The Irgun made it a point to minimize the casualties from their bombings - they called the King David hotel ahead and time and warned people to get out. And thanks to the Irgun's timely warning, only 91 people were killed. That one attack by the Irgun killed approximately as many people as Ayyash did throughout his entire career. For a group that "made it a point to minimize the casualties," they certainly managed to accumulate an impressive body count.
And perhaps more importantly, there are currently no established forensic procedures for recovering data that has been overwritten. Police can't just use any random forensic procedure that they feel like - only certain established procedures can be used, and at present no such procedure exits. Which means that even if it were physically possible for the police to do it, the resulting evidence would almost surely be inadmissable in court. The NSA might take an electron microscope to your hard drive if they think you have the plans for China's new invisible tank on it or something, but in general the police won't be able to do a thing.
Would Monster.com even still exist if it weren't for scams like these? This was moded funny, and it sort of is, but it's also insightful. I've never actually used monster, but I've had numerous people tell me that literally half of the replies from Monster postings are either outright fraud or scams that are only technically legal (ie, contacting someone randomly regarding a "job" that doesn't have anything to do with their field and trying to sell them a $200 for a "starter kit," before they can begin "working".)
Any comparison of space flight to aircraft flight development is just depressing. It took about 30 years to go from the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk to the DC-3, a commercially-useful passenger aircraft that any reasonable person would feel safe flying in. In rocketry, on the other hand, it's been 50 years and it still costs thousands of dollars to put a kilo in orbit - and you still have something like a 1 in 50 chance of dying in the attempt.
But of course, there was a readily-apparent market for aircraft (people want to get places) and continuous pressure from competition to improve (people can always take a train/blimp/car/ship). Not so with space travel.
Ordinary mammalian procreation also introduces tons of genetic changes/defects in offspring. You state that many clones end up being non-viable because of genetic changes introduced in the cloning process, but ignore the fact that a very large fraction of ordinary mammalian pregnancies (something like 10%-50% depending on what species you're looking at and whose numbers you believe) spontaneously abort shortly after conception because of genetic problems in the embryo (and yes, that includes humans - around 30-50% of human pregnancies spontaneously abort, usually before the woman even realizes she is pregnant). So simply pointing out that cloning might introduce genetic changes/damage is meaningless, unless you can provide some numbers to show that it's more damaging than ordinary sexual reproduction. Which you can't.
All the arguments about the cloned animal potentially having damaged genetic material are especially hilarious in light of the fact that the cooking process does vastly more damage to the DNA in the animal you're about to eat than cloning ever could.
The president can only pardon people who have been convicted of violating federal laws. Since most people in prision for drug posession were charged under state drug laws, there wouldn't be anything you could do about it.
You realize that it was "president," not "dictator," right? The president can't just order laws changed. Good luck convincing congress to sign off on any of that.
3) Get a kick-ass foreign relations team into the embassies and capitals to repair our good name. I've always thought it odd/sad that the job of maintaining our relationships with foreign countries - arguably one of the most important things that the Federal Government does - is so often given away to people with no qualification simply because they are a friend of the President/party that happens to be in power. Ambassadorships are given away as a thank you token to people who the executive branch wants to reward. One would think that it would make a lot more sense to carefully select people with diplomatic training and a thorough understanding of the country/culture in which they are supposed to represent us, rather than simply selecting a party hack who's due for an official pat on the back.
How long will it be before it's trivially easy for an amature to fake incriminating video footage? Sure, it might be technically possible for an expert to do some kind of analysis that detects it as a forgery, but does anyone really think that the police/DA are going to call up JPL and ask them to process it? They'll almost certainly just shrug and say "Well, it shows person X doing Y, let's arrest him. It will be an easy conviction - it's caught it on tape!" Good luck if you can't afford to hire an expert of your own to analyze the footage.
This sort of thing went on all the time at my college. When the administration came across evidence that someone committed a mildly illegal act (usually a minor drug or alcohol offense), they would usually offer the accused student the choice of accepting their "in house" punishment or handing the matter over to the police. But any time a student demanded that they be turned over to the police, nothing happened because there invariably wasn't any real evidence that a crime had occurred. The whole "do you want this to go to the police?!?" thing was just a scare tactic to trick people into accepting school-imposed punishments.
TSA will routinely have only 1/2 or even 1/3 of the available screening stations in operation. I've noticed at major airports all over the country. When I flew out of Orlando a few weeks ago there was a 30+ minute wait to get through screening, with the line backed up far out of its designated area. When I finally got to the front, I saw that only two of the six available screening stations running. The rest were just sitting there, unused and shut off. I understand that sometimes people call in sick or equipment breaks down, but they were only using a third of their capacity. It appears that they are simply trying to save money on employees. If they're really too cheap to shell out $11/hour to hire some wantabe-cop and surly ex-highschool cafeteria workers to harass people and be rude to travelers, maybe they could just sell one of the six unused stations?
In addition to the annoyance of having to wait in line, it seems like an atrocious waste of taxpayer money to buy this screening equipment (which I'm sure was astronomically expensive), only to have it sit unused.
A standard joke on the Daily Show is for them to present back-to-back clips of a politician badly contradicting himself. The clips are usually from recent speeches, press conferences, or various testimonies. Haha, it's funny to see a clip of politician saying he supports X and then immediately see another clip of him (usually in front of a very different audience) saying he hates X. The question, however, is why don't the real news agencies ever do this?
Space is very big and it takes lots and lots of energy and resources to build a craft--even just a weapons delivery system--to cross the vast distances between stars. That's true for us today, but there's no reason to assume that it would be an especially big project for a slightly more advanced race to send out a few automated weapons. After all, in 1500 it would have been a huge, expensive project if the king of Spain had decided that he wanted to wipe out a tribe of Native Americans. Now a single cruise missile could to it quickly and easily, at a relatively low cost.
With efficient hydrogen-boron fusion you could send a ship with a mass ratio of around 9 from Proxima Centauri to Earth in about 50-60 years. Would aliens consider a thousand tons of hydrogen and boron to be a big investment?
Remember, we're talking about civil court, not criminal court. You can try to plead the 5th, but refusing to hand over your keys is probably a great way to ensure that your side looses the lawsuit.
I think you missed the point here. We're talking about emails etc. that are related to lawsuits. If you are subpoenaed and required to hand over your computer harddrive as part of the discovery process, you are required to hand over your encryption keys too. PGP etc. wouldn't do you any good.
I never claimed that "there is no fair use," or that fair use wasn't explicitly part of the Copyright Act. I was simply pointing out that you don't have an "inalienable right" to engage in fair use. The only thing that the copyright act says about fair use is that if you engage in fair use, you aren't violating the copyright act. It doesn't say that the media companies can't use technical measure to make it impossible for you to engage in fair use. You appear to be arguing against claims that no one here has raised.
Yes, it is explicitly a part of the copyright act. And all it says is that if you engage in fair use, you aren't violating the copyright act. The media companies are under no obligation to make it easy, or even possible, for you to enage in fair use; they just can't take you to court under the Copyright Acts if you do manage to successfully engage in fair use. But of course, now I'm just repeating myself. Have you ever actually read the copyright act?
This is a very common misconception, particularly among the slashdot crowd. "Fair use" is merely a specific exception to the Copyright Act. The media companies are under no obligation to make it easy, or even possible, for you to enage in fair use; they just can't take you to court under the Copyright Acts if you do manage to successfully engage in fair use.
Maybe you should consider the idea that all this money we are spending on fighting terrorism is working. This $650 million was money spent on even more security, not merely money spent to maintain our existing security. The issue here is whether or not we should be spending even more money on a "threat" that already wasn't killing anyone.
No, according to my logic if zero people died in plane hijackings last year but tens of thousands of people died due to X, we should probably be spending more money fighting X than we spend on preventing plane hijackings. I thought about writing out a long post about rationally fighting threats according to how dangerous they are, but judging by your post I doubt that you would be able to understand it.
Okay, let's see here...strokes kill about 150000 people each year in the U.S., and the government spends about $400 million on stroke research. Terrorists with radioactive materials have killed approximately zero people ever, and the government spends $650 million+ on (admittedly clever) directional radiation detectors. Yeah, we're clearly doing a great job of rationally allocating our money.
If the police can pick the lock to your house and find evidence inside during a search, then presumably anyone else could have picked the lock and planted the evidence there. But I don't think you'll get far trying to claim that you aren't responsible for the guns/drugs/whatever that the police found in your house because "the fact that they could break in proves that your house was compromised."
I mean have a look at unrated movies. American Pie received an R rating in the theatrical version. However the theatrical version was not the cut the director originally wanted. So that was released later, but just not submitted for rating. Ok please, let's not be morons here, it's rating would be NC-17. The only reason they go back and make cuts like that is if they couldn't get the rating they wanted with the original. In the case of an R movie, that mean an NC-17 was what was going to be hung on the original cut. That might have been the case with "American Pie" specifically, but increasingly movies are being released as "special unrated versions" that don't actually contain any particularly shocking or objectionable material - they just stick in a few extra minutes of innocuous stuff that was edited out of the original (usually for time purposes) and try to pass it off as "the unrated version that the censors didn't want you to see!" or similar nonsense. Of course, by the time you realize that there's nothing substantially different about the unrated version you have already purchased/rented it.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot that kinetic energy goes up as the square of velocity.
And perhaps more importantly, there are currently no established forensic procedures for recovering data that has been overwritten. Police can't just use any random forensic procedure that they feel like - only certain established procedures can be used, and at present no such procedure exits. Which means that even if it were physically possible for the police to do it, the resulting evidence would almost surely be inadmissable in court. The NSA might take an electron microscope to your hard drive if they think you have the plans for China's new invisible tank on it or something, but in general the police won't be able to do a thing.
Any comparison of space flight to aircraft flight development is just depressing. It took about 30 years to go from the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk to the DC-3, a commercially-useful passenger aircraft that any reasonable person would feel safe flying in. In rocketry, on the other hand, it's been 50 years and it still costs thousands of dollars to put a kilo in orbit - and you still have something like a 1 in 50 chance of dying in the attempt.
But of course, there was a readily-apparent market for aircraft (people want to get places) and continuous pressure from competition to improve (people can always take a train/blimp/car/ship). Not so with space travel.
Ordinary mammalian procreation also introduces tons of genetic changes/defects in offspring. You state that many clones end up being non-viable because of genetic changes introduced in the cloning process, but ignore the fact that a very large fraction of ordinary mammalian pregnancies (something like 10%-50% depending on what species you're looking at and whose numbers you believe) spontaneously abort shortly after conception because of genetic problems in the embryo (and yes, that includes humans - around 30-50% of human pregnancies spontaneously abort, usually before the woman even realizes she is pregnant). So simply pointing out that cloning might introduce genetic changes/damage is meaningless, unless you can provide some numbers to show that it's more damaging than ordinary sexual reproduction. Which you can't.
All the arguments about the cloned animal potentially having damaged genetic material are especially hilarious in light of the fact that the cooking process does vastly more damage to the DNA in the animal you're about to eat than cloning ever could.
The president can only pardon people who have been convicted of violating federal laws. Since most people in prision for drug posession were charged under state drug laws, there wouldn't be anything you could do about it.
You realize that it was "president," not "dictator," right? The president can't just order laws changed. Good luck convincing congress to sign off on any of that.
How long will it be before it's trivially easy for an amature to fake incriminating video footage? Sure, it might be technically possible for an expert to do some kind of analysis that detects it as a forgery, but does anyone really think that the police/DA are going to call up JPL and ask them to process it? They'll almost certainly just shrug and say "Well, it shows person X doing Y, let's arrest him. It will be an easy conviction - it's caught it on tape!" Good luck if you can't afford to hire an expert of your own to analyze the footage.
This sort of thing went on all the time at my college. When the administration came across evidence that someone committed a mildly illegal act (usually a minor drug or alcohol offense), they would usually offer the accused student the choice of accepting their "in house" punishment or handing the matter over to the police. But any time a student demanded that they be turned over to the police, nothing happened because there invariably wasn't any real evidence that a crime had occurred. The whole "do you want this to go to the police?!?" thing was just a scare tactic to trick people into accepting school-imposed punishments.
TSA will routinely have only 1/2 or even 1/3 of the available screening stations in operation. I've noticed at major airports all over the country. When I flew out of Orlando a few weeks ago there was a 30+ minute wait to get through screening, with the line backed up far out of its designated area. When I finally got to the front, I saw that only two of the six available screening stations running. The rest were just sitting there, unused and shut off. I understand that sometimes people call in sick or equipment breaks down, but they were only using a third of their capacity. It appears that they are simply trying to save money on employees. If they're really too cheap to shell out $11/hour to hire some wantabe-cop and surly ex-highschool cafeteria workers to harass people and be rude to travelers, maybe they could just sell one of the six unused stations?
In addition to the annoyance of having to wait in line, it seems like an atrocious waste of taxpayer money to buy this screening equipment (which I'm sure was astronomically expensive), only to have it sit unused.
A standard joke on the Daily Show is for them to present back-to-back clips of a politician badly contradicting himself. The clips are usually from recent speeches, press conferences, or various testimonies. Haha, it's funny to see a clip of politician saying he supports X and then immediately see another clip of him (usually in front of a very different audience) saying he hates X. The question, however, is why don't the real news agencies ever do this?
With efficient hydrogen-boron fusion you could send a ship with a mass ratio of around 9 from Proxima Centauri to Earth in about 50-60 years. Would aliens consider a thousand tons of hydrogen and boron to be a big investment?
Remember, we're talking about civil court, not criminal court. You can try to plead the 5th, but refusing to hand over your keys is probably a great way to ensure that your side looses the lawsuit.
I think you missed the point here. We're talking about emails etc. that are related to lawsuits. If you are subpoenaed and required to hand over your computer harddrive as part of the discovery process, you are required to hand over your encryption keys too. PGP etc. wouldn't do you any good.
I never claimed that "there is no fair use," or that fair use wasn't explicitly part of the Copyright Act. I was simply pointing out that you don't have an "inalienable right" to engage in fair use. The only thing that the copyright act says about fair use is that if you engage in fair use, you aren't violating the copyright act. It doesn't say that the media companies can't use technical measure to make it impossible for you to engage in fair use. You appear to be arguing against claims that no one here has raised.
Yes, it is explicitly a part of the copyright act. And all it says is that if you engage in fair use, you aren't violating the copyright act. The media companies are under no obligation to make it easy, or even possible, for you to enage in fair use; they just can't take you to court under the Copyright Acts if you do manage to successfully engage in fair use. But of course, now I'm just repeating myself. Have you ever actually read the copyright act?
This is a very common misconception, particularly among the slashdot crowd. "Fair use" is merely a specific exception to the Copyright Act. The media companies are under no obligation to make it easy, or even possible, for you to enage in fair use; they just can't take you to court under the Copyright Acts if you do manage to successfully engage in fair use.
No, according to my logic if zero people died in plane hijackings last year but tens of thousands of people died due to X, we should probably be spending more money fighting X than we spend on preventing plane hijackings. I thought about writing out a long post about rationally fighting threats according to how dangerous they are, but judging by your post I doubt that you would be able to understand it.
Okay, let's see here...strokes kill about 150000 people each year in the U.S., and the government spends about $400 million on stroke research. Terrorists with radioactive materials have killed approximately zero people ever, and the government spends $650 million+ on (admittedly clever) directional radiation detectors. Yeah, we're clearly doing a great job of rationally allocating our money.
If the police can pick the lock to your house and find evidence inside during a search, then presumably anyone else could have picked the lock and planted the evidence there. But I don't think you'll get far trying to claim that you aren't responsible for the guns/drugs/whatever that the police found in your house because "the fact that they could break in proves that your house was compromised."