There was just a big case in the US where finding incidental criminal drug evidence while searching for weapons in pockets was ruled Ok, but that police couldn't trump up fraudulent claims after the fact that weapon searching was going on.
Prople were standing around, and there was no evidence police actually fealt a threat, quite a bit to the contrary, so there was no reason to search, so the search was illegal and so the drug evidence was thrown out.
Then there was the abysmal CNN news article soon after the horrible tsunami a few years back that declared "Global warming sea rise like a tsunami!"
In the fine print of the article halfway down, some scientist said rising seas could be as much as 30 feet, the same height as the tsunami, but over 100-300 years.
Ditto another article anout some tiny island nation sinking, nudge nudge, and near the bottom they admit it is due to local geology rather than rising sea.
Yes, and capitalism kept our shelves bursting with food and boom boxes and cars and, now, iPhones and Androids, while not-capitalism (communism, dictatorships, failed states) kept the shelves filled with air.
People have to be free and secure to create big enterprises withoit fear of having it taken, be it street thug, warlord, mafia, or kickback, a massive problem almost everywhere.
I've seen US union reps and politicians go to China in recent years, coming back declaring communism and central planning work! As if China opening up free markets, creating vast wealth and a giant middle class where 40 years of communism couldn't wasn't the biggest scientific repudiation of that odious system you could imagine.
That nobody has a general-purpose robot that can do housework is prima facie evidence such does not exist.
Yet if a genius were to produce one, a thousand patent scammers would crawl out of the woodwork. Nevermind that it's all in the software and the rest is just 80 year old animatronic-style hardware.
Then after that round of lawyers will come the slip-and-fall ambulance chasers. I can't imagine such a product surviving without a good black box that also records humans around it.
Bitcoin transactions are unobserved by government, and thus difficult to track to tax. It's like a Swiss bank account for everybody where transactions take place securely hidden from taxing eyes.
IIRC, editing posts was a trolling tool. People would make outrageous posts, get people to respond, then edit the post to something innocuous and make the responder look like an ass.
Actually, that sounds like fun. The real game for us trollers would be to craft an edit that makes the response look even sillier. Kind of like coming up with an insane Jeopardy question to a mild "answer", or like Johnny Carson's old Carnac the Magician routine.
The article actually goes out of the way to point out he's invested heavily in a company that brings inventions to market. He isn't some poor little retiree, he's reinvesting his money and it's drying up.
Still I wonder if he licensed the radio, and is now tied to a company that doesn't have to produce it.
As a side note, I bought a Freeplay radio, the spring one. It lasted a few weeks, then the plastic gears inside stripped. What cheapscares, I thought.
It puts primacy of power at a national level as the vastly overriding, important factor, when, in fact, it's the freedom people have to move around.
There are people upset at gerrymandering, even "well-meaning" gerrymandering that creates districts along highway corridors, because they dislike being placed in one nice little homogeneous pool "so you can elect your guy", sayeth those in power, who then sleep like a baby that night.
Something is also wrong if he has to be scared of karma hits for defending "the other side".
It's no longer a joke at slashdot. The metamod system is either impotent, or itself co-opted (nobody meta-downmodding downmods of "the other side") or both.
Thus does an online, mutually-reinforcing meme community drive out any rational discussion, thus giving themselves an even falser sense of security that their received wisdom is settled.
The meme as independent entity, which nobody "really believes in", has human actors as enforcement mechanisms in itself like enzymes and protiens in cells.
"What is thy bidding, my master, I mean, my meme?"
"What have the relatives done?" This is the same meme used to justify large inheritance taxes so certain people can plunder the dead guy.
"Follow the money."
In the case of copyrights, you have to have a post-death buffer of some years so the author can get maximum money out of it. Contracts will be for less if your stepping in front of a bus puts the publisher's investment at high risk.
> California Professors Unveil Proposal To Attack Asteroids With Lasers
Well, best get started now. They're pushing 10 years to get environmental approval to deepen certain shipping ports by 6 feet to accommodate the new supertanker size of the expanding Panama Canal. I can't even begin to imagine the paperwork for a laser 10x the size of the ISS.
Slashdot Mirror
There was just a big case in the US where finding incidental criminal drug evidence while searching for weapons in pockets was ruled Ok, but that police couldn't trump up fraudulent claims after the fact that weapon searching was going on.
Prople were standing around, and there was no evidence police actually fealt a threat, quite a bit to the contrary, so there was no reason to search, so the search was illegal and so the drug evidence was thrown out.
Which still have problems. Its the connectors, it's always the connectors. Dust works its way in their over years of vibration.
Making a connector that stops this and is still removable is a holy grail, still unacheived.
Then there was the abysmal CNN news article soon after the horrible tsunami a few years back that declared "Global warming sea rise like a tsunami!"
In the fine print of the article halfway down, some scientist said rising seas could be as much as 30 feet, the same height as the tsunami, but over 100-300 years.
Ditto another article anout some tiny island nation sinking, nudge nudge, and near the bottom they admit it is due to local geology rather than rising sea.
Even with GW, this is shameful reporting.
Yes, and capitalism kept our shelves bursting with food and boom boxes and cars and, now, iPhones and Androids, while not-capitalism (communism, dictatorships, failed states) kept the shelves filled with air.
People have to be free and secure to create big enterprises withoit fear of having it taken, be it street thug, warlord, mafia, or kickback, a massive problem almost everywhere.
I've seen US union reps and politicians go to China in recent years, coming back declaring communism and central planning work! As if China opening up free markets, creating vast wealth and a giant middle class where 40 years of communism couldn't wasn't the biggest scientific repudiation of that odious system you could imagine.
It's the free market that raises you out of dirt-floor poverty, with all its lumps, not 10,000 years of "government".
Ya ya, heard it all before. European governments declare they own the New World by Divine Right and guns.
We need a new frontier that abandons the sclerotic "old world", this time an actual proper world.
This is all useless blather. The center of empire shifted to the US 100 years ago, and is now shifting to Asia. Why? Freer trade.
Blather all you want, "...but still it moves."
I don't think Slashdot is the great hub you think it is. Every time I click a link here to somewhere else, the page never loads and is clearly broken.
That nobody has a general-purpose robot that can do housework is prima facie evidence such does not exist.
Yet if a genius were to produce one, a thousand patent scammers would crawl out of the woodwork. Nevermind that it's all in the software and the rest is just 80 year old animatronic-style hardware.
Then after that round of lawyers will come the slip-and-fall ambulance chasers. I can't imagine such a product surviving without a good black box that also records humans around it.
Shift to neutral will be ignored by the computer because some engineer decided it's more important to honor an acceleration request?!?!?!
Fire those engineers. You don't belong near safety-critical design.
Bitcoin transactions are unobserved by government, and thus difficult to track to tax. It's like a Swiss bank account for everybody where transactions take place securely hidden from taxing eyes.
For example:
Troll: Linux is a worthless piece of crap. I like Windows.
Sucker: No, you're a worthless piece of crap if you like windows.
After:
Troll My mom died 6 years ago today. She always liked flowers in her windows. Should I do that?
Sucker: No, you're a worthless piece of crap if you like windows.
IIRC, editing posts was a trolling tool. People would make outrageous posts, get people to respond, then edit the post to something innocuous and make the responder look like an ass.
Actually, that sounds like fun. The real game for us trollers would be to craft an edit that makes the response look even sillier. Kind of like coming up with an insane Jeopardy question to a mild "answer", or like Johnny Carson's old Carnac the Magician routine.
Neat!
Wait a minute. Has anyone seen Oprah lately?
Laws are theories. Laws are untested engineering. They should be treated as such.
If we do X, then Y will happen.
There should be followup with mandatory review. Hell, mandatory re-vote, with optional update or it expires.
The article actually goes out of the way to point out he's invested heavily in a company that brings inventions to market. He isn't some poor little retiree, he's reinvesting his money and it's drying up.
Still I wonder if he licensed the radio, and is now tied to a company that doesn't have to produce it.
As a side note, I bought a Freeplay radio, the spring one. It lasted a few weeks, then the plastic gears inside stripped. What cheapscares, I thought.
The container camp owners drive around to pump out your camper is similarly called the honey pot.
Fail. Why?
It puts primacy of power at a national level as the vastly overriding, important factor, when, in fact, it's the freedom people have to move around.
There are people upset at gerrymandering, even "well-meaning" gerrymandering that creates districts along highway corridors, because they dislike being placed in one nice little homogeneous pool "so you can elect your guy", sayeth those in power, who then sleep like a baby that night.
Something is also wrong if he has to be scared of karma hits for defending "the other side".
It's no longer a joke at slashdot. The metamod system is either impotent, or itself co-opted (nobody meta-downmodding downmods of "the other side") or both.
Thus does an online, mutually-reinforcing meme community drive out any rational discussion, thus giving themselves an even falser sense of security that their received wisdom is settled.
The meme as independent entity, which nobody "really believes in", has human actors as enforcement mechanisms in itself like enzymes and protiens in cells.
"What is thy bidding, my master, I mean, my meme?"
"What have the relatives done?" This is the same meme used to justify large inheritance taxes so certain people can plunder the dead guy.
"Follow the money."
In the case of copyrights, you have to have a post-death buffer of some years so the author can get maximum money out of it. Contracts will be for less if your stepping in front of a bus puts the publisher's investment at high risk.
Someone did a ray-traced video of Quake (not real time, of course) with people running around with multiple color sources and so on.
They estimated a real-time version would require a 30,000 GHz processor. Still, it looked awesome.
Elder Scrolls would fit in a small corner of Tera Online. I spent several hours once just riding up into the mountains outside a city once.
This. Combine it with the downmod system that gets misused to hide opinions some self-appointed people on the left disagree with, and presto!
A mechanically-enforced echo chamber for an online "social tribal community".
Who watches these watchmen who get bent out of shape at those who manipulate the media, except when it is themselves?
> California Professors Unveil Proposal To Attack Asteroids With Lasers
Well, best get started now. They're pushing 10 years to get environmental approval to deepen certain shipping ports by 6 feet to accommodate the new supertanker size of the expanding Panama Canal. I can't even begin to imagine the paperwork for a laser 10x the size of the ISS.
We are spending far more per person than we did in 1943, the height of World War II spending. And we aren't even in a major war.
A cutback to 2008 levels is politically infeasible, and would not even qualify as austerity in any reasonable sense of the word.
It's too easy to barf out the meme politicians wanna take gas masks away from firefighters.
You get what The People will buy into, memewise, which is akin to letting them decide what TV shows to watch.