Re: Anyhow, my conspiracy theory is that maybe/. has reached a tippiong point where whatever corporation currently owns/. doesn't get enough click-referral revenue, so they've stopped bothering to link to the articles?
aha!!! I am inclined to agree with you. Though Timothy's history of bizarre posting behavior may mean it's just the same old same old, you may have hit upon the real truth with your conspiracy theory! I breathe along with you. [look up the meaning of conspiracy...]
What is a "recombinant turbine"? Wikipedia does not seem to know, since it thinks the word "recombinant" pertains only to DNA.
A general web search yields only references to batteries that are "recombinant gas turbine starting batteries" which does not seem to make much sense to me.
The page "Srcset" does not exist. You can ask for it to be created, but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered. For search help, please visit Help:Searching.
But definitely the concept of "srcset" makes sense for extremely large displays, extremely small displays, and extremely high-resolution high-DPI displays. But what good is a standard if only one organization is using it? It would work better when more people use it or follow it or recognize it. It does sound more like a "browser" error. Or is it a revenue maximization error to force more bandwidth usage, just like all those javascript and flash-based advertisements are?;>)
The idea of variable resolution images with just one set being requested is a good one; it just has to become more known about, at least enough known about to be worth meriting a mention on some wikipedia page if not a wikipedia page of its own!
You're right that they don't call the plans unlimited in this particular ad. The only mention of "limit" on that page is as "limited-time offer" multiple times and then one time They tell you to "So go ahead and push your devices to their limits and never skip a beat."
They also say
Connect all your devices and push them to their limitsâ"this speed won't let you down.
So they can't complain if you hook up 500 devices if you own 500 devices, right? And since there's no mention of limit, only bandwidth and download and upload speeds, then there is no limit implied. Thus by definition, only limited by capacity.
Atomic Force Microscopy does not visually capture anything. It measures atomic forces with a finer resolution that goes beyond the optical diffraction limit for wavelengths of light visible to the unaided eye.
The rendered images are derived from the force measurements and thus these really are "inferred images" or visual renderings of force measurements. These are definitely not "visual capture" images. These are visual renderings.
Stuxnet Part Deux and add potential eavesdropping capability?
Hmmm... One would think the ability to insert more eavesdropping and spying capabilties ("hidden features?:>) ) may be more the reasoning behind something like this. Perhaps another bonus gift inserted into the software, hardware, or microcode, like Stuxnet did?
No no no. Reread that. I actually gave the real math for it. I'm not claiming that this defendant used a one-time pad. I'm saying it's like the Da Vinci Code, but even better: you can generate a purported one-time pad that would decrypt ANY message of length L into ANY OTHER message of length L. I actually gave the pseudocode for it, using the simplest protocol of all: XORing the message with the one-time pad.
In other words, a claim that someone has "found a one-time pad that decrypts a message" is essentially meaningless. One may generate any claim whatsoever for any message whatsoever by that technique.
Re: You have a problem here. All the feds have to do is go before the judge, start with an archived copy of the original disk which can be proven to be bitwise identical, apply the correct decryption process, and when out pops all the data they claim was there you'll have to explain how they got the original encrypted bytes to decrypt directly into the alleged criminal data.
I can make you a one-time pad that can decrypt any X of length $L_x$ into any Y also of length $L_x$. Just fucking XOR the values of X and Y and call that Z = (X) xor (Y) . Now, Z is the XOR-decryption-encryption key that will transform X into Y. That can be done for every fucking Y possible in the world. Of course, this is charlatanry. You're not going to use a one-time pad of length 1-terabyte, or are you?
But it's trivial. Say that my code is "12345". Say that I want to decode that into "fuxor". Set Z = "12345" xor "fuxor", and say that Z is the encryption key. Now, (Z) xor ("12345") = "fuxor". Tada. La Voila.
But what if instead I wanted to prove that "12345" really encoded "itsCP" ?? Well, claim that Z_2 = "12345" xor "itsCP". Now, (Z_2) xor ("12345") = "itsCP". Ohmifuckinggod, the code "12345" decodes into the obvious claim that "itsCP"!!! There can be no other answer!!! Hang'em!
And that can be done for the noisy chaff that is encrypted data too. It's like the Queen in Alice Wonderland explaining what words mean: "I can make them mean anything I want them to mean!"
in other words, tl;dr: I can make a one-time pad to prove it's anything...
Plus there's an age distribution, and there's been a rather fast tumbling down of other sites.
Tumblr is more popular amongst current high-school kids than facebook is. Facebook is for parents and grandparents. Tumblr is for the current high school kids. Actually, facebook is for the bonus site to make for your parents to see that you're friends with the good kids and the appropriate hoity-toity-clubs like math-club, science-club, model United Nations, scouts of boys and girls, etc. [i do not know where the fight-club members are. no one talks about fight club...;>) ]
Two sites that were filled with questions have disappeared (or half-disappeared): formspring.com (i'm on there somewhere, hint hint) was supposed to go dark in april but the web pages are still there. Ask.fm and a similar ask-a-question functionality on facebook supplanted formspring. And vyou.com (pronounced view?) really did go completely dark. Some kids also have gone onto myspace, though who the hell knows why...
Formspring was really popular amongst the Brazilians. If you had a page with a popular name, say teresa or allyson (in all their spelling versions), you'd get bombarded with questions in portugese and threats asking you to get off of their formspring page so that they could have it.
Well, hey, if you can't get FOSS for what you want, at least have the ethics to realize that you have to pay fo rthe software you use. Don't use unlicensed software. FOSS software is licensed too, even if it is or is not free of cost. Freedom in FOSS is the freedom to share and the lack of a bullshit-filled license.
Or at least don't keep hiring idiots who think that it's okay to steal. It's not okay to steal in either case, and your employees ought to be aware of that:
a - proprietary software copied without paying for the copy or the extra license
b - FOSS software that you intend to use without honoring the license
If your employees can't stop stealing, perhaps they deserve being fired.
Then, when asked for the password, he could truthfully state that his answer is "I do not have the password". Of course, a few weasely questions that he may be required to answer truthfully could shake this, but hey, why not for a first step?
Or possibly:
"I don't need no stinkin' password"
"This is not my drive."
"I forgot my password" as the passphrase!
"I assert my fifth amendment rights"
"I respectfully assert my fifth amendment rights"
"Fuck you" (J_1: what is your password? R_1: fuck you J1:Que? Off to jail! R_1: I answered fully and truthfully!)
Ah, indeed you are correct. The hardware was there, but my opinion or reading of it is that it was not "crippled" but never intended to have this functionality. It does not have enough RAM to buffer frames continuously at uncompressed DNG format rates for continuous video recording to SD card, whereas other cameras that were designed specifically for video recording have enough memory to be capable of doing this.
Thus my interpretation is that this camera model's hardware specs were deemed insufficient by the manufacturer for this specific capability, and considering that it can only do burst mode up to $X$ frames before capping out its memory buffer, the manufacturer may have been correct. So my interpretation is not that they "re-enabled a purposely disabled core" but rather that they added functionality which the manufacturer had decided that this hardware was not capable of performing well.
Now that is a kickass hack! Seriously, taking hardware with limited functionality and actually adding (not just restoring) functionality to it that was not planned for it is pretty cool.
This is not like the "triple core" or "double core" CPUs being "hacked" into quad-cores when the crippling was just the setting low of a line or setting of a jumper on the chip. That was back when they were making all the chips quad cores and then crippling them as needed to meet market need: more dual cores were being purchased because of the lower price point, so the manufacturer just intentionally "disavowed" the extra cores on those chips, just to make a sale at that price point.
Of course, due to some hardware limitations, it can just record bursts of 59 frames at a time (probably RAM buffer limits since the RAW video takes up hella lot of data):
@coutts has found the stubs for the 40d which means it is 'likely' that the 40d can do raw video and DNG bursts however it will need porting and developing.
@Smeangol is having some success in porting the raw recording feature however some other developer assistance may be required to iron out bugs.
Re: I don't know much about him or if he deserves his conviction or not but that seems like a flaw in the justice system that should be fixed.
Fucked up legal system takes away the judging power from the judiciary.
It's not so much a flaw but instead a way for those in power to maintain their consolidated hold on power. This discretionary power held by the Attorneys General (of the States of our United States of America and of the Federal Districts of these United States) on whether or not to charge individuals and with what charges to pound them into submission is monstrously overwhelming firepower: it's the use of nuclear bombs to swat a mosquito. It's not so much a flaw as it a specific design feature: it's meant to be that way because it was designed that way.
It's the same as the silly hammer of "minimum required sentencing guidelines" (guidelines? how are they guidelines if they're forced upon you as a minimum???) forced upon the federal judiciary for certain types of crimes:
These are called mandatory minimum sentences: - A mandatory sentence is a court decision setting where judicial discretion is limited by law. Typically, people convicted of certain crimes must be punished with at least a minimum number of years in prison.
So now with the judicial branch tied off because judicial discretion is limited by law, the enormous power of the judiciary is funneled into the hands of the prosecutors, those Attorneys General aforementioned, and into the hands of the police who also have leeway and discretion in deciding whether to detain / pick up / arrest the people whom they run into or decide to actively look for or to actively avoid looking for.
Fucked up legal system takes away the judging power from the judiciary. As someone else mentions in this article, "It is abuse of power and exploitation of the system by the people within the system."
Yep. I must agree with you. Especially since the USA seems to want to go to war with other countries and individuals about them breaking our laws in their countries (see copyright, Kim Dotcom, the Dmitri Skylarov case, kidnapping Manuel Noriega for breaking "our laws", and probably a million other things), it seems minimal to allow a country to fucking assert its own laws in its own sovereign territory.
Their country, their rules. Though as to your comment about "You can't complain that you do it in your country so why can't you do it there", there are many many whiny americains who go abroad and then whine whine complain whine about how they can't do what they want to do and what they're used to doing at home.
Often, these idiots and our state department are complaining about the jailing of our USAian countrymen (and women!!!) for breaking the laws of those other countries. How dare those other countries have laws that affect our citizens! Why, we won't even be a party to international treaties if our soldiers would be bound by the International Criminal Court!
Say, have you ever read The Nine Billion Names of God ? It's a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, and just like in "2001", he somehow manages to get IBM involved in the storyline!!!
Perhaps it's a fear of the end of the world that leads to such superstitions such as not saying god's name, or in Harry potter stories the continual references to "He who shall not be named" for [spoiler alert!!!] Voldemort (vol-de-mort? flight of death? orgasm? wtf???]
The summary from wikipedia:
This short story tells of a Tibetan lamasery whose monks seek to list all of the Names of God, since they believe the Universe was created in order to note all the names of God and once this naming is completed, God will bring the Universe to an end. Three centuries ago, the monks created an alphabet in which they calculated they could encode all the possible names of God, numbering about 9,000,000,000 ("nine billion") and each having no more than nine characters. Writing the names out by hand, as they had been doing, even after eliminating various nonsense combinations, would take another 15,000 years; the monks wish to use modern technology in order to finish this task more quickly.
.
They rent a computer capable of printing all the possible permutations, and they hire two Westerners to install and program the machine. The computer operators are skeptical but play along. After three months, as the job nears completion, they fear that the monks will blame the computer, and by extension its operators, when nothing happens. The Westerners delay the operation of the computer so that it will complete its final print run just after their scheduled departure. After their successful departure on ponies, they pause on the mountain path on their way back to the airfield, where a plane is waiting to take them back to civilization. Under a clear night sky they estimate that it must be just about the time that the monks are pasting the final printed names into their holy books. Then they notice that ''overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.''
Re: The problem is that none of the mythologies make any sense unless you are already a believer. So comparing three mythologies that do not make sense to each other will not result in any insights except that they are different.
So true! In fact, comparing fictional religious world-views is as fruitful as trying to compare them based on their relative phase shift of holy or sacred days:
Islam holds Friday to be the holy day / lord's day
Judaism holds Saturday to be the holy/lord's day
Christianity holds Sunday to be the holy/lord's day
(or so I have been told, I grew up in the middle of those three) So is the phase shift due to the age of origin of the religions? 'cause Judaism predates the other two and holds the middle religious day.
But then again, considering the various calamitous and cliff-like calendar changes from Julian (hail, Caesar!) to Gregorian (hail, popey monkey suits!) and the various calendrical manipulations involved in orthodoxy and non-orthodoxy, it's all baloney / bologna / non-kosher-meat to me!
And have you noticed how this part of the earth likes to use Norse gods (Tieu, Odin, Thor, Frig/Freya, Saturn) and sky-orbs (Sun's day and Moon's day) for the days of the week?
Christian's worship the sun (son?)? Jews are Saturnalians? Muslims and Freya? WTF? Of course, it all makes no sense at all, which makes sense when you consider that it is nonsense at its base.
That is a problem if they prioritize their own results above legitimate search results and if they effectively blackmail the owners of the search terms into paying to be listed at an appropriately high level. Oh wait, they already do that with adwords and threatening to allow competitors to buy keywords for your own unique business. They keep trying to create gold-rushes and make sure that Google is the only territory in which the gold-rushes occur.
That may, in fact, be inappropriate use of a monopoly. And their purchase of doubleclick and the bundling of their products may in fact constitute such abuse of monopoly powers.
dude, you miss the point entirely. Normally, "whoosh" is used for people who don't get the joke, but in this case you deserve a "whoosh" for not getting the point. WTF do I care if the drug dealer puts adulterants in his crappy drugs? The point is that the deaths from overdoses are not because some insanely careful and meticulous dosage-calculating drug user OD'ed 'cause he counted on the drug dealer to give him a calibrated and accurate and precise amount and strength of drug as the USP would give him. These fuckers die because they used illegal drugs and they took too much of the damn drug.
It's no use blaming the drug dealer for getting your poor widdle kid addicted: your kid chose to use the drugs. Blame your kid, not the drug dealer, for the kid's decision to seek out and use drugs.
To take a phrase from the NRA types: drug-dealers and drugs don't cause the overdoses, the fucking idiots who ingest the drugs cause the overdoses.
Well, you're posting so you're definitely a writer, ergo no money lots of time. However, you're posting in response to something, so you must have read it so you're a reader, so lotsa money and no time. However, you're posting in response tosomething on slashdot, so if you follow the norm (for slashdot) you did not RTFA so you're definitely not a reader, so less money and more time?
As to which color of star to ask, I do not think our badge system defines that as of yet. Please speak to the gamification Tzar and I'm sure they'll get right on it. You could also use D&D to decide:
a - roll a 20-sided die three times to select a HUE
b - roll a six-sided die once to select SATURATION
c - roll a 10-sideed die to select the number of points on the star
d - roll any die and use odd/even to select whether to cut and sew the star yourself or outsource it to chinese manufacturers...
So Google is going to become the new "Permanent Record" bogey-man... just like the arrest and mug-shot sites that put up names and photos of recent arrests and mug-shots and "offer" to make those photos go away if you pay a little something...
Or expedite the "going away" of those photos if you pay a little more. Sad world. Sad concept.
Just because Schmidt 'the idiot' of Google sez forget about your privacy (and no matter how frequently he bleats it) is no reason to take him at his word. We have rights beyond those he believes in, inalienable rights. I read about them somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Re: Anyhow, my conspiracy theory is that maybe /. has reached a tippiong point where whatever corporation currently owns /. doesn't get enough click-referral revenue, so they've stopped bothering to link to the articles?
aha!!! I am inclined to agree with you. Though Timothy's history of bizarre posting behavior may mean it's just the same old same old, you may have hit upon the real truth with your conspiracy theory! I breathe along with you. [look up the meaning of conspiracy...]
Hey Timothy, wake up! How about the link?
Here it is in case you can't find it:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130531131600482
"Innovators, Entrepreneurs and Funds File Amicus in Support of Google in Oracle v. Google Appeal ~pj"
What is a "recombinant turbine"? Wikipedia does not seem to know, since it thinks the word "recombinant" pertains only to DNA.
A general web search yields only references to batteries that are "recombinant gas turbine starting batteries" which does not seem to make much sense to me.
Re: Wikipedia is the only site I know that does [use srcset]
Interestingly enough, searching for "srcset" on wikipedia yields no results on any pages at all anywhere on wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=srcset yields:
Did you mean: secret ?
There were no results matching the query.
The page "Srcset" does not exist. You can ask for it to be created, but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered.
For search help, please visit Help:Searching.
But definitely the concept of "srcset" makes sense for extremely large displays, extremely small displays, and extremely high-resolution high-DPI displays. But what good is a standard if only one organization is using it? It would work better when more people use it or follow it or recognize it. It does sound more like a "browser" error. Or is it a revenue maximization error to force more bandwidth usage, just like all those javascript and flash-based advertisements are? ;>)
The idea of variable resolution images with just one set being requested is a good one; it just has to become more known about, at least enough known about to be worth meriting a mention on some wikipedia page if not a wikipedia page of its own!
You're right that they don't call the plans unlimited in this particular ad. The only mention of "limit" on that page is as "limited-time offer" multiple times and then one time They tell you to "So go ahead and push your devices to their limits and never skip a beat."
They also say
Connect all your devices and push them to their limitsâ"this speed won't let you down.
So they can't complain if you hook up 500 devices if you own 500 devices, right? And since there's no mention of limit, only bandwidth and download and upload speeds, then there is no limit implied. Thus by definition, only limited by capacity.
Atomic Force Microscopy does not visually capture anything. It measures atomic forces with a finer resolution that goes beyond the optical diffraction limit for wavelengths of light visible to the unaided eye.
The rendered images are derived from the force measurements and thus these really are "inferred images" or visual renderings of force measurements. These are definitely not "visual capture" images. These are visual renderings.
Stuxnet Part Deux and add potential eavesdropping capability?
Hmmm... One would think the ability to insert more eavesdropping and spying capabilties ("hidden features? :>) ) may be more the reasoning behind something like this. Perhaps another bonus gift inserted into the software, hardware, or microcode, like Stuxnet did?
No no no. Reread that. I actually gave the real math for it. I'm not claiming that this defendant used a one-time pad. I'm saying it's like the Da Vinci Code, but even better: you can generate a purported one-time pad that would decrypt ANY message of length L into ANY OTHER message of length L. I actually gave the pseudocode for it, using the simplest protocol of all: XORing the message with the one-time pad.
In other words, a claim that someone has "found a one-time pad that decrypts a message" is essentially meaningless. One may generate any claim whatsoever for any message whatsoever by that technique.
Re: You have a problem here. All the feds have to do is go before the judge, start with an archived copy of the original disk which can be proven to be bitwise identical, apply the correct decryption process, and when out pops all the data they claim was there you'll have to explain how they got the original encrypted bytes to decrypt directly into the alleged criminal data.
I can make you a one-time pad that can decrypt any X of length $L_x$ into any Y also of length $L_x$. Just fucking XOR the values of X and Y and call that Z = (X) xor (Y) . Now, Z is the XOR-decryption-encryption key that will transform X into Y. That can be done for every fucking Y possible in the world. Of course, this is charlatanry. You're not going to use a one-time pad of length 1-terabyte, or are you?
But it's trivial. Say that my code is "12345". Say that I want to decode that into "fuxor". Set Z = "12345" xor "fuxor", and say that Z is the encryption key. Now, (Z) xor ("12345") = "fuxor". Tada. La Voila.
But what if instead I wanted to prove that "12345" really encoded "itsCP" ?? Well, claim that Z_2 = "12345" xor "itsCP". Now, (Z_2) xor ("12345") = "itsCP". Ohmifuckinggod, the code "12345" decodes into the obvious claim that "itsCP"!!! There can be no other answer!!! Hang'em!
And that can be done for the noisy chaff that is encrypted data too. It's like the Queen in Alice Wonderland explaining what words mean: "I can make them mean anything I want them to mean!"
in other words, tl;dr: I can make a one-time pad to prove it's anything...
Plus there's an age distribution, and there's been a rather fast tumbling down of other sites.
Tumblr is more popular amongst current high-school kids than facebook is. Facebook is for parents and grandparents. Tumblr is for the current high school kids. Actually, facebook is for the bonus site to make for your parents to see that you're friends with the good kids and the appropriate hoity-toity-clubs like math-club, science-club, model United Nations, scouts of boys and girls, etc. [i do not know where the fight-club members are. no one talks about fight club... ;>) ]
Two sites that were filled with questions have disappeared (or half-disappeared): formspring.com (i'm on there somewhere, hint hint) was supposed to go dark in april but the web pages are still there. Ask.fm and a similar ask-a-question functionality on facebook supplanted formspring. And vyou.com (pronounced view?) really did go completely dark. Some kids also have gone onto myspace, though who the hell knows why...
Formspring was really popular amongst the Brazilians. If you had a page with a popular name, say teresa or allyson (in all their spelling versions), you'd get bombarded with questions in portugese and threats asking you to get off of their formspring page so that they could have it.
Well, hey, if you can't get FOSS for what you want, at least have the ethics to realize that you have to pay fo rthe software you use. Don't use unlicensed software. FOSS software is licensed too, even if it is or is not free of cost. Freedom in FOSS is the freedom to share and the lack of a bullshit-filled license. Or at least don't keep hiring idiots who think that it's okay to steal. It's not okay to steal in either case, and your employees ought to be aware of that: a - proprietary software copied without paying for the copy or the extra license b - FOSS software that you intend to use without honoring the license If your employees can't stop stealing, perhaps they deserve being fired.
Re:Throwing out high quality people because a 3rd party company bullies you is not really great business practice.
Excellent point. Licensing is key. Go FOSS.
He should have made his password or passphrase be
"I do not have the password"
Then, when asked for the password, he could truthfully state that his answer is "I do not have the password". Of course, a few weasely questions that he may be required to answer truthfully could shake this, but hey, why not for a first step?
Or possibly:
"I don't need no stinkin' password"
"This is not my drive."
"I forgot my password" as the passphrase!
"I assert my fifth amendment rights"
"I respectfully assert my fifth amendment rights"
"Fuck you" (J_1: what is your password? R_1: fuck you J1:Que? Off to jail! R_1: I answered fully and truthfully!)
dude ??? Why are you arguing with me? My original position was that this is really a great hack ("kickass hack!" ) adding on new capabilities.
Someone replied to me and said it was like enablibg capabilities that were "hidden".
I replied to them and said "nyah. nyet. no. this is truly adding on new capabilities that were not originally designed for."
So I'm thinking we're on the same side. Am i right?
Ah, indeed you are correct. The hardware was there, but my opinion or reading of it is that it was not "crippled" but never intended to have this functionality. It does not have enough RAM to buffer frames continuously at uncompressed DNG format rates for continuous video recording to SD card, whereas other cameras that were designed specifically for video recording have enough memory to be capable of doing this.
Thus my interpretation is that this camera model's hardware specs were deemed insufficient by the manufacturer for this specific capability, and considering that it can only do burst mode up to $X$ frames before capping out its memory buffer, the manufacturer may have been correct. So my interpretation is not that they "re-enabled a purposely disabled core" but rather that they added functionality which the manufacturer had decided that this hardware was not capable of performing well.
Now that is a kickass hack! Seriously, taking hardware with limited functionality and actually adding (not just restoring) functionality to it that was not planned for it is pretty cool.
This is not like the "triple core" or "double core" CPUs being "hacked" into quad-cores when the crippling was just the setting low of a line or setting of a jumper on the chip. That was back when they were making all the chips quad cores and then crippling them as needed to meet market need: more dual cores were being purchased because of the lower price point, so the manufacturer just intentionally "disavowed" the extra cores on those chips, just to make a sale at that price point.
Of course, due to some hardware limitations, it can just record bursts of 59 frames at a time (probably RAM buffer limits since the RAW video takes up hella lot of data):
DNG Burst and raw videoThe 50d can already shoot DNG silent bursts with maximum resolutions of 1592x1062 (buffer is full at 59 frames) in 1x mode and 1992x1080 (buffer is full at 53 frames) in crop mode thanks to @smeangol http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=5481.msg37526#msg37526
@coutts has found the stubs for the 40d which means it is 'likely' that the 40d can do raw video and DNG bursts however it will need porting and developing.
@Smeangol is having some success in porting the raw recording feature however some other developer assistance may be required to iron out bugs.
Re: I don't know much about him or if he deserves his conviction or not but that seems like a flaw in the justice system that should be fixed.
Fucked up legal system takes away the judging power from the judiciary.
It's not so much a flaw but instead a way for those in power to maintain their consolidated hold on power. This discretionary power held by the Attorneys General (of the States of our United States of America and of the Federal Districts of these United States) on whether or not to charge individuals and with what charges to pound them into submission is monstrously overwhelming firepower: it's the use of nuclear bombs to swat a mosquito. It's not so much a flaw as it a specific design feature: it's meant to be that way because it was designed that way.
It's the same as the silly hammer of "minimum required sentencing guidelines" (guidelines? how are they guidelines if they're forced upon you as a minimum???) forced upon the federal judiciary for certain types of crimes:
These are called mandatory minimum sentences: - A mandatory sentence is a court decision setting where judicial discretion is limited by law. Typically, people convicted of certain crimes must be punished with at least a minimum number of years in prison.So now with the judicial branch tied off because judicial discretion is limited by law, the enormous power of the judiciary is funneled into the hands of the prosecutors, those Attorneys General aforementioned, and into the hands of the police who also have leeway and discretion in deciding whether to detain / pick up / arrest the people whom they run into or decide to actively look for or to actively avoid looking for.
Fucked up legal system takes away the judging power from the judiciary. As someone else mentions in this article, "It is abuse of power and exploitation of the system by the people within the system."
I'm pretty sure there is a "country" resident in the Cayman islands.
I believe you meant to say "a company". ;>)
Re::Their country, their rules
Yep. I must agree with you. Especially since the USA seems to want to go to war with other countries and individuals about them breaking our laws in their countries (see copyright, Kim Dotcom, the Dmitri Skylarov case, kidnapping Manuel Noriega for breaking "our laws", and probably a million other things), it seems minimal to allow a country to fucking assert its own laws in its own sovereign territory.
Their country, their rules. Though as to your comment about "You can't complain that you do it in your country so why can't you do it there", there are many many whiny americains who go abroad and then whine whine complain whine about how they can't do what they want to do and what they're used to doing at home.
Often, these idiots and our state department are complaining about the jailing of our USAian countrymen (and women!!!) for breaking the laws of those other countries. How dare those other countries have laws that affect our citizens! Why, we won't even be a party to international treaties if our soldiers would be bound by the International Criminal Court!
Perhaps it's a fear of the end of the world that leads to such superstitions such as not saying god's name, or in Harry potter stories the continual references to "He who shall not be named" for [spoiler alert!!!] Voldemort (vol-de-mort? flight of death? orgasm? wtf???]
The summary from wikipedia:
This short story tells of a Tibetan lamasery whose monks seek to list all of the Names of God, since they believe the Universe was created in order to note all the names of God and once this naming is completed, God will bring the Universe to an end. Three centuries ago, the monks created an alphabet in which they calculated they could encode all the possible names of God, numbering about 9,000,000,000 ("nine billion") and each having no more than nine characters. Writing the names out by hand, as they had been doing, even after eliminating various nonsense combinations, would take another 15,000 years; the monks wish to use modern technology in order to finish this task more quickly..
They rent a computer capable of printing all the possible permutations, and they hire two Westerners to install and program the machine. The computer operators are skeptical but play along. After three months, as the job nears completion, they fear that the monks will blame the computer, and by extension its operators, when nothing happens. The Westerners delay the operation of the computer so that it will complete its final print run just after their scheduled departure. After their successful departure on ponies, they pause on the mountain path on their way back to the airfield, where a plane is waiting to take them back to civilization. Under a clear night sky they estimate that it must be just about the time that the monks are pasting the final printed names into their holy books. Then they notice that ''overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.''
Re: The problem is that none of the mythologies make any sense unless you are already a believer. So comparing three mythologies that do not make sense to each other will not result in any insights except that they are different.
So true! In fact, comparing fictional religious world-views is as fruitful as trying to compare them based on their relative phase shift of holy or sacred days:
Islam holds Friday to be the holy day / lord's day
Judaism holds Saturday to be the holy/lord's day
Christianity holds Sunday to be the holy/lord's day
(or so I have been told, I grew up in the middle of those three)
So is the phase shift due to the age of origin of the religions? 'cause Judaism predates the other two and holds the middle religious day.
But then again, considering the various calamitous and cliff-like calendar changes from Julian (hail, Caesar!) to Gregorian (hail, popey monkey suits!) and the various calendrical manipulations involved in orthodoxy and non-orthodoxy, it's all baloney / bologna / non-kosher-meat to me!
And have you noticed how this part of the earth likes to use Norse gods (Tieu, Odin, Thor, Frig/Freya, Saturn) and sky-orbs (Sun's day and Moon's day) for the days of the week?
Christian's worship the sun (son?)? Jews are Saturnalians? Muslims and Freya? WTF? Of course, it all makes no sense at all, which makes sense when you consider that it is nonsense at its base.
That is a problem if they prioritize their own results above legitimate search results and if they effectively blackmail the owners of the search terms into paying to be listed at an appropriately high level. Oh wait, they already do that with adwords and threatening to allow competitors to buy keywords for your own unique business. They keep trying to create gold-rushes and make sure that Google is the only territory in which the gold-rushes occur.
That may, in fact, be inappropriate use of a monopoly. And their purchase of doubleclick and the bundling of their products may in fact constitute such abuse of monopoly powers.
dude, you miss the point entirely. Normally, "whoosh" is used for people who don't get the joke, but in this case you deserve a "whoosh" for not getting the point. WTF do I care if the drug dealer puts adulterants in his crappy drugs? The point is that the deaths from overdoses are not because some insanely careful and meticulous dosage-calculating drug user OD'ed 'cause he counted on the drug dealer to give him a calibrated and accurate and precise amount and strength of drug as the USP would give him. These fuckers die because they used illegal drugs and they took too much of the damn drug.
It's no use blaming the drug dealer for getting your poor widdle kid addicted: your kid chose to use the drugs. Blame your kid, not the drug dealer, for the kid's decision to seek out and use drugs.
To take a phrase from the NRA types: drug-dealers and drugs don't cause the overdoses, the fucking idiots who ingest the drugs cause the overdoses.
Well, you're posting so you're definitely a writer, ergo no money lots of time. However, you're posting in response to something, so you must have read it so you're a reader, so lotsa money and no time. However, you're posting in response tosomething on slashdot, so if you follow the norm (for slashdot) you did not RTFA so you're definitely not a reader, so less money and more time?
As to which color of star to ask, I do not think our badge system defines that as of yet. Please speak to the gamification Tzar and I'm sure they'll get right on it. You could also use D&D to decide:
a - roll a 20-sided die three times to select a HUE
b - roll a six-sided die once to select SATURATION
c - roll a 10-sideed die to select the number of points on the star
d - roll any die and use odd/even to select whether to cut and sew the star yourself or outsource it to chinese manufacturers...
So Google is going to become the new "Permanent Record" bogey-man... just like the arrest and mug-shot sites that put up names and photos of recent arrests and mug-shots and "offer" to make those photos go away if you pay a little something...
Or expedite the "going away" of those photos if you pay a little more.
Sad world. Sad concept.
Just because Schmidt 'the idiot' of Google sez forget about your privacy (and no matter how frequently he bleats it) is no reason to take him at his word. We have rights beyond those he believes in, inalienable rights. I read about them somewhere.