Obviously as it spreads more, the risk is greater, but it isn't some "terror alert level" they're raising, it's the phase in the progression of the outbreak that they're tracking.
Honestly, I hope this has an effect on spam. Maybe Spammers will see this and think "wow, this guy got that messed up after getting caught? It's not worth it" or maybe they'll say "Wow, look at how little sympathy there was for him, do people really hate spammers that much?" and stop. Most likely though, if you're the sort of person who sends spam, you're probably a sociopath with no empathy, and you'll probably just say "what a loser, he couldn't hack it in the real world" and try to prove your manliness by doubling your spam output.
The biggest problem with WotLK won't be balance it will be the new abilities. Most people are at the limit of what they can fit on hotbars already. It looks like in WotLK they won't be adding new features to existing abilities (garrote), or obsoleting a new ability (claw -> mangle) but instead will be adding even more abilities. If you have 57 abilities you can use at any one time, it will just be overwhelming.
Feral tanks don't scale badly past T4 content, it's just a real pain to get the required gear. Feral tanks can handle all of Hyjal and all of BT except for Illidan and RoS, since Illidan requires shield block and RoS requires spell reflect. Having said that, the best feral tanking weapon drops in the first real 25 man raid (SSC), the only tanking options for certain slots are tier gear, whereas warriors and paladins get lots of options, and maintaining crit immunity actually gets harder as you progress, rather than easier.
Unless you were lvl 30 or so and trying to quest, and instead kept getting one-shot by bored level 60s. The biggest problem with world PvP in WoW is that there's no reward for winning a fair fight, and no punishment for destroying someone who isn't a challenge to you.
In Team Fortress 2 there are advantages/disadvantages based on class, but for the most part, it's all about player skill. In WoW it's about level difference first, gear difference second, class difference third, and player skill last. Occasionally an undergeared, under-leveled, highly skilled player can defeat someone, but for the most part the wins go to the pvp-specced, pvp-geared, level 70, regardless of skill -- in particular if that level 70 in pvp gear is a rogue who can start from stealth.
WoW PvP needs an overhaul. On a typical horde-dominated PvP server, there can be twice as many active horde players as alliance players, which means that when a new area opens up (like the new island) the Horde can basically dominate the area and keep Alliance out until they get bored. On a typical PvP server your first PvP experience is walking into Redridge or Ashenvale and getting smoked by a player so many levels higher than you you can't even tell what level they are. Even if a bunch of lowbies gang up on a high level player they can't do anything, now that level-based resists work on players too. And don't get me started on afk epics...
Being sighted, and not having access to a screen reader, designing a site to be blind-friendly is just too much effort for most designers, and since there's generally nothing in it for them (no extra money, no extra kudos, etc.) it's hard to justify making an effort to do it.
I think if there were a really easy addon to firefox that said "render for the blind" that didn't actually do the screen-reading part of rendering, but did dump all graphics, render things in "order" rather than how they show up visually, etc. there might be more effort made. I think people just forget to add alt tags, or forget that on-screen order isn't what you get out of a screen reader.
Having said that, I've heard that one of the biggest problems blind people face is that as far as CAPTCHAs are concerned, they're spambots.
Bots do make the game more miserable. If there are no "X" items available on the auction house you have to go gather them yourself. If there are bots gathering up the resources, it makes it harder for you to gather them up. If it were other players gathering you could try to buy off them directly, but a bot won't respond at all. Far worse than gathering resources are the bots in the battlegrounds. They're clever enough to avoid getting automatically flagged for being AFK, but their presence makes it much more likely your side will lose. If you're a human playing the game and have a limited amount of time available, you want to get as many battleground wins as possible in the time you have. The bot users don't care if they lose every game, since it's all free honor and BG tokens for them. In fact, they don't want their bots to win too often, blizzard is more likely to take action against bots that are better than players.
It's one thing to lose a game because your team is full of idiots, at least you can vent at them, or offer suggestions in the hope they'll get better in the future. If it's a bot that's only there to get someone free honor, it's unfair for them, and ruins the game for you.
Oh, and Wright said "God damn America," too. A $20k donation and 20 years of attendance to a church supporting that perspective is just too close of an association.
You're really that disturbed about the "God Damn America" comment? So what? How does associating with someone who has said something like that make Obama unfit to be president?
That's just not true. There are large segments of society who use science on a daily basis, but there are also vast segments who don't know the first thing about science and who, at best, treat it as just another religion. Turn on CNN for an hour and you'll see.
First, you're likely to get some commercials. Commercials talk about something being "clinically proven". What does that mean? It sounds scientific and so people have faith it means that there's "science" behind the claims. You might also get a gum commercial where 4 out of 5 dentists recommend X. Does that mean 80% of all dentists recommend X? Does it mean that exactly 5 dentists were asked? Did they know it was part of a commercial? It sounds scientific enough for people, so they accept it. Second, when the coverage starts you'll most likely get some political coverage. You may get Mike Huckabee's sound bite "I know people say that the math doesn't work out. Folks, I didn't major in math. I majored in miracles, and I still believe in those too." Then you'll get the statistics on various races. The reporters will report that they're able to call state X with 60% of the precincts reporting... but do people understand why they need less than 100%? Other times they talk about the democratic delegate count and someone might mention that even though a bunch of states haven't voted at all, there's no way that it will be resolved without super-delegates, but can they actually explain why that is?
Forget science, people can't even handle math. They can't calculate what kind of mortgage payments are reasonable on their income, or understand how their payments will change over time. Sure, you can't blame all the sub-prime mortgage mess on people being unable to do math, but that's one of the contributing factors.
Fundamentally a scientific approach to something involves making a hypothesis, controlling variables, making some measurements, understanding the errors on those measurements, and drawing a conclusion. Does the average person know how to do that, let alone ever actually do it?
We may not be moving into an era dominated by superstition, but to most people science is just this vague thing that's good and true, and so the actor in the lab coat on a commercial is more trustworthy than if he were just wearing a sweater, and statisticey-sounding numbers are more meaningful than words like "most" or "many".
I think more important than what's allowed on the robots is what kind of surface will they be playing on. When they're played on very smooth, very flat surfaces, it becomes all about wedges and flippers. Every robot has a skirt with less than 1cm clearance on all sides, and the winners are the ones that can slip under that skirt.
If they changed it so that the games were played on uneven, non smooth surfaces, maybe even some dirt/grass, water, etc. you'd have to have exposed wheels / tracks. Wedges / flippers would no longer have a massive advantage.
Survival of the fittest in robot fighting competitions is, like all other survival of the fittest contests, based on the environment. If the environment is varied enough that one niche player can't dominate everything, you'll get much more interesting fights, and much more variety in design.
I just finished watching (well mostly listening to) each of their two Google interviews: Hillary, Obama. It cemented an impression I've had for a while. Hillary may be a very capable legislator, but Obama would make a better president. They both talked about a lot of the same things, but it was Obama who had the edge when talking about restoring America's place in the world. As someone who has lived in Muslim communities, lived overseas, dealt with racism, etc. he would be much more capable of working with countries like Iran, Pakistan, etc.
The other advantage is that he isn't carrying all the political baggage. In Hillary's talk, she keeps attacking Bush and Cheney, and doing it in ways that shows just how much she detests them, calling Bush "the current occupant of the oval office", etc. Sure, that may be playing to the audience, but it isn't helpful, and will hurt her chances of being able to work with these same people later. Obama doesn't get dragged into that.
Obama may have less experience, and may not be as tight a legislator, but the job of the executive isn't to legislate, it's to lead. I can imagine the US following his lead much more easily than Hillary's, and I can imagine his influence overseas would be better too.
Either democrat will be an improvement over the current administration -- hell, either republican would be too, but I think Obama is the candidate better suited to the role of President.
From what I can tell their opinions are pretty similar, and they're offering pretty similar policies, similar enough that what they're likely to be able to pass would probably be identical. To me the difference is that the last 20 years the presidents have been Bush, Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush. If you think monarchies or middle-ages style aristocracies are bad, then you probably shouldn't support the same two families trading off the presidency every two years. Aside from that, my impression is that Clinton tends to support popular things (the war on terra when people were scared, getting the armed forces home when people are tired of the war on terra), be against unpopular things (video game violence, etc.), whereas Obama actually seems to have some real core beliefs, and to just be a bit more honest and sincere in general -- something lacking in all the other remaining candidates other than perhaps Ron Paul or Mike Gravel. Then again, just because you haven't dropped out, doesn't mean you're still in the race.
That's a pretty stupid point of view -- that unless you vote for a candidate other than the one who gets elected you "didn't try to stop them", and shouldn't complain.
There are other ways of trying to stop someone other than voting against them, and possibly voting for someone who you also think is not a good choice. You can campaign against them, you can try to influence others to reject them etc. You lose some credibility about complaining about someone if you actually voted *for* them, but even then you have every right to complain. They may have misrepresented their abilities, their positions, their intentions, or their competence in the election -- in fact it's almost a sure thing that they did. Given that, it's entirely reasonable to complain that you didn't get what you bargained for.
My view is that if you really don't feel like any of the candidates is worthy, or that the political system is so broken that voting *for* anybody is an act of endorsing a system you disagree with, you shouldn't vote.
You're right, fair use is always an option, but fair use would probably never cover taking a bit of code and using it unchanged in a commercial application.
Since we don't know where the code comes from, etc. the best assumption is that you have no rights to do anything with it.
I'm sure it's true that the average person breaks tons of laws every day, in particular copyright violations. That doesn't mean they're safe from lawsuits. The average person might get the Jammie Whatzerface treatment and suddenly be liable for hundreds of thousands in damages.
If you buy a book on ASP, generally the sample code in there has a license that allows everybody (or at least people who bought the book) to use the code in any way they want. The same can't be said for virtually any code you find out on the web. The default for any new work is for it to be copyrighted and with no license. Unless your use of the copyrighted material falls under Fair Use, you're not allowed to use it; copying the entirety of a code snippet for use in a commercial application is not Fair Use.
You'll probably never get in trouble for doing this, because probably most people (90%+) would say their posts are in the public domain if asked about it -- but until you've asked them, you have to assume that it's "look but don't touch".
Starship Troopers is actually a lot like how the US was founded, in that only a small subset of the population could vote. It used to be that to vote in the US you had to be white, male, and a land owner.
These days anybody can vote, regardless of their race, gender or wealth. Is this a better country as a result? I'm not convinced. The reasoning behind restricting voting to white male landowners was that (in theory) they were more able to use that vote intelligently. White male landowners were assumed to be educated enough to make intelligent decisions. While I don't think any reasonable person today would think it's fair to have sexist, racist barriers to voting, maybe it makes sense to value certain opinions more highly than others. On the issue of stem cell research, who's more qualified to make reasonable decisions: a medical doctor doing research, or someone who learned about stem cells by watching Fox news? When it comes to farming legislation, should a city dweller's opinion be valued the same as a farmer's? Should economic policy be decided by the average citizen who carries $20,000 in debt?
Everybody says that our system of government is broken, they whine about politicians all being the same, and corporations controlling everything, but bring up the topic of actually radically reforming the government and people suddenly think it's a great system, it just needs a tweak here or there. Why not rethink the very idea of democracy. The greek term "aristocracy" has been corrupted to mean "rule by the rich", but it literally translates as "rule by the best". With politicians more worried about keeping their jobs than doing the right thing, or more worried about lining their pockets than representing their people, maybe it's time to find decision makers who aren't forced to respond to the whims of an uneducated, shortsighted, easily influenced population and instead find good people. A really good person might never be willing to run for office, seeing how shallow the process is, how looks matter more than substance, how having a gravelly voice is key, and an enthusiastic shout can mean you're unqualified. A great decision maker might make a very poor politician. but what's more important, electability or being able to make the right decisions once in office?
I won't vote, even if I thought my vote mattered I don't want to endorse a system I don't believe in by participating in it. Instead, I'll keep trying to reform the system, and if that doesn't work, go somewhere where it doesn't affect me.
I've been perp-walked out of places as part of a layoff, and have had happy goodbye parties after a transition period. Obviously the way employees are asked to leave leaves a big impact on those who aren't laid off. It's ridiculous when you quit, however. If you work at a place where people are walked out like criminals, you'll know that's how you'll be treated too. If you want to take customer data with you, you will have every opportunity to do that before you announce you're leaving.
In fact, at one place where I used to work, one of the founders was pushed out, and he was forced to wipe his personal laptop before leaving the building, since he had used it as his main laptop at work. Months later, they realized that there was vital information that they didn't have and needed. In desperation, they decided to see if this guy had it. Of course he did. He had been backing up his laptop all along, so he had all the necessary data on a backup drive at home.
Unless you're using military-grade data security practices, treating people like criminals isn't going to prevent them being destructive, or taking data with them, it's just going to piss them off and piss off the employees you have left.
Find a single link to back up this claim of yours that he didn't present a valid Canadian passport. Everything I've seen, and everything everybody aside from you has seen has said that he was sent off to be tortured in Syria despite having a Canadian passport. Your side of the story can't just be the one you invented, it has to have some facts to back it up.
Dual citizenship is a right, and it is fair. My parents were American citizens born and raised in the US, but they had moved to Canada when I was born, so I grew up in Canada to American parents. In what way am I not a citizen of both countries? Apparently neither the US nor Canada agrees with your assertion that you can't be a citizen of both places.
Basically, nobody believes what you do, so I recommend you move to a country where people share your views, somewhere like afghanistan, pakistan, saudi arabia...
Actually, that's what a terrorist *does* want. If everyone is walking around armed, scared of the people around them, ready to shoot someone at the slightest hint they're a terrorist, then the terrorists have achieved their objectives and have brought terror into people's lives. What terrorists don't want is to be ignored.
Ok, this is completely offtopic but I can't let you get away with saying "trapezing through" without saying something. Unlike some mistaken idioms (say like "reign in" instead of "rein in") trapezing through makes no sense. The true idiom is "traipsing through" where traipsing is "to walk from one place to another, often feeling tired or bored". This is almost the opposite of how you'd act on a trapeze. I'm sure your comment was intelligent and insightful otherwise, but I stopped reading when I hit "trapezing".
It's pretty likely that his research being cited to help prove something he didn't believe was enough to get him to look it over more closely. If his research had been used to prove something he believed to be true, he probably wouldn't have examined it as closely. You really can't take the motivation out of science, but as long as the science is sound, it doesn't really matter.
As for whether re-reading something years later would show any errors to be obivious, I would hope so. If the field has advanced a lot, it's pretty likely that people would know not only whether something happens, but why. If your original experiment was built on some assumptions which have proven to be wrong over the years then those assumptions would probably stand out.
"Under the circumstances I mention, just a bunch of chemicals sitting together, no," he said. "Because it takes energy to go from the things that make glycine to glycine, glycine being the simplest amino acid."
There were potential sources of energy, he said. So to say that nothing much would happen in its absence "is totally beside the point." "And that is a point I did not make," he added.
So, reading it years later, when everybody knows that there were all kinds of sources of energy, a passage that talks about what was possible in the absence of energy would stand out. Maybe when it was written, the fact that there was a lot of energy wasn't as well known, so this assumption didn't stand out as much.
If you believe that a god exists and influences everyday lives, give me an example of 5 events that god has influenced and a detailed explanation of why he/she/it did what he/she/it did.
No scientist who deserves the title claims or believes that science yields objective truth. Instead, what they believe is that science yields a good and useful model of the world as it exists. Nobody actually believes that a nucleus contains a bunch of red and white spheres stuck together in a clump, but that's a decent model for understanding a nucleus, so that's how it is often represented.
This event shows the strengths of the scientific process. Papers are published attempting to strengthen, weaken, or change a model. If people discover that a paper is flawed, that paper is retracted so as not to pollute the discussion.
If the papers were being published or retracted based on popular political or religious beliefs, rather than scientific errors, that would be a signal that there's something wrong with the scientific process, but when a paper is retracted because it is found to have errors, even if that's decades after its initial publication, that's great.
Slashdot Mirror
"Current level of influenza pandemic alert raised from phase 4 to 5"
http://www.who.int/en/
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic/phases.htm.
Obviously as it spreads more, the risk is greater, but it isn't some "terror alert level" they're raising, it's the phase in the progression of the outbreak that they're tracking.
Honestly, I hope this has an effect on spam. Maybe Spammers will see this and think "wow, this guy got that messed up after getting caught? It's not worth it" or maybe they'll say "Wow, look at how little sympathy there was for him, do people really hate spammers that much?" and stop. Most likely though, if you're the sort of person who sends spam, you're probably a sociopath with no empathy, and you'll probably just say "what a loser, he couldn't hack it in the real world" and try to prove your manliness by doubling your spam output.
The biggest problem with WotLK won't be balance it will be the new abilities. Most people are at the limit of what they can fit on hotbars already. It looks like in WotLK they won't be adding new features to existing abilities (garrote), or obsoleting a new ability (claw -> mangle) but instead will be adding even more abilities. If you have 57 abilities you can use at any one time, it will just be overwhelming.
Feral tanks don't scale badly past T4 content, it's just a real pain to get the required gear. Feral tanks can handle all of Hyjal and all of BT except for Illidan and RoS, since Illidan requires shield block and RoS requires spell reflect. Having said that, the best feral tanking weapon drops in the first real 25 man raid (SSC), the only tanking options for certain slots are tier gear, whereas warriors and paladins get lots of options, and maintaining crit immunity actually gets harder as you progress, rather than easier.
Unless you were lvl 30 or so and trying to quest, and instead kept getting one-shot by bored level 60s. The biggest problem with world PvP in WoW is that there's no reward for winning a fair fight, and no punishment for destroying someone who isn't a challenge to you.
In Team Fortress 2 there are advantages/disadvantages based on class, but for the most part, it's all about player skill. In WoW it's about level difference first, gear difference second, class difference third, and player skill last. Occasionally an undergeared, under-leveled, highly skilled player can defeat someone, but for the most part the wins go to the pvp-specced, pvp-geared, level 70, regardless of skill -- in particular if that level 70 in pvp gear is a rogue who can start from stealth.
WoW PvP needs an overhaul. On a typical horde-dominated PvP server, there can be twice as many active horde players as alliance players, which means that when a new area opens up (like the new island) the Horde can basically dominate the area and keep Alliance out until they get bored. On a typical PvP server your first PvP experience is walking into Redridge or Ashenvale and getting smoked by a player so many levels higher than you you can't even tell what level they are. Even if a bunch of lowbies gang up on a high level player they can't do anything, now that level-based resists work on players too. And don't get me started on afk epics...
Being sighted, and not having access to a screen reader, designing a site to be blind-friendly is just too much effort for most designers, and since there's generally nothing in it for them (no extra money, no extra kudos, etc.) it's hard to justify making an effort to do it.
I think if there were a really easy addon to firefox that said "render for the blind" that didn't actually do the screen-reading part of rendering, but did dump all graphics, render things in "order" rather than how they show up visually, etc. there might be more effort made. I think people just forget to add alt tags, or forget that on-screen order isn't what you get out of a screen reader.
Having said that, I've heard that one of the biggest problems blind people face is that as far as CAPTCHAs are concerned, they're spambots.
Bots do make the game more miserable. If there are no "X" items available on the auction house you have to go gather them yourself. If there are bots gathering up the resources, it makes it harder for you to gather them up. If it were other players gathering you could try to buy off them directly, but a bot won't respond at all. Far worse than gathering resources are the bots in the battlegrounds. They're clever enough to avoid getting automatically flagged for being AFK, but their presence makes it much more likely your side will lose. If you're a human playing the game and have a limited amount of time available, you want to get as many battleground wins as possible in the time you have. The bot users don't care if they lose every game, since it's all free honor and BG tokens for them. In fact, they don't want their bots to win too often, blizzard is more likely to take action against bots that are better than players.
It's one thing to lose a game because your team is full of idiots, at least you can vent at them, or offer suggestions in the hope they'll get better in the future. If it's a bot that's only there to get someone free honor, it's unfair for them, and ruins the game for you.
You're really that disturbed about the "God Damn America" comment? So what? How does associating with someone who has said something like that make Obama unfit to be president?
That's just not true. There are large segments of society who use science on a daily basis, but there are also vast segments who don't know the first thing about science and who, at best, treat it as just another religion. Turn on CNN for an hour and you'll see.
First, you're likely to get some commercials. Commercials talk about something being "clinically proven". What does that mean? It sounds scientific and so people have faith it means that there's "science" behind the claims. You might also get a gum commercial where 4 out of 5 dentists recommend X. Does that mean 80% of all dentists recommend X? Does it mean that exactly 5 dentists were asked? Did they know it was part of a commercial? It sounds scientific enough for people, so they accept it. Second, when the coverage starts you'll most likely get some political coverage. You may get Mike Huckabee's sound bite "I know people say that the math doesn't work out. Folks, I didn't major in math. I majored in miracles, and I still believe in those too." Then you'll get the statistics on various races. The reporters will report that they're able to call state X with 60% of the precincts reporting... but do people understand why they need less than 100%? Other times they talk about the democratic delegate count and someone might mention that even though a bunch of states haven't voted at all, there's no way that it will be resolved without super-delegates, but can they actually explain why that is?
Forget science, people can't even handle math. They can't calculate what kind of mortgage payments are reasonable on their income, or understand how their payments will change over time. Sure, you can't blame all the sub-prime mortgage mess on people being unable to do math, but that's one of the contributing factors.
Fundamentally a scientific approach to something involves making a hypothesis, controlling variables, making some measurements, understanding the errors on those measurements, and drawing a conclusion. Does the average person know how to do that, let alone ever actually do it?
We may not be moving into an era dominated by superstition, but to most people science is just this vague thing that's good and true, and so the actor in the lab coat on a commercial is more trustworthy than if he were just wearing a sweater, and statisticey-sounding numbers are more meaningful than words like "most" or "many".
I think more important than what's allowed on the robots is what kind of surface will they be playing on. When they're played on very smooth, very flat surfaces, it becomes all about wedges and flippers. Every robot has a skirt with less than 1cm clearance on all sides, and the winners are the ones that can slip under that skirt.
If they changed it so that the games were played on uneven, non smooth surfaces, maybe even some dirt/grass, water, etc. you'd have to have exposed wheels / tracks. Wedges / flippers would no longer have a massive advantage.
Survival of the fittest in robot fighting competitions is, like all other survival of the fittest contests, based on the environment. If the environment is varied enough that one niche player can't dominate everything, you'll get much more interesting fights, and much more variety in design.
I just finished watching (well mostly listening to) each of their two Google interviews: Hillary, Obama. It cemented an impression I've had for a while. Hillary may be a very capable legislator, but Obama would make a better president. They both talked about a lot of the same things, but it was Obama who had the edge when talking about restoring America's place in the world. As someone who has lived in Muslim communities, lived overseas, dealt with racism, etc. he would be much more capable of working with countries like Iran, Pakistan, etc.
The other advantage is that he isn't carrying all the political baggage. In Hillary's talk, she keeps attacking Bush and Cheney, and doing it in ways that shows just how much she detests them, calling Bush "the current occupant of the oval office", etc. Sure, that may be playing to the audience, but it isn't helpful, and will hurt her chances of being able to work with these same people later. Obama doesn't get dragged into that.
Obama may have less experience, and may not be as tight a legislator, but the job of the executive isn't to legislate, it's to lead. I can imagine the US following his lead much more easily than Hillary's, and I can imagine his influence overseas would be better too.
Either democrat will be an improvement over the current administration -- hell, either republican would be too, but I think Obama is the candidate better suited to the role of President.
From what I can tell their opinions are pretty similar, and they're offering pretty similar policies, similar enough that what they're likely to be able to pass would probably be identical. To me the difference is that the last 20 years the presidents have been Bush, Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush. If you think monarchies or middle-ages style aristocracies are bad, then you probably shouldn't support the same two families trading off the presidency every two years. Aside from that, my impression is that Clinton tends to support popular things (the war on terra when people were scared, getting the armed forces home when people are tired of the war on terra), be against unpopular things (video game violence, etc.), whereas Obama actually seems to have some real core beliefs, and to just be a bit more honest and sincere in general -- something lacking in all the other remaining candidates other than perhaps Ron Paul or Mike Gravel. Then again, just because you haven't dropped out, doesn't mean you're still in the race.
Wow, you're right, and for some reason I thought that was *fun*!
Oh wait. It is!
That's a pretty stupid point of view -- that unless you vote for a candidate other than the one who gets elected you "didn't try to stop them", and shouldn't complain.
There are other ways of trying to stop someone other than voting against them, and possibly voting for someone who you also think is not a good choice. You can campaign against them, you can try to influence others to reject them etc. You lose some credibility about complaining about someone if you actually voted *for* them, but even then you have every right to complain. They may have misrepresented their abilities, their positions, their intentions, or their competence in the election -- in fact it's almost a sure thing that they did. Given that, it's entirely reasonable to complain that you didn't get what you bargained for.
My view is that if you really don't feel like any of the candidates is worthy, or that the political system is so broken that voting *for* anybody is an act of endorsing a system you disagree with, you shouldn't vote.
You're right, fair use is always an option, but fair use would probably never cover taking a bit of code and using it unchanged in a commercial application.
Since we don't know where the code comes from, etc. the best assumption is that you have no rights to do anything with it.
I'm sure it's true that the average person breaks tons of laws every day, in particular copyright violations. That doesn't mean they're safe from lawsuits. The average person might get the Jammie Whatzerface treatment and suddenly be liable for hundreds of thousands in damages.
If you buy a book on ASP, generally the sample code in there has a license that allows everybody (or at least people who bought the book) to use the code in any way they want. The same can't be said for virtually any code you find out on the web. The default for any new work is for it to be copyrighted and with no license. Unless your use of the copyrighted material falls under Fair Use, you're not allowed to use it; copying the entirety of a code snippet for use in a commercial application is not Fair Use.
You'll probably never get in trouble for doing this, because probably most people (90%+) would say their posts are in the public domain if asked about it -- but until you've asked them, you have to assume that it's "look but don't touch".
Which isn't true either. You have zero right to copy it or use it in any way until the author gives you those permissions.
Starship Troopers is actually a lot like how the US was founded, in that only a small subset of the population could vote. It used to be that to vote in the US you had to be white, male, and a land owner.
These days anybody can vote, regardless of their race, gender or wealth. Is this a better country as a result? I'm not convinced. The reasoning behind restricting voting to white male landowners was that (in theory) they were more able to use that vote intelligently. White male landowners were assumed to be educated enough to make intelligent decisions. While I don't think any reasonable person today would think it's fair to have sexist, racist barriers to voting, maybe it makes sense to value certain opinions more highly than others. On the issue of stem cell research, who's more qualified to make reasonable decisions: a medical doctor doing research, or someone who learned about stem cells by watching Fox news? When it comes to farming legislation, should a city dweller's opinion be valued the same as a farmer's? Should economic policy be decided by the average citizen who carries $20,000 in debt?
Everybody says that our system of government is broken, they whine about politicians all being the same, and corporations controlling everything, but bring up the topic of actually radically reforming the government and people suddenly think it's a great system, it just needs a tweak here or there. Why not rethink the very idea of democracy. The greek term "aristocracy" has been corrupted to mean "rule by the rich", but it literally translates as "rule by the best". With politicians more worried about keeping their jobs than doing the right thing, or more worried about lining their pockets than representing their people, maybe it's time to find decision makers who aren't forced to respond to the whims of an uneducated, shortsighted, easily influenced population and instead find good people. A really good person might never be willing to run for office, seeing how shallow the process is, how looks matter more than substance, how having a gravelly voice is key, and an enthusiastic shout can mean you're unqualified. A great decision maker might make a very poor politician. but what's more important, electability or being able to make the right decisions once in office?
I won't vote, even if I thought my vote mattered I don't want to endorse a system I don't believe in by participating in it. Instead, I'll keep trying to reform the system, and if that doesn't work, go somewhere where it doesn't affect me.
I've been perp-walked out of places as part of a layoff, and have had happy goodbye parties after a transition period. Obviously the way employees are asked to leave leaves a big impact on those who aren't laid off. It's ridiculous when you quit, however. If you work at a place where people are walked out like criminals, you'll know that's how you'll be treated too. If you want to take customer data with you, you will have every opportunity to do that before you announce you're leaving.
In fact, at one place where I used to work, one of the founders was pushed out, and he was forced to wipe his personal laptop before leaving the building, since he had used it as his main laptop at work. Months later, they realized that there was vital information that they didn't have and needed. In desperation, they decided to see if this guy had it. Of course he did. He had been backing up his laptop all along, so he had all the necessary data on a backup drive at home.
Unless you're using military-grade data security practices, treating people like criminals isn't going to prevent them being destructive, or taking data with them, it's just going to piss them off and piss off the employees you have left.
Find a single link to back up this claim of yours that he didn't present a valid Canadian passport. Everything I've seen, and everything everybody aside from you has seen has said that he was sent off to be tortured in Syria despite having a Canadian passport. Your side of the story can't just be the one you invented, it has to have some facts to back it up.
Dual citizenship is a right, and it is fair. My parents were American citizens born and raised in the US, but they had moved to Canada when I was born, so I grew up in Canada to American parents. In what way am I not a citizen of both countries? Apparently neither the US nor Canada agrees with your assertion that you can't be a citizen of both places.
Basically, nobody believes what you do, so I recommend you move to a country where people share your views, somewhere like afghanistan, pakistan, saudi arabia...
Actually, that's what a terrorist *does* want. If everyone is walking around armed, scared of the people around them, ready to shoot someone at the slightest hint they're a terrorist, then the terrorists have achieved their objectives and have brought terror into people's lives. What terrorists don't want is to be ignored.
Ok, this is completely offtopic but I can't let you get away with saying "trapezing through" without saying something. Unlike some mistaken idioms (say like "reign in" instead of "rein in") trapezing through makes no sense. The true idiom is "traipsing through" where traipsing is "to walk from one place to another, often feeling tired or bored". This is almost the opposite of how you'd act on a trapeze. I'm sure your comment was intelligent and insightful otherwise, but I stopped reading when I hit "trapezing".
It's pretty likely that his research being cited to help prove something he didn't believe was enough to get him to look it over more closely. If his research had been used to prove something he believed to be true, he probably wouldn't have examined it as closely. You really can't take the motivation out of science, but as long as the science is sound, it doesn't really matter.
As for whether re-reading something years later would show any errors to be obivious, I would hope so. If the field has advanced a lot, it's pretty likely that people would know not only whether something happens, but why. If your original experiment was built on some assumptions which have proven to be wrong over the years then those assumptions would probably stand out.
"Under the circumstances I mention, just a bunch of chemicals sitting together, no," he said. "Because it takes energy to go from the things that make glycine to glycine, glycine being the simplest amino acid." There were potential sources of energy, he said. So to say that nothing much would happen in its absence "is totally beside the point." "And that is a point I did not make," he added.So, reading it years later, when everybody knows that there were all kinds of sources of energy, a passage that talks about what was possible in the absence of energy would stand out. Maybe when it was written, the fact that there was a lot of energy wasn't as well known, so this assumption didn't stand out as much.
If you believe that a god exists and influences everyday lives, give me an example of 5 events that god has influenced and a detailed explanation of why he/she/it did what he/she/it did.
No scientist who deserves the title claims or believes that science yields objective truth. Instead, what they believe is that science yields a good and useful model of the world as it exists. Nobody actually believes that a nucleus contains a bunch of red and white spheres stuck together in a clump, but that's a decent model for understanding a nucleus, so that's how it is often represented.
This event shows the strengths of the scientific process. Papers are published attempting to strengthen, weaken, or change a model. If people discover that a paper is flawed, that paper is retracted so as not to pollute the discussion.
If the papers were being published or retracted based on popular political or religious beliefs, rather than scientific errors, that would be a signal that there's something wrong with the scientific process, but when a paper is retracted because it is found to have errors, even if that's decades after its initial publication, that's great.