Or you could make a program that works amazingly well at what it does, but with a backdoor to malfunction at a critical point (bonus points for doing so in a way that makes it difficult to detect the source, like cause a weapons control program to make the engine malfunction). Lots of malware spreads that way, and for good reason (it's easy: the user spreads it for you). More of a trojan than a virus specifically: unless there is some method of semi-automated communication between the ships, though, a true virus seems hard to do.
Unless the server architecture itself has some sort of vulnerability that allows you to circumvent the normal gameplay and install software that way. That would be... interesting, to say the least.
I'm pretty sure they would overlook that in an overtly criminal case CP or terrorism, probably by casting the bill payer as an "accomplice" of some sort who could have information about the crime. That would be enough to get the address from the ISP. Whether it would lead to a friendly chat or a SWAT team raid is the biggest unknown, but there's no way they would let a pesky little bit of precedent get in their way for something like that.
Except those would be criminal cases, not civil as is the case here, so the same legal standards would not apply.
To give an extreme example, if someone sent an image of your kidnapped daughter from a given IP address, you would sure as hell want the police to find out who owns that IP. So yes, they would deal with it differently, because an overtly criminal case is different.
The amount for the cleanup I saw (glanced on Wikipedia) was around $13 billion USD (that might not include the cost of safely decommissioning the reactor, I couldn't find a good number for that, so that figure might just be radiation cleanup). The total economic cost of the earthquake was (by the World's Bank estimate) $235 billion. Obviously, until all is said and done and the reactor is completely decommissioned and the land cleared up, we won't know for certain, but chances are there is at least one order of magnitude difference in the costs. Granted, the nuclear cleanup is still an appreciable fraction of the total cost (and a lot of money no matter how you look at it... well, unless you're a US legislator), but again, the earthquake/tsunami caused far more damage and cost far more money than the nuclear meltdown.
Again, that reactor should have been replaced by something else a decade ago at least, and even then, it still shouldn't have failed if they'd done it properly, but the catastrophe that caused the failure was sufficiently powerful to dwarf the damage caused by the failure itself, which in the end is the only real standard you can establish for the safety of any power system. Contrast that with coal, which doesn't require any catastrophe to spew harmful emissions, or hydroelectric, which in one failure kill over 170,000 people (Banqiao Dam).
The risk tolerance should be for an event that causes significantly more damage in and of itself than the reactor meltdown would. Someone above mentioned an asteroid collision. An asteroid of significant size would cause far more damage than the destroyed reactor would. You can also make the engineering such that even in extreme failure conditions, the amount of radioactive spreading is minimal (although, again, an asteroid would pretty much splatter the uranium everywhere).
I would argue that the Fukushima disaster actually did meet this criterion: far more people were killed by the earthquake/tsunami than will ever be killed by the radiation (in fact, the disaster probably killed more people than all the nuclear reactor accidents ever put together) released, and the cleanup will be a fairly small fraction of the total cost of the disaster. Obviously, they could have been better designed and survived even this (a modern reactor would have), but the simple fact is a disaster bad enough to take out a well-designed nuclear reactor will dwarf the damage caused by the reactor malfunction itself.
I'm not finding fault with this study, but the conclusion seems to have stepped outside the realm of science and into politics by assuming (at least this is the impression the article gives) that government policy is the only way to limit the growth of our ecological footprint.
The good old freedom-loving alternative has inspired such movies as Mad Max 2.
It's peculiar how science is only OK as long as its conclusions are harmless to powerful interests.
These models aren't science. They are at best educated guesses, based on mathematical models that are necessarily unable to predict changes to birthrate or sustainability that occur in the future. This isn't a problem with the models or science: the problem is in granting these models more power than they have. I have little doubt that the models are correct: if the present trends stay exactly the same, collapse will happen when they say it will.
The trends never stay the same. Little exercise: create a population (or economic) model for human civilization using any time in history. It will predict a peak population (or population explosion) at some other point in history (usually a couple hundreds years from the chosen time). Yet guess what? Humanity has continued to expand well past that predicted limits, because these models are inherently unable to predict changes in the trends: they can only be based on current or historical trends, and those always change unpredictably.
So you'll be old, unable to work, and have no money? How is that "good timing" for you?
An economic collapse won't just let you alone, you know. Actually, the people with kids are more likely to survive (and prosper): they will have children willing and able to support them. You? You'll have a mostly worthless retirement fund. You may not have though this all the way through.
They show those kinds of videos to display the ways you can use the technology, not necessarily how you will use them. How you will use them at work depends entirely on what kind of job you have. For instance, if you ever have to go into a warehouse type setting, they could display an overlay with the positions of various items. Or the status of a specific server in a server room (IP address, hardware/software configuration). Or a car-repairman could use it to look up whether a specific part is in stock simply by looking at the part. A barista could use it to store a record of customers regular drinks.
It depends entirely upon the line of work, the needs of the job, and the capability of the ARG technology. In other words, we won't know how useful the tech really is until the tech actually exists.
Why would you say that? I've been looking forward to augmented-reality glasses for a decade at least, and I already wear glasses due to poor vision. If they released a version that fairly inconspicuously worked with or supplanted regular glasses, there would be little reason for me not to buy them.
If by "American" billion you mean "English" billion, than yes. Since Slashdot is an entirely English speaking site, it is most appropriate to use the English word for 10^9... which is billion.
This isn't "rising up and protesting", this is one individual attempting to game the system to extort a company for lots of money.
This is the exact opposite of Internet protests such as those against SOPA, which involved hundreds of thousands of people fighting against corporate greed and government corruption. This case is just about an asshole who wants money.
We all know the 'better' reason: to look for people to kill. However, looking for people to kill would upset some people, so we call it 'looking for debris'.
Exactly. "Debris". The fact that they aren't debris yet is just semantics.
An excellent point. In fact, one of the first things I checked before posting was who funded the results (I've learned that doing your homework before posting can save a lot of face later). If TEPCO had funded it, that would have been enough evidence to doubt the results (I would note, though, that you cannot throw them out completely, but certainly make sure to get a second opinion from an unbiased expert). But, as you say, NOAA doesn't (seem) to have any interest in skewing the results.
Actually, which will prevail? Politically motivated scaremongering or corporations manipulating safety data to prevent a drop in stock price.
[citation needed]
Seriously, unless you have some evidence to back that up, simply claiming scientific fraud because you happen to disagree with the results is not a valid argument, sorry. The scientists give hard numbers to justify their conclusions, even mentioning that the released contamination was on the high sides of the estimates. Fortunately, the ocean is really, really big, so even an apparently massive amount of contamination (relatively speaking) amounts to an extremely diluted concentration.
It would be so easy to Godwin the thread here... so I won't. Instead, I'll just say: that statement is the fundamental justification for most (every?) instance of genocide and many instances of war and evil throughout history. And, like all of them, you are completely wrong. The problem isn't x group of people or y ideology: the problem is human nature, or to quote from Equilibrium, "man's inhumanity towards man." And as the movie points out, there isn't one single property of humanity that causes that.
This can manifest itself through religion, yes, but it can also manifest itself through rationality, emotion, or just about anything else. To attempt to scapegoat any one of this things as "the real problem" is also a trait of human nature: mankind excels at placing blame on others. The reality is so long as men are men (and women are women, don't want to be sexist), these problems will exist.
To cry for the banning of an ideology you disagree with and see as wrong (and, most likely, don't fully understand either: fear of the different, often stemming from ignorance, is another manifestation of the flaw of human nature) is to undue most of the progress we have made as a society towards overcoming our own nature. We will never rid this world of all it's problems: we can do our best not to cause more, and to fix those we see. Intolerance towards another's ideology is one of those problems. And yes, religion can cause that. So can rationality*. And to ban them would be to not only make things worse, but to remove a great source of potential good, which again, both rationality and religion can achieve.
*Of course, rationality and religion as perverted by evil. Neither one, properly used, is inherently evil. They are often used improperly (again, by flawed humanity that strives against its fellow man).
Airplanes have wheels; does that make them flying cars? This is basically just a gyrocopter with fold-up flight parts.
No, because you can't drive an airplane on land (i.e. on standard roads). This vehicle you can, and in fact that is it's primary mode of transport. That makes it a car. It can also fly. Therefore it is a flying car.
A.50-caliber Barret is certainly capable of shooting down an unarmored helicopter or small, slow moving plane (not that it would be easy, but it is possible), but they can also be legally purchased by civilians (outside of California, anyways). It is very doubtful that they have access to actual missiles. The Secret Service does maintain a Stinger missile cache in Manhattan, but only for defending the President against would-be assassins.
That would be the Secret Service, which has always had more authority than regular law enforcement (due to their primary role in protecting the President and other high-profile targets). It's long been known that they keep Stinger missiles on the White House, for example. And the article in fact says precisely that: those missiles are only to be used to protect the President against terrorist attacks, not any form of law enforcement whatsoever.
I do with my bank card. But then, it is a local bank that by default blocks out-of-state (or international) charges and actually uses proper two-factor authentication for online banking, so I have a reasonable degree of confidence in their security systems generally speaking.
Granted, I'm still fairly careful where and when I use it (and plan to switch to a credit card soon, if only for the rewards and credit-building aspect).
Slashdot Mirror
People are already working on an OS for the system, so probably not very long.
Or you could make a program that works amazingly well at what it does, but with a backdoor to malfunction at a critical point (bonus points for doing so in a way that makes it difficult to detect the source, like cause a weapons control program to make the engine malfunction). Lots of malware spreads that way, and for good reason (it's easy: the user spreads it for you). More of a trojan than a virus specifically: unless there is some method of semi-automated communication between the ships, though, a true virus seems hard to do.
Unless the server architecture itself has some sort of vulnerability that allows you to circumvent the normal gameplay and install software that way. That would be... interesting, to say the least.
Really? You can't even be bothered to read the title of the article? Here, let me quote it for you:
BioWare Announces Free DLC To Add More To the Mass Effect 3 Endings
I'm pretty sure they would overlook that in an overtly criminal case CP or terrorism, probably by casting the bill payer as an "accomplice" of some sort who could have information about the crime. That would be enough to get the address from the ISP. Whether it would lead to a friendly chat or a SWAT team raid is the biggest unknown, but there's no way they would let a pesky little bit of precedent get in their way for something like that.
Except those would be criminal cases, not civil as is the case here, so the same legal standards would not apply.
To give an extreme example, if someone sent an image of your kidnapped daughter from a given IP address, you would sure as hell want the police to find out who owns that IP. So yes, they would deal with it differently, because an overtly criminal case is different.
The amount for the cleanup I saw (glanced on Wikipedia) was around $13 billion USD (that might not include the cost of safely decommissioning the reactor, I couldn't find a good number for that, so that figure might just be radiation cleanup). The total economic cost of the earthquake was (by the World's Bank estimate) $235 billion. Obviously, until all is said and done and the reactor is completely decommissioned and the land cleared up, we won't know for certain, but chances are there is at least one order of magnitude difference in the costs. Granted, the nuclear cleanup is still an appreciable fraction of the total cost (and a lot of money no matter how you look at it... well, unless you're a US legislator), but again, the earthquake/tsunami caused far more damage and cost far more money than the nuclear meltdown.
Again, that reactor should have been replaced by something else a decade ago at least, and even then, it still shouldn't have failed if they'd done it properly, but the catastrophe that caused the failure was sufficiently powerful to dwarf the damage caused by the failure itself, which in the end is the only real standard you can establish for the safety of any power system. Contrast that with coal, which doesn't require any catastrophe to spew harmful emissions, or hydroelectric, which in one failure kill over 170,000 people (Banqiao Dam).
The risk tolerance should be for an event that causes significantly more damage in and of itself than the reactor meltdown would. Someone above mentioned an asteroid collision. An asteroid of significant size would cause far more damage than the destroyed reactor would. You can also make the engineering such that even in extreme failure conditions, the amount of radioactive spreading is minimal (although, again, an asteroid would pretty much splatter the uranium everywhere).
I would argue that the Fukushima disaster actually did meet this criterion: far more people were killed by the earthquake/tsunami than will ever be killed by the radiation (in fact, the disaster probably killed more people than all the nuclear reactor accidents ever put together) released, and the cleanup will be a fairly small fraction of the total cost of the disaster. Obviously, they could have been better designed and survived even this (a modern reactor would have), but the simple fact is a disaster bad enough to take out a well-designed nuclear reactor will dwarf the damage caused by the reactor malfunction itself.
The PR disaster is a different story.
BTW being gay is natural.
So is wanting to punch someone in the face when they do something to make you angry. Doesn't mean I have to actually punch people in the face.
No, instead, these idiots want regulation and law to enforce their standards and ideals on others. Have some personal accountability.
A threat of a boycott (which is what the letters are about) has nothing to do with regulation and laws.
I'm not finding fault with this study, but the conclusion seems to have stepped outside the realm of science and into politics by assuming (at least this is the impression the article gives) that government policy is the only way to limit the growth of our ecological footprint.
The good old freedom-loving alternative has inspired such movies as Mad Max 2.
It's peculiar how science is only OK as long as its conclusions are harmless to powerful interests.
These models aren't science. They are at best educated guesses, based on mathematical models that are necessarily unable to predict changes to birthrate or sustainability that occur in the future. This isn't a problem with the models or science: the problem is in granting these models more power than they have. I have little doubt that the models are correct: if the present trends stay exactly the same, collapse will happen when they say it will.
The trends never stay the same. Little exercise: create a population (or economic) model for human civilization using any time in history. It will predict a peak population (or population explosion) at some other point in history (usually a couple hundreds years from the chosen time). Yet guess what? Humanity has continued to expand well past that predicted limits, because these models are inherently unable to predict changes in the trends: they can only be based on current or historical trends, and those always change unpredictably.
So you'll be old, unable to work, and have no money? How is that "good timing" for you?
An economic collapse won't just let you alone, you know. Actually, the people with kids are more likely to survive (and prosper): they will have children willing and able to support them. You? You'll have a mostly worthless retirement fund. You may not have though this all the way through.
They show those kinds of videos to display the ways you can use the technology, not necessarily how you will use them. How you will use them at work depends entirely on what kind of job you have. For instance, if you ever have to go into a warehouse type setting, they could display an overlay with the positions of various items. Or the status of a specific server in a server room (IP address, hardware/software configuration). Or a car-repairman could use it to look up whether a specific part is in stock simply by looking at the part. A barista could use it to store a record of customers regular drinks.
It depends entirely upon the line of work, the needs of the job, and the capability of the ARG technology. In other words, we won't know how useful the tech really is until the tech actually exists.
Why would you say that? I've been looking forward to augmented-reality glasses for a decade at least, and I already wear glasses due to poor vision. If they released a version that fairly inconspicuously worked with or supplanted regular glasses, there would be little reason for me not to buy them.
If by "American" billion you mean "English" billion, than yes. Since Slashdot is an entirely English speaking site, it is most appropriate to use the English word for 10^9... which is billion.
Walk outside at night. Tada! the entire universe in 3D (ok, a little less than half of it, but still).
This isn't "rising up and protesting", this is one individual attempting to game the system to extort a company for lots of money.
This is the exact opposite of Internet protests such as those against SOPA, which involved hundreds of thousands of people fighting against corporate greed and government corruption. This case is just about an asshole who wants money.
It's in the (unmentioned) "???" step.
We all know the 'better' reason: to look for people to kill. However, looking for people to kill would upset some people, so we call it 'looking for debris'.
Exactly. "Debris". The fact that they aren't debris yet is just semantics.
An excellent point. In fact, one of the first things I checked before posting was who funded the results (I've learned that doing your homework before posting can save a lot of face later). If TEPCO had funded it, that would have been enough evidence to doubt the results (I would note, though, that you cannot throw them out completely, but certainly make sure to get a second opinion from an unbiased expert). But, as you say, NOAA doesn't (seem) to have any interest in skewing the results.
Actually, which will prevail? Politically motivated scaremongering or corporations manipulating safety data to prevent a drop in stock price.
[citation needed]
Seriously, unless you have some evidence to back that up, simply claiming scientific fraud because you happen to disagree with the results is not a valid argument, sorry. The scientists give hard numbers to justify their conclusions, even mentioning that the released contamination was on the high sides of the estimates. Fortunately, the ocean is really, really big, so even an apparently massive amount of contamination (relatively speaking) amounts to an extremely diluted concentration.
It would be so easy to Godwin the thread here... so I won't. Instead, I'll just say: that statement is the fundamental justification for most (every?) instance of genocide and many instances of war and evil throughout history. And, like all of them, you are completely wrong. The problem isn't x group of people or y ideology: the problem is human nature, or to quote from Equilibrium, "man's inhumanity towards man." And as the movie points out, there isn't one single property of humanity that causes that.
This can manifest itself through religion, yes, but it can also manifest itself through rationality, emotion, or just about anything else. To attempt to scapegoat any one of this things as "the real problem" is also a trait of human nature: mankind excels at placing blame on others. The reality is so long as men are men (and women are women, don't want to be sexist), these problems will exist.
To cry for the banning of an ideology you disagree with and see as wrong (and, most likely, don't fully understand either: fear of the different, often stemming from ignorance, is another manifestation of the flaw of human nature) is to undue most of the progress we have made as a society towards overcoming our own nature. We will never rid this world of all it's problems: we can do our best not to cause more, and to fix those we see. Intolerance towards another's ideology is one of those problems. And yes, religion can cause that. So can rationality*. And to ban them would be to not only make things worse, but to remove a great source of potential good, which again, both rationality and religion can achieve.
*Of course, rationality and religion as perverted by evil. Neither one, properly used, is inherently evil. They are often used improperly (again, by flawed humanity that strives against its fellow man).
stupid "underated" button right next to "funny". Posting to undue accidental mod.
Airplanes have wheels; does that make them flying cars? This is basically just a gyrocopter with fold-up flight parts.
No, because you can't drive an airplane on land (i.e. on standard roads). This vehicle you can, and in fact that is it's primary mode of transport. That makes it a car. It can also fly. Therefore it is a flying car.
A .50-caliber Barret is certainly capable of shooting down an unarmored helicopter or small, slow moving plane (not that it would be easy, but it is possible), but they can also be legally purchased by civilians (outside of California, anyways). It is very doubtful that they have access to actual missiles. The Secret Service does maintain a Stinger missile cache in Manhattan, but only for defending the President against would-be assassins.
That would be the Secret Service, which has always had more authority than regular law enforcement (due to their primary role in protecting the President and other high-profile targets). It's long been known that they keep Stinger missiles on the White House, for example. And the article in fact says precisely that: those missiles are only to be used to protect the President against terrorist attacks, not any form of law enforcement whatsoever.
I do with my bank card. But then, it is a local bank that by default blocks out-of-state (or international) charges and actually uses proper two-factor authentication for online banking, so I have a reasonable degree of confidence in their security systems generally speaking.
Granted, I'm still fairly careful where and when I use it (and plan to switch to a credit card soon, if only for the rewards and credit-building aspect).