Comment Re:Chernobyl is in Ukraine (Score 1) 121
Yeah, but it's up in the north right on the border with Belarus; not the nice waterfront property Russia's interested around the Sea of Azov.
Yeah, but it's up in the north right on the border with Belarus; not the nice waterfront property Russia's interested around the Sea of Azov.
It's electrical too. Just like a key switch is both mechanical and electrical. They're both devices for converting mechanical actions into conductive connections.
The difference between the two is that a good key switch is harder to design. It's got to deal with the ham-handed people who line the key up approximately and jam it in -- some people have a light touch with machines, others don't. It's also got to deal with the folks who put a quarter pound of keys and assorted novelty items on their keychains.
Have you got any?
New streets don't just appear overnight. They're planned, built, and then populated, a process that takes months. It is logistically possible, especially for wirelessly delivered services, for those streets to appear in real time as they're opened. Somebody has to pay for it, that's all. And the local highway departments have to work with the data providers of course.
If it's a year after a street opened and it's still not in Google maps, chances are there's something screwy with your local highway department releasing data -- maybe the county if you live in certain parts of the country.
.A gold standard doesn't "regulate the price" of anything. Instead, it defines each unit of the currency a claim to a specific amount of gold.
And how in practical terms does that differ from regulating the price of gold?
Whatever the standard US currency is should be backed by tangible assets...
In other words, you believe in price regulation for some commodities. Logically, basing your currency on some tangible thing is exactly equivalent to regulating the price of that commodity. If you don't take steps to regulate the *market* price of gold at $1300, your claim to have based your currency on gold reserves is empty. You've just created a fiat currency of arbitrary volume and have saddled yourself with maintaining reserves of gold in some arbitrary proportion to that arbitrary number.
However one interesting side effect of his, er, *scheme* is that the prices of those stocks you base your currency on will never ever change. Imagine the fun in a world where stock based cryptocurrency has become the norm, and the price of those stocks remain rock stable and everything else veers wildly as the *value* of those stocks fluctuates...
Sure, but why does every vehicle have to work for *everybody*?
I've always liked small cars, but when I had kid tiny cars didn't work for me any more. It doesn't mean that small cars are *stupid*, they're not right for me at this particular phase of my life.
Actually, in the medieval roots of "liberal arts", mathematics in general and Euclid specifically were about half the curriculum.
The old standard curriculum was divided into two parts: the "trivium", or basic curriculum and the "quadrivium", or advanced curriculum:
Trivium:
(1) grammar
(2) logic (arguably mathematical)
(3) rhetoric
Quadrivium:
(4) arithmetic (Euclid)
(5) geometry (Euclid)
(6) music (theory, not performance, also somewhat mathematical)
(7) astronomy.
With a few tweaks, this could become a kick-ass modern basic education.
Pilots and surgeons handle much more taxing memory tasks all the time, using an amazing tool called a *checklist*.
Why add another point of failure to something you may depend on for your life, only incompetent people think that's a good idea.
Because your life might *also* depend on other people not getting hold of your weapon and using it on you? That might not be the case for *you*, of course, but not every user is necessarily like you.
The idea that somehow we can't make electronics reliable enough to depend upon for your life is silly. Walk into any hospital and you'll find it chock full of electronic gizmos that people are staking lives on. Airplanes have electronic instruments that hundreds of lives are staked on. The engine computer in a modern automobile failing would frequently be a fatal event.
In any case, what you need to worry about is the least reliable component in a dangerous scenario, which in 90% of the cases is bound to be the user.
You are a complete fucking idiot.
Sounds like a recipe for happiness.
If you strap on the smartgun without putting the watch on and checking the batteries, I submit you're too stupid to be carrying a lethal weapon.
Jamming is an interesting question. It's not particularly easy to jam RFID without getting quite close, but it's a testable idea.
Check batteries when you arm yourself in the morning. Bang. Done.
Whether this device is a good thing or not boils down to simple math, but the outcome is going to be different for different people.
Take prison guards. They normally go unarmed, because the probability a weapon will be taken and used against them is extremely high. This makes a handgun a net liability for them. A device like this might be a good thing for them, even if they occasionally forget to change the batteries. In fact, even if the device had an extremely high failure rate, say 1 in 5, it might still make sense *for them*.
On the other end of the scale there are big game hunters who carry a sidearm as a backup weapon. Since there is no chance a bear or lion will use their handgun against them, the device would have to have a zero percent failure rate before it made sense to even consider.
Then there are people in the middle, say process servers or people who carry cash, for whom being disarmed is a potential concern but not necessarily an overriding one. For them whether a particular smart gun makes sense depends (a) on their particular situation and (b) on the performance of the specific smart gun model in tests. There's likely to be no one-size-fits-all decision that covers all users and all models of gun.
Critics of smart guns demand certainty: "Even if a particular system could be 99.9% reliable, that means it is expected to fail once every 1000 operations. That is not reliable enough. My life deserves more certainty," says one [citation]. Clearly this is an irrational position, given that non-smart guns don't have anything near 100% reliability. Feeding mechanisms jam and cartridges misfire. This is to say nothing of the most unreliable component in any self-defense shooting scenario: the user. The user can miss, hit an innocent bystander, or even fatally shoot himself.
A device like this could well make a great deal of sense to some users while making absolutely no sense at all for others. Insofar as people are free to use lethal weapons for self defense, they should be free to choose the weapon that fits their needs best.
Hackers of the world, unite!