From: stencil (stencil@bcn.net)
Date: Wed Mar 15 2000 - 07:29:23 MST
On Tue, 14 Mar 2000 06:10:39 -0700, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>If you can protect a computer from misuse,
How do you protect a computer from what Joe and
Mike are doing? More seriously, what constitutes
"misuse?" The techniques of spammers, used for
broadcasting public-safety messages?
>you should be able to
>engineer weapons so that they cannot accidentally (or intentionally
>in the wrong hands) harm people.
Should be. But in the real world Freya always overlooks
the mistletoe, Loki is always re-elected, Baldur always
dies. Behind every red-padlocked launch button is a
morlock like me with a schematic and a screwdriver.
In the newer electrically-fired guns coming on the market
now, the "lock" will seek to ground the detonater contact.
Open that ground and you're free to fire. In the older
system, safety is accomplished by interfering with the
application of a blow to the primer. The owner-recognition
system, necessarily electrical for the foreseeable future,
will interface with the mechanical train through some
piezo- or magneto-strictive device. Find that widget,
block it, you're free to fire.
Weapons - tools that kill men or beasts - appear to me
to be an integral component of humanity as presently
constituted. To seek to transform yourself into a being
who (that?) has transcended the need to kill to live,
seems to me to be shiningly extropian. To seek to
transform others, excepting always those over whom you
have authority commensurate with your responsibility
for them, does not seem to be extropian.
Focus on the front sight.
stencil sends
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