You don't really need "actual damages" because you can go for statutory damages. If you can prove willfull infringement, you can get 150,000 per offense. If you skip proving willfullness, I think this is the section that applies:
(1) Except as provided by clause (2) of this subsection, the copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just. For the purposes of this subsection, all the parts of a compilation or derivative work constitute one work.
$30,000 a pop ain't bad money if you can swing it. I'm not sure exactly what the result would be if you claimed "actual damages" on a zillion dollar price tag despite never having had an "actual sale." Judge might throw out the claim, I suppose. AFAICT, worst case would just be to get laughed at with the huge price tag and then just fall back to statutory damages instead.
I'm ashamed that my future tax dollars and my children's future tax contributions will be going to pay for this fucking horseshit and no one is doing anything to stop it. Hey, politicians listen up... Want my vote? Put a fucking stop to this waste of time, energy and money. Thanks.
You may want to support Ron Paul. He apparently has this slightly bat-shit-insane theory about a secret multinational conspiracy to build a road, but he does support a tiny federal government, so his crazyness would likely do very little damage.
I wouldn't say I'm a 100% fan of his, but his "do no harm" idea for the Federal Government seems like it would be a good "national reset."
'Scuse me? If you've got insurgents setting up an ambush, blasting the frak out of them sounds like a good solution to me. Fire a DU round from a tank down the road, all the IEDs go "boom" and the insurgents waiting on the side go "slwooop" as the massive air pressure changes suck them inside out.
True, but with the modern US Army soldier almost on the level of something from an old science fiction movie in terms of his ability to do massive amounts of killing, the "virtue" of striking terror in the hearts of everybody can become of a huge drawback. It makes it relatively easy to demonise the U.S soldiers, and use the results of that "slwoop" on a recruiting poster to attract another round of insurgents to try and take out the tank.
One rather wonders what would have happened if in 2003 we hadn't sent an Army but just airdropped a few million pacifists into Iraq to sing songs and cuddle with everybody. They probably would have all been killed, but you still have to wonder...
Can someone please explain to me (and this is NOT meant to be a troll-post) why someone can't volunteer for a manned mission to Mars, raise funding from private companies/organizations and just go to Mars? Yes it would be a suicide mission, known up front and with the intent of it being for pure research and in the name of science, why the hell couldn't someone hit up a few big businesses and/or private investors for the cash to make a ship, buy or make the equipment for data analysis and the necessary supplies to get there and transmit back pictures and data? And more than just the Mars Rover, being able to survey the planet much faster and with more detail.
Well, for the sake of argument let us assume that NASA makes doing so illegal for some reason. Now, given that you suggest a suicide mission, the danger of jail apon return is likely to be a very minor concern in the decision to go forward with such an endeavor. So, even if there is a reason why someone can't volunteer for a manned mission to Mars, raise funding from private companies/organizations and just go to Mars, the reason they can't in unlikely to be the reason that nobody ever has.
Seriously, the only thing stopping such a scenario as you suggest is sanity. Most private corporations just aren't that interested in donating money to kill a man a Mars. But, feel free to volunteer and see if anybody will foot the bill for you.
Also, the FCC doesn't cover cable-only channels like FX (lots of "shit" and near nudity there with shows like The Shield and Nip/Tuck, with only self-regulation stopping them from going further), in terms of censorship. They cover broadcast channels that then happen to be re-distributed via cable.
Correct. However, the FCC have demonstrated a very clear desire to censor cable and sat. broadcasts on many occasions. Concern in this regard may be untopical, but it is hardly unjustified.
Is it just me, or is the term "Black Friday" being used much more this year than in previous years? Maybe I'm the only clueless one, but I was seeing it so much I Wiki'd it for a little explanation: the root of the term (and if this is well known to all, my apologies... I'm slow that way) is that the balance sheets of retailers are typically "in the black" by the Friday following Thanksgiving.
Apparently, Black Friday is extremely well known, even internationally. I passingly know a fellow who grew up in Germany and moved to the US this year, and was very excited about his first chance to see Black Friday shopping in person after having heard so much about it. Seeing Americans in a consumerism frenzy must be a bit like watching sharks in a feeding frenzy, I guess.
Why not just remove the plug-in? Your browser may continue to work fine without it, or flashblock.
On some of my machines, I just never installed it. Others, I have removed it. But, it is so damned pervasive that there are some web sites that simply don't work without flash and JS. Youtube is an obvious example, but I could live without it. OTOH, there are some places where I am considering applying for jobs that have flash web sites. I'm really okay with swearing off most sites that require flash, but it is much harder to refuse to deal with a website when you are trying to research a company and get their contact information for a really interesting position. (If for no other reason than if I did start working for them, I'd have internal influence for getting rid of the flash!):)
Is it just me or does it seem like 60MB or even 34MB is a LOT of memory for something that browses Web pages?
I mean, people used to make fun of GNU Emacs, saying things like it stands for eight megabytes and constantly swapping or eventually malloc()'s all computer storage. Emacs takes somewhere around 10MB or so on a RHEL4 box, and that thing is practically an operating system. It reads mail! Firefox doesn't even read mail, and it takes 60MB. Opera reads mail, but still 34MB seems just too big, too.
Maybe I'm just getting to be a cranky old man. Now you kids get offa my lawn!
I used to browse the web on a machine with 8 MB of RAM. Total, including the OS. At the time, real time decoding of a JPEG was extremely difficult, but my current CPU has 100 times the clock speed and is 64 bit and has vector processing features. Yet, browsers still seem to make the same class of CPU-memory tradeoffs that made sense on a 68030. For example, I may have ten tabs open in a window. I can only see one of them at any given moment, but the fully decoded images are all sitting in memory for all ten web pages, despite the fact that the page could be re-rendered almost instantly on a modern system.
Since browsing a few web pages is seldom the only thing I do with my computer, I go and do other stuff in Lightwave, Blender, Photoshop, whatever, then I come back to my web browser, and I wait while the whole working set gets swapped back in. Then, I click on the tab I want, and I wait while the working set for that tab gets swapped back in. If it just rerendered the page from the original bits, rather than using cached decoded images sucking up RAM and whatnot, it'd have almost nothing to reload and worst case performance would be orders of magnitude better. Hooray for "optimisation!"
Oh, and can we get some ninjas to fucking kill Flash. Seriously, I shouldn't need a bunch of script blocking and flash blocking extensions just to be able to browse the fucking intarwebs without having a seizure.
I hate to tell you, but a change in the color of a key could be important. What if that change made the key unreadable to color-blind people? Or reduced the contrast so it was harder for a partially-blind person to read? These details can be important when you're dealing with something like a voting machine. Sure, maybe my scenarios don't seem likely, but they are possible, and thats why the government wants the chance to make the call, not the voting machine company. Notice that (at least the way I read this) the government of California isn't asking to re-certify trivial changes, they're merely asking to be notified of any change (no matter how minor) so that the government of California decides what is trivial, not the vendor.
It's not just that California is "asking." It's that Diebold agreed, in writing to those terms. Some people may feel California is asking something unreasonable. Fine, I disagree, but fine. Doesn't matter if California asked that all voting machines have pictures of sad clowns on them. Diebold agreed to California's terms. Then it ignored them.
The actual error isn't terribly worrying, but the process failure that led to the breach of their contract, especially for something that could have been complied with quite easily, is not the sort of thing you want to see going on at a company that makes closed source voting machines.
Indeed. Changing the position of a bracket and whatnot is a pretty minor design tweak. OTOH, this is a voting machine, and it seems so fundamentally obvious that every employee at every level should have been indoctrinated with the idea that no uncertified changes can ever be made. If people are making minor changes without a very careful process, then you have a culture which clearly wouldn't have considered it a big deal to "tweak" the software in the machines. Nobody would raise a red flag at it, and anybody with access could have modified the software however they like post-certification.
It seems like the sort of corporate culture specifically designed to deniably engineer an untrustable machine.
When you have an ornery parent...that REFUSES to get broadband...even if he's paying MORE for dialup through earthlink...you get desperate when you're visiting. Especially when two or three neighbors are running unsecured WiFi.
I think it should be legal unless you're cracking someone's WEP or WPA to get in.
I basically agree, but I do think that the threshold for doing something wrong is a bit before cracking an encryption key. IMHO, changing a MAC to get around MAC filtering, or logging onto an AP named "Please Don't Use!!" are both over the line. Requiring WEP in order for somebody to "shoo the kids off their lawn" means that you can't have any way to get people not to use your network if you have shitty old equipment that doesn't work properly with your new AP. (grumble, grumble...)
But, yeah, if the Network operator has done absolutely nothing to indicate that a network is private, and my computer automatically says "Hello, can I join you and get an IP" and the AP says "Sure, here is all the information you need to be a member of this network and access the Internet!" then I consider it perfectly moral to use the network. How the hell else do you make it any more open when you do want people to be allowed to use it freely?!
The big space shuttle design flaw (the solid rocket boosters) was driven by a very stupid Air Force mission requirement (single orbit return to base reconnaissance missions) which to put it mildly was not thought out, and which was not challenged sufficiently by NASA.
And, to be fair, it's hard to blame NASA. They had just gone to the moon, and were basically convinced that they could build anything. The space shuttle was a perfect storm of hubris, mish-mashed design goals, pork politics, and a dozen other things. People often look for a specific group to blame for why the space shuttle turned into a design disaster. Everybody involved basically contributed to the shuttle living up to nobody's expectations, and from everybody's perspective, each of them was 100% justified in their contribution to the clusterfuck.
The real hilarity of it is, in the Netherlands, of all places, you can find tons of english speakers. Hell, the people who got the letter probably spoke decent english. Why, in gods name, would you do such an amatuer translation, and not just assume that someone will be able to read it.
Yeah, I have heard similar stories before, and they always shock me. I mean, I guess it makes sense to try and do a good-faith effort to send a message in the reader's native tongue, but you should always include the source for the translation in the message so that they can have it locally translated if it turns out that your translations is wakfled. I mean, I'd do that even if I was using a human native-speaker to translate, just in case something got mixed up along the way.
To rely on a machine translation without any review by an actual human as the only means of communicating is just shockingly stupid. I mean, the sort of stupid that should get you fired for incompetence in a heartbeat, regardless of the outcome.
I only half remember the last story I heard along these lines, but it was something along the lines of... I think it was Americans trying to send an email to a German software company, so they ran their email through babelfish or something similar, and generated completely uninteligible gibberish. Which slowed things down horribly, considering everybody at the German company spoke fluent English, and they had several native speakers working for the company who could smooth out any in-house translation issues very easily. When the germans sent an email back to the Americans asking what the hell they were talking about, the Americans assumed that the Germans were doing the same thing as them, and that it apparently worked, so they did it again. Then the Germans just called the Americans on the telephone.
What's to stop a sufficiently advanced civilization, outside of biochemical compatibility, from viewing us as "the other white meat" with fava beans and a nice chianti.
Nothing. All the folks who say "a super advanced civilisation will have evolved beyond a need to eat us" are basing that view on absolutely nothing. If we ever find an advanced extra terrestrial civilisation, it will quite possibly be so alien as to boggle the mind, so making declarations about how they couldn't behave in some particular way is pretty dubious. The could literally be so alien that it may be impossible to ever really communicate with them. Aside from eating us, they may turn out to have a fondness for geometry, and decide to reshape our planet into a perfect sphere using quantum high energy death beams for purely aesthetic reasons.
The good news is that odds are quite good that we won't be both tasty and nutritious for aliens. The biochemistry would likely turn out to be really quite different. It's even possible that exposure to our atmosphere would be instantly toxic to them, making human hunting a bothersome affair which can only be done in a bulky and cumbersome space suit. Of course, being tasty would give them some reason to keep at least some of us around for breeding stock, so as it happens, being tasty might be a best-case scenario for humanity's long term survival!
But, in my own arbitrary guestimation, I'd expect that a really advanced civilisation would have relatively little interaction with us. There are probably nearer sources of minerals and water and whatnot than flying all the way to the sol system. They'll be so far ahead of us that we won't have any scientific information that intrigues them enough to come and steal it. If they have the sort of inclinations which would result in them wiping us out on contact, they probably would have done it to themselves before becoming so advanced. We'll probably only ever see them in person if they are interested in linguistics and anthropology and literature, etc.
As for the question of funding SETI, I don't think we'll find anything, but the potential payoff is worth the cost. Continuing with my arbitrary guesses, if there are advanced civilizations out there, they are talking to each other using either very directional signals which won't ever get to us. OR, they have invented some sort of sub space radio which is completely unknown to our understanding of the universe. In either case, we won't hear anything. What's worse, if you plug what I think are plausible guesses into the drake equation, any civilizations that are out there are probably very few, and very far away. But, there is still that chance of the biggest disovery in human history. I think that's worth something.
Gee, putting together an operating system that works on all levels as a consumer product is a lot of work. Just think of how good it could be if you could actually PAY people to put in the effort to make things right?
Umm... Why can't you PAY people to work on Fedora? (Or, any other Linux distribution, for that matter.) Nothing stopping you or anybody else. What you can't do is pay arbitrary people to work on proprietary software. That was a really weak, weak troll, IMHO.
You are now assuming that the entire authentication process stays unchanged, and why would it with something completely new? How about an authentication server? Bob logs in on your computer. Your computer sends Bob's doodle to the authentication server which replies if it is Bob or not. Let Bob log in with his own doodle, associated with his account. Thats not even a new technology, kerberos works kinda that way.
Yes, I've managed NIS and Windows domains, so I'm aware of the idea of an auth server. But, my question remains. How do you "tell somebody their initial password" when their account is first created? It makes no difference if you are creating the account on a specific workstation, or on a server controlling access to a whole network. It seems like the only practical way to do this is to have the admin actually sitting with the new user when the account is created so that they can create their own doodle. Seems like an administrative annoyance. The only alternative is to let somebody login initially with a traditional password, and then ask them to change their authentication settings to the passdoodle mode after they are logged on. (And, you just have to trust your users to take the time to do that when they are eager to start getting something done.)
I guess you could force the second option, and have the ability for an administrator to reset a password but tick a box for "user must create passdoodle on first login," which forces the user through the steps before they can do anything else. That seems like the only way for something like this to catch on in any kind of Enterprise setting.
Um... Not to side track. That is just a bad security practice. If you need to give your coworker rights to your computer, you give him rights to log into that work station with his name and password.
I don't disagree that the OP was suggesting bad practice. But, whether you are giving them the password for your account or for their own, you still need to allow somebody a way to initially authenticate, so they can pick something of their own. How exactly do you say, "Hey bob, I've set up an account for you, you can log in with the username bsmith, and the passdoodle... ummm... well, you sort of color in the bird, then outline a house over on the left, and..."
Well good, they needed a font set that had all the symbols you'd ever want to type in science. Only one little problem though...how do you type it? You'd either need a seriously huge keyboard, someone to memorize thousands of key combinations on a current keyboard, or an on screen keyboard program.
Summary says:
Among other uses, it has long been hoped that this would make the wide scale use of MathML in browsers possible.
I'll put a few bucks on 4 episodes, that seems to be the magic number, Worse is that Tim Minear is in on the project, he also does FANTASTIC work, but I swear fox has a hate on for the guy. Wonderfalls, The Inside and Drive are all his work, and all cancelled less than halfway through their seasons.
Why the hell are they still willing to deal with Fox? Seriously, I thought Tim Minnear swore off ever working with Fox again after Wonderfalls. They must be getting either a boat load full of money, or a contract with a lot of guarantees in writing.
I've seen this before, I've never understood it. What does it mean?
Thad
I'm not intimately familiar with the specifics in this case, but starting with a server chip and "adding desktop processor attributes" would typically entail:
adding the inability to use ECC. adding a reduction in cache. adding a lack of fault tolerance or error checking capabilities. adding the feature of being impossible to use with > 2 sockets. adding a whizzy new marketing name.
And, the enthusiast desktop parts are often easy to overclock, while server parts assume you'll just buy a faster CPU instead of wasting time fiddling with something that may catch fire.
BTW, hey, I remember you from alt.movies.visual-effects "back in the day" before the death of Usenet. good to see you haven't fallen off the face of the planet. I'm not in the process of working on a compositing demo reel so I can try to jump from straight IT to visual effects in the near future. I blame this career change in part on all your interesting and informative posts getting stuck in my head.:)
I save ODF locally, PDF if someone else needs to print it, RTF if I need to send it to someone to edit, DOC if I need hell to freeze over.
(OT: Has everyone seen the new Open Rights Group T-shi
Ummm... Me, too.
Seriously, I work in ODF, distribute in PDF. I seldom need to work with other people on things I've written in OpenOffice, so my only real concern for compatibility is when sending somebody a resume to view, or the like. With PDF, I don't have to worry about how screwed up the formatting will be when it gets to them like with DOC.
Currently, I do all my collaborative writing in RTF. I don't actually tend to use OpenOffice for that, but it would be possible. My primary use of RTF is screen plays, and I use a program written for writing screenplays, which I find a whisker more convenient than using a more full featured Word Processor. Lucky enough, RTF happens to work reasonably well with Subversion. It's a bit of a pain to read diffs of RTF in plain text, but it works fine. ODF is compressed, so I wouldn't use it as a primary document format in a shared SVN repository. If there was an uncompressed fully plain text version of ODF, I might start to look at using it in subversion. Eventually, I'll probably just switch to using Tex for screenplays. It's fully plain text, so it'll be even more convenient to look at diffs than RTF, and it is easy as pie to turn Tex into a PDF for distribution...
What bothers me more is the list of side effects on all drugs these days that we seem content to allow. For that matter, there is a drug out right now with ads running on TV--I'm pretty sure it's an allergy medication, but I can't remember the name; Veramyst maybe?--where among the fine print on the bottom is: "The way [this drug] works is not fully understood." If we don't know how a drug works, can we have enough confidence that it's not doing something bad that we should be approving it?
There are many drugs that we don't understand very well. Arguably, given our current level of understanding of how the human body works, we really can't claim to know 100% of how any drug effects a person. If we needed to know how a drug works before using it, we couldn't have used any medicine at all until the late 20th century when we were able to understand the chemical structures of drugs and whatnot. Even aspirin would have had to be banned until quite recently as "not understood." We approve the drugs because a bunch of people ate them, or snorted them, or stuck them where the sun don't shine, or whatever, and their symptoms got less and they didn't all keel over dead. Sure, sometimes a drug makes it past clinical trials and then is found to have a bad side effect that wasn't previously known. It's a shame. But, it'll probably be centuries, if ever, before we can have somebody run a drug's molecular pattern though a simulation in a computer and guarantee that it doesn't do anything bad. And, the only way we could create such a computer simulation is to test it during development by clinical trials and see if anybody keels over dead when the computer says they shouldn't.
Is it just me, or is that pretty handy to know. Words like "the" and "of" pretty much clutter non-smart registers.
Others have mentioned the band The The, but I'd also like to add "Invisible Man" and "The Invisible Man" to the list of reasons why The can be a bother. They are two completely different books.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't really need "actual damages" because you can go for statutory damages. If you can prove willfull infringement, you can get 150,000 per offense. If you skip proving willfullness, I think this is the section that applies:
(1) Except as provided by clause (2) of this subsection, the copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just. For the purposes of this subsection, all the parts of a compilation or derivative work constitute one work.
$30,000 a pop ain't bad money if you can swing it. I'm not sure exactly what the result would be if you claimed "actual damages" on a zillion dollar price tag despite never having had an "actual sale." Judge might throw out the claim, I suppose. AFAICT, worst case would just be to get laughed at with the huge price tag and then just fall back to statutory damages instead.
You may want to support Ron Paul. He apparently has this slightly bat-shit-insane theory about a secret multinational conspiracy to build a road, but he does support a tiny federal government, so his crazyness would likely do very little damage.
I wouldn't say I'm a 100% fan of his, but his "do no harm" idea for the Federal Government seems like it would be a good "national reset."
True, but with the modern US Army soldier almost on the level of something from an old science fiction movie in terms of his ability to do massive amounts of killing, the "virtue" of striking terror in the hearts of everybody can become of a huge drawback. It makes it relatively easy to demonise the U.S soldiers, and use the results of that "slwoop" on a recruiting poster to attract another round of insurgents to try and take out the tank.
One rather wonders what would have happened if in 2003 we hadn't sent an Army but just airdropped a few million pacifists into Iraq to sing songs and cuddle with everybody. They probably would have all been killed, but you still have to wonder...
Well, for the sake of argument let us assume that NASA makes doing so illegal for some reason. Now, given that you suggest a suicide mission, the danger of jail apon return is likely to be a very minor concern in the decision to go forward with such an endeavor. So, even if there is a reason why someone can't volunteer for a manned mission to Mars, raise funding from private companies/organizations and just go to Mars, the reason they can't in unlikely to be the reason that nobody ever has.
Seriously, the only thing stopping such a scenario as you suggest is sanity. Most private corporations just aren't that interested in donating money to kill a man a Mars. But, feel free to volunteer and see if anybody will foot the bill for you.
Correct. However, the FCC have demonstrated a very clear desire to censor cable and sat. broadcasts on many occasions. Concern in this regard may be untopical, but it is hardly unjustified.
Apparently, Black Friday is extremely well known, even internationally. I passingly know a fellow who grew up in Germany and moved to the US this year, and was very excited about his first chance to see Black Friday shopping in person after having heard so much about it. Seeing Americans in a consumerism frenzy must be a bit like watching sharks in a feeding frenzy, I guess.
Egad! As you say, sir. I'd like to say something on the matter, but I'm busy at the moment trying to extract my foot from my mouth...
I guess it's just force of habit whenever there is a voting machines discussion.
On some of my machines, I just never installed it. Others, I have removed it. But, it is so damned pervasive that there are some web sites that simply don't work without flash and JS. Youtube is an obvious example, but I could live without it. OTOH, there are some places where I am considering applying for jobs that have flash web sites. I'm really okay with swearing off most sites that require flash, but it is much harder to refuse to deal with a website when you are trying to research a company and get their contact information for a really interesting position. (If for no other reason than if I did start working for them, I'd have internal influence for getting rid of the flash!)
I used to browse the web on a machine with 8 MB of RAM. Total, including the OS. At the time, real time decoding of a JPEG was extremely difficult, but my current CPU has 100 times the clock speed and is 64 bit and has vector processing features. Yet, browsers still seem to make the same class of CPU-memory tradeoffs that made sense on a 68030. For example, I may have ten tabs open in a window. I can only see one of them at any given moment, but the fully decoded images are all sitting in memory for all ten web pages, despite the fact that the page could be re-rendered almost instantly on a modern system.
Since browsing a few web pages is seldom the only thing I do with my computer, I go and do other stuff in Lightwave, Blender, Photoshop, whatever, then I come back to my web browser, and I wait while the whole working set gets swapped back in. Then, I click on the tab I want, and I wait while the working set for that tab gets swapped back in. If it just rerendered the page from the original bits, rather than using cached decoded images sucking up RAM and whatnot, it'd have almost nothing to reload and worst case performance would be orders of magnitude better. Hooray for "optimisation!"
Oh, and can we get some ninjas to fucking kill Flash. Seriously, I shouldn't need a bunch of script blocking and flash blocking extensions just to be able to browse the fucking intarwebs without having a seizure.
It's not just that California is "asking." It's that Diebold agreed, in writing to those terms. Some people may feel California is asking something unreasonable. Fine, I disagree, but fine. Doesn't matter if California asked that all voting machines have pictures of sad clowns on them. Diebold agreed to California's terms. Then it ignored them.
Indeed. Changing the position of a bracket and whatnot is a pretty minor design tweak. OTOH, this is a voting machine, and it seems so fundamentally obvious that every employee at every level should have been indoctrinated with the idea that no uncertified changes can ever be made. If people are making minor changes without a very careful process, then you have a culture which clearly wouldn't have considered it a big deal to "tweak" the software in the machines. Nobody would raise a red flag at it, and anybody with access could have modified the software however they like post-certification.
It seems like the sort of corporate culture specifically designed to deniably engineer an untrustable machine.
I basically agree, but I do think that the threshold for doing something wrong is a bit before cracking an encryption key. IMHO, changing a MAC to get around MAC filtering, or logging onto an AP named "Please Don't Use!!" are both over the line. Requiring WEP in order for somebody to "shoo the kids off their lawn" means that you can't have any way to get people not to use your network if you have shitty old equipment that doesn't work properly with your new AP. (grumble, grumble...)
But, yeah, if the Network operator has done absolutely nothing to indicate that a network is private, and my computer automatically says "Hello, can I join you and get an IP" and the AP says "Sure, here is all the information you need to be a member of this network and access the Internet!" then I consider it perfectly moral to use the network. How the hell else do you make it any more open when you do want people to be allowed to use it freely?!
The U(1) group is the group of all unitary, unicycles that leave the inner (dot) product invariant.
The SU(2) group is the group of all unitary, motorcycles that leave the inner (dot) product invariant and have a determinant of 1.
The SU(3) group is the group of all unitary, 3-wheeled novelty cars that leave the inner (dot) product invariant and have a determinant of 1.
And, to be fair, it's hard to blame NASA. They had just gone to the moon, and were basically convinced that they could build anything. The space shuttle was a perfect storm of hubris, mish-mashed design goals, pork politics, and a dozen other things. People often look for a specific group to blame for why the space shuttle turned into a design disaster. Everybody involved basically contributed to the shuttle living up to nobody's expectations, and from everybody's perspective, each of them was 100% justified in their contribution to the clusterfuck.
Yeah, I have heard similar stories before, and they always shock me. I mean, I guess it makes sense to try and do a good-faith effort to send a message in the reader's native tongue, but you should always include the source for the translation in the message so that they can have it locally translated if it turns out that your translations is wakfled. I mean, I'd do that even if I was using a human native-speaker to translate, just in case something got mixed up along the way.
To rely on a machine translation without any review by an actual human as the only means of communicating is just shockingly stupid. I mean, the sort of stupid that should get you fired for incompetence in a heartbeat, regardless of the outcome.
I only half remember the last story I heard along these lines, but it was something along the lines of... I think it was Americans trying to send an email to a German software company, so they ran their email through babelfish or something similar, and generated completely uninteligible gibberish. Which slowed things down horribly, considering everybody at the German company spoke fluent English, and they had several native speakers working for the company who could smooth out any in-house translation issues very easily. When the germans sent an email back to the Americans asking what the hell they were talking about, the Americans assumed that the Germans were doing the same thing as them, and that it apparently worked, so they did it again. Then the Germans just called the Americans on the telephone.
Nothing. All the folks who say "a super advanced civilisation will have evolved beyond a need to eat us" are basing that view on absolutely nothing. If we ever find an advanced extra terrestrial civilisation, it will quite possibly be so alien as to boggle the mind, so making declarations about how they couldn't behave in some particular way is pretty dubious. The could literally be so alien that it may be impossible to ever really communicate with them. Aside from eating us, they may turn out to have a fondness for geometry, and decide to reshape our planet into a perfect sphere using quantum high energy death beams for purely aesthetic reasons.
The good news is that odds are quite good that we won't be both tasty and nutritious for aliens. The biochemistry would likely turn out to be really quite different. It's even possible that exposure to our atmosphere would be instantly toxic to them, making human hunting a bothersome affair which can only be done in a bulky and cumbersome space suit. Of course, being tasty would give them some reason to keep at least some of us around for breeding stock, so as it happens, being tasty might be a best-case scenario for humanity's long term survival!
But, in my own arbitrary guestimation, I'd expect that a really advanced civilisation would have relatively little interaction with us. There are probably nearer sources of minerals and water and whatnot than flying all the way to the sol system. They'll be so far ahead of us that we won't have any scientific information that intrigues them enough to come and steal it. If they have the sort of inclinations which would result in them wiping us out on contact, they probably would have done it to themselves before becoming so advanced. We'll probably only ever see them in person if they are interested in linguistics and anthropology and literature, etc.
As for the question of funding SETI, I don't think we'll find anything, but the potential payoff is worth the cost. Continuing with my arbitrary guesses, if there are advanced civilizations out there, they are talking to each other using either very directional signals which won't ever get to us. OR, they have invented some sort of sub space radio which is completely unknown to our understanding of the universe. In either case, we won't hear anything. What's worse, if you plug what I think are plausible guesses into the drake equation, any civilizations that are out there are probably very few, and very far away. But, there is still that chance of the biggest disovery in human history. I think that's worth something.
Umm... Why can't you PAY people to work on Fedora? (Or, any other Linux distribution, for that matter.) Nothing stopping you or anybody else. What you can't do is pay arbitrary people to work on proprietary software. That was a really weak, weak troll, IMHO.
Yes, I've managed NIS and Windows domains, so I'm aware of the idea of an auth server. But, my question remains. How do you "tell somebody their initial password" when their account is first created? It makes no difference if you are creating the account on a specific workstation, or on a server controlling access to a whole network. It seems like the only practical way to do this is to have the admin actually sitting with the new user when the account is created so that they can create their own doodle. Seems like an administrative annoyance. The only alternative is to let somebody login initially with a traditional password, and then ask them to change their authentication settings to the passdoodle mode after they are logged on. (And, you just have to trust your users to take the time to do that when they are eager to start getting something done.)
I guess you could force the second option, and have the ability for an administrator to reset a password but tick a box for "user must create passdoodle on first login," which forces the user through the steps before they can do anything else. That seems like the only way for something like this to catch on in any kind of Enterprise setting.
I don't disagree that the OP was suggesting bad practice. But, whether you are giving them the password for your account or for their own, you still need to allow somebody a way to initially authenticate, so they can pick something of their own. How exactly do you say, "Hey bob, I've set up an account for you, you can log in with the username bsmith, and the passdoodle... ummm... well, you sort of color in the bird, then outline a house over on the left, and..."
Summary says:
Ramen, meet Summary. Summary, meet Ramen. MathML FTW, natch.
Why the hell are they still willing to deal with Fox? Seriously, I thought Tim Minnear swore off ever working with Fox again after Wonderfalls. They must be getting either a boat load full of money, or a contract with a lot of guarantees in writing.
I'm not intimately familiar with the specifics in this case, but starting with a server chip and "adding desktop processor attributes" would typically entail:
adding the inability to use ECC.
adding a reduction in cache.
adding a lack of fault tolerance or error checking capabilities.
adding the feature of being impossible to use with > 2 sockets.
adding a whizzy new marketing name.
And, the enthusiast desktop parts are often easy to overclock, while server parts assume you'll just buy a faster CPU instead of wasting time fiddling with something that may catch fire.
BTW, hey, I remember you from alt.movies.visual-effects "back in the day" before the death of Usenet. good to see you haven't fallen off the face of the planet. I'm not in the process of working on a compositing demo reel so I can try to jump from straight IT to visual effects in the near future. I blame this career change in part on all your interesting and informative posts getting stuck in my head.
Ummm... Me, too.
Seriously, I work in ODF, distribute in PDF. I seldom need to work with other people on things I've written in OpenOffice, so my only real concern for compatibility is when sending somebody a resume to view, or the like. With PDF, I don't have to worry about how screwed up the formatting will be when it gets to them like with DOC.
Currently, I do all my collaborative writing in RTF. I don't actually tend to use OpenOffice for that, but it would be possible. My primary use of RTF is screen plays, and I use a program written for writing screenplays, which I find a whisker more convenient than using a more full featured Word Processor. Lucky enough, RTF happens to work reasonably well with Subversion. It's a bit of a pain to read diffs of RTF in plain text, but it works fine. ODF is compressed, so I wouldn't use it as a primary document format in a shared SVN repository. If there was an uncompressed fully plain text version of ODF, I might start to look at using it in subversion. Eventually, I'll probably just switch to using Tex for screenplays. It's fully plain text, so it'll be even more convenient to look at diffs than RTF, and it is easy as pie to turn Tex into a PDF for distribution...
There are many drugs that we don't understand very well. Arguably, given our current level of understanding of how the human body works, we really can't claim to know 100% of how any drug effects a person. If we needed to know how a drug works before using it, we couldn't have used any medicine at all until the late 20th century when we were able to understand the chemical structures of drugs and whatnot. Even aspirin would have had to be banned until quite recently as "not understood." We approve the drugs because a bunch of people ate them, or snorted them, or stuck them where the sun don't shine, or whatever, and their symptoms got less and they didn't all keel over dead. Sure, sometimes a drug makes it past clinical trials and then is found to have a bad side effect that wasn't previously known. It's a shame. But, it'll probably be centuries, if ever, before we can have somebody run a drug's molecular pattern though a simulation in a computer and guarantee that it doesn't do anything bad. And, the only way we could create such a computer simulation is to test it during development by clinical trials and see if anybody keels over dead when the computer says they shouldn't.
Others have mentioned the band The The, but I'd also like to add "Invisible Man" and "The Invisible Man" to the list of reasons why The can be a bother. They are two completely different books.