Comment Re:So how is that going to work (Score 1) 188
I addressed these questions in another thread:
I addressed these questions in another thread:
The equipment is not illegal for me to purchase or own just because I don't have a valid license. Only transmitting becomes illegal without a license.
Ham radio equipment has valid and legal uses. You can get a license for ham radio. You can't get a license for a jammer. There is no scenario in which it can be used, legally.
It makes no sense to claim companies should be able to market and sell a device, which has NO POSSIBLE legal use. If nothing else, devices that can emit RF have to be approved by the FCC before they can be sold, and there is their authority to ban jammers, just by another name.
Why shouldn't I be allowed to block cell phone signals inside my home?
Let's ask the FCC!
http://transition.fcc.gov/eb/j...
"Signal jammers do not respect property lines, and federal law provides no exception that allows for the private or commercial use of a jammer."
What if I want to test my home security system that relies on cell towers?
Maybe you could "passively block it", exactly as you said a few lines up.
How in the world do you know that nobody nearby is making an emergency call, when you want to test your home security system? You're opening a can of worms, for no actual benefit.
I could think of plenty of other "fair use" reasons that buying and using a cell jammer should be legal.
Again, from the FCC:
"Jammers are more than just a nuisance; they pose an unacceptable risk to public safety by potentially preventing the transmission of emergency communications. Cell phone jammers do not distinguish between social or other cell phone conversations and an emergency call to a family member or a 9-1-1 emergency responder. Similarly, GPS and Wi-Fi jammers maliciously disrupt both routine and critical communications services. Jammers could also block more than just cell phone calls; these devices could disrupt important communications services that operate on adjacent frequencies, or worse, they could disrupt all communications within a broad frequency range."
I would suggest becoming a member of the ACLU and donating to them so that they can continue standing up for everyone's civil rights.
I wouldn't. Not that they don't do good stuff, and they certainly trumpet it on their front-page. But it isn't until you're a member that you start getting the full story. It seems the overwhelming majority of their cases are dedicated to suing every municipality that doesn't immediately take down any even vaguely religious symbol that someone else put on anything that even smells like public land. Or fighting even the most reasonable laws that impose some minor and sane restrictions on late-term abortions, and whatnot.
I'd suggest sending your money to the EFF, instead. No bait-and-switch there. They advertise what they actually do, and they do plenty of good.
Maybe they "could". And yet, they didn't... Otherwise there would be a fork and possibly convergence in the ancestral tree demonstrating it.
Relevant:
I want to be able to call an Amazon quadcopter to carry me to my destination.
Just make absolutely sure you check-mark the option:
* Group my items into as few shipments as possible. (at additional cost)
First you have to answer WHY they didn't spread across the galaxy. Second, why is there only one in the galaxy, and not many millions?
Finally, Fermi's Paradox doesn't care if they are long gone or not. Any evidence of existence of other life-forms resolves the question, and largely eliminates the paradox.
The easiest way to eliminate this threat is to lock down hardware sampling rates such that ultrasonic frequencies cannot be reliably reproduced
That's very short-sighted. The ultrasonics are only a matter of making the communications stealthier. Systems unable to produce ultrasonics could still communicate with each other, using audible ranges.
Doing so, undetected, just requires a little intelligence. It could wait until late at night, when all the systems have been idle for some time. The malware could even set a wake-up time in the BIOS to ensure they all start up some time after everyone has left, and communicate.
Or, you could modulate the data inside some sounds that wouldn't be out-of-place in an office. For computers, the obvious option is to play the sound of fan noises, with a little data modulated in with the audio.
For this to work, the computers must already be 'owned',
Computer viruses spread long before there was networking... One infected file on a CD, DVD, USB Flash drive, etc. Or it could be even more covert, like a USB mouse/keyboard modified with data storage.
the fact the computers can communicate 20 meters with another infected machine is the least of the worries if you ask me.
It's still significant. It may offer the only method of getting information in/out of an otherwise isolated network.
While fully autonomous malware can do some serious damage, it doesn't approach the level of damage possible by leaking sensitive information out to the world, or using some human intelligence to guide some very finely-grained data manipulation / corruption.
I wouldn't call it dogmatic at all.
Of course not... because you happen to believe it. You have absolutely no evidence for it, but it offers an easy explanation for a question that undermines many other dogmatic views you hold.
A new abiogenesis event would not produce a life-form as adapted to competing for resources as the existing biosphere.
OR it would produce a life-form that's better adapted, due to taking a completely different path.
And "better adapted" only really matters if you're assuming existing life-forms quickly consume all available resources, leaving none. That is not accurate.
It would almost certainly get snuffed out because of that.
Pure dogma, even if you continue to refuse to recognize it as such.
I'm not talking about similar features developing. That's irrelevant. I'm talking about the MAJOR steps in evolution.
A second abiogenesis would be at the top of the list, or another advanced technological animal any time in the millions of years of life on Earth before humans. Less significant (but not evidenced in the DNA or fossil evidence) would be multiple independent species making the transition from sea to land, multiple independent non-mammals developing into different branches of mammals. etc., etc. Instead, all the evidence indicates these major events happened only once, and not multiple times, independently.
You seem very confused about Fermi's Paradox. Perhaps you should actually read it. It has nothing to do with civilizations around our age.
There are an incredible number of worlds out there, which are several billions of years older than ours. If other civilizations haven't arisen until recently, an explanation for WHY is badly needed.
1. Sounds a lot like "They choose not to interact with us".
2 & 3 Are the same as "Intelligent civilizations are too far apart in space or time", and also assumes "It is too expensive to spread physically throughout the galaxy" or similar.
4. Just why they "lose interest" could be any number of those theories.
And your alternates, 1, 2 &3 are all just the old "Aliens aren't monitoring Earth because Earth is not superhabitable", and again must assume "It is too expensive to spread physically throughout the galaxy" to explain why none of them ever came out here after possibly many billions of years of existence.
Birth rates rise and fall with many factors, attributing it all to education is ridiculous.
Fermi's Paradox does indeed predate effective birth control, so that's something. And yet, humans in areas with low birth rates, still have a deep desire to explore and colonize other worlds. So that factor does not seem to negate the possibility and perhaps likelihood of the basic assumption.
a full blown spread is highly unlikely or would take thousands upon thousands of years
No, not thousands... "tens of millions of years" per Fermi.
But other civilizations before us would have had those many, many millions of years, many times over, before we showed-up.
very few of us go where it's cold, or where there's lots of insects, etc - who knows what the tolerances of an alien species might be?
Humans are advanced enough to undertake minor teraforming. A few generations, and we should have the process down pat. It seems strange to think of any space-faring civilization not developing similar capabilities just about immediately.
In every non-trivial program there is at least one bug.
