Should be adopted as a new SI (Slashdot International) unit, along with Libraries of Congress per Second.

They're probably no different from regular battery terminals. Minor metallic taste, nothing special. The taste when wire-cutting with your front teeth is more interesting as you get the plastic overtones. Sniffing molten leaded solder (produces a thick smoke) is also fun. Reminds me a bit of slightly burned cinnamon toast.

I'm not normal, am I?

It's cheaper, the shielding is lighter, gives about the same results, and the press doesn't hate it so much.

However, it doesn't much matter which you'd use, you'd get superior results. Provided things didn't break in the bounce. That was a particularly nasty prang. The yellow flags are out for sure. I wonder if Murray Walker had predicted it would go smoothly.

The way I would have done it would be to have a radioisotope battery that could run the computers and heaters (if any) but not the instruments or radio. Those should be on a separate power system, running off the battery, although I see no reason why the computer couldn't have an idle mode which consumed minimal power specifically to top off the battery.

The reason? The instruments take a lot of power over a relatively short timeframe. Same with the transmitter. That's a very different characteristic from the computers, which probably have a very flat profile. No significant change in power at different times. The computers can also be digesting data between science runs.

Well, that's one reason. The other is you don't want single points of failure. If one power system barfs, say due to a kilometre-long vault and crunch, the other has to be sufficiently useful to get work done. The problem is weight constraints. It's hard to build gas jets that can steer a fridge-freezer through space, but much harder if there's a kitchen sink bolted on. That means less-than-ideal for both power sources, which means if both function properly, you want to match power draw profiles to power deliverable. That reduces sensitivity to demand, which means you can remove a lot of protection needed for mismatched systems.

What we really need is a collaboration with ESA and NASA to produce an "educational game" where you design a probe and lander (ignoring the initial rocket stage) by plugging components into a frame, then dropping the lander on a comet or asteroid with typical (ie: high) component failure rates. Then instead of abstract discussions, we can get an approximation to "build it and see", which is the correct way to engineer.

That's the problem. One or two civilized actions and people will start expecting it. Before long, the country will be peaceful and almost murder free. It is absolutely essential, to maintain current levels of paranoia, schizophrenia and xenophobia, to eliminate all vestiges of ethics and morality.

Wasn't that done in User Friendly?

The Knights Hospitalers (I think, could have been Templars) had a fortress that was never conquered. Attackers would be bottlenecked, relative to defenders, were forever being harassed on the flanks and faced numerous blind corners.

Simply build a reproduction of this fortress around the White House. They can build a moat around it, if they like. Ringed by an electric fence. Oh, the moat needs sharks with lasers. Any suggestion for shark species?

The great thing about this is that the White House can remain a tourist attraction. Everyone loves castles, and taking blindfolded and handcuffed tourists through the maze of twisty little passages (all alike) would surely be a massive draw. BDSM is big business these days.

You mean, you've discovered politicians do one intelligent thing? Albeit for stupid reasons.

The polygraph is just a modern version of Trial by Ordeal. Where about the only thing modernized is the type of witchcraft it detects.

It has the reliability and reputation of tealeaf-reading. Actually, more people probably believe in mysticism than lie detectors.

Under these circumstances, any organization relying on polygraph testing deserves everything it suffers. Believe Mystic Meg's advice on lottery numbers? You aren't entitled to a refund on either. Same applies here. Such devices should have been consigned to the scrap yard (and/or the museum of failed criminology) decades ago.

It's no more easy to be sympathetic to the ex-cop. The fact that he's basically correct is irrelevant. First, he's milking the market. Ten greenbacks for a digital book that's likely to be yanked by officialdom. Even Dangermouse was content with one. Besides, most of the tricks are well-known and meditation can take care of the rest.

From the looks of it, the guy also harasses negative reviewers. That's definitely strike two.

And I'm willing to bet that he has abused authority a few times himself. That's becoming par for the course.

Nonetheless, despite despising the lot, police harassment and the de-facto classification of failings within authority are absolute no-go areas and that supersedes my dislike of Doug Williams and his profiteering.

Caused mainly by high quality tea. Coffee drinkers are thus entirely a figment of the imagination.

We have two options here.

Option #1: Include all organisms that are "alive" by some definition at two points in time (A and B) are alive at any point in time between A and B.

This eliminates all definitions that exclude known states for organisms. Which is most of them. All five "life processes" can be suspended in most/all organisms for indefinite periods of time. Since they are indefinite, you cannot assume any finite span of time being involved and therefore it is not the possession of properties that matters, only the potential for possession.

In fact, everything has to be written as potentials, in this model. There is nothing in this model which states that any feature has to exist simultaneously with any other feature.

Option #2: Abandon all notions of "life" entirely and go from the ground up.

There is fundamentally no distinction between living and non-living. All matter is "non-living", any concept of "life" has to be an abstract, non-physical concept that isn't binary but a gradation. In other words, it's not a property something has, it is a magnitude of a property of a collection of properties that something has. This model is necessary if you adhere to the deep oceanic origin of life theory. In this model, life formed in the deep oceanic trenches from an iron/sulphur matrix around which organic molecules (some sinking from the surface, some formed at the trench level) were bound. Since there is no binary living/non-living state in this model, this proto-proto-life must have a non-zero magnitude. (It is clearly more than the non-living structures around it, since it is a gateway to life, but it is clearly less than anything we'd classically consider "living".)

I would argue that in this model, anything that meets the classic five life processes meets or exceeds some threshold boundary, which you are entirely at liberty to call 1.0. Quasi-living things cannot equal or exceed this threshold value, definitely living things cannot fall below it. Furthermore, since all known living organisms contain processes that are critical to the function of the organism and which must have evolved at some point (something only living systems are capable of), all sub-processes of any living organism must have non-zero life, no matter how simple. (In computing terms, if you only have a notion of programs, then threads, procedures, functions, etc, are program-lites but still programmatic in nature.)

You will notice that in neither of these have I actually specified what a living organism must possess. In the first case, there must only be potentials for processes that are counter-entropic, but there is no formal description of what those processes would be. I don't need them to define life, I only need to know that counter-entropic behaviour of some sort is a non-zero possibility. In the second case, I don't even bother considering entropy. It is sufficient that there be a process which, by stepwise refinement, can be shown to be a valid sub-process at some depth of analysis of life. It simply doesn't matter if it organizes into something that is living in some sense we don't know about, just as in programmatic terms you don't care what links to a library file. If it contains some identifiable sub-process that has the potential to be a key part of a living thing, then it has non-zero life and whether that life meets some criteria or other can be left to biologists and philosophers.

These are, in my arrogant opinion, superior to classical definitions because I'm not looking at a specific something and calling it a benchmark. Which, from the perspective of early science, meant humans. If you like, I'm looking only at the fundamental specifications involved and saying that if there is non-zero overlap and that overlap is necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) for life, then whatever possesses that overlap possesses enough to be considered on the spectrum.

I accept, completely, that this still doesn't guarantee covering everything. It does cover ALife and AI (provided that there exists a mapping that could, in principle, be used to convert physical life into ALife and vice versa), but it doesn't cover Isaac Asimov's speculation of silicon lifeforms unless there is a key component of the biology of such life that mirrors the biology of known carbon-based life. Just one component is enough, true, but a totally xenobiological system which has zero correspondence with known systems would not be recognizable by these approaches.

If they're wardriving, very easily. It's called nmap.

I would agree, except that most users live in outright denial, rarely (if ever) learn correctly from mistakes and frequently prefer to ignore their suffering until the harm is truly excessive.

Better critical thinking techniques need to be taught in school, along with practices that impede cognitive dissonance.

Further, there need to be recognized groups that have the authority to mentor those who aren't clued up.

If someone decided to stand on the curb for a long time, they'd probably be reported for suspicious activity. Casing a place is a very common precursor to a break-in. I see no reason for the monitoring of a private webcam to be treated any differently in that regard.

A more likely scenario would be for a criminal to drive past at night, see the car gone, and then check the internal cameras of the house for any activity to determine if it's easy to rob. If there's no baby, there's likely no babysitter either. It's just wardriving with intent.

A third scenario is that the criminals have got something equivalent to packet sniffing for speech. Back in the old pre-common-SSL days, it was common enough for a hostile packet sniffer to log packets that contained a field that was in credit card number format. You didn't have to break in to get all the personal data, you just grabbed it as it went by. You wouldn't then sit there waiting for interesting tidbits of information, you'd simply have your zombie botnet collect interesting-looking sound snippets. It doesn't have to recognize the words, just the patterns. We know for certain the security services had that in 2003 as part of Echelon and Moonpenny, and probably had that as far back as the late 1990s. It would be gross incompetence on the part of anyone dealing with IT security to blithely assume it's not reached the cybercriminal domain.

Hell, just the fact that the intelligence services can sniff for interesting data is a serious risk these days. Both British and American authorities have done some ethically questionable undercover work that (at best) bordered the criminal. And they're some of the better ones. Blatantly criminal endangerment, blackmail and other corrupt practices are widespread.

I could build a device that is, by default, secure against remote intrusion. That's easy. I haven't, because the NSA wants to ban public encryption and GCHQ wants to declare all secure devices terrorist command-and-control centres. I'd rather not be a target for a hellfire missile, thank you very much.

But if I can do it, anyone with half a wit and a credit card can. It's not hard. It's not cheap, but it's not hard.

Such a device aught to be mandatory on eCommerce systems and a minimal version aught to be mandatory on all networked appliances (fridges, toasters, cameras, air conditioning, nuclear reactors....) - that it isn't IS gross incompetence. That the security agencies want to prohibit such technology is gross negligence.

Users aren't allowed to secure their own devices. Didn't you get the memo from GCHQ?

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/c89b...

Encryption and security of any kind are ipso facto creating a terrorist command-and-control centre, apparently.