Let's not exaggerate about "no difference". Writs of assistance, and searches in general, back in the revolutionary days were highly disruptive to life and business. If someone copies out your entire gmail folder you probably won't notice it, it's not like they'll be taking up space and getting in your way and throwing your files around as you try to read it yourself. They were even used to gain entrance to a place and trash it under the guise of a search.
I'm not making a value judgment on the merits of this case or whether it's reasonable or not, but you are drawing a false equivalency. Seizing all of a person's electronics equipment or servers is a much closer analogy. Non-destructive copying with zero downtime is not.
Thing is, that's not actually so bad to me at all. If you could tell whether someone was lying or telling the truth about performing some illegal act--and be certain of it (big assumption)--I'd wholeheartedly support it. It would catch criminals a lot faster, and exonerate the innocent a lot faster, what on earth could be bad about that? As you're describing it, it doesn't sound like it's violating any privacy of yours, except for the specific fact "did you commit the crime". It's just a one-shot perfectly accurate truth serum.
It certainly doesn't violate the 5th Amendment. The "no self incrimination" is specifically to cut down on coerced, inaccurate testimony. If this thing was accurate, it's a completely different issue.
It seems to me that almost every Internet Anti-Government Crusader's true agenda is "protect my right to lie to the authorities", or "protect my right to not get caught". Doesn't get any of my respect.
God, it's nice to see someone on here who doesn't think the government is a literal force of primal evil. Having even a little faith in the system seems to be thoughtcrime on internet boards.
In truth, this is also why Social Security has its problems. When it was established, it was "You likely won't live to use it, but if you do, you will be well taken care of". It was insurance against an uncommon and, in a way, kind of negative thing happening to you: Living to an age such that you could no longer support yourself. It was a luxury that not many people had, and it could absolutely be hard on your family. Of course, now almost everyone lives long enough to collect it.
No, it wasn't meant to be a replacement for savings, and you weren't supposed to get out what you put in. A small portion of the population was supposed to collect it, because most of them didn't live long enough to.
I don't know much about what he actually did at Epic aside from some of Unreal Tournament's best maps (it was pretty awesome that it showed the author name when you loaded a map) and I don't know what his job was the other companies at all. Was he a coder? Designer? Producer? Artist/art director? Nothing but level-design-o-rama?
Cyclists ARE a menace, to themselves. I nearly killed one two years ago because he blew a stop sign coming down a hill, swerved in front of me, hooked his tires into a trolley track and fell over about 20' in front of my car. If I hadn't been driving below the speed limit he would have been street pizza.
Biking in hilly, high density areas (like downtown Seattle) should require a license. One that can be revoked.
See though isn't that destruction of evidence? Which is pretty clearly illegal.
"Oh, you were looking for documents at my house? Sorry, I built my filing cabinet to shred and burn everything if I don't press a button every week" -- if you're arrested for (for example) financial fraud and you pull that kind of BS, you're in deep trouble. In fact, after you've started being investigated for something, any action to destroy potential evidence is super suspicious and may well be specifically illegal, even if (especially if) there's no way after the fact to prove whether it was incriminating or not. Just because you took that action far in the past when you set up the dead man's switch, doesn't excuse you from the consequences.
It's well established in corporate cases that people have an obligation to prevent automatic deletion of materials during an investigation. I'd be surprised if that didn't hold for private citizens too, why wouldn't it? If you would reasonably expect that the police have a lawful reason to search your documents, and you don't volunteer that those documents exist and are going to be deleted...I really don't see any ethical difference between that, and finding some way to delete them remotely yourself.
In a criminal case I don't see an ethical difference between "I did X and Y happened", and "I knew Y would happen if I didn't do X, and I didn't do it". Kind of like "I cut her brake line" vs "I knew her brake line was cut, and that she was going to drive the car, and I didn't inform her".
If there's an argument that a dead man's switch really is ethically different from active deletion...and I really do mean ethically different, not "more likely to get you off the hook for a crime"...I'd love to hear it.
I'm out of the blast range up north (Seatac) but would still hear it if it went off.
That said, magnitude 2 is basically "hit the ground real hard with a sledgehammer". A nearby major construction site causes a lot more vibration, so does a big truck on the freeway.
Honest question as a heavy C# user. Why Visual Basic? What advantage does it give, either in function or practice or even aesthetics, over C#? It seems that they are functionally identical but that C# has the better syntax; clearly there must be some reason VB.NET is still around though. Enlighten me please?
Just rediscovered Alien Legacy, a true Sierra golden age underdog from 1994. It's a space colonization game that's not a 4X, how novel!
I really really wish I could find all those old DOS TSRs from the mid-late 80s. I had one that put a bunch of ascii smiley face characters on the dos prompt that careened around and bounced off of lines of text; hold ctrl or alt to make them go in circles. I would not be surprised if it was really, truly lost in time with no remaining copies.
Visual Studio when doing C# stuff. Eclipse when doing Java stuff. On Linux, vim or notepad++ when doing C stuff or any other random shell junk. On Windows, notepad++ (okay, let's be honest, it's usually just noteBut I always wind up missing Visual Studio. It seems to fit my workflows best, and if it worked well with Java I'd replace Eclipse with it in an instant.
Actually I think you have that wrong. To me, the jargon file had/positive/ words for misbehaving things. They were a pain to deal with, but they were fun to talk about.
As an Age of Empires / Empire Earth fan, I respectfully assert that I prefer random maps. If I'm going to sink a few hundred hours into getting good at a game, I prefer to win by skillful improvising instead of by optimizing my build orders around map travel routes that are known to-the-second and careful memorization of tile counts where I know I can block off a passage most efficiently every game. If your asymmetrical armies are well defined (and admittedly, that means they are not very asymmetrical), no map will give such an extreme advantage that it can't be overcome by spotting it early and adapting your strategy to force an engagement somewhere else. Or, hell, 'when he sees this advantageous narrow passage he's sure to build a lot of scissors units, so I'll build a bunch of rocks in anticipation and take bigger advantage than he will'.
It seems like random-map RTSes and hand-built-map RTSes are really different subgenres altogether, and they draw different crowds.
Already posted, but got a better idea. Combine it with that Myo thing that measures your tendons or whatever so it can tell what hand or finger motions you're making. The hell with touch control or voice control: Make it something you can operate by only moving the hand it's strapped to, without touching anything. Use with Bluetooth earbuds, put your thumb against your third and fourth fingers, 'swipe' up to start/stop your music, or down to skip track...maybe something to answer or hang up a phone call. This is given the assumption that the required hand signals are simple and do not have false positives. Hell, maybe you can write by signing letters in ASL under the table so you can text in a boring meeting, better than subvocal. *IF* the input was extremely usable and reliable, that just might be novel enough for me.
Of course, it occurs that I could just wear a Myo by itself and pair it to the phone in my pocket.
Don't know why, just bugs me to wear them, and I keep bashing them on things. Before I got a cell phone, I wore a carabiner watch on my belt and it was pretty cool...they were built with cheap springs though, had a tendency to stop staying clipped after a year or two, and after I lost one down an elevator shaft while disembarking I pretty much swore off timepieces (coincidentally that's around when I got a cell phone and stopped needing them).
I guess if I was working in a physical, mobile job...where taking a phone out was inconvenient (dirty hands, gloves, hands always full)...and being able to time things was really important...I'd wear a watch. I could control it with voice, that could be a killer app for some job I don't know what. ("Smartwatch, give me a thirty second countdown on my mark... Mark.") Yeah, the only use for a watch in my mind is checking the time without using your pockets, and always-on voice control is the only "smart" addition that makes sense. If you had the use of your hands to fumble with buttons or a touch screen, a phone would be easier to use.
God, Starflight was a thing of beauty. Alien Legacy (1994) had a pretty gorgeous mix of procedural and hand-tweaked, too. If you want a procedural FPS, I think what you're looking for is Tower of Guns--I haven't played it but it definitely fits the bill.
Played around with (and wrote extensions for) an implementation of this on a MUCK 10+ years ago. So, basically online text adventure with a somewhat procedural map. Wound up with procedural cities and cultures and stuff too.
I for one don't care if it's dull. I spent an awful lot of time in Noctis, which had one of the worst control schemes ever, no combat, and no interaction with other players whatsoever besides naming planets and posting short notes (the database was updated every few months and made downloadable), but boy did it have a gorgeous infinite universe in its day.
Wait, so you actually browse Slashdot at -1? Because there's some damn awful stuff on here most of the time. Acres and acres of spam, unrelated rantings of psychopaths, and copypasta from adult novels... Yes, downvoting serves a vital purpose.
This, this, this. Dependency issues on a build server are so often things like "we added this dependency on a library locally, but didn't update the build server", or even "we checked in a change that makes it work on the dev box, but didn't make a change needed for the server". That plus forgetting to merge in stuff is really the only way I ever see build breaks (where checked-in code fails to compile, as opposed to compiles failing locally).
When I get home late and don't have time to cook before crashing, $2-$3 at McDonalds fills me up adequately for dinner (couple cheeseburgers or bacon cheddar mcchickens). $5 is more than I can eat (there's a "two big macs for $5" sale on now).
It's disgusting (if a bit addictive) but it's stupid fast, and yes, it's cheap as dirt. If I was working two jobs it would be nearly mandatory--no prep time, no dishes, right in front of the bus stop; grab it, eat, sleep.
At our local QFC, every time we try making something healthy it costs an arm and a leg. Buying in bulk helps, but the people we're talking about here can't do that all the time.
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Let's not exaggerate about "no difference". Writs of assistance, and searches in general, back in the revolutionary days were highly disruptive to life and business. If someone copies out your entire gmail folder you probably won't notice it, it's not like they'll be taking up space and getting in your way and throwing your files around as you try to read it yourself. They were even used to gain entrance to a place and trash it under the guise of a search.
I'm not making a value judgment on the merits of this case or whether it's reasonable or not, but you are drawing a false equivalency. Seizing all of a person's electronics equipment or servers is a much closer analogy. Non-destructive copying with zero downtime is not.
"Top men."
Thing is, that's not actually so bad to me at all. If you could tell whether someone was lying or telling the truth about performing some illegal act--and be certain of it (big assumption)--I'd wholeheartedly support it. It would catch criminals a lot faster, and exonerate the innocent a lot faster, what on earth could be bad about that? As you're describing it, it doesn't sound like it's violating any privacy of yours, except for the specific fact "did you commit the crime". It's just a one-shot perfectly accurate truth serum.
It certainly doesn't violate the 5th Amendment. The "no self incrimination" is specifically to cut down on coerced, inaccurate testimony. If this thing was accurate, it's a completely different issue.
It seems to me that almost every Internet Anti-Government Crusader's true agenda is "protect my right to lie to the authorities", or "protect my right to not get caught". Doesn't get any of my respect.
God, it's nice to see someone on here who doesn't think the government is a literal force of primal evil. Having even a little faith in the system seems to be thoughtcrime on internet boards.
or New York City for that matter...
In truth, this is also why Social Security has its problems. When it was established, it was "You likely won't live to use it, but if you do, you will be well taken care of". It was insurance against an uncommon and, in a way, kind of negative thing happening to you: Living to an age such that you could no longer support yourself. It was a luxury that not many people had, and it could absolutely be hard on your family. Of course, now almost everyone lives long enough to collect it.
No, it wasn't meant to be a replacement for savings, and you weren't supposed to get out what you put in. A small portion of the population was supposed to collect it, because most of them didn't live long enough to.
I don't know much about what he actually did at Epic aside from some of Unreal Tournament's best maps (it was pretty awesome that it showed the author name when you loaded a map) and I don't know what his job was the other companies at all. Was he a coder? Designer? Producer? Artist/art director? Nothing but level-design-o-rama?
Cyclists ARE a menace, to themselves. I nearly killed one two years ago because he blew a stop sign coming down a hill, swerved in front of me, hooked his tires into a trolley track and fell over about 20' in front of my car. If I hadn't been driving below the speed limit he would have been street pizza.
Biking in hilly, high density areas (like downtown Seattle) should require a license. One that can be revoked.
See though isn't that destruction of evidence? Which is pretty clearly illegal.
"Oh, you were looking for documents at my house? Sorry, I built my filing cabinet to shred and burn everything if I don't press a button every week" -- if you're arrested for (for example) financial fraud and you pull that kind of BS, you're in deep trouble. In fact, after you've started being investigated for something, any action to destroy potential evidence is super suspicious and may well be specifically illegal, even if (especially if) there's no way after the fact to prove whether it was incriminating or not. Just because you took that action far in the past when you set up the dead man's switch, doesn't excuse you from the consequences.
It's well established in corporate cases that people have an obligation to prevent automatic deletion of materials during an investigation. I'd be surprised if that didn't hold for private citizens too, why wouldn't it? If you would reasonably expect that the police have a lawful reason to search your documents, and you don't volunteer that those documents exist and are going to be deleted...I really don't see any ethical difference between that, and finding some way to delete them remotely yourself.
In a criminal case I don't see an ethical difference between "I did X and Y happened", and "I knew Y would happen if I didn't do X, and I didn't do it". Kind of like "I cut her brake line" vs "I knew her brake line was cut, and that she was going to drive the car, and I didn't inform her".
If there's an argument that a dead man's switch really is ethically different from active deletion...and I really do mean ethically different, not "more likely to get you off the hook for a crime"...I'd love to hear it.
I'm out of the blast range up north (Seatac) but would still hear it if it went off.
That said, magnitude 2 is basically "hit the ground real hard with a sledgehammer". A nearby major construction site causes a lot more vibration, so does a big truck on the freeway.
Honest question as a heavy C# user. Why Visual Basic? What advantage does it give, either in function or practice or even aesthetics, over C#? It seems that they are functionally identical but that C# has the better syntax; clearly there must be some reason VB.NET is still around though. Enlighten me please?
Just rediscovered Alien Legacy, a true Sierra golden age underdog from 1994. It's a space colonization game that's not a 4X, how novel!
I really really wish I could find all those old DOS TSRs from the mid-late 80s. I had one that put a bunch of ascii smiley face characters on the dos prompt that careened around and bounced off of lines of text; hold ctrl or alt to make them go in circles. I would not be surprised if it was really, truly lost in time with no remaining copies.
Visual Studio when doing C# stuff. Eclipse when doing Java stuff. On Linux, vim or notepad++ when doing C stuff or any other random shell junk. On Windows, notepad++ (okay, let's be honest, it's usually just noteBut I always wind up missing Visual Studio. It seems to fit my workflows best, and if it worked well with Java I'd replace Eclipse with it in an instant.
Don't have evidence of crimes on my phone? How about perfect legal but very private photos of my wife that I don't want J. Random Officer looking at?
Actually I think you have that wrong. To me, the jargon file had /positive/ words for misbehaving things. They were a pain to deal with, but they were fun to talk about.
As an Age of Empires / Empire Earth fan, I respectfully assert that I prefer random maps. If I'm going to sink a few hundred hours into getting good at a game, I prefer to win by skillful improvising instead of by optimizing my build orders around map travel routes that are known to-the-second and careful memorization of tile counts where I know I can block off a passage most efficiently every game. If your asymmetrical armies are well defined (and admittedly, that means they are not very asymmetrical), no map will give such an extreme advantage that it can't be overcome by spotting it early and adapting your strategy to force an engagement somewhere else. Or, hell, 'when he sees this advantageous narrow passage he's sure to build a lot of scissors units, so I'll build a bunch of rocks in anticipation and take bigger advantage than he will'.
It seems like random-map RTSes and hand-built-map RTSes are really different subgenres altogether, and they draw different crowds.
Already posted, but got a better idea. Combine it with that Myo thing that measures your tendons or whatever so it can tell what hand or finger motions you're making. The hell with touch control or voice control: Make it something you can operate by only moving the hand it's strapped to, without touching anything. Use with Bluetooth earbuds, put your thumb against your third and fourth fingers, 'swipe' up to start/stop your music, or down to skip track...maybe something to answer or hang up a phone call. This is given the assumption that the required hand signals are simple and do not have false positives. Hell, maybe you can write by signing letters in ASL under the table so you can text in a boring meeting, better than subvocal. *IF* the input was extremely usable and reliable, that just might be novel enough for me.
Of course, it occurs that I could just wear a Myo by itself and pair it to the phone in my pocket.
Don't know why, just bugs me to wear them, and I keep bashing them on things. Before I got a cell phone, I wore a carabiner watch on my belt and it was pretty cool...they were built with cheap springs though, had a tendency to stop staying clipped after a year or two, and after I lost one down an elevator shaft while disembarking I pretty much swore off timepieces (coincidentally that's around when I got a cell phone and stopped needing them).
I guess if I was working in a physical, mobile job...where taking a phone out was inconvenient (dirty hands, gloves, hands always full)...and being able to time things was really important...I'd wear a watch. I could control it with voice, that could be a killer app for some job I don't know what. ("Smartwatch, give me a thirty second countdown on my mark... Mark.") Yeah, the only use for a watch in my mind is checking the time without using your pockets, and always-on voice control is the only "smart" addition that makes sense. If you had the use of your hands to fumble with buttons or a touch screen, a phone would be easier to use.
God, Starflight was a thing of beauty. Alien Legacy (1994) had a pretty gorgeous mix of procedural and hand-tweaked, too. If you want a procedural FPS, I think what you're looking for is Tower of Guns--I haven't played it but it definitely fits the bill.
Played around with (and wrote extensions for) an implementation of this on a MUCK 10+ years ago. So, basically online text adventure with a somewhat procedural map. Wound up with procedural cities and cultures and stuff too.
I for one don't care if it's dull. I spent an awful lot of time in Noctis, which had one of the worst control schemes ever, no combat, and no interaction with other players whatsoever besides naming planets and posting short notes (the database was updated every few months and made downloadable), but boy did it have a gorgeous infinite universe in its day.
Wait, so you actually browse Slashdot at -1? Because there's some damn awful stuff on here most of the time. Acres and acres of spam, unrelated rantings of psychopaths, and copypasta from adult novels... Yes, downvoting serves a vital purpose.
This, this, this. Dependency issues on a build server are so often things like "we added this dependency on a library locally, but didn't update the build server", or even "we checked in a change that makes it work on the dev box, but didn't make a change needed for the server". That plus forgetting to merge in stuff is really the only way I ever see build breaks (where checked-in code fails to compile, as opposed to compiles failing locally).
I mean, first thing I would have though is "that's not actually him".
When I get home late and don't have time to cook before crashing, $2-$3 at McDonalds fills me up adequately for dinner (couple cheeseburgers or bacon cheddar mcchickens). $5 is more than I can eat (there's a "two big macs for $5" sale on now).
It's disgusting (if a bit addictive) but it's stupid fast, and yes, it's cheap as dirt. If I was working two jobs it would be nearly mandatory--no prep time, no dishes, right in front of the bus stop; grab it, eat, sleep.
At our local QFC, every time we try making something healthy it costs an arm and a leg. Buying in bulk helps, but the people we're talking about here can't do that all the time.