Isn't it fairly easy to build a deadly zip gun? And I assume today already a gang could buy a CNC machine for less than the cost of a decent 3D printer if they wanted to roll their own guns, as they would have been able to for years? (Do they? If not, why not?)
The thing about metal detection is interesting, though. I suppose this is certainly increasing accessibility to metal-free guns. But that's not game-changing - it just means more intrusive methods required to detect guns.
I don't think so? It's already trivially easy to build a deadly weapon. Gun control exists to stop an arms race by discouraging people in general from thinking they need to carry guns (both criminals and law-abiding), not to make it impossible to get a gun. In some areas this works, as you end up with very little gun crime - e.g. urban UK - maybe in others (remote?) this doesn't apply, as law enforcement is so far away? I am not sure there's a hard and fast rule...
You're not saying enough to be clear about what you're referring to, but I can guess already that I might disagree with your definition of "non-aggression".
The whole point is that some activity can only be judged "safe" in the context that it is performed by fallible humans. You can't say, "This is safe because it would be safe if things were mostly done right."
IOW, no system should be engineered for which gross fuck-up by a few people can cause Chernobyl levels of disaster. The social hierarchy and technical measures were badly implemented, here as with Tepco - just worse in Chernobyl's case.
As someone who was brought up in a school with a cadet force which taught marksmanship and such, but in a country which doesn't have much of a gun culture, I really don't get this obsession with 3D-printer-manufacturing of parts of guns. In particular, I don't get why it's such a thing on/. What's the big deal, really? I assume some US states have always allowed the home building of guns, perhaps with licences, while others haven't? And that lots of people have fucked up, while others do a competent job? What's *new* here?
TBH that's exactly how democracy works, except your opinion just has to be popular enough for whatever you "disagree with" to be outlawed. And instead of just hitting someone, we lock them away, which comes down to the same thing.
And no, libertarianism's no different, because that's just based on popular support for property law. And no, communism's no different, because that's just based on popular support for sharing anything you happen to cherish.
So, your alternatives are tyranny of the majority, or tyranny of the minority. Welcome to civilisation. Regardless, we don't do too badly, you know?
While I would prefer that they neither enshrined dead war criminals nor ignored still living ones, again, they've already done their deeds, and they no longer have significant power. Locking them up won't undo the harm done, while keeping them free won't increase the threat of war. Indeed, the Good Friday agreements were about people on both sides knowing that the other commited atrocities, not saying sorry, and still agreeing to move on. One could even go half way as in South Africa, first deciding to end the conflct (between whites and non-whites), then still offering a reprieve for anyone prepared to be honest and apologetic.
Anyway, there are lots of people in Germany who celebrate Rommel and Goebbels - it's just that by outlawing certain beliefs you get to pretend really hard that they don't exist any more.
Not hearing/providing apologies for the actions of some other mostly dead people against yet other mostly dead people is an excuse, not a preclusion to just getting along.
Really, it is nice for Germans to apologise to Jews; for white South Africans to apologise to black; for Britain to posthumously pardon Turing; &c. It may have a positive effect on lessening tensions between those who relate to perceived victims and those who relate to perceived perpetrators (in war, each party often assumes both roles). But the atrocities have already happened. The people are already dead. Rather than saying sorry for something you haven't actually done to someone you haven't even done it to on behalf of two groups of dead people, instead think, "Someone else fucked up, but we're going to do better."
How many wars/insurrections has the US been involved in since WW2? How many countries has it apologised to? How many of those countries have decided they're going to spend eternity fucking the US over? Some, of course, but very few. The remainder know that, win or lose, you gotta move on. See also the IRA peace process, something closer to my heart. Jerry Adams never said, "I'm sorry for all the people who under my authority were tortured and/or bombed, and I'm sorry to all their families." Nor has Britain hung its head in shame for its own bloody and subversive responses. The Good Friday agreements were instead an approach of, "Even if we don't love each other, and even if we each think the other side deserved all the shit we gave it, let's now just all try to get along."
I'd rather see nuclear energy than reliance on oil, but humans have managed to fuck it up on many occasions.
Everything can be made 100% safe in theory, and any disaster can be optmally managed in theory, but in practice every system is designed and implemented by humans, and this must be taken into account at every stage of, well, everything.
Nuclear power must be managed carefully in the interests of the people, IOW strong independent oversight to the exclusion of both unaccountable stagnation (Chernobyl) and regulatory capture (Tepco).
*All* BIOSes have "proprietary bits" in the sense of offering services peculiar to that brand, and many of the older INTs were just de facto standardised - unique features weren't supported as often as ubiquitous features, because that just meant more work for the OS designer. I've got systems sitting around back to an IBM AT, and have certainly wasted way too much time fiddling with the idiosyncracies of old systems!
But trying to convince manufacturers of an existing system to add a particular feature which is bound to piss off the users is harder than trying to incorporate a feature to a new standard.
"Terror" worked as an excuse for a while, but then with all the Manning etc. revelations, people realised that war on a military strategy was just a bit of clever spin.
Now we're onto the child porn angle, which easier as both the hawks and the pacifists can be seduced into a think-of-the-children argument. Never mind that driving the producers of child sex abuse images further underground is the worst possible thing - I say that such *evidence* of child sex abuse should be out in the open, so that humans are fully exposed to its horror and demand that resources are focussed on the abusers, i.e. those who actually force children to pose or to have sex with them.
Lots of people are titillated by all sorts of exploitation right up to gore, but we don't censor all those images because we pretend that there's something uniquely sacred about the innocence of a child. Well, there's nothing "sacred" about anything except in the imagination of humans.
...stop using a system developed and partly sanctioned by the US military if you want actually want to preserve your privacy. Actually, lack of privacy is a social problem, alland technical solutions are based simply on not your doing anything important enough for someone to engage in an arms race with you (which you will lose).
If you want privacy, you need to have exclusive control of a great deal of the network and intermediate nodes, plus the exact content of the traffic. And then you need to make sure that merely the raw content isn't a giveaway. Otherwise stochastic methods will attack all of the above and identify who you are, before an exploit's even been planted on your home machine.
Or foster a society that refuses to allocate the resources to fuck you over. Remember, anyone can be taught skills - but values are much harder to instil.
Of course, paedophiles are ONLY attracted to children, and all heterosexual men are rapists because they cannot resist the urge to fuck every woman regardless of consent.
I'm bisexual, but I've managed to go several decades without ONCE having any sexual contact with my own gender. Think about this.
It interests me from a legal PoV that what you said is actually illegal ("glorifying" terrorism) in the UK, but it's still wrong. al Qaeda is a disaffected US paramilitary branch, like a guy who was fired from his job and goes back to the office to throw shit around a bit. Their world-police philosophy is All American.
Confuses paedophiles, people who duplicate images, and people who abuse children.
Well done. UK government could do with more people like you to build their Great Firewall (remember when that was a thing only used in reference to China?).
1. "EFI" has been deprecated for over 7 years, champ. UEFI was just a renaming to reflect the fact that it was no longer Intel's pet project but would be maintained by a consortium (U=Unified under the UEFI Forum);
2. The UEFI Forum doesn't exist to plot evil and make impotent nerds like you angry, but to develop the whole UEFI specification;
3. The secure boot bollocks in UEFI is optional. Of course there must be a chain of loaded binary verification for it to be meaningful - what else did you expect?
4. If you think UEFI is overly complex, you should try writing a 16 bit subsystem. And a PC BIOS is only "flexible" in the sense that basic secondary storage/network/system stuff was de facto standardised ages ago and for everything else someone will have written a driver to make the appropriate random INTs;
5. "All we need is a BIOS option to permit the OS to flash into firmware" - I think you've lost the plot here completely, champ, but you appear worried about someone manually typing in a key wrongly while not having a problem with a "flash random user code to firmware" BIOS option.
1) "Fan" is neutral, while "fanboy" and "fangirl" are derogatory, reflecting the immaturity of the person to whom the label is being applied. "Fan" would have conveyed my message incompletely;
2) It is not "misogynist" to have chosen "fangirls", just as it would not have been misandrist to choose "fanboys". This notwithstanding, the habit of arbitrarily choosing male nouns/pronouns is far more of a problem in writing than that of choosing female nouns/pronouns. "He/she" is clumsy, so mix 'em, I say;
3) Not sure why you're talking about "man up", although I've always understood it to mean "don't act like a boy" rather than "don't act like a woman". "Woman up!" will also do, though it would be odd to say that to a man, because they don't identify as a woman. And, like the old saying goes, better to grow a vagina than a pair of balls, because balls are weak and sensitive, whereas vaginas can take a pounding.
As an aside, I have spent the last few months assisting someone who is writing a PhD thesis on the use of language related to mental health, and one of the important lessons which has come out is the extent to which particular groups (often but not always with good intentions) like to police language. In attaching unique derogatory meanings to words or phrases, they marginalise the groups they purport to help by painting a particular individual as the frequent target of insult/stigma when usually no attack is being made. Language is rather more complex than "that word always conveys that meaning so STOP USING IT NOW I SAY".
Ooh, wait, is it "fangirls"? I had the option of "fanboys" or "fangirls", and I guess you're arguing that using feminine rather than masculine nouns when gender is irrelevant is misogyny? In your world, men the norm, and women are the special case, right? Sorry, bud, you've just drawn back the curtain to your own prejudiced thinking.
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Isn't it fairly easy to build a deadly zip gun? And I assume today already a gang could buy a CNC machine for less than the cost of a decent 3D printer if they wanted to roll their own guns, as they would have been able to for years? (Do they? If not, why not?)
The thing about metal detection is interesting, though. I suppose this is certainly increasing accessibility to metal-free guns. But that's not game-changing - it just means more intrusive methods required to detect guns.
I don't think so? It's already trivially easy to build a deadly weapon. Gun control exists to stop an arms race by discouraging people in general from thinking they need to carry guns (both criminals and law-abiding), not to make it impossible to get a gun. In some areas this works, as you end up with very little gun crime - e.g. urban UK - maybe in others (remote?) this doesn't apply, as law enforcement is so far away? I am not sure there's a hard and fast rule...
You're not saying enough to be clear about what you're referring to, but I can guess already that I might disagree with your definition of "non-aggression".
The whole point is that some activity can only be judged "safe" in the context that it is performed by fallible humans. You can't say, "This is safe because it would be safe if things were mostly done right."
IOW, no system should be engineered for which gross fuck-up by a few people can cause Chernobyl levels of disaster. The social hierarchy and technical measures were badly implemented, here as with Tepco - just worse in Chernobyl's case.
As someone who was brought up in a school with a cadet force which taught marksmanship and such, but in a country which doesn't have much of a gun culture, I really don't get this obsession with 3D-printer-manufacturing of parts of guns. In particular, I don't get why it's such a thing on /. What's the big deal, really? I assume some US states have always allowed the home building of guns, perhaps with licences, while others haven't? And that lots of people have fucked up, while others do a competent job? What's *new* here?
TBH that's exactly how democracy works, except your opinion just has to be popular enough for whatever you "disagree with" to be outlawed. And instead of just hitting someone, we lock them away, which comes down to the same thing.
And no, libertarianism's no different, because that's just based on popular support for property law. And no, communism's no different, because that's just based on popular support for sharing anything you happen to cherish.
So, your alternatives are tyranny of the majority, or tyranny of the minority. Welcome to civilisation. Regardless, we don't do too badly, you know?
People, as properly represented by the government.
(And, no, not all governments throughout history have failed to represent the people, before someone gets on their youthful high horse.)
While I would prefer that they neither enshrined dead war criminals nor ignored still living ones, again, they've already done their deeds, and they no longer have significant power. Locking them up won't undo the harm done, while keeping them free won't increase the threat of war. Indeed, the Good Friday agreements were about people on both sides knowing that the other commited atrocities, not saying sorry, and still agreeing to move on. One could even go half way as in South Africa, first deciding to end the conflct (between whites and non-whites), then still offering a reprieve for anyone prepared to be honest and apologetic.
Anyway, there are lots of people in Germany who celebrate Rommel and Goebbels - it's just that by outlawing certain beliefs you get to pretend really hard that they don't exist any more.
Not hearing/providing apologies for the actions of some other mostly dead people against yet other mostly dead people is an excuse, not a preclusion to just getting along.
Really, it is nice for Germans to apologise to Jews; for white South Africans to apologise to black; for Britain to posthumously pardon Turing; &c. It may have a positive effect on lessening tensions between those who relate to perceived victims and those who relate to perceived perpetrators (in war, each party often assumes both roles). But the atrocities have already happened. The people are already dead. Rather than saying sorry for something you haven't actually done to someone you haven't even done it to on behalf of two groups of dead people, instead think, "Someone else fucked up, but we're going to do better."
How many wars/insurrections has the US been involved in since WW2? How many countries has it apologised to? How many of those countries have decided they're going to spend eternity fucking the US over? Some, of course, but very few. The remainder know that, win or lose, you gotta move on. See also the IRA peace process, something closer to my heart. Jerry Adams never said, "I'm sorry for all the people who under my authority were tortured and/or bombed, and I'm sorry to all their families." Nor has Britain hung its head in shame for its own bloody and subversive responses. The Good Friday agreements were instead an approach of, "Even if we don't love each other, and even if we each think the other side deserved all the shit we gave it, let's now just all try to get along."
And it mostly worked.
I think only strawmen are panicking so far?
The American electronics industry from Bell Labs to HP was absolutely awesome.
Then short-termism happened, where everyone at the top did just enough to make themselves and their kids rich.
I'd rather see nuclear energy than reliance on oil, but humans have managed to fuck it up on many occasions.
Everything can be made 100% safe in theory, and any disaster can be optmally managed in theory, but in practice every system is designed and implemented by humans, and this must be taken into account at every stage of, well, everything.
Nuclear power must be managed carefully in the interests of the people, IOW strong independent oversight to the exclusion of both unaccountable stagnation (Chernobyl) and regulatory capture (Tepco).
tl;dr Your two choices are balance and destruction.
Centralise it all, and you'll end up with one massive monolithic corrupt power structure.
Leave it to the market, and each entity will abuse every other in the quest for profit.
Stringently regulate a marketplace in the interests of the country, and everyone except the megalomaniacs and the stupid Is happy.
Seriously, why not?
*All* BIOSes have "proprietary bits" in the sense of offering services peculiar to that brand, and many of the older INTs were just de facto standardised - unique features weren't supported as often as ubiquitous features, because that just meant more work for the OS designer. I've got systems sitting around back to an IBM AT, and have certainly wasted way too much time fiddling with the idiosyncracies of old systems!
But trying to convince manufacturers of an existing system to add a particular feature which is bound to piss off the users is harder than trying to incorporate a feature to a new standard.
The
Onion
Router.
It may have been lowercased in recent years, but all-caps is more informative.
...and you have something on EVERYONE, in advance.
Then regularly select people at random, to keep the rest of the population in fear.
And specifically target any inconveniences.
"Terror" worked as an excuse for a while, but then with all the Manning etc. revelations, people realised that war on a military strategy was just a bit of clever spin.
Now we're onto the child porn angle, which easier as both the hawks and the pacifists can be seduced into a think-of-the-children argument. Never mind that driving the producers of child sex abuse images further underground is the worst possible thing - I say that such *evidence* of child sex abuse should be out in the open, so that humans are fully exposed to its horror and demand that resources are focussed on the abusers, i.e. those who actually force children to pose or to have sex with them.
Lots of people are titillated by all sorts of exploitation right up to gore, but we don't censor all those images because we pretend that there's something uniquely sacred about the innocence of a child. Well, there's nothing "sacred" about anything except in the imagination of humans.
...stop using a system developed and partly sanctioned by the US military if you want actually want to preserve your privacy. Actually, lack of privacy is a social problem, alland technical solutions are based simply on not your doing anything important enough for someone to engage in an arms race with you (which you will lose).
If you want privacy, you need to have exclusive control of a great deal of the network and intermediate nodes, plus the exact content of the traffic. And then you need to make sure that merely the raw content isn't a giveaway. Otherwise stochastic methods will attack all of the above and identify who you are, before an exploit's even been planted on your home machine.
Or foster a society that refuses to allocate the resources to fuck you over. Remember, anyone can be taught skills - but values are much harder to instil.
Of course, paedophiles are ONLY attracted to children, and all heterosexual men are rapists because they cannot resist the urge to fuck every woman regardless of consent.
I'm bisexual, but I've managed to go several decades without ONCE having any sexual contact with my own gender. Think about this.
It interests me from a legal PoV that what you said is actually illegal ("glorifying" terrorism) in the UK, but it's still wrong. al Qaeda is a disaffected US paramilitary branch, like a guy who was fired from his job and goes back to the office to throw shit around a bit. Their world-police philosophy is All American.
Confuses paedophiles, people who duplicate images, and people who abuse children.
Well done. UK government could do with more people like you to build their Great Firewall (remember when that was a thing only used in reference to China?).
1. "EFI" has been deprecated for over 7 years, champ. UEFI was just a renaming to reflect the fact that it was no longer Intel's pet project but would be maintained by a consortium (U=Unified under the UEFI Forum);
2. The UEFI Forum doesn't exist to plot evil and make impotent nerds like you angry, but to develop the whole UEFI specification;
3. The secure boot bollocks in UEFI is optional. Of course there must be a chain of loaded binary verification for it to be meaningful - what else did you expect?
4. If you think UEFI is overly complex, you should try writing a 16 bit subsystem. And a PC BIOS is only "flexible" in the sense that basic secondary storage/network /system stuff was de facto standardised ages ago and for everything else someone will have written a driver to make the appropriate random INTs;
5. "All we need is a BIOS option to permit the OS to flash into firmware" - I think you've lost the plot here completely, champ, but you appear worried about someone manually typing in a key wrongly while not having a problem with a "flash random user code to firmware" BIOS option.
1) "Fan" is neutral, while "fanboy" and "fangirl" are derogatory, reflecting the immaturity of the person to whom the label is being applied. "Fan" would have conveyed my message incompletely;
2) It is not "misogynist" to have chosen "fangirls", just as it would not have been misandrist to choose "fanboys". This notwithstanding, the habit of arbitrarily choosing male nouns/pronouns is far more of a problem in writing than that of choosing female nouns/pronouns. "He/she" is clumsy, so mix 'em, I say;
3) Not sure why you're talking about "man up", although I've always understood it to mean "don't act like a boy" rather than "don't act like a woman". "Woman up!" will also do, though it would be odd to say that to a man, because they don't identify as a woman. And, like the old saying goes, better to grow a vagina than a pair of balls, because balls are weak and sensitive, whereas vaginas can take a pounding.
As an aside, I have spent the last few months assisting someone who is writing a PhD thesis on the use of language related to mental health, and one of the important lessons which has come out is the extent to which particular groups (often but not always with good intentions) like to police language. In attaching unique derogatory meanings to words or phrases, they marginalise the groups they purport to help by painting a particular individual as the frequent target of insult/stigma when usually no attack is being made. Language is rather more complex than "that word always conveys that meaning so STOP USING IT NOW I SAY".
Misogynous? *scratches head*
Ooh, wait, is it "fangirls"? I had the option of "fanboys" or "fangirls", and I guess you're arguing that using feminine rather than masculine nouns when gender is irrelevant is misogyny? In your world, men the norm, and women are the special case, right? Sorry, bud, you've just drawn back the curtain to your own prejudiced thinking.