So basically this slashvertisement is for a childrens toy of absolutely no interest to geeks. I'm still waiting for an affordable, programmable, personal robot to replace the Sony AIBO.

So if this were both widely deployed and effective it would just force these hypothetical dirty bomb enthusiasts to line the bomb container with lead. Lead which would become toxic shrapnel on detonation. The potential for many false positives has already been mentioned, but this system could be easily defeated by a thin lead lining. Lead lining has the further benefit of shielding a non-suicidal bomber from his own radiation.

Gold has the third best conductivity of any known element. Only copper and silver are better. It's a better conductor than aluminum and far less reactive. So, yes, I'd call it a pretty good conductor. When you need a conductor that doesn't corrode there is nothing better.

Americans are well known as some of the slowest and most terrified drivers in the world. Fast is subjective. What is fast to one person is slow to another. It's almost funny, but more pathetic, to watch all the cowardly slow drivers putting around deathly afraid of an accident.

If they wanted that simulation to be realistic, the introduction of in-game DRM would just delay the fully cracked version by a random number of hours between 4 and 48 and in the end they would still go out of business with the only difference being that they lost more money because they had to pay the DRM vendor as well.

The only truly effective DRM is to release a game that no one cares about or wants to play. I think that is the most clever aspect of this publicity stunt faux-game. The best way to avoid free riders is to create something that no one wants to ride.

A jury might give a shit about it. Video evidence is some of the most convincing evidence there is. Ubiquitous cameras won't stop an angry cop from stomping your face in, but a hidden camera that he doesn't know about might help you sue the city for hundreds of thousands afterword and prevent you from rotting in prison for years on trumped up "cover charges" afterward.

I wouldn't have an "assault and battery against a police officer" on my record now if I had had a recording of the event that showed how the cop just made everything up in his story. It's hard to prove that you didn't do something while the camera was turned off but a video that shows an entirely different sequence of events from those in the official police report is simply gold and will tend to sway a jury away from their natural where-there-is-smoke-there-is-fire prejudice against you and in favor of the cop.

I think requiring the police to have video evidence of their probable cause/reasonable suspicion or of the alleged crime itself before they can even legally make an arrest would do a great deal to control police violence against the public. Basically it should be assumed that anything a cop says is a lie until/unless proven otherwise on video. Currently we have the reverse situation where police are assumed to be 100% perfect law-abiding angels until/unless a video demonstrates otherwise. This is why most cops hate video.

If they already have a reputation or some material that might impress people then the simple answer is Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or one of the many crowdfunding sites that will pop up in their wake. Prepayment doesn't stop free riders. It just makes them irrelevant.

In my view the biggest problem that artists have in making a living from their art in this era of crowdfunding is not piracy, but getting known in the first place. That's still a nontrivial problem.

The artists who want it only want it because they are not technically oriented people and don't realize that they are being scammed and that their DRM will be broken in less than a week.

He can learn this the hard way, after he has already lost the goodwill of his fans, or he can learn the truth beforehand and not be scammed out of his hard earned money by some con artist selling him the impossible dream of unbreakable DRM.

I can't figure out if your pro-DRM arguments are based on some sort of future, hypothetical form of unbreakable DRM or today's typical broken-on-the-day-of-release DRM. If it is the former then you may have a point. There would be a subset of pirates who would purchase the content if they could afford to do so and if they had no other option.

Just as with products that are not digitally reproducable there will also be a set of people who either genuinely cannot afford to buy it or who do not value the product highly enough to justify the price. I believe that only a tiny fraction of the thousands or in some cases millions of torrenters would become legitimate customers in the event of such perfect DRM.

Nevertheless the existence of this hypothetical unbreakable DRM would benefit the few large corporations that could afford it, which may in turn increase the income of artists who have sold their souls to such megacrops by a few percent or something similar. It wouldn't convert an artist with a day job to one who could create full time except maybe for a few rare edge cases.

The arguments about why DRM is an inherently flawed system, is nearly always doomed to failure, technical failure, have been made many times here. Presumably we can agree that no attempt at controlling digital content after it has been released to the world has succeeded so far and many millions of dollars and hundreds of man-years of effort have been spent on the problem. I think it would be fair to say that it is not an effective solution to the problem of creating artificial scarcity for an infinitely reproducable digital/virtual good.

So what we are really discussing is whether a probably impossible version of DRM, a hypothetical perfectly effective DRM, perhaps using alien technology which would seem like magic to us, might be a useful thing for society as a whole to have.

If aliens landed and offered this advanced technology to the copyright cartels would we consider them benefactors or attackers? I suppose there is no simple answer to that. One group of people, those who create art works in digital form, would probably be better off.

They would gain one set of customers and lose others. Some of us would simply buy less content because we cannot sample it first. One might argue that content creators would be more likely to offer free samples if unbreakable DRM were around but I'm skeptical of that.

One set of people who would be hurt by this hypothetical perfect DRM are the poor who would never be able to afford to pay for it. One can argue back and forth about the justice of this but the fact remains that only the wealthy would be able to afford certain digital content.

Personally I think it would be nice if such perfect DRM were available. If someone invented such technology I would imagine that they would charge a great deal for it. Onlly the richest of corporations would likely be able to afford it. Small artists would still be left with only the sort of cracked-upon-release DRM that we have now.

I can think of one form of DRM that might be highly effective. Simply kill/maim/rape/imprison everyone who does not buy your product within a certain time period. Make buying your product a form of protection money. Again, in this system, it can be seen that one group, the content creators, are better off, while another, everyone else, is worse off.

A "comfortable" jail? An affordable lawyer? Innocent until proven guilty? Are you sure you are talking about Massachusetts? That's not how things work around here or really anywhere in the US. He might get a free lawyer, but only if his income is low enough to qualify for food stamps. Your income hast to be very low indeed in order to qualify. Otherwise you have to pay.

I don't think he will get a fair trial. The jury is going to want someone to pay for this act of random violence/murder and this guy, whoever he is, is in their crosshairs. The only chance he has of a not guilty verdict is if someone like me is on the jury, someone who truly believes that the burden of proof is on the prosecutor and that the burden should be pretty high and that is pretty damn unlikely.

If the SD card is fully encrypted a cop looking at it wouldn't even know that it has anything on it . In that case he may not dispose of it. Why bother? So it has some chance of helping in the corrupt cop scenario.

There's nothing wrong with breaking our idiotic traffic laws. Is there anyone who doesn't break them? Even slow drivers exceed the speed limit. I see it all the time. They drive at the speed they feel comfortable at. When they hit a 15mph zone they rarely slow down to 15mph. They nearly always continue going at the same 25mph speed that they were traveling at in the 50mph zone with 20 cars trailing them like a train.

It still often takes weeks. I haven't noticed any giant step forward when it comes to ground shipping. Is it somehow now faster for a UPS truck to get from California to Maine for instance?

This sort of law is going to hurt internet businesses. Now not only are consumers expected to pay shipping which is already quite expensive for small orders, but they have to pay tax as well. This is nothing more than a money grab for state governments and local businesses at the expense of internet retailers. I just hope I'll be gone from the US before this sort of law is passed for real. Cheap internet purchases were one of the best things about living in the US.

Citation needed.

I just heard the alarm on your BMW go off. I'm serious. You better go check.