I know. But on the other hand half the people on the flights I take are carrying shopping-bags filled with the duty-free allowance (or more) of strong liquor.
Aditionally free drinks are served, granted you won't get 3 bottles of wine, even if you ask for it, but they'll give you half a bottle and then a whisky for the desert with no second thougth.
If you've ever flied on charter-fligths returning from say Mallorca to some North-European country you'll also know that the prohibition on entering while under the influence of any drug does not, in practice, prohibit anyone capable of walking on his own two feet from going on the plane.
Yeah sure, restricting alcohol *would* improve air-safety, but it'd be bad for bussiness, so it's out of question.
I wasn't talking hypothethically by the way. The raving drunk agressive passenger that needs to be handcuffed down for the rest of the flight is a reality, you read about him in the newspapers regularily. Atleast you do in Norway, Sweden, Germany and Italy which are the countries I know well personally.
It's possible that noone flies drunk in the USA, if so that's a definite plus for security.
I do remember it saying something about children being more uninhibited, having less "enforced baggage" and thus being able to select solutions an adult would not choose because he's conditioned against it. (like the ultimate attack from Ender I guess)
This isn't particularily well supported though. I did read the book twice, but admittedly it's been a decade or so since the last time. To me it didn't really matter, "just because" would've done fine. The book doesn't really hinge on this point anyway.
My point is that the journalist (in the original article) is completely off the mark when he explains that children where used because the battle was so far away that adults would've died before they arrived on the battlefield. That's nonsense. It's nowhere in the book, infact the book contradicts it squarely, I've got no idea where the journalist got that idea.
Here, in Europe I have yet to see these anywhere. At airports there are magnetic scanners for the passengers and x-rays for luggage. No x-rays, much less back-scattering ones for passengers.
I personally don't care much if someone sees some aproximation of me nude. The privacy-implications of that are small compared to for example having to show i.d.
Having to submit to a search in order to enter a government building is under ordinary circumstances inacceptable. (I'll grant exceptions for very few, very specific high-risk circumstances)
But then again, I don't live in Land of the Free. Ok, so that was provocative, but you guys should *really* think about what you're giving up in order to buy a little (real or imagined) security.
Perhaps he should consider actually reading the books he is recommending as source-material for games ? This reads a lot as if he's simply read the back-cover blurb or at most a review of the books in question.
For example, when describing "Enders Game" he writes that: The gist of Ender's Game is that Earth is in danger of annihilation by an insectoid race. The twist is that the battle is taking place a long, long way from home, requiring Earth to train children to save the human race so that they won't die of old age by the time they reach the battlefield.
That is, infact, as they say "not even wrong". Ok, so it's correct that earth is in war with some aliens, but that's about it.
spoiler warning
spoiler warning
spoiler warning
But when Ender ends up commanding the flotilla in the final battle against the aliens (while himself beliving, or atleast being made to believe it is merely yet-another exersize) he is not old at all.
I don't remember if the book says exactly how old he is, but he gets put into military training from age ~7 and spends some time in two different (in-space) academies before this happens. I'd say he's probably a teenager or so.
If a 7 year old can command the battle at say 15, they could just aswell have started with a 20 year old and let him command at 28. Why this ain't done, but instead children are used isn't really explained in depth.
The question at hand, is how to deal with the problem of armed criminals on an airplane.
No it isn't. There are two problems, but this is not one of them:
First, it's a problem (from the airliners point of view) that people where afraid of flying after 11/9. To combat this, you need to do something that is visible, and that gives the appearance that something is being done. Notice that if the measures actually improve security or not is uninmportant, what matters for this problem is only that people feel safer, not that they are safer.
Most of the stuff we've seen after 11/9 fall in this category, fueled by forces that'd like to see more surveillance and broader police-powers generally, and latch onto this as a suitable excuse.
Then there's the problem of ensuring that flying is safe. Generally it already is pretty safe, but it's always a good thing to improve safety if it can be done at an acceptable cost. (not cost only in sense of money, but in sense of money, inconvenience, etc)
Dealing with "armed criminals on an airplane" is a tiny part of that problem. You may be rigth that having 20 other armed people on the (extremely rare) plane that gets problems with an "armed criminal" may help in that spesific case. But very likely it would hurt more than it helps. Because you get a new class of problems: People who wouldn't otherwise be armed, but which now are because it's allowed.
It happens *often* that some passenger drinks too much / had the wife leave him the day before / starts to argue because his seat isn't the one he'd wished for / looses his temper for some other reason. It's not particularily uncommon that such passengers must be restrained.
If a large part of the passengers are armed, what is today a bit of loud yelling followed by a pair of handcuffs for the rest of the fligth may easily turn into a gunfight. I consider it likely this would happen dozens of times before you experience the first case where all the guns in the plane actually *benefit* security.
The mind is not only a turing-machine, it can't be, a turing-machine has no inputs and no outputs.
A turing-machine is a useful mathemathical idea for classifying problems into those that are computable and those that aren't. It's also usefulf inthat it prooves that any machine (or language) that is turing-complete (that is, capable of simulating a turing-machine) can solve the same set of problems.
The sweating of the pipes below ground is a great idea.
A Braindead idea you mean. Seriously. Why do cold pipes "sweat" ? It's just a result of hot-moist air being cooled on contact with the pipe and thus some of the water in that air condensing on the pipe.
How much a pipe sweats is thus directly proportional to how cold it is, and how warm and moist the air is that it contacts with.
If you dig the pipes in, they're *not* going to come into contact with very much moisture other than the moisture that's already in the ground. There's not *that* much air-circulation in the ground.
The whole point of irrigation is bringing water that isn't already available to the plants into some position where it's available to the plant. dug-down cold pipes won't be very efficient at that task.
"We'll give you a choise between doing this and paying 5 million a day."
The ruling was instead more along the lines of:
"You have to do this. To force you, we'll give you a fine of 5 million a day if it ain't done by $date"
The difference is that the fine is meant to be forcing them into compliance. If they ignored the fine, simply paid up and stayed out of compliance, the court would likely just add a zero on the fine and try again. Repeat as nessecary.
It's a sliding scale. You get used to it gradually. It's sorta like the (urban legend) about boiling a live frosh slowly, and it won't notice.
These days there's advertising in TV, in radio, on the handles of shopping-carts, on petrol-pumps, on shopping-carts (additionally to on the handles). There's advertising on cars, on the actual road, there's billboards hundreds of square meters large, with blinking lights. There's ads on 95% of all websites. I get kilos of advertising in my mailbox every months. I get hundreds of spam in my inbox every day.
NONE of this was true when I was young (guess I show my age). And yet, we've gotten used to and "accept" it. We'll get used to the moon being overshadowed by the 3-times larger and 5-times brigther ad for Coke too.
"clearly" in your world seems to mean very very fogged.
First, "terrain like this" in this case means a mix of paved roads, unpaved roads, trails and "desert".
It does *not* like you seem to think mean "offroad-only", I was never suggesting even a skilled driver would do 68mph average on the off-road sections.
You're correct that the speed-limits migth prevent even a skilled driver from completing in a quarter of the alloted time, obviously if he can't go over say 55 even on the paved parts that's going to hold him back.
My point wasn't by the way, if a skilled driver will need a quarter of the time or if he'd need half the time. My point was that this challenge is infact very easily won by a not-particularily-skilled driver and crushed by a skilled driver.
What exactly *is* the average speed in the Desert managed by say the Paris-Dakar rallyists by the way ? It's certainly higher than 17mph, that's for sure.
Actually, the course is by no means that hard. It's no longer than 170 miles, and you've got 10 hours, that means an average speed of 17 will do it.
Parts of that is paved roads, parts unpaved roads and parts "offroad". This means you can do like walking-speed on the offroad-parts and still manage it fine.
Infact I'd take a bet that 9 out of 10 got-drivers-license-yesterday humans would be able to do this in less than half the time allocated to the robots, probably a good driver would do it in a quarter the time the robots get. That'd require him to average 68mph.
Even if those "smarter people" go to work elsewhere, what are the odds that where they go will create a new large company that will resume its F/OSS work?
I don't actualy care much if they work for a "large company" or not. Small companies are fine with me.
But since you asked, I reckon the chanses are pretty good. Starting RedHat, once opun a time, paid off very nicely for the founders, that's not exactly a god argument against doing it again.
Thing is "buy and close" competitors only work in areas where there are high barriers to entry. When the bariers are low buying and closing a profitable competitor will just ensure that the same, or similar people immediately start a new similar business. Why shouldn't they ?
To be able to buy anything, including RedHat, you have to offer more than the current owners think it worth keeping for. Thus, everyone who owns RedHat-stock benefits.
A large portion of the customer-base would evaporate overnigth.
All improvements RedHat has made are GPL, so at most buying those would mean MS would get the rigth to dual-license those under GPL plus some other license, why they'd want this is not clear.
If they stopped actively developing, or started developing under a bad license, a lot of their smarter people would go find work elsewhere.
So what's left then ? They'd have ended up paying overprice for a company with no (smart) developers, no customers, and no code that isn't freely available to the world at large anyway.
If I can tell that the author/speaker is not a native english speaker, then even while I grit my teeth at misworded phrases, I withhold any associated negative response.
I suppose this means that I should take it as a sort of compliment when Americans start critisizing my spelling; one possible interpretation would be that it is close enough that I'm not immediately recognizable as "foreigner".
Anyone that is unable to take the tiny bit of extra effort to ensure that they are using the words they think they are, and that they are spelled correctly, isn't worth listening to.
Does this lack of listening extend to people for whom english is a third language ? (not that I think that's a valid excuse for the editor at New Scientist)
It's just a *tiny* bit annoying when Americans (mostly, the English are more aware that there are other languages/nationalities trough living in Europe) insist that everyone should be able to write impeccable english. Often while themselves being unable to communicate on a basic level in any language other than english.
Can a "free" (as in beer) solution be actually more expensive than a proprietary expensive one? Yes, quite easily in fact: if it costs enough extra hours to use/admin/whatever, it _is_ actually more expensive.
Certainly. This does not surprise anyone. You are kicking in open doors.
*but* In general the costs associated with OSS software scales much better than those with Proprietary software.
For example, If you need 100 Licenses, rather than 1, this will with proprietary software generally cost you something like a factor of 25 more. (you get a volume-discount offcourse)
But if you need a special adaption in OSS (say a program translated to your language) this will cost exactly the same whether you use that program on one computer or on 1000.
Practical result: For "small shops" adaption is expensive, in most cases prohibitively expensive. A home-user could never finance say the translation of KDE into a new language in order to be able to use it.
For "Big shops" on the other hand, it looks different. Norway is a small country, less than 5 million people, a few hundred thousand thereof are attending primary school.
If there was some program which they wanted to use, but which needed translation (say it was only available in english) the costs would be literally *cents* for each schoolkid. Even if the software was only used for say 3rd - 6th grade *AND* only say 10% of the schools used this software at all, it'd still be cheap to translate it, likely much cheaper than buying any proprietary solution.
All this is totally gone with GPL licensing, the answer is basically I can do whatever bar sell it (In my case I dont modify and code, so that doesnt come into play).
Why "bar sell it" ? There is nothing in the GPL whatsoever that prevents you from selling a piece of GPL software for whatever price you can get.
and no currently proposed measures are going to help.
This however is not true, and Schneier hasn't said it that I've seen.
He *has* said that a large fraction of the "security measures" introduced by various firms these days are useless or worse.
He has also said (numerous times) that the correct question is not: "How can we become secure?" but instead: "How can we bring the risks down to an acceptable level ?"
Driving a car ain't "safe", where I live there's around 6 deaths pro million km driven. To me, that's an acceptable risk. Others migth think differently.
From an automotive safety standpoint, a malfunctioning park interlock system is pretty close to the top of the list of bad things.
Agreed. So when it happens, it should probably be displayed, even if that means hiding other, less important error-messages.
However, this also means it *shouldn't* be happening as a result of something common. A low battery-voltage is a pretty common error-scenario. To have something dangerous happen as a result thereof is simply bad design.
If they do keep this bad design, then including the reason in the error-message would also be a good idea:
Warning: The low battery voltage causes the park-interlock system to behave abnormally....
This would atleast give the driver some idea what is going on.
But you did not use your gun for what it was intended for or created for
I most *definitely* did. Most of the shots where fired from a low-caliber competition rifle. This is entirely unsuitable for killing human beings.
Everything about it, the design, the handling, the ammo, the aiming is optimised for shooting at still-standing targets while calm, with low pulse from a stable position. In other words, perfectly the oposite situation from the one you'd normally have if you where shooting at humans.
Additionally the bullets would mostly cause small wounds and be considerably less fatal, even if you do hit, than those from a gun designed to kill.
It is patently obvious that this rifle is not, in fact, designed to kill humans.
The small rest of shots where fired from a shotgun. Here neither the gun, nor the ammo is designed to kill humans. Infact unless you stand very close to the gun even a direct hit would be unlikely to kill you (though it'd be painful.) Instead both the gun and the ammo are specially designed to efficiently kill birds. And that's what I've been using it for too. (well ok, some fake birds for practice)
It's worse than that, because I'm sure each visitor to the gun-range fires more than a single bullet on his visit. And additionally, there's hunters.
For the stats to work out every American would have to be shot at (not nessecarily hit) dozens of times every week. I dunno, I do know Americans gets shot ridiculously much, but I don't think it's up to these levels yet:-)
But the truth is, 99% of gun use is against people.
I refuse to believe you believe this yourself. It's blatantly unplausible.
The truth is, I personally have fired atleast 1000 bullets from a variety of guns this year. Not a single one of them on humans. The same is true for atleast 20 people that I personally know.
So, for your statistic to be true, if I and my friends are the *only* Norwegian to fire at something other than human beings (somehow I doubt this) then nevertheless two million bullets must be fired at human in norway every year.
That's quite a lot, considering that there's only about 4.5 million humans in Norway. Every second Norwegian gets shot at every year ? (and that is assuming *only* I and my 20 friends shoot at things other than humans)
Your "statistics" about BitTorrent-use are equally nonsensical.
There's no problem with "large percentage". There *is* a problem when in sum (terrorist and others) over 3500 wiretapping-warrants are requested, and not even a SINGLE freaking one are denied.
Sure, most officers take care to do good police work, and manage to do so most of the time. No problem.
But there's no way in hell that ALL police officers asking for such warrants do a good job EVERY SINGLE TIME.
But this dynamic adjustment can be done horribly wrong too.
I remember playing a RPG where I was having problems living trough a certain dungeon. No problem, I thougth, I'll just go somewhere else, solve some other quest, gain some levels and then return.
On return the dungeon was no easier than before. Turned out the monsters in that game had stats calculated according to the players stats. So for example, it'd have a strength equal to your strength+2.
What this meant was that advancing your characters was meaningless, getting twice as many hitpoints would only ensure that the enemies started hitting you twice as hard.
Slashdot Mirror
Aditionally free drinks are served, granted you won't get 3 bottles of wine, even if you ask for it, but they'll give you half a bottle and then a whisky for the desert with no second thougth.
If you've ever flied on charter-fligths returning from say Mallorca to some North-European country you'll also know that the prohibition on entering while under the influence of any drug does not, in practice, prohibit anyone capable of walking on his own two feet from going on the plane.
Yeah sure, restricting alcohol *would* improve air-safety, but it'd be bad for bussiness, so it's out of question.
I wasn't talking hypothethically by the way. The raving drunk agressive passenger that needs to be handcuffed down for the rest of the flight is a reality, you read about him in the newspapers regularily. Atleast you do in Norway, Sweden, Germany and Italy which are the countries I know well personally.
It's possible that noone flies drunk in the USA, if so that's a definite plus for security.
This isn't particularily well supported though. I did read the book twice, but admittedly it's been a decade or so since the last time. To me it didn't really matter, "just because" would've done fine. The book doesn't really hinge on this point anyway.
My point is that the journalist (in the original article) is completely off the mark when he explains that children where used because the battle was so far away that adults would've died before they arrived on the battlefield. That's nonsense. It's nowhere in the book, infact the book contradicts it squarely, I've got no idea where the journalist got that idea.
Here, in Europe I have yet to see these anywhere. At airports there are magnetic scanners for the passengers and x-rays for luggage. No x-rays, much less back-scattering ones for passengers.
I personally don't care much if someone sees some aproximation of me nude. The privacy-implications of that are small compared to for example having to show i.d.
Having to submit to a search in order to enter a government building is under ordinary circumstances inacceptable. (I'll grant exceptions for very few, very specific high-risk circumstances)
But then again, I don't live in Land of the Free. Ok, so that was provocative, but you guys should *really* think about what you're giving up in order to buy a little (real or imagined) security.
For example, when describing "Enders Game" he writes that: The gist of Ender's Game is that Earth is in danger of annihilation by an insectoid race. The twist is that the battle is taking place a long, long way from home, requiring Earth to train children to save the human race so that they won't die of old age by the time they reach the battlefield.
That is, infact, as they say "not even wrong". Ok, so it's correct that earth is in war with some aliens, but that's about it.
spoiler warning
spoiler warning
spoiler warning
But when Ender ends up commanding the flotilla in the final battle against the aliens (while himself beliving, or atleast being made to believe it is merely yet-another exersize) he is not old at all.
I don't remember if the book says exactly how old he is, but he gets put into military training from age ~7 and spends some time in two different (in-space) academies before this happens. I'd say he's probably a teenager or so.
If a 7 year old can command the battle at say 15, they could just aswell have started with a 20 year old and let him command at 28. Why this ain't done, but instead children are used isn't really explained in depth.
No it isn't. There are two problems, but this is not one of them:
First, it's a problem (from the airliners point of view) that people where afraid of flying after 11/9. To combat this, you need to do something that is visible, and that gives the appearance that something is being done. Notice that if the measures actually improve security or not is uninmportant, what matters for this problem is only that people feel safer, not that they are safer.
Most of the stuff we've seen after 11/9 fall in this category, fueled by forces that'd like to see more surveillance and broader police-powers generally, and latch onto this as a suitable excuse.
Then there's the problem of ensuring that flying is safe. Generally it already is pretty safe, but it's always a good thing to improve safety if it can be done at an acceptable cost. (not cost only in sense of money, but in sense of money, inconvenience, etc)
Dealing with "armed criminals on an airplane" is a tiny part of that problem. You may be rigth that having 20 other armed people on the (extremely rare) plane that gets problems with an "armed criminal" may help in that spesific case. But very likely it would hurt more than it helps. Because you get a new class of problems: People who wouldn't otherwise be armed, but which now are because it's allowed.
It happens *often* that some passenger drinks too much / had the wife leave him the day before / starts to argue because his seat isn't the one he'd wished for / looses his temper for some other reason. It's not particularily uncommon that such passengers must be restrained.
If a large part of the passengers are armed, what is today a bit of loud yelling followed by a pair of handcuffs for the rest of the fligth may easily turn into a gunfight. I consider it likely this would happen dozens of times before you experience the first case where all the guns in the plane actually *benefit* security.
A turing-machine is a useful mathemathical idea for classifying problems into those that are computable and those that aren't. It's also usefulf inthat it prooves that any machine (or language) that is turing-complete (that is, capable of simulating a turing-machine) can solve the same set of problems.
A Braindead idea you mean. Seriously. Why do cold pipes "sweat" ? It's just a result of hot-moist air being cooled on contact with the pipe and thus some of the water in that air condensing on the pipe.
How much a pipe sweats is thus directly proportional to how cold it is, and how warm and moist the air is that it contacts with.
If you dig the pipes in, they're *not* going to come into contact with very much moisture other than the moisture that's already in the ground. There's not *that* much air-circulation in the ground.
The whole point of irrigation is bringing water that isn't already available to the plants into some position where it's available to the plant. dug-down cold pipes won't be very efficient at that task.
"We'll give you a choise between doing this and paying 5 million a day."
The ruling was instead more along the lines of:
"You have to do this. To force you, we'll give you a fine of 5 million a day if it ain't done by $date"
The difference is that the fine is meant to be forcing them into compliance. If they ignored the fine, simply paid up and stayed out of compliance, the court would likely just add a zero on the fine and try again. Repeat as nessecary.
These days there's advertising in TV, in radio, on the handles of shopping-carts, on petrol-pumps, on shopping-carts (additionally to on the handles). There's advertising on cars, on the actual road, there's billboards hundreds of square meters large, with blinking lights. There's ads on 95% of all websites. I get kilos of advertising in my mailbox every months. I get hundreds of spam in my inbox every day. NONE of this was true when I was young (guess I show my age). And yet, we've gotten used to and "accept" it. We'll get used to the moon being overshadowed by the 3-times larger and 5-times brigther ad for Coke too.
First, "terrain like this" in this case means a mix of paved roads, unpaved roads, trails and "desert". It does *not* like you seem to think mean "offroad-only", I was never suggesting even a skilled driver would do 68mph average on the off-road sections.
You're correct that the speed-limits migth prevent even a skilled driver from completing in a quarter of the alloted time, obviously if he can't go over say 55 even on the paved parts that's going to hold him back.
My point wasn't by the way, if a skilled driver will need a quarter of the time or if he'd need half the time. My point was that this challenge is infact very easily won by a not-particularily-skilled driver and crushed by a skilled driver.
What exactly *is* the average speed in the Desert managed by say the Paris-Dakar rallyists by the way ? It's certainly higher than 17mph, that's for sure.
Parts of that is paved roads, parts unpaved roads and parts "offroad". This means you can do like walking-speed on the offroad-parts and still manage it fine.
Infact I'd take a bet that 9 out of 10 got-drivers-license-yesterday humans would be able to do this in less than half the time allocated to the robots, probably a good driver would do it in a quarter the time the robots get. That'd require him to average 68mph.
I don't actualy care much if they work for a "large company" or not. Small companies are fine with me.
But since you asked, I reckon the chanses are pretty good. Starting RedHat, once opun a time, paid off very nicely for the founders, that's not exactly a god argument against doing it again.
Thing is "buy and close" competitors only work in areas where there are high barriers to entry. When the bariers are low buying and closing a profitable competitor will just ensure that the same, or similar people immediately start a new similar business. Why shouldn't they ?
To be able to buy anything, including RedHat, you have to offer more than the current owners think it worth keeping for. Thus, everyone who owns RedHat-stock benefits.
A large portion of the customer-base would evaporate overnigth.
All improvements RedHat has made are GPL, so at most buying those would mean MS would get the rigth to dual-license those under GPL plus some other license, why they'd want this is not clear.
If they stopped actively developing, or started developing under a bad license, a lot of their smarter people would go find work elsewhere.
So what's left then ? They'd have ended up paying overprice for a company with no (smart) developers, no customers, and no code that isn't freely available to the world at large anyway.
I suppose this means that I should take it as a sort of compliment when Americans start critisizing my spelling; one possible interpretation would be that it is close enough that I'm not immediately recognizable as "foreigner".
Does this lack of listening extend to people for whom english is a third language ? (not that I think that's a valid excuse for the editor at New Scientist)
It's just a *tiny* bit annoying when Americans (mostly, the English are more aware that there are other languages/nationalities trough living in Europe) insist that everyone should be able to write impeccable english. Often while themselves being unable to communicate on a basic level in any language other than english.
Certainly. This does not surprise anyone. You are kicking in open doors.
*but* In general the costs associated with OSS software scales much better than those with Proprietary software.
For example, If you need 100 Licenses, rather than 1, this will with proprietary software generally cost you something like a factor of 25 more. (you get a volume-discount offcourse)
But if you need a special adaption in OSS (say a program translated to your language) this will cost exactly the same whether you use that program on one computer or on 1000.
Practical result: For "small shops" adaption is expensive, in most cases prohibitively expensive. A home-user could never finance say the translation of KDE into a new language in order to be able to use it.
For "Big shops" on the other hand, it looks different. Norway is a small country, less than 5 million people, a few hundred thousand thereof are attending primary school.
If there was some program which they wanted to use, but which needed translation (say it was only available in english) the costs would be literally *cents* for each schoolkid. Even if the software was only used for say 3rd - 6th grade *AND* only say 10% of the schools used this software at all, it'd still be cheap to translate it, likely much cheaper than buying any proprietary solution.
Why "bar sell it" ? There is nothing in the GPL whatsoever that prevents you from selling a piece of GPL software for whatever price you can get.
Which is very obviously true.
and no currently proposed measures are going to help.
This however is not true, and Schneier hasn't said it that I've seen.
He *has* said that a large fraction of the "security measures" introduced by various firms these days are useless or worse.
He has also said (numerous times) that the correct question is not: "How can we become secure?" but instead: "How can we bring the risks down to an acceptable level ?"
Driving a car ain't "safe", where I live there's around 6 deaths pro million km driven. To me, that's an acceptable risk. Others migth think differently.
Agreed. So when it happens, it should probably be displayed, even if that means hiding other, less important error-messages.
However, this also means it *shouldn't* be happening as a result of something common. A low battery-voltage is a pretty common error-scenario. To have something dangerous happen as a result thereof is simply bad design.
If they do keep this bad design, then including the reason in the error-message would also be a good idea:
Warning: The low battery voltage causes the park-interlock system to behave abnormally ....
This would atleast give the driver some idea what is going on.
I most *definitely* did. Most of the shots where fired from a low-caliber competition rifle. This is entirely unsuitable for killing human beings.
Everything about it, the design, the handling, the ammo, the aiming is optimised for shooting at still-standing targets while calm, with low pulse from a stable position. In other words, perfectly the oposite situation from the one you'd normally have if you where shooting at humans.
Additionally the bullets would mostly cause small wounds and be considerably less fatal, even if you do hit, than those from a gun designed to kill.
It is patently obvious that this rifle is not, in fact, designed to kill humans.
The small rest of shots where fired from a shotgun. Here neither the gun, nor the ammo is designed to kill humans. Infact unless you stand very close to the gun even a direct hit would be unlikely to kill you (though it'd be painful.) Instead both the gun and the ammo are specially designed to efficiently kill birds. And that's what I've been using it for too. (well ok, some fake birds for practice)
I
For the stats to work out every American would have to be shot at (not nessecarily hit) dozens of times every week. I dunno, I do know Americans gets shot ridiculously much, but I don't think it's up to these levels yet :-)
I refuse to believe you believe this yourself. It's blatantly unplausible.
The truth is, I personally have fired atleast 1000 bullets from a variety of guns this year. Not a single one of them on humans. The same is true for atleast 20 people that I personally know.
So, for your statistic to be true, if I and my friends are the *only* Norwegian to fire at something other than human beings (somehow I doubt this) then nevertheless two million bullets must be fired at human in norway every year.
That's quite a lot, considering that there's only about 4.5 million humans in Norway. Every second Norwegian gets shot at every year ? (and that is assuming *only* I and my 20 friends shoot at things other than humans)
Your "statistics" about BitTorrent-use are equally nonsensical.
I wonder what it is about sex-offenders that make people completely shut off all rational thougth.
Sure, most officers take care to do good police work, and manage to do so most of the time. No problem.
But there's no way in hell that ALL police officers asking for such warrants do a good job EVERY SINGLE TIME.
This stinks to heaven.
I remember playing a RPG where I was having problems living trough a certain dungeon. No problem, I thougth, I'll just go somewhere else, solve some other quest, gain some levels and then return.
On return the dungeon was no easier than before. Turned out the monsters in that game had stats calculated according to the players stats. So for example, it'd have a strength equal to your strength+2.
What this meant was that advancing your characters was meaningless, getting twice as many hitpoints would only ensure that the enemies started hitting you twice as hard.
Dumb.