[sigh] My point was that *I* live in the USA. If *I* posted pics of my 4-year-old niece naked, then *I* would be in trouble in the USA. Because nuts.
FWIW, I have no desire or plan to post pics of my niece naked, I see no reason to. I just don't regard it with the same level of apparent disgust that Anonymous Coward "Pics or it didn't happen" 2 posts up seems to.
I don't have a horse in the race here - I don't care what the parents or the child do in this particular case, I think they're both being stupid, but whatever.
The law in the UK is specifically *not* for this sort of thing:
"The most recent amendment to the law, outlawing the possession of pornographic photographs of children, was introduced seven years ago, amid intense lobbying from campaigners who included Mary Whitehouse. Although John Patten, then a Home Office minister, emphasised it was not the intention to catch innocent family snaps of naked children in the bath or on the beach"
I quickly googled. There *are* people getting into trouble for taking photos of naked teens etc. on European beaches, but the photographer wasn't related to those teens and that makes a big difference. Naked teenagers is also a lot different from naked 4 year-olds. I didn't find anything successfully prosecuted over naked infant snaps when the photographer was related.
It's pretty commonplace for infant kids to run around naked on the beach in Europe for example. My niece is 4, and when I'm iChatting my parents over in the UK, it's pretty common to see her wandering round the house naked (lunchtime here being bath time in the UK). I don't see why photos are any different. Nudity just isn't such a big deal when the kid is so young they're still "innocent", at least for most Europeans. As far as I'm aware it's the same in Asia. It's mainly the US that's so puritanical over the human body.
And (presumably) the photos aren't sexual in nature. If someone was jacking off to them, the fault lies with that person, not with the photo.
A "failure" here includes an app that crashes. In your case you're saying the touch screen has failed to work, 4 times in a row, and somehow you know it's about to be 5 times.
The chance of a failure involving the touchscreen is statistically (from the report you didn't read) 3%. Raising 0.03 to the fifth power gives a failure rate of 0.0000000243.
Well, literally hundreds of millions of people (per year) buy iPhones (last 12 months was 215 million) and don't have this problem.
I could see you getting a bad phone - shit happens. I could (just about) see you getting *two* bad phones out of two. There is no way I'd buy that you got three successive phones that failed in the same way, as for five ? Well, I'll be charitable and say you must be the unluckiest person on the planet. Is your name Brian by any chance ?
For reference: "In line with the firm’s fourth-quarter report, a study that analyzed smartphone failures during the first quarter of 2016 determined that Android devices cause far more problems for their owners than iPhones. According to Blancco Technology Group’s new data, 44% of Android phones experienced failures between January and March of this year, compared to 25% of iPhones"
Occam's razor says I still think you don't look after the phone, assuming you're telling the truth. Sorry.
You sell 215 million (how many phones Apple sold in the last 12 months) of *anything*, and there's going to be a tiny percentage of them that go wrong in some pattern-like way. Even 0.001% of 215 million is 2150 people with a problem, and although a failure rate of 0.001% is pretty damn good with such a complex device, that's still enough for "many" people to come up with a common problem and someone to get some ad-revenue from the click-bait headline.
(Also own an iPhone, a 6+, and haven't seen any issues)
There are literally (and I use the word correctly) *billions* of BGA chips out there, in all environments from the most benign to the harshest around, from industrial levels of vibration to space exploration (including the launch). Shock, horror, in a sample size that large, some of them fail, well cry me a river. There is no human technology that is 100% perfect, but soldering chips, yes, even BGA chips to boards is pretty damn close.
As for not doing them at home, I've done BGA chips at home many many times - you can actually do them with a toaster oven, but if you want a good (i.e.: ~100%) success rate, you could always get one of these. If you look past the truly egregious website, there's a really well engineered product there, which guarantees alignment as the chip is placed. I've got one and frankly I prefer doing a BGA chip than soldering a QFP by hand (of course the machine does QFP too...)
Inspection, now, that's a different beast. I've thought about getting an old dental XRAY machine off eBay, but who knows if it's strong enough. One day I'll remember to take one of my boards along to my dentist and get them to take a snapshot of it. At the moment, I'm too busy building a laser-cutter anyway.
Yep, they ought to let you in to the "invite" group if you find something and they didn't "invite" you. For feck's sake Apple. Oh, wait, that's the 3rd paragraph in TFA.
Seriously, this is how Apple do it - they start a small project off to get experience, then they roll it out. I can't see the problem here...
Reading comprehension old boy... I didn't say that 1/7th of the world was using or had bought an iPhone (in fact I specifically said I didn't think that). I was simply comparing the magnitudes of the sales figure and the population of the planet.
A parliament that cannot propose legislation is a parliament in name only. It's a check/balance, I'll give you that, but it's not where the power lies if it cannot propose and effect a change that it wants to.
In the UK, you elect an MP. That MP directly votes on, and can propose legislation. The "other" house, the House of Lords, can only delay any legislation that the House of Commons votes for by returning it with recommendations a maximum of 3 times. After the third time, if the House of Commons again votes it through, it becomes law (subject to Liz' royal assent, but that's not being withheld...).
This is effectively the inverse of the European "parliament". The EU commission decides what laws will be proposed, the parliament (the people who the people elected) then get to horse-trade the deal until the parliament and the commission agree, and then all countries must adopt the law. This is a significant reduction in the power of the people.
As a bonus, the commission are basically immunised against any effects of their political machinations, the only way for a member of the EU commission to be removed is if the parliament unanimously votes to remove all members of the commission at the same time. Yeah... Not gonna happen.
So to summarise: you have an un-sackable body that is the only group who can propose legislation, which gives them the ability to apply enormous pressure to the elected representatives (oh, you want X do you ? Well make sure you vote for our Y and Z and then we'll consider it). And then everyone is forced to accept the results of this as law.
Sorry. That sucks. Given the mission statement of ever closer union, the desire to raise an army etc., and the binding nature of EU law as supreme, the mismatch in democratic power within the EU *should* be concerning IMHO. Whether it's sufficiently concerning to brexit is a different argument, but I think it certainly played its part.
It doesn't have to be tradeable for the protections to stand. It just means the original person/company-if-it-was-an-employee that had the idea, and who filed the patent, now has the legal protections and can therefore attempt to attract investment that the patent encourages.
The idea of selling the patent to someone who has (a) no intent to manufacture or execute on the idea, and (b) simply wants to prevent anyone else from using the idea without paying some sort of (usually, after the fact, and punitive) licensing fees is what is counter to the original idea of what a patent would provide.
Intellectual property can be a thing - there ought to be some reward for working hard and creating something, but patents don't have to be considered normal intellectual property, they can be either a non-tradeable subclass, or simply defined otherwise.
Apple patents a lot of things. It's a big company, sure there'll be people at Apple working on AR/VR. There'll also be people there working on colour-coded mouse buttons... There's also the somewhat-nuts situation of "hey we should absolutely patent this in case we ever need it in the future, and we don't want someone else to patent it first".
Personally I think you should have to have demonstrable progress on anything you patent on a yearly basis until it makes it to the market. Also, the whole idea of patents as a tradeable commodity is nuts. If it has to be tradeable, make the patent lifetime be cut in half for every trade...
According to the second chart, Apple doesn't have 1376 employees in the Bay Area. There are more employees ahead of me in the lunch queue at Cafe Macs than that! Apple are building a second campus (and keeping the first) which will on its own hold 13,000 employees. The first campus is supposed to hold ~7000 IIRC, but it's being pushed to about 10,000 right now with people doubling up.
And if you've ever gone over to the Googleplex, you'll see a whole bunch of buildings taking up a pretty huge space. I can't believe there's only 1374 employees there, either.
Fuck me, that's the biggest load of bullshit I've read on Slashdot in recent memory.
How one can distil down an enormously complex situation into "too"[sic] paragraphs of dubious authenticity and simultaneously claim to understand the issues involved sufficiently to invoke two strawmen designed to be easily knocked down is beyond me, but hey, knock yourself out.
Just don't expect to be taken seriously.
1) The "representation" for the *people* in the EU is horribly undemocratic. All the people get to elect representatives to is the toothless chamber, ironically named the European Parliament. Forgive me, but any so-called parliament that can't even propose legislation, or even have the final say in enactment of the legislation graciously imposed upon it, is no parliament worth bearing the name. I'm used to the people (or at least our elected representatives) having the power, not an unelected body of career politicians out to line their own (or their own countries) pockets.
2) There is an element of racism in every society on this planet, it's a leftover from the "us" vs "them" tribal nature of our shared history. There were indeed people with money who were advertising and therefore getting their message across this time, and some of those people had a xenophobic and sometimes racist agenda, agreed. To immediately paint all those who voted leave (for whatever reason of their own) as racist, because some other person was being racist in an advertising campaign beggars belief. Clearly critical thinking in whatever country you're from is lacking (and the point stands if that country is Britain).
The issues involved were complex, and it's not anywhere near as simple as "fuck those brown people"; to imply such is frankly insulting. Perhaps those who voted to leave simply chose the probability of lesser prosperity as an acceptable compromise for real self-determination.
Formatting is screwy even in TT mode, but that's saying I can write 530MBytes/sec to, and read 460 MBytes/sec from the SSD RAID attached over TB2 on a 2013 iMac (quad core i7, 3.5GHz).
Now, creating a 530 MB file and compressing it takes:
simon% dd if=/dev/random of=test.raw bs=555745280 count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
555745280 bytes transferred in 35.273966 secs (15755112 bytes/sec)
simon%/usr/bin/time gzip -1 test.raw
14.50 real 14.02 user 0.33 sys
simon% ls -l test.raw.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 simon staff 555914267 Jun 14 08:29 test.raw.gz
... So allowing for (let's be generous) 2 second's time to read and another 2 seconds time to write the files, that leaves ~10 seconds of time to compress the data, even at the lowest compression gzip can muster. I don't think I'd take a 10x slowdown on my RAID array for (at least in this case) an *increase* in the file-size.
So one of the (at the time) drawbacks of my UK education was that we had to learn poems off by heart for the English Lit. exam. At the time I thought it was just about the most boring part of the curriculum, but now they're a treasure trove of password sources...
Example (no, I don't use this one). One of the poems we had to learn was "Dulce Et Decorum Est"...
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind. Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . . Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.
"The old lie" being "It is a great and glorious thing to die in the service of one's country". Anyway, take the N'th character of every line - easiest is the first, until you get the number of characters you need. It's easy to remember if you know the poem, it gives you a completely unintelligible password, and it's easy to make a password hint that's opaque to pretty much everyone but you.
Has worked for me for ages. (I'm very old, compared to you yound whippersnappers hanging around/. recently).
It was possibly poorly phrased, the "Special Relativity" was supposed to be a clue though. I was talking about it being a universal constant independent of the observer's velocity, i.e.: the difference between light having velocity 'c' and anything else having velocity 'v' where (if I am moving at velocity V), the other object is moving at velocity (v+V) whereas light is moving at velocity 'c'. It just smacks of Reality::constants::FLOAT_MAX.
My argument has nothing to do with our understanding of them. It's a statement that they are areas of our reality that don't behave like all the others - and they tend to be at the extrema, and that's where *we* would put boundary condition / special cases / approximations if we were writing a simulator.
Slashdot Mirror
[sigh] My point was that *I* live in the USA. If *I* posted pics of my 4-year-old niece naked, then *I* would be in trouble in the USA. Because nuts.
FWIW, I have no desire or plan to post pics of my niece naked, I see no reason to. I just don't regard it with the same level of apparent disgust that Anonymous Coward "Pics or it didn't happen" 2 posts up seems to.
I don't have a horse in the race here - I don't care what the parents or the child do in this particular case, I think they're both being stupid, but whatever.
The law in the UK is specifically *not* for this sort of thing:
"The most recent amendment to the law, outlawing the possession of pornographic photographs of children, was introduced seven years ago, amid intense lobbying from campaigners who included Mary Whitehouse. Although John Patten, then a Home Office minister, emphasised it was not the intention to catch innocent family snaps of naked children in the bath or on the beach"
I quickly googled. There *are* people getting into trouble for taking photos of naked teens etc. on European beaches, but the photographer wasn't related to those teens and that makes a big difference. Naked teenagers is also a lot different from naked 4 year-olds. I didn't find anything successfully prosecuted over naked infant snaps when the photographer was related.
Nope. I live in the US. You guys are nuts about this sort of stuff.
Maybe in the US.
It's pretty commonplace for infant kids to run around naked on the beach in Europe for example. My niece is 4, and when I'm iChatting my parents over in the UK, it's pretty common to see her wandering round the house naked (lunchtime here being bath time in the UK). I don't see why photos are any different. Nudity just isn't such a big deal when the kid is so young they're still "innocent", at least for most Europeans. As far as I'm aware it's the same in Asia. It's mainly the US that's so puritanical over the human body.
And (presumably) the photos aren't sexual in nature. If someone was jacking off to them, the fault lies with that person, not with the photo.
Well, you could always use a Samsung phone and burn to death instead, but hey, let's bitch about a fucking headphone socket...
A "failure" here includes an app that crashes. In your case you're saying the touch screen has failed to work, 4 times in a row, and somehow you know it's about to be 5 times.
The chance of a failure involving the touchscreen is statistically (from the report you didn't read) 3%. Raising 0.03 to the fifth power gives a failure rate of 0.0000000243.
Still going with Occam.
Well, literally hundreds of millions of people (per year) buy iPhones (last 12 months was 215 million) and don't have this problem.
I could see you getting a bad phone - shit happens. I could (just about) see you getting *two* bad phones out of two. There is no way I'd buy that you got three successive phones that failed in the same way, as for five ? Well, I'll be charitable and say you must be the unluckiest person on the planet. Is your name Brian by any chance ?
For reference: "In line with the firm’s fourth-quarter report, a study that analyzed smartphone failures during the first quarter of 2016 determined that Android devices cause far more problems for their owners than iPhones. According to Blancco Technology Group’s new data, 44% of Android phones experienced failures between January and March of this year, compared to 25% of iPhones"
Occam's razor says I still think you don't look after the phone, assuming you're telling the truth. Sorry.
Yep, in an nutshell.
You sell 215 million (how many phones Apple sold in the last 12 months) of *anything*, and there's going to be a tiny percentage of them that go wrong in some pattern-like way. Even 0.001% of 215 million is 2150 people with a problem, and although a failure rate of 0.001% is pretty damn good with such a complex device, that's still enough for "many" people to come up with a common problem and someone to get some ad-revenue from the click-bait headline.
(Also own an iPhone, a 6+, and haven't seen any issues)
Good luck trying to get *any* cell phone without BGA chips in them. Or any electronics component, really - maybe a toaster.
To be honest, I agree with the above poster. Absent any specifics, I'd say the problem is you and how you treat the phone.
*looks around*
*sees literally every single electronic item uses BGA chips*
*wonders what goes on in people's minds, sometimes*
Oh for crying out loud.
There are literally (and I use the word correctly) *billions* of BGA chips out there, in all environments from the most benign to the harshest around, from industrial levels of vibration to space exploration (including the launch). Shock, horror, in a sample size that large, some of them fail, well cry me a river. There is no human technology that is 100% perfect, but soldering chips, yes, even BGA chips to boards is pretty damn close.
As for not doing them at home, I've done BGA chips at home many many times - you can actually do them with a toaster oven, but if you want a good (i.e.: ~100%) success rate, you could always get one of these. If you look past the truly egregious website, there's a really well engineered product there, which guarantees alignment as the chip is placed. I've got one and frankly I prefer doing a BGA chip than soldering a QFP by hand (of course the machine does QFP too...)
Inspection, now, that's a different beast. I've thought about getting an old dental XRAY machine off eBay, but who knows if it's strong enough. One day I'll remember to take one of my boards along to my dentist and get them to take a snapshot of it. At the moment, I'm too busy building a laser-cutter anyway.
Yep, they ought to let you in to the "invite" group if you find something and they didn't "invite" you. For feck's sake Apple. Oh, wait, that's the 3rd paragraph in TFA.
Seriously, this is how Apple do it - they start a small project off to get experience, then they roll it out. I can't see the problem here...
Reading comprehension old boy... I didn't say that 1/7th of the world was using or had bought an iPhone (in fact I specifically said I didn't think that). I was simply comparing the magnitudes of the sales figure and the population of the planet.
When does it stop becoming "sheep" and more like "hey, this thing ain't bad" ?
Not all of those phones are going to be still in use, but 1/7th of the world's population is a pretty reasonable sales rate.
A parliament that cannot propose legislation is a parliament in name only. It's a check/balance, I'll give you that, but it's not where the power lies if it cannot propose and effect a change that it wants to.
In the UK, you elect an MP. That MP directly votes on, and can propose legislation. The "other" house, the House of Lords, can only delay any legislation that the House of Commons votes for by returning it with recommendations a maximum of 3 times. After the third time, if the House of Commons again votes it through, it becomes law (subject to Liz' royal assent, but that's not being withheld...).
This is effectively the inverse of the European "parliament". The EU commission decides what laws will be proposed, the parliament (the people who the people elected) then get to horse-trade the deal until the parliament and the commission agree, and then all countries must adopt the law. This is a significant reduction in the power of the people.
As a bonus, the commission are basically immunised against any effects of their political machinations, the only way for a member of the EU commission to be removed is if the parliament unanimously votes to remove all members of the commission at the same time. Yeah... Not gonna happen.
So to summarise: you have an un-sackable body that is the only group who can propose legislation, which gives them the ability to apply enormous pressure to the elected representatives (oh, you want X do you ? Well make sure you vote for our Y and Z and then we'll consider it). And then everyone is forced to accept the results of this as law.
Sorry. That sucks. Given the mission statement of ever closer union, the desire to raise an army etc., and the binding nature of EU law as supreme, the mismatch in democratic power within the EU *should* be concerning IMHO. Whether it's sufficiently concerning to brexit is a different argument, but I think it certainly played its part.
It doesn't have to be tradeable for the protections to stand. It just means the original person/company-if-it-was-an-employee that had the idea, and who filed the patent, now has the legal protections and can therefore attempt to attract investment that the patent encourages.
The idea of selling the patent to someone who has (a) no intent to manufacture or execute on the idea, and (b) simply wants to prevent anyone else from using the idea without paying some sort of (usually, after the fact, and punitive) licensing fees is what is counter to the original idea of what a patent would provide.
Intellectual property can be a thing - there ought to be some reward for working hard and creating something, but patents don't have to be considered normal intellectual property, they can be either a non-tradeable subclass, or simply defined otherwise.
Apple patents a lot of things. It's a big company, sure there'll be people at Apple working on AR/VR. There'll also be people there working on colour-coded mouse buttons... There's also the somewhat-nuts situation of "hey we should absolutely patent this in case we ever need it in the future, and we don't want someone else to patent it first".
Personally I think you should have to have demonstrable progress on anything you patent on a yearly basis until it makes it to the market. Also, the whole idea of patents as a tradeable commodity is nuts. If it has to be tradeable, make the patent lifetime be cut in half for every trade...
Yeah, that list is at best misleading.
According to the second chart, Apple doesn't have 1376 employees in the Bay Area. There are more employees ahead of me in the lunch queue at Cafe Macs than that! Apple are building a second campus (and keeping the first) which will on its own hold 13,000 employees. The first campus is supposed to hold ~7000 IIRC, but it's being pushed to about 10,000 right now with people doubling up.
And if you've ever gone over to the Googleplex, you'll see a whole bunch of buildings taking up a pretty huge space. I can't believe there's only 1374 employees there, either.
Fuck me, that's the biggest load of bullshit I've read on Slashdot in recent memory.
How one can distil down an enormously complex situation into "too"[sic] paragraphs of dubious authenticity and simultaneously claim to understand the issues involved sufficiently to invoke two strawmen designed to be easily knocked down is beyond me, but hey, knock yourself out.
Just don't expect to be taken seriously.
1) The "representation" for the *people* in the EU is horribly undemocratic. All the people get to elect representatives to is the toothless chamber, ironically named the European Parliament. Forgive me, but any so-called parliament that can't even propose legislation, or even have the final say in enactment of the legislation graciously imposed upon it, is no parliament worth bearing the name. I'm used to the people (or at least our elected representatives) having the power, not an unelected body of career politicians out to line their own (or their own countries) pockets.
2) There is an element of racism in every society on this planet, it's a leftover from the "us" vs "them" tribal nature of our shared history. There were indeed people with money who were advertising and therefore getting their message across this time, and some of those people had a xenophobic and sometimes racist agenda, agreed. To immediately paint all those who voted leave (for whatever reason of their own) as racist, because some other person was being racist in an advertising campaign beggars belief. Clearly critical thinking in whatever country you're from is lacking (and the point stands if that country is Britain).
The issues involved were complex, and it's not anywhere near as simple as "fuck those brown people"; to imply such is frankly insulting. Perhaps those who voted to leave simply chose the probability of lesser prosperity as an acceptable compromise for real self-determination.
... voting Brexit is a thing.
[sigh]
Yep, you're right - I misread your comment. The LZ4 variant does indeed do it in time:
simon%
Compressed 555745280 bytes into 555745827 bytes ==> 100.00%
1.05 real 0.26 user 0.69 sys
That's common wisdom, but I don't think it stands up in the modern world. Here's my bonnie results on a softraid-5 partition with a 10GB test file:
simon% bonnie -s 10000 -m imac
File './Bonnie.2543', size: 10485760000
Writing with putc()...done
Rewriting...done
Writing intelligently...done
Reading with getc()...done
Reading intelligently...done
Seeker 3...Seeker 2...Seeker 1...start 'em...done...done...done...
-------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
-Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine GB M/sec %CPU M/sec %CPU M/sec %CPU M/sec %CPU M/sec %CPU
imac 10 29.0 99.3 531.7 27.7 333.0 18.0 26.9 89.5 460.7 16.1 28342 50.5
Formatting is screwy even in TT mode, but that's saying I can write 530MBytes/sec to, and read 460 MBytes/sec from the SSD RAID attached over TB2 on a 2013 iMac (quad core i7, 3.5GHz).
Now, creating a 530 MB file and compressing it takes:
simon% dd if=/dev/random of=test.raw bs=555745280 count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
555745280 bytes transferred in 35.273966 secs (15755112 bytes/sec)
simon% /usr/bin/time gzip -1 test.raw
14.50 real 14.02 user 0.33 sys
simon% ls -l test.raw.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 simon staff 555914267 Jun 14 08:29 test.raw.gz
Hmm. Been here 11 years now. *looks over shoulder* ...
I'm a PEOPLE PERSON, DAMMIT.
So one of the (at the time) drawbacks of my UK education was that we had to learn poems off by heart for the English Lit. exam. At the time I thought it was just about the most boring part of the curriculum, but now they're a treasure trove of password sources...
Example (no, I don't use this one). One of the poems we had to learn was "Dulce Et Decorum Est"...
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
"The old lie" being "It is a great and glorious thing to die in the service of one's country". Anyway, take the N'th character of every line - easiest is the first, until you get the number of characters you need. It's easy to remember if you know the poem, it gives you a completely unintelligible password, and it's easy to make a password hint that's opaque to pretty much everyone but you.
Has worked for me for ages. (I'm very old, compared to you yound whippersnappers hanging around /. recently).
Simon
It was possibly poorly phrased, the "Special Relativity" was supposed to be a clue though. I was talking about it being a universal constant independent of the observer's velocity, i.e.: the difference between light having velocity 'c' and anything else having velocity 'v' where (if I am moving at velocity V), the other object is moving at velocity (v+V) whereas light is moving at velocity 'c'. It just smacks of Reality::constants::FLOAT_MAX.
My argument has nothing to do with our understanding of them. It's a statement that they are areas of our reality that don't behave like all the others - and they tend to be at the extrema, and that's where *we* would put boundary condition / special cases / approximations if we were writing a simulator.