Re:This raises some frightening questions
on
Battlefield Lasers
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· Score: 1
I would prefer that they spend money researching lasers as opposed to buying tanks. The laser research will give us civilians *some* technological advances, the tanks will not buy us shit.
OTOH, Congress is seriously talking about deployment which will not buy as much new tech, but still more then the tanks.
They should spend all the money researching the space plane so that they can cheaply launch all these new sats. when they are done. Yeah that's it!:)
Perhaps we could sell them cruise missles traveling at mock 16?
Re:Assault weapons are designed to wound.
on
Battlefield Lasers
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· Score: 1
Civilians do not let their armies use weapons which result in "wounds." We prefer body bags which get burried to blind people.
If your laser blinds people for a significant period of time a significant number of cases will be permenent. If you want temporary damage to large numbers of people you need to go with non-leathal bilogical weapons. An insect swarm might work if you can't get approval for bacteria.
Lasers are useful when you have a target that's far away and moving erratically enough that you can't fire slugs at it, but personal weapons are usually used at much shorter range.
Think big ass sniper rifle for special forces.
But people would buy em' for cool factor (and point and click mentality). Paper targets on a shooting range. Burning the dear's butt might be considered more humane. Heck, red neck laser tag: put on your anti-red gogles. Tag! It stung so you noticed!
You know ESR would buy one with his 35 mil.. er.. 35 cents.. from VA.
Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....
on
Battlefield Lasers
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· Score: 1
That all depends on how powerful a laser you were talking about, but I don't think they seriously want to zap tanks. That advantage of a laser is that it can be aimed and fired very quickly, so you use it to zap fast moving missles, shells, or air plains you don't use it to zap slow moving tanks.
If you did want to kill a tank with a laser for some reason you would use a very big one and melt it quickly or switch to gamma rays and just kill all the guys without hurting the tank. I could perhaps see sat based gamma ray beams for picking off specific personel behind enemy lines, but tanks are easy to kill with old tech to be worth the trouble.
The wonderful thing about a recession is that you can find good people to do almost anything. You may have to promote them when the recession is over, but you should be fine for a while.
You should have some Linux admins currently since Windows can not run a firewall to save it's market share. The IT staff will notice when the Linux people are getting promoted faster and they will all learn Linux. It's not really any harded then Windows.
Japan has just taken one great leap forward ethically and morally. Plus, Japan stands to reap huge profits as the boby boomers need some meds which will be comming only from Japan. I tend to invest heavily in biotech and I will be seriously looking at Japan's biotech industry.
Problem: The WTO is making China pass & inforce anti-piracy laws. Clearly, China dose not want to prevent people who can not afford Windows from using a computer.
Solution: The punishment for being caught running a pirated version of Windows will be taking a class (payed for out of your fines) on Linux or FreeBSD and using Linux or FreeBSD for one month. You will be free to "buy" a copy of Windows after one month. The same law could be applied to buisnesses and individuals.
I don't think China would have much trouble with Microsoft anymore if they passed such a law.
Why shouldn't they ship a naked PC? We ship naked PCs here. I'd suggest that shipping with Linux serves some more above board: People with no computer experence do not want to pay for a computer that dose not work. This way you can sell them something which dose everything except run the newest coolest game.. and they can pirate and install Windows when they pirate and install the game.
I would suspect that the "computer savviness" has a negitive impact on Linux use. A preloaded RedHat 7.1 is easier to use then Windows is to install (assuming you speak English). Remember, installing Windows involves countless reboots and confusing instillation of drivers which often do not work correctly. Indeed, you are sometimes better off not installing some drivers and uninstalling Windows drivers is often impossible for inexperenced users. I seem to recall that it took me half a month to find the *text *file* to edit to make Windows run with 1 GB of memory and AGP. You also must edit the registry to remove some of the crap your drivers force uppon you. Hell, my roomate's motherboard BIOS pops up a little broken uncloseable Windows program on boot up which you can not prevent without manually editing the CMOS!
If Linux fixes the lack of games and poor langauge support then you will see more Chinese stick with Linux simply because it will be easier to use once preloaded. Preloading and configuring a good release of Wine (rare) would help the game situation too, i.e. you should be able to just instert a StarCraft CD and click install.
Funny. The first thing permanent.com says is "It is a race against time, before biotechnology makes mankind extinct, or nanotechnology destroys Earth's biosphere, suddenly." It sounds to me like these guys are total loons.
No, you can get all kinds of things from the moon back to earth cheaply; a magnetic solar powered gun shooting things into the atlantic could be very profitable. The only real problem is getting materials to the moon.
No catching necissary. You just compute the trajectory and program the capsule to land 10 miles off the coast of the US or Europe. The only real problem is that the pod must be produced on the moon. This means you need some pretty advanced chem/bio-tech to make all the rubberish parts. Still, it could be cheaper to move material from the moon to NY/NJ then it would be to move things from some places on the earth; once you got the system really up and rolling.
CVodeWeavers has fucked this up. Codeweavers normal buisness MO is "Pay us to make shure your companies software works under Wine," i.e. you might DL a linux version with a built in Wine when you wen to the Plugin makers site.
I don't know why they are tring to charge end users for this product. Dose it handle ActiveX controls? That would be a lot more reasonable as ActiveX would be hard to do independently and Microsoft would not pay them to do it (to say the least). Hell, isn't Microsoft killing support for all plugins but ActiveX based stuff in XP anyway? It might be that this product may be too late to market to corperations, so they are just tring to get a little money out of casual users to recoup their investment.
First, the top of the screen will seriously mess up focus follows mouse. Second, pull-down menus will always be crap for efficency and top of the screen is generally going to be a pull-down.
Also, what level of experence was the article talking about. This critical piece of information seems suspiciously absent from the article. I think we know that an inexperenced user of a piece of software will find menus much more efficent, but very experenced use will find short-cuts more efficent (assuming the program is text oriented).
It is essentually inconcievable that a person who has used a keyboard short-cut 1000 times (long enough to learn it) could accomplish something quicker by removing their hand from the keyboard, place their hand on the mouse, selecting two distinct menu items (ala pull-down), and finally replacing their hand on the keyboard.. it's obsurd. Clearly, this situation could be reverse if the person was using a drawing program wich had all importent fuction out in the open (not it pull-downs), ala the Gimp.
Personally, I think you should just axe the pull-downs and click on the background to have a menu appear near your mouse. Placing menus on the top of the screen only solves the vertical position problem, but dose little for the horizontal, plus you have all the difficulty of "hitting the target" when you return your mouse to the application window afterwards.
Also, when the commands excede a serton level of complexity (i.e. use dialogs) then you should probably be interacting with them on a text based level, i.e. have a little mini-shellish programable subwindow, ala Autocad, Norton Commander, or Konqueror (execpt Konqueror's shell window is just bash, so you can not use it to browse the web). I mean lets face it when you have a dialog you probably have enough complexity that some users will want to script things.
Actually, one of the coolest ideas I have seen was to restrict the mouse to *only* cutting and pasting and then make the cutting and pasting efficent enough to simulate menus. The idea was the cutting and pasting is most of mouse use, so make it good at doing that one thing.
..the attacks still point out to me that civil liberties are a compramize. I'm not shure about very much any more as a result. It's easy to say "We should be willing to loose some people for freedom" when you are talking small bombings of a few school children, but nuclear, chemical, or bio weapons are diffrent story.
The one thing I'm shure about is that we must stop congress from taking away our civil liberties for *ineffective* meassures. Crypto restrictions would be ineffective since the terrorists have crypto anyway. Luggage searchs, police on planes, and maybe even extensive background checks when you buy a plane ticket are as unreasonable. (I'm required to identify myself when I drive a car or carry a gun because these activities threaten the lives of others.. perhaps riding on an air plane is not so diffrent.. I donno)
Hell, government sponcered assasinations might be effective.. They would have been unthinkable one week ago, but now I donno. There are many subtil issues.
The truth is that everything changed tuesday. I'm a card carring member of the ACLU, but I'm now advocating extencive background checks for flights and even fingerprint scanners (to prevent mindless beaurocrats from just slowing things to a crawl). Honestly, I would now support crypto backdoors if they would do any good.
Unfortunatly, crypto backdoors would be essentually useless and even counter productive. Bin Laden wil stil tack a layer of crypto onto his communications, so our backdoors would be useless AND might slow of development of real counter measures.
If your going to spend any time making arguments against crypto backdoors then you should focus on the uselessness and counter productive aspects. We have now gone mad as a nation, so all arguments must be focused at helping us achieve our goal (the deaths of terrorists).
First, Reagan was a nimrod who got lucky with a good economy. Historical opinions about the Reagan years have been declining continuously as we get more and more perspective. Reagan basically set a record for scandals. The only good thing I can say about Reagan is that he may not have known what was going on. Oh, a rediculously high percentage of Reagans accomplisments were "commemerative days." I'd say that's a step down from fundraising junkets.
Conversly, Carter was very smart and many historians feal he would have learned how to be a good politician if the economy had allowed him a second term. Also, Carter was *unquestionably* the most honest, most trustworthy, and most well intentioned president from recent history (perhaps ever). I think I heard that Carter was the only president to loose money in office and he is unique in his after office activities too.
Next, Nixon really was damn smart and made a good politician, but he was also corrupt and paranoid. Nixon could perhaps have been one of our greatest presedents if he had been a sane human being, but unfortunatly (for him and us) he was a loony bin.
Kennedy and Clinton were really far above average presidens, but they were basically deceptive people (maybe these go hand-in-hand). Thee good news about Clinton and Kennedy is that they had fewer importent scandals then Reagan (interns and movie stars don't count). Personally, I think Clinton will be remembered quite positivly in the long run (think gay rights).
Also, Bush was almost shurely smarter then Reagan at the time Reagan was in office, but that's beacuase Reagan was old and loosing his mind.
Hey, his IQ is estimated at 91! He may not be smart.. Hell, he may be the dumbest president in history, but he's still well beyond a trained monkey.
Note: The Oil industry is working on putting a trained mnkey in office, but their research is not very far allong and Bush was available. The chimp should be ready next time.:)
FYI> Average estimated IQ for last 6 democratic presidents 156. Average estimated IQ for last 6 republican presidents 116. Clinton, Carter, and Kennedy all topped the list with 182, 176, and 174, but Nixon weighed in at a respectable 155. (Note: the carter IQ is acurate and not just an estimate) Reagan, Bush, and Shrub brought up the tail with 105, 98, and 91.
Personally, I think Nixon's IQ was dragged down by his upbringing (not rich and ended up republican). If he was born to a rich liberal family like Clinton or JFK he might be the top of the lot.
References: IQ estimates were done by the Lovenstein Institute and were scored in the
Swanson/Crain system (scollarly achievments, unscripted pubic speaking, etc.) Shrub did not really have scollarly achievemnts, so they had less reliable data for him.
You are correct that this is a good lissencing scheme for many products, but there are dangers associated to this kind of scheme. Suppose you had to pay web developers to hunt through Apache modules to figure out who you needed to pay. It would make IIS look a lot more tempting.
The Free Software community should embrace this sort of lissence they are confident that the software (and it's derivatives) will not be used by many people (say 1%; ala ERP softare) and the software is inherently large (say CAD/CAE pacages). We should replace crytical or modular things which are lissenced this way (ala Gtk vs. Qt).
Conversly, if only a few people want your produce enough to pay you for it then you are at no risk from competition with a free software replacment (ala ERP software).
They seem to always ask on drug cases, but not murder.
We all have the same views on murder. I would still vote not guilty to a guy accused of possetion (and I've never even smoked pot). It's the only moral thing to do when they have mandatory minimmums which remove the judge's sentencing discression.
Yes, you are correct that a jury can not change the law (that would be moronic), but a jury can chose not to enforce a law that the defence convinces them is mearly wrong (not just unconsitutional). The question is can a jury do this legally.
Personally, I'd feal safer with NASA fling nuke powered rockets over my house then with commercial nukes up the river. The commercial nukes have considerably more reason to cut corners.
Still, NASA nukes have the following property: First people protest NASA's use of nukes and NASA becomes unpopular. Second representatives looking for a place to cut spending figure that NASA's popularity is down. Third NASA can not afford to properly maintain it's nukes.. oops.
A game where you have to write scripts to have a chance?
No, you do not need to write scripts, but you do need to adapt to them and you should not really expect to be able to beat the few people wh are better at scripts then you. You need to write scripts to beat the sript writers; You need to understand scripts to beat the people who can read new scripts and understand them; but you only need to be able to pick up some wierd new user inderface feature and start using it to be able to beat your average player (if a script is really good then it will eventually be documented so that you don't even need to know how to read the coade to control it).
You may have been joking but your partially correct. You can control cheating by allowing specific cheats. RTS games make a good example:
People want to write scripts to help them micromanage their units and they want to write cheats to allow them to see the whole board. Ok, fine. This means we should make it very difficult to write cheats to see the whole board and we should build a scripting langague into the game. Clearly, the guy with the better scripts will kick the shit out of the guy with crappy scripts, so we set up the game to share the scripts. Now, we have eliminated one form of cheating (scripts) by making them legal and fair, but we still have two types of cheating: map cheats and tricks to prevent your scripts from being shared. The solution to these two cheats is to make them unprofitable (Remember: these cheats require hacking assembler while scripts are user friendly). Specifically, we will make battle.net delay the distribution of the scripts for a week or month. Now, it will always be more profitable to develope a better bot and train with the good bots you have as opposed to hacking the assembler to cheat.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that if someone wants to spend the time programming to give themselves an advantage GOOD, but we should force them to eventually share their efforts with the rest of the world.
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I would prefer that they spend money researching lasers as opposed to buying tanks. The laser research will give us civilians *some* technological advances, the tanks will not buy us shit.
:)
OTOH, Congress is seriously talking about deployment which will not buy as much new tech, but still more then the tanks.
They should spend all the money researching the space plane so that they can cheaply launch all these new sats. when they are done. Yeah that's it!
Perhaps we could sell them cruise missles traveling at mock 16?
Civilians do not let their armies use weapons which result in "wounds." We prefer body bags which get burried to blind people.
If your laser blinds people for a significant period of time a significant number of cases will be permenent. If you want temporary damage to large numbers of people you need to go with non-leathal bilogical weapons. An insect swarm might work if you can't get approval for bacteria.
Lasers are useful when you have a target that's far away and moving erratically enough that you can't fire slugs at it, but personal weapons are usually used at much shorter range.
Think big ass sniper rifle for special forces.
But people would buy em' for cool factor (and point and click mentality). Paper targets on a shooting range. Burning the dear's butt might be considered more humane. Heck, red neck laser tag: put on your anti-red gogles. Tag! It stung so you noticed!
You know ESR would buy one with his 35 mil.. er.. 35 cents.. from VA.
That all depends on how powerful a laser you were talking about, but I don't think they seriously want to zap tanks. That advantage of a laser is that it can be aimed and fired very quickly, so you use it to zap fast moving missles, shells, or air plains you don't use it to zap slow moving tanks.
If you did want to kill a tank with a laser for some reason you would use a very big one and melt it quickly or switch to gamma rays and just kill all the guys without hurting the tank. I could perhaps see sat based gamma ray beams for picking off specific personel behind enemy lines, but tanks are easy to kill with old tech to be worth the trouble.
The wonderful thing about a recession is that you can find good people to do almost anything. You may have to promote them when the recession is over, but you should be fine for a while.
You should have some Linux admins currently since Windows can not run a firewall to save it's market share. The IT staff will notice when the Linux people are getting promoted faster and they will all learn Linux. It's not really any harded then Windows.
..reset the admin password. Now you know how stupid script kiddies get hundreds of thousands of CC#s.
Japan has just taken one great leap forward ethically and morally. Plus, Japan stands to reap huge profits as the boby boomers need some meds which will be comming only from Japan. I tend to invest heavily in biotech and I will be seriously looking at Japan's biotech industry.
Problem: The WTO is making China pass & inforce anti-piracy laws. Clearly, China dose not want to prevent people who can not afford Windows from using a computer.
Solution: The punishment for being caught running a pirated version of Windows will be taking a class (payed for out of your fines) on Linux or FreeBSD and using Linux or FreeBSD for one month. You will be free to "buy" a copy of Windows after one month. The same law could be applied to buisnesses and individuals.
I don't think China would have much trouble with Microsoft anymore if they passed such a law.
Why shouldn't they ship a naked PC? We ship naked PCs here. I'd suggest that shipping with Linux serves some more above board: People with no computer experence do not want to pay for a computer that dose not work. This way you can sell them something which dose everything except run the newest coolest game.. and they can pirate and install Windows when they pirate and install the game.
I would suspect that the "computer savviness" has a negitive impact on Linux use. A preloaded RedHat 7.1 is easier to use then Windows is to install (assuming you speak English). Remember, installing Windows involves countless reboots and confusing instillation of drivers which often do not work correctly. Indeed, you are sometimes better off not installing some drivers and uninstalling Windows drivers is often impossible for inexperenced users. I seem to recall that it took me half a month to find the *text *file* to edit to make Windows run with 1 GB of memory and AGP. You also must edit the registry to remove some of the crap your drivers force uppon you. Hell, my roomate's motherboard BIOS pops up a little broken uncloseable Windows program on boot up which you can not prevent without manually editing the CMOS!
If Linux fixes the lack of games and poor langauge support then you will see more Chinese stick with Linux simply because it will be easier to use once preloaded. Preloading and configuring a good release of Wine (rare) would help the game situation too, i.e. you should be able to just instert a StarCraft CD and click install.
Funny. The first thing permanent.com says is "It is a race against time, before biotechnology makes mankind extinct, or nanotechnology destroys Earth's biosphere, suddenly." It sounds to me like these guys are total loons.
No, you can get all kinds of things from the moon back to earth cheaply; a magnetic solar powered gun shooting things into the atlantic could be very profitable. The only real problem is getting materials to the moon.
No catching necissary. You just compute the trajectory and program the capsule to land 10 miles off the coast of the US or Europe. The only real problem is that the pod must be produced on the moon. This means you need some pretty advanced chem/bio-tech to make all the rubberish parts. Still, it could be cheaper to move material from the moon to NY/NJ then it would be to move things from some places on the earth; once you got the system really up and rolling.
CVodeWeavers has fucked this up. Codeweavers normal buisness MO is "Pay us to make shure your companies software works under Wine," i.e. you might DL a linux version with a built in Wine when you wen to the Plugin makers site.
I don't know why they are tring to charge end users for this product. Dose it handle ActiveX controls? That would be a lot more reasonable as ActiveX would be hard to do independently and Microsoft would not pay them to do it (to say the least). Hell, isn't Microsoft killing support for all plugins but ActiveX based stuff in XP anyway? It might be that this product may be too late to market to corperations, so they are just tring to get a little money out of casual users to recoup their investment.
First, the top of the screen will seriously mess up focus follows mouse. Second, pull-down menus will always be crap for efficency and top of the screen is generally going to be a pull-down.
Also, what level of experence was the article talking about. This critical piece of information seems suspiciously absent from the article. I think we know that an inexperenced user of a piece of software will find menus much more efficent, but very experenced use will find short-cuts more efficent (assuming the program is text oriented).
It is essentually inconcievable that a person who has used a keyboard short-cut 1000 times (long enough to learn it) could accomplish something quicker by removing their hand from the keyboard, place their hand on the mouse, selecting two distinct menu items (ala pull-down), and finally replacing their hand on the keyboard.. it's obsurd. Clearly, this situation could be reverse if the person was using a drawing program wich had all importent fuction out in the open (not it pull-downs), ala the Gimp.
Personally, I think you should just axe the pull-downs and click on the background to have a menu appear near your mouse. Placing menus on the top of the screen only solves the vertical position problem, but dose little for the horizontal, plus you have all the difficulty of "hitting the target" when you return your mouse to the application window afterwards.
Also, when the commands excede a serton level of complexity (i.e. use dialogs) then you should probably be interacting with them on a text based level, i.e. have a little mini-shellish programable subwindow, ala Autocad, Norton Commander, or Konqueror (execpt Konqueror's shell window is just bash, so you can not use it to browse the web). I mean lets face it when you have a dialog you probably have enough complexity that some users will want to script things.
Actually, one of the coolest ideas I have seen was to restrict the mouse to *only* cutting and pasting and then make the cutting and pasting efficent enough to simulate menus. The idea was the cutting and pasting is most of mouse use, so make it good at doing that one thing.
..the attacks still point out to me that civil liberties are a compramize. I'm not shure about very much any more as a result. It's easy to say "We should be willing to loose some people for freedom" when you are talking small bombings of a few school children, but nuclear, chemical, or bio weapons are diffrent story.
The one thing I'm shure about is that we must stop congress from taking away our civil liberties for *ineffective* meassures. Crypto restrictions would be ineffective since the terrorists have crypto anyway. Luggage searchs, police on planes, and maybe even extensive background checks when you buy a plane ticket are as unreasonable. (I'm required to identify myself when I drive a car or carry a gun because these activities threaten the lives of others.. perhaps riding on an air plane is not so diffrent.. I donno)
Hell, government sponcered assasinations might be effective.. They would have been unthinkable one week ago, but now I donno. There are many subtil issues.
The truth is that everything changed tuesday. I'm a card carring member of the ACLU, but I'm now advocating extencive background checks for flights and even fingerprint scanners (to prevent mindless beaurocrats from just slowing things to a crawl). Honestly, I would now support crypto backdoors if they would do any good.
Unfortunatly, crypto backdoors would be essentually useless and even counter productive. Bin Laden wil stil tack a layer of crypto onto his communications, so our backdoors would be useless AND might slow of development of real counter measures.
If your going to spend any time making arguments against crypto backdoors then you should focus on the uselessness and counter productive aspects. We have now gone mad as a nation, so all arguments must be focused at helping us achieve our goal (the deaths of terrorists).
First, Reagan was a nimrod who got lucky with a good economy. Historical opinions about the Reagan years have been declining continuously as we get more and more perspective. Reagan basically set a record for scandals. The only good thing I can say about Reagan is that he may not have known what was going on. Oh, a rediculously high percentage of Reagans accomplisments were "commemerative days." I'd say that's a step down from fundraising junkets.
Conversly, Carter was very smart and many historians feal he would have learned how to be a good politician if the economy had allowed him a second term. Also, Carter was *unquestionably* the most honest, most trustworthy, and most well intentioned president from recent history (perhaps ever). I think I heard that Carter was the only president to loose money in office and he is unique in his after office activities too.
Next, Nixon really was damn smart and made a good politician, but he was also corrupt and paranoid. Nixon could perhaps have been one of our greatest presedents if he had been a sane human being, but unfortunatly (for him and us) he was a loony bin.
Kennedy and Clinton were really far above average presidens, but they were basically deceptive people (maybe these go hand-in-hand). Thee good news about Clinton and Kennedy is that they had fewer importent scandals then Reagan (interns and movie stars don't count). Personally, I think Clinton will be remembered quite positivly in the long run (think gay rights).
Also, Bush was almost shurely smarter then Reagan at the time Reagan was in office, but that's beacuase Reagan was old and loosing his mind.
Hey, his IQ is estimated at 91! He may not be smart.. Hell, he may be the dumbest president in history, but he's still well beyond a trained monkey.
:)
Note: The Oil industry is working on putting a trained mnkey in office, but their research is not very far allong and Bush was available. The chimp should be ready next time.
FYI> Average estimated IQ for last 6 democratic presidents 156. Average estimated IQ for last 6 republican presidents 116. Clinton, Carter, and Kennedy all topped the list with 182, 176, and 174, but Nixon weighed in at a respectable 155. (Note: the carter IQ is acurate and not just an estimate) Reagan, Bush, and Shrub brought up the tail with 105, 98, and 91.
Personally, I think Nixon's IQ was dragged down by his upbringing (not rich and ended up republican). If he was born to a rich liberal family like Clinton or JFK he might be the top of the lot.
References: IQ estimates were done by the Lovenstein Institute and were scored in the
Swanson/Crain system (scollarly achievments, unscripted pubic speaking, etc.) Shrub did not really have scollarly achievemnts, so they had less reliable data for him.
You are correct that this is a good lissencing scheme for many products, but there are dangers associated to this kind of scheme. Suppose you had to pay web developers to hunt through Apache modules to figure out who you needed to pay. It would make IIS look a lot more tempting.
The Free Software community should embrace this sort of lissence they are confident that the software (and it's derivatives) will not be used by many people (say 1%; ala ERP softare) and the software is inherently large (say CAD/CAE pacages). We should replace crytical or modular things which are lissenced this way (ala Gtk vs. Qt).
Conversly, if only a few people want your produce enough to pay you for it then you are at no risk from competition with a free software replacment (ala ERP software).
They seem to always ask on drug cases, but not murder.
We all have the same views on murder. I would still vote not guilty to a guy accused of possetion (and I've never even smoked pot). It's the only moral thing to do when they have mandatory minimmums which remove the judge's sentencing discression.
Yes, you are correct that a jury can not change the law (that would be moronic), but a jury can chose not to enforce a law that the defence convinces them is mearly wrong (not just unconsitutional). The question is can a jury do this legally.
Personally, I'd feal safer with NASA fling nuke powered rockets over my house then with commercial nukes up the river. The commercial nukes have considerably more reason to cut corners.
Still, NASA nukes have the following property: First people protest NASA's use of nukes and NASA becomes unpopular. Second representatives looking for a place to cut spending figure that NASA's popularity is down. Third NASA can not afford to properly maintain it's nukes.. oops.
I would hope that you can not give up your "fair use" rights by contract just as you can not sell yourself into slavery.
A game where you have to write scripts to have a chance?
No, you do not need to write scripts, but you do need to adapt to them and you should not really expect to be able to beat the few people wh are better at scripts then you. You need to write scripts to beat the sript writers; You need to understand scripts to beat the people who can read new scripts and understand them; but you only need to be able to pick up some wierd new user inderface feature and start using it to be able to beat your average player (if a script is really good then it will eventually be documented so that you don't even need to know how to read the coade to control it).
You may have been joking but your partially correct. You can control cheating by allowing specific cheats. RTS games make a good example:
People want to write scripts to help them micromanage their units and they want to write cheats to allow them to see the whole board. Ok, fine. This means we should make it very difficult to write cheats to see the whole board and we should build a scripting langague into the game. Clearly, the guy with the better scripts will kick the shit out of the guy with crappy scripts, so we set up the game to share the scripts. Now, we have eliminated one form of cheating (scripts) by making them legal and fair, but we still have two types of cheating: map cheats and tricks to prevent your scripts from being shared. The solution to these two cheats is to make them unprofitable (Remember: these cheats require hacking assembler while scripts are user friendly). Specifically, we will make battle.net delay the distribution of the scripts for a week or month. Now, it will always be more profitable to develope a better bot and train with the good bots you have as opposed to hacking the assembler to cheat.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that if someone wants to spend the time programming to give themselves an advantage GOOD, but we should force them to eventually share their efforts with the rest of the world.