"If we were to define non-lethal as not possible to kill someone with, we couldn't even define marshmallows as non-lethal due to their choking hazard."
This is exactly why police departments, etc. don't ever refer to these things as "non-lethal" (at least not in an official manner). They're properly called "LESS-lethal."
The difference between having your name in an mp3 that you sell, and having your name in a book that you sell is that with the book, it's rather obvious that it's the original copy. Not so with the mp3. How do you know the guy you sell it to won't put it up for sharing? You'll be the one that gets sued.
I don't think your mechanic and factory examples are good ones for this situation. As someone else pointed out, messiness helping productivity only works when there's one person involved with the mess. In a factory, too many people have to collaborate in that space to allow a mess.
I do know that when I properly file something in my office at home, I can spend 10 minutes locating the folder and file drawer, whereas I seem to have an uncanny ability to know exactly which pile of paper something is in, and how far down it will be. (and even "I put it in that stack over there, but two months ago I moved that stack over here so it should be here now") I think it really comes down to how the individual thinks. I have a very good sense of space and time, so plucking a paper out of a stack is easy for me, but totally bewilders my mother, who needs have everything organized. (which caused some problems when she would come in and "organize" my room for me back in the day...)
Here's the critical bit: "...this information takes into account historic ACCIDENT and disposal records..."
Obviously most of those tiny little cars are more likely to be flattened in an accident with a big old SUV and totalled. With the H1, you simply break out a spatula and scrape the other car off of your bumper. Hence the hummer is more likely to survive for almost 400k miles.:)
"Why don't programs run as separate users with separate priviliges? There is NO reason why Word (or openoffice for that matter) should be able to access every part of the registry or harddisk that the user running it can."
I think it's just a matter of cost. As a piece of (commercial) software approaches absolute security, the cost of development approaches infinity. (maybe not quite THAT extreme, but you get the idea:) For OSS, as it approaches absoulute security, you get version 0.5, 0.9, 0.99, 0.999, etc. So what we end up with is 'good enough'.
Yes it does. If you stop buying RIAA music because you are against DRM they will blame it on pirates and make even worse DRM initiatives. Either way - we lose.
Carry that thought a few steps further: We get worse DRM, so more people get fed up and stop buying it, which they assume is more piracy, so we get even WORSE DRM, even MORE people get fed up... and eventually they go out of business because no one will touch their music.
"Bring in a leader with teeth and some money and we'll talk."
They should just talk people into sending them a percentage of the purchase price every time someone pirates something! Even Bush couldn't raise that much money...:)
I've always wondered if the best way to handle inaccurate info would be to sue the reporting company for libel... Technically, the credit agencies are only passing on information others give them.
You laugh, but that's probaby one of the more useful things to do with them. High speed chases are dangerous - for both the police and for anyone else nearby. (and the suspect, too, but it's their own damn fault if they get killed, so we won't worry about them) Having a drone follow and direct the officers on the ground at low speed, and then nabbing them when they stop is much safer than chasing them down.
If rack-mount servers all had standardized couplings, you could just buy the server, slap it in the rack, and plug the rack hoses into the server. Even better is that once you've got the heat contained in the water, just plug the rack into the centralized (and external to the server room) heat exchanger (via another standardized coupling) and start saving a bundle on a/c costs. Unfortunately I think you'd still need to worry about a bunch of small pumps everywhere, though. One big one to circulate water through the heat-exchanger which would act as a sort of water bus that the smaller rack pumps would feed off of. The racks would, in turn act as a bus for the individual server pumps.
It might start getting complicated, but you could take it one level further and also modularize the components in the server, which means you could have fanless water cooled power supplies, processors, hard drives, chipsets, etc. (which would have the water cooling hardware built in at the factory... you just need to connect it) Then you'd just need one chassis fan to take care of what little heat is left.
And add to that one other fairly simple change: First patent app this year? $100. 2nd: $200. 3rd: $400. 20th: $52,428,800. Better make sure that patent's worth it.
Yeah, you might kinda be able to get around it by creating a stub company just to hold the patent, but you'd still have to license it from them. Just have to make sure the license terms can't be discriminatory.
Don't hook the charging stations up to the grid... just give it its own tiny self-contained pebble-bed-reactor:) And they can use the excess power to run the rest of the block...
...that a good way to fight this would be for every single government IT worker to follow this law TO THE LETTER! "Sorry boss... can't do that anymore... here's why." When the lawmakers can't get their email and have their security breached because their own people didn't have the tools to do the job, maybe they'll see some sense. And, of course, if they fire you because you wouldn't do something illegal, that's probably a big settlement coming your way...
"Odd things can be related. I remember hearing about how there were fox fur breeders somewhere (like in Russia). They decided to try to breed tamer foxes so they wouldn't have to worry about getting bit so much. Well after a few generations they succeeded. There was only one problem: all the tame foxes had a big white streak down their back, ruining the pelt. They two traits were related somehow, even though you wouldn't think it."
Disclaimer: trying to remember from 9th grade bio here...:) Those trais are probably related by being close to each other in the chromosome. Those traits are likely to stick together (like blue eyes and light hair) during normal reproduction. I would think if you're genetically engineering something and modifying the genes directly, you could avoid such issues.
"People said the same thing when anaesthesia was invented. There were those who worried that people would suffer from missing out on the "transformative experience of pain." Guess what? It turns out that biting a stick while a surgeon sawed off your leg wasn't that crucial to enriching the human experience after all."
The difference is that, in general, anaesthesia is preventing the experience altogether, whereas this pill is trying to make you forget it after the fact. In most cases, if I've already gone through the trouble of having a bad experience, I might as well remember it so I can learn from it. It's not useless, though... rape and severe cases of child abuse come to mind as instances where it could help.
"I'd take advantage of equipment I had in place at critical infrastructure points to conduct MITM attacks between a PC and Windows Update servers, in order to transparently install my spookware on only those machines that specifically identify themselves..."
Why bother with a MITM attack? Wouldn't it be easier to co-opt MS? Maybe that was the REAL reason they started the whole Genuine advantage program... Now that you mention it, I'd almost be supprised if they WEREN'T doing that.
"What happens when you burn the methanol and biodiesel? Doesn't that just release the stored CO2 and Nitrogen Oxides back into the atmosphere, or am I missing something here?"
That's what an Algaelytic Converter is for! You just grow the algae in your carpool and pump your exaust through it.:)
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"If your eyes are below your nose, for example..."
:)
You forgot to mention that this configuration would really "blow" if you have bad allergies...
"If we were to define non-lethal as not possible to kill someone with, we couldn't even define marshmallows as non-lethal due to their choking hazard."
This is exactly why police departments, etc. don't ever refer to these things as "non-lethal" (at least not in an official manner). They're properly called "LESS-lethal."
The difference between having your name in an mp3 that you sell, and having your name in a book that you sell is that with the book, it's rather obvious that it's the original copy. Not so with the mp3. How do you know the guy you sell it to won't put it up for sharing? You'll be the one that gets sued.
Combining all those damn bar-coded shopping cards sounds like a golden opportunity for e-paper...
I don't think your mechanic and factory examples are good ones for this situation. As someone else pointed out, messiness helping productivity only works when there's one person involved with the mess. In a factory, too many people have to collaborate in that space to allow a mess.
I do know that when I properly file something in my office at home, I can spend 10 minutes locating the folder and file drawer, whereas I seem to have an uncanny ability to know exactly which pile of paper something is in, and how far down it will be. (and even "I put it in that stack over there, but two months ago I moved that stack over here so it should be here now") I think it really comes down to how the individual thinks. I have a very good sense of space and time, so plucking a paper out of a stack is easy for me, but totally bewilders my mother, who needs have everything organized. (which caused some problems when she would come in and "organize" my room for me back in the day...)
Here's the critical bit: "...this information takes into account historic ACCIDENT and disposal records..."
:)
Obviously most of those tiny little cars are more likely to be flattened in an accident with a big old SUV and totalled. With the H1, you simply break out a spatula and scrape the other car off of your bumper. Hence the hummer is more likely to survive for almost 400k miles.
That's one of the reasons I simply never use "rm -rf *". I always "cd .." then "rm -rf foo/*"
I think you just basically described SELinux...
Now we just need a bill to make it a felony for lawmakers to title their bills with misleading names...
I think it's just a matter of cost. As a piece of (commercial) software approaches absolute security, the cost of development approaches infinity. (maybe not quite THAT extreme, but you get the idea :) For OSS, as it approaches absoulute security, you get version 0.5, 0.9, 0.99, 0.999, etc. So what we end up with is 'good enough'.
Well, then you'd need another statistic: Enough horse dung to cover the state of Connecticut to a depth of 3 meters every year.
Carry that thought a few steps further: We get worse DRM, so more people get fed up and stop buying it, which they assume is more piracy, so we get even WORSE DRM, even MORE people get fed up... and eventually they go out of business because no one will touch their music.
...that those things are gone, or that I'm actually old enough to have heard all of them regularly.
Of course, my first two computer screens didn't whistle, either... 'cause they only had one resolution.
"Bring in a leader with teeth and some money and we'll talk."
:)
They should just talk people into sending them a percentage of the purchase price every time someone pirates something! Even Bush couldn't raise that much money...
I've always wondered if the best way to handle inaccurate info would be to sue the reporting company for libel... Technically, the credit agencies are only passing on information others give them.
You laugh, but that's probaby one of the more useful things to do with them. High speed chases are dangerous - for both the police and for anyone else nearby. (and the suspect, too, but it's their own damn fault if they get killed, so we won't worry about them) Having a drone follow and direct the officers on the ground at low speed, and then nabbing them when they stop is much safer than chasing them down.
Seriously...
If rack-mount servers all had standardized couplings, you could just buy the server, slap it in the rack, and plug the rack hoses into the server. Even better is that once you've got the heat contained in the water, just plug the rack into the centralized (and external to the server room) heat exchanger (via another standardized coupling) and start saving a bundle on a/c costs. Unfortunately I think you'd still need to worry about a bunch of small pumps everywhere, though. One big one to circulate water through the heat-exchanger which would act as a sort of water bus that the smaller rack pumps would feed off of. The racks would, in turn act as a bus for the individual server pumps.
It might start getting complicated, but you could take it one level further and also modularize the components in the server, which means you could have fanless water cooled power supplies, processors, hard drives, chipsets, etc. (which would have the water cooling hardware built in at the factory... you just need to connect it) Then you'd just need one chassis fan to take care of what little heat is left.
And add to that one other fairly simple change: First patent app this year? $100. 2nd: $200. 3rd: $400. 20th: $52,428,800. Better make sure that patent's worth it.
Yeah, you might kinda be able to get around it by creating a stub company just to hold the patent, but you'd still have to license it from them. Just have to make sure the license terms can't be discriminatory.
Don't hook the charging stations up to the grid... just give it its own tiny self-contained pebble-bed-reactor :) And they can use the excess power to run the rest of the block...
...that a good way to fight this would be for every single government IT worker to follow this law TO THE LETTER! "Sorry boss... can't do that anymore... here's why." When the lawmakers can't get their email and have their security breached because their own people didn't have the tools to do the job, maybe they'll see some sense. And, of course, if they fire you because you wouldn't do something illegal, that's probably a big settlement coming your way...
"Odd things can be related. I remember hearing about how there were fox fur breeders somewhere (like in Russia). They decided to try to breed tamer foxes so they wouldn't have to worry about getting bit so much. Well after a few generations they succeeded. There was only one problem: all the tame foxes had a big white streak down their back, ruining the pelt. They two traits were related somehow, even though you wouldn't think it."
:)
Disclaimer: trying to remember from 9th grade bio here...
Those trais are probably related by being close to each other in the chromosome. Those traits are likely to stick together (like blue eyes and light hair) during normal reproduction. I would think if you're genetically engineering something and modifying the genes directly, you could avoid such issues.
"People said the same thing when anaesthesia was invented. There were those who worried that people would suffer from missing out on the "transformative experience of pain." Guess what? It turns out that biting a stick while a surgeon sawed off your leg wasn't that crucial to enriching the human experience after all."
The difference is that, in general, anaesthesia is preventing the experience altogether, whereas this pill is trying to make you forget it after the fact. In most cases, if I've already gone through the trouble of having a bad experience, I might as well remember it so I can learn from it. It's not useless, though... rape and severe cases of child abuse come to mind as instances where it could help.
"I'd take advantage of equipment I had in place at critical infrastructure points to conduct MITM attacks between a PC and Windows Update servers, in order to transparently install my spookware on only those machines that specifically identify themselves..."
Why bother with a MITM attack? Wouldn't it be easier to co-opt MS? Maybe that was the REAL reason they started the whole Genuine advantage program... Now that you mention it, I'd almost be supprised if they WEREN'T doing that.
"What happens when you burn the methanol and biodiesel? Doesn't that just release the stored CO2 and Nitrogen Oxides back into the atmosphere, or am I missing something here?"
:)
That's what an Algaelytic Converter is for! You just grow the algae in your carpool and pump your exaust through it.