Oh yeah, mandatory Trusted Computing, the magic bullet. Because enumerating and safeguarding against all known good or bad software products has worked sooo well in corporate environments.
Last time I checked, online gaming had a massive problem with cheaters of all sorts, despite a decade's effort to secure their client code and to check against known badware. With no luck.
Good luck trying to keep an updated, effective list of all known intellectual-property-respecting, human-rights-compatible, hate-speech-free and politically-absolutely-correct software products.
Excuse me while I'm off to my hidden stash of guns and ammo, adding loads of paper and several unregistered mechanical typewriters to the loot.
Don't forget: the Soviet Union required the registration of any and all typewriters and printing devices with the authorities. Unregistered possession of such items was a felony and severely punished.
But in Soviet Europe, Trusted Computing registers YOU! Ihre Papiere bitte mein Herr!
Yes, you are right, personal definitions of tyrannical vary wildly between citizens. Nevertheless, there will be a point when the majority of gun-owning cilians will say *not one step further* and that is the definition of tyranny obtained via the 'wisdom-of-the-crowd' method.
Most officers will follow lawful orders, but not when law itself is so corrupted, that these orders call for mass murder.
Imagine that Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court are taken over by a hostile tyranny. Any insane ramblings by the then-tyrant-president will be cast into law by a then-corrupt Congress and cleanly supported by the then-corrupt SCOTUS. Imagine a new law calls for the removal of all male children from their non ruling-party member parents to governmental re-education. Lawful order: yes, morally acceptable order: hell no.
All parents that fit this definition will then instantly shoot back the moment they see a policeman coming for their kids. I would. Then you have the situation I described: all governmental service people know exactly that they will be in life danger when they execute this order - AND - if they don't, as well, because their party commissars will shoot them when they disobey. Given this unsolvable situation, many government employees may defect instead of shooting fathers and mothers.
People without guns can be rounded up by officers in riot gear with pepper spray and water cannons. Rounding up some people with guns is much harder and will induce heavy violence on both sides. Not much governmental minions will be able to consciously target local people, brothers, sisters and neighbors with the gun of a main battle tank.
Some could do this, but the ensuing protest will surely prohibit any and all cooperation they'd get from the occupied civilians. If you round up armed and resisting civilians, the stakes are orders of magnitude higher.
Also, aircraft and tanks need regular supply materials, the crew needs rest and electronic systems are notoriously vulnerable to jamming.
Remember: the Nazis had aircraft, tanks, APCs and machine guns. And they were indoctrinated, prejudiced and hostile to their foreign occupied countries. Yet, the resistance movement made a noticeable impact on their operations.
One million service people mean nothing: more than two thirds of them will instantly desert the army when they are ordered to shoot fathers and mothers of their own country. Most of the rest will simply disobey their orders and desert later when no one is looking. The few remaining lunatics are horribly outnumbered - and outgunned, because most deserted troops took some kind of weapon system with them.
Unarmed people, no matter if determined or not, can be free, enslaved or dead. Armed and determined people can only be free or dead, but hardly enslaved. And everything done against their will costs a tyrant a much much higher price. Which is the point of all that.
To quote Nietzsche: You can only remain silent when you are armed, otherwise people just babble and quarrel.
I can't believe I have to explain this as a German to Americans...
When it is racism now to state a fact that can be observed all around the country, simply by counting faces, so to speak, then call me racist.
Fact is, for any given incident of blue collar crime, it is more likely that the perpetrator belongs to the group of poor, uneducated people of African or Latin American descent.
To be sure of this you just need to visit one random jail somewhere in this country.
Note that I did not say anything about white-collar crime. These tend to be more devastating, but also much much more surviveable for the victims, but it's about violent crimes we need to defend the most, because these incidents are more time-critical, life-threatening and unforeseen.
Anyway, it is not racist to state countable facts that anyone can observe. However it would BE racist to state that being black is the *reason* for committing crimes. One is a fact, the other is an unscientific assumption.
Poor, uneducated Blacks statistically commit more crimes per person when compared to poor, uneducated Whites or Asians. But educated and affluent Blacks do not when compared to educated and affluent Whites or Blacks. With this observation, the statistical odds are heavily against a racist interpretation.
Your reaction is precisely what I called useless political correctness. It's within empirical observations that a certain group commits the most crimes and it is also statistically substantiated that 'being Black' is no deciding factor in this equation.
For every trained professional stormtrooper, you have several thousand armed citizens. The stormtrooper shoot for money, strange ideas or fear. The citizens shoot for their freedom, their land, their family. Both are from the same country.
Remember: the French and Polish resistance had notable success in slowing or even pinning down the Nazis. And they had much less firepower than the people of an average small town in the US.
And don't underestimate the conscience of nameless stormtroopers. Only very very few highly trained and brainwashed Nazis could operate the concentration camps, and even then many committed suicide or deserted on the first chance they saw.
A tyrannical government has to have countless minions to execute their tyrannical orders.
Poorly armed civilians are probably outgunned by even the first wave of governmental stormtroopers.
But by definition of a tyranny, the freedom-loving public outnumbers the stormtroopers by several magnitudes. That's where the blood of patriots AND tyrants comes from in Jeffersons' popular quote.
Regular governmental minions usually have a conscience and if upholding unjust order means killing thousands of fellow countrymen, this will be enough to have some minions defect to the freedom side. Unarmed people can be rounded up to the re-education camp like sheep, with water cannons and pepper spray only. No stormtrooper will have a problem with that. But an armed populace, even only simple small arms means a much larger and more dangerous operation.
Even the Nazis were afraid to go into Warsaw ghetto because the Jews there had simple weapons. The Nazis won this battle, but their losses from rogue civilians in occupied Poland were higher than on the Western front until the GIs arrived.
That's only a viable option if the majority supports it. If the majority vote calls for legalization, so be it - the Netherlands did that more than a decade ago.
But if the public vote is FOR drug prohibition, the police has to support this, up to the death penalty if need be like in China or Singapore.
Stop complaining and start signing petitions if you want to change that. After all, people just need to NOT take drugs, NOT steal and NOT rob each other. It's so easy that even dumb-as-a-rock imbeciles can do it.
Millions of people do not take a single dose of drugs for decades and are absolutely happy with it. Even some shady underworld people sell or buy illegal drugs for years and do NOT kill other dealers or rob innocent people, it's not that hard to NOT beat humans to a bloody pulp.
And don't complain about the jails. I'd support a tax raise by X percent just to build new work camps for repeat offenders and violent criminals. Open camps with barbed wires around is enough, they all chose to be criminals and/or are dangerous creatures. Behave or be gone, simple as that.
At first you need to crack down on political correctness.
Your typical murderer: - is not of Asian or European descent - is not female - is older than ten but younger than 40 years - has not graduated from high school - is no member of any organized Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, Wicca, Scientology or Jedi religious community. - has had no regular employment for more than a year - is not unbeknownst to local police concerning violence and petty crimes - has a connection to substance abuse and/or drug trafficking. - shows obvious signs of personal neglect.
Anyone living in your city can visually identify the people belonging to the most notorious group of possible murderers. Within less than 100 milliseconds even in a low-light environment.
Simply put, these are the people you would instinctively avoid on the street rather than to walk past them.
Control these obvious targets and your police can devote much more time to real crime solving: the remaining 20 percent or so of violent offenders that do not fit the pattern. But most other murderers and their victims know each other by first name, so the police has a fair chance of solving the crime.
Political correctness and misguided human rights activism is one of the main reasons that the police can not perform their duties like they need to. That said, depraved policemen like those who attacked Rodney King bear a lot of guilt on this development as well.
Black or Hispanic young men often complain about being stopped by police for 'driving while black', ie. doing nothing suspicious at all. But that's an unfortunate result of politically inconvenient realities.
Truly random stop and search operations will not yield significant results because the face of crime is not random. It is male, between 15 and 35, with poor education and a dark skin complexion. Changing search procedures or whining about inequal treatment will not change this empirical fact that everyone can observe in our jails and courthouses.
Note that I did not talk about possible reasons behind this situation. If this is a consequence of social inequality, social exclusion or pure chance should be of no interest to law enforcement. Teachers and welfare professionals should care about that, while the police keeps them from being murdered.
Radioactive dust is pretty dangerous and pretty scary. There is no substance other than military nerve gas that can affect as much people within a similar distance of an incident.
Radioactive dust from a burning or shattered reactor core is highly toxic (chemically, 2mg Pu per person is enough), highly carcinogenic, hard to remove, hard to detect and hard to contain. And will be for a pretty long time, even when the dust finally settles somewhere.
The primary damage in and around Chernobyl was done by radioactive dust and particles. They were carried downwind for thousands of kilometers and caused significantly higher cancer rates all along their path.
A small bomb on the right component can release a larger quantity of radioactive particles that are then spread by the wind. Assuming you could blow up a reactor vessel within San Francisco harbor, you would have a radioactive cloud that would not kill everyone, but make all land and buildings within a 20km radius uninhabitable, for several decades.
One dirty bomb is not the end of the world and will not be worse than Chernobyl. But even an incident with a magnitude of less than TEN percent of Chernobyl would be devastating when happening in a Western metropolitan area, seriously.
A suicide bomber without care for his own life would be able to get inside the reactor, take out the radioactive fuel and then do something destructive with it. So basically, grim determination and a large angle grinder would be enough to get to the nuclear core.
The point is: if it wasn't dangerous to run a reactor without shielding, closed circuits, precise monitoring and strong security - why do we do all that in commercial nuclear plant operation? You think we do all that just to please the public and 'irrational tree huggers'? Why don't we have nuclear barbecue grills then, they sure would save some wood from the rainforest, would it?;)
And then please bring back the navy patrols, the destroyers and the thirty-dozen-vessel-convoys. Because with the world today, you'd have so much more to worry about than some Nazis in slow U-Boats trolling the Atlantic. And no matter how fast that ship would be, radio transmissions within the enemy navy are faster.
One captured nuclear vessel could power a substantial part of most rogue state's economies all the while producing dirty bomb material or worse. And a small bomb hidden on the reactor could bring so much Allahu Ackbar to our ports it's not funny anymore.
So you'd better have a carrier battle group defending the thing OR an undocumented remote self-destruct mechanism, so you can wipe out the entire environment of whoever captures such a vessel. But then again, our own people might be a bit uneasy about these perceived future Chernobyls, whether that is reasonable or not.
With the world what it is today, these things would be efficient transport vessels AND readymade sea-going, self-propelled dirty bombs with free access to hundreds of large cities anywhere.
Thank you, but with some peaceful religions around, a ship like that is certainly not halal.
It's pretty much the same as so many dictionaries that deliberately omit any and all naughty words. It's so ridiculous to pretend these words don't exist, are not used and / or no one does ever need to look them up.
I mean, come on, three minutes on a busy street in the UK, you're going to hear the C-word. How are you going to know what that less-than-friendly that taxi driver tried to say, ask the hotel receptionist??
Is it really that bad with the US? The EU turns more and more to straight communism and I have been pondering for a while to get out of here to the land of the free. This eco-/multicultural fascism going on here is not funny anymore, so please don't tell me it's the same on your side of the ocean...
Assumptions or facts (you decide) leading to this decision:
the upgradeability of desktops is overrated: with a high chance, you have to throw half the components away for any serious upgrade.
No one is willing to pay a decent price for aged pieces of hardware.
People do, however, pay more for complete and functional computers or notebooks, even for aged and used models.
Most upgrades can be done with USB nowadays.
The performance of notebooks is not that far behind desktops like it used to be.
Notebooks usually employ power-saving features designed for longer battery life. You can use them on mostly on AC power, but save on energy, heat and noise anyways.
You can take some beer AND your notebook to a LAN party, in one backpack - and on a BIKE, if you want.
Your machine has a built-in UPS and a somewhat shock-resistant HD - rough handling and power outages are frequent on LANs - and can be disastrous at work.
Your machine folds away nicely when you're not using it. And even while online, you don't have a rat's nest below your desk, but two cables lying around: mouse and AC power, nothing else.
You can work or game on the couch, in bed, in the garden or on boring business trips. All on the same machine as usual, so you don't have reconfigure your machine or adapt your motor skills.
People usually don't more than 120GB of data with them at all times, not even with Vista. The games you actually plan to play, some music and some applications should remain below 100 GB. And everything else lies on the huge NAS unit in the basement that you're wirelessly connected to while at home. Videos, music and backup storage doesn't need to be lightning fast for SOHO usage.
That's why I use a notebook for everything, with regular backups and a decent NAS filling the gaps.
You have a high-school dropout driving the companies' expensive specialty vehicles. Your security service employs an anti-social jerk with an alcohol problem who plays ping-pong with your master key every night (these stainless-steel things, mind you). Your cleaning contractor has a master key as well and he empties your waste baskets every friday when you left the office. Your boss once took home some personal records over the weekend, forgot about it and left them lying on his back seat for days.
If you're not developing equipment for NASA or the Air Force, chances are that your internal IT is orders of magnitude more secure (and dumbed-down) than that of any other asset and liability of your company.
Amen to that, brother. It's all about cooperation between workers, users and admins. Companies let their lowest employees handle equipment worth several millions - while at the same time lock down the right mouse button to prevent *abuse* of whatever.
People abuse company vehicles all the time and no one cares. It's absolutely normal that employees drive expensive company limos, trucks, 40-tons, cranes and whatnot for weeks and months. Usually you have one or two of your people driving half a million quid in equipment some thousand miles across the country.
And then IT managers of the same company demand their users to stop listening to music at work and use Internet Explorer because Firefox is nonstandard and therefore unsafe. Talk about priorities, eh:)
The unrelenting strictness of your outlined approach to network security means you're either Mordac from the Dilbert comics or it's your IT department that earns all the company's money.
Seriously, in most cases it's the users, the lusers and the cow-orkers in sales and accounting that fund your department. Heck, even a million quid saved in hardware expenses cannot make up for the productivity losses of several dozen semi-frustrated users or the probability of having no workaround when things in your data center go ever so slightly wrong.
When your first and only reaction to opposition is sporting a stiff upper lip, then you should work at a local university or government agency. Your users are your customers and when they're too unhappy or their tools too dumbed down they can't focus on bringing in the cash.
The computer is a pretty universal tool and it would be extremely stupid to tell people to use it in an oh-so-limited fashion. You are then stifling innovation, flexibility and self-reliance and preventing workarounds or important *mistakes*. Forcing people to conform to ultra-ridig bureaucracies and essentially treating them like replacable wheels in a large gearbox never resulted in wealth, innovation or success. It didn't work government and state level and it certainly won't work for a company whose workers are not enslaved in serfdom.
If you pull some serious restrictions, either your brightest people leave or your brightest people make YOU leave. Just wait 'till half of them start bringing in their personal laptops just to get some work done - with their boss' explicit approval. I do. And I keep doing so as long as thin clients are orders of magnitudes too slow and IT departments take years to evaluate and allow GPL'ed programs like Firefox, Inkscape or Gimp on their holy networks.
You can save on Photoshop, Corel and all the other expensive dinosaurs, but just give me a physical machine where I can install GPL'ed stuff, a smallish SQL setup and a PERL environment without filling out a dozen requests.
Queue Britney Spears:
I am for the death penalty. Who commits terrible acts must get a fitting punishment. That way he learns the lesson for the next time.
It's false advertising when the product doesn't do what the vendor says it does. This obviously doesn't apply for claims like "guaranteed happiness" or something like that, but if you advertise millions of colors you better make sure your product does indeed display millions of colors in a test lab.
Of course there may be little perceptile differences between "real" colors and dithered colors, so the "real" product may only be discerned from the "dithered" one by professionals in a lab - but that does not change the meaning of "real" and "true" the slightest. The fact that it's a good lie doesn't make it less a lie, to say it in a more dramatic way.
An MP3 or AAC soundfile may sound absolutely transparent and identical to the original uncompressed PCM stream, but it is not the same. Maybe it takes proverbial golden ears or a 15'000 USD stereo setup to notice, it is still missing information. A picture that was JPG or wavelet compressed is fundamentally different from a simple raster image, even if you had to zoom up to 500x to see the difference.
Let me emphasize that I'm not saying lossy output technologies are fraud, as all technical reproduction methods incur some losses to the original. But it is fraud to claim a higher output fidelity than is physically possible with a particular product. I absolutely disagree to the claim that a lie is acceptable if I can't prove it wrong with only the naked eye or ear. A lie is a lie, even if takes an electron microscope to reveal.
A reduction in cost and complexity can be quite useful, just look at how we lived with flickering TV sets for decades. But it is fraud when the buyer is not informed about it.
Unfortunately: yes. But DX got more complicated with each generation, decreasing versatility. *Maybe* this isn't the case with ray-traced rendering - I certainly hope so.
I take that as less than an educated guess, in fact, gameplay quality can only improve when using raytracing. Less effort has to be spent on the rendering engine, no more hacks to make it look good, less chances to screw up on complexity and bugs and more chances of using the same 3d world and engine on multiple platforms from workstations to handhelds.
This increases the market window for quality games while also increasing the budget percentage that can be spent on level design and storyboard. I'm pretty optimistic about this one, as I hope that a rendering engine using raytracing can be a generic commodity so any independent game studio can easily get in the market and "hit the ground running" if you excuse this bad marketing metaphor. So I hope we see independent and less overused games and maybe even some new genres in the near future. New technologies always allow for that and I certainly remember when Wolfenstein 3d and others opened the door to the entire FPS genre we have today. I admit that while we have pixel-perfect glory by now, we're still stuck at shooting Nazis, but the same technology led to the development of modern 3d engines and hardware used for almost all games by now.
And even if raytracing doesn't bring any more diversity into the market, I am absolutely, positively sure we will have an in-game rendering of Omaha Beach in perfect 1080p HD, so *maybe* some game developers get the clue that players do not want to virtually land on Normandy beaches ever again.
Yeah, and it had channel logos from Al-Jazeera and various other middle eastern TV stations. And online newspapers from Iran, Egypt and Saudi-Arabia that mysteriously change the meaning of their headlines when you switch the language from Arabicto English. Read any Iranian newspaper in Arabic through the Google translator and then again in "original" English. When you see it, you'll shit bricks, so to speak. Or watch MEMRI.TV when you're bored sometimes.
Yeah, I know of the accusations against MEMRI, but sooner or later you'll learn what the usual chants like "Death to America, death to Israel!" sounds like in Arabic and then you meet these chants again and again on all major middle eastern TV stations. And mysteriously also on Western European demonstrations for "peace in the middle east".
But then again, this may ALL be a conspiracy by ChimpyMcBushHitler and his Jewish companions...
A squad of armed Marines guard the container at all times while it is being transported to, then burned in a high-temperature trash incinerator and inspected for leftovers afterwards?
You could also use a cadre of riot police guarding the container to an industrial mill, an ultra-fine high-powered shredder or a Blendtec blender. Be creative!
Some examples to give you ideas: http://www.stedman-machine.com/vslam-app.htm. Their slogan is hilarious and I can't explain why: "Your solution to size reduction(tm)". What a relief to all those thousands of emails I get per week...:)
I think you hit the nail right on the head here concerning age and risk aversive behavior. Younger people, especially males under 30, are always willing to take much more risks than anyone else. So you could do a study in any environment and come up with the result that the young whippersnappers are not following established procedure like the old folks do.
Many posters including myself missed this simple fact and concentrated on tech issues, pro's and con's instead of the blindingly obvious elephant in the room: young people, young men and risks. Young men will take risks just because they can, so T entire FA is moot, I think. Just wait two decades and today's millenials will wave manuals, proper procedures and committee decisions right in your face like the old dudes do now.
If that's good or bad, I don't want to decide, but at least it's a phenomenon observed in many ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah, mandatory Trusted Computing, the magic bullet. Because enumerating and safeguarding against all known good or bad software products has worked sooo well in corporate environments.
Last time I checked, online gaming had a massive problem with cheaters of all sorts, despite a decade's effort to secure their client code and to check against known badware. With no luck.
Good luck trying to keep an updated, effective list of all known intellectual-property-respecting, human-rights-compatible, hate-speech-free and politically-absolutely-correct software products.
Excuse me while I'm off to my hidden stash of guns and ammo, adding loads of paper and several unregistered mechanical typewriters to the loot.
Don't forget: the Soviet Union required the registration of any and all typewriters and printing devices with the authorities. Unregistered possession of such items was a felony and severely punished.
But in Soviet Europe, Trusted Computing registers YOU! Ihre Papiere bitte mein Herr!
Yes, you are right, personal definitions of tyrannical vary wildly between citizens. Nevertheless, there will be a point when the majority of gun-owning cilians will say *not one step further* and that is the definition of tyranny obtained via the 'wisdom-of-the-crowd' method.
Most officers will follow lawful orders, but not when law itself is so corrupted, that these orders call for mass murder.
Imagine that Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court are taken over by a hostile tyranny. Any insane ramblings by the then-tyrant-president will be cast into law by a then-corrupt Congress and cleanly supported by the then-corrupt SCOTUS. Imagine a new law calls for the removal of all male children from their non ruling-party member parents to governmental re-education. Lawful order: yes, morally acceptable order: hell no.
All parents that fit this definition will then instantly shoot back the moment they see a policeman coming for their kids. I would. Then you have the situation I described: all governmental service people know exactly that they will be in life danger when they execute this order - AND - if they don't, as well, because their party commissars will shoot them when they disobey. Given this unsolvable situation, many government employees may defect instead of shooting fathers and mothers.
People without guns can be rounded up by officers in riot gear with pepper spray and water cannons. Rounding up some people with guns is much harder and will induce heavy violence on both sides. Not much governmental minions will be able to consciously target local people, brothers, sisters and neighbors with the gun of a main battle tank.
Some could do this, but the ensuing protest will surely prohibit any and all cooperation they'd get from the occupied civilians. If you round up armed and resisting civilians, the stakes are orders of magnitude higher.
Also, aircraft and tanks need regular supply materials, the crew needs rest and electronic systems are notoriously vulnerable to jamming.
Remember: the Nazis had aircraft, tanks, APCs and machine guns. And they were indoctrinated, prejudiced and hostile to their foreign occupied countries. Yet, the resistance movement made a noticeable impact on their operations.
One million service people mean nothing: more than two thirds of them will instantly desert the army when they are ordered to shoot fathers and mothers of their own country. Most of the rest will simply disobey their orders and desert later when no one is looking. The few remaining lunatics are horribly outnumbered - and outgunned, because most deserted troops took some kind of weapon system with them.
Unarmed people, no matter if determined or not, can be free, enslaved or dead. Armed and determined people can only be free or dead, but hardly enslaved. And everything done against their will costs a tyrant a much much higher price. Which is the point of all that.
To quote Nietzsche: You can only remain silent when you are armed, otherwise people just babble and quarrel.
I can't believe I have to explain this as a German to Americans...
When it is racism now to state a fact that can be observed all around the country, simply by counting faces, so to speak, then call me racist.
Fact is, for any given incident of blue collar crime, it is more likely that the perpetrator belongs to the group of poor, uneducated people of African or Latin American descent.
To be sure of this you just need to visit one random jail somewhere in this country.
Note that I did not say anything about white-collar crime. These tend to be more devastating, but also much much more surviveable for the victims, but it's about violent crimes we need to defend the most, because these incidents are more time-critical, life-threatening and unforeseen.
Anyway, it is not racist to state countable facts that anyone can observe. However it would BE racist to state that being black is the *reason* for committing crimes. One is a fact, the other is an unscientific assumption.
Poor, uneducated Blacks statistically commit more crimes per person when compared to poor, uneducated Whites or Asians. But educated and affluent Blacks do not when compared to educated and affluent Whites or Blacks. With this observation, the statistical odds are heavily against a racist interpretation.
Your reaction is precisely what I called useless political correctness. It's within empirical observations that a certain group commits the most crimes and it is also statistically substantiated that 'being Black' is no deciding factor in this equation.
For every trained professional stormtrooper, you have several thousand armed citizens. The stormtrooper shoot for money, strange ideas or fear. The citizens shoot for their freedom, their land, their family. Both are from the same country.
Remember: the French and Polish resistance had notable success in slowing or even pinning down the Nazis. And they had much less firepower than the people of an average small town in the US.
And don't underestimate the conscience of nameless stormtroopers. Only very very few highly trained and brainwashed Nazis could operate the concentration camps, and even then many committed suicide or deserted on the first chance they saw.
A tyrannical government has to have countless minions to execute their tyrannical orders.
Poorly armed civilians are probably outgunned by even the first wave of governmental stormtroopers.
But by definition of a tyranny, the freedom-loving public outnumbers the stormtroopers by several magnitudes. That's where the blood of patriots AND tyrants comes from in Jeffersons' popular quote.
Regular governmental minions usually have a conscience and if upholding unjust order means killing thousands of fellow countrymen, this will be enough to have some minions defect to the freedom side. Unarmed people can be rounded up to the re-education camp like sheep, with water cannons and pepper spray only. No stormtrooper will have a problem with that. But an armed populace, even only simple small arms means a much larger and more dangerous operation.
Even the Nazis were afraid to go into Warsaw ghetto because the Jews there had simple weapons. The Nazis won this battle, but their losses from rogue civilians in occupied Poland were higher than on the Western front until the GIs arrived.
That's only a viable option if the majority supports it. If the majority vote calls for legalization, so be it - the Netherlands did that more than a decade ago.
But if the public vote is FOR drug prohibition, the police has to support this, up to the death penalty if need be like in China or Singapore.
Stop complaining and start signing petitions if you want to change that. After all, people just need to NOT take drugs, NOT steal and NOT rob each other. It's so easy that even dumb-as-a-rock imbeciles can do it.
Millions of people do not take a single dose of drugs for decades and are absolutely happy with it. Even some shady underworld people sell or buy illegal drugs for years and do NOT kill other dealers or rob innocent people, it's not that hard to NOT beat humans to a bloody pulp.
And don't complain about the jails. I'd support a tax raise by X percent just to build new work camps for repeat offenders and violent criminals. Open camps with barbed wires around is enough, they all chose to be criminals and/or are dangerous creatures. Behave or be gone, simple as that.
At first you need to crack down on political correctness.
Your typical murderer:
- is not of Asian or European descent
- is not female
- is older than ten but younger than 40 years
- has not graduated from high school
- is no member of any organized Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, Wicca, Scientology or Jedi religious community.
- has had no regular employment for more than a year
- is not unbeknownst to local police concerning violence and petty crimes
- has a connection to substance abuse and/or drug trafficking.
- shows obvious signs of personal neglect.
Anyone living in your city can visually identify the people belonging to the most notorious group of possible murderers. Within less than 100 milliseconds even in a low-light environment.
Simply put, these are the people you would instinctively avoid on the street rather than to walk past them.
Control these obvious targets and your police can devote much more time to real crime solving: the remaining 20 percent or so of violent offenders that do not fit the pattern. But most other murderers and their victims know each other by first name, so the police has a fair chance of solving the crime.
Political correctness and misguided human rights activism is one of the main reasons that the police can not perform their duties like they need to. That said, depraved policemen like those who attacked Rodney King bear a lot of guilt on this development as well.
Black or Hispanic young men often complain about being stopped by police for 'driving while black', ie. doing nothing suspicious at all. But that's an unfortunate result of politically inconvenient realities.
Truly random stop and search operations will not yield significant results because the face of crime is not random. It is male, between 15 and 35, with poor education and a dark skin complexion. Changing search procedures or whining about inequal treatment will not change this empirical fact that everyone can observe in our jails and courthouses.
Note that I did not talk about possible reasons behind this situation. If this is a consequence of social inequality, social exclusion or pure chance should be of no interest to law enforcement. Teachers and welfare professionals should care about that, while the police keeps them from being murdered.
Radioactive dust is pretty dangerous and pretty scary. There is no substance other than military nerve gas that can affect as much people within a similar distance of an incident.
Radioactive dust from a burning or shattered reactor core is highly toxic (chemically, 2mg Pu per person is enough), highly carcinogenic, hard to remove, hard to detect and hard to contain. And will be for a pretty long time, even when the dust finally settles somewhere.
The primary damage in and around Chernobyl was done by radioactive dust and particles. They were carried downwind for thousands of kilometers and caused significantly higher cancer rates all along their path.
A small bomb on the right component can release a larger quantity of radioactive particles that are then spread by the wind. Assuming you could blow up a reactor vessel within San Francisco harbor, you would have a radioactive cloud that would not kill everyone, but make all land and buildings within a 20km radius uninhabitable, for several decades.
One dirty bomb is not the end of the world and will not be worse than Chernobyl. But even an incident with a magnitude of less than TEN percent of Chernobyl would be devastating when happening in a Western metropolitan area, seriously.
A suicide bomber without care for his own life would be able to get inside the reactor, take out the radioactive fuel and then do something destructive with it. So basically, grim determination and a large angle grinder would be enough to get to the nuclear core.
The point is: if it wasn't dangerous to run a reactor without shielding, closed circuits, precise monitoring and strong security - why do we do all that in commercial nuclear plant operation? You think we do all that just to please the public and 'irrational tree huggers'? Why don't we have nuclear barbecue grills then, they sure would save some wood from the rainforest, would it? ;)
I say we take off and nuke the, ah you know... :)
And then please bring back the navy patrols, the destroyers and the thirty-dozen-vessel-convoys. Because with the world today, you'd have so much more to worry about than some Nazis in slow U-Boats trolling the Atlantic. And no matter how fast that ship would be, radio transmissions within the enemy navy are faster.
One captured nuclear vessel could power a substantial part of most rogue state's economies all the while producing dirty bomb material or worse. And a small bomb hidden on the reactor could bring so much Allahu Ackbar to our ports it's not funny anymore.
So you'd better have a carrier battle group defending the thing OR an undocumented remote self-destruct mechanism, so you can wipe out the entire environment of whoever captures such a vessel. But then again, our own people might be a bit uneasy about these perceived future Chernobyls, whether that is reasonable or not.
With the world what it is today, these things would be efficient transport vessels AND readymade sea-going, self-propelled dirty bombs with free access to hundreds of large cities anywhere.
Thank you, but with some peaceful religions around, a ship like that is certainly not halal.
It's pretty much the same as so many dictionaries that deliberately omit any and all naughty words. It's so ridiculous to pretend these words don't exist, are not used and / or no one does ever need to look them up.
I mean, come on, three minutes on a busy street in the UK, you're going to hear the C-word. How are you going to know what that less-than-friendly that taxi driver tried to say, ask the hotel receptionist??
As a native German I'd say: Jawohl mein Herr!
Is it really that bad with the US? The EU turns more and more to straight communism and I have been pondering for a while to get out of here to the land of the free. This eco-/multicultural fascism going on here is not funny anymore, so please don't tell me it's the same on your side of the ocean...
Assumptions or facts (you decide) leading to this decision:
That's why I use a notebook for everything, with regular backups and a decent NAS filling the gaps.
What's your argument for a desktop?
Your backups already are in a secure undisclosed location, are they?
You have a high-school dropout driving the companies' expensive specialty vehicles. Your security service employs an anti-social jerk with an alcohol problem who plays ping-pong with your master key every night (these stainless-steel things, mind you). Your cleaning contractor has a master key as well and he empties your waste baskets every friday when you left the office. Your boss once took home some personal records over the weekend, forgot about it and left them lying on his back seat for days.
If you're not developing equipment for NASA or the Air Force, chances are that your internal IT is orders of magnitude more secure (and dumbed-down) than that of any other asset and liability of your company.
Amen to that, brother. It's all about cooperation between workers, users and admins. Companies let their lowest employees handle equipment worth several millions - while at the same time lock down the right mouse button to prevent *abuse* of whatever.
:)
People abuse company vehicles all the time and no one cares. It's absolutely normal that employees drive expensive company limos, trucks, 40-tons, cranes and whatnot for weeks and months. Usually you have one or two of your people driving half a million quid in equipment some thousand miles across the country.
And then IT managers of the same company demand their users to stop listening to music at work and use Internet Explorer because Firefox is nonstandard and therefore unsafe. Talk about priorities, eh
The unrelenting strictness of your outlined approach to network security means you're either Mordac from the Dilbert comics or it's your IT department that earns all the company's money.
Seriously, in most cases it's the users, the lusers and the cow-orkers in sales and accounting that fund your department. Heck, even a million quid saved in hardware expenses cannot make up for the productivity losses of several dozen semi-frustrated users or the probability of having no workaround when things in your data center go ever so slightly wrong.
When your first and only reaction to opposition is sporting a stiff upper lip, then you should work at a local university or government agency. Your users are your customers and when they're too unhappy or their tools too dumbed down they can't focus on bringing in the cash.
The computer is a pretty universal tool and it would be extremely stupid to tell people to use it in an oh-so-limited fashion. You are then stifling innovation, flexibility and self-reliance and preventing workarounds or important *mistakes*. Forcing people to conform to ultra-ridig bureaucracies and essentially treating them like replacable wheels in a large gearbox never resulted in wealth, innovation or success. It didn't work government and state level and it certainly won't work for a company whose workers are not enslaved in serfdom.
If you pull some serious restrictions, either your brightest people leave or your brightest people make YOU leave. Just wait 'till half of them start bringing in their personal laptops just to get some work done - with their boss' explicit approval. I do. And I keep doing so as long as thin clients are orders of magnitudes too slow and IT departments take years to evaluate and allow GPL'ed programs like Firefox, Inkscape or Gimp on their holy networks.
You can save on Photoshop, Corel and all the other expensive dinosaurs, but just give me a physical machine where I can install GPL'ed stuff, a smallish SQL setup and a PERL environment without filling out a dozen requests.
It's false advertising when the product doesn't do what the vendor says it does. This obviously doesn't apply for claims like "guaranteed happiness" or something like that, but if you advertise millions of colors you better make sure your product does indeed display millions of colors in a test lab.
Of course there may be little perceptile differences between "real" colors and dithered colors, so the "real" product may only be discerned from the "dithered" one by professionals in a lab - but that does not change the meaning of "real" and "true" the slightest. The fact that it's a good lie doesn't make it less a lie, to say it in a more dramatic way.
An MP3 or AAC soundfile may sound absolutely transparent and identical to the original uncompressed PCM stream, but it is not the same. Maybe it takes proverbial golden ears or a 15'000 USD stereo setup to notice, it is still missing information. A picture that was JPG or wavelet compressed is fundamentally different from a simple raster image, even if you had to zoom up to 500x to see the difference.
Let me emphasize that I'm not saying lossy output technologies are fraud, as all technical reproduction methods incur some losses to the original. But it is fraud to claim a higher output fidelity than is physically possible with a particular product. I absolutely disagree to the claim that a lie is acceptable if I can't prove it wrong with only the naked eye or ear. A lie is a lie, even if takes an electron microscope to reveal.
A reduction in cost and complexity can be quite useful, just look at how we lived with flickering TV sets for decades. But it is fraud when the buyer is not informed about it.
Unfortunately: yes. But DX got more complicated with each generation, decreasing versatility. *Maybe* this isn't the case with ray-traced rendering - I certainly hope so.
I take that as less than an educated guess, in fact, gameplay quality can only improve when using raytracing. Less effort has to be spent on the rendering engine, no more hacks to make it look good, less chances to screw up on complexity and bugs and more chances of using the same 3d world and engine on multiple platforms from workstations to handhelds.
This increases the market window for quality games while also increasing the budget percentage that can be spent on level design and storyboard. I'm pretty optimistic about this one, as I hope that a rendering engine using raytracing can be a generic commodity so any independent game studio can easily get in the market and "hit the ground running" if you excuse this bad marketing metaphor. So I hope we see independent and less overused games and maybe even some new genres in the near future. New technologies always allow for that and I certainly remember when Wolfenstein 3d and others opened the door to the entire FPS genre we have today. I admit that while we have pixel-perfect glory by now, we're still stuck at shooting Nazis, but the same technology led to the development of modern 3d engines and hardware used for almost all games by now.
And even if raytracing doesn't bring any more diversity into the market, I am absolutely, positively sure we will have an in-game rendering of Omaha Beach in perfect 1080p HD, so *maybe* some game developers get the clue that players do not want to virtually land on Normandy beaches ever again.
Yeah, and it had channel logos from Al-Jazeera and various other middle eastern TV stations. And online newspapers from Iran, Egypt and Saudi-Arabia that mysteriously change the meaning of their headlines when you switch the language from Arabicto English. Read any Iranian newspaper in Arabic through the Google translator and then again in "original" English. When you see it, you'll shit bricks, so to speak. Or watch MEMRI.TV when you're bored sometimes.
Yeah, I know of the accusations against MEMRI, but sooner or later you'll learn what the usual chants like "Death to America, death to Israel!" sounds like in Arabic and then you meet these chants again and again on all major middle eastern TV stations. And mysteriously also on Western European demonstrations for "peace in the middle east".
But then again, this may ALL be a conspiracy by ChimpyMcBushHitler and his Jewish companions...
A squad of armed Marines guard the container at all times while it is being transported to, then burned in a high-temperature trash incinerator and inspected for leftovers afterwards?
:)
You could also use a cadre of riot police guarding the container to an industrial mill, an ultra-fine high-powered shredder or a Blendtec blender. Be creative!
Some examples to give you ideas: http://www.stedman-machine.com/vslam-app.htm. Their slogan is hilarious and I can't explain why: "Your solution to size reduction(tm)". What a relief to all those thousands of emails I get per week...
I think you hit the nail right on the head here concerning age and risk aversive behavior. Younger people, especially males under 30, are always willing to take much more risks than anyone else. So you could do a study in any environment and come up with the result that the young whippersnappers are not following established procedure like the old folks do.
Many posters including myself missed this simple fact and concentrated on tech issues, pro's and con's instead of the blindingly obvious elephant in the room: young people, young men and risks. Young men will take risks just because they can, so T entire FA is moot, I think. Just wait two decades and today's millenials will wave manuals, proper procedures and committee decisions right in your face like the old dudes do now.
If that's good or bad, I don't want to decide, but at least it's a phenomenon observed in many ways.