Posts by Charles 9 16605 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
It makes perfect sense. Telepresence beats a physical visit to a remote, rarely-accessed location any day of the week. A trip not taken is an accident not risked. And you can make far fewer field trips thanks to that camera, which needs less maintenance if set up correctly. Which probably means you need to hire fewer rangers in the first place. That's why the Border Patrol uses this, too.
That I agree. ALL vehicles, human-driven or not, generally need protection against accidents not of their making, so "no-fault" would be the default for AVs. Liability would have to be taken out by the manufacturer instead of the driver, though, in case an accident is traced to a manufacturing flaw.
"No fault insurance is an oxymoron: if I'm not at fault then I'm not liable - and I don't need insurance to cover things I'm not liable for."
No, it's not. Otherwise, disaster insurance (fire, flood, etc. some of which are also required by law) would be an oxymoron, too. No-fault and collision insurance cover repairs beyond your control. Otherwise, you'd be paying the entire cost (up to and including a total replacement) out of pocket. Insurance in general isn't a protection against liability but broader: a safeguard against sudden hardship, of which liability happens to comprise a subset.
"Citizens don't have a right own nuclear bomb, or a nerve gas, or even multiple psycho-active substances, so why should owning any sort of lethal weapon be regarded as a "right"?"
Care to state just where in the law (especially the Constitution) such weapons are prohibited to private parties?
"...chooses to ignore the first half of the second amendment..."
Let's read that amendment in its entirety, then:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
According to the usage of the word in 1790 (the time this was written), something that was "regulated" was maintained, organized, prepared, etc. IOW, by your own logic, those words support the NRA in the need to keep the militia prepared for any eventuality. As for the "individual" thing, recall that a militia can be a militia of one AND their intention was that every able-bodied adult male (about 18 to 45) were to be in some militia. Also, they are ANTI-military; that's why they wanted the militias to be the backbone of American defense.
Lastly, consider the overriding tone of the Bill of Rights. The main theme was to protect the citizen by limiting the government. About the only time the Bill of Rights limits citizens directly is in the 7th Amendment, and that's because it covers civil disputes: a necessarily citizen-vs-citizen thing. Seen that way, the Second Amendment is empowering the citizen by limiting the government's ability to disarm it.
Not necessarily a gun. Just a feeling of being cornered or dead-ended and developing a need to lash out and/or take others with him. Note there have been plenty of massacres where guns weren't involved (Bath Township, Oklahoma City, 9/11). And plenty of mayhem can be had with just a car...or a gas can and a match...
Yes, it does. As they say, history is written by the winners (and in this case, by the majority). Just as words change over time because more and more people adopt a different form of the word, so too can meaning, and slang becomes vernacular becomes adopted.
I put it simply. Decentralized always has strings attached: usually in the form of slow transfers and bandwidth overhead. Otherwise, freenet would've taken off (it's still rather niche years later). You know what's the biggest obstacle to running a full-fat Bitcoin client now? Downloading the ledger, which can easily sap most data budgets.
"I also have an HP printer that I can print to by emailing PDFs. It has no port forwarding and there is no UPnP yet somehow it all still works..."
ONLY as long as the HP service behind this remains in operation. What happens when (not if) it shuts down? Then you can't e-mail your printer anymore. That's the catch. Without an open port, you have to go through an intermediary (your printer talks to HP, that's why it works), meaning you place your trust in that intermediary.
"A Hardened Firewall is one of the most important security building blocks. a real MUST."
But what about the Stupid Users who STILL demand their stuff be able to talk on the Internet, including their gaming consoles (that need ports if they're ever going to HOST games and be real gamers, etc.)? Unless you're saying people should require a license to use the Internet, we're going to need a solution for the Stupid Users.
WHY? Because the Internet wasn't built with Stupid Users in mind. Stupid Users who wouldn't know a port if it owned them yet expect their Internet stuff to work from Day 0.
Look, it's either UPnP or increased Help Desk traffic. Pick your poison unless you think people should have a license to use the Internet.
"And why aren't there Linux distros for phone hardware? I'm sick of having Google listening in on everything....."
A lot of phone hardware is black-boxed. Not even Google gets to know all the juicy details. They just get binary blobs to interface their stuff with Android. ARM-based devices like this weren't built with enumerated buses in mind for the internal hardware (unlike in the computer world where stuff like PCI and so on took hold).
TL;DR version: It's hard to build a linux kernel for a system whose internals are considered trade secrets.
"On most microwaves I've seen, the door is attached to a switch. You still have a standard hinge and handle to pull open, but if you do that the microwave immediately turns off."
What I'm saying is that it's sometimes possible to trick the sensor in such a door; think it's closed while it really isn't. It's less likely to happen with a discrete opener.
"That's the control you don't need. Do what every microwave does, and I assume did, and just have a door. You pull it open."
I believe that stopped when radiation complaints were raised because such a setup can't be sure the microwave door wasn't fully closed, meaning there was a chance of microwaves escaping out of a door that was only ajar. Thus why most doors I see that need to default closed require a specific opening action like a level handle or a button.
So basically, moving X people throughout a city with N different destinations is not something that can be readily solved by technology, simply because physics gets in the way. There's just no easy way to deal with surges, full stop, but a lot of human traffic these days happens in surges. You're caught between Scylla and Charybdis: between picking losers (people get left behind) or having a lot of idle capacity, and the medium is UNhappy in this case (BOTH losers AND idle resources).
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