Prior to the convention the US (through Martin-Marietta / GE) developed the Stingray laser system. My recollection was that it was man portable, but FAS says it's mounted on a Bradley AFV. It's putatively designed to disable enemy sensors; it has a scan mode where it sweeps low intensity lasers around and looks for back scatter from optical systems. When that occurs, it illuminates the source with much more powerful radiation, to disable the optics. Thing is, if the optics in question have a human retina at the far end rather than a CCD, it still serves it's functional role of "disabling the sensor". I presume that the system was shelved in '86 because of the protocol mentioned above, but am not sure.

Anyway, a risk of "less than lethal" systems is that it drops the activation energy for their use. If something like the Stingray were deployed, I'd think it would get co-opted for use in roles beyond just disabling range finders. Another link with more blinding systems.

Could you clarify how these tests would not be a proof of the null hypothesis? How do you define "low"? I share your distrust of corporations, but asking every product to demonstrate that it's never harmful is obviously impossible. "Low risk" is going to be subjective; more helpful would be, say, the number of people in a study, the time followed, a difference in overall mortality and the statistical significance of that difference. I think most people would agree that GM foods are not dramatically harmful (eg drops of life expectancy by decades), so presumably to have the statistical power to detect "low risks" we're talking about a large (100s? 1000s?), long (years? 10s of years?) controlled (don't get to eat what you want) study. People tend not to sign up for those, so if that is your level of comfort you're probably just asking GM products to be shelved. I recognize that is a request/demand for many people.

The same issue can be applied to many other technological concerns; cell phone radiation, high voltage power lines, plasticizers, etc. Some of those have been addressed by epidemiology (eg HV lines / transformers), and some have shown statistical risk in animal models (bisphenol A). You have requested human data, though, and as mentioned above I don't think you can get adequately powered controlled groups of people for food consumption like you can for power lines or transformers, where you can at least segregate groups by proximity to EM fields at the place of residence. If you have a specific substance you suspect of causing harm, you can try to correlate presence of the substance to risk (for example, with, bisphenol A). If you could find a distinct chemical marker related to the GM product (ie a substance that remains in the human long enough to be sampled), then I think you could do a nicely powered study for even reasonably low risk. It's not clear what this correlating substance would be, though; I don't think the transgene, in either DNA, RNA or protein form, would be detectable in a human consuming the food.

While preparing for the Trinity test in the Manhattan Project there was serious concern that the test might actually ignite the atmosphere (ie, all the atmosphere):

Fortunately, Bethe was right (at least for all tests performed to date). Teller by all accounts was a genius and critical to the development of a functional fusion weapon, however. I don't have a good feeling how seriously the concern was initially taken, but it seems to have been dismissed with frightening swiftness.

I'll enthusiastically second this. I have been running FreeNAS solidly for 2 months now. I have configured 5 x 1.5TB drives in RAID-Z2 configuration. That gives me 4.01Tb of storage, allowing for two simultaneous drive failures without data loss. My final build uses an ECS 945GCD-M(1.0) Atom 330 Micro ATX board with an Intel 1Gb PCI card; I had a lot of trouble getting the network working with a pure intel board (which did NOT have an Intel network controller on it, GRR). While a highly regarded SATA controller worked with the original Intel MoBo, it didn't with my current one, but a cheaper one does. I'm using a 400MW 80 Plus PSU, and Kill-a-Watt says I pull about 75W total while running, motherboard reports that it's running at about 30C. I have 4Gb of RAM, of which maybe 30% gets used, and CPU seems to be around 10-20% generally. Discounting the hardware that didn't work, it comes to about $1000. I also invested in $130 of UPS (which brought it through a 5 second mini-blackout), and a Gb switch. I get sustained 30-40MB/sec, both to/from Vista and Ubuntu systems over a wired Cat-5e home network; far more than needed for use as a HTPC.

ZFS is stunning. I was sure I was missing something when I set it up but - it's - just - that - easy. It's like encountering a bullet train after spending two decades using hand-drawn sledges to get around. Copy-on-write, self-healing, snapshots as easy as sneezing. RAID configuration that would fit into a Twitter message. Hot spares, automatic re-silvering when adding or removing disks. It's about 4 tech levels above what I'm conversant in, which does make me nervous; I have not tried to recover from a drive failure yet. I'd also like to move the OS off the ancient 30Gb boot drive and onto a flash disk, but want to make sure my tertiary backups (mostly external USB drives) are *really* up-to-date. FreeNAS allows export and import of configuration XML files, so hopefully that will be relatively easy.

I did learn that while you don't need to explicitly format the drives, if you have used them for a prior ZFS system you should wipe them before reusing them. I lost three weekends of my life to trying to configure OpenSolaris (the time would have been better spent getting femur piercings). In the process, I briefly had a four drive ZFS zpool. When I tried to build a pool with those plus one more in FreeNAS, Bad Things Happened. I had to use DBAN to clear off the drives, after which everything went fine. I earlier tried FreeBSD, but it refused to boot from a USB CD with the EliteGroup motherboard. Ah, and I did need to modify vm.kmem_size and vm.kmem_size_max, I think both to 4G. That can be done from the FreeNAS config page (99% of FreeNAS management is done from a webpage, similar to router configuration).

Wise up, people. That's not a telescope, it's a wave motion gun. Just compare to its predecessor, Space Telescope Yamato - although the main weapon has been moved from a spinal mount to a giant deck emplacement, they're using the same hull layout and even an identical color scheme.

Agree. I'll also add that our best defense against another Holocaust-scale tragedy is open, high-quality information throughout the world, and there are vigorous efforts by many forces to move in the other direction. Access to reliable, complete information in many ways is more important than a formal democratic foundation; even in a totalitarian state I have the option to rise up in revolt when I learn things are bad, but can sit idly by in a democracy if I am cocooned in pleasant misinformation.

Suppressing bad information can go a long way to placating an oppressed population, as in North Korea. Skewing or outright fabrication of information can lead even a modern population to provide the democratic majority needed for outright war, as in the leadup to the 2003 Iraq invasion.

So no, I also don't feel secure from another Hitler. If information control is fully ceded to the powerful, even a well intentioned and "educated" population could drop the world into another maelstrom.

I would have been fine with allowing the airlines to resume flying if they had said "We've done our own tests, conditions are fine for flying. As evidence of our confidence, we have secured bonds worth $20 million for every passenger airborne at any given time, and if any of our aircraft crash during this time, we will release this money without delay or question to the relatives of the deceased."

Of course that didn't happen, and of course even if it did it would be a near certainty that any ensuing loss would be eaten by the government (ie taxpayers). With corporations, I only trust them if significant money is on the line. If they assure us that something is 100% safe, then they should have no problem agreeing to massive financial compensation in the 0% chance that they were wrong. At a higher probability-impact level, they should be held to this even for non-zero-but-exceptionally-tiny likelihoods.

Reference to The Forge of God, for those unfamiliar with it. Postulates a universe with three types of civilizations; Sterilizers, in the phraseology used above, naive civilizations that reveal themselves to the sterilizers and are annihilated, and then a very loose consortium of non-Sterilizers who band together for mutual defense. This third category hides from its own members, effectively using anonymous communication to coordinate defense and response to the sterilizers. The later group is actually revealed in his follow-on novel, Anvil of Stars.

Next time this happens yell out to an imaginary colleague somewhere on the other side of the cube farm "Frank! Hey Frank! Were you able to purge all the trojans from our latest release? Bob needs to decide if we can fix this quietly or if we have to inform our customers."

The role playing game Paranoia? Sounds like it at least.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_%28role-playing_game%29

and as long as you're quiet and don't try to damage the control systems, you can move about freely and they'll generally ignore you

... at least according to their CEO. In general, it does look like "most" of their games are DRM-free, but I was unable to find a clear statement about when and what. The example above is Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom, the DRM in question is Stardock's GOO.

I am currently only buying DRM-free games. I patronize GOG extensively, they explicitly state they never use DRM. The games are older, but they have many good ones, the prices are excellent, and ... NO DRM. I'm very interested in Paradox, but want to be able to know - clearly and explicitly - which games lack DRM

There's at least one case where a stolen computer took photos of the new owner (presumably either the thief or someone complicit / unwitting downstream in the fencing process) and then automatically posted the images online. The photos show a clear image of the person's face, plus rather large tattoos on each arm. Additionally, Flickr provided the IP address the photos were posted from.

AFAICT these pictures were not terribly useful; I'm assuming that if the information led to recovery of the computer the owner would mention it in their blog. If so, it would imply that it's not simple to use webcam information to recover stolen hardware.

IANAL, but I RTFA, and I also read the linked settlement document. Am I correct in understanding that Katzer et. al. owe $100,000 plus legal costs? I know this has been a drawn-out battle, but that still seems like a fairly significant victory for Jacobsen et al.

I know of at least one case where a bystander was assaulted for calling 911 - Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett was beaten with a tire iron at a state fair when he tried to call 911 after hearing a woman call for help.

I was once (late 90's) riding the MBTA in Boston around midnight. I was in the last car, sitting at the end, as were maybe three other teenagers. In the second to last car were about 5 other teenagers. They were yelling at each other through the glass. When we stopped at a platform, the larger group came into my car and started pounding on the smaller group. The T was generally pretty safe, so I was taken back by shock for a bit. I then pushed the little red button next to me and said (trying to be quiet but hoping I could still be heard) something like "Uh, I think you need to send some cops back here, there's a big fight." The conductor said (quite loudly) "We're aware of it, the police are on their way." I then waited for what seemed like a very long time wondering if I would ultimately be safer staying in the car or dashing out the door if big group finished little group and decided to head over to me.

Anyway, I made what I think was the right decision (even though it was likely irrelevant in providing any sort of aid), but I certainly didn't think it was without risk. Not sure what I think of the law.