I'm down. Who wants to help start the Foundation?

"Oh, you own the implant, but the software is licensed. Make sure you keep up your license payments and come in for your monthly compliance review or we'll use the remote kill switch."

I guess I was more pointing out that you can hear them say "call 911" as opposed to, i don't know, "code blue" or something. My line of reasoning was that preserving the craft to determine it's mode of failure could warrant a dedicated team with special training and/or equipment, and that budgetary concerns might have led to the lack of such.

Of course I'm not super familiar with NASA's internal workings and especially not this project specifically. It could be that they figure out it's cheaper to just add enough sensors to determine any likely failure modes from the telemetry and just let the thing self destruct if it goes down.

I think the saddest thing about this video is that Kennedy Space Center had to call 911 and wait 9 minutes for a fire engine to arrive to put out the flames. I guess it shows how much budget they've lost that NASA doesn't have their own emergency response teams for things like this.

Has anybody mathematically proven that the current copyright laws are detrimental to the sciences and useful arts? If we could do that maybe we could get some laws struck down as unconstitutional. (I know, I'm dreaming...)

I just imagined hacking the freeway so all the cars slow down to 5 mph because of a bunch of fake deer scattered on the shoulder.

Just like I've had "the same" desktop for 15 years. I think one of the IDE cables might even be original!

How barbaric! Don't you know that these days we threaten and harass our neighbors with lawyers, not violence!~

Yeah, I've got a (nearly) complete collection of Analog magazines going back to the 60's that have survived just fine shoved in random boxes. A large number of them even spent several years piled up in a non-climate controlled storage unit. I've just recently gotten them all organized and displayed in chronological order on my shelves and decided to read them in order (I was born in 85 so most of the early ones are all new stories for me! Thanks Dad for being an infohoarder!). I haven't noticed any serious deterioration except some bent pages from careless handling and the inevitable smudge on the cover they get when you read the whole thing in one sitting. :)

Maybe Google secretly really likes the Sex Party and is intentionally Streisand Effecting them?

When I was a teenager a guy we all knew turned narc. He called me up and asked if I had any pot. I told him I had a tiny amount left and would smoke with him. He comes to my house and starts begging me to let him take some home. He tells me his stepfather is going to beat him unless he brings some home. After half an hour I get sick of this yoyo bugging me so I give him half a gram just so he'll get out of my house. He didn't even pay for it.

Fast forward a few months and I get pulled over and told I'm being charged with
-Possession with intent to distribute narcotics
-Sale and delivery of narcotics
-Maintaining a vehicle for the purpose of distributing narcotics
-Maintaining a dwelling for the purpose of distributing narcotics
-Conspiracy to distribute narcotics

On the (bad) advice of my lawyer I plead guilty to 3 out of 5 felonies.

Turns out this was part of our town police's two year long secret undercover investigation. Similar things happened to 8 of my friends, none of whom I would consider "drug dealers." Two years and who knows how much money spent, net result: a bunch of kids who could of had bright futures now with felonies on their records (since you're an adult at 16 in North Carolina).

This is the result of the war on drugs. Police departments need drug busts on a recurring basis to keep getting some of that sweet sweet federal drug enforcement money. What we end up with is a systematic campaign to label casual drug users (usually kids, they don't have the defensive paranoia older users have yet) as dealers and load them up with felonies.

Well, um, I've gone off on a bit of a rant, but the point (I think) was that I was guilty of simple possession, and I was entrapped into distribution that I otherwise was not interested in committing. I guess it's a but blurry considering I was willing to smoke with him... but either way claiming that I was maintaining my house and car for the purpose of conspiring to deal drugs is ludicrous.

TL;DR: A lot of cops suck, the drug war sucks, arresting kids sucks, and entrapment sucks. ;-)

I agree, but unfortunately it's never going to happen until the majority of the population stops believing in the invisible sky fairy. You can't have a sane society based on a mass delusion.

You could say they are difficult or maybe even impossible with our current technology, but obviously not impossible in general. Haven't you ever heard a driver say "I almost lost it in that turn." If a human driver can realize he's about to screw up and correct for it then a computer can too.

Unfortunately, what we will probably get is paranoid full auto, boring slow semi auto, and your insurance company has just been notified electronically and your policy cancelled full manual control.

I think you just came up with my new business plan: Extreme Assisted Suicide.

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