It's "lodestone", you infidel. And they aren't gems, either. Did you sleep through earth science?

The framework is fine. The linker isn't designed to put objects this size on the heap. Goddamned Insmell smegma registers.

Nah, those of us that think don't hang out in earthquake zones.

rimshot

they risk releasing biomechanoid killing machines that will destroy all of humanity.

Too late, already done. They're called "televisions." They kill the mind first.

There is a bottom, you heretic. It's a Yurtle.

These tunneling machines are not meant to be stopped, and consequently do not have a "reverse".

We engineer types call that "a failure of vision."

So because to our knowledge nobody has ever sold a rogue nuclear weapon to someone in the past that means it will never happen in the future?

No, it probably won't happen in the future, either. There are huge technical hurdles, most likely insurmountable.

But I'll tell you something else: Say it happens. Some big city somewhere goes up in a mushroom cloud. It still won't knock civilization out. There are billions of people on the planet, hundreds of societies, and the complete destruction of a city or two -- regardless of how -- won't mean squat in the long run to civilization at large. As we have already seen many times in the last hundred years, examples that come right to mind include Dresden, Tokyo, Berlin, Beirut, Warsaw, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just to name a few. The whole "terrorists might get a nuke and end civilization" meme is pure hysteria, nothing more.

And you can leave out the government propaganda nonsense - I don't believe in government any more than you do.

What are you talking about? Did I say I "didn't believe in" government? No, I didn't say anything of the kind. Please try to keep the strawman assembly to a minimum. Let me explain my previous post in just a few short words: Your thesis about nukes ending civilization is utter nonsense; what you ought to be concerned with is the actual threat, which is the present government out of control. None of which is propaganda: it's straight up fact. Also, just as an aside, I consider government an absolute necessity. Get it now?

It only takes one wealthy wackjob to buy a chemical or nuclear weapon and use it to kill millions of people.

No, it also takes a seller of such weapons. And there aren't any, or we'd have been sweeping up the remains of some city, political center, or major chunk of infrastructure by now. The whole "terrorists and nuclear weapons" is a total mind job done on you and yours by your government. One thing to to keep in mind: Nukes are very difficult and expensive to manufacture, and pretty damned difficult to lose track of.

Civilization isn't likely to die due to nuclear weapons. We've set off well over a thousand of them already, and there's no particular notable effects other than the low hum of hysteria at the intersection of the set of the ill-informed and the paranoid.

Also, Chemical weapons are a lot less "mass" than nukes are, barring very sophisticated delivery systems, which again, aren't available to religious tools. Bacterial weapons are vaguely possible (although still very, very technical), but incorporate the downside of most likely eventually killing everyone everywhere instead of just the target(s), and so not even your average superstition-addled dingbat seriously considers them.

If you are a US citizen, If you want to worry about civilization, you should be worrying about the decay of our government from one authorized by the constitution into a form exclusively controlled by corporate and political groups. Because unlike the "nuclear threat", said decay is real and ongoing and has already screwed things up immensely: almost 100% loss of manufacturing capacity and so also jobs, crippling inflation, loss of citizen's rights, usurpation of article five powers by the judiciary, illegal legislation that spans almost the entire bill of rights to ex post facto laws to the complete inversion of the commerce clause, promulgation of multiple very expensive, ultimately useless wars... the problem isn't terrorists. The problem is our federal government. The whole terrorist thing is to keep the citizens looking the wrong way.

The NSA is doing everything it can to save your ass.

No. US citizens are not under any real threat, either short term or long -- at least, no threat that isn't in the end posed by our government itself. What the NSA is doing is attempting to shore up the government, which, frankly, I'm beginning to feel would be better off being replaced by people, almost *any* group of people, who simply understand that it is not acceptable to break one's oath, and that the oath to the constitution is designed to, and should, ultimately govern all of our legislation.

The same researchers plan to do a study on the new electronic social networking phenomena. All of the test subjects will be given pagers for two hours a day.

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You could allow something like this to be anonymous, by allowing addressing to be a relatively poor hash that a message to you would match many people and from there signature checks could determin that the message was in fact for you. The problem comes in that any such system is open to channel poisoning.. many fake messages to a block so that the decryption time becomes costly, and/or you get so many garbage messages that you can't filter out the "real" stuff. This just shows you can do encrypted + decentralized, but not really anonymous. Any solution I've thought through has to give up one of anonymous, decentralized or full-encryption of the message envelope

Wasn't that more or less Netware's approach? not the tree of VMs, but the tree of permissions.

Do what I did: install XP with SP3 and turn off updates entirely first thing. What possible difference could it make at this late date?

That's exactly what I meant (I think you misread me). Tires spinning more distance (ie. odometer reading) than the GPS records means the road is slippery. Well, if the GPS has that much sensitivity. :)

That's literally true -- as I recall, there was a study that found about 70% of the time, dogs signal in accord with the handler's expectations, rather than per what they actually found (or didn't find).

Speaking as a pro dog trainer, I don't find this the least bit remarkable. Dogs suitable for advanced training want to please their handlers. Theit handlers want to find drugs. QED.