Aside from the huge privacy issues, I'm even more concerned that they would screw up collecting it. Everyone sheds DNA. Who is to say that the DNA they collect is actually from the person they think it is? DNA gets all mixed together after it leaves a person's body.
That's what juries are for. The prosecution presents evidence that the defendant's DNA was found at the scene of the crime. The defense attorney then attacks the credibility of the evidence, for example by offering an alternative theory for why his DNA was there, or attacking the method of collection to raise doubt that it's actually his DNA the police collected. (He doesn't necessarily have to provide his own DNA sample. Defendants aren't obligated to prove their innocence.) Then the investigator explains why the collection method is sound. At the end of the day, the jury decides whether the defense has raised a reasonable doubt.
This comment makes absolutely no sense. Where does probable cause come from, except from an investigation? How do you expect police to do their job if they're only allowed to start collecting evidence after they get a warrant, which must be supported by evidence?
The purpose of a warrant is to allow the police to breach your otherwise constitutionally-guaranteed reasonable expectation of privacy. A warrant permits police to search your home, person, vehicle, or other private space without your permission. Other than such private spaces, police don't need permission from anybody to investigate. They certainly don't need a warrant to search a crime scene, where you have no legally-protected reasonable expectation of privacy.
so they follow you around until they see you throw away a cup, or a piece of gum, or sneeze and toss the tissue away in a public place. Then they amble up and help themselves.
That sounds like "police work" to me. I'd rather police spend their time doing things like staking out suspected criminals than doing what the NSA does.
Mark Twain supposedly said, "It's easy to quit smoking. I've done it dozens of times!" (Implying that even in the late 19th century, there was a reason to want to quit smoking).
There is a lot of truth to that statement.
It was the cheaper consumer models that were affected. Retail profit margins are so thin that manufacturers and retailers make up for it with preloaded crapware.
Lenovo's business products were not affected by this as these aren't usually preloaded with crap.
The same goes for other manufactures too. Dell and HP both offer cheap crapware infested models, along with pricier crap free business models.
You do get what you pay for.
The last consumer-grade Dell PC I bought came with a restore disk that was just a plain vanilla Windows 7 image. It didn't even have drivers. So, voila, perform a clean install right out of the box, install the drivers (from the included driver disks), and you've got a crapware-free Windows. (Of course, it's still on a consumer-grade Dell laptop, and that's a little harder to remedy. But like you say, you get what you pay for.)
Answer - There is no section that says that. It's true that some Mormons once slaughtered a group of passing settlers. It was unequivocally a bad thing to do. It can be slightly better understood (but not excused) by understanding the circumstances. Mormons were quite paranoid of outsiders, since they and their families had been driven out of several cities, raped, and murdered. There was hysteria about Johnston's Army coming into the territory, conquering it, and again raping and murdering people (this was right in the middle of the "Utah War"). In the midst of that hysteria, one group of people went completely nuts and did some horrible, inexcusable things. At first, they told Brigham Young that Indians did it, and Brigham (probably reluctant to believe that some of his own people could do something so heinous), believed them. A local grand jury also failed to indict, again probably reluctant to believe that some of their own could do something so heinous. Years later, federal prosecutors came in, and when it became clear that John Lee and his friends had in fact been responsible, the church excommunicated them (which is the worst penalty a church can or should be able to levy). Years later, Lee was convicted by an all-Mormon jury and shot, and Brigham Young opined that Lee got less than he deserved. There have been some efforts to implicate Brigham Young as a co-conspirator, but it takes a lot of winking at the actual evidence to get there. Many people believe that he made mistakes in how he handled the situation, which is a more supportable proposition.
Bringing up facts about Mormons is fine. But if you're going to do it, learn the whole story. Don't just parrot some anti-Mormon sound bite you once heard from somebody.
They don't lose their copyright just because they stop running a server.
But they should if one were to take seriously all that is said about the reasons why we have copyright and how it should serve the good of the society as a whole.
Perhaps, but I think that's a little extreme. I am, rather, in favor of a more reasonable copyright term. (I would not have upheld the current copyright term if I were on the Supreme Court, since "life of the author" is not a determinate time.) But even then, if they never publish the source code, copyright doesn't come into it. All you could do is copy the game binary, so you would still have to reverse engineer a game server. That's the problem with the DMCA. It reaches over traditional copyright boundaries and prohibits people from doing things like implementing something on their own, which has not copyright implications.
All this will do is at best stop the companies from filing DMCA take downs on the fans; it will in no way obligate the company to release their internal software for the servers which ran the game.
That's not a bug, that's a feature. They don't lose their copyright just because they stop running a server. This is just an exemption that wouldn't let them sue gamers for DMCA violations when they reverse engineer their own servers.
Now only if they'd let me live in this here abandoned house. Perrect!
That's a poor analogy. This isn't a request for a blanket copyright exemption for abandonware. This is a request for a DMCA exception that lets people who already legally own a copy of a game to continue playing it by circumventing DRM and running their own servers.
I will write a script that locates ambiguous usage of commas, and will replace them with the correct oxford comma usage.
Sir, that is uncouth, uncivilized and incorrect.
There are legitimate grammar and usage debates, with cogent arguments on either side. But the Oxford Comma is the One True Way. The best argument I've ever heard against it is, "Well, it saves a few drops of ink on the printed page." Anti-Oxford Comma heathens should be drawn, quartered, and burned at the stake for befouling the language.
This guy's my hero - misuse of "comprised" is a pet peeve of mine.
Despite sounding vaguely similar to "composed", it's not a synonym. Comprised is a near-synonym for included, but implies totality. "The band comprised a guitarist, a bassist, and a drummer" means that was the entirety of the band. Since so few people actually understand this, I tend to avoid the word.
I believe you have that backwards. "Comprising" is open-ended, and means "including at least". "Consisting of" implies totality. At least in the legal world.
This is an important distinction for patent claims. If you say "A widget comprising a, b, and c," that means the widget includes a, b, and c, and anything else. If you say "A widget consisting of a, b, and c," that means it includes only a, b, and c (which is why you never see "consisting of" in a patent claim, except in Markush groups).
First: I doubt there are any Bible haters here. Why would anyone hate book?
I guess you would have to ask the many, many Slashdot posters who regularly mock the Bible, including the GP. (That said, there are plenty of books I hate, so it's not inconceivable.)
Second: you seem not to know much about what you are talking about, hint: read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
Um, did you read the page you linked to? Because it definitely supports exactly what I was saying. Whether you believe the Bible was divinely inspired, it was a near-contemporary account. The fact that a little blurb on Wikipedia mentions that some early-20th-Century archaeologists think Molech might have been made up is hardly conclusive evidence that Molech is "obviously" an invention of the Jews to denigrate their enemies. But regardless of what you think actually happened, the author of Chronicles was definitely saying, "Manasseh was an awful person because he sacrificed children to Molech." That's a far cry from the GP's original thesis of "Manasseh was an awful person because he did the equivalent of reading Harry Potter."
Yeah, I know you think it's clever and edgy to make fun of people who read the Bible, but if you're going to do it, at least have some basic understanding. The passage you're referring to, in which Manasseh's evils are enumerated, includes "he caused his children to pass through the fire in the valley of the son of Hinnom." This is a reference to Molech worship, in which people literally burned children to death in the arms of golden idols. Surely even for an edgy, clever Bible-hater, that's sufficiently abominable to call him evil.
You do understand that Pascal was first released in 1970, right? Many Pascal programmers in the 1970s asked the same question - why do we need C, with its dangerous string handling and obtuse preprocessor, if it doesn't solve any new problems?
Um, you realize that C came out at almost exactly the same time, don't you? Granted, I wasn't programming anything in the 1970s, but I know enough history to know that the Unix kernel was already being ported to C right around 1970.
I like the End-X style, such as VB's, because if the nesting gets messed up due to a typo, End-X carries info about which block ender went with which block starter. "End While" goes with "While", obviously, not an IF statement. Brackets lack this ability.
"Lacks" is a strong word; it's just not inherent. Back when I used to write software in C and C++ for money, I would religiously put "}//end if" to make sure I could keep track of which braces went where. If I needed even more context, I would put " }//end if(var1 == var2). It's not that hard. Like many things in C, you have plenty of rope to hang yourself if you really want to, but you can also make it tidy and sensible if you care to. C is not your friend, and is not your enemy.
C is like an M1 rifle. Sturdy, proved in battle many times over, occasionally finnicky, and ready to put a high-powered round precisely where you aim it without apology. Whether you aim at your foot is your business.
Slashdot Mirror
Who has won the case of SCO v. IBM? Why, IBM's lawyers, of course.
Aside from the huge privacy issues, I'm even more concerned that they would screw up collecting it. Everyone sheds DNA. Who is to say that the DNA they collect is actually from the person they think it is? DNA gets all mixed together after it leaves a person's body.
That's what juries are for. The prosecution presents evidence that the defendant's DNA was found at the scene of the crime. The defense attorney then attacks the credibility of the evidence, for example by offering an alternative theory for why his DNA was there, or attacking the method of collection to raise doubt that it's actually his DNA the police collected. (He doesn't necessarily have to provide his own DNA sample. Defendants aren't obligated to prove their innocence.) Then the investigator explains why the collection method is sound. At the end of the day, the jury decides whether the defense has raised a reasonable doubt.
This comment makes absolutely no sense. Where does probable cause come from, except from an investigation? How do you expect police to do their job if they're only allowed to start collecting evidence after they get a warrant, which must be supported by evidence?
The purpose of a warrant is to allow the police to breach your otherwise constitutionally-guaranteed reasonable expectation of privacy. A warrant permits police to search your home, person, vehicle, or other private space without your permission. Other than such private spaces, police don't need permission from anybody to investigate. They certainly don't need a warrant to search a crime scene, where you have no legally-protected reasonable expectation of privacy.
so they follow you around until they see you throw away a cup, or a piece of gum, or sneeze and toss the tissue away in a public place. Then they amble up and help themselves.
That sounds like "police work" to me. I'd rather police spend their time doing things like staking out suspected criminals than doing what the NSA does.
Mark Twain supposedly said, "It's easy to quit smoking. I've done it dozens of times!" (Implying that even in the late 19th century, there was a reason to want to quit smoking).
In other words, the ACLU does not believe in the right to keep and bear arms. What was your point?
we're waging war with no human casualties
Oh, oh, I've seen this one before!
And the conspiracy was actually caught on film this time.
There is a lot of truth to that statement. It was the cheaper consumer models that were affected. Retail profit margins are so thin that manufacturers and retailers make up for it with preloaded crapware.
Lenovo's business products were not affected by this as these aren't usually preloaded with crap. The same goes for other manufactures too. Dell and HP both offer cheap crapware infested models, along with pricier crap free business models.
You do get what you pay for.
The last consumer-grade Dell PC I bought came with a restore disk that was just a plain vanilla Windows 7 image. It didn't even have drivers. So, voila, perform a clean install right out of the box, install the drivers (from the included driver disks), and you've got a crapware-free Windows. (Of course, it's still on a consumer-grade Dell laptop, and that's a little harder to remedy. But like you say, you get what you pay for.)
Double Jeopardy only applies to criminal law.
Because they are deliberately tricking people into using the online account.
Yeah, pretty much, from what I've seen of Windows 8.
True story. You're welcome.
Answer - There is no section that says that. It's true that some Mormons once slaughtered a group of passing settlers. It was unequivocally a bad thing to do. It can be slightly better understood (but not excused) by understanding the circumstances. Mormons were quite paranoid of outsiders, since they and their families had been driven out of several cities, raped, and murdered. There was hysteria about Johnston's Army coming into the territory, conquering it, and again raping and murdering people (this was right in the middle of the "Utah War"). In the midst of that hysteria, one group of people went completely nuts and did some horrible, inexcusable things. At first, they told Brigham Young that Indians did it, and Brigham (probably reluctant to believe that some of his own people could do something so heinous), believed them. A local grand jury also failed to indict, again probably reluctant to believe that some of their own could do something so heinous. Years later, federal prosecutors came in, and when it became clear that John Lee and his friends had in fact been responsible, the church excommunicated them (which is the worst penalty a church can or should be able to levy). Years later, Lee was convicted by an all-Mormon jury and shot, and Brigham Young opined that Lee got less than he deserved. There have been some efforts to implicate Brigham Young as a co-conspirator, but it takes a lot of winking at the actual evidence to get there. Many people believe that he made mistakes in how he handled the situation, which is a more supportable proposition.
Bringing up facts about Mormons is fine. But if you're going to do it, learn the whole story. Don't just parrot some anti-Mormon sound bite you once heard from somebody.
Citation.
But they should if one were to take seriously all that is said about the reasons why we have copyright and how it should serve the good of the society as a whole.
Perhaps, but I think that's a little extreme. I am, rather, in favor of a more reasonable copyright term. (I would not have upheld the current copyright term if I were on the Supreme Court, since "life of the author" is not a determinate time.) But even then, if they never publish the source code, copyright doesn't come into it. All you could do is copy the game binary, so you would still have to reverse engineer a game server. That's the problem with the DMCA. It reaches over traditional copyright boundaries and prohibits people from doing things like implementing something on their own, which has not copyright implications.
All this will do is at best stop the companies from filing DMCA take downs on the fans; it will in no way obligate the company to release their internal software for the servers which ran the game.
That's not a bug, that's a feature. They don't lose their copyright just because they stop running a server. This is just an exemption that wouldn't let them sue gamers for DMCA violations when they reverse engineer their own servers.
Now only if they'd let me live in this here abandoned house. Perrect!
That's a poor analogy. This isn't a request for a blanket copyright exemption for abandonware. This is a request for a DMCA exception that lets people who already legally own a copy of a game to continue playing it by circumventing DRM and running their own servers.
Sir, that is uncouth, uncivilized and incorrect.
There are legitimate grammar and usage debates, with cogent arguments on either side. But the Oxford Comma is the One True Way. The best argument I've ever heard against it is, "Well, it saves a few drops of ink on the printed page." Anti-Oxford Comma heathens should be drawn, quartered, and burned at the stake for befouling the language.
This guy's my hero - misuse of "comprised" is a pet peeve of mine.
Despite sounding vaguely similar to "composed", it's not a synonym. Comprised is a near-synonym for included, but implies totality. "The band comprised a guitarist, a bassist, and a drummer" means that was the entirety of the band. Since so few people actually understand this, I tend to avoid the word.
I believe you have that backwards. "Comprising" is open-ended, and means "including at least". "Consisting of" implies totality. At least in the legal world.
This is an important distinction for patent claims. If you say "A widget comprising a, b, and c," that means the widget includes a, b, and c, and anything else. If you say "A widget consisting of a, b, and c," that means it includes only a, b, and c (which is why you never see "consisting of" in a patent claim, except in Markush groups).
First: I doubt there are any Bible haters here. Why would anyone hate book?
I guess you would have to ask the many, many Slashdot posters who regularly mock the Bible, including the GP. (That said, there are plenty of books I hate, so it's not inconceivable.)
Second: you seem not to know much about what you are talking about, hint: read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
Um, did you read the page you linked to? Because it definitely supports exactly what I was saying. Whether you believe the Bible was divinely inspired, it was a near-contemporary account. The fact that a little blurb on Wikipedia mentions that some early-20th-Century archaeologists think Molech might have been made up is hardly conclusive evidence that Molech is "obviously" an invention of the Jews to denigrate their enemies. But regardless of what you think actually happened, the author of Chronicles was definitely saying, "Manasseh was an awful person because he sacrificed children to Molech." That's a far cry from the GP's original thesis of "Manasseh was an awful person because he did the equivalent of reading Harry Potter."
Yeah, I know you think it's clever and edgy to make fun of people who read the Bible, but if you're going to do it, at least have some basic understanding. The passage you're referring to, in which Manasseh's evils are enumerated, includes "he caused his children to pass through the fire in the valley of the son of Hinnom." This is a reference to Molech worship, in which people literally burned children to death in the arms of golden idols. Surely even for an edgy, clever Bible-hater, that's sufficiently abominable to call him evil.
You do understand that Pascal was first released in 1970, right? Many Pascal programmers in the 1970s asked the same question - why do we need C, with its dangerous string handling and obtuse preprocessor, if it doesn't solve any new problems?
Um, you realize that C came out at almost exactly the same time, don't you? Granted, I wasn't programming anything in the 1970s, but I know enough history to know that the Unix kernel was already being ported to C right around 1970.
I like the End-X style, such as VB's, because if the nesting gets messed up due to a typo, End-X carries info about which block ender went with which block starter. "End While" goes with "While", obviously, not an IF statement. Brackets lack this ability.
"Lacks" is a strong word; it's just not inherent. Back when I used to write software in C and C++ for money, I would religiously put "}//end if" to make sure I could keep track of which braces went where. If I needed even more context, I would put " }//end if(var1 == var2). It's not that hard. Like many things in C, you have plenty of rope to hang yourself if you really want to, but you can also make it tidy and sensible if you care to. C is not your friend, and is not your enemy.
C is like an M1 rifle. Sturdy, proved in battle many times over, occasionally finnicky, and ready to put a high-powered round precisely where you aim it without apology. Whether you aim at your foot is your business.
Welcome to my life every time Slashdot posts one of their misinformed anti-patent rants. (Signed, a patent attorney.)
nitric acid and tributyl phosphate can form a dangerously explosive polymer called red oil.
Which, in concentrated form, can form a black hole that can devour a whole planet.