The organization simply asked Napster to ban a few hundred thousand accounts. What's illegal about that?
Well, if instead of pulling me over for "weaving" Mandeville had just acted to seize all pre-1975 Cadillac sedans, I'd have been even more pissed off than I was.
In 'net terms what copyright.net is doing is called Denial Of Service. IIRC this is illegal under the DMCA 8-O
But of course the equivalent to my metaphor is actually going on -- whenever cops seize your money or your car or your boat and charge your property with a crime, rather than you, "your property has no civil rights" and they can shift the burden of proof (to a nearly impossible standard) to you. Welcome to Forfeiture Hell.
The Constitution may not be a dead letter yet, but it's panting, sweating, turning red, and dropping to the floor and nobody seems too interested in performing CPR.
Much of law is based solely on appearances: the whole issue of "probable cause" is based on the police's perception of criminal wrongdoing, not the actuality of those criminal act.
This is a distortion of the truth. While it is technically true, probable cause must be based on a specific fact which is not just consistent with criminal behavior, but indicates that a particular crime has occurred.
There are many court cases which have established, as one author colorfully put it, that you cannot define "grand theft auto" as "six Chicanos in a Cadillac".
Let's be clear about this: Probable cause does not consist of being in a place where criminals hang out, of driving the kind of car they do, of dressing like they do, or of talking like they do or being of their race. All these things have been very clearly established by court challenges.
By this standard, which the DMCA and RIAA both violate, using Napster does not make you a violator, and neither does having files with particular song titles on your hard drive. Really only some kind of evidence that you downloaded a particular song at a particular time would suffice. Which means that what copyright.net is doing is illegal, and the provisions supporting them in the DMCA are illegal. But good luck getting our current pack of Supreme Court justices to agree. Dred Scott would have been proud of 'em, based on some of their recent activities.
I used to drive a very old Cadillac, and once I moved to the white-bread suburbs I got pulled over at least once a year for "weaving" just past the same donut shop about a mile from my house. I finally got rid of the car after the last cop tried to pick a fight with me when he realized I wasn't the drug dealer he thought he'd tagged. I never pursued it but this was highly illegal, because driving an old Cadillac through Mandeville at 3:00 AM is not, repeat not, probable cause. Thus the lame "weaving" excuse. I could have probably got a settlement out of them but it wasn't worth the effort, and then it was just over the top.
Oh, the cop who tried to pick a fight with me eventually succeeded in picking a fight with someone else. About a week later he was fired, and word was the city shelled out 6 figures + to the guy he baited. These laws about police limits aren't exercised frequently because it's such a pain to do so, but they do exist. And it sounds like copyright.net just added several hundred thousand crimes of a more serious nature to the long list of likely copyright infringements surrounding Napster's servers.
The work of Turing and Church proved that there does not exist a general procedure to determine if an arbitrary piece of software terminates (and by extension, that many other properties are similarly undecidable). Did you ever study computer science?
Kee-rect, and "yes."
They did NOT show that one cannot "prove" software.
Actually, what they showed is that software exists that cannot be proven. The fact that software exists which can be proven is irrelevant if the software you need isn't in that set.
In addition, the notion of "proving" software is nonsense unless you say what you are proving about the software.
Well, the original post that started this mentioned an operating system, so I'd say the notion of "proof" being bandied about here involves not crashing and behaving predictably. Ultimately IMHO it is an exact analog of Turing's stopping problem, which is why I brought it up. Many algorithms cannot be predicted in any sense by anything simpler than themselves. The only way to "prove" them is to run them and observe their behavior. Of course this proof is inductive rather than deductive; but Turing's side observation was that this unprovability is a characteristic of living things, and the fact that a deterministic system could exhibit such behavior meant it might be possible to emulate life.
As hardware becomes faster and cheaper and software more complex and abstract, it will be more unprovable. There is a reason computers crash more nowadays than they did Back When.
There may be
many extremely useful properties of programs that actually can be proved mechanically
but is this class growing? I'd say not. Back in the 80's the DOD ran a project to build a fully proven multitasking CPU core; even with all their resources they failed. The performance issue was too much even for them to ignore.
Today when we talk about "useful" software we are often talking about threaded, interrupt driven stuff riding on top of a very highly unproven operating system. Do you think that one day you will be able to buy a "fully proven" equiv for your PC of choice, and find "fully proven" software to run on it? Of course not. The economics and interest are not there becuase the reality is that proving software is expensive and futile.
In Turing's day, it was commonly thought that any complex system could be emulated, modeled, and predicted. Turing, Church, Godel, and Mandelbrot have all contributed to putting that idea 6 feet under. People who do real work with real tools in the real world now know that many real applications simply cannot be treated this way. People who think otherwise are living in fantasyland.
My DSL shares happily with my voice fones. You do have to put the filters on all your voice equipment as some (but not all) of them will interfere with the DSL. I have not noticed any bandwidth hit when the voice fone is in use and I regularly see the 1.5Mbps down / 200Kbps up I was promised when I signed up.
My telco is my ISP, specifically BellSouth FastAccess DSL.
I went with BellSouth precisely because they own the wire. Sure, Telocity may have better customer service, but who is Telocity gonna call when the line goes bad? Riiiiight.
And in all honesty, I'm pleased with the service. I ordered the self-install kit and got it running with minimal trouble. I received the kit about 10 days after placing the order, and I was online about 4 hours after receiving the kit. This included making it work with my home network even though BellSouth specifically doesn't support home networking. I just went through the normal install for Internet Connection Sharing (yeah, I'm using Win98, sue me).
Recently I had a problem with my regular phone connection -- no dial tone. (Oddly, the DSL continued to work throughout this episode.) This required BellSouth to send out a tech, and replace the line running from the pole to my house. He arrived on time, worked like a dog, kept us informed of everything he found and did, and corrected the problem. Telcos are not necessarily evil, though the procedure for putting in the service call was pretty anonymous and bureaucratic. I groaned when they said "we'll check it within 36 hours," but then they actually did.
...and that word is trivial. Real-world applications quickly achieve levels of complexity that make them unprovable either in a practical sense or theoretically, depending on the application.
Formal methods allow you to reduce larger problems to "trivial" status than you can hold in your head, or to distribute them across multiple programmers without affecting their triviality. When the scale of the problem and the resources available to solve it are of the right size, this makes such methods appropriate.
Formal methods have two major costs. The first is that you can't easily back up and punt; when you realize half-way through that the formal design which looked good on paper is eating resources or presents a poor user interface in practice, it is very hard to go back and improve things. The second is that they increase resource requirements across the board, because you cannot apply creative solutions which become apparent midstream to streamline the project.
Sometimes the need for a formal method is due to the use of another formal method. For example, if you use top-down (appropriate for a large project) you are forced into all-up testing, which means you need strongly typed languages, etc. or you will be debugging forever. You can program bottom-up and prove each module as a trivial exercise as you build to higher and higher complexity, but your final project (while efficient and bug-free) may not resemble the formal spec much. This may not be a problem for a game; it may be a big problem for a bank.
Strongly OO languages like C++ which dereference everything eat processor cycles. It may not be apparent why this is a problem until you try to implement a 6-level interrupt system on an 80186 (as one company I know of did).
So yes, it is possible to prove some software, but this is not true of most software on a useful scale. When dealing with interrupts or a network or multithreaded or multiuser anything, there are so many sources of potential error that the formal system will bog down. You simply cannot check everything. You end up with either your intuition or no project.
Turing was interested in the problem of duplicating human intelligence. Thus, he aimed his theories at a high level of general abstraction, an "umbrella" which would cover his goal no matter what its eventual form might turn out to be. One result of this is that Computable Numbers is sometimes cited to support the concept of free will. Another is, as computers get more and more complex, Turing's take on the situation becomes more accurate and useful. His point was that even a fully deterministic machine can be beyond deterministic prediction. It's a shame he didn't live to see his vindication by Mandelbrot.
As the man who single-handedly turned cryptography into a science, Claude E. Shannon is in many ways responsible for the paranoid nature of today's society.
While Shannon's contribution to crypto was large (like his contributions in other fields), this is an overstatement which greatly distort's Shannon's own motivations.
Shannon's article was the capstone on a body of work which was mostly created during World War II by people like Alan Turing and John von Neumann, as well as dozens of equally important but less famous people who worked at places like Bletchey Park.
If you want a "sinister figure" why not pick on John von Neumann, who instead of riding his unicycle in the corridors was working hard to make the H-bomb a reality (alongside the original Dr. Strangelove himself, the truly sinister Edward Teller).
Why is it that programmers feel that they are somehow above the need for these techniques?
Because these techniques don't exist. This was proven by Alan Turing in his paper Computable Numbers. The only way to "prove" a piece of software is to run it.
Oh, you're probably thinking of things like OO and top-down and all those gimmicks they teach in CS courses. Well, sometimes those techniques help you write better code (at a cost) and sometimes they make you write worse code (because of the costs).
Top-down, for example, makes sense when you have 100 programmers doing the software for a bank. It makes no sense at all and results in inferior code and user interfaces when you have 1 or 2 guys writing code for a PLC.
A line pops into my head from Greg Bear's book Eon. A character from a civilization 1,200 years advanced beyond ours is explaining to a contemporary person why they still have conflict. To paraphrase, there are limited resources and even very wise and educated people will inevitably come to have different ideas about how to solve problems. Each will want to use the limited resources in his way, because he believes it is the best way. Thus there is conflict.
This is why the language, OS, and technique wars will always be with us. What works in a palm does not work on a desktop, neither works in a PLC, and none of those things works for an enterprise server. And human beings are still subtle and complex enough compared to machines that attacking a problem of the right scale as an "art" will produce superior results.
You do realize that our present consumption levels are only a shade of what would be if the entire world consumed like the First World (the US especially). More importantly, with population growth on top of that, making any comparison of current to future growth is silly.
Well, yes. But as you went on to say...
Of course, this does ignore the fact that maybe fossil fuel consumption will decline with technological advancement
Which in fact is exactly what has been happening. There is also the fact that the entire Gulf hasn't been explored. As one geophysicist told me, "every time we go out there, we find more than we thought could possibly exist." It's not widely reported outside of the industry, but most geophysicists no longer believe that all fossil fuels have fossil origins. Some of what we know is there simply couldn't have gotten where it is if it were of fossil origin.
There are large areas of the world where we don't look for fuel because the theories say it's a waste of time. But if there are geological as opposed to fossil sources for petrochemicals, there may be vast untapped fields of gas and oil in places we just aren't looking, such as trapped beneath continental shield plates.
While there are good reasons for limiting population growth, lack of fuel is not currently one of them. (Pollution from use of the fuel we have is IMO somewhat more important.)
While I basically agree with your main point, there are some flaws in your supporting argument.
We have reached the maximum rate of extraction, and this rate will begin to decline, while demand and human population continues to grow *expontentially*
We have reached the maximum rate of extraction at current pricing levels. Anyone in the oil industry will tell you there is a huge amount of oil offshore in the Gulf of Mexico; the reason we aren't extracting it is that it is cheaper to import from the Middle East than to build drilling platforms. But as the technology to do deep-water extraction improves and the value of the fuel increases, these sources will be tapped. And they are very extensive -- sufficient, by most estimates I've heard, to power our civilization at its current level for centuries.
And while we do need to achieve negative population growth, experience shows that the best way to do that is to increase individual wealth. The nations with the lowest population growth are all the ones with the highest standards of living.
And for all its flaws (and it has many), capitalism has proven to be one effective tool for increasing productivity and standards of living. It's not the only thing you need, which is one point the reviewed book is making; but it is one thing that can work in appropriate circumstances.
Unfortunately, the current trend even in wealthy countries is for capital to accumulate around the wealthiest at the expense of the poor, which is a sure recipe for reversing the progress we have made toward long-term stability.
The 12AX7 dual triode is not a "big honkin" tube. It is a 9-pin miniature base low power amplifier. The 01A is a single triode of much older manufacture, with the very old four-pin socket. It is about 4 inches long and almost completely opaque with silver getter, which is what makes it useful for the X-ray generator.
And that's not even to get into transmitting tubes...
I originally saw this project in a book of amateur science projects which was already quite old in the 70's when I was in high school. (I don't remember the title, but I think it might have been issued by Scientific American.) I actually did a few of the projects in this book, like the "mouse" that could learn to run a maze based on relay logic. The fact that the tube of choice was an 01A should tell you something.
I do have a 01A and briefly considered building the X-ray machine, but fortunately came to my senses before trying it. The trend in professional X-ray machines has been toward lower and lower emission with more sensitive film and detectors. Long-term exposure to X-rays is quite dangerous even at low levels.
The library of congress contains just about every copywrited work ever written.
That is NOWHERE near true, alas.
Only because the LOC can only contain works which have been registered. Copyright law currently recognizes your IP right (whether you like it or not) to anything you create at the moment you create it. Registration, which will get your work into the LOC under appropriate circumstances, is only a tool to strengthen your copyright which you have anyway if you are the creator of a new work. Of course, if you create it it's copyrighted by default but the LOC doesn't have a copy, which is true of many of the works ever created.
Further down I have a post about forfeiture laws. Some friends of mine run a card counting team (no, I'm not one of them, I have a Real Job, being a professional gambler is more work than you realize). One of these folks is also a would-be novelist who has written a couple of (alas unpublished, I think they're good) detective novels, well researched. This research has been applied to problems which might one day prove useful to the card counters, such as forfeiture and assault (by over-enthusiastic casino personnel). And all these guys love to talk about what they do. So over beers I've gotten quite an education in layman's law. (I must say it's more interesting than hearing about 3-level vs. 4-level counts.) Probably too bad for me, since one day I'll get pulled over by a kop and I'll know my rights and this dipshit kop from Opelousas will say "only a kriminal would know this much about legal loopholes" and the nice doggie will pee on my car on command. Welkome to amerika.
Let's say you're stopped by a traffic cop on, say, I-10 in, say, Ascension Parish, LA. Let's say you have a few hundred bucks with you (maybe you're driving to Mississippi to visit the gambling boats). Let's say the cop asks if you have any money, and being a Good Innocent Citizen who Knows Your Rights, you say sure.
What might happen then, and has happened to lots and lots of people, is the cop takes your money because he suspects it is "drug money." You then have something like 5 days to file an appeal, for a hearing in which you will have to prove (to an almost impossible standard) that the money is not drug money. I know of one dude, a card counter, who lost $24K like this in North Carolina. Ever try to explain that you have $24K in cash because you're a professional gambler? Well, it was the truth, but it wasn't good enough.
How do they get around the Constitution? Well, they don't arrest or charge YOU, they charge THE MONEY, and the case reads "State of Louisiana vs. $250 cash." Since property does not have civil rights (at least unless it's an "artificial person" called a corporation) then it can be guilty till proven innocent. Which it is.
The Constitution is a dead letter. And none of the players in the current political scene is exactly moving to do CPR on it.
Not quite. While there is an admittedly fuzzy edge around what constitutes a "threat," and IANAL, I believe he is on the legal side of the line in this case.
If he had e-mailed Dave and said "I'm going to kill you," that would be a threat.
If he had posted here, "I'm going to kill that scumbucket," that would be a threat.
If he had posted here, "I think someone should kill that scumbucket," whether it is considered a threat would probably depend on which circuit court he is under (in the USA at least). Context would become an important consideration; was there a likelihood that a reasonable person would take the statement as a serious threat? Personally I feel this would fail, but some judges would hold it up.
What he did post was, to paraphrase, "somebody who gets one of his subpoenas is likely to kill that scumbucket." While his method of delivering this idea was colorful it was not a direct threat, certainly no reasonable person would think that he was seriously playing with the idea of going to Dave's house and ramming the subpoena up his butt personally. (In fact, his lack of a subpoena from Dave would show pretty conclusively that this is no "threat." And it just sounds like a lark.)
It is not a "threat" to warn someone that they are participating in an activity that might be dangerous. "If you go in that neighborhood don't expect to leave with your hubcaps" is not a threat to steal your hubcaps, but a suggestion of how to keep them.
If they do accept this, you can bet that the "unlimited" service will include the encryption and other DRM suggestions which were floated a week or so ago. In other words, you will share MP3's but you won't download MP3's, but a bastard format that won't work on your Rio, won't burn on CD, and won't play at all when its license has expired (unless you crack it of course).
Oh, and if it's cracked, the record labels wouldn't go along, even if they initially acquiesce.
Re:The movie wanked on the ending.
on
Hannibal's Return
·
· Score: 2
You obviously missed one option:
5. Lecter fails to catch Starling.
No, just as negative zero = zero, this is the same as "Starling fails to catch Lecter."
This page shows that Pluto and its moon Charon are tidally locked, just like Earth and Luna.
This page shows that Jupiter's moon Amalthea is tidally locked.
This page discusses the case of Mercury, which as I said isn't yet tidally locked but does have a day tidally related to its year.
"Although Mercury is not tidally locked to the Sun, its rotational period is tidally coupled to its orbital period. Mercury rotates one and a half times during each orbit."
This page states that all four of Jupiter's Galilean moons are tidally locked.
That took about 5 minutes. Altavista found a total of 499 pages containing the phrase "tidally locked."
I meant to say, at what rate is the moon increasing or decreasing its rate of revolution, so that the far side will face us, but now understand you to be saying that it never will???
Right. Nearside has been facing the Earth for at least a billion years. (There were figures on this in Rare Earth but I don't have them handy.) From now on, as the moon spirals outward and the month gets longer, the tides will tend to slow its rotation down too so nearside continues to face the Earth.
The cameras shown are completely ordinary looking 2 1/4 inch SLR's. They are not 35mm cameras, and as with most 2 1/4 inch cameras the primary viewfinder is a ground glass on top of the viewfinder. This is the normal arrangement for a 2 1/4 inch SLR or TLR. You operate it by holding it at your waist and looking down at the ground glass to aim and focus.
Pentaprism viewfinders are available for these cameras as external accessories which mount atop the camera body. This gives you a rear viewfinder as found on most 35mm cameras. Naturally, the Apollo astronauts used the top viewfinder, since holding the camera up to your eye is impractical in a space suit.
And yes, I do know what I am talking about. The main reason I do not own a 'blad myself is that 2 1/4 inch SLR's are very expensive. I do own two Mamiya TLR's in a similar format, and did quite a bit of shopping, pricing, and trying-out back in the 80's when I was into film photography.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if instead of pulling me over for "weaving" Mandeville had just acted to seize all pre-1975 Cadillac sedans, I'd have been even more pissed off than I was.
In 'net terms what copyright.net is doing is called Denial Of Service. IIRC this is illegal under the DMCA 8-O
But of course the equivalent to my metaphor is actually going on -- whenever cops seize your money or your car or your boat and charge your property with a crime, rather than you, "your property has no civil rights" and they can shift the burden of proof (to a nearly impossible standard) to you. Welcome to Forfeiture Hell.
The Constitution may not be a dead letter yet, but it's panting, sweating, turning red, and dropping to the floor and nobody seems too interested in performing CPR.
This is a distortion of the truth. While it is technically true, probable cause must be based on a specific fact which is not just consistent with criminal behavior, but indicates that a particular crime has occurred.
There are many court cases which have established, as one author colorfully put it, that you cannot define "grand theft auto" as "six Chicanos in a Cadillac".
Let's be clear about this: Probable cause does not consist of being in a place where criminals hang out, of driving the kind of car they do, of dressing like they do, or of talking like they do or being of their race. All these things have been very clearly established by court challenges.
By this standard, which the DMCA and RIAA both violate, using Napster does not make you a violator, and neither does having files with particular song titles on your hard drive. Really only some kind of evidence that you downloaded a particular song at a particular time would suffice. Which means that what copyright.net is doing is illegal, and the provisions supporting them in the DMCA are illegal. But good luck getting our current pack of Supreme Court justices to agree. Dred Scott would have been proud of 'em, based on some of their recent activities.
I used to drive a very old Cadillac, and once I moved to the white-bread suburbs I got pulled over at least once a year for "weaving" just past the same donut shop about a mile from my house. I finally got rid of the car after the last cop tried to pick a fight with me when he realized I wasn't the drug dealer he thought he'd tagged. I never pursued it but this was highly illegal, because driving an old Cadillac through Mandeville at 3:00 AM is not, repeat not, probable cause. Thus the lame "weaving" excuse. I could have probably got a settlement out of them but it wasn't worth the effort, and then it was just over the top.
Oh, the cop who tried to pick a fight with me eventually succeeded in picking a fight with someone else. About a week later he was fired, and word was the city shelled out 6 figures + to the guy he baited. These laws about police limits aren't exercised frequently because it's such a pain to do so, but they do exist. And it sounds like copyright.net just added several hundred thousand crimes of a more serious nature to the long list of likely copyright infringements surrounding Napster's servers.
Kee-rect, and "yes."
They did NOT show that one cannot "prove" software.
Actually, what they showed is that software exists that cannot be proven. The fact that software exists which can be proven is irrelevant if the software you need isn't in that set.
In addition, the notion of "proving" software is nonsense unless you say what you are proving about the software.
Well, the original post that started this mentioned an operating system, so I'd say the notion of "proof" being bandied about here involves not crashing and behaving predictably. Ultimately IMHO it is an exact analog of Turing's stopping problem, which is why I brought it up. Many algorithms cannot be predicted in any sense by anything simpler than themselves. The only way to "prove" them is to run them and observe their behavior. Of course this proof is inductive rather than deductive; but Turing's side observation was that this unprovability is a characteristic of living things, and the fact that a deterministic system could exhibit such behavior meant it might be possible to emulate life.
As hardware becomes faster and cheaper and software more complex and abstract, it will be more unprovable. There is a reason computers crash more nowadays than they did Back When.
There may be
many extremely useful properties of programs that actually can be proved mechanically
but is this class growing? I'd say not. Back in the 80's the DOD ran a project to build a fully proven multitasking CPU core; even with all their resources they failed. The performance issue was too much even for them to ignore.
Today when we talk about "useful" software we are often talking about threaded, interrupt driven stuff riding on top of a very highly unproven operating system. Do you think that one day you will be able to buy a "fully proven" equiv for your PC of choice, and find "fully proven" software to run on it? Of course not. The economics and interest are not there becuase the reality is that proving software is expensive and futile.
In Turing's day, it was commonly thought that any complex system could be emulated, modeled, and predicted. Turing, Church, Godel, and Mandelbrot have all contributed to putting that idea 6 feet under. People who do real work with real tools in the real world now know that many real applications simply cannot be treated this way. People who think otherwise are living in fantasyland.
My DSL shares happily with my voice fones. You do have to put the filters on all your voice equipment as some (but not all) of them will interfere with the DSL. I have not noticed any bandwidth hit when the voice fone is in use and I regularly see the 1.5Mbps down / 200Kbps up I was promised when I signed up.
I went with BellSouth precisely because they own the wire. Sure, Telocity may have better customer service, but who is Telocity gonna call when the line goes bad? Riiiiight.
And in all honesty, I'm pleased with the service. I ordered the self-install kit and got it running with minimal trouble. I received the kit about 10 days after placing the order, and I was online about 4 hours after receiving the kit. This included making it work with my home network even though BellSouth specifically doesn't support home networking. I just went through the normal install for Internet Connection Sharing (yeah, I'm using Win98, sue me).
Recently I had a problem with my regular phone connection -- no dial tone. (Oddly, the DSL continued to work throughout this episode.) This required BellSouth to send out a tech, and replace the line running from the pole to my house. He arrived on time, worked like a dog, kept us informed of everything he found and did, and corrected the problem. Telcos are not necessarily evil, though the procedure for putting in the service call was pretty anonymous and bureaucratic. I groaned when they said "we'll check it within 36 hours," but then they actually did.
Formal methods allow you to reduce larger problems to "trivial" status than you can hold in your head, or to distribute them across multiple programmers without affecting their triviality. When the scale of the problem and the resources available to solve it are of the right size, this makes such methods appropriate.
Formal methods have two major costs. The first is that you can't easily back up and punt; when you realize half-way through that the formal design which looked good on paper is eating resources or presents a poor user interface in practice, it is very hard to go back and improve things. The second is that they increase resource requirements across the board, because you cannot apply creative solutions which become apparent midstream to streamline the project.
Sometimes the need for a formal method is due to the use of another formal method. For example, if you use top-down (appropriate for a large project) you are forced into all-up testing, which means you need strongly typed languages, etc. or you will be debugging forever. You can program bottom-up and prove each module as a trivial exercise as you build to higher and higher complexity, but your final project (while efficient and bug-free) may not resemble the formal spec much. This may not be a problem for a game; it may be a big problem for a bank.
Strongly OO languages like C++ which dereference everything eat processor cycles. It may not be apparent why this is a problem until you try to implement a 6-level interrupt system on an 80186 (as one company I know of did).
So yes, it is possible to prove some software, but this is not true of most software on a useful scale. When dealing with interrupts or a network or multithreaded or multiuser anything, there are so many sources of potential error that the formal system will bog down. You simply cannot check everything. You end up with either your intuition or no project.
Turing was interested in the problem of duplicating human intelligence. Thus, he aimed his theories at a high level of general abstraction, an "umbrella" which would cover his goal no matter what its eventual form might turn out to be. One result of this is that Computable Numbers is sometimes cited to support the concept of free will. Another is, as computers get more and more complex, Turing's take on the situation becomes more accurate and useful. His point was that even a fully deterministic machine can be beyond deterministic prediction. It's a shame he didn't live to see his vindication by Mandelbrot.
...for Lots of Irritating Single Parentheses.
While Shannon's contribution to crypto was large (like his contributions in other fields), this is an overstatement which greatly distort's Shannon's own motivations.
Shannon's article was the capstone on a body of work which was mostly created during World War II by people like Alan Turing and John von Neumann, as well as dozens of equally important but less famous people who worked at places like Bletchey Park.
If you want a "sinister figure" why not pick on John von Neumann, who instead of riding his unicycle in the corridors was working hard to make the H-bomb a reality (alongside the original Dr. Strangelove himself, the truly sinister Edward Teller).
Because these techniques don't exist. This was proven by Alan Turing in his paper Computable Numbers. The only way to "prove" a piece of software is to run it.
Oh, you're probably thinking of things like OO and top-down and all those gimmicks they teach in CS courses. Well, sometimes those techniques help you write better code (at a cost) and sometimes they make you write worse code (because of the costs).
Top-down, for example, makes sense when you have 100 programmers doing the software for a bank. It makes no sense at all and results in inferior code and user interfaces when you have 1 or 2 guys writing code for a PLC.
A line pops into my head from Greg Bear's book Eon. A character from a civilization 1,200 years advanced beyond ours is explaining to a contemporary person why they still have conflict. To paraphrase, there are limited resources and even very wise and educated people will inevitably come to have different ideas about how to solve problems. Each will want to use the limited resources in his way, because he believes it is the best way. Thus there is conflict.
This is why the language, OS, and technique wars will always be with us. What works in a palm does not work on a desktop, neither works in a PLC, and none of those things works for an enterprise server. And human beings are still subtle and complex enough compared to machines that attacking a problem of the right scale as an "art" will produce superior results.
Well, yes. But as you went on to say...
Of course, this does ignore the fact that maybe fossil fuel consumption will decline with technological advancement
Which in fact is exactly what has been happening. There is also the fact that the entire Gulf hasn't been explored. As one geophysicist told me, "every time we go out there, we find more than we thought could possibly exist." It's not widely reported outside of the industry, but most geophysicists no longer believe that all fossil fuels have fossil origins. Some of what we know is there simply couldn't have gotten where it is if it were of fossil origin.
There are large areas of the world where we don't look for fuel because the theories say it's a waste of time. But if there are geological as opposed to fossil sources for petrochemicals, there may be vast untapped fields of gas and oil in places we just aren't looking, such as trapped beneath continental shield plates.
While there are good reasons for limiting population growth, lack of fuel is not currently one of them. (Pollution from use of the fuel we have is IMO somewhat more important.)
We have reached the maximum rate of extraction, and this rate will begin to decline, while demand and human population continues to grow *expontentially*
We have reached the maximum rate of extraction at current pricing levels. Anyone in the oil industry will tell you there is a huge amount of oil offshore in the Gulf of Mexico; the reason we aren't extracting it is that it is cheaper to import from the Middle East than to build drilling platforms. But as the technology to do deep-water extraction improves and the value of the fuel increases, these sources will be tapped. And they are very extensive -- sufficient, by most estimates I've heard, to power our civilization at its current level for centuries.
And while we do need to achieve negative population growth, experience shows that the best way to do that is to increase individual wealth. The nations with the lowest population growth are all the ones with the highest standards of living.
And for all its flaws (and it has many), capitalism has proven to be one effective tool for increasing productivity and standards of living. It's not the only thing you need, which is one point the reviewed book is making; but it is one thing that can work in appropriate circumstances.
Unfortunately, the current trend even in wealthy countries is for capital to accumulate around the wealthiest at the expense of the poor, which is a sure recipe for reversing the progress we have made toward long-term stability.
Actually, it was one pound of silver. There is no such thing as "sterling gold." :-)
And that's not even to get into transmitting tubes...
I do have a 01A and briefly considered building the X-ray machine, but fortunately came to my senses before trying it. The trend in professional X-ray machines has been toward lower and lower emission with more sensitive film and detectors. Long-term exposure to X-rays is quite dangerous even at low levels.
That is NOWHERE near true, alas.
Only because the LOC can only contain works which have been registered. Copyright law currently recognizes your IP right (whether you like it or not) to anything you create at the moment you create it. Registration, which will get your work into the LOC under appropriate circumstances, is only a tool to strengthen your copyright which you have anyway if you are the creator of a new work. Of course, if you create it it's copyrighted by default but the LOC doesn't have a copy, which is true of many of the works ever created.
Further down I have a post about forfeiture laws. Some friends of mine run a card counting team (no, I'm not one of them, I have a Real Job, being a professional gambler is more work than you realize). One of these folks is also a would-be novelist who has written a couple of (alas unpublished, I think they're good) detective novels, well researched. This research has been applied to problems which might one day prove useful to the card counters, such as forfeiture and assault (by over-enthusiastic casino personnel). And all these guys love to talk about what they do. So over beers I've gotten quite an education in layman's law. (I must say it's more interesting than hearing about 3-level vs. 4-level counts.) Probably too bad for me, since one day I'll get pulled over by a kop and I'll know my rights and this dipshit kop from Opelousas will say "only a kriminal would know this much about legal loopholes" and the nice doggie will pee on my car on command. Welkome to amerika.
What might happen then, and has happened to lots and lots of people, is the cop takes your money because he suspects it is "drug money." You then have something like 5 days to file an appeal, for a hearing in which you will have to prove (to an almost impossible standard) that the money is not drug money. I know of one dude, a card counter, who lost $24K like this in North Carolina. Ever try to explain that you have $24K in cash because you're a professional gambler? Well, it was the truth, but it wasn't good enough.
How do they get around the Constitution? Well, they don't arrest or charge YOU, they charge THE MONEY, and the case reads "State of Louisiana vs. $250 cash." Since property does not have civil rights (at least unless it's an "artificial person" called a corporation) then it can be guilty till proven innocent. Which it is.
The Constitution is a dead letter. And none of the players in the current political scene is exactly moving to do CPR on it.
Not quite. While there is an admittedly fuzzy edge around what constitutes a "threat," and IANAL, I believe he is on the legal side of the line in this case.
If he had e-mailed Dave and said "I'm going to kill you," that would be a threat.
If he had posted here, "I'm going to kill that scumbucket," that would be a threat.
If he had posted here, "I think someone should kill that scumbucket," whether it is considered a threat would probably depend on which circuit court he is under (in the USA at least). Context would become an important consideration; was there a likelihood that a reasonable person would take the statement as a serious threat? Personally I feel this would fail, but some judges would hold it up.
What he did post was, to paraphrase, "somebody who gets one of his subpoenas is likely to kill that scumbucket." While his method of delivering this idea was colorful it was not a direct threat, certainly no reasonable person would think that he was seriously playing with the idea of going to Dave's house and ramming the subpoena up his butt personally. (In fact, his lack of a subpoena from Dave would show pretty conclusively that this is no "threat." And it just sounds like a lark.)
It is not a "threat" to warn someone that they are participating in an activity that might be dangerous. "If you go in that neighborhood don't expect to leave with your hubcaps" is not a threat to steal your hubcaps, but a suggestion of how to keep them.
I spent the last hour reading the link. It's way cool.
Yeah, well, you & I know that. The fatcats aren't that smart. What they'll do when they get whacked by a cluestick is another matter.
Oh, and if it's cracked, the record labels wouldn't go along, even if they initially acquiesce.
5. Lecter fails to catch Starling.
No, just as negative zero = zero, this is the same as "Starling fails to catch Lecter."
This page shows that Jupiter's moon Amalthea is tidally locked.
This page discusses the case of Mercury, which as I said isn't yet tidally locked but does have a day tidally related to its year. "Although Mercury is not tidally locked to the Sun, its rotational period is tidally coupled to its orbital period. Mercury rotates one and a half times during each orbit."
This page states that all four of Jupiter's Galilean moons are tidally locked.
That took about 5 minutes. Altavista found a total of 499 pages containing the phrase "tidally locked."
Right. Nearside has been facing the Earth for at least a billion years. (There were figures on this in Rare Earth but I don't have them handy.) From now on, as the moon spirals outward and the month gets longer, the tides will tend to slow its rotation down too so nearside continues to face the Earth.
Pentaprism viewfinders are available for these cameras as external accessories which mount atop the camera body. This gives you a rear viewfinder as found on most 35mm cameras. Naturally, the Apollo astronauts used the top viewfinder, since holding the camera up to your eye is impractical in a space suit.
And yes, I do know what I am talking about. The main reason I do not own a 'blad myself is that 2 1/4 inch SLR's are very expensive. I do own two Mamiya TLR's in a similar format, and did quite a bit of shopping, pricing, and trying-out back in the 80's when I was into film photography.