This is a story right out of the old Mission: Impossible TV series. An episode used this exact premise in at least one episode I can think of to cheat a guy who was using the same trick at his own game. They way they beat him was by remarking the cards and then remarking them using a different technology. In that show, the game was baccarat instead of poker. Of course, this was television and rather fanciful, yet I'm glad to see that someone actually has done it.... and even happier to see that they got caught at it.
A fellow I knew about ten years ago was wacko conspiracy theorist, "I've seen the mothership" UFO believer, who also was an incredible analog and digital electronics wizard. He told me that the NSA was already using carbon-based semiconductors running at much higher clock speeds for its various nefarious operations. This makes me wonder if carbon nanotube technology hadn't already been developed and implemented in "skunkworks" world and it's only now that it's being developed in universities. It's sort of parallels the development of public key encryption, something that the British intelligence developed in the late 1960's but kept secret until recently while it took nearly a decade for it to become known outside of the world of the spooks. Of course, encryption is just mathematics while carbon-based semiconductors are technology. But when an entity has nearly unlimited funds to accomplish something, they can find the minds to do it as well as pay for the development of the technology.
They didn't steal 7 milliseconds.. they had the information minutes or more likely a few hours before everybody else. Don't try blaming this on some simple technological advandage.
I agree. This trade was based upon a bit of inside information and it was executed in this way so that no one would notice, or so they hoped. Well, someone noticed and that cat is out of the bag.
I generally subscribe to Holmesian school of thought on such things: "Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth." I doubt that the traders used time travel or that one of them was able to speed up the speed of light specifically for this purpose, or that they executed this trade by guessing that it would happen precisely after it finished. And, as far as I know, John de Lancie is still an actor and not a member of the Q Continuum using this as a prank to play upon us. Therefore, eliminating all the other possibilities, the cause is insider trading.
There! Mystery solved. You may now congratulate me or denigrate me as you choose.
Re:Text based adventure as a boot option?
on
Boot To Zork
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I agree. The text-based adventure games are much more fun. The cyberspace equivalent of the Theater of the Mind.
I loved the Fortran-based MIT Adventure. I still have the source code of the version ported to Control Data Cyber mainframes that was floating around the lower-tier (not UC) California state universities, all of whom had Cybers, in the 1980's. I'll probably port it to C one of these days for shits and giggles one of these days so I can relive my undergrad days a bit.
Actually, when it comes to metadata, you could make a First Amendment case: freedom of association.
Indeed, and, in fact, this is the major argument being made by the ACLU acting on its own behalf in its lawsuit against the NSA over the collection of metadata. It allows the government to determine who its clients are, who are its members, etc. Numerous Supreme Court rulings from the civil rights era make it clear that the First Amendment guarantees the right to associate anonymously. It should also be noted that the First Amendment freedoms are the most protected by the courts. When the government feels the need to do so it MUST MUST MUST as little as possible and only to satisfy its legitimate needs and no farther. The courts call the application of this "strict scrutiny". Because this is a geeky forum, most people here know a way this collection of metadata can be done that protects the identity of the parties. Because this exists, the NSA's collection of meta data is unconstitutional on its face.
There is no point in arguing that the NSA has a legitimate need to collect metadata from phone companies and ISPs. We don't like it but It has that need, it can demonstrate the validity of that need, and the courts are going to recognize it. But there is a less restrictive way of doing it that would accomplish the same thing and they didn't use it.
I did a great job of writing this article. The first line is a the quote, the rest is my alleged contribution to this discussion. And I properly looked at the preview this time.
When upgrading my mac computers I have always seen a significant boost in performance on the same hardware (obviously).
That has not always been my experience. I upgraded my maxed out 5 year old iMac from Snow Leopard directly to Mountain Lion and it's noticeably more sluggish. But going from Leopard to Snow Leopard was a big improvement, probably because of the 64-bit kernel. It seems that unless the OS takes advantage of some hitherto unused hardware capability it's slower.
So, my conclusion is this: Upgrade == New heights in the development and marketing of Bloatware.
A very conservative friend seems to think I'm rather liberal when I think regulation is a good idea sometimes. Regulation *is* quite often a good idea when history has amply demonstrated that a business model cannot operate in a legitimate or non-abusive manner without it. Classic examples of this are banks and the the Wall Street financial market as well as the taxi business in places like San Francisco and New York, automobile manufacturing, trucking companies, and the labor markets. Great evils of various kinds have occurred when these things were not regulated. But sometimes overregulation creates problems. A great example is the airline industry. At one time, the airlines were highly regulated. Regardless of who you flew with, the fare would be the same for the same route and they were high. Airline travel in those days was quite expensive. Since airlines couldn't attract customers using fares, they differentiated themselves by offering great service (even in "cattle" class), better planes, etc. For example, when was the last time that any of you flew a Boeing 747 on a domestic flight that wasn't a leg of an international flight? In the 1970's, wide-bodied planes were common on the higher trafficked domestic flights. These days, airline service is awful but relatively inexpensive.
So I ask the question: Does ride-sharing really need to be regulated beyond a requirement that the vehicles and drivers have proper insurance? Is it anything like the wild west of unregulated taxi services in places like New York and San Francisco that created chaos?
You know, it's all well and good that these trolls can be forced to pay legal costs and other damages, but it really ought to be illegal to knowingly enforce a bad patent. The lawyers prosecuting these suits can be referred to the bar for disciplinary action. If lawyers started to be disbarred or even fined by the courts, the latter is within the power of the court, these things would stop very fast.
It's the same thing for the most part. The big difference though is that it doesn't require an IBM z-series mainframe to run. I'm not bad-mouthing IBM mainframes. The beasts IBM sells today are rather small, very fast, very flexible, and rock solid reliable. But they use an instruction set that is backwards compatible with that of the IBM 360 series mainframes of the 1960's and their successors, not the x86 instruction set that the rest of the world is using for servers. IBM's VM/CMS has been around for decades and is proven. This new OS has yet to prove itself.
He's done more for liberty in the USA than any politician has done in 50 years.
Except that what he has done is being largely ignored by most of "my fellow Americans", in the Nixon sense of the word.
I think you're referring to "Great Silent Majority". The Great Silent Majority is made up of morons whose stupidity is only exceeded by the ignorance of the politicians they elect to Congress, who live lives they believe that are so pathetically empty and unfulfilling that they must resort to television fantasy and reality shows to fill this perceived void.
I am now a part of the Slight Vocal Minority, many of which think Edward Snowden should be given a medal for revealing the illegal snooping the NSA has been doing on the American public and then put in prison for revealing what it is doing in the rest of the world.
Fortunately, such legislation will never survive constitutional scrutiny in the United States. Access to the Internet is a First-Amendment right. No law or government action can ban any individual from the Internet with certain very narrow exceptions, these applying to those on parole, probation, or federal supervised release, and even then appeals courts have been very hesitant to uphold such bans. Such restrictions almost never survive and only apply to people who have egregiously abused access to the Internet (e.g., computer hacking, selling or operating a child pornography distribution site), and even then only for as long as they're still under the thumb of parole or the courts. Once clear of them, the Internet is free and open. Now, an ISP can ban access to the Internet but the Internet is now so close to being ubiquitous, almost like the phone system, that's close to impossible now.
Despite the massive flaws in the American system which are frequently pointed out by myself and others here, we Yanks really are quite blessed by the the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights.
I understand why this fellow uses tape. Stored properly, the tape can last for decades. However, there is a larger problem, one that has been in existence since the invention of practical audio recording in 1877. Audio recording mediums as well as their formats regularly change. Let me see how many I can recall off the top of my head (in roughly chronological order):
Wax cylinders Edison flat disks The thinner 78 rpm 10- and 12-inch disks that eventually became the standard 16-inch 16 rpm disks that were used by radio stations to record broadcasts Magnetic wire Mono magnetic tape (1/4 and 1/2 inch) Three-track tape (for studio masters in the mid-1950's) Two-track stereo reel-to-reel tape Compact cassettes (mono, stereo, and quadraphonic) 33 rpm "long playing" records, the LP made with vinyl 45 rpm "singles", the ones with the big hole in the center Stereo LP's and 45's Multi-track one inch tape used for studio masters Quadraphonic LP's (that's four audio tracks) 14-bit digital recording onto VHS tape Compact disk (CD's) Super-audio CDs MP3, AAC, FLAC, PCM, AIFF, WAV, and whatever alphabet soup of compressed and uncompressed digital audio formats
I've left out most digital recording media for the masters because those can vary widely depending upon the computer system used.
The problem people making audio recordings face should be obvious now.
Recording media (and formats) are going to continue to change as recording technology continues to develop and evolve, and as computer data storage media continue to develop and evolve. In my mind, the only way to make a master recording and keep it fresh and readable is record it digitally at a very sampling frequency and at a high bit rate so the recording resolution is very high, and then every so often copy it to a new recording media. In short, audio recording in a digital world requires the preserver to take an active role in its preservation. So, in my mind, this guy's attitude in recording masters onto audio tape is laudable but probably not practical long-term.
I wonder how much of this stuff is already out in the wild thanks to Edward Snowden's efforts. Not much point if all this shit turns out to have already been released. It wouldn't surprise me if a good chunk of this is old news.
Actually, you will get neither if the NSA is able to read all encrypted communication. Simply put, if the government has the ability to penetrate all encrypted communications, there will be no privacy. If there is no privacy the government will eventually degenerate to a tyranny. Given a choice between a tyranny and dead Syrians, I choose the dead Syrians. I don't like the idea of people being killed by their government but I'd rather have the Syrian government killing Syrians than the American government killing Americans, something which will eventually happen if we lose our civil rights.
Don't doubt for a minute that there are forces in the government that are working toward that. They're mostly not evil people and most don't really understand what the ramifications of what they are doing, but history does repeat itself and there is plenty of history that demonstrates what happens when a government can do whatever it wants. Orwell's "1984" is fiction, not history, but it is based upon history and basic psychology. If we want to retain our civil rights, we need to fight and struggle for them, both in the courts and in civil disobedience if necessary.
Sometimes listening to old MP3s of Dimension-X or X-Minus-1 (which you can find on archive.org) is a lot of fun. It was a simpler age with the new sciences of atomic physics and morality to be explored.
Yes! I thoroughly enjoy listening to the old Dimension X and X Minux One radio shows from the 1950 and the mid-1950's, respectively. Incidentally, Frederick Pohl's stories were featured on occasion on these shows. This should be be a surprise; so were the stories of Asimov, Heinlein, and Bradbury. In fact, radio is a terrific medium for science fiction, a "theater of the mind" even more powerful than the original written works the radio plays are based upon.
Incidentally, my favorite X Minus One episode is "Star Bright" by Mark Clifton, a fine science fiction writer who died before his time.
I should have said that the Chinese economy is doomed to stagnation and decline without democratic reforms. They are coming, the Chinese people want it, the allegedly Communist party in power cannot kill enough people to stop it.
Well, I wasn't thinking of protectionism as being one of the "some others" but more or less right.
Another thing which is killing the Chinese economy is the lack of democracy. I don't mean democracy in terms of the way American government is organized and operates because as democracies go, it's not very democratic. Democracies necessarily require that the citizens are guaranteed a full set of civil rights, especially the right to freedom of speech, expression, and association and, regardless of what many may feel here, Americans have an extraordinary set of these that the courts time and again have forced governments to recognize. When citizens have these things, capitalism generally functions better.
When I read this story I found myself reacting with a great yawn. China is a very difficult place for an American Internet firm to do business because of the virulent corruption throughout its government and economy in general and the nonexistent rule of law, a court system that is not independent of the government in other words. Incidentally, these facts as well as some others will eventually lead to the collapse of China's economy.
It may be bad form for one to comment upon his own posting but Russia's position is, more or less, correct on this issue. American courts leave much to be desired in terms of fairness or actual justice. But Russia's are worse. American prisons are generally pretty awful compared to those of Western Europe. But Russia's are worse. The only thing I can see going for Russia is that it doesn't have a death penalty, which may be worse in that life in a Russian prison could easily make a person wish for death. American prisoners serving life sentences are not in any kind of paradise and prisons for such people are not pleasant places but it is possible to live a fairly decent and satisfying life if the inmate can lower his or her expectations.
"More stable" and "faster speeds" than what? The previously rubbish versions of Lion or Windows 8?
I upgraded my iMac from Panther directly to Mountain Lion recently. The result? It got slower, noticeably slower and sluggish. Granted, this is a five year old machine and is maxed out at 4 GB of RAM, but memory usage has not noticeably increased. It's just slower. It's also buggier. There is a nagging bug in the DVD player I have reported to Apple and they have not fixed that is not present in the Snow Leopard version. Fortunately, the Snow Leopard version still works in Mountain Lion and I can use it. (What? You don't write code while watching a DVD?) I guess I'm fortunate that my MacBook cannot be upgraded to Mountain Lion. It remains relatively speedy.
I think this guy has managed to use the word "nigger" in his posting more times than it is used in Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn". While that is kind of an anti-achievement, I think he has also more than adequately demonstrated his lack of gray matter between his ears. He's probably depressed because it's still hard to get Twinkies.
Well, a careful reading of this article tells me that it's not as bad as it seems. I haven't read the opinion but based upon what the article says it seems that what the court says about the sender of the text message also possibly being liable for an accident the driver is at-fault for is mere dicta and carries less authority as precedent. So, not so bad after all.
This NJ court is nuts. Sending a text message is quite innocuous and quite safe. What is not safe if the idiot behind the wheel to check the message without first pulling off the road or waiting for the next traffic light to read the message. After all, the phone stores the message! I hope this decision is appealed.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a story right out of the old Mission: Impossible TV series. An episode used this exact premise in at least one episode I can think of to cheat a guy who was using the same trick at his own game. They way they beat him was by remarking the cards and then remarking them using a different technology. In that show, the game was baccarat instead of poker. Of course, this was television and rather fanciful, yet I'm glad to see that someone actually has done it.... and even happier to see that they got caught at it.
A fellow I knew about ten years ago was wacko conspiracy theorist, "I've seen the mothership" UFO believer, who also was an incredible analog and digital electronics wizard. He told me that the NSA was already using carbon-based semiconductors running at much higher clock speeds for its various nefarious operations. This makes me wonder if carbon nanotube technology hadn't already been developed and implemented in "skunkworks" world and it's only now that it's being developed in universities. It's sort of parallels the development of public key encryption, something that the British intelligence developed in the late 1960's but kept secret until recently while it took nearly a decade for it to become known outside of the world of the spooks. Of course, encryption is just mathematics while carbon-based semiconductors are technology. But when an entity has nearly unlimited funds to accomplish something, they can find the minds to do it as well as pay for the development of the technology.
They didn't steal 7 milliseconds.. they had the information minutes or more likely a few hours before everybody else. Don't try blaming this on some simple technological advandage.
I agree. This trade was based upon a bit of inside information and it was executed in this way so that no one would notice, or so they hoped. Well, someone noticed and that cat is out of the bag.
I generally subscribe to Holmesian school of thought on such things: "Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth." I doubt that the traders used time travel or that one of them was able to speed up the speed of light specifically for this purpose, or that they executed this trade by guessing that it would happen precisely after it finished. And, as far as I know, John de Lancie is still an actor and not a member of the Q Continuum using this as a prank to play upon us. Therefore, eliminating all the other possibilities, the cause is insider trading.
There! Mystery solved. You may now congratulate me or denigrate me as you choose.
I agree. The text-based adventure games are much more fun. The cyberspace equivalent of the Theater of the Mind.
I loved the Fortran-based MIT Adventure. I still have the source code of the version ported to Control Data Cyber mainframes that was floating around the lower-tier (not UC) California state universities, all of whom had Cybers, in the 1980's. I'll probably port it to C one of these days for shits and giggles one of these days so I can relive my undergrad days a bit.
Actually, when it comes to metadata, you could make a First Amendment case: freedom of association.
Indeed, and, in fact, this is the major argument being made by the ACLU acting on its own behalf in its lawsuit against the NSA over the collection of metadata. It allows the government to determine who its clients are, who are its members, etc. Numerous Supreme Court rulings from the civil rights era make it clear that the First Amendment guarantees the right to associate anonymously. It should also be noted that the First Amendment freedoms are the most protected by the courts. When the government feels the need to do so it MUST MUST MUST as little as possible and only to satisfy its legitimate needs and no farther. The courts call the application of this "strict scrutiny". Because this is a geeky forum, most people here know a way this collection of metadata can be done that protects the identity of the parties. Because this exists, the NSA's collection of meta data is unconstitutional on its face.
There is no point in arguing that the NSA has a legitimate need to collect metadata from phone companies and ISPs. We don't like it but It has that need, it can demonstrate the validity of that need, and the courts are going to recognize it. But there is a less restrictive way of doing it that would accomplish the same thing and they didn't use it.
I did a great job of writing this article. The first line is a the quote, the rest is my alleged contribution to this discussion. And I properly looked at the preview this time.
When upgrading my mac computers I have always seen a significant boost in performance on the same hardware (obviously).
That has not always been my experience. I upgraded my maxed out 5 year old iMac from Snow Leopard directly to Mountain Lion and it's noticeably more sluggish. But going from Leopard to Snow Leopard was a big improvement, probably because of the 64-bit kernel. It seems that unless the OS takes advantage of some hitherto unused hardware capability it's slower.
So, my conclusion is this: Upgrade == New heights in the development and marketing of Bloatware.
A very conservative friend seems to think I'm rather liberal when I think regulation is a good idea sometimes. Regulation *is* quite often a good idea when history has amply demonstrated that a business model cannot operate in a legitimate or non-abusive manner without it. Classic examples of this are banks and the the Wall Street financial market as well as the taxi business in places like San Francisco and New York, automobile manufacturing, trucking companies, and the labor markets. Great evils of various kinds have occurred when these things were not regulated. But sometimes overregulation creates problems. A great example is the airline industry. At one time, the airlines were highly regulated. Regardless of who you flew with, the fare would be the same for the same route and they were high. Airline travel in those days was quite expensive. Since airlines couldn't attract customers using fares, they differentiated themselves by offering great service (even in "cattle" class), better planes, etc. For example, when was the last time that any of you flew a Boeing 747 on a domestic flight that wasn't a leg of an international flight? In the 1970's, wide-bodied planes were common on the higher trafficked domestic flights. These days, airline service is awful but relatively inexpensive.
So I ask the question: Does ride-sharing really need to be regulated beyond a requirement that the vehicles and drivers have proper insurance? Is it anything like the wild west of unregulated taxi services in places like New York and San Francisco that created chaos?
You know, it's all well and good that these trolls can be forced to pay legal costs and other damages, but it really ought to be illegal to knowingly enforce a bad patent. The lawyers prosecuting these suits can be referred to the bar for disciplinary action. If lawyers started to be disbarred or even fined by the courts, the latter is within the power of the court, these things would stop very fast.
It's the same thing for the most part. The big difference though is that it doesn't require an IBM z-series mainframe to run. I'm not bad-mouthing IBM mainframes. The beasts IBM sells today are rather small, very fast, very flexible, and rock solid reliable. But they use an instruction set that is backwards compatible with that of the IBM 360 series mainframes of the 1960's and their successors, not the x86 instruction set that the rest of the world is using for servers. IBM's VM/CMS has been around for decades and is proven. This new OS has yet to prove itself.
If you have any burning sensations, it's obvious that you need to be using condoms!
He's done more for liberty in the USA than any politician has done in 50 years.
Except that what he has done is being largely ignored by most of "my fellow Americans", in the Nixon sense of the word.
I think you're referring to "Great Silent Majority". The Great Silent Majority is made up of morons whose stupidity is only exceeded by the ignorance of the politicians they elect to Congress, who live lives they believe that are so pathetically empty and unfulfilling that they must resort to television fantasy and reality shows to fill this perceived void.
I am now a part of the Slight Vocal Minority, many of which think Edward Snowden should be given a medal for revealing the illegal snooping the NSA has been doing on the American public and then put in prison for revealing what it is doing in the rest of the world.
Fortunately, such legislation will never survive constitutional scrutiny in the United States. Access to the Internet is a First-Amendment right. No law or government action can ban any individual from the Internet with certain very narrow exceptions, these applying to those on parole, probation, or federal supervised release, and even then appeals courts have been very hesitant to uphold such bans. Such restrictions almost never survive and only apply to people who have egregiously abused access to the Internet (e.g., computer hacking, selling or operating a child pornography distribution site), and even then only for as long as they're still under the thumb of parole or the courts. Once clear of them, the Internet is free and open. Now, an ISP can ban access to the Internet but the Internet is now so close to being ubiquitous, almost like the phone system, that's close to impossible now.
Despite the massive flaws in the American system which are frequently pointed out by myself and others here, we Yanks really are quite blessed by the the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights.
I understand why this fellow uses tape. Stored properly, the tape can last for decades. However, there is a larger problem, one that has been in existence since the invention of practical audio recording in 1877. Audio recording mediums as well as their formats regularly change. Let me see how many I can recall off the top of my head (in roughly chronological order):
Wax cylinders
Edison flat disks
The thinner 78 rpm 10- and 12-inch disks that eventually became the standard
16-inch 16 rpm disks that were used by radio stations to record broadcasts
Magnetic wire
Mono magnetic tape (1/4 and 1/2 inch)
Three-track tape (for studio masters in the mid-1950's)
Two-track stereo reel-to-reel tape
Compact cassettes (mono, stereo, and quadraphonic)
33 rpm "long playing" records, the LP made with vinyl
45 rpm "singles", the ones with the big hole in the center
Stereo LP's and 45's
Multi-track one inch tape used for studio masters
Quadraphonic LP's (that's four audio tracks)
14-bit digital recording onto VHS tape
Compact disk (CD's)
Super-audio CDs
MP3, AAC, FLAC, PCM, AIFF, WAV, and whatever alphabet soup of compressed and uncompressed digital audio formats
I've left out most digital recording media for the masters because those can vary widely depending upon the computer system used.
The problem people making audio recordings face should be obvious now.
Recording media (and formats) are going to continue to change as recording technology continues to develop and evolve, and as computer data storage media continue to develop and evolve. In my mind, the only way to make a master recording and keep it fresh and readable is record it digitally at a very sampling frequency and at a high bit rate so the recording resolution is very high, and then every so often copy it to a new recording media. In short, audio recording in a digital world requires the preserver to take an active role in its preservation. So, in my mind, this guy's attitude in recording masters onto audio tape is laudable but probably not practical long-term.
I wonder how much of this stuff is already out in the wild thanks to Edward Snowden's efforts. Not much point if all this shit turns out to have already been released. It wouldn't surprise me if a good chunk of this is old news.
Actually, you will get neither if the NSA is able to read all encrypted communication. Simply put, if the government has the ability to penetrate all encrypted communications, there will be no privacy. If there is no privacy the government will eventually degenerate to a tyranny. Given a choice between a tyranny and dead Syrians, I choose the dead Syrians. I don't like the idea of people being killed by their government but I'd rather have the Syrian government killing Syrians than the American government killing Americans, something which will eventually happen if we lose our civil rights.
Don't doubt for a minute that there are forces in the government that are working toward that. They're mostly not evil people and most don't really understand what the ramifications of what they are doing, but history does repeat itself and there is plenty of history that demonstrates what happens when a government can do whatever it wants. Orwell's "1984" is fiction, not history, but it is based upon history and basic psychology. If we want to retain our civil rights, we need to fight and struggle for them, both in the courts and in civil disobedience if necessary.
Sometimes listening to old MP3s of Dimension-X or X-Minus-1 (which you can find on archive.org) is a lot of fun. It was a simpler age with the new sciences of atomic physics and morality to be explored.
Yes! I thoroughly enjoy listening to the old Dimension X and X Minux One radio shows from the 1950 and the mid-1950's, respectively. Incidentally, Frederick Pohl's stories were featured on occasion on these shows. This should be be a surprise; so were the stories of Asimov, Heinlein, and Bradbury. In fact, radio is a terrific medium for science fiction, a "theater of the mind" even more powerful than the original written works the radio plays are based upon.
Incidentally, my favorite X Minus One episode is "Star Bright" by Mark Clifton, a fine science fiction writer who died before his time.
I should have said that the Chinese economy is doomed to stagnation and decline without democratic reforms. They are coming, the Chinese people want it, the allegedly Communist party in power cannot kill enough people to stop it.
Well, I wasn't thinking of protectionism as being one of the "some others" but more or less right.
Another thing which is killing the Chinese economy is the lack of democracy. I don't mean democracy in terms of the way American government is organized and operates because as democracies go, it's not very democratic. Democracies necessarily require that the citizens are guaranteed a full set of civil rights, especially the right to freedom of speech, expression, and association and, regardless of what many may feel here, Americans have an extraordinary set of these that the courts time and again have forced governments to recognize. When citizens have these things, capitalism generally functions better.
When I read this story I found myself reacting with a great yawn. China is a very difficult place for an American Internet firm to do business because of the virulent corruption throughout its government and economy in general and the nonexistent rule of law, a court system that is not independent of the government in other words. Incidentally, these facts as well as some others will eventually lead to the collapse of China's economy.
I believe Russia.
RUSSIA.
It may be bad form for one to comment upon his own posting but Russia's position is, more or less, correct on this issue. American courts leave much to be desired in terms of fairness or actual justice. But Russia's are worse. American prisons are generally pretty awful compared to those of Western Europe. But Russia's are worse. The only thing I can see going for Russia is that it doesn't have a death penalty, which may be worse in that life in a Russian prison could easily make a person wish for death. American prisoners serving life sentences are not in any kind of paradise and prisons for such people are not pleasant places but it is possible to live a fairly decent and satisfying life if the inmate can lower his or her expectations.
"More stable" and "faster speeds" than what? The previously rubbish versions of Lion or Windows 8?
I upgraded my iMac from Panther directly to Mountain Lion recently. The result? It got slower, noticeably slower and sluggish. Granted, this is a five year old machine and is maxed out at 4 GB of RAM, but memory usage has not noticeably increased. It's just slower. It's also buggier. There is a nagging bug in the DVD player I have reported to Apple and they have not fixed that is not present in the Snow Leopard version. Fortunately, the Snow Leopard version still works in Mountain Lion and I can use it. (What? You don't write code while watching a DVD?) I guess I'm fortunate that my MacBook cannot be upgraded to Mountain Lion. It remains relatively speedy.
I think this guy has managed to use the word "nigger" in his posting more times than it is used in Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn". While that is kind of an anti-achievement, I think he has also more than adequately demonstrated his lack of gray matter between his ears. He's probably depressed because it's still hard to get Twinkies.
Well, a careful reading of this article tells me that it's not as bad as it seems. I haven't read the opinion but based upon what the article says it seems that what the court says about the sender of the text message also possibly being liable for an accident the driver is at-fault for is mere dicta and carries less authority as precedent. So, not so bad after all.
This NJ court is nuts. Sending a text message is quite innocuous and quite safe. What is not safe if the idiot behind the wheel to check the message without first pulling off the road or waiting for the next traffic light to read the message. After all, the phone stores the message! I hope this decision is appealed.