Actually, maybe. Microsoft already owns rights to online depictions of Whistler's Mother for their Encarta encyclopedia, so they could partake of this whimsy if it so struck them. However, Microsoft has always been slow to acknowledge codenames in their software once it gets to final distribution stage.
It's commonly left out, because Russian doesn't normally allow hard "e" sounds in the middle of words (unless they're of foreign origin) -- since "e" is a common vowel, all the "y"s would be redundant. The "y" sound is indicated by the vowel, but it's really a softening of the previous consonant more than its own independent sound. I'd have transcribed it "zv'ezda", but that still doesn't help you unless you know what to make of the apostrophe.
You also have to factor in deaths from the Russian space program (Vladimir Komarov, Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev) and the countless animal deaths in the early days. Even when they were not directly involved in NASA's programs, it's not as though NASA didn't take heed of the mistakes learned by their deaths as well.
And modern Space exploration has only been going on for fifty years now. Presidents have been getting assasinated for the last couple hundred years. Since the space program started, only one president (JFK) has been assasinated, though their have been other attempts (Reagan, etc.) By your logic, space exploration remains ten times as fatal as the office of president.
On the other hand, the potential of placing these types of turbines in the ocean not near the shoreline is very tempting.
No it isn't. By "these types of turbines", you must mean the turbines in question: Wells turbines. They're oscillating water columns, and they require large waves in order to function. You don't find large waves out at sea. In fact, you need rocky shorelines (not just shorelines) to get OWCs functioning, because of the wave amplitudes required (i.e. hooray for Scotland, but California will have to explore other methods).
What's more, you have to run cabling to shore in order to transport the electricity once generated. That introduces a second limitation on the use of OWCs at distant sea, as though their complete abject failure weren't sufficient limitation.
Tidal generators are the stuff dreams are made of
on
Wave Driven Generators
·
· Score: 3
What the press release doesn't make clear is that Wavegen's generator has actually made its schedule: the 2000 rollout was promised back in 1998. How many technologies do you know which have made their window like that?
What the press release also doesn't mention is how Wavegen's generators don't pose the same ecological threat that other generators have historically posed: the chief alternative is a "tidal fence" which completely blocks off the channel in the same way a dam blocks off a river. And like with dams, tidal fences can disrupt the migration and spawning patterns of fish and other sea creatures, who shouldn't be forced to bear the brunt of human progress upon their tuckered little bodies. Wavegen's generators, as you can see from the diagram pose no such risk.
Now, let's just make sure we don't steal too much momentum from the moon and have it crash into the earth. That would put a real damper on any ipo.
Hardcopies of braille books are deteriorating just like other paper books, except at a faster rate: in normal paper, you only have to contend with acids in the paper, whereas with braille paper you have to deal with these same acids in addition to oils and dirt from physical contact between the reader's fingers and the paper surface. (Imagine every third-grader who checks out a library book rubbing his greasy fingers against the words as he reads it, and you might get an idea of the problem.) As such, there is an effort underway to digitize all old braille books, and only recently has the appropriate braille scanning software been developed.
The ultimate irony would be for these digital copies to be subsequently stored on a disk medium that itself resembles braille. Actually, that would be the penultimate irony. The ultimate irony would be for the disk medium to fail for the same reasons that historical braille systems have failed, but as the blurb points out, this systems is not strictly braille-like.
When this enigma machine was stolen, no expense was spared, both by British detectives and by interested parties in the private sector (including the Sunday Times), who understood what important part of British cultural heritage enigma machines constitute.
But steal from the weak, and the weak will have to do without; for the rich will watch idly by. More than fifty years after the engima machines were built to fight the Nazis, the descendants of Churchill are doing nothing to help recover works of art stolen by those same Nazis, stolen from homes of the people they liquidated.
It's not that there aren't appropriate mechanisms aren't in place to find and recover stolen art. The Art Loss Register will soon be seeing its tenth birthday. The means exists but the will is lacking: cultural racism prevents otherwise honest and decent people from lending their hand and bringing these works home.
I'm happy for Bletchley Park and the relief they must feel now that their engima machine is returned to their collective busom. Now, perhaps, they can find the time to recover Nazi loot that remains stolen, even now in the 21st century! Don't you see? Churchill, Stalin, and the British people thought they won the war, but they've lost as long as the Nazis' perpetrations cast a stain upon England. What would Churchill do?
That's the question, and I fear England may ignore the answer.
The problem isn't whether fingerprints are unique (although it's an interesting point that their uniqueness has never been proved). For all the author cares, they are unique. It's irrelevent to his chief argument.
The problem is that exact complete fingerprints aren't used in forensic investigation. Mere fragments are. And not just fragments; sloppy fragments, read by making impressions with the detective's dust and transfered onto paper. The question is therefore whether those fragments are unique relative to other fragments, given the additional fudge factor in how they're read, and whether the use of fragments instead of complete fingerprints is sufficient.
People need to work on their critical-reading skills.
I'm not just talking about whether censorware is technologically effective (and numerous studies have proven it's not). I'm saying it's not socially effective in deterring people from looking at stuff they want to see.
Take your MPAA example, which you misstate. R and X ratings are quite effective, and the MPAA very much does pay attention, but not for the purpose of deterring people (even minors) from seeing violence or sex in theaters. R and X ratings encourage viewership, since they assure hormonally empowered youths to see a movie which they might otherwise pass by. Whenever a movie is produced, much time is spent determining which audience it's intended at, and much time is spent in postproduction inserting or excising breasts to give the film the precise rating the coporate underwriters intend. Every ounce of human flesh, every "pussy shot", every rape scene, every domestic violence incident, every shame borne by the family of a starving soaps actress (or by herself in her later years, when she realizes what has become of her childhood pride) is meticulously planned and placed by the bearded man with the megaphone.
It's the same with internet censorware. When censorware becomes an unfortunate universal reality among consumers (either by installing it themselves or through AOL proxy servers, etc.), you'll see web authors inserting or excising breasts to give their webpages the precise rating their own corporate underwriters intend. Censorware ratings can work both ways, blocking or informing the user which sites have the ratings he (and it's predominantly 'he's) wishes to view. Instead of having sites vying to stack search engines with their smut, you'll see them stack the censorware stats.
But getting back to my original point, censorware isn't effective because it tells the user: "Aha, this site contains something naughty". The user, his interest piqued, will wonder what he's missing and will do whatever it takes to see what he's forbidden to see. Film censors are effective precisely because they prevent the viewer from ever knowing what he's missing (since consumers don't have access to insider knowledge about what is and what is not allowed to go to production). Censorware cannot ever be as effective, because even when it succeeds in blocking a site, the consumer is inevitably told what is happening.
If by "circumstantial evidence" you mean finger prints, the murder weapon, dna evidence, and fiber samples, then yes. I don't think we should have any capital cases, but given the current reality of capital punishment, there has to be more evidence than merely one witness's testimony. Too much can go wrong. At the time, it was dark, the events happened too fast, and the witness had never seen him before. All she knew was that some black man had killed a white Texan, and she later convinced herself that it was Graham.
Eye witness testimony is only damning because people give it undue authority. Scientifically speaking, it's highly unreliable.
Just ask Gary Graham. Actually, you can't ask him, since he's dead now, having been convicted and executed in Texas solely on the basis of one eye-witness's testimony. If the system will allow someone to be executed solely on eye-witness testimony, then it will certainly allow misdemeanor convictions on that same testimony.
Which isn't to say it's a good thing. Far from it. Eye witness testimony is some of the most unreliable evidence around, as numerous psychological and legal studies attest to. Memories are too maleable, and people make mistakes. Accordingly, most ancient legal systems required the testimony of two eye witnesses, so at least the two accounts could be verified against each other and the truth might be discovered. Unfortunately, our own system seems more interested in closure than justice, sometimes.
Yes, but it's not that simple. We can all agree that humans have a right not to be killed by each other, and yet there are all sorts of exceptions to that right as it is understood in contemporary American legal jurisprudence: self-defense, sovereign immunity, military action, etc.
Property is not an absolute right. The 5th and 14th amendments allow eminent domain and takings as long as there is just compensation. In your disease example, the government would "purchase" the cure at its fair market value. It happens all the time with less melodramatic examples (like Nixon's papers from his presidency, which were recently bought in a legal settlement with the Federal government).
Even if you think animals merely have a "qualified" prima-facie right to their lives, you still have a burden to show that normal human practices in the absence of great catastrophe or necessity can override those rights. By relegating it to the status of "mere psychological pleasantry, not a right", you're just begging the question as to what sort of rights animals have in the first place.
For starters, one of the netrek maintainers has come out and admitted that netrek has been spoofed recently.
Second, it's misleading to say "it's open source to top it all off" if the very mechanism that the game relies on for authentication is itself closed source. Almost all of the source is fully disclosed, but the key isn't, and that's crucial. It's much like Carmack's closed-source proposal a while back to fix Quake cheating, and it's only as secure as it is obscure.
If there were enough demand, then you'd see netrek's key cracked. What's keeping it legitimate here is a combination of social factors (collective assent by intended audience to play fairly -- the learning curve for netrek is simply enormous, and so the players are largely self selecting) and a closed-source technical hurdle to help keep casual lamers out.
I've had some limited experience with punkbuster, and it's not all its cracked up to be. It's not actually for half-life; it's for the Team Fortress mod for half-life. But just look at their faq:
Q: Isn't this a little bit like "Big Brother" watching us?
Note, their faq's answer was not a refutation of the "Big Brother" concern. They merely explained how more enforcement is good, and so by implication (though they don't come out and explicitly say it), "Big Brother" must be good.
In some cases, you may have to live without certain honest customizations and go back to original code or data files in order to play on PunkBuster monitored servers...Simply put, if you are one of the vast majority of honest people who just install a game and run it, then you have absolutely nothing to worry about.
They admit to sweeping too broadly, but then they justify it by the old adage of "If you're not a criminal, then you don't have anything to fear from the police". If punkbuster bans legitimate gameplay, then it cannot be considered a complete work.
So much of the replay value in games like TFC is in finding all those little ways to tweak your game play: not to cheat, but to find quirks and key sequences which while being perfectly legal, are not obvious to a novice and which give the practiced seasoned master and upperhand. It's no different from learning a different fingering on the violin -- you wouldn't accuse Yitzhak Perlman of "cheating" when he goes up to 7th position whereas your average 1st-grader is still down in 1st position.
Punkbuster has some noble intentions, but by sweeping too broadly in what is and what is not a cheat, it enforces a certain level of mediocrity on the players on its servers. I just hope they'll fix it soon.
A good companion book to Perlman's Interconnections, and indeed the only other significant work on the subject, is Routing in Today's Internetworks, by Mark Dickie. It's based on the OSI reference manual and it explores routing protocols starting with the very basic and working up to the advanced: IS-IS, NetWare Link Services Protocol (NLSP). RIP, DRP, ES-IS, IPX, SAP, and AppleTalk DDP, PTM, AURP, etc. If Perlman's book is as lucid as Dickie's, then I'll consider adding it to my library.
Like back in 1983 when two cosmonauts Titov (who was on one of the later missions to on Mir) and Strekalov saw their Soyuz 10 explode on the ground, sending the two of them three miles into the air but land (more or less) safely.
Even their uncontrolled crashes have been remarkably successful in avoiding populated areas. Remember: most of Russia is uninhabited, so if you aim for somewhere in the taiga (much less in the pacific), there's not much damage you can cause, unless you start a forest fire.
From the article: "The issue, though, isn't providing a new outlet for Linux fetishism." The alternative is to mention pdas which run PalmOS (which need no one's help on slashdot) or run WinCE (which will see hell freeze over before anyone on slashdot advocates).
But you already knew the answer before you threw that barb out into slashdot, right?
We really ought to instate some kind of national Beat a Lawyer day.
Now, that's rather shortsighted of you. Almost all civil-rights progress in the last hundred years is directly attributable to the tireless efforts of lawyers, as is most civil-rights legislation, which is secured by legislators who are ex-lawyers. Just because a few greedy ones are fighting for others' rights to claim a patent on your gonads doesn't mean the majority are deserving of your disrespect and outright hatred.
Ask yourself where you'll be in twenty years if there are no lawyers. Heck, look no further than the very topic of this article: gene patents. Governments won't stop awarding these illegitimate rights to corporations; you'll just be without the means to defend them from you. It's entirely unlike civil disarmament, where at least the government has consistently demonstrated it will act on citizens' calls for distress, and so we may safely disarm both sides of the conflict. In the realm of patents, you'll be left completely alone without any defense. There's a reason why even the indigent have the right to legal counsel (see Gideon v. Wainright): it is a truly necessary part of citizenship.
To be true, lawyers are a force of nature worthy of respect no less than the plummeting waters of a waterfall, which can either flood a village or be harnassed to produce hydro-electric energy. But is a world without lawyers really a world in which you want to live? Is a world without advocates really a world in which you want to live? The weak will be left to the mercy of the strong, and we'll be in exactly the same situation where we are today, except both sides will be even more ignorant of their rights and privileges, and disputes will get even sillier.
If you disapprove of gene patents, then contact your congresswoman and demand they be excised from patent law. Don't tear down the greatest edifice of the modern American state.
Abusive husbands and dictatorial bosses are resourceful: they already know what their options are and they know how to enforce them upon their subjugated "property". Currently, there are no technical barriers to having either demand that absentee ballots be used. It's like blaming newspapers for more poisonings if newspapers publish instructions on how to refine GHB in your basement: people who want to do such a thing are already doing it and don't need to be informed.
That already happens today with absentee ballots. There's nothing to prevent your boss (or your abusive husband) from forcing you to vote in his presence. Changing the mechanics of the voting process won't prevent illegal fraud which is already occurring under the old system.
It's good that someone is doing something to help keep our planet clean, but you also have to understand the economics behind IBM's move here. Companies like Micro Metallics have been extracting gold and other precious metals from discarded computers for many years now: with yields of as much as 20oz/ton, compared to 1oz/ton of ore from a typical gold mine. For $20, you're basically purchasing the "right" to have IBM make money off your valuable commodities. It's one thing to make a cash-for-service exchange, but it's an entirely different thing to make a cash-for-service-which-makes-cash exchange.
And don't forget Envirocycle's role in this operation. Besides being on their way to a solid monopoly in the computers-recycling industry, they pose a serious unrecognized risk of corporate espionage. As this Science News article pointed out as far back as 1995, in the course of recycling proprietary circuit boards and chips, Envirocycle is being given privileged access to industry leaders' intellectual property. Usually, Envirocycle is instructed to destroy those chips, but just think how little it would cost for a competitor to buy (or even just steal) those chips out from under their own competitors' noses.
Recycling is ultimately a good thing, but there need to be strong industry-ethics standards in place to assure that in saving the environment, we don't give up important rights and privileges. I'm wary that this industry (like so many others) cannot be expected to regulate its own behavior, but the solution is left as an exercise to the reader.
A discovery such as this sodium lauryl sulfate gel (an invisible HIV-fighting non-toxic topical gel) could rewrite the face of the current world-wide AIDS epidemic. But instead of sharing her finding with the world and saving millions of lives, Piret is choosing to patent her discovery and make a profit off the suffering of others.
I encourage all of you to write or call her at (418) 654-2705 and andre.desormeaux@crchul.ulaval.ca and tell her that there are more important things in this world than money. It's the moral thing to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, maybe. Microsoft already owns rights to online depictions of Whistler's Mother for their Encarta encyclopedia, so they could partake of this whimsy if it so struck them. However, Microsoft has always been slow to acknowledge codenames in their software once it gets to final distribution stage.
It's commonly left out, because Russian doesn't normally allow hard "e" sounds in the middle of words (unless they're of foreign origin) -- since "e" is a common vowel, all the "y"s would be redundant. The "y" sound is indicated by the vowel, but it's really a softening of the previous consonant more than its own independent sound. I'd have transcribed it "zv'ezda", but that still doesn't help you unless you know what to make of the apostrophe.
You also have to factor in deaths from the Russian space program (Vladimir Komarov, Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev) and the countless animal deaths in the early days. Even when they were not directly involved in NASA's programs, it's not as though NASA didn't take heed of the mistakes learned by their deaths as well.
And modern Space exploration has only been going on for fifty years now. Presidents have been getting assasinated for the last couple hundred years. Since the space program started, only one president (JFK) has been assasinated, though their have been other attempts (Reagan, etc.) By your logic, space exploration remains ten times as fatal as the office of president.
On the other hand, the potential of placing these types of turbines in the ocean not near the shoreline is very tempting.
No it isn't. By "these types of turbines", you must mean the turbines in question: Wells turbines. They're oscillating water columns, and they require large waves in order to function. You don't find large waves out at sea. In fact, you need rocky shorelines (not just shorelines) to get OWCs functioning, because of the wave amplitudes required (i.e. hooray for Scotland, but California will have to explore other methods).
What's more, you have to run cabling to shore in order to transport the electricity once generated. That introduces a second limitation on the use of OWCs at distant sea, as though their complete abject failure weren't sufficient limitation.
What the press release doesn't make clear is that Wavegen's generator has actually made its schedule: the 2000 rollout was promised back in 1998. How many technologies do you know which have made their window like that?
What the press release also doesn't mention is how Wavegen's generators don't pose the same ecological threat that other generators have historically posed: the chief alternative is a "tidal fence" which completely blocks off the channel in the same way a dam blocks off a river. And like with dams, tidal fences can disrupt the migration and spawning patterns of fish and other sea creatures, who shouldn't be forced to bear the brunt of human progress upon their tuckered little bodies. Wavegen's generators, as you can see from the diagram pose no such risk.
Now, let's just make sure we don't steal too much momentum from the moon and have it crash into the earth. That would put a real damper on any ipo.
Hardcopies of braille books are deteriorating just like other paper books, except at a faster rate: in normal paper, you only have to contend with acids in the paper, whereas with braille paper you have to deal with these same acids in addition to oils and dirt from physical contact between the reader's fingers and the paper surface. (Imagine every third-grader who checks out a library book rubbing his greasy fingers against the words as he reads it, and you might get an idea of the problem.) As such, there is an effort underway to digitize all old braille books, and only recently has the appropriate braille scanning software been developed.
The ultimate irony would be for these digital copies to be subsequently stored on a disk medium that itself resembles braille. Actually, that would be the penultimate irony. The ultimate irony would be for the disk medium to fail for the same reasons that historical braille systems have failed, but as the blurb points out, this systems is not strictly braille-like.
When this enigma machine was stolen, no expense was spared, both by British detectives and by interested parties in the private sector (including the Sunday Times), who understood what important part of British cultural heritage enigma machines constitute.
But steal from the weak, and the weak will have to do without; for the rich will watch idly by. More than fifty years after the engima machines were built to fight the Nazis, the descendants of Churchill are doing nothing to help recover works of art stolen by those same Nazis, stolen from homes of the people they liquidated.
It's not that there aren't appropriate mechanisms aren't in place to find and recover stolen art. The Art Loss Register will soon be seeing its tenth birthday. The means exists but the will is lacking: cultural racism prevents otherwise honest and decent people from lending their hand and bringing these works home.
I'm happy for Bletchley Park and the relief they must feel now that their engima machine is returned to their collective busom. Now, perhaps, they can find the time to recover Nazi loot that remains stolen, even now in the 21st century! Don't you see? Churchill, Stalin, and the British people thought they won the war, but they've lost as long as the Nazis' perpetrations cast a stain upon England. What would Churchill do?
That's the question, and I fear England may ignore the answer.
The problem isn't whether fingerprints are unique (although it's an interesting point that their uniqueness has never been proved). For all the author cares, they are unique. It's irrelevent to his chief argument.
The problem is that exact complete fingerprints aren't used in forensic investigation. Mere fragments are. And not just fragments; sloppy fragments, read by making impressions with the detective's dust and transfered onto paper. The question is therefore whether those fragments are unique relative to other fragments, given the additional fudge factor in how they're read, and whether the use of fragments instead of complete fingerprints is sufficient.
People need to work on their critical-reading skills.
I'm not just talking about whether censorware is technologically effective (and numerous studies have proven it's not). I'm saying it's not socially effective in deterring people from looking at stuff they want to see.
Take your MPAA example, which you misstate. R and X ratings are quite effective, and the MPAA very much does pay attention, but not for the purpose of deterring people (even minors) from seeing violence or sex in theaters. R and X ratings encourage viewership, since they assure hormonally empowered youths to see a movie which they might otherwise pass by. Whenever a movie is produced, much time is spent determining which audience it's intended at, and much time is spent in postproduction inserting or excising breasts to give the film the precise rating the coporate underwriters intend. Every ounce of human flesh, every "pussy shot", every rape scene, every domestic violence incident, every shame borne by the family of a starving soaps actress (or by herself in her later years, when she realizes what has become of her childhood pride) is meticulously planned and placed by the bearded man with the megaphone.
It's the same with internet censorware. When censorware becomes an unfortunate universal reality among consumers (either by installing it themselves or through AOL proxy servers, etc.), you'll see web authors inserting or excising breasts to give their webpages the precise rating their own corporate underwriters intend. Censorware ratings can work both ways, blocking or informing the user which sites have the ratings he (and it's predominantly 'he's) wishes to view. Instead of having sites vying to stack search engines with their smut, you'll see them stack the censorware stats.
But getting back to my original point, censorware isn't effective because it tells the user: "Aha, this site contains something naughty". The user, his interest piqued, will wonder what he's missing and will do whatever it takes to see what he's forbidden to see. Film censors are effective precisely because they prevent the viewer from ever knowing what he's missing (since consumers don't have access to insider knowledge about what is and what is not allowed to go to production). Censorware cannot ever be as effective, because even when it succeeds in blocking a site, the consumer is inevitably told what is happening.
If by "circumstantial evidence" you mean finger prints, the murder weapon, dna evidence, and fiber samples, then yes. I don't think we should have any capital cases, but given the current reality of capital punishment, there has to be more evidence than merely one witness's testimony. Too much can go wrong. At the time, it was dark, the events happened too fast, and the witness had never seen him before. All she knew was that some black man had killed a white Texan, and she later convinced herself that it was Graham.
Eye witness testimony is only damning because people give it undue authority. Scientifically speaking, it's highly unreliable.
Just ask Gary Graham. Actually, you can't ask him, since he's dead now, having been convicted and executed in Texas solely on the basis of one eye-witness's testimony. If the system will allow someone to be executed solely on eye-witness testimony, then it will certainly allow misdemeanor convictions on that same testimony.
Which isn't to say it's a good thing. Far from it. Eye witness testimony is some of the most unreliable evidence around, as numerous psychological and legal studies attest to. Memories are too maleable, and people make mistakes. Accordingly, most ancient legal systems required the testimony of two eye witnesses, so at least the two accounts could be verified against each other and the truth might be discovered. Unfortunately, our own system seems more interested in closure than justice, sometimes.
It's confirmed in an AP story on yahoo.
Yes, but it's not that simple. We can all agree that humans have a right not to be killed by each other, and yet there are all sorts of exceptions to that right as it is understood in contemporary American legal jurisprudence: self-defense, sovereign immunity, military action, etc.
Property is not an absolute right. The 5th and 14th amendments allow eminent domain and takings as long as there is just compensation. In your disease example, the government would "purchase" the cure at its fair market value. It happens all the time with less melodramatic examples (like Nixon's papers from his presidency, which were recently bought in a legal settlement with the Federal government).
Even if you think animals merely have a "qualified" prima-facie right to their lives, you still have a burden to show that normal human practices in the absence of great catastrophe or necessity can override those rights. By relegating it to the status of "mere psychological pleasantry, not a right", you're just begging the question as to what sort of rights animals have in the first place.
For starters, one of the netrek maintainers has come out and admitted that netrek has been spoofed recently.
Second, it's misleading to say "it's open source to top it all off" if the very mechanism that the game relies on for authentication is itself closed source. Almost all of the source is fully disclosed, but the key isn't, and that's crucial. It's much like Carmack's closed-source proposal a while back to fix Quake cheating, and it's only as secure as it is obscure.
If there were enough demand, then you'd see netrek's key cracked. What's keeping it legitimate here is a combination of social factors (collective assent by intended audience to play fairly -- the learning curve for netrek is simply enormous, and so the players are largely self selecting) and a closed-source technical hurdle to help keep casual lamers out.
I've had some limited experience with punkbuster, and it's not all its cracked up to be. It's not actually for half-life; it's for the Team Fortress mod for half-life. But just look at their faq:
Q: Isn't this a little bit like "Big Brother" watching us?
Note, their faq's answer was not a refutation of the "Big Brother" concern. They merely explained how more enforcement is good, and so by implication (though they don't come out and explicitly say it), "Big Brother" must be good.
In some cases, you may have to live without certain honest customizations and go back to original code or data files in order to play on PunkBuster monitored servers...Simply put, if you are one of the vast majority of honest people who just install a game and run it, then you have absolutely nothing to worry about.
They admit to sweeping too broadly, but then they justify it by the old adage of "If you're not a criminal, then you don't have anything to fear from the police". If punkbuster bans legitimate gameplay, then it cannot be considered a complete work.
So much of the replay value in games like TFC is in finding all those little ways to tweak your game play: not to cheat, but to find quirks and key sequences which while being perfectly legal, are not obvious to a novice and which give the practiced seasoned master and upperhand. It's no different from learning a different fingering on the violin -- you wouldn't accuse Yitzhak Perlman of "cheating" when he goes up to 7th position whereas your average 1st-grader is still down in 1st position.
Punkbuster has some noble intentions, but by sweeping too broadly in what is and what is not a cheat, it enforces a certain level of mediocrity on the players on its servers. I just hope they'll fix it soon.
A good companion book to Perlman's Interconnections, and indeed the only other significant work on the subject, is Routing in Today's Internetworks, by Mark Dickie. It's based on the OSI reference manual and it explores routing protocols starting with the very basic and working up to the advanced: IS-IS, NetWare Link Services Protocol (NLSP). RIP, DRP, ES-IS, IPX, SAP, and AppleTalk DDP, PTM, AURP, etc. If Perlman's book is as lucid as Dickie's, then I'll consider adding it to my library.
Like back in 1983 when two cosmonauts Titov (who was on one of the later missions to on Mir) and Strekalov saw their Soyuz 10 explode on the ground, sending the two of them three miles into the air but land (more or less) safely.
Even their uncontrolled crashes have been remarkably successful in avoiding populated areas. Remember: most of Russia is uninhabited, so if you aim for somewhere in the taiga (much less in the pacific), there's not much damage you can cause, unless you start a forest fire.
From the article: "The issue, though, isn't providing a new outlet for Linux fetishism." The alternative is to mention pdas which run PalmOS (which need no one's help on slashdot) or run WinCE (which will see hell freeze over before anyone on slashdot advocates).
But you already knew the answer before you threw that barb out into slashdot, right?
We really ought to instate some kind of national Beat a Lawyer day.
Now, that's rather shortsighted of you. Almost all civil-rights progress in the last hundred years is directly attributable to the tireless efforts of lawyers, as is most civil-rights legislation, which is secured by legislators who are ex-lawyers. Just because a few greedy ones are fighting for others' rights to claim a patent on your gonads doesn't mean the majority are deserving of your disrespect and outright hatred.
Ask yourself where you'll be in twenty years if there are no lawyers. Heck, look no further than the very topic of this article: gene patents. Governments won't stop awarding these illegitimate rights to corporations; you'll just be without the means to defend them from you. It's entirely unlike civil disarmament, where at least the government has consistently demonstrated it will act on citizens' calls for distress, and so we may safely disarm both sides of the conflict. In the realm of patents, you'll be left completely alone without any defense. There's a reason why even the indigent have the right to legal counsel (see Gideon v. Wainright): it is a truly necessary part of citizenship.
To be true, lawyers are a force of nature worthy of respect no less than the plummeting waters of a waterfall, which can either flood a village or be harnassed to produce hydro-electric energy. But is a world without lawyers really a world in which you want to live? Is a world without advocates really a world in which you want to live? The weak will be left to the mercy of the strong, and we'll be in exactly the same situation where we are today, except both sides will be even more ignorant of their rights and privileges, and disputes will get even sillier.
If you disapprove of gene patents, then contact your congresswoman and demand they be excised from patent law. Don't tear down the greatest edifice of the modern American state.
Abusive husbands and dictatorial bosses are resourceful: they already know what their options are and they know how to enforce them upon their subjugated "property". Currently, there are no technical barriers to having either demand that absentee ballots be used. It's like blaming newspapers for more poisonings if newspapers publish instructions on how to refine GHB in your basement: people who want to do such a thing are already doing it and don't need to be informed.
Hook the central server up to a continuous dot-matrix printer. Problem solved.
That already happens today with absentee ballots. There's nothing to prevent your boss (or your abusive husband) from forcing you to vote in his presence. Changing the mechanics of the voting process won't prevent illegal fraud which is already occurring under the old system.
It's good that someone is doing something to help keep our planet clean, but you also have to understand the economics behind IBM's move here. Companies like Micro Metallics have been extracting gold and other precious metals from discarded computers for many years now: with yields of as much as 20oz/ton, compared to 1oz/ton of ore from a typical gold mine. For $20, you're basically purchasing the "right" to have IBM make money off your valuable commodities. It's one thing to make a cash-for-service exchange, but it's an entirely different thing to make a cash-for-service-which-makes-cash exchange.
And don't forget Envirocycle's role in this operation. Besides being on their way to a solid monopoly in the computers-recycling industry, they pose a serious unrecognized risk of corporate espionage. As this Science News article pointed out as far back as 1995, in the course of recycling proprietary circuit boards and chips, Envirocycle is being given privileged access to industry leaders' intellectual property. Usually, Envirocycle is instructed to destroy those chips, but just think how little it would cost for a competitor to buy (or even just steal) those chips out from under their own competitors' noses.
Recycling is ultimately a good thing, but there need to be strong industry-ethics standards in place to assure that in saving the environment, we don't give up important rights and privileges. I'm wary that this industry (like so many others) cannot be expected to regulate its own behavior, but the solution is left as an exercise to the reader.
Take neutron stars, for example: entire solar masses compressed into a single neutron nucleus. See? It's still on an atomic scale.
A discovery such as this sodium lauryl sulfate gel (an invisible HIV-fighting non-toxic topical gel) could rewrite the face of the current world-wide AIDS epidemic. But instead of sharing her finding with the world and saving millions of lives, Piret is choosing to patent her discovery and make a profit off the suffering of others.
I encourage all of you to write or call her at (418) 654-2705 and andre.desormeaux@crchul.ulaval.ca and tell her that there are more important things in this world than money. It's the moral thing to do.