The government policy might have caused it, but a reversal of the policy might never fix it. The real world is like that, unfortunately.
Besides, it's not the policy you're thinking of anyway, that causes this specific problem. This specific problem (theft for scrapyard sales) is primarily caused by piss tests. If people supposedly would suck cock for a hit of crack, then they'll also scrub toilets at minimum wage for crack too. But piss tests short circuit that. Here's the problem: the government doesn't mandate pre-employment piss tests. So they can't fix it easily. It would be far harder to convince legislators to prohibit them than it would to convince them to legalize drugs. There is a corporate culture that has gone on nearly 50 years now that has normalized piss tests, and they are true believers in it. They would lobby against prohibiting the tests.
But, even if all that could be done (very doubtful), we've also taught crackheads and tweakers to steal copper wire and whatever else not nailed down. We've taught them to do this for 50 years. Multiple generations of junkies and dope fiends have done this, passing down the knowledge (or what passes for that) of how to steal to feed a drug habit. They aren't going back to scrubbing toilets, even if they would have done that way back if only they hadn't been forced to stop.
>And do you really think there wouldn't be enough food and shelter to go around, if the government decided to get serious about poverty relief?
I think that even without the government getting serious about poverty relief, housing prices are insane and there's not enough to go around. And my grocery bill's not exactly nothing, either. And all for what, even if it did work the way you think it would, I'd get to pay for that welfare so this guy's radio station wasn't held hostage by Rudy's desperate need for bathtub meth? No thanks.
This could be made a serious felony. If the thief doesn't plan for or attempt to get say, 25% of fair market value or replacement cost (whichever is higher), multiply the penalty by 5 years, no chance of parole.
Though I don't know if there are enough prisons for all those stealing catalytic converters.
>Claude walked me through examining the some of the original software in GHIDRA,
I wanted to be able to decrypt the files on The Complete New Yorker magazine DVDs. The old software was WinXP only, and crashed by the time you turned to page 3 or 4. It walked me through using Ghidra on the relevant dll, mapped out how it was using Blowfish, what the credentials were that it was passing, and re-implemented all of that in a python script.
Now all the files are in plain pdf.
Right now, it's helping me write an extension to the mkv specification for embedded scripts and modify VLC to be conformant, so I can watch Black Mirror Bandersnatch. Already have a buggy implementation, about 3 days in.
I've also had it add BEP 46 mutable torrent functionality to Transmission (and to some extent, to the WebTorrent library).
These are all well beyond my abilities to do casually, and probably beyond my ability to do even if I spent the next 18 months doing nothing by grinding away at it.
I only replied because I thought it curious that Claude apparently favors Ghidra.
Interestingly enough, i’ve been sitting on a project for the last 12ish years where i just took the FMloader lib and used that from C# to turn the djvu files into pdfs. All that was needed was a decompiler and an hour of banging my head on it. I published some of the results a few years ago but need to go back and actually build out a full app.
I'm trying to not do the naive pdf creation, where each page is just the raster. Trying to keep the JBIG2 bilevel, as I get better quality at lower file size. Using jpeg2000 too, where appropriate, but the pdfs are still x2.5 the size of the original. Though, I can have it spit out decrypted djvu files that are exactly the same filesize... I just don't like that format for archival.
If you want the Rolling Stone or Playboy archives decrypted, ReconSuave on github has tools to do those. I got tired of waiting for him to do The New Yorker though.
Ive mainly been outputting them to high fidelity jpegs and then stuffing them into a cbz for portability. Works well went im reading on my ipad. As for the others i had them sorted out about a week or two after i decompiled the original binaries.
I’ve definitely kicked myself a few times for not posting about them sooner, but the fear of pissing off CondeNast tempered my willingness to show off
Do any of the cbz readers handle jpeg2000? It makes a big difference in filesize without any quality degradation. Like 40% smaller, maybe more in some cases. You should tinker with that if you have the time.
Okular handles cbz that contain jxl with no issue. (IIUC both archive format and image format support is provided via a pluggable extension system but I don't recall the details because my setup has "just worked" for a very long time now.)
Also FYI you can use mupdf to read cbz archives although I don't personally recommend it for that usecase.
Ooooh, you don't happen to have the code for the New Yorker decryption in a form you could send, do you? Or put up on github or even just give me the starting prompt…
Okay, a couple of hours later…thanks for the hint as that's fucking dark magic ;) and I now have access to the entire New Yorker again after around 15 years :)
Since I think you'll find the one for Rolling Stone and Playboy, but not The New Yorker (I might be one of the few that has this or something like it)...
I'll have a more proper github repo at some point, but there are bugs I was working through. Some issues are bloated up ridiculously... a 9mb djvu file shouldn't become a 110mb pdf. Most issues will work well though. Hope it helps.
I use Claude on the desktop, and only occasionally Claude Code. It's the one that recommended Ghidra. Walked me through the install. Taught me the basics (G to go to an address, etc). Would tell me where to go, and what to paste back to it. It eventually converged on where to find the iv and credentials and so forth (after acting confused for awhile), and then wrote the python script for me that decrypts. I'd like to think my questions (and challenges to its assertions) were intelligent enough to spur it towards the solution, but self-flattery is all that is.
The dll in question was pretty obvious just from the filename alone that it was where the magic happened.
If you want something similar, you might just start by asking it if it would be feasible to decompile the software in question to reverse engineer the decryption, that you'd heard Ghidra was a big deal. Keep nudging it to guide you along that sort of path.
Growing, biological organisms need growth. Because once they stop growing, now they're in dying mode. It won't happen instantly, of course, but they're going to die. And it's this way with civilizations too. Rather than being one of the "disadvantages of capitalism", it may actually be a principle of life itself.
>What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon,
Because you're not "dwindling the population" in the way you think. You're not taking an "8 billion" number and changing it to "4 billion". You're taking this growing organism, and switching it into a shrinking mode. Worse, you're changing it to "shrinking mode" in a way where you can't switch it out of that mode. It will, by necessity, shrink to nothing.
And it shrinks quicker than you could imagine. When fertility rates are at 1.0 (China), each generation is one half the size of the previous. It doesn't seem like much has changed... there are 4 or so older generations that are still large (but non-reproductive). When you have a 0.5 fertility rate (South Korea), each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.
Human extinction only takes about 12-14 generations at that rate. Less than 350 years. Even before it gets that far though, things get awful really quickly. It's not as if it's 350 years, and then everyone's gone. Those last few generations have no technology, they're huddled around in the dark trying not to starve.
>If there's less population, we need less production and less workers.
This isn't as true as it sounds. Some of our technology does not scale downward. If you need a nuclear power plant, this has a minimum number of workers. Even if you only want half the power, you can't get away with "half the workers". So, as there's less population, some technology will have to be abandoned. If you just employ people at the power plant despite that, then you're by necessity pulling those people from some other industry... it's an opportunity cost thing, and you have fewer opportunities.
Sub-replacement fertility is human extinction. Not in 10,000 years, but in just a couple of centuries.
When you have only a few thousand people in an area you can hunt the wild animals that are breeding more than humans. Resources will be abundant again. Today we need all this infrastructure to feed so many people as if we all just started hunting there would quickly be no deer left, but people back then could treat deer as an infinite resource, and if the future is like back then, so will they.
Indeed. And in context of India since that's what Economist's article is about. Having higher population growth is just insanity to me. After destroying land, water, air, forests, mountains and still barely enough for hundreds of millions souls I am not sure how population deflation can be a important concern at this point.
>At that point, the birth rate would quickly rise again, no?
Hospitals failing. Caloric intake failing. Yeh sure, why not? Let's just imagine that all high technology that acutally props up reproductive success seriously strained or even vanishing will result in things magically correcting.
The same attitudes that have negatively impacted fertility rates don't disappear because things get worse. They're reinforced by it. An economy that collapses because there aren't enough workers doesn't make people say "I want to have babies"... if the media is to be believed, people wait until the economy improves first. Why would that happen?
>So it's likely that either there's a point of equilibrium
All evidence to the contrary? We've actually run experiments with animals. After they crash, the stress and trauma imposed on them keeps them from reproducing at a behavioral level despite resources being abundant.
>Total extinction seems unlikely.
Based on what exactly? Your unwillingness to own up to plainly obvious but disturbing conclusions?
>Because if you're back to living in a pre-industrial society,
Short of time travel, we can't have a pre industrial society, as that's the society that comes at a point in history before industry. What we'd have would be a post-collapse society. They're not the same thing. They don't even resemble each other much.
When moose on the island are nearly wiped out and their predators starve to death, the moose can "swing back up" because moose never have low fertility. It's something like 25.0, give or take. They have a low population not because fertility went low... they have it because baby moose get eaten or starve or die from disease. Once those pressures ease up, the 25.0 fertility is still there and population rises quite rapidly.
When human fertility goes down, it means that humans can't ever bounce back. So unless you're hypothesizing some sort of thing which causes human fertility to rise paradoxically and inexplicably, this reply of yours makes no sense at all. Not even a little. By the time people like you realize how wrong you are, your species will be past the point of no return.
Why do you think nothing will change in 350 years? Where were we 350 years ago? We thought population was stable back then with less than 1 billion people. Is it plausible that things will change again in the next 350? I think so. I think at least one thing changes about the world in every 350 years.
This is NOT human extinction. Just the collapse of global modernity.
Why would the last group of N people not subsistence farm? "Guess we wont try to live like people have for the last x million years, here is a good place to lay down and die."
>Why would the last group of N people not subsistence farm?
Why would they be able to reinvent that, when none of their ancestors for how many generations did so? Is that something a person can do well, do you think, with no prior experience or expertise? What if they get it wrong, they'll starve?
We could ask why they could reinvent all the technologies that people from prior eras of agriculture could manage? Will they instantly be able to make their own ropes, do you think? Have you ever made rope? Does it not count as technology if it's not a transistor etched into a silicon wafer? But previous eras of history did utilized that quite a bit for their agriculture. Are they supposed to make due without? There must be a hundred different things they won't know how to do, but were necessary for agriculture in any era of history you might name, but that you can't name because you know nothing about it.
Technologies, ones so mundane that you don't even recognize they exist, permeate the world. They're lost and then they're gone because a replacement was better. But when the replacement disappears, those lost technologies don't spring back into existence magically. Civilization is "path dependent", it doesn't get knocked back to previous tiers because those previous tiers cease to exist once we've moved on to the next. And it's really hilarious to me that not only are you ignorant of this, but you're snarky about it too.
> when none of their ancestors for how many generations [farmed]
Because they'd still have books and seeds and farming implements lying around? And maybe some actual farmers to learn from?
> What if they get it wrong, they'll starve?
Probably, yeah many will starve. Early English settlers in North America had very little farming experience and many died. Enough survived to build colonies.
They don't need to reinvent it - the Amish are doing it right now to some variation of "Amish on a tractor" if you want.
Insisting that negative population growth necessarily means extinction is as silly as saying that positive population growth necessarily means people standing on people from coast to coast.
You should realise (apparently not?) that many people alive today still farm with minimal technology .. moreover there are people alive still hunting and gathering.
They've not lost their skill to survive sans tech - unlike, say, yourself.
>You should realise (apparently not?) that many people alive today still farm with minimal technology
Actually, I know alot more about this than you do. And what you call "minimal technology" is not the case at all. Do you think you could make a plow or use it, supposing you had a mule to go with it? Why do you think it's "minimal technology"? But if you insist it is, I take it to mean that you think just anyone could construct or procure a plow in the Mad Max wastelands, which is silly on its face. It's not just the bronze/iron/steel work. Now we're back to "can you make a rope?"... can you? I think with an hour or two you could make something. If I brought the tool for you to use. And if you had the fiber for it. But it takes quite alot of practice to get good at it, I'll never get there. And even if you had the tool (haha, sandcast one in iron for bonus points!), and had the practice, now you're a fucking hemp/jute/sissal/something farmer just to have enough fiber to make the ropes to plow, but you're no longer growing grain so you don't need the plow. Why is this minimal technology so uncooperative, do you think? Why do you need so many fucking specialties just to do subsistence farming? Maybe you should go out there like they did 12,000 years ago with a stone hoe and plant the seeds stooped over, one at a time. I'm sure the yields will be high enough with that that humanity's numbers can start growing again instead of shrinking.
Cute, someone who watches video instead of reads. That's... I dunno. Maybe if you read, you'd understand how centuries ago this continent was so full of game that those Europeans who saw it were astounded, but now there's practically nothing left. Not enough to feed a recovering civilization with anyway. Even if they used firearms instead of the spear in that video. I'll even forgiven that now you've stepped back even further from the subsistence agriculture thing to hunting-and-gathering. Maybe humanity should crawl back into the ocean and become fish too... that's how we'll beat extinction.
> Actually, I know alot more about this than you do.
So you say.
> Do you think you could make a plow or use it, supposing you had a mule to go with it?
What, another one? We used oxen and draught horses rather than mules.
> you think just anyone could construct or procure a plow in the Mad Max wastelands,
I live in Australia, I know where many working old ploughs are - most of the farms here still have them on display - there are several on this very property.
> Now we're back to "can you make a rope?
Sure - been there, down that, have you?
Look, this is getting dull - I'm 70, I grew up in a remote location, my father, still alive, born in 1935, fed his family as a child while his father was away at war - I've often spent months in remote areas.
In the event of the collapse of the modern US tech sphere some humans will get by, others will not.
This whole line of argument has been incredibly entertaining to me, given those I know who could build a functional plow out of the ruins of damn near anything made of metal - even freeway signs can be made to service.
That's not even counting those who can keep old Farmall tractors running on whatever they have laying around. It's not the greatest, but it's functional, and a mechanical horse is way more powerful than a real one - and even then, real ones are still quite capable of supporting more than subsistence.
Yeah, I kind of take it for granted that humans can survive on what exists around them ... essentially everybody I know in rural W.Australia can do so. Most farms here keep a back log of every bit of kit they ever had, going back to the 1880s and earlier in some cases - I've helped strip down and rebuild a couple of Allis-Chalmers tractors in the past four years and the local small town car museum has a crazy number of historic vehicles (three wheels, steam powered, one time speed record holding, etc) that are kept in working order by locals.
I've renovated old old houses in Fremantle and flipped them with very few contractors (while working on bleeding edge code bases) and built air strips in the PNG highlands, worked with wood workers, glass blowers and metal workers, etc.
I suspect some people have spent a little too long behind screens and forgotten how to shear a sheep, draw, card, spin, and knit a jumper.
There's also this insane (or amazing) drive towards productivity that we don't notice - we build roads that not only support 80+ MPH 18 wheelers, but do so durably and safely!
You can build a road an 18 wheeler can transit with manual labor, just slowly. And if you don't need to support more than a Jeep, the road can almost build itself.
Or another way - building a modern house with modern conveniences and efficiencies is pretty dependent on a ton of things.
Building a sufficient house in many parts of the world is dependent on manpower.
Being W.Australia, where the Pintupi Nine popped into the modern world during the 1980s, there are a few people happily getting along with no house at all, as they and their families ever did for a few thousand years past.
It's all manpower and horse drays - the really tough bits are dropping, chopping, and moving those trees, they're a bit bigger and tougher than they look.
We're also very likely to get a "technology flyover" situation - in the past, if Caesar wanted to send something (even just a message) fast to the edge of the Empire, he needed a road the entire way.
If Lincoln wanted troops moved to the front, he needed rails, or lots of roads and time.
Now we can travel and communicate between vastly distant areas without intervening connections - you just need an airport in Perth and something resembling a landing strip in the Outback, and you have travel. Satellites and radio preclude the need for wires to be run.
If humans do go extinct, it's going to be from a lack of will rather than a lack of means.
This is probably one of the worst posts about minimal technology I've ever seen online.
Making rope is easier than getting the license to be allowed to farm industrial hemp.
Even if machines and electronics stop working, you can still extract their metals out of them without the effort of reducing ore from scratch.
There are entire landfills waiting to be mined.
Then there is the fact that you're completely uninformed about rural life even just 150 years ago. They used very little steel tools and while the steel tools they did use were essential, the vast majority of them can be shared with the rest of the village.
Even just 200 years ago, most people lived off the land.
The idea that urbanisation turned all of humanity into a helpless class of humans is ridiculous.
The only real constraint is sufficient farm land to support a transition away from urban living, but when you think about it, even that is unnecessary, because there is no reason to abandon the idea of professional farming just because the population declined.
The moment you entertain even just a little bit of modern technology being preserved the argument makes no sense. The amount of power that you can capture with solar panels by far exceeds what human power and horse power can do. Solar panels are only considered inferior to fossil fuels due to the fact that you can burn fossil fuels on demand, whereas solar panels only produce during the day when the sun is out.
But that doesn't negate the fact that the amount of work solar panels can drive exceeds the work a human can do in a day. You can build a slightly less efficient industrial society on the basis of such an energy source. Technology and energy are not going to be the problem.
> This is probably one of the worst posts about minimal technology I've ever seen online.
Harsh, I thought of it more as having an adorable level of cluelessness.
> no reason to abandon the idea of professional farming just because the population declined
Indeed, both for economies of scale and for the fact that existing modern farmlands are like butter to work - the major and minor tree roots of the past are gone, the rocks have been picked or sifted out, deep clays have been ripped up and mixed with sandy surface soils, etc. In this part of the world there are many 4,000 hectare farmlands made up of uniformly graded soils ready to work with less energy input than virgin land requires (whether with new or old methods).
Veering away from looking backwards:
We're also on the cusp of having self docking and charging autonomous agri bots running from battery farms - not quite there yet .. but "watch this space".
>But when Indian school textbooks are reprinted this summer, they will carry a very different message. They will warn not of the dangers of having too many babies, but of the risks of having too few.
The Chinese have discovered that it is easy to crank down the fertility rate, but impossible to raise it again when you want to do that. And they have brutal totalitarianism on their side.
I think the Chinese discovered that because they lowered fertility rates at a time they were naturally lowering anyway (as we see everywhere else). They can accelerate or, probably, slow down the natural progression but can't reverse it.
Right. That will just turn the clock back. Because people are so clueless, stupid, they don't see around and notice this endless overcrowding is making their lives living hell. They don't read or see about lack of jobs, constant layoffs, housing shortage or anything else.
Just a warning about lack of cheap labor for 1 percenters in India should make every boy and girl in India to fulfill national duty to make more babies.
Any time you try to randomly assort 30 children of the same calendar age into a room with a single (or even several) teacher, it's going to be bad for nearly everyone except those in the very middle of the curve. A very narrow portion of that middle too. It can't not be. And if the teacher tries to cater to the slow kids and the "gifted" kids even a little, then the middle-of-the-curve children will suffer for that too.
The problem isn't "education"... everyone not destined to be a feral caveman needs one. The problem is "public schools". The idea itself is wrong, and it can't be made to work. But our single-minded pursuit of it to the detriment of all other alternatives just compounds the trouble.
Of the 50 people who end up reading my comment above, every one of you will read it a different way, and it's unlikely very many of you will read it as intended.
> Of the 50 people who end up reading my comment above, every one of you will read it a different way, and it's unlikely very many of you will read it as intended.
Because that's how language works. Stop being a pompous self-righteous ass and take responsibility for your own words.
> Of the 50 people who end up reading my comment above, every one of you will read it a different way, and it's unlikely very many of you will read it as intended.
Isn't this admission a sign that you should be more clear on the intent of the comment? There are many countries with well-functioning public school systems.
It might have worked in the very distant past. I learned that there was once a monitorial system of education where a single teacher might be in charge of many students, but only because the teacher would get a lot of help from skilled students who would teach what they had learned to other students in their charge.
Isn't this just solved by better student teacher ratios, which you could totally have in public schools if they were funded better and societally we valued teachers more?
What are private schools doing that you couldn't implement in public schools with adequate political will and money?
Your question is easily resolved by looking up how much American schools are funded, compared to historical funding, other countries' funding, and their relative successes.
Outcomes aren't any better with lower ratios. The best-funded public schools have funding higher than anywhere else, in the world, and have poor outcomes... it's not a funding problem. And it's difficult to "value teachers" when we learn of these outcomes, it runs counter to human nature.
Private schools are (excepting the truly 0.01% which are the most elite schools meant for the children of billionaires and statesmen) are nothing more than public schools dressed up in $20,000/yr tuition so that the upper middle class can feel special. They draw personnel from the same pool of teachers, they use the same textbooks and pedagogy. They are essentially public schools with a new label. But that you think I might be talking about private schools shows how you can't even really think about alternatives. You don't have the mental language to do so.
I think I should also gently suggest here that the issue could also be expectations. The idea that you put 30 random children in a class and that therefore there must be some who are "gifted", and there must be some who are "slow".
I don't know man? I'm just saying that sometimes sure, all the kids in your neighborhood could be above average. But most of the time, all the kids in a class are just average. And now the poor teacher has to explain to irate parents that their kid's not any more special than the other kids in the class. (Only we don't. We acquiesce to their insanity and label average at best kids as "gifted" and then have everyone be shocked when those kids don't gain admission to Ivies. Ma'am, that kid was lucky to get into his/her state flagship. And even at that state flagship, s/he probably ain't gonna be majoring in ChemE or anything if you want my honest opinion.)
Sure, you can have slow kids in a class. But, really? 30 random kids? Is it statistically likely that any are "slow"? Or is it more likely you're dealing with no good parents who don't work with their children at home? Then those same parents come to berate the teachers for not doing enough to teach a fourth grader addition and subtraction. With absolutely no reflection on why a fourth grader, with no learning disability, doesn't understand addition and subtraction.)
I don't envy teachers because these are the attitudes they have to deal with.
Public Service Announcement: No people, your children aren't "gifted". And it's very unlikely that your kids are "slow". Your kids are very likely, (horror of horrors), just average. Every one of them.
If we can just get past those things we can start looking at some of the real issues.
Don't have kids huh...gifted is just a classification for those with test scores in the top 1-5%. So if you have 100 kids, there is a pretty high likelihood you have 1-5 gifted kids (yes its not that simple, whatever).
And the research on the topic says that tracking (the idea you are criticizing here), improves educational outcomes. What to know the real problem with education? Its people like you who don't have kids and know nothing about the education system driving their own ideology and biases into the system. You have no stake in this, yet you want your opinion heard despite the fact that you put no effort into learning about the topic of education other than going through the system yourself which hardly counts.
PS You don't even know the term for the thing you are criticizing.
PPS By definition, every kid can't be average. So you don't understand statistics either.
>people like you who don't have kids and know nothing about the education system
You know when I did my student teaching stint to certify? 1993.
PS: You know why they say tracking works? Because we throw out data from after high school graduation. Ever wonder how those, uh, "gifted", kids who got "A"s in high school Calc typically do in Calculus streams at the University level? I can assure you there are many many professors out there dealing with the results of our tracking system, (that being where the proliferation of "gifted" programs came from), who would not say that it is "working".
This won't down the bot population. There are hundreds of millions of people in poverty who have this digital identity issued by their government that is mostly worthless to them. They'll sell it for $50, and there will be a bot running around with their name.
First of all, having to buy each account for $50 instead of spinning up thousands for free would shut down most botnets as the economics would no longer work. Second, the move toward identity verification will eventually make even selling accounts like this impossible. You can only sell your identity once.
I stand by what I originally said, though I admit it was a bit inflammatory. Everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too. Social/mass media is being used to disrupt western democracies. This is not the future we all wanted for the internet, but humans ruin literally everything. So we have to deal with reality here, meaning identity verification will become a non-negotiable. The masses may rail against it, but it's necessary and inevitable.
>First of all, having to buy each account for $50 instead of spinning up thousands for free would shut
Would cost them chump change. You've added an operating expense. When bot farms have giant walls of smartphones bolted into specially-designed rigs, that means they're already used to operating costs that are non-trivial.
>Second, the move toward identity verification will eventually make even selling accounts like this impossible.
How do you figure that? Even if some scheme is invented where a person can verify that it's them, that will be part of the sale. They will make it possible for the third party to do the verification too. If you've got some genius scheme though where that is impossible, I'd love to hear it. Something that only the person themselves can do, and others can't impersonate them even with permission.
Theoretically it limits supply. Pragmatically, it limits supply to whatever fraction of the world's poorest 4 billion people are easy enough to cut a deal with. In other words, "still sufficient to cause the same sorts of misery as identity-less bots already cause".
>Maybe we need an alternative set of root servers for a free Internet.
Can't even do that. We'd need (ultra?) stable IP addresses, and the entities in charge of those don't hand them out anymore. We've sort of been cut out of the basic infrastructure to let us build stuff a second time.
You can still get a block on the grey market for (I believe) currently a 4-digit payment, which is not free, but it's quite accessible if you have any serious usage at all.
(It will be officially transferred to your name - there's nothing grey about the blocks themselves - the greyness is that RIRs officially forbid selling them, but they can't really do anything to stop it and they don't forbid buying.)
IPv6 blocks are still available from RIRs and you don't really have to care about anyone stuck in the 1980s if you don't want to.
Also each of the root servers is itself run by a different organization. If you had some clout, you could ask them to also host your alternate root server on the next IP address. Half of them are anycast blocks which means they likely have 253 addresses free as anycast blocks aren't really shareable.
>even a tiny probability that it might be a threat has to be paid attention
What if it had been named "Teddy Ruxpin is my friend", but the pilot doesn't know whether that's a secret code for "I'm going to release aerosol sarin nerve gas on the plane"?
Should he react to all messages as if they are threats, because no matter how small the risk is, more than zero is too much?
If you can't know whether something is a threat or not, the only reasonable response is to treat it as a non-threat. Anything else leads to absurd outcomes that make it harder to protect from real threats.
>The right to free speech does not mean the right to ignore the predictable effects
What are the predictable effects for the scenario in question? Please enlighten us, because most of us are apparently unable to predict those ourselves.
> What if it had been named "Teddy Ruxpin is my friend", but the pilot doesn't know whether that's a secret code for "I'm going to release aerosol sarin nerve gas on the plane"?
I'm unable to find any connection between Teddy Ruxpin and sarin gas online, so I don't see why a pilot would make such a connection. Am I missing something?
> If you can't know whether something is a threat or not, the only reasonable response is to treat it as a non-threat.
Have you ever been in a position where you were responsible for the safety of several hundred people?
> What are the predictable effects for the scenario in question?
That not turning that Bluetooth device off when told to was going to end up delaying the flight.
> That not turning that Bluetooth device off when told to was going to end up delaying the flight.
This thread is discussing the “Free Palestine, F Zionists” WiFi hotspot and the threat to turn it off within 30 seconds or face the FBI. Which is explicitly not a threat, whereas “BOMB” in the context of a plane is more obviously a potential threat.
I don't see that as necessarily true. I can imagine many situations where F INSERT NAME OF ENTITY would be considered threatening. If they had F the captain of this plane, would the captain be wrong to feel threatened at all?
Threatening is not the same as an actual threat. If someone stood up on a plane and yelled “bomb”, the default implication is that there is a bomb present.
If someone gets up and yells “F the captain”, it is reasonable to be fearful that they might act on that sentiment, but the statement itself is not a threat; not an expression of intention (or in the former case, presence of an object that is intended) to inflict evil, injury, or damage.
Common law has dealt with this for nigh on a thousand years. If you put a person in reasonable fear that your behaviour may lead to them harming you, then they are threatening you.
The captain and established protocol follow what has been found to be useful and reasonable when on an aeroplane, not teenagers, jokers, or l33t haxx0rs, and asking people to turn off their bluetooth is reasonable, as is turning a plane around when they won't.
Yes, I nor many other people are arguing that “BOMB” couldn’t be interpreted as a threat. “F the captain” does not carry reasonable fear of harm. It carries reasonable suspicion that the individual is erratic, that is all. Unless one is an HR representative, there’s no reasonable implication of harm in the statement “F the captain”.
Asking people to turn their Bluetooth off can be reasonable in certain scenarios, like that of the “BOMB” incident. Saying “F <whatever>” is not a threat.
If someone in your presence were to say "Fuck Willy_k" then I'm sure you'd take that as an aggression, as would any other normal person. It doesn't need HR to know that.
>I'm unable to find any connection between Teddy Ruxpin and sarin gas online, so I don't see why a pilot would make such a connection.
And I'm unable to see the connection that you're imagining in the original post. What is it? Can you explain it to me? Is the threat here in the room with us now?
> I'm unable to see the connection that you're imagining in the original post.
The word "bomb" has a particular significance in the context of an airplane full of people who can't escape.
If you don't think it should, start your own airline and advertise that you have no problem at all with people using the word "bomb" freely aboard your planes, and see how many customers you get.
> Should he react to all messages as if they are threats, because no matter how small the risk is, more than zero is too much?
No. But he should treat messages that are blatantly intended to provoke others as such. If someone on the flight is going out of their way to cause trouble, kicking them off is the smart move.
Besides, it's not the policy you're thinking of anyway, that causes this specific problem. This specific problem (theft for scrapyard sales) is primarily caused by piss tests. If people supposedly would suck cock for a hit of crack, then they'll also scrub toilets at minimum wage for crack too. But piss tests short circuit that. Here's the problem: the government doesn't mandate pre-employment piss tests. So they can't fix it easily. It would be far harder to convince legislators to prohibit them than it would to convince them to legalize drugs. There is a corporate culture that has gone on nearly 50 years now that has normalized piss tests, and they are true believers in it. They would lobby against prohibiting the tests.
But, even if all that could be done (very doubtful), we've also taught crackheads and tweakers to steal copper wire and whatever else not nailed down. We've taught them to do this for 50 years. Multiple generations of junkies and dope fiends have done this, passing down the knowledge (or what passes for that) of how to steal to feed a drug habit. They aren't going back to scrubbing toilets, even if they would have done that way back if only they hadn't been forced to stop.
>And do you really think there wouldn't be enough food and shelter to go around, if the government decided to get serious about poverty relief?
I think that even without the government getting serious about poverty relief, housing prices are insane and there's not enough to go around. And my grocery bill's not exactly nothing, either. And all for what, even if it did work the way you think it would, I'd get to pay for that welfare so this guy's radio station wasn't held hostage by Rudy's desperate need for bathtub meth? No thanks.
reply