I used to buy many books second-hand. Then came the great bookshelf collapse. Nearly broke an arm when that thing fell on top of me.
I donated them all to the school I was a student with at the time to start the sixth-form library. Over the next two years I saw them used as paper plane material, soaked and stuck to the ceiling as paper wads, thrown, used to prop furniture and stuffed in a toilet. I never actually saw a student read one of them, though the teachers did.
Those who wrote the first amendment obviously couldn't have intended it apply to technologies they could not predict. Thus it makes sense to look at the reasoning behind the amendment, and decide if the same reasoning extends to cover these new technologies as well.
This doesn't work on the second amendment because there seems to be very little agreement about exactly what it's for these days. Some insist it's there to ensure a right to self-defense, some that it is there to ensure the citizens are ready to form a militia for national defense (This being written in the days when such a thing was still practical), and some that it's there so that the people might be able to overthrow the government should it turn oppressive. The wording of the amendment itsself is hopelessly ambiguous.
You get one shot with the weapons of the era. Then you need to go through the slow process of manual reloading. You can't really go on a killing spree with one.
If you wanted to commit some mass-murder with 1700's weaponry, I imagine the best you could come up with would be a really big bomb - lots of gunpowder stacked up underneath a populated building. It'd also be a valuable weapon to overthrow a government - someone tried that in England once, and nearly pulled it off too. So, does the second amendment give people the right to own several tons of low explosive? If not, why? If so, why wouldn't this also extend to high explosive and nuclear weaponry?
Because, hypothetically, if I was planning to overthrow a tyrannical government, blowing up a nuke in the middle of the capital city would be one hell of a way to signal the start of the rebellion.
As we've seen in the middle east, small weapons can pose a threat to a government. The trick is just preventing the government from bringing their really big weapons to bear. If you march your patriotic rebellion upon Washington, it would just be carpet-bombed into a bloody and burning pulp - but if you instead have your men infiltrate in civilian clothes, fight dirty, use sabotage where possible, snipe from a distance and disappear into the population again... well, then the only way to kill them all would be to kill several times as many loyal civilians, which would just inspire more rebellion.
Yes, England had that system during the middle ages. Manditory bow training for all men.
But an army of the time wasn't like a modern army. There were a few professionals, but most of the men were conscripts. The idea wasn't to allow the militia to be quickly organised: It was to the King's representative could turn up at your village and declare he wanted thirty men to go fight the French (Again), and you'd better show some loyalty and do you were told.
It could be argued too that modern weapons are not the same as weapons of the time. At the time of writing, the most advanced guns around were muskets - there were no rifles, and fully-automatic weapons were unimagined. Today the most powerful weapons available are bombs capable of destroying a small country, and even some of our 'small' arms can turn a man into a highly efficient killing machine capable of potentially several deaths-per-second given a sufficiently rapidly replenished supply of targets.
The US police are infamously variable. In some towns they are a model of how the police should be, respectful of the law and all citizens until proven guilty. The next town over they are little more than a legal mafia, happily resorting to intimidation and extortion to extract fines and reacting to any challenge to their authority with a campaign of persecution.
If you're in the latter, you're basically screwed. If you don't hand over the password, the officer will decide he smells a hint of pot in your car and tear the interior apart in a search in an effort to provoke you into touching him - and then it's one charge of 'resisting arrest' and a face full of pepper spray. You can fight in court, but they'll layer the charges on so thick and delay so long you'd exaust your life savings trying to secure any form of victory.
Only because so much is either sent in cleartext or stored in centralized and monitorable locations (eg, facebook).
If all traffic of any importance were encrypted, and only the recipient had the key, the NSA would be unable to monitor everything without detection. They could use endpoint hacks or active MITM on targetted individuals, but doing so en mass would be quickly noticed.
Like many things in physics, it's really a discrete signal at a rate so high as to be continuous for all practical purposes. If you could get your sampling rate ridiculous enough, you'll start to detect individual photons.
I'm sure the NSA does, and many other countries too - but even for them, it's non-trivial. They may be able to subvert encryption on targeted suspects by compromising the endpoints or using false certificates, but they can't monitor entire populations that way.
Not lying. An IQ test is required for membership. A proper one, not an online one.
Though it's arguable how useful an IQ test is. It's a poor metric of intelligence, it's just commonly used because all the other suggestions are worse.
Sometimes they stopped trying to hide it and just resorted to 'enter the fifth character of the ninth line on page eighteen.'
I got Transartica as a (legal) three-game bundle set, all one one CD. I had endless trouble with that - it kept asking, but never accepted my answers, because I didn't have the original manual. The combined manual I had (Transartica, Fairy Godmother and... some game I forget) used different page numbering. I didn't discover the solution until some years after purchase. The front label of the CD case was actually folded in two: If removed from the CD case and opened up, tucked away inside it was a page/line/word list chart. The publisher had included it, but not made it easy to find.
If you enter those in Hexen, the game insults you for cheating and inverts the code's effect: idkfa takes all your guns away and iddqd is instant death.
Quite possible. The conspiracy claim doesn't have any actual evidence at all - not even a decent statistical analysis to back up the accusation that the IRS was selectively under-prioritising tax exemption claims from right-wing pressure groups. All they have are lots of anecdotes from tea party organisations that sent in their forms and didn't get a reply for months.
Except that they claim the emails were stored on the desktop only.
Which means either gross incompetence, or 'deliberate incompetence' - knowing they can't delete some records, but making sure to use inept data preservation measures so accidents happen on a regular basis.
"It was a nice feeling to have a Microvac of your own and Jerrodd was glad he was part of his generation and no other. In his father's youth, the only computers had been tremendous machines taking up a hundred square miles of land. There was only one to a planet. Planetary ACs they were called. They had been growing in size steadily for a thousand years and then, all at once, came refinement. In place of transistors had come molecular valves so that even the largest Planetary AC could be put into a space only half the volume of a spaceship."
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I used to buy many books second-hand. Then came the great bookshelf collapse. Nearly broke an arm when that thing fell on top of me.
I donated them all to the school I was a student with at the time to start the sixth-form library. Over the next two years I saw them used as paper plane material, soaked and stuck to the ceiling as paper wads, thrown, used to prop furniture and stuffed in a toilet. I never actually saw a student read one of them, though the teachers did.
Those who wrote the first amendment obviously couldn't have intended it apply to technologies they could not predict. Thus it makes sense to look at the reasoning behind the amendment, and decide if the same reasoning extends to cover these new technologies as well.
This doesn't work on the second amendment because there seems to be very little agreement about exactly what it's for these days. Some insist it's there to ensure a right to self-defense, some that it is there to ensure the citizens are ready to form a militia for national defense (This being written in the days when such a thing was still practical), and some that it's there so that the people might be able to overthrow the government should it turn oppressive. The wording of the amendment itsself is hopelessly ambiguous.
You get one shot with the weapons of the era. Then you need to go through the slow process of manual reloading. You can't really go on a killing spree with one.
If you wanted to commit some mass-murder with 1700's weaponry, I imagine the best you could come up with would be a really big bomb - lots of gunpowder stacked up underneath a populated building. It'd also be a valuable weapon to overthrow a government - someone tried that in England once, and nearly pulled it off too. So, does the second amendment give people the right to own several tons of low explosive? If not, why? If so, why wouldn't this also extend to high explosive and nuclear weaponry?
Because, hypothetically, if I was planning to overthrow a tyrannical government, blowing up a nuke in the middle of the capital city would be one hell of a way to signal the start of the rebellion.
No. Of course they couldn't. Just go back and look at some of the 'life in the year 2000' videos made in the 50s and 60s and see how wrong they were.
The founders knew this though. That's why they included the process of constitutional amendment.
Only possible because his logistics were seriously overstretched, and even then it needed French support.
Dirty secret of the American revolution: Likely wouldn't have worked without French support.
As we've seen in the middle east, small weapons can pose a threat to a government. The trick is just preventing the government from bringing their really big weapons to bear. If you march your patriotic rebellion upon Washington, it would just be carpet-bombed into a bloody and burning pulp - but if you instead have your men infiltrate in civilian clothes, fight dirty, use sabotage where possible, snipe from a distance and disappear into the population again... well, then the only way to kill them all would be to kill several times as many loyal civilians, which would just inspire more rebellion.
Yes, England had that system during the middle ages. Manditory bow training for all men.
But an army of the time wasn't like a modern army. There were a few professionals, but most of the men were conscripts. The idea wasn't to allow the militia to be quickly organised: It was to the King's representative could turn up at your village and declare he wanted thirty men to go fight the French (Again), and you'd better show some loyalty and do you were told.
It could be argued too that modern weapons are not the same as weapons of the time. At the time of writing, the most advanced guns around were muskets - there were no rifles, and fully-automatic weapons were unimagined. Today the most powerful weapons available are bombs capable of destroying a small country, and even some of our 'small' arms can turn a man into a highly efficient killing machine capable of potentially several deaths-per-second given a sufficiently rapidly replenished supply of targets.
The US police are infamously variable. In some towns they are a model of how the police should be, respectful of the law and all citizens until proven guilty. The next town over they are little more than a legal mafia, happily resorting to intimidation and extortion to extract fines and reacting to any challenge to their authority with a campaign of persecution.
If you're in the latter, you're basically screwed. If you don't hand over the password, the officer will decide he smells a hint of pot in your car and tear the interior apart in a search in an effort to provoke you into touching him - and then it's one charge of 'resisting arrest' and a face full of pepper spray. You can fight in court, but they'll layer the charges on so thick and delay so long you'd exaust your life savings trying to secure any form of victory.
This is an actual line of perl code from a script I use often:
s/\b(\w)/uc($1)/ge;
Go on. Just try to work out what it does.
Only because so much is either sent in cleartext or stored in centralized and monitorable locations (eg, facebook).
If all traffic of any importance were encrypted, and only the recipient had the key, the NSA would be unable to monitor everything without detection. They could use endpoint hacks or active MITM on targetted individuals, but doing so en mass would be quickly noticed.
Like many things in physics, it's really a discrete signal at a rate so high as to be continuous for all practical purposes. If you could get your sampling rate ridiculous enough, you'll start to detect individual photons.
I'm sure the NSA does, and many other countries too - but even for them, it's non-trivial. They may be able to subvert encryption on targeted suspects by compromising the endpoints or using false certificates, but they can't monitor entire populations that way.
Then the obvious solution is to make sure everyone uses encryption for even the most trivial things. Enable it by default.
So let them listen. That's what encryption is for.
Not lying. An IQ test is required for membership. A proper one, not an online one.
Though it's arguable how useful an IQ test is. It's a poor metric of intelligence, it's just commonly used because all the other suggestions are worse.
Sometimes they stopped trying to hide it and just resorted to 'enter the fifth character of the ninth line on page eighteen.'
I got Transartica as a (legal) three-game bundle set, all one one CD. I had endless trouble with that - it kept asking, but never accepted my answers, because I didn't have the original manual. The combined manual I had (Transartica, Fairy Godmother and... some game I forget) used different page numbering. I didn't discover the solution until some years after purchase. The front label of the CD case was actually folded in two: If removed from the CD case and opened up, tucked away inside it was a page/line/word list chart. The publisher had included it, but not made it easy to find.
If you enter those in Hexen, the game insults you for cheating and inverts the code's effect: idkfa takes all your guns away and iddqd is instant death.
Quite possible. The conspiracy claim doesn't have any actual evidence at all - not even a decent statistical analysis to back up the accusation that the IRS was selectively under-prioritising tax exemption claims from right-wing pressure groups. All they have are lots of anecdotes from tea party organisations that sent in their forms and didn't get a reply for months.
I'm not sure quite how it works. I'm in the UK - our law on the matter is similar, but different.
I remember harvesting energy to power a radio receiver before. Gave me enough power to demodulate and drive the earpiece.
Very quietly.
The antenna ran from the house to the end of the garden.
Don't waste your money. Once the solar roadways hit mass production we won't need diesel any more.
Except that they claim the emails were stored on the desktop only.
Which means either gross incompetence, or 'deliberate incompetence' - knowing they can't delete some records, but making sure to use inept data preservation measures so accidents happen on a regular basis.
This post is illegal.
Really, it is. I'm at work, violating the usage policy by going on slashdot. Unauthorised use of a computer.
"It was a nice feeling to have a Microvac of your own and Jerrodd was glad he was part of his generation and no other. In his father's youth, the only computers had been tremendous machines taking up a hundred square miles of land. There was only one to a planet. Planetary ACs they were called. They had been growing in size steadily for a thousand years and then, all at once, came refinement. In place of transistors had come molecular valves so that even the largest Planetary AC could be put into a space only half the volume of a spaceship."
- Issac Asimov, The Last Question, 1956.