local crews maintain the network.
That works for you since you (apparently) have a need to use it for server purposes. I don't. At home, I use it for web browsing, game playing, e-mail, and VoIP. With only a 256kbps uplink, I wouldn't want to burden the link with a server, and would prefer to pay for a dedicated server for something like that.
Most people I know on DSL are capped at 1.5Mbps, while I routinely can download on my cablemodem at home at 350KB/sec. They're also usually capped at 128kbps upload, while mine (Adelphia Powerlink in Southern California) has been raised to 256kbps. The download speed difference has been around for as long as I've had a cablemodem under Adelphia (and Comcast before that) -- about five years.
Not quite. It depends on what station. Pilot and copilot stations have changed little. Navigator, ESO, and weapons are an entirely different story. In addition, they're still using the original engines, although I believe that most of them have wings newer than the fuselage.
The re-engine plans were drawn up by Boeing, and involve replacing the existing eight engines with four from the civil lines. I forget which model, but the 757 comes to mind.
As for the nuclear engines... I don't know where you heard that, but AFAIK the only nuclear engine test was aboard a B-36 test platform, and that was scrapped due to weight issues (its entire bombload and most of the fuel) and worries about what would happen to the fuel if it crashed.
Current plans are to evaluate retirement in 2040. The hope is that a supersonic or hypersonic bomber will be ready by then.
I do wonder what the longest family crew lineage is. It's possible that there is a crewman out there whose father and grandfather were BUFF crewmen, too.
It's not just the damage caused to the species in the river. It's also the loss of habitat behind the dame for land-borne species. It's the loss of fresh water in the deltas. It's the lack of replacement sediments for the down-river areas which build up behind the dam and which eventually leads to a loss of capacity for the reservoir.
I understand the use of dams for hydroelectric power for now, for use as water reservoirs, or for a certain degree of flood control. However, when those dams have as much effect as the Hoover Dam (and the consequential 1200 or so miles of disruption and damage to river species, not to mention the devastation to the Amerind populations along the river) and the disastrous effects of the upcoming Three Rivers Dam project (which will dwarf Hoover Dam in its environmental effects), I think it is time to look at other means for power generation, and I think that nuclear power is the least damaging long-term *when the reactors are designed right*, which those in the US and western Europe are. I live in Southern California, about 70 miles north of the San Onofre nuclear power facility, and I don't have any fear of it. I'd gladly support the construction of a new reactor in my immediate neighborhood. I'd even get a cool little packet of potassium iodide pills I can show off to visitors.
I think some changes are in order, but not because it's a good idea to reduce CO2 even if the climate isn't warming. I think doing it to reduce the *other* emissions is the better idea. I have always been a skeptic about global warming, but I've tried to keep my mind open about it. However, even as that is seen as a possible problem, issues like smog and acid rain are real problems that have been around for decades and longer.
While I realize the problems of storing things like radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, I also see the benefits of their byproducts (mainly steam) compared to the environmental damage done by coal, oil, gas, and hydroelectric plants. A single nuclear plant could store the waste from its lifetime in a relatively small location (compared to the area over which fire-based emissions spread), paid for by fees on the utility company, which is well-guarded, well-built, and well-sealed. Some of it could even be fed back into newer designs to be re-used until it's at an even lower radiation level. Continue work on fusion reactors, and bring them online as soon as is practical. Compare the damage done to the environment by a well-designed reactor to the damage done by a coal plant, and I think the tradeoffs are clearly more beneficial -- IMHO.
Barring this, require better scrubbers on the plants. One of the things that gets missed is that these scrubbers also create jobs in manufacturing and R&D, both of which are relatively high-paying, which is good for the tax base. Lower emissions (and still keep working on the fusion process), more taxes coming in.... It could work.
Conceal the source or destination...so that means having an unlisted number (transmits private or no caller id info) is illegal?
I don't think it would be here, since the phone company still has records of the source and destination of a call. Even with caller ID block, for example, when you call a toll-free number, the company with the number still gets your phone number on their bill.
You're working on the assumption that they have nobody there working past the technology of a typewriter. I'm presuming that they have either a younger attorney, or else maybe a tech person there.
I'll follow it up in a few days if I have not received a response, with a phone call if necessary.
Text of the e-mail I just sent to the Michigan AG's office:
...
***
Subject: Questions on Michigan law, section 750.540c.amended
This new law, due to take effect on Monday, Mar 31, 2003 (likely the day this is read) has brought some concern to those of us who are technically minded. The main issue stems from this portion:
(1) A person shall not assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise an unlawful telecommunications access device or assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise a telecommunications device intending to use those devices or to allow the devices to be used to do any of the following or knowing or having reason to know that the devices are intended to be used to do any of the following:
(b) Conceal the existence or place of origin or destination of any telecommunications service.
This would seem to make illegal any hardware and software designed to make use of such technologies as NAT (Network Address Translation), which is used to allow multiple computers or other devices to access a single connection to the Internet. Specifically, the ISP will see only the information about the router, which, as a consequence of the technology, blocks any information about the original computer sending the transmission.
Another portion reads thusly:
(2) A person shall not modify, alter, program, or reprogram a telecommunications access device for the purposes described in subsection (1).
This would seem to make illegal a feature on many routers that allows a device on the outside of the private network to see a MAC address that is not the true address of the router, but rather one that matches a network card of a computer behind the router. This allows the router to be used in cases where an ISP uses the MAC address as a security feature to prevent unauthorized access to its network. It would seem that use of this feature could be combined with the above concern to result in a doubling of the penalty.
Because of the popularity of these technologies, my reading of the law would make many Michigan residents into potential criminals, and could unfairly force them into paying more for additional connections to their ISP if the ISP chooses to forbid NATs and then proceed to systematically hunt down those that would use NATs.
Is this understanding of the law as written correct in letter if not in spirit? Can you provide any information on how the Attorney General's office plans to advise the various district attorneys on conditions under which violations of this law should be pursued? For example, could an ISP demand criminal charges be brought against someone who has used NAT technologies on its network? There is a large technical community that is now worried about this.
Thank you for your time.
***
I will post any response I get from them.
(1) A person shall not assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise an unlawful telecommunications access device or assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise a telecommunications device intending to use those devices or to allow the devices to be used to do any of the following or knowing or having reason to know that the devices are intended to be used to do any of the following:
...
(b) Conceal the existence or place of origin or destination of any telecommunications service.
This makes NAT illegal. The other sections of (1) are effectively OR statements.
(2) A person shall not modify, alter, program, or reprogram a telecommunications access device for the purposes described in subsection (1).
It's now illegal to also use the built-in function of your router to change the external MAC address to allow it to connect to the network in the first place.
Violation of either of the above is four years and/or $2000 *per* violation, meaning up to eight years and $4000 for using NAT and changing the MAC address to allow it to be used.
You're presuming a supernatural element to life, rather than looking at it as it probably should be, and that is as an incredibly complex series of chemical reactions. You may well be right, but seeing as how we have created fully-functional viruses in the lab (see the earlier mention of the creation of the polio virus), I see no reason to think that the successful creation of a cellular organism will result in anything less functional than the original, as long as there are no chemistry-killing errors in the cells.
Where would I put my new device that gives me the equivalent of a 60-foot antenna? I paid $19.95 + S/H for this sticker-- I mean, for this incredible innovation!
Even more frightening is the fact that we understand the fundamental axioms of biology way less than computer science.
This is because with computers, we've started big and worked our way down, understanding each step as we went. Here, though, we're starting at the most basic level that we know -- self-replicating molecules -- and working up. I submit to you that this would be more analogous to coding in binary, testing the results as a few more bits were added each time to see what the result was. Sometimes you might get a working effect out of it (good or bad); more often, you'd get either no function or an error. Eventually, you might get a viable BIOS -- or you might get a virulent worm. It all depends on how quickly you move.