That's not actually true, although the legal system treats it as such. Constitutional means compatible with the US Constitution. Some things flatly aren't, even if the court says otherwise.
You don't decide that, the Supreme Court does. Who says the Supreme Court decides that? The Constitution.
The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court
So if you want to "overrule" the Supreme Court because the law is not compatible with the constitution, you too is in violation of constitution. Better hope two wrongs make a right...
No, but all your fellow users will gladly blame Microsoft while Microsoft itself will politely ignore you - at least not rudely trash talk you in an "attack is the best defense" way. You may not get any help in either case, but it'll be a much more pleasant experience. There's a huge difference between not getting your way and not getting your way as well as being insulted. Don't get me wrong I'm sure the Microsoft developers don't hold their users in much higher regard than in open source projects, but if you want to stay employed in customer support you don't tell it to their face.
How exactly do you feed people on the journey to Mars, what do they eat when they finally get there, and what type of food will even survive that long?
Dude, canned food was invented over 200 years ago. Many military field reserve rations have a 20+ year shelf life. For a Mars colony you probably have to grow food but for a field mission you can bring freeze dried food and reuse filtered water. I see our current day rations are 3-400 grams freeze dried, 100-150 kg and you're good for a year.
Isn't this exactly why it works on a MMO and shouldn't work on Office? If you don't like the MMO anymore, there's no reason to keep paying for it. But you quite probably DO care about old documents and don't want to be stuck with a $100/year bill just to access them. But then again, I may be overestimating people...
I think they're in a waiting game, this generation of consoles has lasted long and the next generation is likely to last longer as 1080p resolution will be standard for TVs for many, many years so it's better to have a PS4 that's 10% faster than the xbox720 for 10 years than it is to get a year's head start on sales - many people will wait until they can compare them anyway.
That would be true if everything you did at work was individual tests. That small banter tends to help coordination, I know more about what coworkers are doing or not doing, what they're making progress on, what they're stuck on and if we're on the same page with regards to what we're creating. I'm not so sure the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, but it's not that easy. Then again I'm pretty good at mentally blocking it as much as I need to.
You seem to think that unions are there to protect lazy people?
I don't think they do it intentionally, but it's very hard for a union to let anybody at all get fired easily. To their members the fact that their union will stick up for them even if you've been railroaded and the situation looks bad for you is more valuable than whether the employer is stuck with some lazy workers. I've certainly seen termination processes drag out and require more documentation and with more chances of redemption due to unions. It doesn't help only those that are unfairly being laid off, with the good comes the bad.
I don't think I'd say primitive, it's rather that they're far more size and power-sensitive. Despite the various ultra-thin laptop varieties that have cropped up the basic form factor of a laptop has been nearly unchanged for a decade and for most people the weight and thickness difference is of marginal importance. Phones are still a form factor where there's a lot more you'd like to fit in it than is practically possible, you'd like the power of a laptop and a photo camera and a video camera and a GPS reciever and mobile data networks and wifi and as your music player and all of this running off a battery so small it fits in your pocket while actually lasting a good while. If you want to put anything in a smart phone the next two questions after "Why?" is "How many cubic millimeters does it take?" and "How many milliwatts does it draw?"
...but it won't make them talk like a human. Being a good programmer in my experience requires you to articulate the logic that's implicit. Once I thought the tedium and attention to explain in excruciating detail what to do was sufficient, it's necessary but not enough. Implicitly you're doing a lot of other things that aren't in the recipe like checking if any of the ingredients are past their due date, spoiled, sour or moldy. You check that all your utensils are clean and in working order, you clean out the oven if it's already occupied, if that bag of sugar is leaking you have an error handler for that, you do a zillion things that aren't in your recipe no matter how detailed you make it. The computer does absolutely none of these checks unless you tell it to.
If you find really sloppy code where there's only one working code path, it's the main path where everything goes as expected. The slightest deviation from that, and the code goes boom. Good code is one that actually handles all these sorts of odd conditions or at least fails gracefully. But you can't write that kind of code unless you can "introspect" yourself and realize all those implicit assumptions you make. In my impression, very few people are able to do that - sure if you point out a way their code crashes they can put a band-aid on it but either you have the knack for writing that code on your own or you don't.
So exactly this. Intel released a Windows-only chip and now Bruce threw a temper tantrum and dug up every pathetic reason you could find this chip must be a total and utter failure. By the sound of it you should think they've released the PIV or the Itanic all over again, from everything I can tell this is a rather standard evolutionary development. It got some power hints that they're working on with Windows, but you know Intel wants the market ARM has today. Maybe this chip is Win-only yes like Google wanted Android 3.0 to only be for tablets but long term, Intel wants to power Microsoft and Apple and Google.
You blindly assume that everyone online on the net needs a seperate IP address. But that is clearly wrong. The place where I work has only 16 public IP addresses, yet there are about 500 PCs buzzing along with people surfing and mailing.
Considering that we're about 2.3 billion people online and we're already talking about running out, we're using considerably more than 1 IP/person today. And if the entire world eventually reach North American penetration rates there's another 3 billion coming online. And most now believe the world population will peak at 10 billion so there's another 2.3 billion as well. Yes, with enough NAT you could probably make it sort of work but it'd be the end of the Internet as we know it. Only ISPs, big companies and people with way too much money would have a public IP that others could talk to. The rest could only access Facebook and YouTube and such via NAT.
Yeah agreed. I've been on native IPv6 (dual stack, obviously) for, hmm, approaching two years now (I'm in the APNIC area so they ran out of IPv4 a while ago) and honestly I'm only reminded of the fact when someone brings IPv6 up in an article or something. The changeover was easy from the user's perspective - it just works. Indeed I suspect many users of my ISP don't even know they are on IPv6. The resistance and heel-dragging on the changeover in many places/companies is a bit mystifying to me. It's not really that hard.
Well as long as you are on dual stack you have an IPv4 address for everything that needs an IPv4 address, but it doesn't solve anything as no more people can run that than there are IPv4 addresses. How much would cease to work if you went IPv6 only? Because that's the only Internet connection they can offer soon. And if you don't see the problem you don't know the average company's pile of legacy/custom code that will all assume it's using IPv4 and nothing else that nobody knows or the vendor will charge a ton to fix. To rip out all the IPv4 code and go IPv6 you'd need another coding frenzy like y2k, and your chances to conjure that kind of doomsday scenario is nil. IPv4 was so good that there's now decades of old code that will assume an IP is always a dotted quad and can fit in 4 bytes. Nobody wants to be the one who breaks production systems just to go IPv6 for no tangible reason.
So there's 7 billion people and 4 billion IP addresses, how'd that work even if you could reclaim every range and achieve perfect routing and perfect efficiency meaning you couldn't be online at home or at work and on the phone at the same time. You'd just run into the same problem a little bit down the road as another billion people go online. Pretty soon there won't be any other choice.
A minimum amount of energy it would require to reliably change a single bit can be reasonably be derived from this. Although for trivial operations, the energy requirements are absurdly tiny fractions of a joule, I might suggest that for modern complex computing that we perform today, those minimum energy requirements aren't going to be anywhere as near to zero as they expect.
At 25C (room temperature, or 298.15 kelvins), the Landauer limit represents an energy of approximately 0.0178 eV, or 2.85 zJ. Theoretically, room-temperature computer memory operating at the Landauer limit could be changed at a rate of one billion bits per second with only 2.85 trillionths of a watt of power being expended in the memory media.
I think the author misunderstood what "ubiquitous" means. It means you can put serious computing power anywhere, including in places that don't have displays, cameras, etc. He's just thinking, "How far can they reduce the power use of my existing smartphone?" The real question is, "What completely new types of devices become practical when computing requires hardly any power at all?"
Well, as a counterpoint I would say we could have turned everything connected to the AC grid into "smart" devices already, but despite many, many house of the future concepts pretty much everything I see in stores is regular old dumb devices anyway. So yes maybe with extremely low power we could turn everything into a "smart" device, but I still have my doubts that we actually will.
There's weight... and space and SATA connectors and power connectors, I always prefer my storage more compact. A 128GB SSD is fine but I'd gladly take a few 5TB HDDs to go with it.
Except he got it for failing to "secure" his internet connection, not for copyright infringement. Imagine you're a building owner renting out the apartment to tenants with internet connection. They download, you get fined. That level of indirection is a new level of stupid.
It would have had a better chance if it was launching in late 2009 or early 2010. (...) Ok, ok, the motion control was actually hideously inaccurate (only partially rectified by the Wiimote-Plus) and far from jumping around, the best way to play most games was to sit still and make small movements. But by the time people noticed that, they'd already bought.
That didn't matter much to the kids I saw playing tennis, they were waving and hitting with more theatrics than a normal racket. Even mum and dad could be dragged into a game of bowling. The downside is that it's something of a one-trick pony, I don't think a "Wii HD" would be very compelling and many Wii buyers would have felt a bit snubbed if they learned it was already obsolete three years down the road. I think the Wii U got multiplayer potential if they use the console screen wisely, say one person with "secret" information against three with classic controllers. Still it remains to be seen what the execution will be like.
Russia is the only country in the world with a significant population on the Arctic-facing shores (Canada and Norway are distant runner ups)
And here in Norway we have the Gulf Stream coming up from the Atlantic so most harbors here are ice free all year long and if not with very weak ice. We have a few ice-breakers yes, but I'm guessing the US probably has more ice breakers in Alaska than we do in total.
Wow, letterboxing? Really? Really? Did Apple just never learn how to make an API for UI elements that doesn't suck?
They could make wonderful APIs, but crappy developers don't plan or test for it so the result is always a mess. If you've ever played with the DPI setting in Windows you know what I mean. And why so many websites choose a fixed-pixel width despite all the fancy dynamic layout. That's why they went with "half resolution" on the rMBP too, they don't want users complaining because all their UI elements just got too small. Let me know when you can fix stupid, that's when Apple will trust developers with that. I very much doubt all Android apps work on all resolutions...
To average users that's like arguing about a monolithic kernel or microkernel is best, they don't care. They want applications and the iPhone got apps for practically everything which in the public eye makes it a "general purpose" computer. Around here the perception is that Apple's walled garden is like being trapped in Gitmo, but to most people it's the size of the US - most people don't have or want a passport to go outside. Many of them don't mind putting it all on iCloud so Apple can store and sync it for them, they just don't want to manage their own systems. I'll just repeat that for the "you can pry my root password from my cold dead hands" crowd here at Slashdot, they don't want to. And in all honesty if I wasn't tech-savvy I'd probably pick Apple too over bugging friends, family, the neighborhood kid or geeksquad.
The GMA500 disaster showed how much Intel cares for end users after selling them the hardware.
GMA500 = rebranded PowerVR SGX 535. The graphics Intel develops themselves isn't for serious gamers but it's improved leaps and bounds over the last couple years. You're of course free to be unhappy about the Poulsbo and with good reason, but most people with a recent Intel IGP are very happy and the sales of discrete cards only goes one way, down.
It would be similar to you hanging up a pamphlet on a bulletin board near a copy machine.
If you actually upload to another peer, you are distributing and in violation of 17106(3). The downloader is reproducing and in violation of 17106(1). The whole "making available" issue is because they can not prove any distribution actually occurred, except possibly one the copyright goons caused themselves but that doesn't count. Consider the following analogy, assume you are preparing a murder. You've procured the gun, you've tricked the victim here, everything is lined up for your trigger man to pull the trigger. If he did, surely you're at the very least aiding and abetting a murder if not in a conspiracy to murder or possibly committing a murder depending on the law. But if nobody pulls the trigger, there's no murder. And that's the core of the "making available" issue, no matter if your computer is ready to hand out copies to everyone in the swarm it doesn't happen until somebody asks. If no copy was made, how can there be a copyright violation?
Ever eaten MRE's. I swear, they must be pre-aged!!
If you're in the military or got them from there, quite possibly. The military keeps a rather big stockpile in case of an actual emergency up to and including an extended all-out war. At least here in Norway rather than throw it away soldiers - particularly fresh recruits - get the oldest rations to eat on their exercises, so they can refill the stockpile with new ones without throwing anything away. I don't know about the newer Drytech food, but the old RSPs (our MREs) had a shelf live of at least 20 years so it was not uncommon for recruits to eat food older than they were as military duty usually kicks in at 19. Actually they only stopped buying them 17 years ago, so they might be chowing down the last ones still. From what I hear they actually change very little in taste over those 20 years, but it didn't exactly taste great to begin with...
I am a lawyer. This is not legal advice, but you should take it anyway. Wait for your attorney to arrive before telling the cops anything other than "I will require my attorney to be present before answering any questions."
I'm not your wallet. This is not economic advice, but you should take it anyway. Until and unless the police actually arrest you or do something else that gives you reason to call your lawyer, you should just clam up. Or pay the price.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not actually true, although the legal system treats it as such. Constitutional means compatible with the US Constitution. Some things flatly aren't, even if the court says otherwise.
You don't decide that, the Supreme Court does. Who says the Supreme Court decides that? The Constitution.
The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court
So if you want to "overrule" the Supreme Court because the law is not compatible with the constitution, you too is in violation of constitution. Better hope two wrongs make a right...
No, but all your fellow users will gladly blame Microsoft while Microsoft itself will politely ignore you - at least not rudely trash talk you in an "attack is the best defense" way. You may not get any help in either case, but it'll be a much more pleasant experience. There's a huge difference between not getting your way and not getting your way as well as being insulted. Don't get me wrong I'm sure the Microsoft developers don't hold their users in much higher regard than in open source projects, but if you want to stay employed in customer support you don't tell it to their face.
How exactly do you feed people on the journey to Mars, what do they eat when they finally get there, and what type of food will even survive that long?
Dude, canned food was invented over 200 years ago. Many military field reserve rations have a 20+ year shelf life. For a Mars colony you probably have to grow food but for a field mission you can bring freeze dried food and reuse filtered water. I see our current day rations are 3-400 grams freeze dried, 100-150 kg and you're good for a year.
Isn't this exactly why it works on a MMO and shouldn't work on Office? If you don't like the MMO anymore, there's no reason to keep paying for it. But you quite probably DO care about old documents and don't want to be stuck with a $100/year bill just to access them. But then again, I may be overestimating people...
I think they're in a waiting game, this generation of consoles has lasted long and the next generation is likely to last longer as 1080p resolution will be standard for TVs for many, many years so it's better to have a PS4 that's 10% faster than the xbox720 for 10 years than it is to get a year's head start on sales - many people will wait until they can compare them anyway.
That would be true if everything you did at work was individual tests. That small banter tends to help coordination, I know more about what coworkers are doing or not doing, what they're making progress on, what they're stuck on and if we're on the same page with regards to what we're creating. I'm not so sure the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, but it's not that easy. Then again I'm pretty good at mentally blocking it as much as I need to.
You seem to think that unions are there to protect lazy people?
I don't think they do it intentionally, but it's very hard for a union to let anybody at all get fired easily. To their members the fact that their union will stick up for them even if you've been railroaded and the situation looks bad for you is more valuable than whether the employer is stuck with some lazy workers. I've certainly seen termination processes drag out and require more documentation and with more chances of redemption due to unions. It doesn't help only those that are unfairly being laid off, with the good comes the bad.
I don't think I'd say primitive, it's rather that they're far more size and power-sensitive. Despite the various ultra-thin laptop varieties that have cropped up the basic form factor of a laptop has been nearly unchanged for a decade and for most people the weight and thickness difference is of marginal importance. Phones are still a form factor where there's a lot more you'd like to fit in it than is practically possible, you'd like the power of a laptop and a photo camera and a video camera and a GPS reciever and mobile data networks and wifi and as your music player and all of this running off a battery so small it fits in your pocket while actually lasting a good while. If you want to put anything in a smart phone the next two questions after "Why?" is "How many cubic millimeters does it take?" and "How many milliwatts does it draw?"
...but it won't make them talk like a human. Being a good programmer in my experience requires you to articulate the logic that's implicit. Once I thought the tedium and attention to explain in excruciating detail what to do was sufficient, it's necessary but not enough. Implicitly you're doing a lot of other things that aren't in the recipe like checking if any of the ingredients are past their due date, spoiled, sour or moldy. You check that all your utensils are clean and in working order, you clean out the oven if it's already occupied, if that bag of sugar is leaking you have an error handler for that, you do a zillion things that aren't in your recipe no matter how detailed you make it. The computer does absolutely none of these checks unless you tell it to.
If you find really sloppy code where there's only one working code path, it's the main path where everything goes as expected. The slightest deviation from that, and the code goes boom. Good code is one that actually handles all these sorts of odd conditions or at least fails gracefully. But you can't write that kind of code unless you can "introspect" yourself and realize all those implicit assumptions you make. In my impression, very few people are able to do that - sure if you point out a way their code crashes they can put a band-aid on it but either you have the knack for writing that code on your own or you don't.
So exactly this. Intel released a Windows-only chip and now Bruce threw a temper tantrum and dug up every pathetic reason you could find this chip must be a total and utter failure. By the sound of it you should think they've released the PIV or the Itanic all over again, from everything I can tell this is a rather standard evolutionary development. It got some power hints that they're working on with Windows, but you know Intel wants the market ARM has today. Maybe this chip is Win-only yes like Google wanted Android 3.0 to only be for tablets but long term, Intel wants to power Microsoft and Apple and Google.
You blindly assume that everyone online on the net needs a seperate IP address. But that is clearly wrong. The place where I work has only 16 public IP addresses, yet there are about 500 PCs buzzing along with people surfing and mailing.
Considering that we're about 2.3 billion people online and we're already talking about running out, we're using considerably more than 1 IP/person today. And if the entire world eventually reach North American penetration rates there's another 3 billion coming online. And most now believe the world population will peak at 10 billion so there's another 2.3 billion as well. Yes, with enough NAT you could probably make it sort of work but it'd be the end of the Internet as we know it. Only ISPs, big companies and people with way too much money would have a public IP that others could talk to. The rest could only access Facebook and YouTube and such via NAT.
Yeah agreed. I've been on native IPv6 (dual stack, obviously) for, hmm, approaching two years now (I'm in the APNIC area so they ran out of IPv4 a while ago) and honestly I'm only reminded of the fact when someone brings IPv6 up in an article or something. The changeover was easy from the user's perspective - it just works. Indeed I suspect many users of my ISP don't even know they are on IPv6. The resistance and heel-dragging on the changeover in many places/companies is a bit mystifying to me. It's not really that hard.
Well as long as you are on dual stack you have an IPv4 address for everything that needs an IPv4 address, but it doesn't solve anything as no more people can run that than there are IPv4 addresses. How much would cease to work if you went IPv6 only? Because that's the only Internet connection they can offer soon. And if you don't see the problem you don't know the average company's pile of legacy/custom code that will all assume it's using IPv4 and nothing else that nobody knows or the vendor will charge a ton to fix. To rip out all the IPv4 code and go IPv6 you'd need another coding frenzy like y2k, and your chances to conjure that kind of doomsday scenario is nil. IPv4 was so good that there's now decades of old code that will assume an IP is always a dotted quad and can fit in 4 bytes. Nobody wants to be the one who breaks production systems just to go IPv6 for no tangible reason.
Time to crackdown and revoke/reclaim IP's
So there's 7 billion people and 4 billion IP addresses, how'd that work even if you could reclaim every range and achieve perfect routing and perfect efficiency meaning you couldn't be online at home or at work and on the phone at the same time. You'd just run into the same problem a little bit down the road as another billion people go online. Pretty soon there won't be any other choice.
A minimum amount of energy it would require to reliably change a single bit can be reasonably be derived from this. Although for trivial operations, the energy requirements are absurdly tiny fractions of a joule, I might suggest that for modern complex computing that we perform today, those minimum energy requirements aren't going to be anywhere as near to zero as they expect.
It's the Landauer's principle but it's an extremely low limit. To quote WP:
At 25C (room temperature, or 298.15 kelvins), the Landauer limit represents an energy of approximately 0.0178 eV, or 2.85 zJ. Theoretically, room-temperature computer memory operating at the Landauer limit could be changed at a rate of one billion bits per second with only 2.85 trillionths of a watt of power being expended in the memory media.
I think the author misunderstood what "ubiquitous" means. It means you can put serious computing power anywhere, including in places that don't have displays, cameras, etc. He's just thinking, "How far can they reduce the power use of my existing smartphone?" The real question is, "What completely new types of devices become practical when computing requires hardly any power at all?"
Well, as a counterpoint I would say we could have turned everything connected to the AC grid into "smart" devices already, but despite many, many house of the future concepts pretty much everything I see in stores is regular old dumb devices anyway. So yes maybe with extremely low power we could turn everything into a "smart" device, but I still have my doubts that we actually will.
There's weight... and space and SATA connectors and power connectors, I always prefer my storage more compact. A 128GB SSD is fine but I'd gladly take a few 5TB HDDs to go with it.
Except he got it for failing to "secure" his internet connection, not for copyright infringement. Imagine you're a building owner renting out the apartment to tenants with internet connection. They download, you get fined. That level of indirection is a new level of stupid.
It would have had a better chance if it was launching in late 2009 or early 2010. (...) Ok, ok, the motion control was actually hideously inaccurate (only partially rectified by the Wiimote-Plus) and far from jumping around, the best way to play most games was to sit still and make small movements. But by the time people noticed that, they'd already bought.
That didn't matter much to the kids I saw playing tennis, they were waving and hitting with more theatrics than a normal racket. Even mum and dad could be dragged into a game of bowling. The downside is that it's something of a one-trick pony, I don't think a "Wii HD" would be very compelling and many Wii buyers would have felt a bit snubbed if they learned it was already obsolete three years down the road. I think the Wii U got multiplayer potential if they use the console screen wisely, say one person with "secret" information against three with classic controllers. Still it remains to be seen what the execution will be like.
Russia is the only country in the world with a significant population on the Arctic-facing shores (Canada and Norway are distant runner ups)
And here in Norway we have the Gulf Stream coming up from the Atlantic so most harbors here are ice free all year long and if not with very weak ice. We have a few ice-breakers yes, but I'm guessing the US probably has more ice breakers in Alaska than we do in total.
Wow, letterboxing? Really? Really? Did Apple just never learn how to make an API for UI elements that doesn't suck?
They could make wonderful APIs, but crappy developers don't plan or test for it so the result is always a mess. If you've ever played with the DPI setting in Windows you know what I mean. And why so many websites choose a fixed-pixel width despite all the fancy dynamic layout. That's why they went with "half resolution" on the rMBP too, they don't want users complaining because all their UI elements just got too small. Let me know when you can fix stupid, that's when Apple will trust developers with that. I very much doubt all Android apps work on all resolutions...
To average users that's like arguing about a monolithic kernel or microkernel is best, they don't care. They want applications and the iPhone got apps for practically everything which in the public eye makes it a "general purpose" computer. Around here the perception is that Apple's walled garden is like being trapped in Gitmo, but to most people it's the size of the US - most people don't have or want a passport to go outside. Many of them don't mind putting it all on iCloud so Apple can store and sync it for them, they just don't want to manage their own systems. I'll just repeat that for the "you can pry my root password from my cold dead hands" crowd here at Slashdot, they don't want to. And in all honesty if I wasn't tech-savvy I'd probably pick Apple too over bugging friends, family, the neighborhood kid or geeksquad.
The GMA500 disaster showed how much Intel cares for end users after selling them the hardware.
GMA500 = rebranded PowerVR SGX 535. The graphics Intel develops themselves isn't for serious gamers but it's improved leaps and bounds over the last couple years. You're of course free to be unhappy about the Poulsbo and with good reason, but most people with a recent Intel IGP are very happy and the sales of discrete cards only goes one way, down.
It would be similar to you hanging up a pamphlet on a bulletin board near a copy machine.
If you actually upload to another peer, you are distributing and in violation of 17106(3). The downloader is reproducing and in violation of 17106(1). The whole "making available" issue is because they can not prove any distribution actually occurred, except possibly one the copyright goons caused themselves but that doesn't count. Consider the following analogy, assume you are preparing a murder. You've procured the gun, you've tricked the victim here, everything is lined up for your trigger man to pull the trigger. If he did, surely you're at the very least aiding and abetting a murder if not in a conspiracy to murder or possibly committing a murder depending on the law. But if nobody pulls the trigger, there's no murder. And that's the core of the "making available" issue, no matter if your computer is ready to hand out copies to everyone in the swarm it doesn't happen until somebody asks. If no copy was made, how can there be a copyright violation?
Ever eaten MRE's. I swear, they must be pre-aged!!
If you're in the military or got them from there, quite possibly. The military keeps a rather big stockpile in case of an actual emergency up to and including an extended all-out war. At least here in Norway rather than throw it away soldiers - particularly fresh recruits - get the oldest rations to eat on their exercises, so they can refill the stockpile with new ones without throwing anything away. I don't know about the newer Drytech food, but the old RSPs (our MREs) had a shelf live of at least 20 years so it was not uncommon for recruits to eat food older than they were as military duty usually kicks in at 19. Actually they only stopped buying them 17 years ago, so they might be chowing down the last ones still. From what I hear they actually change very little in taste over those 20 years, but it didn't exactly taste great to begin with...
I am a lawyer. This is not legal advice, but you should take it anyway. Wait for your attorney to arrive before telling the cops anything other than "I will require my attorney to be present before answering any questions."
I'm not your wallet. This is not economic advice, but you should take it anyway. Until and unless the police actually arrest you or do something else that gives you reason to call your lawyer, you should just clam up. Or pay the price.