Your evidence for this assertion is...? (having had to deal with a lot of the "adversity is character-building" retarded sadists over the years, I'm more of the opinion that adverse circumstances may discover or reveal innate character (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse), but doesn't "build" or "develop" it (whatever those mean). While I'm a great fan of active, outdoor hobbies, I never did swallow that "character-building" mouthful from a number of the proponents I've met, including teachers.)
but it also breeds common sense.
s/common sense/experience/ and you'd be correct, almost by definition. But does "common sense" equal "experience"? I think not, though I wouldn't dispute that "experience" is a substantial component of "common sense". I think that turning experience into a reasonable probability of avoiding similar problems in the future, or of managing them better, will also certainly require a reasonable working memory, as well as a degree of introspection. The latter is certainly lacking in some people, often the ones who go on about "use some common sense!", because it needs you to accept that you may personally be wrong.
So you are saying Microsoft has done away with the First sale doctrine?
Never heard of it. Does it apply in my jurisdiction (either of them)? I suspect not, for the following reason...
Software companies always claim so, but I don't believe they have done so.
My employers, in their sales contracts, have never permitted resale of software, or of the dongles which secure it's usage. In the past, our control was relatively coarse-grained - version 1.x dongles simply wouldn't work with version 2.x etc - but the tools are more sophisticated now and a client need to get a new set of keys every so-many months (on the dongle's calendar, not the computer's) or hours of use (on the dongle's internal clock). If a client feels the desire to sell the software on to someone else, they can do. But we have no obligation to supply the purchaser with the codes necessary for the software to work. (A significant proportion of the copies and dongles in existence are "evaluation" copies (priced at a few hundred dollars for administrative costs) or academic copies in universities (priced at zero from the advertising budget). Converting them to a full-price version only requires a new set of codes.)
The dongles are a tool for enforcing the terms of the license. Nothing less, but nothing more either.
Oh, and your petrol tax example was a bad one. The use is not licensed in that case, [...] It has to do with paying road taxes, not licensing.
It's diesel tax, not petrol tax ; very different fuels. Road Fund Tax is hypothecated to maintaining the roads, but the tax from fuel sales goes into the general taxation pot. (I see from Wikipedia that the reverse situation applies in some countries.)
But you say it yourself : in the first phrase it's about licensing, in the second case it's not about licensing. Yes, in theory you could enter into a negotiation with the HMCR / DCR (or whatever this year's name is) about a particular batch of fuel ; they may even have an established method of re-marking such re-purposed-tax-paid fuel. The analogy would be as if the buyers of our sold-on software above had entered negotiation with us and brought a license to use the software for (for example) 3 months. We then wait until the cheque clears, and send them a set of codes which would enable the dongle for 12 weeks / 84 days. Or, if a business entity went bust and gave it's discs and manuals to a local university, we might waive the charge and send them 6 months worth of codes for the dongle. But that's our choice ; under the terms of the license, we're not obliged to do anything for them.
but I've always been partial to pikes myself. Not only are polearms bad ass in and of themselves, they make great places to put the heads of the conquered or others who need to be made examples of.
Personally, I think you'd be hard put to beat a billhook for getting up close and personal. They were my tool of choice for doing forestry work as a youth, combining the heft of a handaxe with a fair length of edge and a piercing tip to the bill. Putting them onto a pole (making the early pike) gives you reach, but makes them much more cumbersome. I wonder if you can still get them? The local DIY stores don't have them, and I've got an out-of-control hedge in the back garden that needs a serious talking-to. But the BTCV is still selling them (which doesn't surprise me in the slightest, once I think about it) ; I really should get back together with them - forestry work is fun.
I think it's time to put this one to rest. In any sort of corporate environment where "employees" are using computers, there should be multiple layers of defense to eat the 'click here to see the kitten' program before it makes it to the desktop.
... one layer of which should consist of something similar to a gibbet, on which hang the putrifying remains of the last person who caused damage to the system by clicking on the cute kitten trojan.
The Bastard Operator From Hell did (does) have a serious point behind those lime pits (buried in the pits, even). The gibbet... well the very word includes implications of being highly visible to the target audience for whom it is meant to be a deterrent. Details are location-dependent.
But, but... that would require leaving my basement.
I wish that it didn't have the take a picture stipulation because then you could just call up his hotel or other forms of shelter when you find him.
Luke, trainee jedi-geek that you are, you show your geek-naïveté in approaching the problem from such a brute-force perspective. The true geek would do all their stalking using quite conventional transaction-tracking. Then, having determined the hotel/ rehab-clinic/ brothel/ mountain hovel/ etc that he is staying in (assuming that he's not on a road trip), your uber-geek credentials would be established by getting the hotel-etc's CCTV system to take the photos for you.
If the hotel-etc does not have a CCTV system, then your geek challenge escalates to that of socially engineering the management into installing a CCTV system (to your specifications ; at their expense). Naturally, this system should have security to protect your prize from being found by other stalker-geeks ; that's part of the specification you'll need to write ; if the target is on a road trip, then you simply need to work out where he'll be in the future and get a system installed ahead of time.
Now you have the problem of speaking the code word to him. That's tricky. It'll also be quite location dependent. Hmm... does anyone like DHL or FedEx do collections? I'm sure someone would... I'll assume DHL for simplicity.
So you send a picture from the CCTV system to the target by DHL, along with a self-addressed envelope, and instruct the courier to deliver one package and collect the return package. Then telephone the target and deliver the code word and tell them to write a cheque in your name, but not to sign it. The DHL boy then knocks on the door, delivers the photos (not the negatives, if he's in a brothel ; that's your retirement fund), collects the cheque after the target has signed it, and posts it back to you.
No need to leave your parent-proofed cellar. And that CCTV system that you've installed in the brothel is going to pay back over and over.
Back to World of Warcraft for you, Luke.
I did wonder if you could set up a scam with planted evidence that would get the police to do the tracking, photographing and delivery of the code word. Plausible, but it might just get you in trouble for wasting police time. Oh, Doh!, you do it through a proxy so that it's Mayor West of Quahog who wastes the police's time. That's my uber-geek aspirations blown then, isn't it?
Several someones appear to not have properly investigated this sale including the buyer and Chase.
"Chase" being a bank or something similar involved in this fiasco? But the BUYER needing to investigate the sale? I've never heard of such a thing happening at a public auction, and I can't think of any grounds for a buyer at a public auction to have doubts about someone's title to the goods on sale.
Actually, now that I think on it, I have heard of such things, but in respect of cars, not houses. And for cars there are databases constructed by the car finance industry where, for a small fee, a potential buyer can investigate a particular vehicle's finance history and verify that there's nothing outstanding on it. But in a case like this, I can't see how the buyer is intrinsically at fault ; in fact, both buyer and (unwilling) seller have grounds for restitution from whoever set up the sale.
(The buyer may have been somewhat high-handed about how he treated the contents of the property, but since he had every reason to believe that it was his property now - building, land and contents - that's no business of yours or mine.)
Some people are actually capable of reading and understanding what you (and others) say, then remembering it and acting on it. We understand that everything that we do on line has the potential to be remembered by the system, and therefore recalled at some future date. Therefore we only say things that we're willing to have recalled twenty years from now. Similarly we know that it's not impossible for someone else to read our mail, so if we want to send a private communication we write a document, encrypt it with an appropriate tool, and then transmit the encrypted version.
So, Bruce, as a journalist, you're going to have to find a different drum to beat on.
The people who haven't absorbed the message so far? Tough. They'll either learn, or fall behind economically (or politically, or culturally ; all in some fairly vague sense). At which point, they (and their descendants) might as well be dead. Tough.
According to TFA, it is simultaneously true that this year's stock of freshers is both "multicultural" and "They have never understood the meaning of R.S.V.P." While I wouldn't require strong French as an indication of being "multicultural", this does seem to be a bit of a non-sequiteur. Ooops, there I go again. But some phrases get so absorbed into one native language that they acquire a certain je ne sais quoi, and their understanding simply becomes part of the host language. It's particularly so between French and English because of the actions of a Scandanavian bastard almost a thousand years ago. So, essentially what the article is saying is that students going to college this year can be expected to be ignorant, if not necessarily stupid. Well, DOH!, but isn't that why they're going to college? Hmmm, do I brush up on my Spanish first, or my French, or my Russian? The wife wants to move once #1 daughter gets her digit out and moves out, but we haven't decided which country to move to. Oh well, no great hurry.
I wonder if he has also enough dirt on other MPs to blackmail and force himself back into such power
it's the only sane explanation... I strongly suspect he's got real dirt on things senior labour members got up to in their student days... I very much suspect there's some real dirt on Tony Blair...
It's scary that I read this after posting my earlier comment concerning Lords Archer and Mandelson, in the cell, using the soap and the slop bucket... Mind you, while it would explain how B.Liar could bear poking Cherie, it doesn't really explain where all the kiddies came from. Oh yes it does - him being a Catholic, and the old Bedouin proverb about sleeping with "a boy for pleasure, a woman for children, and a goat for warmth". You could get all 3 from Cherie. There's multi-tasking for you. Something women are notoriously good at.
But that's veering from legitimate political comment - on what blackmail hold Mandelson has over the higher echelons of the "New Labour" Party - and towards praise for the woman's flexibility.
With no respect to Mandelson, foul little organism that it is, I believe that the openly-Conservative Lord Archer has tried to achieve this several times. You know, there's something almost nice about the image I get of those two buggering each other in a cell - the looks on each one's face might almost be worth the process of catching them and prosecuting them.
For time-served advice on this matter, see RFC-2100 (ha-ha-but-serious) from 1997, RFC-1178 (serious-but-ha-ha) from 1990, and RFC-1034 (just plain tedious) from 1987. You will note that these date back to the dissemination of the current DNS system ; as the system hasn't changed significantly, the advice on naming conventions is similarly unlikely to change.
From a more practical point of view... look at the likely size of your domain ; apply an appropriate number of doublings (to account for unexpected growth, everyone and their dog getting both print and fax servers, then not releasing the names when the servers go away, another unexpected doubling) ; go and find a "jargon" dictionary somewhat bigger than you suppose you'll need ; start to use it.
Examples I've seen : - departmental computers in a university department (not the lab computers) ; likely namespace size a few dozen ; naming theme "malt whiskies", with some 300 possibilities (and you can use blended whiskies for degenerate bastard machines that won't be around for long, or a sub-department. - servers in a small company, for mail, proxy, mass storage, etc ; likely name space a handful ; theme was fictional servants, with dozens of possibilities before needing to do research. - me? At home I use raw IP addresses. When the wife or daughter knows what an IP address is compared to a host name, then I'll worry about it.
... and a tissue sample from (for an example) Tony Blair, and I can have him commence his career as a axe-murdering homosexual rapist. Woo Hoo!, hold the front page!
(actually, I think I might need to RTFA too. But why violate SlashDot norms.)
from a year-old wreck of a cow?... I wouldn't have put it past El Runtissimo.
Some years previously the mountaineering club hit a yearling deer with a Transit van (mini-bus ; 2-ton truck with a passenger body). Venison steaks all round, except for the club's token vegetarian. Waste not, want not.
One immediate use that springs to mind is shoplifting - at least assuming that it blocks RFID tags. Although hopefully those kids smart enough to figure that out would also be smart enough not to shop lift.
"smart enough not to" not get caught "shop lift"-ing
Get it? Who owns the PC has no bearing on whether the license is valid or not.
That, like everything else, depends on the details of the license in question.
As far as I can tell, the machines in question are ones formerly owned by a business. So, the license might be an OEM one, or it might be a retail one.
But the business is a "defence contractor" - so potentially at least they're actually on a government license (does "defence" include mercenary work too in the poster's country?) - does that follow the same laws as a OEM or retail license?
I'd read the EULA for the specific copy and for the specific country involved before I'd say anything. And what I'd say would almost certainly be "what self-serving retard of a lawyer wrote this incomprehensible drivel?" At which point you're caught between getting a legal opinion or taking a chance. On the (probably valid) assumption that all businesses and lawyers are bastards, you are free to take what risks you feel like with the bastards.
Retail boxes of Windows are transferable from PC to PC provided you remove the software from the old PC first; OEM licenses are tied to the machine itself and not transferrable to a new PC.
Wasn't that the whole point of the XP activation thing - to stop people moving from machine to machine? (Not that I ever wasted time installing XP - I've never had it at home, and at work we got an IT man about the time XP came out, so that sort of thing became Someone Else's Problem.)
So let me get this straight: suppose I purchase two computers, and resell one to my parents. That makes the COA illegal for them to use?
Very likely. [On preview, I see that goalposts have shifted. Initially it sounded like you were talking about getting machines that were being sold off from a business upgrading, but now it sounds like you're buying at retail. Below I've assumed that you're talking of disposal equipment from a business re-fit. Stuff brough for retail may well be different.)
Compaq (or HP, Dell, WhoEver ; the big computer manufacturer) would have made a deal with MS (and equivalent other companies for other parts of the software package installed, but we'll stick to MS for the time being) for so-many hundred thousand units of Windows COA to be used under certain conditions ; MS would have agreed a particular price on the condition that those conditons were met. One of the most important conditions from MS's point of view would be that those COAs do not get out into the retail world to dilute the value of their domestic product. Normally that means that the COAs are sold under contractual terms that specify that they are only valid COAs if used on the original hardware, by the original purchasers from Compaq (HP, Dell, etc). The licenses secured by the COA are not transferable, by contractual agreement between Compaq (etc) and the person that Compaq sold them to.
http://www.microsoft.com/howtotell/content.aspx?pg=coa is not really informative, could you explain why I would need a lawyer?
You'll need the lawyer for when you appear in court on charges of either misrepresentation (when your parents sue you for the value of the license (secured by the COA) that you had no ownership of and so could neither sell nor transfer to them. Or, potentially, you could be done for just plain theft, or sale of stolen good, since the person you're buying from probably has no legal right to the COAs either. And now that you've been told this in a public forum, the scant protection that you get from claiming ignorance has vanished.
Now, it may be true that MS (Compaq, HP, whoever) have never "done an RIAA" by suing the nice granny down the street ; but that doesn't mean that they don't have the legal apparatus in place to do that should they wish.
I don't know what the laws in whichever country you live in are, but the strong likelihood is that they're approximately the same as in the rest of the world ; multinational trade agreements negotiated on the behalf of companies like MS (Compaq, HP, etc) are manipulated to ensure that these business-friendly practices are exported to the rest of the world.
One of the main planks of the recurring "Microsoft Tax" arguments around the world is that the details of the EULAs for consumer editions of the OS supplied with a laptop forbid the transfer of the OS separate from the hardware. Bulk sales of hardware have, in the EULAs I've examined similarly forbid the transfer of a commercial license to the retail world.
Here is an analogy : here in the UK (and TTBOMK, most of Europe) there are two licenses for diesel fuel - that for road vehicles and that for off-road equipment. If you are caught using diesel sold for use in off-road equipment in on-road equipment, then you're at risk of a criminal record, a substantial fine, and possibly the destruction of the vehicle in question. The tax authorities carry out random roadside checks for abusers, and the off-road fuel is stained with a dye to make it easy to spot. There is absolutely no difference between the two products (apart from the dye), but the conditions under which they're licensed for use are difference, and that different licensing can be (and is) enforced by the full apparatus of the law. (Cross-border fuel smuggling and removal of the dye is one of the main businesses of the terrorists in Northern Ireland, second only to heroin.)
I've noticed that I'm talking of Compaq and HP as if they're separate
doing a quick install using the COA numbers on the case stickers.
Did you read and agree to the EULA on these? I'd be pretty surprised if those COAs were legal to use except on the original hardware by the original customer.
Total cost to us: ~$45 and 4 hours Total profit: ~$155
When the -knock- comes at your door... you can use that profit to hire a lawyer to tell you that you're screwed. 155/4 = $38.75/hour, which is not going to be high enough to get more than an hour or two of lawyer time.
I'd say that your count of categories is wrong. A wave has a fundamental property - it's direction of propagation. Given that, there are two (non-exclusive) classes of waves:
"1D:" Compression wave in a single dimension, like the "striking a rod" example above.
These are waves where the direction of travel of the wave is parallel to the the direction of motion of the particles comprising the medium of propagation.
2D: Guitar string. A string is a single dimension (eg left to right) but you need a second dimension for it to vibrate up and down. 3D: Ripples in a pond. The pond surface is a plane (2D, left/right, forward/back) but the wave is a displacement in a third dimension (up/down).
All other waves comprise particles that move transversely to the direction of propagation of the wave. This motion can be as complex as you like, in as many dimensions as you care to count (if you choose to believe String Theory, you've got around 11 other dimensions to play with ; in 'brane' universes only 4 or 5 other dimensions. Pick a universe to live in.)
Obviously, the true motion of your medium's particles can be as complex as you like, and you simply resolve it into components parallel to the direction of travel and transverse to the direction of travel. In the transverse component, you can resolve it into as many other further orthogonal components as you desire, or your universe can accommodate.
If you can figure out when fatigued metal will break under a certain sheer force, that's approximately the same class of problem. It hasn't happened yet, AFAIK.
That situation would be analogous to understanding the faulting behaviour of arbitrarily large units of quite homogeneous rock - say a gabbroic or ultrabasic intrusion. Which is, a moderately good first-order description of the axial complex of a mid-ocean ridge and the oceanic slab that rolls off the conveyor by continuous casting.
The next step of course is to extend the work to rock structures that vary in composition against position. Then you'll need to extend the work to take into account that these laterally variable rock units are also variable in mechanical strength, as they have micro-fractures, and meso-fractures, and mega-fractures. Now these compositional variations and strength variations are further complicated by the fact that some (but not all) of these various scales of fracture are partly annealed back towards their original strength.
Oh, there is progress being made I have no doubt. But I wouldn't bet on the problem being solved any time soon. For a start, we're not going to get the degree of information that we need to characterise the full thickness of the crust in an area of interest. I did an analysis of this scale of problem a while ago in the context of characterising the Yellowstone calderas - it's not impossible, but it's a multi-billion dollar project. Putting up with earthquakes may well be cheaper. (I do of course discount the millions of likely victims ; they're most likely to be poor and Indian, and so don't count. It's much easier to count the number of Californian houses that may need redecorating than accounting for lives lost.)
I've seen how crappy closed source software companies make millions, and those days are numbered. Their CEOs can kiss their 20 mansions goodbye.
I work for a closed-source company which is about 2/3 software : 1/3 non-computing services. While our turnover is in the millions and we're a private company (i.e. shares are not publicly traded), the last time I went past the BigBoss's house, it was still a council house. He probably owns it, but it's not what anyone would call a mansion. Yes, we do use open source components where they make sense. That's very small parts of our packages because our packages are pretty specialised. Yes, I have wondered about how I could achieve the same functionality using more open source components. It's not incredible, but it's also more work than I care to do. I'd rather repair the floppy sun-visor in the car and spend my spare time taking the wife to the cinema at the weekend. I am learning some programming - more than I had at university in the 1980s, but I doubt that I'll be doing much of substance for a decade or 3 yet. But you're free to wait until I've got nothing better to do. Which reminds me... I've got something better to do.
Unless it's a Smart, or an original BMC Mini, I can't think of a car that weighs 3/4 of a tonne. Pretty much everything is heavier than that.
I guessed. It was a 3-door Astra of some variation ; "went like shit off a shovel". And with it being nearly 20 years since I moved out of that flat, I don't have any better description. To me, it was white (with red splotches), 4-wheeled, and totally wrecked, which answered all important questions.
take off and nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
The whole point of nuking the site from orbit is that you reduce to zero (not "very low" but "zero") the possibility of your organism getting off the planet. The nuking from orbit needs to be done by a vessel that hasn't landed (or even entered the atmosphere and the nuking needs to vaporise all surface-to-orbit capable ships on the ground as well as all organisms capable of learning how to build one. It's the only way to be "sure", rather than "have a reasonable degree of confidence".
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Your evidence for this assertion is ...?
Your evidence for this assertion is ...? (having had to deal with a lot of the "adversity is character-building" retarded sadists over the years, I'm more of the opinion that adverse circumstances may discover or reveal innate character (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse), but doesn't "build" or "develop" it (whatever those mean). While I'm a great fan of active, outdoor hobbies, I never did swallow that "character-building" mouthful from a number of the proponents I've met, including teachers.)
s/common sense/experience/ and you'd be correct, almost by definition. But does "common sense" equal "experience"? I think not, though I wouldn't dispute that "experience" is a substantial component of "common sense". I think that turning experience into a reasonable probability of avoiding similar problems in the future, or of managing them better, will also certainly require a reasonable working memory, as well as a degree of introspection. The latter is certainly lacking in some people, often the ones who go on about "use some common sense!", because it needs you to accept that you may personally be wrong.
Never heard of it. Does it apply in my jurisdiction (either of them)? I suspect not, for the following reason ...
My employers, in their sales contracts, have never permitted resale of software, or of the dongles which secure it's usage. In the past, our control was relatively coarse-grained - version 1.x dongles simply wouldn't work with version 2.x etc - but the tools are more sophisticated now and a client need to get a new set of keys every so-many months (on the dongle's calendar, not the computer's) or hours of use (on the dongle's internal clock). If a client feels the desire to sell the software on to someone else, they can do. But we have no obligation to supply the purchaser with the codes necessary for the software to work.
(A significant proportion of the copies and dongles in existence are "evaluation" copies (priced at a few hundred dollars for administrative costs) or academic copies in universities (priced at zero from the advertising budget). Converting them to a full-price version only requires a new set of codes.)
The dongles are a tool for enforcing the terms of the license. Nothing less, but nothing more either.
It's diesel tax, not petrol tax ; very different fuels.
Road Fund Tax is hypothecated to maintaining the roads, but the tax from fuel sales goes into the general taxation pot. (I see from Wikipedia that the reverse situation applies in some countries.)
But you say it yourself : in the first phrase it's about licensing, in the second case it's not about licensing. Yes, in theory you could enter into a negotiation with the HMCR / DCR (or whatever this year's name is) about a particular batch of fuel ; they may even have an established method of re-marking such re-purposed-tax-paid fuel. The analogy would be as if the buyers of our sold-on software above had entered negotiation with us and brought a license to use the software for (for example) 3 months. We then wait until the cheque clears, and send them a set of codes which would enable the dongle for 12 weeks / 84 days. Or, if a business entity went bust and gave it's discs and manuals to a local university, we might waive the charge and send them 6 months worth of codes for the dongle. But that's our choice ; under the terms of the license, we're not obliged to do anything for them.
That's no way to refer to your mother's turkey baster.
Personally, I think you'd be hard put to beat a billhook for getting up close and personal. They were my tool of choice for doing forestry work as a youth, combining the heft of a handaxe with a fair length of edge and a piercing tip to the bill. Putting them onto a pole (making the early pike) gives you reach, but makes them much more cumbersome.
I wonder if you can still get them? The local DIY stores don't have them, and I've got an out-of-control hedge in the back garden that needs a serious talking-to. But the BTCV is still selling them (which doesn't surprise me in the slightest, once I think about it) ; I really should get back together with them - forestry work is fun.
The Bastard Operator From Hell did (does) have a serious point behind those lime pits (buried in the pits, even). The gibbet ... well the very word includes implications of being highly visible to the target audience for whom it is meant to be a deterrent. Details are location-dependent.
Luke, trainee jedi-geek that you are, you show your geek-naïveté in approaching the problem from such a brute-force perspective. The true geek would do all their stalking using quite conventional transaction-tracking. Then, having determined the hotel/ rehab-clinic/ brothel/ mountain hovel/ etc that he is staying in (assuming that he's not on a road trip), your uber-geek credentials would be established by getting the hotel-etc's CCTV system to take the photos for you.
If the hotel-etc does not have a CCTV system, then your geek challenge escalates to that of socially engineering the management into installing a CCTV system (to your specifications ; at their expense). Naturally, this system should have security to protect your prize from being found by other stalker-geeks ; that's part of the specification you'll need to write ; if the target is on a road trip, then you simply need to work out where he'll be in the future and get a system installed ahead of time.
Now you have the problem of speaking the code word to him. That's tricky. It'll also be quite location dependent. Hmm ... does anyone like DHL or FedEx do collections? I'm sure someone would ... I'll assume DHL for simplicity.
So you send a picture from the CCTV system to the target by DHL, along with a self-addressed envelope, and instruct the courier to deliver one package and collect the return package. Then telephone the target and deliver the code word and tell them to write a cheque in your name, but not to sign it. The DHL boy then knocks on the door, delivers the photos (not the negatives, if he's in a brothel ; that's your retirement fund), collects the cheque after the target has signed it, and posts it back to you.
No need to leave your parent-proofed cellar. And that CCTV system that you've installed in the brothel is going to pay back over and over.
Back to World of Warcraft for you, Luke.
I did wonder if you could set up a scam with planted evidence that would get the police to do the tracking, photographing and delivery of the code word. Plausible, but it might just get you in trouble for wasting police time. Oh, Doh! , you do it through a proxy so that it's Mayor West of Quahog who wastes the police's time. That's my uber-geek aspirations blown then, isn't it?
"Chase" being a bank or something similar involved in this fiasco? But the BUYER needing to investigate the sale? I've never heard of such a thing happening at a public auction, and I can't think of any grounds for a buyer at a public auction to have doubts about someone's title to the goods on sale.
Actually, now that I think on it, I have heard of such things, but in respect of cars, not houses. And for cars there are databases constructed by the car finance industry where, for a small fee, a potential buyer can investigate a particular vehicle's finance history and verify that there's nothing outstanding on it. But in a case like this, I can't see how the buyer is intrinsically at fault ; in fact, both buyer and (unwilling) seller have grounds for restitution from whoever set up the sale.
(The buyer may have been somewhat high-handed about how he treated the contents of the property, but since he had every reason to believe that it was his property now - building, land and contents - that's no business of yours or mine.)
Some people are actually capable of reading and understanding what you (and others) say, then remembering it and acting on it. We understand that everything that we do on line has the potential to be remembered by the system, and therefore recalled at some future date. Therefore we only say things that we're willing to have recalled twenty years from now. Similarly we know that it's not impossible for someone else to read our mail, so if we want to send a private communication we write a document, encrypt it with an appropriate tool, and then transmit the encrypted version.
So, Bruce, as a journalist, you're going to have to find a different drum to beat on.
The people who haven't absorbed the message so far? Tough. They'll either learn, or fall behind economically (or politically, or culturally ; all in some fairly vague sense). At which point, they (and their descendants) might as well be dead. Tough.
According to TFA, it is simultaneously true that this year's stock of freshers is both "multicultural" and "They have never understood the meaning of R.S.V.P."
While I wouldn't require strong French as an indication of being "multicultural", this does seem to be a bit of a non-sequiteur. Ooops, there I go again. But some phrases get so absorbed into one native language that they acquire a certain je ne sais quoi, and their understanding simply becomes part of the host language. It's particularly so between French and English because of the actions of a Scandanavian bastard almost a thousand years ago.
So, essentially what the article is saying is that students going to college this year can be expected to be ignorant, if not necessarily stupid. Well, DOH!, but isn't that why they're going to college?
Hmmm, do I brush up on my Spanish first, or my French, or my Russian? The wife wants to move once #1 daughter gets her digit out and moves out, but we haven't decided which country to move to. Oh well, no great hurry.
It's scary that I read this after posting my earlier comment concerning Lords Archer and Mandelson, in the cell, using the soap and the slop bucket ...
Mind you, while it would explain how B.Liar could bear poking Cherie, it doesn't really explain where all the kiddies came from. Oh yes it does - him being a Catholic, and the old Bedouin proverb about sleeping with "a boy for pleasure, a woman for children, and a goat for warmth". You could get all 3 from Cherie. There's multi-tasking for you. Something women are notoriously good at.
But that's veering from legitimate political comment - on what blackmail hold Mandelson has over the higher echelons of the "New Labour" Party - and towards praise for the woman's flexibility.
With no respect to Mandelson, foul little organism that it is, I believe that the openly-Conservative Lord Archer has tried to achieve this several times. You know, there's something almost nice about the image I get of those two buggering each other in a cell - the looks on each one's face might almost be worth the process of catching them and prosecuting them.
For time-served advice on this matter, see RFC-2100 (ha-ha-but-serious) from 1997, RFC-1178 (serious-but-ha-ha) from 1990, and RFC-1034 (just plain tedious) from 1987. You will note that these date back to the dissemination of the current DNS system ; as the system hasn't changed significantly, the advice on naming conventions is similarly unlikely to change.
From a more practical point of view ... look at the likely size of your domain ; apply an appropriate number of doublings (to account for unexpected growth, everyone and their dog getting both print and fax servers, then not releasing the names when the servers go away, another unexpected doubling) ; go and find a "jargon" dictionary somewhat bigger than you suppose you'll need ; start to use it.
Examples I've seen :
- departmental computers in a university department (not the lab computers) ; likely namespace size a few dozen ; naming theme "malt whiskies", with some 300 possibilities (and you can use blended whiskies for degenerate bastard machines that won't be around for long, or a sub-department.
- servers in a small company, for mail, proxy, mass storage, etc ; likely name space a handful ; theme was fictional servants, with dozens of possibilities before needing to do research.
- me? At home I use raw IP addresses. When the wife or daughter knows what an IP address is compared to a host name, then I'll worry about it.
... and a tissue sample from (for an example) Tony Blair, and I can have him commence his career as a axe-murdering homosexual rapist. Woo Hoo!, hold the front page!
(actually, I think I might need to RTFA too. But why violate SlashDot norms.)
from a year-old wreck of a cow? ... I wouldn't have put it past El Runtissimo.
Some years previously the mountaineering club hit a yearling deer with a Transit van (mini-bus ; 2-ton truck with a passenger body). Venison steaks all round, except for the club's token vegetarian. Waste not, want not.
"smart enough not to" not get caught "shop lift"-ing
Fixed that for you.
That, like everything else, depends on the details of the license in question.
As far as I can tell, the machines in question are ones formerly owned by a business. So, the license might be an OEM one, or it might be a retail one.
But the business is a "defence contractor" - so potentially at least they're actually on a government license (does "defence" include mercenary work too in the poster's country?) - does that follow the same laws as a OEM or retail license?
I'd read the EULA for the specific copy and for the specific country involved before I'd say anything. And what I'd say would almost certainly be "what self-serving retard of a lawyer wrote this incomprehensible drivel?" At which point you're caught between getting a legal opinion or taking a chance. On the (probably valid) assumption that all businesses and lawyers are bastards, you are free to take what risks you feel like with the bastards.
Wasn't that the whole point of the XP activation thing - to stop people moving from machine to machine? (Not that I ever wasted time installing XP - I've never had it at home, and at work we got an IT man about the time XP came out, so that sort of thing became Someone Else's Problem.)
Very likely.
[On preview, I see that goalposts have shifted. Initially it sounded like you were talking about getting machines that were being sold off from a business upgrading, but now it sounds like you're buying at retail. Below I've assumed that you're talking of disposal equipment from a business re-fit. Stuff brough for retail may well be different.)
Compaq (or HP, Dell, WhoEver ; the big computer manufacturer) would have made a deal with MS (and equivalent other companies for other parts of the software package installed, but we'll stick to MS for the time being) for so-many hundred thousand units of Windows COA to be used under certain conditions ; MS would have agreed a particular price on the condition that those conditons were met. One of the most important conditions from MS's point of view would be that those COAs do not get out into the retail world to dilute the value of their domestic product. Normally that means that the COAs are sold under contractual terms that specify that they are only valid COAs if used on the original hardware, by the original purchasers from Compaq (HP, Dell, etc). The licenses secured by the COA are not transferable, by contractual agreement between Compaq (etc) and the person that Compaq sold them to.
You'll need the lawyer for when you appear in court on charges of either misrepresentation (when your parents sue you for the value of the license (secured by the COA) that you had no ownership of and so could neither sell nor transfer to them. Or, potentially, you could be done for just plain theft, or sale of stolen good, since the person you're buying from probably has no legal right to the COAs either. And now that you've been told this in a public forum, the scant protection that you get from claiming ignorance has vanished.
Now, it may be true that MS (Compaq, HP, whoever) have never "done an RIAA" by suing the nice granny down the street ; but that doesn't mean that they don't have the legal apparatus in place to do that should they wish.
I don't know what the laws in whichever country you live in are, but the strong likelihood is that they're approximately the same as in the rest of the world ; multinational trade agreements negotiated on the behalf of companies like MS (Compaq, HP, etc) are manipulated to ensure that these business-friendly practices are exported to the rest of the world.
One of the main planks of the recurring "Microsoft Tax" arguments around the world is that the details of the EULAs for consumer editions of the OS supplied with a laptop forbid the transfer of the OS separate from the hardware. Bulk sales of hardware have, in the EULAs I've examined similarly forbid the transfer of a commercial license to the retail world.
Here is an analogy : here in the UK (and TTBOMK, most of Europe) there are two licenses for diesel fuel - that for road vehicles and that for off-road equipment. If you are caught using diesel sold for use in off-road equipment in on-road equipment, then you're at risk of a criminal record, a substantial fine, and possibly the destruction of the vehicle in question. The tax authorities carry out random roadside checks for abusers, and the off-road fuel is stained with a dye to make it easy to spot. There is absolutely no difference between the two products (apart from the dye), but the conditions under which they're licensed for use are difference, and that different licensing can be (and is) enforced by the full apparatus of the law. (Cross-border fuel smuggling and removal of the dye is one of the main businesses of the terrorists in Northern Ireland, second only to heroin.)
I've noticed that I'm talking of Compaq and HP as if they're separate
Did you read and agree to the EULA on these? I'd be pretty surprised if those COAs were legal to use except on the original hardware by the original customer.
When the -knock- comes at your door ... you can use that profit to hire a lawyer to tell you that you're screwed. 155/4 = $38.75/hour, which is not going to be high enough to get more than an hour or two of lawyer time.
I'd say that your count of categories is wrong. A wave has a fundamental property - it's direction of propagation. Given that, there are two (non-exclusive) classes of waves :
These are waves where the direction of travel of the wave is parallel to the the direction of motion of the particles comprising the medium of propagation.
All other waves comprise particles that move transversely to the direction of propagation of the wave. This motion can be as complex as you like, in as many dimensions as you care to count (if you choose to believe String Theory, you've got around 11 other dimensions to play with ; in 'brane' universes only 4 or 5 other dimensions. Pick a universe to live in.)
Obviously, the true motion of your medium's particles can be as complex as you like, and you simply resolve it into components parallel to the direction of travel and transverse to the direction of travel. In the transverse component, you can resolve it into as many other further orthogonal components as you desire, or your universe can accommodate.
Are you under the impression that the "War on Drugs" is going "well", for any common use of "well"?
That situation would be analogous to understanding the faulting behaviour of arbitrarily large units of quite homogeneous rock - say a gabbroic or ultrabasic intrusion. Which is, a moderately good first-order description of the axial complex of a mid-ocean ridge and the oceanic slab that rolls off the conveyor by continuous casting.
The next step of course is to extend the work to rock structures that vary in composition against position. Then you'll need to extend the work to take into account that these laterally variable rock units are also variable in mechanical strength, as they have micro-fractures, and meso-fractures, and mega-fractures. Now these compositional variations and strength variations are further complicated by the fact that some (but not all) of these various scales of fracture are partly annealed back towards their original strength.
Oh, there is progress being made I have no doubt. But I wouldn't bet on the problem being solved any time soon. For a start, we're not going to get the degree of information that we need to characterise the full thickness of the crust in an area of interest. I did an analysis of this scale of problem a while ago in the context of characterising the Yellowstone calderas - it's not impossible, but it's a multi-billion dollar project. Putting up with earthquakes may well be cheaper. (I do of course discount the millions of likely victims ; they're most likely to be poor and Indian, and so don't count. It's much easier to count the number of Californian houses that may need redecorating than accounting for lives lost.)
Not for long.
Seriously, the switch-off of analogue radio is looming almost as fast as the switch-off of analogue TV.
I work for a closed-source company which is about 2/3 software : 1/3 non-computing services. While our turnover is in the millions and we're a private company (i.e. shares are not publicly traded), the last time I went past the BigBoss's house, it was still a council house. He probably owns it, but it's not what anyone would call a mansion. ... I've got something better to do.
Yes, we do use open source components where they make sense. That's very small parts of our packages because our packages are pretty specialised.
Yes, I have wondered about how I could achieve the same functionality using more open source components. It's not incredible, but it's also more work than I care to do. I'd rather repair the floppy sun-visor in the car and spend my spare time taking the wife to the cinema at the weekend.
I am learning some programming - more than I had at university in the 1980s, but I doubt that I'll be doing much of substance for a decade or 3 yet. But you're free to wait until I've got nothing better to do. Which reminds me
I guessed. It was a 3-door Astra of some variation ; "went like shit off a shovel". And with it being nearly 20 years since I moved out of that flat, I don't have any better description. To me, it was white (with red splotches), 4-wheeled, and totally wrecked, which answered all important questions.
The whole point of nuking the site from orbit is that you reduce to zero (not "very low" but "zero") the possibility of your organism getting off the planet. The nuking from orbit needs to be done by a vessel that hasn't landed (or even entered the atmosphere and the nuking needs to vaporise all surface-to-orbit capable ships on the ground as well as all organisms capable of learning how to build one. It's the only way to be "sure", rather than "have a reasonable degree of confidence".