There is a procedure for amending the constitution, but it is by intent a difficult process. Something that can be done only when there is a wide consensus that an amendment is required. Not going to happen on this issue.
It would only need the supreme court to reconsider what 'well-regulated militia' means and decide it doesn't mean any and every individual acting on their own.
"The second amendment is outdated by now considering the amount of firepower that SWAT and Secret Service teams packs, any group of citizens will lose by default."
Only in a fair fight - and a fundamental rule of combat is that you don't want to get in a fair fight, you want to get in a fight where you maximise your advantage. Any half-decent anti-government faction is going to take advantage of their ability to vanish into the general population. Targeted assassinations, bombs, hit-and-run ambushes, the usual terrorist stuff. A city offers a wealth of places for a sniper to work from. Governments have been toppled from within before.
It still couldn't work though - not unless there was a great deal of public support. You'd need someone who is both a charismatic leader (ie, not Bundy) and a superb tactician to get it going.
Chaos in Iraq. Root cause: An oppressive government that didn't overplay their hand, but was destabilised by invasion from outside and subsequent inept attempts to maintain order.
Still a neural network. Just a network of incomprehensibly greater complexity and incorporating many element behaviours with no analogue in current artificial networks. A neural network nonetheless.
I use btrfs. It's still not faced the sort of testing that enterprise users would want, but I've put it through some pretty horrific abuses and it's came out almost undamaged, including a really awful hard drive that was randomly and silently dropping writes when under heavy load. Thank you, Seagate.
If this were theft they may well, but it isn't. It's a contract violation, or copyright infringement at worst. That's firmly in civil law territory. They might be able to find a criminal act later - fraud perhaps, or criminal copyright infringement under the NET act - but not until they've identified the pirate.
With that many distinct activations, it's probably someone trying to pass off counterfeit software as legitimate. Even the pirate community hates scum like that.
The Alcalde's gaze was impassive. "The 'unaided skills' test, Miss Washington. There is nothing whatsoever _naked_ about it."
"It might as well be, Mister." Patsy was speaking in English now, and with none of the light mocking tone that made her a minor queen in her clique. It was her image and voice, but the words and body language were very un-Patsy. Juan probed the external network traffic. There was lots of it, but mostly simple query/response stuff, like you'd expect. A few sessions had been around for dozens of seconds; Bertie's remote was one of the two oldest. The other belonged Patsy Washington -- at least it was tagged with her personal certificate. Identity hijacking was a major no-no at Fairmont, but if a parent was behind it there wasn't much the school could do. And Juan had met Patsy's father. Maybe it was just as well the Alcalde didn't have to talk to him in person. Patsy's image leaned clumsily through the chair in front of her. "In fact," she continued, "it's worse than naked. All their lives, these -- we -- have had civilization around us. We're damned good at using that civilization. Now you theory-minded intellectuals figure it would be nice to jerk it all away and put us at risk."
"We are putting no one at risk... Miss Washington." Mr. Alcalde was still speaking in Spanish. In fact, Spanish was the only language their principal had ever been heard to speak; the Alcalde was kind of a bizarre guy. "We at Fairmont consider unaided skills to be the ultimate fallback protection. We're not Amish here, but we believe that every human being should be able to survive in reasonable environments -- without networks, even without computers."
"Next you'll be teaching rock-chipping!" said Patsy.
The Alcalde ignored the interruption. "Our graduates must be capable of doing well in outages, even in disasters. If they can't, we have not properly educated them!" He paused, glared all around the room. "But this is no survivalist school. We're not dropping you into a jungle. Your unaided skills test will be at a safe location our faculty have chosen -- perhaps an Amish town, perhaps an obsolete suburb. Either way, you'll be doing good, in a safe environment. You may be surprised at the insights you get with such complete, old-fashioned simplicity."
I gather it's the same situation you see at any organisation. The IT department sets up elaborate security systems - multi-factor authentication, resources that can only be accessed from physically secured locations, the works. But all that security greatly annoys the users, so they go behind IT's back and start using their personal email address instead. Because it works, and is more convenient.
True, to some extent, though: There are a lot of soviet-era weapons systems still in use with only minor updates, and Russia does have an arms export industry.
The plane was shot down by a Russian weapons system, but it could have been found or given to the rebels. If given, it evidently didn't come with a well-trained operator.
"Instead of an upgraded Mac Pro, Apple might come out with a model that actually has internal bays for things like drives, and actually has upgradeable video cards."
You mean like the previous several generations of Mac Pro?
I run backups across my lan, from the server (where the data lives) to my desktop (where the backup media plugs in). Once I noticed the network was the bottleneck I was able to speed up backups quite a lot by sticking an infiniband card in each end.
There is porn on the internet. The kids should just be taught what that is and that they can ignore it, close the tab and get on with whatever they were doing. Instead they learn that there is something forbidden, something so dangerous that adults will go in to a panic at the thought of their seeing it. That's probably more damaging than an occasional glimpse of porn.
The problem with 4K is that, unless you strap the screen to your face, you do not have 4k-worthy eyes.
You'd get about as much benefit from reproducing the ultraviolet component, or playing it back with the ultrasonic sounds. It's technologically feasable now, but there's no point when you're limited by the resolution of human senses under normal viewing conditions.
Perhaps 4K will one day be the standard for virtual reality interfaces, where there really is a need for such high resolutions - but when you're looking at a television from a comfortable viewing distance, most people can't tell 720p from 1080p, so they aren't going to benefit from 4k.
Key cache, probably. Put the disc in once with an internet connection, it'll store the key to play it in future. The licensing agreement would certainly contain provisions specifying that key storage must be on the same physical die as the chip that does the decryption and decompression, to make sure hackers cannot extract the keys - though as with current blu-ray, when you've got a few hundred manufacturers making a few thousand different designs, someone is going to make a mistake that can be hacked.
"It's always possible to be a criminal - but ripping, storing and viewing in your own home is actually fair use, protected and legal."
That depends which country you are in. However, even in those countries which do allow this, it is usually illegal in some manner to bypass or to obtain tools designed to bypass the DRM. Yes, you may have that right - but there is no legal way to exercise it. This is true in almost all countries because it is a requirement of the WIPO copyright treaty of 1996 that all countries agreeing to the treaty must pass laws which, among other things, criminalise the distribution of circumvention devices and software.
You've been torrenting from the wrong places. The 'standard' movie now is a 720p file of approximately 4.4GB in size (Just small enough to burn to a DVD-R). The quality of these is slightly inferior to that of a blu-ray at 720p (The compression is more capable, but not enough to make up for the lower bitrate), but a great deal better than a DVD. If you've a ton of bandwidth you can also download an un-recompressed blu-ray rip, either an exact replica of the blu-ray sans encryption or a repackage of the same compressed data in another container.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a procedure for amending the constitution, but it is by intent a difficult process. Something that can be done only when there is a wide consensus that an amendment is required. Not going to happen on this issue.
It would only need the supreme court to reconsider what 'well-regulated militia' means and decide it doesn't mean any and every individual acting on their own.
I don't think either side cares much about real research. The gun-control side are driven by fear, the pro-gun side by fantasies.
"The second amendment is outdated by now considering the amount of firepower that SWAT and Secret Service teams packs, any group of citizens will lose by default."
Only in a fair fight - and a fundamental rule of combat is that you don't want to get in a fair fight, you want to get in a fight where you maximise your advantage. Any half-decent anti-government faction is going to take advantage of their ability to vanish into the general population. Targeted assassinations, bombs, hit-and-run ambushes, the usual terrorist stuff. A city offers a wealth of places for a sniper to work from. Governments have been toppled from within before.
It still couldn't work though - not unless there was a great deal of public support. You'd need someone who is both a charismatic leader (ie, not Bundy) and a superb tactician to get it going.
Chaos in Iraq. Root cause: An oppressive government that didn't overplay their hand, but was destabilised by invasion from outside and subsequent inept attempts to maintain order.
Perhaps Islam is not a unified religion, and different regions may have very different forms of Islam even if they share the same holy text?
Christians used to be just as oppressive, so the religion does have the capability if circumstances are suited.
Still a neural network. Just a network of incomprehensibly greater complexity and incorporating many element behaviours with no analogue in current artificial networks. A neural network nonetheless.
The human player is basically a trained neural network too.
Number of players: Zero
I use btrfs. It's still not faced the sort of testing that enterprise users would want, but I've put it through some pretty horrific abuses and it's came out almost undamaged, including a really awful hard drive that was randomly and silently dropping writes when under heavy load. Thank you, Seagate.
If this were theft they may well, but it isn't. It's a contract violation, or copyright infringement at worst. That's firmly in civil law territory. They might be able to find a criminal act later - fraud perhaps, or criminal copyright infringement under the NET act - but not until they've identified the pirate.
With that many distinct activations, it's probably someone trying to pass off counterfeit software as legitimate. Even the pirate community hates scum like that.
The Alcalde's gaze was impassive. "The 'unaided skills' test, Miss Washington. There is nothing whatsoever _naked_ about it." ... Miss Washington." Mr. Alcalde was still speaking in Spanish. In fact, Spanish was the only language their principal had ever been heard to speak; the Alcalde was kind of a bizarre guy. "We at Fairmont consider unaided skills to be the ultimate fallback protection. We're not Amish here, but we believe that every human being should be able to survive in reasonable environments -- without networks, even without computers."
"It might as well be, Mister." Patsy was speaking in English now, and with none of the light mocking tone that made her a minor queen in her clique. It was her image and voice, but the words and body language were very un-Patsy. Juan probed the external network traffic. There was lots of it, but mostly simple query/response stuff, like you'd expect. A few sessions had been around for dozens of seconds; Bertie's remote was one of the two oldest. The other belonged Patsy Washington -- at least it was tagged with her personal certificate. Identity hijacking was a major no-no at Fairmont, but if a parent was behind it there wasn't much the school could do. And Juan had met Patsy's father. Maybe it was just as well the Alcalde didn't have to talk to him in person. Patsy's image leaned clumsily through the chair in front of her. "In fact," she continued, "it's worse than naked. All their lives, these -- we -- have had civilization around us. We're damned good at using that civilization. Now you theory-minded intellectuals figure it would be nice to jerk it all away and put us at risk."
"We are putting no one at risk
"Next you'll be teaching rock-chipping!" said Patsy.
The Alcalde ignored the interruption. "Our graduates must be capable of doing well in outages, even in disasters. If they can't, we have not properly educated them!" He paused, glared all around the room. "But this is no survivalist school. We're not dropping you into a jungle. Your unaided skills test will be at a safe location our faculty have chosen -- perhaps an Amish town, perhaps an obsolete suburb. Either way, you'll be doing good, in a safe environment. You may be surprised at the insights you get with such complete, old-fashioned simplicity."
I expect they'll keep the room well-ventilated for odour reasons anyway.
I gather it's the same situation you see at any organisation. The IT department sets up elaborate security systems - multi-factor authentication, resources that can only be accessed from physically secured locations, the works. But all that security greatly annoys the users, so they go behind IT's back and start using their personal email address instead. Because it works, and is more convenient.
An ally of convenience. NATO and the EU might not like Erdogan on ideological grounds, but right now there are mutual interests and enemies in play.
True, to some extent, though: There are a lot of soviet-era weapons systems still in use with only minor updates, and Russia does have an arms export industry.
The plane was shot down by a Russian weapons system, but it could have been found or given to the rebels. If given, it evidently didn't come with a well-trained operator.
"Instead of an upgraded Mac Pro, Apple might come out with a model that actually has internal bays for things like drives, and actually has upgradeable video cards."
You mean like the previous several generations of Mac Pro?
I run backups across my lan, from the server (where the data lives) to my desktop (where the backup media plugs in). Once I noticed the network was the bottleneck I was able to speed up backups quite a lot by sticking an infiniband card in each end.
There is porn on the internet. The kids should just be taught what that is and that they can ignore it, close the tab and get on with whatever they were doing. Instead they learn that there is something forbidden, something so dangerous that adults will go in to a panic at the thought of their seeing it. That's probably more damaging than an occasional glimpse of porn.
Anonymous has many factions. Sometimes they even target Anonymous.
The problem with 4K is that, unless you strap the screen to your face, you do not have 4k-worthy eyes.
You'd get about as much benefit from reproducing the ultraviolet component, or playing it back with the ultrasonic sounds. It's technologically feasable now, but there's no point when you're limited by the resolution of human senses under normal viewing conditions.
Perhaps 4K will one day be the standard for virtual reality interfaces, where there really is a need for such high resolutions - but when you're looking at a television from a comfortable viewing distance, most people can't tell 720p from 1080p, so they aren't going to benefit from 4k.
Key cache, probably. Put the disc in once with an internet connection, it'll store the key to play it in future. The licensing agreement would certainly contain provisions specifying that key storage must be on the same physical die as the chip that does the decryption and decompression, to make sure hackers cannot extract the keys - though as with current blu-ray, when you've got a few hundred manufacturers making a few thousand different designs, someone is going to make a mistake that can be hacked.
"It's always possible to be a criminal - but ripping, storing and viewing in your own home is actually fair use, protected and legal."
That depends which country you are in. However, even in those countries which do allow this, it is usually illegal in some manner to bypass or to obtain tools designed to bypass the DRM. Yes, you may have that right - but there is no legal way to exercise it. This is true in almost all countries because it is a requirement of the WIPO copyright treaty of 1996 that all countries agreeing to the treaty must pass laws which, among other things, criminalise the distribution of circumvention devices and software.
You've been torrenting from the wrong places. The 'standard' movie now is a 720p file of approximately 4.4GB in size (Just small enough to burn to a DVD-R). The quality of these is slightly inferior to that of a blu-ray at 720p (The compression is more capable, but not enough to make up for the lower bitrate), but a great deal better than a DVD. If you've a ton of bandwidth you can also download an un-recompressed blu-ray rip, either an exact replica of the blu-ray sans encryption or a repackage of the same compressed data in another container.