We cannot keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. [or the definition of insanity sometimes attributed to Albert Einstein: "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"]
This phrase is overused.
When used in a practical sense, it's just plain false. It's "quasi-opposite" phrases "practice makes perfect" and "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again" are frequently enough true that they make using this phrase in an off-hand, not-carefully-considering-the-context way just sound stupid.
Anyway, you almost never "keep doing the same thing/do the same thing twice" in the real (analog) world anyway (which is why "try, try again" actually works), so using the phrase in a literal is almost always pointless outside of a computer or other non-analog (discrete-state) deterministic environment.
For them though, the "slight change in the quantitative cost" was the up-front price of a VCR that allowed more than 1 or 2 pre-programmed, recurring (i.e. "weekly" or "daily") events dropping below a certain price and/or the slight upward change in their income making a previously-too-expensive device suddenly affordable.
Trivia: You can now get bring-your-own-USB-storage DVR set-top-box from certain major American electronics stores for well under $50. These have been available online for awhile but it's nice to see them in stores. The one I've seen is not as good (or expensive) as a Slingbox or $299+ ChannelMaster and it's not as fun as building your own MythTV box but it gets the job done and you don't have to be a geek to set one up or use it.
It's "practically impossible short of turning the border into a DMZ" like North/South Korea's border?
If that's too strong, how about "It clear with anyone with eyes to see that it's so far from being economically cost-effective that sealing the border for the purposes of immigration control might as well be considered practically (albeit not literally) impossible."
Note that both statements leave open the fact that if the need became great enough, as it is in the North/South Korea situation, sealing the border may become cost-effective. It will still be extremely expensive but if the benefits of sealing it (preventing another country from making a credible effort to over-run ours - the threat South Koreans currently face) it might become cost-effective.
Are prions alive? For the purposes of this discussion, why do you think they are they more or less alive than viruses, or why do you think they are the same as viruses with respect to being alive?
If a soul is more or less how we collectively imagine it to be, what possible value is having a soul if some classes of living beings can exist without it?
Many people would substitute the phrase "beings of a type (i.e. species) which at their peak intellect are typically sufficiently intelligent" or "... sufficiently self-aware" for "living", using their own definition of "sufficiently."
A malicious attacker could substitute toxic fake coffee or hot chocolate for the real thing.
A malicious attacker could also substitute a coffee or hot chocolate that is tainted with a chemical that creates slight etchings in the surface of the coffee cup or other cup used to hold the end product. For certain types of cups, the result will be a cup that will be more likely to harbor bacterial growth than one with a smooth surface. Assuming a successful attack, the risk of illness or fatality is low for a healthy adult but it might be significant for a person with a suppressed or compromised immune system.
Recommended mitigation: Keep people who want to kill you away from your coffee maker.
And yet somehow, there is always a key - some centralized process somewhere that is the Achilles' heel.
And this is why there are hundreds of root DNS servers with over a dozen "names" (list).
TOR has (or had) "directory servers." Although it was discarded as not being practical, TOR or its predecessors considered using fully-distributed directory information (see 2004 documentation). TOR now has the option of using bridge-nodes. The addresses of these nodes are typically distributed "out of band" (e.g. by email or personal contact) on a need-to-use basis.
In short, "centralized servers" are not a bad thing as long as there are enough of them without any significant risk of common failure (short of a catastrophic event that would take down the whole Internet or for that matter the whole planet).
(except that I can't imagine now 'bit-torrent streaming' would work.)
Imagine a video broken into small chunks of 1-2 seconds. Imagine a torrent-ified web browser that used the torrent protocol to verify that all chunks were available for download from somewhere then proceeded to download the first few seconds of the video ("buffering") and while doing so figure out how big of an initial buffer it needed (latency, sigh), then after filling the initial buffer displayed them in order, downloading subsequent chunks while the first chunks were displaying.
Oh, that large and ever-changing latency? That's not your imagination, that's real.
Tor isn't anonymous anymore, and just using it probably puts you on a watch list somewhere. Insert tinfoil hat joke below.
I'm not laughing, and I doubt you are either. Sigh.
On a slightly different topic: Tor increases anonymity by making it much harder for someone to track you down. In practical terms, if neither you nor anyone using your ISP are currently being monitored, you don't use it to visit sites that are being actively monitored by an adversary (including any site that shares an ISP with such a site), and you use it only sparingly (maybe a few MB today e.g. to visit a blocked-from-your-country news or web-mail site, then none at all for a few weeks, changing IP addresses and devices in the meantime) it is much more likely than not that your actual traffic will not be de-anonymized. But there is still a good chance that you could be. Of course, if you live in certain non-free countries, ALL TOR and similar traffic probably triggers alarms at your country's or ISP's border-routers and even of the police can't decode WHAT you are viewing, they can probably throw you in the gulag just for daring to use TOR. In countries that pretend to be free, you won't be arrested but as the parent-posting AC said, you might be put on a watch-list so the NEXT time you use TOR you can be traced much easier. So be sure that your second trip through TOR you pretend to be a good citizen and only visit www.ILoveMyGloriousLeader.[yourcountrycode] and that you post all kinds of kinds words to the public blog.
The third, more of a security/philosophical flaw, is that the base protocol was not documented in any significant fashion. To review the protocol's security, you'd need to have an expert understanding of Java and a large part of the codebase. So it never really had many eyes on it looking for flaws.
I know what you are trying to say - that the protocol was not documented in any significant fashion in a popular human language, but I must point out that computer code, to the extent that it is non-ambiguous,* is "documentation in a significant fashion" of the protocol's implementation. Unless there is other documentation to that contradicts it (such as a human-language protocol spec) it is also the de facto documentation for the protocol.
Now all we need is a few million people who can understand Java as well as most people understand their native human language.
*Some computer languages have ambiguities/undefined-behavior in their spec (these are frequently unintentional oversights). Some computer languages have popular implementations that "go against the spec," introducing de facto ambiguities where the original specification had none.
Netflix could too, if they can get authorization to actually use the system (insert MPAA members howling about their IP being on a P2P network
I can see the MPAA accepting "partial" distribution (say, 75% or maybe even 90% or 99%+ of the bits) over hard-to-track torrent-like protocols as long as enough of the bits are distributed "directly" to ensure that those having only the "partial" distribution either get a useless (e.g. encrypted or compressed-with-key-bits-missing) bits or they get bits that result in such an unpleasant viewing experience (drop-outs/noise, segments that have key plot elements removed, or missing audio) that it won't be an economic threat.
Heck, if the recording-industry was smart, they would set up their own "stripped-to-the-point-of-useless" torrent-like system then invite customers to buy/rent unique-per-customer versions of the missing data. Of course there would have to be some incentive/compensation for your average viewer for them to allow others to "upload" from their computer, such as "fan bucks" usable at the movie's official web site online store or some such.
From a marketing perspective, it would also be smart for the recording industry to use existing BitTorrent-type networks to seed sample TV episodes (complete with ads of course, sigh).
Note the lack of a space in "Fun,Edna" in the acceptance letter.
Also, using a gmail address doesn't exactly seem professional. You would think a legitimate professional journal could splurge a few bucks for their own domain-name. Oh wait....
I'm all for this. ..after we grant human children some basic rights (such as a say in custody hearings).
I assume by "children" you mean "legal children," i.e. minors. I say this because the whole thread is about the legal construct of person-hood.
We are already well on our way there. In most of the United States, minors between the ages of 6 and 17 (or more in certain situations) are entitled to a free public education. Minors of all ages (including people 18 or over with court-appointed guardians) are entitled to be free of abuse by their parents or guardians. Minors who have sufficient mental capacity (typically teenagers, but sometimes younger) have a voice and sometimes a de facto veto in custody hearings.
Most - but not all - societies treat children and the developmentally disabled as "special cases" when it comes to personhood - someplace above even the most intelligent non-human animal but somewhere below that of an adult with all of the rights and responsibilities that come with being an adult.
Having the right 46 chromosomes (or having parents or grandparents, or not-too-far-back-great-grandparents with them) pretty much gives you a free pass on having to qualify as a legal person. Corporations and other "non-human" legal persons do not get this "free pass."
If someone presented a chimp to the court with an IQ of 100 (i.e. that of an average adult) and that same chimp was clearly able to communicate and comprehend things at the level of an average adult, any court using this ruling's logic would be hard-pressed to deny that particular chimp the status of personhood. It might not grant it the status of a "legal adult," but that's another question.
But what if someone presented a particular chimp that functioned at the level just above (but indisputably above) where an 18-year-old human would need to function to avoid having a court appoint a guardian? In practical terms, we are talking the equivalent of someone with a 70s or low-80s IQ, a proven ability to make reasonable financial and other adult personal decisions, a proven general understanding of what is going on in the world similar to that of someone with a 70s- or low-80s IQ, etc. What then?
We already have primates that can communicate with humans in a human language (American Sign Language or something similar) at the level of a child. How close are we to being able to teach a chimp or other primate the skills needed to pass the "able to take on the responsibilities of personhood" test to the satisfaction of a court of law?
There are already some ways to get some of the benefits of https: without all of the costs, and I'm sure ingenious people will figure out other work-around as well. In the meantime, from where I sit the benefits of https: generally outweigh the costs.
Let's take caching as a trivial example that doesn't require much ingenuity to figure out:
Let's say I run an https: web site. Let's say I want to run a content-delivery-network for my images, ads, and most other content but I want to maintain control of the main index.html file and of a few other "embedded" items. The end user loads the https://.../index.html. Based on the customer's IP address the index.html file will include https: links to nearby CND-offered images, ads, etc. Since the CDN's URL will have a valid certificate, there won't be certificate issues for these items. As long as the end user's web browser tolerates an https: web site embedding content from a different https: web site this will work.
There are some things that clearly disturb the general public to the point where the police are justified in stopping as it is happening due to the specifics of the situation but which should not be criminal offenses thanks to the First Amendment. In other words, the speech should be "partially protected" - if the police tell you to stop saying such and such in a particular situation, and you refuse to comply, then a charge of disorderly conduct may be in order, but if you do comply and go and say the same exact words in a different environment where a reasonable person wouldn't foresee that those hearing your words would react in a way that is criminal, the police shouldn't be allowed to touch you.
A hypothetical (I hope) example would be a person bent on inciting mischief (or even a person with no such motive but a huge lack of awareness of human behavior) going to a large, not-all-that-well-organized protest against the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri and saying quite loudly that "poor people should be allowed to walk into any store and take what they want" while not saying anything that sounds like "let's go raid the store across the street now" (that would be inciting others to commit a crime, which is likely already in the "not protected" category).
The police should rightly be able to order the person "cease and desist" as a reasonable person would view the words said in that specific context where the crowd is both large and not following a single leader as likely to incite at least one protester to commit a criminal act (note that this assumption that the words plus the situation would likely result in a criminal act likely wouldn't hold if the crowd was small or the number of people not respecting the protest's leader's instructions were small). If the same person then wrote those exact same words in a newspaper column or a blog, and took no specific actions to make sure that his words were seen by the protesters, then the police should leave him alone, he's just stating his opinion.
Now, we as a society have to be very careful about this. When in doubt, leave people alone to say what they want. If the end result is violence or other criminal acts, then the next time someone says something similar in a similar situation, the police will be able to rightly claim "history has taught us that if we don't get this person to pick a better time and place to speak his peace, criminal acts are likely to occur."
A similar situation exists with speech that is directly threatening: * Does it actually cause someone to fear for their life or safety? * Would a reasonable person see that the person's words, delivered in the manner in which they were delivered, cause a person to fear for their life or safety? * Given the entire situation, is it crystal clear after the fact that there was a clear, actual, intentional, credible threat?
If the first two questions are yes and the 3rd is no, then the proper police response is to shut the guy down and tell him to find a different way of communicating the same message. Of course, if all 3 are true then that's already covered by existing statutes and case law.
If the charges stuck, the man was facing multiple lifetimes worth of imprisonment.
Bull****. Federal sentencing guidelines almost never ask for "fully stacked" sentences. Instead, you wind up with X months for the "top count" and a significant "discount" of additional time for each additional count that is either proven or conceded. For a single count, the maximum sentence is almost never handed out unless there are other factors in play. So let's say this guy did admit to all 44 charges and accept a guilty plea on all 44 counts, and that there were no other factors that counted for or against him under the sentencing guidelines. The guidelines would probably recommend that he get a few years for the first count, a year or two more for each of counts 2 and 3, and a month or two for each additional count, likely resulting in a sentence in the 10-15 year range.
If you MUST have a remote-control door lock, make it something that requires very close physical proximity that is very hard to override.
For example, have a receiver that is on the car-facing side of the door handle using a very-near-field communications setup. You swipe your "key" under the handle and the door locks or unlocks.
Yes, it might be possible for a thief to make a small "reflector" and tape it to your car door near the handle, but that's one more step he'll have to go through and one more opportunity for him to be caught or leave his fingerprints behind. Plus, unlike today, the thief can't just sit in a parking lot all day collecting "sample transmissions" for later analysis/reverse-engineering.
Close. I forgot to say "without anything except the laptop and - when the battery is low - a power cord."
That same machine with one of the internal drives replaced by the SSD would be perfect, assuming of course that it fit within my budget and met my other needs (not to heavy, not too big, not too small, etc.).
[The following is for casual readers NOT you or other Slashdotters as you guys already know this]
Regarding portability: Not only must the computer be bootable over the USB (i.e. not someone else's computer with a locked-down BIOS) but the "core" device drivers required to use that computer must be pre-loaded on all the OSes. I've had brand-new computers not boot common Linux ISOs without special tweaks on the command line due to issues with video or other drivers. I've had brand-new computers refuse to boot Windows install/rescue/etc. disks/external-drives and/or boot them but not "see" the hard drive without either customizing the install disk, loading device drivers manually, or going into the BIOS and changing settings to decrease the hardware's performance. The biggest "gotchas" these days will probably be the USB 3 chipsets (the fix is to just find a USB 2 port and suffer the performance it) or the video driver (the fix is to use "safe"/"low resolution"/"low performance"/"generic" boot options if you can).
The "big win" for solid-state for a lot of applications is shock-resistance.
Most server racks, desktops, and set-top-boxes outside of earthquake zones don't have this requirements but anything mobile does.
Having said that, my ideal laptop would have oodles of storage but the drive would hardly ever need to "spin up" because almost everything I need would fit in the SSD. In "real terms" this would be at least a 128GB SSD plus at least 2TB of less expensive storage.
Slashdot Mirror
We cannot keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. [or the definition of insanity sometimes attributed to Albert Einstein: "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"]
This phrase is overused.
When used in a practical sense, it's just plain false. It's "quasi-opposite" phrases "practice makes perfect" and "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again" are frequently enough true that they make using this phrase in an off-hand, not-carefully-considering-the-context way just sound stupid.
Anyway, you almost never "keep doing the same thing/do the same thing twice" in the real (analog) world anyway (which is why "try, try again" actually works), so using the phrase in a literal is almost always pointless outside of a computer or other non-analog (discrete-state) deterministic environment.
The 16th century called, they want their late-breaking news back.
But when I had a VCR, I almost never time-shifted
I did. So did many others.
For them though, the "slight change in the quantitative cost" was the up-front price of a VCR that allowed more than 1 or 2 pre-programmed, recurring (i.e. "weekly" or "daily") events dropping below a certain price and/or the slight upward change in their income making a previously-too-expensive device suddenly affordable.
Trivia: You can now get bring-your-own-USB-storage DVR set-top-box from certain major American electronics stores for well under $50. These have been available online for awhile but it's nice to see them in stores. The one I've seen is not as good (or expensive) as a Slingbox or $299+ ChannelMaster and it's not as fun as building your own MythTV box but it gets the job done and you don't have to be a geek to set one up or use it.
It's "practically impossible short of turning the border into a DMZ" like North/South Korea's border?
If that's too strong, how about "It clear with anyone with eyes to see that it's so far from being economically cost-effective that sealing the border for the purposes of immigration control might as well be considered practically (albeit not literally) impossible."
Note that both statements leave open the fact that if the need became great enough, as it is in the North/South Korea situation, sealing the border may become cost-effective. It will still be extremely expensive but if the benefits of sealing it (preventing another country from making a credible effort to over-run ours - the threat South Koreans currently face) it might become cost-effective.
Jon Postel. He's got the experience and people trust him.
Unfortunately, he left us awhile back to take on the task of running The Great Internet In The Sky.
Are prions alive? For the purposes of this discussion, why do you think they are they more or less alive than viruses, or why do you think they are the same as viruses with respect to being alive?
If a soul is more or less how we collectively imagine it to be, what possible value is having a soul if some classes of living beings can exist without it?
Many people would substitute the phrase "beings of a type (i.e. species) which at their peak intellect are typically sufficiently intelligent" or "... sufficiently self-aware" for "living", using their own definition of "sufficiently."
A malicious attacker could substitute toxic fake coffee or hot chocolate for the real thing.
A malicious attacker could also substitute a coffee or hot chocolate that is tainted with a chemical that creates slight etchings in the surface of the coffee cup or other cup used to hold the end product. For certain types of cups, the result will be a cup that will be more likely to harbor bacterial growth than one with a smooth surface. Assuming a successful attack, the risk of illness or fatality is low for a healthy adult but it might be significant for a person with a suppressed or compromised immune system.
Recommended mitigation:
Keep people who want to kill you away from your coffee maker.
They want their portrait-mode monitors back.
And yet somehow, there is always a key - some centralized process somewhere that is the Achilles' heel.
And this is why there are hundreds of root DNS servers with over a dozen "names" (list).
TOR has (or had) "directory servers." Although it was discarded as not being practical, TOR or its predecessors considered using fully-distributed directory information (see 2004 documentation). TOR now has the option of using bridge-nodes. The addresses of these nodes are typically distributed "out of band" (e.g. by email or personal contact) on a need-to-use basis.
In short, "centralized servers" are not a bad thing as long as there are enough of them without any significant risk of common failure (short of a catastrophic event that would take down the whole Internet or for that matter the whole planet).
(except that I can't imagine now 'bit-torrent streaming' would work.)
Imagine a video broken into small chunks of 1-2 seconds. Imagine a torrent-ified web browser that used the torrent protocol to verify that all chunks were available for download from somewhere then proceeded to download the first few seconds of the video ("buffering") and while doing so figure out how big of an initial buffer it needed (latency, sigh), then after filling the initial buffer displayed them in order, downloading subsequent chunks while the first chunks were displaying.
Oh, that large and ever-changing latency? That's not your imagination, that's real.
Tor isn't anonymous anymore, and just using it probably puts you on a watch list somewhere. Insert tinfoil hat joke below.
I'm not laughing, and I doubt you are either. Sigh.
On a slightly different topic:
Tor increases anonymity by making it much harder for someone to track you down. In practical terms, if neither you nor anyone using your ISP are currently being monitored, you don't use it to visit sites that are being actively monitored by an adversary (including any site that shares an ISP with such a site), and you use it only sparingly (maybe a few MB today e.g. to visit a blocked-from-your-country news or web-mail site, then none at all for a few weeks, changing IP addresses and devices in the meantime) it is much more likely than not that your actual traffic will not be de-anonymized. But there is still a good chance that you could be. Of course, if you live in certain non-free countries, ALL TOR and similar traffic probably triggers alarms at your country's or ISP's border-routers and even of the police can't decode WHAT you are viewing, they can probably throw you in the gulag just for daring to use TOR. In countries that pretend to be free, you won't be arrested but as the parent-posting AC said, you might be put on a watch-list so the NEXT time you use TOR you can be traced much easier. So be sure that your second trip through TOR you pretend to be a good citizen and only visit www.ILoveMyGloriousLeader.[yourcountrycode] and that you post all kinds of kinds words to the public blog.
Advertising fixes that problem by giving income proportional to the popularity. But it comes with the undesirable side-effect of the ads themselves.
Thereby lowering popularity - a classic example of a negative feedback loop keeping your server farm from crashing under load.
The third, more of a security/philosophical flaw, is that the base protocol was not documented in any significant fashion. To review the protocol's security, you'd need to have an expert understanding of Java and a large part of the codebase. So it never really had many eyes on it looking for flaws.
I know what you are trying to say - that the protocol was not documented in any significant fashion in a popular human language, but I must point out that computer code, to the extent that it is non-ambiguous,* is "documentation in a significant fashion" of the protocol's implementation. Unless there is other documentation to that contradicts it (such as a human-language protocol spec) it is also the de facto documentation for the protocol.
Now all we need is a few million people who can understand Java as well as most people understand their native human language.
*Some computer languages have ambiguities/undefined-behavior in their spec (these are frequently unintentional oversights). Some computer languages have popular implementations that "go against the spec," introducing de facto ambiguities where the original specification had none.
Netflix could too, if they can get authorization to actually use the system (insert MPAA members howling about their IP being on a P2P network
I can see the MPAA accepting "partial" distribution (say, 75% or maybe even 90% or 99%+ of the bits) over hard-to-track torrent-like protocols as long as enough of the bits are distributed "directly" to ensure that those having only the "partial" distribution either get a useless (e.g. encrypted or compressed-with-key-bits-missing) bits or they get bits that result in such an unpleasant viewing experience (drop-outs/noise, segments that have key plot elements removed, or missing audio) that it won't be an economic threat.
Heck, if the recording-industry was smart, they would set up their own "stripped-to-the-point-of-useless" torrent-like system then invite customers to buy/rent unique-per-customer versions of the missing data. Of course there would have to be some incentive/compensation for your average viewer for them to allow others to "upload" from their computer, such as "fan bucks" usable at the movie's official web site online store or some such.
From a marketing perspective, it would also be smart for the recording industry to use existing BitTorrent-type networks to seed sample TV episodes (complete with ads of course, sigh).
Note the lack of a space in "Fun,Edna" in the acceptance letter.
Also, using a gmail address doesn't exactly seem professional. You would think a legitimate professional journal could splurge a few bucks for their own domain-name. Oh wait....
I'm all for this. . .after we grant human children some basic rights (such as a say in custody hearings).
I assume by "children" you mean "legal children," i.e. minors. I say this because the whole thread is about the legal construct of person-hood.
We are already well on our way there. In most of the United States, minors between the ages of 6 and 17 (or more in certain situations) are entitled to a free public education. Minors of all ages (including people 18 or over with court-appointed guardians) are entitled to be free of abuse by their parents or guardians. Minors who have sufficient mental capacity (typically teenagers, but sometimes younger) have a voice and sometimes a de facto veto in custody hearings.
Most - but not all - societies treat children and the developmentally disabled as "special cases" when it comes to personhood - someplace above even the most intelligent non-human animal but somewhere below that of an adult with all of the rights and responsibilities that come with being an adult.
Having the right 46 chromosomes (or having parents or grandparents, or not-too-far-back-great-grandparents with them) pretty much gives you a free pass on having to qualify as a legal person. Corporations and other "non-human" legal persons do not get this "free pass."
If someone presented a chimp to the court with an IQ of 100 (i.e. that of an average adult) and that same chimp was clearly able to communicate and comprehend things at the level of an average adult, any court using this ruling's logic would be hard-pressed to deny that particular chimp the status of personhood. It might not grant it the status of a "legal adult," but that's another question.
But what if someone presented a particular chimp that functioned at the level just above (but indisputably above) where an 18-year-old human would need to function to avoid having a court appoint a guardian? In practical terms, we are talking the equivalent of someone with a 70s or low-80s IQ, a proven ability to make reasonable financial and other adult personal decisions, a proven general understanding of what is going on in the world similar to that of someone with a 70s- or low-80s IQ, etc. What then?
We already have primates that can communicate with humans in a human language (American Sign Language or something similar) at the level of a child. How close are we to being able to teach a chimp or other primate the skills needed to pass the "able to take on the responsibilities of personhood" test to the satisfaction of a court of law?
There are already some ways to get some of the benefits of https: without all of the costs, and I'm sure ingenious people will figure out other work-around as well. In the meantime, from where I sit the benefits of https: generally outweigh the costs.
Let's take caching as a trivial example that doesn't require much ingenuity to figure out:
Let's say I run an https: web site. Let's say I want to run a content-delivery-network for my images, ads, and most other content but I want to maintain control of the main index.html file and of a few other "embedded" items. The end user loads the https://.../index.html. Based on the customer's IP address the index.html file will include https: links to nearby CND-offered images, ads, etc. Since the CDN's URL will have a valid certificate, there won't be certificate issues for these items. As long as the end user's web browser tolerates an https: web site embedding content from a different https: web site this will work.
There are some things that clearly disturb the general public to the point where the police are justified in stopping as it is happening due to the specifics of the situation but which should not be criminal offenses thanks to the First Amendment. In other words, the speech should be "partially protected" - if the police tell you to stop saying such and such in a particular situation, and you refuse to comply, then a charge of disorderly conduct may be in order, but if you do comply and go and say the same exact words in a different environment where a reasonable person wouldn't foresee that those hearing your words would react in a way that is criminal, the police shouldn't be allowed to touch you.
A hypothetical (I hope) example would be a person bent on inciting mischief (or even a person with no such motive but a huge lack of awareness of human behavior) going to a large, not-all-that-well-organized protest against the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri and saying quite loudly that "poor people should be allowed to walk into any store and take what they want" while not saying anything that sounds like "let's go raid the store across the street now" (that would be inciting others to commit a crime, which is likely already in the "not protected" category).
The police should rightly be able to order the person "cease and desist" as a reasonable person would view the words said in that specific context where the crowd is both large and not following a single leader as likely to incite at least one protester to commit a criminal act (note that this assumption that the words plus the situation would likely result in a criminal act likely wouldn't hold if the crowd was small or the number of people not respecting the protest's leader's instructions were small). If the same person then wrote those exact same words in a newspaper column or a blog, and took no specific actions to make sure that his words were seen by the protesters, then the police should leave him alone, he's just stating his opinion.
Now, we as a society have to be very careful about this. When in doubt, leave people alone to say what they want. If the end result is violence or other criminal acts, then the next time someone says something similar in a similar situation, the police will be able to rightly claim "history has taught us that if we don't get this person to pick a better time and place to speak his peace, criminal acts are likely to occur."
A similar situation exists with speech that is directly threatening:
* Does it actually cause someone to fear for their life or safety?
* Would a reasonable person see that the person's words, delivered in the manner in which they were delivered, cause a person to fear for their life or safety?
* Given the entire situation, is it crystal clear after the fact that there was a clear, actual, intentional, credible threat?
If the first two questions are yes and the 3rd is no, then the proper police response is to shut the guy down and tell him to find a different way of communicating the same message. Of course, if all 3 are true then that's already covered by existing statutes and case law.
If the charges stuck, the man was facing multiple lifetimes worth of imprisonment.
Bull****. Federal sentencing guidelines almost never ask for "fully stacked" sentences. Instead, you wind up with X months for the "top count" and a significant "discount" of additional time for each additional count that is either proven or conceded. For a single count, the maximum sentence is almost never handed out unless there are other factors in play. So let's say this guy did admit to all 44 charges and accept a guilty plea on all 44 counts, and that there were no other factors that counted for or against him under the sentencing guidelines. The guidelines would probably recommend that he get a few years for the first count, a year or two more for each of counts 2 and 3, and a month or two for each additional count, likely resulting in a sentence in the 10-15 year range.
If you MUST have a remote-control door lock, make it something that requires very close physical proximity that is very hard to override.
For example, have a receiver that is on the car-facing side of the door handle using a very-near-field communications setup. You swipe your "key" under the handle and the door locks or unlocks.
Yes, it might be possible for a thief to make a small "reflector" and tape it to your car door near the handle, but that's one more step he'll have to go through and one more opportunity for him to be caught or leave his fingerprints behind. Plus, unlike today, the thief can't just sit in a parking lot all day collecting "sample transmissions" for later analysis/reverse-engineering.
Close. I forgot to say "without anything except the laptop and - when the battery is low - a power cord."
That same machine with one of the internal drives replaced by the SSD would be perfect, assuming of course that it fit within my budget and met my other needs (not to heavy, not too big, not too small, etc.).
[The following is for casual readers NOT you or other Slashdotters as you guys already know this]
Regarding portability: Not only must the computer be bootable over the USB (i.e. not someone else's computer with a locked-down BIOS) but the "core" device drivers required to use that computer must be pre-loaded on all the OSes. I've had brand-new computers not boot common Linux ISOs without special tweaks on the command line due to issues with video or other drivers. I've had brand-new computers refuse to boot Windows install/rescue/etc. disks/external-drives and/or boot them but not "see" the hard drive without either customizing the install disk, loading device drivers manually, or going into the BIOS and changing settings to decrease the hardware's performance. The biggest "gotchas" these days will probably be the USB 3 chipsets (the fix is to just find a USB 2 port and suffer the performance it) or the video driver (the fix is to use "safe"/"low resolution"/"low performance"/"generic" boot options if you can).
There once was a cult which was into flashy colors.
To be fair, a lot of relatively sane people were into flashy-colored web sites at the time.
The "big win" for solid-state for a lot of applications is shock-resistance.
Most server racks, desktops, and set-top-boxes outside of earthquake zones don't have this requirements but anything mobile does.
Having said that, my ideal laptop would have oodles of storage but the drive would hardly ever need to "spin up" because almost everything I need would fit in the SSD. In "real terms" this would be at least a 128GB SSD plus at least 2TB of less expensive storage.