You should read the forum threads, or the summary page at appledefects.com. This staining of Macbooks is different from the accumulation of surface dirt on your iBook. Reportedly, Mr. Clean Magic Eraser has been tried, and does not work.
I'm sorry to crap on your parade, but white plastic does not have to stain-- and these Macbooks are staining, not simply "showing dirt".
I have an iBook G4, which I've had for a year and a half. It's my work machine, and I'm a software developer. It's also my personal machine, and gets used quite a bit before and after work hours. The keycap lettering is visibly worn (only a spec of 'C' remains). I wash my hands when they have visible crud on them, and I know how to use a napkin, but I'm not OCD about it. This iBook is just as white as it was the day I bought it. If I tilt it just so, I can see a sheen of skin oil on the palm rests, trackpad, and keys; and there's some gray crud accumulated on the display bezel. It shows dirt. Both wipe away with a dry cloth, so neither has penetrated the plastic. There is no staining.
I've never heard of an iBook which stained, as opposed to simply accumulating dirt which could be removed with a mild cleaner. The Macbook has a different finish, with a softer "hand", and it seems clear from the forum threads that this finish is susceptible to staining in a way that the iBook's is not. (The frequency with which this staining occurs may be very low-- there's not much evidence so far that it's very widespread. This does not mean it isn't happening.)
I'm posting this not so much in defense of white, as in defense of those who bought these white laptops. This problem has not existed with previous white Apple laptops-- which were sold for years-- so there's no reason that anyone should have expected it now. Your smug, condescending tone unnecessarily insults these people, and is taken without real basis.
What's special about musicians, that you feel it's right to limit their earning potential, in a way that nobody else's is limited? What gives you the right to pass any sort of moral judgment on musicians who are financially successful?
Suppose I decided that whatever you do for a living, it's absurd that you should be able to become a millionaire? In fact, because your industry did not always exist, there is absolutely no reason it should now! You should be paid only by the hour, and only during the hours you are actually working. Furthermore, you should not even be paid well. That would be morally wrong. You should work because you love your art, and accept payment only reluctantly, and regard it as filthy-- otherwise you are a bad person.
Yeah, that's all true, and you've no doubt pegged the reason that these numbers hurt my head. But while the atmosphere itself is huge, the article you just linked points out that by volume, almost all of it (about 99%) is nitrogen and oxygen. I'm not going to do the math on composition by mass and relate that to the emissions numbers I already gave-- it's Sunday morning-- but if we mosey on down the Wikipedia block we can learn that the amounts of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere have increased quite a bit since we got serious about burning stuff.
Anyway, my point was simply that the planet is not the only one in this game with staggeringly huge numbers on its side, and thus the assumption that we can't do any real damage to our environment because of a difference in scale is just plain faulty. When you look at the amounts of greenhouse gasses, the sizes of forests and fisheries, amounts of fresh water, area of inhabitable land, etc, the scale comes into better focus and you can see that we're not some scrappy underdog without a chance-- we're punching our own weight. More "sting like a bee" than "float like a butterfly".
I've had a hard time with the scale, too-- mostly because the amount of crap we pump out is almost incomprehensibly huge. Emissions are measured in millions of tons per year, for crying out loud. In 2003, the world was consuming something like eighty million (42-gallon) barrels of oil per day-- and by consuming, I mostly mean burning. At the same time, we've been knocking down forest like nobody's business.
So yeah, the planet is ridiculously big, and it's unimaginably old. But there are a lot of us, and we are going to town on that atmosphere.
Art is expressive. If a work does not convey a specific message or emotion from its creator to the audience, but instead leaves everything to the interpretation of the audience, it is not art.
If the intent to evoke a particular thought or emotional response is there, but the work does not do so, then the creator has failed to create art.
If there is no such intent, then the creator is just screwing around and wasting everybody's time.
I can't tell whether this movie was a failure or just screwing around, but either way it's not art any more than your blade of grass or grain of sand is, and you shouldn't give the creators or the work any credit for your own ability to amuse yourself when left to your own devices.
A better example of a lack of freedom of speech is that its illegal to talk about killing the President of the United States.
No it isn't. It's illegal to threaten to kill the President of the United States. That's very different. You can talk about Wile E Coyote dropping anvils on the guy, and how hilarious that would be, until you're blue in the face.
I didn't know about this law [McCain-Feingold]. Sounds dumb if it really exists and is that specific. So, internet, radio, press, flyers, meetings are OK to criticize a political candidate, but TV is off limits for 60 days before an election? OK.
No, he just lied to you. What McCain-Feingold says is:
Every person who makes a disbursement for the direct costs of producing and airing electioneering communications in an aggregate amount in excess of $10,000 during any calendar year shall, within 24 hours of each disclosure date, file with the Commission a statement containing the information described in paragraph (2).
... where, among other conditions, an "electioneering communication" is defined as being made within 60 days of an election or 30 days of a primary/caucus/etc.
Everybody pays for their bandwidth already-- the price of connectivity is pegged to how much traffic you generate. If Google, Amazon, et al. create more traffic, they buy more bandwidth to carry it. Payment scales with use right now. There's no such thing as more or less profitable traffic, for a telco-- traffic is traffic-- and there's no reason there should be.
This is not about making payment scale with use. This is a shakedown.
The analogy you draw to the California energy companies is surprisingly apt-- that was a shakedown, too.
1) What we have here. A source leaks information from a company to a website (blog), who then publishes it. The website operator (blogger) did nothing wrong, they violated no law. The person leaking it broke an NDA, but that's not their concern.
Yeah, maybe that's what you want the law to be. Here's what the law actually says:
Whoever, with intent to convert a trade secret, that is related
to or included in a product that is produced for or placed in interstate
or foreign commerce, to the economic benefit of anyone other than the
owner thereof, and intending or knowing that the offense will, injure
any owner of that trade secret, knowingly--...
(3) receives, buys, or possesses such information, knowing the
same to have been stolen or appropriated, obtained, or converted
without authorization;...
In other words, if you receive what you know to be stolen trade secrets, you're in violation of the law. There's nothing in the law that I can find that exempts some special "journalist" class.
The idea that you can input some values and expect useful output from a function is nice in theory. Perhaps in some very limited mathematics oriented programs where the inputs must lead to a nice answer, but real world applications may end up manipulating more than just the input data.
You're right. And in such instances, if all you're doing is checking output, you don't really understand unit testing-- a key tenet of which is testing the code unit in isolation.
Can you test that the LCD has refreshed at the inputted rate? Can you verify that the input data was correctly injected into the database just be checking the output of the function?
Depends. Most of the time you're not writing the actual driver for the LCD or for the DB. You want to test your code, not code somebody else wrote-- that's their job. So you mock up the LCD driver or the DB driver, and you verify with some unit tests that your code is making the correct calls to those drivers with the correct parameters.
This works whenever you need to verify that a function is interacting with other components in the way that it should. You prove that if all other components behave as expected, your function works for the tested input. Then if your function works with the mock components but not with the production components, you know that either those components are broken or your understanding of them is incorrect.
You still have to do integration tests and functional system tests, because nobody cares if your function works if the system does not, but proper unit testing can drastically reduce the time and effort involved in such integration and system testing because you don't have to try to hit every code path from the system boundaries.
CIA blowup? You mean the NSA "blowup"? In any event you should consider Franklin's quote, which you cite, as perhaps giving as much (and IMHO more) justification for the existence/legality/morality of the NSA surveillance than against privacy concerns. Note he did say liberty and not privacy.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
"Franklin's" quote hasn't got anything to do with it.
And moreover, why is this being termed by the media as domestic surveillance when it is clearly focused primarily overseas and only spotlights (obvious apple fanboy plug) the United States when those calls from suspected and/or confirmed terrorists are answered in the US?
Because it's conducted on US soil, using US telecom equipment, involves watching US telecom traffic, and at least sometimes targets US citizens in the US. Seriously, how hard is this to follow?
Lastly, what I find even more befuddling is that with the perhaps justified lack of details and raw facts about the program itself (besides the official line and the mass histerionics on the left), people can say with certainty whether this is legal or not. In one of Bush's more candid moments, he did say "If I was trying to break the law, why would I inform Congress?" Perhaps one of his better public speaking moments.
What I find befuddling is the people who are stumbling around in drunken figure-eights, waving their hands and blathering about how complicated and confusing it all is. "Lawsy, there's just so much controversy!" This is a bullshit tactic in "arguments" over global warming and science education, and it's bullshit here, too.
This is not complicated. It's not hard to understand or to follow, unless you're wilfully dense. You don't need any more details than the President has already given us, either. The President-- by his own admission-- ordered that surveillance be conducted under conditions not authorized by law, exceeding in the process both Constitutional and statutory limits on his authority. His actions are explicitly defined in FISA as a criminal offense.
Neither the Republicans' hand-waving nor the Democrats' weak knees change the glaringly obvious facts of the matter, and neither should make those facts any less obvious to anyone who can read a newspaper report, the Fourth Amendment, and a copy of FISA.
The hijackers could just as well have used computers anywhere else, or not at all, to buy those tickets. If the Feds want to watch for terrorists buying airline tickets, they can watch the damn airlines. No need to know what I read last week.
We really, really need to remove everybody in the House, Senate, and White House immediately, and restore the rights of the people.
Not everyone. My Representative, John Lewis (Georgia 5th district), has his head screwed on straight. He voted against the PATRIOT Act, and I've been watching him (via his Plogress feed) come down on the right side of every major issue.
I'm sure there are others like him. Don't throw out any babies with the bath water.
Science works by assuming that a theory is correct, and then verifying the hell out of it... until you hit something that the theory says should work but doesn't, no matter how hard you try.
The best theory we have is evolution. Debating it is useless. What advances the science, and possibly leads to an abandonment of evolution as the paradigmatic theory, is assuming that evolution is true and attempting to extract and verify predictions from it.
You're missing the point, and you're not even arguing for ID vs. evolution, you're arguing for creationism vs. "primordial soup".
The theory of evolution doesn't really have anything to do with the origin of life, or even the nature of life.
That said, here's why I have no problem with the "primordial soup" idea, and have no need for a Creator: The Universe is staggeringly huge, and mindbogglingly old. Its size is measured in hundreds of billions of light-years, and a light-year is over 5*10^12 miles! Its age is measured in billions of years. The idea that somewhere in all that space, and all that time, you'd get the right combination for life just does not seem surprising. You roll enough dice enough times, eventually you're probably going to get a handful of snakeeyes.
Occam's razor says we shouldn't needlessly multiply entities. If you've got enough time and enough dice rolling around of their own accord, you don't need a guy whose job it is to pick each of them up and put them down with one pip facing up. It just isn't necessary.
But whether I'm surprised or not doesn't really matter much, because you can do science around it. The "primordial soup" idea is testable, and it's falsifiable, at least in principle. If we can figure out what the soup should have been like around the time we think life should have popped into being, we should be able to make some soup and see if life pops out. This may be difficult bordering on impossible, but the concept is sound. We cannot make God, there is no test for God, and God is not falsifiable. Therefore, God is not science, and by extension neither is Creationism, and neither is "Intelligent Design"-- which is really just creationism costumed for a different show.
Not that we were arguing about Intelligent Design just now.
I know you don't want to get all worked up, but you might want to consider doing so, because this bill does exactly what you claim it doesn't do: it establishes a national ID card.
Section 202 of the bill defines standards for State-issued driver's licenses. Section 203 requires participation by the States in a "shared database".
When you figure out how every state issuing a standard ID tied into a single database is functionally different from the Federal government issuing a standard ID, you let us know.
A state can still issue a driver's license that doesn't qualify, you just can't use it to get on a plane, among other things. Nobody has to get it, you'll just be walking or riding the bus everywhere you go.
I can't imagine why you would dissemble in such a manner, so I'll just assume you're a fool. If this passes into law, no State is going to voluntarily restrict its own citizens from doing business with the Federal government or with Federally-regulated industries. That would be economic suicide.
SEE uses Bonjour to discover documents on the local network, but that's all Bonjour does for it or any other program. That's nice, but all the stuff that really makes SEE cool-- the shared buffer, user highlighting, etc-- has nothing to do with Bonjour
The first I read about using AOP to enfoce contracts was an article by Gregor Kiczales in the Dec. 2004 issue of Software Development. I copied this example into my notes:
declare error: within (com.acme.lower..*) && call (com.acme.upper..*): "Lower layer should not call upper layer.";
I can't pull SD's website right now, but it looks (from Google) like the full article might be here.
During the Civil War, President Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus entirely [teachingam...istory.org], essentially ignoring the right of jury trials and the Bill of Rights. Clearly American democracy did not perish afterwards, and the right was later reinstated at the end of the war. No matter how odious the PATRIOT Act really is, it barely compares to Lincoln's actions.
Jesus Christ.
Lincoln suspended habeas corpus illegally. Only Congress can suspend that right, and Congress can only do so because it is explicitly allowed under certain circumstances by Article I Section 9.
Furthermore, you should probably read the Supreme Court's decision in Ex-parte Milligan, the case which "restored" habeas corpus:
It is essential to the safety of every government that, in a great crisis like the one we have just passed through, there should be a power somewhere of suspending the writ of habeas corpus. In every war, there are men of previously good character wicked enough to counsel their fellow-citizens to resist the measures deemed necessary by a good government to sustain its just authority and overthrow its enemies, and their influence may lead to dangerous combinations. In the emergency of the times, an immediate public investigation according to law may not be possible, and yet the period to the country may be too imminent to suffer such persons to go at large. Unquestionably, there is then an exigency which demands that the government, if it should see fit in the exercise of a proper discretion to make arrests, should not be required to produce the persons arrested [p*126] in answer to a writ of habeas corpus. The Constitution goes no further. It does not say, after a writ of habeas corpus is denied a citizen, that he shall be tried otherwise than by the course of the common law; if it had intended this result, it was easy, by the use of direct words, to have accomplished it.
The illustrious men who framed that instrument were guarding the foundations of civil liberty against the abuses of unlimited power; they were full of wisdom, and the lessons of history informed them that a trial by an established court, assisted by an impartial jury, was the only sure way of protecting the citizen against oppression and wrong. Knowing this, they limited the suspension to one great right, and left the rest to remain forever inviolable. But it is insisted that the safety of the country in time of war demands that this broad claim for martial law shall be sustained. If this were true, it could be well said that a country, preserved at the sacrifice of all the cardinal principles of liberty, is not worth the cost of preservation. Happily, it is not so.
In other words: habeas corpus can be suspended in time of war, but other rights and privileges cannot, and the Founders intended it that way, and a good thing, too.
Umm, no... Actually this is the reason the UCMJ was created, since the US Constitution does NOT extend to military members outside the territories of the US. The UCMJ provides uniform coverage regardless of the location of the service members and in fact has more safeguards and protections than the Constitution for the accused.
Whoa, hang on there. First of all, the UCMJ was created simply to provide a single code of regulation for all branches of the military. It happened shortly after the DoD was created. Military law has existed in the U.S. since the Revolutionary War.
Second, it's an extremely misleading generalization, at best, to say that the Constitution does not apply to military members outside of U.S. territory. Parts of the Constitution have territorial bounds, but most of it does not. No amendment in the Bill of Rights has a territorial boundary, and you'll note that the Fifth Amendment specifically excludes military personnel in time of war-- not necessary if the document as a whole did not apply to them. Also, please note that the the UCMJ is Federal law, enacted by Congress under its Constitutional power to regulate the military.
There has been a great deal of debate in civilian and military courts about how the Constitution applies to military personnel but there has never been any question that it does. In fact, much of that debate seems to have been rooted in the wording of various articles and clauses of the Constitution. You can find several cases and articles on FindLaw.
On the one hand: Skype is easy to download, set up, and use; supports every major PC platform and is cross-platform compatible; offers free calls (with no recurring fee) to other Skype users; and offers extremely cheap calls to POTS phones.
On the other: Firefly is single-platform and charges a minimum of twice what Skype does for POTS calls; you didn't mention a softphone that actually uses E164 or DUNDi, and there's no reason an end user should give a damn; ditto that last point for IAX; again for Speex; and I can't find any information about what free interconnects are available, if any, at vonage's website or at firefly's or at FWD's (and FWD doesn't even provide POTS service)-- and interconnects don't matter to me anyway, if my friends are all using Skype.
So I could just grab Skype and have other people grab Skype and we can all use it. Or I can fret and worry about implementation details I don't have any real reason to care about, and pay more for the same service or try to cobble together some frankensolution on the cheap, which nobody else will be able to use with me.
I think I know which one I'm gonna go with for the time being.
A voice piped up from the back... "So if every bill goes out 18 months late, we win!"
That's funny, but it's true. If you have every bill going out close to 18 months late, you must have well-defined processes that are actually being followed. If you have well-defined processes that are being followed, you can look for and make meaningful improvements.
Six Sigma isn't directly about quality, it's about process improvement. The first step is to get all your ducks in a row.
Slashdot Mirror
You should read the forum threads, or the summary page at appledefects.com. This staining of Macbooks is different from the accumulation of surface dirt on your iBook. Reportedly, Mr. Clean Magic Eraser has been tried, and does not work.
I have an iBook G4, which I've had for a year and a half. It's my work machine, and I'm a software developer. It's also my personal machine, and gets used quite a bit before and after work hours. The keycap lettering is visibly worn (only a spec of 'C' remains). I wash my hands when they have visible crud on them, and I know how to use a napkin, but I'm not OCD about it. This iBook is just as white as it was the day I bought it. If I tilt it just so, I can see a sheen of skin oil on the palm rests, trackpad, and keys; and there's some gray crud accumulated on the display bezel. It shows dirt. Both wipe away with a dry cloth, so neither has penetrated the plastic. There is no staining.
I've never heard of an iBook which stained, as opposed to simply accumulating dirt which could be removed with a mild cleaner. The Macbook has a different finish, with a softer "hand", and it seems clear from the forum threads that this finish is susceptible to staining in a way that the iBook's is not. (The frequency with which this staining occurs may be very low-- there's not much evidence so far that it's very widespread. This does not mean it isn't happening.)
I'm posting this not so much in defense of white, as in defense of those who bought these white laptops. This problem has not existed with previous white Apple laptops-- which were sold for years-- so there's no reason that anyone should have expected it now. Your smug, condescending tone unnecessarily insults these people, and is taken without real basis.
What's special about musicians, that you feel it's right to limit their earning potential, in a way that nobody else's is limited? What gives you the right to pass any sort of moral judgment on musicians who are financially successful?
Suppose I decided that whatever you do for a living, it's absurd that you should be able to become a millionaire? In fact, because your industry did not always exist, there is absolutely no reason it should now! You should be paid only by the hour, and only during the hours you are actually working. Furthermore, you should not even be paid well. That would be morally wrong. You should work because you love your art, and accept payment only reluctantly, and regard it as filthy-- otherwise you are a bad person.
A little bit obnoxious, isn't it?
Anyway, my point was simply that the planet is not the only one in this game with staggeringly huge numbers on its side, and thus the assumption that we can't do any real damage to our environment because of a difference in scale is just plain faulty. When you look at the amounts of greenhouse gasses, the sizes of forests and fisheries, amounts of fresh water, area of inhabitable land, etc, the scale comes into better focus and you can see that we're not some scrappy underdog without a chance-- we're punching our own weight. More "sting like a bee" than "float like a butterfly".
So yeah, the planet is ridiculously big, and it's unimaginably old. But there are a lot of us, and we are going to town on that atmosphere.
If the intent to evoke a particular thought or emotional response is there, but the work does not do so, then the creator has failed to create art.
If there is no such intent, then the creator is just screwing around and wasting everybody's time.
I can't tell whether this movie was a failure or just screwing around, but either way it's not art any more than your blade of grass or grain of sand is, and you shouldn't give the creators or the work any credit for your own ability to amuse yourself when left to your own devices.
No it isn't. It's illegal to threaten to kill the President of the United States. That's very different. You can talk about Wile E Coyote dropping anvils on the guy, and how hilarious that would be, until you're blue in the face.
I didn't know about this law [McCain-Feingold]. Sounds dumb if it really exists and is that specific. So, internet, radio, press, flyers, meetings are OK to criticize a political candidate, but TV is off limits for 60 days before an election? OK.
No, he just lied to you. What McCain-Feingold says is:
Everybody pays for their bandwidth already-- the price of connectivity is pegged to how much traffic you generate. If Google, Amazon, et al. create more traffic, they buy more bandwidth to carry it. Payment scales with use right now. There's no such thing as more or less profitable traffic, for a telco-- traffic is traffic-- and there's no reason there should be.
This is not about making payment scale with use. This is a shakedown.
The analogy you draw to the California energy companies is surprisingly apt-- that was a shakedown, too.
Yeah, maybe that's what you want the law to be. Here's what the law actually says:
In other words, if you receive what you know to be stolen trade secrets, you're in violation of the law. There's nothing in the law that I can find that exempts some special "journalist" class.
That's the great thing about Cheney: You always know where you stand with him.
You just have to make sure that he knows, too.
I'm beginning to think that I'm the only person who knows how to do long division.
The idea that you can input some values and expect useful output from a function is nice in theory. Perhaps in some very limited mathematics oriented programs where the inputs must lead to a nice answer, but real world applications may end up manipulating more than just the input data.
You're right. And in such instances, if all you're doing is checking output, you don't really understand unit testing-- a key tenet of which is testing the code unit in isolation.
Can you test that the LCD has refreshed at the inputted rate? Can you verify that the input data was correctly injected into the database just be checking the output of the function?
Depends. Most of the time you're not writing the actual driver for the LCD or for the DB. You want to test your code, not code somebody else wrote-- that's their job. So you mock up the LCD driver or the DB driver, and you verify with some unit tests that your code is making the correct calls to those drivers with the correct parameters.
This works whenever you need to verify that a function is interacting with other components in the way that it should. You prove that if all other components behave as expected, your function works for the tested input. Then if your function works with the mock components but not with the production components, you know that either those components are broken or your understanding of them is incorrect.
You still have to do integration tests and functional system tests, because nobody cares if your function works if the system does not, but proper unit testing can drastically reduce the time and effort involved in such integration and system testing because you don't have to try to hit every code path from the system boundaries.
"Franklin's" quote hasn't got anything to do with it.
And moreover, why is this being termed by the media as domestic surveillance when it is clearly focused primarily overseas and only spotlights (obvious apple fanboy plug) the United States when those calls from suspected and/or confirmed terrorists are answered in the US?
Because it's conducted on US soil, using US telecom equipment, involves watching US telecom traffic, and at least sometimes targets US citizens in the US. Seriously, how hard is this to follow?
Lastly, what I find even more befuddling is that with the perhaps justified lack of details and raw facts about the program itself (besides the official line and the mass histerionics on the left), people can say with certainty whether this is legal or not. In one of Bush's more candid moments, he did say "If I was trying to break the law, why would I inform Congress?" Perhaps one of his better public speaking moments.
What I find befuddling is the people who are stumbling around in drunken figure-eights, waving their hands and blathering about how complicated and confusing it all is. "Lawsy, there's just so much controversy!" This is a bullshit tactic in "arguments" over global warming and science education, and it's bullshit here, too.
This is not complicated. It's not hard to understand or to follow, unless you're wilfully dense. You don't need any more details than the President has already given us, either. The President-- by his own admission-- ordered that surveillance be conducted under conditions not authorized by law, exceeding in the process both Constitutional and statutory limits on his authority. His actions are explicitly defined in FISA as a criminal offense.
Neither the Republicans' hand-waving nor the Democrats' weak knees change the glaringly obvious facts of the matter, and neither should make those facts any less obvious to anyone who can read a newspaper report, the Fourth Amendment, and a copy of FISA.
Section 215 is dangerous, unnecessary, and violates the highest law of the land.
Not everyone. My Representative, John Lewis (Georgia 5th district), has his head screwed on straight. He voted against the PATRIOT Act, and I've been watching him (via his Plogress feed) come down on the right side of every major issue.
I'm sure there are others like him. Don't throw out any babies with the bath water.
Blockbuster.
Science works by assuming that a theory is correct, and then verifying the hell out of it... until you hit something that the theory says should work but doesn't, no matter how hard you try.
The best theory we have is evolution. Debating it is useless. What advances the science, and possibly leads to an abandonment of evolution as the paradigmatic theory, is assuming that evolution is true and attempting to extract and verify predictions from it.
Go read your Kuhn.
The theory of evolution doesn't really have anything to do with the origin of life, or even the nature of life.
That said, here's why I have no problem with the "primordial soup" idea, and have no need for a Creator: The Universe is staggeringly huge, and mindbogglingly old. Its size is measured in hundreds of billions of light-years, and a light-year is over 5*10^12 miles! Its age is measured in billions of years. The idea that somewhere in all that space, and all that time, you'd get the right combination for life just does not seem surprising. You roll enough dice enough times, eventually you're probably going to get a handful of snakeeyes.
Occam's razor says we shouldn't needlessly multiply entities. If you've got enough time and enough dice rolling around of their own accord, you don't need a guy whose job it is to pick each of them up and put them down with one pip facing up. It just isn't necessary.
But whether I'm surprised or not doesn't really matter much, because you can do science around it. The "primordial soup" idea is testable, and it's falsifiable, at least in principle. If we can figure out what the soup should have been like around the time we think life should have popped into being, we should be able to make some soup and see if life pops out. This may be difficult bordering on impossible, but the concept is sound. We cannot make God, there is no test for God, and God is not falsifiable. Therefore, God is not science, and by extension neither is Creationism, and neither is "Intelligent Design"-- which is really just creationism costumed for a different show.
Not that we were arguing about Intelligent Design just now.
Section 202 of the bill defines standards for State-issued driver's licenses. Section 203 requires participation by the States in a "shared database".
When you figure out how every state issuing a standard ID tied into a single database is functionally different from the Federal government issuing a standard ID, you let us know.
I can't imagine why you would dissemble in such a manner, so I'll just assume you're a fool. If this passes into law, no State is going to voluntarily restrict its own citizens from doing business with the Federal government or with Federally-regulated industries. That would be economic suicide.
SEE uses Bonjour to discover documents on the local network, but that's all Bonjour does for it or any other program. That's nice, but all the stuff that really makes SEE cool-- the shared buffer, user highlighting, etc-- has nothing to do with Bonjour
Jesus Christ.
Lincoln suspended habeas corpus illegally. Only Congress can suspend that right, and Congress can only do so because it is explicitly allowed under certain circumstances by Article I Section 9.
Furthermore, you should probably read the Supreme Court's decision in Ex-parte Milligan, the case which "restored" habeas corpus:
In other words: habeas corpus can be suspended in time of war, but other rights and privileges cannot, and the Founders intended it that way, and a good thing, too.
Whoa, hang on there. First of all, the UCMJ was created simply to provide a single code of regulation for all branches of the military. It happened shortly after the DoD was created. Military law has existed in the U.S. since the Revolutionary War.
Second, it's an extremely misleading generalization, at best, to say that the Constitution does not apply to military members outside of U.S. territory. Parts of the Constitution have territorial bounds, but most of it does not. No amendment in the Bill of Rights has a territorial boundary, and you'll note that the Fifth Amendment specifically excludes military personnel in time of war-- not necessary if the document as a whole did not apply to them. Also, please note that the the UCMJ is Federal law, enacted by Congress under its Constitutional power to regulate the military.
There has been a great deal of debate in civilian and military courts about how the Constitution applies to military personnel but there has never been any question that it does. In fact, much of that debate seems to have been rooted in the wording of various articles and clauses of the Constitution. You can find several cases and articles on FindLaw.
Let's review.
On the one hand: Skype is easy to download, set up, and use; supports every major PC platform and is cross-platform compatible; offers free calls (with no recurring fee) to other Skype users; and offers extremely cheap calls to POTS phones.
On the other: Firefly is single-platform and charges a minimum of twice what Skype does for POTS calls; you didn't mention a softphone that actually uses E164 or DUNDi, and there's no reason an end user should give a damn; ditto that last point for IAX; again for Speex; and I can't find any information about what free interconnects are available, if any, at vonage's website or at firefly's or at FWD's (and FWD doesn't even provide POTS service)-- and interconnects don't matter to me anyway, if my friends are all using Skype.
So I could just grab Skype and have other people grab Skype and we can all use it. Or I can fret and worry about implementation details I don't have any real reason to care about, and pay more for the same service or try to cobble together some frankensolution on the cheap, which nobody else will be able to use with me.
I think I know which one I'm gonna go with for the time being.
That's funny, but it's true. If you have every bill going out close to 18 months late, you must have well-defined processes that are actually being followed. If you have well-defined processes that are being followed, you can look for and make meaningful improvements.
Six Sigma isn't directly about quality, it's about process improvement. The first step is to get all your ducks in a row.