I can't predict any better than you what the next surprise will be.
Oh, but it's fun to make wild-ass predictions. I'd put my money on volcanoes, but that's an obvious bet right now. And I'd bet on some nice armed revolutions in first-world countries, but that wouldn't really be a "disaster". All-in-all, I'm going to bet on a massive solar flare that takes out most power/comm lines, along the lines of the Carrington Event. It would be somewhat unexpected (solar activity is abnormally low lately), but "a calm before the storm" is rather common in natural disasters, so there's some vague logic to it.
Because that would make sense. I'm convinced that any C-level executive is no longer motivated by profits, but a sociopathic desire to inflict as much suffering on humanity as legally possible (including changing the definition of "legally" as far as they can).
I can accept malicious data taking over the stereo system. That's believable. What I find impossible is going from there to the rest of the car. I installed my own stereo system - the only wires involved were power and output to the speakers. That's it. Unless they can find an exploit in a 12v battery, they literally cannot get to anything automotive.
Maybe newer cars, where everything is "integrated", are different. In which case, I'm glad I bought a used '99 Talon rather than a brand-new anything.
I am well aware of Cincinnatus's dictatorship, as well as several others - Calatinus, Fabius Maximus, Sulla, and Camillus, to name a few.
However, let us not forget the last dictator, a certain Gaius Iulius Caesar, who used that power to make himself dictator for life. A rather short life, to be sure, but his successors found ways to secure the power of the dictatorship without the title itself.
So, your saying that you would be fine with a dictatorship, as long as the dictator was making moral and ethically sound decisions?
While a benevolent dictatorship might work for Linux, I don't think it would work well for a full government. You can't fork a country as easily, if you disagree with the decisions.
Actually, I used to have that taped to the wall behind my parent's monitor. To make sure they read it, the admin account's password was "various", with the password hint "the second word on the poster behind the monitor". It worked, too. They took it down when they moved the computer, though, so they might have problems logging in as admin next time they need to install something.
I've been able to "negotiate" some ground rules for doing family tech support.
If I say "it's fucked", it's fucked. I don't do miracles.
If it's a program I've never used before, I'll click around for a few minutes to see if I can guess it. After that, I'll hand you the manual, and let you figure it out yourself.
When I say "don't use ___, use ____ instead", you do it. I've been able to switch most of my family away from IE and MS Office this way.
I don't work with printers. Period. If necessary, I (somewhat-jokingly) claim it's for religious reasons, as "only the devil is evil enough to be responsible for printer drivers."
If I hop onto a browser to search for a solution, I will disable any toolbars that are taking up all your browser screen space. Without even being asked. You're welcome.
If I've been at it for over an hour, and have made no progress, I reserve the right to give up.
I suggest setting these down yourself, if you're frequently called upon to help. Generally, I've found it actually makes people slightly happier with you - apparently, placing more value on your skills makes others value them more as well.
Start filing the lawsuits. The whole purpose of copyleft is to use copyright law against itself. If we start actually enforcing the licenses, we'll be doing exactly what we're supposed to, and probably making a tidy profit to boot. It might not even require personal effort on our part - there's gotta be a lawyer somewhere reading this article, with dollar signs dancing through his head. If a medium-sized business like OpenLogic was able to find all these violations, a couple interns at a law firm could probably find just as many, and I doubt many open-source hackers would refuse to sue someone who is violating their license.
What is stopping the US and Russia from teaming up and wiping another country off the map?
The fact that they've been hated enemies for 80 years, have no significant political, economic or religious ties to each other, and see each other as the One Thing Keeping Us From Our Rightful Place? Oh, and the lingering fear that if they do that, they'll scare the rest of the world enough that instead of US + RU vs. Elbonia, it becomes US + RU vs. the World? Oh, and don't forget that Russia is both economically and militarily unprepared for any major military action - their economy is in the dumps, their equipment is becoming dated, and their morale is abysmal (they lose more soldiers per year to suicide than the US loses due to enemy action - while fighting two wars at once, and while having a larger army).
Plus, the fact that defense is now at least plausible - China, Russia and the US have the technology to take down an inbound ICBM, and it's likely major allies of the above will get it within a decade.
Finally, you don't need nukes to wipe a country off the globe. Send in the tanks, send in the bombers, send in the Marines, kill anything that moves. Country eliminated. Don't mistake modern militaries' failure at occupations for an inability to utterly destroy an opponent.
That seems to be China's plan. Depending on who you ask, they have between 100 and 300 warheads, with about 70% of them "active", ie. ready to be used without warning. This is on par with France and the UK, and possibly with Israel (sources for Israel's armory vary between 0 and 500, usually about 100 or so). India and Pakistan each have about 100 as well - sufficient to deter, but not sufficient to really damage the planet. And, of course, we can't forget North Korea's half-dozen devices.
This is a pretty big contrast to the US and Russia, which have close to 2000 active warheads, and about 10,000 total warheads. Each.
Honestly, both countries could slash their active stockpiles in half without removing their ability to pretty much trash the biosphere. Hell, even just getting rid of all the deactivated weapons would be a good start - as they are now, they are still able to be used at least as dirty bomb material, and having one would make constructing a real warhead vastly easier. Just as with any weapon - just because the safety is off and the gun is unloaded, doesn't mean you shouldn't treat it as if it were dangerous.
While that is probably a better solution, freedom-wise, it also ignores one simple truth:
User-friendliness.
Android, although based on Linux, is not Linux, and is not made for the type of person who uses Linux. It is made for the type of person who uses a cell phone. Most of them, on seeing a "The application 'AnnaKournikovaPics' has been disabled for security reasons", is more likely to click "Re-enable anyways" than "Why was this disabled?". Thus, the malware would not be removed; in the case of some malware, that could be quite dangerous. Not just to the user, but to those around them.
If, for whatever reason, the kill-switch is used on software you must legitimately run, you can always install it manually (ie. not from the Market). Worst-case scenario, jailbreaking is necessary, which would hardly inconvenience most people who can be trusted to run an app that has been remotely killed.
I think it's the eyes. The eyes still don't quite seem "alive". Makes sense - the eyes are the most difficult thing to replicate. It certainly is in video games - the shader code for eyes alone is usually larger than all the other shaders combined.
Honestly, though, I think if they got the movements done properly (and had a good intelligence behind the curtain, artificial or human), I would be able to converse with the thing as though it were human. It's that close. The poses themselves are convincing, it's just the changing between them that throws it all out. That might just be because it's still a demo, because they haven't figured out how to program fluid motion yet, or because of some hardware limitation - IANA robotics expert, so I wouldn't know what the case is.
One of the things I noticed was "and contacting law enforcement about the attacks". I think that could be a pretty good standard to follow for using a remote-deactivation capability, to prevent it from being abused. "If it's serious enough to use a kill switch, it's serious enough that someone will be filing a lawsuit, and we're sure enough of it that we're reporting it to police (under threat of perjury)."
This is probably the best compromise. Obviously, some people would prefer no kill switch at all, while others would like the kill switch to be used on practically anything they don't like. If "serious enough and sure enough to sue" is the standard being used, it won't affect free speech (since, if you would be sued over it already, we've already lost that battle), and it makes accidents much less likely. Now, requiring that lawsuit to be won would make it even safer, but you run into the problem of it continuing to do damage for the years it takes to finally settle the suit.
Overall, I would like to see that standard officially written and adopted, even if it isn't made legally binding. It would make me feel a lot better about the existence of a kill switch, knowing that it will only be used in truly serious cases.
Infantry weapons are, honestly, not that hard to use. Hell, the M18 Claymore mine has a helpful "FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY" label telling you which way to point it. Even a Kalashnikov is simple - point it towards the bad guys, flip safety down one notch (to AB, C, or L, depending on where it was built), pull trigger until it stops making noise, drop magazine, insert new magazine, repeat until bad guys are dead, and flip safety back up when done. Now, proper maintenance and aiming is only marginally more complicated, but honestly, it's easier to use than some video games.
PS: Congratulations, all of us are now on a watchlist for having received "terrorist training".
That assumes that this law will actually benefit the people making the music. Normally, the only people to get money are the parasites - the "managers", the "producers", the "executives", and, of course, their lawyers, who make money off the music without even pretending to have musical ability.
But blind people still benefit from highways (even though they don't drive, they still ride), and people without children benefit from educational taxes (because, seriously, would you want to put up with someone else's uneducated brat?). The only people this tax would benefit is the RIAA (or whatever the Canadian equivalent is).
Even now that they have the data, what are they going to do with it? They can't sue these people for anything, they can't even investigate all of them to find out if there is anything they can charge them with. Honestly, I think at this point lawyers are just being evil as a Pavlovian response, and aren't even thinking about what they're doing anymore.
The sudo thing doesn't seem that bad, unless the year of "Linux on the desktop" has finally arrived. For servers, pretty much everyone who has any access should have full access - anybody who should be logging into a database server should be able to do essentially anything that's necessary. Obviously, this depends on not giving access to people who don't need it (for instance, developers shouldn't have access to the production servers). And when I speak of "everyone", I mean "every person", not "every account" - system accounts used by daemons and such shouldn't have root access anyways.
Sudo is not a perfect security solution, nor is it designed to be. If a user really wants to run a command as root, he'll find a way. Sudo rules will not stop an admin gone postal. Sudo is intended to make root logins unnecessary, stop uneducated users from doing things they ought not be doing, and to limit (or at least slow) the damage an intruder can do. That's it.
My personal BSD box has some very simple sudo rules: my personal account and root are permitted to do everything (with the user's password required every half-hour). Everyone else is not allowed to use sudo. And I would be fine with using such a sudo configuration in a real production environment.
Sure. It's not recommended, but quite a few people do it. Hell, you could use GPLv1 if you wanted. There's no licensing on the license itself - as long as you don't misrepresent anything (ie. write your own license, but call it GPL), you can do whatever you want with it.
Your confusion probably comes from the fact that Dr. Manhattan's costume changes drastically over the story. It goes from a full set of clothes, to the speedo, to "blowing in the wind", paralleling the character's increasing detachment from humanity.
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I can't predict any better than you what the next surprise will be.
Oh, but it's fun to make wild-ass predictions. I'd put my money on volcanoes, but that's an obvious bet right now. And I'd bet on some nice armed revolutions in first-world countries, but that wouldn't really be a "disaster". All-in-all, I'm going to bet on a massive solar flare that takes out most power/comm lines, along the lines of the Carrington Event. It would be somewhat unexpected (solar activity is abnormally low lately), but "a calm before the storm" is rather common in natural disasters, so there's some vague logic to it.
Because that would make sense. I'm convinced that any C-level executive is no longer motivated by profits, but a sociopathic desire to inflict as much suffering on humanity as legally possible (including changing the definition of "legally" as far as they can).
I can accept malicious data taking over the stereo system. That's believable. What I find impossible is going from there to the rest of the car. I installed my own stereo system - the only wires involved were power and output to the speakers. That's it. Unless they can find an exploit in a 12v battery, they literally cannot get to anything automotive.
Maybe newer cars, where everything is "integrated", are different. In which case, I'm glad I bought a used '99 Talon rather than a brand-new anything.
By "constrain" they mean "have proven that the temperature cannot exceed"; they have established a constraint on their estimates.
I am well aware of Cincinnatus's dictatorship, as well as several others - Calatinus, Fabius Maximus, Sulla, and Camillus, to name a few.
However, let us not forget the last dictator, a certain Gaius Iulius Caesar, who used that power to make himself dictator for life. A rather short life, to be sure, but his successors found ways to secure the power of the dictatorship without the title itself.
So all we need is an immortal benevolent dictator? Sounds like a theocracy to me...
So, your saying that you would be fine with a dictatorship, as long as the dictator was making moral and ethically sound decisions?
While a benevolent dictatorship might work for Linux, I don't think it would work well for a full government. You can't fork a country as easily, if you disagree with the decisions.
Actually, I used to have that taped to the wall behind my parent's monitor. To make sure they read it, the admin account's password was "various", with the password hint "the second word on the poster behind the monitor". It worked, too. They took it down when they moved the computer, though, so they might have problems logging in as admin next time they need to install something.
I suggest setting these down yourself, if you're frequently called upon to help. Generally, I've found it actually makes people slightly happier with you - apparently, placing more value on your skills makes others value them more as well.
Start filing the lawsuits. The whole purpose of copyleft is to use copyright law against itself. If we start actually enforcing the licenses, we'll be doing exactly what we're supposed to, and probably making a tidy profit to boot. It might not even require personal effort on our part - there's gotta be a lawyer somewhere reading this article, with dollar signs dancing through his head. If a medium-sized business like OpenLogic was able to find all these violations, a couple interns at a law firm could probably find just as many, and I doubt many open-source hackers would refuse to sue someone who is violating their license.
What is stopping the US and Russia from teaming up and wiping another country off the map?
The fact that they've been hated enemies for 80 years, have no significant political, economic or religious ties to each other, and see each other as the One Thing Keeping Us From Our Rightful Place? Oh, and the lingering fear that if they do that, they'll scare the rest of the world enough that instead of US + RU vs. Elbonia, it becomes US + RU vs. the World? Oh, and don't forget that Russia is both economically and militarily unprepared for any major military action - their economy is in the dumps, their equipment is becoming dated, and their morale is abysmal (they lose more soldiers per year to suicide than the US loses due to enemy action - while fighting two wars at once, and while having a larger army).
Plus, the fact that defense is now at least plausible - China, Russia and the US have the technology to take down an inbound ICBM, and it's likely major allies of the above will get it within a decade.
Finally, you don't need nukes to wipe a country off the globe. Send in the tanks, send in the bombers, send in the Marines, kill anything that moves. Country eliminated. Don't mistake modern militaries' failure at occupations for an inability to utterly destroy an opponent.
That seems to be China's plan. Depending on who you ask, they have between 100 and 300 warheads, with about 70% of them "active", ie. ready to be used without warning. This is on par with France and the UK, and possibly with Israel (sources for Israel's armory vary between 0 and 500, usually about 100 or so). India and Pakistan each have about 100 as well - sufficient to deter, but not sufficient to really damage the planet. And, of course, we can't forget North Korea's half-dozen devices.
This is a pretty big contrast to the US and Russia, which have close to 2000 active warheads, and about 10,000 total warheads. Each.
Honestly, both countries could slash their active stockpiles in half without removing their ability to pretty much trash the biosphere. Hell, even just getting rid of all the deactivated weapons would be a good start - as they are now, they are still able to be used at least as dirty bomb material, and having one would make constructing a real warhead vastly easier. Just as with any weapon - just because the safety is off and the gun is unloaded, doesn't mean you shouldn't treat it as if it were dangerous.
While that is probably a better solution, freedom-wise, it also ignores one simple truth:
User-friendliness.
Android, although based on Linux, is not Linux, and is not made for the type of person who uses Linux. It is made for the type of person who uses a cell phone. Most of them, on seeing a "The application 'AnnaKournikovaPics' has been disabled for security reasons", is more likely to click "Re-enable anyways" than "Why was this disabled?". Thus, the malware would not be removed; in the case of some malware, that could be quite dangerous. Not just to the user, but to those around them.
If, for whatever reason, the kill-switch is used on software you must legitimately run, you can always install it manually (ie. not from the Market). Worst-case scenario, jailbreaking is necessary, which would hardly inconvenience most people who can be trusted to run an app that has been remotely killed.
I think it's the eyes. The eyes still don't quite seem "alive". Makes sense - the eyes are the most difficult thing to replicate. It certainly is in video games - the shader code for eyes alone is usually larger than all the other shaders combined.
Honestly, though, I think if they got the movements done properly (and had a good intelligence behind the curtain, artificial or human), I would be able to converse with the thing as though it were human. It's that close. The poses themselves are convincing, it's just the changing between them that throws it all out. That might just be because it's still a demo, because they haven't figured out how to program fluid motion yet, or because of some hardware limitation - IANA robotics expert, so I wouldn't know what the case is.
One of the things I noticed was "and contacting law enforcement about the attacks". I think that could be a pretty good standard to follow for using a remote-deactivation capability, to prevent it from being abused. "If it's serious enough to use a kill switch, it's serious enough that someone will be filing a lawsuit, and we're sure enough of it that we're reporting it to police (under threat of perjury)."
This is probably the best compromise. Obviously, some people would prefer no kill switch at all, while others would like the kill switch to be used on practically anything they don't like. If "serious enough and sure enough to sue" is the standard being used, it won't affect free speech (since, if you would be sued over it already, we've already lost that battle), and it makes accidents much less likely. Now, requiring that lawsuit to be won would make it even safer, but you run into the problem of it continuing to do damage for the years it takes to finally settle the suit.
Overall, I would like to see that standard officially written and adopted, even if it isn't made legally binding. It would make me feel a lot better about the existence of a kill switch, knowing that it will only be used in truly serious cases.
Infantry weapons are, honestly, not that hard to use. Hell, the M18 Claymore mine has a helpful "FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY" label telling you which way to point it. Even a Kalashnikov is simple - point it towards the bad guys, flip safety down one notch (to AB, C, or L, depending on where it was built), pull trigger until it stops making noise, drop magazine, insert new magazine, repeat until bad guys are dead, and flip safety back up when done. Now, proper maintenance and aiming is only marginally more complicated, but honestly, it's easier to use than some video games.
PS: Congratulations, all of us are now on a watchlist for having received "terrorist training".
That assumes that this law will actually benefit the people making the music. Normally, the only people to get money are the parasites - the "managers", the "producers", the "executives", and, of course, their lawyers, who make money off the music without even pretending to have musical ability.
But blind people still benefit from highways (even though they don't drive, they still ride), and people without children benefit from educational taxes (because, seriously, would you want to put up with someone else's uneducated brat?). The only people this tax would benefit is the RIAA (or whatever the Canadian equivalent is).
Even now that they have the data, what are they going to do with it? They can't sue these people for anything, they can't even investigate all of them to find out if there is anything they can charge them with. Honestly, I think at this point lawyers are just being evil as a Pavlovian response, and aren't even thinking about what they're doing anymore.
In unrelated news, that girl from high school has finally agreed to go out with me.
Pretty much a civil war? Hell, at the rate it's going, the civil war will be over before the UN even forms a committee on it.
Obligatory "I for one welcome our new memetic overlords".
The sudo thing doesn't seem that bad, unless the year of "Linux on the desktop" has finally arrived. For servers, pretty much everyone who has any access should have full access - anybody who should be logging into a database server should be able to do essentially anything that's necessary. Obviously, this depends on not giving access to people who don't need it (for instance, developers shouldn't have access to the production servers). And when I speak of "everyone", I mean "every person", not "every account" - system accounts used by daemons and such shouldn't have root access anyways.
Sudo is not a perfect security solution, nor is it designed to be. If a user really wants to run a command as root, he'll find a way. Sudo rules will not stop an admin gone postal. Sudo is intended to make root logins unnecessary, stop uneducated users from doing things they ought not be doing, and to limit (or at least slow) the damage an intruder can do. That's it.
My personal BSD box has some very simple sudo rules: my personal account and root are permitted to do everything (with the user's password required every half-hour). Everyone else is not allowed to use sudo. And I would be fine with using such a sudo configuration in a real production environment.
Sure. It's not recommended, but quite a few people do it. Hell, you could use GPLv1 if you wanted. There's no licensing on the license itself - as long as you don't misrepresent anything (ie. write your own license, but call it GPL), you can do whatever you want with it.
Nope. If anything, the movie was tamer about it.
Your confusion probably comes from the fact that Dr. Manhattan's costume changes drastically over the story. It goes from a full set of clothes, to the speedo, to "blowing in the wind", paralleling the character's increasing detachment from humanity.