However even that overstates what you need. While it is convenient if you have a function to numerically evaluate fitness, all you really need is a comparison ability - some means of comparing individual A and individual B and selecting which on is "better", for any definition of "better". It doesn't even have to be an absolute or accurate comparison - all you need is some means of selection that chooses the "better" individual more than 50% of the time.
Though on the other hand, defining a good fitness function is the hardest part of genetic programming, and bad fitness functions are the big source of failure. Especially in cases where you have no idea what a proper solution should look like, and you need a way to measure some degree of progress even when the algorithm is very far from the goal.
Actually, one of the things I really like about genetic programming is that, much like real-life evolution, it doesn't give a rats ass what your pre-conceived notions of what the solution should be are. You give it a criterion for success, it satisfies it, sometimes with unexpected (both pleasant and unpleasant) results.
One example I like involves some robotics engineers who were making a dragonfly robot, and instead of coding up logic to make it fly they decided to use GA. Being modest, they decided that simply rising a small distance above the table would be sufficient. Very quickly, the GA zeroed in on a solution whereby the robot simply folded it's wings down completely, lifting its body off the table enough to satisfy the criterion. Oops!
Another one, an unexpected success, involved using GA to program an FPGA for some task. It eventually arrived at a solution to the proble that used fewer gates than the hand-designed solution, so they were pleased. When they looked closely at the design it created, they saw that it had made use of some gates that weren't attached to anything else in the design at all. Thinking they must just be 'cruft' in the genetic code, they removed those gates. The design stopped working. Via capacitance/inductance, those circuits were affecting the behavior of the rest of the design, resulting in analog behavior in an otherwise digital circuit! Sadly this means it wasn't very useful, since it was much more sensitive to changing heat/voltage/etc than a digital design, but still an awesome demonstration of unexpected solutions.
Early in my own hobbyist fumblings, I used GA to create a neural network that could play tick-tack-toe. My fitness function was my hand-coded opponent, which played random but optimal moves. It trained quickly to always tie, so then I decided to take the winner and play against it myself. Just for grins, I played a sub-optimal move, and what do you know, the network went bonkers, trying to play illegal moves and whatnot. I learned my lesson about having too specific of test cases.
As for this article, it is a visually nice demo for introducing people to the subject, but in fact it uses one of the most limited and least powerful aspects of evolving processes. It is a simple asexual hillclimbing of a single individual.
That's very true, but since this is Slashdot, let's stick to what's most important: All the people saying that this isn't evolution or genetic programming are wrong.:)
Hmmph. I guess we're all guilty of possessing and consuming what people call "child pornography".
Maybe you pervs are all guilty, trying to pass off your fetish as "mainstream". I haven't heard of any of those things. Family Guy? Nirvana? WTF are those?!
Except Winger. I've heard of them, but not the song "Seventeen". Must be one of their less popular ones, after they sold out.
Not so. Anyone can determine constitutionality by examining a law, and the constitution, and telling you whether or not it violates the constitution. Now, that won't save your ass in court, but to say that the only valid judge of constitutionality is the courts is not only wrong, but against the spirit in which our nation was founded (that the people should keep the government in check).
Uh, sure, anyone can form an opinion regarding Constitutionality, and it's "valid" for the same definition of valid that any person's random opinion can be considered valid. Legally, though, of course only a Judge may judge Constitutionality in a legally binding way. Says so in the Constitution -- and it may be your opinion that the Constitution doesn't say this, but, well, like I said...
I can believe many things, but a world without causility is not one of them.
Yes, but that's because if causality were ever violated, then the universe would cease to exist, and you definitely shouldn't believe in things that don't exist.
However what people from your era don't realize is that the universe doesn't actually enforce causality. It's perfectly possible to travel back in time and kill your own grandfather, for example. It'd just cause the universe to wink out of existence. That's why we need the Time Police to make sure that nobody abuses time travel in a way that violates causality. We know they've been successful because the universe is still around. It's tough work, though, since even the most innocuous action could end everything we know. Which is why the NSA (a front for the Time Police in this era) has to spy on everyone. Well, that and they're kinda pervie. Most Time Cops are. Comes with the job, for some reason. Anyway, your tax dollars at work creating a Universe That Makes Sense(tm). Also say thanks to Jean Claude Van Dame if you see him.
Same advice I give my other friends: Stop saying speed-of-light travel is impossible.
Okay, well there's a difference between saying that it's never-ever absolutely impossible no matter what advances are made in physics, and saying that, as of right now, according to our very best scientific theories, the one in question being over 100 years old and extremely well verified, breaking c is science fiction.
Especially in the context in which it was brought up. There's a huge difference between a space elevator and a FTL drive. In the case of the elevator, there are practical engineering realities which may make it a distant goal, a pipe dream, or simply not worth pursuing, but the physics of the thing are real, established, and say it could work. We have no idea what the physical principle behind a working FTL drive would be, and as far as our current knowledge of physical principles, it is literally impossible. Yes that understanding may change, nevertheless there is a huge gulf between "possible, according to current theory" and "impossible, according to current theory". Maybe in 300 years that won't be the case, but today you have to literally make up imaginary physics to make an FTL drive work.
You people with your damn hyperlinks are ruining journalism. It's getting so a guy can't even wait breathlessly for the News At 11 anymore to find out what common household product might be Killing Our Children.
I know what you mean. Turns out it was steak knives. Anti-climactic for sure.
It's kind of like the UN calling their soldiers "peacekeeping" troops (who get accused of raping innocent people in Africa all the time).
Er, well, what I was going for was the CIA getting around their rules against torture (such as they were!) by sending suspects to countries that have zero problem with torture. It's the "we don't torture, oh no... so why don't you do it for us and tell us what happens?" thing.
The UN Peacekeeper rape scandals would be more like if the Kirin Tor mage said "We are not allowed to use such tactics... LOL." and proceeded to zap the shit out of the captive.
You get to torture a prisoner with electricity, throw molotov cocktails at starving trolls, poke young apes with a sharp stick to piss off its mother and many other disturbing things.
Meh. Having already helped the Forsaken devise a new version of the plague that created them in order to wipe out the Alliance (and others?), a little bit of torture didn't seem like it was that bad.
I did love how the guy says "Oh, we in the Kirin Tor can't use such tactics... so I'm just going to hand you this little magic mind-stabber, and rearrange these shelves while you do whatever you want to do." Remind you of anything?
Spoken like a person who has never driven across the United States. There are regions where you can drive for miles and never see anything except a couple random cows grazing. Comparing this 2500-mile wide federation versus a small country no bigger than Delaware makes ZERO sense. It's like comparing a pumpkin versus a pea... totally illogical.
First, I have driven many times across the US, and while there are huge regions where there's nothing, that's a complete and total red herring with regards to broadband deployment. The only thing those empty regions need is a big fat backbone crossing them to connect the population centers on either side. And our backbone is fine. A lot of it is lying dark simply because it isn't needed, so there's extra capacity there in case we ever fix the situation in the population centers. So the issue of us being a 2500-mile-wide federation is already solved.
Second, we do have sections of the country where the area is as small and the density as high as whatever country you're thinking of, so then what's the excuse? Look at New York City. Here we have 20,000,000 people close enough together that the "wide federation" argument is completely irrelevant, yet still solely considering NYC broadband is pathetic compared to other countries. How could that possibly not be a big enough market? How could the size of the United States possibly be a reason for anemic broadband in New York? Or LA? Or Houston, Dallas, Chicago, and so on and so on.
No. Country size or overall density is not the reason our broadband sucks. Because even when all those factors are resolved, it still sucks.
I remember a comedian (Bobcat Goldthwait iirc, which tells you how long ago this was if I can't recall for certain) pointing this out, observing that it's only porn if it's titillating. So has a picture of his kid running naked through a sprinkler in his wallet, and he shows it to a normal person, they go "oh hey, cute kid", and then he shows it to the reactionary type and they go "Oh my God! Get that disgusting sexual filth away from me!" which makes you wonder why they thought that way.
There was also a hilarious Mad TV sketch, also many years ago, about an artist who painted Rorschach tests, only he had an actual subject in mind when painting them, who trying to get a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts by talking to a congressman or whoever, who sees child porn in every one of them. E.g. "I can't believe that you would show me such filth!" "What are you talking about?" "This is clearly child pornography! See, there's the smooth, young boy, and there's the wrinkled old man trying to seduce him!" and "I call this one 'Puppies, puppies, puppies'", followed by "Why don't you call it what it is: 'Naked boys, naked boys, naked boys'!" and so forth. At the end of the sketch, the senator stands up and without prompting cries "I am not a pedophile!" It was quite hilarious.
On the other hand, it's not like any reasonable, non-pedophile person would see a drawing of two Simpson's characters humping and think that this wasn't intended to be sexual.
Yes but you're making the assumption Iran would be deterred by MAD because other countries have been historically. You're right. Iran isn't going to launch a missile at Israel. But they *are* going to hand a bomb over to Hizbollah or Hamas, who can detonate it on their behalf - and then sit back and say "it wasn't us!".
MAD plays has no meaning the instant you bring non-state actors into the mix and that's precisely how Iran likes to play.
Iran may give a bomb to Hezbollah, but they aren't going to give them a nuclear-capable missile. It wouldn't serve any point, it'd just be a way for Hezbollah to turn their Lebanon into a glass parking lot (and the same fact that applies to the leaders of iran applies to hezbollah), and it'd make it easier to tell who gave them the missile originally. Not to mention Lebanon is watched pretty heavily, which Hezbollah avoids by sticking to their tunnels. It's hard to sneak a missile + trailer around like that.
So yes, MAD fails to work in the same scenarios where the missile shield is useless from the get-go.
One very large reason for having this system is so that *the US can launch a tactical strike* or two, and then shrug it's shoulders and say, "What the fuck are you going to do about it?"
Actually, I addressed that. I see the potential, but am unconvinced that it represents anything more than a strategic bullet point.
Take a warhead and put it in a shipping container? Seriously? Do you have any idea how hard it would be to retask a warhead to trigger in a way other than how it was designed?
If you aren't ripping the warhead out of an already assembled ICBM, not actually that hard. If you're Iran or NK, you design your nuke to work this way in the first place.
And what makes you think that thousands of "anonymous" shipping containers come into port every day? Do you think it's like dropping a letter in a public mailbox? You think there's no paperwork saying who each one is from and to?
The fact that I have some basic awareness of the reality of illegal activity and our port security. Yes, there's paperwork. Acme Inc. has sent a shipment of Cupie Dolls to General Warehousing Co., and according to the port inspector who was paid a hefty sum not to look inside that container, that's exactly what's inside it. "Anonymous" means whatever anti-nuke dragnet you think exists around our borders never lays eyes on it.
ICBMs exist, and lots of them. Shipping container nukes don't. Regardless, it's a lot easier to send an anonymous ICBM, say from a patch of ground in Somalia, than it is to send an anonymous shipping container on a container ship.
LOL. Take a warhead. Put it in a shipping container. Bam, shipping container nuke.
And thousands of "anonymous" shipping containers come into port every day. You really think getting an ICBM into another country is easier than hiring a boat and bribing a port worker? Well it works for drug dealers and other smugglers all the time.
We already have a way to prevent anyone from launching an ICBM at the US, or a NATO ally, or Israel. A method that has a proven track record, and doesn't require gimmicks and rigged tests to seem worth something. It's called "enough nukes to turn the country launching a missile into a glass parking lot". MAD works, and unless it's Russia (maybe China) then it wouldn't even be "Mutually".
Say whatever you want about suicide bombers and martyrs. The leaders of Iran, North Korea, Russia, and whatever other possible nuclear threat you want to name, are not suicidal, not idiots, and not about to sacrifice all the power they've acquired and their entire country in order to destroy a city or two before being completely wiped out.
Obama's not going to make all our enemies stop hating us. Much more likely, he's just going to start mending relations with our allies. He's also not going to go and preemptively invade North Korea, or try to liberate a few more Muslim countries. So he doesn't have to make our enemies like us, he only has to not attack them and force them to retaliate in order to make it nearly inconceivable that a nuclear ICBM would be launched at us.
No, what we have to worry about are shipping container nukes, suitcase nukes, whatsit we can hide in the bottom of a fishing boat nukes. Nobody who wants to launch a preemptive strike is going to give us a hemisphere-sized parabolic fucking ARROW pointed at them, much less a chance to shoot their device down. They're going to smuggle a nuke in so we never see it coming. Which makes a missile shield kinda worthless for defense against a first strike. It'll just be sitting there doing nothing when the bomb goes off.
This, by the way, is why some theorize that the true purpose of the shield is to allow us to launch a first strike, and counter any missile-based retaliation. Russia says so, anyway. I don't really buy it, though I'm sure it's a bullet point feature in the minds of some. I just don't see it being politically acceptable or necessary any time soon, especially not based on assuming the defense shield can reduce the cost to us to an acceptable level. Russia, at least, has nothing to worry about. Their stockpile has deteriorated, but it's still enough to put the M in MAD. A 75% effective defense field wouldn't cut it, much less 10%. If they can even hack that, when Russia also has the tech to play the measure/counter-measure game and use the built-in advantage of being the attacker.
It may not be useless to have around, just in case, I suppose. I haven't been very impressed with their "successes", it seems like more of a boondoggle than anything and I don't think it shouldn't be a priority. Our priority should be the biggest threats, and well, ICBMs just aren't it.
And yet here we are, with an exploit - *so what* if it can only run on a compromised machine, us geeks will catch-and-kill it but the chairman of your company won't when he installs FF at home 'because his son said it's the best'.
What do you mean, "so what if it can only run on a compromised machine"?!
Once your machine is compromised by malware, you're FUCKED and your browser's security doesn't enter into it -- unless your browser was the vector by which your machine got compromised which is not the case here. The malware will log your keys, or it will load the browser itself and peek at the memory containing the unencrypted passwords that must at some point exist, and that's it. Browser security can't prevent this; only a platform like Trusted Computing can. FF is better because it is less of a vector for external attacks, not because it can prevent local exploitation when the system it is running on is compromised.
So go ahead and put on your "I told you so" shirt, just make sure to put the parenthetical (something obvious and pointless) between "you" and "so".
You contradict yourself in your own post. You feel the game is worth playing, but at the same time call it a shitty product that doesn't work worth a damn?
It's not a contradiction at all. The game is worth playing, but then they slap DRM on top of it, resulting in a shitty product. The pirated version is actually the superior product.
If you really wanted to make a point, a better approach would be to not purchase the game, and not pirate it either. By pirating it, you just give them ammunition to keep pushing DRM as evidence that it isn't yet good enough.
What difference would it make? Like they're going to know. it's not like nobody is going to pirate it, so as long as it exists in pirated form, they will make whatever idiotic assumptions about piracy rates that they make today.
It will never be good enough, but you won't convince them of that by pirating it.
Nor will you by not pirating it. Nor will you by buying it.
Did you know that the foundations of computer science were laid down before the existence of the first electrical computer?
Did you know that, when electrical computers came into existence, having this science all laid out already was actually pretty useful? Kept people from standing around going "Okay now what do we do?" for several years.
In short, your view of utility is short-sighted and lacks vision.
The Terminator breed is indeed bullshit, but not in the sense you mean.
Yes, fear about "Frankenfood" exists. Fortunately progress has been made regarding those invalid concerns.
Fear about oppressive legal requirements, and strains of plants that actually enforce those requirements, has become a more recent, and 100% valid concern. You can find the leaders of african countries rejecting Monsanto seeds for exactly, and specifically, that reason on teh googles.
Take Monsanto out of the picture, and I'm a proponent of GM foods. Act like DRM food is acceptable, or refuse to distinguish between it and other GM foods like I am, and I'm against it.
That's alright, I'm still trying to figure out which way is 'North' in space... Does North always point to the magnetic pole of Earth even on Mars? Has someone studied the Milky Way and determined that there's a magnetic ring perpendicular to the dish?
Don't forget that geographic North and magnetic North aren't the same thing. The concept of North predates any knowledge of magnetism, that just turned out to be a convenient way to figure out which direction North was once the lodestone was discovered (but not perfect, because the magnetic north pole of earth and the geographic north pole are not in the same place, so you need to know that delta when using a compass). The geographic terms north/south were then applied to magnetism, not vice versa.
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However even that overstates what you need. While it is convenient if you have a function to numerically evaluate fitness, all you really need is a comparison ability - some means of comparing individual A and individual B and selecting which on is "better", for any definition of "better". It doesn't even have to be an absolute or accurate comparison - all you need is some means of selection that chooses the "better" individual more than 50% of the time.
Though on the other hand, defining a good fitness function is the hardest part of genetic programming, and bad fitness functions are the big source of failure. Especially in cases where you have no idea what a proper solution should look like, and you need a way to measure some degree of progress even when the algorithm is very far from the goal.
Actually, one of the things I really like about genetic programming is that, much like real-life evolution, it doesn't give a rats ass what your pre-conceived notions of what the solution should be are. You give it a criterion for success, it satisfies it, sometimes with unexpected (both pleasant and unpleasant) results.
One example I like involves some robotics engineers who were making a dragonfly robot, and instead of coding up logic to make it fly they decided to use GA. Being modest, they decided that simply rising a small distance above the table would be sufficient. Very quickly, the GA zeroed in on a solution whereby the robot simply folded it's wings down completely, lifting its body off the table enough to satisfy the criterion. Oops!
Another one, an unexpected success, involved using GA to program an FPGA for some task. It eventually arrived at a solution to the proble that used fewer gates than the hand-designed solution, so they were pleased. When they looked closely at the design it created, they saw that it had made use of some gates that weren't attached to anything else in the design at all. Thinking they must just be 'cruft' in the genetic code, they removed those gates. The design stopped working. Via capacitance/inductance, those circuits were affecting the behavior of the rest of the design, resulting in analog behavior in an otherwise digital circuit! Sadly this means it wasn't very useful, since it was much more sensitive to changing heat/voltage/etc than a digital design, but still an awesome demonstration of unexpected solutions.
Early in my own hobbyist fumblings, I used GA to create a neural network that could play tick-tack-toe. My fitness function was my hand-coded opponent, which played random but optimal moves. It trained quickly to always tie, so then I decided to take the winner and play against it myself. Just for grins, I played a sub-optimal move, and what do you know, the network went bonkers, trying to play illegal moves and whatnot. I learned my lesson about having too specific of test cases.
As for this article, it is a visually nice demo for introducing people to the subject, but in fact it uses one of the most limited and least powerful aspects of evolving processes. It is a simple asexual hillclimbing of a single individual.
That's very true, but since this is Slashdot, let's stick to what's most important: All the people saying that this isn't evolution or genetic programming are wrong. :)
Hmmph. I guess we're all guilty of possessing and consuming what people call "child pornography".
Maybe you pervs are all guilty, trying to pass off your fetish as "mainstream". I haven't heard of any of those things. Family Guy? Nirvana? WTF are those?!
Except Winger. I've heard of them, but not the song "Seventeen". Must be one of their less popular ones, after they sold out.
Not so. Anyone can determine constitutionality by examining a law, and the constitution, and telling you whether or not it violates the constitution. Now, that won't save your ass in court, but to say that the only valid judge of constitutionality is the courts is not only wrong, but against the spirit in which our nation was founded (that the people should keep the government in check).
Uh, sure, anyone can form an opinion regarding Constitutionality, and it's "valid" for the same definition of valid that any person's random opinion can be considered valid. Legally, though, of course only a Judge may judge Constitutionality in a legally binding way. Says so in the Constitution -- and it may be your opinion that the Constitution doesn't say this, but, well, like I said...
I can believe many things, but a world without causility is not one of them.
Yes, but that's because if causality were ever violated, then the universe would cease to exist, and you definitely shouldn't believe in things that don't exist.
However what people from your era don't realize is that the universe doesn't actually enforce causality. It's perfectly possible to travel back in time and kill your own grandfather, for example. It'd just cause the universe to wink out of existence. That's why we need the Time Police to make sure that nobody abuses time travel in a way that violates causality. We know they've been successful because the universe is still around. It's tough work, though, since even the most innocuous action could end everything we know. Which is why the NSA (a front for the Time Police in this era) has to spy on everyone. Well, that and they're kinda pervie. Most Time Cops are. Comes with the job, for some reason. Anyway, your tax dollars at work creating a Universe That Makes Sense(tm). Also say thanks to Jean Claude Van Dame if you see him.
Same advice I give my other friends: Stop saying speed-of-light travel is impossible.
Okay, well there's a difference between saying that it's never-ever absolutely impossible no matter what advances are made in physics, and saying that, as of right now, according to our very best scientific theories, the one in question being over 100 years old and extremely well verified, breaking c is science fiction.
Especially in the context in which it was brought up. There's a huge difference between a space elevator and a FTL drive. In the case of the elevator, there are practical engineering realities which may make it a distant goal, a pipe dream, or simply not worth pursuing, but the physics of the thing are real, established, and say it could work. We have no idea what the physical principle behind a working FTL drive would be, and as far as our current knowledge of physical principles, it is literally impossible. Yes that understanding may change, nevertheless there is a huge gulf between "possible, according to current theory" and "impossible, according to current theory". Maybe in 300 years that won't be the case, but today you have to literally make up imaginary physics to make an FTL drive work.
You people with your damn hyperlinks are ruining journalism. It's getting so a guy can't even wait breathlessly for the News At 11 anymore to find out what common household product might be Killing Our Children.
I know what you mean. Turns out it was steak knives. Anti-climactic for sure.
Unless you count things like adoption and availability. Then, even NYC is far behind.
It's kind of like the UN calling their soldiers "peacekeeping" troops (who get accused of raping innocent people in Africa all the time).
Er, well, what I was going for was the CIA getting around their rules against torture (such as they were!) by sending suspects to countries that have zero problem with torture. It's the "we don't torture, oh no... so why don't you do it for us and tell us what happens?" thing.
The UN Peacekeeper rape scandals would be more like if the Kirin Tor mage said "We are not allowed to use such tactics... LOL." and proceeded to zap the shit out of the captive.
You get to torture a prisoner with electricity, throw molotov cocktails at starving trolls, poke young apes with a sharp stick to piss off its mother and many other disturbing things.
Meh. Having already helped the Forsaken devise a new version of the plague that created them in order to wipe out the Alliance (and others?), a little bit of torture didn't seem like it was that bad.
I did love how the guy says "Oh, we in the Kirin Tor can't use such tactics... so I'm just going to hand you this little magic mind-stabber, and rearrange these shelves while you do whatever you want to do." Remind you of anything?
Spoken like a person who has never driven across the United States. There are regions where you can drive for miles and never see anything except a couple random cows grazing. Comparing this 2500-mile wide federation versus a small country no bigger than Delaware makes ZERO sense. It's like comparing a pumpkin versus a pea... totally illogical.
First, I have driven many times across the US, and while there are huge regions where there's nothing, that's a complete and total red herring with regards to broadband deployment. The only thing those empty regions need is a big fat backbone crossing them to connect the population centers on either side. And our backbone is fine. A lot of it is lying dark simply because it isn't needed, so there's extra capacity there in case we ever fix the situation in the population centers. So the issue of us being a 2500-mile-wide federation is already solved.
Second, we do have sections of the country where the area is as small and the density as high as whatever country you're thinking of, so then what's the excuse? Look at New York City. Here we have 20,000,000 people close enough together that the "wide federation" argument is completely irrelevant, yet still solely considering NYC broadband is pathetic compared to other countries. How could that possibly not be a big enough market? How could the size of the United States possibly be a reason for anemic broadband in New York? Or LA? Or Houston, Dallas, Chicago, and so on and so on.
No. Country size or overall density is not the reason our broadband sucks. Because even when all those factors are resolved, it still sucks.
Bah, it says 'video unavailable'. :P
You'd think so but you'll go broke paying imaginary child support,
Oh, but see, I imagine I won't. ;)
I remember a comedian (Bobcat Goldthwait iirc, which tells you how long ago this was if I can't recall for certain) pointing this out, observing that it's only porn if it's titillating. So has a picture of his kid running naked through a sprinkler in his wallet, and he shows it to a normal person, they go "oh hey, cute kid", and then he shows it to the reactionary type and they go "Oh my God! Get that disgusting sexual filth away from me!" which makes you wonder why they thought that way.
There was also a hilarious Mad TV sketch, also many years ago, about an artist who painted Rorschach tests, only he had an actual subject in mind when painting them, who trying to get a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts by talking to a congressman or whoever, who sees child porn in every one of them. E.g. "I can't believe that you would show me such filth!" "What are you talking about?" "This is clearly child pornography! See, there's the smooth, young boy, and there's the wrinkled old man trying to seduce him!" and "I call this one 'Puppies, puppies, puppies'", followed by "Why don't you call it what it is: 'Naked boys, naked boys, naked boys'!" and so forth. At the end of the sketch, the senator stands up and without prompting cries "I am not a pedophile!" It was quite hilarious.
On the other hand, it's not like any reasonable, non-pedophile person would see a drawing of two Simpson's characters humping and think that this wasn't intended to be sexual.
Fantastic!
Imaginary things are now real!
Imaginary people now have all the rights of real people!
This is fantastic news for the bevy of supermodels who constantly fawn over me and fight for the right to be my love slave. Fantastic news, indeed.
Yes but you're making the assumption Iran would be deterred by MAD because other countries have been historically. You're right. Iran isn't going to launch a missile at Israel. But they *are* going to hand a bomb over to Hizbollah or Hamas, who can detonate it on their behalf - and then sit back and say "it wasn't us!".
MAD plays has no meaning the instant you bring non-state actors into the mix and that's precisely how Iran likes to play.
Iran may give a bomb to Hezbollah, but they aren't going to give them a nuclear-capable missile. It wouldn't serve any point, it'd just be a way for Hezbollah to turn their Lebanon into a glass parking lot (and the same fact that applies to the leaders of iran applies to hezbollah), and it'd make it easier to tell who gave them the missile originally. Not to mention Lebanon is watched pretty heavily, which Hezbollah avoids by sticking to their tunnels. It's hard to sneak a missile + trailer around like that.
So yes, MAD fails to work in the same scenarios where the missile shield is useless from the get-go.
One very large reason for having this system is so that *the US can launch a tactical strike* or two, and then shrug it's shoulders and say, "What the fuck are you going to do about it?"
Actually, I addressed that. I see the potential, but am unconvinced that it represents anything more than a strategic bullet point.
Take a warhead and put it in a shipping container? Seriously? Do you have any idea how hard it would be to retask a warhead to trigger in a way other than how it was designed?
If you aren't ripping the warhead out of an already assembled ICBM, not actually that hard. If you're Iran or NK, you design your nuke to work this way in the first place.
And what makes you think that thousands of "anonymous" shipping containers come into port every day? Do you think it's like dropping a letter in a public mailbox? You think there's no paperwork saying who each one is from and to?
The fact that I have some basic awareness of the reality of illegal activity and our port security. Yes, there's paperwork. Acme Inc. has sent a shipment of Cupie Dolls to General Warehousing Co., and according to the port inspector who was paid a hefty sum not to look inside that container, that's exactly what's inside it. "Anonymous" means whatever anti-nuke dragnet you think exists around our borders never lays eyes on it.
ICBMs exist, and lots of them. Shipping container nukes don't. Regardless, it's a lot easier to send an anonymous ICBM, say from a patch of ground in Somalia, than it is to send an anonymous shipping container on a container ship.
LOL. Take a warhead. Put it in a shipping container. Bam, shipping container nuke.
And thousands of "anonymous" shipping containers come into port every day. You really think getting an ICBM into another country is easier than hiring a boat and bribing a port worker? Well it works for drug dealers and other smugglers all the time.
We already have a way to prevent anyone from launching an ICBM at the US, or a NATO ally, or Israel. A method that has a proven track record, and doesn't require gimmicks and rigged tests to seem worth something. It's called "enough nukes to turn the country launching a missile into a glass parking lot". MAD works, and unless it's Russia (maybe China) then it wouldn't even be "Mutually".
Say whatever you want about suicide bombers and martyrs. The leaders of Iran, North Korea, Russia, and whatever other possible nuclear threat you want to name, are not suicidal, not idiots, and not about to sacrifice all the power they've acquired and their entire country in order to destroy a city or two before being completely wiped out.
Obama's not going to make all our enemies stop hating us. Much more likely, he's just going to start mending relations with our allies. He's also not going to go and preemptively invade North Korea, or try to liberate a few more Muslim countries. So he doesn't have to make our enemies like us, he only has to not attack them and force them to retaliate in order to make it nearly inconceivable that a nuclear ICBM would be launched at us.
No, what we have to worry about are shipping container nukes, suitcase nukes, whatsit we can hide in the bottom of a fishing boat nukes. Nobody who wants to launch a preemptive strike is going to give us a hemisphere-sized parabolic fucking ARROW pointed at them, much less a chance to shoot their device down. They're going to smuggle a nuke in so we never see it coming. Which makes a missile shield kinda worthless for defense against a first strike. It'll just be sitting there doing nothing when the bomb goes off.
This, by the way, is why some theorize that the true purpose of the shield is to allow us to launch a first strike, and counter any missile-based retaliation. Russia says so, anyway. I don't really buy it, though I'm sure it's a bullet point feature in the minds of some. I just don't see it being politically acceptable or necessary any time soon, especially not based on assuming the defense shield can reduce the cost to us to an acceptable level. Russia, at least, has nothing to worry about. Their stockpile has deteriorated, but it's still enough to put the M in MAD. A 75% effective defense field wouldn't cut it, much less 10%. If they can even hack that, when Russia also has the tech to play the measure/counter-measure game and use the built-in advantage of being the attacker.
It may not be useless to have around, just in case, I suppose. I haven't been very impressed with their "successes", it seems like more of a boondoggle than anything and I don't think it shouldn't be a priority. Our priority should be the biggest threats, and well, ICBMs just aren't it.
And yet here we are, with an exploit - *so what* if it can only run on a compromised machine, us geeks will catch-and-kill it but the chairman of your company won't when he installs FF at home 'because his son said it's the best'.
What do you mean, "so what if it can only run on a compromised machine"?!
Once your machine is compromised by malware, you're FUCKED and your browser's security doesn't enter into it -- unless your browser was the vector by which your machine got compromised which is not the case here. The malware will log your keys, or it will load the browser itself and peek at the memory containing the unencrypted passwords that must at some point exist, and that's it. Browser security can't prevent this; only a platform like Trusted Computing can. FF is better because it is less of a vector for external attacks, not because it can prevent local exploitation when the system it is running on is compromised.
So go ahead and put on your "I told you so" shirt, just make sure to put the parenthetical (something obvious and pointless) between "you" and "so".
You contradict yourself in your own post. You feel the game is worth playing, but at the same time call it a shitty product that doesn't work worth a damn?
It's not a contradiction at all. The game is worth playing, but then they slap DRM on top of it, resulting in a shitty product. The pirated version is actually the superior product.
If you really wanted to make a point, a better approach would be to not purchase the game, and not pirate it either. By pirating it, you just give them ammunition to keep pushing DRM as evidence that it isn't yet good enough.
What difference would it make? Like they're going to know. it's not like nobody is going to pirate it, so as long as it exists in pirated form, they will make whatever idiotic assumptions about piracy rates that they make today.
It will never be good enough, but you won't convince them of that by pirating it.
Nor will you by not pirating it. Nor will you by buying it.
Did you know that the foundations of computer science were laid down before the existence of the first electrical computer?
Did you know that, when electrical computers came into existence, having this science all laid out already was actually pretty useful? Kept people from standing around going "Okay now what do we do?" for several years.
In short, your view of utility is short-sighted and lacks vision.
Huh? If my ISP wants to keep someone from initiating a connection to my home computer today, they can. What about IPv4 makes this hard?
The Terminator breed is indeed bullshit, but not in the sense you mean.
Yes, fear about "Frankenfood" exists. Fortunately progress has been made regarding those invalid concerns.
Fear about oppressive legal requirements, and strains of plants that actually enforce those requirements, has become a more recent, and 100% valid concern. You can find the leaders of african countries rejecting Monsanto seeds for exactly, and specifically, that reason on teh googles.
Take Monsanto out of the picture, and I'm a proponent of GM foods. Act like DRM food is acceptable, or refuse to distinguish between it and other GM foods like I am, and I'm against it.
That's alright, I'm still trying to figure out which way is 'North' in space... Does North always point to the magnetic pole of Earth even on Mars? Has someone studied the Milky Way and determined that there's a magnetic ring perpendicular to the dish?
Don't forget that geographic North and magnetic North aren't the same thing. The concept of North predates any knowledge of magnetism, that just turned out to be a convenient way to figure out which direction North was once the lodestone was discovered (but not perfect, because the magnetic north pole of earth and the geographic north pole are not in the same place, so you need to know that delta when using a compass). The geographic terms north/south were then applied to magnetism, not vice versa.