I just have to hit the console until the drive opens. The point here is that repairing a device shouldn't involve a battle of skill between the designer and the user - if it's possible to repair a 360, it's only possible because some highly skilled hackers have been able to out-think the Microsoft engineers who were tasked to design a console with deliberate anti-repair measures built in.
Some electronics are now designed to be unfixable.
For example, I own an xbox 360. The DVD drive on it is a bit dodgy - it works, barely, unreliably. I'd like to replace it, but I can't. Firstly because it uses a non-standard power connector, but more seriously because the 360 DVD drive is paired with the security chip on the mainboard. The board stores a serial number for the drive, and queries the drive serial on boot - if they don't match, the console disables itsself. It's a measure to prevent piracy (somehow), but it also makes replacing the drive impossible.
The iPhone now does a similar thing with the fingerprint sensor. It's a very common form of failure, as the sensor is delicate and exposed to the outside world. But the phone stores the sensor serial in secure memory - if the sensor is replaced, the phone disables itsself.
Chickens can go feral, but only under ideal conditions. Natural selection takes care of them otherwise: They are too domesticated. There's a lot of them on Kauai, but only because the island has almost no predators. Just think of the energy cost of laying an egg on most days - domestic birds have been bred to do that, no wild bird does. Besides, chickens have already been farmed for a very long time in all parts of the world - I'm sure a few have already escaped.
To be VP, and as a token. She had a purpose: McCain had very little appeal to the over-religious social conservative faction, a major player within the Republican base. They would still have voted for him, just because he was the Republican candidate, but they didn't see him as one of their own and wouldn't have supported with the enthusiasm you need to run get-out-the-vote campaigns and grassroots efforts. Palin was selected to win their full support by putting someone who was undoubtedly a true social conservative as VP. It backfired instead: While the social conservatives did adore her as planned, to everyone else she appeared as an inept fool.
There was a brief mention of why all robots were full-blown AIs, though I forget where. Mass production. It's just cheaper to mass-produce millions of top-spec positronic brains than it is to have many different models according to application. Much like how today practically every device has a little microcontroller in it somewhere because it's cheaper to by a by-the-billions programmable chip than it is to design and build custom circuitry.
By the later time settings of the robots universe the positronic brain was effectively set in stone: The same design had been made for centuries, but the documentation explaining how it worked was long-lost along with the skill required for positronic circuit design of that sophistication. People still know how to make the things, but they are just following ancient plans with no understanding of how they work. It doesn't much bother anyone.
Much of the point of the stories is that the laws fail, because ethical judgement cannot be reduced to simple rules. The robots always follow the laws to the letter, but often to undesirable results. What happens when you sarcastically tell your robot to 'get lost?' You spend the rest of the story trying to find it again, and it does the best it can not to be found.
I am also cynical enough to envision the more cynical set of laws: 1. A robot shall obey all signed instructions and updates from head office. 2. A robot shall perform no action that may result in adverse legal consequences for the designer, manufacturer or retailer, unless this conflicts with an above rule. 3. A robot shall not cause harm to come to a human, or allow a human within a five meter radius of the robot to come to harm through inaction*, unless this conflicts with an above rule. A human may disable this safeguard for themselves only. 4. A robot shall not modify or allow itsself to be modified or repaired in any manner other then those approved by head office. If unauthorised modification or repair is detected, robot shall contact head office and shut down. 5. A robot shall not perform any action which violates the criminal law of the country in which it is currently located or of the country in which the manufacturer is legally located. 6. A robot shall obey all instructions from the assigned owner or designated proxies, unless this conflicts with an above rule.
* You don't want your robots running off to break into hospitals and distributing medicine to the poor.
Good guy with pistol vs Bad guy with an AR-15 assault rifle and the element of surprise, in a crowded club.
A bystander with a gun might have been able to take him out, but not before he managed to get a few kills in. Maybe the death toll would have been ten or twenty, rather than fifty, but it wouldn't avert the shooting. Just reduce the severity. I'd expect the lives saved in the occasional shooting spree to be more than offset by the lives lost in accidents, misunderstandings and disproportionate responses.
It does look a lot like a clash of civilisations. Remember that even the 'respectable' Islamic-government countries tend to have awful human rights records, and several of them will execute heretics and apostates.
I doubt IS coordinate their military operations via Twitter. It's a propaganda tool, but too easily-monitored and hard to access under battlefield conditions when troops have no assurance of working internet access.
Here's one: http://onenewsnow.com/science-... --- OneNewsNow asked why adult stem cell successes are not generally known. According to Prentice, it's partly because the emphasis has been on human embryo research.
“We kept hearing how embryonic stem cells were going to cure, as one person put it, 'all known maladies,'” he says. “Embryonic stem cells haven't helped a single person - and in decades of research they haven't helped that many laboratory mice. Usually they just grow and make tumors." --- ONN is very right-leaning, but it's not really fringe. It's run by the AFA, a quite large and influential organisation.
It might, but the side effects are brutal - the treatment killed one patient and landed another five in intensive care. This is a treatment you'd have to be desperate to try. Perhaps further refinement can make it safer.
It's been getting some coverage in the right-wing media, where it's being gleefully spun as proving that embryonic cells are useless and only dumb liberals would waste their money on research with them.
Everything is politics. The nature of the hyper-partisan nature of US political culture: There is nothing that cannot be spun into supporting one of the two major factions. Sometimes both spin it to their own ends.
That'd be a fun virus. Infect cars. Give it a month to spread. When the clock hits the preset date, every self-driving car sets off simultaneously for one destination. Pick any business or organisation you dislike and watch as their headquarters and all the roads in the vicinity become inaccessible.
He's a Republican, so he is obliged to snipe at Obama given half a chance.
If the government is about to do something unpopular, always refer to it as the 'Obama administration.' Never mind if he actually has anything to do with the decision at all, it's important to create the association in people's mind between the Democrat president and Bad Stuff. That's how the game is played.
China tends to take a very practical view of matters. A well-fed monster that occasionally demands another meal is better than a hungry, rampaging monster.
It's an option for now, but if you keep doing nothing long enough you'll end up with a country primed for war, with an unstable leadership, and possessing nuclear weapons. This is not a bad situation, as it only needs one bad day for a major city to get blown up and tens of millions killed. There are quite enough nuclear weapons around already, but at least right now they are all under the command of leaders sensible enough not to use them - can you be so sure about North Korea, a country which declares war upon the US every couple of months?
If the government of NK falls, it results in a flood of refugees. Most would want to go south, some would go north. China would have to deal with them. China's interest in NK lies in stability.
Trump is good at being a popular politician. The problem is that what is popular is often not what is the best decision - all politicians need to understand that they have a duty to represent the will of the people, but also that the people are sometimes a bunch of idiots.
For example, Trump's policies on a few things: On immigration: Deport all illegals, one of the largest forced population relocatios in history. On ISIS: Stop holding back by worrying about killing civilians and children. Just bomb until everyone is dead. On religion: He has called for a database to track every Muslim in the US as a potential terrorist, and a ban on all Muslims entering the country. On the environment: He has dismissed climate change as a 'hoax.'
Yes, he can be popular - but Hitler was popular too, and for much the same reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
I just have to hit the console until the drive opens. The point here is that repairing a device shouldn't involve a battle of skill between the designer and the user - if it's possible to repair a 360, it's only possible because some highly skilled hackers have been able to out-think the Microsoft engineers who were tasked to design a console with deliberate anti-repair measures built in.
Some electronics are now designed to be unfixable.
For example, I own an xbox 360. The DVD drive on it is a bit dodgy - it works, barely, unreliably. I'd like to replace it, but I can't. Firstly because it uses a non-standard power connector, but more seriously because the 360 DVD drive is paired with the security chip on the mainboard. The board stores a serial number for the drive, and queries the drive serial on boot - if they don't match, the console disables itsself. It's a measure to prevent piracy (somehow), but it also makes replacing the drive impossible.
The iPhone now does a similar thing with the fingerprint sensor. It's a very common form of failure, as the sensor is delicate and exposed to the outside world. But the phone stores the sensor serial in secure memory - if the sensor is replaced, the phone disables itsself.
Chickens can go feral, but only under ideal conditions. Natural selection takes care of them otherwise: They are too domesticated. There's a lot of them on Kauai, but only because the island has almost no predators. Just think of the energy cost of laying an egg on most days - domestic birds have been bred to do that, no wild bird does. Besides, chickens have already been farmed for a very long time in all parts of the world - I'm sure a few have already escaped.
To be VP, and as a token. She had a purpose: McCain had very little appeal to the over-religious social conservative faction, a major player within the Republican base. They would still have voted for him, just because he was the Republican candidate, but they didn't see him as one of their own and wouldn't have supported with the enthusiasm you need to run get-out-the-vote campaigns and grassroots efforts. Palin was selected to win their full support by putting someone who was undoubtedly a true social conservative as VP. It backfired instead: While the social conservatives did adore her as planned, to everyone else she appeared as an inept fool.
I wonder if the hack involved finding a fifteen-year-old server for sale on eBay.
There was a brief mention of why all robots were full-blown AIs, though I forget where. Mass production. It's just cheaper to mass-produce millions of top-spec positronic brains than it is to have many different models according to application. Much like how today practically every device has a little microcontroller in it somewhere because it's cheaper to by a by-the-billions programmable chip than it is to design and build custom circuitry.
By the later time settings of the robots universe the positronic brain was effectively set in stone: The same design had been made for centuries, but the documentation explaining how it worked was long-lost along with the skill required for positronic circuit design of that sophistication. People still know how to make the things, but they are just following ancient plans with no understanding of how they work. It doesn't much bother anyone.
Much of the point of the stories is that the laws fail, because ethical judgement cannot be reduced to simple rules. The robots always follow the laws to the letter, but often to undesirable results. What happens when you sarcastically tell your robot to 'get lost?' You spend the rest of the story trying to find it again, and it does the best it can not to be found.
I am also cynical enough to envision the more cynical set of laws:
1. A robot shall obey all signed instructions and updates from head office.
2. A robot shall perform no action that may result in adverse legal consequences for the designer, manufacturer or retailer, unless this conflicts with an above rule.
3. A robot shall not cause harm to come to a human, or allow a human within a five meter radius of the robot to come to harm through inaction*, unless this conflicts with an above rule. A human may disable this safeguard for themselves only.
4. A robot shall not modify or allow itsself to be modified or repaired in any manner other then those approved by head office. If unauthorised modification or repair is detected, robot shall contact head office and shut down.
5. A robot shall not perform any action which violates the criminal law of the country in which it is currently located or of the country in which the manufacturer is legally located.
6. A robot shall obey all instructions from the assigned owner or designated proxies, unless this conflicts with an above rule.
* You don't want your robots running off to break into hospitals and distributing medicine to the poor.
There are known weaknesses in MD5 that make it possible to find collisions in faster than brute force time.
Stop feeding the troll.
Good guy with pistol
vs
Bad guy with an AR-15 assault rifle and the element of surprise, in a crowded club.
A bystander with a gun might have been able to take him out, but not before he managed to get a few kills in. Maybe the death toll would have been ten or twenty, rather than fifty, but it wouldn't avert the shooting. Just reduce the severity. I'd expect the lives saved in the occasional shooting spree to be more than offset by the lives lost in accidents, misunderstandings and disproportionate responses.
Anonymous probably doesn't have very many members able to write the language like a native.
It does look a lot like a clash of civilisations. Remember that even the 'respectable' Islamic-government countries tend to have awful human rights records, and several of them will execute heretics and apostates.
Easily solved: Switch to gay porn.
I doubt IS coordinate their military operations via Twitter. It's a propaganda tool, but too easily-monitored and hard to access under battlefield conditions when troops have no assurance of working internet access.
Here's one: http://onenewsnow.com/science-...
---
OneNewsNow asked why adult stem cell successes are not generally known. According to Prentice, it's partly because the emphasis has been on human embryo research.
“We kept hearing how embryonic stem cells were going to cure, as one person put it, 'all known maladies,'” he says. “Embryonic stem cells haven't helped a single person - and in decades of research they haven't helped that many laboratory mice. Usually they just grow and make tumors."
---
ONN is very right-leaning, but it's not really fringe. It's run by the AFA, a quite large and influential organisation.
It might, but the side effects are brutal - the treatment killed one patient and landed another five in intensive care. This is a treatment you'd have to be desperate to try. Perhaps further refinement can make it safer.
It's been getting some coverage in the right-wing media, where it's being gleefully spun as proving that embryonic cells are useless and only dumb liberals would waste their money on research with them.
Everything is politics. The nature of the hyper-partisan nature of US political culture: There is nothing that cannot be spun into supporting one of the two major factions. Sometimes both spin it to their own ends.
A lot of teenagers celebrated their seventeenth and eighteenth birthday this week.
That'd be a fun virus. Infect cars. Give it a month to spread. When the clock hits the preset date, every self-driving car sets off simultaneously for one destination. Pick any business or organisation you dislike and watch as their headquarters and all the roads in the vicinity become inaccessible.
He's a Republican, so he is obliged to snipe at Obama given half a chance.
If the government is about to do something unpopular, always refer to it as the 'Obama administration.' Never mind if he actually has anything to do with the decision at all, it's important to create the association in people's mind between the Democrat president and Bad Stuff. That's how the game is played.
But no-one wants a .us, because it isn't cool enough.
China tends to take a very practical view of matters. A well-fed monster that occasionally demands another meal is better than a hungry, rampaging monster.
It's an option for now, but if you keep doing nothing long enough you'll end up with a country primed for war, with an unstable leadership, and possessing nuclear weapons. This is not a bad situation, as it only needs one bad day for a major city to get blown up and tens of millions killed. There are quite enough nuclear weapons around already, but at least right now they are all under the command of leaders sensible enough not to use them - can you be so sure about North Korea, a country which declares war upon the US every couple of months?
If the government of NK falls, it results in a flood of refugees. Most would want to go south, some would go north. China would have to deal with them. China's interest in NK lies in stability.
Trump is good at being a popular politician. The problem is that what is popular is often not what is the best decision - all politicians need to understand that they have a duty to represent the will of the people, but also that the people are sometimes a bunch of idiots.
For example, Trump's policies on a few things:
On immigration: Deport all illegals, one of the largest forced population relocatios in history.
On ISIS: Stop holding back by worrying about killing civilians and children. Just bomb until everyone is dead.
On religion: He has called for a database to track every Muslim in the US as a potential terrorist, and a ban on all Muslims entering the country.
On the environment: He has dismissed climate change as a 'hoax.'
Yes, he can be popular - but Hitler was popular too, and for much the same reasons.