That, and that
a) Texas actually was independent, had broken off by military force, and was likely to keep that status on its own,
b) They planned to join the U.S. from the beggining, but were rebuffed.
I am a laweyr, but you'd have to be pretty damned stupid or fancy yourself a sovereign nation (but I repeat myself) to take this as legal advice.
Warning: check your idealism at the door before reading this. It is *entirely* realpolitick/positive law, and not the world as it "should" be.
There certainly is "the Law of Nations," which is ancient. It's a basic and largely unwritten code of conduct between nations (don't kill the other guys diplomats, etc.).
Treaties such as the Geneva Convention have extended these standars.
"International Law" is a newer concept. and is largely wieleded as a buzzword by discontents within a country to achieve what they cannot through the legal process. It tends to be claims of authority for unratified treaties and the like, an attempts to give authority to UN proclamations.
Basically, international law is whatever the victor of the last war says it is, or is willing to abide by. As an example, a "naval salute" in the days of cannons consisted of each ship emptying it's cannons to show that they were no longer prepared to fire on one another. SHips alternated cannons until each was empty. The exception was the Royal Navy (Britain), which was entitled to have the other ship empty its entire battery before emptying its own. Why? Because Britain ruled the seas from the smashing of the Armada until surpassed by the U.S. this century. Today, if we still had such ships, it would be the U.S. receiving the salute from Britain first.
The bottom line is that "international law" means nothing if you don't have the military power to back your position. ANother way of putting it is that today it is whatever the U.S. says it is.
Treaties are another matter, but they are generally not at issue when folks cry "international law."
. . . why the plastic liner inside you microwave shrivelled, your house burned up after a gas explosion, but was put out by the flooding washing machine . . .
The biggest failing of the later series, and where the writers/producers/poohbahs just plain failed to "get it," is that the newer series were about the charactersm, whereas Star Trek was not.
Star Trek *had* characters, but we weren't expected to care about them as themselves, but what they stood for. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are different parts of our own mind and culture coming into conflict. Spock was interesting as the outsider looking in for the observation; in the newer series, we're supposed to care about the stupid robot *himself*.
[The spinoffs aren't the only shows to make this mistake--compare the first half-season of Alien Nation, which was very well done and was about the conflict rather than the races, to the rest of its run, in which we were supposed to become interested in the details of the space beasties. The early episodes frequently crammed a feature-lenght plot into the hour, whereas the later ones spent time babbling about the eggs . . . Or _Heat of the Night_. The movie and early television series had the conflict between the two characters, whereas it devolved into them being chums fighting other evils . ..]
Anyway, skip the character development and write a better plot. Don't waste time on the characters "growth," or let excessive consistency get in the way of a good episode.
And a couple of quibbles after looking at the page. The captain may be an improvement over the last several, who have been burdened by (and even provided!) adult supervision. Kirk ran around the galaxy without supervision, getting himself into messes that were, often as not, of his own creation. The Bald One was the type of pencil-necked desk-flyer that Kirk avoided. [Oh, and if Kirk ever caught a klingon on his bridge, he would *personally* have thrown him out the airlock].
I'm starting to ramble (just coming off the second really bad cold in a week), but when the Klingons became more interesting than the fedceration, it was doomed . . . and that switch. Originally, the Klingons were Nazi's with bad accents. In the later series, they were Norsemen with funny heads . . .
Oh, and why are there a Sub-Commander and a Lt. Commander in the same navy in this new character list??? These are the British and American names for the same rank . . .
Finally, I suppose that the "sensual" female vulcan will be the, errr, busty hormone target, in the tradition of Commander Cleavage, Major Mammary, and 36 of D?
> The guys in the server room who clean the crap off the floor get hot
> and bothered by operating systems. The guys these people clean up
> after only care about getting the job done right.
For the most part. But if you told them to run NT on big iron, they would probably get hot under the collar and very bothered:)
> and the one IBM/Motorola 64-bit PowerPC, the 620, was a horrible flop, coming
> out six weeks before the internally developed 630.
The 620 made it int at least one Apple server, iirc. And when it trounced the wintel boxes in a benchmark, the predictable response back was that it wasn't fair to compare a 64 bit machine to 32 bit machines.
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. If you need legal advice, contact an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.
The Fourth Amendment only applies to governmental action. Any law must give way to the 4th or any othe rpart of the constitution.
However, when a private party acts illegally, it is likely to be "estopped" from using evidence gathered in this matter. However, estoppel is a doctrine from equity, not law, and the party seeking to use an equitable doctrine must come forwared with "clean hands"
So why am I skeptical? Very simply, the purported license terms apear to be a sham from the beginning. There appears to be not only no legitimate use, but no use at all for the service under its license terms. You are allowed to download a file, but not open it afterwards. In other words, its useless.
If it's true that David Boies was involved, there may be something that wasn't reported that would make a difference: he's too smart and too good an attorney to have been involved with this the way it was reported (OK, some of his arguments on behalf of the Gore campaign were silly at best, but he's still very good. And when your case is a lost cause from the start, a good attorney grabs for every glimmer of hope).
From what has been reported, it would seem to me that there's a good chance that the license is modified by the clear intent of the authors (as is the case where projects are accused of violating their own GPL license) so that opening the files *is* allowed. At that point, I don't see where aimster has gotten anywhere.
*today* we store two bytes that way, and the hardware shifting is trivial.
The machine didn't necessarily have "bytes" at the time. It wasn't even necessarily electronic. Even if it was, it was likely to hold a decimal value as one of ten spots being "on," and adding by decrementing one argument until 0, while incrementing the other meanwhile--though more expensive machines had addition lookup tables in hardware *as an option*.
And multiplication? Not in hardware, but repeated adds. Division? *shudder*
>The fanatical monks you speak of were liable to burn anybody and
>anything that did not fit into the belief system they were
>'promoting'.
Is this a troll, or are you really that ignorant of history? You are mixing assorted events from several centuries apart.
The fanatical monks spent their lives copying manuscripts to preserve the knowledge. It was not the monks burning people in the Spanish Inquisition, to which I assume you refer, but the state. A priest would routinely be present, with the authority to stop interrogations (read: torture), but was not the torturor. ALso, the primary function of the inquisition was civil, not religious: spain had been recovered after a period of non-christian rule, and any remaining (or suspected) non-chrisitian was seen as a threat.
And Beatles albums, for crying out loud? they're a thousand years after they period we're talking about (whereas the inquisition is only several hundred years later).
The Roman Empire fell. Humanity scrounged its way through the dark ages for about a thousand years before the renaissance. Fortunately, the church, with legions of fanatical monks, manged to preserve a significant portion (but not all) of the older knowledge. And we're already looking at the value of a collapse again?
Why would the lesson stick around any longer this time?
>Things like chimneys were "invented" somewhere around 1400's in Europe.
were they? I can't imagine central heating without a chimney. The
*romans* had central heating. They even used them in Britain. Once they
left, it was 1500 years before it returned . . .
>and bypass the known problems like
>- using short-lived designs like 2-digit years in computers
But, contrary to all the hype, that was *not* an error.
While the cleanup cost was huge, an estimate was done as to what the costs would have been to use 4 year dates from the beginning. The present value dwarfed the costs of fleanup; it was by a factor of 3 or 4.
Early on, an encoded date wasn't a serious option; you had to store the
date you wanted as you wanted it--converting a binary digit to two decimal digits still had noticable costs. Consider also the additional storage requirements. Punch cards had, give or take, 72 usable columns. 4 digit dates cost two of those. Also 2 more punches by the operator per card--a 3-5% increase in labor. Then there's storying the date in memory. A buck/byte/month for main memory was a breakthrough when it happened.
Like other things that look like errors, this one just plain wasn't.
hawk
That's the least of the infrastructure problems .
on
Rebooting The World?
·
· Score: 2
Just how much machinery is getting whacked in this catastrophe?
Do we lose our heavy industry while we're at it? And *much* more importantly, what about pesticide production, seed, and water distribution.
Without a steady supply of freshly crossbred seed and pesticide, agricultural production will drop rapidly *each* year. The industrialized nations would have nothing left to export.
The nations currently facing starvation are the only ones whose situaton might improve: In all of those countries, there is more than enough food; the problem is goverment and/or rebel corruption that either stops the distribuiton or steals the food. Over half of the countries with segments facing starvation actually *export* food. Why might they improve? With the collapse of machinery, the armies will have trouble maintaining their hold.
And then somewhere in all of tehse messes we need to worry about rebuilding the machines. Given a catastrophe that puts us into such a predicament, computers will be the least of our worries . . .
>One instructor burned
>"if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" into our
>minds for a semester, which killed any 'favorite language syndrome' in
>me forever.
However, if that one language is Fortran . . .:)
>There were still a lot of 'cookie cutter' programmers in
>my classes, but I'm convinced that this was despite the
>instructors'/Professors' best efforts.
Yep, there's limits:) In the math class, the CS folks served as curve fodder. We also got a bunch of EE's in our EM THeory l class (after they had a disaster instructor in their electromagnetic theory class). This instructor handed out tests sorted by grade. With 9 of us (Physics) and 18 of them (engineering), we usually got 8 of the first 9 tests.
Before the tests, they would ask us, "how do you remember all these fromulas."
We'd stare blankly back. "You're kidding, aren't you? There's 200 in that chapter. Know this one and this one and integrate".
At which point a blank look would be returned . ..
>Couldn't agree more. Anything not directly associated with the CS
>dept. is likely to be a serious mistake if you want a career as a
>techie. (ie, programming, not just managing programmers.)
Caveat: this is more than 15 years old; you were (at best) in diapers:)
When I was an undergrad (Physics, Math, & Philosophy), things weren't as settled. The engineering degree was still called "Computer Science" (it changed to "Computer Engineering" a couple of years later to keep accreditation boards happy), and there was a CS degree through the math department, as wells. One of the articles had an article outside his door with an on-the-record comment from an IBM recruiter/manager. He said that when hiring a programmer, he *preferred* a math major to a cs major, because, "I want someone who can think."
THe point being that with a solid grounding in mathematics, it's easy to teach someone to program. If you come from a "cookie-cutter" engineering or CS program, you know solutions to a few specific problems, and can't solve anything useful.
I am *not* claiming that all CS programs have this problem--but I've met folks with MSCS's from respected universities suffering from it. "I know Fortran IV, not 77." "I don't know how to do that kind of sort" (with a bubble sort in front of him, he couldn't figure it out and apply it to a different variable.[1] I had to build some cards and show him by hand[2]
hawk
[1] Yes, I know that a buble sort is inefficient in most cases. (a) the code in front of him was one of the cases where it made sense, and (b) the bubble sort in the code pre-dated my involvement.
[2] If it took this to show him a bubble-sort, do you think there was *any* chance of showing him any other kind?:)
I just looked for pc133 on pricewatch. It looks like for any name brand memory, you're well past $350, and to $440 by the time you're to Kingston (the ones that make the sparc-type memory) [make that $440 once you add ecc].
But it's still half as much. And
So just how much difference would the slower memory make? memory bandwidth is my bottleneck, with near-random accesses accross a 1G array . . .
Oh, and talking to our tech folks, Sun memory probably won't be considered.
Our numerically intensive folks suggest third party memory, anyway. It's *still* outrageously expensive for the stuff theseuse--The best I can find is about $1000 for 512mb, and almost $500 for 256mb.
And I need a whole gig: the memory will cost twice as much as the workstation . . .
Then a huge monitor, a scsi controller, and a 15k drive,, and I only have a couple of hundred left for the tape drive:(
Slashdot Mirror
> In Britain we'd rather dual at five paces and then make up over a afternoon tea.
:)
damn, you guys are lousy shots if you can do this. No wonder we were able to run you off with squirrel guns
hawk, noting that making squirrels a dietary staple required high marksmanship skills.
That, and that
a) Texas actually was independent, had broken off by military force, and was likely to keep that status on its own,
b) They planned to join the U.S. from the beggining, but were rebuffed.
> Let's face it, if Britain decided to use force, do
:)
> you seriously think anyone is going to give a damn?
And that, if you refer to my post above (below?) is the crux of international law
I am a laweyr, but you'd have to be pretty damned stupid or fancy yourself a sovereign nation (but I repeat myself) to take this as legal advice.
Warning: check your idealism at the door before reading this. It is *entirely* realpolitick/positive law, and not the world as it "should" be.
There certainly is "the Law of Nations," which is ancient. It's a basic and largely unwritten code of conduct between nations (don't kill the other guys diplomats, etc.).
Treaties such as the Geneva Convention have extended these standars.
"International Law" is a newer concept. and is largely wieleded as a buzzword by discontents within a country to achieve what they cannot through the legal process. It tends to be claims of authority for unratified treaties and the like, an attempts to give authority to UN proclamations.
Basically, international law is whatever the victor of the last war says it is, or is willing to abide by. As an example, a "naval salute" in the days of cannons consisted of each ship emptying it's cannons to show that they were no longer prepared to fire on one another. SHips alternated cannons until each was empty. The exception was the Royal Navy (Britain), which was entitled to have the other ship empty its entire battery before emptying its own. Why? Because Britain ruled the seas from the smashing of the Armada until surpassed by the U.S. this century. Today, if we still had such ships, it would be the U.S. receiving the salute from Britain first.
The bottom line is that "international law" means nothing if you don't have the military power to back your position. ANother way of putting it is that today it is whatever the U.S. says it is.
Treaties are another matter, but they are generally not at issue when folks cry "international law."
hawk, esq.
Hey, I've hung FreeBSD three times. No, wait. That's linux. No, wait, that's total. 1 FreeBSD and 2 Linux :)
Of course, it's taken me 4 years to do this . . .
I'm getting an 8x DVD player so that I can watch that movie in 12 minutes. That makes the 5 minutes a much bigger deal :)
. . . why the plastic liner inside you microwave shrivelled, your house burned up after a gas explosion, but was put out by the flooding washing machine . . .
:)
hawk
Star Trek *had* characters, but we weren't expected to care about them as themselves, but what they stood for. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are different parts of our own mind and culture coming into conflict. Spock was interesting as the outsider looking in for the observation; in the newer series, we're supposed to care about the stupid robot *himself*.
[The spinoffs aren't the only shows to make this mistake--compare the first half-season of Alien Nation, which was very well done and was about the conflict rather than the races, to the rest of its run, in which we were supposed to become interested in the details of the space beasties. The early episodes frequently crammed a feature-lenght plot into the hour, whereas the later ones spent time babbling about the eggs . . . Or _Heat of the Night_. The movie and early television series had the conflict between the two characters, whereas it devolved into them being chums fighting other evils . .
Anyway, skip the character development and write a better plot. Don't waste time on the characters "growth," or let excessive consistency get in the way of a good episode.
And a couple of quibbles after looking at the page. The captain may be an improvement over the last several, who have been burdened by (and even provided!) adult supervision. Kirk ran around the galaxy without supervision, getting himself into messes that were, often as not, of his own creation. The Bald One was the type of pencil-necked desk-flyer that Kirk avoided. [Oh, and if Kirk ever caught a klingon on his bridge, he would *personally* have thrown him out the airlock].
I'm starting to ramble (just coming off the second really bad cold in a week), but when the Klingons became more interesting than the fedceration, it was doomed . . . and that switch. Originally, the Klingons were Nazi's with bad accents. In the later series, they were Norsemen with funny heads . . .
Oh, and why are there a Sub-Commander and a Lt. Commander in the same navy in this new character list??? These are the British and American names for the same rank . . .
Finally, I suppose that the "sensual" female vulcan will be the, errr, busty hormone target, in the tradition of Commander Cleavage, Major Mammary, and 36 of D?
:)
hawk
> The guys in the server room who clean the crap off the floor get hot
> and bothered by operating systems. The guys these people clean up
> after only care about getting the job done right.
For the most part. But if you told them to run NT on big iron, they would probably get hot under the collar and very bothered
hawk
:)
> out six weeks before the internally developed 630.
The 620 made it int at least one Apple server, iirc. And when it trounced the wintel boxes in a benchmark, the predictable response back was that it wasn't fair to compare a 64 bit machine to 32 bit machines.
hawk
The Fourth Amendment only applies to governmental action. Any law must give way to the 4th or any othe rpart of the constitution.
However, when a private party acts illegally, it is likely to be "estopped" from using evidence gathered in this matter. However, estoppel is a doctrine from equity, not law, and the party seeking to use an equitable doctrine must come forwared with "clean hands"
So why am I skeptical? Very simply, the purported license terms apear to be a sham from the beginning. There appears to be not only no legitimate use, but no use at all for the service under its license terms. You are allowed to download a file, but not open it afterwards. In other words, its useless.
If it's true that David Boies was involved, there may be something that wasn't reported that would make a difference: he's too smart and too good an attorney to have been involved with this the way it was reported (OK, some of his arguments on behalf of the Gore campaign were silly at best, but he's still very good. And when your case is a lost cause from the start, a good attorney grabs for every glimmer of hope).
From what has been reported, it would seem to me that there's a good chance that the license is modified by the clear intent of the authors (as is the case where projects are accused of violating their own GPL license) so that opening the files *is* allowed. At that point, I don't see where aimster has gotten anywhere.
hawk, esq.
The machine didn't necessarily have "bytes" at the time. It wasn't even necessarily electronic. Even if it was, it was likely to hold a decimal value as one of ten spots being "on," and adding by decrementing one argument until 0, while incrementing the other meanwhile--though more expensive machines had addition lookup tables in hardware *as an option*.
And multiplication? Not in hardware, but repeated adds. Division? *shudder*
hawk
>The fanatical monks you speak of were liable to burn anybody and
>anything that did not fit into the belief system they were
>'promoting'.
Is this a troll, or are you really that ignorant of history? You are mixing assorted events from several centuries apart.
The fanatical monks spent their lives copying manuscripts to preserve the knowledge. It was not the monks burning people in the Spanish Inquisition, to which I assume you refer, but the state. A priest would routinely be present, with the authority to stop interrogations (read: torture), but was not the torturor. ALso, the primary function of the inquisition was civil, not religious: spain had been recovered after a period of non-christian rule, and any remaining (or suspected) non-chrisitian was seen as a threat.
And Beatles albums, for crying out loud? they're a thousand years after they period we're talking about (whereas the inquisition is only several hundred years later).
hawk
Why would the lesson stick around any longer this time?
hawk
>Things like chimneys were "invented" somewhere around 1400's in Europe.
were they? I can't imagine central heating without a chimney. The
*romans* had central heating. They even used them in Britain. Once they
left, it was 1500 years before it returned . . .
hawk
Brewing. THat would save me :) Especially it it's at least 200 years, before yeast was understood . . .
hawk of many hats
>- using short-lived designs like 2-digit years in computers
But, contrary to all the hype, that was *not* an error.
While the cleanup cost was huge, an estimate was done as to what the costs would have been to use 4 year dates from the beginning. The present value dwarfed the costs of fleanup; it was by a factor of 3 or 4.
Early on, an encoded date wasn't a serious option; you had to store the
date you wanted as you wanted it--converting a binary digit to two decimal digits still had noticable costs. Consider also the additional storage requirements. Punch cards had, give or take, 72 usable columns. 4 digit dates cost two of those. Also 2 more punches by the operator per card--a 3-5% increase in labor. Then there's storying the date in memory. A buck/byte/month for main memory was a breakthrough when it happened.
Like other things that look like errors, this one just plain wasn't.
hawk
Do we lose our heavy industry while we're at it? And *much* more importantly, what about pesticide production, seed, and water distribution.
Without a steady supply of freshly crossbred seed and pesticide, agricultural production will drop rapidly *each* year. The industrialized nations would have nothing left to export.
The nations currently facing starvation are the only ones whose situaton might improve: In all of those countries, there is more than enough food; the problem is goverment and/or rebel corruption that either stops the distribuiton or steals the food. Over half of the countries with segments facing starvation actually *export* food. Why might they improve? With the collapse of machinery, the armies will have trouble maintaining their hold.
And then somewhere in all of tehse messes we need to worry about rebuilding the machines. Given a catastrophe that puts us into such a predicament, computers will be the least of our worries . . .
hawk, economist
Yes, but Kingston 133 and kingston sparc memory is more of an apples/apples match than kingston sparc and ibm 133 . . .
>"if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" into our
>minds for a semester, which killed any 'favorite language syndrome' in
>me forever.
However, if that one language is Fortran . . .
>There were still a lot of 'cookie cutter' programmers in
>my classes, but I'm convinced that this was despite the
>instructors'/Professors' best efforts.
Yep, there's limits
Before the tests, they would ask us, "how do you remember all these fromulas."
We'd stare blankly back. "You're kidding, aren't you? There's 200 in that chapter. Know this one and this one and integrate".
At which point a blank look would be returned . .
>Couldn't agree more. Anything not directly associated with the CS
:)
:)
>dept. is likely to be a serious mistake if you want a career as a
>techie. (ie, programming, not just managing programmers.)
Caveat: this is more than 15 years old; you were (at best) in diapers
When I was an undergrad (Physics, Math, & Philosophy), things weren't as settled. The engineering degree was still called "Computer Science" (it changed to "Computer Engineering" a couple of years later to keep accreditation boards happy), and there was a CS degree through the math department, as wells. One of the articles had an article outside his door with an on-the-record comment from an IBM recruiter/manager. He said that when hiring a programmer, he *preferred* a math major to a cs major, because, "I want someone who can think."
THe point being that with a solid grounding in mathematics, it's easy to teach someone to program. If you come from a "cookie-cutter" engineering or CS program, you know solutions to a few specific problems, and can't solve anything useful.
I am *not* claiming that all CS programs have this problem--but I've met folks with MSCS's from respected universities suffering from it. "I know Fortran IV, not 77." "I don't know how to do that kind of sort" (with a bubble sort in front of him, he couldn't figure it out and apply it to a different variable.[1] I had to build some cards and show him by hand[2]
hawk
[1] Yes, I know that a buble sort is inefficient in most cases. (a) the code in front of him was one of the cases where it made sense, and (b) the bubble sort in the code pre-dated my involvement.
[2] If it took this to show him a bubble-sort, do you think there was *any* chance of showing him any other kind?
I just looked for pc133 on pricewatch. It looks like for any name brand memory, you're well past $350, and to $440 by the time you're to Kingston (the ones that make the sparc-type memory) [make that $440 once you add ecc].
But it's still half as much. And
So just how much difference would the slower memory make? memory bandwidth is my bottleneck, with near-random accesses accross a 1G array . . .
Oh, and talking to our tech folks, Sun memory probably won't be considered.
hawk
Our numerically intensive folks suggest third party memory, anyway. It's *still* outrageously expensive for the stuff theseuse--The best I can find is about $1000 for 512mb, and almost $500 for 256mb.
:(
And I need a whole gig: the memory will cost twice as much as the workstation . . .
Then a huge monitor, a scsi controller, and a 15k drive,, and I only have a couple of hundred left for the tape drive
hawek
The Sunblade 1000 is a III. This 100 is a IIe
I looked at sun's release, and they brag about 3 pci slots--I assume that it would indicate if they were 64 bit slits.
Still, this has potential: we have money allocated for an ultra 10 at the moment; presumably we can get more machine this way.
Still need to find what IBM will do on an RS/6000, and assembling a dual athlon looks tempting, too . . .
Now if only the price of 1G of memory would come down to a few hundred instead of 1k
hawk, who remembers not knowing what he'd do with a whole 16k when he paid $40 for it . . .