It comes up sometimes on religious news sites I read - someone erects a religious monument or a graphic display of fetus-gore, the homeowners' association objects, and a bunch of churches and conservative political organisations join the fray to accuse the HOA of inringing upon free speech rights.
Military use? I could see a lot of application there, snipers are some of the most intensively-trained soldiers. But then why show it off at CES?
Are they planning to sell this to hobbyists? Hunters? Do we really want this kind of thing in the hands of civilians? It's absolutely useless for self-defense, but it'd make one really good murder weapon if the police have to search an 1800yd-radius circle to find where the shooter was.
There's always a perverse incentive. The obvious solution for a restraunt would be to start lowering the quality of the food to people consuming too much. On your fourth plate of prawns? Time to crank up the oven and serve the fifth overcooked and dry. The ISP counterpart would be to degrade service to heavy users - which is exactly what they do.
Conservatives currenly consist of several conflicting ideologies - the political, social and economic conservatives - as described by Tony Perkins, who is himself all three with an emphesis on social. They are held unified by a common political party (republicans) and opponent (Democrats/liberals). This political situation lets them work effectively together even though their ideologies would otherwise conflict on some issues.
Healthcare reform, for example. The democrat solution is to just throw money at private insurance companies, when the rest of the developed world long ago set up some sort of universal public coverage system. The democrats are also quite happy to throw money at the military, though perhaps not to the same extent as the republicans.
The cost of upgrading a fab for process shrink is almost as much as building a new fab. They often don't get upgraded - they get downmarketed. A new fab is built for the process shrink, and the old fab is reduced to making lower-spec tech. All those little microcontrollers, glue chips, controllers and interfaces found in just about everything electronic may well come from the same fab that once churned out the state-of-the-art Pentium 3.
Fab facilities are tremendously expensive. This isn't something you can throw together in your basement. A fab is going to cost at least a billion dollars - and that's not even for state-of-the-art 14nm stuff. TMSC's fab cost ten billion dollars to build. That's just the construction cost - semiconductor tech is constantly changing, so if you want to make the latest goodies like high-performance GPUs there's also the need to constantly puchase new and better equipment.
If they can do those things, then they will do those things regardless of tax.
Can you imagine a CEO looking over the budget and deciding 'huh, turns out we can cut wages by a third and save millions... but we're turning a nice profit right now, so I why bother?'
No, but it certainly goes a long way. Did anyone go to jail when BP negligently cut corners on a well and Deepwater Horizon started spewing oil with no off-valve? The company even pled guilty to eleven counts of manslaughter, but all it got was a fine (though quite a large one). It appears that in this case, the corporate entity took all the consequences and left the individuals who actually made the decisions shielded from anything worse than a drop in their annual bonus.
Our lead emissions have left a trace in ice cores. As has our industrial production of CO2. We've got radar-trackable space junk in graveyard orbit that isn't going to go anywhere for millions of years. Our nuclear tests have left detectable traces of long-lived isotopes in ice cores too. If there had been any advanced industrial civilisation in the last hundred thousand years, we'd have found it.
It used to be possible to use some very sensitive equipment to find overwritten data because the head didn't always align over the track, and could miss a little at the edge. But that hasn't worked in years - track density and drive precision got far too high.
You can pretty-much wipe a drive through software - not even the best equipment can recover overwritten data on a modern drive, though back in the drives of years ago it could be done. The only issue here is remapping - if the drive has transparently remapped bad clusters, some traces of data may remain in those.
They aren't involved in this particular case, but they are involved in other copyright cases. In the US, internet copyright infringement has been a criminal matter since the NET act - which makes all online for-profit infringement criminal, and defines for-profit as including an expectation of access to additional infringing material. Here in the UK, PIPCU (A division of the CoLP) has made a name for itsself by routinely overstepping their authority in order to take action against torrent sites.
Close. This was a civil case, so the plaintiff doesn't need to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt, as the prosecution would in a criminal case. Only has to prove that he was probably infringing.
It's pretty common for countries to try to boost their creative output in order to promote the country to the rest of the world. Both the US and UK have systems of tax breaks for locally-produced movies, as does much of the world. Uwe Boll is (in)famous for finding a way to exploit the German system of subsidies by making films so low-budget they cost less than the government paid to subsidise them - he made quite a few before the government revised their laws to stop him. Laws requiring channels to show a certain proportion of domestic content exist in Canada, Australia, and quite a few other countries. Your recollection on France is half-right - it's just outdated. While Franch used to have such a requirement, EU regulations now prohibit members from favoring their own industries at the expense of those of other EU members - so France's 'minimum French TV quota' is now a 'minimum made-in-the-EU quota.'
Static magnetic fields have no affect on humans at all, or most other forms of life. Changing ones have to be running at a silly intensity to do anything, though if you crank them up enough you can jam areas of the brain. It's useful in research for safely probing things without having to open the skull.
A mega-project like that? Why would you want the pyramids? It's the way to say your civilization is now advanced enough to do anything they feel like, for no better reason than to show they can.
Slashdot Mirror
Douchy it may be, but should everything douchy be illegal? Every action is going to be considered douchy by someone.
It comes up sometimes on religious news sites I read - someone erects a religious monument or a graphic display of fetus-gore, the homeowners' association objects, and a bunch of churches and conservative political organisations join the fray to accuse the HOA of inringing upon free speech rights.
Military use? I could see a lot of application there, snipers are some of the most intensively-trained soldiers. But then why show it off at CES?
Are they planning to sell this to hobbyists? Hunters? Do we really want this kind of thing in the hands of civilians? It's absolutely useless for self-defense, but it'd make one really good murder weapon if the police have to search an 1800yd-radius circle to find where the shooter was.
Compression and/or caching.
There's always a perverse incentive. The obvious solution for a restraunt would be to start lowering the quality of the food to people consuming too much. On your fourth plate of prawns? Time to crank up the oven and serve the fifth overcooked and dry. The ISP counterpart would be to degrade service to heavy users - which is exactly what they do.
More flights means moving more passangers per plane - money saved on plane rental, staff, maintenance.
No-one expects oil to stay this cheap forever though. It's just a matter of how long.
Conservatives currenly consist of several conflicting ideologies - the political, social and economic conservatives - as described by Tony Perkins, who is himself all three with an emphesis on social. They are held unified by a common political party (republicans) and opponent (Democrats/liberals). This political situation lets them work effectively together even though their ideologies would otherwise conflict on some issues.
Healthcare reform, for example. The democrat solution is to just throw money at private insurance companies, when the rest of the developed world long ago set up some sort of universal public coverage system. The democrats are also quite happy to throw money at the military, though perhaps not to the same extent as the republicans.
The cost of upgrading a fab for process shrink is almost as much as building a new fab. They often don't get upgraded - they get downmarketed. A new fab is built for the process shrink, and the old fab is reduced to making lower-spec tech. All those little microcontrollers, glue chips, controllers and interfaces found in just about everything electronic may well come from the same fab that once churned out the state-of-the-art Pentium 3.
We don't need real AI. We need good-enough-to-be-safe AI, with human intervention available when the AI calls for it.
Fab facilities are tremendously expensive. This isn't something you can throw together in your basement. A fab is going to cost at least a billion dollars - and that's not even for state-of-the-art 14nm stuff. TMSC's fab cost ten billion dollars to build. That's just the construction cost - semiconductor tech is constantly changing, so if you want to make the latest goodies like high-performance GPUs there's also the need to constantly puchase new and better equipment.
If they can do those things, then they will do those things regardless of tax.
Can you imagine a CEO looking over the budget and deciding 'huh, turns out we can cut wages by a third and save millions... but we're turning a nice profit right now, so I why bother?'
No, but it certainly goes a long way. Did anyone go to jail when BP negligently cut corners on a well and Deepwater Horizon started spewing oil with no off-valve? The company even pled guilty to eleven counts of manslaughter, but all it got was a fine (though quite a large one). It appears that in this case, the corporate entity took all the consequences and left the individuals who actually made the decisions shielded from anything worse than a drop in their annual bonus.
Have some shameless self-promotion... might finally have found someone who can figure out how to play this: http://birds-are-nice.me/VoroW...
Another theory is that the ancient Egyptians were a bunch of furrys.
Our lead emissions have left a trace in ice cores. As has our industrial production of CO2. We've got radar-trackable space junk in graveyard orbit that isn't going to go anywhere for millions of years. Our nuclear tests have left detectable traces of long-lived isotopes in ice cores too. If there had been any advanced industrial civilisation in the last hundred thousand years, we'd have found it.
It used to be possible to use some very sensitive equipment to find overwritten data because the head didn't always align over the track, and could miss a little at the edge. But that hasn't worked in years - track density and drive precision got far too high.
Language changes. Words acquire new meanings.
It can still be recovered forensically though.
You can pretty-much wipe a drive through software - not even the best equipment can recover overwritten data on a modern drive, though back in the drives of years ago it could be done. The only issue here is remapping - if the drive has transparently remapped bad clusters, some traces of data may remain in those.
They aren't involved in this particular case, but they are involved in other copyright cases. In the US, internet copyright infringement has been a criminal matter since the NET act - which makes all online for-profit infringement criminal, and defines for-profit as including an expectation of access to additional infringing material. Here in the UK, PIPCU (A division of the CoLP) has made a name for itsself by routinely overstepping their authority in order to take action against torrent sites.
Close. This was a civil case, so the plaintiff doesn't need to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt, as the prosecution would in a criminal case. Only has to prove that he was probably infringing.
It's pretty common for countries to try to boost their creative output in order to promote the country to the rest of the world. Both the US and UK have systems of tax breaks for locally-produced movies, as does much of the world. Uwe Boll is (in)famous for finding a way to exploit the German system of subsidies by making films so low-budget they cost less than the government paid to subsidise them - he made quite a few before the government revised their laws to stop him. Laws requiring channels to show a certain proportion of domestic content exist in Canada, Australia, and quite a few other countries. Your recollection on France is half-right - it's just outdated. While Franch used to have such a requirement, EU regulations now prohibit members from favoring their own industries at the expense of those of other EU members - so France's 'minimum French TV quota' is now a 'minimum made-in-the-EU quota.'
Static magnetic fields have no affect on humans at all, or most other forms of life. Changing ones have to be running at a silly intensity to do anything, though if you crank them up enough you can jam areas of the brain. It's useful in research for safely probing things without having to open the skull.
A mega-project like that? Why would you want the pyramids? It's the way to say your civilization is now advanced enough to do anything they feel like, for no better reason than to show they can.
That would explain the uncertainty principle. A little aliasing noise to mask the quantization artifacts.