Being science, QM can be proven, whereas religion, by its very nature, cannot.
No, Quantum Mechanics (and all other good science) can be disproven. Religion cannot.
Ironically, that's why science provides progress where religion provides none; by showing people irrefutably their ideas are wrong, they can stop wasting time dwelling on them, and move on to new ideas. Thanks to that, we have spaceships, internets and lasers.
As the source code is open and all the hard work is done for you an easy-to-reuse and fully free/open source library, just implement it for your handset. That's the joy of write once / use anywhere.
Back in the day, all C64s that people owned had exactly the same hardware inside them, and that was mostly stable for its entire lifespan. All the good demos came out after people had studied the unchanging hardware for years.
Name some good C64 demos from 1983 or 1984. In my opinion, most of the good C64 demos started around 1985. The most amazing ones, the ones that really make your jaw drop, came in the 1990s or 2000s.
It takes time to study hardware and find its every little nook or cranny. Demo authors are always dejected when they hear their productions don't work on all machines. Look at the public humiliation Spaceballs' State Of The Art got for only working on a A500 with trapdoor expansion.
I, for one, wouldn't like to try and find a specific hardware revision of a specific model of graphics card because a demo coder decided to bang its registers directly. Fuck that. I want him to use the standard API and work on as many capable graphics cards as possible.
Working on only one machine is not "pushing the envelope". Pushing the best graphics cards to do what their designers didn't expect is "pushing the envelope". Pushing today's fixed hardware platforms (PS3, Nintendo DS, iPhone, etc.) is pushing the envelope.
C64 demos can overwrite the OS by writing to addresses $E000-$FFFF (writethrough), then setting bit 1 of byte $0001 to 0, which flips that address range from pointing to the ROM chip to pointing to newly filled RAM chips.
Well, you're really wasting space there. With a default compile and link, you've included crt0.o which sets up the default C environment, and sections to command the dynamic linker to link in references to printf().
If you read this tutorial on the ELF format, you'll find the smallest valid Linux x86 ELF file that sucessfully does nothing is 368 bytes (although this demo is for Windows, so will be using the Portable Executable format instead). So you have far more code space to play with.
There are other tricks; usually the thing is packed with a code compressor, as even tightly-written code is likely to have some redundancy. I haven't looked at this one, but it's likely that 4kb executable is the result of an exe-packer packing a 5kb-10kb executable.
The famous production people usually refer to when it comes to small files with procedurally generated graphics is.the.product by farbrausch. If you read that site, you'll find out many of the tips and tricks that can be used to really pack down the size of executables and still make amazing 3d scenes.
The source is much larger. The size counted is the size of the executable. Write as many comments as you like in your source code.
You can use as much memory as you like, but it's a very boring pile of memory if you don't then precompute a pile of pretty pictures using algorithms and data, which is what the 4kb is really counting.
You can use as many external libraries you like, as long as they're public; so you don't have to write your own OpenGL implementation, but you can't hide 200kb of your latest cool code somewhere other than the 4kb executable.
Feel free to hack the executable format to remove unnecessary headers and sections that an average compiler or linker would generate.
The IFPI won an initial judgement. There are still a whole boatload of appeals to go before the Pirate Bay is required to give any money to the IFPI.
But the IFPI don't really want reparations; what they do want is for millions of people to give up pirating music. In order to do that, they have to give all those people the impression that they will be mercilessly crushed by the law if they dare infringe copyrights.
That's why the personal friend of the music industry (the judge) hit them with a huge initial fine, and the entire news media (owned by the same people who own the music industry) disseminated the fact of the huge fine as widely as the could muster.
At the end of the day, it's not really about the Pirate Bay. It's about YOU, the average consumer. The IFPI are driven by a need to control you. If they can't make you love them, they'll make you fear them.
Just curious, if you are using a Google Voice number as your "one number to rule them all", and the service is down, what happens? Even if it goes down temporarily (as Gmail does constantly, ahem) does that mean incoming calls cant get to you?
It's likely that the same thing happens as when a regular phone service goes down. The caller hears a tone telling them the call couldn't be routed and they can decide if they want to call you later.
Currently, you have no evidence to say Google will be any better or worse than a regular phone carrier on the PSTN, most of whom regularly manage 99.999% uptime (due to large capital expenditure on redundant hardware - something that Google can definitely afford).
Also, since Google is obviously able to hijack the voice audio, what's to say they aren't listening to / recording calls? I realize they "aren't evil" but, still.
I like the concept of this service, but don't want to have my incoming calls relying on Google's service to make it through.
All existing phone companies can have downtime and can hijack/record your phone connection.
You have no evidence that Google - or rather, the company GrandCentral, which Google bought - will be incompetent or malevolent in running a phone service.
AT&T already do hijack phone connections at the behest of the US government. Google, on the other hand, told the government to get lost when it asked them to provide search histories of people searching for porn. Which one has a better track record?
BT, the monopoly provider of telephone landlines in most of the UK, only have IPstream in their exchanges, which has a maximum speed of 8Mbps. Most broadband providers, including BT Broadband, are merely reselling this 8Mbps access.
Be, Virgin and TalkTalk took advantage of the OLO (other licensed operator) scheme that BT was forced by OFTEL/OFCOM to provide. They put their equipment in BT's exchanges. They can provide broadband speeds higher than 8Mbps.
However, in order get access to those other providers inside BT's exchanges, you need a BT line, even if you never use the BT line. Sure, it sucks to be you, but what's the alternative? Other operators would be forced to build and operate all their own cables and exchanges, rather than rent a corner of BT's exchange, and given they don't have access rights to the land like BT does, there are many places they wouldn't be able to go.
That's the tradeoff - you can get better-than-BT broadband almost anywhere in the country because you need a BT line.
The problem that's unique to the US is that government corn subsidies makes corn cheaper than anything else. So manufacturers use high fructose corn syrup instead of sugar as sweetener.
HFCS is not only a sugar substitute, it also gets put into things that wouldn't otherwise be sweetened if you had to pay the full cost of sugar to sweeten it.
How about the US government stop subsidising corn?
They're not delusional. This is the first judgement. The judge can declare anything he wants, even that he's the King of Mongolia and he's not wearing any pants.
He's trusted to produce the first verdict, no matter how wrong or illegitimate that verdict eventually turns out to be. That's why it was important for him to throw the book at the evil-doers now so his friends in the media can trumpet this damning judgement now.
It looks good in the press. Big headlines in newspapers all around the world: "PIRATES SLAPPED WITH HUGE FINE AND JAIL SENTENCES". Lots of quotes from media cartels about how important it is that they protect poor struggling artists.
Remember, if you're a poor struggling artist, it's very important that you sign up with these middle-men and give them a cut of all your takings. Or let them work their Hollywood accounting on you. They've got sports cars to pay off and no creative talent of their own. They need you.
Remember that news media companies are in cahoots with the entertainment industry - because they're owned by the same people.
Cut to whenever the appeals are done and the judgement is actually in line with Swedish law, the verdict will likely be a small fine, if anything. Will anybody hear about that verdict? Only through media sources that aren't controlled by the entertainment industry.
The reason they don't is that the only format which works out-of-the-box almost ubiquitously on desktop computers is FAT. That's why FAT is the de-facto standard flash memory filesystem.
Microsoft Windows only supports FAT and NTFS for reliable read-write access. That's about 90% of all desktop computers. Most other popular operating systems support FAT well, but few support NTFS well. Hence FAT.
It's entirely Microsoft's doing. If you wanted some other filesystem to replace FAT, it could only be another filesystem fully supported by Microsoft Windows, otherwise it wouldn't be out-of-the-box compatible with over 90% of desktop computers and thus would be trounced by anything that was.
An insurance policy is a contract. If you want to modify the terms, just call up your insurer and negotiate before buying the policy! I had to do that a few years ago to get travel insurance for my 85 year old grandmother.
* Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 * Sale of Goods Act 1979 * Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999
Implicit contract terms for regularly traded consumer goods and services are highly regulated, e.g.
* Goods are of satisfactory quality * Goods are fit for the purpose * Goods are as described * If goods are faulty and you haven't "accepted" them, you are entitled to a full refund * If you have "accepted" faulty goods, you are entitled to compensation, repair or replacement, rescission or reduction in price.
Sure there can be informal and oral contracts, but they're difficult to enforce, especially if they're trying to prevent you from doing something you normally can do, or trying to remove/reduce liability.
"Encouraging" someone to murder is called conspiracy to murder and it's a different crime from murder.
The other example you give is called manslaughter.
Yes, these are all crimes, but they're all different crimes and are all tried differently!
Click-throughs have little or no legal basis, let alone the ability to hold a conspirator to clicking "OK" accountable.
In the UK, you absolutely cannot enter a contract without it being a fair contract. A fair contract is where both parties have equal opportunity to amend the contract and both have to agree the final terms before jointly signing it. If it's one-sided, "take it or leave it", then it is simply not a contract and has no legal strength.
Genetic mutations are more-or-less random, being as they are based on unpredictable matings.
Natural selection says in any given generation, organisms that are better adapted for the environment they're in at the time are more likely to survive and procreate than organisms that aren't. Over multiple generations, if the environment is stable, those advantageous genetics stay in place.
Most of the rest of your complaints are based around the strawman arguments that "natural selection says once you're the best, you're always the best" and "natural selection says some traits are always better in all circumstances". Both are utter bollocks.
1. You can use git for any purpose. You have to pay serious coin before you can use Bitkeeper for any purpose.
2. You have the freedom to see how git works, down to every last line of code. I can't comment on whether Bitkeeper also includes this level of freedom.
3. You can make any damn changes you want to Git, without prior approval.
4. You can pass on all these freedoms, and the freedom to use your change, to anybody you want. It was precisely the fact you can't do that with Bitkeeper that led to it being dropped by the Linux developers and replaced with a coded-from-scratch replacement.
Looking at my own OS X activity monitor: * 320MB free (i.e. in use as disk cache) * ~320MB wired * ~970MB active * ~400MB inactive * ~500MB swap used
And it's not about applications launched later; it's about applications running now, and the files they're accessing now.
What kind of OS would say "I could use more memory right now to give better disk caching... but fuck it, there's a service that hasn't been used in 6 weeks. Better let it keep that inactive program in memory and just keep reading the disk over and over again instead of caching it"
Swap space does improve performance. I have a lot of services loaded, ready for someone to use them, but they are rarely used. FTP server, file server, music server, web server, and so on. Most people have at least one little-used process running.
With no swap, these never-running programs actively consume RAM and reduce the amount of RAM available to running programs and even disk cache.
With swap, these sleepy daemons are paged out and not loaded again unless someone needs them. I get my RAM back for something I'm doing now.
Yes, I could pare down my system so it doesn't load things unless absolutely needed, but why should I have to do that manually when I could just leave them running and have them consume zero RAM?
As to "how big should swap be?", I prefer the Mac OS X solution - all free space on your drive is swap. Nothing is reserved, and you can make swap go away by completely filling your drive (but you wouldn't do that, would you?)
Andrea Dworkin says "violation is a synonym for intercourse", which is Dworkinese for "IMHO, even consensual sexual intercourse is still forcible violation of a woman". If you read the link, you can see the context where Dworkin explains why she thinks penetration is violation of a woman. You may fall asleep before you get to the money shot, though.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, of which the American Red Cross is a member, has special worldwide exclusive rights to the Red Cross symbol via the First Geneva Convention (passed 1864).
The Red Cross symbol can be used to indicate ICRC member organisation presence on battlefields, and it can be used as or in the organisational logo of any ICRC member organisation. The First Geneva Convention prohibits any other use of the Red Cross, worldwide.
The USA ratified this in 1882, meaning they agreed to enforce this restriction. However, they did not pass any actual law to prohibit it until 1900. In 1887, the US government approved Johnson & Johnson's trademark application to use the Red Cross on medical products, which broke their commitment to the First Geneva Convention!
The 1900 law prohibits what Johnson & Johnson did, but has a clause saying that any infringements prior to 1905 (i.e. Johnson & Johnson) will not be covered. They're still illegal internationally since 1864 and illegal in the USA since 1905.
Johnson & Johnson want to argue that they have special privileges to do something which both very profitable for them and is illegal for anyone else, namely usurping the symbol of Red Cross and milking its iconic status for purely profit-making enterprise. There is no agreement to take all profits made by branding J&J stuff with the Red Cross and hand them over to the ICRC or ARC.
I understand that J&J donated about $5 million last year to the Red Cross, but Johnson & Johnson made a profit last year of $38.27 billion. The Red Cross are not getting in their way of making a healthy profit. I don't have the figures on what percentage of that is directly attributable to selling on the back of the ICRC's global reputation, but it doesn't come with the ICRC's permission.
The American Red Cross was founded to provide free medical and humanitarian aid. Johnson & Johnson was founded solely to make money. The American Red Cross may be idiots and selling themselves out, but they're not the ones on shaky legal ground here. It only takes one stroke of the pen to remove the last line of 18 U.S.C. Â 706:
Whoever wears or displays the sign of the Red Cross or any insignia colored in imitation thereof for the fraudulent purpose of inducing the belief that he is a member of or an agent for the American National Red Cross; or
Whoever, whether a corporation, association or person, other than the American National Red Cross and its duly authorized employees and agents and the sanitary and hospital authorities of the armed forces of the United States, uses the emblem of the Greek red cross on a white ground, or any sign or insignia made or colored in imitation thereof or the words "Red Cross" or "Geneva Cross" or any combination of these words
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
This section shall not make unlawful the use of any such emblem, sign, insignia or words which was lawful on the date of enactment of this title.
It bears pointing out that use of the logo was unlawful everywhere except the US on that date, and that the US is breaking its commitment to the First Geneva Convention, ratified prior to issuing the J&J trademark, by permitting said trademark.
If I were a lawmaker, I'd look into righting 100-year-old wrongs.
How do you account for this animated gif of a seagull sneaking into a shop and stealing a bag of crisps? If it was a smart gull, it would have worn a baseball cap or a hoodie, so it wasn't recognisable to the police on the CCTV.
Slashdot Mirror
Let sweden register "bank.se" and offer subdomains only to valid banks.
It works here in the UK - schools get .sch.uk, the police get .police.uk, etc., while we normal people get .plc.uk, .me.uk, .co.uk and so on.
Being science, QM can be proven, whereas religion, by its very nature, cannot.
No, Quantum Mechanics (and all other good science) can be disproven. Religion cannot.
Ironically, that's why science provides progress where religion provides none; by showing people irrefutably their ideas are wrong, they can stop wasting time dwelling on them, and move on to new ideas. Thanks to that, we have spaceships, internets and lasers.
As the source code is open and all the hard work is done for you an easy-to-reuse and fully free/open source library, just implement it for your handset. That's the joy of write once / use anywhere.
http://www.cyrket.com/package/com.google.zxing.client.android
Back in the day, all C64s that people owned had exactly the same hardware inside them, and that was mostly stable for its entire lifespan. All the good demos came out after people had studied the unchanging hardware for years.
Name some good C64 demos from 1983 or 1984. In my opinion, most of the good C64 demos started around 1985. The most amazing ones, the ones that really make your jaw drop, came in the 1990s or 2000s.
It takes time to study hardware and find its every little nook or cranny. Demo authors are always dejected when they hear their productions don't work on all machines. Look at the public humiliation Spaceballs' State Of The Art got for only working on a A500 with trapdoor expansion.
I, for one, wouldn't like to try and find a specific hardware revision of a specific model of graphics card because a demo coder decided to bang its registers directly. Fuck that. I want him to use the standard API and work on as many capable graphics cards as possible.
Working on only one machine is not "pushing the envelope". Pushing the best graphics cards to do what their designers didn't expect is "pushing the envelope". Pushing today's fixed hardware platforms (PS3, Nintendo DS, iPhone, etc.) is pushing the envelope.
C64 demos can overwrite the OS by writing to addresses $E000-$FFFF (writethrough), then setting bit 1 of byte $0001 to 0, which flips that address range from pointing to the ROM chip to pointing to newly filled RAM chips.
Well, you're really wasting space there. With a default compile and link, you've included crt0.o which sets up the default C environment, and sections to command the dynamic linker to link in references to printf().
If you read this tutorial on the ELF format, you'll find the smallest valid Linux x86 ELF file that sucessfully does nothing is 368 bytes (although this demo is for Windows, so will be using the Portable Executable format instead). So you have far more code space to play with.
There are other tricks; usually the thing is packed with a code compressor, as even tightly-written code is likely to have some redundancy. I haven't looked at this one, but it's likely that 4kb executable is the result of an exe-packer packing a 5kb-10kb executable.
The famous production people usually refer to when it comes to small files with procedurally generated graphics is .the .product by farbrausch. If you read that site, you'll find out many of the tips and tricks that can be used to really pack down the size of executables and still make amazing 3d scenes.
The source is much larger. The size counted is the size of the executable. Write as many comments as you like in your source code.
You can use as much memory as you like, but it's a very boring pile of memory if you don't then precompute a pile of pretty pictures using algorithms and data, which is what the 4kb is really counting.
You can use as many external libraries you like, as long as they're public; so you don't have to write your own OpenGL implementation, but you can't hide 200kb of your latest cool code somewhere other than the 4kb executable.
Feel free to hack the executable format to remove unnecessary headers and sections that an average compiler or linker would generate.
The IFPI sued the Pirate Bay, not the MPAA.
The IFPI won an initial judgement. There are still a whole boatload of appeals to go before the Pirate Bay is required to give any money to the IFPI.
But the IFPI don't really want reparations; what they do want is for millions of people to give up pirating music. In order to do that, they have to give all those people the impression that they will be mercilessly crushed by the law if they dare infringe copyrights.
That's why the personal friend of the music industry (the judge) hit them with a huge initial fine, and the entire news media (owned by the same people who own the music industry) disseminated the fact of the huge fine as widely as the could muster.
At the end of the day, it's not really about the Pirate Bay. It's about YOU, the average consumer. The IFPI are driven by a need to control you. If they can't make you love them, they'll make you fear them.
Just curious, if you are using a Google Voice number as your "one number to rule them all", and the service is down, what happens? Even if it goes down temporarily (as Gmail does constantly, ahem) does that mean incoming calls cant get to you?
It's likely that the same thing happens as when a regular phone service goes down. The caller hears a tone telling them the call couldn't be routed and they can decide if they want to call you later.
Currently, you have no evidence to say Google will be any better or worse than a regular phone carrier on the PSTN, most of whom regularly manage 99.999% uptime (due to large capital expenditure on redundant hardware - something that Google can definitely afford).
Also, since Google is obviously able to hijack the voice audio, what's to say they aren't listening to / recording calls? I realize they "aren't evil" but, still.
I like the concept of this service, but don't want to have my incoming calls relying on Google's service to make it through.
All existing phone companies can have downtime and can hijack/record your phone connection.
You have no evidence that Google - or rather, the company GrandCentral, which Google bought - will be incompetent or malevolent in running a phone service.
AT&T already do hijack phone connections at the behest of the US government. Google, on the other hand, told the government to get lost when it asked them to provide search histories of people searching for porn. Which one has a better track record?
BT, the monopoly provider of telephone landlines in most of the UK, only have IPstream in their exchanges, which has a maximum speed of 8Mbps. Most broadband providers, including BT Broadband, are merely reselling this 8Mbps access.
Be, Virgin and TalkTalk took advantage of the OLO (other licensed operator) scheme that BT was forced by OFTEL/OFCOM to provide. They put their equipment in BT's exchanges. They can provide broadband speeds higher than 8Mbps.
However, in order get access to those other providers inside BT's exchanges, you need a BT line, even if you never use the BT line. Sure, it sucks to be you, but what's the alternative? Other operators would be forced to build and operate all their own cables and exchanges, rather than rent a corner of BT's exchange, and given they don't have access rights to the land like BT does, there are many places they wouldn't be able to go.
That's the tradeoff - you can get better-than-BT broadband almost anywhere in the country because you need a BT line.
The problem that's unique to the US is that government corn subsidies makes corn cheaper than anything else. So manufacturers use high fructose corn syrup instead of sugar as sweetener.
HFCS is not only a sugar substitute, it also gets put into things that wouldn't otherwise be sweetened if you had to pay the full cost of sugar to sweeten it.
How about the US government stop subsidising corn?
They're not delusional. This is the first judgement. The judge can declare anything he wants, even that he's the King of Mongolia and he's not wearing any pants.
He's trusted to produce the first verdict, no matter how wrong or illegitimate that verdict eventually turns out to be. That's why it was important for him to throw the book at the evil-doers now so his friends in the media can trumpet this damning judgement now.
It looks good in the press. Big headlines in newspapers all around the world: "PIRATES SLAPPED WITH HUGE FINE AND JAIL SENTENCES". Lots of quotes from media cartels about how important it is that they protect poor struggling artists.
Remember, if you're a poor struggling artist, it's very important that you sign up with these middle-men and give them a cut of all your takings. Or let them work their Hollywood accounting on you. They've got sports cars to pay off and no creative talent of their own. They need you.
Remember that news media companies are in cahoots with the entertainment industry - because they're owned by the same people.
Cut to whenever the appeals are done and the judgement is actually in line with Swedish law, the verdict will likely be a small fine, if anything. Will anybody hear about that verdict? Only through media sources that aren't controlled by the entertainment industry.
The reason they don't is that the only format which works out-of-the-box almost ubiquitously on desktop computers is FAT. That's why FAT is the de-facto standard flash memory filesystem.
Microsoft Windows only supports FAT and NTFS for reliable read-write access. That's about 90% of all desktop computers. Most other popular operating systems support FAT well, but few support NTFS well. Hence FAT.
It's entirely Microsoft's doing. If you wanted some other filesystem to replace FAT, it could only be another filesystem fully supported by Microsoft Windows, otherwise it wouldn't be out-of-the-box compatible with over 90% of desktop computers and thus would be trounced by anything that was.
An insurance policy is a contract. If you want to modify the terms, just call up your insurer and negotiate before buying the policy! I had to do that a few years ago to get travel insurance for my 85 year old grandmother.
* Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977
* Sale of Goods Act 1979
* Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999
Implicit contract terms for regularly traded consumer goods and services are highly regulated, e.g.
* Goods are of satisfactory quality
* Goods are fit for the purpose
* Goods are as described
* If goods are faulty and you haven't "accepted" them, you are entitled to a full refund
* If you have "accepted" faulty goods, you are entitled to compensation, repair or replacement, rescission or reduction in price.
Sure there can be informal and oral contracts, but they're difficult to enforce, especially if they're trying to prevent you from doing something you normally can do, or trying to remove/reduce liability.
"Encouraging" someone to murder is called conspiracy to murder and it's a different crime from murder.
The other example you give is called manslaughter.
Yes, these are all crimes, but they're all different crimes and are all tried differently!
Click-throughs have little or no legal basis, let alone the ability to hold a conspirator to clicking "OK" accountable.
In the UK, you absolutely cannot enter a contract without it being a fair contract. A fair contract is where both parties have equal opportunity to amend the contract and both have to agree the final terms before jointly signing it. If it's one-sided, "take it or leave it", then it is simply not a contract and has no legal strength.
You misunderstand the most basic principles.
Genetic mutations are more-or-less random, being as they are based on unpredictable matings.
Natural selection says in any given generation, organisms that are better adapted for the environment they're in at the time are more likely to survive and procreate than organisms that aren't. Over multiple generations, if the environment is stable, those advantageous genetics stay in place.
Most of the rest of your complaints are based around the strawman arguments that "natural selection says once you're the best, you're always the best" and "natural selection says some traits are always better in all circumstances". Both are utter bollocks.
Finally, the very man who championed falsifiability, Popper, wrote the falsifiable form of Darwin's theory of natural selection.
It's four good reasons.
1. You can use git for any purpose. You have to pay serious coin before you can use Bitkeeper for any purpose.
2. You have the freedom to see how git works, down to every last line of code. I can't comment on whether Bitkeeper also includes this level of freedom.
3. You can make any damn changes you want to Git, without prior approval.
4. You can pass on all these freedoms, and the freedom to use your change, to anybody you want. It was precisely the fact you can't do that with Bitkeeper that led to it being dropped by the Linux developers and replaced with a coded-from-scratch replacement.
Looking at my own OS X activity monitor:
* 320MB free (i.e. in use as disk cache)
* ~320MB wired
* ~970MB active
* ~400MB inactive
* ~500MB swap used
And it's not about applications launched later; it's about applications running now, and the files they're accessing now.
What kind of OS would say "I could use more memory right now to give better disk caching... but fuck it, there's a service that hasn't been used in 6 weeks. Better let it keep that inactive program in memory and just keep reading the disk over and over again instead of caching it"
Swap space does improve performance. I have a lot of services loaded, ready for someone to use them, but they are rarely used. FTP server, file server, music server, web server, and so on. Most people have at least one little-used process running.
With no swap, these never-running programs actively consume RAM and reduce the amount of RAM available to running programs and even disk cache.
With swap, these sleepy daemons are paged out and not loaded again unless someone needs them. I get my RAM back for something I'm doing now.
Yes, I could pare down my system so it doesn't load things unless absolutely needed, but why should I have to do that manually when I could just leave them running and have them consume zero RAM?
As to "how big should swap be?", I prefer the Mac OS X solution - all free space on your drive is swap. Nothing is reserved, and you can make swap go away by completely filling your drive (but you wouldn't do that, would you?)
Andrea Dworkin says "violation is a synonym for intercourse", which is Dworkinese for "IMHO, even consensual sexual intercourse is still forcible violation of a woman". If you read the link, you can see the context where Dworkin explains why she thinks penetration is violation of a woman. You may fall asleep before you get to the money shot, though.
http://www.geocities.com/rcwoolley/
The Red Cross symbol can be used to indicate ICRC member organisation presence on battlefields, and it can be used as or in the organisational logo of any ICRC member organisation. The First Geneva Convention prohibits any other use of the Red Cross, worldwide.
The USA ratified this in 1882, meaning they agreed to enforce this restriction. However, they did not pass any actual law to prohibit it until 1900. In 1887, the US government approved Johnson & Johnson's trademark application to use the Red Cross on medical products, which broke their commitment to the First Geneva Convention!
The 1900 law prohibits what Johnson & Johnson did, but has a clause saying that any infringements prior to 1905 (i.e. Johnson & Johnson) will not be covered. They're still illegal internationally since 1864 and illegal in the USA since 1905.
Johnson & Johnson want to argue that they have special privileges to do something which both very profitable for them and is illegal for anyone else, namely usurping the symbol of Red Cross and milking its iconic status for purely profit-making enterprise. There is no agreement to take all profits made by branding J&J stuff with the Red Cross and hand them over to the ICRC or ARC.
I understand that J&J donated about $5 million last year to the Red Cross, but Johnson & Johnson made a profit last year of $38.27 billion. The Red Cross are not getting in their way of making a healthy profit. I don't have the figures on what percentage of that is directly attributable to selling on the back of the ICRC's global reputation, but it doesn't come with the ICRC's permission.
The American Red Cross was founded to provide free medical and humanitarian aid. Johnson & Johnson was founded solely to make money. The American Red Cross may be idiots and selling themselves out, but they're not the ones on shaky legal ground here. It only takes one stroke of the pen to remove the last line of 18 U.S.C. Â 706:
It bears pointing out that use of the logo was unlawful everywhere except the US on that date, and that the US is breaking its commitment to the First Geneva Convention, ratified prior to issuing the J&J trademark, by permitting said trademark.
If I were a lawmaker, I'd look into righting 100-year-old wrongs.