The whole thing where innocents get the death penalty because of mistakes, is why you keep them in jail until you're absolutely sure they -did- do it. And in most cases, you can't be absolutely sure they did it, so... you keep them there for life, instead of killing them. If they're escaping from jail too often, you've got another problem anyway. And the populace won't notice the difference between a death and a life imprisonment, other than having to pay slightly less tax because apparently life imprisonment is cheaper. And you have the benefit of not killing the innocent.
I'd say there's quite a few reasons to reserve executions for very few cases, or ban it outright. That said, I'm biased, I'm European. We're all progressive and shit.
The economy seems to always adjust to whether people can afford stuff though. Otherwise nobody would sell anything. If people can afford another $30000 in emergencies because they have some organs to sell, the cost of the stuff an average person buys in their life would just go up by a total of $30000. In that way, being able to sell organs while alive would become just another insurance scheme: spend a bit extra over time, so you can afford something big when you really need it.
Personally, the thought of having to actually use that insurance freaks me out. We'd be better off just getting a mandatory regular insurance of said $30k or whatever those organs are worth.
Think of debts due to hospital bills of a loved one, or having to choose between having two kidneys and letting your kid go to college. If many people started selling "redundant" organs, even for the best of reasons, then standards could shift so that others might do it for not-so-great reasons.. and we get a drop in the average health of poor people, for the advantage of those that are better off.
Hell, imagine having cancer and knowing it hasn't spread to some of your valuable, sellable organs yet... and you can't afford hospital bills the normal way. Most people would do it.
I know I'm invoking the slippery slope argument here, but I think it might be justified.
The butchering argument is one I hadn't thought of yet... And I'd say it's pretty much on equal footing with the "forced to sell kidney to pay debts" scenario. Good one.
An analogy I found earlier today was that those countries are a bit like babies. Making noise, occasionally hurting others or themselves by accident.. But if a baby drools/pees/vomits all over your sweater, you do not obliterate it. You teach it, or just trust that it's causing almost no damage. The well-established, loosely-allied countries in the world are the adults in this simile, who should be teaching the less well-off countries.
If we just showed the residents of those places how things could be, and gave them an anonymous, secure channel to voice their opinions through, that would give us plenty of information to know what to do next. Instead, the US gathered up some cronies (sadly, the country I live in was one of them) and pretty much just crushed any problem countries.
Thanks for the link. I care not for Apple, but seeing that Cycles will get proper OpenCL support was almost enough to make me squee. Almost. Good to know, anyway:)
Probably, though I wouldn't know. I hadn't looked into mining until Bitcoins got so difficult to mine that graphics cards were completely irrelevant already. It's all ASICs now, and if you try to buy one you won't get it until it's become worthless. Expect to be scammed. That's mostly why Scrypt was made, afaik: to put power back in the users' hands, by making it difficult to mine by graphics card (failed) and by ASIC (hasn't failed yet; might later)
Apparently, Radeons have an instruction that's really important for Scrypt mining, which nVidia cards lack. That's why Radeons of the same price generally reach perhaps 10 times as many hashes per second.
I was going to post a similar comment to harrkev's, except I had to log in first to be able to actually post it. So I'll just add to that.
The printer used by Defense Distributed, as far as I know, is an FDM printer, much like the RepRaps. This would mean that I could easily print a plastic gun that's just as good as the ones made by DD. Making such a printer is easy to the point that anyone can make one from scratch with some technical knowledge and programming skills, now that we've seen them and know how they work. There is absolutely no way anyone could prevent a dedicated individual from 3D printing one of these guns.
I'm speaking from experience here, I've got a homemade Mendel90 and I've looked into the related software and firmware.
Can you imagine the fucked-up settings after a nice night with the boyfriend/girlfriend? Twenty apps open, desktop rearranged into total chaos, and you're about to send a mail containing "afaguhiho;agehgisuaffgasf butts" to the CEO of Microsoft.
To add to Errol's reply.. Basically, our minister of security and justice, Ivo Opstelten, loves to act like a rabid fanboy of the book 1984, and of the things the UK and USA are already doing. We're just lagging behind a year or two on the field of "massive disregard for citizens' rights".
The protocol this site uses, thought up apparently two decades ago, would prevent people from falsely claiming to have killed the target. Read up on it. It's scarily effective.
From a quick glance at the text and photos, I'd say this looks about as comfortable as my current life... and the surveillance there is only marginally worse than it is atm, thanks to the NSA:P
If your hardware is compromised, you've got a problem anyway. And it's more likely for commonly used computer systems to be compromised, like desktop PCs and laptops, than something as geeky as a Raspberry. Other than that, those things are far easier to carry wherever, and have no wifi built in as far as I know. Most/all of the storage is removable, and you could probably set said storage to be read-only.
If you're going to build an air-gapped encryption/decryption device, you might as well go for a Raspberry Pi.
But a plane meant for surveillance is probably not going to be similarly-equipped to a commercial airliner. And not having to put lots of food, a toilet, and two pilots on the plane would probably save quite a bit of space, fuel efficiency and cost.
And I'm getting the impression that you're just being as pedantically "no, I am right here" as I am.
You'll still agree with me that it's easier to keep a pilot focused on task for multi-day flights, if you can provide him with decent meals, decent bathroom breaks and even sleep (swapping out with a second pilot) once in a while?
I may have misunderstood, but the concept of hovering over an area near-perpetually was supposed to be one of the surveillance advantages of drones.
Still, the biggest distinction is that each manned plane requires 1 trained pilot. Drones can go on autopilot for most of the uninteresting bits, swapping out the pilot to a drone that's about to make a more difficult manoeuvre. The pilots can also rest when they need to, so the drone can stay up in the air for multiple days while a piloted craft would probably need to land once in a while to physically swap out the pilot for a rested one.
Trained people are a major hurdle in getting large amounts of manned aircraft in the sky at all time.
I can actually speak from experience when I say it doesn't catch fire quickly. The heating elements just don't get enough power to really do anything horrible unless you leave it sitting, active, for multiple hours. At the rate it was going the one time my thermistor misreported temperatures, it would've probably taken a few hours for it to even melt away the PEEK nozzle holder. Not sure what the combustion points of PLA or ABS are, and I assume that of PEEK and brass will be quite a bit higher.. but yeah.
The only way it could reasonably cause a fire in the time it'd take for an average print is probably if you shorted some of the 12v wires. The 4pi electronics board I use has a ton of safety features built in. Shorting the heater wires would probably just blow the fuse, and I could replace that easily. The Arduino+RAMPS electronics that most RepRap users have are a bit easier to get in trouble with, I guess.
Though you do have a point. If it did catch fire, I'd probably be screwed. But the same would go for any other interesting tinkering experiment.
No, I don't know of a group that has made such a printer for less than $50k. Few people have a need for such sizes, given that it'd take ages to print things at such scales with current speeds. No interest means that nobody's really looked at it much. Hence, there are few large-scale RepRap design. The Kamermaker in Amsterdam is the first to come to mind, and that's not quite open source.
One thing that would probably help a lot is if people started using multiple extruders with vastly varying nozzle sizes, like close to 2mm for infill (3mm filament is pretty much the standard for RepRaps; 1.75mm for some other printers) and about 0.5-0.3mm for perimeters. Even then, it'd take some impressive printer designs to print anything with a bounding box near a meter in size, in a sane timeframe.
It might be thinkable to use some pellet-based extruder that has a nozzle beyond 3mm, to really speed up the internal structures.
Slashdot Mirror
Which would likely be the owners of 90% of the computers in botnets. Gullible of plain ol' stupid. So, I guess that's a match made in heaven.
One might even argue that subjecting your fellow Slashdotters to horrible puns is cruel, but that would lead to even sillier (and pointless) ideas.
The whole thing where innocents get the death penalty because of mistakes, is why you keep them in jail until you're absolutely sure they -did- do it. And in most cases, you can't be absolutely sure they did it, so... you keep them there for life, instead of killing them. If they're escaping from jail too often, you've got another problem anyway. And the populace won't notice the difference between a death and a life imprisonment, other than having to pay slightly less tax because apparently life imprisonment is cheaper. And you have the benefit of not killing the innocent.
I'd say there's quite a few reasons to reserve executions for very few cases, or ban it outright. That said, I'm biased, I'm European. We're all progressive and shit.
The economy seems to always adjust to whether people can afford stuff though. Otherwise nobody would sell anything. If people can afford another $30000 in emergencies because they have some organs to sell, the cost of the stuff an average person buys in their life would just go up by a total of $30000. In that way, being able to sell organs while alive would become just another insurance scheme: spend a bit extra over time, so you can afford something big when you really need it.
Personally, the thought of having to actually use that insurance freaks me out. We'd be better off just getting a mandatory regular insurance of said $30k or whatever those organs are worth.
Think of debts due to hospital bills of a loved one, or having to choose between having two kidneys and letting your kid go to college. If many people started selling "redundant" organs, even for the best of reasons, then standards could shift so that others might do it for not-so-great reasons.. and we get a drop in the average health of poor people, for the advantage of those that are better off.
Hell, imagine having cancer and knowing it hasn't spread to some of your valuable, sellable organs yet... and you can't afford hospital bills the normal way. Most people would do it.
I know I'm invoking the slippery slope argument here, but I think it might be justified.
The butchering argument is one I hadn't thought of yet... And I'd say it's pretty much on equal footing with the "forced to sell kidney to pay debts" scenario. Good one.
An analogy I found earlier today was that those countries are a bit like babies. Making noise, occasionally hurting others or themselves by accident.. But if a baby drools/pees/vomits all over your sweater, you do not obliterate it. You teach it, or just trust that it's causing almost no damage. The well-established, loosely-allied countries in the world are the adults in this simile, who should be teaching the less well-off countries.
If we just showed the residents of those places how things could be, and gave them an anonymous, secure channel to voice their opinions through, that would give us plenty of information to know what to do next. Instead, the US gathered up some cronies (sadly, the country I live in was one of them) and pretty much just crushed any problem countries.
Thanks for the link. I care not for Apple, but seeing that Cycles will get proper OpenCL support was almost enough to make me squee. Almost. Good to know, anyway :)
Probably, though I wouldn't know. I hadn't looked into mining until Bitcoins got so difficult to mine that graphics cards were completely irrelevant already. It's all ASICs now, and if you try to buy one you won't get it until it's become worthless. Expect to be scammed. That's mostly why Scrypt was made, afaik: to put power back in the users' hands, by making it difficult to mine by graphics card (failed) and by ASIC (hasn't failed yet; might later)
Apparently, Radeons have an instruction that's really important for Scrypt mining, which nVidia cards lack. That's why Radeons of the same price generally reach perhaps 10 times as many hashes per second.
I was going to post a similar comment to harrkev's, except I had to log in first to be able to actually post it. So I'll just add to that.
The printer used by Defense Distributed, as far as I know, is an FDM printer, much like the RepRaps. This would mean that I could easily print a plastic gun that's just as good as the ones made by DD. Making such a printer is easy to the point that anyone can make one from scratch with some technical knowledge and programming skills, now that we've seen them and know how they work. There is absolutely no way anyone could prevent a dedicated individual from 3D printing one of these guns.
I'm speaking from experience here, I've got a homemade Mendel90 and I've looked into the related software and firmware.
Can you imagine the fucked-up settings after a nice night with the boyfriend/girlfriend? Twenty apps open, desktop rearranged into total chaos, and you're about to send a mail containing "afaguhiho;agehgisuaffgasf butts" to the CEO of Microsoft.
To add to Errol's reply.. Basically, our minister of security and justice, Ivo Opstelten, loves to act like a rabid fanboy of the book 1984, and of the things the UK and USA are already doing. We're just lagging behind a year or two on the field of "massive disregard for citizens' rights".
Not an ideal choice, in other words.
Source: dutch citizen. Annoyed dutch citizen.
You think he was handing her a few dollars' worth of pennies? Ahem, maybe not "handing"...
I struggle to find out how SuricouRaven was being homophobic. Maybe pedophobic, if that's a word?
The protocol this site uses, thought up apparently two decades ago, would prevent people from falsely claiming to have killed the target. Read up on it. It's scarily effective.
I agree. It'd be good if any form of tracking that gets applied to more than 0.01% of the public in a year, first gets applied to the police force.
From a quick glance at the text and photos, I'd say this looks about as comfortable as my current life... and the surveillance there is only marginally worse than it is atm, thanks to the NSA :P
Raspberry Pi?
If your hardware is compromised, you've got a problem anyway. And it's more likely for commonly used computer systems to be compromised, like desktop PCs and laptops, than something as geeky as a Raspberry. Other than that, those things are far easier to carry wherever, and have no wifi built in as far as I know. Most/all of the storage is removable, and you could probably set said storage to be read-only.
If you're going to build an air-gapped encryption/decryption device, you might as well go for a Raspberry Pi.
They can see the message going from your pc to Slashdot. They'll know about your hypothetical drug-smuggling plans anyway. Isn't that lovely?
But a plane meant for surveillance is probably not going to be similarly-equipped to a commercial airliner. And not having to put lots of food, a toilet, and two pilots on the plane would probably save quite a bit of space, fuel efficiency and cost.
And I'm getting the impression that you're just being as pedantically "no, I am right here" as I am.
You'll still agree with me that it's easier to keep a pilot focused on task for multi-day flights, if you can provide him with decent meals, decent bathroom breaks and even sleep (swapping out with a second pilot) once in a while?
I may have misunderstood, but the concept of hovering over an area near-perpetually was supposed to be one of the surveillance advantages of drones.
Still, the biggest distinction is that each manned plane requires 1 trained pilot. Drones can go on autopilot for most of the uninteresting bits, swapping out the pilot to a drone that's about to make a more difficult manoeuvre. The pilots can also rest when they need to, so the drone can stay up in the air for multiple days while a piloted craft would probably need to land once in a while to physically swap out the pilot for a rested one.
Trained people are a major hurdle in getting large amounts of manned aircraft in the sky at all time.
I can actually speak from experience when I say it doesn't catch fire quickly. The heating elements just don't get enough power to really do anything horrible unless you leave it sitting, active, for multiple hours. At the rate it was going the one time my thermistor misreported temperatures, it would've probably taken a few hours for it to even melt away the PEEK nozzle holder. Not sure what the combustion points of PLA or ABS are, and I assume that of PEEK and brass will be quite a bit higher.. but yeah.
The only way it could reasonably cause a fire in the time it'd take for an average print is probably if you shorted some of the 12v wires. The 4pi electronics board I use has a ton of safety features built in. Shorting the heater wires would probably just blow the fuse, and I could replace that easily. The Arduino+RAMPS electronics that most RepRap users have are a bit easier to get in trouble with, I guess.
Though you do have a point. If it did catch fire, I'd probably be screwed. But the same would go for any other interesting tinkering experiment.
No, I don't know of a group that has made such a printer for less than $50k. Few people have a need for such sizes, given that it'd take ages to print things at such scales with current speeds. No interest means that nobody's really looked at it much. Hence, there are few large-scale RepRap design. The Kamermaker in Amsterdam is the first to come to mind, and that's not quite open source.
One thing that would probably help a lot is if people started using multiple extruders with vastly varying nozzle sizes, like close to 2mm for infill (3mm filament is pretty much the standard for RepRaps; 1.75mm for some other printers) and about 0.5-0.3mm for perimeters. Even then, it'd take some impressive printer designs to print anything with a bounding box near a meter in size, in a sane timeframe.
It might be thinkable to use some pellet-based extruder that has a nozzle beyond 3mm, to really speed up the internal structures.