Yes, but only when the fuel line and tank have been compromised by the crash (and the tank is mostly full), so it's relatively rare. They try to design them to stop it from happening.
A well recorded instance is the early Ford Pinto, where cost-cutting meant that the fuel system was easily compromised in a crash.
Note that it doesn't ash the whole car like in Hollywood - there's just not that much fuel in there. It's a shockwave and a new source of fire, that's all.
Surely, the executive privilege thing is to protect state secrets, not to protect state officals?
and
Is there any actual basis in law for this claim?
You have to realise that the basis for "executive privilege" in the form it exists in the US is more or less "I have a stick, you will do as I say". It's the de-facto observation that the executive branch can do more or less anything it wants that won't actually get it impeached, regardless of what the written law may say. The courts can tell the executive to hand over these documents, and the executive will just say "no", and then the courts will look silly - it's the executive that is responsible for enforcing the orders of the courts, and they can simply decline to enforce the ones they don't like. This may be technically a crime, but again it's the executive (via the justice department) who decides whether to prosecute crimes. Since the judicial branch of the government cannot ever win this game, "executive privilege" just means that they won't embarrass themselves by doing it.
Essentially, the only direct control that can be exerted over the executive branch is impeachment, and anything that does not merit this cannot be controlled. It's a design flaw in the US government. It's also the reason why the executive is rife with low levels of corruption.
Also: fire extinguishers are meant to be used to save people, not save cars. If you have someone trying to get out of a car that has a small fire in the engine compartment and you use up the extinguisher trying to put it out- now you have someone still in the car, a fire, and an empty extinguisher.
On the other hand, if that fire gets to the fuel line, you could have a fuel tank explosion on your hands - it's not the fireball-o-rama that you see on TV, but it will throw the car into the air, and probably kill anybody still alive inside it. So if you can use the extinguisher to put out the fire, that might not be such a bad idea.
But if you've got a fire in a car, you should really be thinking about picking up anybody still inside the car and getting a couple hundred yards away from it as fast as possible. The best thing to do about a car fire is to be somewhere else, if that's at all possible.
People, in fact, play these games because of the grind.
I do not think you know what this word means. The grind is, by definition, that part of the game which they do not want to play. The grind is when you stand in a field for 10 hours punching rats so that you can get the skill which you actually want to use instead of punching. If you are enjoying yourself, then you are not grinding. If you are repetitively killing the same critter 500 times over to advance in level and unlock the next batch of content, or collect a full set of equipment so that you can take on the really tough parts of the game, then you are grinding.
Grind is to games what padding is to novels. It is inserted to make the game longer without having to actually create more content. Game content is about the experience of playing the game. Grinding is about making a number larger. Grinding can be accomplished most effectively by a computer; content is utterly pointless if you aren't playing it.
Hence, anything in the game which drives people to cheat is, by definition, grind. This is pretty much what the word means.
(and also reinforced to me why game code shouldn't be written in C; at least use C++, people...)
Realistically, this isn't important. It might work for minor desktop applications, but for any network system, if you can't get it right in C, then you aren't going to be able to get it right in C++ or Java or whatever the language of the day is, either.
Bounds errors are by far the simplest problem to detect and write code to avoid. If you cannot get that right, you will not get more subtle issues of network synchronisation right. You can easily argue that languages which eliminate the problem of bounds errors will save you development time by not having to worry about them; you really can't argue that they will make the system any less vulnerable to things like speed or item duplication attacks. The only particularly interesting thing about bounds errors is that they're the main source of remote code execution attacks.
In America they grow mostly maize and wheat, which can be easily automated by dragging heavy machinery across the top of the soil. In Japan they grow mostly fruit and vegetables, which have to be carefully picked from the plants. Tractors are just not that useful to them, which is why they don't really use them. Harvesting is mostly done by hand because the land of genius automation has not been able to find a way to automate it - until now (maybe).
Here's a hint at the problems they have to deal with: the Japanese radish (one of their staple vegetables) is a foot long and about three inches wide. It takes a lot of careful pulling to get something that size out of the ground without damaging it.
Also, at $1800 per, your not going to see people investing in these when they can just hire some cheap child labor.
What country do you think Japan is in?
This is not China or India. They do not have "cheap child labour". This is the country with the highest per-capita wages in the world. This is where labour is at its most expensive. This is also the country where children go to school 10 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week, from the age when they can hold a pencil until they go to university. There's no child labour at all, let alone cheap.
now figure out how you're going to get it back down to the ground
Don't underestimate how easy this is just because NASA makes it look hard. The only things that are hard to bring down from orbit are people and delicate equipment. For the rest, you put it in a big box, and you drop it (into an ocean). It is not hard to make a container that can survive being dropped from orbit into an ocean, if the contents can happily survive high heat and pressure.
you need it orbiting the sun
Anything that reaches escape velocity from the planet is more or less in orbit around the star. It's already got the orbital velocity of the planet, you just have to get it out of that gravity well and then stabilise it.
I posed the question "What do you say to someone who says that open source software is difficult to use, or buggy?"
Well, that was a dumb question deserving of ridicule.
Either it means "There exists at least one piece of open-source software that is either difficult to use or buggy", in which case it's a worthless question because you haven't named the piece of software, or it means "Every piece of software written in the open-source style is difficult to use and buggy", in which case it's obvious nonsense.
The question demonstrates cluelessness on a fundamental level. There is no real relationship between whether a piece of software has the source available, whether it is easy to use, and whether it is reliable. There is no sane reason to try to lump all these things together.
This part of the case is not really about whether he committed a crime or not. This is about whether or not the RIAA should have to prove that he actually committed a crime, or whether they can wave their "we're rich" stick in the air and get him convicted.
The RIAA are treating this whole affair as a profit centre, by cutting their "investigations" to the point where they spend pretty much nothing on them, and pushing for fast settlement. The result is a fairly arbitrary cash-grab by a large corporation that is targetting vulnerable individuals who may or may not have actually done anything wrong - it's a safe bet that at least some of them didn't, but settled anyway when the RIAA explained that this would be cheaper than fighting them in court.
This has to stop. The way to stop it is to force the RIAA to do a proper investigation. That means throwing out all their "we don't need no stinking evidence - come on mate, you can see he's guilty, it's written all over his face" lawsuits.
While I think NO penalties for ignoring copyright infringement is a bad idea
Kindly explain why you think it is a bad idea for people to share what they have, and that we should stop them from doing this. Note that this is the exact opposite of what most children are taught is the "right" way to behave.
The internet has finally brought these two fundamentally opposed notions into direct conflict. There can be no compromise between those who want to base society on taking/withholding and those who want to base it on sharing, and that's what we're looking at here.
Do you share your ball with the other kids on the playground, so that you can all enjoy the game, or do you reserve it for the few who can afford to pay you, which means there aren't enough players for a good game but you'll benefit more from it? It's all the same ethical decision at the bottom of it.
I don't think it's entirely unfair to assume that an article entitled "Steal this Wi-Fi" is about stealing Wi-Fi.
Your expectations aside, literate people would expect it to be an allusion to the well-known Steal this book, a bestseller on how to obtain a free buffalo from the US government.
I wonder about the new speed specification... in my experience even with no other devices on the USB bus getting 480mbit was impossible. I always had to resort to firewire for my drive caddy because I got consistent results with it.
480Mbit is the maximum permissible speed. There is no requirement for a device or host controller to actually support running at that speed. It's the same thing that you get with Ethernet - 100Mbit is the speed limit, not the speed requirement, and most equipment that you can buy will not actually work anywhere near that fast.
This is before considering the overheads in the protocol.
First, a minor point, banks don't issue money (they used to but that creates undesireable barriers to trade) and thus making banks adhere to the gold standard is meaningless. Governments make currency standards.
Watch it. Learn. Our system of currency is based on nothing more than a pile of lies and a mechanism for transferring wealth into the hands of the wealthy. It is also based on perpetually accelerating the rate of growth, which is so laughably unsustainable that it's amazing it has lasted this long.
Oh boy. You haven't seen IT hiring practices, have you? No person shall be barred from employment for reason of age, gender, race, appearance, incompetence, or general desire to burn the company to the ground. Nor shall we check any of these things when hiring. Instead, we shall hire based on their ability to preach about the importance of "teamwork" and "communication" skills, and their ability to lie like a salesdroid.
The British system is not designed to be democratic, it is designed to give the illusion of democracy while still allowing the same people to rule: The companies and rich people who donate money to political parties.
Actually, that's a misconception. The British government was designed in the wake of a series of civil wars and revolutions to give the politicians the illusion of power while largely restraining them from actually doing anything. Recently they've been starting to wriggle out from that a bit, and sometime in the next couple of hundred years we're probably going to have to round them all up and have them shot (again - this seems to be necessary every 3 to 4 centuries), but for the most part they're so buried in infighting and bureaucracy that they can't cause any real trouble. Note that the system is designed to resist groups like the Green party who want to get the government to actually do things.
This is probably the main reason why large corporations haven't really been able to gain a stronghold in the UK. There's nobody to bribe who can really do anything.
For example, as we know it there are some parameters in the standard model of physics that have to be set just right in order for the universe as it is currently set to exist. That is for the strength of the gravitional force, magnetic force, atomic etc.
Numerous hypotheses have been advanced for this, some of which may (or will) become provable or falsifiable when science develops far enough. Your argument is based on current ignorance, not some fundamental limitation of the scientific method.
(One of the simplest theories states that all possible combinations of parameters are instantiated in some universe, and only those which are viable survive; this one would become provable if we found a way to access the others)
Which God are they promoting as being compatible with their science curriculum? Because I'm pretty sure that they can't be claiming all religions are compatible with it - there are sure to be some which just aren't.
Odds are that they're only promoting one (or a handful of) major religions. Aren't there laws against that sort of thing?
The Church-Turing thesis is unprovable even alone - it's a philosophical observation of something that ought to be true and appears to be, but it is mathematically impossible to prove that it is true (because it has an arbitrary self-referential definition in the middle of it). You do not need to posit that the universe is a simulation in order to question the thesis - it's just that nobody who has pursued that line of thinking has found that it leads to any kind of meaningful conclusions.
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the Church-Turing thesis is good enough for us to get on with working on things, neither more nor less.
There are lies, damn lies, statistics, and netcraft website counts.
And that's before we consider factors like "what do these numbers mean anyway?".
Consider this: for a given large number of websites, running on a hosting provider, then the total number of Windows servers required to host those sites is considerably larger than the total number of Linux-based servers required to host those same sites (all running on identical hardware), because Linux is simply more hardware-efficient. So we would naturally expect the number of Linux-based servers to be lower, all else being equal.
So what is it that you really want to count anyway? I don't see a good answer.
That's 1990s stuff. The whole CISC vs RISC thing has been completely obsoleted by modern chip designs, which render the distinction meaningless. RISC was a solution to a problem that no longer exists (and CISC was nothing more than the lack of a solution).
You can build CPUs fast or low power. For ia32 CPUs built fast, see Intel and AMD. For them built low-power, see Via. You can buy laptops with Via chips in them, and they have considerably more battery life. Don't whine when you find out that they won't run Oblivion, or Vista, because they aren't that fast.
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Yes, but only when the fuel line and tank have been compromised by the crash (and the tank is mostly full), so it's relatively rare. They try to design them to stop it from happening.
A well recorded instance is the early Ford Pinto, where cost-cutting meant that the fuel system was easily compromised in a crash.
Note that it doesn't ash the whole car like in Hollywood - there's just not that much fuel in there. It's a shockwave and a new source of fire, that's all.
Here's a video of an exploding fuel tank in a Pinto.
and
You have to realise that the basis for "executive privilege" in the form it exists in the US is more or less "I have a stick, you will do as I say". It's the de-facto observation that the executive branch can do more or less anything it wants that won't actually get it impeached, regardless of what the written law may say. The courts can tell the executive to hand over these documents, and the executive will just say "no", and then the courts will look silly - it's the executive that is responsible for enforcing the orders of the courts, and they can simply decline to enforce the ones they don't like. This may be technically a crime, but again it's the executive (via the justice department) who decides whether to prosecute crimes. Since the judicial branch of the government cannot ever win this game, "executive privilege" just means that they won't embarrass themselves by doing it.
Essentially, the only direct control that can be exerted over the executive branch is impeachment, and anything that does not merit this cannot be controlled. It's a design flaw in the US government. It's also the reason why the executive is rife with low levels of corruption.
On the other hand, if that fire gets to the fuel line, you could have a fuel tank explosion on your hands - it's not the fireball-o-rama that you see on TV, but it will throw the car into the air, and probably kill anybody still alive inside it. So if you can use the extinguisher to put out the fire, that might not be such a bad idea.
But if you've got a fire in a car, you should really be thinking about picking up anybody still inside the car and getting a couple hundred yards away from it as fast as possible. The best thing to do about a car fire is to be somewhere else, if that's at all possible.
I do not think you know what this word means. The grind is, by definition, that part of the game which they do not want to play. The grind is when you stand in a field for 10 hours punching rats so that you can get the skill which you actually want to use instead of punching. If you are enjoying yourself, then you are not grinding. If you are repetitively killing the same critter 500 times over to advance in level and unlock the next batch of content, or collect a full set of equipment so that you can take on the really tough parts of the game, then you are grinding.
Grind is to games what padding is to novels. It is inserted to make the game longer without having to actually create more content. Game content is about the experience of playing the game. Grinding is about making a number larger. Grinding can be accomplished most effectively by a computer; content is utterly pointless if you aren't playing it.
Hence, anything in the game which drives people to cheat is, by definition, grind. This is pretty much what the word means.
Realistically, this isn't important. It might work for minor desktop applications, but for any network system, if you can't get it right in C, then you aren't going to be able to get it right in C++ or Java or whatever the language of the day is, either.
Bounds errors are by far the simplest problem to detect and write code to avoid. If you cannot get that right, you will not get more subtle issues of network synchronisation right. You can easily argue that languages which eliminate the problem of bounds errors will save you development time by not having to worry about them; you really can't argue that they will make the system any less vulnerable to things like speed or item duplication attacks. The only particularly interesting thing about bounds errors is that they're the main source of remote code execution attacks.
In America they grow mostly maize and wheat, which can be easily automated by dragging heavy machinery across the top of the soil. In Japan they grow mostly fruit and vegetables, which have to be carefully picked from the plants. Tractors are just not that useful to them, which is why they don't really use them. Harvesting is mostly done by hand because the land of genius automation has not been able to find a way to automate it - until now (maybe).
Here's a hint at the problems they have to deal with: the Japanese radish (one of their staple vegetables) is a foot long and about three inches wide. It takes a lot of careful pulling to get something that size out of the ground without damaging it.
What country do you think Japan is in?
This is not China or India. They do not have "cheap child labour". This is the country with the highest per-capita wages in the world. This is where labour is at its most expensive. This is also the country where children go to school 10 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week, from the age when they can hold a pencil until they go to university. There's no child labour at all, let alone cheap.
Don't underestimate how easy this is just because NASA makes it look hard. The only things that are hard to bring down from orbit are people and delicate equipment. For the rest, you put it in a big box, and you drop it (into an ocean). It is not hard to make a container that can survive being dropped from orbit into an ocean, if the contents can happily survive high heat and pressure.
Anything that reaches escape velocity from the planet is more or less in orbit around the star. It's already got the orbital velocity of the planet, you just have to get it out of that gravity well and then stabilise it.
Well, that was a dumb question deserving of ridicule.
Either it means "There exists at least one piece of open-source software that is either difficult to use or buggy", in which case it's a worthless question because you haven't named the piece of software, or it means "Every piece of software written in the open-source style is difficult to use and buggy", in which case it's obvious nonsense.
The question demonstrates cluelessness on a fundamental level. There is no real relationship between whether a piece of software has the source available, whether it is easy to use, and whether it is reliable. There is no sane reason to try to lump all these things together.
This part of the case is not really about whether he committed a crime or not. This is about whether or not the RIAA should have to prove that he actually committed a crime, or whether they can wave their "we're rich" stick in the air and get him convicted.
The RIAA are treating this whole affair as a profit centre, by cutting their "investigations" to the point where they spend pretty much nothing on them, and pushing for fast settlement. The result is a fairly arbitrary cash-grab by a large corporation that is targetting vulnerable individuals who may or may not have actually done anything wrong - it's a safe bet that at least some of them didn't, but settled anyway when the RIAA explained that this would be cheaper than fighting them in court.
This has to stop. The way to stop it is to force the RIAA to do a proper investigation. That means throwing out all their "we don't need no stinking evidence - come on mate, you can see he's guilty, it's written all over his face" lawsuits.
And from my past experiences of UK schools, they're probably counting the Intel Macs in that figure.
Kindly explain why you think it is a bad idea for people to share what they have, and that we should stop them from doing this. Note that this is the exact opposite of what most children are taught is the "right" way to behave.
The internet has finally brought these two fundamentally opposed notions into direct conflict. There can be no compromise between those who want to base society on taking/withholding and those who want to base it on sharing, and that's what we're looking at here.
Do you share your ball with the other kids on the playground, so that you can all enjoy the game, or do you reserve it for the few who can afford to pay you, which means there aren't enough players for a good game but you'll benefit more from it? It's all the same ethical decision at the bottom of it.
And always with the very best of intentions.
Your expectations aside, literate people would expect it to be an allusion to the well-known Steal this book, a bestseller on how to obtain a free buffalo from the US government.
Crazy Eddie is supposed to fail.
480Mbit is the maximum permissible speed. There is no requirement for a device or host controller to actually support running at that speed. It's the same thing that you get with Ethernet - 100Mbit is the speed limit, not the speed requirement, and most equipment that you can buy will not actually work anywhere near that fast.
This is before considering the overheads in the protocol.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279
Watch it. Learn. Our system of currency is based on nothing more than a pile of lies and a mechanism for transferring wealth into the hands of the wealthy. It is also based on perpetually accelerating the rate of growth, which is so laughably unsustainable that it's amazing it has lasted this long.
Oh boy. You haven't seen IT hiring practices, have you? No person shall be barred from employment for reason of age, gender, race, appearance, incompetence, or general desire to burn the company to the ground. Nor shall we check any of these things when hiring. Instead, we shall hire based on their ability to preach about the importance of "teamwork" and "communication" skills, and their ability to lie like a salesdroid.
I wish I was making this stuff up.
Actually, that's a misconception. The British government was designed in the wake of a series of civil wars and revolutions to give the politicians the illusion of power while largely restraining them from actually doing anything. Recently they've been starting to wriggle out from that a bit, and sometime in the next couple of hundred years we're probably going to have to round them all up and have them shot (again - this seems to be necessary every 3 to 4 centuries), but for the most part they're so buried in infighting and bureaucracy that they can't cause any real trouble. Note that the system is designed to resist groups like the Green party who want to get the government to actually do things.
This is probably the main reason why large corporations haven't really been able to gain a stronghold in the UK. There's nobody to bribe who can really do anything.
Sheer nonsense. You did not even bother to read the post which you are replying to.
Numerous hypotheses have been advanced for this, some of which may (or will) become provable or falsifiable when science develops far enough. Your argument is based on current ignorance, not some fundamental limitation of the scientific method.
(One of the simplest theories states that all possible combinations of parameters are instantiated in some universe, and only those which are viable survive; this one would become provable if we found a way to access the others)
Which God are they promoting as being compatible with their science curriculum? Because I'm pretty sure that they can't be claiming all religions are compatible with it - there are sure to be some which just aren't.
Odds are that they're only promoting one (or a handful of) major religions. Aren't there laws against that sort of thing?
The Church-Turing thesis is unprovable even alone - it's a philosophical observation of something that ought to be true and appears to be, but it is mathematically impossible to prove that it is true (because it has an arbitrary self-referential definition in the middle of it). You do not need to posit that the universe is a simulation in order to question the thesis - it's just that nobody who has pursued that line of thinking has found that it leads to any kind of meaningful conclusions.
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the Church-Turing thesis is good enough for us to get on with working on things, neither more nor less.
And that's before we consider factors like "what do these numbers mean anyway?".
Consider this: for a given large number of websites, running on a hosting provider, then the total number of Windows servers required to host those sites is considerably larger than the total number of Linux-based servers required to host those same sites (all running on identical hardware), because Linux is simply more hardware-efficient. So we would naturally expect the number of Linux-based servers to be lower, all else being equal.
So what is it that you really want to count anyway? I don't see a good answer.
That's 1990s stuff. The whole CISC vs RISC thing has been completely obsoleted by modern chip designs, which render the distinction meaningless. RISC was a solution to a problem that no longer exists (and CISC was nothing more than the lack of a solution).
You can build CPUs fast or low power. For ia32 CPUs built fast, see Intel and AMD. For them built low-power, see Via. You can buy laptops with Via chips in them, and they have considerably more battery life. Don't whine when you find out that they won't run Oblivion, or Vista, because they aren't that fast.