You can record shows off cable TV with your VCR, and the tapes still work if/when you stop paying for cable, or move house, or buy a new TV/VCR. This doesn't happen with most Pressplay "downloads", and there are limits on how many "portable downloads" (i.e. uncrippled downloads) you can buy per month.
It is a fallacy that laws always provide justice. Indeed, it's pretty obvious by looking at a handful of laws that they don't provide justice. Certainly, this ideally what they would do, but IMHO, the most important role of law is to provide order, a known set of regulations that everyone follows, so that society doesn't degenerate into an anarchy.
Actually, I think it's because all the menus use custom UI code, but the favorites menu uses different custom UI because you can drag and drop the menus. The reason you can tell this is because explorer uses the IE-style menus with a grip on the left side. These menus aren't native Windows menus---in fact if you try to do the same thing at the API level yourself, you have to emulate much of the behaviour of normal Windows menus, including left/right arrow keys to jump between menus and all that stuff. Yes, it's dodgy. I find MMC's menus (that's Microsoft Management Console) more annoying inconsistent, though.
My bad, on the IBM site it says that they can't yet manufacture CMOS on SiGe, which is pretty much a requirement for CPUs these days. They can only manufacture bipolar transistors and analog devices.
They do say that "Shortly, we will be releasing our BiCMOS SiGe technology...", which means that they will be able to manufacture bipolar transistors and MOS transistors on the same chip. In other words, you can't make a modern CPU with it now if you don't work for IBM, but you will be able to soon.
I'm sure you could make a CPU out of it, even if it was just a simple one. A simple CPU has less demanding fabrication requirements than all the things you listed. It just isn't economical for general-purpose low frequency use compared to normal silicon CMOS. SiGe is aimed at applications which use e.g. GaAs technology at the moment.
Yes, it will be used for general applications, not just SRAM. Static RAM is often used as a test for new manufacturing processes because it is very repetitive. This makes it easy to design wafers completely covered by SRAM, and easy to test so the defect rate can be worked out.
Also, the upcoming Intel/AMD cores will be using huge amounts of cache (of the order of 1MB, which until now has only been seen on pretty high-end server CPUs), so being able to reliably manufacture large amounts of it is important anyway.
No, but objects don't "exert" charge, spin, or colour, so why should they "exert" mass? Maybe "exert" is the wrong word here.
I thought mass was just another property anyway, and that it is already widely thought there are messenger particles for gravity. However, there just isn't a theory (yet) that tells us quantitatively how it works, like QED/electroweak theories and QCD.
Just a nitpick---MAPI is a software interface between programs on the client computer, not a protocol between a client and a mail server like IMAP is. It's designed with a lot of Outlook-type features in mind, but can't do everything that Outlook or Exchange can do. I'm not sure if the Exchange protocol has any specific name/abbreviation.
MAPI is used for implementing "Send to..." items in applications and for writing front-end email programs that don't want to implement the actual back-end part of talking to the server.
Exact audio copy (EAC) is good, and it's what I use. You may have to fiddle with some options the first time that you use it, but it is very configurable. It works with freedb/CDDB, does custom filenaming schemes, and is very good at avoiding errors (jitter etc.) unless the CD is horribly scratched.
Anyway, to get EAC to work with Vorbis 1.0, download the Ogg Vorbis tools from the Vorbis web site or a mirror, and then extract the EAC program and oggenc.exe. Run EAC, and in "Compression options", choose the "External compression" tab (the libVorbis codec option doesn't seem to work for me...), choose Ogg Vorbis as the parameter passing scheme, and set up the path to the encoder. The resulting Ogg file is correctly tagged (with an Ogg tag) if you choose "add ID3 tag".
As has been said before, that's a shortcut, which does have to be interpreted on a program-by-program basis. Microsoft says that programs should follow them, but you can't type a complete path with a shortcut in it, and many programs don't support them as they should. By the way, you can also make a shortcut from one folder to another by right-dragging the target folder to the source folder in explorer, and choosing "create shortcut here" from the menu that appears. Then rename the shortcut if you want.
On systems with NTFS v5 and above (i.e. Windows 2000 and XP), there is a symlink capability -- it's called a "reparse point". Microsoft calls them "junction points" when they're a symlink to a directory, and "volume mount points" when they're used to do something similar to Unix mounting (or the old DOS "join" command).
They work quite well at the command line, but many programs written for Windows don't support them because they assume that a file can only have one name, for example. Or they don't correctly handle symlink loops, where a symlink in a directory refers to one of it's own parent directories. They're not very well documented or supported under Windows 2000 - you have to download some utilities from Microsoft or System Internals or someone - but they're better documented and supported under Windows XP from what I've heard.
1.4 "IPR Impairing License" shall mean the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License, and any license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form; (b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works;
or (c) be redistributable at no charge.
Note that if either (a), (b), OR (c) is true, then the license is an "IPR impairing license". Also, it is possible to sublicense some software in a way that would make it fall under the definition of an "IPR impairing license". In the main passage of the license text, it says:
...Company shall not distribute any Company Implementation in any manner that would subject such Company Implementation to the terms of an IPR Impairing License.
So something like public domain software, which can be sublicensed as BSD, GPL etc. is out as well.
I don't know how to make a database that looks like a.pst file, but you can do something similar: in Outlook, it is possible to add custom properties (with data types that you specify) to email messages, contact items, todo items etc. I think you have to use a VBScript app (or other COM-interfacing program) to actually change the data stored in the custom properties, but they can be used in searches, sorting etc. with the normal outlook interface. The properties are preserved when the emails are copied to or from an exchange server, and if you send an email with custom properties, the properties are viewable by the receiver.
Let me tell you about an interesting feature that XP has that the rest of the Windows line doesn't: It can have multiple users running programs at the same time.
WinNT (I think) and Win2K (certainly) can do this. Shift-right click a program or shortcut to a program and choose "Run as...". Alternatively, from a command prompt, type: runas/user:Administrator cmd.exe. (You may need a 3rd party program to do this under Win NT, but it should be possible.)
Services also typically run as different users, as do system processes such as winlogon.exe, svchost.exe, csrss.exe and mstask.exe. As others have pointed out, Terminal Services also allows multiple users to run programs with their own privilages. In fact, Windows NT, 2K, and XP allow finer-grained control of processes, threads, and objects than Unix does. What XP allows is an easy way for multiple users to have their own individual desktops available at the same time (and their own Explorer process running on their appropriate desktop). Download Process Explorer from System Internals to see how processes under NT work.
TFloore said: I suspect you can pass these 5 standards completely, and still be insecure.
Your suspicions are certainly accurate. Programs which are "excessively" vulnerable to denial of service attacks are considered to have security flaws (see the Microsoft advisory on the UPnP problems for a recent example of this). Also, there are many, many other routine security flaws which can arise in programs, and in particular, programs which require root/System/Administrator privilages to run.
As an example here, suppose program XYZ wants to modify the file.xyz in the user's home directory if it exists. Suppose also that program XYZ needs to be run SUID root. If the program gets the user's home directory from the HOME environment variable. This opens up a security problem, because the user could have set the HOME environment variable to anything. It is also possible that a malicious user could make.xyz a symlink to another file that they normally would not have permission to modify. Both these things allow a user to modify a file that they shouldn't be allowed to touch, and hence are security flaws.
There's a good FAQ on this (the Secure UNIX Programming FAQ) at http://www.whitefang.com/sup/, if you're interested.
I'm an Australian, and I really don't think that what they did was wrong. However, I do think that the article has quite a bit of political bias (I'd expect to see this sort of bias on k5 more than here). Let's look at the story:
Well well, the Australian government has been caught out spying on its own citizens, despite denying for years that they do this type of thing.
They were spying on phone conversations to a ship which was boarded by SAS troops! From the article: The Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) at Geraldton in Western Australia intercepted the phone calls after the ship was boarded by SAS troops. Whether or not you agree with the government's actions regarding the ship is irrelevant; this ain't no ordinary civilian phone conversation they listened in on.
This story at The Age shows that the Defence Signals Directorate listens to just about every bit of communications in Australia.
Funny, when I read the story, I didn't see that stated. I read a number of statements saying that the DSD's intelligence gathering was within Australian laws and supervised by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. The DSD also reports to the cabinet and (I think) a committee on intelligence. I read that the Opposition Leader, Simon Crean, asked for an inquiry and I read that the opposition said that they now generally don't trust the DSD, but no actual facts. (Aside: Does anyone else dislike the term "unAustralian" (or whatever nationality you please)? Simon Crean used the term and it really ticks me off.)
The interesting thing about this story is the background to it. In this case the govt spied because they were trying to win an election, and needed evidence to demonise a ship that was docking in Australia carrying a bunch of refugees.
Well, the government still has the same policy after the election. The main people saying that the government is using this for political gain are the people who don't like the government's actions, or who dislike the government generally. For all you Australians who think the government is doing this for political gain: Phillip Ruddock (immigration minister, primarily responsible for refugee decisions) is a member of Amnesty International, and has been for a long time. John Howard (Prime Minister) has demonstrated that he doesn't mind taking unpopular decisions every now and then, especially when quite a long way from an election. Have you ever considered that these two, and the rest of the government, might (a) know more about the situation than you (and their info isn't full of media bias); and (b) may have a different value system to you??? (Shock horror!)
What was said is the following: Transcripts of phone conversations between the International Transport Federation, Maritime Union of Australia and the crew of the MV Tampa were used by the government to formulate a political response... One wonders why the phone conversations were useful. I assume that if the political response was simply lies, lies, and more lies, then the actual facts probably wouldn't be that useful. I'd be interested to know exactly how the phone conversations were used, although that probably is classified information that we won't find out for another 50 years.
The fact that the scheduler is O(1) is largely irrelevant, although that's how it was announced on the Kernel mailing list so that's what it's called. The patch includes rewrites for other critical scheduler functions which improve performance under common conditions, especially interactive performance. In particular, it gives priority boosts for processes that have low average load requirements when they need the CPU.
It's in MI1 when you're dropping rocks onto the see-saw. (The see-saw that flings the rocks to hit the banana tree on the beach...) If you walk too close to the edge in the correct area of the screen, part of it collapses, you fall off the edge and get the fake death sequence.
There's a Java class called ClassLoader that allows Java programs to dynamically load classes at runtime. The classes can be stored somehow on the computer, downloaded over the network, or generated dynamically by the program if it knows the Java class format. You can make portable self-modifying code with Java;). Basically, you can make your precompiled class files into shared libraries or whatever, but you still need to be able to handle bytecode class files received over the network, compiled with a source-to-bytecode compiler, etc.
Large software development projects can be scaled successfully - there are much larger projects than Linux that do this very well. It's just a question of whether Linus is willing to learn a little from their example, while at the same time avoiding their mistakes.
I think you've got this dead on. In projects not all that much larger than the kernel, the top-level managers are further away from the nitty-gritty details of the code than Linus seems to want to be. I think that Linus still looks on the kernel as his "pet project", and doesn't want to relinquish control, but the kernel will eventually get too complex for him to micromanage efficiently.
Kylix/Delphi 6/(New versions of C++ Builder) have their class libraries (CLX) based on Qt. If you buy one of these products, you have an unlimited license to use Qt linked with programs you create which are based on CLX. The CLX widgets Qt widgets -- the CLX is a set of wrapper classes to remove multiple inheritance (Delphi doesn't support it) and add some VCL-like features. You can make direct Qt calls from your programs. (Of course, you still need to get enough money to buy Kylix/Delphi/C++ Builder in the first place...)
The second law of thermodynamics is statistical (or maybe probabilistic) because, when you look at the microscopic motions particles, it is possible for the second law to be broken, but incredibly unlikely. The classic example is: I have a sealed box of an odorous gas. I take it into a large room and open the box. The gas obviously will disperse and fill the room; this is predicted by the 2nd law of thermodynamics. If you look at the random motions of just one of these gas particles, it would look perfectly OK if you watched the movie "in reverse". However, it wouldn't look ok for the entire process to go in reverse. The reason is that it is incredibly unlikely that if a room is full of gas, then all the gas particles will, by chance, all move into the box in the corner. It is possible, but so incredibly unlikely you'd be waiting for many many times the age of the universe before it probably would happen. In more technical terms, there are many more states that the gas can be in if it "evenly" fills the room, but comparitively few if the gas is all in one corner. If each "state" of the particles on a microscopic level is equally likely (i.e. if the gas has been in the room for a long enough time that it has reached equilibrium), then the probability that the gas will fill the room instead of all being in the box is very close to 1.
So the cases where you'd see the 2nd Law not holding are where the probabilities of observing it are much more favorable than 1 in 10^80 or something. This means that you need to be looking at small numbers of particles (maybe 5 or 10 instead of ~10^23 particles for macroscopic objects) for long times. Certainly you wouldn't see it being violated constantly in a 40 pound lump of metal that some guy put together in his backyard.
Gravity, in contrast (according to theory anyway) always works. Full stop. It's not like that it's just an incredibly likely that objects will attract each other, it's a "certainty". It's the same with most of the other physical laws out there. Quantum mechanics is "probabilistic", but in another somewhat different sense, and theromodynamics doesn't really apply on the scale of quantum mechanics anyway. (Thermodynamics deals with the study of "macroscopic" systems with large numbers of particles, where general properties of the set of particles can be expressed. Properties like total energy, volume, # of particles, temperature, pressure, etc.)
Right click on the page, choose "View page info", click the "Images" tab, and you get a table which shows the ALT text of all the images on the page. You might have to resize the columns of the table, or resize the window. There's already a description of this somewhere in Bugzilla, and they decided that it isn't a bug per se because no spec requires that browsers display the ALT text in a tooltip. (It's just that other browsers have in the past.)
You make some interesting points that I haven't heard before:
The refugees are held in privatised "for profit" detention centres.
Are you sure about this? I was almost 100% sure that the detention centres were government run. (e.g. the recent Woomera riots caused a large damage bill that the government had to pick up).
Many refugees have been held for times in excess of two years. To a large degree that is due to appeals, but it is still a very bad situation.
Yes, this is bad. However, if you went to another country without any paperwork and they decided to send you back, would you expect that country to pay for your legal services so you could appeal the decision over and over? There are very few countries that would pay for this. I agree that more could be done to speed up legal proceedings in cases like these (there are also other types of cases where faster legal proceedings would be best for all concerned).
A lot of people would consider every refugee here unworthy, since they had to be rich or have a lot of contacts to get here in the first place.
I don't believe refugees are unworthy because of the amount of money that they have. I'm not all that impressed with "refugees" stopping safely in 3 or more other countries before they arrive, though. I'm also not impressed by the behaviour of certain individuals (people rioting in detention centres setting them on fire, purposefully attempting to poison themselves "in protest" etc.). Frankly, although the conditions are not all that nice at all, although I think the conditions are much better in an Australian detention centre than they are in many of the countries that said refugees come from. They are safe, have free food, accomodation, medical treatment, hygenic sewage facilities, and free legal representation. There are stories of guards waking detainees up in the middle of the night and searching their cells, but I have yet to see conclusive proof of this.
Here the majority don't want immigrants BECAUSE they might work and take good anglo-saxon jobs.
I think this may be an argument used by certain groups (I haven't heard the gvt use it themselves, strangely enough) to get trade unions and blue collar workers on side. Personally, I believe there is not enough incentive for refugees to work. Refugees get a lot of welfare privilages that normal immigrants don't get (until they've lived in the country for a few years), as well as free English classes, and are treated like they're a citizen in almost all other respects.
That said, there are problems with the efficiency of processing (as there are with almost all other areas in the public service). It is necessary to keep people isolated for at least a month or two for quarantine reasons, but much more than that is unnecessary.
... that big-endian systems like Intel are more susceptible to overflows for some reason. Don't know if that is actually true or not.
Actually it's not true. Intel (well, x86) systems are little endian:). I've seen a few people who seem to think that little endian is less logical than big-endian, though I really don't see why. Both big and little endian have their logic to them. I have a feeling it's mostly from people who hate Intel and all things x86, though, as most CPUs that aren't x86 are big-endian. Similarly, I really don't see why little endian systems are more suseptible to buffer overflows. You just have to remember to use htons() or htonl() if appropriate.
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You can record shows off cable TV with your VCR, and the tapes still work if/when you stop paying for cable, or move house, or buy a new TV/VCR. This doesn't happen with most Pressplay "downloads", and there are limits on how many "portable downloads" (i.e. uncrippled downloads) you can buy per month.
It is a fallacy that laws always provide justice. Indeed, it's pretty obvious by looking at a handful of laws that they don't provide justice. Certainly, this ideally what they would do, but IMHO, the most important role of law is to provide order, a known set of regulations that everyone follows, so that society doesn't degenerate into an anarchy.
Actually, I think it's because all the menus use custom UI code, but the favorites menu uses different custom UI because you can drag and drop the menus. The reason you can tell this is because explorer uses the IE-style menus with a grip on the left side. These menus aren't native Windows menus---in fact if you try to do the same thing at the API level yourself, you have to emulate much of the behaviour of normal Windows menus, including left/right arrow keys to jump between menus and all that stuff. Yes, it's dodgy. I find MMC's menus (that's Microsoft Management Console) more annoying inconsistent, though.
They do say that "Shortly, we will be releasing our BiCMOS SiGe technology...", which means that they will be able to manufacture bipolar transistors and MOS transistors on the same chip. In other words, you can't make a modern CPU with it now if you don't work for IBM, but you will be able to soon.
I'm sure you could make a CPU out of it, even if it was just a simple one. A simple CPU has less demanding fabrication requirements than all the things you listed. It just isn't economical for general-purpose low frequency use compared to normal silicon CMOS. SiGe is aimed at applications which use e.g. GaAs technology at the moment.
Also, the upcoming Intel/AMD cores will be using huge amounts of cache (of the order of 1MB, which until now has only been seen on pretty high-end server CPUs), so being able to reliably manufacture large amounts of it is important anyway.
I thought mass was just another property anyway, and that it is already widely thought there are messenger particles for gravity. However, there just isn't a theory (yet) that tells us quantitatively how it works, like QED/electroweak theories and QCD.
MAPI is used for implementing "Send to..." items in applications and for writing front-end email programs that don't want to implement the actual back-end part of talking to the server.
Anyway, to get EAC to work with Vorbis 1.0, download the Ogg Vorbis tools from the Vorbis web site or a mirror, and then extract the EAC program and oggenc.exe. Run EAC, and in "Compression options", choose the "External compression" tab (the libVorbis codec option doesn't seem to work for me...), choose Ogg Vorbis as the parameter passing scheme, and set up the path to the encoder. The resulting Ogg file is correctly tagged (with an Ogg tag) if you choose "add ID3 tag".
HTH.
On systems with NTFS v5 and above (i.e. Windows 2000 and XP), there is a symlink capability -- it's called a "reparse point". Microsoft calls them "junction points" when they're a symlink to a directory, and "volume mount points" when they're used to do something similar to Unix mounting (or the old DOS "join" command).
They work quite well at the command line, but many programs written for Windows don't support them because they assume that a file can only have one name, for example. Or they don't correctly handle symlink loops, where a symlink in a directory refers to one of it's own parent directories. They're not very well documented or supported under Windows 2000 - you have to download some utilities from Microsoft or System Internals or someone - but they're better documented and supported under Windows XP from what I've heard.
Note that if either (a), (b), OR (c) is true, then the license is an "IPR impairing license". Also, it is possible to sublicense some software in a way that would make it fall under the definition of an "IPR impairing license". In the main passage of the license text, it says:
So something like public domain software, which can be sublicensed as BSD, GPL etc. is out as well.I don't know how to make a database that looks like a .pst file, but you can do something similar: in Outlook, it is possible to add custom properties (with data types that you specify) to email messages, contact items, todo items etc. I think you have to use a VBScript app (or other COM-interfacing program) to actually change the data stored in the custom properties, but they can be used in searches, sorting etc. with the normal outlook interface. The properties are preserved when the emails are copied to or from an exchange server, and if you send an email with custom properties, the properties are viewable by the receiver.
Services also typically run as different users, as do system processes such as winlogon.exe, svchost.exe, csrss.exe and mstask.exe. As others have pointed out, Terminal Services also allows multiple users to run programs with their own privilages. In fact, Windows NT, 2K, and XP allow finer-grained control of processes, threads, and objects than Unix does. What XP allows is an easy way for multiple users to have their own individual desktops available at the same time (and their own Explorer process running on their appropriate desktop). Download Process Explorer from System Internals to see how processes under NT work.
Your suspicions are certainly accurate. Programs which are "excessively" vulnerable to denial of service attacks are considered to have security flaws (see the Microsoft advisory on the UPnP problems for a recent example of this). Also, there are many, many other routine security flaws which can arise in programs, and in particular, programs which require root/System/Administrator privilages to run.
As an example here, suppose program XYZ wants to modify the file .xyz in the user's home directory if it exists. Suppose also that program XYZ needs to be run SUID root. If the program gets the user's home directory from the HOME environment variable. This opens up a security problem, because the user could have set the HOME environment variable to anything. It is also possible that a malicious user could make .xyz a symlink to another file that they normally would not have permission to modify. Both these things allow a user to modify a file that they shouldn't be allowed to touch, and hence are security flaws.
There's a good FAQ on this (the Secure UNIX Programming FAQ) at http://www.whitefang.com/sup/, if you're interested.
Re: "UnAustralian": Certainly - I didn't mean to imply that one side of politics is any more or less guilty than the other ;).
Funny, when I read the story, I didn't see that stated. I read a number of statements saying that the DSD's intelligence gathering was within Australian laws and supervised by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. The DSD also reports to the cabinet and (I think) a committee on intelligence. I read that the Opposition Leader, Simon Crean, asked for an inquiry and I read that the opposition said that they now generally don't trust the DSD, but no actual facts. (Aside: Does anyone else dislike the term "unAustralian" (or whatever nationality you please)? Simon Crean used the term and it really ticks me off.)
Well, the government still has the same policy after the election. The main people saying that the government is using this for political gain are the people who don't like the government's actions, or who dislike the government generally. For all you Australians who think the government is doing this for political gain: Phillip Ruddock (immigration minister, primarily responsible for refugee decisions) is a member of Amnesty International, and has been for a long time. John Howard (Prime Minister) has demonstrated that he doesn't mind taking unpopular decisions every now and then, especially when quite a long way from an election. Have you ever considered that these two, and the rest of the government, might (a) know more about the situation than you (and their info isn't full of media bias); and (b) may have a different value system to you??? (Shock horror!)
What was said is the following: Transcripts of phone conversations between the International Transport Federation, Maritime Union of Australia and the crew of the MV Tampa were used by the government to formulate a political response... One wonders why the phone conversations were useful. I assume that if the political response was simply lies, lies, and more lies, then the actual facts probably wouldn't be that useful. I'd be interested to know exactly how the phone conversations were used, although that probably is classified information that we won't find out for another 50 years.
The fact that the scheduler is O(1) is largely irrelevant, although that's how it was announced on the Kernel mailing list so that's what it's called. The patch includes rewrites for other critical scheduler functions which improve performance under common conditions, especially interactive performance. In particular, it gives priority boosts for processes that have low average load requirements when they need the CPU.
It's in MI1 when you're dropping rocks onto the see-saw. (The see-saw that flings the rocks to hit the banana tree on the beach...) If you walk too close to the edge in the correct area of the screen, part of it collapses, you fall off the edge and get the fake death sequence.
There's a Java class called ClassLoader that allows Java programs to dynamically load classes at runtime. The classes can be stored somehow on the computer, downloaded over the network, or generated dynamically by the program if it knows the Java class format. You can make portable self-modifying code with Java ;). Basically, you can make your precompiled class files into shared libraries or whatever, but you still need to be able to handle bytecode class files received over the network, compiled with a source-to-bytecode compiler, etc.
I think you've got this dead on. In projects not all that much larger than the kernel, the top-level managers are further away from the nitty-gritty details of the code than Linus seems to want to be. I think that Linus still looks on the kernel as his "pet project", and doesn't want to relinquish control, but the kernel will eventually get too complex for him to micromanage efficiently.
Kylix/Delphi 6/(New versions of C++ Builder) have their class libraries (CLX) based on Qt. If you buy one of these products, you have an unlimited license to use Qt linked with programs you create which are based on CLX. The CLX widgets Qt widgets -- the CLX is a set of wrapper classes to remove multiple inheritance (Delphi doesn't support it) and add some VCL-like features. You can make direct Qt calls from your programs. (Of course, you still need to get enough money to buy Kylix/Delphi/C++ Builder in the first place...)
So the cases where you'd see the 2nd Law not holding are where the probabilities of observing it are much more favorable than 1 in 10^80 or something. This means that you need to be looking at small numbers of particles (maybe 5 or 10 instead of ~10^23 particles for macroscopic objects) for long times. Certainly you wouldn't see it being violated constantly in a 40 pound lump of metal that some guy put together in his backyard.
Gravity, in contrast (according to theory anyway) always works. Full stop. It's not like that it's just an incredibly likely that objects will attract each other, it's a "certainty". It's the same with most of the other physical laws out there. Quantum mechanics is "probabilistic", but in another somewhat different sense, and theromodynamics doesn't really apply on the scale of quantum mechanics anyway. (Thermodynamics deals with the study of "macroscopic" systems with large numbers of particles, where general properties of the set of particles can be expressed. Properties like total energy, volume, # of particles, temperature, pressure, etc.)
Right click on the page, choose "View page info", click the "Images" tab, and you get a table which shows the ALT text of all the images on the page. You might have to resize the columns of the table, or resize the window. There's already a description of this somewhere in Bugzilla, and they decided that it isn't a bug per se because no spec requires that browsers display the ALT text in a tooltip. (It's just that other browsers have in the past.)
That said, there are problems with the efficiency of processing (as there are with almost all other areas in the public service). It is necessary to keep people isolated for at least a month or two for quarantine reasons, but much more than that is unnecessary.