That was sort of my point. None the less, on the rare occasion when an airplane (especially a commercial jetliner) has problems they tend to be real gory problems that fail spectacularly. The raw energies involved and the decided lack of options available make survival almost a miracle. That is one of the reasons why Chesley Sullenberger was remarkable is in part that he rescued a plane in a situation lesser pilots would have simply crashed and burned with all passengers and crew.
That is also why it tends to be newsworthy, as the accidents tend to have high body counts and tend to occur in highly visible places too. Then again, I've been told by airplane mechanics that if automobiles were maintained to the same repair levels that are standard (and required by the FAA) for even private non-commercial general aviation aircraft that they would easily last 30-40 years and nearly a million miles.
Using a firearm to shoot at a gas tank is a lousy way to cause ignition. If instead you considered that a piece of road debris came up from under the car and ripped out a hole along with some other metal that then subsequently started to scrape on the roadway, there are plenty of ways to get a spark to strike that would ignite the fuel.
Heck, there have been cases that have been recorded where women getting in and out of their cars when wearing nylon pantyhose and building up a static electricity spark have been able to ignite the fuel tank simply when using a self-service pump at a gasoline station. I could go on, but I think this mythbuster didn't really get the true potential danger gasoline can cause. Once that spark happens, gasoline releases an incredible amount of energy.
I do agree with you that the ground clearance issue might be somewhat of a problem. If the Tesla Model S had a ground clearance more like the old style SUVs, quite possibly (but we will never really know) this driver might have simply driven over the top of this debris and nothing would have happened. Then again I suppose Tesla could install "cow catcher" type spoilers in front of the Model S to deflect this kind of debris away from the vehicle or something else equally different.
If Chevy Volts were bursting into flames, we'd be hearing about it. There's a whole swath of American politicians ready to pounce on anything negative regarding the Volt because, you know, Obama.
In this situation, your brother in law committed what was potentially multiple felonies and certainly was a negligent motor vehicle operator for failing to secure his cargo (which would include the floor jack and contents of the trunk). It could even be considered a hit and run accident in the way you've described.
Seriously, this sounds like one heartless bastard that really needs to rethink his personal ethics.
I do agree that some people who tailgate often get karmic justice in terms of shit happening to them simply because they are not thinking about potential problems with the vehicle ahead of them. When I'm driving I try to imagine from time to time that a sinkhole or at least a large pothole has opened up to swallow the vehicle in front of me and wonder if I have time to react and avoid that disaster myself? I've also seen a whole bunch of stuff on a highway that has fallen out of vehicles.
I've even taken the time to pull over and if there was a safe way to remove the debris (like on a rural interstate with a lull in the traffic) I try to pull it off to the side of the highway. Even if I can't take it off the highway safely, I have tried to report the problem by dialing 9-1-1 on my cell phone where dispatchers will take note of the milepost and get a highway patrol or state police vehicle to check it out. It is amazing how much trash and stuff they pull off of highways.
Instead, if this had been an ICE that trailer hitch would have ripped out an engine mount or yanked out the drive line causing the car to pole vault... or possibly instead simply gone up through the floor of the car and ripped out the legs or heart of the driver.
Yeah, that would have looked real pretty. We aren't talking a little pebble here, and that trailer hitch would have caused substantial damage to almost any vehicle, even a semi-truck that would have hit it. Had this drive hit the hitch going at 5 mph, that would have been a small collision. This was not a small collision. Fatalities have been caused for lesser things in the past.
Cars are deathtraps. Tesla's not as much as most cars, but cars are deathtraps.
So is a jetliner. It may be not nearly as much as a Telsa automobile, but it still is one too and when something bad happens it is extremely hard to leave. At least the guy in the OP could get out when something really bad happened.
Takes two to tango? Yeah, sure all it takes to not having a minuscule number of fundies blocking the state apparatus is to just let them get the final say whenever discord strikes. That's exactly how a democracy is supposed to work, right?
That is exactly how a committee is supposed to work (like a legislative body such as the U.S. Congress or Parliament). When there is discord and a substantial minority (not even a majority) that is making a significant complaint about what is happening on that committee, it is supposed to sort of gum up the works.
If you want something run efficiently, you get a king or a dictator. I could Godwinize this discussion at this point, but note what countries were run "efficiently" at the government level and ask if you really want to live under such a government? They also just as efficiently destroy your freedoms as well. If anything the U.S. federal government has been run far too efficiently in this past couple of decades by a bunch of like minded white guys that are mostly influenced by the same extreme minority of lobbyists who don't give a damn about ordinary citizens.
It didn't matter that Verhoeven had nothing to do with the sequels. He set the story arc going that other even more clueless directors that knew nothing about RAH and frankly didn't care because there was already this film franchise with the tone already set to keep the stereotypes and bastardized version of the film going. If these directors and producers of the sequels had half a clue, they would have at least tried to take on some of the other works of RAH with Johnny Rico standing in for some of the other heros. They didn't even try.
Being a J1 and being a soldier and getting shot at are worlds apart when it comes to risk and sacrifice. Not in the same league in the slightest.
Being a Peace Corps volunteer serving in Afghanistan or Madagascar (I personally know people who have done both) where you are running around in places of extreme poverty and risking the potential to be shot simply by being an American.... and only armed with a stack of pamplets or the Voice of America radio broadcasts is definitely worlds apart from a soldier who has a bunch of people at his back and an arsenal of weapons at their disposal to be able to shoot back.
I've seen the poor (even homeless and astounding poverty compared to "typical" people in the same city) in America and the poor in other countries, and frankly I don't mind being poor in America as it sure as hell beats being poor elsewhere in the world. Nobody in America ever needs to go to bed hungry, and almost anybody can get at least an associate's degree (2 year college degree) in almost every place for free or at least very cheaply if they really work at it. Advanced degrees do cost some money, but do you really think it is the job of every government to pay for a PhD of every citizens? Should every citizen even have a PhD?
I'll even argue that the general public health is vastly better in America than most other places of the world. Yes, there are some European countries (mostly small and not on the scale of America either) that do better, but health care isn't really as big of a deal in general either with programs for helping out the poor with health care that are decades old and a public health service that is over a century old.
As for America pushing people around the world, it is a very small minority of people from America that are doing such stupid things.... and frankly much of it is going on because many European countries let America get away with that kind of foreign policy and even encourage it (while publicly repudiating it even if in private they openly support American politicians).
I'll grant that America is less free today than it was a decade ago, and there has been a definite trade off of liberty for security. There are problems here, but of course you hear about those problems in part because it is a part of the domestic debate on how to deal with those problems and not something swept under the rug like is done in countries such as Iran and North Korea.
Americans just don't like to think of themselves as the most militaristic nation on Earth, which is why they either can't see it, or keep denying it.
You must not know a thing about America to say something like that. There is a whole other country besides what is portrayed in films & television shows, much less a vast majority of the country that lives in neither California nor New York.
There is a reason why Congress has an approval rating of less than 20%, and even most people who hold the office of President rarely get above 50% approval.
It was patently clear that Paul Verhoeven was neither a fan of Robert Heinlein nor had anything even remotely similar to Heinlein's political philosophy toward life in general. On the whole Heinlein was mostly libertarian with a conservative bias, certainly not the hardcore conservative that some (including Verhoeven) have pained the guy.
When I compare and contrast that with Peter Jackson's rendition of Lord of the Rings, Jackson was at least a fan of that book as was most of the production staff (particular the cast). While hardcore fans of the book might have some issues with regards to how Jackson actually did the screenplay and movie, the films definitely captured the essential flavors of the book and made you love and hate the various characters as much as those in the book.
I saw absolutely none of that with Starship Troopers, where Paul Verhoeven in the "making of" featurettes openly bragged that he was no Heinlein fan and was deliberately making a parody of some of Heinlein's political philosophies. Most of the production crew had never even read the book, and of those who had basically skimmed the book instead largely just for this one production. Almost nobody was a fan of Heinlein that was also involved with the production.
The proof that they were very much off base was with regards to the Starship Trooper sequals, that went from bad to worse and ended up so horrible that they became direct to video releases instead. As bad as the original movie was, the sequels went down the proverbial rabbit hole and were in a completely different universe. They remind me more of the Star Wars Christmas Special in terms of production quality.
The concern isn't really just getting an extra block out of the blue every once in awhile. This exploit is about essentially capturing the chain (for the selfish purpose of collecting all of the mined coins and transaction fees) through a manipulation of the protocol even though you don't control 50% or more of the network.
Because tremendous coordination and resources would need to be spent on this, and you would want to keep this kind of exploit rather quiet in terms of something so brazenly obvious like having a timestamp just 1 second after the previous block in the chain. Heck, anything less than 30 seconds between blocks is likely to be flagged and you certainly don't want to see something like a string of four or five blocks in a row (or more) that all have extremely short times between them. If you have a 4th or 5th block at the end of a sub-chain and a competing block that was made an hour later according to its timestamp (and for you as a client or competing miner that hour later is now and not an hour in the past), suggestions of network latency start to become suspect.
This kind of exploit only happens when it is done on the sly, but it is only effective if you are going all out and capturing a long series of blocks (and its practical use improves as you get longer and longer chains). As an isolated exception for just two successive blocks and getting that one extra block "captured" through this exploit, it really is a waste of computing resources and will ultimately backfire. Sure, they get this one block, but the next block may not be accepted by the network. In the Bitcoin protocol, the longer chain always wins as it is proof of more computing resources.
My point is that the use of this exploit can be regulated through some kind of time stamping process, but it isn't necessarily required to have a 3rd party time stamping service... which was the point of the OP above that you are chewing me out over. Additional rules could also be added to further limit the usefulness of this attack.... rules that are backward compatible as it doesn't need a full rewrite of the Bitcoin protocol nor does it require every client and miner to agree to this change.... the clients & miners can be updated over human time scales of weeks or months. Fixes do not require a firm 3rd party time stamping service like NTP with an atomic clock running precisely to the millisecond.
There are always exceptions. A good example is during massive civil unrest and riots where there is a point to a complete suspension of civil rights of any kind and pure brutal marshal law. This is something that was even stated as a potential exception in the U.S. Constitution, so it was at least considered as something to be worried about.
Then again, such periods were seen as unusual, short, and always facing the very real possibility that the military power used to put down such civil unrest could just as easily be used to overthrow the civilian government as well... something that subsequent history has shown to be largely correct too.
Note that a formal declaration of war is something that voters will care about and will respond to in terms of representatives playing roughshod over that power. I seriously doubt that any of the military fiascos America has faced over the past 60+ years would have happened had elected representatives been forced to take a vote on those misadventures as a formal war declaration. The "authorization of the use of force" for the Iraq War was seen as a war declaration, but without any teeth and was even seen that way by ordinary citizens. A half-ass solution to a political quandry that silly politicians didn't want to really face if they were honest.
Clint Eastwood did something like that with "Flag of our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima". Both are equally good movies in their own right standing on their own, but together they tell an amazing story.
Ender's Shadow was incorporated into this film, but I'd agree that a retelling of the same story from a different perspective would have been incredible. Bean's apology to his ship commanders as they flew into the final battle is especially something that should be told cinematically but would detract from a story focused on Ender.
Peter Jackson is also including a whole bunch of material from the Silmarillion and other stories that never had much if anything to do with the Hobbit other than being a general back story to the Lord of the Rings. There is even some stuff from the Lord of the Rings (the books) that is now being added into the Hobbit movies.
I'm just waiting to see how Peter Jackson does the Battle of the Five Armies. That is likely to be a very visually exciting part of the story and would fit well with Peter Jackson's style of movie making.
The first cut of David Lynch's Dune was about 4 1/2 hours long. That was of course a rough cut and some legitimate trimming of the movie should have been done, but it wouldn't have been anything approaching major motion picture quality if most of that had been kept.
I just saw the "extended edition" DVD that included all of the deleted scenes. There wasn't all that much impressive other than it did flesh out a few stories a bit more but mostly would have dragged on some parts that really would have put most of the audience to sleep. I think there was only one scene that I personally would have put back into the movie, and even that is arguable and not strictly necessary for telling the story as it was done.
Of course the book had nothing to do with the radio plays either. Also look at the video game (a text-based RPG adventure game) which told a completely different story. Heck, include the television series with that while you are at it.
That was sort of the style of Douglas Adams, and by having the movie be something completely different was very much in keeping with the way that he (the original author) intended you to experience the movie. Of anybody who was a master storyteller, Douglas Adams very much understood the medium that the story was being presented and how to get that message across using that medium.
The only regret was that when the DVD of the movie came out with HHGG that Douglas Adams wasn't around to offer some significant insight into its development. I did like the Infinite Improbability Drive option in the DVD menu and there were some other cute quirky things, but I know that DNA would have really pushed the boundaries of that medium and made it truly epic if he had a chance.
That is precisely why a declaration of war is so utterly important in these situations. I agree with you that basic freedoms should almost always be preserved.
The question I need to ask in return is why do you think it is no longer important to even bother with a war declaration? The current thinking is that we are always at war, therefore there is no need to declare that any specific state of war is happening.
Part of the root of the misconception is that people are applying the rules as applied to criminal procedure without considering the national security powers under article II of the Constitution in time of war when combined with the previous decisions of the court.
Of course it would help if there actually was a declaration of war given by Congress. It should be noted that the last actual declaration of war happened on December 10th, 1941, and that declaration supposedly ended with a pair of peace treaties signed with the governments of the respective targets of such declarations. An argument could be made that World War II actually ended with the reunification treaty of Germany, but that is really splitting hairs.
No doubt there are people who wish to do evil to America, but this singular failure to even bother with a formal declaration of war is something that should also show up in the legal and constitutional responsibilities of the federal government. There is also a huge difference between cracking the Enigma code (or other clearly internal government communications of a potential military rival) and intercepting the internal communications of formally allied countries, and even more so for internal domestic communications between private citizens.
I had relatives who lived in "military secure areas" during World War II (again, it was a declared war, so different rules can and should apply) where their private snail mail was openly censored against revealing military secrets. She occasionally wrote something like "the USS Missouri is passing by my house as I'm writing this" simply to make sure that a black magic marker would be used on her letter. Regardless, there is an end to such wars and restrictions, and this state of perpetual war which causes anything resembling civilian control of the government to be a complete farce need to end. There certainly was no need to monitor and censor civilian communications in the 1970's in order to allow the U.S. Navy to protect America against the Soviet Union.
The fact that the NSA sees no distinction between civilian and military communications is precisely why it needs to be shut down as an agency altogether.
I don't know why you started your reply with "Except...". What you say is true, but it's irrelevant because it doesn't hinder someone from lying about the timestamp of his block. Finding a hash proof with a fake timestamp is no harder than finding a hash proof with a correct timestamp.
You can't simply assign an arbitrary timestamp onto the block though. Yes, you can lie about the timestamp, but it would need to be a timestamp that is more or less close to the other blocks in the chain. A time stamp that comes after the next block on the chain would certainly be flagged as suspicious, particularly if it is different by several hours or even days. In other words, there is a limit to the kind of mischief you can do with time stamping.
Yes, when you are busy generating the blocks you can assign an arbitrary time stamp, but once you have generated that hash it is "fixed in stone" as it were, since the point of Bitcoin is to find hashes which are computationally difficult to perform. My point here is that you can't manipulate that timestamp *after* the block has been generated, so the best you can do is only fiddle with that time stamp in a very marginal manner. Even a dishonest miner trying to manipulate the system pretty much needs to either insert a completely bogus timestamp (like a network time of 0 seconds... aka January 1st, 1970) or stick with the current time when the block was created with perhaps an offset of a couple of minutes where you claim the internal clock of the computer was off.
Except that the time stamp is built into the hash that generated the block in the first place. In other words, if you say the block was mined just one second later (which BTW sometimes does happen.... some blocks are generated very quickly after the previous block), the time stamp much also include the hash "proof" where the time code is being used as a part of the verification that the "winning" hash has in fact been achieved.
Unfortunately the current Bitcoin protocol doesn't really care when the blocks were generated, and many clients don't even bother with properly time stamping the blocks. I guess that could change though.
There is already some timestamping in the Bitcoin protocol, and this kind of attack was at least considered once upon a time by Satoshi before he went and disappeared.
The time stamp process within the Bitcoin protocol is more or less an average of what most of the clients say is the current time, and that protocol could be further refined in terms of eliminating outliers (one client or a small group of clients could in theory be rejected). At the very least you can program your own packet sniffer to flag curious blocks that may indicate some sort of attack like this is going on, even if in the protocol itself doesn't directly reject these kind of blocks.
The needs of the Bitcoin protocol do not need a hyper accurate time stamp protocol like NTP (and especially not an atomic clock), but rather "good enough" (a time stamp +/- 15 minutes or so) is sufficient. I do think a minor tweak to the Bitcoin protocol could likely implement a modest protection against all but the worst offenders of this kind of attack. It does not need to be a 3rd party time stamping service but could be implemented within the existing communication protocol and remain decentralized.
In the case of Tesla, they can also bring the software engineers onto the factory floor where the software is actually being used, and to do that during a lunch break where the factory workers and that engineer share that lunch and they all go back to work that same afternoon. This is very important in a manufacturing company to have the engineers see the final product as it is being shipped out and to be able to fix problems and anticipate changes even before it becomes a problem. Those companies who outsource their engineering (of any kind) fail to get this kind of dividend.
Some smart companies even have the junior engineers spend a fair bit of time (about 3-6 months) on the factory floor simply building the product as a way to introduce them to everything that is going on and to understand the products that the company is making. That can be costly (not to mention that some of those junior engineers think it is a waste of their engineering degree), but in the long run gets much better engineering to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
That was sort of my point. None the less, on the rare occasion when an airplane (especially a commercial jetliner) has problems they tend to be real gory problems that fail spectacularly. The raw energies involved and the decided lack of options available make survival almost a miracle. That is one of the reasons why Chesley Sullenberger was remarkable is in part that he rescued a plane in a situation lesser pilots would have simply crashed and burned with all passengers and crew.
That is also why it tends to be newsworthy, as the accidents tend to have high body counts and tend to occur in highly visible places too. Then again, I've been told by airplane mechanics that if automobiles were maintained to the same repair levels that are standard (and required by the FAA) for even private non-commercial general aviation aircraft that they would easily last 30-40 years and nearly a million miles.
Using a firearm to shoot at a gas tank is a lousy way to cause ignition. If instead you considered that a piece of road debris came up from under the car and ripped out a hole along with some other metal that then subsequently started to scrape on the roadway, there are plenty of ways to get a spark to strike that would ignite the fuel.
Heck, there have been cases that have been recorded where women getting in and out of their cars when wearing nylon pantyhose and building up a static electricity spark have been able to ignite the fuel tank simply when using a self-service pump at a gasoline station. I could go on, but I think this mythbuster didn't really get the true potential danger gasoline can cause. Once that spark happens, gasoline releases an incredible amount of energy.
I do agree with you that the ground clearance issue might be somewhat of a problem. If the Tesla Model S had a ground clearance more like the old style SUVs, quite possibly (but we will never really know) this driver might have simply driven over the top of this debris and nothing would have happened. Then again I suppose Tesla could install "cow catcher" type spoilers in front of the Model S to deflect this kind of debris away from the vehicle or something else equally different.
If Chevy Volts were bursting into flames, we'd be hearing about it. There's a whole swath of American politicians ready to pounce on anything negative regarding the Volt because, you know, Obama.
You mean like this earlier Slashdot Story? Or like this Volt that burned down the owner's garage and house?
It just takes a little searching in your favorite search engine to find that it has happened to a Volt as well, and in fact was worse.
In this situation, your brother in law committed what was potentially multiple felonies and certainly was a negligent motor vehicle operator for failing to secure his cargo (which would include the floor jack and contents of the trunk). It could even be considered a hit and run accident in the way you've described.
Seriously, this sounds like one heartless bastard that really needs to rethink his personal ethics.
I do agree that some people who tailgate often get karmic justice in terms of shit happening to them simply because they are not thinking about potential problems with the vehicle ahead of them. When I'm driving I try to imagine from time to time that a sinkhole or at least a large pothole has opened up to swallow the vehicle in front of me and wonder if I have time to react and avoid that disaster myself? I've also seen a whole bunch of stuff on a highway that has fallen out of vehicles.
I've even taken the time to pull over and if there was a safe way to remove the debris (like on a rural interstate with a lull in the traffic) I try to pull it off to the side of the highway. Even if I can't take it off the highway safely, I have tried to report the problem by dialing 9-1-1 on my cell phone where dispatchers will take note of the milepost and get a highway patrol or state police vehicle to check it out. It is amazing how much trash and stuff they pull off of highways.
Instead, if this had been an ICE that trailer hitch would have ripped out an engine mount or yanked out the drive line causing the car to pole vault... or possibly instead simply gone up through the floor of the car and ripped out the legs or heart of the driver.
Yeah, that would have looked real pretty. We aren't talking a little pebble here, and that trailer hitch would have caused substantial damage to almost any vehicle, even a semi-truck that would have hit it. Had this drive hit the hitch going at 5 mph, that would have been a small collision. This was not a small collision. Fatalities have been caused for lesser things in the past.
Cars are deathtraps. Tesla's not as much as most cars, but cars are deathtraps.
So is a jetliner. It may be not nearly as much as a Telsa automobile, but it still is one too and when something bad happens it is extremely hard to leave. At least the guy in the OP could get out when something really bad happened.
Takes two to tango? Yeah, sure all it takes to not having a minuscule number of fundies blocking the state apparatus is to just let them get the final say whenever discord strikes. That's exactly how a democracy is supposed to work, right?
That is exactly how a committee is supposed to work (like a legislative body such as the U.S. Congress or Parliament). When there is discord and a substantial minority (not even a majority) that is making a significant complaint about what is happening on that committee, it is supposed to sort of gum up the works.
If you want something run efficiently, you get a king or a dictator. I could Godwinize this discussion at this point, but note what countries were run "efficiently" at the government level and ask if you really want to live under such a government? They also just as efficiently destroy your freedoms as well. If anything the U.S. federal government has been run far too efficiently in this past couple of decades by a bunch of like minded white guys that are mostly influenced by the same extreme minority of lobbyists who don't give a damn about ordinary citizens.
It didn't matter that Verhoeven had nothing to do with the sequels. He set the story arc going that other even more clueless directors that knew nothing about RAH and frankly didn't care because there was already this film franchise with the tone already set to keep the stereotypes and bastardized version of the film going. If these directors and producers of the sequels had half a clue, they would have at least tried to take on some of the other works of RAH with Johnny Rico standing in for some of the other heros. They didn't even try.
Being a J1 and being a soldier and getting shot at are worlds apart when it comes to risk and sacrifice. Not in the same league in the slightest.
Being a Peace Corps volunteer serving in Afghanistan or Madagascar (I personally know people who have done both) where you are running around in places of extreme poverty and risking the potential to be shot simply by being an American.... and only armed with a stack of pamplets or the Voice of America radio broadcasts is definitely worlds apart from a soldier who has a bunch of people at his back and an arsenal of weapons at their disposal to be able to shoot back.
Which one risks their life more? Seriously?
I've seen the poor (even homeless and astounding poverty compared to "typical" people in the same city) in America and the poor in other countries, and frankly I don't mind being poor in America as it sure as hell beats being poor elsewhere in the world. Nobody in America ever needs to go to bed hungry, and almost anybody can get at least an associate's degree (2 year college degree) in almost every place for free or at least very cheaply if they really work at it. Advanced degrees do cost some money, but do you really think it is the job of every government to pay for a PhD of every citizens? Should every citizen even have a PhD?
I'll even argue that the general public health is vastly better in America than most other places of the world. Yes, there are some European countries (mostly small and not on the scale of America either) that do better, but health care isn't really as big of a deal in general either with programs for helping out the poor with health care that are decades old and a public health service that is over a century old.
As for America pushing people around the world, it is a very small minority of people from America that are doing such stupid things.... and frankly much of it is going on because many European countries let America get away with that kind of foreign policy and even encourage it (while publicly repudiating it even if in private they openly support American politicians).
I'll grant that America is less free today than it was a decade ago, and there has been a definite trade off of liberty for security. There are problems here, but of course you hear about those problems in part because it is a part of the domestic debate on how to deal with those problems and not something swept under the rug like is done in countries such as Iran and North Korea.
Actually, it is rather insightful.
Americans just don't like to think of themselves as the most militaristic nation on Earth, which is why they either can't see it, or keep denying it.
You must not know a thing about America to say something like that. There is a whole other country besides what is portrayed in films & television shows, much less a vast majority of the country that lives in neither California nor New York.
There is a reason why Congress has an approval rating of less than 20%, and even most people who hold the office of President rarely get above 50% approval.
It was patently clear that Paul Verhoeven was neither a fan of Robert Heinlein nor had anything even remotely similar to Heinlein's political philosophy toward life in general. On the whole Heinlein was mostly libertarian with a conservative bias, certainly not the hardcore conservative that some (including Verhoeven) have pained the guy.
When I compare and contrast that with Peter Jackson's rendition of Lord of the Rings, Jackson was at least a fan of that book as was most of the production staff (particular the cast). While hardcore fans of the book might have some issues with regards to how Jackson actually did the screenplay and movie, the films definitely captured the essential flavors of the book and made you love and hate the various characters as much as those in the book.
I saw absolutely none of that with Starship Troopers, where Paul Verhoeven in the "making of" featurettes openly bragged that he was no Heinlein fan and was deliberately making a parody of some of Heinlein's political philosophies. Most of the production crew had never even read the book, and of those who had basically skimmed the book instead largely just for this one production. Almost nobody was a fan of Heinlein that was also involved with the production.
The proof that they were very much off base was with regards to the Starship Trooper sequals, that went from bad to worse and ended up so horrible that they became direct to video releases instead. As bad as the original movie was, the sequels went down the proverbial rabbit hole and were in a completely different universe. They remind me more of the Star Wars Christmas Special in terms of production quality.
The concern isn't really just getting an extra block out of the blue every once in awhile. This exploit is about essentially capturing the chain (for the selfish purpose of collecting all of the mined coins and transaction fees) through a manipulation of the protocol even though you don't control 50% or more of the network.
Because tremendous coordination and resources would need to be spent on this, and you would want to keep this kind of exploit rather quiet in terms of something so brazenly obvious like having a timestamp just 1 second after the previous block in the chain. Heck, anything less than 30 seconds between blocks is likely to be flagged and you certainly don't want to see something like a string of four or five blocks in a row (or more) that all have extremely short times between them. If you have a 4th or 5th block at the end of a sub-chain and a competing block that was made an hour later according to its timestamp (and for you as a client or competing miner that hour later is now and not an hour in the past), suggestions of network latency start to become suspect.
This kind of exploit only happens when it is done on the sly, but it is only effective if you are going all out and capturing a long series of blocks (and its practical use improves as you get longer and longer chains). As an isolated exception for just two successive blocks and getting that one extra block "captured" through this exploit, it really is a waste of computing resources and will ultimately backfire. Sure, they get this one block, but the next block may not be accepted by the network. In the Bitcoin protocol, the longer chain always wins as it is proof of more computing resources.
My point is that the use of this exploit can be regulated through some kind of time stamping process, but it isn't necessarily required to have a 3rd party time stamping service... which was the point of the OP above that you are chewing me out over. Additional rules could also be added to further limit the usefulness of this attack.... rules that are backward compatible as it doesn't need a full rewrite of the Bitcoin protocol nor does it require every client and miner to agree to this change.... the clients & miners can be updated over human time scales of weeks or months. Fixes do not require a firm 3rd party time stamping service like NTP with an atomic clock running precisely to the millisecond.
There are always exceptions. A good example is during massive civil unrest and riots where there is a point to a complete suspension of civil rights of any kind and pure brutal marshal law. This is something that was even stated as a potential exception in the U.S. Constitution, so it was at least considered as something to be worried about.
Then again, such periods were seen as unusual, short, and always facing the very real possibility that the military power used to put down such civil unrest could just as easily be used to overthrow the civilian government as well... something that subsequent history has shown to be largely correct too.
Note that a formal declaration of war is something that voters will care about and will respond to in terms of representatives playing roughshod over that power. I seriously doubt that any of the military fiascos America has faced over the past 60+ years would have happened had elected representatives been forced to take a vote on those misadventures as a formal war declaration. The "authorization of the use of force" for the Iraq War was seen as a war declaration, but without any teeth and was even seen that way by ordinary citizens. A half-ass solution to a political quandry that silly politicians didn't want to really face if they were honest.
Clint Eastwood did something like that with "Flag of our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima". Both are equally good movies in their own right standing on their own, but together they tell an amazing story.
Ender's Shadow was incorporated into this film, but I'd agree that a retelling of the same story from a different perspective would have been incredible. Bean's apology to his ship commanders as they flew into the final battle is especially something that should be told cinematically but would detract from a story focused on Ender.
Peter Jackson is also including a whole bunch of material from the Silmarillion and other stories that never had much if anything to do with the Hobbit other than being a general back story to the Lord of the Rings. There is even some stuff from the Lord of the Rings (the books) that is now being added into the Hobbit movies.
I'm just waiting to see how Peter Jackson does the Battle of the Five Armies. That is likely to be a very visually exciting part of the story and would fit well with Peter Jackson's style of movie making.
The first cut of David Lynch's Dune was about 4 1/2 hours long. That was of course a rough cut and some legitimate trimming of the movie should have been done, but it wouldn't have been anything approaching major motion picture quality if most of that had been kept.
I just saw the "extended edition" DVD that included all of the deleted scenes. There wasn't all that much impressive other than it did flesh out a few stories a bit more but mostly would have dragged on some parts that really would have put most of the audience to sleep. I think there was only one scene that I personally would have put back into the movie, and even that is arguable and not strictly necessary for telling the story as it was done.
That said, it could have used some more help.
Of course the book had nothing to do with the radio plays either. Also look at the video game (a text-based RPG adventure game) which told a completely different story. Heck, include the television series with that while you are at it.
That was sort of the style of Douglas Adams, and by having the movie be something completely different was very much in keeping with the way that he (the original author) intended you to experience the movie. Of anybody who was a master storyteller, Douglas Adams very much understood the medium that the story was being presented and how to get that message across using that medium.
The only regret was that when the DVD of the movie came out with HHGG that Douglas Adams wasn't around to offer some significant insight into its development. I did like the Infinite Improbability Drive option in the DVD menu and there were some other cute quirky things, but I know that DNA would have really pushed the boundaries of that medium and made it truly epic if he had a chance.
That is precisely why a declaration of war is so utterly important in these situations. I agree with you that basic freedoms should almost always be preserved.
The question I need to ask in return is why do you think it is no longer important to even bother with a war declaration? The current thinking is that we are always at war, therefore there is no need to declare that any specific state of war is happening.
Part of the root of the misconception is that people are applying the rules as applied to criminal procedure without considering the national security powers under article II of the Constitution in time of war when combined with the previous decisions of the court.
Of course it would help if there actually was a declaration of war given by Congress. It should be noted that the last actual declaration of war happened on December 10th, 1941, and that declaration supposedly ended with a pair of peace treaties signed with the governments of the respective targets of such declarations. An argument could be made that World War II actually ended with the reunification treaty of Germany, but that is really splitting hairs.
No doubt there are people who wish to do evil to America, but this singular failure to even bother with a formal declaration of war is something that should also show up in the legal and constitutional responsibilities of the federal government. There is also a huge difference between cracking the Enigma code (or other clearly internal government communications of a potential military rival) and intercepting the internal communications of formally allied countries, and even more so for internal domestic communications between private citizens.
I had relatives who lived in "military secure areas" during World War II (again, it was a declared war, so different rules can and should apply) where their private snail mail was openly censored against revealing military secrets. She occasionally wrote something like "the USS Missouri is passing by my house as I'm writing this" simply to make sure that a black magic marker would be used on her letter. Regardless, there is an end to such wars and restrictions, and this state of perpetual war which causes anything resembling civilian control of the government to be a complete farce need to end. There certainly was no need to monitor and censor civilian communications in the 1970's in order to allow the U.S. Navy to protect America against the Soviet Union.
The fact that the NSA sees no distinction between civilian and military communications is precisely why it needs to be shut down as an agency altogether.
I don't know why you started your reply with "Except...". What you say is true, but it's irrelevant because it doesn't hinder someone from lying about the timestamp of his block. Finding a hash proof with a fake timestamp is no harder than finding a hash proof with a correct timestamp.
You can't simply assign an arbitrary timestamp onto the block though. Yes, you can lie about the timestamp, but it would need to be a timestamp that is more or less close to the other blocks in the chain. A time stamp that comes after the next block on the chain would certainly be flagged as suspicious, particularly if it is different by several hours or even days. In other words, there is a limit to the kind of mischief you can do with time stamping.
Yes, when you are busy generating the blocks you can assign an arbitrary time stamp, but once you have generated that hash it is "fixed in stone" as it were, since the point of Bitcoin is to find hashes which are computationally difficult to perform. My point here is that you can't manipulate that timestamp *after* the block has been generated, so the best you can do is only fiddle with that time stamp in a very marginal manner. Even a dishonest miner trying to manipulate the system pretty much needs to either insert a completely bogus timestamp (like a network time of 0 seconds... aka January 1st, 1970) or stick with the current time when the block was created with perhaps an offset of a couple of minutes where you claim the internal clock of the computer was off.
Except that the time stamp is built into the hash that generated the block in the first place. In other words, if you say the block was mined just one second later (which BTW sometimes does happen.... some blocks are generated very quickly after the previous block), the time stamp much also include the hash "proof" where the time code is being used as a part of the verification that the "winning" hash has in fact been achieved.
Unfortunately the current Bitcoin protocol doesn't really care when the blocks were generated, and many clients don't even bother with properly time stamping the blocks. I guess that could change though.
There is already some timestamping in the Bitcoin protocol, and this kind of attack was at least considered once upon a time by Satoshi before he went and disappeared.
The time stamp process within the Bitcoin protocol is more or less an average of what most of the clients say is the current time, and that protocol could be further refined in terms of eliminating outliers (one client or a small group of clients could in theory be rejected). At the very least you can program your own packet sniffer to flag curious blocks that may indicate some sort of attack like this is going on, even if in the protocol itself doesn't directly reject these kind of blocks.
The needs of the Bitcoin protocol do not need a hyper accurate time stamp protocol like NTP (and especially not an atomic clock), but rather "good enough" (a time stamp +/- 15 minutes or so) is sufficient. I do think a minor tweak to the Bitcoin protocol could likely implement a modest protection against all but the worst offenders of this kind of attack. It does not need to be a 3rd party time stamping service but could be implemented within the existing communication protocol and remain decentralized.
In the case of Tesla, they can also bring the software engineers onto the factory floor where the software is actually being used, and to do that during a lunch break where the factory workers and that engineer share that lunch and they all go back to work that same afternoon. This is very important in a manufacturing company to have the engineers see the final product as it is being shipped out and to be able to fix problems and anticipate changes even before it becomes a problem. Those companies who outsource their engineering (of any kind) fail to get this kind of dividend.
Some smart companies even have the junior engineers spend a fair bit of time (about 3-6 months) on the factory floor simply building the product as a way to introduce them to everything that is going on and to understand the products that the company is making. That can be costly (not to mention that some of those junior engineers think it is a waste of their engineering degree), but in the long run gets much better engineering to happen.