Remember that most of Newtonian physics is a description of what motion is observable on the scale of visibility to the human eye.
The first law is basically just stating that at a human scale, if velocity changes, something caused it. Nothing will spontaneously change velocity without something acting upon it to effect that change in velocity.
And when the option to keep your private stuff private is removed without your knowledge? What then?
It leads me to a similar problem I have with the current approach to privacy. That whole concept of 'no expectation of privacy' is only relevant to the concept that you cannot make something private again once it has been made public, not that everything about you is public unless it is kept in a closet in your house with no windows and lead walls.
If I were Mozilla, I certainly would. Whenever I hear of Firefox now, I'm going to associate the name with Malware and probably just use something else. Sure after thinking about it for a bit, I'll remember this story, but that first impression matters a lot when branding is concerned.
As someone who loves pinball games, but never became a fanatic, here is a big problem that I had with pinball.
The points. I never knew what the hell was going on with the points. Weird multipliers, huge numbers that I think can be called 'bajillions', and not really knowing if I would get 1 or 5 balls out of a quarter. (Why did that peg on the side disappear?)
I realize that a lot of people like the 'discovery' aspect of the games, but damned if that wasn't weird for someone new to the games. As it was, I never really felt like I should try for a higher score, since my scores always seemed to vary by 10 orders of magnitude between similar plays.
That was a big problem for me. As a tween/teenager I didn't really have that much cash to dump in games that had become designed for hardened arcade players.
The second thing that killed arcades for me were the actual people who inhabited them and loved to kick a kid off a machine or join in a challenge against them. Not being able to be a 'regular' a lot of the fun was killed for me.
Ironically, I love pinball machines because I didn't have to deal with other jerks at the arcade, and they tended to be less expensive. (also, they were just fun).
But I never dared risk $1 per play when I only had $5-10 to spend.
It is an added complication into a system which already has solutions. This isn't car seatbelts. Car seatbelts actually IMPROVE your ability to drive a car in difficult situations by keeping the driver in front of the wheel during moments of high acceleration. Everything about seatbelts either improves your capability to drive a vehicle, or is neutral with respect to your ability to drive a vehicle.
Did you read my post? It wasn't theoretical, it was a literal example where a slightly burned finger caused a fingerprint scanner to fail to recognize my fingerprint and therefore refused me access to the lab.
Situations where you would be firing a gun are almost always 'less than ideal'. So when a simple 1st degree burn results in false-negatives for modern scanning technology, there is no way in hell that this would work for firearms.
I'd be pretty freaking surprised if this group designed a fingerprint scanner that not only worked in less than ideal situations, but had sufficiently small false-negative ID rate. If they did, this wouldn't just be a 'gun' thing, this would be a revolutionize the entire biometric industry thing.
P.S. I *do* check out all my car's systems before any trip out-of-town.
I tend to slack with regard to this. What I usually do is give my car a once-over whenever I stop for gas. (pop the hood, check the oil, radiator levels, etc) and take a look at the tires.
Not all that I SHOULD be doing, but I'm trying to build in the habit little by little.
They are in deep space, so they have an infinite sink at nearly zero deg kelvin.
What exactly could it 'sink' that heat into? While we consider space to be 'cold' the reality is that it is less 'cold' and more 'generally won't make things warm.'
The vacuum is both a benefit and a problem. When you want to keep things a certain temperature, the vacuum is great as you don't have to sorry about convection/conduction altering the temperature. But when you want to cool things off, that vacuum is a problem because you can't use convection/conduction to remove that heat from your system. You can certainly move the heat from one part of your system to another part of your system, but it takes a long time to take that heat OUT of your system.
You would have to move the heat to a massive radiator and wait a long time for it to cool due to radiation. Whatever you are using to move that heat will have to work the entire time, (and may have to be cooled as well!). Even then, the temperatures involved mean that such a process would take a very long time to get as low as they needed to conduct the experiments.
Don't think of space as cold, think of space as very effective insulation.
What was the market penetration of Buckyballs? Did they achieve saturation levels of firearms in the US?
Another problem with Buckyballs (and I have a bunch on my desk as I type) is that when you drop them, they scatter and cling. It would be very easy for them to 'contaminate' an area. I expect that after I leave for my next assignment, the person who inherits my desk will be finding little magnets on the lamp, edges of drawers, etc. In my office, that's not an issue (I hope), but at my home, I actually did become rather worried that I might lose a couple of the magnets and my children could find them (Kids find EVERYTHING).
With a firearm, I'm not worried about them getting lost under the stove, or stuck to the lamp. I don't run the risk of losing one while I'm handling them.
So I can see that buckyballs could actually become quite a serious problem if left in the market for a long time. I honestly could see it being an issue like lead paint in homes. Obviously a bit easier to cleanup, but quite easily a contaminant.
Your statement is true, but if firearms become more 'safe' this credo will fade with time, even if they still remain rather dangerous.
Consider what you SHOULD do every time you drive your car. Do you check your headlights? Verify that your brake lights work, verify your fluid levels, check your actual brakes (every time?), check your tires for wear and inflation levels.
These are all things which do contribute to a non-negligible quantity of injuries and deaths, yet because they have become safe-enough, most people don't think to perform these checks. There is a very real risk that a well-intentioned fix could result in increased dangerous practices.
(That said, it's not the safety devices on cars themselves which add to the danger, but people becoming complacent that the safety device removes the need to be responsible)
I cannot imagine what a nightmare it will be to manage weapons access thru fingerprints into a large military unit.
Slashdot has hit a new low, you did not even bother reading the summary
That's kind of his point. Every time I get my CAC reissued, there is a 'ghost' me floating around where some people fat-fingered in my details. Needless to say, it's usually a multi-day process of calls between helpdesks getting bounced back and forth just to get my damned email account working correctly.
It's hard for the military to PHYSICALLY account for firearms right now. Tack on an electronic registry that links individuals (or groups) and physical items and you are going to get a hell of a lot of mixups and confusions until you reach the point where they get so fed up with the 'safeguards' that the safeguards are manually disabled.
Think that won't happen? Ever see a door with the lock taped, or a brick in the entry way? That's someone getting fed up with having to keep opening the door and disabling the control system. It happens all the time when the access control system gets in the way with someone doing their job. To slightly misapply a quote: "Life finds a way"
A facility where I worked required fingerprint authorization as part of a lab entry requirement. That morning I burned my fingers while cooking my breakfast. I thought nothing of it until about 5 hours later when I needed to go into the lab. No entry. It just wouldn't recognize my print even through a barely first degree burn. (Just the pads of my fingertips were burned, and not deep enough for blisters).
I had completely forgotten that my fingers were burned by the time I went to use the scanner. In my case, it meant an extra 10 minutes to get security to walk me in. I'd hate for it to happen in a time critical situation.
Even though you are really pushing an agenda with that wording, this tech is dangerous at a firing range as well.
1. You will have people who get complacent about safety. They will leave loaded firearms on the bench with the expectation that it won't fire without 'authorization'.
2. In the event of a misfire (the best way to describe a trigger pull without a discharge), you will have a moment of confusion, and the person is likely to try and diagnose the error. This may be adjusting their grip, pushing a button, tapping it, etc. However all of these actions will be occuring on a firearm that has a live round in the chamber. Anything that takes the persons attention away from keeping a loaded firearm pointed in a safe direction is dangerous.
The 'scary' factor for birds is quite offset by how delicate they are.
In fact, I can't say I know of a single bird that really looks scary. Sure, bigger I've seen, but not scary.
Millions of years of primate evolution next to 'soft fuzzy thing that squeeks and explodes into a puff of feathers when hit with rock' seems to have bred out any 'fear' response for birds in me.
I'd be willing to bet that at least 1000 people would consider the naming company to have more authority than you. If for no other reason than the fact that they paid money to that company.
However, given that there would be 1000 of them, to one of you, I don't think that you can actually claim to have more authority.
It's not blocking them without trying them. It's more that everything was actually fine, and then these companies decided they weren't extracting enough revenue from every possible moment and force themselves in as middlemen/toll collectors.
I consider the actions of these companies to be like going to a public park. You lay out your picnic blanket, sit down to enjoy the day, and these companies come in with 30 people and stand shoulder to shoulder around the place where you sat down. You ask them to move, and they say 'Sure, give us $5 and we will stop obstructing your view for 1 hour.' There isn't anything illegal about what they are doing, but it sure as hell is taking an enjoyable experience, smashing it into pieces, and offering to sell you back most of the pieces for a fee.
No problem for OSX and Windows, the Intenet enabled HDTV, the Dennon home theater receiver, the Roku set top box. The Xbox, Playstation or the Wii.
It is a problem for OSX and Windows in at least one case:
Amazon VoD will NOT let you view rented movies in HD on your PC. You must use a 'box' device like the Roku/Xbox/PS3 if you want to view in HD.
I ran into this when I rented a movie on my Roku, and decided I preferred to watch it on my bigscreen that I run off my PC. When I logged into Amazon to restart the film, I was blocked from watching it in HD. To watch it in HD I had to disconnect my Roku box and hook it up to the aux HDMI input on my bigscreen instead of the PC which drove my home theater.
That was a big issue for me because my PC is the gateway for the audio to my receiver. My television 'tells' devices connected to it that it only has 2 speakers, so the devices 'helpfully' only send out the 2 channel sound instead of the raw 5.1 (even when the media source supports it). Therefore I actually have to analog bypass the HDMI audio through my PC if I actually want to hear 5.1 audio.
Yeah it's complicated, and the only reason it's complicated is because I have to setup a Rube Goldberg system just to properly output the video/audio that I PAID FOR. All those complications are a byproduct of the DRM systems trying to control the datapath and intentionally failing because like most people I didn't build my entertainment system in one lump sum purchase with information from the future. I built it by purchasing a good receiver, upgrading old speakers, replacing an old television, integrating a PC, replacing an old DVD player with an Oppo upscaling player, introducing a game system, adding in an IRtoRF converter... etc. Basically the way that you HAVE to upgrade your system because 99% of people can't afford to buy the system they want all at once or repurchasing every component every time you want to upgrade one component.
Even upgrading my receiver won't likely help much, since my television is working fine, and I don't want to drop $1k just to get the damned 5.1 audio pass through to work when I connnect devices.
Slashdot Mirror
You are overthinking it.
Remember that most of Newtonian physics is a description of what motion is observable on the scale of visibility to the human eye.
The first law is basically just stating that at a human scale, if velocity changes, something caused it. Nothing will spontaneously change velocity without something acting upon it to effect that change in velocity.
And when the option to keep your private stuff private is removed without your knowledge? What then?
It leads me to a similar problem I have with the current approach to privacy. That whole concept of 'no expectation of privacy' is only relevant to the concept that you cannot make something private again once it has been made public, not that everything about you is public unless it is kept in a closet in your house with no windows and lead walls.
If I were Mozilla, I certainly would. Whenever I hear of Firefox now, I'm going to associate the name with Malware and probably just use something else. Sure after thinking about it for a bit, I'll remember this story, but that first impression matters a lot when branding is concerned.
Damage to their brand has certainly occured.
As someone who loves pinball games, but never became a fanatic, here is a big problem that I had with pinball.
The points. I never knew what the hell was going on with the points. Weird multipliers, huge numbers that I think can be called 'bajillions', and not really knowing if I would get 1 or 5 balls out of a quarter. (Why did that peg on the side disappear?)
I realize that a lot of people like the 'discovery' aspect of the games, but damned if that wasn't weird for someone new to the games. As it was, I never really felt like I should try for a higher score, since my scores always seemed to vary by 10 orders of magnitude between similar plays.
That was a big problem for me. As a tween/teenager I didn't really have that much cash to dump in games that had become designed for hardened arcade players.
The second thing that killed arcades for me were the actual people who inhabited them and loved to kick a kid off a machine or join in a challenge against them. Not being able to be a 'regular' a lot of the fun was killed for me.
Ironically, I love pinball machines because I didn't have to deal with other jerks at the arcade, and they tended to be less expensive. (also, they were just fun).
But I never dared risk $1 per play when I only had $5-10 to spend.
Was the bard Seth Able?
Its grasping at straws.
It is an added complication into a system which already has solutions. This isn't car seatbelts. Car seatbelts actually IMPROVE your ability to drive a car in difficult situations by keeping the driver in front of the wheel during moments of high acceleration. Everything about seatbelts either improves your capability to drive a vehicle, or is neutral with respect to your ability to drive a vehicle.
Did you read my post? It wasn't theoretical, it was a literal example where a slightly burned finger caused a fingerprint scanner to fail to recognize my fingerprint and therefore refused me access to the lab.
Situations where you would be firing a gun are almost always 'less than ideal'. So when a simple 1st degree burn results in false-negatives for modern scanning technology, there is no way in hell that this would work for firearms.
I'd be pretty freaking surprised if this group designed a fingerprint scanner that not only worked in less than ideal situations, but had sufficiently small false-negative ID rate. If they did, this wouldn't just be a 'gun' thing, this would be a revolutionize the entire biometric industry thing.
P.S. I *do* check out all my car's systems before any trip out-of-town.
I tend to slack with regard to this. What I usually do is give my car a once-over whenever I stop for gas. (pop the hood, check the oil, radiator levels, etc) and take a look at the tires.
Not all that I SHOULD be doing, but I'm trying to build in the habit little by little.
one case a rather grumpy bear
When he discovered the destroyed hive, did he respond, "Oh pooh."?
Let me introduce you to the price tag. Those things look to be about $1700-$2300!
It's easy being 'green' when you have a lot of green.
They are in deep space, so they have an infinite sink at nearly zero deg kelvin.
What exactly could it 'sink' that heat into? While we consider space to be 'cold' the reality is that it is less 'cold' and more 'generally won't make things warm.'
The vacuum is both a benefit and a problem. When you want to keep things a certain temperature, the vacuum is great as you don't have to sorry about convection/conduction altering the temperature. But when you want to cool things off, that vacuum is a problem because you can't use convection/conduction to remove that heat from your system. You can certainly move the heat from one part of your system to another part of your system, but it takes a long time to take that heat OUT of your system.
You would have to move the heat to a massive radiator and wait a long time for it to cool due to radiation. Whatever you are using to move that heat will have to work the entire time, (and may have to be cooled as well!). Even then, the temperatures involved mean that such a process would take a very long time to get as low as they needed to conduct the experiments.
Don't think of space as cold, think of space as very effective insulation.
What was the market penetration of Buckyballs? Did they achieve saturation levels of firearms in the US?
Another problem with Buckyballs (and I have a bunch on my desk as I type) is that when you drop them, they scatter and cling. It would be very easy for them to 'contaminate' an area. I expect that after I leave for my next assignment, the person who inherits my desk will be finding little magnets on the lamp, edges of drawers, etc. In my office, that's not an issue (I hope), but at my home, I actually did become rather worried that I might lose a couple of the magnets and my children could find them (Kids find EVERYTHING).
With a firearm, I'm not worried about them getting lost under the stove, or stuck to the lamp. I don't run the risk of losing one while I'm handling them.
So I can see that buckyballs could actually become quite a serious problem if left in the market for a long time. I honestly could see it being an issue like lead paint in homes. Obviously a bit easier to cleanup, but quite easily a contaminant.
Your statement is true, but if firearms become more 'safe' this credo will fade with time, even if they still remain rather dangerous.
Consider what you SHOULD do every time you drive your car. Do you check your headlights? Verify that your brake lights work, verify your fluid levels, check your actual brakes (every time?), check your tires for wear and inflation levels.
These are all things which do contribute to a non-negligible quantity of injuries and deaths, yet because they have become safe-enough, most people don't think to perform these checks. There is a very real risk that a well-intentioned fix could result in increased dangerous practices.
(That said, it's not the safety devices on cars themselves which add to the danger, but people becoming complacent that the safety device removes the need to be responsible)
That's kind of his point. Every time I get my CAC reissued, there is a 'ghost' me floating around where some people fat-fingered in my details. Needless to say, it's usually a multi-day process of calls between helpdesks getting bounced back and forth just to get my damned email account working correctly.
It's hard for the military to PHYSICALLY account for firearms right now. Tack on an electronic registry that links individuals (or groups) and physical items and you are going to get a hell of a lot of mixups and confusions until you reach the point where they get so fed up with the 'safeguards' that the safeguards are manually disabled.
Think that won't happen? Ever see a door with the lock taped, or a brick in the entry way? That's someone getting fed up with having to keep opening the door and disabling the control system. It happens all the time when the access control system gets in the way with someone doing their job. To slightly misapply a quote: "Life finds a way"
Forget combat situations.
A facility where I worked required fingerprint authorization as part of a lab entry requirement. That morning I burned my fingers while cooking my breakfast. I thought nothing of it until about 5 hours later when I needed to go into the lab. No entry. It just wouldn't recognize my print even through a barely first degree burn. (Just the pads of my fingertips were burned, and not deep enough for blisters).
I had completely forgotten that my fingers were burned by the time I went to use the scanner. In my case, it meant an extra 10 minutes to get security to walk me in. I'd hate for it to happen in a time critical situation.
Even though you are really pushing an agenda with that wording, this tech is dangerous at a firing range as well.
1. You will have people who get complacent about safety. They will leave loaded firearms on the bench with the expectation that it won't fire without 'authorization'.
2. In the event of a misfire (the best way to describe a trigger pull without a discharge), you will have a moment of confusion, and the person is likely to try and diagnose the error. This may be adjusting their grip, pushing a button, tapping it, etc. However all of these actions will be occuring on a firearm that has a live round in the chamber. Anything that takes the persons attention away from keeping a loaded firearm pointed in a safe direction is dangerous.
I'll have to post an image I made when tineye.com was launched.
The error message it generated was something along the lines:
"We are sorry, TinEye did not return any results for 'tineye.jpg'
I'd have gone with the Samsung Galaxy.
The 'scary' factor for birds is quite offset by how delicate they are.
In fact, I can't say I know of a single bird that really looks scary. Sure, bigger I've seen, but not scary.
Millions of years of primate evolution next to 'soft fuzzy thing that squeeks and explodes into a puff of feathers when hit with rock' seems to have bred out any 'fear' response for birds in me.
I'd be willing to bet that at least 1000 people would consider the naming company to have more authority than you. If for no other reason than the fact that they paid money to that company.
However, given that there would be 1000 of them, to one of you, I don't think that you can actually claim to have more authority.
The downside:
The plant is poison ivy. (no clue, but that would be the typical luck)
It's not blocking them without trying them. It's more that everything was actually fine, and then these companies decided they weren't extracting enough revenue from every possible moment and force themselves in as middlemen/toll collectors.
I consider the actions of these companies to be like going to a public park. You lay out your picnic blanket, sit down to enjoy the day, and these companies come in with 30 people and stand shoulder to shoulder around the place where you sat down. You ask them to move, and they say 'Sure, give us $5 and we will stop obstructing your view for 1 hour.' There isn't anything illegal about what they are doing, but it sure as hell is taking an enjoyable experience, smashing it into pieces, and offering to sell you back most of the pieces for a fee.
When was the last time I bought a bluray disc?
They were very successful. So was King Pyrrhis.
No problem for OSX and Windows, the Intenet enabled HDTV, the Dennon home theater receiver, the Roku set top box. The Xbox, Playstation or the Wii.
It is a problem for OSX and Windows in at least one case:
Amazon VoD will NOT let you view rented movies in HD on your PC. You must use a 'box' device like the Roku/Xbox/PS3 if you want to view in HD.
I ran into this when I rented a movie on my Roku, and decided I preferred to watch it on my bigscreen that I run off my PC. When I logged into Amazon to restart the film, I was blocked from watching it in HD. To watch it in HD I had to disconnect my Roku box and hook it up to the aux HDMI input on my bigscreen instead of the PC which drove my home theater.
That was a big issue for me because my PC is the gateway for the audio to my receiver. My television 'tells' devices connected to it that it only has 2 speakers, so the devices 'helpfully' only send out the 2 channel sound instead of the raw 5.1 (even when the media source supports it). Therefore I actually have to analog bypass the HDMI audio through my PC if I actually want to hear 5.1 audio.
Yeah it's complicated, and the only reason it's complicated is because I have to setup a Rube Goldberg system just to properly output the video/audio that I PAID FOR. All those complications are a byproduct of the DRM systems trying to control the datapath and intentionally failing because like most people I didn't build my entertainment system in one lump sum purchase with information from the future. I built it by purchasing a good receiver, upgrading old speakers, replacing an old television, integrating a PC, replacing an old DVD player with an Oppo upscaling player, introducing a game system, adding in an IRtoRF converter... etc. Basically the way that you HAVE to upgrade your system because 99% of people can't afford to buy the system they want all at once or repurchasing every component every time you want to upgrade one component.
Even upgrading my receiver won't likely help much, since my television is working fine, and I don't want to drop $1k just to get the damned 5.1 audio pass through to work when I connnect devices.