US vs Miller was about the defendant having a sawed-off shotgun (on which the appropriate firearms tax had not been paid). The Supreme Court agreed with the US attorney (the defendants were not present or represented at the Supreme Court hearing) that a sawed-off shotgun is not a military weapon (they were wrong, but evidence to the contrary was not presented at trial or appeal), and so not covered by the 2nd Amendment.
By this logic, bans or restrictions on assault rifles and machine guns clearly do violate the 2nd Amendment, as they are clearly intended for military (and hence militia) use. (The court agreed with the general definition of "militia" as "all able-bodied males", not members of regular forces.)
US vs Miller is one of those bad decisions in which both sides can find something to back up their claims. The ACLU claiming that it settles the point is complete cop-out.
experts now believe the problem stems from a design flaw in the temporary cable
I've got to wonder, how hard is it to design a power cable, even one meant to operate in space? I mean, fabrication flaw perhaps, although that should be caught in testing. But design flaw? We've had fifty years experience designing stuff to work in Earth orbit; what's up with that?
We'd still need great improvements in reaction drives, for example, to overcome the velocity differences between different star systems.
Jerry Oltion, no doubt among others (I'd seen the idea before, just don't remember where) solved this already. (E.g. in his book Anywhere But Here).
Use your "Go Anywhere Fast" drive to jump you to the neighborhood of star A. If your relative velocity is too high, just jump to a point in that star's system where your velocity vector points away from the star (or other suitably massive object) and let its gravity slow you down. Lather, rinse, repeat as necessary. (You can do something similar before jumping if you know the velocity you need.)
Oltion's technique for landing on and taking off from a planet is, uh, interesting. Personally I'd rather have thrusters.
Regular Coke is red, Diet Coke mostly silver, Coke Zero mostly black, caffeine-free Coke gold, and the new Coke-Plus with vitamins (wtf?) is multicolored.
(Did I pass the test? Hmm, perhaps since you didn't seem to know that, you're the AI?)
If a certain person has a unique combination of skills and talents that the government really needs, they'll find a way to grant clearance. Frankly, though, people in such a position are rare. (But even a criminal record doesn't necessarily preclude a clearance. It depends in part on what's on your record and what the clearance is for.)
The most famous such example is probably Von Braun and his team of German rocket scientists.
If the storage is limited -- which it is -- you don't want it to keep recording after the crash and risk losing (overwriting) the pre-crash data. Yes the 10 minutes +/- 10% may be arbitrary, but they have to pick a number.
If the external power dies more than ten minutes before the crash, you have a problem, but the fact that the power died and what led up to that may be a clue. (Large aircraft will typically have a small wind turbine generator that will deploy to provide power in the case of total engine failure.)
A few thousand bucks for a piece of equipment on an aircraft that costs tens of millions of dollars is a pretty trivial amount. It probably costs more to change the color of the fabric on the seats.
I just discovered James Swain's "Tony Valentine" series of mysteries set in and around casinos and the gambling world. Swain is a gambling expert and magician himself, and the backgrounds in the novels ring true. The hero, Tony Valentine, is an ex-cop who worked for years in Atlantic City and now runs his own consulting business (called Grift Sense) helping casinos catch cheats and frauds. (The first book, Grift Sense, is set in Las Vegas, the second, Funny Money, is set in Atlantic City. There are several more in the series I haven't got to yet.)
I'm not a huge mystery fan (I prefer SF) but I enjoy them if they're well written. Swain does a good job with these, and gives a look at the behind-the-scenes of casinos, gambling, and different cheats as background to the main puzzle(s) of the story.
But even if the FCC decides that Comcast has violated Net neutrality principles, it's unclear what the agency can actually do to Comcast
If Comcast is messing with the content going over their cables, then they should no longer be allowed common carrier immunity for that content. This makes them liable for every bit of pirated media, kiddy porn, libel and spam sent over those cables.
A few lawsuits ought to wake them up, I'm sure Comcast has pockets deep enough to attract a few contingency lawyers.
Microsoft has been reporting 15% growth in revenues the U.S., 20 to 30% growth abroad each quarter. [emphasis added]
Amazingly enough, Microsoft has been known to lie about some things. I suggest you review the fine print on those "reports", and then ponder why, if Microsoft's growth is really as reported, their stock hasn't been doing as well as it historically used to. Their cash reserves are also shrinking. Then there are the legal battles they're fighting.
So if you happen to simultaneously invent something with someone who beats you to the patent office by 20 minutes, you're happy paying him for his intellectual property that you clearly stole (telepathically)?
Hardware vendors today selling Linux systems (mostly servers) don't bother with their own distros. HP, IBM and Dell are happy to sell you systems with your choice of RedHat or Novell Suse, probably even Debian. Supporting a distro non-trivial; even Oracle "cheats" by just rebranding RedHat.
I could see it perhaps if a distro needs tweaking for some special hardware (as may be the case with low end compact systems like eeePC), but otherwise why bother? As the hardware becomes more commoditized at the small end, it will be supported in mainline, anything unique may be a vendor-provided add-on, though. (This is the case with server hardware today -- it'll load up fine with just about any distro, but tweaked drivers or utilities to take advantage of certain server-grade hardware options may require a separate "support pack" that's only available for a handful of distros and versions.)
A tomato is quite cheap. Tomatoes made into salads and served on attractive plates by sexy waitresses in fancy restaurants are not cheap. The value added is in the air of the restaurant, the clean plate, the sexy waitress, and the tasty salad.
Of course in the Microsoft restaurant, it has a huge advertising budget and a glitzy facade so you think it's a fancy restaurant, but when you get inside, the plates are disposable, the waitresses diseased, and the salad has cockroaches and some strange vegetables you didn't ask for. And it's still not cheap.
What the heck does an astronomer know about biology? Especially a PhD astronomer -- in general the more focussed one gets in one field (and you have to be focussed to get a PhD), the less one knows about unrelated fields. Asking an astronomer about biological evolution like asking a paleontologist about the stellar evolution of Wolf-Rayet stars or Seyfert galaxies.
(I know in college my astrophysics prof knew about as much biology as my biology profs knew astrophysics. I'm pretty sure I was the only student out of a class year of several thousand taking both. Not that I have a PhD in either.)
Sure, there are rare exceptions, but I doubt this is one of them.
Friendly nit-pick: the C64 ran on a 6510, CBM's clone of the 6502. The main distinction was a bunch of 'hidden' op-codes that weren't part of the official set
Yes, the C64 used a 6510. However...
The 6510 wasn't a "clone" of the 6502, it was a 6502 core plus 8 I/O ports (although most versions of the chip only brought 6 of those out to pins). The I/O ports were similar to those found on the 6522 VIA.
Further, CBM had no need to "clone" the 6502 since Commodore bought MOS back in the early KIM-1 days, MOS Technology was also known as the Commodore Semiconductor Group. The 6502 and 6510 were both MOS Tech/CSG products.
The "hidden" op-codes weren't exactly a distinction from the 6502, various vendors' implementations (particularly Rockwell's) also had a number of undocumented op-codes. The 6502 instruction set being rather (but not completely) orthogonal, it wasn't hard to figure out what some of those undocumented ops did.
The 1541 (and the 1540 before it, it was just a ROM change) did use a 6502; mine had a 6502B (2 MHz clock) but I don't know if they actually ran the clock any faster or that just happened to be the part they had on hand when they assembled mine (which was a 1540 that I later swapped out the ROM on, the ROM change actually slowed it down slightly, the C64 had a bit more overhead than the VIC-20 that the 1540 was designed for.)
You know that, and I know that, but I guarantee you that in such a case, the prosecution would raise the question.
One would hope that somebody who qualifies for a CCW permit (or carries openly in places that allow it) isn't quite so twitchy as to react like that to a mere insult.
Any part of the reaction in excess of what was proportional to the provocation was the "unprovoked" part.
Killing the pilot (assuming it really was a human and not a Cylon ruse), maybe even bombing the base he (allegedly) launched from might have been considered provoked. Nuking billions of people on twelve planets was unprovoked.
If someone calls you an asshole and you whip out a gun and blow them away, no jury is going to be very sympathetic to the viewpoint that you were provoked, and the prosecutor will make a good case for first-degree murder and were just looking for an excuse to pull the trigger (why else were you carrying the gun in the first place?).
Of course, all this presupposes that it wasn't just a Cylon version of the Gleiwitz incident that Nazi Germany used as an excuse to invade Poland.
That turns out to have been a toaster^WCylon pretending to be human to provide an excuse for the attack (a time honored tradition in military history).
There's no way the Cylons had the time to build up the force they had, and to conduct the necessary infiltration of Colonial defense infrastructure, were that not the case.
Besides, even if that were a human, don't you think nuking twelve planets is a bit of overreaction to one lone pilot incursion? That's like USSR launching WW-III because of Francis Gary Powers' U-2 incident. A bit vicious, don't you think?
I think you need to go watch the first episodes (the miniseries) over again.
They Cylons launched an unprovoked sneak attack and thoroughly nuked the twelve colonies, after a 40-year cease-fire. And you're saying the humans are more vicious?
Um, Microsoft employed SCO to employ SCO-like tactics, hello? Remember, several million dollars for "Unix licenses", several million dollars PIPE investments by way of Baystar and RBC, etc.
Not to mention the "nice little operating system you have there, it'd be a shame if we had to enforce any of our 238 patents on it" tactics to spread FUD.
The Saturn V and Saturn I(b) rockets were designed by a team that had more than twenty years' experience, going back to before the V-1. They blew up more than their share of rockets, not all of them deliberately.
Indeed, the Saturns were designed by Von Braun's team that in NASA's early days had been working out of the Redstone Arsenal. The rockets that NASA was designing on its own at that time were blowing up with depressing regularity; if Eisenhower had let them, the Von Braun team could have put something in orbit before the Russians did.
Shuttle may have made its first few launches successfully, but they blew up their fair share of hardware during testing (the SSMEs in particular were a bitch). They had couple of decades of experience with large solids (initially for Titan III, developed in part for the Air Force's MOL program) by then, too.
Not to mention that NASA had a development budget several orders of magnitude larger than SpaceX's.
On paper, rocket science isn't that hard. The thing is, a lot of it isn't on paper as such, it comes with the experience that tells you to use stainless steel nuts instead of aluminum ones, or to make sure your LOX valves don't get condensation and ice on them that freezes them shut, or to triple check that you've got the right software loaded.
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US vs Miller was about the defendant having a sawed-off shotgun (on which the appropriate firearms tax had not been paid). The Supreme Court agreed with the US attorney (the defendants were not present or represented at the Supreme Court hearing) that a sawed-off shotgun is not a military weapon (they were wrong, but evidence to the contrary was not presented at trial or appeal), and so not covered by the 2nd Amendment.
By this logic, bans or restrictions on assault rifles and machine guns clearly do violate the 2nd Amendment, as they are clearly intended for military (and hence militia) use. (The court agreed with the general definition of "militia" as "all able-bodied males", not members of regular forces.)
US vs Miller is one of those bad decisions in which both sides can find something to back up their claims. The ACLU claiming that it settles the point is complete cop-out.
experts now believe the problem stems from a design flaw in the temporary cable
I've got to wonder, how hard is it to design a power cable, even one meant to operate in space? I mean, fabrication flaw perhaps, although that should be caught in testing. But design flaw? We've had fifty years experience designing stuff to work in Earth orbit; what's up with that?
We'd still need great improvements in reaction drives, for example, to overcome the velocity differences between different star systems.
Jerry Oltion, no doubt among others (I'd seen the idea before, just don't remember where) solved this already. (E.g. in his book Anywhere But Here).
Use your "Go Anywhere Fast" drive to jump you to the neighborhood of star A. If your relative velocity is too high, just jump to a point in that star's system where your velocity vector points away from the star (or other suitably massive object) and let its gravity slow you down. Lather, rinse, repeat as necessary. (You can do something similar before jumping if you know the velocity you need.)
Oltion's technique for landing on and taking off from a planet is, uh, interesting. Personally I'd rather have thrusters.
What kind of Coke can?
Regular Coke is red, Diet Coke mostly silver, Coke Zero mostly black, caffeine-free Coke gold, and the new Coke-Plus with vitamins (wtf?) is multicolored.
(Did I pass the test? Hmm, perhaps since you didn't seem to know that, you're the AI?)
If a certain person has a unique combination of skills and talents that the government really needs, they'll find a way to grant clearance. Frankly, though, people in such a position are rare. (But even a criminal record doesn't necessarily preclude a clearance. It depends in part on what's on your record and what the clearance is for.)
The most famous such example is probably Von Braun and his team of German rocket scientists.
If the storage is limited -- which it is -- you don't want it to keep recording after the crash and risk losing (overwriting) the pre-crash data. Yes the 10 minutes +/- 10% may be arbitrary, but they have to pick a number.
If the external power dies more than ten minutes before the crash, you have a problem, but the fact that the power died and what led up to that may be a clue. (Large aircraft will typically have a small wind turbine generator that will deploy to provide power in the case of total engine failure.)
Would 10 +/- 1 make it clearer?
A few thousand bucks for a piece of equipment on an aircraft that costs tens of millions of dollars is a pretty trivial amount. It probably costs more to change the color of the fabric on the seats.
I just discovered James Swain's "Tony Valentine" series of mysteries set in and around casinos and the gambling world. Swain is a gambling expert and magician himself, and the backgrounds in the novels ring true. The hero, Tony Valentine, is an ex-cop who worked for years in Atlantic City and now runs his own consulting business (called Grift Sense) helping casinos catch cheats and frauds. (The first book, Grift Sense, is set in Las Vegas, the second, Funny Money, is set in Atlantic City. There are several more in the series I haven't got to yet.)
I'm not a huge mystery fan (I prefer SF) but I enjoy them if they're well written. Swain does a good job with these, and gives a look at the behind-the-scenes of casinos, gambling, and different cheats as background to the main puzzle(s) of the story.
But even if the FCC decides that Comcast has violated Net neutrality principles, it's unclear what the agency can actually do to Comcast
If Comcast is messing with the content going over their cables, then they should no longer be allowed common carrier immunity for that content. This makes them liable for every bit of pirated media, kiddy porn, libel and spam sent over those cables.
A few lawsuits ought to wake them up, I'm sure Comcast has pockets deep enough to attract a few contingency lawyers.
Microsoft has been reporting 15% growth in revenues the U.S., 20 to 30% growth abroad each quarter. [emphasis added]
Amazingly enough, Microsoft has been known to lie about some things. I suggest you review the fine print on those "reports", and then ponder why, if Microsoft's growth is really as reported, their stock hasn't been doing as well as it historically used to. Their cash reserves are also shrinking. Then there are the legal battles they're fighting.
That is the picture of a company on the way down.
So if you happen to simultaneously invent something with someone who beats you to the patent office by 20 minutes, you're happy paying him for his intellectual property that you clearly stole (telepathically)?
Hardware vendors today selling Linux systems (mostly servers) don't bother with their own distros. HP, IBM and Dell are happy to sell you systems with your choice of RedHat or Novell Suse, probably even Debian. Supporting a distro non-trivial; even Oracle "cheats" by just rebranding RedHat.
I could see it perhaps if a distro needs tweaking for some special hardware (as may be the case with low end compact systems like eeePC), but otherwise why bother? As the hardware becomes more commoditized at the small end, it will be supported in mainline, anything unique may be a vendor-provided add-on, though. (This is the case with server hardware today -- it'll load up fine with just about any distro, but tweaked drivers or utilities to take advantage of certain server-grade hardware options may require a separate "support pack" that's only available for a handful of distros and versions.)
A tomato is quite cheap. Tomatoes made into salads and served on attractive plates by sexy waitresses in fancy restaurants are not cheap. The value added is in the air of the restaurant, the clean plate, the sexy waitress, and the tasty salad.
Of course in the Microsoft restaurant, it has a huge advertising budget and a glitzy facade so you think it's a fancy restaurant, but when you get inside, the plates are disposable, the waitresses diseased, and the salad has cockroaches and some strange vegetables you didn't ask for. And it's still not cheap.
Attribution where due, please. From Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, which I heartily recommend. It makes especially good reading on a long train ride.
only OS with more packages is Debian
Whatever happened to Windows?
Vista. That's a non-operating system.
What the heck does an astronomer know about biology? Especially a PhD astronomer -- in general the more focussed one gets in one field (and you have to be focussed to get a PhD), the less one knows about unrelated fields. Asking an astronomer about biological evolution like asking a paleontologist about the stellar evolution of Wolf-Rayet stars or Seyfert galaxies.
(I know in college my astrophysics prof knew about as much biology as my biology profs knew astrophysics. I'm pretty sure I was the only student out of a class year of several thousand taking both. Not that I have a PhD in either.)
Sure, there are rare exceptions, but I doubt this is one of them.
Friendly nit-pick: the C64 ran on a 6510, CBM's clone of the 6502. The main distinction was a bunch of 'hidden' op-codes that weren't part of the official set
Yes, the C64 used a 6510. However...
The 6510 wasn't a "clone" of the 6502, it was a 6502 core plus 8 I/O ports (although most versions of the chip only brought 6 of those out to pins). The I/O ports were similar to those found on the 6522 VIA.
Further, CBM had no need to "clone" the 6502 since Commodore bought MOS back in the early KIM-1 days, MOS Technology was also known as the Commodore Semiconductor Group. The 6502 and 6510 were both MOS Tech/CSG products.
The "hidden" op-codes weren't exactly a distinction from the 6502, various vendors' implementations (particularly Rockwell's) also had a number of undocumented op-codes. The 6502 instruction set being rather (but not completely) orthogonal, it wasn't hard to figure out what some of those undocumented ops did.
The 1541 (and the 1540 before it, it was just a ROM change) did use a 6502; mine had a 6502B (2 MHz clock) but I don't know if they actually ran the clock any faster or that just happened to be the part they had on hand when they assembled mine (which was a 1540 that I later swapped out the ROM on, the ROM change actually slowed it down slightly, the C64 had a bit more overhead than the VIC-20 that the 1540 was designed for.)
You know that, and I know that, but I guarantee you that in such a case, the prosecution would raise the question.
One would hope that somebody who qualifies for a CCW permit (or carries openly in places that allow it) isn't quite so twitchy as to react like that to a mere insult.
Any part of the reaction in excess of what was proportional to the provocation was the "unprovoked" part.
Killing the pilot (assuming it really was a human and not a Cylon ruse), maybe even bombing the base he (allegedly) launched from might have been considered provoked. Nuking billions of people on twelve planets was unprovoked.
If someone calls you an asshole and you whip out a gun and blow them away, no jury is going to be very sympathetic to the viewpoint that you were provoked, and the prosecutor will make a good case for first-degree murder and were just looking for an excuse to pull the trigger (why else were you carrying the gun in the first place?).
Of course, all this presupposes that it wasn't just a Cylon version of the Gleiwitz incident that Nazi Germany used as an excuse to invade Poland.
That turns out to have been a toaster^WCylon pretending to be human to provide an excuse for the attack (a time honored tradition in military history).
There's no way the Cylons had the time to build up the force they had, and to conduct the necessary infiltration of Colonial defense infrastructure, were that not the case.
Besides, even if that were a human, don't you think nuking twelve planets is a bit of overreaction to one lone pilot incursion? That's like USSR launching WW-III because of Francis Gary Powers' U-2 incident. A bit vicious, don't you think?
I think you need to go watch the first episodes (the miniseries) over again.
They Cylons launched an unprovoked sneak attack and thoroughly nuked the twelve colonies, after a 40-year cease-fire. And you're saying the humans are more vicious?
Your name isn't Gaius Baltar, is it?
Microsoft has not employed SCO-like tactics
Um, Microsoft employed SCO to employ SCO-like tactics, hello? Remember, several million dollars for "Unix licenses", several million dollars PIPE investments by way of Baystar and RBC, etc.
Not to mention the "nice little operating system you have there, it'd be a shame if we had to enforce any of our 238 patents on it" tactics to spread FUD.
Actually, V-1 wasn't a rocket, it was a pulse jet;
You're right, that was a brain spasm. Of course I meant V-2.
The Saturn V and Saturn I(b) rockets were designed by a team that had more than twenty years' experience, going back to before the V-1. They blew up more than their share of rockets, not all of them deliberately.
Indeed, the Saturns were designed by Von Braun's team that in NASA's early days had been working out of the Redstone Arsenal. The rockets that NASA was designing on its own at that time were blowing up with depressing regularity; if Eisenhower had let them, the Von Braun team could have put something in orbit before the Russians did.
Shuttle may have made its first few launches successfully, but they blew up their fair share of hardware during testing (the SSMEs in particular were a bitch). They had couple of decades of experience with large solids (initially for Titan III, developed in part for the Air Force's MOL program) by then, too.
Not to mention that NASA had a development budget several orders of magnitude larger than SpaceX's.
On paper, rocket science isn't that hard. The thing is, a lot of it isn't on paper as such, it comes with the experience that tells you to use stainless steel nuts instead of aluminum ones, or to make sure your LOX valves don't get condensation and ice on them that freezes them shut, or to triple check that you've got the right software loaded.