Could you use multiple independent lasers all aimed simultaneously at the same target to increase the effective yield to a power greater than what a single laser could achieve?

When people try to blame events on one side even though both side are to blame, then yes, pointing out the violations of what they consider the "good" side matter to help people see reality. In my post that you responded to I didn't make a claim about who started it. In fact I was responding to a poster who clearly DID label a party as being the one who started it, by listing examples that predated it of similar actions. I however do understand that a person could take my earliest counterexample, either Clinton or Truman depending on post, and say I was trying to blame them, which I was not. There is no clear beginning to this, unless you are a fundamentalist and say it was Eve looking around to see if anyone was watching before picking the fruit.

Where did anyone here say that?

Probably unlike most here, I am, just not in a way Slashdot readers can see.

Sorry for the typo, EO12333 was signed end of 1981, by Reagan within his first year after taking office.

CIA was created in 1947 and the NSA in 1952, both under Truman, a Democrat. Due to domestic spying abuses (by both sides), Executive Order 12333 was passed to curtail it in 1991 by Reagan, a Republican.

Both sides have used and abused their authorities regarding monitoring of US person, though be careful when trying to throw stones. The issues you bring up did not first appear under Bush, but each president has had the power to address it, and so far I only see Reagan made a decent attempt at trying to stop it.

Where I live, in small claims court the filing fees are automatically added onto the judgement amount if the plaintiff wins. The fees run $35 to $80 per case depending on amount being sued for. Other costs, like time for the plaintiff to go to court, travel, making copies of documents, etc., however are not claimable. Not sure about fees to have the defendant served.

Hopefully that was a typo. It is called 419 because that is the section of Nigerian law that makes it illegal.

That was an editing error, not a spelling error, since I changed the sentence structure and failed to correct the syntax. Still my error though, and especially tough for me since I try hard to get my contractions and homonyms correct. Thank you Russ. (Bows head in shame)

How could they be sure it wasn't an exhibit attendee. Attendees don't sign agreements before entering that promise not to use personal WiFi, so what if the hotel stomped on them? What about someone physically outside the convention space, but close enough that due to signal reflections the hotel equipment decided was inside the hall? Is stomping on them OK since they seemed to be in the hall? I am sure there are more examples where innocent people could get targetted by such a device.

Just like you did. It Marriott, not Mariott. And the summary spelled it Marriot, not Mariot as you wrote.

In partial fairness to the Slashdot editor, the linked BBC article has the title "Marriot hotels do U-turn over wi-fi hotspot blocks", and the first use of the hotel's name in the article uses the same misspelling. Later uses in the article get it right though. Still confused as to how a BBC article got this so wrong, especially since it has both the right and wrong spelling in the same article. Your misspelling on the other hand has no excuse.

True, but the flesh-and-blood player faces the same probability decisions as the robot so there is no advantage after a large number of hands. The real difference here is the robot could potentially read the live players body language to gain additional information that it incorporates into its decisions, but the reverse isn't true.

No, the best that should happen is they both win the same amount after a large number of hands (note the phrase "given enough hands" so the law of large numbers is involved). Since the decisions are based on probability given the known cards (or so I assume since I haven't read the article), any decisions by the second robot trying to beat the first that went against the probability tree would be sub-optimal and cause it to slowly lose.

What defies logic? Do you not believe North Korea has the ability or motivation to hack Sony as a result of this movie's production and imminent release (or for any other reason that regime may have given how much logic they appear to employ in their decisions)? Unless you believe the North Koreans were incapable of performing the hack, then there is no problem with logic, only that the evidence that you have personally seen doesn't meet what you demand in order to satisfy you of their likely guilt.

The real problem with your statement is this part:

First, note your telling use of the word "possibly", not even the word "probably".

Unless you had a bunch of surveillance cameras watching every move as a hack was done, and probably not even then, "iron clad evidence" doesn't exist in this virtual world of the Internet. No matter what evidence is collected, someone will say it could have been faked, misinterpreted, or lied about, and technically they are right. This means the standards you say most people will demand in order to believe North Korea was the driving force behind this are not obtainable, even if North Korea is guilty. Of course the same holds true for evidence in any crime, which is why in the US the standard is beyond a reasonable doubt, not as I have heard many say, beyond a shadow of a doubt. The first is obtainable, the second isn't, after all, for any given crime, prove that advanced space aliens didn't do it and create all the evidence to implicate the accused, including planting false memories? At some point the evidence is convincing and you believe the implicated party is guilty, at least for those who don't have a need to believe otherwise. If all you see is conspiracy theories, then that is the lens you will use to interpret everything, and bend the interpretation to what you desire the reality to be.

Clearly you have never dealt with actual hackers. Every one I have ever seen has gotten sloppy at some stage, and that was with hackers up to Advance Persistent Threat level. Or did you mean any sloppiness was by the hacker and not by the script, including the hacker's sloppiness writing the script, so the ever-present sloppiness is in the real world? If that is what you meant then I agree. The scripts/programs always do exactly what they were programmed to do, even if that is not what the programmer intended.

But even words like house, car, gun, etc. can be a problem, since for each of these there are example of objects you can physically point at that some people say ARE one of those, and others will say they AREN'T. Whether for physical objects or for abstract concepts, there are grey areas/edge cases that people will disagree about. Saying there is no universally accepted definition for something doesn't mean it is undefined or doesn't exist.

NSA uses same protocols on their network as everyone else (including hackers). So is this stunning revelation now what passes here as news? Is this just a slow news day or has Slashdot taken another step down?