So the water won't ruin your electronics, it just runs around the plastic panels and into your lap. Having seen a bit more discussion of that McDonald's scalding-coffee lawsuit today, I'm wondering just how hot the water can get at the CPU? Especially the last little bit after the rest has leaked out? Are we going to have someone suing the manufacturer because they were too dumb to shut the thing off and get it out of their lap when it started leaking, and got hurt by that final blast of steam and hot water?
Air conditioners, cars, toilets, any hydraulic systems...they spring leaks all the time.
It depends on the sort of air conditioner you are talking about. I've never seen a self-contained window unit leak - nor an electric refrigerator or freezer. All the plumbing in these is metal, with welded joints, and the compressor motor is sealed in with the refrigerant, so only two wires come through the case. These just don't leak unless there is major mechanical damage. Automobile A/C, OTOH, leaks all the time because there shaft seals where the compressor is driven by a v-belt and pulley, plus rubber hoses, etc.
So if the laptop cooling plumbing could be built like a refrigerator, it would be leakproof unless you really smashed up the computer - and then it wouldn't matter. Of course, making a water pump without shaft seals is quite a lot harder than making a leak-proof compressor. You can't have the electromagnets under water, but maybe you could have a combined rotor and impeller sealed into the pipe, with the electromagnets around it.
Or maybe you should just fill the laptop cooling system with a refrigerant. You might not even have to have a pump in this case - the mechanical power input might be the pressure difference between the hot CPU and the cool heat dissipator. The tricky part is that this would probably have to work "upside down", that is it's likely to get tipped so the cool end is above the hot end...
Most Americans prefer their beer quite chilled - what the guys I know that have been in England complained about most is that otherwise great beer was served at near room temperature. ("Room temperature" in England can be much chillier than most Americans find tolerable, but it's still too warm for beer if you're used to it being chilled to about 40F = 5C or lower.) So either that guy that posted about a beer-cooled computer is an idiot, or he's no American.
But I have heard of a British concoction called "mulled ale". If I understood this right, the ale was heated over a fire???
Not to criticize British taste, you understand. Everyone has favorite recipes that seem utterly disgusting to the rest of the world. (Even though half my ancestors were Scots, I don't even want to think about haggis...)
I would say "a few", not "many". The vast bulk of their production was smaller boats for blockading Britain.
This was damned fortunate for the US after Pearl Harbor. All the coastal shipping was completely unprotected, and it took several months before antisub patrols became sufficiently effective - long enough for a sub to cross the Atlantic, use up all its torpedos, go home to get more, and come back. But the Germans didn't have enough subs capable of making the trip, or many "tanker" subs to resupply the little boats, so the number of sinkings was limited. The panic and the disruption caused by keeping ships in port were pretty bad, though.
OTOH, the strictly temporary spot shortages of petroleum caused by tankers being sunk or kept in port became an excuse for the government to severely ration gasoline. This doesn't seem to have been necessary in the US during most of the war from the viewpoint of total available supplies versus consumption, but it helped get the civilian population into making sacrifices for the war effort, and it conserved a lot of irreplaceable tire rubber.
What _might_ be fraud, and is certainly despicable, is that Compression Labs was a member of the JPEG committee, and never mentioned that they had a patent possibly affecting the standard.
Damn, I wish I could be the judge on a few such cases: "In 19xx, CL joined the JPEG committee and signed an agreement to reveal all patents and patent applications relating to the standard being developed. CL did not reveal the subject patent. Therefore, they did not consider that JPEG could possibly infringe this patent. On that basis, no further consideration of the case is needed. I find for the defendants. Further, I find that this lawsuit was frivolous and order CL to pay court costs and the defendants' reasonable and proper legal fees and expenses."
And [all US subs] had something the German U-Boats didn't have...showers.
U.S. subs in the WWII era had to patrol the Pacific - which meant big boats capable of very long cruises, and the crew had to be kept healthy. So they had showers, and air-conditioning for the tropical areas, as good a food service as could be fitted in, and a reasonable amount of room to live in.
Most U-boats were designed for short cruises out into the North Sea and around the British isles. So they were as small as possible (which helps evade detection, too), and if that meant cramped quarters and no showers, the crew could just bear it for a few weeks. After all, they could have joined the infantry instead and lived in muddy foxholes for _months_ at a time with no chance to clean up.
Of course, as the war went on and the sub defenses multiplied close in to Britain, and on the approaches to the ports used to replenish the U-boats, the U-boats had to lengthen their cruises, and so things could get pretty uncomfortable. Furthermore, originally the boats would surface every night to run the diesels and recharge the batteries - crewmen could lollygag on deck during this, the hatches could be opened and some of the smell blown out, and if it wasn't too cold they could take seawater baths. But then someone (a Brit, I think?) invented radar small enough to mount in an airplane, the Americans manufactured thousands of large long-range airplanes, and once enough radar equipped bombers were on patrol, surfacing anywhere near the shipping lanes came to carry a high risk of being bombed. So the Germans invented the snorkel; now the U-boats could run the diesels while submerged, with only a periscope and air intake pipe exposed. These were undetectable to radar, but the crews suffered... For safer areas, the Germans also provided radar detectors, so the subs could surface as long as they could dive quickly when the detector pinged. But staying ready for a fast dive = keep most of the crew below...
Try it in the winter in a northern state - many of my idjit countrymen seem to set their heater to 78F and their air conditioners to 72. Good thing most central air systems have a lockout that prevents the two from running simultaneously...
And it is bad for your health. People step outdoors on a moderate winter day and they're badly chilled almost immediately. Their body hasn't adapted to winter. Also, it's too hot indoors to wear warm clothes - so for one thing, they might put a two inch thick down jacket over their chest, but they are leaking heat through thin trousers. Keep the heat at 65 to 68, and (1) you can be comfortable indoors while dressed appropriately for the season, and (2) you'll adapt to cooler temperatures.
Isn't air conditioning just an application of an earlier invention to a "new" area?
Yes. Furthermore, according to the article, "Carrier borrowed on the heater principle, but instead of sending air through hot coils, he sent it through coils chilled with cold water." This sounds like he didn't even use a compression - expansion heat pump/refrigeration principle, but just piped in cool water from the lake.
Talk about obvious! If you count that as "air conditioning", you ought to credit it to the unkown architect that first designed a building that kept itself cool. Except that was just an artificial cave...
if you define it as a self propelled flying contraption I think you've got to go with either Lilienthal (German or French?) or Zeppelin (German). If you define it as a heavier-than-air flying contraption that can come back to ground without being smashed to pieces, it's definitely the Wrights. Lilienthal wrecked several powered airplanes while the Wrights were still flying kites and building wind tunnels. But the Wrights expanded their box kites into an airplane slow, stable, and tough enough that by being very cautious they managed to teach themselves to fly without killing themselves or wrecking it beyond repair. (Their very first flight did end in a tailspin and a crash - but from 8 foot altitude and a quite slow speed, so no one hurt and the plane was repaired in a short time. Their second flight the next day, with a rudder added to prevent tailspins, should be counted as the first successful heavier than air powered flight.)
Almost every pilot since then has had the advantage of learning from an experienced pilot. But someone had to be first, and it was the Wright's motorized box kite, and their extremely systematic step-by-step approach, that made do-it-yourself pilot training possible.
The anthrax was "effective" only because this country is run by nervous ninnies, who set a bad example for the rest of the country by running away at the first sign of danger. If you're under 80 and reasonably healthy, you'd be safer working in that "contaminated" congressional office building than walking six blocks from it in the wrong direction without bodyguards - but our "great" leaders _have_ bodyguards, used family influence to do their Vietnam War service in the states, and feel free to panic publicly anytime they feel like it.
And they didn't just buy the anthrax powder. You could buy anthrax samples, but in wet, not powdered form - to kill someone with that, you'd have to hold them down and spray it up their nose. It's a tricky thing to make a fine powder that spreads well without killing the spores; the Russians made a rather crude powder (and it's likely possible to bribe a lab tech to pilfer some, except that few foreigners could make contact without arousing suspicions), but the powder in the mailing was much better than that. Supposedly our own labs never made powder quite that fine - at least not that was turned in by the scientists. (There are strong suspicions that the mailer is one of our scientists - that's quite a way to get budget cuts reversed!)
One thing I wouldn't worry about much - chemical or biological agents. They are just not that effective. The anthrax letters were basically a fizzle - for a truly massive amount of work, and with anthrax powder that was allegedly _better_ than US military labs ever managed to produce, they could have killed three times as many people by just swerving a car onto a sidewalk. And then there was that Japanese cult with the nerve gas in the subway - prying up a rail could have caused a real disaster, the gas sure didn't.
someone did fly the plane that you have a right to travel on into a building.
And the reason for that is, we've gone from a country where people were expected to pretty much take care of themselves, to a country where everyone has been told repeatedly to let the bad guys have whatever they want, and wait for the proper authorities to do something about it.
This article was about when there is an actual signed contract between the corporation buying the software and the software vendor. Under those circumstances, it _might_ be possible to negotiate away the "We are not responsible for anything but putting the software on the CD" clause. However, in exchange the purchaser probably gives the vendor considerable control over the environment in which the software is run. No one can guarantee that software will run properly without knowing what computers it will run on, how they are configured, and what other software is installed on them.
But if you really want to get Linux under a commercial-style contract, I'm sure you could find some vendor to sell you support for so many copies installed at such and such a site, on such and such computers, with a list of other programs approved to work with it - and they'll throw in install disks too... Then if they don't get the software working, you might be able to sue for breach of contract, unless the contract forbids this.
I suspect you'll actually have an a better chance of persuading a small OSS vendor to write a contract that does provide penalties or allow breach-of-contract suits for nonperforming software. The reasons for this are both good and bad:
1. Suppose it turns out that the only thing that will make all the programs the customer needs run together is a little code change in the operating system? It's hard to imagine MS changing Windows just for one customer, especially after they've already got your money, but people do write patches for Linux just because they want it, whether or not it ever gets into the official source tree. Satisfied customers don't sue.
2. It's likely that a big, complicated lawsuit against an OSS support vendor cannot pay off, because the whole company isn't worth the legal expenses. You'd wind up owning the vendor, but owing the lawyers a lot more than the vendor is worth. OTOH, MSFT could pay $10 billion cash without blinking. It would take 10 years of legal wrangling before you got any of it, but there are many people who would be willing to gamble, even on a poorly-founded case. So MSFT will probably insist upon contract clauses severely limiting the damages you could ever recover...
Dane put fraud further down in Hell than murder, with betrayal at the very bottom.
Um. that's Dante that wrote "Inferno". And the value system in medieval Italy was quite a lot different than in most nations in the 21st century. (There is one group of Italians that holds to the old values - the Mafia.)
But there is a reasonable argument that some frauds are worse than murder. People spend large parts of their life to working. A middle-aged man's pension plan might be the product of several whole years of work, say 1/20th of his life. Is it really more serious take the whole life away from 3,000 people than to take 1/20th of their lives away from 1,000,000?
I was about to write a post pointing out that the determination of motive that distinquishes between manslaughter, 2nd degree (unpremeditated murder), and 1st degree (premeditated) murder usually hinges on plain facts - e.g., did the killer bring the weapon along or pick up something that happened to be lying there. The determination of "hate crime" is often based on far more nebulous evidence. If the juries took "beyond a reasonable doubt" seriously, the only ones ever convicted of hate crimes would be those that confessed to them, but it's pretty easy to decide beyond a reasonable doubt that someone who waited in ambush with a gun really did intend to kill the victim...
But your point as to the difference between punishing actions and punishing thoughts is even better.
How does one kill someone across state lines? 1)Stand near the state line and fire a gun at someone on the other side.
2) Get a job at the Tylenol factory and add a little cyanide to the pills. Ship them out to stores all across the nation.
3) Hack into the records in a hospital in another state. Find someone with severe penicillin allergy. Erase that info, and put in a prescription for penicillin.
The question is, if existing laws cover the first two murders, and I'm sure they do, why is a special law required for the last third one?
Of course, there are also interstate (and international) murders for which you'll never see the man responsible going to prison:
4) You are a CEO of a corporation headquartered in one of these urbanized states with all sorts of regulations. So you have the factory (but not the HQ) moved to the most backwards and rural state you can find. And you order the manager to cut corners on safety...
Of course most people (cops included) don't realize that a shotgun [serbu.com] with a pistol grip and a 6" barrel is legal (and quite a lot of fun) if you pay the tax.
Ye gads! How do you fire that thing without breaking your wrist? Or do you only fire it when the alternative may be worse than a broken wrist? (For those that didn't follow monkeydo's link, it's a pistol with a 6 inch shotgun barrel.)
IIRC, in those laws concerning the minimum barrel length, part of the definition of rifle or shotgun is that there be a shoulder rest - whether permanent like most long guns, or folding or detachable. I don't see any place to attach a butt, so that weapon would probably be classed as a handgun of monstrous caliber.
Didn't the Hague and Geneva conventions ban shotguns from military use? Certainly in 1904 or thereabouts when the first of these conventions started, the military wasn't using shotguns. The big argument was about dum-dum bullets, which were pretty useful in colonial wars against people like the Zulus or Moros. Anyway, a shotgun (long or short) makes a good military weapon only in very special circumstances - but put troops in those circumstances long enough and they'll obtain a shotgun whether it's allowed or not. (And since Vietnam was officially a "police action" no matter how much it seemed like a war, and cops do use shotguns...)
Well, the US militia in the 18th & 19th centuries were not totally disorganized. One more time, it wasn't a matter of how the active militia was organized - but that the milita was defined to include everyone who appeared suitable for military service, whether or not they ever attended a meeting. If you were an able-bodied white male in the right age group (something like 15 to 45), you were in the militia.
I agree, the second should be re-written - not because it's meaning is all that foggy, but because there is an underlying right that the Founding Fathers never imagined any government in the English tradition would ever infringe - but now it's being infringed widely. E.g., the old farmer in the UK who is now doing 10 years for defending himself against burglars. He was repeatedly burglarized - and I suspect beaten, that being SOP by many UK burglars nowadays - until he illegally obtained a shotgun and shot the next bunch. In Australia, home invasions have skyrocketed since the gov't confiscated honest peoples' guns, and in some US states, you can keep a long gun in your house but it's almost impossible to use it in self-defense without facing both criminal charges and civil suits for abusing the poor criminals. So if I could rewrite the Bill of Rights now, the very first article would start:
The right of the people to defend themselves, individually and collectively, shall not be infringed"
You could do surgery on the sidewalk there [in Switzerland] without causing an infection.
A slight exaggeration, I'm sure, but point taken. There must be _some_ Swiss criminals, but the worst thing I've ever heard a Swiss accused of was a sort of bureaucratic crime - just keeping any money deposited by (probably dead) German jews before WWII in Swiss banks unless someone could actually prove he was the heir...
I do wonder though, how much of their good behavior comes from every man going through boot camp (for centuries), how much from the knowledge that your neighbors have as much firepower as a regular infantryman (although I've heard that a Swiss who uses his military weapon without authorization goes to prison longer than the average American murderer), and how much from other factors...
1) The prefatory clause does not limit the application of the main clause.
2) "Militia" meant simply all male citizens of age and condition to be fit for military service. It wasn't necessary to be in any sort of organization, if you could potentially fight you were a member of the unorganized militia. "Well regulated", in 18th century military terms, meant "well equipped".
So the "militia" clause expressed a hope (not a law) that the citizenry would arm themselves suitably for military operations, just in case it became necessary to call on them. (And many indian wars, as well as the successful defense of New Orleans against British regulars in the War of 1812, were conducted primarily by men who joined up for just a few months.) The binding main clause says simply that the federal government should not interfere with individuals obtaining and owning "arms".
However, the US Supreme Court has always dodged cases that would require directly defining the limits (if any) on "the right to bear arms". It came closest in "Miller vs. US", where it decided that there is no right to own a sawed-off shotgun - confusingly, this decision went a ways down the road of misinterpreting the first clause, but then finally decided that the weapon in question was not covered since the military doesn't use shotguns. By the same logic, "Saturday night specials" (the cheapest, lowest quality handguns) wouldn't qualify either, because real military forces prefer weapons that don't blow up in your hand when properly used. The real problem at this point is that this reasoning seems to imply that you should have the right to buy and keep in your home a standard infantry weapon - nowadays, that's an assault rifle that can empty a 30 round clip in under 3 seconds. But we have laws not only forbidding these, but forbidding anything that even looks like them...
By the way, in Switzerland every able-bodied man is a member of the military reserve, and the government GIVES him a military weapon to take home. And the Swiss don't use them to massacre their neighbors. Is it because the Swiss are that much better behaved than Americans, or because they know the neighbors are equally well armed???
Re:I want a hyped story about corporate theft next
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NYTimes Looks at Warez
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And they certainly won't send 40 stormtroopers to bust Ken Lay...
Of course, some of these things depends on where you are. Maybe you don't get tornados and hurricanes in Denmark, and on the second floor you are too high for people accidentally parking their car in the server room, and probably too low for middle-eastern nutcases parking airplanes... But water damage? If you've got a sprinkler (automatic fire extinguisher) system, it's a real possibility (and in many places sprinklers are mandatory in office buildings). If your upstairs neighbors have a bathroom. If your roof leaks. And how far above sea level are you and how bad are the storms?
Of course, operator error (both accidental deletions and mistakes in making or using backups, or in rebuilding the Raid 5 after a one-drive crash) are definitely the all-time winner.
One other substantial danger: a couple of years ago a nitwit MCSE here installed a boot sector virus on a server.
The better CD-R's are supposed to last 100 years. (I wonder how they measured that?) It isn't eternity, but it's about as long as an average book printed today will last, and it's probably a heck of a lot longer than CD-readers will be available, which in most cases is longer than the file formats will be usable...
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So the water won't ruin your electronics, it just runs around the plastic panels and into your lap. Having seen a bit more discussion of that McDonald's scalding-coffee lawsuit today, I'm wondering just how hot the water can get at the CPU? Especially the last little bit after the rest has leaked out? Are we going to have someone suing the manufacturer because they were too dumb to shut the thing off and get it out of their lap when it started leaking, and got hurt by that final blast of steam and hot water?
Air conditioners, cars, toilets, any hydraulic systems...they spring leaks all the time.
It depends on the sort of air conditioner you are talking about. I've never seen a self-contained window unit leak - nor an electric refrigerator or freezer. All the plumbing in these is metal, with welded joints, and the compressor motor is sealed in with the refrigerant, so only two wires come through the case. These just don't leak unless there is major mechanical damage. Automobile A/C, OTOH, leaks all the time because there shaft seals where the compressor is driven by a v-belt and pulley, plus rubber hoses, etc.
So if the laptop cooling plumbing could be built like a refrigerator, it would be leakproof unless you really smashed up the computer - and then it wouldn't matter. Of course, making a water pump without shaft seals is quite a lot harder than making a leak-proof compressor. You can't have the electromagnets under water, but maybe you could have a combined rotor and impeller sealed into the pipe, with the electromagnets around it.
Or maybe you should just fill the laptop cooling system with a refrigerant. You might not even have to have a pump in this case - the mechanical power input might be the pressure difference between the hot CPU and the cool heat dissipator. The tricky part is that this would probably have to work "upside down", that is it's likely to get tipped so the cool end is above the hot end...
Most Americans prefer their beer quite chilled - what the guys I know that have been in England complained about most is that otherwise great beer was served at near room temperature. ("Room temperature" in England can be much chillier than most Americans find tolerable, but it's still too warm for beer if you're used to it being chilled to about 40F = 5C or lower.) So either that guy that posted about a beer-cooled computer is an idiot, or he's no American.
But I have heard of a British concoction called "mulled ale". If I understood this right, the ale was heated over a fire???
Not to criticize British taste, you understand. Everyone has favorite recipes that seem utterly disgusting to the rest of the world. (Even though half my ancestors were Scots, I don't even want to think about haggis...)
I would say "a few", not "many". The vast bulk of their production was smaller boats for blockading Britain.
This was damned fortunate for the US after Pearl Harbor. All the coastal shipping was completely unprotected, and it took several months before antisub patrols became sufficiently effective - long enough for a sub to cross the Atlantic, use up all its torpedos, go home to get more, and come back. But the Germans didn't have enough subs capable of making the trip, or many "tanker" subs to resupply the little boats, so the number of sinkings was limited. The panic and the disruption caused by keeping ships in port were pretty bad, though.
OTOH, the strictly temporary spot shortages of petroleum caused by tankers being sunk or kept in port became an excuse for the government to severely ration gasoline. This doesn't seem to have been necessary in the US during most of the war from the viewpoint of total available supplies versus consumption, but it helped get the civilian population into making sacrifices for the war effort, and it conserved a lot of irreplaceable tire rubber.
What _might_ be fraud, and is certainly despicable, is that Compression Labs was a member of the JPEG committee, and never mentioned that they had a patent possibly affecting the standard.
Damn, I wish I could be the judge on a few such cases: "In 19xx, CL joined the JPEG committee and signed an agreement to reveal all patents and patent applications relating to the standard being developed. CL did not reveal the subject patent. Therefore, they did not consider that JPEG could possibly infringe this patent. On that basis, no further consideration of the case is needed. I find for the defendants. Further, I find that this lawsuit was frivolous and order CL to pay court costs and the defendants' reasonable and proper legal fees and expenses."
And [all US subs] had something the German U-Boats didn't have...showers.
U.S. subs in the WWII era had to patrol the Pacific - which meant big boats capable of very long cruises, and the crew had to be kept healthy. So they had showers, and air-conditioning for the tropical areas, as good a food service as could be fitted in, and a reasonable amount of room to live in.
Most U-boats were designed for short cruises out into the North Sea and around the British isles. So they were as small as possible (which helps evade detection, too), and if that meant cramped quarters and no showers, the crew could just bear it for a few weeks. After all, they could have joined the infantry instead and lived in muddy foxholes for _months_ at a time with no chance to clean up.
Of course, as the war went on and the sub defenses multiplied close in to Britain, and on the approaches to the ports used to replenish the U-boats, the U-boats had to lengthen their cruises, and so things could get pretty uncomfortable. Furthermore, originally the boats would surface every night to run the diesels and recharge the batteries - crewmen could lollygag on deck during this, the hatches could be opened and some of the smell blown out, and if it wasn't too cold they could take seawater baths. But then someone (a Brit, I think?) invented radar small enough to mount in an airplane, the Americans manufactured thousands of large long-range airplanes, and once enough radar equipped bombers were on patrol, surfacing anywhere near the shipping lanes came to carry a high risk of being bombed. So the Germans invented the snorkel; now the U-boats could run the diesels while submerged, with only a periscope and air intake pipe exposed. These were undetectable to radar, but the crews suffered... For safer areas, the Germans also provided radar detectors, so the subs could surface as long as they could dive quickly when the detector pinged. But staying ready for a fast dive = keep most of the crew below...
Try it in the winter in a northern state - many of my idjit countrymen seem to set their heater to 78F and their air conditioners to 72. Good thing most central air systems have a lockout that prevents the two from running simultaneously...
And it is bad for your health. People step outdoors on a moderate winter day and they're badly chilled almost immediately. Their body hasn't adapted to winter. Also, it's too hot indoors to wear warm clothes - so for one thing, they might put a two inch thick down jacket over their chest, but they are leaking heat through thin trousers. Keep the heat at 65 to 68, and (1) you can be comfortable indoors while dressed appropriately for the season, and (2) you'll adapt to cooler temperatures.
Isn't air conditioning just an application of an earlier invention to a "new" area?
Yes. Furthermore, according to the article, "Carrier borrowed on the heater principle, but instead of sending air through hot coils, he sent it through coils chilled with cold water." This sounds like he didn't even use a compression - expansion heat pump/refrigeration principle, but just piped in cool water from the lake.
Talk about obvious! If you count that as "air conditioning", you ought to credit it to the unkown architect that first designed a building that kept itself cool. Except that was just an artificial cave...
if you define it as a self propelled flying contraption I think you've got to go with either Lilienthal (German or French?) or Zeppelin (German). If you define it as a heavier-than-air flying contraption that can come back to ground without being smashed to pieces, it's definitely the Wrights. Lilienthal wrecked several powered airplanes while the Wrights were still flying kites and building wind tunnels. But the Wrights expanded their box kites into an airplane slow, stable, and tough enough that by being very cautious they managed to teach themselves to fly without killing themselves or wrecking it beyond repair. (Their very first flight did end in a tailspin and a crash - but from 8 foot altitude and a quite slow speed, so no one hurt and the plane was repaired in a short time. Their second flight the next day, with a rudder added to prevent tailspins, should be counted as the first successful heavier than air powered flight.)
Almost every pilot since then has had the advantage of learning from an experienced pilot. But someone had to be first, and it was the Wright's motorized box kite, and their extremely systematic step-by-step approach, that made do-it-yourself pilot training possible.
The anthrax was "effective" only because this country is run by nervous ninnies, who set a bad example for the rest of the country by running away at the first sign of danger. If you're under 80 and reasonably healthy, you'd be safer working in that "contaminated" congressional office building than walking six blocks from it in the wrong direction without bodyguards - but our "great" leaders _have_ bodyguards, used family influence to do their Vietnam War service in the states, and feel free to panic publicly anytime they feel like it.
And they didn't just buy the anthrax powder. You could buy anthrax samples, but in wet, not powdered form - to kill someone with that, you'd have to hold them down and spray it up their nose. It's a tricky thing to make a fine powder that spreads well without killing the spores; the Russians made a rather crude powder (and it's likely possible to bribe a lab tech to pilfer some, except that few foreigners could make contact without arousing suspicions), but the powder in the mailing was much better than that. Supposedly our own labs never made powder quite that fine - at least not that was turned in by the scientists. (There are strong suspicions that the mailer is one of our scientists - that's quite a way to get budget cuts reversed!)
One thing I wouldn't worry about much - chemical or biological agents. They are just not that effective. The anthrax letters were basically a fizzle - for a truly massive amount of work, and with anthrax powder that was allegedly _better_ than US military labs ever managed to produce, they could have killed three times as many people by just swerving a car onto a sidewalk. And then there was that Japanese cult with the nerve gas in the subway - prying up a rail could have caused a real disaster, the gas sure didn't.
They wouldn't even need to sneak anything on board, just act like really rich people.
And for some of those Saudi terrorists, that doesn't require any "acting".
someone did fly the plane that you have a right to travel on into a building.
And the reason for that is, we've gone from a country where people were expected to pretty much take care of themselves, to a country where everyone has been told repeatedly to let the bad guys have whatever they want, and wait for the proper authorities to do something about it.
Nor does showing an ID do much to stop terrorists. It's too easy to get fake ID's.
This article was about when there is an actual signed contract between the corporation buying the software and the software vendor. Under those circumstances, it _might_ be possible to negotiate away the "We are not responsible for anything but putting the software on the CD" clause. However, in exchange the purchaser probably gives the vendor considerable control over the environment in which the software is run. No one can guarantee that software will run properly without knowing what computers it will run on, how they are configured, and what other software is installed on them.
But if you really want to get Linux under a commercial-style contract, I'm sure you could find some vendor to sell you support for so many copies installed at such and such a site, on such and such computers, with a list of other programs approved to work with it - and they'll throw in install disks too... Then if they don't get the software working, you might be able to sue for breach of contract, unless the contract forbids this.
I suspect you'll actually have an a better chance of persuading a small OSS vendor to write a contract that does provide penalties or allow breach-of-contract suits for nonperforming software. The reasons for this are both good and bad:
1. Suppose it turns out that the only thing that will make all the programs the customer needs run together is a little code change in the operating system? It's hard to imagine MS changing Windows just for one customer, especially after they've already got your money, but people do write patches for Linux just because they want it, whether or not it ever gets into the official source tree. Satisfied customers don't sue.
2. It's likely that a big, complicated lawsuit against an OSS support vendor cannot pay off, because the whole company isn't worth the legal expenses. You'd wind up owning the vendor, but owing the lawyers a lot more than the vendor is worth. OTOH, MSFT could pay $10 billion cash without blinking. It would take 10 years of legal wrangling before you got any of it, but there are many people who would be willing to gamble, even on a poorly-founded case. So MSFT will probably insist upon contract clauses severely limiting the damages you could ever recover...
Dane put fraud further down in Hell than murder, with betrayal at the very bottom.
Um. that's Dante that wrote "Inferno". And the value system in medieval Italy was quite a lot different than in most nations in the 21st century. (There is one group of Italians that holds to the old values - the Mafia.)
But there is a reasonable argument that some frauds are worse than murder. People spend large parts of their life to working. A middle-aged man's pension plan might be the product of several whole years of work, say 1/20th of his life. Is it really more serious take the whole life away from 3,000 people than to take 1/20th of their lives away from 1,000,000?
I was about to write a post pointing out that the determination of motive that distinquishes between manslaughter, 2nd degree (unpremeditated murder), and 1st degree (premeditated) murder usually hinges on plain facts - e.g., did the killer bring the weapon along or pick up something that happened to be lying there. The determination of "hate crime" is often based on far more nebulous evidence. If the juries took "beyond a reasonable doubt" seriously, the only ones ever convicted of hate crimes would be those that confessed to them, but it's pretty easy to decide beyond a reasonable doubt that someone who waited in ambush with a gun really did intend to kill the victim...
But your point as to the difference between punishing actions and punishing thoughts is even better.
How does one kill someone across state lines?
1)Stand near the state line and fire a gun at someone on the other side.
2) Get a job at the Tylenol factory and add a little cyanide to the pills. Ship them out to stores all across the nation.
3) Hack into the records in a hospital in another state. Find someone with severe penicillin allergy. Erase that info, and put in a prescription for penicillin.
The question is, if existing laws cover the first two murders, and I'm sure they do, why is a special law required for the last third one?
Of course, there are also interstate (and international) murders for which you'll never see the man responsible going to prison:
4) You are a CEO of a corporation headquartered in one of these urbanized states with all sorts of regulations. So you have the factory (but not the HQ) moved to the most backwards and rural state you can find. And you order the manager to cut corners on safety...
Of course most people (cops included) don't realize that a shotgun [serbu.com] with a pistol grip and a 6" barrel is legal (and quite a lot of fun) if you pay the tax.
Ye gads! How do you fire that thing without breaking your wrist? Or do you only fire it when the alternative may be worse than a broken wrist? (For those that didn't follow monkeydo's link, it's a pistol with a 6 inch shotgun barrel.)
IIRC, in those laws concerning the minimum barrel length, part of the definition of rifle or shotgun is that there be a shoulder rest - whether permanent like most long guns, or folding or detachable. I don't see any place to attach a butt, so that weapon would probably be classed as a handgun of monstrous caliber.
Didn't the Hague and Geneva conventions ban shotguns from military use? Certainly in 1904 or thereabouts when the first of these conventions started, the military wasn't using shotguns. The big argument was about dum-dum bullets, which were pretty useful in colonial wars against people like the Zulus or Moros. Anyway, a shotgun (long or short) makes a good military weapon only in very special circumstances - but put troops in those circumstances long enough and they'll obtain a shotgun whether it's allowed or not. (And since Vietnam was officially a "police action" no matter how much it seemed like a war, and cops do use shotguns...)
I agree, the second should be re-written - not because it's meaning is all that foggy, but because there is an underlying right that the Founding Fathers never imagined any government in the English tradition would ever infringe - but now it's being infringed widely. E.g., the old farmer in the UK who is now doing 10 years for defending himself against burglars. He was repeatedly burglarized - and I suspect beaten, that being SOP by many UK burglars nowadays - until he illegally obtained a shotgun and shot the next bunch. In Australia, home invasions have skyrocketed since the gov't confiscated honest peoples' guns, and in some US states, you can keep a long gun in your house but it's almost impossible to use it in self-defense without facing both criminal charges and civil suits for abusing the poor criminals. So if I could rewrite the Bill of Rights now, the very first article would start:
You could do surgery on the sidewalk there [in Switzerland] without causing an infection.
A slight exaggeration, I'm sure, but point taken. There must be _some_ Swiss criminals, but the worst thing I've ever heard a Swiss accused of was a sort of bureaucratic crime - just keeping any money deposited by (probably dead) German jews before WWII in Swiss banks unless someone could actually prove he was the heir...
I do wonder though, how much of their good behavior comes from every man going through boot camp (for centuries), how much from the knowledge that your neighbors have as much firepower as a regular infantryman (although I've heard that a Swiss who uses his military weapon without authorization goes to prison longer than the average American murderer), and how much from other factors...
1) The prefatory clause does not limit the application of the main clause.
2) "Militia" meant simply all male citizens of age and condition to be fit for military service. It wasn't necessary to be in any sort of organization, if you could potentially fight you were a member of the unorganized militia. "Well regulated", in 18th century military terms, meant "well equipped".
So the "militia" clause expressed a hope (not a law) that the citizenry would arm themselves suitably for military operations, just in case it became necessary to call on them. (And many indian wars, as well as the successful defense of New Orleans against British regulars in the War of 1812, were conducted primarily by men who joined up for just a few months.) The binding main clause says simply that the federal government should not interfere with individuals obtaining and owning "arms".
However, the US Supreme Court has always dodged cases that would require directly defining the limits (if any) on "the right to bear arms". It came closest in "Miller vs. US", where it decided that there is no right to own a sawed-off shotgun - confusingly, this decision went a ways down the road of misinterpreting the first clause, but then finally decided that the weapon in question was not covered since the military doesn't use shotguns. By the same logic, "Saturday night specials" (the cheapest, lowest quality handguns) wouldn't qualify either, because real military forces prefer weapons that don't blow up in your hand when properly used. The real problem at this point is that this reasoning seems to imply that you should have the right to buy and keep in your home a standard infantry weapon - nowadays, that's an assault rifle that can empty a 30 round clip in under 3 seconds. But we have laws not only forbidding these, but forbidding anything that even looks like them...
By the way, in Switzerland every able-bodied man is a member of the military reserve, and the government GIVES him a military weapon to take home. And the Swiss don't use them to massacre their neighbors. Is it because the Swiss are that much better behaved than Americans, or because they know the neighbors are equally well armed???
And they certainly won't send 40 stormtroopers to bust Ken Lay...
Of course, some of these things depends on where you are. Maybe you don't get tornados and hurricanes in Denmark, and on the second floor you are too high for people accidentally parking their car in the server room, and probably too low for middle-eastern nutcases parking airplanes... But water damage? If you've got a sprinkler (automatic fire extinguisher) system, it's a real possibility (and in many places sprinklers are mandatory in office buildings). If your upstairs neighbors have a bathroom. If your roof leaks. And how far above sea level are you and how bad are the storms?
Of course, operator error (both accidental deletions and mistakes in making or using backups, or in rebuilding the Raid 5 after a one-drive crash) are definitely the all-time winner.
One other substantial danger: a couple of years ago a nitwit MCSE here installed a boot sector virus on a server.
The better CD-R's are supposed to last 100 years. (I wonder how they measured that?) It isn't eternity, but it's about as long as an average book printed today will last, and it's probably a heck of a lot longer than CD-readers will be available, which in most cases is longer than the file formats will be usable...