The worst thing about such talk of weapons is that natural law shows us that weapons able to destroy entire solar systems in a single blast and send radiation out over massive areas are entirely possible (see supernova) all that is required is enough energy which would probably make such a device absolutely massive.
Although someone developing technology which could cause a star to enter prematurely into its death phase by interrupting its normal reactions could possibly be smaller (especially if a chain reaction was involved) which could be a devastating but fairly easy to carry weapon if someone was out for interstellar war with someone.
Are you serious, earth orbits relative to the sun, the sun orbits through what is to us very deep space while orbiting the galactic center, as a result of earth orbiting around the sun earth moves through deep space with it granted that happens over astronomical time scales as the sun has a huge orbital path compared to some object in near (solar system) areas of space
I see another problem here, lets presume I could materialize on the surface of earth at this altitude, longitude and latitude at some arbitrary date I would also need to materializing there with the same momentum as the body in question otherwise I am going to appear stationary and be rapidly accelerated by gravity towards a body which is approaching me at a massive speed enough I would imagine to completely obliterate my body, if we were talking earth it would be traveling towards you or away from you at a rate of up to 30km/s if you were stationary and did not possess the momentum we all have by being on earth normally it would be somewhat painful I imagine.
While the traditional nick term would normally be pipes something lay people can also figure out, Tubes seams a little odd, mainly as pipes gives the perception instantly in almost any persons head of either a net link (if they are a tech person) or a water/gas pipe in anyone else which instantly brings up the mental image of a piece of utility structure which carries material from one place to another tubes does seam like an odd word having said that it was I believe from what I heard about said comment in a meeting anyone who can claim they have not juxtaposed words while speaking freely without rehearsal is a liar the human brain is rather error prone like that. Also optical lines do operate very much like tubes with the light being directed along by the external walls of the fibre so it is hardly something that abnormal of a comment, seamed an odd word but does make some sense, would people be making such ridicule of it if he had spoken of a traffic tunnel as a tube, such as perhaps a road tunnel or perhaps an underground railway tunnel which also happen to be somewhat like the physical connections of a computer network as they allow payloads to travel from one location to another utilizing the infrastructure of course this is slashdot so mixing up your terms when it comes to anything remotely related to technology is going to be ridiculed.
Sorry but I don't understand this whole point of admitting it being so bad, we have here a politician that admits to such as that, is it just we are so used to dishonest politicians around here that an honest one comes as a shock, or perhaps the hatred of politics is so bad that when we get a politician being honest then we criticize them for that instead?
If you read TFA not very slashdot I know, but it does say that several of the sites were what would normally be considered trusted and thus could likely end up on such a whitelist so it would hardly protect you against situations like this where trusted websites have been owned by a malware attack themselves.
The cause of piracy is not the content having no value it is a disagreement between the content producers and consumers over what that value happens to be, namely that the content producers overvalue the goods compared to consumes resulting in the situation where consumers feel that the content producers are price gouging and thus have no desire whatsoever to pay the asking price.
There are other causes as well, a good example is content providers not providing the content in the format that the consumer wants, applying unfair restrictions that cause inconvenience on some legitimate products and limit legitimate use like watching it on your laptop instead of your PC etc etc.
So the solutions boil down to providing consumers with what they actually want, provide consumers with a product which they feel is value for money, and don't make it difficult for consumers to use products in legitimate ways. Do these things and piracy will decrease, sure some people don't actually care but most people are more than happy to pay for quality content at a reasonable price point. Fail to do these things and you have a seriously flawed business model which is going to slowly bleed money and die.
The funny part here is the movie industries have not had as much of a decline in cinema sales than in other things because the cinema offers something a pirate copy never can, a trip to the cinema is a night out, an experience in a way that is more than watching at home even with massive TV screens and fully dolby surround in your living room in fact a study actually found that such households with that sort of high tech equipment tends to visit the cinema more than households without it possibly due to a higher disposable income though, or that people who like films are more inclined to invest in expensive equipment to watch stuff at home.
I could be wrong but my understanding was that the weapon had to be tied to a suspect, that does not require a registration (in fact simply being the registered owner of the weapon would not prove you pulled the trigger although if it was not reported stolen it would hurt you in trial most likely) but physical evidence linking the suspect to the weapon (fingerprints, hair fibres/dna, fiber evidence from clothing), combined with ballistics linking the weapon to the murder would be somewhat problematic for the suspect.
Guns however create pesky ballistic evidence, a wireless signal passed to the device may show up in it's log somewhere if an old guy with a pacemaker dying of a heart attack was even autopsied but it could still be just taken as natural causes, not only that but even if you could prove the device was tampered with it could be difficult to link such a signal with the transceiver that sent it directly, unlike trying to link a bullet to a gun.
Now bear in mind people have tried some pretty mental schemes in an attempt to get away with murder and it doesn't seam that ridiculous that someone could actually try something that elaborate in order to attempt to kill someone without it being traced back to the attacker.
Of course there is still the fact that not having the pacemaker has pretty good odds of killing you anyway, having one without the wireless technology would mean it would need to be altered by surgery which also carries a risk of death which is far higher than the risk of hacking so it is overreacting really to get overly worried about it all the same.
Depends on how essential the piece of evidence itself was and the same for any evidence which was derived from it either directly or that lead from the illegal discovery (fruit of the poisoned tree) example, in a murder investigation the police search your car without a warrant, in the process of doing so they discover a knife which carries forensic evidence (fingerprints, blood other trace evidence etc) then all of that is inadmissible in court because from the moment the police illegally searched your car any discovery coming from that car or it's contents were all products of that illegal act (thus what the term fruit of the poisoned tree comes from).
Other evidence which was discovered beforehand through legitimate rules of evidence would still be admissible however, as would any evidence discovered completely independently of the search of the car so it is possible that there would be some other way to make the case (perhaps such as physical evidence found on a carpet or similar that was used to move the body, which was found for instance with the victim or in the home of the suspect/victim or some other location). It certainly would not do the prosecution's case any favors though.
By the way I am not a lawyer so this is just my understanding of it but I believe it to be correct, of course if the knife was your only piece of physical evidence you would be in somewhat of a mess unless you could somehow pull together a very strong circumstantial case somewhere.
True, this actually reminds me of a survey that was done which was interesting more so in my opinion as it lacked the emotive aspect of talking about terms like piracy which makes something sound inherently bad. The study actually surveyed groups of people one was highly marginalized people the other was socially well connected people about what they would expect an extraterrestrial civilizations attitude to be were we to encounter one those who were highly marginalized generally considered that they would be hostile, the other group answered very strongly towards them being benevolent.
Of course this is how psychology works people make assumptions about everyone they meet from the second they encounter them and go very heavily on the actions of themselves, but also the actions of others towards them thus the marginalized people who have generally felt society to be hostile towards them assume an entirely separate society would be also. Of course taking this thought process even further it is quite likely that content producers implicit assumption by using DRM that the buyer is a thief could very well cause the buyer to assume that the content producer has some kind of negative intent as said person sees the entire group of content producers as being hostile towards them (accusing you of theft is hostile) thus are likely to be hostile towards the producers and probably are much less likely to be altruistic in return by doing something like for instance paying for a work because it would be the right thing to do, people are not very inclined to do right by another person who is accusing them of wrongdoing.
It can be useful with fiction as well, especially such as like was done heavily by the fan community of books written in series (like harry potter for instance) where people discuss theories and other critical analysis of fiction works where it can be very useful to supply direct quotes from the work in question, and most people even the most avid readers of a work can remember it word for word in all it's hundreds of pages.
7 may be a little low, the last thing I saw which put a number on it based on any attempt at producing a rational thought out result without the obviously emotive reactions it stirs up when the matter is discussed legally because too many parties virulently defend their particular interests and don't consider the reasoned cost benefit balance to both themselves and wider society (the latter being what copyright was supposably intended to protect by encouraging creativity.) was a value of 14 years with the implicit statement that the term actually would drop with lowered cost of production of (official) copies, it took into account the costs of production for official and none official copies, the value of the work to society versus time this being the one where the current long copyright terms fail, works are in copyright for decades after much of it has gone out of date, where a term in or around 10-15 years would leave many works out of copyright within time that a derivative work desirable to society could be written.
Yes there are some classics that do still stand out decades after they are produced but a small number of what is produced, however if the term was shorter and derivative works of other material could be produced before it became old on arrival perhaps more works would actually be improved or enhanced with derivatives to make them also valuable classics.
Mainly proprietary DRM laden formats is where the added complexity and incompatibilities come in over ebooks, as you pointed out a book is the simplest form of file possible on it's own, it is literally text plain and simple text, maybe PDF if you want to throw in illustrations as well, it is the proprietary DRM schemes that create all the many formats and incompatibilities.
I would have to agree that the same happens in any country the state (or one or more of it's agencies) will require this information in the UK that would firstly be the local authority (which is closest to a city administration but cover areas of a city or sometimes more than one town/city) for the purpose of council taxes your personal details will be registered and connected with the address of any residence you own or rent (not just your primary residence) of course the council tax works a different way to income tax but serves the same purpose as a city/state or other local element of tax (income or otherwise) and oddly enough requires you to provide a state agency with your residence information.
Sure, because lie detectors are foolproof, and you cannot possibly train someone how to fool one ever, that will explain how during the likes of the cold war several soviet agents infiltrating the US successfully passed a lie detector test, sometimes on multiple separate occasions.
I would have thought a large amount of ATC activity could possibly be automated, almost all of it is based on fixed rules, separation distances etc, with specific rules on how to obtain those distances in most cases, rules for resolving a potential collision situation, lots of these do vary with meteorological conditions and aircraft type, the latter would be known to the system anyway and meteorological data is already computerized so could be available to the system to modify the rule sets in use to suit the conditions which are present at the time in a specific region.
The rules do get more complex at airport approaches or in the vicinity of airports but still governed by strict rules I can't see why a computer can't follow comprehensive strict rules in fact something with comprehensive logical rules seams perfectly suited for computers, granted there is the issue of emergency situations where rules often have to be bent in order to ensure safe resolution of the emergency situation, but surely backup human operators could be available to take over control of sectors where such an emergency condition exists from the computer for this purpose, but in normal circumstances barring any sort of emergency computers could follow the rules with a precision and efficiency far beyond human operators for the most part I would expect.
Basically all the inputs into the current system the human controllers use are already computerized the only thing that is not is the decision making processes that ensure the procedures and guidelines are followed I am not sure I see a problem here, of course any such system design would need extensive testing, preferably by hooking up the inputs from real world radar tracking, meteorological data and all the other data relevant to such a system and using that to get the system to produce a simulation of how it would guide all the aircraft within the respective control sector, preferably over a prolonged period of time to ensure it does so without error, and of course being analyzed by experts in air traffic control etc.
It would be a complex system to design but certainly not one beyond the reaches of computer programming, making it cover every eventuality especially abnormal emergency situations but surely a team of human operators could be available to take over from the system where such a situation occurred, one could still reduce dramatically the amount of staff needed as they would not need to be controlling every sector as they do now but only ones where there was an abnormal situation.
On this I would have to agree, It's akin to saying "If you don't pay us for this information we will use it against you" ie a threat thus blackmail.
On the other hand if someone found an exploit in a system of some kind and notified the vendor/owner of that system of its existence and offered to turn over copies of all their documentation on the vulnerability so they could fix it but would not use or allow others to use the information in an attack it is not blackmail (By definition blackmail usually involves a threat of one form or another against the target, an implied threat like "we will only provide this info to third parties who pay us" where the intent of those parties is unknown is what makes it blackmail in this case IMO)
I would be inclined to think the same, copyright gives the holder a number of rights (which they may allocate freely to others), patents give the holder a number of rights which they can share with others also so I don't really see alot of difference.
Although I would have thought not patenting it and releasing the documents would have the effect of making it public domain as well, not sure someone else could then patent the invention as the existing published documents would be prior art but I'm no lawyer so I could be wrong.
Break-Resistant maybe, there is no such thing as "Break-Proof" all consumer electronic devices in fact electronic devices in general will break if given sufficient impact strangely enough very sensitive components don't like being smashed around, shock lol. There is no way that an electronic device is going to retain the same degree of usability as a dead tree under repeated impacts, the latter will break eventually, the former may get a bit battered but will retain the printing on the page all the same.
It seams you completely failed to understand the point re grapefruit, grapefruit juice has an effect on a multitude of liver enzymes (inducers of some, inhibitors of others some strongly), opiate drugs in particular are heavily effected by it, although many other classes are too, for instance with any opiate bar codeine grapefruit will greatly increase the potency and duration of the drug, with codeine it will reduce the effect of the drug to practically 0.
Other foods also can have similar effects, and can cause anything from sudden side effects making the drug intolerable for the patient, or even worse (grapefruit and a strong opiate can lead to dangerous overdose plasma levels of opiate). Thus doctors cannot know everything, they do not take a full dietary history with every prescription even if they did the science of pharmacology does not know all the chemicals or foods that can affect the pharmoknetics of all drugs not to mention the problems of individual biological variance as well.
It is perfectly understandable why some people may choose to stop taking a medication prescribed to them where they suffer side effects which are worse than the condition it is intended to treat ("The cure is worse than the disease" to quote a phrase).
Sure, and the same page lists the other 3 in the top 5 as being a BSD derivative, along with every other system in the top 19 (bar one unknown) with MS having it's next entry at 22. Looking at a wider portion of the dataset shows that those particular two systems are more exceptions than rules, compared to other systems on alternative operating systems.
Sure, and they can't possibly track you via your mobile phone already, it's not like the mobile phone broadcasts anything to identify itself like an IMEI number or GSM code at any point during it's life (except when it has to sign on to a network or update it's registration on the network on request) seams to me that could theoretically be broken to fool the phone into identifying to the network while in fact being activated by a third party transmitter that wanted to capture that information. Sure it would not identify the individual by name or anything without access to more information, but to track the movements of a person based on those numbers would be possible surely? That is of course if anyone cared to do so.
Well of course it could have the option at this point to decide that it is in error and issue a status alert to the pilots to take manual control of the aircraft, the pilots form a backup system throughout automatic flight anyway in the case of error so there is no reason to believe that such a system could not issue a report of a fatal error to the pilots and allow them to take control of the aircraft either for the remainder of the flight if need be or until the system could reinitialize the systems in the voting scheme and clear up the fault (if clearing it up was possible by doing this) else it would have to be a manual landing at the nearest suitable airport for the aircraft like is practice for any other serious unresolvable fault with the aircraft systems, this even occurs often where a backup system is present (on the grounds an aircraft with one system failed and using backup now has a single point of failure issue and is vulnerable).
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The worst thing about such talk of weapons is that natural law shows us that weapons able to destroy entire solar systems in a single blast and send radiation out over massive areas are entirely possible (see supernova) all that is required is enough energy which would probably make such a device absolutely massive.
Although someone developing technology which could cause a star to enter prematurely into its death phase by interrupting its normal reactions could possibly be smaller (especially if a chain reaction was involved) which could be a devastating but fairly easy to carry weapon if someone was out for interstellar war with someone.
Are you serious, earth orbits relative to the sun, the sun orbits through what is to us very deep space while orbiting the galactic center, as a result of earth orbiting around the sun earth moves through deep space with it granted that happens over astronomical time scales as the sun has a huge orbital path compared to some object in near (solar system) areas of space
I see another problem here, lets presume I could materialize on the surface of earth at this altitude, longitude and latitude at some arbitrary date I would also need to materializing there with the same momentum as the body in question otherwise I am going to appear stationary and be rapidly accelerated by gravity towards a body which is approaching me at a massive speed enough I would imagine to completely obliterate my body, if we were talking earth it would be traveling towards you or away from you at a rate of up to 30km/s if you were stationary and did not possess the momentum we all have by being on earth normally it would be somewhat painful I imagine.
While the traditional nick term would normally be pipes something lay people can also figure out, Tubes seams a little odd, mainly as pipes gives the perception instantly in almost any persons head of either a net link (if they are a tech person) or a water/gas pipe in anyone else which instantly brings up the mental image of a piece of utility structure which carries material from one place to another tubes does seam like an odd word having said that it was I believe from what I heard about said comment in a meeting anyone who can claim they have not juxtaposed words while speaking freely without rehearsal is a liar the human brain is rather error prone like that. Also optical lines do operate very much like tubes with the light being directed along by the external walls of the fibre so it is hardly something that abnormal of a comment, seamed an odd word but does make some sense, would people be making such ridicule of it if he had spoken of a traffic tunnel as a tube, such as perhaps a road tunnel or perhaps an underground railway tunnel which also happen to be somewhat like the physical connections of a computer network as they allow payloads to travel from one location to another utilizing the infrastructure of course this is slashdot so mixing up your terms when it comes to anything remotely related to technology is going to be ridiculed.
Sorry but I don't understand this whole point of admitting it being so bad, we have here a politician that admits to such as that, is it just we are so used to dishonest politicians around here that an honest one comes as a shock, or perhaps the hatred of politics is so bad that when we get a politician being honest then we criticize them for that instead?
If you read TFA not very slashdot I know, but it does say that several of the sites were what would normally be considered trusted and thus could likely end up on such a whitelist so it would hardly protect you against situations like this where trusted websites have been owned by a malware attack themselves.
The cause of piracy is not the content having no value it is a disagreement between the content producers and consumers over what that value happens to be, namely that the content producers overvalue the goods compared to consumes resulting in the situation where consumers feel that the content producers are price gouging and thus have no desire whatsoever to pay the asking price.
There are other causes as well, a good example is content providers not providing the content in the format that the consumer wants, applying unfair restrictions that cause inconvenience on some legitimate products and limit legitimate use like watching it on your laptop instead of your PC etc etc.
So the solutions boil down to providing consumers with what they actually want, provide consumers with a product which they feel is value for money, and don't make it difficult for consumers to use products in legitimate ways. Do these things and piracy will decrease, sure some people don't actually care but most people are more than happy to pay for quality content at a reasonable price point. Fail to do these things and you have a seriously flawed business model which is going to slowly bleed money and die.
The funny part here is the movie industries have not had as much of a decline in cinema sales than in other things because the cinema offers something a pirate copy never can, a trip to the cinema is a night out, an experience in a way that is more than watching at home even with massive TV screens and fully dolby surround in your living room in fact a study actually found that such households with that sort of high tech equipment tends to visit the cinema more than households without it possibly due to a higher disposable income though, or that people who like films are more inclined to invest in expensive equipment to watch stuff at home.
I could be wrong but my understanding was that the weapon had to be tied to a suspect, that does not require a registration (in fact simply being the registered owner of the weapon would not prove you pulled the trigger although if it was not reported stolen it would hurt you in trial most likely) but physical evidence linking the suspect to the weapon (fingerprints, hair fibres/dna, fiber evidence from clothing), combined with ballistics linking the weapon to the murder would be somewhat problematic for the suspect.
Guns however create pesky ballistic evidence, a wireless signal passed to the device may show up in it's log somewhere if an old guy with a pacemaker dying of a heart attack was even autopsied but it could still be just taken as natural causes, not only that but even if you could prove the device was tampered with it could be difficult to link such a signal with the transceiver that sent it directly, unlike trying to link a bullet to a gun. Now bear in mind people have tried some pretty mental schemes in an attempt to get away with murder and it doesn't seam that ridiculous that someone could actually try something that elaborate in order to attempt to kill someone without it being traced back to the attacker. Of course there is still the fact that not having the pacemaker has pretty good odds of killing you anyway, having one without the wireless technology would mean it would need to be altered by surgery which also carries a risk of death which is far higher than the risk of hacking so it is overreacting really to get overly worried about it all the same.
Depends on how essential the piece of evidence itself was and the same for any evidence which was derived from it either directly or that lead from the illegal discovery (fruit of the poisoned tree) example, in a murder investigation the police search your car without a warrant, in the process of doing so they discover a knife which carries forensic evidence (fingerprints, blood other trace evidence etc) then all of that is inadmissible in court because from the moment the police illegally searched your car any discovery coming from that car or it's contents were all products of that illegal act (thus what the term fruit of the poisoned tree comes from). Other evidence which was discovered beforehand through legitimate rules of evidence would still be admissible however, as would any evidence discovered completely independently of the search of the car so it is possible that there would be some other way to make the case (perhaps such as physical evidence found on a carpet or similar that was used to move the body, which was found for instance with the victim or in the home of the suspect/victim or some other location). It certainly would not do the prosecution's case any favors though. By the way I am not a lawyer so this is just my understanding of it but I believe it to be correct, of course if the knife was your only piece of physical evidence you would be in somewhat of a mess unless you could somehow pull together a very strong circumstantial case somewhere.
True, this actually reminds me of a survey that was done which was interesting more so in my opinion as it lacked the emotive aspect of talking about terms like piracy which makes something sound inherently bad. The study actually surveyed groups of people one was highly marginalized people the other was socially well connected people about what they would expect an extraterrestrial civilizations attitude to be were we to encounter one those who were highly marginalized generally considered that they would be hostile, the other group answered very strongly towards them being benevolent. Of course this is how psychology works people make assumptions about everyone they meet from the second they encounter them and go very heavily on the actions of themselves, but also the actions of others towards them thus the marginalized people who have generally felt society to be hostile towards them assume an entirely separate society would be also. Of course taking this thought process even further it is quite likely that content producers implicit assumption by using DRM that the buyer is a thief could very well cause the buyer to assume that the content producer has some kind of negative intent as said person sees the entire group of content producers as being hostile towards them (accusing you of theft is hostile) thus are likely to be hostile towards the producers and probably are much less likely to be altruistic in return by doing something like for instance paying for a work because it would be the right thing to do, people are not very inclined to do right by another person who is accusing them of wrongdoing.
It can be useful with fiction as well, especially such as like was done heavily by the fan community of books written in series (like harry potter for instance) where people discuss theories and other critical analysis of fiction works where it can be very useful to supply direct quotes from the work in question, and most people even the most avid readers of a work can remember it word for word in all it's hundreds of pages.
7 may be a little low, the last thing I saw which put a number on it based on any attempt at producing a rational thought out result without the obviously emotive reactions it stirs up when the matter is discussed legally because too many parties virulently defend their particular interests and don't consider the reasoned cost benefit balance to both themselves and wider society (the latter being what copyright was supposably intended to protect by encouraging creativity.) was a value of 14 years with the implicit statement that the term actually would drop with lowered cost of production of (official) copies, it took into account the costs of production for official and none official copies, the value of the work to society versus time this being the one where the current long copyright terms fail, works are in copyright for decades after much of it has gone out of date, where a term in or around 10-15 years would leave many works out of copyright within time that a derivative work desirable to society could be written. Yes there are some classics that do still stand out decades after they are produced but a small number of what is produced, however if the term was shorter and derivative works of other material could be produced before it became old on arrival perhaps more works would actually be improved or enhanced with derivatives to make them also valuable classics.
Mainly proprietary DRM laden formats is where the added complexity and incompatibilities come in over ebooks, as you pointed out a book is the simplest form of file possible on it's own, it is literally text plain and simple text, maybe PDF if you want to throw in illustrations as well, it is the proprietary DRM schemes that create all the many formats and incompatibilities.
I would have to agree that the same happens in any country the state (or one or more of it's agencies) will require this information in the UK that would firstly be the local authority (which is closest to a city administration but cover areas of a city or sometimes more than one town/city) for the purpose of council taxes your personal details will be registered and connected with the address of any residence you own or rent (not just your primary residence) of course the council tax works a different way to income tax but serves the same purpose as a city/state or other local element of tax (income or otherwise) and oddly enough requires you to provide a state agency with your residence information.
Sure, because lie detectors are foolproof, and you cannot possibly train someone how to fool one ever, that will explain how during the likes of the cold war several soviet agents infiltrating the US successfully passed a lie detector test, sometimes on multiple separate occasions.
I would have thought a large amount of ATC activity could possibly be automated, almost all of it is based on fixed rules, separation distances etc, with specific rules on how to obtain those distances in most cases, rules for resolving a potential collision situation, lots of these do vary with meteorological conditions and aircraft type, the latter would be known to the system anyway and meteorological data is already computerized so could be available to the system to modify the rule sets in use to suit the conditions which are present at the time in a specific region. The rules do get more complex at airport approaches or in the vicinity of airports but still governed by strict rules I can't see why a computer can't follow comprehensive strict rules in fact something with comprehensive logical rules seams perfectly suited for computers, granted there is the issue of emergency situations where rules often have to be bent in order to ensure safe resolution of the emergency situation, but surely backup human operators could be available to take over control of sectors where such an emergency condition exists from the computer for this purpose, but in normal circumstances barring any sort of emergency computers could follow the rules with a precision and efficiency far beyond human operators for the most part I would expect. Basically all the inputs into the current system the human controllers use are already computerized the only thing that is not is the decision making processes that ensure the procedures and guidelines are followed I am not sure I see a problem here, of course any such system design would need extensive testing, preferably by hooking up the inputs from real world radar tracking, meteorological data and all the other data relevant to such a system and using that to get the system to produce a simulation of how it would guide all the aircraft within the respective control sector, preferably over a prolonged period of time to ensure it does so without error, and of course being analyzed by experts in air traffic control etc. It would be a complex system to design but certainly not one beyond the reaches of computer programming, making it cover every eventuality especially abnormal emergency situations but surely a team of human operators could be available to take over from the system where such a situation occurred, one could still reduce dramatically the amount of staff needed as they would not need to be controlling every sector as they do now but only ones where there was an abnormal situation.
On this I would have to agree, It's akin to saying "If you don't pay us for this information we will use it against you" ie a threat thus blackmail. On the other hand if someone found an exploit in a system of some kind and notified the vendor/owner of that system of its existence and offered to turn over copies of all their documentation on the vulnerability so they could fix it but would not use or allow others to use the information in an attack it is not blackmail (By definition blackmail usually involves a threat of one form or another against the target, an implied threat like "we will only provide this info to third parties who pay us" where the intent of those parties is unknown is what makes it blackmail in this case IMO)
I would be inclined to think the same, copyright gives the holder a number of rights (which they may allocate freely to others), patents give the holder a number of rights which they can share with others also so I don't really see alot of difference. Although I would have thought not patenting it and releasing the documents would have the effect of making it public domain as well, not sure someone else could then patent the invention as the existing published documents would be prior art but I'm no lawyer so I could be wrong.
Break-Resistant maybe, there is no such thing as "Break-Proof" all consumer electronic devices in fact electronic devices in general will break if given sufficient impact strangely enough very sensitive components don't like being smashed around, shock lol. There is no way that an electronic device is going to retain the same degree of usability as a dead tree under repeated impacts, the latter will break eventually, the former may get a bit battered but will retain the printing on the page all the same.
It seams you completely failed to understand the point re grapefruit, grapefruit juice has an effect on a multitude of liver enzymes (inducers of some, inhibitors of others some strongly), opiate drugs in particular are heavily effected by it, although many other classes are too, for instance with any opiate bar codeine grapefruit will greatly increase the potency and duration of the drug, with codeine it will reduce the effect of the drug to practically 0. Other foods also can have similar effects, and can cause anything from sudden side effects making the drug intolerable for the patient, or even worse (grapefruit and a strong opiate can lead to dangerous overdose plasma levels of opiate). Thus doctors cannot know everything, they do not take a full dietary history with every prescription even if they did the science of pharmacology does not know all the chemicals or foods that can affect the pharmoknetics of all drugs not to mention the problems of individual biological variance as well. It is perfectly understandable why some people may choose to stop taking a medication prescribed to them where they suffer side effects which are worse than the condition it is intended to treat ("The cure is worse than the disease" to quote a phrase).
Sure, and the same page lists the other 3 in the top 5 as being a BSD derivative, along with every other system in the top 19 (bar one unknown) with MS having it's next entry at 22. Looking at a wider portion of the dataset shows that those particular two systems are more exceptions than rules, compared to other systems on alternative operating systems.
Sure, and they can't possibly track you via your mobile phone already, it's not like the mobile phone broadcasts anything to identify itself like an IMEI number or GSM code at any point during it's life (except when it has to sign on to a network or update it's registration on the network on request) seams to me that could theoretically be broken to fool the phone into identifying to the network while in fact being activated by a third party transmitter that wanted to capture that information. Sure it would not identify the individual by name or anything without access to more information, but to track the movements of a person based on those numbers would be possible surely? That is of course if anyone cared to do so.
Well of course it could have the option at this point to decide that it is in error and issue a status alert to the pilots to take manual control of the aircraft, the pilots form a backup system throughout automatic flight anyway in the case of error so there is no reason to believe that such a system could not issue a report of a fatal error to the pilots and allow them to take control of the aircraft either for the remainder of the flight if need be or until the system could reinitialize the systems in the voting scheme and clear up the fault (if clearing it up was possible by doing this) else it would have to be a manual landing at the nearest suitable airport for the aircraft like is practice for any other serious unresolvable fault with the aircraft systems, this even occurs often where a backup system is present (on the grounds an aircraft with one system failed and using backup now has a single point of failure issue and is vulnerable).