That they left you alone probably only means they found easier victims, you were no fun. For everybody who thinks this is the solution to end bullying, I'd quote this old story:
Two guys are hiking in the Alaskan wilderness when they realize they're being stalked by a hungry grizzly bear. One of them bends down to tighten his shoelaces, stretches and discards his backpack. His partner asks him if he seriously thinks he can outrun a bear. "No," he replies, "but all I have to do is outrun you."
The bear is the bully and you are the faster runner. It saves you but someone will be the slowest runner. And it doesn't matter how hard a shell he has because they're going to pound and jab and poke at it until they find some angle that hurts or just wears you down. Being frozen out is hardly the worst kind of bullying there is, a lot of bullying victims are harassed or abused. You can grow as thick a hide as you want, but it won't stop them destroying your homework or taking your lunch money or throwing things at you or rubbing your face in the dirt. At some point you are going to snap and either break down or rage.
Personally I fought, one against one much stronger and one against three a year younger. And I lost, but I never quit. If they harassed me again, we'd fight again. Eventually they realized I wasn't going to break and that it'd be more fun with someone who didn't fight back. It didn't stop them harassing people, it only stopped them harassing me. Some years later I actually grabbed one tiny little squirt by the throat and lifted him off the ground to make them stop harassing me and it worked. All I wanted was to be left alone and even that took a struggle. Just because you got off easy you shouldn't assume everyone else could.
The problem here isn't with Java, it's with Swing (Java's native GUI toolkit). Swing is terribly slow. Applications written in Java with another toolkit, such as SWT or Qt, are fine. Azureus, for example, is a fairly popular BitTorrent client that is written in Java/SWT. (to be fair, the application itself is pretty bloated, but that has little to do with Java and more to do with the developers cramming in every feature under the sun)
Personally I've found that application horribly slow to respond and extremely resource intensive, most like any other Java app I run into. uTorrent FTW, or KTorrent when I was on KDE. The only Java app I know to run well is a huge web-based server system, and it works like a 747 - horribly big to get off the air, but can carry hundreds of people as easily as the first one. The enterprise stuff works, as desktop software it's still meh. I use a lot of C++/Qt though and that's snappy, haven't run into a Java/Qt application yet - examples?
In other words, it's ultimately a self-destructive strategy that will end in dragging down first world markets to third world economic levels. We may already be past that critical point, looking at the perpetual recession we are in.
It's what most of that first world is built on, getting ridiculously cheap labor intensive imports from abroad while exporting expensive high tech and processed products back. Except the world isn't stupid and the world isn't standing still. As the rest of the world gets civilized, they do get educated. They too understand high tech. Americans aren't magical just because they're born in the US, the rest of the world is catching up. You can close off the borders, but that market isn't coming back. Then it'd just be the US economy, no almighty dollar which is worth so much around the world. That dollar was - is - worth so much because there's valuable things to be bought for dollars. Close off trade, take that away and you might find yourself with a third world currency bringing US wages down to match the rest of the world all the same. Either way they're starting to match the US and you can't just stick your head in the sand about that.
Mind you, MS is still the only one of these big three to have a committed interest in long-term research (the "grand vision" which has kept IBM alive despite a century of changes): Google, for all its PhDs, publishes very little interesting research, and Apple publishes nothing, only occasionally advancing the state of the art where it's been important for implementation.
Public research. That is more a question of strategy, by publishing you generate interest and investors but at the same time you reveal what it is you're researching and what you think may be the next big thing. I can't really say I blame them, if they're footing the bill then they're the ones who should benefit from it. If you want public science, the public will probably have to fund it.
In the real world, they're not. With a sufficiently educated populace, or a sufficiently minor subset of the populace who gets involved in voting and politics, it can potentially work. But with a populace with shrinking levels of basic education and basic abilities to rationally evaluate the information they're receiving, the US is showing that democracy largely does not work. The world was a far simpler place when the US system of government was put together.
When the US system of government was put together, there was no such thing as the telegraph or telephone or radio. You had messengers riding with news across the country, which was printed in newspapers far from all could read. You can bemoan the current education system and mass media all you like, but to pretend it was worse 200+ years ago you must be dreaming. I would wager the average voter knew far less about what they were doing in Washington than today.
The main problem is that the US system fairly quickly degenerated to a two-party system rather than individual representatives, which is what I thought they imagined. You sacrificed political nuances and compromises for strong political leadership, the winner takes it all. If you claim it doesn't work, I'd say it's because a democracy without choices doesn't work. That's not a general problem with democracy, only with the US implementation.
"Understanding is a three edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth." -- J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5
I like this quote, even if it's from a sci-fi - so often it goes into a binary mode where one side is right and the other is wrong. Very often both sides are exaggerating and using spurious logic and arguments, even if one side is fundamentally right. A complete misinterpretation is that the truth is always in the middle and that flat-earthers and round-earthers be given equal weight though.
Of course their damage claims are ridiculous, but I see some pretty ludicrous claims on the other side too. Ask anyone who's tried to make a living on donations how that "pay if you like it" model is working out for them. So many people are happy to make a savings where they can, so if they can avoid paying they simply will. They could have found the money somehow, but it'd have to be taken from something else and they don't want to do that. And the "free marketing" argument that only works if it ends up in sales, otherwise it's "we make $0 on each pirated copy, but we make up for it on volume". Actually probably negative because even pirates like to use your support system.
But it does not follow that the state has the power to prevent children from hearing or saying anything without their parentsâ(TM) prior consent.
It's not hard to imagine a law against teen sexting being struck down on the claim the both the sender and the receiver of such images have First Amendment rights.
Except pretty clearly the state does have that power, since adult porn is protected by the first amendment and children - unlike adults - are prevented from hearing/watching it without prior consent from the parents. Anything "obscene" falls into its own category with its own rules, as usual.
You may not, but the Firefox developers do, and they care because Firefox is a free product and they're the ones who will be sued by MPEG-LA.
If they wanted to then Firefox could use the system codecs or call a closed source plugin, there are ways to work around it that would be legally kosher but Firefox out of principle don't want to. Maybe if they get really desperate, but they'll drag their feet as long as possible. Meanwhile the alternative is still for people to install flash and get H.264 in Firefox that way...
Time = money is only true when you paying someone. If you are paying someone $15 per hour, then yes, 8 minutes is worth $2. However, when you are sitting at home and not getting paid then 8 minutes of your time, or 8 hours, or 8 days, is worth exactly zero.
Assuming you got nothing better you wanted to do, then being able to do that instead is worth something to you. At least my non-work time can be divided into chores and leisure and generally I'd be willing to pay to have less of the former and more of the latter. Everything you do also has an opportunity cost, could you something more productive with your time? If you could work one more hour for $10 in post-tax income then spend one hour less bargain-hunting increasing your expenses by $5, you come out ahead if we assume both are things you equally dislike doing.
Of course this depends on the financial situation you're in. If you can't work overtime or find more work then your income is fixed, then you might put extreme value on living cheaper even it takes a lot of time. Other times you may work plenty overtime and make good money and be extremely willing to pay so your time off really is time off. Your real sensitivity depends more on how badly you need the money rather than how much you get paid.
I could make this a lot more complex since you got degrees of wanting and not wanting to do things, some things are time-sensitive like having time off on weekends when my buddies also have time off and so on but it'd only confuse the picture. You can often swap money for time and time for money and sometimes by making combinations you can come out ahead both in time and money. Many people only want to see savings, not savings/time or savings less costs like driving across town to buy it.
I promised myself I wouldn't become an old fart but when the suggestion is to upgrade a P4 in order to surf the net, I cringe. It's a fscking gigahertz processor, for crying out loud. It's amazing what kind of computing power you can waste just drawing up a web page, even with javascript and flash to kill performance.
Really? Is the release cycle really the problem for you or something vague about extensions?
People have a problem with the rapid release cycle because of extensions, the point has been made many times now with all the subtlety of a sledge hammer. If you can't wrap your head around that concept, you must be a Firefox developer.
I'm pretty sure the way 3 strikes rules work is that the penalty applies the third time you are convicted. Presumably this means you have already been in front of a judge *twice* who has told you that this behavior will result in a felony charge.
You can't get all three in one go, but the strikes are per charge not per case so you can use up the first two. And strikes you got as a juvenile count the rest of your life, so worst case you'd better not steal a pack of gum the rest of your life or face 25 to life. Look at the three strikes law page on wikipedia for some outrageous examples.
Well, the bank who gave you the blueprints is plain arrogant. Same as if a server administrator posted his intrusion detection system configuration publicly so attackers could emulate the attack in advance and avoid tripping it. You have to assume there are unknown exploits in the system, but you counter it with an unknown of your own that attackers won't know what will trigger alarms. Don't think for a second that a bank tells you all the security systems and routines when they give you the tour, they just point out the obvious ones so the people from America's Dumbest Criminals won't try.
Well that depends on the Terms of Service of the board where you posted them - both what rights you signed away and what rights others get - but I would imagine for most of these fly-by-night scraping sites yes. It'll probably be just as hard bringing those to court as spammers though, the chance you'll ever recover any time or money you spend pursuing them is very slim and the award likely the statutory minimum.
I think it comes down to whether you think the law shapes society or society shapes the law. Most of us believe in individual freedom and the law should in very little degree dictate how others should live. The same fundamentalists who want to impose their religion on others by law are those most afraid to have another religion imposed on them. I guess the more you look on the law as a hammer, the harder it swings both ways. And if you then think there's a "right" way and a "wrong" way, well they'll be the ones shouting the loudest. I'm not naive to the threat (see my sig), but I have a strong faith that an individualistic society will repel or ignore fundamentalist law.
B) One kid unthinkingly sends image to another kid. Other kid unthinkingly forwards it to friend. Other kid unthinkingly mass-mails. People get upset. Someone calls police. None are even vaguely capable of fully understanding the consequences of their actions, or more importantly separating the dramatic emotional effect of the moment from the real-life long-term consequences of said act... because they are/kids/.
Before, we charge kid with making, distributing, or simply receiving child pornography-- this has happened several times. Kids life is ruined.
The only way the system makes sense is if you turn it upside down, it's not to protect teenagers from sexually exploiting themselves, it's to keep the sexual teenagers from corrupting the "innocent" teenagers. The producers who generate the idea of teen porn are the worst, then those who help spread it next and finally all that seek it and contribute to a teen sex culture. All people that should be put away so the rest won't think of sex before they're 18. They've just realized penalties aren't working because the last thing teenagers think about when sexting is being up on felony child pornography charges, so now they're going for reeducation instead. Make it a small infraction, catch more teenagers and try to make it a thing you don't do. Good luck trying to restrain the combination of raging hormones, camera cellphones and the Internet. I'll get the popco.... uh, no wait I won't.
I'd be worse if they made one side of it legal and the other illegal. You send a sexting message to your gf, she can now get you charged later when she's your ex-gf. This way if you were both in on it you're both guilty, if you didn't want the sexting messages you have to report it. Which might be a good idea if someone sends you sexual messages you don't want anyway.
you come up with a website, and you post your monthly expenses as they come up. and people donate.
Having seen a similar process happening at a political party, I strongly advise against it. Certain people will demand to know every last dollar you spend and everybody will be a critic of your expenses. As long as you're asking for money some people see it as justification to grope deeply into your personal life. And they won't simply shut up if you say no, they'll keep pushing. Also there's probably someone living off Ramen noodles in their dorm room who say they could live for half that. And you'll only get running expenses, no chance to build up for bigger purchases and when you do need to make them anyway your donations won't be twice as large that month.
Just give a figure. Compare it to a minimum wage job or cost of living index or standard budgets to show that it's reasonable but don't start breaking it down. Whether you went over or under in a given month is none of their business. And just say that this is an income level I can live with, that we can hold a debate on whether that's reasonable compared to what other people are living off, but that you're not going to detail your personal spending. I'd probably say where I live so people don't think I'm living in a mansion, if you got a family to support say that but the way where I post every bill (or at least the sum) on a website? No way. No fucking way.
I would predict that the average computer geek is significantly better at languages than the average guy on the street.
At least the written language, I mean most of us sit in offices... well, maybe cubicles... or basements.... using our heads, the average guy on the street also consist of people working all day at Wal-Mart and McDonalds. They can of course be very good at languages too, but statistically just being any kind of knowledge worker makes you more likely to know and understand languages better. And from knowing any programming language you're at least a little bit skilled in translating text into code, which I'm sure helps learning to translate into a foreign language too.
They should have just hopped on the Android bandwagon and thrown in completely with Google.
If you're talking about being the last one to the market instead of going with Windows Phone, maybe. But Nokia's main failure is not bringing their own platform to the market, I don't know whose fault that was but it wasn't Elop.
A third of all the kids play the top 1% of iOS games.
I play PC games. Give me a call when you make a decent one. That is what phones are for.
I play Angry Birds and the other 1% top games on my iPhone and just finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution on max difficulty on my PC, I don't see the big contradiction in that. The games on my phone are to pass time, I'm not expecting a huge game experience for $1 and I don't think the small screen and touch interfaces could provide one either. It's just there in my pocket every time I got 5 minutes to waste and I just grab something from the top 25 - sometimes top 100 - because they're probably decent then. Usually I go straight for the pay games with no in-game payments, because freemiums and those that try to milk you through in-game stores are plain annoying. The only frustrating thing is that Apple's icons are plain fraudulent, there are apps with in-game stores and purchases yet don't carry the "+" sign in the store like the Mighty Eagle in Angry Birds. I don't mind that they do, just be honest about it. Apple should just block any app that doesn't carry that sign from calling any purchasing API at all.
"Better numbers" are for YOUR website. Some other website, the aggregate of many websites, or even an aggregate of all websites in the world are completely meaningless to the traffic coming to your website.
And by your own logic, they're equally irrelevant for everyone else. And if you have 95% IE users because your site is buggy in everything but IE, well by all means write to your market. If you're looking to capture a market, sell a web based application or decide what browsers to test for then probably you want to use the general figures.
So far there's not been much reason to try reaching anything. If we can narrow down some of those 15 billion to be actually earth-like, where we really could colonize a whole planet I'd say you have reason.
However, there is one thing I am confused about with the muon: it can decay?? I thought fundamental particles are the smallest that small can get, as in, you can't get anything from "splitting" it, there is no substructure within? Isn't this a little nonsensical that the most fundamental particles are capable of decaying in to neutrinos? (more?)
We create exotic particles by accelerating protons and electrons to extreme speeds and smash them together so the energy is converted to mass. As they fall apart they split into smaller particles and some mass is converted to energy. The whole thing is rather counter-intuitive, it's like crashing two cars at 200 mph and the result is a semitrailer weighing much more than both cars put together. Then that semitrailer falls apart in some random way, maybe giving you a bicycle and two motorcycles.
We don't really know how that process happens, the particles we're talking are less than 0.000000000000001m in charge radius, moving at near light speed and it happens so fast it looks instantaneous. I'm sure scientists would love to observe what's going as a fundamental particle grows or loses mass, but we're not there. Hell, the accelerators have more than enough trying to track what went into and what came out of a decay, far less see one in progress.
I guess you can say they're called fundamental until we've found something even more fundamental, just like we once thought the atom was the smallest possible unit. That energy can become mass and mass become energy means it's more than just a substructure, the energy must somehow get trapped in that structure as mass. And then tear that structure somehow breaking free. I think you'll have a row of Nobel prizes if you figure out exactly how though.
But the main point is that it's mostly irrelevant. It's only a problem if you're a fundamentalist, which I hope you're not. Some of the things that are warranted and condoned by the foundational texts of the United States include slavery and the only male landowners being allowed to vote. This is only of importance historically, except to the extent that some of the bad bits of US history had socioeconomic implications which have lasted to the present day. Otherwise, it hardly matters for the modern American.
Because: a) They were men, possibly fairly enlightened and wise men but not gods. b) It's a government by the people, of the people, for the people.
Religion is not a democracy, it presumes a higher authority which can of course be interpreted but not changed by men, it's like having a constitution that is eternal and can not be amended. Of course you can try to say it's a matter of understanding it in context but sometimes the religious texts are very clear and unambiguous. Religious relativists are actually quite annoying, no matter how many flaws or errors you point out it's only euphemisms and allegories, it can morph into whatever that person wants it to be. Like some Christians I have the impression that as long as you act with compassion and forgiveness, all the other details - including and up to the commandments - are just general guidelines. It smells a little like I want the liberty to do whatever I want and I want God's blessing of it. Or in other words, to eat my cake and have it too.
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That they left you alone probably only means they found easier victims, you were no fun. For everybody who thinks this is the solution to end bullying, I'd quote this old story:
Two guys are hiking in the Alaskan wilderness when they realize they're being stalked by a hungry grizzly bear. One of them bends down to tighten his shoelaces, stretches and discards his backpack. His partner asks him if he seriously thinks he can outrun a bear. "No," he replies, "but all I have to do is outrun you."
The bear is the bully and you are the faster runner. It saves you but someone will be the slowest runner. And it doesn't matter how hard a shell he has because they're going to pound and jab and poke at it until they find some angle that hurts or just wears you down. Being frozen out is hardly the worst kind of bullying there is, a lot of bullying victims are harassed or abused. You can grow as thick a hide as you want, but it won't stop them destroying your homework or taking your lunch money or throwing things at you or rubbing your face in the dirt. At some point you are going to snap and either break down or rage.
Personally I fought, one against one much stronger and one against three a year younger. And I lost, but I never quit. If they harassed me again, we'd fight again. Eventually they realized I wasn't going to break and that it'd be more fun with someone who didn't fight back. It didn't stop them harassing people, it only stopped them harassing me. Some years later I actually grabbed one tiny little squirt by the throat and lifted him off the ground to make them stop harassing me and it worked. All I wanted was to be left alone and even that took a struggle. Just because you got off easy you shouldn't assume everyone else could.
The problem here isn't with Java, it's with Swing (Java's native GUI toolkit). Swing is terribly slow. Applications written in Java with another toolkit, such as SWT or Qt, are fine. Azureus, for example, is a fairly popular BitTorrent client that is written in Java/SWT. (to be fair, the application itself is pretty bloated, but that has little to do with Java and more to do with the developers cramming in every feature under the sun)
Personally I've found that application horribly slow to respond and extremely resource intensive, most like any other Java app I run into. uTorrent FTW, or KTorrent when I was on KDE. The only Java app I know to run well is a huge web-based server system, and it works like a 747 - horribly big to get off the air, but can carry hundreds of people as easily as the first one. The enterprise stuff works, as desktop software it's still meh. I use a lot of C++/Qt though and that's snappy, haven't run into a Java/Qt application yet - examples?
In other words, it's ultimately a self-destructive strategy that will end in dragging down first world markets to third world economic levels. We may already be past that critical point, looking at the perpetual recession we are in.
It's what most of that first world is built on, getting ridiculously cheap labor intensive imports from abroad while exporting expensive high tech and processed products back. Except the world isn't stupid and the world isn't standing still. As the rest of the world gets civilized, they do get educated. They too understand high tech. Americans aren't magical just because they're born in the US, the rest of the world is catching up. You can close off the borders, but that market isn't coming back. Then it'd just be the US economy, no almighty dollar which is worth so much around the world. That dollar was - is - worth so much because there's valuable things to be bought for dollars. Close off trade, take that away and you might find yourself with a third world currency bringing US wages down to match the rest of the world all the same. Either way they're starting to match the US and you can't just stick your head in the sand about that.
Mind you, MS is still the only one of these big three to have a committed interest in long-term research (the "grand vision" which has kept IBM alive despite a century of changes): Google, for all its PhDs, publishes very little interesting research, and Apple publishes nothing, only occasionally advancing the state of the art where it's been important for implementation.
Public research. That is more a question of strategy, by publishing you generate interest and investors but at the same time you reveal what it is you're researching and what you think may be the next big thing. I can't really say I blame them, if they're footing the bill then they're the ones who should benefit from it. If you want public science, the public will probably have to fund it.
In the real world, they're not. With a sufficiently educated populace, or a sufficiently minor subset of the populace who gets involved in voting and politics, it can potentially work. But with a populace with shrinking levels of basic education and basic abilities to rationally evaluate the information they're receiving, the US is showing that democracy largely does not work. The world was a far simpler place when the US system of government was put together.
When the US system of government was put together, there was no such thing as the telegraph or telephone or radio. You had messengers riding with news across the country, which was printed in newspapers far from all could read. You can bemoan the current education system and mass media all you like, but to pretend it was worse 200+ years ago you must be dreaming. I would wager the average voter knew far less about what they were doing in Washington than today.
The main problem is that the US system fairly quickly degenerated to a two-party system rather than individual representatives, which is what I thought they imagined. You sacrificed political nuances and compromises for strong political leadership, the winner takes it all. If you claim it doesn't work, I'd say it's because a democracy without choices doesn't work. That's not a general problem with democracy, only with the US implementation.
"Understanding is a three edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth." -- J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5
I like this quote, even if it's from a sci-fi - so often it goes into a binary mode where one side is right and the other is wrong. Very often both sides are exaggerating and using spurious logic and arguments, even if one side is fundamentally right. A complete misinterpretation is that the truth is always in the middle and that flat-earthers and round-earthers be given equal weight though.
Of course their damage claims are ridiculous, but I see some pretty ludicrous claims on the other side too. Ask anyone who's tried to make a living on donations how that "pay if you like it" model is working out for them. So many people are happy to make a savings where they can, so if they can avoid paying they simply will. They could have found the money somehow, but it'd have to be taken from something else and they don't want to do that. And the "free marketing" argument that only works if it ends up in sales, otherwise it's "we make $0 on each pirated copy, but we make up for it on volume". Actually probably negative because even pirates like to use your support system.
But it does not follow that the state has the power to prevent children from hearing or saying anything without their parentsâ(TM) prior consent.
It's not hard to imagine a law against teen sexting being struck down on the claim the both the sender and the receiver of such images have First Amendment rights.
Except pretty clearly the state does have that power, since adult porn is protected by the first amendment and children - unlike adults - are prevented from hearing/watching it without prior consent from the parents. Anything "obscene" falls into its own category with its own rules, as usual.
You may not, but the Firefox developers do, and they care because Firefox is a free product and they're the ones who will be sued by MPEG-LA.
If they wanted to then Firefox could use the system codecs or call a closed source plugin, there are ways to work around it that would be legally kosher but Firefox out of principle don't want to. Maybe if they get really desperate, but they'll drag their feet as long as possible. Meanwhile the alternative is still for people to install flash and get H.264 in Firefox that way...
Time = money is only true when you paying someone. If you are paying someone $15 per hour, then yes, 8 minutes is worth $2. However, when you are sitting at home and not getting paid then 8 minutes of your time, or 8 hours, or 8 days, is worth exactly zero.
Assuming you got nothing better you wanted to do, then being able to do that instead is worth something to you. At least my non-work time can be divided into chores and leisure and generally I'd be willing to pay to have less of the former and more of the latter. Everything you do also has an opportunity cost, could you something more productive with your time? If you could work one more hour for $10 in post-tax income then spend one hour less bargain-hunting increasing your expenses by $5, you come out ahead if we assume both are things you equally dislike doing.
Of course this depends on the financial situation you're in. If you can't work overtime or find more work then your income is fixed, then you might put extreme value on living cheaper even it takes a lot of time. Other times you may work plenty overtime and make good money and be extremely willing to pay so your time off really is time off. Your real sensitivity depends more on how badly you need the money rather than how much you get paid.
I could make this a lot more complex since you got degrees of wanting and not wanting to do things, some things are time-sensitive like having time off on weekends when my buddies also have time off and so on but it'd only confuse the picture. You can often swap money for time and time for money and sometimes by making combinations you can come out ahead both in time and money. Many people only want to see savings, not savings/time or savings less costs like driving across town to buy it.
I promised myself I wouldn't become an old fart but when the suggestion is to upgrade a P4 in order to surf the net, I cringe. It's a fscking gigahertz processor, for crying out loud. It's amazing what kind of computing power you can waste just drawing up a web page, even with javascript and flash to kill performance.
Really? Is the release cycle really the problem for you or something vague about extensions?
People have a problem with the rapid release cycle because of extensions, the point has been made many times now with all the subtlety of a sledge hammer. If you can't wrap your head around that concept, you must be a Firefox developer.
I'm pretty sure the way 3 strikes rules work is that the penalty applies the third time you are convicted. Presumably this means you have already been in front of a judge *twice* who has told you that this behavior will result in a felony charge.
You can't get all three in one go, but the strikes are per charge not per case so you can use up the first two. And strikes you got as a juvenile count the rest of your life, so worst case you'd better not steal a pack of gum the rest of your life or face 25 to life. Look at the three strikes law page on wikipedia for some outrageous examples.
Which bank would you prefer?
Well, the bank who gave you the blueprints is plain arrogant. Same as if a server administrator posted his intrusion detection system configuration publicly so attackers could emulate the attack in advance and avoid tripping it. You have to assume there are unknown exploits in the system, but you counter it with an unknown of your own that attackers won't know what will trigger alarms. Don't think for a second that a bank tells you all the security systems and routines when they give you the tour, they just point out the obvious ones so the people from America's Dumbest Criminals won't try.
Well that depends on the Terms of Service of the board where you posted them - both what rights you signed away and what rights others get - but I would imagine for most of these fly-by-night scraping sites yes. It'll probably be just as hard bringing those to court as spammers though, the chance you'll ever recover any time or money you spend pursuing them is very slim and the award likely the statutory minimum.
I think it comes down to whether you think the law shapes society or society shapes the law. Most of us believe in individual freedom and the law should in very little degree dictate how others should live. The same fundamentalists who want to impose their religion on others by law are those most afraid to have another religion imposed on them. I guess the more you look on the law as a hammer, the harder it swings both ways. And if you then think there's a "right" way and a "wrong" way, well they'll be the ones shouting the loudest. I'm not naive to the threat (see my sig), but I have a strong faith that an individualistic society will repel or ignore fundamentalist law.
B) One kid unthinkingly sends image to another kid. Other kid unthinkingly forwards it to friend. Other kid unthinkingly mass-mails. People get upset. Someone calls police. None are even vaguely capable of fully understanding the consequences of their actions, or more importantly separating the dramatic emotional effect of the moment from the real-life long-term consequences of said act... because they are /kids/.
Before, we charge kid with making, distributing, or simply receiving child pornography-- this has happened several times. Kids life is ruined.
The only way the system makes sense is if you turn it upside down, it's not to protect teenagers from sexually exploiting themselves, it's to keep the sexual teenagers from corrupting the "innocent" teenagers. The producers who generate the idea of teen porn are the worst, then those who help spread it next and finally all that seek it and contribute to a teen sex culture. All people that should be put away so the rest won't think of sex before they're 18. They've just realized penalties aren't working because the last thing teenagers think about when sexting is being up on felony child pornography charges, so now they're going for reeducation instead. Make it a small infraction, catch more teenagers and try to make it a thing you don't do. Good luck trying to restrain the combination of raging hormones, camera cellphones and the Internet. I'll get the popco.... uh, no wait I won't.
I'd be worse if they made one side of it legal and the other illegal. You send a sexting message to your gf, she can now get you charged later when she's your ex-gf. This way if you were both in on it you're both guilty, if you didn't want the sexting messages you have to report it. Which might be a good idea if someone sends you sexual messages you don't want anyway.
you come up with a website, and you post your monthly expenses as they come up. and people donate.
Having seen a similar process happening at a political party, I strongly advise against it. Certain people will demand to know every last dollar you spend and everybody will be a critic of your expenses. As long as you're asking for money some people see it as justification to grope deeply into your personal life. And they won't simply shut up if you say no, they'll keep pushing. Also there's probably someone living off Ramen noodles in their dorm room who say they could live for half that. And you'll only get running expenses, no chance to build up for bigger purchases and when you do need to make them anyway your donations won't be twice as large that month.
Just give a figure. Compare it to a minimum wage job or cost of living index or standard budgets to show that it's reasonable but don't start breaking it down. Whether you went over or under in a given month is none of their business. And just say that this is an income level I can live with, that we can hold a debate on whether that's reasonable compared to what other people are living off, but that you're not going to detail your personal spending. I'd probably say where I live so people don't think I'm living in a mansion, if you got a family to support say that but the way where I post every bill (or at least the sum) on a website? No way. No fucking way.
I would predict that the average computer geek is significantly better at languages than the average guy on the street.
At least the written language, I mean most of us sit in offices... well, maybe cubicles... or basements.... using our heads, the average guy on the street also consist of people working all day at Wal-Mart and McDonalds. They can of course be very good at languages too, but statistically just being any kind of knowledge worker makes you more likely to know and understand languages better. And from knowing any programming language you're at least a little bit skilled in translating text into code, which I'm sure helps learning to translate into a foreign language too.
They should have just hopped on the Android bandwagon and thrown in completely with Google.
If you're talking about being the last one to the market instead of going with Windows Phone, maybe. But Nokia's main failure is not bringing their own platform to the market, I don't know whose fault that was but it wasn't Elop.
A third of all the kids play the top 1% of iOS games.
I play PC games. Give me a call when you make a decent one. That is what phones are for.
I play Angry Birds and the other 1% top games on my iPhone and just finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution on max difficulty on my PC, I don't see the big contradiction in that. The games on my phone are to pass time, I'm not expecting a huge game experience for $1 and I don't think the small screen and touch interfaces could provide one either. It's just there in my pocket every time I got 5 minutes to waste and I just grab something from the top 25 - sometimes top 100 - because they're probably decent then. Usually I go straight for the pay games with no in-game payments, because freemiums and those that try to milk you through in-game stores are plain annoying. The only frustrating thing is that Apple's icons are plain fraudulent, there are apps with in-game stores and purchases yet don't carry the "+" sign in the store like the Mighty Eagle in Angry Birds. I don't mind that they do, just be honest about it. Apple should just block any app that doesn't carry that sign from calling any purchasing API at all.
"Better numbers" are for YOUR website. Some other website, the aggregate of many websites, or even an aggregate of all websites in the world are completely meaningless to the traffic coming to your website.
And by your own logic, they're equally irrelevant for everyone else. And if you have 95% IE users because your site is buggy in everything but IE, well by all means write to your market. If you're looking to capture a market, sell a web based application or decide what browsers to test for then probably you want to use the general figures.
So far there's not been much reason to try reaching anything. If we can narrow down some of those 15 billion to be actually earth-like, where we really could colonize a whole planet I'd say you have reason.
However, there is one thing I am confused about with the muon: it can decay??
I thought fundamental particles are the smallest that small can get, as in, you can't get anything from "splitting" it, there is no substructure within?
Isn't this a little nonsensical that the most fundamental particles are capable of decaying in to neutrinos? (more?)
We create exotic particles by accelerating protons and electrons to extreme speeds and smash them together so the energy is converted to mass. As they fall apart they split into smaller particles and some mass is converted to energy. The whole thing is rather counter-intuitive, it's like crashing two cars at 200 mph and the result is a semitrailer weighing much more than both cars put together. Then that semitrailer falls apart in some random way, maybe giving you a bicycle and two motorcycles.
We don't really know how that process happens, the particles we're talking are less than 0.000000000000001m in charge radius, moving at near light speed and it happens so fast it looks instantaneous. I'm sure scientists would love to observe what's going as a fundamental particle grows or loses mass, but we're not there. Hell, the accelerators have more than enough trying to track what went into and what came out of a decay, far less see one in progress.
I guess you can say they're called fundamental until we've found something even more fundamental, just like we once thought the atom was the smallest possible unit. That energy can become mass and mass become energy means it's more than just a substructure, the energy must somehow get trapped in that structure as mass. And then tear that structure somehow breaking free. I think you'll have a row of Nobel prizes if you figure out exactly how though.
But the main point is that it's mostly irrelevant. It's only a problem if you're a fundamentalist, which I hope you're not. Some of the things that are warranted and condoned by the foundational texts of the United States include slavery and the only male landowners being allowed to vote. This is only of importance historically, except to the extent that some of the bad bits of US history had socioeconomic implications which have lasted to the present day. Otherwise, it hardly matters for the modern American.
Because:
a) They were men, possibly fairly enlightened and wise men but not gods.
b) It's a government by the people, of the people, for the people.
Religion is not a democracy, it presumes a higher authority which can of course be interpreted but not changed by men, it's like having a constitution that is eternal and can not be amended. Of course you can try to say it's a matter of understanding it in context but sometimes the religious texts are very clear and unambiguous. Religious relativists are actually quite annoying, no matter how many flaws or errors you point out it's only euphemisms and allegories, it can morph into whatever that person wants it to be. Like some Christians I have the impression that as long as you act with compassion and forgiveness, all the other details - including and up to the commandments - are just general guidelines. It smells a little like I want the liberty to do whatever I want and I want God's blessing of it. Or in other words, to eat my cake and have it too.