from the if-you-can-sue-tobacco-companies-why-not dept.
I would compare this case more to suing gun manufacturers than to suing tobacco companies. In my opinion, the tobacco lawsuits were actually reasonable: People were claiming the tobacco companies actively suppressed research into the addictive and carcinogenic nature of tobacco; thus, people bought the product, got addicted, and came down with cancer, all the while thinking what they were doing was reasonable safe. Thus, there were ample grounds for a lawsuit.
This case, however, is a lot more like the nonsense over suing gun makers for what criminals do with them, suing bars over deaths caused by drunken drivers, &c. -- someone's just looking to place blame on a tangentially-connected, and -- coincidentally, I'm sure -- well-monied third party.
The LTTE is notorious for its suicide bombings. Since the late 1980s, the group has conducted some 200 suicide bombings -- far more than any other terrorist group.
That's a bit more than the 76 that the International Herald Tribune article claims.
Neither article sufficiently explains where or how the respective writers gathered their data. In one of the other threads in reply to the original comment here, the author seemed to be under the impression that Muslim bombings are much more common merely because the Tamils are barely reported about in western media, whereas Palestinian suicide bombings are usually all over the news. Perhaps the CFR article exaggerates, or perhaps IHT's author just didn't go beyond adding up easily-accessible western news reports.
The original comment said "suiciding bombings" -- this group carries out more suicide bombings than all these Muslim groups combined.* There are probably more members of the Islamic resistance groups, but they're not nearly as prolific.
* The only caveat here is what's going on in Iraq. I remember reading these statistics about the Tamil Tigers back when Muslim attacks were mainly related to the Israel situation, Chechnya, and Indonesia. Since everyone and their brother seems to be getting involved in attacks in Iraq, the numbers may've changed. I didn't think of Iraq because it's an active warzone, and things like civilian bombings in the middle of a war really shouldn't be thought of as terrorism, but as partisan attacks or an insurgency or something similar.
Nice try at a diversion, except the original comment said: "... the vast majority of that shit is from Muslim fanatics who live primarily in the Middle East," not merely "a lot of."
The Tamil Tigers, in Sri Lanka. In fact, they're more prolific suicide bombers than any other separatist groups. They're Hindu I think, but their grievance is nationalistic, not religious in nature. Oh, and many of their targets are Muslims.
If you guys want I can stop by chat with you, assuming there isn't enough native Arabic speakers.
Sure, come on in. Other than English speakers, I think #'s biggest population is either the Arabs, or Indonesians/Malaysians, but we always can always do with more users.:)
The channel name being only "#", make sure you use something like mIRC, X-Chat, ircle, or a similar "real" IRC client. The DALnet Java client (accessible from their own website, ironically), and some other generalized chat clients, such as Trillian, have difficulty dealing with a "nameless" channel like #. If you come in, let the ops know you know J^raxis, or type !voice to get moded +v; voice mode is how we differentiate the people who're actually "in" # from the newbies who fall in and out, get kicked, and so on.
Maybe this will get him to shut up, or maybe it'll just feed his paranoid fantasies -- they're all out to get me, look at them all come after me, vast video-game conspiracy, and so on. Hopefully it'll get him out of the public spotlight at least.
The other reply is probably correct; this was before water had precipitated out to form oceans and so on. Additionally, whatever got thrown up into orbit was hot: any water ejected would have certainly been vaporous. The material from which the moon is made -- part of the evidence that bolsters the Giant Impact theory -- appears to have literally boiled around the time of the moon's formation, which burnt off most of the lighter chemicals:
Chemical inspection of [moon] rocks found them to be nearly devoid of volatile and lighter elements, leading to the speculation that they formed from an unusually extreme amount of heating that boiled them off.
Tectonics might not be. One of the prevailing theories of why we have tectonic plates is that a sizeable chunk of the earth's crust got sheared off by a massive impact, leaving the remaining chunks of crust to slowly slide around the surface of the earth. The impactor that struck the earth hit at a particularly fortuitous angle; a little bit off and it would have destroyed the planet instead. Whether or not these kinds of impacts are improbable or not is still an open question -- one theory is that the impactor formed at one of the earth's Lagrange points, and it wasn't just a "random" blow from an asteroid, so it may be more common than it at first sounds.
Incidentally, the impactor blew that crustal material clear into orbit, which ultimately coalesced into the moon. See the giant impact theory entry on Wikipedia.
Re:Why are we hiding from the police, daddy?
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Vim 6.4 Released
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· Score: 1
La2, ana Amriki. I've been learning 3arabi from online friends, in here mostly. I don't know much of the vocubulary yet (except some basic stuff to talk to the mobtadi2een on DALnet there). I can read the "chat alphabet" well enough and actual Arabic script somewhat.
Are there any good machine translators for Arabic out there yet? I used to use Ajeeb a bit, but they seem to've moved to a subscription site now. In my experience, machine translation's pretty bad at this point, anyway; I don't rely on it: Things like Babelfish seem to fall on their face with translations as simple as English-to-Spanish, two languages that can almost be translated between each other word-for-word.
Re:Why are we hiding from the police, daddy?
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Vim 6.4 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
Polish apparently uses jj to transliterate Arabic; see Omar Chajjam. I don't know Polish, but it probably uses it for other things, too, since transliteration generally means bringing foreign words into your language's orthography.
That also ignores the fact that people don't just use editors for typing natural text but for typing code: I'm sure someone's source code contains name tokens with jj in them.
Re:Why are we hiding from the police, daddy?
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Vim 6.4 Released
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· Score: 1
Arrow keys also work just fine for moving around, by default.
Why don't these things just have a clock that the user can set by hand on them, and have it generate the same tokens for, say, a 5-10 minute period? That way, as long as you have the clock to within a couple minutes of accurate (a reasonable range of accuracy for what someone would keep a wallclock set to), it'll generate a usable password.
That not only avoids the problem of drift, but also obviates the need for devices to be able to be plugged into something network-connected in order to resync their clocks (since connecting it to the Internet would also be a possible conduit for the device to be compromised).
Don't give the customers something to lose. Out of 30,000 people, you know that some will be losing this every day.
Banks have been giving customers something for, um, how long have ATMs and ATM cards been around? Customers losing those doesn't seem to be much of a problem.
Do you view internet ads as different from say, TV ads?
Not really -- TV ads I just skip over.
What about in a magazine? Do you not buy a magazine because it has too many?
Magazine ads don't usually animate like GIFs or Flash files, nor do they typically have sound attached or intentionally get in the way*, trying to be as disruptive as possible. As long as Internet ads try to be as obnoxious as they are, they all get blocked.
* I don't just mean popups here, I mean in-page ads that move about or use DHTML features to look like a popup window but technically aren't.
This is passing all files named *.ext to grep via xargs; the contents of said files are then searched by grep for "bar". The comment I replied to was someone's attempt at optimization which inadvertantly changed what the command actually did.
Isn't that searching the files for "bar", not merely matching their names? But you don't really need xargs to do that either, you can do something like:
find . -name '*.ext' -exec grep -i bar {}/dev/null \;
Even though the programs are meant for remote copying, you can use either `scp` or `rsync` (`rsync --progress`) to do local-to-local copying. As long as the destination name doesn't have a colon in it, the programs treat the destination as a local target.
The only way you could convince me otherwise is to prove that they knew about the name of your company and went and registered it.
Right, and this what the UDRP calls a "bad-faith" registration, which is one the criteria for yanking someone's domain. A usual red-flag for bad-faith registrations is attempting to sell the domain to the person claiming legitimate ownership, usually at an inflated price -- something that this purported cybersquatter not only didn't do, but he didn't even agree to sell when approached unsolicited.
Espionage or sabotage. Who's to say that, if relations soured between the US and [any given country using products therefrom] that these products wouldn't be used as a channel for espionage or sabotage? Even when relations are good, everyone capable of doing so spies on everyone else. If US products are going over there, American company representatives are going over there, and I'd be willing to bet there are plenty of people gathering intelligence to some degree.
At the very least, in the event of a war or economic embargo, continued access to the foreign products (and we're talking about software here for which one continually needs to get upgrades and security updates) would be seriously threatened.
Legal disputes. If there were intellectual property disputes over the product, licensing concerns, etc., guess whose laws are going to apply and in whose courts the situation would probably be handled.
In general, it's just not a good idea to rely on something that you don't have control over, don't you think?
The square foot of the opening may be smaller, but the number strips increases the surface area of every interface; I imagine that the door can't be airtight when closed!
The door in the video seems to have about a centimetre-wide gap down the middle, and there's probably space between each slat, but this could always be filled with some sort of weather-stripping like ordinarly house doors have.
Also doesn't this require multiple motors? Another failure mode if the door doesn't open the strip at eye level and smacks someone in the face.
Watch the video. It looks like it's a problem with the sensors, not the motors, but the door almost does this to the guy who tries to walk through it a few minute into the video. Several slats at head height won't even open after he waves at them.
Slashdot Mirror
I would compare this case more to suing gun manufacturers than to suing tobacco companies. In my opinion, the tobacco lawsuits were actually reasonable: People were claiming the tobacco companies actively suppressed research into the addictive and carcinogenic nature of tobacco; thus, people bought the product, got addicted, and came down with cancer, all the while thinking what they were doing was reasonable safe. Thus, there were ample grounds for a lawsuit.
This case, however, is a lot more like the nonsense over suing gun makers for what criminals do with them, suing bars over deaths caused by drunken drivers, &c. -- someone's just looking to place blame on a tangentially-connected, and -- coincidentally, I'm sure -- well-monied third party.
Nope.
The Council on Foreign Relations writes:
That's a bit more than the 76 that the International Herald Tribune article claims.
Neither article sufficiently explains where or how the respective writers gathered their data. In one of the other threads in reply to the original comment here, the author seemed to be under the impression that Muslim bombings are much more common merely because the Tamils are barely reported about in western media, whereas Palestinian suicide bombings are usually all over the news. Perhaps the CFR article exaggerates, or perhaps IHT's author just didn't go beyond adding up easily-accessible western news reports.
* The only caveat here is what's going on in Iraq. I remember reading these statistics about the Tamil Tigers back when Muslim attacks were mainly related to the Israel situation, Chechnya, and Indonesia. Since everyone and their brother seems to be getting involved in attacks in Iraq, the numbers may've changed. I didn't think of Iraq because it's an active warzone, and things like civilian bombings in the middle of a war really shouldn't be thought of as terrorism, but as partisan attacks or an insurgency or something similar.
Nice try at a diversion, except the original comment said: "... the vast majority of that shit is from Muslim fanatics who live primarily in the Middle East," not merely "a lot of."
Elderly Parents Abandoned at Hospitals.
The Tamil Tigers, in Sri Lanka. In fact, they're more prolific suicide bombers than any other separatist groups. They're Hindu I think, but their grievance is nationalistic, not religious in nature. Oh, and many of their targets are Muslims.
The channel name being only "#", make sure you use something like mIRC, X-Chat, ircle, or a similar "real" IRC client. The DALnet Java client (accessible from their own website, ironically), and some other generalized chat clients, such as Trillian, have difficulty dealing with a "nameless" channel like #. If you come in, let the ops know you know J^raxis, or type !voice to get moded +v; voice mode is how we differentiate the people who're actually "in" # from the newbies who fall in and out, get kicked, and so on.
Maybe this will get him to shut up, or maybe it'll just feed his paranoid fantasies -- they're all out to get me, look at them all come after me, vast video-game conspiracy, and so on. Hopefully it'll get him out of the public spotlight at least.
The other reply is probably correct; this was before water had precipitated out to form oceans and so on. Additionally, whatever got thrown up into orbit was hot: any water ejected would have certainly been vaporous. The material from which the moon is made -- part of the evidence that bolsters the Giant Impact theory -- appears to have literally boiled around the time of the moon's formation, which burnt off most of the lighter chemicals:
Incidentally, the impactor blew that crustal material clear into orbit, which ultimately coalesced into the moon. See the giant impact theory entry on Wikipedia.
La2, ana Amriki. I've been learning 3arabi from online friends, in here mostly. I don't know much of the vocubulary yet (except some basic stuff to talk to the mobtadi2een on DALnet there). I can read the "chat alphabet" well enough and actual Arabic script somewhat.
Are there any good machine translators for Arabic out there yet? I used to use Ajeeb a bit, but they seem to've moved to a subscription site now. In my experience, machine translation's pretty bad at this point, anyway; I don't rely on it: Things like Babelfish seem to fall on their face with translations as simple as English-to-Spanish, two languages that can almost be translated between each other word-for-word.
Polish apparently uses jj to transliterate Arabic; see Omar Chajjam. I don't know Polish, but it probably uses it for other things, too, since transliteration generally means bringing foreign words into your language's orthography.
That also ignores the fact that people don't just use editors for typing natural text but for typing code: I'm sure someone's source code contains name tokens with jj in them.
Arrow keys also work just fine for moving around, by default.
That not only avoids the problem of drift, but also obviates the need for devices to be able to be plugged into something network-connected in order to resync their clocks (since connecting it to the Internet would also be a possible conduit for the device to be compromised).
Banks have been giving customers something for, um, how long have ATMs and ATM cards been around? Customers losing those doesn't seem to be much of a problem.
Not really -- TV ads I just skip over.
What about in a magazine? Do you not buy a magazine because it has too many?
Magazine ads don't usually animate like GIFs or Flash files, nor do they typically have sound attached or intentionally get in the way*, trying to be as disruptive as possible. As long as Internet ads try to be as obnoxious as they are, they all get blocked.
* I don't just mean popups here, I mean in-page ads that move about or use DHTML features to look like a popup window but technically aren't.
find . -name '*.ext' |xargs grep -i bar
This is passing all files named *.ext to grep via xargs; the contents of said files are then searched by grep for "bar". The comment I replied to was someone's attempt at optimization which inadvertantly changed what the command actually did.
find . -name '*.ext' -exec grep -i bar {} /dev/null \;
Even though the programs are meant for remote copying, you can use either `scp` or `rsync` (`rsync --progress`) to do local-to-local copying. As long as the destination name doesn't have a colon in it, the programs treat the destination as a local target.
Right, and this what the UDRP calls a "bad-faith" registration, which is one the criteria for yanking someone's domain. A usual red-flag for bad-faith registrations is attempting to sell the domain to the person claiming legitimate ownership, usually at an inflated price -- something that this purported cybersquatter not only didn't do, but he didn't even agree to sell when approached unsolicited.
Many reasons.
Espionage or sabotage. Who's to say that, if relations soured between the US and [any given country using products therefrom] that these products wouldn't be used as a channel for espionage or sabotage? Even when relations are good, everyone capable of doing so spies on everyone else. If US products are going over there, American company representatives are going over there, and I'd be willing to bet there are plenty of people gathering intelligence to some degree.
At the very least, in the event of a war or economic embargo, continued access to the foreign products (and we're talking about software here for which one continually needs to get upgrades and security updates) would be seriously threatened.
Legal disputes. If there were intellectual property disputes over the product, licensing concerns, etc., guess whose laws are going to apply and in whose courts the situation would probably be handled.
In general, it's just not a good idea to rely on something that you don't have control over, don't you think?
That was his point: "Foreign-owned commercial entity" was beating around the bush about Microsoft, I gather.
Which probably means prosecuting p2p users.