Common misconception. Hawking demonstrated that with great pressure (such as are found during the big bang and in the aftermath of large stellar collisions) objects which would not otherwise collapse would then collapse. These are called "quantuum black holes" and "quantuum neutron stars," and though there is a point at which they'll bleed away due to hawking radiation, there are also stable sizes which are smaller than would otherwise collapse. A neutron star the size of Sol would be stable, provided a moderate food source.
There are people which believe that the Tuskunga meteor strike was actually a black hole, and there are simulations of the gravity effect which are reasonably close to what actually happened, with the flattening and the safe part and the curious burn marks and the OY LEVEN, GOOD GUYVEN IT'S ON MY SHOE.
As the post you replied to pointed out, that's relatively straightforward in binary and trinary star systems such as the Tau Ceti group, given the kind of civilization which could construct a structure to gather the heat radiation from a black hole.
From scratch, no. By ramming existing things together, though, sure you could. Don't forget that potential energy is just as good at making black holes as kinetic or mechanical. All we really need to do is whack a couple of suns together, which is well within humanity's current power output (we just don't know how to focus that power on a sun.) With the electromechanical energy North America consumes in a decade focussed into a single vector converted into perfect mechanial energy (yeah yeah, not possible, just for the sake of discussion,) we could impart enough force on a binary star to introduce a significant wobble into one of the orbits; if we did that twice carefully, they should collapse into one another.
A usable setup might, for example, be to start a serious wobble in Proxima Centauri, then to use its gravity in tandem with the pushing force on Centauri B, in the hopes of whacking it into Centauri A. That only nets 2.25 Sols of mass, whereas you need around 480 Sols to go through a complete gravitational collapse. That said, if you scoot a few quantuum black holes, which we can apparently now create, across the surface then they'll start smorgasbording; you can chow down on their emitted energy while they grow in mass to create a black hole by accretion instead of collapse (which I guess would be the composition of quantuum black holes, but whatever.)
It shouldn't actually be all that hard, actually. My unfounded guess is that our great grandchildren will be arguing about whether to do something like this in order to solve their energy crisis; by then I suspect they'll know how.
Given the tiny cross-section of even quite massive black holes and high radiation rates when they're small, this is a moderately large - and extremely massive - object.
Extremely massive? Yes. Moderately large? No. IANAAP, but there's a Niven short story book which claims that a neutron star with the density of Sol would be roughly the size of a baseball. Black holes are far denser than neutron stars, being massive enough to collapse neutron repulsion.
Elsewhere in this thread it was suggested that the size needed to balance matter uptake with the amount of mass lost through Hawking radiation is in the neighborhood of Mount Everest for size, which is rather smaller than our sun; I would not blindly repeat another poster's unfounded claim except that I also seem to remember such a claim and also cannot verify its validity. Running with the presumption that the amount of mass needed is less than that of the Earth, however, is quite a bit more reasonable - I am certain that Hawking bleed is a moderately slow thing on planetary scales, and believe that a black hole on par with a planet for mass will not evaporate before its job is done.
Even given an Earth-massed black hole, if a neutron star the mass of Sol is only a baseball in size, the black hole's superior density and Earth's inferior mass spell one very, very small black hole. Just the mass difference alone would mean that an Earth-massed neutron star would be hard to see without tools; what change the superior density of the black hole would cause should be dramatic, though I don't know the actual numbers in question.
I remember reading a speculative article by an amateur in a zine on a BBS back before zines were lame which suggested a set of math for exactly this. I have no idea how clueful said amateur was, and it's been almost two decades, so I'll be damned if I can remember so many details. One thing, however, struck me enough that I remember it to this day: his claim, which I cannot defend, was that a black hole which could eventually eat an Earth-sized planet would be smaller than a speck of dust by a major difference, and that one of the practical difficulties of dealing with said black hole (the ongoing discussion was in fact around the short story Hole Man and how one might respond to the situation without evacuating Earth) would be just aiming. There had been a bunch of suggestions regarding thermonuclear devices, lasers and other things trying to excite the contained matter enough to warp the gravity distribution and attempt to cause fragmentation or accelerate Hawking loss, but it seems that even if you have a nuke that'll survive long enough to make it close to a black hole without going off or being destroyed, and even if you surmount the time issues approaching the Schwartzschild radius, that it's gonna be damned hard just to decide where the place you want to aim is going to be.
What do you think the law is except a large series of references?
If we were discussing the law that might be tangentially germane, but we're not. I realize this is hard for you, so let me spell it out.
You, in a condescending tone, told someone else that they used a word incorrectly when in fact they had not. I pointed out the etymology and history of the word and said "I'm sorry, but they weren't in fact incorrect." You tried to refer me to a book in order to save face. I said "No, ass, don't pretend that a book will make your argument for you; if you want to pretend someone used a word incorrectly you have to be specific about why."
It really doesn't amtter whether the law is a litany of references, though in fact believing that it is shows a critical minunderstanding of the application of case law and the desperation to apply precedent to a disconnected argument in the hope of saving face. The issue at hand has nothing to do with the actual laws in question.
If you want to argue that the word "fork" really means "apple", then yes, you can be dismissed with nothing more than a "look it up in Webster's, and if you don't like it, take it up with them".
I dare you to tell that to a professional etymologist with a straight face. You couldn't have chosen a less authoritative group to hang your verecundiam on. Maybe you didn't realize this, but dictionaries aren't in fact a good way of getting the definitions of terms, especially with regards to the law where terms are rigidly defined by the law itself.
Likewise, if you want to argue that the definitions in Black's are not authoritative
They aren't. US law is not determined hinging on the definintions in Black's. Of course, I wasn't actually talking about Black's at all; this is a low-quality straw man.
are not definitive,
How could a definition not be definitive? Are we arguing in the same English?
are inaccurate,
You're putting words in my mouth in order to fabricate a mistake to argue against; I never said any such thing. I'll try again. "Do not rely on books to make your argument for you; that is the behavior of a small child, and tends to allow people which believe they know things that in fact they do not to rant at pleasure without any need to actually justify themselves, for as long as they believe that pompous verecundiam makes their bed for them before they sleep."
I'm not telling you there's anything wrong with Black's. I'm telling you that Black's has nothing to do with what I said to you, and that if you want to get on a soapbox you'd better be able to stand up for what you said.
Until you're ready to do that, you're just a troll.
Yes yes, make sure to tell me how wrong something I didn't say was, and then insult me over it; that's the way to win an argument like an adult. Something tells me you still won't actually support your own statements after this, preferring instead to ignore the perfectly solid etymological grounds which were presented now five messages ago in a clear and unambiguous fashion and prefer instead to make up arguments which were never made to rail against so as to feel correct.
Incidentally, I'm not the one who has to make an argument.
Luckily, nobody has asked you to make argument. You made argument quite some time ago. Now I'm asking you to be a big boy and explain how a perfectly good word is incorrect in use, without handwaving it away to a book, whether or not it is authority on the topic. I'm not telling you there's anytnhing wrong with Black's. I'm telling you there's something wrong with your inability to support your own arguments without it.
You want to overturn two centuries of American jurisprudence in how a word is used?
No. It's my position that you've simply accused someone wrongly.
Great: the burden of proof is on you to show that it's wrong, not on me to show
You don't have to get all the way back up to your previous height to be a pendulum. The object should continue to behave as a pendulum until it has consumed so much of the earth's mass that it breaks free. That's going to be quite some time - probably decades. Read a Niven book.
Actually, Xerox PARC had tabbed text editors five years before Apple existed, and we had tabbed text editors on dead trees like two thousand years ago. I've never understood why people thought tabs were innovative - NeXT's window manager allowed you to put non-tabbed things into tabs just because you said so. C'mon.
Sorry. Chainmail was the set of miniatures rules extracted from 2nd edition AD&D. D&D evolved from an older british game called "Tunnels and Trolls," arguably hybridized with a little known Conan-themed RPG called "Royal Armies of the Hyborean Age," and was the first thing gygax/TSR made.
Why do you thin that AD&D (1E) had all ranges and movements in inches whcih were later converted to feet (which differed if you were indoors or out)?
Because 1st edition AD&D was the first D&D to directly integrate the miniatures rules partially developed by the Dungeons and Dragons Master System and Immortal System crusade rules. Please remember that AD&D was almost 15 years into TSR's gaming line; it should not be used as evidence of how things started. If you look, original D&D was in fact in meters, not inches, not feet.
Miniatures were for sell at just about every place that sold D&D stuff.
When 1st edition AD&D was new, there wasn't a single store in New York City which carried TSR products. Back then they were still a wholly mail-order supplied operation. Where are you getting this stuff? Miniatures broke into the market through miniature train and toy stores; there was no such thing as a fantasy gaming store. You're claiming that a product which created that kind of store showed up in those stores before they existed.
TSR put out lots of minis although I prefered Ral Partha.
Uh, no, you didn't. The miniatures made under the TSR name from 1988 on were made by Ral Partha. You might as well say a 1997 Toyota Celica is better than a 1997 Geo Prizm - they're the same damned car, and they're the same damned miniatures.
Miniatures rules are in the original D&D and in 1st edition AD&D. In 2nd edition, TSR bifurcated their RPG and miniatures gaming lines inot D&D and Chainmail. There are ancillary miniatures rules listed in the 2nd edition DM's guide. The Dungeons and Dragons boardgame is essentially a lightweight miniatures game. Al-Qadim and Dark Sun heavily suggested miniatures, and included extended rules for them. The original Greyhawk and Dragonlance settings gave extension rules. Spelljammer required miniatures, and shipped with haxmaps for gaming. There were miniatures extensions listed in The Manual of The Planes, and Planescape had not only a rudimentary miniature system but also a miniatures rules expansion system. There are miniatures rules in the 3rd ed game.
And I'm pretty young--so careful how you throw around "traditionally" d^_^b.
That doesn't make sense. You're young; you have no idea how the game's traditions work. Remember, D&D is almost 40 years old, and you apparently aren't. Miniatures have been featured in almost every campaign setting TSR has ever made, and other than second edition have been at least partially in every core rules system other than 2nd edition, which simply put them in an extra book for the purposes of making more money.
Yes, RPGs like D&D are traditionally played on a tabletop using miniatures.
Actually, before people mod this funny, think about it. It's cheaper than the other setup, and serves other utility, such as secret message-passing, an interface for using abilities without letting other players know, and so forth.
I game that way with some friends with laptops. Being able to use instant messenger to conceal things which wouldn't be detectable in-game has led to some odd new developments, as players become less resistant to skullduggery due to practical concerns.
We play a four-color comic book style game under a nasty hack between Champions 5th edition and Aberrant. We by design have a lot of strange intrigue in our game. Being able to make things secret has been a boon to us. If you've got enough space for a gaming room, five $40 tables, five $150 LCD screens and five $150 barebones computers (grab a $100 one from pricewatch, throw in a $30 ancient CPU and $20 of crappy RAM,) hook up a small LAN and run yourself a slightly more powerful box as a server, and wham! you've got a much more powerful, much more flexible, arguably much cooler setup, which can also be used for other things - network gaming, for example - at about two thirds the cost.
Only real problem is that it takes a lot more space.
You had a garbage heap? Why, we had to play while running down the street to keep from being hit about the head and ears with sticks by locals, and as often used our dice to distract neighborhood dogs as to make skill roles.
Rolling dice, by the way, is very difficult while running. Hard to read the numbers; it's a real skill. Builds character.
Re:Er? yeah amazingly innovative features there
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You've gotta love how Opera users think they invented things from Xerox PARC which were commonly used in Smalltalk-V and Hypercard.
It's been eight years, and you're talking about something that's still not going to happen for a year or two. Most auto manufacturers don't make parts for a car model that far out of date, and cars weren't as rudimentary by current standards seven years ago as computers, let alone nine or potentially ten.
This isn't as unreasonable as you want it to seem.
IE doesn't use Win32 widgets, and hasn't since IE3. The way Win32 widgets work, things begin to drag when you have two hundred and fifty buttons on the same form. That's not even marginally unreasonable on a web page. If IE used Win32 widgets, things would be dog slow on complex pages.
Whereas everyone loves to whine how slow Netscape 4 was, anyone which remembers Netscape 3 will sagely nod when I tell them the biggest factor in that speed change was their own stepping away from standard widgets.
Besides, look at what IE widgets already do, which is way more complex than what Win32 widgets do.
CSS3 isn't standardized yet. Anyone who's used VC6 knows how bad an idea it is to ask Microsoft to implement software to a spec which hasn't been formalized yet.
for (int i=0; i<10; ++i) {} int i;// Incorrectly flagged as redeclaration for SEVEN YEARS
Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate
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remember how many versions of MS-DOS shipped without a decent text editor?
Because web applications threaten microsoft. That's why the things which are broken are broken: position, complex display, complex layout. If you use the set of javascripts called IE7 (god, I hate that name, but they're really good scripts) you find that in fact IE7 has all of the support it needs for the various missing things. IE6 could in fact be made into a standards compliant browser by injecting a few hundred lines of JavaScript.
Microsoft just doesn't want to.
Now, without putting on your tin foil hat, take a look at the specific things which are missing. Take a look at the things which are broken. Ask yourself, "if those things worked and were portable, how close could one get to the kind of interface a person expects for an application?"
They're not going to fix the box model bugs. They're going to polish them up just enough to get good PR, but leave them broken enough to screw with application development. They won't touch the problems with positioning, the width bugs, the bugs with auto, the bugs with -min and -max, et cetera. HTML is a much bigger threat to the application wagon circle than Java ever was. That's why their XSLT is still broken, even though they were the first to market; that's why ActiveX has the barriers it has to things that don't want to behave like DLLs; that's why their RFC2557 support in "web page archives" is so badly broken; it goes on and on.
They're going to take the parts of CSS2, and maybe even of 3, which in the long run don't matter, but which get naüve eyeballs. They'll put in text rotation, and transparent colors, and drop shadows, and stuff like that. They'll embrace all of the complex functionality for anything which is convenience-only but doesn't actually change things, and they'll get all of that 100% correct: the layered background support, the layered border support, stuff you can do right now with some extra <div>s.
But the things which really matter, which lead to the mammoth hacks you see in well developed CSS like in MediaWiki's MonoBook or at sites like TheNoodleIncident or PositionIsEverything in order to get something which should be trivial to work in just this one browser, which have been broken for years, which have been shown to be trivial to fix?
None of that will change.
They're going to implement 85% of CSS2. They're going to implement a big chunk of CSS3. Everything you'd see on geocities - the bastard children of <blink> and <marquee>, the things which nobody actually needs to threaten applications, the things which weirdos that try to explain songs to each other in blogs use to excess.
The things, in short, which would make someone shallow switch over CSS standards support.
They're going to turn their biggest weakness into their biggest strength. You can expect to see huge tracts of CSS2 and CSS3 supported. Just not the stuff which is already broken.
That stuff has to stay broken, until they can't wait any longer. That's what Avalon is about - they're scrambling to fold HTML into the UI experience so that by the time they have to give up the ghost and make IE do what it should have years ago, they can "make it a compelling new way to think about application interfaces."
They're making sure that nobody can beat their OS to the punch by breaking IE until they've had a chance to make their own first entry, and it's a damned good strategy. OSX' interface architecture is a mess; there are a billion different ways to do any one thing and none of them are as elegant as CSS is slowly becoming. The various Unices and Linuces don't have a dominant WM, and certainly don't have a dominant interface architecture; they won't organize in time to beat Avalon to the punch, which is only a few years away. XUL was a good try, and almost made it, but you have to have a mozilla install, and it's a giant hassle to use as a developer, so nobody's really taking advantage. Besides, until recen
And how does "convicted," the past tense affirmative of "conviction (strong belief,)" not apply there? That is what the word means in the legal, denotative and connotative senses. If a court finds you to be blank, you are a convicted blank.
Technically, if a court of law signs an affadavit that you are a samaritan, you would be a convicted good person. Just because a word has a foreboding connotation doesn't mean that the word is wrong in use.
Sure there is. Find the most common codepage and report any characters which aren't in that codepage. The idea isn't to mark extended UTF characters. The idea is to mark characters which aren't in the primary codepage. That there's a primary codepage which we think of as ASCII isn't important - that's our default, not the only choice.
The appropriate thing to do, which many linguists raised during the standardization of UTF but who were unfortunately ignored, would have been to create an entire codepage for each language, explicitly choosing to replicate most letters. That way, even though French and English use almost exactly the same character set, it would be perfectly clear that what we were looking at was French, because it would be encoded right into the document, and so we could distinguish between a French R, a German R, or the Chinese letter which looks like a cursive lower case R, or whatever the hell.
Maybe more broadly, what we need to do is to begin to accept that our current language encoding scheme is an utter hack, a miserable security nightmare, and the worst thing which ever happened to portability. Worse still, the problem isn't UTF-* or UCS-* at all; the problem is actually in our component architectures. We should be able to swap character encodings out as easily as we do fonts. If we could do that, then something superior to Unicode could arise and take hold, and get rid of these problems once and for goddamned all.
It's not like 32-bit character sets are in any danger of running out of room in the human population any century soon, cough y2k cough. It's also not like it'd be hard to write a font engine based on references, so we could use the same glyph for R in each of the European languages. Furthermore it's not like we don't have very good searchable compressed text representations.
It really seems that the primary objection to moving to a much more versatile and flexible character encoding is the supposedly preposterous amount of space it'll suddenly take up, and oh my god our text is all going to inflate by 300% and hard drives will be the size of camels and my laptop is going to crush my spine. I'm calling bullshit. I'm old enough to remember how disk space actually works. I have a text file collection from the BBS days which I remain proud of to this day; I've got thousands of movie scripts, the complete works of (insert two dozen authors here,) construction plans for devices to scam telephone networks which haven't existed for 15 years, the whole nine yards. The whole collection, uncompressed, is less than fifty meg.
Now, let's be honest. There are a lot of people on SlashDot reading this post right now which, over thinband, download more pornography than that on an average night. That's less than a tenth of a CD. You almost can't buy SD cards that small anymore. In fact, if you use a text-specific compressor, you can almost get it small enough to cram onto four floppy disks.
For maybe a better sense of scale, I just looked at Project Gutenberg's FAQ as regards setting up a mirror; it says that the entire Gutenberg collection, which I suspect is probably the biggest flat text collection on earth, would need "a couple of gig" to host, but if that space is prohibitive, they'll allow you to store only the uncompressed versions. The way it's phrased isn't clear, but I believe that implies that the entire collection both compressed and uncompressed is "only a couple of gig," or probably just barely not fit on a single double sided double surfaced DVD (the room to spare is less than 400 meg.)
So, like, if you use a burner you can buy at Fry's for $300 and some media which costs $10, move to an encoding which would make every linguist on earth break down laughing, and used a compression program from the late seventies, you'd barely half fill the DVD.
The problem isn't that UTF-8 is too powerful. The problem is that UTF-8 isn't powerful enough. It's able to render all our letters, but it can't carry l
That last one is infeasable. By design the net takes any client; a basic security premise is that any client, with enough resources, can be mimiced or compromised. You can't rely on things which have been compiled into the client; they're not in your control and are therefore unreliable.
An easy set of introductions to how badly wrong that notion can go come in the form of discussions about game clients on public networks, where sniffing can get around the client removing information from the player's use instead of it being done by the server.
The short version: on the public network, you cannot trust a foreign binary.
You really should look a word up before criticizing someone else's use thereof. The word empire has nothing to do with government. The word empire, from emperor, from old french empéror, from latin imperatorium's nominative imperiator, is not a governmental title at all. The word means "commander," and was adopted only after conferred by a vote of the Roman military onto a successful general. There could be more than one imperator at once, until Julius and then Augustus adopted the title as a show of solidarity with the military, presumably to secure loyalties. Note that Tiberius and Claudius rejected the title after Julius and Augustus had taken it on; as military they felt it needed to be earned.
The title "emperor" was applied to Asian monarchs by the West during the middle ages specifically because it was not a royal title, but rather a military one; the issue was to suggest that the Asian monarchs did not have the royal blood which at the time was seen as a semi-holy thing in Europe (qv. divine right, etc;) it was in essence a way to exclude Asian monarchs from "royalty" by word use.
With respect, the word "empire" does not apply to most countries. An empire is not a large country, but something acquired and held by conquest. The United States is arguably an empire thanks to the Spanish American war, but the term is typically applied to territory acuired mostly through conquest instead of in small part, such as was the case with Russia (the original nation) and the USSR, with Britain and Portugal and the European colonial powers, with ancient Egypt and Rome and Macedon, with feudal Japan and ancient China and Mongolia, the Aztec empire, and so forth. By contrast, you would not apply these terms to Canada, to the Inca, to non-WW2 Germany, etc.
With that observation, it becomes quite clear that the word "empire" does in fact apply quite well to some financial institutions - particularly those characterized by hostile takeover, marginalizations, and so forth.
Slashdot Mirror
Common misconception. Hawking demonstrated that with great pressure (such as are found during the big bang and in the aftermath of large stellar collisions) objects which would not otherwise collapse would then collapse. These are called "quantuum black holes" and "quantuum neutron stars," and though there is a point at which they'll bleed away due to hawking radiation, there are also stable sizes which are smaller than would otherwise collapse. A neutron star the size of Sol would be stable, provided a moderate food source.
There are people which believe that the Tuskunga meteor strike was actually a black hole, and there are simulations of the gravity effect which are reasonably close to what actually happened, with the flattening and the safe part and the curious burn marks and the OY LEVEN, GOOD GUYVEN IT'S ON MY SHOE.
As the post you replied to pointed out, that's relatively straightforward in binary and trinary star systems such as the Tau Ceti group, given the kind of civilization which could construct a structure to gather the heat radiation from a black hole.
From scratch, no. By ramming existing things together, though, sure you could. Don't forget that potential energy is just as good at making black holes as kinetic or mechanical. All we really need to do is whack a couple of suns together, which is well within humanity's current power output (we just don't know how to focus that power on a sun.) With the electromechanical energy North America consumes in a decade focussed into a single vector converted into perfect mechanial energy (yeah yeah, not possible, just for the sake of discussion,) we could impart enough force on a binary star to introduce a significant wobble into one of the orbits; if we did that twice carefully, they should collapse into one another.
A usable setup might, for example, be to start a serious wobble in Proxima Centauri, then to use its gravity in tandem with the pushing force on Centauri B, in the hopes of whacking it into Centauri A. That only nets 2.25 Sols of mass, whereas you need around 480 Sols to go through a complete gravitational collapse. That said, if you scoot a few quantuum black holes, which we can apparently now create, across the surface then they'll start smorgasbording; you can chow down on their emitted energy while they grow in mass to create a black hole by accretion instead of collapse (which I guess would be the composition of quantuum black holes, but whatever.)
It shouldn't actually be all that hard, actually. My unfounded guess is that our great grandchildren will be arguing about whether to do something like this in order to solve their energy crisis; by then I suspect they'll know how.
Hmmm..
Step 1 : Create black holes in Lab
Step 2: Take the decay energy, convert to electricity
Step 3: PROFIT!
4: default on your electricity bill.
I really hope that this is just a joke
No, it's the first article in the new globicide category.
Jesus. Don't even bother modding parent into the ground. Break out the metamoderation sticks.
Given the tiny cross-section of even quite massive black holes and high radiation rates when they're small, this is a moderately large - and extremely massive - object.
Extremely massive? Yes. Moderately large? No. IANAAP, but there's a Niven short story book which claims that a neutron star with the density of Sol would be roughly the size of a baseball. Black holes are far denser than neutron stars, being massive enough to collapse neutron repulsion.
Elsewhere in this thread it was suggested that the size needed to balance matter uptake with the amount of mass lost through Hawking radiation is in the neighborhood of Mount Everest for size, which is rather smaller than our sun; I would not blindly repeat another poster's unfounded claim except that I also seem to remember such a claim and also cannot verify its validity. Running with the presumption that the amount of mass needed is less than that of the Earth, however, is quite a bit more reasonable - I am certain that Hawking bleed is a moderately slow thing on planetary scales, and believe that a black hole on par with a planet for mass will not evaporate before its job is done.
Even given an Earth-massed black hole, if a neutron star the mass of Sol is only a baseball in size, the black hole's superior density and Earth's inferior mass spell one very, very small black hole. Just the mass difference alone would mean that an Earth-massed neutron star would be hard to see without tools; what change the superior density of the black hole would cause should be dramatic, though I don't know the actual numbers in question.
I remember reading a speculative article by an amateur in a zine on a BBS back before zines were lame which suggested a set of math for exactly this. I have no idea how clueful said amateur was, and it's been almost two decades, so I'll be damned if I can remember so many details. One thing, however, struck me enough that I remember it to this day: his claim, which I cannot defend, was that a black hole which could eventually eat an Earth-sized planet would be smaller than a speck of dust by a major difference, and that one of the practical difficulties of dealing with said black hole (the ongoing discussion was in fact around the short story Hole Man and how one might respond to the situation without evacuating Earth) would be just aiming. There had been a bunch of suggestions regarding thermonuclear devices, lasers and other things trying to excite the contained matter enough to warp the gravity distribution and attempt to cause fragmentation or accelerate Hawking loss, but it seems that even if you have a nuke that'll survive long enough to make it close to a black hole without going off or being destroyed, and even if you surmount the time issues approaching the Schwartzschild radius, that it's gonna be damned hard just to decide where the place you want to aim is going to be.
What do you think the law is except a large series of references?
If we were discussing the law that might be tangentially germane, but we're not. I realize this is hard for you, so let me spell it out.
You, in a condescending tone, told someone else that they used a word incorrectly when in fact they had not. I pointed out the etymology and history of the word and said "I'm sorry, but they weren't in fact incorrect." You tried to refer me to a book in order to save face. I said "No, ass, don't pretend that a book will make your argument for you; if you want to pretend someone used a word incorrectly you have to be specific about why."
It really doesn't amtter whether the law is a litany of references, though in fact believing that it is shows a critical minunderstanding of the application of case law and the desperation to apply precedent to a disconnected argument in the hope of saving face. The issue at hand has nothing to do with the actual laws in question.
If you want to argue that the word "fork" really means "apple", then yes, you can be dismissed with nothing more than a "look it up in Webster's, and if you don't like it, take it up with them".
I dare you to tell that to a professional etymologist with a straight face. You couldn't have chosen a less authoritative group to hang your verecundiam on. Maybe you didn't realize this, but dictionaries aren't in fact a good way of getting the definitions of terms, especially with regards to the law where terms are rigidly defined by the law itself.
Likewise, if you want to argue that the definitions in Black's are not authoritative
They aren't. US law is not determined hinging on the definintions in Black's. Of course, I wasn't actually talking about Black's at all; this is a low-quality straw man.
are not definitive,
How could a definition not be definitive? Are we arguing in the same English?
are inaccurate,
You're putting words in my mouth in order to fabricate a mistake to argue against; I never said any such thing. I'll try again. "Do not rely on books to make your argument for you; that is the behavior of a small child, and tends to allow people which believe they know things that in fact they do not to rant at pleasure without any need to actually justify themselves, for as long as they believe that pompous verecundiam makes their bed for them before they sleep."
I'm not telling you there's anything wrong with Black's. I'm telling you that Black's has nothing to do with what I said to you, and that if you want to get on a soapbox you'd better be able to stand up for what you said.
Until you're ready to do that, you're just a troll.
Yes yes, make sure to tell me how wrong something I didn't say was, and then insult me over it; that's the way to win an argument like an adult. Something tells me you still won't actually support your own statements after this, preferring instead to ignore the perfectly solid etymological grounds which were presented now five messages ago in a clear and unambiguous fashion and prefer instead to make up arguments which were never made to rail against so as to feel correct.
Incidentally, I'm not the one who has to make an argument.
Luckily, nobody has asked you to make argument. You made argument quite some time ago. Now I'm asking you to be a big boy and explain how a perfectly good word is incorrect in use, without handwaving it away to a book, whether or not it is authority on the topic. I'm not telling you there's anytnhing wrong with Black's. I'm telling you there's something wrong with your inability to support your own arguments without it.
You want to overturn two centuries of American jurisprudence in how a word is used?
No. It's my position that you've simply accused someone wrongly.
Great: the burden of proof is on you to show that it's wrong, not on me to show
You don't have to get all the way back up to your previous height to be a pendulum. The object should continue to behave as a pendulum until it has consumed so much of the earth's mass that it breaks free. That's going to be quite some time - probably decades. Read a Niven book.
Ad verecundiam isn't impressive. Make an argument, not a reference, or kindly sit down.
Actually, Xerox PARC had tabbed text editors five years before Apple existed, and we had tabbed text editors on dead trees like two thousand years ago. I've never understood why people thought tabs were innovative - NeXT's window manager allowed you to put non-tabbed things into tabs just because you said so. C'mon.
Sorry. Chainmail was the set of miniatures rules extracted from 2nd edition AD&D. D&D evolved from an older british game called "Tunnels and Trolls," arguably hybridized with a little known Conan-themed RPG called "Royal Armies of the Hyborean Age," and was the first thing gygax/TSR made.
Why do you thin that AD&D (1E) had all ranges and movements in inches whcih were later converted to feet (which differed if you were indoors or out)?
Because 1st edition AD&D was the first D&D to directly integrate the miniatures rules partially developed by the Dungeons and Dragons Master System and Immortal System crusade rules. Please remember that AD&D was almost 15 years into TSR's gaming line; it should not be used as evidence of how things started. If you look, original D&D was in fact in meters, not inches, not feet.
Miniatures were for sell at just about every place that sold D&D stuff.
When 1st edition AD&D was new, there wasn't a single store in New York City which carried TSR products. Back then they were still a wholly mail-order supplied operation. Where are you getting this stuff? Miniatures broke into the market through miniature train and toy stores; there was no such thing as a fantasy gaming store. You're claiming that a product which created that kind of store showed up in those stores before they existed.
TSR put out lots of minis although I prefered Ral Partha.
Uh, no, you didn't. The miniatures made under the TSR name from 1988 on were made by Ral Partha. You might as well say a 1997 Toyota Celica is better than a 1997 Geo Prizm - they're the same damned car, and they're the same damned miniatures.
Besides, Ral Partha didn't start until 1984; 1st edition AD&D is from 1973. Your timeline is a decade in disjoint.
Warhammer started out as a game to use the minis that GW made for D&D.
Games Workshop started making miniatures for TSR in 1989. Hogshead has been publishing warhammer since 1977. Where are you getting your information?
Miniatures rules are in the original D&D and in 1st edition AD&D. In 2nd edition, TSR bifurcated their RPG and miniatures gaming lines inot D&D and Chainmail. There are ancillary miniatures rules listed in the 2nd edition DM's guide. The Dungeons and Dragons boardgame is essentially a lightweight miniatures game. Al-Qadim and Dark Sun heavily suggested miniatures, and included extended rules for them. The original Greyhawk and Dragonlance settings gave extension rules. Spelljammer required miniatures, and shipped with haxmaps for gaming. There were miniatures extensions listed in The Manual of The Planes, and Planescape had not only a rudimentary miniature system but also a miniatures rules expansion system. There are miniatures rules in the 3rd ed game.
And I'm pretty young--so careful how you throw around "traditionally" d^_^b.
That doesn't make sense. You're young; you have no idea how the game's traditions work. Remember, D&D is almost 40 years old, and you apparently aren't. Miniatures have been featured in almost every campaign setting TSR has ever made, and other than second edition have been at least partially in every core rules system other than 2nd edition, which simply put them in an extra book for the purposes of making more money.
Yes, RPGs like D&D are traditionally played on a tabletop using miniatures.
Actually, before people mod this funny, think about it. It's cheaper than the other setup, and serves other utility, such as secret message-passing, an interface for using abilities without letting other players know, and so forth.
I game that way with some friends with laptops. Being able to use instant messenger to conceal things which wouldn't be detectable in-game has led to some odd new developments, as players become less resistant to skullduggery due to practical concerns.
We play a four-color comic book style game under a nasty hack between Champions 5th edition and Aberrant. We by design have a lot of strange intrigue in our game. Being able to make things secret has been a boon to us. If you've got enough space for a gaming room, five $40 tables, five $150 LCD screens and five $150 barebones computers (grab a $100 one from pricewatch, throw in a $30 ancient CPU and $20 of crappy RAM,) hook up a small LAN and run yourself a slightly more powerful box as a server, and wham! you've got a much more powerful, much more flexible, arguably much cooler setup, which can also be used for other things - network gaming, for example - at about two thirds the cost.
Only real problem is that it takes a lot more space.
Just about anything, well used, can add to the experience of a roleplaying game. This shouldn't be any exception.
You had a garbage heap? Why, we had to play while running down the street to keep from being hit about the head and ears with sticks by locals, and as often used our dice to distract neighborhood dogs as to make skill roles.
Rolling dice, by the way, is very difficult while running. Hard to read the numbers; it's a real skill. Builds character.
You've gotta love how Opera users think they invented things from Xerox PARC which were commonly used in Smalltalk-V and Hypercard.
It's been eight years, and you're talking about something that's still not going to happen for a year or two. Most auto manufacturers don't make parts for a car model that far out of date, and cars weren't as rudimentary by current standards seven years ago as computers, let alone nine or potentially ten.
This isn't as unreasonable as you want it to seem.
IE doesn't use Win32 widgets, and hasn't since IE3. The way Win32 widgets work, things begin to drag when you have two hundred and fifty buttons on the same form. That's not even marginally unreasonable on a web page. If IE used Win32 widgets, things would be dog slow on complex pages.
Whereas everyone loves to whine how slow Netscape 4 was, anyone which remembers Netscape 3 will sagely nod when I tell them the biggest factor in that speed change was their own stepping away from standard widgets.
Besides, look at what IE widgets already do, which is way more complex than what Win32 widgets do.
CSS3 isn't standardized yet. Anyone who's used VC6 knows how bad an idea it is to ask Microsoft to implement software to a spec which hasn't been formalized yet.
// Incorrectly flagged as redeclaration for SEVEN YEARS
for (int i=0; i<10; ++i) {} int i;
remember how many versions of MS-DOS shipped without a decent text editor?
edlin builds character.
Because web applications threaten microsoft. That's why the things which are broken are broken: position, complex display, complex layout. If you use the set of javascripts called IE7 (god, I hate that name, but they're really good scripts) you find that in fact IE7 has all of the support it needs for the various missing things. IE6 could in fact be made into a standards compliant browser by injecting a few hundred lines of JavaScript.
Microsoft just doesn't want to.
Now, without putting on your tin foil hat, take a look at the specific things which are missing. Take a look at the things which are broken. Ask yourself, "if those things worked and were portable, how close could one get to the kind of interface a person expects for an application?"
They're not going to fix the box model bugs. They're going to polish them up just enough to get good PR, but leave them broken enough to screw with application development. They won't touch the problems with positioning, the width bugs, the bugs with auto, the bugs with -min and -max, et cetera. HTML is a much bigger threat to the application wagon circle than Java ever was. That's why their XSLT is still broken, even though they were the first to market; that's why ActiveX has the barriers it has to things that don't want to behave like DLLs; that's why their RFC2557 support in "web page archives" is so badly broken; it goes on and on.
They're going to take the parts of CSS2, and maybe even of 3, which in the long run don't matter, but which get naüve eyeballs. They'll put in text rotation, and transparent colors, and drop shadows, and stuff like that. They'll embrace all of the complex functionality for anything which is convenience-only but doesn't actually change things, and they'll get all of that 100% correct: the layered background support, the layered border support, stuff you can do right now with some extra <div>s.
But the things which really matter, which lead to the mammoth hacks you see in well developed CSS like in MediaWiki's MonoBook or at sites like TheNoodleIncident or PositionIsEverything in order to get something which should be trivial to work in just this one browser, which have been broken for years, which have been shown to be trivial to fix?
None of that will change.
They're going to implement 85% of CSS2. They're going to implement a big chunk of CSS3. Everything you'd see on geocities - the bastard children of <blink> and <marquee>, the things which nobody actually needs to threaten applications, the things which weirdos that try to explain songs to each other in blogs use to excess.
The things, in short, which would make someone shallow switch over CSS standards support.
They're going to turn their biggest weakness into their biggest strength. You can expect to see huge tracts of CSS2 and CSS3 supported. Just not the stuff which is already broken.
That stuff has to stay broken, until they can't wait any longer. That's what Avalon is about - they're scrambling to fold HTML into the UI experience so that by the time they have to give up the ghost and make IE do what it should have years ago, they can "make it a compelling new way to think about application interfaces."
They're making sure that nobody can beat their OS to the punch by breaking IE until they've had a chance to make their own first entry, and it's a damned good strategy. OSX' interface architecture is a mess; there are a billion different ways to do any one thing and none of them are as elegant as CSS is slowly becoming. The various Unices and Linuces don't have a dominant WM, and certainly don't have a dominant interface architecture; they won't organize in time to beat Avalon to the punch, which is only a few years away. XUL was a good try, and almost made it, but you have to have a mozilla install, and it's a giant hassle to use as a developer, so nobody's really taking advantage. Besides, until recen
And how does "convicted," the past tense affirmative of "conviction (strong belief,)" not apply there? That is what the word means in the legal, denotative and connotative senses. If a court finds you to be blank, you are a convicted blank.
Technically, if a court of law signs an affadavit that you are a samaritan, you would be a convicted good person. Just because a word has a foreboding connotation doesn't mean that the word is wrong in use.
Mod parent down.
Sure there is. Find the most common codepage and report any characters which aren't in that codepage. The idea isn't to mark extended UTF characters. The idea is to mark characters which aren't in the primary codepage. That there's a primary codepage which we think of as ASCII isn't important - that's our default, not the only choice.
The appropriate thing to do, which many linguists raised during the standardization of UTF but who were unfortunately ignored, would have been to create an entire codepage for each language, explicitly choosing to replicate most letters. That way, even though French and English use almost exactly the same character set, it would be perfectly clear that what we were looking at was French, because it would be encoded right into the document, and so we could distinguish between a French R, a German R, or the Chinese letter which looks like a cursive lower case R, or whatever the hell.
Maybe more broadly, what we need to do is to begin to accept that our current language encoding scheme is an utter hack, a miserable security nightmare, and the worst thing which ever happened to portability. Worse still, the problem isn't UTF-* or UCS-* at all; the problem is actually in our component architectures. We should be able to swap character encodings out as easily as we do fonts. If we could do that, then something superior to Unicode could arise and take hold, and get rid of these problems once and for goddamned all.
It's not like 32-bit character sets are in any danger of running out of room in the human population any century soon, cough y2k cough. It's also not like it'd be hard to write a font engine based on references, so we could use the same glyph for R in each of the European languages. Furthermore it's not like we don't have very good searchable compressed text representations.
It really seems that the primary objection to moving to a much more versatile and flexible character encoding is the supposedly preposterous amount of space it'll suddenly take up, and oh my god our text is all going to inflate by 300% and hard drives will be the size of camels and my laptop is going to crush my spine. I'm calling bullshit. I'm old enough to remember how disk space actually works. I have a text file collection from the BBS days which I remain proud of to this day; I've got thousands of movie scripts, the complete works of (insert two dozen authors here,) construction plans for devices to scam telephone networks which haven't existed for 15 years, the whole nine yards. The whole collection, uncompressed, is less than fifty meg.
Now, let's be honest. There are a lot of people on SlashDot reading this post right now which, over thinband, download more pornography than that on an average night. That's less than a tenth of a CD. You almost can't buy SD cards that small anymore. In fact, if you use a text-specific compressor, you can almost get it small enough to cram onto four floppy disks.
For maybe a better sense of scale, I just looked at Project Gutenberg's FAQ as regards setting up a mirror; it says that the entire Gutenberg collection, which I suspect is probably the biggest flat text collection on earth, would need "a couple of gig" to host, but if that space is prohibitive, they'll allow you to store only the uncompressed versions. The way it's phrased isn't clear, but I believe that implies that the entire collection both compressed and uncompressed is "only a couple of gig," or probably just barely not fit on a single double sided double surfaced DVD (the room to spare is less than 400 meg.)
So, like, if you use a burner you can buy at Fry's for $300 and some media which costs $10, move to an encoding which would make every linguist on earth break down laughing, and used a compression program from the late seventies, you'd barely half fill the DVD.
The problem isn't that UTF-8 is too powerful. The problem is that UTF-8 isn't powerful enough. It's able to render all our letters, but it can't carry l
That last one is infeasable. By design the net takes any client; a basic security premise is that any client, with enough resources, can be mimiced or compromised. You can't rely on things which have been compiled into the client; they're not in your control and are therefore unreliable.
An easy set of introductions to how badly wrong that notion can go come in the form of discussions about game clients on public networks, where sniffing can get around the client removing information from the player's use instead of it being done by the server.
The short version: on the public network, you cannot trust a foreign binary.
Why not? It's common.
You really should look a word up before criticizing someone else's use thereof. The word empire has nothing to do with government. The word empire, from emperor, from old french empéror, from latin imperatorium's nominative imperiator, is not a governmental title at all. The word means "commander," and was adopted only after conferred by a vote of the Roman military onto a successful general. There could be more than one imperator at once, until Julius and then Augustus adopted the title as a show of solidarity with the military, presumably to secure loyalties. Note that Tiberius and Claudius rejected the title after Julius and Augustus had taken it on; as military they felt it needed to be earned.
The title "emperor" was applied to Asian monarchs by the West during the middle ages specifically because it was not a royal title, but rather a military one; the issue was to suggest that the Asian monarchs did not have the royal blood which at the time was seen as a semi-holy thing in Europe (qv. divine right, etc;) it was in essence a way to exclude Asian monarchs from "royalty" by word use.
With respect, the word "empire" does not apply to most countries. An empire is not a large country, but something acquired and held by conquest. The United States is arguably an empire thanks to the Spanish American war, but the term is typically applied to territory acuired mostly through conquest instead of in small part, such as was the case with Russia (the original nation) and the USSR, with Britain and Portugal and the European colonial powers, with ancient Egypt and Rome and Macedon, with feudal Japan and ancient China and Mongolia, the Aztec empire, and so forth. By contrast, you would not apply these terms to Canada, to the Inca, to non-WW2 Germany, etc.
With that observation, it becomes quite clear that the word "empire" does in fact apply quite well to some financial institutions - particularly those characterized by hostile takeover, marginalizations, and so forth.