They also tend to use the viewpoint of the alleged victim as a standard, rather than the "reasonable person" viewpoint, for determining what's harrassing or threatening. Which is a bit absurd, and leads to such bizarre results as a woman (or, more accurately, her lawyer) receiving disability and worker's comp for suffering stress when working around large, black males.
The laws need to realize that some lines are simply so unreasonable to be threats. Were I to suggest that I'd use mental powers chanelled through a modified TI-82 to crash Ceres into the Chesapeake Bay and start a massive tidal wave, drowning people in the area, no *reasonable* person would believe that.
Since when did California care about the Constitution? Off the top of my head, they've also been smacked down for medical marijuana (State laws do NOT override Federal laws, which basically was what CA claimed.) and trying to bar *legal* immigrants from getting benefits (Prop. 103, IIRC; violation of equal protection regardless of nationality). And in one CA town, it's illegal to call yourself a pet "owner"...
Ah. But it is plausible that a private citizen might have the means to build a small explosive device capable of damaging an building or depressurizing an aircraft cabin, or at least maiming nearby people. Pipe bombs, for instance, are generally quite low-tech, but rather dangerous to anybody nearby -- and McVeigh's ammonium nitrate bomb was based on fertilizer.
It is far less plausible that GPS coordinates would actually be indicative of a true threat, since far fewer people have access to the fire control systems of precision-guided munitions, and those generally don't act unilaterally in attacking domestic religious groups.
This could only be a problem if the client is aware of (and thus can render) things that the user can't see. That's more the game developer's problem than that of the video card folks, IMHO -- the client receives more information than the player should, ideally, have. Theoretically even without the ASUS driver issue somebody could try to hack up a trainer...
Of course, to fix the underlying problem the server would have to be able to do visibility testing from every player to every player with every state change, perhaps powerups and anything else that's critical to hide. Mostly players -- your client isn't told at all where an enemy is if you can't see him. It'd probably be expensive in an FPS...
If a virus killed its host quickly, and in such a manner that it was obvious that biohazard folks should handle it; or it was very difficult to spread, then it might not have a chance to spread beyond the intended victim and the mutation rate is less of a concern.
Re:All you need is a DNA disassembler
on
The DNA Bomb
·
· Score: 1
Er...
a) You'd need to figure out protein folding given an amino acid chain and the cellular environment. I'm under the impression that this is a non-trivial problem.
b) You'd need to figure out where to *put* the DNA strand, given a retrovirus that could deliver it. A fair part of DNA is thought to be inactive (introns).
c) Ultimately, you need to be able to go from "This is my objective" to "This is the protein that does this", could be bloody hard depending on the vagueness of your objective.
For a weapon, you wouldn't necessarily need to understand everything about cellular mechanics -- just enough to be able to identify, target, and irreparably damage.
It's their decision to make -- what's more important to them, time or money? And, of course, whether or not they *need* the upgrade in the first place -- and the answer is not an automatic yes.
And even if they go the Linux/BSD/etc route, nothing says that the effort has to be done by themselves.
What the RIAA does when it overcharges is NOT robbery; after all, you're not forced to buy CDs at inflated prices. Now, what they appear to have done is price-fixing -- but that's not robbery, that's collusion, and it STILL doesn't force you to buy CDs. You buy of your own volition -- in contrast to infringement, where you rip off a company and they have absolutely no say in it.
If you don't want to pay excessive prices for CDs, you're not required to buy them -- but neither do you have some mystical right to their content.
Plus, they also often offer site licensing for entire educational institutions. Companies like it when a university's willing to fork over a lot of money for software, and if that means lots of students required to use it for a class (and thus with more experience with that versus a competitor's program), so much the better.
Whether or not the RIAA profits from your infringement is, actually, irrelevant as to the determination as to whether it IS infringement.
And perhaps you'd like to enlighten the world as to how the RIAA *could* use the Internet? Keep in mind that there are, er, technical difficulties in getting people to pay for easily duplicated-and-distributed content. And masses have shown that they ARE willing to infringe on copyrights, suggesting than an "honor system" approach is probably doomed as well...
I'd think that the rather large drop-off in Napster usage since their filtering began hints strongly that an AWFUL LOT of people there were "abusing" it -- IOW, either sharing or downloading stuff that's blocked, much of it probably copyrighted pop music...
Er, probably not. I'd think Newtonian physics and basic E&M -- IOW, first principles -- would be more likely subjects, no?. But that wouldn't necessarily quickly translate into knowing enough fluid dynamics to study, say, lift.
Chernobyl proved to be a case of bad design and bad procedures. West-built reactors, for instance, were designed with an eye towards such details as fail-safes and other safety measures... meaning that there's a huge difference in magnitude between a Chernobyl-class event and, oh, TMI.
You wouldn't compare the safety record of the Corsair with a Saab, would you? Neither are Chernobyl and, say, CANDU reactors all that similar...
I wouldn't be surprised if some of the opposition comes from people who are against anything that could possibly help a nuclear weapons development program.
Others complain about waste -- how recyclable IS that stuff from an advanced design, and what does one do with the rest? Nevada's still fighting to stop being the primary waste dump, AFAIK.
A third bit is that there's no requirement to do research before forming an opinion...
What's interesting is that their parents got away from Chernobyl before conception -- IOW, the embryos were NOT exposed to the same level of radiation as the parents. This at least somewhat suggests that radioactivity affected the germ plasm of the parents.
That is, exposure to radioactivity -- even relatively low levels -- may not only hose the person exposed, but also his or her descendants, and their descendants, and their descendants...
Inhaled particulates, perhaps? If their air filters during cleanup weren't *perfect*, perhaps they ended up inhaling small quantities of radioactive isotopes.
...Trust no one (except the Computer). And keep your laser handy, folks -- mutants may be around.
Presently unregistered mutants are hereby ordered to report to the nearest terminal for Mutant Self-Incrimination, followed by arrest and execution by INTSEC.
Keep in mind that those who operate porn pages may have an incentive to make them EASIER to label as porn (by adding lots of keywords and so forth); at least if they want to get customers who type queries like "porn" or "hardcore" into search engines. More customers, more dinero...
Nah. It's most likely the filtering, which reduces the appeal to those interested in downloading popular copyrighted songs (those popular enough to be noticed and blocked, that is; with high probability they've been collecting statistical data on searches).
They may also have some false positives slightly reducing traffic. *shrug*
An interesting issue that goes along with a more automated (or, more remote-control... either way) military is whether this decreases the political cost of a war (since it reduces the probability of human casualties), and whether or not this is dangerous. Some vague thoughts --
* A reduced casualty rate frees the military to act more aggressively because it's the casualties that most riles up people (and Congressmen). "No hydraulic fluid for oil" doesn't quite have the same impact.
* Thus, they can act with less of a popular mandate, which is a double-edged sword; "unpopular" does not necessarily mean "wrong" from a moral perspective. I've read that isolationism was quite strong in the US before Pearl Harbor (and even *after* that attack, there was STILL a Congressman who voted against declaring war on Japan); but abandoning Europe to the Nazis and even denying, say, Lend-Lease would have been far less moral than going against the isolationists and helping out.
* Conversely, would an enemy, seeing that it may have greater difficulty striking at the people actually in the military, be more likely to resort to striking at people who *aren't* -- via terrorism, for instance?
* How much automation technology will make its way into civillian craft?
Self-destruction also makes sense from an intel point of view, if there's anything that an enemy could gain from analyzing it... and it's safer than having a self-destruct capability in a manned craft, since if it goes off by mistake, well, you didn't lose a crew. Sounds like it'd be a relatively sane thing to include.
It'd be unbelievably stupid to wait for a war before weapons development. These things take time to research, manufacture, include in training, and deploy. Hell, even the Desert Shield buildup -- which was performed in a vaguely friendly host country, under good conditions -- took several months if memory serves.
Slashdot Mirror
They also tend to use the viewpoint of the alleged victim as a standard, rather than the "reasonable person" viewpoint, for determining what's harrassing or threatening. Which is a bit absurd, and leads to such bizarre results as a woman (or, more accurately, her lawyer) receiving disability and worker's comp for suffering stress when working around large, black males.
The laws need to realize that some lines are simply so unreasonable to be threats. Were I to suggest that I'd use mental powers chanelled through a modified TI-82 to crash Ceres into the Chesapeake Bay and start a massive tidal wave, drowning people in the area, no *reasonable* person would believe that.
Since when did California care about the Constitution? Off the top of my head, they've also been smacked down for medical marijuana (State laws do NOT override Federal laws, which basically was what CA claimed.) and trying to bar *legal* immigrants from getting benefits (Prop. 103, IIRC; violation of equal protection regardless of nationality). And in one CA town, it's illegal to call yourself a pet "owner"...
Ah. But it is plausible that a private citizen might have the means to build a small explosive device capable of damaging an building or depressurizing an aircraft cabin, or at least maiming nearby people. Pipe bombs, for instance, are generally quite low-tech, but rather dangerous to anybody nearby -- and McVeigh's ammonium nitrate bomb was based on fertilizer.
It is far less plausible that GPS coordinates would actually be indicative of a true threat, since far fewer people have access to the fire control systems of precision-guided munitions, and those generally don't act unilaterally in attacking domestic religious groups.
This could only be a problem if the client is aware of (and thus can render) things that the user can't see. That's more the game developer's problem than that of the video card folks, IMHO -- the client receives more information than the player should, ideally, have. Theoretically even without the ASUS driver issue somebody could try to hack up a trainer...
Of course, to fix the underlying problem the server would have to be able to do visibility testing from every player to every player with every state change, perhaps powerups and anything else that's critical to hide. Mostly players -- your client isn't told at all where an enemy is if you can't see him. It'd probably be expensive in an FPS...
If a virus killed its host quickly, and in such a manner that it was obvious that biohazard folks should handle it; or it was very difficult to spread, then it might not have a chance to spread beyond the intended victim and the mutation rate is less of a concern.
Er...
a) You'd need to figure out protein folding given an amino acid chain and the cellular environment. I'm under the impression that this is a non-trivial problem.
b) You'd need to figure out where to *put* the DNA strand, given a retrovirus that could deliver it. A fair part of DNA is thought to be inactive (introns).
c) Ultimately, you need to be able to go from "This is my objective" to "This is the protein that does this", could be bloody hard depending on the vagueness of your objective.
*shrug*
For a weapon, you wouldn't necessarily need to understand everything about cellular mechanics -- just enough to be able to identify, target, and irreparably damage.
*sigh*
Read their charters. Oversight committees aren't as dumb as you seem to think they are -- believe it or not, their IS intelligence outside Slashdot.
It's their decision to make -- what's more important to them, time or money? And, of course, whether or not they *need* the upgrade in the first place -- and the answer is not an automatic yes.
And even if they go the Linux/BSD/etc route, nothing says that the effort has to be done by themselves.
What the RIAA does when it overcharges is NOT robbery; after all, you're not forced to buy CDs at inflated prices. Now, what they appear to have done is price-fixing -- but that's not robbery, that's collusion, and it STILL doesn't force you to buy CDs. You buy of your own volition -- in contrast to infringement, where you rip off a company and they have absolutely no say in it.
If you don't want to pay excessive prices for CDs, you're not required to buy them -- but neither do you have some mystical right to their content.
Plus, they also often offer site licensing for entire educational institutions. Companies like it when a university's willing to fork over a lot of money for software, and if that means lots of students required to use it for a class (and thus with more experience with that versus a competitor's program), so much the better.
Whether or not the RIAA profits from your infringement is, actually, irrelevant as to the determination as to whether it IS infringement.
And perhaps you'd like to enlighten the world as to how the RIAA *could* use the Internet? Keep in mind that there are, er, technical difficulties in getting people to pay for easily duplicated-and-distributed content. And masses have shown that they ARE willing to infringe on copyrights, suggesting than an "honor system" approach is probably doomed as well...
Argument by anecdote... now THAT's persuasive.
*snort*
I'd think that the rather large drop-off in Napster usage since their filtering began hints strongly that an AWFUL LOT of people there were "abusing" it -- IOW, either sharing or downloading stuff that's blocked, much of it probably copyrighted pop music...
Er, probably not. I'd think Newtonian physics and basic E&M -- IOW, first principles -- would be more likely subjects, no?. But that wouldn't necessarily quickly translate into knowing enough fluid dynamics to study, say, lift.
Not really. For instance, you probably don't need to compare A papers with D papers assuming a somewhat consistent grading system...
Chernobyl proved to be a case of bad design and bad procedures. West-built reactors, for instance, were designed with an eye towards such details as fail-safes and other safety measures... meaning that there's a huge difference in magnitude between a Chernobyl-class event and, oh, TMI.
You wouldn't compare the safety record of the Corsair with a Saab, would you? Neither are Chernobyl and, say, CANDU reactors all that similar...
I wouldn't be surprised if some of the opposition comes from people who are against anything that could possibly help a nuclear weapons development program.
Others complain about waste -- how recyclable IS that stuff from an advanced design, and what does one do with the rest? Nevada's still fighting to stop being the primary waste dump, AFAIK.
A third bit is that there's no requirement to do research before forming an opinion...
What's interesting is that their parents got away from Chernobyl before conception -- IOW, the embryos were NOT exposed to the same level of radiation as the parents. This at least somewhat suggests that radioactivity affected the germ plasm of the parents.
That is, exposure to radioactivity -- even relatively low levels -- may not only hose the person exposed, but also his or her descendants, and their descendants, and their descendants...
Inhaled particulates, perhaps? If their air filters during cleanup weren't *perfect*, perhaps they ended up inhaling small quantities of radioactive isotopes.
...Trust no one (except the Computer). And keep your laser handy, folks -- mutants may be around.
Presently unregistered mutants are hereby ordered to report to the nearest terminal for Mutant Self-Incrimination, followed by arrest and execution by INTSEC.
The Computer is Your Friend.
Keep in mind that those who operate porn pages may have an incentive to make them EASIER to label as porn (by adding lots of keywords and so forth); at least if they want to get customers who type queries like "porn" or "hardcore" into search engines. More customers, more dinero...
Nah. It's most likely the filtering, which reduces the appeal to those interested in downloading popular copyrighted songs (those popular enough to be noticed and blocked, that is; with high probability they've been collecting statistical data on searches).
They may also have some false positives slightly reducing traffic. *shrug*
An interesting issue that goes along with a more automated (or, more remote-control... either way) military is whether this decreases the political cost of a war (since it reduces the probability of human casualties), and whether or not this is dangerous. Some vague thoughts --
* A reduced casualty rate frees the military to act more aggressively because it's the casualties that most riles up people (and Congressmen). "No hydraulic fluid for oil" doesn't quite have the same impact.
* Thus, they can act with less of a popular mandate, which is a double-edged sword; "unpopular" does not necessarily mean "wrong" from a moral perspective. I've read that isolationism was quite strong in the US before Pearl Harbor (and even *after* that attack, there was STILL a Congressman who voted against declaring war on Japan); but abandoning Europe to the Nazis and even denying, say, Lend-Lease would have been far less moral than going against the isolationists and helping out.
* Conversely, would an enemy, seeing that it may have greater difficulty striking at the people actually in the military, be more likely to resort to striking at people who *aren't* -- via terrorism, for instance?
* How much automation technology will make its way into civillian craft?
Self-destruction also makes sense from an intel point of view, if there's anything that an enemy could gain from analyzing it... and it's safer than having a self-destruct capability in a manned craft, since if it goes off by mistake, well, you didn't lose a crew. Sounds like it'd be a relatively sane thing to include.
It'd be unbelievably stupid to wait for a war before weapons development. These things take time to research, manufacture, include in training, and deploy. Hell, even the Desert Shield buildup -- which was performed in a vaguely friendly host country, under good conditions -- took several months if memory serves.