If you put yourself in the mindset of someone who owns a weapon for personal defense, then the single most important safety feature is that the weapon goes "bang" when the trigger is pulled. From an engineering standpoint, any additional gizmos on the gun to keep it from going "bang" on command are *guaranteed* to reduce reliability. If someone is coming at you with deadly force, having an unreliable gun in your hand is a huge safety issue.
This particular gun design debate is similar to the "Boeing versus Airbus" design philosophy debate, and for similar reasons: ultimately, do you let the safety systems over-ride the pilot, or do you let the pilot over-ride the safety systems?
As an American, I am profoundly depressed by this thread. I respect the juror who is posting his perspective here, and greatly appreciate the fact he's taking the time to explain what happened from an insider's perspective. But his account reveals a terrible devolution of our system of justice: the ordinary citizens on a jury no longer protect us against an inappropriate or unfair application of the law.
It makes me furious every time I hear a juror come out of the jury room and say "I don't think he really did anything bad, but according to the judge's instructions, I had no choice but to convict." No, you had a choice. The brilliantly cynical and untrusting rebels who wrote the Constitution put you there to make the choice. Not an unfeeling robotic choice, not a judge-directed decision, but an independent decision that truly reflects the informed judgment of a "jury of peers."
The jury has become, not an independent check against the juggernaut of government prosecution, but a mere puppet of the system. In such a legal system, any one of us can be sent to jail for life on the government's whim, because there's not one of us who doesn't -- knowingly or unknowingly -- violate several laws daily; we count on juries to say, when appropriate, "ok, maybe he technically violated the law, but this prosecution is unreasonable, and we're not going along with it."
Our system was designed to make it really, really hard to convict. And really easy to acquit. If the prosecutor doesn't like the case, he can toss it out. If the judge doesn't like the case, he can toss it out. Heck, if the judge doesn't like the jury's "guilty" verdict, he can toss it out (but he can't set aside a "not guilty" verdict). Why has the jury come to believe they can't exercise at least the same power as the prosecutors and the judge routinely do: the power to toss out a case that just ain't right?
Looking at the pop-up labels that show up when you mouse-over the data, there seems to be a huge temporal discontinuity in your data set: right at the first vertical stripe, the displayed date/time labels jump from 2009-09-17 to 2009-09-27. Maybe I'm just misreading the display, but a 10-day discontinuity would seem to account for the anomaly you describe.
IANAL, but I'd never before heard of a law that explicitly required software to behave in a very specific way, and display very specific warnings. That alone tips this bill into the "big deal" category for me.
Add to this the tendency of prosecutors to misuse Federal statutes in ways that clearly exceed the legislative intent, and this law seems to open the door for prosecution of any government-targeted "bad guy" who also happens to have such 'illegal' network software.
And, of course, the original reason for this bill also stinks: it's almost certainly an RIAA-bought-and-paid-for law clearly designed to eliminate the "I didn't know" defense when suing file-sharers.
I would expect Congressmen to be falling all over each other to bring this to a vote now. After all, it's they're no longer just doing it for the RIAA/MPAA "campaign contributions." Now, it's personal.
The situation is already far worse than anyone in this thread has mentioned. Sure, you can strongly encrypt your laptop, and then, at the US Border checkpoint, adamantly refuse to provide your password. Fine. If you're a US citizen, they have to let you in anyway. And, of course, they'll confiscate your laptop for forensic analysis, which will yield nothing.
And, most importantly, the now royally pissed-off customs agent will document the fact that you were uncooperative (and carrying potential contraband) in the US Customs database. The database that is automatically checked every time you enter the country. Expect an anal probe *every* time you deal with US Customs from then on; and of course, losing your laptop at every subsequent entry into the US is a given.
US Customs' ability to mark you and make all subsequent travel *miserable* has greatly improved in recent years. "Land of the Free" my ass.
Chile is very clear and upfront about the reason for the $131 entry charge: it's because that's exactly what the US charges them for a visa. If the US quit charging, so would Chile.
In that respect, I found Chile *far* more civilized than the US.
In the USA, the "emergency personnel" that respond to a suicidal person call will probably be cops. The odds of that suicidal person getting himself shot go way up once the police are involved.
I would exhaust *all* other possibilities before calling the US police on someone I cared about.
When I received Red Cross first aid training, I was taught that applying a tourniquet is a decision to "sacrifice a limb to save a life." Having to pre-apply one of those things to each of your limbs before going into combat has got to be immensely sobering.
For an 18-year-old kid, the theoretical possibility of getting killed in combat probably doesn't hold as much dread as the very real possibilities of traumatic amputation symbolized by those tourniquets.
I hope that they built Hell large enough to contain all those national leaders who enter "wars of choice," as well as all military recruiters who play up the "money for college" aspects without mentioning the "wear four tourniquets to work" bit.
-- "A rational army would run away." -- Montesquieu
"280 million Trinitron displays equals how many billion tonnes of lead and other human-unfriendly substances?"
Doubtful that the Trinitron hazardous waste is anywhere near even an "billion" tons. Assuming two kilograms of lead per TV, that's 560,000 tons -- three orders of magnitude less than the smallest accepted value for "a billion tonnes".
Sadly, there's probably far more lead in use as pipes and solder in your municipal water system than will ever leach out of your city's dead Trinitrons.
Could I just bring a bunch of 3.5mm plugs wired together in parallel, or would that not work?
That approach has worked great for me, driving a set of three powered speaker pairs. Radio Shack even sells a one-in/three-out adapter plug; I use that to split the signal three ways, coming right off the soundcard speaker jack. Then I run 30-50 feet of shielded audio cable (bought in bulk and then connectorized; an easy soldering job) to each of the three powered speaker sets. Sound quality is fine.
I'm guessing that a six-way split would work just as well as my three-way split does.
Now, show me a theatre PC style case for one of these and I'll buy it tomorrow.
You may want to check out the Hush-PC ATX. It's a no-fan, heat-pipe system that looks right at home on top of the TV. But it ain't cheap -- upwards of $1700.
I have no affiliation with the company, other than as a recent customer.
Actually, in "the Land of the Free," the law used to be somewhat liberal. The Communications Act of 1934 allowed you to listen to any RF that came your way. However, if the transmission wasn't intended as a "broadcast", you couldn't talk about it with anyone. It seemed like an odd law to have in a supposedly free country, but the worst was yet to come.
With the rise of the cell phone industry and its lobby, our fine Congress was persuaded to pass the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. This act made it illegal to listen to cell phone conversations. This did nothing for cell phone security, but allowed the industry to pretend that their unencrypted communications were 'secure' ("no ma'am, no one can eavesdrop on your call -- it's illegal").
After the ECPA of 1986, I kind of lost track of all the waveforms that became illegal to demodulate. Congress has figured out that it can score cheap points with industry and the uneducated public by making it a federal felony to listen to certain frequencies. Cordless phones, encrypted transmissions, and Allah knows what else are now verboten listening. Hell, I'm a licensed ham and scanner enthusiast, and even I can't keep track of all the prohibitions.
It used to be that restrictions on radio receivers were the hallmark of a police state. They still are.
Human nature isn't going to change anytime soon. We've always had psychopaths, zealots, and demagogues, and we're certainly not going to get rid of them in the "foreseeable future." Some humans will always want to kill vast numbers of their fellow humans, for all the usual reasons: ethnic and racial bigotry, religious fundamentalism, resource competition, etc.
The problem is that the technologies of mass murder are becoming more efficient and more accessible. Looking down the road just a few years, a bio-terrorist attack using genetically engineered pathogens could potentially inflict 90%+ casualties on the human race. Unlike nuclear weapons, bio-weapon development doesn't require a large dedicated infrastructure. One lab is all it takes. How long until a terror group--or even just a latter-day McVeigh/Kaczynski--decides to whip-up an airborne virus optimized for lethality?
I'm not saying that persons with genocidal intentions will become increasingly common. I am saying that technology will make it increasingly easier for genocidal intentions to be carried out by a small group of persons, or even conceivably by a single person. Not every bioterror attack will succeed, but it only takes one runaway success...
Regrettably, I can only conclude that this century will be the human race's last. We draw a false sense of security from our survival of the 20th century's World Wars and the Cold War. But in the last century, the means of mass destruction were controlled by a handfull of states. In the coming century, thousands or millions of individuals will have access to the means of producing genetically engineered microorganisms. Short of an unimaginable global police state, I don't see how we can prevent someone from building and unleashing a species-killing pathogen.
The B-52H [bombnav.org] does have a cool looking CRT in it, but we are NOT talking glass cockpit here. All of the instruments are conventional dials (and, with 8 engines, that's a lot of dials). The CRTs are merely used to see outside.
Of course, seeing outside the aircraft is pretty important, too. Especially when you consider that, when these aircraft take off in a nuclear scenario, all the cockpit windows are covered with heavy (and opaque) thermal curtains. The only way the crew can see out is by looking at the CRTs.
For those who might be curious, the B-52H has two cameras mounted just below the nose: an infrared camera, and a visible-light camera. The view from those cameras is displayed on the cockpit CRTs, along with radar-derived terrain-avoidance data. Very handy for skimming the ground at night over hostile territory, with intermittent thermonuclear detonations occuring in the middle distance...
Now, for a truly cool-looking glass cockpit, check out the B2. Yours for only $1,999,999,999.95 [Prices are MSRP including delivery, plus any options. Your final price may vary, contact your dealer.]
Actually, the US made a big deal of NOT permanently damaging the Serbian power grid. We did bomb power substations, but with carbon filament, not with explosives. The carbon filament shorted everything out, forcing shutdown for a few hours. Then, the Serbs would go out, sweep off the carbon filament, and turn the lights back on. The US military's intent was to cause temporary inconvenience to the population, in order to turn the people against the leadership. You can argue as to the effectiveness of the approach, but you can't say that the US wasn't trying its damndest to be humane.
The US Government is making a major investment in PKI. Which, if past experience is any guide, means that this is yet another instance of "building yesterday's solution to today's problems tomorrow." Remember GOSIP?
Florida allows 10 days for overseas absentee ballots to come in. With a margin now in the hundreds, the overseas ballots (mostly from military personnel) could make the difference.
Which I think is incredibly cool. Talk about a civics lesson!
... I actually wasted 30 seconds converting the hex to dotted decimal, just to see THAT.
Of course, you just knew that the/. demographic would "break the code", didn't you?
Slashdot Mirror
If you put yourself in the mindset of someone who owns a weapon for personal defense, then the single most important safety feature is that the weapon goes "bang" when the trigger is pulled. From an engineering standpoint, any additional gizmos on the gun to keep it from going "bang" on command are *guaranteed* to reduce reliability. If someone is coming at you with deadly force, having an unreliable gun in your hand is a huge safety issue.
This particular gun design debate is similar to the "Boeing versus Airbus" design philosophy debate, and for similar reasons: ultimately, do you let the safety systems over-ride the pilot, or do you let the pilot over-ride the safety systems?
As an American, I am profoundly depressed by this thread. I respect the juror who is posting his perspective here, and greatly appreciate the fact he's taking the time to explain what happened from an insider's perspective. But his account reveals a terrible devolution of our system of justice: the ordinary citizens on a jury no longer protect us against an inappropriate or unfair application of the law.
It makes me furious every time I hear a juror come out of the jury room and say "I don't think he really did anything bad, but according to the judge's instructions, I had no choice but to convict." No, you had a choice. The brilliantly cynical and untrusting rebels who wrote the Constitution put you there to make the choice. Not an unfeeling robotic choice, not a judge-directed decision, but an independent decision that truly reflects the informed judgment of a "jury of peers."
The jury has become, not an independent check against the juggernaut of government prosecution, but a mere puppet of the system. In such a legal system, any one of us can be sent to jail for life on the government's whim, because there's not one of us who doesn't -- knowingly or unknowingly -- violate several laws daily; we count on juries to say, when appropriate, "ok, maybe he technically violated the law, but this prosecution is unreasonable, and we're not going along with it."
Our system was designed to make it really, really hard to convict. And really easy to acquit. If the prosecutor doesn't like the case, he can toss it out. If the judge doesn't like the case, he can toss it out. Heck, if the judge doesn't like the jury's "guilty" verdict, he can toss it out (but he can't set aside a "not guilty" verdict). Why has the jury come to believe they can't exercise at least the same power as the prosecutors and the judge routinely do: the power to toss out a case that just ain't right?
Looking at the pop-up labels that show up when you mouse-over the data, there seems to be a huge temporal discontinuity in your data set: right at the first vertical stripe, the displayed date/time labels jump from 2009-09-17 to 2009-09-27. Maybe I'm just misreading the display, but a 10-day discontinuity would seem to account for the anomaly you describe.
It couldn't be that easy, could it?
IANAL, but I'd never before heard of a law that explicitly required software to behave in a very specific way, and display very specific warnings. That alone tips this bill into the "big deal" category for me.
Add to this the tendency of prosecutors to misuse Federal statutes in ways that clearly exceed the legislative intent, and this law seems to open the door for prosecution of any government-targeted "bad guy" who also happens to have such 'illegal' network software.
And, of course, the original reason for this bill also stinks: it's almost certainly an RIAA-bought-and-paid-for law clearly designed to eliminate the "I didn't know" defense when suing file-sharers.
For months now, some RIAA-influenced Congressmen have been working on a crazily overbroad P2P regulation bill, H.R. 1319: The Informed P2P User Act. It just passed out of committee last month.
I would expect Congressmen to be falling all over each other to bring this to a vote now. After all, it's they're no longer just doing it for the RIAA/MPAA "campaign contributions." Now, it's personal.
The situation is already far worse than anyone in this thread has mentioned. Sure, you can strongly encrypt your laptop, and then, at the US Border checkpoint, adamantly refuse to provide your password. Fine. If you're a US citizen, they have to let you in anyway. And, of course, they'll confiscate your laptop for forensic analysis, which will yield nothing.
And, most importantly, the now royally pissed-off customs agent will document the fact that you were uncooperative (and carrying potential contraband) in the US Customs database. The database that is automatically checked every time you enter the country. Expect an anal probe *every* time you deal with US Customs from then on; and of course, losing your laptop at every subsequent entry into the US is a given.
US Customs' ability to mark you and make all subsequent travel *miserable* has greatly improved in recent years. "Land of the Free" my ass.
Chile is very clear and upfront about the reason for the $131 entry charge: it's because that's exactly what the US charges them for a visa. If the US quit charging, so would Chile.
In that respect, I found Chile *far* more civilized than the US.
In the USA, the "emergency personnel" that respond to a suicidal person call will probably be cops. The odds of that suicidal person getting himself shot go way up once the police are involved.
I would exhaust *all* other possibilities before calling the US police on someone I cared about.
When I received Red Cross first aid training, I was taught that applying a tourniquet is a decision to "sacrifice a limb to save a life." Having to pre-apply one of those things to each of your limbs before going into combat has got to be immensely sobering.
For an 18-year-old kid, the theoretical possibility of getting killed in combat probably doesn't hold as much dread as the very real possibilities of traumatic amputation symbolized by those tourniquets.
I hope that they built Hell large enough to contain all those national leaders who enter "wars of choice," as well as all military recruiters who play up the "money for college" aspects without mentioning the "wear four tourniquets to work" bit.
--
"A rational army would run away." -- Montesquieu
"280 million Trinitron displays equals how many billion tonnes of lead and other human-unfriendly substances?"
Doubtful that the Trinitron hazardous waste is anywhere near even an "billion" tons. Assuming two kilograms of lead per TV, that's 560,000 tons -- three orders of magnitude less than the smallest accepted value for "a billion tonnes".
Sadly, there's probably far more lead in use as pipes and solder in your municipal water system than will ever leach out of your city's dead Trinitrons.
That approach has worked great for me, driving a set of three powered speaker pairs. Radio Shack even sells a one-in/three-out adapter plug; I use that to split the signal three ways, coming right off the soundcard speaker jack. Then I run 30-50 feet of shielded audio cable (bought in bulk and then connectorized; an easy soldering job) to each of the three powered speaker sets. Sound quality is fine.
I'm guessing that a six-way split would work just as well as my three-way split does.
You may want to check out the Hush-PC ATX. It's a no-fan, heat-pipe system that looks right at home on top of the TV. But it ain't cheap -- upwards of $1700.
I have no affiliation with the company, other than as a recent customer.
Actually, in "the Land of the Free," the law used to be somewhat liberal. The Communications Act of 1934 allowed you to listen to any RF that came your way. However, if the transmission wasn't intended as a "broadcast", you couldn't talk about it with anyone. It seemed like an odd law to have in a supposedly free country, but the worst was yet to come.
With the rise of the cell phone industry and its lobby, our fine Congress was persuaded to pass the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. This act made it illegal to listen to cell phone conversations. This did nothing for cell phone security, but allowed the industry to pretend that their unencrypted communications were 'secure' ("no ma'am, no one can eavesdrop on your call -- it's illegal").
After the ECPA of 1986, I kind of lost track of all the waveforms that became illegal to demodulate. Congress has figured out that it can score cheap points with industry and the uneducated public by making it a federal felony to listen to certain frequencies. Cordless phones, encrypted transmissions, and Allah knows what else are now verboten listening. Hell, I'm a licensed ham and scanner enthusiast, and even I can't keep track of all the prohibitions.
It used to be that restrictions on radio receivers were the hallmark of a police state. They still are.
But the Kazaa story is also on www.news.com.
It looks like cnet owns the .com.com domain, too:
Registrant:
CNET Networks, Inc (COM2994-DOM)
235 2nd Street
San Francisco, CA 94104
US
Domain Name: COM.COM
The problem is that the technologies of mass murder are becoming more efficient and more accessible. Looking down the road just a few years, a bio-terrorist attack using genetically engineered pathogens could potentially inflict 90%+ casualties on the human race. Unlike nuclear weapons, bio-weapon development doesn't require a large dedicated infrastructure. One lab is all it takes. How long until a terror group--or even just a latter-day McVeigh/Kaczynski--decides to whip-up an airborne virus optimized for lethality?
I'm not saying that persons with genocidal intentions will become increasingly common. I am saying that technology will make it increasingly easier for genocidal intentions to be carried out by a small group of persons, or even conceivably by a single person. Not every bioterror attack will succeed, but it only takes one runaway success ...
Regrettably, I can only conclude that this century will be the human race's last. We draw a false sense of security from our survival of the 20th century's World Wars and the Cold War. But in the last century, the means of mass destruction were controlled by a handfull of states. In the coming century, thousands or millions of individuals will have access to the means of producing genetically engineered microorganisms. Short of an unimaginable global police state, I don't see how we can prevent someone from building and unleashing a species-killing pathogen.
The B-52H [bombnav.org] does have a cool looking CRT in it, but we are NOT talking glass cockpit here. All of the instruments are conventional dials (and, with 8 engines, that's a lot of dials). The CRTs are merely used to see outside.
...
Of course, seeing outside the aircraft is pretty important, too. Especially when you consider that, when these aircraft take off in a nuclear scenario, all the cockpit windows are covered with heavy (and opaque) thermal curtains. The only way the crew can see out is by looking at the CRTs.
For those who might be curious, the B-52H has two cameras mounted just below the nose: an infrared camera, and a visible-light camera. The view from those cameras is displayed on the cockpit CRTs, along with radar-derived terrain-avoidance data. Very handy for skimming the ground at night over hostile territory, with intermittent thermonuclear detonations occuring in the middle distance
Now, for a truly cool-looking glass cockpit, check out the B2. Yours for only $1,999,999,999.95 [Prices are MSRP including delivery, plus any options. Your final price may vary, contact your dealer.]
For details, check this out.
The US Government is making a major investment in PKI. Which, if past experience is any guide, means that this is yet another instance of "building yesterday's solution to today's problems tomorrow." Remember GOSIP?
Florida allows 10 days for overseas absentee ballots to come in. With a margin now in the hundreds, the overseas ballots (mostly from military personnel) could make the difference. Which I think is incredibly cool. Talk about a civics lesson!
... I actually wasted 30 seconds converting the hex to dotted decimal, just to see THAT. Of course, you just knew that the /. demographic would "break the code", didn't you?