An atmosphere is not absolutely necessary. Just have a look at the design of an fusion bomb. The nuclear warhead evaporates the styrofoam and you have your shockwave.
The problem is still that the warhead will vaporize the balls too, and even if it didn't the shockwave produced wouldn't impel the balls outward with enough velocity to make them a universal hazard. On top of that, even if you could set off a shockwave that would drive steel balls outward fast enough to do damage, by the time they got far enough from the blast that the radiation wasn't the main damage effect, they'd be so widely scattered that the odds that they'd hit anything would be remote.
Still not efficient. Each beam would radiate directly outward from the core, and if a ship was far enough from the core not to be damaged by the radiation from the nuke, the odds that a given beam would hit the ship is very small. At a mile from the bomb (which is how far one would have to be before the x-ray beams would be a bigger threat than the radiation from the reaction itself) the gap between x-ray beams would be more than a hundred yards, so even if you got lucky and hit a ship, you'd hit it with one beam, which is a very inefficient use of that much energy. You'd be better off building an x-ray cannon and using it one shot at a time.
I have a question about the Nukes in space thing. I know that, without an atmosphere, you don't get the massive shockwave which causes much of the damage that you see in atmospheric detonations. . . but, wouldn't the Nuke still generate several million degrees of thermal energy? Wouldn't it tend to vaporize anything nearby, and melt things that are a little farther away, but still within like a mile or two? Wouldn't it also release a massive amount of Neutron radiation? (I'm not sure - could you effectively shield against that much neutron radiation? I know that space craft have to have a certain level of shielding just to remain safe from 'normal' Solar radiation, but could you effectively shield against the radiation released from an H-Bomb?)
You're right about how an H-bomb would generate a massive amount of radiation. The problem is that getting a bomb within a mile or two of a ship isn't easy. The most important part is that the bomb can't cover that kind of distance really quickly, in terms of detection. Sure, you can shoot it at your opponent at high rate, but remember that in space you'll probably be considered "engaged with the enemy" from hundreds of miles out. They'll see the nuke coming, and can easily take measures to shoot it as it approaches. All they'd have to do is damage it and it won't detonate. If you could get it close it would certainly damage or destroy a ship, but in space it's the "get it close" part that turns into the challenge.
I disagree that nukes wouldn't be useful. Put enough tiny metal balls on it, send it into the middle of a fleet of ships and detonate. It will tear everything to shreds.
No, it wouldn't. Without an atomosphere there's no shockwave to propagate outward, and with no shockwave there's nothing to push the balls. A nuclear detonation isn't like using an explosive that creates an expanding ball of gas. In space it would just be a huge ball of heat and hard radiation, which would melt the balls without motivating them outward at any real rate of speed.
From the pictures, the "Arabic stickers" are stickers with Arabic letters stuck on the keyboard, to facilitate typing in Arabic. I'd consider that an odd political statement.
And when tv and phone comes over the internet that dial-up connection is pretty fucking useless.
TV can come from a satellite dish or the air, and people who have dial-up Internet don't usually have to worry about using VOIP since they can use the phone line itself (or, as they usually do, they use their cell phones). Neither of these issues makes broadband a necessity for accessing the Internet or the world at large.
Electricity is not a right. It will get cut off if you don't pay the bill.
Your malfunction is that you're misreading the article, and the comments about the arguments made. The article isn't arguing that broadband itself is a right, nor is (or was) electricity. It's universal access to broadband (or electricity, in the past) that's at issue. It's not that you should get power for free, it's that the power company is compelled to provide you access if you're willing to pay (that is, they can't flatly refuse to run a wire to your house if you request service). By the same token, the article is discussing the push to force broadband companies to make broadband accessible to anyone who's willing to pay the bill. Today, there are some people who can't get broadband access no matter how much they're willing to pay, because cable/phone companies are refusing to pay for infrastructure upgrades.
These require a communications network. This means broadband to me.
Why? Being able to communicate doesn't require broadband access. Dialup or a cellular modem are more than sufficient for access to the 'Net. Sure, it won't support watching TV online and high end gaming but I lived on dialup for years and never had any trouble with communications, even voice chat (Ventrilo didn't particularly like dialup but it worked).
Well, this may be horrifying to hear, but the large majority of your list of benefits doesn't require broadband access to get.
I sit on my couch with access to more information than was available to the greatest scholars in the world 50 years ago. I save hundreds (maybe thousands) of dollars a year by price shopping online, and hundreds more by reading informed reviews on products before I buy them. I can look up my symptoms if I'm feeling ill. I can look for a new job, and upon finding a prospect I can research the company to make sure they are legitimate and a good place to work. I can determine what kind of salary I should expect and how much I should pay for repairs on my car.
A dialup connection is more than sufficient for all of this. That's the problem you're going to encounter. Too many people make the mistake of thinking that "no broadband" means "no access to the Internet" and that's not true.
People that have never had a consistent, high speed internet connection don't understand these things.
Get over yourself. You don't even consider that people can access the 'Net without a broadband connection, so you're pretty well unqualified to discuss what these people understand. Heck, in "the sticks" you'll find that a lot of people just use cell phone modems to access the Internet, so trying to convince them that broadband is a necessity is an uphill battle.
You're absolutely correct, nothing obliges Google from making money... even if it help someone else do evil.
The flip side of this is that, if Google didn't censor searches, they'd be prohibited from being there at all. You can say that they should take a moral stand, but why is refusing to do business in China better than doing limited business, in this case? It's not like some other engine would spring up in Google's place that will allow these searches to work, so Google's presence doesn't leave the Chinese everyman any worse off than if they were absent, and in fact their presence makes it better in some ways. Given that, I can't agree that it directly parallels giving actual money to finance Hitler's rise to power.
it's even a problem in Latin America, where our corporations have convinced people that it's better to drink soft drinks than drink fruit juice from fruits plucked fresh off the vine.
Both are sugar water devoid of any physical presence that might regulate digestion.
Both equally qualify as "junk food".
You are trying to replace one stupid lie with another one.
Not exactly. Most soft drinks do not contain vitamins, and virtually every fruit juice does. Moreover, virtually no fruit juices contain caffiene but more than a third of soft drinks do.
This notion that "sugar water is healthy" is a big part of the current obesity epidemic.
Again, not exactly. Many people who are overweight consume too much fat, not sugar and other carbohydrates. Not drinking fruit juice isn't going to fix anything for these people.
But from my TV-watching experience, when you say "no" most of the time the good guys will whip out a warrant--they just asked to see if you'd cooperate, and refusing will inspire them to investigate more intensely. In fact the insubordinate but effective cop will likely break into your house anyway!
This is why you should never get your legal experience from television. In the real world, no officer with a warrant will ask nicely "just to see if you'd cooperate". Also, if an officer broke into your house, nothing found would be admissible, and in the real world most judges will summarily dismiss a case where evidence has been gathered improperly, since these cases virtually always fall apart due to evidence being excluded.
Legal?: I cant speak to international law, but seeing as there is effectively no government at least in that area of Somalia, I think you would have a goodd defense.
Just because there's no effective Somali government to complain doesn't mean that the rest of the international community won't take a very dim view of offshore bombardment. Blasting away at the shores of Somalia would be picking a major fight with more than just Somalia.
Moral?: Actuially this seems pretty easy to me. You have people fostering attacks on your shipping assets through an intentional money gathering scheme. They are not even trying to pretend that is not what they are doing. attacking the root of their ability to do their job would be very moral in my mind.
Then your view of morality is frail at best. It's very convenient to say that we can start shelling "pirate towns" but that assumes that these pirates are conveniently located in tight communities with no innocent bystanders. Living in proximity to people who do illegal things shouldn't carry a death penalty, according to most moral codes, and shelling from twenty miles out is not usually discriminate enough to ensure that you're not blowing up people who aren't participating in the money gathering scheme.
Ethical?: The idea of ethics in war are confusing to me as a general rule, so I wont comment.
You shouldn't. Take the point above about at least trying not to kill people who just happen to be nearby to those you're targeting, and take it a step further to the understanding that attempting total annihilation has historically never been effective. Until you understand that (i) fighting Somali pirates isn't in any real sense a "war" and (ii) most of the people who would be harmed by your suggestion aren't involved in piracy, you're not qualified to comment on possible solutions.
> You say it's easy to just turn off your computer to "escape" from the internet, but that's like saying that you can easily escape from physical bullying by staying locked up in your house.
But that's not the point of the parent post. The point is that there's no need for a "911 equivalent" on the computer. Cyber-bullying is a real problem, but it's not a moment-critical problem like getting beaten up. If you have to switch it off for five minutes or an hour until you can call for help it's not going to result in physical harm to you. That's why the button is a dumb idea.
I don't normally shout RTFA, but the writeup doesn't describe the article very well. California doesn't care about the size of your TV, the article states that they're putting mandatory limits on how much power it can use. This is a problem for manufacturers, but consumers will still be able to buy whatever TV size they care to own.
Smart people who use this method would consider using splits. Good luck guessing when my password is (line 3, word 4, first 5 letters) plus (line 3, word 2, first 1 letter) plus the last word. Run my sheet through your dictionary attack and you'll never, ever get it right, and remembering it is 345,321,lastword.
You're correct that retail versions of XP don't have this restriction, but you mentioned OEM keys in your post. If you have a retail version, then you can fix the problem by calling Microsoft on the phone and they'll validate your key when you explain what happened.
For my mention that you could give the license to the person you gave the PC to, I said that to show that Microsoft probably didn't disable the key as you describe in your post, they just won't validate it online after the hardware change. The key is still valid. Again, get on the phone and they should allow it to activate on the new PC (assuming it's a retail key).
> Eventually I wanted to upgrade again, so I gave a family member my old PC(after wiping Windows and installing Ubuntu, *gasp*) and tried to reactivate again on a new board with a new CPU + GPU + RAM + more HDDs.
This is not to say that I agree with the concept, but here's where you stepped outside the official license. Since XP is licensed only for the first computer you install it on, when you did this and tried to install it on a new platform you violated the license. Again, I think that license scheme sucks big time, but you can't say that you're "doing it the right way" and that Microsoft screwed you through trickery or by cancelling a legitimate license. To them it's no longer legitimate.
> There's no way I'm letting a company force me to pay twice!
I'm with you 1000 percent here, but then your only legal option is to pick a non-Windows OS. Your XP license isn't invalid, though. You could give it to the family member that got your old PC to install beside (or in place of) Ubuntu, and Microsoft would very likely activate it on that machine.
> Don't you know that's how justice is supposed to work? The police over-charge, your lawyers counter-offer, you haggle and you get a verdict.
Your failure is in this sentence. The police didn't overcharge in this case. The crime he confessed to was planning to enter the store and steal a CD, and that's Felony Commercial Burglary in California. They let him plead to a lesser offense that didn't directly mesh with his own confession on the basis that it's cheaper to plead him to that lesser offense than to go to trial and convict for FCB. They get expedience, and he gets a conviction for petty larceny when he committed and confessed to FCB.
If you have an argument that FCB shouldn't apply to a $20.00 CD, then your fight is with the California legislature, not with the police.
Passenger planes running at cruising speed move much faster than small craft, and well within the flight envelope of a fighter. Even if it was running very slowly (or in the case of a small craft), the fighter can fly a zigzag pattern behind the plane that covers more distance along the flight path so that they can keep above stall speed. In the case where the small craft decelerates to a point where fighters can't safely stay with it (which some drug runners have been known to do) they'd just dispatch a helicopter to run the escort.
> "Consenting Adult" in some countries is a 14 year old. In some Mexican cities, it's 12. If you want to draw a line in the sand with your "consenting adults", you'll soon see that where you are will quickly become "bigotry and close-minded" and a progressive movement will move to alter the definition of the line you've drawn.
Age of consent is not the same for legal purposes as "consenting adult". Since we're discussing where I'd draw the line for a law, it's reasonable to stick with the definition as it stands in the country in question. Since we're discussing marriage as a legal construct, and "consenting adult" is a legal construct, it's accurate for the purpose.
> Besides, the fact that you say "consenting adults" is biggoted, unfair, and close-minded to those who practice beastiality and statutory rape. They are people too, are they not? Who are you to say they can't show their love like you can?
Nice try, but the flip side is what burns you. One half of the bestiality pair isn't "people", so that part falls to pieces. Also, we're discussing marriage, which is a legal construct, so incorporating animals (which can't participate in contracts) and chidren (who can't participate in contracts) doesn't make any sense.
> Face it, when you call someone else a monster, someone behind you is calling you a monster. the only difference is that the person who YOU are accusing is not trying to take some "open-minded" highground.
Sorry, but restricting consenting adults from doing something that other consenting adults can do without question is discriminatory. There's no basis for prohibiting same sex marriages between consenting adults when opposite sex marriages between consenting adults is not prohibited. That's the only parallel that fits, and again, your attempt to insert animals and children fails to rebut the actual argument because it's specious.
> Instead of arguing for the right to call a homosexual union a "marriage", the gay rights movement should be arguing for equal treatment of those unions to allow jail visits, hospital visits, burial rites, etc. The Women's Suffrage movement didn't fight so the word "male" would also mean "female". Picking your battles is 90% of the recipe for any political success.
I entirely agree, but the word that the law uses for such unions is "marriage" and until that changes for everyone, it's should be available to anyone. Forms from the IRS say "married". Insurance companies say "married". Military benefits say "married". That's the legal term, and civil unions to date have been "seperate but equal" in the same way that the old racial "seperate but equal" constructs were, which is to say not equal at all. If governments are going to insist on using the word, then it should be equal. If not, then governments should eject it from their nomenclature.
> Because being raised by a person of only one gender is bad, it very well may be just as bad to be raised by two people of only one gender.
You're going to have to back this up with something, because as it stands it's counter to evidence. One of the major problems with single parent households is the need for the parent to be absent (mostly for wage earning) significantly more than two-parent households. Therefore, for the most widely recognized problem facing children of a single parent, your argument falls flat.
> For laws that are even less specific, would you prefer to have the ability (or let others have the ability) to marry animals or inanimate objects?
Completely specious argument, unless animals have suddenly gained the right to own property or sign contracts or whatever else you can attach to adult humans. Comparing gay marriage with these things is a weak argument because animals and objects aren't consenting adults. Please give it up, because only an idiot would try to defend it at this point.
> Where exactly do you prefer to set the moral standard for marriage if not between a man and a woman?
I'm going to go back to "consenting adults" on this one. Why should I consider that immoral? Because your holy book says so?
> I agree there is nothing wrong with interracial couples under the premise a person has no control over their race however I'm also someone who believes a person *does* have control over their sexual preferences and therefore should not get special treatment if they choose a preference that goes against societal standards. And it is those societal standards that continue to be tested in the West and the people continue to show they are against gay marriage (not so much in the New England states or in San Francisco though).
Since your argument fits perfectly when you substitute "religion", your argument fails the test of Constitutional equality. If you don't like that, Iran would be your best choice, or the Vatican City. And as a side note, gay people do get "special" treatment because of their orientation, it's just negative treatment, just like blacks and Jews used to get.
> Of course, if you are a liberal who believes there is no personal responsibility and by extension you have no control over your sexual preferences then you believes that you are being treated unfairly in the eyes of the law when you are told you cannot marry someone of the same sex. The lack of personal responsibility is a major issue in American society today that needs remedied, fast.
"Liberal" isn't a curse word, no matter what Sean Hannity would have you believe. It's a nice try to tie personal responsibility to bias, though. As much as I hate to prove Godwin true, that's pretty much exactly the tack that the Third Reich took, in treating Jews like they deserved the trouble they got by not renouncing Judaism. So, even if you believe that gays have control of their sexual preference, you're still in great company for telling them that they should just accept the discrimination for their choice, and that fighting to change a law they see as unjust is not their place. Well done.
> I do not choose to be heterosexual. But I do choose not to indulge my sexuality with every attractive other-gender person I encounter.
Gay people wanting to marry are choosing a single partner, not "every attractive [same]-gender person [they] encounter." Your argument fails. Most gay people are no more promiscuous than most straight people.
Slashdot Mirror
An atmosphere is not absolutely necessary. Just have a look at the design of an fusion bomb. The nuclear warhead evaporates the styrofoam and you have your shockwave.
The problem is still that the warhead will vaporize the balls too, and even if it didn't the shockwave produced wouldn't impel the balls outward with enough velocity to make them a universal hazard. On top of that, even if you could set off a shockwave that would drive steel balls outward fast enough to do damage, by the time they got far enough from the blast that the radiation wasn't the main damage effect, they'd be so widely scattered that the odds that they'd hit anything would be remote.
Virg
Still not efficient. Each beam would radiate directly outward from the core, and if a ship was far enough from the core not to be damaged by the radiation from the nuke, the odds that a given beam would hit the ship is very small. At a mile from the bomb (which is how far one would have to be before the x-ray beams would be a bigger threat than the radiation from the reaction itself) the gap between x-ray beams would be more than a hundred yards, so even if you got lucky and hit a ship, you'd hit it with one beam, which is a very inefficient use of that much energy. You'd be better off building an x-ray cannon and using it one shot at a time.
Virg
I have a question about the Nukes in space thing. I know that, without an atmosphere, you don't get the massive shockwave which causes much of the damage that you see in atmospheric detonations. . . but, wouldn't the Nuke still generate several million degrees of thermal energy? Wouldn't it tend to vaporize anything nearby, and melt things that are a little farther away, but still within like a mile or two? Wouldn't it also release a massive amount of Neutron radiation? (I'm not sure - could you effectively shield against that much neutron radiation? I know that space craft have to have a certain level of shielding just to remain safe from 'normal' Solar radiation, but could you effectively shield against the radiation released from an H-Bomb?)
You're right about how an H-bomb would generate a massive amount of radiation. The problem is that getting a bomb within a mile or two of a ship isn't easy. The most important part is that the bomb can't cover that kind of distance really quickly, in terms of detection. Sure, you can shoot it at your opponent at high rate, but remember that in space you'll probably be considered "engaged with the enemy" from hundreds of miles out. They'll see the nuke coming, and can easily take measures to shoot it as it approaches. All they'd have to do is damage it and it won't detonate. If you could get it close it would certainly damage or destroy a ship, but in space it's the "get it close" part that turns into the challenge.
Virg
I disagree that nukes wouldn't be useful. Put enough tiny metal balls on it, send it into the middle of a fleet of ships and detonate. It will tear everything to shreds.
No, it wouldn't. Without an atomosphere there's no shockwave to propagate outward, and with no shockwave there's nothing to push the balls. A nuclear detonation isn't like using an explosive that creates an expanding ball of gas. In space it would just be a huge ball of heat and hard radiation, which would melt the balls without motivating them outward at any real rate of speed.
Virg
Given the political statements on her laptop...
From the pictures, the "Arabic stickers" are stickers with Arabic letters stuck on the keyboard, to facilitate typing in Arabic. I'd consider that an odd political statement.
Virg
And when tv and phone comes over the internet that dial-up connection is pretty fucking useless.
TV can come from a satellite dish or the air, and people who have dial-up Internet don't usually have to worry about using VOIP since they can use the phone line itself (or, as they usually do, they use their cell phones). Neither of these issues makes broadband a necessity for accessing the Internet or the world at large.
Virg
Electricity is not a right. It will get cut off if you don't pay the bill.
Your malfunction is that you're misreading the article, and the comments about the arguments made. The article isn't arguing that broadband itself is a right, nor is (or was) electricity. It's universal access to broadband (or electricity, in the past) that's at issue. It's not that you should get power for free, it's that the power company is compelled to provide you access if you're willing to pay (that is, they can't flatly refuse to run a wire to your house if you request service). By the same token, the article is discussing the push to force broadband companies to make broadband accessible to anyone who's willing to pay the bill. Today, there are some people who can't get broadband access no matter how much they're willing to pay, because cable/phone companies are refusing to pay for infrastructure upgrades.
Virg
These require a communications network. This means broadband to me.
Why? Being able to communicate doesn't require broadband access. Dialup or a cellular modem are more than sufficient for access to the 'Net. Sure, it won't support watching TV online and high end gaming but I lived on dialup for years and never had any trouble with communications, even voice chat (Ventrilo didn't particularly like dialup but it worked).
Virg
I sit on my couch with access to more information than was available to the greatest scholars in the world 50 years ago. I save hundreds (maybe thousands) of dollars a year by price shopping online, and hundreds more by reading informed reviews on products before I buy them. I can look up my symptoms if I'm feeling ill. I can look for a new job, and upon finding a prospect I can research the company to make sure they are legitimate and a good place to work. I can determine what kind of salary I should expect and how much I should pay for repairs on my car.
A dialup connection is more than sufficient for all of this. That's the problem you're going to encounter. Too many people make the mistake of thinking that "no broadband" means "no access to the Internet" and that's not true.
People that have never had a consistent, high speed internet connection don't understand these things.
Get over yourself. You don't even consider that people can access the 'Net without a broadband connection, so you're pretty well unqualified to discuss what these people understand. Heck, in "the sticks" you'll find that a lot of people just use cell phone modems to access the Internet, so trying to convince them that broadband is a necessity is an uphill battle.
Virg
You're absolutely correct, nothing obliges Google from making money... even if it help someone else do evil.
The flip side of this is that, if Google didn't censor searches, they'd be prohibited from being there at all. You can say that they should take a moral stand, but why is refusing to do business in China better than doing limited business, in this case? It's not like some other engine would spring up in Google's place that will allow these searches to work, so Google's presence doesn't leave the Chinese everyman any worse off than if they were absent, and in fact their presence makes it better in some ways. Given that, I can't agree that it directly parallels giving actual money to finance Hitler's rise to power.
Virg
it's even a problem in Latin America, where our corporations have convinced people that it's better to drink soft drinks than drink fruit juice from fruits plucked fresh off the vine.
Both are sugar water devoid of any physical presence that might regulate digestion.
Both equally qualify as "junk food".
You are trying to replace one stupid lie with another one.
Not exactly. Most soft drinks do not contain vitamins, and virtually every fruit juice does. Moreover, virtually no fruit juices contain caffiene but more than a third of soft drinks do.
This notion that "sugar water is healthy" is a big part of the current obesity epidemic.
Again, not exactly. Many people who are overweight consume too much fat, not sugar and other carbohydrates. Not drinking fruit juice isn't going to fix anything for these people.
Virg
But from my TV-watching experience, when you say "no" most of the time the good guys will whip out a warrant--they just asked to see if you'd cooperate, and refusing will inspire them to investigate more intensely. In fact the insubordinate but effective cop will likely break into your house anyway!
This is why you should never get your legal experience from television. In the real world, no officer with a warrant will ask nicely "just to see if you'd cooperate". Also, if an officer broke into your house, nothing found would be admissible, and in the real world most judges will summarily dismiss a case where evidence has been gathered improperly, since these cases virtually always fall apart due to evidence being excluded.
Virg
Legal?: I cant speak to international law, but seeing as there is effectively no government at least in that area of Somalia, I think you would have a goodd defense.
Just because there's no effective Somali government to complain doesn't mean that the rest of the international community won't take a very dim view of offshore bombardment. Blasting away at the shores of Somalia would be picking a major fight with more than just Somalia.
Moral?: Actuially this seems pretty easy to me. You have people fostering attacks on your shipping assets through an intentional money gathering scheme. They are not even trying to pretend that is not what they are doing. attacking the root of their ability to do their job would be very moral in my mind.
Then your view of morality is frail at best. It's very convenient to say that we can start shelling "pirate towns" but that assumes that these pirates are conveniently located in tight communities with no innocent bystanders. Living in proximity to people who do illegal things shouldn't carry a death penalty, according to most moral codes, and shelling from twenty miles out is not usually discriminate enough to ensure that you're not blowing up people who aren't participating in the money gathering scheme.
Ethical?: The idea of ethics in war are confusing to me as a general rule, so I wont comment.
You shouldn't. Take the point above about at least trying not to kill people who just happen to be nearby to those you're targeting, and take it a step further to the understanding that attempting total annihilation has historically never been effective. Until you understand that (i) fighting Somali pirates isn't in any real sense a "war" and (ii) most of the people who would be harmed by your suggestion aren't involved in piracy, you're not qualified to comment on possible solutions.
Virg
> You say it's easy to just turn off your computer to "escape" from the internet, but that's like saying that you can easily escape from physical bullying by staying locked up in your house.
But that's not the point of the parent post. The point is that there's no need for a "911 equivalent" on the computer. Cyber-bullying is a real problem, but it's not a moment-critical problem like getting beaten up. If you have to switch it off for five minutes or an hour until you can call for help it's not going to result in physical harm to you. That's why the button is a dumb idea.
Virg
I don't normally shout RTFA, but the writeup doesn't describe the article very well. California doesn't care about the size of your TV, the article states that they're putting mandatory limits on how much power it can use. This is a problem for manufacturers, but consumers will still be able to buy whatever TV size they care to own.
Virg
> slashdot has 6 letters?
He pulled a dopey. He meant to say that in step two, he counts the number of consonants in the web site name.
Virg
Smart people who use this method would consider using splits. Good luck guessing when my password is (line 3, word 4, first 5 letters) plus (line 3, word 2, first 1 letter) plus the last word. Run my sheet through your dictionary attack and you'll never, ever get it right, and remembering it is 345,321,lastword.
Virg
> Wasn't this only the OEM license keys?
You're correct that retail versions of XP don't have this restriction, but you mentioned OEM keys in your post. If you have a retail version, then you can fix the problem by calling Microsoft on the phone and they'll validate your key when you explain what happened.
For my mention that you could give the license to the person you gave the PC to, I said that to show that Microsoft probably didn't disable the key as you describe in your post, they just won't validate it online after the hardware change. The key is still valid. Again, get on the phone and they should allow it to activate on the new PC (assuming it's a retail key).
Virg
> Eventually I wanted to upgrade again, so I gave a family member my old PC(after wiping Windows and installing Ubuntu, *gasp*) and tried to reactivate again on a new board with a new CPU + GPU + RAM + more HDDs.
This is not to say that I agree with the concept, but here's where you stepped outside the official license. Since XP is licensed only for the first computer you install it on, when you did this and tried to install it on a new platform you violated the license. Again, I think that license scheme sucks big time, but you can't say that you're "doing it the right way" and that Microsoft screwed you through trickery or by cancelling a legitimate license. To them it's no longer legitimate.
> There's no way I'm letting a company force me to pay twice!
I'm with you 1000 percent here, but then your only legal option is to pick a non-Windows OS. Your XP license isn't invalid, though. You could give it to the family member that got your old PC to install beside (or in place of) Ubuntu, and Microsoft would very likely activate it on that machine.
Virg
> Don't you know that's how justice is supposed to work? The police over-charge, your lawyers counter-offer, you haggle and you get a verdict.
Your failure is in this sentence. The police didn't overcharge in this case. The crime he confessed to was planning to enter the store and steal a CD, and that's Felony Commercial Burglary in California. They let him plead to a lesser offense that didn't directly mesh with his own confession on the basis that it's cheaper to plead him to that lesser offense than to go to trial and convict for FCB. They get expedience, and he gets a conviction for petty larceny when he committed and confessed to FCB.
If you have an argument that FCB shouldn't apply to a $20.00 CD, then your fight is with the California legislature, not with the police.
Virg
Passenger planes running at cruising speed move much faster than small craft, and well within the flight envelope of a fighter. Even if it was running very slowly (or in the case of a small craft), the fighter can fly a zigzag pattern behind the plane that covers more distance along the flight path so that they can keep above stall speed. In the case where the small craft decelerates to a point where fighters can't safely stay with it (which some drug runners have been known to do) they'd just dispatch a helicopter to run the escort.
Virg
> "Consenting Adult" in some countries is a 14 year old. In some Mexican cities, it's 12. If you want to draw a line in the sand with your "consenting adults", you'll soon see that where you are will quickly become "bigotry and close-minded" and a progressive movement will move to alter the definition of the line you've drawn.
Age of consent is not the same for legal purposes as "consenting adult". Since we're discussing where I'd draw the line for a law, it's reasonable to stick with the definition as it stands in the country in question. Since we're discussing marriage as a legal construct, and "consenting adult" is a legal construct, it's accurate for the purpose.
> Besides, the fact that you say "consenting adults" is biggoted, unfair, and close-minded to those who practice beastiality and statutory rape. They are people too, are they not? Who are you to say they can't show their love like you can?
Nice try, but the flip side is what burns you. One half of the bestiality pair isn't "people", so that part falls to pieces. Also, we're discussing marriage, which is a legal construct, so incorporating animals (which can't participate in contracts) and chidren (who can't participate in contracts) doesn't make any sense.
> Face it, when you call someone else a monster, someone behind you is calling you a monster. the only difference is that the person who YOU are accusing is not trying to take some "open-minded" highground.
Sorry, but restricting consenting adults from doing something that other consenting adults can do without question is discriminatory. There's no basis for prohibiting same sex marriages between consenting adults when opposite sex marriages between consenting adults is not prohibited. That's the only parallel that fits, and again, your attempt to insert animals and children fails to rebut the actual argument because it's specious.
> Instead of arguing for the right to call a homosexual union a "marriage", the gay rights movement should be arguing for equal treatment of those unions to allow jail visits, hospital visits, burial rites, etc. The Women's Suffrage movement didn't fight so the word "male" would also mean "female". Picking your battles is 90% of the recipe for any political success.
I entirely agree, but the word that the law uses for such unions is "marriage" and until that changes for everyone, it's should be available to anyone. Forms from the IRS say "married". Insurance companies say "married". Military benefits say "married". That's the legal term, and civil unions to date have been "seperate but equal" in the same way that the old racial "seperate but equal" constructs were, which is to say not equal at all. If governments are going to insist on using the word, then it should be equal. If not, then governments should eject it from their nomenclature.
Virg
> Because being raised by a person of only one gender is bad, it very well may be just as bad to be raised by two people of only one gender.
You're going to have to back this up with something, because as it stands it's counter to evidence. One of the major problems with single parent households is the need for the parent to be absent (mostly for wage earning) significantly more than two-parent households. Therefore, for the most widely recognized problem facing children of a single parent, your argument falls flat.
Virg
> For laws that are even less specific, would you prefer to have the ability (or let others have the ability) to marry animals or inanimate objects?
Completely specious argument, unless animals have suddenly gained the right to own property or sign contracts or whatever else you can attach to adult humans. Comparing gay marriage with these things is a weak argument because animals and objects aren't consenting adults. Please give it up, because only an idiot would try to defend it at this point.
> Where exactly do you prefer to set the moral standard for marriage if not between a man and a woman?
I'm going to go back to "consenting adults" on this one. Why should I consider that immoral? Because your holy book says so?
> I agree there is nothing wrong with interracial couples under the premise a person has no control over their race however I'm also someone who believes a person *does* have control over their sexual preferences and therefore should not get special treatment if they choose a preference that goes against societal standards. And it is those societal standards that continue to be tested in the West and the people continue to show they are against gay marriage (not so much in the New England states or in San Francisco though).
Since your argument fits perfectly when you substitute "religion", your argument fails the test of Constitutional equality. If you don't like that, Iran would be your best choice, or the Vatican City. And as a side note, gay people do get "special" treatment because of their orientation, it's just negative treatment, just like blacks and Jews used to get.
> Of course, if you are a liberal who believes there is no personal responsibility and by extension you have no control over your sexual preferences then you believes that you are being treated unfairly in the eyes of the law when you are told you cannot marry someone of the same sex. The lack of personal responsibility is a major issue in American society today that needs remedied, fast.
"Liberal" isn't a curse word, no matter what Sean Hannity would have you believe. It's a nice try to tie personal responsibility to bias, though. As much as I hate to prove Godwin true, that's pretty much exactly the tack that the Third Reich took, in treating Jews like they deserved the trouble they got by not renouncing Judaism. So, even if you believe that gays have control of their sexual preference, you're still in great company for telling them that they should just accept the discrimination for their choice, and that fighting to change a law they see as unjust is not their place. Well done.
Virg
> I do not choose to be heterosexual. But I do choose not to indulge my sexuality with every attractive other-gender person I encounter.
Gay people wanting to marry are choosing a single partner, not "every attractive [same]-gender person [they] encounter." Your argument fails. Most gay people are no more promiscuous than most straight people.
Virg