Blowing up buildings with bombs is illegal, but there are plenty of books and web sites that describe how to make bombs. You need to differentiate between CONTENT and illegal ACTIONS.
The difference between homosexuality and necrophilia is that dead bodies (like children and animals) cannot give consent. How if a living person gave documented consent to allow a necrophilic to use their dead body, then that area is a little grey.:-)
I don't think the Supreme Court has ruled on virtual child porn, but people in the US have been arrested for writing pornographic stories about child in his private journal! No real children were involved and he did not intend anyone to read his journal, but somehow it was found and he was arrested.
I should have mentioned that I used to be registered Green. I even voted for Ralph Nader in 2000!:-) Since then I have seen how the government cannot solve our social problems; government is causing the problems!
Phase of the Moon
on
Debugging
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· Score: 3, Interesting
There really was a bug based on the phase of the moon. See the Jargon Dictionary for more info: phase of the moon:
phase of the moon phase of the moon n. Used humorously as a random parameter on which something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine. "This feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon." See also heisenbug.
True story: Once upon a time there was a program bug that really did depend on the phase of the moon. There was a little subroutine that had traditionally been used in various programs at MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon's true phase. GLS incorporated this routine into a LISP program that, when it wrote out a file, would print a timestamp line almost 80 characters long. Very occasionally the first line of the message would be too long and would overflow onto the next line, and when the file was later read back in the program would barf. The length of the first line depended on both the precise date and time and the length of the phase specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the bug literally depended on the phase of the moon!
The first paper edition of the Jargon File (Steele-1983) included an example of one of the timestamp lines that exhibited this bug, but the typesetter `corrected' it. This has since been described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug.
However, beware of assumptions. A few years ago, engineers of CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) were baffled by some errors in experiments conducted with the LEP particle accelerator. As the formidable amount of data generated by such devices is heavily processed by computers before being seen by humans, many people suggested the software was somehow sensitive to the phase of the moon. A few desperate engineers discovered the truth; the error turned out to be the result of a tiny change in the geometry of the 27km circumference ring, physically caused by the deformation of the Earth by the passage of the Moon! This story has entered physics folklore as a Newtonian vengeance on particle physics and as an example of the relevance of the simplest and oldest physical laws to the most modern science.
For an introduction to libertarianism for Green/left people, check out Mary Ruwart's book "Healing Our World". There is a more recent edition, but you can browse the previous edition online for free. She demonstrates how libertarianism's principles of non-agression and a free market can help the poor more than our nation's current policies that only help the rich get richer.
I agree that IRV is broken and too complicated for Joe American. I simply voting method is Approval Voting, where each voter gives a thumbs up/down for every candidate. No ranking or runoffs. The candidate with the most votes wins.
There are no gates. This is the carpool lane. The FasTrak cars drive through at 20-30 MPH. Maybe they can take a photo of your license plate, but good luck slamming a gate down your car!
The UN is an unelected, anti-democratic group of greedy dictators and spoiled, well-intentioned socialists. The UN wants to take away our guns, cigarettes, internet, and freedom to speak our against the global Drug War... and they want the USA to foot the bill. When the Black Helicopters come, whose side will you be on?
so Linux is getting buggier as more bugs get fixed??
Re:Best learner's C++?
on
Practical C++
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· Score: 1
"Thinking in C++" is a great book. Bruce Eckel has been working on a new book called "Thinking in Python". Given his track record, it should be a good one!
sure, but is the "enhanced" copy real evidence? Can the "enhanced" copy be used in court? What if the enhancement was to photoshop in "missing" details?
I code for WinCE and Symbian. I have a Nokia 3650 (Symbian OS 6) and 6600 (Symbian OS 7). The Symbian OS is FAR from bulletproof and has reproducible OS crashes. I have never had WinCE (PocketPC 2002, 2003, or Smartphone 2002) crash on me.
Plus the Symbian SDK and APIs use a peculiar dialect of C++ (with strange non-standard exception handling) that is incompatible with standard C++, making cross-platform code sharing difficult.
When the phone companies were privatized, a phone call was a dime. Now they are fifty cents
I'm not sure why you are paying 50 cents per phone call. You can buy pre-paid phone cards at 7-11 or Costco for about 4 cents/minute! And I read that some mobile phone carriers are now offering FREE unlimited minutes (if you sign their long-term contract). Sounds like successful competition is benefiting the consumer to me!!
Re:Something I learned from Martin Gardner...
on
The Golden Ratio
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· Score: 1
If virus writers were truly malicious, why don't they add "format c:" code to their viruses? I know the virus does not want to destroy its host, but once the virus has propagated itself to everyone in your Outlook Address Book, then it can safely format your hard disk (immediately or say 1-2 days later).
That there have been no such viruses is very suspicious. Maybe the virus writer are spammers who just want to install zombie email relays...
Slashdot Mirror
Blowing up buildings with bombs is illegal, but there are plenty of books and web sites that describe how to make bombs. You need to differentiate between CONTENT and illegal ACTIONS.
Blowing up buildings with bombs is illegal, but there are plenty of books and web sites that describe how to make bombs.
The difference between homosexuality and necrophilia is that dead bodies (like children and animals) cannot give consent. How if a living person gave documented consent to allow a necrophilic to use their dead body, then that area is a little grey.
I don't think the Supreme Court has ruled on virtual child porn, but people in the US have been arrested for writing pornographic stories about child in his private journal! No real children were involved and he did not intend anyone to read his journal, but somehow it was found and he was arrested.
man, that is some trippy shit!!
I should have mentioned that I used to be registered Green. I even voted for Ralph Nader in 2000!
There really was a bug based on the phase of the moon. See the Jargon Dictionary for more info: phase of the moon:
phase of the moon
phase of the moon n. Used humorously as a random parameter on which something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine. "This feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon." See also heisenbug.
True story: Once upon a time there was a program bug that really did depend on the phase of the moon. There was a little subroutine that had traditionally been used in various programs at MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon's true phase. GLS incorporated this routine into a LISP program that, when it wrote out a file, would print a timestamp line almost 80 characters long. Very occasionally the first line of the message would be too long and would overflow onto the next line, and when the file was later read back in the program would barf. The length of the first line depended on both the precise date and time and the length of the phase specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the bug literally depended on the phase of the moon!
The first paper edition of the Jargon File (Steele-1983) included an example of one of the timestamp lines that exhibited this bug, but the typesetter `corrected' it. This has since been described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug.
However, beware of assumptions. A few years ago, engineers of CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) were baffled by some errors in experiments conducted with the LEP particle accelerator. As the formidable amount of data generated by such devices is heavily processed by computers before being seen by humans, many people suggested the software was somehow sensitive to the phase of the moon. A few desperate engineers discovered the truth; the error turned out to be the result of a tiny change in the geometry of the 27km circumference ring, physically caused by the deformation of the Earth by the passage of the Moon! This story has entered physics folklore as a Newtonian vengeance on particle physics and as an example of the relevance of the simplest and oldest physical laws to the most modern science.
For an introduction to libertarianism for Green/left people, check out Mary Ruwart's book "Healing Our World". There is a more recent edition, but you can browse the previous edition online for free. She demonstrates how libertarianism's principles of non-agression and a free market can help the poor more than our nation's current policies that only help the rich get richer.
I agree that IRV is broken and too complicated for Joe American. I simply voting method is Approval Voting, where each voter gives a thumbs up/down for every candidate. No ranking or runoffs. The candidate with the most votes wins.
There are no gates. This is the carpool lane. The FasTrak cars drive through at 20-30 MPH. Maybe they can take a photo of your license plate, but good luck slamming a gate down your car!
Microsoft's ATL libraries generate stack-based code at runtime. So any Windows app that uses ATL might require a recompile!
The UN is an unelected, anti-democratic group of greedy dictators and spoiled, well-intentioned socialists. The UN wants to take away our guns, cigarettes, internet, and freedom to speak our against the global Drug War... and they want the USA to foot the bill. When the Black Helicopters come, whose side will you be on?
Google made their toolbar for IE because something like 90% of Google users probably run IE on Windows!
I don't see Canada going around toppling dictators to "make the world a better place". Why should the US be expected to do so??
so Linux is getting buggier as more bugs get fixed??
"Thinking in C++" is a great book. Bruce Eckel has been working on a new book called "Thinking in Python". Given his track record, it should be a good one!
static const char* password = "!seineew era sreenigne epacsteN";
sure, but is the "enhanced" copy real evidence? Can the "enhanced" copy be used in court? What if the enhancement was to photoshop in "missing" details?
I code for WinCE and Symbian. I have a Nokia 3650 (Symbian OS 6) and 6600 (Symbian OS 7). The Symbian OS is FAR from bulletproof and has reproducible OS crashes. I have never had WinCE (PocketPC 2002, 2003, or Smartphone 2002) crash on me.
Plus the Symbian SDK and APIs use a peculiar dialect of C++ (with strange non-standard exception handling) that is incompatible with standard C++, making cross-platform code sharing difficult.
"Right To Work" laws are anti-union. They allow an individual to work without a union REQUIRING him to join the union and pay union dues.
When the phone companies were privatized, a phone call was a dime. Now they are fifty cents
I'm not sure why you are paying 50 cents per phone call. You can buy pre-paid phone cards at 7-11 or Costco for about 4 cents/minute! And I read that some mobile phone carriers are now offering FREE unlimited minutes (if you sign their long-term contract). Sounds like successful competition is benefiting the consumer to me!!
even easier:
#define PHI 1.6
If the spammer BCC's the one email to millions of people, his server only needs to host that one spam, not millions.
If virus writers were truly malicious, why don't they add "format c:" code to their viruses? I know the virus does not want to destroy its host, but once the virus has propagated itself to everyone in your Outlook Address Book, then it can safely format your hard disk (immediately or say 1-2 days later).
That there have been no such viruses is very suspicious. Maybe the virus writer are spammers who just want to install zombie email relays...
also see The Drudge Report for stills.