You don't have to load Google tools on an Android phone--in fact, Google gets mad if you get vanilla Android and try to put Google tools on it, or redistribute Google tools. Google tools are an optional part of Android, which the phone distributors elect to install. In fact, Android has no dependence on anything--it's possible to get Android, sans Google, sans Market, and load Amazon Marketplace on it (or any other APKs). This of course requires your phone/tablet supplier to allow that--note that Market isn't on the Nook...
They're learning from IBM. IBM doesn't want a bunch of little shits nibbling at them all the time, tossing settlement money and watching them swarm like seagulls. They DESTROY you for that shit, then everyone else hides under a rock and leaves them alone.
A lot of what I read isn't in nor will ever be in digital. However I am impressed with Kiseido Digital's digitization of Go World and a few books, and with Slate and Shell's ebook offerings.
It's not just a fucking "government line", it's one that the victims themselves generally say.
But let's not worry about them, as long as you're free to whack off to whatever pr0n you choose.
Let's try this again.
The current law states that you cannot retrieve any data off a child porn infected computer; it must be quarantined and then DOD secure wiped. All data on the machine is now tainted and nothing of value can be retrieved because it carries the radioactive infection of child pornography. The physical disk is suspect and must go through a complete surface wipe.
What this means: Your virtualization server has one VM that has an illegal image on it. That image could have been anywhere on the disk, so we are going to wipe the ENTIRE server, all virtual machines get trashed.
Further, you aren't allowed to copy ANY files off. It has mission-critical databases? Too bad. The back-up server grabbed a copy of the VM that had that image in it, so it too is now tainted and needs a full wipe; no restoration from back-ups. All data on here has been touched by the Scarlet Swine Flu and has tiny, vicious particles of evil attached to it.
Your SAN carries ALL your corporate data? That whole thing is getting wiped dude.
And during investigation, the entire evidence chain is based on a hash, a number generated from a file. We're not allowed to see the image, or transfer it, or anything; what we do is we run a program that analyzes the image, generates a hash value, and emits THAT as evidence. That number can never transform back into the original image, but we have a database of bad numbers. They're "fuzzy hashes" that will match a tweaked image, so if you alter the tone and insert some noise it should (should) still match. That's all the evidence we have: a number that matches another number, just trust us that number is child porn.
If there was such a video of ME, I would be quite happy with the government seizing it, returning any non-relevant data back to the owners promptly, and retaining the image for legal purposes. Publication is not necessary for this. What has been seen can be relaid, but what has been seen cannot be unseen; someone out there has the ability to relay as much as can be relayed by the next guy already, and if it made the big time on the file sharing networks then the whole damn movie is just lost in the wild.
There are multiple levels of stupidity here. We should be able to non-destructively remove a single image from a media, or sanely recover important non-related data. We should be able to acknowledge the value of having actual evidence, rather than a number someone wrote down that was also previously recorded in a database with no real retention of the source material. But no, we've attached some infectious voodoo magic to bits of data, ones and zeroes, like someone could lay their hand on a.txt file that's 15 bytes long and have visions of a 200 kilobyte image that was on another computer that this file was once on as well.
And in the other direction: Why don't we have the same procedures for dissemination of adult porn? I've seen tons of pictures of over-18 college students "MY GIRLFRIEND PISSED ME OFF HERE ARE HER BOOBS" but they're 22 so it's okay and I can have that even though the victims are crying. The guy that took the picture and distributed it all over the god damn world isn't even arrested for it, and nobody comes to degauss my computer and put me in jail for possession.
Simple, easy to correct design flaws. This is more artful than anything, and the "string" is non-existent--that hole is for smoking the hive to remove the glass pane. Of course it needs redesign with a confined separate area for the queen, and removable panels so you can smoke out the bees and get at the honeycombs. If only you could build a one-way panel that only let bees out, but not in... then, with the turn of a key, close it as a door and allow the upper compartment to empty. Then open that and remove the comb, replace the cleaned substrate, and allow bees to rebuild and create more honey.
And this is why you need some related form of momentum--something to vaguely give that impression as well as something to show that we've accepted such censorship. Those arguments are nutty... but also not so nutty, really. Abortion is fun because you can make societal arguments like the unintended consequence of ELIMINATING other unintended consequences (i.e. risks) causing a slide of other moral fibers of society, or more real effects like proliferation of STDs. Then again, you could just talk about killing babies. Or both, if you juggle your topics right and get the timing down just so.... Of course, some of that relied on people competently understanding the problem that widespread drug use causes to society--something real, but vague, which people just won't swallow. It's analogous of course to the problem that eliminating the risk of pregnancy causes to society (which is more complex and annoying, and fun to argue about in itself--if the man says abort it, the woman says she wanted to keep it, why the fuck should the man have to pay child support?)
Child porn is not a reason to allow the government to blatantly mandate block lists for the Internet. Child porn is a reason for the government to monitor such things, but also to arrange stings and traps and to go put an end to human trafficking and to try to stop the child molesters.
The current government line is that each time another person views an image of child porn, that child is victimized again. It's one more victimization of that child for one more person to see it. The current law states that you cannot retrieve any data off a child porn infected computer; it must be quarantined and then DOD secure wiped. All data on the machine is now tainted and nothing of value can be retrieved because it carries the radioactive infection of child pornography. The physical disk is suspect and must go through a complete surface wipe.
Personally, I think a child is mostly victimized when you kidnap them in the night, beat them, stick multiple adult-sized penises up their asses, and then sell them to an underground sex slave operation. I'm not sure the threat of another person handling an image (there are "fuzzy hashing algorithms" used to handle child porn so the image itself is NEVER transmitted or even seen by someone else--the person to see it hides it, reports it, and the investigators never LOOK at it because that would be "victimizing the child again") really stands up to much of this.
By the way, the first effort Slashdot covered for blanket censorship was a child pornography one--and the day it started, the blacklist carried many non-child-pornography addresses, mostly related to file sharing (as an extension--you might share child pornography!).
There are many losses of freedom that society simply will not tolerate and, even if society did, there are civil liberties organizations that will step up to the ball and fight those battles.
We here at the TSA whole-heartedly agree, and can attest to the viciousness of people trying to pass airport checkpoints without having their boobs x-ray-goggled and their scrotums squeezed. It was a humbling experience for us when the ACLU obtained a court order forcing us to cease all operations not shown to improve security, both for specific complaints such as humiliation over naked x-rays and groping and for more general complaints about using non-issues as a platform to force travelers into ridiculous and submissive positions so that we can exert control continuously and ensure that they will follow any instruction no matter how much it strips their civil liberties.
At the TSA, we now focus on working with intelligence agencies and on aircraft control strategies. Locked cockpit doors and fast response and escort when a pilot behaves in an unexpected and uncontrolled manner have become the gold standard, and we are strict on airlines that do not enforce these standards. Your convenience and safety are both equal priorities, as they should be.
No the problem is the slope needs to provide enough momentum to get up the next hill. Child porn-- Huge. File sharing-- Not as big, but big enough to argue, with big supporters to help. Hate speech-- hard to argue against, not huge, starting to hit the trough.
At a point you need to convince people that something like Abortion is grotesque, an abomination to the moral fiber of society, etc., if you want to get that blocked. An up-hill battle, and one that needs to start on the way down. The momentum from blocking other shit-we-don't-like gives you that push up the hill. If you can ban political dissent or unpopular political views (start with communism, etc), and still run with that momentum, you can get over the next hill and ride the slope down.
After that, it's just going down. You get ONE point of resistance, one hill to try to roll over. If people will swallow that, you can slide down the next slope FOREVER... or until they all guillotine you.
We are being "Represented" and yet many are saying "Our vote doesn't count." They are being manipulated, yet they feel they are being ignored. Or perhaps they are too stupid to self-govern, and those in power are not working in our interests to compensate. Politicians are playing politics to trade in votes as I trade on the stock market, rather than staking their careers on the potentially losing proposition of doing something that's actually earnestly good for the people.
When the population feels that the economy is so run-down that food and jobs are going to become too scarce to live, they will become frightened, then angry, then violent. "Represented" or not.
As people advocate taking the living shit out of everything to fix all our problems, I recall France beheading everyone because they were taxing the living shit out of everything to the point of completely destroying the economy...
As people consistently argue that newer is better and this old stuff is just old and archaic... because they want to change what isn't broke. It's not broke but we can make a damn good argument for why it's broke and needs fixing...
Ground strike force. Just unleash the military on them, with body armor and superior weaponry, including air strike access and surface-to-surface missiles and computer targeting and snipers and tanks. Just send it as military aid to Mexico, and be done with it (the "Aid" being that we find their constant import of drugs into our country an act of war, not to mention the occasional small-scale violent invasion from border-jumpers beheading people--and so we will either take Mexico by force OR help them destroy their small terrorist sects).
A drive-by shoot-up isn't executed via machete. While I can handle someone with a gun, it's a very delicate situation that requires either fast reflexes going in (i.e. trap before draw) or careful psychological control (i.e. don't make them shoot you). You cannot automatically win a firearm fight "because you're good," even if you have a gun and you're the world's best quickdraw. You CAN win against a guy with a gun, bare handed, but it's not simple and it's extremely opportunistic; cooperation is delay, but a strong opportunity shouldn't be ignored because they might just shoot you when they're done anyway (i.e. if you don't fight, you die).
Drive-by shoot-ups are more like "they're already going to shoot you, you know this, they know this, and they don't particularly care about anything intermediate so they're coming out with guns blazing." You've already lost the "control" part, you can't hold the situation in limbo looking for an opportunity. That makes flight, cover, and retaliation immediate needs. If you can disable him (unlikely with gunfire already occurring), then attack immediately; otherwise get out of the line of fire, get cover, and make sure that cover isn't trapped behind a stationary object (because he'll just walk over to the slate lab desk you knocked over, lean over it, and shoot you in the head). Ambush by firearm sucks like that: Can't fight, can't run, can't hide.
Shitty, right?
A man cannot slash with a machete arm at 1762ft/s. I can still control this, physically. This is dangerous, but it's not impossible to control--in fact, handling a man with a knife or sword is almost exactly like handling an unarmed assailant (and in fact all tactics that work against a sword or knife armed assailant work against an unarmed assailant; staff weapons have incompatible countermeasures because much of the time you want to control the staff and use it as a lever--do not grab a machete blade, you will lose).
These things are not magic and they are not automatic god mode. They are dangerous--seriously dangerous. At the same time, we've found a pattern by which a man in a stand-off against police with a firearm will occasionally (fairly often) kill the police, but in the wide majority of cases just ends up getting shot to death the first time he flinches. The group is of course safer: Two or more officers, man fires, second officer kills him.
This is why I advocate training everyone for self defense and, while I feel strong training and certification requirements are important, I feel firearms should be pervasive as self-defense weapons. At the same time, even the well trained need to control their firearms--stray bullets suck--so requiring a second form of weapon when carrying a firearm (certification of hand-to-hand combat skill counts, but also a sword, knives, nunchaku if you want, anything) would be optimal. Yes, you could pull a gun on the guy attacking you with a club; I'm pretty sure a sword will work, too, because I'm sure as hell not going to provoke this situation. That guy has a SWORD; if he comes at me we're going to have a problem, but otherwise, you know, cool sword dude.
Some guy coming at me with a machete is going to be treated like a guy with a sword, knife, or just his bare hands. This would all have worked out just fine if he had stayed over there; but now he's threatening to cut my head off and while I can bike 15 miles at 15mph easy... I can only run half a block. I guess I'll just have to take him down; it's that simple. Unless you got a magic flute I can play to have a giant bird swoop down and carry me away from danger?
In real life, I respond poorly to threats. I've been threatened in real life by groups of people much bigger than me in dark alleys with me backed in a corner. I walked through them. They moved. Sure, mexican drug cartels aren't scared of their own shadow like your vanilla street thug; that makes them more dangerous as well--even if the street thugs around here fight back, I will destroy them
I've been watching the legal system for quite some time and I've noticed that when a judge tells you to do something and you don't listen, eventually they want to know why you aren't doing what they told you to do. It's also not helpful to tell a judge he doesn't have the authority to hear your case, or really any other range of stupidity that tends to piss people off in general.
Look. It takes a certain amount of energy to burn things. Like paper has to reach a temperature of, let's say, 451 degrees farenheight to ignite. Now, in the presence of a catalyst (say a catalytic gas), paper's activation energy becomes lower. Paper will now ignite at 378 degrees farenheit. With me so far?
If we bring the temperature below 378 degrees farenheit, the paper will stop burning. Of course, once you ignite paper, the combustion reaction releases energy, keeping the temperature up and allowing more paper to burn. Thus the catalyst serves to make initiation easier by requiring a lower initial energy load--and the paper burns faster because the amount of energy absorbed to break bonds is reduced as well, keeping more free energy to ignite other paper.
Now let's say you take this in reverse. Take CO2 and H2O and turn it into hydrocarbons, like methane. Methane burns like paper and releases heat. To make methane, you take CO2 and H2O, add a certain amount of heat, and the output is Methane. We'll call this temperature 800 degrees farenheit (although it's a number of joules of energy you have to add to the molecules to form bonds, really).
Now you add a catalyst. Line the cylinder with something that allows the system to form methane at 600 degrees farenheit. The number of joules of energy needed to initiate bond formation is reduced; however the total energy required to make those bonds remains the same. So if the process normally begins at 800 degrees farenheit and consumes 100 joules of energy, it will now begin at 600 degrees farenheit and consume 100 joules of energy. The advantage here is that you can use a cooler flame to begin the process, thus avoiding using some amount of fuel to raise the temperature, and avoiding an appreciable loss in the system (a hotter system will transfer more energy more rapidly to cooler mass, even though insulation; insulation slows the process, but so does equalizing temperature between both masses in the first place, hence a cooler reaction vessel).
If we extrude this out, let's say you find a magic catalyst that makes the energy of activation equal to the ambient energy available at, say, 50 degrees farenheit. It's 90 degrees farenheit outside today. By leaving your vessel in the warm ambient air, your vessel will automatically generate methane from CO2 and H2O. Mind you, it still absorbs 100 joules of energy each time it forms a methane molecule. As a result, ambient heat is consumed: the vessel becomes colder than the atmosphere around it. If the reaction occurs sufficiently quickly, the vessel will eventually freeze--a temperature of 50 degrees farenheit will be reached, and the reaction will cease to occur until enough energy enters the vessel to form a bond, in which case a molecule of methane will promptly be created and all reaction will again stop pending further energy absorption into the medium.
If you create a catalyst that splits water with a low enough activation energy, it WILL reduce the temperature of the water continuously until it reaches the temperature at which the reaction begins--the temperature at which the amount of energy in the molecules is below the activation energy required. Thus if you can make water react at 40 degrees farenheit, the system will freeze at 40 degrees farenheit--you'll have to warm it up or it just won't work anymore. If the activation energy comes in the form of electricity, however, then you will continuously consume energy from the input electricity; it will prove impossible to separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen, burn that hydrogen and oxygen, use that to generate electricity, and power the electrolysis process to generate more hydrogen and oxygen. At some point, you will need an external fuel source, whether the reaction occurs by means of heat or electricity input.
In other words: you will NEVER make a self-sustaining machine in which you dump water in, seal it off, and then repeatedly recycle the water produced by ignition or any ot
Labor unions have had policies put in place by which government employees are impossible to fire if you don't fire them within one year. Administration is way easier with contractors, whereas the unions have made employee management a nightmare. Dude here punched his boss in the face and they were unable to fire him, so transferred him to another department instead, same pay grade, no demotion.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't have to load Google tools on an Android phone--in fact, Google gets mad if you get vanilla Android and try to put Google tools on it, or redistribute Google tools. Google tools are an optional part of Android, which the phone distributors elect to install. In fact, Android has no dependence on anything--it's possible to get Android, sans Google, sans Market, and load Amazon Marketplace on it (or any other APKs). This of course requires your phone/tablet supplier to allow that--note that Market isn't on the Nook...
They're learning from IBM. IBM doesn't want a bunch of little shits nibbling at them all the time, tossing settlement money and watching them swarm like seagulls. They DESTROY you for that shit, then everyone else hides under a rock and leaves them alone.
Rather like in that Cloverfield film. Here it suddenly is, it all its glory, exposed.
DAY OF LAVOS
A lot of what I read isn't in nor will ever be in digital. However I am impressed with Kiseido Digital's digitization of Go World and a few books, and with Slate and Shell's ebook offerings.
It's not just a fucking "government line", it's one that the victims themselves generally say. But let's not worry about them, as long as you're free to whack off to whatever pr0n you choose.
Let's try this again.
The current law states that you cannot retrieve any data off a child porn infected computer; it must be quarantined and then DOD secure wiped. All data on the machine is now tainted and nothing of value can be retrieved because it carries the radioactive infection of child pornography. The physical disk is suspect and must go through a complete surface wipe.
What this means: Your virtualization server has one VM that has an illegal image on it. That image could have been anywhere on the disk, so we are going to wipe the ENTIRE server, all virtual machines get trashed.
Further, you aren't allowed to copy ANY files off. It has mission-critical databases? Too bad. The back-up server grabbed a copy of the VM that had that image in it, so it too is now tainted and needs a full wipe; no restoration from back-ups. All data on here has been touched by the Scarlet Swine Flu and has tiny, vicious particles of evil attached to it.
Your SAN carries ALL your corporate data? That whole thing is getting wiped dude.
And during investigation, the entire evidence chain is based on a hash, a number generated from a file. We're not allowed to see the image, or transfer it, or anything; what we do is we run a program that analyzes the image, generates a hash value, and emits THAT as evidence. That number can never transform back into the original image, but we have a database of bad numbers. They're "fuzzy hashes" that will match a tweaked image, so if you alter the tone and insert some noise it should (should) still match. That's all the evidence we have: a number that matches another number, just trust us that number is child porn.
If there was such a video of ME, I would be quite happy with the government seizing it, returning any non-relevant data back to the owners promptly, and retaining the image for legal purposes. Publication is not necessary for this. What has been seen can be relaid, but what has been seen cannot be unseen; someone out there has the ability to relay as much as can be relayed by the next guy already, and if it made the big time on the file sharing networks then the whole damn movie is just lost in the wild.
There are multiple levels of stupidity here. We should be able to non-destructively remove a single image from a media, or sanely recover important non-related data. We should be able to acknowledge the value of having actual evidence, rather than a number someone wrote down that was also previously recorded in a database with no real retention of the source material. But no, we've attached some infectious voodoo magic to bits of data, ones and zeroes, like someone could lay their hand on a .txt file that's 15 bytes long and have visions of a 200 kilobyte image that was on another computer that this file was once on as well.
And in the other direction: Why don't we have the same procedures for dissemination of adult porn? I've seen tons of pictures of over-18 college students "MY GIRLFRIEND PISSED ME OFF HERE ARE HER BOOBS" but they're 22 so it's okay and I can have that even though the victims are crying. The guy that took the picture and distributed it all over the god damn world isn't even arrested for it, and nobody comes to degauss my computer and put me in jail for possession.
Simple, easy to correct design flaws. This is more artful than anything, and the "string" is non-existent--that hole is for smoking the hive to remove the glass pane. Of course it needs redesign with a confined separate area for the queen, and removable panels so you can smoke out the bees and get at the honeycombs. If only you could build a one-way panel that only let bees out, but not in ... then, with the turn of a key, close it as a door and allow the upper compartment to empty. Then open that and remove the comb, replace the cleaned substrate, and allow bees to rebuild and create more honey.
And this is why you need some related form of momentum--something to vaguely give that impression as well as something to show that we've accepted such censorship. Those arguments are nutty ... but also not so nutty, really. Abortion is fun because you can make societal arguments like the unintended consequence of ELIMINATING other unintended consequences (i.e. risks) causing a slide of other moral fibers of society, or more real effects like proliferation of STDs. Then again, you could just talk about killing babies. Or both, if you juggle your topics right and get the timing down just so.... Of course, some of that relied on people competently understanding the problem that widespread drug use causes to society--something real, but vague, which people just won't swallow. It's analogous of course to the problem that eliminating the risk of pregnancy causes to society (which is more complex and annoying, and fun to argue about in itself--if the man says abort it, the woman says she wanted to keep it, why the fuck should the man have to pay child support?)
but focusing on the pictures rather than the molestation seems wrong
Are we being conditioned to consider the thought as the crime, rather than the act?
Child porn is not a reason to allow the government to blatantly mandate block lists for the Internet. Child porn is a reason for the government to monitor such things, but also to arrange stings and traps and to go put an end to human trafficking and to try to stop the child molesters.
The current government line is that each time another person views an image of child porn, that child is victimized again. It's one more victimization of that child for one more person to see it. The current law states that you cannot retrieve any data off a child porn infected computer; it must be quarantined and then DOD secure wiped. All data on the machine is now tainted and nothing of value can be retrieved because it carries the radioactive infection of child pornography. The physical disk is suspect and must go through a complete surface wipe.
Personally, I think a child is mostly victimized when you kidnap them in the night, beat them, stick multiple adult-sized penises up their asses, and then sell them to an underground sex slave operation. I'm not sure the threat of another person handling an image (there are "fuzzy hashing algorithms" used to handle child porn so the image itself is NEVER transmitted or even seen by someone else--the person to see it hides it, reports it, and the investigators never LOOK at it because that would be "victimizing the child again") really stands up to much of this.
By the way, the first effort Slashdot covered for blanket censorship was a child pornography one--and the day it started, the blacklist carried many non-child-pornography addresses, mostly related to file sharing (as an extension--you might share child pornography!).
Boiling the frog?
There are many losses of freedom that society simply will not tolerate and, even if society did, there are civil liberties organizations that will step up to the ball and fight those battles.
We here at the TSA whole-heartedly agree, and can attest to the viciousness of people trying to pass airport checkpoints without having their boobs x-ray-goggled and their scrotums squeezed. It was a humbling experience for us when the ACLU obtained a court order forcing us to cease all operations not shown to improve security, both for specific complaints such as humiliation over naked x-rays and groping and for more general complaints about using non-issues as a platform to force travelers into ridiculous and submissive positions so that we can exert control continuously and ensure that they will follow any instruction no matter how much it strips their civil liberties.
At the TSA, we now focus on working with intelligence agencies and on aircraft control strategies. Locked cockpit doors and fast response and escort when a pilot behaves in an unexpected and uncontrolled manner have become the gold standard, and we are strict on airlines that do not enforce these standards. Your convenience and safety are both equal priorities, as they should be.
No the problem is the slope needs to provide enough momentum to get up the next hill. Child porn-- Huge. File sharing-- Not as big, but big enough to argue, with big supporters to help. Hate speech-- hard to argue against, not huge, starting to hit the trough.
At a point you need to convince people that something like Abortion is grotesque, an abomination to the moral fiber of society, etc., if you want to get that blocked. An up-hill battle, and one that needs to start on the way down. The momentum from blocking other shit-we-don't-like gives you that push up the hill. If you can ban political dissent or unpopular political views (start with communism, etc), and still run with that momentum, you can get over the next hill and ride the slope down.
After that, it's just going down. You get ONE point of resistance, one hill to try to roll over. If people will swallow that, you can slide down the next slope FOREVER... or until they all guillotine you.
Or it's just easier for me to not be a political expert, and make a joke that's universally understood. Brits know what Republicans are.
Then child porn. Then hate speech. Then speech to create political unrest. Then pro-abortion speech. Then pro-Republican speech.
We are being "Represented" and yet many are saying "Our vote doesn't count." They are being manipulated, yet they feel they are being ignored. Or perhaps they are too stupid to self-govern, and those in power are not working in our interests to compensate. Politicians are playing politics to trade in votes as I trade on the stock market, rather than staking their careers on the potentially losing proposition of doing something that's actually earnestly good for the people.
When the population feels that the economy is so run-down that food and jobs are going to become too scarce to live, they will become frightened, then angry, then violent. "Represented" or not.
As people advocate taking the living shit out of everything to fix all our problems, I recall France beheading everyone because they were taxing the living shit out of everything to the point of completely destroying the economy...
Now days, the proper way to organized files
As people consistently argue that newer is better and this old stuff is just old and archaic... because they want to change what isn't broke. It's not broke but we can make a damn good argument for why it's broke and needs fixing...
Explain what is not working.
Ground strike force. Just unleash the military on them, with body armor and superior weaponry, including air strike access and surface-to-surface missiles and computer targeting and snipers and tanks. Just send it as military aid to Mexico, and be done with it (the "Aid" being that we find their constant import of drugs into our country an act of war, not to mention the occasional small-scale violent invasion from border-jumpers beheading people--and so we will either take Mexico by force OR help them destroy their small terrorist sects).
A drive-by shoot-up isn't executed via machete. While I can handle someone with a gun, it's a very delicate situation that requires either fast reflexes going in (i.e. trap before draw) or careful psychological control (i.e. don't make them shoot you). You cannot automatically win a firearm fight "because you're good," even if you have a gun and you're the world's best quickdraw. You CAN win against a guy with a gun, bare handed, but it's not simple and it's extremely opportunistic; cooperation is delay, but a strong opportunity shouldn't be ignored because they might just shoot you when they're done anyway (i.e. if you don't fight, you die).
Drive-by shoot-ups are more like "they're already going to shoot you, you know this, they know this, and they don't particularly care about anything intermediate so they're coming out with guns blazing." You've already lost the "control" part, you can't hold the situation in limbo looking for an opportunity. That makes flight, cover, and retaliation immediate needs. If you can disable him (unlikely with gunfire already occurring), then attack immediately; otherwise get out of the line of fire, get cover, and make sure that cover isn't trapped behind a stationary object (because he'll just walk over to the slate lab desk you knocked over, lean over it, and shoot you in the head). Ambush by firearm sucks like that: Can't fight, can't run, can't hide.
Shitty, right?
A man cannot slash with a machete arm at 1762ft/s. I can still control this, physically. This is dangerous, but it's not impossible to control--in fact, handling a man with a knife or sword is almost exactly like handling an unarmed assailant (and in fact all tactics that work against a sword or knife armed assailant work against an unarmed assailant; staff weapons have incompatible countermeasures because much of the time you want to control the staff and use it as a lever--do not grab a machete blade, you will lose).
These things are not magic and they are not automatic god mode. They are dangerous--seriously dangerous. At the same time, we've found a pattern by which a man in a stand-off against police with a firearm will occasionally (fairly often) kill the police, but in the wide majority of cases just ends up getting shot to death the first time he flinches. The group is of course safer: Two or more officers, man fires, second officer kills him.
This is why I advocate training everyone for self defense and, while I feel strong training and certification requirements are important, I feel firearms should be pervasive as self-defense weapons. At the same time, even the well trained need to control their firearms--stray bullets suck--so requiring a second form of weapon when carrying a firearm (certification of hand-to-hand combat skill counts, but also a sword, knives, nunchaku if you want, anything) would be optimal. Yes, you could pull a gun on the guy attacking you with a club; I'm pretty sure a sword will work, too, because I'm sure as hell not going to provoke this situation. That guy has a SWORD; if he comes at me we're going to have a problem, but otherwise, you know, cool sword dude.
Some guy coming at me with a machete is going to be treated like a guy with a sword, knife, or just his bare hands. This would all have worked out just fine if he had stayed over there; but now he's threatening to cut my head off and while I can bike 15 miles at 15mph easy... I can only run half a block. I guess I'll just have to take him down; it's that simple. Unless you got a magic flute I can play to have a giant bird swoop down and carry me away from danger?
In real life, I respond poorly to threats. I've been threatened in real life by groups of people much bigger than me in dark alleys with me backed in a corner. I walked through them. They moved. Sure, mexican drug cartels aren't scared of their own shadow like your vanilla street thug; that makes them more dangerous as well--even if the street thugs around here fight back, I will destroy them
And backing down only teaches the cartels that this form of intimidation works. I would never back down from some mexican with a machete.
I've been watching the legal system for quite some time and I've noticed that when a judge tells you to do something and you don't listen, eventually they want to know why you aren't doing what they told you to do. It's also not helpful to tell a judge he doesn't have the authority to hear your case, or really any other range of stupidity that tends to piss people off in general.
This is totally epic, in any case. I do know that if they continue to fail to comply, some judge will eventually start hanging people.
Look. It takes a certain amount of energy to burn things. Like paper has to reach a temperature of, let's say, 451 degrees farenheight to ignite. Now, in the presence of a catalyst (say a catalytic gas), paper's activation energy becomes lower. Paper will now ignite at 378 degrees farenheit. With me so far?
If we bring the temperature below 378 degrees farenheit, the paper will stop burning. Of course, once you ignite paper, the combustion reaction releases energy, keeping the temperature up and allowing more paper to burn. Thus the catalyst serves to make initiation easier by requiring a lower initial energy load--and the paper burns faster because the amount of energy absorbed to break bonds is reduced as well, keeping more free energy to ignite other paper.
Now let's say you take this in reverse. Take CO2 and H2O and turn it into hydrocarbons, like methane. Methane burns like paper and releases heat. To make methane, you take CO2 and H2O, add a certain amount of heat, and the output is Methane. We'll call this temperature 800 degrees farenheit (although it's a number of joules of energy you have to add to the molecules to form bonds, really).
Now you add a catalyst. Line the cylinder with something that allows the system to form methane at 600 degrees farenheit. The number of joules of energy needed to initiate bond formation is reduced; however the total energy required to make those bonds remains the same. So if the process normally begins at 800 degrees farenheit and consumes 100 joules of energy, it will now begin at 600 degrees farenheit and consume 100 joules of energy. The advantage here is that you can use a cooler flame to begin the process, thus avoiding using some amount of fuel to raise the temperature, and avoiding an appreciable loss in the system (a hotter system will transfer more energy more rapidly to cooler mass, even though insulation; insulation slows the process, but so does equalizing temperature between both masses in the first place, hence a cooler reaction vessel).
If we extrude this out, let's say you find a magic catalyst that makes the energy of activation equal to the ambient energy available at, say, 50 degrees farenheit. It's 90 degrees farenheit outside today. By leaving your vessel in the warm ambient air, your vessel will automatically generate methane from CO2 and H2O. Mind you, it still absorbs 100 joules of energy each time it forms a methane molecule. As a result, ambient heat is consumed: the vessel becomes colder than the atmosphere around it. If the reaction occurs sufficiently quickly, the vessel will eventually freeze--a temperature of 50 degrees farenheit will be reached, and the reaction will cease to occur until enough energy enters the vessel to form a bond, in which case a molecule of methane will promptly be created and all reaction will again stop pending further energy absorption into the medium.
If you create a catalyst that splits water with a low enough activation energy, it WILL reduce the temperature of the water continuously until it reaches the temperature at which the reaction begins--the temperature at which the amount of energy in the molecules is below the activation energy required. Thus if you can make water react at 40 degrees farenheit, the system will freeze at 40 degrees farenheit--you'll have to warm it up or it just won't work anymore. If the activation energy comes in the form of electricity, however, then you will continuously consume energy from the input electricity; it will prove impossible to separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen, burn that hydrogen and oxygen, use that to generate electricity, and power the electrolysis process to generate more hydrogen and oxygen. At some point, you will need an external fuel source, whether the reaction occurs by means of heat or electricity input.
In other words: you will NEVER make a self-sustaining machine in which you dump water in, seal it off, and then repeatedly recycle the water produced by ignition or any ot
Outsourced IT workers are not employees, they are contractors. Employees are direct hire. I'm not on government payroll.
Labor unions have had policies put in place by which government employees are impossible to fire if you don't fire them within one year. Administration is way easier with contractors, whereas the unions have made employee management a nightmare. Dude here punched his boss in the face and they were unable to fire him, so transferred him to another department instead, same pay grade, no demotion.