The hard part of planning a terrorist attack is not figuring out what to shoot / blow up.
[Your words]... it's figuring out how to shoot it out/ blow it up, as well as (optionally) get away afterwards.
For all of which, photography is useful.
And of course, you could obtain sufficient, sufficiently accurate photography with a camera in a bag (on 1Hz shots) and an accomplice walking around with a 1m walking stick ("ranging pole", in the technical terminology). Of course, you could protect against this by imprisoning all people who understand geometry, and doubly imprisoning all people who have done surveying work in the centuries before GPS.
Oh, better jail and torture people who have surveying text books (you know : ink-on-paper!) from a century or two ago in their personal libraries, because the only possible reason for knowing of such technologies is to perform terrorist actions. It's comparable to planning kiddy-fucking to even think of using millennia-old techniques for millennia-old problems.
And, slightly more on topic, I love some of the verb tenses that arise from contemplating such distances... "In the future, we will know if the star has already died sometime between 640 years ago and now". It really does hurt my head.
Send your head back to the designer for refund or repair.
I believe that there are many organisations purporting to represent the designer, and each one of them is potentially liable for their designer's error(s), if they pass on the designs as being fit for use.
If you don't like the design, sue the distributors and let them pass the costs on to the manufacturers..
I suspect this could also realistically apply if you are harmed by flaws in the original structure's designs, e.g. poor reaction times, poor shock resistance. So sue the designer's representatives. Sue them hard, and let them reclaim their costs from the designer, if they can get the purported designer to appear in court.
"At this point it looks purely coincidental" that two of the top members were academics, police Lt. William Roseman said.
For a little more precision, this sounds more like a (semi-)organised group of "punters" (I think the American equivalent is a "Washington", or an "Adams" or something similar) with some degree of organisation to swap recommendations ("Crystal on 111-222-3333-4444 says she swallows, but really spits") and-or warnings (see previous comment).
(Do I need to explain? Surely not to an experienced group such as Slashdot's wankers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H readers.)
If there was evidence of Prof.X saying Student.Y "has a hot ass, and will do bareback anal for â150 and an A-grade in statistical analysis", then there might be a story. In fact, the appropriate phrase is "purely coincidental."
"Male human beings involved in attempts to organise access to sexually available females" is barely a story, even if a more accurate headline than the cited story has.
When you buy a CD at a store there is no personal data embedded into the disc.
Yet.
Nope... I can see it already. You take the sleeve to the counter (or however it works - it's that long since I went into a music-shop), hand over your credit card, they're getting the pre-printed disc out of the racks behind the counter, drop it into the "disc-checking station" ("to ensure that your disc hasn't been scratched in storage", despite CDs being immune to damages short of thermonuclear Armageddon - I read the reviews and believe them!) where a hash of your credit card details, store, date, time are burned into the lead-in area of the disc.
Hmm, the disc's directory might need a link part way through to make reading devices detour back to re-read the lead-in in full.
... Having been "watching" an iceberg for 6 months now, I'm moving out of the at-risk area. Mosto f the people I know are in a "we can move given a week's notice" situation. It looks as if the big berg is going to get stuck on the coast and melt.
But it's interesting.
I wanna cuddle a polar bear!
From the inside of a polar-bear-proof suit. I may be romantic, but I'm not stupid!
OK. A considered response, which deserves a considered response.
We're not fundamentally in disagreement. But on a point by point basis:
Both:-) the whole Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (aka Mad Cow disease) was kicked off by adding the rendered remains of sick and injured animals to cattle feed. In retrospect this was a bad idea.
In the late '70s and early '80s, when I "were nobbut a young loon", and before I'd solidified my personal choices about my morals, I was a sincere member of the animal rights movement. I'm still (not) in (dis-)agreement with (most of) the movement's moral position (NB : this does not mean that I'm in agreement with all other members ; I learned a lot in jail cells and thought hard about it. I was, in my youth, an ignorant youth ; now I'm much older, more experienced but only arguably wiser.) But back in the day, say "1983", we were saying prospectively that this (feeding bits of sheep to sheep ; bits of cow to cows) is a bad idea. At that time I couldn't put a solid scientific footing to my (our) disquiet, but deep concern was certainly being expressed.
It wasn't nice to be proved right.
Well, not very nice. Being proved correct is always nice, to a degree.
(EDIT : what was said over spliffs and coffee shop tables is NOT necessarily what was said to reporters by "spokespeople", or what the reporters reported. I shouldn't need to say that, but I'll say it nonetheless. Otherwise I'm silly-ly open to being quoted out of context.)
Being a member of "the lunatic fringe" does not mean that you're necessarily in the wrong.
Its possible but unlikely for this to happen,[SNIP description of the "prion process"]
This leads to the linked questions how does this start up and why is it unlikely to happen with other proteins?
I did use the term "weaponise" ; that means to use forethought and planning to design such a system. Evolutionary issues are real, but irrelevant ; I'm not talking about a system evolving naturally, but being developed by people with a solid understanding of protein design and the co-opting of cellular protein synthetic pathways.
You want people like that? Advertise where a drug company has shut a research lab.
Now could you make a new one? I'll have to say no.
Strong statement. With all due respect, I do not accept your assertion as an adequate "argument from authority".
Each of theses proteins has a only few stable configurations and have evolved to naturally fall into the correct shape.
As stated above, I'm not talking about a natural selection process. You're addressing a question you'd like to address, not the question I am considering.
As for its weapons potential even under the best circumstances its not going to be very fast
What is the purpose of the weapon you're considering? Now that I'm prompted, I'd say that I'm considering a weapon which is designed to reduce human consumption of flesh by (say) 75%, over a decade, and then keep the consumption down for the foreseeable future (say, a millennium). Net directly-attributable deaths from the weapon "APARP" (safety engineering acronym : "As Low As Reasonably Practicable". Which begs questions of what is considered "reasonable". I'd consider anything better expressed in units less than a gigadeath (10^9 deaths) would probably be worth looking at more closely. Get the deaths (for a 1*Earth susceptible population) down into the mere megadeaths and you're talking about an "advertising campaign", not "microbiological warfare".
I'd only expect to see something like that in moderatly hard SciFi.
I THINK I'd like to see it stay there too.
But, if I can conceive of it, then the professional threat-managing people should certainly have th
If Foot and Mouth was prionic it would not be such a problem just stop feeding the animals brains and your sorted
You're implying that you think that prions are associated with "brains" (were you making a zombie joke too? It's not at all clear.) or central nervous system tissue.
The kuru/ scrapie/ CWD/ nvCJD/ BSE prion seems to be a characteristic of a protein that is strongly concentrated in CNS tissue. However as I understand the concept, there is precisely nothing to prevent the prion "effect" occuring in, for example, actin or myosin (the main contractile proteins of eucaryote cells).
I'd like to be proven wrong that a transmissible prion could be produced that affects muscle tissue, and is transmitted by muscle tissue. But now that I formulate the idea, it seems much more plausible that it'll be proved possible by someone making one. The weapons potential is interesting.
I can see the movie : "Dr Stainglove : or how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Hamburger."
you probably don't want to store $500,000 of jewelry in your dresser drawer. Maybe you keep a few pieces at home, and keep the rest in your safety deposit box?
Now here's a first : poetry being cited in a Slashdot discussion. Well, it's a first for me, at least.
There is a poem whose author I forget but with a title "Warming her pearls", about the vicarious pleasure a servant gets from the task of "warming" her mistress' pearl jewellery by wearing it through the day. Sentimental claptrap, of course, but the point of at least some jewellery is the sensual pleasure of wearing it, seeing it, touching it. Whether or not you owni it is fairly unimportant.
In that context, you may just as well not own the stuff, if you have to keep it in your safety deposit box.
I have a fairly substantial collection of fossils and minerals and rocks - some of which I have made into jewellery, some more of which I could make into jewellery. Their point is to sit in my "treasure chest" as my wife calls it, and to be there when I want to take it out and experienced when I want to. Putting them into the bank would... well, I might just as well put them back in the ground.
(Incidentally, I remember making that "treasure chest" with my Dad when I was about 4 or 5 ; same importance. If push came to shove and the house were on fire, I might just empty the rocks out of the box and save that, because many of the rocks wouldn't be particularly bothered by a fire.)
(Second incidental : an acquaintance once reported his house roof collapsing because of the amount of rocks in the attic. This news was met in the circle with comments about how he should have strengthend his roof appropriately. Not collecting samples was not considered a rational response.)
Poem : http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showthread.php?t=3939
I wouldn't trust a US-based journalist to understand the concept of taking a train and all that it implies.
I would ; the large majority of US journalists will have seen "The Taking of Pelham 123" and understood it's implications quite well. It doesn't even particularly matter which version of the film they've seen - I'm told the recent (last decade or so?) remake was competently done, if I remember the reviews properly.
USDA requires all beef byproducts, eyeballs and organ meat included, to be labeled as such. (emphasis added)
How on earth do they make that out? Have you ever tried slaughtering a cow (or bull, or heifer, or bullock) to get at the meat and NOT generated at least one eyeball, and numerous organs as an unavoidable part of the process.
Oh, hang on. I get it. Under USDA rules, you can only call it "beef" if you cut the flesh off the living animal, then do enough repair work to let the animal carry on living and grow some more meat. So you don't need to go through the tedious rigmarole of growing a set of those eyeballs, sex organs (ha! a definite waste of protein there!), square yards of skin, bones etc for each useful package of profitable flesh.
That's pretty canny.
Do they use anaesthetics to calm the animal down before they peel the flesh off it? Or just use a cage to restrain the animal. Cages for the "organic" beef, I suppose.
Older engineers cost too much: Healthcare, experience, it all comes together for a higher cost, and no one wants that on the quarterly report. Younger types, [SNIP - left to be sure you're talking about an old-young dichotomy.]
So, are you saying that "younger types" are stupid enough to accept jobs without healthcare benefit of some sort (I assume you're talking with the American royal "we" there, so there is no individual right to affordable health care, only the right to [over-]pay for it), or that they're so desperate for work that they'll accept being exploited by unscrupulous employers who decline to pay for healthcare benefits.
Slashdot Mirror
[Your words] ... it's figuring out how to shoot it out/ blow it up, as well as (optionally) get away afterwards.
For all of which, photography is useful.
And of course, you could obtain sufficient, sufficiently accurate photography with a camera in a bag (on 1Hz shots) and an accomplice walking around with a 1m walking stick ("ranging pole", in the technical terminology). Of course, you could protect against this by imprisoning all people who understand geometry, and doubly imprisoning all people who have done surveying work in the centuries before GPS.
Oh, better jail and torture people who have surveying text books (you know : ink-on-paper!) from a century or two ago in their personal libraries, because the only possible reason for knowing of such technologies is to perform terrorist actions. It's comparable to planning kiddy-fucking to even think of using millennia-old techniques for millennia-old problems.
Send your head back to the designer for refund or repair.
I believe that there are many organisations purporting to represent the designer, and each one of them is potentially liable for their designer's error(s), if they pass on the designs as being fit for use.
If you don't like the design, sue the distributors and let them pass the costs on to the manufacturers..
I suspect this could also realistically apply if you are harmed by flaws in the original structure's designs, e.g. poor reaction times, poor shock resistance. So sue the designer's representatives. Sue them hard, and let them reclaim their costs from the designer, if they can get the purported designer to appear in court.
For a little more precision, this sounds more like a (semi-)organised group of "punters" (I think the American equivalent is a "Washington", or an "Adams" or something similar) with some degree of organisation to swap recommendations ("Crystal on 111-222-3333-4444 says she swallows, but really spits") and-or warnings (see previous comment).
(Do I need to explain? Surely not to an experienced group such as Slashdot's wankers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H readers.)
If there was evidence of Prof.X saying Student.Y "has a hot ass, and will do bareback anal for â150 and an A-grade in statistical analysis", then there might be a story. In fact, the appropriate phrase is "purely coincidental."
"Male human beings involved in attempts to organise access to sexually available females" is barely a story, even if a more accurate headline than the cited story has.
Your requirement of proficiency renders the whole concept moot.
Managers who are proficient at doing anything wouldn't be managers.
Yet.
Nope ... I can see it already. You take the sleeve to the counter (or however it works - it's that long since I went into a music-shop), hand over your credit card, they're getting the pre-printed disc out of the racks behind the counter, drop it into the "disc-checking station" ("to ensure that your disc hasn't been scratched in storage", despite CDs being immune to damages short of thermonuclear Armageddon - I read the reviews and believe them!) where a hash of your credit card details, store, date, time are burned into the lead-in area of the disc.
Hmm, the disc's directory might need a link part way through to make reading devices detour back to re-read the lead-in in full.
I stand by my "yet".
I don't know who'll be supplying my next phone - when this current Nokia gives up it's 3-year grasp on life. but it won't be a Nokia.
Speechless.
It's so sad to see someone lacking the normal blanket of cosy illusion and comforting half-truth.
Tables? What sort of a gay bar do you think this is?
What's an "instant message"?
And perhaps as importantly, "should I care"?
(I suspect that the OP has a sexual joke in there, but even my pretty perverse imagination doesn't quite see what the joke is. Is it not in English?)
But it's interesting.
I wanna cuddle a polar bear!
From the inside of a polar-bear-proof suit.
I may be romantic, but I'm not stupid!
Wanna cudle iceberg!
Waaaaaa!
But I am rapidly approaching "pissed".
Dickless lurkstation?
What is the probability of the flaws being addressed in OS applications before they're addressed in closed source applications?
My bet : better than 0.9 probability that (essentially all) OS will have solutions before (essentially any) CS.
Prove me wrong with links.
Timothy McVeigh (sp?), where are you when Obama's administration needs a clue-bat?
We're not fundamentally in disagreement. But on a point by point basis:
In the late '70s and early '80s, when I "were nobbut a young loon", and before I'd solidified my personal choices about my morals, I was a sincere member of the animal rights movement. I'm still (not) in (dis-)agreement with (most of) the movement's moral position (NB : this does not mean that I'm in agreement with all other members ; I learned a lot in jail cells and thought hard about it. I was, in my youth, an ignorant youth ; now I'm much older, more experienced but only arguably wiser.) But back in the day, say "1983", we were saying prospectively that this (feeding bits of sheep to sheep ; bits of cow to cows) is a bad idea. At that time I couldn't put a solid scientific footing to my (our) disquiet, but deep concern was certainly being expressed.
It wasn't nice to be proved right.
Well, not very nice. Being proved correct is always nice, to a degree.
(EDIT : what was said over spliffs and coffee shop tables is NOT necessarily what was said to reporters by "spokespeople", or what the reporters reported. I shouldn't need to say that, but I'll say it nonetheless. Otherwise I'm silly-ly open to being quoted out of context.)
Being a member of "the lunatic fringe" does not mean that you're necessarily in the wrong.
I did use the term "weaponise" ; that means to use forethought and planning to design such a system. Evolutionary issues are real, but irrelevant ; I'm not talking about a system evolving naturally, but being developed by people with a solid understanding of protein design and the co-opting of cellular protein synthetic pathways.
You want people like that? Advertise where a drug company has shut a research lab.
Strong statement. With all due respect, I do not accept your assertion as an adequate "argument from authority".
As stated above, I'm not talking about a natural selection process. You're addressing a question you'd like to address, not the question I am considering.
What is the purpose of the weapon you're considering? Now that I'm prompted, I'd say that I'm considering a weapon which is designed to reduce human consumption of flesh by (say) 75%, over a decade, and then keep the consumption down for the foreseeable future (say, a millennium). Net directly-attributable deaths from the weapon "APARP" (safety engineering acronym : "As Low As Reasonably Practicable". Which begs questions of what is considered "reasonable". I'd consider anything better expressed in units less than a gigadeath (10^9 deaths) would probably be worth looking at more closely. Get the deaths (for a 1*Earth susceptible population) down into the mere megadeaths and you're talking about an "advertising campaign", not "microbiological warfare".
I THINK I'd like to see it stay there too.
But, if I can conceive of it, then the professional threat-managing people should certainly have th
You're implying that you think that prions are associated with "brains" (were you making a zombie joke too? It's not at all clear.) or central nervous system tissue.
The kuru/ scrapie/ CWD/ nvCJD/ BSE prion seems to be a characteristic of a protein that is strongly concentrated in CNS tissue. However as I understand the concept, there is precisely nothing to prevent the prion "effect" occuring in, for example, actin or myosin (the main contractile proteins of eucaryote cells).
I'd like to be proven wrong that a transmissible prion could be produced that affects muscle tissue, and is transmitted by muscle tissue. But now that I formulate the idea, it seems much more plausible that it'll be proved possible by someone making one. The weapons potential is interesting.
I can see the movie : "Dr Stainglove : or how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Hamburger."
Are you sure that it's a parody, and not just the pics posted by the guy she dumped in college because he preferred her cunt over her arsehole?
I'm setting myself up for a goatse, aren't I?
Who? (I know, she's the one to be used naked and petrified with hot grit. So ... she's some sort of advert for a road-surfacing machine?)
That question is eminently amenable to expermient.
Now here's a first : poetry being cited in a Slashdot discussion. Well, it's a first for me, at least.
There is a poem whose author I forget but with a title "Warming her pearls", about the vicarious pleasure a servant gets from the task of "warming" her mistress' pearl jewellery by wearing it through the day. Sentimental claptrap, of course, but the point of at least some jewellery is the sensual pleasure of wearing it, seeing it, touching it. Whether or not you owni it is fairly unimportant.
In that context, you may just as well not own the stuff, if you have to keep it in your safety deposit box.
I have a fairly substantial collection of fossils and minerals and rocks - some of which I have made into jewellery, some more of which I could make into jewellery. Their point is to sit in my "treasure chest" as my wife calls it, and to be there when I want to take it out and experienced when I want to. Putting them into the bank would ... well, I might just as well put them back in the ground.
(Incidentally, I remember making that "treasure chest" with my Dad when I was about 4 or 5 ; same importance. If push came to shove and the house were on fire, I might just empty the rocks out of the box and save that, because many of the rocks wouldn't be particularly bothered by a fire.)
(Second incidental : an acquaintance once reported his house roof collapsing because of the amount of rocks in the attic. This news was met in the circle with comments about how he should have strengthend his roof appropriately. Not collecting samples was not considered a rational response.) Poem : http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showthread.php?t=3939
I would ; the large majority of US journalists will have seen "The Taking of Pelham 123" and understood it's implications quite well. It doesn't even particularly matter which version of the film they've seen - I'm told the recent (last decade or so?) remake was competently done, if I remember the reviews properly.
OK, I'll rephrase that - you'd trust ... etc ... to contain nothing that Microsoft didn't intend to be there.
[shakes head]
How on earth do they make that out? Have you ever tried slaughtering a cow (or bull, or heifer, or bullock) to get at the meat and NOT generated at least one eyeball, and numerous organs as an unavoidable part of the process.
Oh, hang on. I get it. Under USDA rules, you can only call it "beef" if you cut the flesh off the living animal, then do enough repair work to let the animal carry on living and grow some more meat. So you don't need to go through the tedious rigmarole of growing a set of those eyeballs, sex organs (ha! a definite waste of protein there!), square yards of skin, bones etc for each useful package of profitable flesh.
That's pretty canny.
Do they use anaesthetics to calm the animal down before they peel the flesh off it? Or just use a cage to restrain the animal. Cages for the "organic" beef, I suppose.
So, are you saying that "younger types" are stupid enough to accept jobs without healthcare benefit of some sort (I assume you're talking with the American royal "we" there, so there is no individual right to affordable health care, only the right to [over-]pay for it), or that they're so desperate for work that they'll accept being exploited by unscrupulous employers who decline to pay for healthcare benefits.
Stupid or desperate? Or both.
Must suck to be an American.