Not really, but the hurricane isn't really the problem anymore; it's the flood. And although you're bound to get tons of water in your city because of the hurricane itself, the breaking of the levees really shouldn't have happened. And pumps that stop working just when you need them most are kind of useless too.
Proper preparation couldn't have prevented this disaster, but it could have mitigated the effects.
Living below sea level doesn't have to be dangerous. 7 milion Dutch live below sea level, but none of them is afraid that we'll drown in a flood like this, because during the last 50 years, we spent about a trillion dollars on making sure it's safe in even the most vicious storms we can imagine. New Orleans neglected its safety, and this is the result.
I don't understand why some American christians feel so threatened by the evolution theory. If I can use evolution, including truly random mutations and all, to make something, then surely so can God? Evolution is not magic, it's a mechanism. A tool, if you will, and it can be used to make something that does exactly what you want it to, but is to complex to design by hand.
The most important argument of the Intelligent Design crowd seems to be that life is too complex to be the result of a random process, but these kind of random processes produce amazingly (even ridiculously) complex solutions all the time. They just don't really understand what they're talking about. Evolution may not be experimentally provable in biology, but it has already been proven in Artificial Intelligence.
And it doesn't even conflict with a belief in God. What more do you want?
Anarchy has a sort of double meaning. Originally, anarchism (as political movement) and libertarian socialism were synonymous, although the meanings have diverged a bit since then. Especially in the US.
Did you know that a person who molests a child still has parental rights so long as it was their child they molested?
I suspect that varies from state to state. In any event, even if you molest your child, you're still their parent, so it would seem appropriate that you should still have `paternal rights'
It varies quite a lot from state to state indeed. A couple of years ago, Texan authorities took the children of two Peruvian immigrants away because they had photographs of the mother breastfeeding her son. Apparently that counts as kiddie porn in Texas.
Even after charges were dropped, it took quite some time (and protests!) before the children were returned to their parents.
Nobody fares well against a hurricane of this size, but with proper preparation, the results of such a disaster don't have to be quite as severe as they seem to be in New Orleans.
The first thing, ofcourse, is to build enough good dikes that a single breach won't flood the entire city. Then make sure you have plenty of pumps and backup pumps, and that they will keep working during a flood. Then, when disaster strikes, fill the holes in the dikes, and pump all the water out. It's the flooding that's the real problem here; the longer it lasts, the bigger the damage and death toll.
The known death toll so far is meaningless. Compare the tsunami in the Indian ocean: the initial estimates of the death toll was a fraction of the final figure.
As for international help, had this hit a poorer country, ofcourse the US (and the rest of the world) would help. (See the tsunami again.) But a rich country should be able to deal with something like this. The US can deal with earthquakes in California, Germany is dealing with their constantly flooding rivers of the past couple of years, and in 1953, Netherland dealt with its own giant flood also mostly by itself (although I believe we got a bit of help from France). But if the US really needs help that other nations can provide, I have no doubt that they will. At the moment, it seems they need pumps and engineers, mostly. I wonder if we have and powerful mobile pumps that we could send, but if we do, I hope we will.
Actually, some of the Dutch polders are getting too dry because of all the pumping. Ground water levels drop, which is bad for agriculture, and land sinks faster because of this. Therefore people are considering leaving the lowest polders a bit wetter, so they won't suck all the water out of the surrounding land.
We did? I thought I heard on the radio yesterday that we never get anything beyond force 11.
In any case, when you're hit by a hurricane, there's nothing you can possibly do to prevent flooding. What's important is that you're able to end the flood as soon as possible. Fix the dikes, and have plenty of reliable pumps ready to pump all that water back into the sea again.
This 9 week estimate suggests to me that New Orleans neglected to be sufficiently prepared for this.
What I'm wondering is: does Netherland have any specialised aid we can send to help? It sounds to me like New Orleans could really use some.
Of course not, but it does tell you SOMETHING at least.
Yes, but does it tell you what you need to know?
If someone has an MCSE and they've got a few years of Windows support experience on their resume, you can be reasonably certian that they actually know what they are talking about, when it comes to Windows.
It could mean that the person knows what he's talking about, but it can also mean he just managed to pass the test and then was lucky enough to hold on to a job for a couple of years.
It's the same with a university degree. It could mean he has a good theoretical foundation as well as some actual experience, but it can also be someone who just managed to pass all the test without really understanding what it's all about.
Ofcourse the degree and the certificate do say something, and if you get the chance to get either, there's no reason not to. But they certainly aren't ultimate proof of someone's ability.
So what is proof of someone's ability? For my current job, I had to do an assessment. They gave me a programming assignment, and then I had to give a small presentation to the other programmers about what I did and how I did it. This proved that I could learn their technology quickly (I'd never done anything with Cocoon or XSL before), and by examining my programming style, they could determine just what kind of programmer I was. And that's really the only way: let your experts judge the ability of the new experts.
I think the fact that half of the programmers here never even finished university says something about the practical value of a degree. (And the best programmer in my circle of friends was also an early drop-out.)
Nevertheless, the company has decided to give the programmers lots of new and expensive trainings to make them even better, and while we're at it, why not also get some certificates? It's the training that matters, not the certificates, but they're nice nonetheless.
No, sad would be the lack of democracy in Japan, or Germany.
True, but that's not the issue here, so please don't try to cloud the issue by pretending it is. In WW2, the US helped to defeat a country that had already declared war on the US. Although the US joining the allies in defeating Germany certainly made a big difference, they didn't do it out of the goodness of their heart or because democracy was at stake, but because it was in their own interest to do so. And it was, because the US emerged from that war as the leading world power.
Even the Saudis just started having municipal elections... these things take time.
Which is very nice, but Saudi Arabia is still one of the most undemocratic countries in the world, and doesn't even come close to Iran's still rather questionable level of democracy. So why is there talk about indaving Iran and not about invading Saudi Arabia? Because Saudi Arabia has a pro-US government (although the people are very anti-US, so the US probably doesn't even want free elections there), while Iran is pretty anti-US. It's just self-interest.
The last straw was the shoot-down of the Blackhawk in Mogadishu.
But that was an act of guerilla warfare, not an act of terrorism. And any presence of Al Quaeda people still doesn't make it an act of war.
By neo-con standards, the US war of independence would probably count as terrorism, but I think sloppy use of such terms is dangerous, and will in the end only diminish the real meaning of the word "terrorism".
Help me out, here, with some post-Cold War examples.
You went back to WW2 to support your claim of the US being the greatest defender of democracy, and I can't go back to 1954? Well, we still have the US's support of Saudi Arabia while it's (or was, I hope) considering to invade Iran, which, while not exactly a paragon of democracy, is still infinitly more democratic than Saudi Arabia.
But IMO even the Cold War is a lousy excuse to justify tyranny and overthrow democracies. Had the US opposed those dictators and supported those people movements, they wouldn't even have to turn to the USSR for support.
As an aside, I wasn't aware that Chavez was turning to China for support. That is indeed a worrying as well as an incomprehensible development.
Earth as a whole won't become inhospitable, but a lot of countries will. My country, for example, will completely disapppear unless we raise our dikes by another 300 feet, which would be rather a lot.
Even if you don't care about malfunctioning ecosystems (this is happening right now), at the very least this is going to be terribly, horribly expensive. Entire countries will disappear, hundreds of millions of people will have to move. And who knows how long it will take for the ecosystems to reach a new balance?
Because the US is the single greatest defender of democracy in the history of the world.
I hope this is meant as irony, because otherwise it's kind of sad.
Although the US is indeed one of the biggest countries that occasionally comes to the defense of democracy, it's also one of the biggest countries to overthrow democratically elected governments and replace them with a pro-US dictator whenever that fits better into their goals.
Iran, for example, had a democratically elected government before the US replaced it with the Shah in 1954. You may also have heard of Pinochet in Chili, and of all the mess the US was involved in Central America.
And because in the preceding years, they saw terrorism work like a charm.... It caused Clinton to tuck tail and leave Somalia to the warlords.
I don't think that was because of terrorism, but rather because the US forces were unable to deal with guerilla's. I can't remember any terrorist strike against a US civilian target that had anything to do with Somalia.
And about those WMDs, it was the US that claimed to have proof, not the other way around. So far, that proof seems to have been a complete and utter fabrication.
Actually, aren't those 3rd party iPod batteries actually cheaper and better than the official Apple iPod batteries?
Same thing with controllers. If the official version sucks, I'd like to be able to buy a better version from another company. If the official version is good, it doesn't make sense to replace it with a bad one. Companies who create crappy parts for their products also create the demand for better 3rd party replacement parts.
That's true. In many strategy games, in order to give the AI a fighting chance, it gets advantages that the player doesn't. In some it's more extreme than in others, but a level playing field is very rare.
The AI is not too smart, though. It's just cheating or playing a different game entirely. On a level or almost-level playing field in a turn-based strategy game with fog of war and that sort of stuff, no AI can possibly beat a good human player. And I wish it could.
The problem is that moving to another country hoping to get a dream job there is a very risky step, while trying to find a job in a country where you don't live is pretty hard.
Besides, I'm actually pretty happy with my current job. I guess I'll just have to write my computer games in my spare time.
mcv.
You're listening to the wrong people. Strong AI (which is probably what you mean) has always been more than 10 years away. The last 20 years, serious researchers have been seriously doubting whether it's a worthwhile goal at all. Much better to make AI that's really good at specific tasks. We have plenty of human-level intelligences on the planet already.
Ofcourse there will always be wild-eyed prophets with outrageous claims, but you should know better than to listen to them.
GAs aren't for devising completely new things, but for tuning existing things. They can tune certain parameters of existing tactics, for example. If you want to see completely new tactics, use Genetic Programming.
Ofcourse most of those tactics will be useless, and evolution is very slow, so most of the evolution needs to happen on big, powerful computers before actually releasing the game.
Read up a bit more on http://www.genetic-programming.org/Genetic Programming. It's more powerful and flexible than standard genetic algorithms, but also a lot more complex and unpredictable. Possibilities are endless, and they've only begun to discover just how many kinds of problems you can solve with evolution this way.
Also an interesting idea is to use genetic algorithms to set up the parameters for a neural network. Tuning NN isn't easy, so why not let evolution do it for you?
My AI education overlapped enormously with CS. We got the same programming and SE courses that everybody else got. The main difference is that we got less hardware and OS stuff and a lot more logic. And ofcourse lots of AI techniques. Most CS students did learn a bit about search algorithms and expert systems, but not about neural networks, genetic programming and multi-agent systems.
And in my opinion, it shows in the state of AI in most games. They do some decent searching where possible, but mostly have vague, unfounded heuristics that seem to work nicely at first, but crumble as soon as the gamers get hold of the game.
But although most of my fellow students and AI are gaming adicts and would love to work in the gaming business, we've all ended up C and Java programmers for web applications. I'd love to have a job that involved a bit more AI, but those jobs just don't seem to exist. Not in my country, anyway.
Unfortunately, I see much of AI as trying to impose order on chaos which cannot be done with deterministic methods.
Besides, non-deterministic AI techniques are a lot more fun. And more powerful, because they can find ways to solve the problem that the programmer would never think of.
Until game developers learn to take advantage of those non-deterministic methods, preferably with the machine-learning still active while the game is being played, game AI will consist of unfounded heuristics with easily exploited blind spots.
mcv.
It's easy to make AIs that are too good? Then why doesn't anyone ever do that?
Halfway decent AI isn't hard to write (as Brad Wardell, maker of http://www.galciv.com/Galactic Civilizations (a game famous for its AI) likes to point out), but a good player can still slap that kind of AI around. Writing really good AI for games where it matters (strategy games) just doesn't happen. It's too hard, takes too much time, and it's easier to hire an extra graphics guy to make the pictures look nicer.
What is possible, is to make an "AI" that reacts too fast. Computers are much fast than us humans, so in any game where reaction time matters (FPS, RTS clickfests), an "AI" may be too quick to be fun to play against. But it's not the intelligence that's the problem there. It's the speed.
Personally, I'd appreciate it if makers of strategy games and CRPGs put a bit more effort into AI. Those are the games that really need it and where the computer is still way too stupid.
mcv.
That is ofcourse trivial to solve. If your girlfriend has to be authorised to use your gun, give her a ring with the same code. It's as simple as that.
Ofcourse with 2 rings around the chance of one of them getting stolen by a criminal who also wants to use your gun gets a bit bigger, but it's still a lot safer than nothing at all.
mcv.
The problem with RFID on passports is not that your passport contains personal information, but that it can be read from a distance without you knowing about it. Ofcourse it's encrypted, but encryption can be broken.
The new Dutch passports with RFID (on insistence of the US) has already been cracked, even before they were officially introduced. This means that not just government agencies spying on me will be able to read my passport, but so will criminals.
And why? You need your passport only to enter a country and a few similar situations where somebody asks for it, you had it over, they check it. A chip that requires actual physical contact is good enough for that, and a whole lot more secure.
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Not really, but the hurricane isn't really the problem anymore; it's the flood. And although you're bound to get tons of water in your city because of the hurricane itself, the breaking of the levees really shouldn't have happened. And pumps that stop working just when you need them most are kind of useless too.
Proper preparation couldn't have prevented this disaster, but it could have mitigated the effects.
Living below sea level doesn't have to be dangerous. 7 milion Dutch live below sea level, but none of them is afraid that we'll drown in a flood like this, because during the last 50 years, we spent about a trillion dollars on making sure it's safe in even the most vicious storms we can imagine. New Orleans neglected its safety, and this is the result.
I don't understand why some American christians feel so threatened by the evolution theory. If I can use evolution, including truly random mutations and all, to make something, then surely so can God? Evolution is not magic, it's a mechanism. A tool, if you will, and it can be used to make something that does exactly what you want it to, but is to complex to design by hand.
Take a look at Genetic Programming to see what I'm talking about.
The most important argument of the Intelligent Design crowd seems to be that life is too complex to be the result of a random process, but these kind of random processes produce amazingly (even ridiculously) complex solutions all the time. They just don't really understand what they're talking about. Evolution may not be experimentally provable in biology, but it has already been proven in Artificial Intelligence.
And it doesn't even conflict with a belief in God. What more do you want?
Anarchy has a sort of double meaning. Originally, anarchism (as political movement) and libertarian socialism were synonymous, although the meanings have diverged a bit since then. Especially in the US.
It varies quite a lot from state to state indeed. A couple of years ago, Texan authorities took the children of two Peruvian immigrants away because they had photographs of the mother breastfeeding her son. Apparently that counts as kiddie porn in Texas.
Even after charges were dropped, it took quite some time (and protests!) before the children were returned to their parents.
i'm afraid you're misinformed. The Belgians make much better potato chips than we could ever hope to. And they have better mayonaise too. mcv.
Nobody fares well against a hurricane of this size, but with proper preparation, the results of such a disaster don't have to be quite as severe as they seem to be in New Orleans.
The first thing, ofcourse, is to build enough good dikes that a single breach won't flood the entire city. Then make sure you have plenty of pumps and backup pumps, and that they will keep working during a flood. Then, when disaster strikes, fill the holes in the dikes, and pump all the water out. It's the flooding that's the real problem here; the longer it lasts, the bigger the damage and death toll.
The known death toll so far is meaningless. Compare the tsunami in the Indian ocean: the initial estimates of the death toll was a fraction of the final figure.
As for international help, had this hit a poorer country, ofcourse the US (and the rest of the world) would help. (See the tsunami again.) But a rich country should be able to deal with something like this. The US can deal with earthquakes in California, Germany is dealing with their constantly flooding rivers of the past couple of years, and in 1953, Netherland dealt with its own giant flood also mostly by itself (although I believe we got a bit of help from France). But if the US really needs help that other nations can provide, I have no doubt that they will. At the moment, it seems they need pumps and engineers, mostly. I wonder if we have and powerful mobile pumps that we could send, but if we do, I hope we will.
mcv.
Actually, some of the Dutch polders are getting too dry because of all the pumping. Ground water levels drop, which is bad for agriculture, and land sinks faster because of this. Therefore people are considering leaving the lowest polders a bit wetter, so they won't suck all the water out of the surrounding land.
there's a truly gigantic floating set of metal arms, which are rotated into place and then sunk, to protect the mouth of the Rotterdam waterway.
Each of those arms is as big as the Eiffel Tower. And since the arms are robotic, we have a robot that's bigger that the Eiffel Tower.
mcv.
We did? I thought I heard on the radio yesterday that we never get anything beyond force 11.
In any case, when you're hit by a hurricane, there's nothing you can possibly do to prevent flooding. What's important is that you're able to end the flood as soon as possible. Fix the dikes, and have plenty of reliable pumps ready to pump all that water back into the sea again.
This 9 week estimate suggests to me that New Orleans neglected to be sufficiently prepared for this.
What I'm wondering is: does Netherland have any specialised aid we can send to help? It sounds to me like New Orleans could really use some.
mcv.
Of course not, but it does tell you SOMETHING at least.
Yes, but does it tell you what you need to know?
If someone has an MCSE and they've got a few years of Windows support experience on their resume, you can be reasonably certian that they actually know what they are talking about, when it comes to Windows.
It could mean that the person knows what he's talking about, but it can also mean he just managed to pass the test and then was lucky enough to hold on to a job for a couple of years.
It's the same with a university degree. It could mean he has a good theoretical foundation as well as some actual experience, but it can also be someone who just managed to pass all the test without really understanding what it's all about.
Ofcourse the degree and the certificate do say something, and if you get the chance to get either, there's no reason not to. But they certainly aren't ultimate proof of someone's ability.
So what is proof of someone's ability? For my current job, I had to do an assessment. They gave me a programming assignment, and then I had to give a small presentation to the other programmers about what I did and how I did it. This proved that I could learn their technology quickly (I'd never done anything with Cocoon or XSL before), and by examining my programming style, they could determine just what kind of programmer I was. And that's really the only way: let your experts judge the ability of the new experts.
I think the fact that half of the programmers here never even finished university says something about the practical value of a degree. (And the best programmer in my circle of friends was also an early drop-out.)
Nevertheless, the company has decided to give the programmers lots of new and expensive trainings to make them even better, and while we're at it, why not also get some certificates? It's the training that matters, not the certificates, but they're nice nonetheless.
mcv.
No, sad would be the lack of democracy in Japan, or Germany.
True, but that's not the issue here, so please don't try to cloud the issue by pretending it is. In WW2, the US helped to defeat a country that had already declared war on the US. Although the US joining the allies in defeating Germany certainly made a big difference, they didn't do it out of the goodness of their heart or because democracy was at stake, but because it was in their own interest to do so. And it was, because the US emerged from that war as the leading world power.
Even the Saudis just started having municipal elections... these things take time.
Which is very nice, but Saudi Arabia is still one of the most undemocratic countries in the world, and doesn't even come close to Iran's still rather questionable level of democracy. So why is there talk about indaving Iran and not about invading Saudi Arabia? Because Saudi Arabia has a pro-US government (although the people are very anti-US, so the US probably doesn't even want free elections there), while Iran is pretty anti-US. It's just self-interest.
The last straw was the shoot-down of the Blackhawk in Mogadishu.
But that was an act of guerilla warfare, not an act of terrorism. And any presence of Al Quaeda people still doesn't make it an act of war.
By neo-con standards, the US war of independence would probably count as terrorism, but I think sloppy use of such terms is dangerous, and will in the end only diminish the real meaning of the word "terrorism".
Help me out, here, with some post-Cold War examples.
You went back to WW2 to support your claim of the US being the greatest defender of democracy, and I can't go back to 1954? Well, we still have the US's support of Saudi Arabia while it's (or was, I hope) considering to invade Iran, which, while not exactly a paragon of democracy, is still infinitly more democratic than Saudi Arabia.
But IMO even the Cold War is a lousy excuse to justify tyranny and overthrow democracies. Had the US opposed those dictators and supported those people movements, they wouldn't even have to turn to the USSR for support.
As an aside, I wasn't aware that Chavez was turning to China for support. That is indeed a worrying as well as an incomprehensible development.
mcv.
Earth as a whole won't become inhospitable, but a lot of countries will. My country, for example, will completely disapppear unless we raise our dikes by another 300 feet, which would be rather a lot.
Even if you don't care about malfunctioning ecosystems (this is happening right now), at the very least this is going to be terribly, horribly expensive. Entire countries will disappear, hundreds of millions of people will have to move. And who knows how long it will take for the ecosystems to reach a new balance?
mcv.
Because the US is the single greatest defender of democracy in the history of the world.
... It caused Clinton to tuck tail and leave Somalia to the warlords.
I hope this is meant as irony, because otherwise it's kind of sad.
Although the US is indeed one of the biggest countries that occasionally comes to the defense of democracy, it's also one of the biggest countries to overthrow democratically elected governments and replace them with a pro-US dictator whenever that fits better into their goals.
Iran, for example, had a democratically elected government before the US replaced it with the Shah in 1954. You may also have heard of Pinochet in Chili, and of all the mess the US was involved in Central America.
And because in the preceding years, they saw terrorism work like a charm.
I don't think that was because of terrorism, but rather because the US forces were unable to deal with guerilla's. I can't remember any terrorist strike against a US civilian target that had anything to do with Somalia.
And about those WMDs, it was the US that claimed to have proof, not the other way around. So far, that proof seems to have been a complete and utter fabrication.
mcv.
Actually, aren't those 3rd party iPod batteries actually cheaper and better than the official Apple iPod batteries?
Same thing with controllers. If the official version sucks, I'd like to be able to buy a better version from another company. If the official version is good, it doesn't make sense to replace it with a bad one. Companies who create crappy parts for their products also create the demand for better 3rd party replacement parts.
mcv.
That's true. In many strategy games, in order to give the AI a fighting chance, it gets advantages that the player doesn't. In some it's more extreme than in others, but a level playing field is very rare.
The AI is not too smart, though. It's just cheating or playing a different game entirely. On a level or almost-level playing field in a turn-based strategy game with fog of war and that sort of stuff, no AI can possibly beat a good human player. And I wish it could.
mcv.
The problem is that moving to another country hoping to get a dream job there is a very risky step, while trying to find a job in a country where you don't live is pretty hard. Besides, I'm actually pretty happy with my current job. I guess I'll just have to write my computer games in my spare time. mcv.
You're listening to the wrong people. Strong AI (which is probably what you mean) has always been more than 10 years away. The last 20 years, serious researchers have been seriously doubting whether it's a worthwhile goal at all. Much better to make AI that's really good at specific tasks. We have plenty of human-level intelligences on the planet already.
Ofcourse there will always be wild-eyed prophets with outrageous claims, but you should know better than to listen to them.
mcv.
GAs aren't for devising completely new things, but for tuning existing things. They can tune certain parameters of existing tactics, for example. If you want to see completely new tactics, use Genetic Programming.
Ofcourse most of those tactics will be useless, and evolution is very slow, so most of the evolution needs to happen on big, powerful computers before actually releasing the game.
mcv.
Read up a bit more on http://www.genetic-programming.org/Genetic Programming. It's more powerful and flexible than standard genetic algorithms, but also a lot more complex and unpredictable. Possibilities are endless, and they've only begun to discover just how many kinds of problems you can solve with evolution this way.
Also an interesting idea is to use genetic algorithms to set up the parameters for a neural network. Tuning NN isn't easy, so why not let evolution do it for you?
mcv.
My AI education overlapped enormously with CS. We got the same programming and SE courses that everybody else got. The main difference is that we got less hardware and OS stuff and a lot more logic. And ofcourse lots of AI techniques. Most CS students did learn a bit about search algorithms and expert systems, but not about neural networks, genetic programming and multi-agent systems.
And in my opinion, it shows in the state of AI in most games. They do some decent searching where possible, but mostly have vague, unfounded heuristics that seem to work nicely at first, but crumble as soon as the gamers get hold of the game.
But although most of my fellow students and AI are gaming adicts and would love to work in the gaming business, we've all ended up C and Java programmers for web applications. I'd love to have a job that involved a bit more AI, but those jobs just don't seem to exist. Not in my country, anyway.
mcv.
Unfortunately, I see much of AI as trying to impose order on chaos which cannot be done with deterministic methods. Besides, non-deterministic AI techniques are a lot more fun. And more powerful, because they can find ways to solve the problem that the programmer would never think of. Until game developers learn to take advantage of those non-deterministic methods, preferably with the machine-learning still active while the game is being played, game AI will consist of unfounded heuristics with easily exploited blind spots. mcv.
It's easy to make AIs that are too good? Then why doesn't anyone ever do that? Halfway decent AI isn't hard to write (as Brad Wardell, maker of http://www.galciv.com/Galactic Civilizations (a game famous for its AI) likes to point out), but a good player can still slap that kind of AI around. Writing really good AI for games where it matters (strategy games) just doesn't happen. It's too hard, takes too much time, and it's easier to hire an extra graphics guy to make the pictures look nicer. What is possible, is to make an "AI" that reacts too fast. Computers are much fast than us humans, so in any game where reaction time matters (FPS, RTS clickfests), an "AI" may be too quick to be fun to play against. But it's not the intelligence that's the problem there. It's the speed. Personally, I'd appreciate it if makers of strategy games and CRPGs put a bit more effort into AI. Those are the games that really need it and where the computer is still way too stupid. mcv.
That is ofcourse trivial to solve. If your girlfriend has to be authorised to use your gun, give her a ring with the same code. It's as simple as that. Ofcourse with 2 rings around the chance of one of them getting stolen by a criminal who also wants to use your gun gets a bit bigger, but it's still a lot safer than nothing at all. mcv.
The problem with RFID on passports is not that your passport contains personal information, but that it can be read from a distance without you knowing about it. Ofcourse it's encrypted, but encryption can be broken.
The new Dutch passports with RFID (on insistence of the US) has already been cracked, even before they were officially introduced. This means that not just government agencies spying on me will be able to read my passport, but so will criminals.
And why? You need your passport only to enter a country and a few similar situations where somebody asks for it, you had it over, they check it. A chip that requires actual physical contact is good enough for that, and a whole lot more secure.
mcv.