The reason so few crimes are committed with them is because we have regulated them out of common use. It is very difficult to buy one.
Well that and they're shit for accuracy. Full auto in a rifle is only really useful for laying down suppressing fire, and you're going to be out of ammo in seconds in any combat situation. Now a full on military machine gun - that is absolutely an anti-personnel weapon, but it's not exactly highly mobile, requires usually 2-3 trained people to handle properly, and eats ammo like there's no tomorrow.
The US was once just as safe (and that was back before 'gun control' was an issue, when children routinely carried their rifle with them to school.)
That's still necessary in some areas because of wildlife. You'd be a damn fool to go roaming about in Alaska without some kind of firearm just because of bears, moose, wolves, etc. Alaska has fairly lax gun laws for this reason. Heck, most rural parts of California are pretty chill on gun regulations as well because of mountain lions, coyotes, bobcats, and again, bears.
It boggles my mind sometimes when people get all touchy feely over that "poor dead mountain lion" when it would just as soon rip their face off if they ever met one. I think because most people don't live close to nature anymore they forget how absolutely savage it can be. We're apex predators only insofar as we act like one.
FWIW I don't recall that the last four on that list (India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel) have thermonuclear bombs (which would be fusion-based generally) but rather more limited, but still devastating, fission-only warheads. The fusion bombs can be roughly 1000 times as powerful as the fission only predecessors. And wasn't North Korea's yield something like 2-3 kilotons? Our 1945 first try firecrackers were clocking in at 15-20kt yields. Nuclear tech is tricky business.
There is no suppression of already-discovered cures, that's pretty obvious. But could it be that possible cures receive less R&D investment than they "deserve" based on their projected future value to patients? That seems more reasonable.
Well sure, but then you're talking about an impersonal emergent phenomenon that results from how the system shakes out. That's vastly different and much more incomprehensible to the mind of one person than "a cabal of pharmacy companies are screwing us over". Conspiracy theories are helped along in their persistence because they present understandable causes ("pharmacy cabal") to real world symptoms ("no cure for cancer") when the truth ("result of emergent system") is basically incomprehensible.
But if you made it to 25 you had time to reproduce (3, 4, 5 or more times at that). Evolutionarily speaking what happens after that is irrelevant. GP's example with sickle cell anemia is spot on - it affects you to late to be filtered by natural selection. Same thing with cancer.
It's really a very simple matter - make the objectionable bits an opt-in choice. If the employee wants it then $1 per month or something nominal is deducted from their paycheck. Then the employer isn't paying for it, done.
I pretty much came in here to say this. People already game the system in so many intricate ways, but those ways at least are social engineering techniques that mean you at least have to have a clue about how people tick (and thus in a social situation, like a date, you can reasonably hold your own/not suck at being a conversationalist). But if you're optimizing against a machine algorithm the sky's the limit. Make a few fake profiles and hit yourself up to increase your attractiveness score, or convince your friends to do the same in kind. Figure out what keywords get you more attractive girls/guys, and build your profile around that. Then you finally end up on a date and...*pfft* now your out of your element. Then the dating site loses credibility and gets washed back into the primordial ooze from which it crawled.
I have to tell you that if the woman who wants to be a housewife isn't herself a hard worker then it's never going to work out. Maintaining a house takes a lot of effort. Now if a woman wants to be well kept then you need to start involving servants to maintain the house and that's a whole different prospect. But your implication ('more ambitious') that a housewife doesn't have to work very hard is fairly insulting to the many good women (and some men) who choose that path in order to make their families the best they can possibly be. It's noble work, and hard, and a perfectly valid choice if one partner makes enough money to allow it. But it is absolutely not for the lazy.
At least, they have dropped support for the 8 and 16 bit stuff.
Not so. Basically all consumer desktops are shipping 64-bit by default, but Windows 7, and even Windows 8 come with 32-bit editions that still include the 16-bit emulators to run legacy software.
One of the most blatant examples of foolish political ideas by science fiction authors is Gene Roddenberry's idea that advanced civilizations would have no money.
I'm not so sure Gene was that far off the mark. If you think about it money is basically a bartering tool to assist with the distribution of scarce resources. If you reach a point where resources are no longer scarce (sometimes called a post-scarcity society) then what would be the point of money? You want a mansion, order it up! You want a rocket ship to fly to Mars? Submit the requisition and the machines build it out for you. Too crowded on Earth? Grab a new residence on the ring-world being built around Alpha Centauri. And on and on. The Culture series of novels by Iain Banks envisions such a society, and I have to say it makes a lot of sense.
The part where Roddenberry's idealism got ahead of reason was in thinking it would happen that soon. I get the sense that we're still at least 1000+ years away from getting rid of money entirely. But if we don't blow ourselves up and we keep on developing tech at the current breakneck pace, I would say we will definitely eventually reach a point where money is no longer a necessary concept.
You do know that's confgurable right? I mean, yeah it comes that way out of the box and that's kind of annoying, but you can set the shutdown behavior of your laptop any which way you want. Don't want to install updates? Disable the install updates on shutdown feature. Here first Google result for "disable update on shutdown windows 7" (minus quotes).
Because being washed down the drain doesn't impact their survival. There's no selection pressure to make them glue better to the skin, they thrive just as well (if not better) in the drain pipe/sewage.
Yes and no. The 90% are only valid if the laser beam hits the object nearly at 90 degrees. Then indeed, the reflection will cause 90% of the energy to be reflected and 10% will be heating the surface. But still, this means we need to have a 10 times larger laser to have the same effect than on a non reflective (black) object.
I suppose that would depend on how well your reflective surface withstands the raise in temperature. Even if only 10% of the energy is absorbed it can pretty quickly cause a cascading effect of reducing the reflectivity of the device until the whole reflective layer ablates away. With mylar this would hardly take any time at all, with highly polished mirrors the first tiny scorch marks would melt the glass away in seconds. The laser doesn't have to be 10x as strong, it just has to be strong enough to wreck the reflective armor and still punch through the vitals before the payload can get to the target. When you're playing with 10's of thousands of watts, this is not a huge bar to meet.
It probably happens when you're driving along and one of those flash freezes like in "The Day After Tomorrow" hits. The bugs in flight like instantly freeze or something and smack your windshield like little hail balls.
In today's lesson we learn that life is not like Die Hard 2. You are not going to somehow remote hack a plane's altimeter. And any pilot worth anything is going to recognize that the tower data is screwy.
I'm not sure such a terrorist would even live long enough to plant such a device. If it's strong enough to kill people who are sitting next to it, it will at least sicken, if not kill, the person who plants it.
He can't do it with that dragnet, either. All this NSA dragnet shit was in place for YEARS at the time of the Boston Marathon bombing, and it wasn't worth shit.
But let's say it prevented 100+ Boston Marathon-esque bombings, because the government stopped it before it got too far. Would it be an acceptable risk then?
No. Millions have fought and died for our freedoms. I would not be willing to give them up for a couple of thousands civilians who tragically died. And in following your hyperbole to the end - if we were having 100+ similar bombings a year we would be drone striking the ever loving fuck out of whatever country we remotely thought was behind them. I'm not saying rollover and take it, I am saying don't let them wipe their asses with the constitution and tell us it's okay because their shit smells like roses.
The second option is up to the said residents themselves (that's you and me) — whose representatives in Congress can tell the Admiral just that, if they want to. But, as long as he has that job, he sees no other way to do it, but to collect the metadata. Do you?
None of the angry comments in this thread so far are offering a viable alternative — maybe, we really ought to stop trying to prevent a terrorist act and try to build up instead the perception, that punishment will be inevitable afterwards, for example. But NSA are currently charged with prevention...
I don't need to put forth an alternative. Boo-fucking-hoo if he thinks he needs this to prevent the next terrorist attack. If it's outside the bounds of the constitution as myself and many like minded individuals believe, then he is not allowed to fucking do it. I don't care if it could've prevented an attack. The odds of an attack happening are fairly slim to begin with, and even if attacks increase 1000% (to what, like 1-2 major incidents a year?) then it's worth it to keep our essential liberties intact. The things people freak out about boggle the mind. Hundreds of *THOUSANDS* of people dead to heart attacks and cancer each year, tens of thousands dead in automobile accidents, and maybe on average a couple of hundred *MAX* to terrorist attacks. Talk about disproportionate response.
As long as you can side load apps and the APIs are free for developers it will still be light-years more open than Apple ever allows you to be. Heck, you can't even write an iPhone app unless you're doing it on a Mac with a sanctioned Apple developer license.
their heritage is rooted in less civilized cultures in general than average-skinned people.
*cough*crusades and inquisition*cough*
Ooh then there's the Holocaust, the Baton Death March, Stalin's regime basically massacring 20 million of his own countrymen, the Salem Witch Trials, Japanese internment camps during WWII, and slavery. These are just off the top of my head. The list of misdeeds of "average-skinned" people is legion. I would not dare call any country truly civilized as yet. We're all plenty barbaric whenever we feel the need to be. We just play dress up with civilization.
They already are bitching about people with solar installations. Whiny babies claiming having to buy back the electricity at 50% under wholesale rates, I.E. chump change is too expensive, yet they sell MY electricity to others at full rate.
They actually want to not only not buy power I send back to them, but they want to have a "minimum billing" so that even if I generate 120% of my energy needs they can still charge me $50 a month as a minimum billing.
When you start maintaining all of the infrastructure that feeds power to your house and out to the grid then you can bitch about how they only pay your 50% of what they charge for it.
Minimum billing is a bit ridiculous though, I agree.
Any energy storage scheme would work. If you wanted to get all 19th century on it you could build a huge reservoir on the roof, pump water into it during off-peak hours, and drop it through some turbines on the way to a basin in the basement to generate power during peak hours. Same net effect, though then the maintenance costs are borne by the company.
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The reason so few crimes are committed with them is because we have regulated them out of common use. It is very difficult to buy one.
Well that and they're shit for accuracy. Full auto in a rifle is only really useful for laying down suppressing fire, and you're going to be out of ammo in seconds in any combat situation. Now a full on military machine gun - that is absolutely an anti-personnel weapon, but it's not exactly highly mobile, requires usually 2-3 trained people to handle properly, and eats ammo like there's no tomorrow.
The US was once just as safe (and that was back before 'gun control' was an issue, when children routinely carried their rifle with them to school.)
That's still necessary in some areas because of wildlife. You'd be a damn fool to go roaming about in Alaska without some kind of firearm just because of bears, moose, wolves, etc. Alaska has fairly lax gun laws for this reason. Heck, most rural parts of California are pretty chill on gun regulations as well because of mountain lions, coyotes, bobcats, and again, bears.
It boggles my mind sometimes when people get all touchy feely over that "poor dead mountain lion" when it would just as soon rip their face off if they ever met one. I think because most people don't live close to nature anymore they forget how absolutely savage it can be. We're apex predators only insofar as we act like one.
FWIW I don't recall that the last four on that list (India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel) have thermonuclear bombs (which would be fusion-based generally) but rather more limited, but still devastating, fission-only warheads. The fusion bombs can be roughly 1000 times as powerful as the fission only predecessors. And wasn't North Korea's yield something like 2-3 kilotons? Our 1945 first try firecrackers were clocking in at 15-20kt yields. Nuclear tech is tricky business.
There is no suppression of already-discovered cures, that's pretty obvious. But could it be that possible cures receive less R&D investment than they "deserve" based on their projected future value to patients? That seems more reasonable.
Well sure, but then you're talking about an impersonal emergent phenomenon that results from how the system shakes out. That's vastly different and much more incomprehensible to the mind of one person than "a cabal of pharmacy companies are screwing us over". Conspiracy theories are helped along in their persistence because they present understandable causes ("pharmacy cabal") to real world symptoms ("no cure for cancer") when the truth ("result of emergent system") is basically incomprehensible.
But if you made it to 25 you had time to reproduce (3, 4, 5 or more times at that). Evolutionarily speaking what happens after that is irrelevant. GP's example with sickle cell anemia is spot on - it affects you to late to be filtered by natural selection. Same thing with cancer.
It's really a very simple matter - make the objectionable bits an opt-in choice. If the employee wants it then $1 per month or something nominal is deducted from their paycheck. Then the employer isn't paying for it, done.
I pretty much came in here to say this. People already game the system in so many intricate ways, but those ways at least are social engineering techniques that mean you at least have to have a clue about how people tick (and thus in a social situation, like a date, you can reasonably hold your own/not suck at being a conversationalist). But if you're optimizing against a machine algorithm the sky's the limit. Make a few fake profiles and hit yourself up to increase your attractiveness score, or convince your friends to do the same in kind. Figure out what keywords get you more attractive girls/guys, and build your profile around that. Then you finally end up on a date and...*pfft* now your out of your element. Then the dating site loses credibility and gets washed back into the primordial ooze from which it crawled.
I have to tell you that if the woman who wants to be a housewife isn't herself a hard worker then it's never going to work out. Maintaining a house takes a lot of effort. Now if a woman wants to be well kept then you need to start involving servants to maintain the house and that's a whole different prospect. But your implication ('more ambitious') that a housewife doesn't have to work very hard is fairly insulting to the many good women (and some men) who choose that path in order to make their families the best they can possibly be. It's noble work, and hard, and a perfectly valid choice if one partner makes enough money to allow it. But it is absolutely not for the lazy.
At least, they have dropped support for the 8 and 16 bit stuff.
Not so. Basically all consumer desktops are shipping 64-bit by default, but Windows 7, and even Windows 8 come with 32-bit editions that still include the 16-bit emulators to run legacy software.
Great, thanks for ruining the next episode of CSI...
"It's a two car collision, where's the other car?"
"No sign of it anywhere, just a mess of Lego bricks..."
Tune in Wednesday to see the mystery unfold!
One of the most blatant examples of foolish political ideas by science fiction authors is Gene Roddenberry's idea that advanced civilizations would have no money.
I'm not so sure Gene was that far off the mark. If you think about it money is basically a bartering tool to assist with the distribution of scarce resources. If you reach a point where resources are no longer scarce (sometimes called a post-scarcity society) then what would be the point of money? You want a mansion, order it up! You want a rocket ship to fly to Mars? Submit the requisition and the machines build it out for you. Too crowded on Earth? Grab a new residence on the ring-world being built around Alpha Centauri. And on and on. The Culture series of novels by Iain Banks envisions such a society, and I have to say it makes a lot of sense.
The part where Roddenberry's idealism got ahead of reason was in thinking it would happen that soon. I get the sense that we're still at least 1000+ years away from getting rid of money entirely. But if we don't blow ourselves up and we keep on developing tech at the current breakneck pace, I would say we will definitely eventually reach a point where money is no longer a necessary concept.
It will be more of a problem with 2003 since Microsoft extended support for another year and change.
You do know that's confgurable right? I mean, yeah it comes that way out of the box and that's kind of annoying, but you can set the shutdown behavior of your laptop any which way you want. Don't want to install updates? Disable the install updates on shutdown feature. Here first Google result for "disable update on shutdown windows 7" (minus quotes).
Because being washed down the drain doesn't impact their survival. There's no selection pressure to make them glue better to the skin, they thrive just as well (if not better) in the drain pipe/sewage.
Yes and no. The 90% are only valid if the laser beam hits the object nearly at 90 degrees. Then indeed, the reflection will cause 90% of the energy to be reflected and 10% will be heating the surface. But still, this means we need to have a 10 times larger laser to have the same effect than on a non reflective (black) object.
I suppose that would depend on how well your reflective surface withstands the raise in temperature. Even if only 10% of the energy is absorbed it can pretty quickly cause a cascading effect of reducing the reflectivity of the device until the whole reflective layer ablates away. With mylar this would hardly take any time at all, with highly polished mirrors the first tiny scorch marks would melt the glass away in seconds. The laser doesn't have to be 10x as strong, it just has to be strong enough to wreck the reflective armor and still punch through the vitals before the payload can get to the target. When you're playing with 10's of thousands of watts, this is not a huge bar to meet.
It probably happens when you're driving along and one of those flash freezes like in "The Day After Tomorrow" hits. The bugs in flight like instantly freeze or something and smack your windshield like little hail balls.
In today's lesson we learn that life is not like Die Hard 2. You are not going to somehow remote hack a plane's altimeter. And any pilot worth anything is going to recognize that the tower data is screwy.
I'm not sure such a terrorist would even live long enough to plant such a device. If it's strong enough to kill people who are sitting next to it, it will at least sicken, if not kill, the person who plants it.
He can't do it with that dragnet, either. All this NSA dragnet shit was in place for YEARS at the time of the Boston Marathon bombing, and it wasn't worth shit.
But let's say it prevented 100+ Boston Marathon-esque bombings, because the government stopped it before it got too far. Would it be an acceptable risk then?
No. Millions have fought and died for our freedoms. I would not be willing to give them up for a couple of thousands civilians who tragically died. And in following your hyperbole to the end - if we were having 100+ similar bombings a year we would be drone striking the ever loving fuck out of whatever country we remotely thought was behind them. I'm not saying rollover and take it, I am saying don't let them wipe their asses with the constitution and tell us it's okay because their shit smells like roses.
The second option is up to the said residents themselves (that's you and me) — whose representatives in Congress can tell the Admiral just that, if they want to. But, as long as he has that job, he sees no other way to do it, but to collect the metadata. Do you?
None of the angry comments in this thread so far are offering a viable alternative — maybe, we really ought to stop trying to prevent a terrorist act and try to build up instead the perception, that punishment will be inevitable afterwards, for example. But NSA are currently charged with prevention...
I don't need to put forth an alternative. Boo-fucking-hoo if he thinks he needs this to prevent the next terrorist attack. If it's outside the bounds of the constitution as myself and many like minded individuals believe, then he is not allowed to fucking do it. I don't care if it could've prevented an attack. The odds of an attack happening are fairly slim to begin with, and even if attacks increase 1000% (to what, like 1-2 major incidents a year?) then it's worth it to keep our essential liberties intact. The things people freak out about boggle the mind. Hundreds of *THOUSANDS* of people dead to heart attacks and cancer each year, tens of thousands dead in automobile accidents, and maybe on average a couple of hundred *MAX* to terrorist attacks. Talk about disproportionate response.
As long as you can side load apps and the APIs are free for developers it will still be light-years more open than Apple ever allows you to be. Heck, you can't even write an iPhone app unless you're doing it on a Mac with a sanctioned Apple developer license.
And hear I thought you were just meta-trolling the grammer Nazis =D
their heritage is rooted in less civilized cultures in general than average-skinned people.
*cough*crusades and inquisition*cough*
Ooh then there's the Holocaust, the Baton Death March, Stalin's regime basically massacring 20 million of his own countrymen, the Salem Witch Trials, Japanese internment camps during WWII, and slavery. These are just off the top of my head. The list of misdeeds of "average-skinned" people is legion. I would not dare call any country truly civilized as yet. We're all plenty barbaric whenever we feel the need to be. We just play dress up with civilization.
They already are bitching about people with solar installations. Whiny babies claiming having to buy back the electricity at 50% under wholesale rates, I.E. chump change is too expensive, yet they sell MY electricity to others at full rate.
They actually want to not only not buy power I send back to them, but they want to have a "minimum billing" so that even if I generate 120% of my energy needs they can still charge me $50 a month as a minimum billing.
When you start maintaining all of the infrastructure that feeds power to your house and out to the grid then you can bitch about how they only pay your 50% of what they charge for it.
Minimum billing is a bit ridiculous though, I agree.
Any energy storage scheme would work. If you wanted to get all 19th century on it you could build a huge reservoir on the roof, pump water into it during off-peak hours, and drop it through some turbines on the way to a basin in the basement to generate power during peak hours. Same net effect, though then the maintenance costs are borne by the company.