The thing is, Bitcoin doesn't HAVE to amount to anything.
You really think that Snapchat is a $2bn business? Bollocks. Same as every other IPO.
The trick is to get in while it's cheap, and out while it's expensive, before it collapses. It can collapse or not. That's not the question. The question is: If you used your brain, could you have made lots of money? And the answer is Yes. At one point there were Bitcoin faucets giving out 0.01's of a Bitcoin for free. They would be worth $4 each now.
And for what? Doing nothing. No, you don't even have to mine. And if you put in a few pounds like I did a year or so again, I've seen that investment double-and-a-bit in that time (even if you don't include the Humble Bundles I bought with Bitcoin out of my wallet).
The thing about Bitcoin is that while every say "it's failed" for years on end, others are quietly building up a stash worth a fortune. It's only a definition of "failed" if you didn't use it to your advantage, apparently.
Why do humans need real-time video communication on Mars? It won't be real-time. Mars is 3 light-minutes away from Earth. The best we can hope for is a 6 minute lag between you asking a question and getting an answer.
And if you're going to have a six-minute lag, pretty much the bandwidth is irrelevant. It might as well be by the cheapest way possible, i.e. audio only with the occasional static picture for the "What the hell is this in the microscope?" questions.
The sheer bandwidth is also the problem. At 6 minute latencies, you're basically introducing more and more "buffers" to ensure correct data transmission. You won't know if what you sent was received properly until six minutes later. So you have to store AT LEAST six minutes of data (more likely lots more as you will have to retransmit).
The more bandwidth you wish to buffer, the larger storage that six minutes costs you. Six minutes of audio is nothing. A few hundred Kb. Six minutes of video is more. Six minutes of HD video is more again. And so on. And everything that you store / forward costs BIG money over interplanetary scales - from the broadcasting station itself (which can't reasonably ever be upgraded) to the DSN satellies around Mars to the receiving stations on Earth, and the more you send and the more you store and the faster you want to do it, the more it costs EVERYWHERE.
And, as you state, there is NO scientific value in this. So until humans are on the planet, it's really moot. But once they are there, HD video is the least of their concerns.
This is probably why you're not Director of Planetary Exploration at NASA, by the way.
It's responded with "No Comment" like it has for just about every media outlet that has ever asked it.
It might even be legally bound to reply to "press enquiries", in whatever form. I'm pretty sure if I wrote them a letter, they would reply. Most likely with a similar response.
Just because they're spies does not mean they don't have a press office and/or a secretary who just fobs off anyone who asks. Hell, you can get replies from Santa if you post them in a Royal Mail postbox (even if you don't address the letter, but just put "To Santa" and have a return address!).
A response means nothing. The response given means nothing (it literally means "I have received your letter. I have no response").
Seriously, my PC could handle that now. It's hardly a "demanding" case. Especially with boxes, which are quite easily to simulate physically.
Hell, the nVidia and GPU demos that I've seen do the equivalent with thousands of boxes - maybe not as pretty but they are unoptimised demos.
Just because your console is crap doesn't mean that farming it out as a thin-client will work - somewhere there still has to be the horsepower to do the job, and thus we're still paying for it.
Stop this junk where you want to find a reason to run the game off of the home console (and thus control piracy). Farming out data / video is a TERRIBLE idea. OnLive went bust trying to prove it. And yet every year, GPU's get cheaper and do more.
If you want to have a "killer" feature in the next-gen consoles, it's not thousands-of-boxes. It's going to be freedom (e.g. SetamBoxes, etc.).
There's a point at which administration costs more than non-enforcement. Whatever limit you select, or whatever criteria you choose, you will spend more time determining if something is illegal or not than you'll ever "save" compared to the law of averages.
Fact is, dog-owners are doing more damage to the environment than all of the above, but we don't regulate them on the same basis that they should be more harshly "punished" for owning a meat-eating pet (it's technically worse than owning several huge petrol-guzzling 4x4's).
The London Smoke Free Zone works the same (if you ever hear anyone complain about London "smog", like my Italian friends, tell them they are only about a century out). You have an area, inside which there is a limit on what an individual chimney/fire can put out. But yet you can burn any amount of garden waste you like, outside, in the open air, in any kind of controlled fire.
To cater for all the idiosyncrasies and enforce the law, you have to make it simple. Laws that are too complex are too easy to avoid, argue against, and have the police believe they are practically unenforceable. A person who WANTS to cause more damage and yet stay within the law will always find a way to do it.
Which is why every home I've ever lived in or moved into doesn't do that? And hasn't for years.
You have on-demand boilers these days. The days of "Economy 7" (in the UK) and stored hot water are long gone. They went as soon as we started to worry about all the energy we're pissing away by doing that.
My house doesn't even have a water tank - the boiler is on the ground floor fed by water pressure, and the hot water / radiators are pumped from the boiler directly when they are required (and at no other times).
Hell, my boiler has a "pre-heat" option that keeps a couple of litres of water warm for the hot-water taps if you really want that. I turn it off - it's a waste of energy for no real benefit. The fact that it's an option tells you that 50% of people with those boilers probably do too.
I've ripped out more old, unused hot water storage tanks from houses than I've ever seen in active use. Dunno what country you live in (gallons and Fahrenheit might give that away) but in the UK, stored hot water tanks are old-hat and have been since I was a kid. I've never lived in a house that had one (and thus have never heard "You've used up all the hot water!").
However the problem still exists the second you scale up.
The problem, as always, is that's it not "just a battery", but "battery with charger with load monitor with safety protection with replacement batteries every few years", which greatly adds to the cost.
If it was easy to store electricity efficiently, we wouldn't need all this "always-on" peak demand power generation. We'd just store everything generated at night already and then release it the next day.
Fact is, as soon as you get into storing electricity, you're into massive efficiency drops.
Please tell me the dollar value of, say, a sword from Warcraft. Or a Steam Trading Card. Or a TF2 item.
It's EXACTLY the same - a virtual item gains "value" from the amount others are willing to pay for it. Enough people like that makes a market, and the item a commodity.
Hell, we deal in "frozen concentrated orange juice futures" in the "real" world of stock markets, I see no reason that Bitcoin is any different.
There can only ever be X amount of BitCoin. Like there are only one thousand "foil" cards in a trading set in the world, or whatever, or only 5 golden tickets in your Wonka Bars. Scarcity and demand create a value that far exceeds what you might be personally willing to pay.
And like everything else in real life or virtual, you can make money using Bitcoin without ever using it as a currency. I put £20 into Bitcoin a few months ago. At one point it was worth £15. Now it's worth £30. If you know how to play that market, you can make money without ever buying a single "real" product with the currency.
I bought some Humble Bundles with the "interest" that accrued through me doing absolutely-bugger-all. I don't "mine", and CPU mining is dead now as the Bitcoin protocol ensures that supply and demand balance by making Bitcoins "rarer" and harder to find as time goes on, so that whole side of it is practically irrelevant to the casual user.
Sure, you can scam people on it. Sure, you can lose money. But you can also use it like any other commodity. My Steam Wallet has ZERO value outside of Steam. My TF2 items are given to me for free (I don't buy them). But at some point I am able to carefully watch prices, track various commodities, come out with a "virtual" profit that I can them use to buy free games. Since the Steam Trading Card Beta began, I've had about £50 worth of free games on my single, 10-year-old Steam account, just by leaving games running in the background and then trading the cards / items I got from that. (Hell, I made £10 in Halloween items in TF2 alone this year, now I know what I'm doing and what websites to trade various things on).
People who instantly leap on the "it's a scam" line are liable to get scammed in real life - because they just don't understand that it's nothing more than legal trade in commodity (admittedly there's illegal trade as well, same as everything else from stolen WoW accounts to cloned virtual items, etc.) and is subject to the exact same "rules" as your real money.
It can collapse. It can collapse because of fraud. So did the Zimbabwean currency, if you remember. I think I'd rather have had my money in BitCoin than Zimbabwe any day. But that's just the same as everything else involving money - a balance of risk versus reward on a simple numbers game.
However the test used in the patent systems worldwide tends to be along the lines:
"to one skilled in the art".
i.e. if it's blindingly obvious to someone who does similar work all day long, professionally, every day, then it shouldn't actually be patentable at all.
I can reliably inform you that a Ford Mondeo 1.8 petrol, built in the late 90's, is more than capable of going 132mph on the Autobahn, without even being a boy-racer about it
I chickened out because it was such an old car and such a stupid speed to be doing in it, but in fact I hadn't noticed it creeping up that far as I was concentrating so much on the road ahead - which was perfectly flat, straight and empty for many miles at the time. If you were to take it to the "redline" on the revmeter, you could have gone more than 132 easily.
But over the lifetime of any average, runtime should outweigh compile time by orders of magnitude.
Otherwise, honestly, why bother to write the program efficiently at all?
And if you want to decrease compile times, it's easy - throw more machines and more power at the job. If you want to decrease runtime, then ALL of your users have to do that.
Honestly, if your compile times are that much, and that much of a burden, you need to upgrade, and you also need to modularise your code more. The fact is that most of that compile time isn't actually needed for 90% of compiles unless your code is very crap.
It's chance. If you buy a thousand machines, chances are a few of them will ARRIVE with a duff hard disk.
I'm a pedant with my own hardware and don't like to subject it to the slightest unnecessary heat/movement/stress but I still have had failures, from back in the days of 40Mb hard drives up to newer ones.
It's just the way things are. Some people are lucky. Some assign it to superstitions about how they arrange their drives, what manufacturer they use or whatever. Fact is, every now and then one will go wrong.
And the problem with hard drives is that, unlike most other components of a computer, you will REMEMBER when it stops working, even if you have adequate backups. I've done any amount of laptop hinges so I treat them as fragile items, but I don't handle hard drives especially carelessly any more. When the drive goes, it will cost me more in time and effort than anything else.
And for good reason. That someone wants to take you through some dramatic rigmarole means nothing. You can't "use" them in the UK, for anything. Using the data from them is like saying you don't hire people who are Sagittarians, and would be treated the same way (i.e. unfair hiring practices, constructive dismissal, etc.)
So it's actually the WORST device in the world to use then.
Because the people who you don't want to get into the job, the ones who know that it's a load of baloney and any idiot can "pass" the test, will. And the people who are innocent but have that "guilty fear" that comes with natural innocence will "fail".
I'm sorry, but in my country, I'd laugh at you if you asked me to take one. And I'd probably be able to get you into the papers tomorrow in the funny section too, just to show you up. It's just that hilarious a concept. But then, to my knowledge, outside of very, very, very restricted professions we don't have work-prescribed drug testing or any of the other shit either (I don't do drugs, never have, but just the CONCEPT of someone demanding I take a drug test to work somewhere? Fuck off. And I work in education). When did your boss get to control your life?
And for a job in a BANK? FFS. The US must be much more stupid than I suspected.
Theft is "intention to permanently deprive". Thus, if you intend to do it, quite possibly. However there are issues of criminal damage on the part of the police if you are innocent (same as if they ram someone off the road but got the wrong car).
Also, to answer another post, if the police kick in your door they have to make it good. Especially if you're innocent (yes, you could argue for the cost of it even if you were guilty but you'd have to have good reason, i.e. they didn't correctly call "Police", or warn you, or whatever). If they take your property, they are not allowed to wipe the drives unless you had something illegal on them (that's again criminal damage). If they did, you can sue for compensation. The whole "can the police make you delete photos" debacle clarified that issue quite well. No, they can't. It's not their property. But if the photos are illegal, they can confiscate them (which would eventually include deletion if you were guilty) but they can't "damage" them or delete them until they are brought before a court (that's basically destruction of evidence) and they can't make YOU do it either (again, without a court agreeing in your specific case). They can request it quite forcefully but if they make you do it, it's illegal. Same for any data on confiscated items.
However, you are not entitled to a lot of things like getting your data back immediately even if it's business-critical data when the PC is confiscated. Tough, basically. You can try to sue for compensation later if you can prove the value of that data and that they absolutely did not have to confiscate that PC (which is almost impossible, because they have a legal right/requirement to gather evidence).
Basically, if you're left out-of-pocket as a result of their actions, because they were in error (you didn't do the crime, the goods were confiscated illegally, etc.) you can sue for compensation. Otherwise, they have to return what they confiscated in the condition it was taken or, again, you can sue for compensation.
It might take years, of course, and not be worth the hassle but you don't avoid because it might be hassle - if you think you were wronged according to the letter of the law, then pursue it relentlessly until a judge tells you otherwise.
The courts issued a order. That's about the ultimate legal requirement to do something.
And the ISP's did protest at first and fought the first orders in court. They failed, and appealed. The court still issued the orders. Since then, the ISP's have a legal requirement to carry out the orders.
The ISP's have done everything they can and did not want to co-operate. And there's some dubious legal theory going on (for a start, the "big six" ISP's are the only ones that are required to block things, while anyone smaller doesn't even get involved and isn't required to do anything at all). But that has to be turned over in court at great expense because the legal decision has already been made.
Sure, we could fight it more, but it's hard to justify why you need to facilitate access to illegal content.
Did we wade because we lived near water, or did we live near water because we could wade?
And the answer is, of course: Yes. To both. Probably. At the same time. And neither one really coming "first".
And we KNOW that we came from the water originally. Everything did, if you go back far enough. So was it a hangover from our aquatic genes, or was it us re-developing the same things later on? And again, the answer is "Yes. Probably."
Giant noisy sucking arms spewing out nearly a hundred decibels of unnatural noise, including in the frequencies that we can't hear but cats are very sensitive to, which starts up suddenly, chases them around the house when they hide, which their "alpha" owner tries to wrest control over but which ends up tugging them around the house chasing after the cat, and which if they get too near tries to swallow their tail.
Yeah. Must be evolution about a snake-fear... And they're scared of your car starting up while they're inside the engine because cats evolved from animals that got swallowed by bellowing mammoths with whirling stomach parts...
Given the myriad other hazards, and billions of other reasons that stereoscopic vision in hunter-animals evolved, the answer is pretty much No.
This is why it's controversial. It's "true" while also being absolute bollocks. It's like saying that without lead-acid batteries, cars wouldn't have evolved as they have. Well, no. But it doesn't mean that without lead-acid batteries cars couldn't have existed or anything like that.
P.S. The "wading in water made man stand upright" is just as controversial because, although it may be a FACTOR, the impact of that factor is the crucial question. It may well be zero. It may well be quite a lot. But chances are that it's such a minuscule factor that it's not worth spouting off about compared to thousands of other factors.
Evolution is not a case of "jumping off this cliff made birds suddenly grow wings". There are billions of factors over millions of years and hundreds of thousands of generations that all nudge towards small changes which impact upon the previous and next changes.
As such, this suggestion is almost complete bollocks, while being - on the surface - based on truthful data. But "snake-like predators might possibly have contributed a tiny bit to millions of years of our evolution along with million of other factors" isn't a headline that sells papers to journals.
Slashdot Mirror
"Find and block misleading ads"
Why is this our job?
Why do you not know what's being advertised on your own website?
Why do you run a business based on something you can't control?
Why don't YOU go through your ads and start removing the misleading crap?
The thing is, Bitcoin doesn't HAVE to amount to anything.
You really think that Snapchat is a $2bn business? Bollocks. Same as every other IPO.
The trick is to get in while it's cheap, and out while it's expensive, before it collapses. It can collapse or not. That's not the question. The question is: If you used your brain, could you have made lots of money? And the answer is Yes. At one point there were Bitcoin faucets giving out 0.01's of a Bitcoin for free. They would be worth $4 each now.
And for what? Doing nothing. No, you don't even have to mine. And if you put in a few pounds like I did a year or so again, I've seen that investment double-and-a-bit in that time (even if you don't include the Humble Bundles I bought with Bitcoin out of my wallet).
The thing about Bitcoin is that while every say "it's failed" for years on end, others are quietly building up a stash worth a fortune. It's only a definition of "failed" if you didn't use it to your advantage, apparently.
I do dream bigger.
I'd rather send a bunch more people up there and fuck the real-time video and bandwidth.
We're supposed to be colonising, not annexing Facebook.
Hell, that's better than some outlying regions of Scotland have got for their "broadband" Internet connections.
Why do humans need real-time video communication on Mars? It won't be real-time. Mars is 3 light-minutes away from Earth. The best we can hope for is a 6 minute lag between you asking a question and getting an answer.
And if you're going to have a six-minute lag, pretty much the bandwidth is irrelevant. It might as well be by the cheapest way possible, i.e. audio only with the occasional static picture for the "What the hell is this in the microscope?" questions.
The sheer bandwidth is also the problem. At 6 minute latencies, you're basically introducing more and more "buffers" to ensure correct data transmission. You won't know if what you sent was received properly until six minutes later. So you have to store AT LEAST six minutes of data (more likely lots more as you will have to retransmit).
The more bandwidth you wish to buffer, the larger storage that six minutes costs you. Six minutes of audio is nothing. A few hundred Kb. Six minutes of video is more. Six minutes of HD video is more again. And so on. And everything that you store / forward costs BIG money over interplanetary scales - from the broadcasting station itself (which can't reasonably ever be upgraded) to the DSN satellies around Mars to the receiving stations on Earth, and the more you send and the more you store and the faster you want to do it, the more it costs EVERYWHERE.
And, as you state, there is NO scientific value in this. So until humans are on the planet, it's really moot. But once they are there, HD video is the least of their concerns.
This is probably why you're not Director of Planetary Exploration at NASA, by the way.
Er... it hasn't.
It's responded with "No Comment" like it has for just about every media outlet that has ever asked it.
It might even be legally bound to reply to "press enquiries", in whatever form. I'm pretty sure if I wrote them a letter, they would reply. Most likely with a similar response.
Just because they're spies does not mean they don't have a press office and/or a secretary who just fobs off anyone who asks. Hell, you can get replies from Santa if you post them in a Royal Mail postbox (even if you don't address the letter, but just put "To Santa" and have a return address!).
A response means nothing. The response given means nothing (it literally means "I have received your letter. I have no response").
Call me back when there's a story.
When they enable IPv6 and stop publishing IPv6 stories, most probably.
The example video is, well, just pathetic.
Seriously, my PC could handle that now. It's hardly a "demanding" case. Especially with boxes, which are quite easily to simulate physically.
Hell, the nVidia and GPU demos that I've seen do the equivalent with thousands of boxes - maybe not as pretty but they are unoptimised demos.
Just because your console is crap doesn't mean that farming it out as a thin-client will work - somewhere there still has to be the horsepower to do the job, and thus we're still paying for it.
Stop this junk where you want to find a reason to run the game off of the home console (and thus control piracy). Farming out data / video is a TERRIBLE idea. OnLive went bust trying to prove it. And yet every year, GPU's get cheaper and do more.
If you want to have a "killer" feature in the next-gen consoles, it's not thousands-of-boxes. It's going to be freedom (e.g. SetamBoxes, etc.).
There's a point at which administration costs more than non-enforcement. Whatever limit you select, or whatever criteria you choose, you will spend more time determining if something is illegal or not than you'll ever "save" compared to the law of averages.
Fact is, dog-owners are doing more damage to the environment than all of the above, but we don't regulate them on the same basis that they should be more harshly "punished" for owning a meat-eating pet (it's technically worse than owning several huge petrol-guzzling 4x4's).
The London Smoke Free Zone works the same (if you ever hear anyone complain about London "smog", like my Italian friends, tell them they are only about a century out). You have an area, inside which there is a limit on what an individual chimney/fire can put out. But yet you can burn any amount of garden waste you like, outside, in the open air, in any kind of controlled fire.
To cater for all the idiosyncrasies and enforce the law, you have to make it simple. Laws that are too complex are too easy to avoid, argue against, and have the police believe they are practically unenforceable. A person who WANTS to cause more damage and yet stay within the law will always find a way to do it.
Er... I agree?
Which is why every home I've ever lived in or moved into doesn't do that? And hasn't for years.
You have on-demand boilers these days. The days of "Economy 7" (in the UK) and stored hot water are long gone. They went as soon as we started to worry about all the energy we're pissing away by doing that.
My house doesn't even have a water tank - the boiler is on the ground floor fed by water pressure, and the hot water / radiators are pumped from the boiler directly when they are required (and at no other times).
Hell, my boiler has a "pre-heat" option that keeps a couple of litres of water warm for the hot-water taps if you really want that. I turn it off - it's a waste of energy for no real benefit. The fact that it's an option tells you that 50% of people with those boilers probably do too.
I've ripped out more old, unused hot water storage tanks from houses than I've ever seen in active use. Dunno what country you live in (gallons and Fahrenheit might give that away) but in the UK, stored hot water tanks are old-hat and have been since I was a kid. I've never lived in a house that had one (and thus have never heard "You've used up all the hot water!").
That's only a few car batteries.
However the problem still exists the second you scale up.
The problem, as always, is that's it not "just a battery", but "battery with charger with load monitor with safety protection with replacement batteries every few years", which greatly adds to the cost.
If it was easy to store electricity efficiently, we wouldn't need all this "always-on" peak demand power generation. We'd just store everything generated at night already and then release it the next day.
Fact is, as soon as you get into storing electricity, you're into massive efficiency drops.
For the benefit of non-UK residents:
Milton Keynes is the butt of every joke going.
You could put free money in it, and people would still drive around it to avoid it.
Please tell me the dollar value of, say, a sword from Warcraft. Or a Steam Trading Card. Or a TF2 item.
It's EXACTLY the same - a virtual item gains "value" from the amount others are willing to pay for it. Enough people like that makes a market, and the item a commodity.
Hell, we deal in "frozen concentrated orange juice futures" in the "real" world of stock markets, I see no reason that Bitcoin is any different.
There can only ever be X amount of BitCoin. Like there are only one thousand "foil" cards in a trading set in the world, or whatever, or only 5 golden tickets in your Wonka Bars. Scarcity and demand create a value that far exceeds what you might be personally willing to pay.
And like everything else in real life or virtual, you can make money using Bitcoin without ever using it as a currency. I put £20 into Bitcoin a few months ago. At one point it was worth £15. Now it's worth £30. If you know how to play that market, you can make money without ever buying a single "real" product with the currency.
I bought some Humble Bundles with the "interest" that accrued through me doing absolutely-bugger-all. I don't "mine", and CPU mining is dead now as the Bitcoin protocol ensures that supply and demand balance by making Bitcoins "rarer" and harder to find as time goes on, so that whole side of it is practically irrelevant to the casual user.
Sure, you can scam people on it. Sure, you can lose money. But you can also use it like any other commodity. My Steam Wallet has ZERO value outside of Steam. My TF2 items are given to me for free (I don't buy them). But at some point I am able to carefully watch prices, track various commodities, come out with a "virtual" profit that I can them use to buy free games. Since the Steam Trading Card Beta began, I've had about £50 worth of free games on my single, 10-year-old Steam account, just by leaving games running in the background and then trading the cards / items I got from that. (Hell, I made £10 in Halloween items in TF2 alone this year, now I know what I'm doing and what websites to trade various things on).
People who instantly leap on the "it's a scam" line are liable to get scammed in real life - because they just don't understand that it's nothing more than legal trade in commodity (admittedly there's illegal trade as well, same as everything else from stolen WoW accounts to cloned virtual items, etc.) and is subject to the exact same "rules" as your real money.
It can collapse. It can collapse because of fraud. So did the Zimbabwean currency, if you remember. I think I'd rather have had my money in BitCoin than Zimbabwe any day. But that's just the same as everything else involving money - a balance of risk versus reward on a simple numbers game.
However the test used in the patent systems worldwide tends to be along the lines:
"to one skilled in the art".
i.e. if it's blindingly obvious to someone who does similar work all day long, professionally, every day, then it shouldn't actually be patentable at all.
I can reliably inform you that a Ford Mondeo 1.8 petrol, built in the late 90's, is more than capable of going 132mph on the Autobahn, without even being a boy-racer about it
I chickened out because it was such an old car and such a stupid speed to be doing in it, but in fact I hadn't noticed it creeping up that far as I was concentrating so much on the road ahead - which was perfectly flat, straight and empty for many miles at the time. If you were to take it to the "redline" on the revmeter, you could have gone more than 132 easily.
But over the lifetime of any average, runtime should outweigh compile time by orders of magnitude.
Otherwise, honestly, why bother to write the program efficiently at all?
And if you want to decrease compile times, it's easy - throw more machines and more power at the job. If you want to decrease runtime, then ALL of your users have to do that.
Honestly, if your compile times are that much, and that much of a burden, you need to upgrade, and you also need to modularise your code more. The fact is that most of that compile time isn't actually needed for 90% of compiles unless your code is very crap.
It's chance. If you buy a thousand machines, chances are a few of them will ARRIVE with a duff hard disk.
I'm a pedant with my own hardware and don't like to subject it to the slightest unnecessary heat/movement/stress but I still have had failures, from back in the days of 40Mb hard drives up to newer ones.
It's just the way things are. Some people are lucky. Some assign it to superstitions about how they arrange their drives, what manufacturer they use or whatever. Fact is, every now and then one will go wrong.
And the problem with hard drives is that, unlike most other components of a computer, you will REMEMBER when it stops working, even if you have adequate backups. I've done any amount of laptop hinges so I treat them as fragile items, but I don't handle hard drives especially carelessly any more. When the drive goes, it will cost me more in time and effort than anything else.
In the UK: "Inadmissible in court"
And for good reason. That someone wants to take you through some dramatic rigmarole means nothing. You can't "use" them in the UK, for anything. Using the data from them is like saying you don't hire people who are Sagittarians, and would be treated the same way (i.e. unfair hiring practices, constructive dismissal, etc.)
So it's actually the WORST device in the world to use then.
Because the people who you don't want to get into the job, the ones who know that it's a load of baloney and any idiot can "pass" the test, will. And the people who are innocent but have that "guilty fear" that comes with natural innocence will "fail".
I'm sorry, but in my country, I'd laugh at you if you asked me to take one. And I'd probably be able to get you into the papers tomorrow in the funny section too, just to show you up. It's just that hilarious a concept. But then, to my knowledge, outside of very, very, very restricted professions we don't have work-prescribed drug testing or any of the other shit either (I don't do drugs, never have, but just the CONCEPT of someone demanding I take a drug test to work somewhere? Fuck off. And I work in education). When did your boss get to control your life?
And for a job in a BANK? FFS. The US must be much more stupid than I suspected.
Despite the fact that most of the world knows this, there's still one country that thinks such things can be admissible in court.
Theft is "intention to permanently deprive". Thus, if you intend to do it, quite possibly. However there are issues of criminal damage on the part of the police if you are innocent (same as if they ram someone off the road but got the wrong car).
Also, to answer another post, if the police kick in your door they have to make it good. Especially if you're innocent (yes, you could argue for the cost of it even if you were guilty but you'd have to have good reason, i.e. they didn't correctly call "Police", or warn you, or whatever). If they take your property, they are not allowed to wipe the drives unless you had something illegal on them (that's again criminal damage). If they did, you can sue for compensation. The whole "can the police make you delete photos" debacle clarified that issue quite well. No, they can't. It's not their property. But if the photos are illegal, they can confiscate them (which would eventually include deletion if you were guilty) but they can't "damage" them or delete them until they are brought before a court (that's basically destruction of evidence) and they can't make YOU do it either (again, without a court agreeing in your specific case). They can request it quite forcefully but if they make you do it, it's illegal. Same for any data on confiscated items.
However, you are not entitled to a lot of things like getting your data back immediately even if it's business-critical data when the PC is confiscated. Tough, basically. You can try to sue for compensation later if you can prove the value of that data and that they absolutely did not have to confiscate that PC (which is almost impossible, because they have a legal right/requirement to gather evidence).
Basically, if you're left out-of-pocket as a result of their actions, because they were in error (you didn't do the crime, the goods were confiscated illegally, etc.) you can sue for compensation. Otherwise, they have to return what they confiscated in the condition it was taken or, again, you can sue for compensation.
It might take years, of course, and not be worth the hassle but you don't avoid because it might be hassle - if you think you were wronged according to the letter of the law, then pursue it relentlessly until a judge tells you otherwise.
The courts issued a order. That's about the ultimate legal requirement to do something.
And the ISP's did protest at first and fought the first orders in court. They failed, and appealed. The court still issued the orders. Since then, the ISP's have a legal requirement to carry out the orders.
The ISP's have done everything they can and did not want to co-operate. And there's some dubious legal theory going on (for a start, the "big six" ISP's are the only ones that are required to block things, while anyone smaller doesn't even get involved and isn't required to do anything at all). But that has to be turned over in court at great expense because the legal decision has already been made.
Sure, we could fight it more, but it's hard to justify why you need to facilitate access to illegal content.
And thus you get chicken-and-egg situations:
Did we wade because we lived near water, or did we live near water because we could wade?
And the answer is, of course: Yes. To both. Probably. At the same time. And neither one really coming "first".
And we KNOW that we came from the water originally. Everything did, if you go back far enough. So was it a hangover from our aquatic genes, or was it us re-developing the same things later on? And again, the answer is "Yes. Probably."
Giant noisy sucking arms spewing out nearly a hundred decibels of unnatural noise, including in the frequencies that we can't hear but cats are very sensitive to, which starts up suddenly, chases them around the house when they hide, which their "alpha" owner tries to wrest control over but which ends up tugging them around the house chasing after the cat, and which if they get too near tries to swallow their tail.
Yeah. Must be evolution about a snake-fear... And they're scared of your car starting up while they're inside the engine because cats evolved from animals that got swallowed by bellowing mammoths with whirling stomach parts...
Idiot.
The question is: Is it enough to be relevant?
Given the myriad other hazards, and billions of other reasons that stereoscopic vision in hunter-animals evolved, the answer is pretty much No.
This is why it's controversial. It's "true" while also being absolute bollocks. It's like saying that without lead-acid batteries, cars wouldn't have evolved as they have. Well, no. But it doesn't mean that without lead-acid batteries cars couldn't have existed or anything like that.
P.S. The "wading in water made man stand upright" is just as controversial because, although it may be a FACTOR, the impact of that factor is the crucial question. It may well be zero. It may well be quite a lot. But chances are that it's such a minuscule factor that it's not worth spouting off about compared to thousands of other factors.
Evolution is not a case of "jumping off this cliff made birds suddenly grow wings". There are billions of factors over millions of years and hundreds of thousands of generations that all nudge towards small changes which impact upon the previous and next changes.
As such, this suggestion is almost complete bollocks, while being - on the surface - based on truthful data. But "snake-like predators might possibly have contributed a tiny bit to millions of years of our evolution along with million of other factors" isn't a headline that sells papers to journals.