They are not complex, but they are precision - tolerances are tiny fractions of a millimeter. On parts that can wear down over time, or corrode, or get coated in dust. This is why responsible gun owners recognize the importance of maintaining their gun. If you buy a gun for self-defense and just leave it sitting by the bed for ten years, when someone really does come to rob your house it may well just jam. Or explode and take your fingers off.
It goes both ways. The gun rights lobby opposes any and all forms of regulation, even the most common-sense, because they fear exactly the scenario you describe: If the government is allowed any power to regulate guns, that power could be deliberately mis-applied to restrict access.
This is why there has been intense opposition to things like restrictions on high-capacity magazines, or requiring less environmentally-damaging alternatives to lead shot.
The situation is paralleled in abortion, and has a similar effect: It forces political pressure groups to the extremes. Either prohibit entirely, or allow without restriction, both of which are not what the public in general desires.
Most piracy is torrented, but there is one area where streams rule: Sports.
Sports fans really want to watch sports live. Which means streaming. And there's a lot of money in sports broadcasting - channels pay for exclusive broadcast rights, they want to make sure that is what they get.
What you just described is the old CPSA system - Content Protection System Architecture. It was envisioned by content creators as an interlocking set of DRM technologies that would protect content end to end - it included good old CSS, along with HDCP, CPRM/CPPM, and a bunch of others. The plan was simple: In order to play encrypted media, a manufacturer would need to license the encryption system used. The license would prohibit outputting of any protected content in any form other than degraded (ie, no HD) analog or encrypted digital, so the next step in the chain would have to license that encryption, and so on. A key feature was to be a watermark which would by included in all encrypted content. If any device ever detected the watermark on a non-encrypted input it would have to assume the content to be unauthorised and disable that input.
So, for example, even if someone cracked protection on blu-ray and uploaded the disc to The Bay, when you tried to play it back your monitor would detect the watermark present on your non-encrypted DVI port and disable the image.
The CPSA vision of a single unified DRM framework never really worked out. The watermark part was never completed, and so many key elements were cracked that the businesses sponsoring the initiative lost faith in it. But it does have some relics today, as a lot of DRM technologies still in common use had their origins in CPSA.
Don't forget macrovision. One of the lesser-known provisions of the DMCA says that all video recorders in the US need to either include the design defect that allowed macrovision to jam their recording ability, or circuitry to detect the macrovision signal and disable recording anyway.
This was a real bother for me trying to digitise old family videos. No macrovision on them, but the tapes were old and degraded to the point that my video capture card would often false-positive - which would result in the card driver disabling the card and replacing the image with a 'copying prohibited' message. The only way to fix it was to stop recording, exit the software and relaunch it.
When I go to McDonald's now, I can enter my order in a touchscreen terminal near the tables. Goodbye, one job per terminal. Or three, as they need to be manned continually and that means shift work.
I can still see the army of people back in the kitchen making the food, but I've no doubt McDonald's is researching means to semi-automate their kitchens. You can't get rid of all the staff, but you can certainly cut back the numbers.
The DNC did conspire against Bernie, but they had their reasons: They regarded him as too unreliable in the presidential election. There was a chance he would say things that were far too left-wing for the American people to accept, and his anti-corporate positions would be a serious problem in fundraising. Politics is a very expensive business, and if corporate donors refused to support Bernie it would have crippled his campaign.
The DNC were afraid that their left-wing grassroots members would nominate an unelectable candidate. In a satisfying symmetry, many in the Republican party were afraid that their right-wing grassroots members would nominate an unelectable candidate with a history of saying the most offensive things and no political experience: Trump. So the DNC did all they could to keep Bernie from winning, and the RNC did all they could to keep Trump from winning. The DNC succeeded in their aim, the RNC didn't.
Political affiliation is also a form of tribalism.
How else do you explain the strong correlation between positions on gun control, abortion, climate change mitigation and immigration? These issues have absolutely no relation at all, yet if you know an individuals position on just one you can guess with a high degree of reliability their position on the other three.
I must make one small correction: Being gay is not a crime in Russia. Not officially anyway. Police harassment is commonplace though, and they do have a law since 2013 which forbids any promotion of 'non-traditional' sexuality to minors, including any public statement where there is any possibility at all that a minor may see it. A law which the government interprets sufficiently broadly that they considered prosecuting Apple for including the same-sex couple emoji in the iPhone.
So if you say you are gay in Russia, the police may well arrest you for promotion of homosexuality to a child, on the grounds that a child may have heard you say that. And even if they don't, your local gang of thugs will come around to beat the crap out of you. And then the police will arrest you for provoking them, and let the gang off with a caution.
But the actual being gay part? Not a crime. They don't need it to be.
Inherited or not, nukes are nukes. Does it matter where they got them? They also have a very capable intelligence service with many decades of experience, and a demonstrated willingness to use this not just for gathering information but for active espionage and assassination missions.
While Christians were certainly persecuted in Iraq, most of the violence was muslim-on-muslim. The tension was always there, but the brutal government of Saddam was at least very good at keeping the peace. Take that away, dismantle most of the police force to rid it of those loyal to the old regime, and those simmering tensions quickly erupt into open violence.
The Nazis were an existential threat. Russia was (and many say still is) an existential threat, and so the US built a great many nukes as a deterrent.
The Middle East Mess is not an existential threat. People worry about civilian casualties because they can afford to worry. If IS actually had the ability to pose an existential threat, you can be confident that many countries would not hesitate more than a month before firebombing the whole region no matter how many civilians were killed. But even the Syrian government is such a pathetic joke that there is no political will to even send in the army, just for cheap-and-safe airstrikes.
Those countries don't want to deal with the refugees either. For one, wrong sort of Muslim. For another, they share the same fears about terrorist infiltration and economic impact.
The most plausible theory I've seen is that it was a Russian weapon, but not necessarily a Russian operator. Remember Russia wanted to keep plausible denyability, so they were limited in how many men they could send - smuggling a weapon across the border was enough of a risk, but a crew of trained radar and SAM missile operators would have been worse. So it's quite possible the air defence system was being operated by a rebel fighter who had been given some hasty, incomplete training, or by a Russian covert operative who had no experience with such a weapon. This would explain why they were unable to distinguish a civilian airliner from a military aircraft, and why they didn't check against freely-published civilian flight schedules.
Just look at what happened in Iraq. The country was under the control of a brutal, oppressive dictator. America marched in, took out his regime, executed him, and celebrated at the introduction of freedom and democracy - and then it all went to hell, as it turned out the country was full of violently opposed factions and Saddam's brutal oppression was the only thing keeping them from turning on each other. So Shia-v-Sunni terror attacks became so commonplace they didn't even make the news after a while, and eventually Islamic State were able to form and rapidly recruit.
That's the Syria situation. How many rebel groups do they have now? Fighting each other half the time. Even a brutal dictator is better than anarchy.
My bet would be that he is using tax avoidance measures to such an extreme level - secret Swiss bank accounts, shell companies in Ireland, whatever it takes - that he fears even the people would find it distasteful.
Luminous Town Electric, a capacitor manufacturer, hired a scientist who worked for Rubycon Corporation, another and rather more up-market capacitor manufacturer. As part of the 'unwritten' terms of employment, he was supposed to steal Rubycon's far superior electrolyte formulation, a trade secret mix of chemicals that make Rubycon's capacitors so good. But he screwed up - accounts differ as to if he made an error, or if Rubycon management found out about the industrial espionage and swapped the formula on file for a deliberately defective one. Either way, Luminous got hold of a dud - and, thinking they now had Rubycon's famous electrolyte formula, went straight into production without testing it. They made and sold a lot of capacitors before customers realised that the new Luminous capacitors were prone to explode after a while.
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Here's a statement that we should all be able to agree on:
There are a lot of responsible gun owners in America. There are also a lot of irresponsible gun owners. Occasional accidents will happen.
They are not complex, but they are precision - tolerances are tiny fractions of a millimeter. On parts that can wear down over time, or corrode, or get coated in dust. This is why responsible gun owners recognize the importance of maintaining their gun. If you buy a gun for self-defense and just leave it sitting by the bed for ten years, when someone really does come to rob your house it may well just jam. Or explode and take your fingers off.
I do wonder if there were similar objections raised when the safety was first introduced.
It goes both ways. The gun rights lobby opposes any and all forms of regulation, even the most common-sense, because they fear exactly the scenario you describe: If the government is allowed any power to regulate guns, that power could be deliberately mis-applied to restrict access.
This is why there has been intense opposition to things like restrictions on high-capacity magazines, or requiring less environmentally-damaging alternatives to lead shot.
The situation is paralleled in abortion, and has a similar effect: It forces political pressure groups to the extremes. Either prohibit entirely, or allow without restriction, both of which are not what the public in general desires.
Most piracy is torrented, but there is one area where streams rule: Sports.
Sports fans really want to watch sports live. Which means streaming. And there's a lot of money in sports broadcasting - channels pay for exclusive broadcast rights, they want to make sure that is what they get.
What you just described is the old CPSA system - Content Protection System Architecture. It was envisioned by content creators as an interlocking set of DRM technologies that would protect content end to end - it included good old CSS, along with HDCP, CPRM/CPPM, and a bunch of others. The plan was simple: In order to play encrypted media, a manufacturer would need to license the encryption system used. The license would prohibit outputting of any protected content in any form other than degraded (ie, no HD) analog or encrypted digital, so the next step in the chain would have to license that encryption, and so on. A key feature was to be a watermark which would by included in all encrypted content. If any device ever detected the watermark on a non-encrypted input it would have to assume the content to be unauthorised and disable that input.
So, for example, even if someone cracked protection on blu-ray and uploaded the disc to The Bay, when you tried to play it back your monitor would detect the watermark present on your non-encrypted DVI port and disable the image.
The CPSA vision of a single unified DRM framework never really worked out. The watermark part was never completed, and so many key elements were cracked that the businesses sponsoring the initiative lost faith in it. But it does have some relics today, as a lot of DRM technologies still in common use had their origins in CPSA.
Don't forget macrovision. One of the lesser-known provisions of the DMCA says that all video recorders in the US need to either include the design defect that allowed macrovision to jam their recording ability, or circuitry to detect the macrovision signal and disable recording anyway.
This was a real bother for me trying to digitise old family videos. No macrovision on them, but the tapes were old and degraded to the point that my video capture card would often false-positive - which would result in the card driver disabling the card and replacing the image with a 'copying prohibited' message. The only way to fix it was to stop recording, exit the software and relaunch it.
I can imagine social conservatives already screaming about the 'marriage penalty' in the UBI encouraging fornication. Politics is always ugly.
When I go to McDonald's now, I can enter my order in a touchscreen terminal near the tables. Goodbye, one job per terminal. Or three, as they need to be manned continually and that means shift work.
I can still see the army of people back in the kitchen making the food, but I've no doubt McDonald's is researching means to semi-automate their kitchens. You can't get rid of all the staff, but you can certainly cut back the numbers.
The DNC did conspire against Bernie, but they had their reasons: They regarded him as too unreliable in the presidential election. There was a chance he would say things that were far too left-wing for the American people to accept, and his anti-corporate positions would be a serious problem in fundraising. Politics is a very expensive business, and if corporate donors refused to support Bernie it would have crippled his campaign.
The DNC were afraid that their left-wing grassroots members would nominate an unelectable candidate. In a satisfying symmetry, many in the Republican party were afraid that their right-wing grassroots members would nominate an unelectable candidate with a history of saying the most offensive things and no political experience: Trump. So the DNC did all they could to keep Bernie from winning, and the RNC did all they could to keep Trump from winning. The DNC succeeded in their aim, the RNC didn't.
Political affiliation is also a form of tribalism.
How else do you explain the strong correlation between positions on gun control, abortion, climate change mitigation and immigration? These issues have absolutely no relation at all, yet if you know an individuals position on just one you can guess with a high degree of reliability their position on the other three.
Then what solutions do you offer that do not involve genocide?
I want to see what hits the fan when Google gets machine translation really perfected.
I must make one small correction: Being gay is not a crime in Russia. Not officially anyway. Police harassment is commonplace though, and they do have a law since 2013 which forbids any promotion of 'non-traditional' sexuality to minors, including any public statement where there is any possibility at all that a minor may see it. A law which the government interprets sufficiently broadly that they considered prosecuting Apple for including the same-sex couple emoji in the iPhone.
So if you say you are gay in Russia, the police may well arrest you for promotion of homosexuality to a child, on the grounds that a child may have heard you say that. And even if they don't, your local gang of thugs will come around to beat the crap out of you. And then the police will arrest you for provoking them, and let the gang off with a caution.
But the actual being gay part? Not a crime. They don't need it to be.
Inherited or not, nukes are nukes. Does it matter where they got them? They also have a very capable intelligence service with many decades of experience, and a demonstrated willingness to use this not just for gathering information but for active espionage and assassination missions.
While Christians were certainly persecuted in Iraq, most of the violence was muslim-on-muslim. The tension was always there, but the brutal government of Saddam was at least very good at keeping the peace. Take that away, dismantle most of the police force to rid it of those loyal to the old regime, and those simmering tensions quickly erupt into open violence.
The Nazis were an existential threat. Russia was (and many say still is) an existential threat, and so the US built a great many nukes as a deterrent.
The Middle East Mess is not an existential threat. People worry about civilian casualties because they can afford to worry. If IS actually had the ability to pose an existential threat, you can be confident that many countries would not hesitate more than a month before firebombing the whole region no matter how many civilians were killed. But even the Syrian government is such a pathetic joke that there is no political will to even send in the army, just for cheap-and-safe airstrikes.
Those countries don't want to deal with the refugees either. For one, wrong sort of Muslim. For another, they share the same fears about terrorist infiltration and economic impact.
Not all wars. Many are, yes. But there are also political wars, and ideological wars.
The most plausible theory I've seen is that it was a Russian weapon, but not necessarily a Russian operator. Remember Russia wanted to keep plausible denyability, so they were limited in how many men they could send - smuggling a weapon across the border was enough of a risk, but a crew of trained radar and SAM missile operators would have been worse. So it's quite possible the air defence system was being operated by a rebel fighter who had been given some hasty, incomplete training, or by a Russian covert operative who had no experience with such a weapon. This would explain why they were unable to distinguish a civilian airliner from a military aircraft, and why they didn't check against freely-published civilian flight schedules.
And the direct military applications of space technology.
Just look at what happened in Iraq. The country was under the control of a brutal, oppressive dictator. America marched in, took out his regime, executed him, and celebrated at the introduction of freedom and democracy - and then it all went to hell, as it turned out the country was full of violently opposed factions and Saddam's brutal oppression was the only thing keeping them from turning on each other. So Shia-v-Sunni terror attacks became so commonplace they didn't even make the news after a while, and eventually Islamic State were able to form and rapidly recruit.
That's the Syria situation. How many rebel groups do they have now? Fighting each other half the time. Even a brutal dictator is better than anarchy.
My bet would be that he is using tax avoidance measures to such an extreme level - secret Swiss bank accounts, shell companies in Ireland, whatever it takes - that he fears even the people would find it distasteful.
It's a crude mimic. Give it a couple more decades.
Luminous Town Electric, a capacitor manufacturer, hired a scientist who worked for Rubycon Corporation, another and rather more up-market capacitor manufacturer. As part of the 'unwritten' terms of employment, he was supposed to steal Rubycon's far superior electrolyte formulation, a trade secret mix of chemicals that make Rubycon's capacitors so good. But he screwed up - accounts differ as to if he made an error, or if Rubycon management found out about the industrial espionage and swapped the formula on file for a deliberately defective one. Either way, Luminous got hold of a dud - and, thinking they now had Rubycon's famous electrolyte formula, went straight into production without testing it. They made and sold a lot of capacitors before customers realised that the new Luminous capacitors were prone to explode after a while.
Legal definitions and common usage often differ. That's why lawyers have specialist dictionaries of legal terms.