We KNOW that these aren't hard to create, kids with no formal training can crank them out like they're nothing. To a 14 year old kid who needs to show off to his friends (and almost all of them do), it's IRRESISTABLE. I can't picture throwing someone behind bars for more than a couple years just because they're virus is effective.
But this is really an argument in favor of different sentencing for juveniles than for adults (an idea that I support, and feel that recent laws are incredibly stupid to ignore) not against heavy potential penalties for writing viruses. IMO, writing a virus is the ethical equivalent of starting a fire, and deliberately releasing one is the moral equivalent of arson. Like a fire, a virus has the potential to spread completely out of the control of its originator and cause tremendous damage along the way. Little kids are not generally sent to prison when their playing with matches burns something down, but adults who do so are- and deserve to be- treated quite harshly. IMO any person who is legally competent to understand the consequences of releasing a virus and does so anyway deserves a nice long vacation at Club Fed.
Ion engines work by accelerating charged particles (ions) electrically rather than accelerating molecules chemically. A conventional rocket motor works by taking a fuel/oxidizer mix that contains stored chemical energy, releasing the chemical energy by burning the fuel/oxidizer, and using the generated heat to accelerate the combustion products out of the rocket. In an ion engine, OTOH, an inert gas (xenon) is ionized and the ions are accelerated by passing them through an electric field (and then throwing them out of the engine).
There are two important criteria to use in judging an engine: thrust and specific impulse. The thrust is how hard the rocket can push (i.e. its force) and is a combination of how rapidly it can push reaction products out and how fast they're going. Specific impulse measures how fuel efficient the rocket is, i.e. how much thrust it can get from a given amount of 'fuel', and basically depends on the velocity of the reaction products leaving the thruster. Chemical rockets can achieve much higher burn rates than ion engines, so they can produce much higher thrust. Ion engines, though, can achieve much higher specific impulse, because they can accelerate ions to much higher velocities by using energy accumulated from solar panels or radiothermal generators.
Overall which one you want to use depends on circumstances. Chemical rockets are necessary for things like getting into orbit in the first place, because you need to have a thrust/weight ratio > 1 to get off the ground, and ion engines can't get there. OTOH, once you're in space you can't easily get more fuel, so the greater efficiency of ion engines means that they make a good propultion system for long, deep space flights.
But the intentions are different. The BSD license exists in large part to facilitate the distribution of the code in as wide a form as possible. In that sense, taking the code and incorporating it into the Linux kernel is in keeping with the intent of the original license. The only thing wrong (and it is a significant wrong; one who depends on a license to protect his own work has a moral obligation to respect the licenses that others use to protect theirs) is that the copyright notice was removed. The GPL, OTOH, is intended specifically to keep GPLed software from being lifted into proprietary products. That means that doing so is a violation of not just the letter but also the spirit of the license.
Think about this: if the cumulative value of everything in the world were expressed in measures of gold, which theoretically backs the majority of world currencies, does enough gold physically exist to back the paper money value, or has the paper money itself become valuable?
Actually, most major currencies are not backed by gold and haven't been for some time. The United States, for instance, went off the gold standard during the Nixon Administration. Even before that there wasn't enough gold to come anywhere close to backing all of the currency in circulation. Instead the money could theoretically be exchanged for gold, but there were sharp limits on how much gold a person could actually posses, imports and exports were restricted, etc.
The reason that gold stopped being used as backing for currency is that the partial backing system just didn't work anymore. Real exchange rates between countries shifted because their economies grew at different rates and their central banks had different policies, but the nominal exchange rates weren't allowed to fluctuate. That meant that the real and nominal value of gold was skewed and smuggling became a serious problem- hence the restictions on gold ownership.
Today there simply isn't enough gold to come anywhere close to meeting the needs of even partially backing currencies (with all the problems that would entail) much less fully backing it. Instead money is backed by the faith and credit of the government that issues it. That's a big part of the reason that exchange rates fluctuate wildly in response to political instability. It seems less tangible that backing with gold, but in reality it's not as big a difference from the partial backing system as you might think.
Of course a large number of upper class vices also depend on cash money. Cocaine, bribery, blackmail, tax evasion, money laundering, and the like are also traditionally cash only operations. I guess that the favorite for of rich person bribery is now sufficiently accepted that politicians even allow the bribes- err.. campaign contributions- they receive to be public record so that's a little bit less of a problem today than it used to be.
I personally like cash, though, even though I am not especially interested in any of those vices. I don't necessarily want everything that I do to be recorded for posterity, or to be available to anyone who has a chance to see my bank records. It's also very convenient for interpersonal transactions. When I go out to lunch with my coworkers, it's very convenient for everyone to be able to toss cash into a big pot to settle the bill. It would be quite awkward if we had to ask for separate checks. Sometimes I want to borrow a bit of money from somebody else, too, and most of my friends don't have credit card machines and don't like taking checks. Being able to settle our minor debts in cash is very convenient.
I wonder what RMS's goal is for denying other parties credit for things such as XFree86, Perl, etc. GNU's stuff is only piece. Certainly an important piece, but only one piece.
It's particularly ironic that RMS makes such a vigorous complaint about this given that he vigorously (and correctly, IMO) complained about the "practical problems" with the "obnoxious advertizing clause" in the original BSD license. It seems to me that the whole "GNU/Linux" situation represents essentially the same problem. There's no logical reason to include GNU but exclude the other components when naming it, and demanding that GNU be included in the name is exactly the same thing that made the advertizing clause so annoying.
It's not even that much of a pain. All they have to do is to provide a CD with the product that contains their source code. That's not a terrible hassle or expense, you know. They don't even have to do that; they can simply include a note in the product literature that the source is available on request for such-and-such a fee for medium, shipping, and handling, or for download on their web-site. The chances are that only a tiny fraction of their customers would want to see it anyway, and most of them would download it from the ftp site (at virtually no cost) instead of actually requesting the physical medium (in which case you can charge them costs). It's hard to see that doing that is actually a significant problem.
Not quite. Section 3 requires that the software either be provided with source, with a written offer to provide the source to any third party who asks on a medium customarily used for data interchange for no more than cost, or a passed on offer of the previous type (and that's only allowed for non-commercial distribution, and only if received as a binary that same way). There is a special clarification that says that if you're distributing the binaries by making them available for download, putting the source on the same server counts as distributing them together, even if users are not forced to download the source. That's the situation for Debian.
OTOH, Microtest did not distribute their binaries by making them available for download, and they didn't distribute them with the machine, either. That means that they must make a written offer to provide the source on a medium customarily used for software interchange at no more than cost. ISTR that RMS specifically mentioned that companies are not allowed to say simply "well download it from our ftp"- they must offer to provide physical media with the source- so that people without network access have a chance to get the source, too. Doing so also prevents a company from cheating and putting their ftp server on a 14.4K modem and claiming that it's available for download when nobody could actually download it successfully.
> They probably only have to give the source code and their changes to customers, though, and not to the general public
What makes you think that?
Why wouldnt they have to give the code to the general public?
Because that's what the GPL says. The GPL only requires that source code be made available to people who receive the binaries. There is no requirement that it be made available to anyone who asks. There is also no requirement that it be made available for download by ftp. A company that wished to would have every right to tell their customers that the GPLed source code was only available by sending a letter with $1 for a CD and $3 for shipping and handling (i.e. reasonable media and distribution costs), and (IIRC) could also demand proof of purchase as well. They can't prevent their customers from redistributing the source code once they have it- the GPL forbids that- but they are under no particular obligation to make the code as easy as possible to get. They only have to make it as easy to get as the GPL requires- which is harder than most people realize.
Actually, they have to do more than that. For one thing, the GPL absolutely requires that they let their customers know that the software is GPLed and that the code is available. They have clearly failed to do so. They also must provide the code on a physical medium on request for no more than the cost of media and shipping; simply putting it up on ftp is not sufficient. In practice making it available by ftp may be acceptible if it means that nobody particularly wants to get the software on a physical medium, but the offer to provide the physical medium must be made.
And that's just for the GPLed programs. Some of the other licenses used have their own requirements. Apache, for instance, includes the "Obnoxious Advertizing Clause" in its license, so removing their trademark from the package is a big no-no. The stripping of the Apache advertizing information is actually very good evidence that this is not just a casual, accidental license violation. Removing that stuff is clearly deliberate, since simple laziness would result in it being left in.
The ammendment is actually surprisingly layman-readable. It appears that most of it is fairly straightforward stuff; telling various government agencies to carry out studies to see what they should do to help out with their corner of combatting terrorism. Those parts should be relatively noncontroversial.
It gets a bit more interesting toward the end, where they appear to be ammending existing rules for wiretaps. Unfortunately, because those parts are mostly adding phrases to existing laws it's a bit tougher to follow, but it looks as though most of what they're doing is adding language expanding existing rules about phone taps to network taps. That bit should also be relatively uncontroversial, because existing rules for phone taps are fairly strict. The part that's really bad is at the very end, where they expand the rules for when authorities are allowed to use taps without judicial review. I'm always very worried about laws that negate important rights in "Emergency Circumstances"- the description of when the special rules are in effect. Even worse, the circumstances are fairly vague. What exactly constitutes "immediate threat to the national security interests of the United States" or "immediate threat to public health or safety"? Those both provide a lot of wiggle room.
Nope. I just clicked on your link, and the ACLU web site popped right up. Maybe you're having a problem establishing a connection from your end, but the site is still there.
Sadly, terrorism is the perfect threat for those who want to take liberties away. Liberties are always curtailed in wartime (read the Bill of Rights: writs of habeus corpus can be suspended during war) and everyone in Washington is saying that this is a war. But in a normal war there's a clear enemy, and some way of telling when the war is over. Fighting against terrorists, though, there is nothing but a mass of shadows. There's no way of telling when they've all been caught of have given up, so there's no way to tell that the fight is over. That means that there's no time when the liberties that are ignored in the interests of pursuing the war should be reinstated- so they likely never will be. We must fight to preserve them now or we can kiss them goodby forever.
That is extremely scary. It's frightening to see that people who think this way (if such mental processes deserve the dignity of being described as thought) are as well respected and listened to as these men. To take advantage of the disaster to demonize their enemies is simply disgusting.
Hopefully, some day, Cyberlink will get around to actually releasing it so that I can pay them some money. Until then, I'm happily using the copy that I war^H^H^H found somewhere...
You might find Videolan an interesting alternative. They don't have menu navigation yet, but apart from that it's a nice player. It plays quite well (though it sounds as though it has higher processor requirements than PowerDVD), has a nice interface with native support for gtk+ and qt, and finally has usable if ugly subtitles. Of the available free players I've found it to be the best.
Re:Hugo just inverted Clarke's assumption
on
Harry Potter Wins Hugo
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· Score: 2, Insightful
While this has been moderated as funny, there is a serious side to this. David Brin, in his essay Science versus Magic makes a point essentially along these lines. His point is that the distinction between magic and technology is not so much their principle of operation as their sociology. Science and Technology (according to Brin) are about sharing ideas, understanding universally operating principles, and developing artifacts that work reliably. Magic, OTOH, is based on non-shared knowledge and forcing the world to work the way that you want it to, not according to reliable principles.
By that logic, you can actually make a very good case that "magic" in Harry Potter is much closer to Brin's idea of technology than his idea of magic. In Potter's world, new discoveries are shared with the rest of the (magical) world though regular publications and (magical) artifacts are mass produced and expected to work reliably. The very idea of a place like Hogwarts, where young witches and wizards are trained in a standardized magical curriculum is specifically against Brin's idea of magic.
IOW, Clarke did have it backward. Sufficiently advanced technology is distinguishable from magic because it operates differently. OTOH, as magic becomes more advanced it starts to look more and more like a technology.
Children's bedtime stories (even if they are good) on the Hugo list!
Suggesting that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is just a "children's bedtime story" is severely underrates it. This is not some lightweight bit of fluff but a serious work, and it most certainly belongs on the short list of the best fiction of any genre published last year. It's reasonable to question its qualification as a work of science fiction, but in terms of quality of writing it is certainly qualified for consideration.
Not to be a stick in the mud, but I didn't notice much, if any, improvement when trying it. Of course I'm already operating at reasonably high resolution to start with, so there's going to be somewhat less room for improvement through anti-aliasing, but it's certainly not dramatic. The other disadvantage is that it's only for the one theme, so you can't take advantage if you want to keep using your existing theme. And, as they mention but don't emphasize, it's only for widgets not for all fonts, so the value was rather limited to start with.
The microbes might not be economically viable at extracting gold from seawater, but that doesn't mean that they're useless. A clever engineer could probably figure out a way of using the microbes to cheaply process low grade ore. That's currently done using environmentally dangerous processes like cyanide heap leaching (which is as dangerous as you'd expect a process using large amount of cyanide to be) but a microbe that has an affinity for gold could make that type of work much safer and more environmentally friendly. Yes it would take quite a bit of work, but gold is still valuable enough that people are likely to look into it.
Of course not. It's obviously a scam, but it's equally obvious that scams are not going anywhere. Human nature hasn't changed. As long as there are people who are desperate to belive there will be people willing to tell them what they want to hear. As long as the net is less than people want it to be- which is to say as long as it exists- there will be snake oil salesmen promising that they can make it into what people want.
I don't think it's that ambitious. I've been using Evolution as my primary mail client for almost a year. It's improved a lot in that time, and for the past several months it's been quite reliable and has all the features I need. I don't think that getting it up to release quality on that schedule is an unreasonable expectation.
C'mon, give up! We all know there is no viable business model in running a foreign country!
Now this is obviously not true. Everyone knows that running a foreign country is a very profitable business, so long as you take the following steps:
Give fat government contracts to your friends and relatives
Give important contracts (i.e. ones that actually must produce results) to the company that offers you the largest kickback
Embezzle heavily
Stash proceeds in a Swiss/Cayman Islands bank account
Hotfoot it out of the country one step ahead of the revolution
By following these simple steps you can make running a country a very profitable line of work. Do be sure, though, not to miss that all important last step.
AFAIK, under the Washington state law you don't have to show damages. You only have to show that the mail has a misleading subject line, incorrect return address, or forged path. To quote:
"Don't lie. That's it," said Assistant Attorney General H. Regina Cullen. "People can spam. But they have to be truthful."
It seems like a reasonable standard to me: you can send as much email as you want as long as you don't try to dodge responsibility for it. But, of course, no spammer wants to tell the truth because he's going to get smacked in return by all the people he's pissed off. It has the desirable effect of stopping obnoxious behavior without illegalizing potentially valuable mass emails.
MS used a contract to force exclusivity on its hardware partners. They could switch at any time to another OS vendor, or hardware platform, and didnt.
Here's what: it's illegal for a monopoly company to do that. Realistically, no hardware vendor could afford to do without Microsoft; they had a monopoly. Using their monopoly power to prevent others from competing effectively is restraint of free trade and illegal under the Sherman Antitrust act. This should have been brought up at the antitrust trial and wasn't. That's a big deal.
To say that it doesn't make the system more secure is incorrect. It doesn't involve the same kind of security audits that have been carried out with other projects, so the individual components aren't any more secure. The new security mechanisms can improve matters, though, because they make it easier to implement least privilege. You should be able to give programs only the privileges they need to do their jobs, so that a single buffer overflow or trojaned binary won't leave the whole system open to attack. It's an approach that's orthogonal and complementary to code auditing.
Slashdot Mirror
But this is really an argument in favor of different sentencing for juveniles than for adults (an idea that I support, and feel that recent laws are incredibly stupid to ignore) not against heavy potential penalties for writing viruses. IMO, writing a virus is the ethical equivalent of starting a fire, and deliberately releasing one is the moral equivalent of arson. Like a fire, a virus has the potential to spread completely out of the control of its originator and cause tremendous damage along the way. Little kids are not generally sent to prison when their playing with matches burns something down, but adults who do so are- and deserve to be- treated quite harshly. IMO any person who is legally competent to understand the consequences of releasing a virus and does so anyway deserves a nice long vacation at Club Fed.
Ion engines work by accelerating charged particles (ions) electrically rather than accelerating molecules chemically. A conventional rocket motor works by taking a fuel/oxidizer mix that contains stored chemical energy, releasing the chemical energy by burning the fuel/oxidizer, and using the generated heat to accelerate the combustion products out of the rocket. In an ion engine, OTOH, an inert gas (xenon) is ionized and the ions are accelerated by passing them through an electric field (and then throwing them out of the engine).
There are two important criteria to use in judging an engine: thrust and specific impulse. The thrust is how hard the rocket can push (i.e. its force) and is a combination of how rapidly it can push reaction products out and how fast they're going. Specific impulse measures how fuel efficient the rocket is, i.e. how much thrust it can get from a given amount of 'fuel', and basically depends on the velocity of the reaction products leaving the thruster. Chemical rockets can achieve much higher burn rates than ion engines, so they can produce much higher thrust. Ion engines, though, can achieve much higher specific impulse, because they can accelerate ions to much higher velocities by using energy accumulated from solar panels or radiothermal generators.
Overall which one you want to use depends on circumstances. Chemical rockets are necessary for things like getting into orbit in the first place, because you need to have a thrust/weight ratio > 1 to get off the ground, and ion engines can't get there. OTOH, once you're in space you can't easily get more fuel, so the greater efficiency of ion engines means that they make a good propultion system for long, deep space flights.
But the intentions are different. The BSD license exists in large part to facilitate the distribution of the code in as wide a form as possible. In that sense, taking the code and incorporating it into the Linux kernel is in keeping with the intent of the original license. The only thing wrong (and it is a significant wrong; one who depends on a license to protect his own work has a moral obligation to respect the licenses that others use to protect theirs) is that the copyright notice was removed. The GPL, OTOH, is intended specifically to keep GPLed software from being lifted into proprietary products. That means that doing so is a violation of not just the letter but also the spirit of the license.
Actually, most major currencies are not backed by gold and haven't been for some time. The United States, for instance, went off the gold standard during the Nixon Administration. Even before that there wasn't enough gold to come anywhere close to backing all of the currency in circulation. Instead the money could theoretically be exchanged for gold, but there were sharp limits on how much gold a person could actually posses, imports and exports were restricted, etc.
The reason that gold stopped being used as backing for currency is that the partial backing system just didn't work anymore. Real exchange rates between countries shifted because their economies grew at different rates and their central banks had different policies, but the nominal exchange rates weren't allowed to fluctuate. That meant that the real and nominal value of gold was skewed and smuggling became a serious problem- hence the restictions on gold ownership.
Today there simply isn't enough gold to come anywhere close to meeting the needs of even partially backing currencies (with all the problems that would entail) much less fully backing it. Instead money is backed by the faith and credit of the government that issues it. That's a big part of the reason that exchange rates fluctuate wildly in response to political instability. It seems less tangible that backing with gold, but in reality it's not as big a difference from the partial backing system as you might think.
Of course a large number of upper class vices also depend on cash money. Cocaine, bribery, blackmail, tax evasion, money laundering, and the like are also traditionally cash only operations. I guess that the favorite for of rich person bribery is now sufficiently accepted that politicians even allow the bribes- err.. campaign contributions- they receive to be public record so that's a little bit less of a problem today than it used to be.
I personally like cash, though, even though I am not especially interested in any of those vices. I don't necessarily want everything that I do to be recorded for posterity, or to be available to anyone who has a chance to see my bank records. It's also very convenient for interpersonal transactions. When I go out to lunch with my coworkers, it's very convenient for everyone to be able to toss cash into a big pot to settle the bill. It would be quite awkward if we had to ask for separate checks. Sometimes I want to borrow a bit of money from somebody else, too, and most of my friends don't have credit card machines and don't like taking checks. Being able to settle our minor debts in cash is very convenient.
It's particularly ironic that RMS makes such a vigorous complaint about this given that he vigorously (and correctly, IMO) complained about the "practical problems" with the "obnoxious advertizing clause" in the original BSD license. It seems to me that the whole "GNU/Linux" situation represents essentially the same problem. There's no logical reason to include GNU but exclude the other components when naming it, and demanding that GNU be included in the name is exactly the same thing that made the advertizing clause so annoying.
It's not even that much of a pain. All they have to do is to provide a CD with the product that contains their source code. That's not a terrible hassle or expense, you know. They don't even have to do that; they can simply include a note in the product literature that the source is available on request for such-and-such a fee for medium, shipping, and handling, or for download on their web-site. The chances are that only a tiny fraction of their customers would want to see it anyway, and most of them would download it from the ftp site (at virtually no cost) instead of actually requesting the physical medium (in which case you can charge them costs). It's hard to see that doing that is actually a significant problem.
Not quite. Section 3 requires that the software either be provided with source, with a written offer to provide the source to any third party who asks on a medium customarily used for data interchange for no more than cost, or a passed on offer of the previous type (and that's only allowed for non-commercial distribution, and only if received as a binary that same way). There is a special clarification that says that if you're distributing the binaries by making them available for download, putting the source on the same server counts as distributing them together, even if users are not forced to download the source. That's the situation for Debian.
OTOH, Microtest did not distribute their binaries by making them available for download, and they didn't distribute them with the machine, either. That means that they must make a written offer to provide the source on a medium customarily used for software interchange at no more than cost. ISTR that RMS specifically mentioned that companies are not allowed to say simply "well download it from our ftp"- they must offer to provide physical media with the source- so that people without network access have a chance to get the source, too. Doing so also prevents a company from cheating and putting their ftp server on a 14.4K modem and claiming that it's available for download when nobody could actually download it successfully.
Because that's what the GPL says. The GPL only requires that source code be made available to people who receive the binaries. There is no requirement that it be made available to anyone who asks. There is also no requirement that it be made available for download by ftp. A company that wished to would have every right to tell their customers that the GPLed source code was only available by sending a letter with $1 for a CD and $3 for shipping and handling (i.e. reasonable media and distribution costs), and (IIRC) could also demand proof of purchase as well. They can't prevent their customers from redistributing the source code once they have it- the GPL forbids that- but they are under no particular obligation to make the code as easy as possible to get. They only have to make it as easy to get as the GPL requires- which is harder than most people realize.
Actually, they have to do more than that. For one thing, the GPL absolutely requires that they let their customers know that the software is GPLed and that the code is available. They have clearly failed to do so. They also must provide the code on a physical medium on request for no more than the cost of media and shipping; simply putting it up on ftp is not sufficient. In practice making it available by ftp may be acceptible if it means that nobody particularly wants to get the software on a physical medium, but the offer to provide the physical medium must be made.
And that's just for the GPLed programs. Some of the other licenses used have their own requirements. Apache, for instance, includes the "Obnoxious Advertizing Clause" in its license, so removing their trademark from the package is a big no-no. The stripping of the Apache advertizing information is actually very good evidence that this is not just a casual, accidental license violation. Removing that stuff is clearly deliberate, since simple laziness would result in it being left in.
The ammendment is actually surprisingly layman-readable. It appears that most of it is fairly straightforward stuff; telling various government agencies to carry out studies to see what they should do to help out with their corner of combatting terrorism. Those parts should be relatively noncontroversial.
It gets a bit more interesting toward the end, where they appear to be ammending existing rules for wiretaps. Unfortunately, because those parts are mostly adding phrases to existing laws it's a bit tougher to follow, but it looks as though most of what they're doing is adding language expanding existing rules about phone taps to network taps. That bit should also be relatively uncontroversial, because existing rules for phone taps are fairly strict. The part that's really bad is at the very end, where they expand the rules for when authorities are allowed to use taps without judicial review. I'm always very worried about laws that negate important rights in "Emergency Circumstances"- the description of when the special rules are in effect. Even worse, the circumstances are fairly vague. What exactly constitutes "immediate threat to the national security interests of the United States" or "immediate threat to public health or safety"? Those both provide a lot of wiggle room.
Nope. I just clicked on your link, and the ACLU web site popped right up. Maybe you're having a problem establishing a connection from your end, but the site is still there.
Sadly, terrorism is the perfect threat for those who want to take liberties away. Liberties are always curtailed in wartime (read the Bill of Rights: writs of habeus corpus can be suspended during war) and everyone in Washington is saying that this is a war. But in a normal war there's a clear enemy, and some way of telling when the war is over. Fighting against terrorists, though, there is nothing but a mass of shadows. There's no way of telling when they've all been caught of have given up, so there's no way to tell that the fight is over. That means that there's no time when the liberties that are ignored in the interests of pursuing the war should be reinstated- so they likely never will be. We must fight to preserve them now or we can kiss them goodby forever.
That is extremely scary. It's frightening to see that people who think this way (if such mental processes deserve the dignity of being described as thought) are as well respected and listened to as these men. To take advantage of the disaster to demonize their enemies is simply disgusting.
You might find Videolan an interesting alternative. They don't have menu navigation yet, but apart from that it's a nice player. It plays quite well (though it sounds as though it has higher processor requirements than PowerDVD), has a nice interface with native support for gtk+ and qt, and finally has usable if ugly subtitles. Of the available free players I've found it to be the best.
While this has been moderated as funny, there is a serious side to this. David Brin, in his essay Science versus Magic makes a point essentially along these lines. His point is that the distinction between magic and technology is not so much their principle of operation as their sociology. Science and Technology (according to Brin) are about sharing ideas, understanding universally operating principles, and developing artifacts that work reliably. Magic, OTOH, is based on non-shared knowledge and forcing the world to work the way that you want it to, not according to reliable principles.
By that logic, you can actually make a very good case that "magic" in Harry Potter is much closer to Brin's idea of technology than his idea of magic. In Potter's world, new discoveries are shared with the rest of the (magical) world though regular publications and (magical) artifacts are mass produced and expected to work reliably. The very idea of a place like Hogwarts, where young witches and wizards are trained in a standardized magical curriculum is specifically against Brin's idea of magic.
IOW, Clarke did have it backward. Sufficiently advanced technology is distinguishable from magic because it operates differently. OTOH, as magic becomes more advanced it starts to look more and more like a technology.
Suggesting that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is just a "children's bedtime story" is severely underrates it. This is not some lightweight bit of fluff but a serious work, and it most certainly belongs on the short list of the best fiction of any genre published last year. It's reasonable to question its qualification as a work of science fiction, but in terms of quality of writing it is certainly qualified for consideration.
Not to be a stick in the mud, but I didn't notice much, if any, improvement when trying it. Of course I'm already operating at reasonably high resolution to start with, so there's going to be somewhat less room for improvement through anti-aliasing, but it's certainly not dramatic. The other disadvantage is that it's only for the one theme, so you can't take advantage if you want to keep using your existing theme. And, as they mention but don't emphasize, it's only for widgets not for all fonts, so the value was rather limited to start with.
The microbes might not be economically viable at extracting gold from seawater, but that doesn't mean that they're useless. A clever engineer could probably figure out a way of using the microbes to cheaply process low grade ore. That's currently done using environmentally dangerous processes like cyanide heap leaching (which is as dangerous as you'd expect a process using large amount of cyanide to be) but a microbe that has an affinity for gold could make that type of work much safer and more environmentally friendly. Yes it would take quite a bit of work, but gold is still valuable enough that people are likely to look into it.
Of course not. It's obviously a scam, but it's equally obvious that scams are not going anywhere. Human nature hasn't changed. As long as there are people who are desperate to belive there will be people willing to tell them what they want to hear. As long as the net is less than people want it to be- which is to say as long as it exists- there will be snake oil salesmen promising that they can make it into what people want.
I don't think it's that ambitious. I've been using Evolution as my primary mail client for almost a year. It's improved a lot in that time, and for the past several months it's been quite reliable and has all the features I need. I don't think that getting it up to release quality on that schedule is an unreasonable expectation.
Now this is obviously not true. Everyone knows that running a foreign country is a very profitable business, so long as you take the following steps:
By following these simple steps you can make running a country a very profitable line of work. Do be sure, though, not to miss that all important last step.
AFAIK, under the Washington state law you don't have to show damages. You only have to show that the mail has a misleading subject line, incorrect return address, or forged path. To quote:
It seems like a reasonable standard to me: you can send as much email as you want as long as you don't try to dodge responsibility for it. But, of course, no spammer wants to tell the truth because he's going to get smacked in return by all the people he's pissed off. It has the desirable effect of stopping obnoxious behavior without illegalizing potentially valuable mass emails.
Here's what: it's illegal for a monopoly company to do that. Realistically, no hardware vendor could afford to do without Microsoft; they had a monopoly. Using their monopoly power to prevent others from competing effectively is restraint of free trade and illegal under the Sherman Antitrust act. This should have been brought up at the antitrust trial and wasn't. That's a big deal.
To say that it doesn't make the system more secure is incorrect. It doesn't involve the same kind of security audits that have been carried out with other projects, so the individual components aren't any more secure. The new security mechanisms can improve matters, though, because they make it easier to implement least privilege. You should be able to give programs only the privileges they need to do their jobs, so that a single buffer overflow or trojaned binary won't leave the whole system open to attack. It's an approach that's orthogonal and complementary to code auditing.