I think that, more generally, intelligent people don't get arrested for crimes for several reasons. First, because they are smarter, they just don't get themselves into jams where murdering someone seems like the best way to get out of the jam. Second, because they are more successful they have more to lose in terms of wealth, happiness, good living situation, so they risk more when choosing crime, so they're less likely to choose it. Only thirdly is actual proficiency in the planning and execution of the crime.
The raw words written to the drive are actually re-encoded into slightly larger codewords with nice properties like not having too many zero or one bits in a row, and error detection/correction.
Plus I think that the 0/1 bits are not encoded as "no magnetism"/"some magnetism", but instead as "north magnetism"/"south magnetism" since magnetic fields have a direction.
And I don't think the magnetic fields on the platters have any appreciable effect on the head besides the electromagnetic effects at the sensor.
> Any form that doesn't have loose fibrils, microparticles, or dust.
Encasement breaks, materials erode, have to be manufactured and disposed. That's not a valid argument at all.
> I'd compare it to wood from walnut trees
Well, then you are very uninformed. The toxicity characteristics are nothing alike. If you want to point to a similar hazard, I'd suggest beryllium compounds.
I used to work for a company that sold factory automation technology, and had hundreds of manuals for all the products they sold. In the front matter of every manual was a disclaimer that nothing in the manual was warranted to be true. This was automation equipment running things like steel mills, factories, petroleum plants, where failures could result in many deaths and grave financial losses.
The real story here is that Air Canada's lawyers argued, among other things, that the chatbot was a separate and independent legal entity from Air Canada and therefore Air Canada was not obligated to honor the made up policy.
In other words, this was possibly the first historical argument made in a court that AI's are sentient and not automated chattel.
For basically forever compilers and languages have been designed with a total ordering on operator precedences. The Yacc compiler generator tool maps operator precedence to integers, as do most handwritten compiler parsers.
A total ordering has a definite answer to the question "is x greater than, equal to, or less than y?" for all x and y. A partial ordering will answer "I don't know" for some x and y.
It's quite possible to implement operator precedence using a partial ordering. When the parser has to resolve precedence between two operators and their relationship is not defined, throw an "ambiguous precedence" error.
You can implement the partial ordering by putting all the operators into a DAG of sets of operators. If two operators are in the same set, they have equal precedence. If there is a path through the DAG from one operator to the other, that defines the precedence relation. Else there is no relation.
Say "*" is defined to have a higher precedence than "+", and they both have an undefined precedence relation with "&". Then "1 + 2 * 3" should compile into "1 + (2*3)", but "1 + 2 & 3" should throw an "ambiguous precedence" syntax error.
Even if it's stable in a game theory sense, it depends on the political class being partitioned into exactly two parties. Otherwise the two biggest parties would have an incentive to smother all smaller competitors.
I think the answer has to lie in an algorithmic solution dependent on a high-resolution population density map.
