These products are patented. If you so wanted, you could look up the patents and provided the ~20 years are up start up a factory and start producing them. The trick isn't the IP, it's the fact that no one in their right mind would build an entire factory to produce a product with such a limited market.
I agree, I was puzzling for a bit trying to figure out if it were some local acronym. Seattle's Agriculture Task Force or something which would be justified in trying to catch grease dumpers. Knowing it was the federal Bureau is important.
It's not until you can recreate the process that you will know if the dove was in the sleeve or if the magician picked up the dove with the other hand while you weren't looking.
Technically you can't know if that's what the magician did. You can only rule out what he could not have done.
I'm not so sure I'm comfortable with a precision modernization program for a nuclear arsenal. For better or worse, our MAD deterrent seems to have worked. No country has used nuclear weapons since WWII. They are doomsday weapons and any use of them would escalate a conflict well into a total-warfare situation regardless of their precision. A nuclear weapon applied even on the most restricted and limited of targets is the most destabilizing thing you can probably do. Worse yet, it encourages other countries to consider 'usable' nuclear weapons of their own. As much as I hate our current situation I would hope we would work towards disarmament rather than finding more palatable means to deploy nuclear weapons.
As someone who is not a citizen of the USA I have to ask, what do Americans think is the answer?
Honestly? End the drug war on all drugs and repurpose that money into non-discriminatory mental health services. Currently our civilians are being consumed in a proxy war between the police and the cartels.
After that? I'd start with a massive effort to reform our police forces. Currently there is a massive divide (real or perceived) between our police and the people. We have given a great deal of discretion to police officers but the oversight that should accompany that discretion is practically non-existent. Until we can get our urban areas behaving more like communities rather than a bunch of people living in close proximity I don't see us making any headway. Eliminate the profit motives from our governments who use the police forces as a tax collection service and revenue generation tool (fines, asset forfeiture, etc create perverse incentives)
So in short: End the drug war, reform our police force into a community force.
You forgot the most important part: Putting a battery into a gun. The magnetic one might get around this, but the RFID and Fingerprint options would have you relying on a small battery. Even if you don't need to shoot, how many of you have opened up a battery case to discover that one has corroded and damaged your device? How great would that be to discover that your firearm now has a corrosive item included in it?
I know, right? If I am spending a whole $5 on a computer, it shouldn't have any limitations.
That's what I'm trying to figure out here. What exactly were they expecting. This is like buying a scooter and complaining that it fits fewer people than a bus.
The main difference in the business models is that Taxi companies have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a taxi license/plate/medallion, the supply of which has been artificially restricted by government regulation. This forces costs up for them and prices up for customers. There is no such regulation on Uber and so they are competing on unequal terms.
The supply of the taxi medallions has been restricted by regulation... regulations specifically lobbied for by the taxi companies. This is their own mess that they created, and a disrupting technology is ruining the business model they turned into law.
They are building a large apt building near Conshohocken. The thing must be 5 stories tall but the whole damned thing went up with wood framing (at least it looked like it from I-76). I'd imagine that there are quite a few buildings like that which would have model like collapses if subjected to typical movie building trauma.
Exactly. Number 1 rule for any science fiction or fantasy story: Stick to the rules for your universe. Anyone can accept that magic works a certain way, what they can't accept is when your characters or your story forgets to behave within your rules.
A backdoor might be hard to hide, but a backdoor enabling flaw might not be. Just as with any problem, you don't always have to solve it in one go, you take "bite sized" pieces and solve them.
So you don't enable a backdoor, you just introduce a flaw which makes it easier to exploit another flaw downstream.
The way human institutions are currently structured, the species is DE-volving. There's little hope that homo sapiens is going to become healthier, heartier or more intelligent through evolution. All of the evolutionary pressures have been removed by society and technology. Without drastic changes, we are an evolutionary dead end.
As long as humans are reproducing, humans are evolving. Even if it is evolving humans most adapted to pushing a button labeled "produce child" and having a robot nanny care for the child its entire life.
Pressures are not removed, they may change, but they are never removed until the last of a species dies.
Terrorist: "Hi, Bob's business freight courier service? I've got a lead on some test petroleum product I need shipped from the seller's address in Indiana to my office here in Fort Worth, TX. It's all packaged up and ready to ship. Just arrive at the loading dock and use the dock phone to call my number and I'll be down to accept delivery."
Petroleum product meaning standard fertilizer/petroleum mixture so favored for explosives. Office being the target building. And the number he calls from the dock phone will be a call to the trigger.
The point of this is to say that there are so many ways that this can be accomplished today, that it is kind of silly to worry about AVs when the potential exists in a billion different ways today. The key is to catch them before they are ready to call Bob's Courier Service. Once it reaches that level of maturity, from a counterterror perspective, you've failed.
A-10: Solider: "You see that that little hut next to the big tree two klicks from our smoke?" Target disappears in a cloud of smoke, debris, and body parts. A-10 Pilot: "You mean that one?"
Soldier: "Yes. We saw a family take refuge there after telling us about the guys on the ridge."
The lack of flexing on the display when I opened it was a big factor for me. Some of the laptops out there made me feel like I was going to put a crack in the display.
Ok, so I use a MacBook Pro for my laptop, but Thunderbolt peripherals are sorely lacking last I checked. Anything out there was expensive, or very niche. I'd much rather have 2+ USB ports on one side of my mac than my unused Thunderbolt ports.
The specs are great, but I can't use anything with it.
The only thing the MacBook has is 256GB of SSD storage, to the XPS 13's 128GB...i5, i3, to a notebook, they are mostly the same thing...
So the only thing is the storage... and the processor....
the mbp has more ports (hdmi & 2x thunderbolt/mini display port), a more than 50% larger battery, slightly lower screen resolution, but a faster gpu to go with it
the ports... the battery... the GPU...
Don't get me wrong, Macs do have a price premium, but it's not nearly as drastic as you are portraying. I hated macs, until windows 8 came around, and handling/using the machines on display at my local microcenter just sold me on the build quality of the Macs. So I bought a mac, setup a dualboot of windows 8 (I wish I could have done otherwise) and it's the best windows laptop I've ever owned. Check my post history prior to 2013 I was an absolute anti-mac standard PC fanboy. It's just that now that I focused a bit more on the quality of the hardware over individual specs the Mac turned out to be a good choice (Not the best for all) but for me .
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These products are patented. If you so wanted, you could look up the patents and provided the ~20 years are up start up a factory and start producing them. The trick isn't the IP, it's the fact that no one in their right mind would build an entire factory to produce a product with such a limited market.
It's not an IP issue, it's a tooling issue.
A recessed bulb in the ceiling can cover a wide area of a room with direct LOS. It doesn't necessarily have to be a desk lamp as the light source.
Space opera = future fantasy. Space magic.
There is no reason someone can't enjoy futuristic fantasy stories.
aka space cowboys
See you space cowboy.
(If being a simpleton gets me more space cowboy, I'm all for it)
I agree, I was puzzling for a bit trying to figure out if it were some local acronym. Seattle's Agriculture Task Force or something which would be justified in trying to catch grease dumpers. Knowing it was the federal Bureau is important.
It's not until you can recreate the process that you will know if the dove was in the sleeve or if the magician picked up the dove with the other hand while you weren't looking.
Technically you can't know if that's what the magician did. You can only rule out what he could not have done.
I'm not so sure I'm comfortable with a precision modernization program for a nuclear arsenal. For better or worse, our MAD deterrent seems to have worked. No country has used nuclear weapons since WWII. They are doomsday weapons and any use of them would escalate a conflict well into a total-warfare situation regardless of their precision. A nuclear weapon applied even on the most restricted and limited of targets is the most destabilizing thing you can probably do. Worse yet, it encourages other countries to consider 'usable' nuclear weapons of their own. As much as I hate our current situation I would hope we would work towards disarmament rather than finding more palatable means to deploy nuclear weapons.
As someone who is not a citizen of the USA I have to ask, what do Americans think is the answer?
Honestly? End the drug war on all drugs and repurpose that money into non-discriminatory mental health services. Currently our civilians are being consumed in a proxy war between the police and the cartels.
After that? I'd start with a massive effort to reform our police forces. Currently there is a massive divide (real or perceived) between our police and the people. We have given a great deal of discretion to police officers but the oversight that should accompany that discretion is practically non-existent. Until we can get our urban areas behaving more like communities rather than a bunch of people living in close proximity I don't see us making any headway. Eliminate the profit motives from our governments who use the police forces as a tax collection service and revenue generation tool (fines, asset forfeiture, etc create perverse incentives)
So in short: End the drug war, reform our police force into a community force.
You forgot the most important part: Putting a battery into a gun. The magnetic one might get around this, but the RFID and Fingerprint options would have you relying on a small battery. Even if you don't need to shoot, how many of you have opened up a battery case to discover that one has corroded and damaged your device? How great would that be to discover that your firearm now has a corrosive item included in it?
If that private plane or jet is on final near my house and that low it's already going to be crashing in my fields.
I know, right? If I am spending a whole $5 on a computer, it shouldn't have any limitations.
That's what I'm trying to figure out here. What exactly were they expecting. This is like buying a scooter and complaining that it fits fewer people than a bus.
I don't know, how much excess radiation was absorbed by those bodies?
The main difference in the business models is that Taxi companies have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a taxi license/plate/medallion, the supply of which has been artificially restricted by government regulation. This forces costs up for them and prices up for customers. There is no such regulation on Uber and so they are competing on unequal terms.
The supply of the taxi medallions has been restricted by regulation... regulations specifically lobbied for by the taxi companies. This is their own mess that they created, and a disrupting technology is ruining the business model they turned into law.
With regard to calling Uber parasitic rent seekers... Isn't that exactly what this medallion system created? A bunch of rent seeking?
They are building a large apt building near Conshohocken. The thing must be 5 stories tall but the whole damned thing went up with wood framing (at least it looked like it from I-76). I'd imagine that there are quite a few buildings like that which would have model like collapses if subjected to typical movie building trauma.
Exactly. Number 1 rule for any science fiction or fantasy story: Stick to the rules for your universe. Anyone can accept that magic works a certain way, what they can't accept is when your characters or your story forgets to behave within your rules.
I like to think of the wands as a bit like a resonant megaphone. The magic comes from the wizard, and the wands just amplify and focus what comes out.
Swish and flick the wrong way and you screw up the frequency with a magical Doppler effect.
True, but it puts the scale of the SLOC into perspective. I doubt IOS is significantly smaller than the Linux kernel.
A backdoor might be hard to hide, but a backdoor enabling flaw might not be. Just as with any problem, you don't always have to solve it in one go, you take "bite sized" pieces and solve them.
So you don't enable a backdoor, you just introduce a flaw which makes it easier to exploit another flaw downstream.
The way human institutions are currently structured, the species is DE-volving. There's little hope that homo sapiens is going to become healthier, heartier or more intelligent through evolution. All of the evolutionary pressures have been removed by society and technology. Without drastic changes, we are an evolutionary dead end.
As long as humans are reproducing, humans are evolving. Even if it is evolving humans most adapted to pushing a button labeled "produce child" and having a robot nanny care for the child its entire life.
Pressures are not removed, they may change, but they are never removed until the last of a species dies.
Terrorist: "Hi, Bob's business freight courier service? I've got a lead on some test petroleum product I need shipped from the seller's address in Indiana to my office here in Fort Worth, TX. It's all packaged up and ready to ship. Just arrive at the loading dock and use the dock phone to call my number and I'll be down to accept delivery."
Petroleum product meaning standard fertilizer/petroleum mixture so favored for explosives. Office being the target building. And the number he calls from the dock phone will be a call to the trigger.
The point of this is to say that there are so many ways that this can be accomplished today, that it is kind of silly to worry about AVs when the potential exists in a billion different ways today. The key is to catch them before they are ready to call Bob's Courier Service. Once it reaches that level of maturity, from a counterterror perspective, you've failed.
A-10:
Solider: "You see that that little hut next to the big tree two klicks from our smoke?"
Target disappears in a cloud of smoke, debris, and body parts.
A-10 Pilot: "You mean that one?"
Soldier: "Yes. We saw a family take refuge there after telling us about the guys on the ridge."
The lack of flexing on the display when I opened it was a big factor for me. Some of the laptops out there made me feel like I was going to put a crack in the display.
Ok, so I use a MacBook Pro for my laptop, but Thunderbolt peripherals are sorely lacking last I checked. Anything out there was expensive, or very niche. I'd much rather have 2+ USB ports on one side of my mac than my unused Thunderbolt ports.
The specs are great, but I can't use anything with it.
The only thing the MacBook has is 256GB of SSD storage, to the XPS 13's 128GB...i5, i3, to a notebook, they are mostly the same thing...
So the only thing is the storage... and the processor....
the mbp has more ports (hdmi & 2x thunderbolt/mini display port), a more than 50% larger battery, slightly lower screen resolution, but a faster gpu to go with it
the ports... the battery... the GPU...
Don't get me wrong, Macs do have a price premium, but it's not nearly as drastic as you are portraying. I hated macs, until windows 8 came around, and handling/using the machines on display at my local microcenter just sold me on the build quality of the Macs. So I bought a mac, setup a dualboot of windows 8 (I wish I could have done otherwise) and it's the best windows laptop I've ever owned. Check my post history prior to 2013 I was an absolute anti-mac standard PC fanboy. It's just that now that I focused a bit more on the quality of the hardware over individual specs the Mac turned out to be a good choice (Not the best for all) but for me .