As a means to prevent malicious use of the weapon, require multiple access keys to activate it, and provide one each to the governments of the UN Security Council members. Unanimous, active participation would then be required to fire the weapon, which would only realistically be achieved due to a true threat to the entire planet.
I'm thinking, mount this bad boy on a turret on an island somewhere, and use it to destroy asteroids in threat range. I'm much more inclined to do this on a turret on the ground than a satellite; although the satellite would make the weapon more effective against space-based targets, it would also allow it to be directed at points on the earth. As a laser beam can't bend, all you could do to attack terrestrial enemies with it is shoot planes/satellites out of the sky.
I presume that by "dirty bomb" you mean "weather-related accident that occurred over 1000 miles from our shores"? Yes. One day, some American is gonna get hurt by a drone. Hell, one could crash on your house. People also have been injured or killed accidentally by every branch of the armed services. A woman was accidentally killed with a police officer's sidearm next. I presume, then, that for safety against accidental injury/death, we should disarm the entire country. But wait, that would run afoul of your precious Constitution, which apparently to your mind reads, "The most advanced military in the world cannot be trusted with sophisticated weapons, but a beer-guzzling pheasant hunter living in a trailer in Alabama should have 30 assault rifles because CONSTITUTION!"
Government has had the ability to spy on you for a long, long time. The methods have gotten more advanced, but the "spooks" are the same as they were in the 1940s. In those intervening years, you haven't seen Americans whisked away to death camps. You haven't seen the Thought Police, or Big Brother in Room 101. Am I a fan of some government agent at Langley reading my email? Of course not. But I also know that my email will only be read by a real agent at all if something is flagged by a computer algorithm, and I promise the NSA's super-computers are bored to tears reading about my eBay auction purchases and the e-bills from the power company. Are the algorithms overly broad? Sure. But that doesn't mean that the guy who eventually screens that mail doesn't shrug and say, "Yeah, just some redneck yutz talking about his camping trip," and moves on.
I absolutely think we have given up too much liberty to the prevention of terrorism. Terrorism has cost fewer American lives than lightning strikes. Some security is needed, but the level to which we protect against it is absurd, and it's brought upon by two factors: money-making for the defense contractors, and the fact that in our polarized politics, no elected administration who "let an attack happen on their watch" would get re-elected, and the American public would see video of some burning plane every day for the entire 18-month election cycle.
This executive order, like many others Obama and his predecessors have issued, don't have anything to do with terrorism, and they sure don't have anything to do with commandeering your precious Fox News if Rush Limbaugh mouths off one too many times. This is nothing but assigning areas of responsibilities among the cabinet-level officials. Government bureaucracy is huge, and in an emergency, communication can be difficult. It is necessary for everybody to know what their job is in the event of an emergency, so that they can do it without waiting for instructions. It's the national equivalent of a fire drill, for heaven's sake.
I'm an independent voter, but I'll admit to lean Democratic. This isn't because I like what the Democrats are doing. It's because they are the only party who seems to be trying. They're the people who are proposing solutions, for Republicans to downvote, stonewall, filibuster, and not replace with constructive suggestions of their own. They're the one whose adherents, from media personalities and candidates to soapboxing constituents like me, seem to actually be educated and involved in the issues at hand, rather than just freaking out on some obviously uninformed rant. We can, and we should, disagree and debate things. Deciding what to do, given the facts, is what lawmakers are elected to do. Deciding what the facts ARE is not.
One final note while I'm up on my soapbox and inviting the slings and arrows of outraged fortunate. Elected officials are in office to serve the common good and the civic needs of the people they represent. They are not responsible for saving our immortal souls, and must stop trying. According to the Christian 10 commandments, I must honor my mother and father, but I can't go to jail for calling my dad a jerk. We mustn't covet our neighbor's wives, but it happens every day. Nobody's passi
The main difference here is that they have to delegate the power to the Director of HS, since that position didn't exist when the original order allowing this came into being. All this is saying is that the government can use civilian means to communicate with people in the event of an emergency. We need to put a 50% tax on tin foil hats and pay down the debt.
Has a free version, does ICQ,AIM,GTalk,Facebook,MSN,Yahoo (Yahoo implementation is a little buggy for me, but YMMV), and its own protocol "Bump". The paid version is $5, no ads, Skype support, etc. Both versions do push messaging, simple and clean interface. Highly recommend.
I doubt al Qaeda had any intention of this bomb going off. They put it in somebody's underwear, just so Americans would now have to strip to get on a plane. Government officials need to stop going on TV and saying that the terrorists "hate freedom." Because they do. And if the terrorist's goal is to attack freedom, guess what, government? YOU'RE LETTING THEM WIN. Put an X-Ray machine, a Geiger counter, and a dog at every terminal in the country. That's it. When the terrorists have a bomb that isn't made of metal AND is made of a chemical the dog can't detect, send a sample of that chemical to every airport in the country, and teach the dogs to smell that too.
"To quiet privacy concerns, the authorities are also spending $7 million to 'remove the human factor from the image review process' and replace the passenger's image with an avatar."
The NFL needs to set aside a SUSBTANTIAL of their $9 billion cash flow to researching better helmets. I don't mean moderate improvements. I'm talking about something that can wick away nearly all of the impact force to other parts of the body. This is the single biggest existential threat to the game, and it has got to be resolved.
Issue is, it's not a convention. Half the apps out there do 2.9 > 2.10, and half the apps don't. So unless you go back and read the version history for an app, you can't be sure which format it's using. It's the inconsistency I don't like, more than the practice itself. If every app out there did 2.9 2.10, you could get used to it. If it's, "Well, which way is this one set up?" then that's unclear.
What makes it frustrating is that some developers DO use decimal notation because they're actually using decimal version numbers, and so if you're not familiar with the release cycle of a program, it can sometimes take a minute to figure out if they're on decimal numbers (2.9 > 2.10) or on separators (2.10 > 2.9). Things like IP addresses and dates are consistently written in that way - you don't sometimes do math on the octets and other times not. Thus, not confusing. It's the inconsistency that bothers me.
Understanding, and agreeing with, are two vastly different things. I emphatically disagree with the practice. Which I can only do because I understand how it works, and find it to be a poor method.
Jesus Christ. Now I remember why I never post here any more. Seemingly everyone who posts on tech forums feels that having survived being the nerd that nobody wanted to talk to in school gives them the right to be an abject, vitriolic prick on the Internet, where nobody can see that they're living in their mom's basement and having a monogamous relationship with a tube sock.
Of course I -understand- how version numbers work. I've been designing software for 17 years. The point I'm making is that the way these companies are doing the version numbering, while understood, is dumb. If you're going to write a number like a decimal, it should be a decimal. When you increment up from 2.9, you should go to something like 2.91, or FSM forbid, 3.0. Secondary decimal points are ridiculous to me. If you want to reference a build number, put it in another field somewhere - nobody really cares about the build number unless that's all that changed, meaning it's probably a development snapshot rather than an actual release.
So, to review for you dickless trolls out there, understanding does not equal agreement.
Make it 3D and give it a touchscreen.... I want to watch people flailing trying to grab that damn angry bird on their 55" TV and careen right through their coffee table.
No, I'm saying, with my PS3, when they changed the terms to be odious, I said, fuck it, I guess I won't take my PS3 online anymore. But since so much of what makes the 360 my favorite console is online/Gold only, I was willing to hold my nose and swallow the provision on the Xbox.
Nothing, because I accepted the updated TaCoS for XBL. I did NOT accept the TaCoS for PSN, and as such have lost all the online functionality of that device.
Slashdot Mirror
As a means to prevent malicious use of the weapon, require multiple access keys to activate it, and provide one each to the governments of the UN Security Council members. Unanimous, active participation would then be required to fire the weapon, which would only realistically be achieved due to a true threat to the entire planet.
I'm thinking, mount this bad boy on a turret on an island somewhere, and use it to destroy asteroids in threat range. I'm much more inclined to do this on a turret on the ground than a satellite; although the satellite would make the weapon more effective against space-based targets, it would also allow it to be directed at points on the earth. As a laser beam can't bend, all you could do to attack terrestrial enemies with it is shoot planes/satellites out of the sky.
I presume that by "dirty bomb" you mean "weather-related accident that occurred over 1000 miles from our shores"? Yes. One day, some American is gonna get hurt by a drone. Hell, one could crash on your house. People also have been injured or killed accidentally by every branch of the armed services. A woman was accidentally killed with a police officer's sidearm next. I presume, then, that for safety against accidental injury/death, we should disarm the entire country. But wait, that would run afoul of your precious Constitution, which apparently to your mind reads, "The most advanced military in the world cannot be trusted with sophisticated weapons, but a beer-guzzling pheasant hunter living in a trailer in Alabama should have 30 assault rifles because CONSTITUTION!"
Government has had the ability to spy on you for a long, long time. The methods have gotten more advanced, but the "spooks" are the same as they were in the 1940s. In those intervening years, you haven't seen Americans whisked away to death camps. You haven't seen the Thought Police, or Big Brother in Room 101. Am I a fan of some government agent at Langley reading my email? Of course not. But I also know that my email will only be read by a real agent at all if something is flagged by a computer algorithm, and I promise the NSA's super-computers are bored to tears reading about my eBay auction purchases and the e-bills from the power company. Are the algorithms overly broad? Sure. But that doesn't mean that the guy who eventually screens that mail doesn't shrug and say, "Yeah, just some redneck yutz talking about his camping trip," and moves on.
I absolutely think we have given up too much liberty to the prevention of terrorism. Terrorism has cost fewer American lives than lightning strikes. Some security is needed, but the level to which we protect against it is absurd, and it's brought upon by two factors: money-making for the defense contractors, and the fact that in our polarized politics, no elected administration who "let an attack happen on their watch" would get re-elected, and the American public would see video of some burning plane every day for the entire 18-month election cycle.
This executive order, like many others Obama and his predecessors have issued, don't have anything to do with terrorism, and they sure don't have anything to do with commandeering your precious Fox News if Rush Limbaugh mouths off one too many times. This is nothing but assigning areas of responsibilities among the cabinet-level officials. Government bureaucracy is huge, and in an emergency, communication can be difficult. It is necessary for everybody to know what their job is in the event of an emergency, so that they can do it without waiting for instructions. It's the national equivalent of a fire drill, for heaven's sake.
I'm an independent voter, but I'll admit to lean Democratic. This isn't because I like what the Democrats are doing. It's because they are the only party who seems to be trying. They're the people who are proposing solutions, for Republicans to downvote, stonewall, filibuster, and not replace with constructive suggestions of their own. They're the one whose adherents, from media personalities and candidates to soapboxing constituents like me, seem to actually be educated and involved in the issues at hand, rather than just freaking out on some obviously uninformed rant. We can, and we should, disagree and debate things. Deciding what to do, given the facts, is what lawmakers are elected to do. Deciding what the facts ARE is not.
One final note while I'm up on my soapbox and inviting the slings and arrows of outraged fortunate. Elected officials are in office to serve the common good and the civic needs of the people they represent. They are not responsible for saving our immortal souls, and must stop trying. According to the Christian 10 commandments, I must honor my mother and father, but I can't go to jail for calling my dad a jerk. We mustn't covet our neighbor's wives, but it happens every day. Nobody's passi
The main difference here is that they have to delegate the power to the Director of HS, since that position didn't exist when the original order allowing this came into being. All this is saying is that the government can use civilian means to communicate with people in the event of an emergency. We need to put a 50% tax on tin foil hats and pay down the debt.
I've always been convinced that my high school chemistry teacher was real personality used to create GLaDOS.
Has a free version, does ICQ,AIM,GTalk,Facebook,MSN,Yahoo (Yahoo implementation is a little buggy for me, but YMMV), and its own protocol "Bump". The paid version is $5, no ads, Skype support, etc. Both versions do push messaging, simple and clean interface. Highly recommend.
I doubt al Qaeda had any intention of this bomb going off. They put it in somebody's underwear, just so Americans would now have to strip to get on a plane. Government officials need to stop going on TV and saying that the terrorists "hate freedom." Because they do. And if the terrorist's goal is to attack freedom, guess what, government? YOU'RE LETTING THEM WIN. Put an X-Ray machine, a Geiger counter, and a dog at every terminal in the country. That's it. When the terrorists have a bomb that isn't made of metal AND is made of a chemical the dog can't detect, send a sample of that chemical to every airport in the country, and teach the dogs to smell that too.
"To quiet privacy concerns, the authorities are also spending $7 million to 'remove the human factor from the image review process' and replace the passenger's image with an avatar."
http://www.imaxmelbourne.com.au/images/uploads/Avatar/Avatar-BIG-1.jpg
"Sorry, buddy, you're gonna have to check that bow."
The NFL needs to set aside a SUSBTANTIAL of their $9 billion cash flow to researching better helmets. I don't mean moderate improvements. I'm talking about something that can wick away nearly all of the impact force to other parts of the body. This is the single biggest existential threat to the game, and it has got to be resolved.
It would take a lot longer to look up Romney. You'd have to search all 5 or 6 of his houses.
Issue is, it's not a convention. Half the apps out there do 2.9 > 2.10, and half the apps don't. So unless you go back and read the version history for an app, you can't be sure which format it's using. It's the inconsistency I don't like, more than the practice itself. If every app out there did 2.9 2.10, you could get used to it. If it's, "Well, which way is this one set up?" then that's unclear.
What makes it frustrating is that some developers DO use decimal notation because they're actually using decimal version numbers, and so if you're not familiar with the release cycle of a program, it can sometimes take a minute to figure out if they're on decimal numbers (2.9 > 2.10) or on separators (2.10 > 2.9). Things like IP addresses and dates are consistently written in that way - you don't sometimes do math on the octets and other times not. Thus, not confusing. It's the inconsistency that bothers me.
Understanding, and agreeing with, are two vastly different things. I emphatically disagree with the practice. Which I can only do because I understand how it works, and find it to be a poor method.
Emphasis.
While I'm not a fan of MS numbering, at least it's a number that keeps going up.
Jesus Christ. Now I remember why I never post here any more. Seemingly everyone who posts on tech forums feels that having survived being the nerd that nobody wanted to talk to in school gives them the right to be an abject, vitriolic prick on the Internet, where nobody can see that they're living in their mom's basement and having a monogamous relationship with a tube sock.
Of course I -understand- how version numbers work. I've been designing software for 17 years. The point I'm making is that the way these companies are doing the version numbering, while understood, is dumb. If you're going to write a number like a decimal, it should be a decimal. When you increment up from 2.9, you should go to something like 2.91, or FSM forbid, 3.0. Secondary decimal points are ridiculous to me. If you want to reference a build number, put it in another field somewhere - nobody really cares about the build number unless that's all that changed, meaning it's probably a development snapshot rather than an actual release.
So, to review for you dickless trolls out there, understanding does not equal agreement.
Why is it that so many FOSS projects (GIMP, PGAdmin, etc) don't understand basic math?
"...their code branch will become the 2.9 development series once 2.8 is released. With this, 2.10 will finally feature..."
2.10 IS NOT HIGHER THAN 2.9.
I had a pic of that same girl playing it as my twitter avatar in 2010.
EULAs. Read 'em.
And spent the better part of a decade being a joke, and nearly going bankrupt, before wisely re-recruiting Steve Jobs.
No company should EVER do anything important on April 1.
Make it 3D and give it a touchscreen.... I want to watch people flailing trying to grab that damn angry bird on their 55" TV and careen right through their coffee table.
Chi-Tebow boson.
No, I'm saying, with my PS3, when they changed the terms to be odious, I said, fuck it, I guess I won't take my PS3 online anymore. But since so much of what makes the 360 my favorite console is online/Gold only, I was willing to hold my nose and swallow the provision on the Xbox.
Nothing, because I accepted the updated TaCoS for XBL. I did NOT accept the TaCoS for PSN, and as such have lost all the online functionality of that device.