Comment Prey (Score 1) 36
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how Michael Crichton's novel "Prey" is set into motion...
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how Michael Crichton's novel "Prey" is set into motion...
So, how far are we from developing modules that can determine the crime coefficients of people, then guns that only shoot projected criminals?
Let's see:
I second EVE Online. I've been playing it for better part of 10 months, and now I've gotten to the point where I no longer need to pay. in fact, I've bought the last four or so subscriptions out of in-game money I made working for the in-game empires. If you focus training, you can easily be self-sufficient in two months or so.
Surprise, surprise. Fingerprint identification is rarely secure, some implementations can even be tricked using gummy bears. Really secure ones usually have rather steep costs and bulky supporting hardware associated (usually to check for blood flow to ensure the finger is a live one). Anything in a laptop or smartphone has no chance at real security whatsoever.
But guess what? This probably wasn't an exercise in security, but ease-of-use: being able to unlock your phone with a touch is easier than slide-to-unlock or passcodes. And it was a good exercise (not to mention fun when it was discovered that the software can even interpret a cat's pawprint). It was successful. So what if it can be broken easily, almost all of fingerprinting is the same.
Why would they need to be armed to be considered a drone? Or why must they be under the control of law enforcement?
I'm waiting for the day when truth content can be determined by a quick remote neural scan, integrated into a variety of appliances. This is one of the premises of the anime Psycho-Pass. It would also cut down on gun crime, since guns, like in the show, would only fire when pointed at one who has committed a crime, or is psychologically on the verge of committing one.
Spammers might just be using a database that was built upon an old one that still had your pseudonym in it, and since the emails don't bounce, they keep sending them. You'd need to "reseed the system" to detect any new leaks, I guess...
That actually sounds more like Bullseye. Hawkeye is usually bow-only (but has been shown to use improvised weapons, yes), while Bullseye has been shown to kill a man by spitting his tooth through the target's skull, and is able to use any object as a precise projectile weapon.
The real thing that's turning javascript into the lingua franca of the web are really three things:
It's an inside-out stack.
That part is actually a bit more complicated than that. And since there have been no cases in this topic before (and likely won't be in the near future), one can only guess.
One important point, though, is that the neutrality and non-sovereignty of space is a ius cogens norm of international law by now: it actually doesn't require a treaty to be upheld, but it's still a good thing to have one. Therefore, I think welcoming such a person would be only slightly less riskier than holding a welcome party for Osama bin Laden (albeit on a different, less physical level).
Technically, the 1979 Moon Agreement prohibits private persons and corporation from claiming ownership of celestial bodies. The problem is that the agreement is generally ignored, with few signatories, which include none of the space powers, and therefore it has negligible impact.
It would actually be interesting to see how the arrival of private companies to spaceflight and space resource extraction changes the legal regime: the 1967 Outer Space Treaty is badly outdated, and needs to be updated at the very least, but preferably scrapped and replaced with another, more up-to-date agreement, one that includes the private sector, and also regulates orbital weapons, with a special focus on orbital kinetic bombardment platforms, as well as settling the legal status of extraterrestrial resources and the circumstances of their extraction.
The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh
