It's obviously not practical to scan all, but nothing to stop them running a lottery system. Pick a small number (One in a hundred?) of laptops at random and subject them to the search machine, which would obviously have to be something simple enough to run with minimal training. Perhaps a list of SHA hashes for known 'suspicious' files like terrorist training, drugs production manuals, pirate files, DRM-breakers and pornography. All the inspector need do then is plug in the bootable USB scanner, get the device owner to hand over any passwords (Under threat of a few weeks in jail) and let it scan.
It wouldn't work, really. Any guard-safe scanner would fail on unusual configurations (Laptops running linux), or falsely detect encrypted partitions when none exist, and it's sure to get the odd false positive from the browser cache because the user once saw a thumbnail of something dodgy on google image search. But that's the great thing about it politically: It doesn't *need* to work. It just has look like it works. Any critics can be silenced by those all-powerful words: 'Protect the children.'
The problem with Gattaca's dystopia was that it applied statistical probabilities to individuals. Someone is more likely to have heart problems? Employers know, and will reject that applicant from phsically stressful jobs. Even though it's just a probability. In the real world, this would be like companies observing the statistical truth (politically incorrect as it is) that black Americans are significently more likely to commit a crime than white Americans, and thus refusing to hire any blacks on the grounds that they are more likely to steal the petty cash. It might make sense in statistics, but it becomes very unfair when applied to individuals. It's the ultimate in prejudging.
Most of us are so adapted, it doesn't do anything. I went to the US once, where tea was in short supply, and suffered two days of headaches before I realised I was going through caffeine withdrawal and resorted to coffee.
I run an after-school engineering club. I ended up taking the 'own money' route for the first month, because it took that long to figure out the procedure for buying any supplies through the official channels. I still have to occasionally pay myself for things which can't be obtained from any of the officially authorised suppliers.
The long-term goal is to build a robot, but the rate at which these kids learn they'll have left by the time we finish it and their successors will carry on. Right now we are building an electronic die, which teaches them logic circuit design and how to read a datasheet. It took two 45-minute lessons to get a seven-segment decoder hooked up to a display.
Which makes good business sense. Microsoft learned with Vista that if they make a product 'good enough' then it can be very difficult to get people to upgrade to a successor, and forcing people to upgrade by ending support invokes much upset. Apple found a way to turn every device into not just a one-time sale but a continuous revenue stream by making themselves the middleman in associated services, requiring the user to go via their own sales channel for software and media. It's a very effective business model, and even if some of the end users feel rather disgusted by the idea that their own purchased hardware is locked-down and designed to sacrifice capability in order to extract more money from them it still makes the shareholders happy.
Nothing wrong with the idea of an application menu. It works. It's efficient, it's fast. The big annoyance for me with the windows start menu is the breaking of the cardinal rule of interface design: consistancy. Things move around. For example, I am in the habbit at work of bringing up a remote desktop client with ctrl-esc R. That used to work. Then I ran another program starting with R, and the menu rearranged itsself, and ctrl-esc R did something else entirely! That should not happen. Metro takes the thing even further though, with the whole layout shifting around unpredictably as the interface tries to guess what I want.
The best alternative to a menu would be an auto-completing text launcher, but tha wouldn't work well on a tablet at all.
They largely fixed UAC. It was a well-intentioned idea, but Vista's implimentation was very awkward - it'd pop up authorisation boxes for every little change, to the point that it didn't even provide security as people habitually clicked 'yes' every time. Seven changed it around so only things that really needed authorisation asked. Really, though, I think it was more that by the time Seven came out, sticking with XP was getting much more difficult. A lack of new hardware support, the looming threat of the (much-delayed) ceasation of security patches.
You mean it'll be Vista all over again - people will take one look at the horror, then just refuse to upgrade from the predecessor until Microsoft gets their act together. Everyone I know skipped Vista altogether, and kept on using XP until Seven came out.
When I was in university, the 1) groups all self-segregated in the lecture hall. A quick glance over collected students and you could see the pockets of ethnicity.
Android is somewhat complicated. The core parts of it are free, yes (Though I understand google tends to be a little slow releasing the source for the latest versions), but in actual use manufacturers typically mix it with propritary extras and then lock it down hard through hardware - so, even though you have access to the source in princible, you can't actually run it on most devices without the manufacturer's secret firmware-signing key, and the user is kept from having administrative access short of hacking the device somehow. I had to do that for my phone and tablet just in order to remove some manufacturer's bundled crapware. It's a very complicated matter, because the OS provider and the hardware manufacturer have to coordinate so closely (This isn't like x86, you can't just install it on any ARM device) and yet are working at cross-purposes, with Google trying to keep it open while the manufacturers are often intent on keeping the device locked down in order to promote tie-in services (ie, crapware), minimise support costs or to meet the terms dictated by mobile network operators.
It is very difficult to quantify the effects of piracy. A download does not equate to lost sale, and even if it did the glazier's fallacy must be accounted for.
That's probably averaging out. 2KW averaged over a few days, but with peaks much greater when the electric shower is on or someone is drying their hair. You could use an inverter to help with that. It also can safely ignore heating and cooking, as that'd just run off burning the gas and thus use negligable electricity.
Methane-and-stuff. You need some rather bulky equipment to purify it for cells. It'd mean your remote country house would need someone to bring a tanker around from time to time, just like is the case with oil- or gas-heating already.
Not for very long, though. If you follow the media, espicially the more conservative media, there is a fair bit of public outrage at the ruling - lots of headlines along the lines of 'New York legalises child pornography!'. So much that within less than a day of the ruling, the legislature was already in the process of passing a bill to reverse it. It will, without a shadow of a doubt, sail through unchallenged.
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765576135/New-York-bill-quickly-follows-court-ruling-on-child-porn.html
I think it's a great scam, because people are terrified of the idea of being associated with child porn. A threat like that will ensure they don't go to a repair shop, or mention it to anyone. Not the police, not friends or family. Noone. Greatly reducing the chance of the sucker being told it's a scam.
Slight problem: Eventually, that dictator is going to die. Even if you get a good, uncorruptable, competant idealist once, how are you going to ensure you can get them time after time for hundreds of years?
A matter of definition. To some people, all nudity is porn. I've even met one person online who was outraged at the display maniquins used in a store window because they were provocatively posed and wearing lingerie.
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Then what is your alternative?
It's obviously not practical to scan all, but nothing to stop them running a lottery system. Pick a small number (One in a hundred?) of laptops at random and subject them to the search machine, which would obviously have to be something simple enough to run with minimal training. Perhaps a list of SHA hashes for known 'suspicious' files like terrorist training, drugs production manuals, pirate files, DRM-breakers and pornography. All the inspector need do then is plug in the bootable USB scanner, get the device owner to hand over any passwords (Under threat of a few weeks in jail) and let it scan.
It wouldn't work, really. Any guard-safe scanner would fail on unusual configurations (Laptops running linux), or falsely detect encrypted partitions when none exist, and it's sure to get the odd false positive from the browser cache because the user once saw a thumbnail of something dodgy on google image search. But that's the great thing about it politically: It doesn't *need* to work. It just has look like it works. Any critics can be silenced by those all-powerful words: 'Protect the children.'
The problem with Gattaca's dystopia was that it applied statistical probabilities to individuals. Someone is more likely to have heart problems? Employers know, and will reject that applicant from phsically stressful jobs. Even though it's just a probability. In the real world, this would be like companies observing the statistical truth (politically incorrect as it is) that black Americans are significently more likely to commit a crime than white Americans, and thus refusing to hire any blacks on the grounds that they are more likely to steal the petty cash. It might make sense in statistics, but it becomes very unfair when applied to individuals. It's the ultimate in prejudging.
Most of us are so adapted, it doesn't do anything. I went to the US once, where tea was in short supply, and suffered two days of headaches before I realised I was going through caffeine withdrawal and resorted to coffee.
I run an after-school engineering club. I ended up taking the 'own money' route for the first month, because it took that long to figure out the procedure for buying any supplies through the official channels. I still have to occasionally pay myself for things which can't be obtained from any of the officially authorised suppliers.
The long-term goal is to build a robot, but the rate at which these kids learn they'll have left by the time we finish it and their successors will carry on. Right now we are building an electronic die, which teaches them logic circuit design and how to read a datasheet. It took two 45-minute lessons to get a seven-segment decoder hooked up to a display.
Which makes good business sense. Microsoft learned with Vista that if they make a product 'good enough' then it can be very difficult to get people to upgrade to a successor, and forcing people to upgrade by ending support invokes much upset. Apple found a way to turn every device into not just a one-time sale but a continuous revenue stream by making themselves the middleman in associated services, requiring the user to go via their own sales channel for software and media. It's a very effective business model, and even if some of the end users feel rather disgusted by the idea that their own purchased hardware is locked-down and designed to sacrifice capability in order to extract more money from them it still makes the shareholders happy.
Nothing wrong with the idea of an application menu. It works. It's efficient, it's fast. The big annoyance for me with the windows start menu is the breaking of the cardinal rule of interface design: consistancy. Things move around. For example, I am in the habbit at work of bringing up a remote desktop client with ctrl-esc R. That used to work. Then I ran another program starting with R, and the menu rearranged itsself, and ctrl-esc R did something else entirely! That should not happen. Metro takes the thing even further though, with the whole layout shifting around unpredictably as the interface tries to guess what I want.
The best alternative to a menu would be an auto-completing text launcher, but tha wouldn't work well on a tablet at all.
They largely fixed UAC. It was a well-intentioned idea, but Vista's implimentation was very awkward - it'd pop up authorisation boxes for every little change, to the point that it didn't even provide security as people habitually clicked 'yes' every time. Seven changed it around so only things that really needed authorisation asked. Really, though, I think it was more that by the time Seven came out, sticking with XP was getting much more difficult. A lack of new hardware support, the looming threat of the (much-delayed) ceasation of security patches.
You mean it'll be Vista all over again - people will take one look at the horror, then just refuse to upgrade from the predecessor until Microsoft gets their act together. Everyone I know skipped Vista altogether, and kept on using XP until Seven came out.
When I was in university, the 1) groups all self-segregated in the lecture hall. A quick glance over collected students and you could see the pockets of ethnicity.
Android is somewhat complicated. The core parts of it are free, yes (Though I understand google tends to be a little slow releasing the source for the latest versions), but in actual use manufacturers typically mix it with propritary extras and then lock it down hard through hardware - so, even though you have access to the source in princible, you can't actually run it on most devices without the manufacturer's secret firmware-signing key, and the user is kept from having administrative access short of hacking the device somehow. I had to do that for my phone and tablet just in order to remove some manufacturer's bundled crapware. It's a very complicated matter, because the OS provider and the hardware manufacturer have to coordinate so closely (This isn't like x86, you can't just install it on any ARM device) and yet are working at cross-purposes, with Google trying to keep it open while the manufacturers are often intent on keeping the device locked down in order to promote tie-in services (ie, crapware), minimise support costs or to meet the terms dictated by mobile network operators.
Trying to use a desktop interface on a tablet or vice versa is just painful. Witness Unity or Metro and the amount of angry they both inspired.
It is very difficult to quantify the effects of piracy. A download does not equate to lost sale, and even if it did the glazier's fallacy must be accounted for.
The power output is DC. So all you need to do is stick a great big battery bank in there. Problem solved.
The electricity industry insists on using these strange units of energy that are used no-where else. It's annoying.
Condensing water from ambient air is easy. Happens every time your car window gets fogged up. There is just no point in doing so.
That's probably averaging out. 2KW averaged over a few days, but with peaks much greater when the electric shower is on or someone is drying their hair. You could use an inverter to help with that. It also can safely ignore heating and cooking, as that'd just run off burning the gas and thus use negligable electricity.
Methane-and-stuff. You need some rather bulky equipment to purify it for cells. It'd mean your remote country house would need someone to bring a tanker around from time to time, just like is the case with oil- or gas-heating already.
You are not the target of this scam.
Not for very long, though. If you follow the media, espicially the more conservative media, there is a fair bit of public outrage at the ruling - lots of headlines along the lines of 'New York legalises child pornography!'. So much that within less than a day of the ruling, the legislature was already in the process of passing a bill to reverse it. It will, without a shadow of a doubt, sail through unchallenged.
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765576135/New-York-bill-quickly-follows-court-ruling-on-child-porn.html
I think it's a great scam, because people are terrified of the idea of being associated with child porn. A threat like that will ensure they don't go to a repair shop, or mention it to anyone. Not the police, not friends or family. Noone. Greatly reducing the chance of the sucker being told it's a scam.
Even if the russians did, the scammers would just relocate their operations somewhere else.
Slight problem: Eventually, that dictator is going to die. Even if you get a good, uncorruptable, competant idealist once, how are you going to ensure you can get them time after time for hundreds of years?
A matter of definition. To some people, all nudity is porn. I've even met one person online who was outraged at the display maniquins used in a store window because they were provocatively posed and wearing lingerie.
All religions have their moderates and their fanatics. Numbers vary wildly, both percentage-wise and as absolutes.