I had access to cesium-137 at college. There wasn't any real security about it. You could probably rip it off it you wanted to. I personally have a cache of americium-241 on a shelf in my garage. Thats where I put old, non-functional smoke detectors. I don't actually know where I can go to get rid of them and I am not stupid enough to put them in the bin so they stay in the garage.
You can't make a nuclear bomb out of these materials. You can certainly make a dirty bomb which will spread the stuff around, but I don't know how bad that is really going to be. It might release radioactivity embarrassingly close to background with any decent coverage.
The incredible power of advertising is something that the US's architects never considered
Not to mention communications. They may have expected that different regions would turn up their own candidates, with the outcome to be hacked out when the electoral college met.
However she never garnered more than ~5% of the general population outside her electorate
I have a theory that 5% of the vote is always up for grabs if you survey current candidates and build your platform out of everything not in the combined set of all their platforms.
It just means pandering to the fringe. One nation never agreed on a reall national platform because the fringe issues were different from place to place.
Mandatory voting is only acceptable if one of the options is "none of the above", and if this is what most people select, then other elections have to be held with entirely different candidates, until the public finally accepts one of them.
Here in.au they can only make you line up to have your name crossed off the list of people who should be turning up. By that point you may as well cast a vote.
But under your plan what do you do if you don't get an election with > 50% choosing a candidate for decades? Does the incumbent stay in power? Sounds like a loophole to me.
In this case the receiver of the message (a human brain) only uses a minute proportion of the data in the video stream. So a compression algorithm with a good understanding of human vision should be able to achieve an enormous compression ratio.
I was thinking in terms of being able to run binaries without any risk at all. The java applet sandbox is pretty good for that, or at least it was in the past.
Being able to load a driver for a new device and being absolutely sure that it can only bring itself down, not corrupt anything in the kernel.
Installing software should be as safe as installing a new appliance in your house. It only does one thing. It can sneak out the front door with your CD collection in ther middle of the night.
Software in general, and kernel modules in particular, can't be trusted in that way, but I don't see why they shouldn't be. I was thinking in terms of a bytecode interpreter available to the kernel with a builtin sandbox and precicely defined APIs so that you could run risky software.
Besides, I don't think armed robots roaming the streets would fly with a whole lot of folks.
A long time ago I heard about a survey of bank customers who preferred automatic teller machines to human tellers because the computerised version is friendlier.
Now, cops are not known to be friendly, in fact, many problems arise when they depart from established procedures and start setting policy, rather than enforcing it.
I would say that a robot which is programmed to respond in a particular way would do so all the time. The real problem comes when Government finds out that robot police are so cheap they can put one every ten metres along every street in the city. That would worry me. Probably worth pointing out that while speed cameras pay for themselves we don't have millions of the things on the roads yet, at least where I live.
As long as we can trust our governments to want to stay popular, they might continue to use technology appropriately. I hope so, anyway.
How about this: A gay man has sex with a married bisexual man. The bisexual man goes home to his wife who says okay honey tonight is my fertile time so lets try for a baby. He gives it a go but he is all out of sperm and not very fertile. He is, however, covered with his partners sperm and it is this which makes his wife pregnant.
The chances of this working are pretty low, however many gay men are very promiscuous, which may even out the odds, as well as the fact that somebody else raises their child while while they are out having sex with other people.
Now obviously in this day and age people have showers before changing partners, but our behaviour is controlled by our genes and past behavioural patterns are the ones which make genes work. If it worked in the dim and distant past then we would still exhibit the behaviour today.
I beg to differ. I'd say that Asimov and Herbert are right up there with Heinlein. I'd describe Heinlein as the gold standard by which others are measured.
I think the Clarke-Asimov treaty got it right. Asimov was a fantastic science writer. His SF was really just a vehicle for his ideas, more so than other writers. Anything he wrote which goes beyond science was pretty poorly done.
As far as Herbert goes, well, I don't think Dune was SF, so I don't count him as a good SF writer.
*Don't use tabs*. And everything will fit perfectly in 80 columns.
But isn't that the point about tabs? I type a tab and display it as four characters. You get my code but display tabs as two characters. If they were used properly everything should scale correctly.
With some people working in Eclipse with CheckStyle and checking in to VCS and whatever else I really wonder if our modern coders would be better off working with some sort of symbolic database of instructions, instead of messing with code.
Urban myth perhaps? There's no relation between screen widths and punch cards.
The mainframe which I used at college ran an IBM OS. If I wrote a 15 line script to run a batch job the OS would send me back a message saying 15 cards read.
Greg Egan wrote a book on that topic. Aliens were relying on non-collapsed wave functions as a part of their normal life. New instruments like the Hubble Telescope were causing mass genocide in the observable universe, which got some aliens pretty pissed off.
Found some truly disgusting JPGs in a folder named 'Family Photos". The country where this occurred makes it a crime not to report child pornography, so I was stuck in a tough situation. I had to decide whether our ethical standards concerning the customer's privacy had precedence, or the criminal code.
I don't see the dilemma. You did the right thing, no doubt about it.
I don't want to see other people's stuff. I don't look for it either.
I think most of us who have been doing support of one kind or another for ten or more years are pretty bored with the sort of stuff which the lusers regard as their pride and joy anyway.
Certainly the kids who are likely to be employed by a store like this would do this kind of thing and only good management will stop that. Not sure you will find that anywhere though.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA:
The machines include americium-241 and cesium-137I had access to cesium-137 at college. There wasn't any real security about it. You could probably rip it off it you wanted to. I personally have a cache of americium-241 on a shelf in my garage. Thats where I put old, non-functional smoke detectors. I don't actually know where I can go to get rid of them and I am not stupid enough to put them in the bin so they stay in the garage.
You can't make a nuclear bomb out of these materials. You can certainly make a dirty bomb which will spread the stuff around, but I don't know how bad that is really going to be. It might release radioactivity embarrassingly close to background with any decent coverage.
Not to mention communications. They may have expected that different regions would turn up their own candidates, with the outcome to be hacked out when the electoral college met.
I have a theory that 5% of the vote is always up for grabs if you survey current candidates and build your platform out of everything not in the combined set of all their platforms.
It just means pandering to the fringe. One nation never agreed on a reall national platform because the fringe issues were different from place to place.
Here in .au they can only make you line up to have your name crossed off the list of people who should be turning up. By that point you may as well cast a vote.
But under your plan what do you do if you don't get an election with > 50% choosing a candidate for decades? Does the incumbent stay in power? Sounds like a loophole to me.
In this case the receiver of the message (a human brain) only uses a minute proportion of the data in the video stream. So a compression algorithm with a good understanding of human vision should be able to achieve an enormous compression ratio.
As long as it is slightly cheaper than the nearest competitor
"It can sneak out the front door with your CD collection in ther middle of the night"
s/can/can not/
I was thinking in terms of being able to run binaries without any risk at all. The java applet sandbox is pretty good for that, or at least it was in the past.
Being able to load a driver for a new device and being absolutely sure that it can only bring itself down, not corrupt anything in the kernel.
Installing software should be as safe as installing a new appliance in your house. It only does one thing. It can sneak out the front door with your CD collection in ther middle of the night.
Software in general, and kernel modules in particular, can't be trusted in that way, but I don't see why they shouldn't be. I was thinking in terms of a bytecode interpreter available to the kernel with a builtin sandbox and precicely defined APIs so that you could run risky software.
2. Display Balance
3. A Good Tasering
4. Return Card
Years ago an ATM I used which was old by the standards of the day would display Take reciept, and please don't litter.
Then spit the reciept card out on to the ground.
A long time ago I heard about a survey of bank customers who preferred automatic teller machines to human tellers because the computerised version is friendlier.
Now, cops are not known to be friendly, in fact, many problems arise when they depart from established procedures and start setting policy, rather than enforcing it.
I would say that a robot which is programmed to respond in a particular way would do so all the time. The real problem comes when Government finds out that robot police are so cheap they can put one every ten metres along every street in the city. That would worry me. Probably worth pointing out that while speed cameras pay for themselves we don't have millions of the things on the roads yet, at least where I live.
As long as we can trust our governments to want to stay popular, they might continue to use technology appropriately. I hope so, anyway.
Think of it as an electric fence, without the fence.
How about this: A gay man has sex with a married bisexual man. The bisexual man goes home to his wife who says okay honey tonight is my fertile time so lets try for a baby. He gives it a go but he is all out of sperm and not very fertile. He is, however, covered with his partners sperm and it is this which makes his wife pregnant.
The chances of this working are pretty low, however many gay men are very promiscuous, which may even out the odds, as well as the fact that somebody else raises their child while while they are out having sex with other people.
Now obviously in this day and age people have showers before changing partners, but our behaviour is controlled by our genes and past behavioural patterns are the ones which make genes work. If it worked in the dim and distant past then we would still exhibit the behaviour today.
I think the Clarke-Asimov treaty got it right. Asimov was a fantastic science writer. His SF was really just a vehicle for his ideas, more so than other writers. Anything he wrote which goes beyond science was pretty poorly done.
As far as Herbert goes, well, I don't think Dune was SF, so I don't count him as a good SF writer.
But isn't that the point about tabs? I type a tab and display it as four characters. You get my code but display tabs as two characters. If they were used properly everything should scale correctly.
With some people working in Eclipse with CheckStyle and checking in to VCS and whatever else I really wonder if our modern coders would be better off working with some sort of symbolic database of instructions, instead of messing with code.
The mainframe which I used at college ran an IBM OS. If I wrote a 15 line script to run a batch job the OS would send me back a message saying 15 cards read.
I don't think so but you could create your own. How about calling it the isle of slash?
Since you reminded me of the URL I went back and looked at some favourites from a couple of weeks ago but they seem to be gone, along with their tags.
...and telling them that they have misspelt pornografic. Probably have to pay somebody to rebuild stop_eng.jpg
Its not clear to my why they use an image there. Suggestions?
Fairly nice code, otherwise.
You can drink to forget but don't drive straight away
I had to look closely to see if you had used the letter J
Greg Egan wrote a book on that topic. Aliens were relying on non-collapsed wave functions as a part of their normal life. New instruments like the Hubble Telescope were causing mass genocide in the observable universe, which got some aliens pretty pissed off.
Try one username/password combination at random. At least one of your instances will get in.
I don't see the dilemma. You did the right thing, no doubt about it.
Reminds me of the Gary Glitter episode.
I think most of us who have been doing support of one kind or another for ten or more years are pretty bored with the sort of stuff which the lusers regard as their pride and joy anyway.
Certainly the kids who are likely to be employed by a store like this would do this kind of thing and only good management will stop that. Not sure you will find that anywhere though.