I am sure I am not the only one who is tired of hearing about ethical challenges that come with every small new incremental step in stem cell/cloning research. The issues haven't changed, they are the same as when cloning was first brought to the public spotlight when dolly was cloned; and they are the same as have been discussed in science fiction circles way before that.
Absolutely. If anything, this removes an "ethical challenge" -- that the creation of a human clone (as well as any other activity requiring the use of stem cells) would necessarily require the use of material from an aborted feotus. Seriously: this is a major breakthrough that (once the process has been refined and can be used on humans) means we no longer need feotal material for research purposes, which is something a lot of people object to.
I wrote: And I'm still far from convinced that a functional language is the best way to start. A lot of standard tasks are complicated by the functional approach. Alice at least is based on Standard ML which is not a pure functional language (more along the lines of LISP than, say, Miranda, the language I learned functional programming with), but I'd still avoid it for a few reasons, most notably the fact that the only GUI binding available for it is GTK+ which is a very complicated environment that I would say is not suitable for beginners.
And then I discovered there are two different languages called Alice. Mea culpa.
The reason films are acceptable at 24 frames is because there's a very large amount of motion blur inherent to the format. This blur smooths out movement and hides the low frame rate. Stop-motion animation *doesn't* have this motion blur, which becomes obvious whenever you see it.
There are plenty of techniques available that produce simulated motion blur in each frame. Why not use them?
There's a difference between how films are generated and how the images on the screen are generated (google). Games are unplayable at 24fps. 50FPS is acceptable, but not good.
Yes. My argument is that this is a flaw in the game design, not in the display device.
Off-the-shelf packages like these are atypical, and represent I believe less than 1% of code that is written commercially. They are dwarfed by the number of payroll systems, account management systems, workflow tracker systems, management information systems, intranets, extranets, web services, etc. Most of these are written (depending on how old they are) in C#, Java, Delphi, VB, Smalltalk, or even COBOL. Very few are in C or C++.
Also, a lot of this software would probably be written differently if it were started today. Microsoft's research OS, Singularity, is written in C#. I firmly believe that if they were to reimplement Office from scratch they would do so in C#. If I were starting a photoshop-like project today I would strongly consider a functional language.
I wish there were some language like BASIC still around these days. When I started programming a little over 20 years ago (I'm 29) I was able to plug my older brother's Vic-20 right into the TV and start writing code from there. Power on, "3000 bytes free, Ready.", in less than 1 second. You start hammering away with simple BASIC statements and if you want to organize it into a bigger program, prepend line numbers. Everyone can get that.
VBScript is included with every modern version of Windows and is almost as simple. Open notepad, write simple program, give it a.vbs extension and double-click. Or more usefully, run a command prompt and 'cscript myscript.vbs'. There are plenty of tutorials on how to use it.
Alice is a language designed for people new to the idea of programming
There are a lot of languages designed for people new to programming, and many of them are better known and more widely supported than Alice. And I'm still far from convinced that a functional language is the best way to start. A lot of standard tasks are complicated by the functional approach. Alice at least is based on Standard ML which is not a pure functional language (more along the lines of LISP than, say, Miranda, the language I learned functional programming with), but I'd still avoid it for a few reasons, most notably the fact that the only GUI binding available for it is GTK+ which is a very complicated environment that I would say is not suitable for beginners.
The choices are, essentially:
* BASIC. If you'll forgive the pun, basic, but not actually useless. VB.NET is a useful language that you can pick up with relative ease, and it's reasonably easy to transition to C# later because they share the same standard library. BASIC has been widely criticised for not teaching structured programming techniques and leading to a variety of brain damage, but it isn't clear how well these criticisms apply to modern, structured, object-oriented BASIC implementations.
* Pascal / Object Pascal. Originally designed to teach structured programming techniques. Object Pascal (or, more precisely, "Pascal with Objects" as implemented by Borland in the early 90s) was a breakthrough language for me. Stuff I'd failed to grasp with C++ became much more obvious with the simpler implementation in Pascal. I'd say still useful pedagogically, even if the available systems (i.e. Delphi and a few open-source reimplementations thereof) are a little outdated.
* Smalltalk. An early object-oriented language, whose main developer was highly interested in the possibility of teaching children to program. A lot of people are put off smalltalk by its differences from most other languages (primarily that code is entered in an interactive environment, rather than written in a text editor and then compiled/executed) and strange syntax (although nothing like as strange as LISP). IMO, Smalltalk is the LISP of the object-oriented world and well worth looking at as a first language.
Some other contenders weren't designed or developed as pedagogical languages, but are worth considering anyway:
* Java. As somebody pointed out above, the downside of Java is the high overhead of boilerplate code that's required to do anything. The advantage is that you won't be constrained in what you can achieve by the environment... Java is pretty-much open ended, and almost everything you need to learn can be learned in it.
* Javascript. Don't laugh. Javascript is quite a good language, with support for a lot of neat stuff like closures, and it provides an interesting environment for a beginner to work in.
* Python. Interactive interpreter is a plus. Total lack of programming overhead is also a plus. Significant whitespace is a minus for a beginning programmer, as the tab/space confusion problem can be quite tricky for somebody who doesn't understand it at a low level to manage.
Exactly what I was going to say. I don't have a lot of experience with Scheme per-se, but I doubt it's significantly different in this regard to most other LISPs; I recently converted an algorithm to Java that was originally described by its author by providing the source code in CMU Common LISP, and while there's certainly a barrier to reading it if you are unfamiliar with the syntax by the time I reached the end I would say I was reading it as fluently as any other language I've worked with. If it only takes reading ~2000 lines of code to achieve that, it's hardly a problem.
Writing it may be harder, but reading is no real problem.
Why would you expect the PS3 to use some half-assed psuedostandard that not all TVs can actually display? PAL60 is a perversion of the standard that just happens to work on some TVs because the difference between 50Hz and 60Hz is within the tolerance of their hardware. You can't rely on it to work, and even when it does the results might not be what you want.
Example: my last TV could display PAL60 signals, but the picture ended up squashed in the top 3/4 of the height of the display, its aspect ratio completely distorted and practically unwatchable. If I bought a PS3 and it displayed games like this, I'd return it.
Where I am, standard def is approximately 720x576. Widescreen sets may support 1024x576. But even using your figures, my calculations say that it's only a factor of 6.4 increase. Interlacing reduces the frame rate, not the display resolution.
The issues with 25frames/50fields per second aren't new with the development of HD. Why is someone trying to relate the two?
Because with the introduction of HDTV we now have standards for both 50fps and 60fps that are both actively deployed in the same area, so the issue is now one that's on user-by-user basis, not a country-by-country basis. People who know each other and regularly play on each other's hardware are seeing differences now, not just people who travel from country to country.
50 fields is a lot, you can certainly play fast-paced game with those framerates quite well.
Certainly agree here. I've never understood why you would want more than this. Films run at 23.976fps, and you don't get many people complaining that the action is jittery. Most of us can't tell. I fail to see, therefore, why games should need to run at any higher frame rate -- except for issues of poor design where stuff is only calculated once per frame that may need to actually be calculated more frequently than that.
Built-in transparent full-volume encryption is pretty cool, especially when you can encrypt a flashdrive (on Win7) then still access the contents (with passphrase or other key source) on an older computer running XP or similar.
As this feature was trivially available with free third-party software, I don't see it being a huge improvement.
Strong two-way firewall with good configurability means no more spending time and possibly money on third-party firewalls. That saves system resources too. Vista had this too, and I've seen no sign of it being vulnerable to penetration.
Outbound filtering on firewalls is almost useless, especially as they become more common and attackers more frequently use the workarounds that they cannot protect against. The XP firewall is adequate for almost all users.
UAC makes running as a standard user a lot easier to deal with (it's a bloody pain on XP, and frankly running as Administrator is just bloody idiotic). Win7 has added more configurability to UAC and made it less in-your-face by default.
I've been running as a standard user on W2K and XP since 2001 and have never found any real issue. Runas is a simple-to-use service that provides similar benefits to UAC without the problems of it trying to guess what you're trying to do (and frequently getting it wrong).
Automatic driver installations and updates. WinXP's plug-and-play driver collection is horrifically outdated (it's an 8-year-old OS) and a lot of modern hardware requires manually installing drivers. On Win7, those drivers are already present on the system and get installed immediately, or Windows will check online, find your drivers, and download/install them for you (signed and certified binaries only, of course). Win7 will also check for updates to existing drivers, and allow you to download the updates with a single click.
Three points: 1 -- most users do not install new hardware, but just use what was installed on the machine to start with; 2 -- installing the manufactrer-provided driver is hardly a huge hassle; 3 -- this benefit will only last for about 6 months anyway, as a new generation of hardware that needs new drivers will be released pretty soon. And XP is already capable of online search for drivers and updating existing ones... it doesn't work because most manufacturers don't put their drivers into the scheme.
These are very much things that "most users" will find superior to XP. The hardware requirements are undeniably higher, but you can get computers for under $400 that are quite capable of running Win7, and mid-to-high-end new machines have more RAM than a 32-bit OS can utilize anyhow.
I run a 32-bit OS here that can use up to 64GB of memory. Are you sure about that last statement?
Application bloat will save the day for MS. It's already hard to manage a desktop of intensive apps and data on 32 bit XP limited to 3.5GB of RAM.
If you have need for more than 4GB RAM (not 3.5GB; that's the per-process virtual memory limit) then you have two options that don't mean upgrading to vista or win7:
* 64-bit XP * Windows Server 2003, which depending on the edition you're using supports up 128GB in 32-bit mode.
But I consider myself a very intensive memory user (at the moment I'm running Firefox, Thunderbird, Google Chrome, IE, Eclipse, MS Word, MS Excel and Photoshop) and find 2GB physical RAM adequate. Not sure who would need more than that on a desktop machine right now.
Marriage changes certain rights a person has, and allows legal claims that arose because of abuse, not the other way around:
It shouldn't change anything; that's the point. The legal status of two people who are married should be no different to the legal status of any other two people who are dependents (e.g. cohabiting partners).
Would we allow families to marry off their daughter to older men in return for payment?
Before I answer the question, remember that this happens anyway, whether or not the system permits it.
Now: If their church (or whatever other marriage-issuing authority they chose) permitted it, yes. This would, however, be completely meaningless as the person forcibly married could simply choose to ignore the marriage if they desired.
- How would monetary issues, property ownership, health care coverage, duties of care for minors, and land transfers be regulated? Would a couple participate in both, but would we need the proof of identity in each transaction?
The same way they are for cohabiting partners at the moment. Quite simple, really.
If a crafty husband walks out on his family and 4 kids, leaving nothing for them, would any crime have been committed?
Yes. Probably along the lines of failure to pay court-arranged child support. The marriage may also (at the option of the couple at the time of the marriage) have included a contract to share possessions in some fashion, at which point he may also be in violation of that contract, and could be ordered to comply and (like this lawyer) imprisoned if he refused to comply with the court's order.
Overall, if the government didn't have a single record of which 2 people were married, many of the crimes we prosecute now would get mired down in claims without more than testimonial evidence. It doesn't seem like it would simplify anything, to me
Why does whether or not two people are married even enter into any criminal procedings? It doesn't need to.
I do pair programming for a living. It's great for the senior guy to teach the junior guy what the heck is going on. That said, there needs to be a senior guy first.
When I was a CS student there was enough disparity between us all that in any randomly picked pair, there was a pretty good chance of one having a lot more experience than the other.
. . . to do some research, and choose for themselves whatever suits their needs best.
Chances are the students don't have the necessary permissions to install new software packages on the school's computers, so this would be a non-starter.
You're missing the point of the question. Pair programming involves both partners working on the code, watching as it's written, and one making live suggestions to the other as it's done. VNC would be a more appropriate solution to the problem, or if you're willing to drop the 'free' requirement, I've heard good stuff about this system, which at $100 per user isn't exactly break-the-bank kind of stuff.
Taking photos isn't bio-engineering and their is a lot of competition.
Yes, there's a lot. But my experience was that most were members of the same professional associations, and wouldn't consider licensing under any terms other than the standard form t&cs supplied by those associations.
If Wikipedia has changed their terms and are allowing cc-*-nc-* licensing, then I'll be very happy to stand corrected. If they still require licensing of all uses including commercial ones then I'm sorry, but I simply can't play that game.
They can't. One of the stated goals of the project is to allow commercial reproductions (e.g. distributions on CDROM or printed copies). To permit restriction of photographs to non-commercial uses would cripple this, effectively preventing them from reaching a key aim point. They'd rather not have the photo (which encourages somebody else -- perhaps somebody who already has that commercial use permit -- to take the photo for them) than have one that can't be used properly.
[The NYT's] article on the bad photos on Wikipedia doesn't include a single link to the bad photos themselves [...]
NYT, like most newspapers, writes the articles for print, then reproduces them on the web site. Their process simply does not support links in the article body (although you may find a 'related sites' sidebar). This is pretty standard, and you'll see the same on almost all newspaper websites, plus a large proportion of news sites that are written specifically for the web (e.g. news.bbc.co.uk).
the museum in question says that low res versions would be ok, but high res infringes on their copyright (note, the items in question are in the public domain in the US, but the laws regarding reproductions of items are a bit wonky in the UK)
Actually, my understanding is that the laws regarding reproductions are actually very similar. Corel v Bridgeman, for instance, was heard by a US court but the decision was based on UK law. The only problem is no UK court has ever heard an equivalent case, and UK courts don't generally recognise US court decisions as precedent, so it could theoretically go the other way. In all truth, a UK court would be likely to make the same decision (that reproductions of public domain works which were produced with nothing other than mechanical effort to improve the quality of the reproduction are not protected by copyright), but it is impossible to be certain, and nobody really wants to take the chance.
IANAL, but I have read extensively on copyright law and the common law system.
Slashdot Mirror
And now I've read the article and see I've misunderstood the scope of the discovery here.
Although it still seems an embryo is required for cloning, my point regarding stem cell research stands.
I am sure I am not the only one who is tired of hearing about ethical challenges that come with every small new incremental step in stem cell/cloning research. The issues haven't changed, they are the same as when cloning was first brought to the public spotlight when dolly was cloned; and they are the same as have been discussed in science fiction circles way before that.
Absolutely. If anything, this removes an "ethical challenge" -- that the creation of a human clone (as well as any other activity requiring the use of stem cells) would necessarily require the use of material from an aborted feotus. Seriously: this is a major breakthrough that (once the process has been refined and can be used on humans) means we no longer need feotal material for research purposes, which is something a lot of people object to.
I wrote: And I'm still far from convinced that a functional language is the best way to start. A lot of standard tasks are complicated by the functional approach. Alice at least is based on Standard ML which is not a pure functional language (more along the lines of LISP than, say, Miranda, the language I learned functional programming with), but I'd still avoid it for a few reasons, most notably the fact that the only GUI binding available for it is GTK+ which is a very complicated environment that I would say is not suitable for beginners.
And then I discovered there are two different languages called Alice. Mea culpa.
The reason films are acceptable at 24 frames is because there's a very large amount of motion blur inherent to the format. This blur smooths out movement and hides the low frame rate. Stop-motion animation *doesn't* have this motion blur, which becomes obvious whenever you see it.
There are plenty of techniques available that produce simulated motion blur in each frame. Why not use them?
There's a difference between how films are generated and how the images on the screen are generated (google). Games are unplayable at 24fps. 50FPS is acceptable, but not good.
Yes. My argument is that this is a flaw in the game design, not in the display device.
So...What is Windows written in?
What is the Linux kernel written in?
What are KDE and Gnome written in?
Autocad...Photoshop...MS Office?
AFIK, they are all C or C++
Off-the-shelf packages like these are atypical, and represent I believe less than 1% of code that is written commercially. They are dwarfed by the number of payroll systems, account management systems, workflow tracker systems, management information systems, intranets, extranets, web services, etc. Most of these are written (depending on how old they are) in C#, Java, Delphi, VB, Smalltalk, or even COBOL. Very few are in C or C++.
Also, a lot of this software would probably be written differently if it were started today. Microsoft's research OS, Singularity, is written in C#. I firmly believe that if they were to reimplement Office from scratch they would do so in C#. If I were starting a photoshop-like project today I would strongly consider a functional language.
I wish there were some language like BASIC still around these days. When I started programming a little over 20 years ago (I'm 29) I was able to plug my older brother's Vic-20 right into the TV and start writing code from there. Power on, "3000 bytes free, Ready.", in less than 1 second. You start hammering away with simple BASIC statements and if you want to organize it into a bigger program, prepend line numbers. Everyone can get that.
VBScript is included with every modern version of Windows and is almost as simple. Open notepad, write simple program, give it a .vbs extension and double-click. Or more usefully, run a command prompt and 'cscript myscript.vbs'. There are plenty of tutorials on how to use it.
Alice is a language designed for people new to the idea of programming
There are a lot of languages designed for people new to programming, and many of them are better known and more widely supported than Alice. And I'm still far from convinced that a functional language is the best way to start. A lot of standard tasks are complicated by the functional approach. Alice at least is based on Standard ML which is not a pure functional language (more along the lines of LISP than, say, Miranda, the language I learned functional programming with), but I'd still avoid it for a few reasons, most notably the fact that the only GUI binding available for it is GTK+ which is a very complicated environment that I would say is not suitable for beginners.
The choices are, essentially:
* BASIC. If you'll forgive the pun, basic, but not actually useless. VB.NET is a useful language that you can pick up with relative ease, and it's reasonably easy to transition to C# later because they share the same standard library. BASIC has been widely criticised for not teaching structured programming techniques and leading to a variety of brain damage, but it isn't clear how well these criticisms apply to modern, structured, object-oriented BASIC implementations.
* Pascal / Object Pascal. Originally designed to teach structured programming techniques. Object Pascal (or, more precisely, "Pascal with Objects" as implemented by Borland in the early 90s) was a breakthrough language for me. Stuff I'd failed to grasp with C++ became much more obvious with the simpler implementation in Pascal. I'd say still useful pedagogically, even if the available systems (i.e. Delphi and a few open-source reimplementations thereof) are a little outdated.
* Smalltalk. An early object-oriented language, whose main developer was highly interested in the possibility of teaching children to program. A lot of people are put off smalltalk by its differences from most other languages (primarily that code is entered in an interactive environment, rather than written in a text editor and then compiled/executed) and strange syntax (although nothing like as strange as LISP). IMO, Smalltalk is the LISP of the object-oriented world and well worth looking at as a first language.
Some other contenders weren't designed or developed as pedagogical languages, but are worth considering anyway:
* Java. As somebody pointed out above, the downside of Java is the high overhead of boilerplate code that's required to do anything. The advantage is that you won't be constrained in what you can achieve by the environment... Java is pretty-much open ended, and almost everything you need to learn can be learned in it.
* Javascript. Don't laugh. Javascript is quite a good language, with support for a lot of neat stuff like closures, and it provides an interesting environment for a beginner to work in.
* Python. Interactive interpreter is a plus. Total lack of programming overhead is also a plus. Significant whitespace is a minus for a beginning programmer, as the tab/space confusion problem can be quite tricky for somebody who doesn't understand it at a low level to manage.
Scheme isn't remotely write-only
Exactly what I was going to say. I don't have a lot of experience with Scheme per-se, but I doubt it's significantly different in this regard to most other LISPs; I recently converted an algorithm to Java that was originally described by its author by providing the source code in CMU Common LISP, and while there's certainly a barrier to reading it if you are unfamiliar with the syntax by the time I reached the end I would say I was reading it as fluently as any other language I've worked with. If it only takes reading ~2000 lines of code to achieve that, it's hardly a problem.
Writing it may be harder, but reading is no real problem.
Why would you expect the PS3 to use some half-assed psuedostandard that not all TVs can actually display? PAL60 is a perversion of the standard that just happens to work on some TVs because the difference between 50Hz and 60Hz is within the tolerance of their hardware. You can't rely on it to work, and even when it does the results might not be what you want.
Example: my last TV could display PAL60 signals, but the picture ended up squashed in the top 3/4 of the height of the display, its aspect ratio completely distorted and practically unwatchable. If I bought a PS3 and it displayed games like this, I'd return it.
and the difference is more then 1600x1200 vs 1024x768, it's 1920x1080 vs 320x240
Nothing uses 320x240. Seriously. Standard definition of a PAL TV is (approximately) 720x576.
Standard def is 640x480 interlaced
Where I am, standard def is approximately 720x576. Widescreen sets may support 1024x576. But even using your figures, my calculations say that it's only a factor of 6.4 increase. Interlacing reduces the frame rate, not the display resolution.
The issues with 25frames/50fields per second aren't new with the development of HD. Why is someone trying to relate the two?
Because with the introduction of HDTV we now have standards for both 50fps and 60fps that are both actively deployed in the same area, so the issue is now one that's on user-by-user basis, not a country-by-country basis. People who know each other and regularly play on each other's hardware are seeing differences now, not just people who travel from country to country.
50 fields is a lot, you can certainly play fast-paced game with those framerates quite well.
Certainly agree here. I've never understood why you would want more than this. Films run at 23.976fps, and you don't get many people complaining that the action is jittery. Most of us can't tell. I fail to see, therefore, why games should need to run at any higher frame rate -- except for issues of poor design where stuff is only calculated once per frame that may need to actually be calculated more frequently than that.
XP 32 bit can not use a full 4gb. It can only "see" 3.foo GB of ram, due to having only 32 bit address space
XP 32-bit can use PAE, which provides a 36-bit address space.
Reckon I've played 800 hours of Elite. And of Civ I, II and III.
Don't play many modern games but I'd assume they're similar in terms of replayability?
Built-in transparent full-volume encryption is pretty cool, especially when you can encrypt a flashdrive (on Win7) then still access the contents (with passphrase or other key source) on an older computer running XP or similar.
As this feature was trivially available with free third-party software, I don't see it being a huge improvement.
Strong two-way firewall with good configurability means no more spending time and possibly money on third-party firewalls. That saves system resources too. Vista had this too, and I've seen no sign of it being vulnerable to penetration.
Outbound filtering on firewalls is almost useless, especially as they become more common and attackers more frequently use the workarounds that they cannot protect against. The XP firewall is adequate for almost all users.
UAC makes running as a standard user a lot easier to deal with (it's a bloody pain on XP, and frankly running as Administrator is just bloody idiotic). Win7 has added more configurability to UAC and made it less in-your-face by default.
I've been running as a standard user on W2K and XP since 2001 and have never found any real issue. Runas is a simple-to-use service that provides similar benefits to UAC without the problems of it trying to guess what you're trying to do (and frequently getting it wrong).
Automatic driver installations and updates. WinXP's plug-and-play driver collection is horrifically outdated (it's an 8-year-old OS) and a lot of modern hardware requires manually installing drivers. On Win7, those drivers are already present on the system and get installed immediately, or Windows will check online, find your drivers, and download/install them for you (signed and certified binaries only, of course). Win7 will also check for updates to existing drivers, and allow you to download the updates with a single click.
Three points: 1 -- most users do not install new hardware, but just use what was installed on the machine to start with; 2 -- installing the manufactrer-provided driver is hardly a huge hassle; 3 -- this benefit will only last for about 6 months anyway, as a new generation of hardware that needs new drivers will be released pretty soon. And XP is already capable of online search for drivers and updating existing ones... it doesn't work because most manufacturers don't put their drivers into the scheme.
These are very much things that "most users" will find superior to XP. The hardware requirements are undeniably higher, but you can get computers for under $400 that are quite capable of running Win7, and mid-to-high-end new machines have more RAM than a 32-bit OS can utilize anyhow.
I run a 32-bit OS here that can use up to 64GB of memory. Are you sure about that last statement?
Application bloat will save the day for MS. It's already hard to manage a desktop of intensive apps and data on 32 bit XP limited to 3.5GB of RAM.
If you have need for more than 4GB RAM (not 3.5GB; that's the per-process virtual memory limit) then you have two options that don't mean upgrading to vista or win7:
* 64-bit XP
* Windows Server 2003, which depending on the edition you're using supports up 128GB in 32-bit mode.
But I consider myself a very intensive memory user (at the moment I'm running Firefox, Thunderbird, Google Chrome, IE, Eclipse, MS Word, MS Excel and Photoshop) and find 2GB physical RAM adequate. Not sure who would need more than that on a desktop machine right now.
Marriage changes certain rights a person has, and allows legal claims that arose because of abuse, not the other way around:
It shouldn't change anything; that's the point. The legal status of two people who are married should be no different to the legal status of any other two people who are dependents (e.g. cohabiting partners).
Would we allow families to marry off their daughter to older men in return for payment?
Before I answer the question, remember that this happens anyway, whether or not the system permits it.
Now: If their church (or whatever other marriage-issuing authority they chose) permitted it, yes. This would, however, be completely meaningless as the person forcibly married could simply choose to ignore the marriage if they desired.
- How would monetary issues, property ownership, health care coverage, duties of care for minors, and land transfers be regulated? Would a couple participate in both, but would we need the proof of identity in each transaction?
The same way they are for cohabiting partners at the moment. Quite simple, really.
If a crafty husband walks out on his family and 4 kids, leaving nothing for them, would any crime have been committed?
Yes. Probably along the lines of failure to pay court-arranged child support. The marriage may also (at the option of the couple at the time of the marriage) have included a contract to share possessions in some fashion, at which point he may also be in violation of that contract, and could be ordered to comply and (like this lawyer) imprisoned if he refused to comply with the court's order.
Overall, if the government didn't have a single record of which 2 people were married, many of the crimes we prosecute now would get mired down in claims without more than testimonial evidence. It doesn't seem like it would simplify anything, to me
Why does whether or not two people are married even enter into any criminal procedings? It doesn't need to.
I do pair programming for a living. It's great for the senior guy to teach the junior guy what the heck is going on. That said, there needs to be a senior guy first.
When I was a CS student there was enough disparity between us all that in any randomly picked pair, there was a pretty good chance of one having a lot more experience than the other.
. . . to do some research, and choose for themselves whatever suits their needs best.
Chances are the students don't have the necessary permissions to install new software packages on the school's computers, so this would be a non-starter.
I would recommend to use Subversion.
You're missing the point of the question. Pair programming involves both partners working on the code, watching as it's written, and one making live suggestions to the other as it's done. VNC would be a more appropriate solution to the problem, or if you're willing to drop the 'free' requirement, I've heard good stuff about this system, which at $100 per user isn't exactly break-the-bank kind of stuff.
Well, I guess that depends on who you bank with.
Taking photos isn't bio-engineering and their is a lot of competition.
Yes, there's a lot. But my experience was that most were members of the same professional associations, and wouldn't consider licensing under any terms other than the standard form t&cs supplied by those associations.
If Wikipedia has changed their terms and are allowing cc-*-nc-* licensing, then I'll be very happy to stand corrected. If they still require licensing of all uses including commercial ones then I'm sorry, but I simply can't play that game.
They can't. One of the stated goals of the project is to allow commercial reproductions (e.g. distributions on CDROM or printed copies). To permit restriction of photographs to non-commercial uses would cripple this, effectively preventing them from reaching a key aim point. They'd rather not have the photo (which encourages somebody else -- perhaps somebody who already has that commercial use permit -- to take the photo for them) than have one that can't be used properly.
[The NYT's] article on the bad photos on Wikipedia doesn't include a single link to the bad photos themselves [...]
NYT, like most newspapers, writes the articles for print, then reproduces them on the web site. Their process simply does not support links in the article body (although you may find a 'related sites' sidebar). This is pretty standard, and you'll see the same on almost all newspaper websites, plus a large proportion of news sites that are written specifically for the web (e.g. news.bbc.co.uk).
the museum in question says that low res versions would be ok, but high res infringes on their copyright (note, the items in question are in the public domain in the US, but the laws regarding reproductions of items are a bit wonky in the UK)
Actually, my understanding is that the laws regarding reproductions are actually very similar. Corel v Bridgeman, for instance, was heard by a US court but the decision was based on UK law. The only problem is no UK court has ever heard an equivalent case, and UK courts don't generally recognise US court decisions as precedent, so it could theoretically go the other way. In all truth, a UK court would be likely to make the same decision (that reproductions of public domain works which were produced with nothing other than mechanical effort to improve the quality of the reproduction are not protected by copyright), but it is impossible to be certain, and nobody really wants to take the chance.
IANAL, but I have read extensively on copyright law and the common law system.