You can twist up the theoretical limits of this order all you like, as if you were a catholic schoolboy trying to find a loophole to get out of some medieval church ritual, but these people can live their lives pretty normally. They should just not be dicks about trying to circumvent the intent of the order.
According to TFA, the order being sought does not state an intent. It states a number of independent requirements to be legally imposed on the affected persons. One of these requirements is that they should not communicate with each other for 10 years. In other words, if they communicated in any way at all in the 10 year period - even just one asking another what the time is - they would be in actual breach of the order being sought. A communication between them would be in breach no matter what its topic or content, and no matter whether it employed speech, sign language, text message, Royal Mail letter, semaphore flags, Morse code, or any other medium.
Or is that too complicated a concept for you?
Apparently, the simple language of the order being sought is not nearly complicated enough for your twisted interpretation. A ban on communication between persons is quite simple, and it clearly would preclude all direct exchange of information, opinion, gossip, etc.
I'd imagine there'd be a way to comply with the heavy-handed order while having a venue that is out of reach of the ASBO.
Can they communicate indirectly, via mutual friends?
If not, then since they likely have a number of mutual friends, they are effectively being told not to communicate with anyone who communicates with others in the affected group. After all, what if a mutual friend mentions something one of the other members of the affected group said? How about indirect communication via two degrees of separation? If they are forbidden from indirect contact, then the order is perilously close to requiring solitary confinement or other drastic social exclusion.
An exclusion which prohibits communication with mutual friends is likely a good test case for the ECJ or the ECHR. Similarly, an order which imposes an onerous obligation on mutual friends which were not subjects of the order, would be a good test case for said mutual friends to bring to the ECJ or ECHR.
Ideally, the interface for my next TV would have an on/off function, an input select function, and maybe a volume control. Optionally, it could have a function for toggling how it handles inputs of different aspect ratios. I see nothing wrong with having a separate controller for a TV, provided it restricts itself to these few functions (and the input select function is of limited worth, to me).
All other media interface functions (whatever device they are presented on) would relate to the media source device, and would therefore not operate on the TV. This is where the real functionality would reside, and it has little to do with the TV.
How many gratuitous errors and claimed impossibilities do you generally consider acceptable in your version of science?
All of them, at least in a provisional sense. The provision being that each is promptly acknowledged as an error as soon as it becomes known that it was an error. Science progresses through the discovery of inconsistency or inaccuracy in existing explanations, and this means there will be occasional false positive. Science is not a fixed body of dogma independent of truth (that would describe most religions).
213 million six foot power strips daisy chained together...
The Fire Marshall will have an absolute conniption fit over that one.
Hah! Use the 12 foot versions and the conniptions will be halved... And halved again by using 20 foot single.outlet extension cords (not power bars). Problem solved!
If you're unlucky enough to be given a flight with an AA number, check if it's a codeshare and actually a BA flight. Much much better. AA reminds me of Air Canada at its worst: the staff would deny all knowledge of special meals and blithely state that since there were no special meals, there was actually no meal at all for you (I never received a meal from Air Canada, on dozens of transatlantic flights, while every other airline generally managed to supply one), then cut off anyone who smiled on the grounds they were drunk (happened to me twice, stone cold sober, only on Air Canada), and possibly slap them around to ensure they scowled like all the other inmates/passengers. Almost any other airline is preferable: SAS, Finnair, Lufthansa, Air France, BA, Iberia, hell even Delta or United are better than AA or Air Canada.
Meanwhile, you can cross six time zones from San Juan to Honolulu without having to tell anybody.
Unless you want to fly....
Indeed. Tell it to the TSA, who even stake out railways and highways nowadays. Of course, one could avoid vehicles altogether, at some cost in time.
Swimming in stages from Puerto Rico to Florida (via Hispaniola or the Turks & Caicos and then the Bahamas) is kind-of plausible and may even have been accomplished by a well-prepared athlete with a good support boat and crew alongside. But I rather doubt that anyone has managed to swim from the West coast (or Alaska) to Hawai'i or thence to Guam or American Samoa.
Since Puerto Rico and American Samoa are both U.S. territories, no passport should be needed for travel between them. But you'll have to tell the TSA person all about your trip if you fly.
Guns are legal, too. But if the feds make me pay for yours, I'll raise hell.
But likely not for long... especially if they're holding one of those guns to your head.
Mind you, I rather doubt that the feds would willingly allow anyone to have guns, other than their agents.
WTF? I'm of a similar age to you (within a few years). However, I don't recall a single "multiple choice" test in high school or university (engineering), or even when I returned to grad school (PhD) in mid-career. Every formal test involved writing essays and/or doing unexpected analysis and/or making unprompted calculations. Writing and publicly defending the thesis was another kettle of fish. I recall encountering multiple choice tests in primary school only, and they were far from the predominant form of test even then.
I occasionally teach an engineering course at the local university. It has a test at the end, and I never set any multiple choice questions (but every question has a clearly correct response which includes reasoning toward an answer). I expect the students to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of what was in the lectures and related class material. Making a lucky guess at the answer gets you no points - it's the process of reasoning from knowledge which is assessed.
Tricky question. A molly mule (female whose sire is a donkey and dam is a horse) can be impregnated by a stallion on occasion, but give birth to horses in that case. On the other hand, there are a couple of documented cases of a hinny mare (sire is horse, dam is donkey) giving birth to a novel hybrid when impregnated by a jack donkey.
I am the widow of A.Q. Khan from Pakistan. I am contacting you in good faith because I know you are a good person and will help me. I need your help in moving $6 trillion worth of plutonium out of the country. In exchange, you will receive a ten percent commission...
Shouldn't that be "In exchange, you will receive some polonium."?
I suppose you also have rejected laser printers in favor of good ol' dot matrix.
You and your new-fangled dot-matrix things. I prefer the trusty line printer, with its monospace all-upper-case one-font-only output. Very fast printing mechanism, but it can be hard to get the 14"x11" fanfold paper.
OK guys, raise your hands - how many have gotten 'feminine products' adverts?
That, and worse. It's partly a consequence of the whole family sharing the same IP address in conjunction with quasi-safe browsing habits.
We all have different logon accounts on each of several PCs, and we tend to use more than one browser per person (mostly Opera, Firefox, Chromium). However, both my wife and I have shown the kids how to get their browsers to automatically delete cookies and LSOs on terminating a session, and encourage them to clear private data regularly. So essentially all the vendors have to go on is the IP address, since the cookies are new every visit.
The only one that bugs me is the "daily deal" ad shown at one weather web site, which invariably shows me a picture of a tray of sushi (one of my favorite foods). I don't recall doing any online searching/browsing/shopping for sushi, and doubt if the "daily deal" even has a place offering sushi within 200km of me.
Didn't you mean "640TB blah blah blah".
We've already got at least 20TB of fixed disks at home (including online backups). The media server alone has 12TB.
The parents believe in their minds that they are in fact VERY interested in their child's well-being. Hence not wanting to vaccinate them.
The charitable interpretation is that the parents are deluding themselves, and indulging in a nasty form of child abuse.
Or did you mean "interested in their child's well-being" and actively working against it? That's the less charitable interpretation.
YES PLEASE! Finally high res screens on consumer electronics! I hope the rumor that Apple's computers will get updated with high res screens is also true. Laptop manufacturers need a kick in the butt to get them out of the 1366x768 doldrums.
Agreed. My 8-year-old laptop has 1920x1200 pixels in its 17" screen. I started looking for a replacement a couple of years ago, but the best screen available was mere HD (1920x1080), which has 120 rows fewer. I was hoping to get something with more pixels, not less! The old laptop still works fine (all praise to Xubuntu), so I'm willing to wait some more.
The brand name meant something when it actually was made in Japan. Once they started outsourcing to China, like everyone else, there's no reason to pay more for them than anyone else.
This.
My 8-year-old "made in Japan" Sony VAIO A117S laptop still runs fine, with its original 1.7GHz Pentium M, 1GiB memory, Radeon Mobility 9?00 (the label and all the marketing says 9700, but it reports itself as 9600), and gorgeous 1920x1200 17" LCD. We replaced the disk with a larger capacity model[*] about a year ago, because the 80GB original had become just too small (but was still running fine). That laptop has been our "kitchen PC" for 4 years and is used regularly for all sorts of stuff - browsing, email, word processing, image processing, watching videos from our media server, and so forth. With a couple of dance pads, it's used for Stepmania. It runs Xubuntu 10.04 LTS.
[*] Made in Thailand, not in Japan. Backed up regularly to our server, 'nuff said.
I think Larry Flint had it right with his satire of this politician years ago in Hustler. Away from ability to google the following "hustler santorum" but I'm sure it will index the proper links.
BTW, the link above for Rick Santorum contains material which would appall any normal human, but which Santorum himself is probably proud of, in his own morally-twisted way. The other links are to material he would be less enthusiastic about. The Asshole of the month page is from 2007, but Santorum was behaving like an asshole long before that.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets start again with COBOL ;) Java might actually be a good choice.
No, no, no! Use APL. After all, APL is easy!.
Confession: I have long had a soft spot for APL. It and Fortran IV were jointly the first programming languages I learned.
You can twist up the theoretical limits of this order all you like, as if you were a catholic schoolboy trying to find a loophole to get out of some medieval church ritual, but these people can live their lives pretty normally. They should just not be dicks about trying to circumvent the intent of the order.
According to TFA, the order being sought does not state an intent. It states a number of independent requirements to be legally imposed on the affected persons. One of these requirements is that they should not communicate with each other for 10 years. In other words, if they communicated in any way at all in the 10 year period - even just one asking another what the time is - they would be in actual breach of the order being sought. A communication between them would be in breach no matter what its topic or content, and no matter whether it employed speech, sign language, text message, Royal Mail letter, semaphore flags, Morse code, or any other medium.
Or is that too complicated a concept for you?
Apparently, the simple language of the order being sought is not nearly complicated enough for your twisted interpretation. A ban on communication between persons is quite simple, and it clearly would preclude all direct exchange of information, opinion, gossip, etc.
I'd imagine there'd be a way to comply with the heavy-handed order while having a venue that is out of reach of the ASBO.
Can they communicate indirectly, via mutual friends?
If not, then since they likely have a number of mutual friends, they are effectively being told not to communicate with anyone who communicates with others in the affected group. After all, what if a mutual friend mentions something one of the other members of the affected group said? How about indirect communication via two degrees of separation? If they are forbidden from indirect contact, then the order is perilously close to requiring solitary confinement or other drastic social exclusion.
An exclusion which prohibits communication with mutual friends is likely a good test case for the ECJ or the ECHR. Similarly, an order which imposes an onerous obligation on mutual friends which were not subjects of the order, would be a good test case for said mutual friends to bring to the ECJ or ECHR.
Ideally, the interface for my next TV would have an on/off function, an input select function, and maybe a volume control. Optionally, it could have a function for toggling how it handles inputs of different aspect ratios. I see nothing wrong with having a separate controller for a TV, provided it restricts itself to these few functions (and the input select function is of limited worth, to me).
All other media interface functions (whatever device they are presented on) would relate to the media source device, and would therefore not operate on the TV. This is where the real functionality would reside, and it has little to do with the TV.
Mr. Relativistic Physics appears to be having an affair with Ms. Soap Opera. Therefore, please don't be surprised by any outcome.
An interocitor will take care of both of them. Probably with a surprising outcome.
How many gratuitous errors and claimed impossibilities do you generally consider acceptable in your version of science?
All of them, at least in a provisional sense. The provision being that each is promptly acknowledged as an error as soon as it becomes known that it was an error. Science progresses through the discovery of inconsistency or inaccuracy in existing explanations, and this means there will be occasional false positive. Science is not a fixed body of dogma independent of truth (that would describe most religions).
It ended in everyone worrying about weather or not there head was the next to get chopped off.
Aren't you glad they didn't target bad spellers...
213 million six foot power strips daisy chained together...
The Fire Marshall will have an absolute conniption fit over that one.
Hah! Use the 12 foot versions and the conniptions will be halved... And halved again by using 20 foot single.outlet extension cords (not power bars). Problem solved!
If you're unlucky enough to be given a flight with an AA number, check if it's a codeshare and actually a BA flight. Much much better. AA reminds me of Air Canada at its worst: the staff would deny all knowledge of special meals and blithely state that since there were no special meals, there was actually no meal at all for you (I never received a meal from Air Canada, on dozens of transatlantic flights, while every other airline generally managed to supply one), then cut off anyone who smiled on the grounds they were drunk (happened to me twice, stone cold sober, only on Air Canada), and possibly slap them around to ensure they scowled like all the other inmates/passengers. Almost any other airline is preferable: SAS, Finnair, Lufthansa, Air France, BA, Iberia, hell even Delta or United are better than AA or Air Canada.
Cigars, rum, hookers.
At least one of these has value for almost anyone (and possibly more than one). Then there's the nice climate, the vintage cars, and so forth...
Meanwhile, you can cross six time zones from San Juan to Honolulu without having to tell anybody.
Unless you want to fly....
Indeed. Tell it to the TSA, who even stake out railways and highways nowadays. Of course, one could avoid vehicles altogether, at some cost in time.
Swimming in stages from Puerto Rico to Florida (via Hispaniola or the Turks & Caicos and then the Bahamas) is kind-of plausible and may even have been accomplished by a well-prepared athlete with a good support boat and crew alongside. But I rather doubt that anyone has managed to swim from the West coast (or Alaska) to Hawai'i or thence to Guam or American Samoa.
Since Puerto Rico and American Samoa are both U.S. territories, no passport should be needed for travel between them. But you'll have to tell the TSA person all about your trip if you fly.
Guns are legal, too. But if the feds make me pay for yours, I'll raise hell.
But likely not for long... especially if they're holding one of those guns to your head.
Mind you, I rather doubt that the feds would willingly allow anyone to have guns, other than their agents.
WTF? I'm of a similar age to you (within a few years). However, I don't recall a single "multiple choice" test in high school or university (engineering), or even when I returned to grad school (PhD) in mid-career. Every formal test involved writing essays and/or doing unexpected analysis and/or making unprompted calculations. Writing and publicly defending the thesis was another kettle of fish. I recall encountering multiple choice tests in primary school only, and they were far from the predominant form of test even then.
I occasionally teach an engineering course at the local university. It has a test at the end, and I never set any multiple choice questions (but every question has a clearly correct response which includes reasoning toward an answer). I expect the students to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of what was in the lectures and related class material. Making a lucky guess at the answer gets you no points - it's the process of reasoning from knowledge which is assessed.
Do mules count as a subspecies of horse/donkey?
Tricky question. A molly mule (female whose sire is a donkey and dam is a horse) can be impregnated by a stallion on occasion, but give birth to horses in that case. On the other hand, there are a couple of documented cases of a hinny mare (sire is horse, dam is donkey) giving birth to a novel hybrid when impregnated by a jack donkey.
The women anime fans have neckbeards too, in my experience.
Depends what's needed for the cosplay.
FWIW, a lot of them shave their pubes. Possibly inspired by hentai.
I am the widow of A.Q. Khan from Pakistan. I am contacting you in good faith because I know you are a good person and will help me. I need your help in moving $6 trillion worth of plutonium out of the country. In exchange, you will receive a ten percent commission...
Shouldn't that be "In exchange, you will receive some polonium."?
I suppose you also have rejected laser printers in favor of good ol' dot matrix.
You and your new-fangled dot-matrix things. I prefer the trusty line printer, with its monospace all-upper-case one-font-only output. Very fast printing mechanism, but it can be hard to get the 14"x11" fanfold paper.
Money talks. 'nuff said.
OK guys, raise your hands - how many have gotten 'feminine products' adverts?
That, and worse. It's partly a consequence of the whole family sharing the same IP address in conjunction with quasi-safe browsing habits.
We all have different logon accounts on each of several PCs, and we tend to use more than one browser per person (mostly Opera, Firefox, Chromium). However, both my wife and I have shown the kids how to get their browsers to automatically delete cookies and LSOs on terminating a session, and encourage them to clear private data regularly. So essentially all the vendors have to go on is the IP address, since the cookies are new every visit.
The only one that bugs me is the "daily deal" ad shown at one weather web site, which invariably shows me a picture of a tray of sushi (one of my favorite foods). I don't recall doing any online searching/browsing/shopping for sushi, and doubt if the "daily deal" even has a place offering sushi within 200km of me.
"16TB ought to be enough for anybody."
Didn't you mean "640TB blah blah blah".
We've already got at least 20TB of fixed disks at home (including online backups). The media server alone has 12TB.
The parents believe in their minds that they are in fact VERY interested in their child's well-being. Hence not wanting to vaccinate them.
The charitable interpretation is that the parents are deluding themselves, and indulging in a nasty form of child abuse.
Or did you mean "interested in their child's well-being" and actively working against it? That's the less charitable interpretation.
How does someone use the phrase `corporatist plutocrats` and not get modded into oblivion? Is this person 12?
Just call them "running dogs of Wall Street" then.
Maybe the Chinese have enough traditionalist shills here that it would be modded up, in aggregate.
YES PLEASE! Finally high res screens on consumer electronics! I hope the rumor that Apple's computers will get updated with high res screens is also true. Laptop manufacturers need a kick in the butt to get them out of the 1366x768 doldrums.
Agreed. My 8-year-old laptop has 1920x1200 pixels in its 17" screen. I started looking for a replacement a couple of years ago, but the best screen available was mere HD (1920x1080), which has 120 rows fewer. I was hoping to get something with more pixels, not less! The old laptop still works fine (all praise to Xubuntu), so I'm willing to wait some more.
The brand name meant something when it actually was made in Japan. Once they started outsourcing to China, like everyone else, there's no reason to pay more for them than anyone else.
This.
My 8-year-old "made in Japan" Sony VAIO A117S laptop still runs fine, with its original 1.7GHz Pentium M, 1GiB memory, Radeon Mobility 9?00 (the label and all the marketing says 9700, but it reports itself as 9600), and gorgeous 1920x1200 17" LCD. We replaced the disk with a larger capacity model[*] about a year ago, because the 80GB original had become just too small (but was still running fine). That laptop has been our "kitchen PC" for 4 years and is used regularly for all sorts of stuff - browsing, email, word processing, image processing, watching videos from our media server, and so forth. With a couple of dance pads, it's used for Stepmania. It runs Xubuntu 10.04 LTS.
[*] Made in Thailand, not in Japan. Backed up regularly to our server, 'nuff said.
I think Larry Flint had it right with his satire of this politician years ago in Hustler. Away from ability to google the following "hustler santorum" but I'm sure it will index the proper links.
If I'm not mistaken, you'd need to search more specifically than that. You might need "Asshole of the month" in your search as well as the terms "Rick Santorum" and "Larry Flynt".
BTW, the link above for Rick Santorum contains material which would appall any normal human, but which Santorum himself is probably proud of, in his own morally-twisted way. The other links are to material he would be less enthusiastic about. The Asshole of the month page is from 2007, but Santorum was behaving like an asshole long before that.