I find that "complex page layouts" apply to anything more complicated than a letter. It's difficult to position illustrations in a book. I can't find any support for pamphlet-style text flow (e.g. where one side of the paper has pages 1 and 4, and the other side has 2 and 3, such that when folded it reads like a book.)
Those are two layouts I use all the time, and they don't seem all that complicated to me. I'd expect them from a word processor, and shouldn't need a dedicated page-layout engine. But I use OO anyway because they're supported only marginally better in Word. (I'm astoundingly disappointed that MS keeps adding new forms of singing-dancing-floating-blinking-blog-publishing text without addressing relatively common page-layout issues that have been clearly missing for a very long time.)
Actually, they DO have a department that makes up these names. Seriously. You call down to the department and they give you a code name for a project. Often they're two semi-random words stuck together like that, though occasionally they'll recognize that projects are related by giving them related names.
There's a very good reason for having a separate department to make up the names: it ensures that you're not accidentally giving away information about the project in its name. The name is usually unclassified in and of itself, even if everything else about the project is.
You mean for inbound port 25 requests? Are the spambots really using port 25? I know it's the standard port to use, but since it's fully under their control they could use any port they like for inbound control.
Or do you mean outbound port 25, so that all requests have to go through their mail server? Wouldn't they just be prepared to go through the ISPs mail server?
An ISP is far more likely to think that if a customer of theirs wants to run a spam-bot, then it's really not their concern.
In fact, much has been said on Slashdot recently in favor of "net neutrality", in which all traffic is equal and all the ISPs do is carry bits. Under that principle it would be dishonest of them to shut down the spambots.
(The situation isn't quite parallel. The ISPs usually have explicit anti-spamming clauses in their contracts with the users. They may or may not have "we reserve the right to restrict bandwidth from some sites at our discretion" clauses, though I'm sure they're adding them if they don't.)
You wouldn't have to do all of the job yourself. If you reported a few dozen addresses, and so did everyone who runs an IRC or mail server, between you you'd get most of those 50k+ IP addresses.
Assuming, of course, that the ISPs actually bothered with your report. Which, I think, is the real problem. You wouldn't see 50k addresses if the first twelve that you'd received (and the first twelve that everybody else had received) had been shut down.
I'm very, very disappointed in the ISPs for this. You shouldn't even have to be reporting this. It's not that hard to detect potential spambots on your network. But if they shut down all of their users running spam relays they'd lose a lot of money.
The other thing they didn't expect
on
Back to the Moon
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I read those stories too, years ago, and another common feature of them was that they all expected it wouldn't cost as much as it did. Heinlein, for example, expected one incredibly rich guy to bankrupt himself to do it. Others seemed to think that it would be knocked up in the back yard by some really smart mechanically-inclined boy not at all unlike the average reader of Astounding magazine.
According to another post in this thread, the total cost in 2006 dollars was $125 billion. That's about four times Bill Gates' net worth if he sold every single thing he had (though only about 50% more than his peak net worth). And it's 40 times the net worth of a random member of the Forbes 500.
Presumably, there turned out to be great numbers of unexpected problems, each of which required new equipment to be added. More equipment meant more weight which meant bigger rockets which add new layers of technological problems to handle, which means more manpower and time and therefore more money.
I like to think that we could do it cheaper today, what with readily-available computers both on board and in design, and 40 years advances in metallurgy and engineering technique. Assuming we wanted to do the same thing we did before, that is: put two guys on the moon and bring 'em right back. If you want to preserve the human race or mine the moon for treasure or whatever your reason is for wanting to go back, you'll have to spend more.
Strictly speaking, the article doesn't say that this was derived from the data that the government got from Verizon et al., which is what they were referring to when they said that they looking at the call graph only for terrorist-related stuff. Perhaps they had a judicially-warranted pen register put on their line because they showed reasonable concern about a leak of classified information.
I'm not saying it DID happen that way. But I am saying that there isn't necessarily a contradiction, in which case it's not "just another lie". Perhaps it's a completely different lie.
The electors don't vote in secret. The electors theoretically have free will to vote for whom they want, but in practice they are all sent with instructions from the state legislature to vote for one candidate. In nearly all states, all of the electors vote for the same candidate, and everybody knows who that is ahead of time.
In other words, if you bribe an elector, everybody knows it. I suppose you could try to get away with it once and count on people to accept the results before they change the rules to eliminate the possibility. More likely, the Supreme Court would find a way to invalidate the bribed votes. Either way the bribed elector is going to jail, and in all likelihood so are you. Maybe you could pull off a coup this way, but it won't work twice.
Ya know, this quote always ticks me off. It's full of adjectives: "essential", "little", "temporary".
Is freedom from having a record of your calls kept around by the government (rather than by the phone company, who was doing it anyway) an "essential" liberty?
Is preventing a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 or worse a "little" safety? Is it somehow inevitable that the terrorists will win, so that this comprises only "temporary" safety?
Quite possibly, yes. It's not the nature of the threat from the government I'm ticked about; it's the ubiquity of the quote and the degree to which it's used to put off the real discussion necessary.
I hugely admire Ben Franklin. I despise the way the government is taking every opportunity to chip away at people's rights, especially since they have been using it to spy in purely peaceable protest groups. I'm livid when I hear the press criticized as giving aid and comfort to the enemy every single time a dubious and possibly illegal program is discovered.
But I want something other than pithy 18th century quotes. There really are terrorists, and they really are trying to cause serious harm inside the US. We've given up all sorts of liberties to prevent crime of all sorts: we're generally not allowed to carry guns, the government is allowed with supervision to wiretap us, etc.
Clearly some compromise between our liberties and our safety is necessary. What's the best compromise? I have a few ideas, and many of them started with electing a different man in 2004. But I assure you that the right compromise will not be found by trotting out famous quotations and ignoring their caveats.
Hey, thanks. I use TUCOWS has my host provider (via DomainDirect) and I had no idea why they were down. All their page said was "Intermittent issues with the loading of any and all services through DomainDirect.com. This is affecting all services including domain registration, management and navigation. There is no ETA to a resolution time. We apologize for the inconvenience. "
The way Netflix is set up, you're "renting" three movies at a time, all month, whether you're churning through them or not. That's the thing that made through-the-mail rentals work: if you waited until you were ready to watch a movie, it would take a full day or two to get there. That disc in your hand (or in transit) costs them money, whether you're watching it or not.
I suppose they could introduce a hybrid model, where you pay $10 to have three discs at a time, plus $.80 per disc to cover shipping. That would break even in the vicinity of 10-11 discs per month, and you'd save $9 every month that you watched no discs at all. (They could even give you a discount if you put two discs in one mailer.)
That might even be more effective for them, too, since it means that instead of throttling high-velocity users they just pay for all the extra shipping. It's a bit more complicated on the accounting side, especially since it means you're paying in retrospect rather than in advance, but I'm sure they could make it work.
And you'll get it. Really, I think you will. If your ISP doesn't give you the rate you want, somebody else will step up to the plate and sell it to you. ISPs already compete with each other on bandwidth, and I'm certain that the instant they start throttling one site ads will appear on TV showing a sad middle-age couple watching a picture of a new grandchild come in line by line next to a smiling couple sharing a video-chat with theirs.
You may not like the price at which they want to sell it to you, but the price is a function of how much you're willing to pay. Always. This net non-neutrality bit is a way for them to raise prices; they're just trying to do it with a finer grain than just jacking up your rates.
They think they can charge Google, and then Google will charge you, but since Google is free that's just not gonna happen. They think of that as Google's problem. And when it's Google's problem... well, Google is pretty good at solving problems. Anything from a parallel backbone to an ad campaign to convince users to switch to less pricey ISPs.
The internet routes around damage. Even brain damage on the part of ISPs.
(None of this applies if you find yourself stuck in the middle of nowhere with only one ISP who has a contract with the town. Those guys are kinda hosed.)
When people say "special interests", they usually mean a relatively small set of people with a disproportionate amount of power for one reason or another. Sometimes it's because they have a whole lot of money to be used in campaign donations. Sometimes it's a group that one party or another feels beholden to (the religious right, Latinos, nationalists, labor) for ideological reasons, even where that group isn't necessarily a majority (or even the majority of the majority), where solidarity outweighs the group's overall interest.
Geographically, power in the US Congress is not evenly divided. Bills begin in committees; committee members (and especially chairs) have considerable ability to quash or modify bills. Amendments to bills are difficult to remove. Especially in some committees, a single Congressman can effectively hold an entire house of Congress to the special interests of his or her constituents.
A substantial rewrite of the rules of Congress might help, but they're not happening any time soon (because the present rules always benefit the party in power). So some "special interests" will continue to have more power than their voting numbers suggest, and so the term "special interest" will continue to have a pejorative connotation.
My first thought was that the company might have debts, but no, they're debt-free. The P/E is 6.5, which is unbelievably low. Of course that doesn't take into account the loss of Apple's business, and without a lot more financial analysis I can't begin to guess what their future earnings will look like. It's been declining steadily for a year, even before the latest bad news.
But based on the numbers I've got in hand, it seems like the stock is very underpriced.
I'd be happy to hear alternatives. Executive appointments smack of the risk of abuse of power, but at least the chief executive is called to account for his actions every four years or so. The party in power changes every so often. If you think that elected officials are risky, unelected officials are even worse.
So either you're suggesting a radical reformulation of the way "governments are instituted among men" (and perhaps this government has "become destructive of these ends"), or you're merely pointing out the risks in hopes that people will become more observant in time for the next opportunity to change the power players in November.
Ending up at a link farm isn't any fun, but at least it's not dangerous. But you're told to type URLs from email rather than copy-and-paste, and then you risk being screwed by your own typo. Even going to your own bank is risky if you type without consciously typo-checking the URL.
You're skipping a bit of the text, which skews the reading. Paragraphs a-d apply to part 2:
Members of other militias...provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following conditions:
So you need all of a-d, not just any one, to qualify for PoW status under paragraph 2.
The "one or more categories" text refers to sections 1-6. 1. Regular army 2. Militias that wear uniforms, have hierarchies, etc. and basically behave like a regular army. 3. The regular army of a non-recognized government 4. Civilians working with the army, carrying ID cards 5. Merchant marines 6. Insurgents (disorganized groups) who "respect the laws and customs of war".
I suppose you could try to fit them in under category 1 or 3, which doesn't explicitly include the uniform-and-hierarchy clauses, but I think those are intended to be read as given by the term "regular army". But that this point you're well beyond my nonexistent lawyer qualifications.
Technically, no. To qualify for the Geneva Conventions as a PoW you have to have "a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance"; i.e. a uniform. That's kinda the whole crux of this: if they were wearing uniforms we'd know that they were bad guys and we wouldn't be putting innocent people in jail.
Innocent people do get stuck in uniforms; that's why the Geneva Conventions call for such polite treatment of prisoners. Go to war without uniforms and you're responsible for the death of a lot of civilians on your own side, because your enemy can't tell the lawful combatants from innocent bystanders.
This is lawyering and sophistry. Uniforms or no, it's monstrous for a country that that thinks of itself as civilized to be torturing people years after any possible intelligence value has been sucked out. (And many people would say it's monstrous long before that point.)
So I'm not defending Guantanamo Bay; I think it's a disgusting indicator of how far we've sunk, not to mention a PR nightmare. But I just want to throw in my $.02 about how bitter I am about all of the bad press that the US gets about the accidental deaths of civilians. We'd much rather kill only the terrorists, but that's impossible, and we look like monsters for it.
Sadly, my complaint would be more valid if our policies didn't make us monsters anyway.
Google's indexes probably run to many terabytes. Google indexes roughly a billion pages. If each page has a thousand words, and each word can be reduced to a single 32-bit number in the index, that comes to 4 terabytes. And it's probably much, much higher than that; this is a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
Especially since there's considerable redundancy; they can't search all that data that quickly without throwing multiple computers at it. Even if you could have a local Google copy, it would run very slowly.
To run the calculation another way: when Google Desktop indexes your hard drive, it takes up around 10% of that drive. The web contains many petabytes, and even though much of that is pictures, there are still petabytes of text to index.
In fact, it's Google's ability to store and quickly access all that information that's more interesting than the Pagerank algorithm (for which there are other, equally good candidates). Google's ability to manage all that data is the real reason Google is able to say to the world, "Come, everybody gets free 2 gigabyte accounts! We've got more disks than you can shake a stick at!" And why they can store satellite photos to cover the globe and serve them up, and store vast quantities of free video, etc. And make caches of all of those web pages (at least the text part).
I was kind of curious about your link titled "Firefox is the most unstable program in common use." Perhaps it was some sort of study; I was interested in its methodology.
But no, it's a link to another posting by you. You cite all sorts of interesting bugs in Firefox, which are bad and wrong, but don't add up to justifying your statement that it's the "most unstable". Clearly many users find it "stable enough", especially at the price ($0), and more usable than the leading competitor (i.e. IE).
By the time I got to posting this you'd already been modded "offtopic", which isn't entirely right: the article is about FF extensions, and you're validly pointing out that extensions make FF even more unstable. You devote a lot of space to a memory bug which does need to be fixed, but debugging details aren't relevant in this forum. Nor is your repeated assertion that FF users are some sort of cult who are intent on covering up the bugs by modding you down.
So you're gonna get modded down, and you're probably going to take that as more proof of your persecution. I wanted to take the time to suggest that if you struck a more reasonable tone in your arguments, focusing more on the bugs and their effects than the ad hominem attacks on FF developers and users, then you might find a more tolerant audience.
True, though the article states that other ID proponents have cited it as an example.
Behe's statement provokes an interestingly falsifiable challenge. Using the techniques developed for this study, it may be possible to find a system of at least three pieces performing some purpose, as he suggests. He's still got wiggle room in there should somebody discover that (especially in the word "purpose"), but he'll find himself increasingly marginalized if somebody manages to meet his challenge. (Not that he's not marginalized already by the vast majority of the scientific community, but perhaps that would be sufficient to keep him from being quoted in the New York Times.)
Proving things from a molecular level to the organelle level that Behe talks most about will be extremely difficult, because of the orders of magnitude you mention. Here, he's lowered the bar to a mere three molecules. I'll be interested to see how he reacts if somebody manages to place such a demonstration in front of him.
I get a fair number of junk faxes as it is. There's no business relationship; it's an unlisted fax number. The FCC can open the "floodgates" as far as they want with regulations if they're not going to prosecute anybody.
By contrast, the Do Not Call list appears to be more or less working. The few political and charity calls that still get through don't bother me much.
I don't know why telemarketers are respecting the DNC, but the junk faxers are fearless. Maybe junk faxes are less expensive to send, so they're more akin to spam than telemarketing?
I don't suppose it's any more useless than the rest of the studies done in the sociology department. (And that may be enough to stop right there.)
I consider it kind of an interesting question: is the US Intelligent Design movement having any effect on Canadians? I imagine that Canadians, at least, would like to know if they have to worry about encroaching creationism. And if there is, to begin to have a direction in which to fight it.
The professor considers the board's refusal evidence of what he was trying to demonstrate: that anti-evolutionism isn't restricted to the US.
I haven't looked at the study design; many sociology studies are badly designed and statistically biased. So maybe the study is a bad one. The title "Detrimental effects of popularizing anti-evolution's intelligent design..." certainly suggests that he's starting with a biased point of view. And you may not be able to do a good one for a mere $40,000. But I consider the question that it proposes to answer interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
I find that "complex page layouts" apply to anything more complicated than a letter. It's difficult to position illustrations in a book. I can't find any support for pamphlet-style text flow (e.g. where one side of the paper has pages 1 and 4, and the other side has 2 and 3, such that when folded it reads like a book.)
Those are two layouts I use all the time, and they don't seem all that complicated to me. I'd expect them from a word processor, and shouldn't need a dedicated page-layout engine. But I use OO anyway because they're supported only marginally better in Word. (I'm astoundingly disappointed that MS keeps adding new forms of singing-dancing-floating-blinking-blog-publishing text without addressing relatively common page-layout issues that have been clearly missing for a very long time.)
Actually, they DO have a department that makes up these names. Seriously. You call down to the department and they give you a code name for a project. Often they're two semi-random words stuck together like that, though occasionally they'll recognize that projects are related by giving them related names.
There's a very good reason for having a separate department to make up the names: it ensures that you're not accidentally giving away information about the project in its name. The name is usually unclassified in and of itself, even if everything else about the project is.
(Sorry for getting serious all over your joke.)
You mean for inbound port 25 requests? Are the spambots really using port 25? I know it's the standard port to use, but since it's fully under their control they could use any port they like for inbound control.
Or do you mean outbound port 25, so that all requests have to go through their mail server? Wouldn't they just be prepared to go through the ISPs mail server?
An ISP is far more likely to think that if a customer of theirs wants to run a spam-bot, then it's really not their concern.
In fact, much has been said on Slashdot recently in favor of "net neutrality", in which all traffic is equal and all the ISPs do is carry bits. Under that principle it would be dishonest of them to shut down the spambots.
(The situation isn't quite parallel. The ISPs usually have explicit anti-spamming clauses in their contracts with the users. They may or may not have "we reserve the right to restrict bandwidth from some sites at our discretion" clauses, though I'm sure they're adding them if they don't.)
You wouldn't have to do all of the job yourself. If you reported a few dozen addresses, and so did everyone who runs an IRC or mail server, between you you'd get most of those 50k+ IP addresses.
Assuming, of course, that the ISPs actually bothered with your report. Which, I think, is the real problem. You wouldn't see 50k addresses if the first twelve that you'd received (and the first twelve that everybody else had received) had been shut down.
I'm very, very disappointed in the ISPs for this. You shouldn't even have to be reporting this. It's not that hard to detect potential spambots on your network. But if they shut down all of their users running spam relays they'd lose a lot of money.
I read those stories too, years ago, and another common feature of them was that they all expected it wouldn't cost as much as it did. Heinlein, for example, expected one incredibly rich guy to bankrupt himself to do it. Others seemed to think that it would be knocked up in the back yard by some really smart mechanically-inclined boy not at all unlike the average reader of Astounding magazine.
According to another post in this thread, the total cost in 2006 dollars was $125 billion. That's about four times Bill Gates' net worth if he sold every single thing he had (though only about 50% more than his peak net worth). And it's 40 times the net worth of a random member of the Forbes 500.
Presumably, there turned out to be great numbers of unexpected problems, each of which required new equipment to be added. More equipment meant more weight which meant bigger rockets which add new layers of technological problems to handle, which means more manpower and time and therefore more money.
I like to think that we could do it cheaper today, what with readily-available computers both on board and in design, and 40 years advances in metallurgy and engineering technique. Assuming we wanted to do the same thing we did before, that is: put two guys on the moon and bring 'em right back. If you want to preserve the human race or mine the moon for treasure or whatever your reason is for wanting to go back, you'll have to spend more.
Strictly speaking, the article doesn't say that this was derived from the data that the government got from Verizon et al., which is what they were referring to when they said that they looking at the call graph only for terrorist-related stuff. Perhaps they had a judicially-warranted pen register put on their line because they showed reasonable concern about a leak of classified information.
I'm not saying it DID happen that way. But I am saying that there isn't necessarily a contradiction, in which case it's not "just another lie". Perhaps it's a completely different lie.
The electors don't vote in secret. The electors theoretically have free will to vote for whom they want, but in practice they are all sent with instructions from the state legislature to vote for one candidate. In nearly all states, all of the electors vote for the same candidate, and everybody knows who that is ahead of time.
In other words, if you bribe an elector, everybody knows it. I suppose you could try to get away with it once and count on people to accept the results before they change the rules to eliminate the possibility. More likely, the Supreme Court would find a way to invalidate the bribed votes. Either way the bribed elector is going to jail, and in all likelihood so are you. Maybe you could pull off a coup this way, but it won't work twice.
Ya know, this quote always ticks me off. It's full of adjectives: "essential", "little", "temporary".
Is freedom from having a record of your calls kept around by the government (rather than by the phone company, who was doing it anyway) an "essential" liberty?
Is preventing a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 or worse a "little" safety? Is it somehow inevitable that the terrorists will win, so that this comprises only "temporary" safety?
Quite possibly, yes. It's not the nature of the threat from the government I'm ticked about; it's the ubiquity of the quote and the degree to which it's used to put off the real discussion necessary.
I hugely admire Ben Franklin. I despise the way the government is taking every opportunity to chip away at people's rights, especially since they have been using it to spy in purely peaceable protest groups. I'm livid when I hear the press criticized as giving aid and comfort to the enemy every single time a dubious and possibly illegal program is discovered.
But I want something other than pithy 18th century quotes. There really are terrorists, and they really are trying to cause serious harm inside the US. We've given up all sorts of liberties to prevent crime of all sorts: we're generally not allowed to carry guns, the government is allowed with supervision to wiretap us, etc.
Clearly some compromise between our liberties and our safety is necessary. What's the best compromise? I have a few ideas, and many of them started with electing a different man in 2004. But I assure you that the right compromise will not be found by trotting out famous quotations and ignoring their caveats.
Hey, thanks. I use TUCOWS has my host provider (via DomainDirect) and I had no idea why they were down. All their page said was "Intermittent issues with the loading of any and all services through DomainDirect.com. This is affecting all services including domain registration, management and navigation. There is no ETA to a resolution time. We apologize for the inconvenience. "
Thanks for letting me know what's up, guys.
The way Netflix is set up, you're "renting" three movies at a time, all month, whether you're churning through them or not. That's the thing that made through-the-mail rentals work: if you waited until you were ready to watch a movie, it would take a full day or two to get there. That disc in your hand (or in transit) costs them money, whether you're watching it or not.
I suppose they could introduce a hybrid model, where you pay $10 to have three discs at a time, plus $.80 per disc to cover shipping. That would break even in the vicinity of 10-11 discs per month, and you'd save $9 every month that you watched no discs at all. (They could even give you a discount if you put two discs in one mailer.)
That might even be more effective for them, too, since it means that instead of throttling high-velocity users they just pay for all the extra shipping. It's a bit more complicated on the accounting side, especially since it means you're paying in retrospect rather than in advance, but I'm sure they could make it work.
And you'll get it. Really, I think you will. If your ISP doesn't give you the rate you want, somebody else will step up to the plate and sell it to you. ISPs already compete with each other on bandwidth, and I'm certain that the instant they start throttling one site ads will appear on TV showing a sad middle-age couple watching a picture of a new grandchild come in line by line next to a smiling couple sharing a video-chat with theirs.
You may not like the price at which they want to sell it to you, but the price is a function of how much you're willing to pay. Always. This net non-neutrality bit is a way for them to raise prices; they're just trying to do it with a finer grain than just jacking up your rates.
They think they can charge Google, and then Google will charge you, but since Google is free that's just not gonna happen. They think of that as Google's problem. And when it's Google's problem... well, Google is pretty good at solving problems. Anything from a parallel backbone to an ad campaign to convince users to switch to less pricey ISPs.
The internet routes around damage. Even brain damage on the part of ISPs.
(None of this applies if you find yourself stuck in the middle of nowhere with only one ISP who has a contract with the town. Those guys are kinda hosed.)
When people say "special interests", they usually mean a relatively small set of people with a disproportionate amount of power for one reason or another. Sometimes it's because they have a whole lot of money to be used in campaign donations. Sometimes it's a group that one party or another feels beholden to (the religious right, Latinos, nationalists, labor) for ideological reasons, even where that group isn't necessarily a majority (or even the majority of the majority), where solidarity outweighs the group's overall interest.
Geographically, power in the US Congress is not evenly divided. Bills begin in committees; committee members (and especially chairs) have considerable ability to quash or modify bills. Amendments to bills are difficult to remove. Especially in some committees, a single Congressman can effectively hold an entire house of Congress to the special interests of his or her constituents.
A substantial rewrite of the rules of Congress might help, but they're not happening any time soon (because the present rules always benefit the party in power). So some "special interests" will continue to have more power than their voting numbers suggest, and so the term "special interest" will continue to have a pejorative connotation.
Probably a good thing, if you ever go on eBay.
My first thought was that the company might have debts, but no, they're debt-free. The P/E is 6.5, which is unbelievably low. Of course that doesn't take into account the loss of Apple's business, and without a lot more financial analysis I can't begin to guess what their future earnings will look like. It's been declining steadily for a year, even before the latest bad news.
But based on the numbers I've got in hand, it seems like the stock is very underpriced.
I'd be happy to hear alternatives. Executive appointments smack of the risk of abuse of power, but at least the chief executive is called to account for his actions every four years or so. The party in power changes every so often. If you think that elected officials are risky, unelected officials are even worse.
So either you're suggesting a radical reformulation of the way "governments are instituted among men" (and perhaps this government has "become destructive of these ends"), or you're merely pointing out the risks in hopes that people will become more observant in time for the next opportunity to change the power players in November.
Ending up at a link farm isn't any fun, but at least it's not dangerous. But you're told to type URLs from email rather than copy-and-paste, and then you risk being screwed by your own typo. Even going to your own bank is risky if you type without consciously typo-checking the URL.
You're skipping a bit of the text, which skews the reading. Paragraphs a-d apply to part 2:
...provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following conditions:
Members of other militias
So you need all of a-d, not just any one, to qualify for PoW status under paragraph 2.
The "one or more categories" text refers to sections 1-6.
1. Regular army
2. Militias that wear uniforms, have hierarchies, etc. and basically behave like a regular army.
3. The regular army of a non-recognized government
4. Civilians working with the army, carrying ID cards
5. Merchant marines
6. Insurgents (disorganized groups) who "respect the laws and customs of war".
I suppose you could try to fit them in under category 1 or 3, which doesn't explicitly include the uniform-and-hierarchy clauses, but I think those are intended to be read as given by the term "regular army". But that this point you're well beyond my nonexistent lawyer qualifications.
Technically, no. To qualify for the Geneva Conventions as a PoW you have to have "a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance"; i.e. a uniform. That's kinda the whole crux of this: if they were wearing uniforms we'd know that they were bad guys and we wouldn't be putting innocent people in jail.
Innocent people do get stuck in uniforms; that's why the Geneva Conventions call for such polite treatment of prisoners. Go to war without uniforms and you're responsible for the death of a lot of civilians on your own side, because your enemy can't tell the lawful combatants from innocent bystanders.
This is lawyering and sophistry. Uniforms or no, it's monstrous for a country that that thinks of itself as civilized to be torturing people years after any possible intelligence value has been sucked out. (And many people would say it's monstrous long before that point.)
So I'm not defending Guantanamo Bay; I think it's a disgusting indicator of how far we've sunk, not to mention a PR nightmare. But I just want to throw in my $.02 about how bitter I am about all of the bad press that the US gets about the accidental deaths of civilians. We'd much rather kill only the terrorists, but that's impossible, and we look like monsters for it.
Sadly, my complaint would be more valid if our policies didn't make us monsters anyway.
Google's indexes probably run to many terabytes. Google indexes roughly a billion pages. If each page has a thousand words, and each word can be reduced to a single 32-bit number in the index, that comes to 4 terabytes. And it's probably much, much higher than that; this is a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
Especially since there's considerable redundancy; they can't search all that data that quickly without throwing multiple computers at it. Even if you could have a local Google copy, it would run very slowly.
To run the calculation another way: when Google Desktop indexes your hard drive, it takes up around 10% of that drive. The web contains many petabytes, and even though much of that is pictures, there are still petabytes of text to index.
In fact, it's Google's ability to store and quickly access all that information that's more interesting than the Pagerank algorithm (for which there are other, equally good candidates). Google's ability to manage all that data is the real reason Google is able to say to the world, "Come, everybody gets free 2 gigabyte accounts! We've got more disks than you can shake a stick at!" And why they can store satellite photos to cover the globe and serve them up, and store vast quantities of free video, etc. And make caches of all of those web pages (at least the text part).
I was kind of curious about your link titled "Firefox is the most unstable program in common use." Perhaps it was some sort of study; I was interested in its methodology.
But no, it's a link to another posting by you. You cite all sorts of interesting bugs in Firefox, which are bad and wrong, but don't add up to justifying your statement that it's the "most unstable". Clearly many users find it "stable enough", especially at the price ($0), and more usable than the leading competitor (i.e. IE).
By the time I got to posting this you'd already been modded "offtopic", which isn't entirely right: the article is about FF extensions, and you're validly pointing out that extensions make FF even more unstable. You devote a lot of space to a memory bug which does need to be fixed, but debugging details aren't relevant in this forum. Nor is your repeated assertion that FF users are some sort of cult who are intent on covering up the bugs by modding you down.
So you're gonna get modded down, and you're probably going to take that as more proof of your persecution. I wanted to take the time to suggest that if you struck a more reasonable tone in your arguments, focusing more on the bugs and their effects than the ad hominem attacks on FF developers and users, then you might find a more tolerant audience.
True, though the article states that other ID proponents have cited it as an example.
Behe's statement provokes an interestingly falsifiable challenge. Using the techniques developed for this study, it may be possible to find a system of at least three pieces performing some purpose, as he suggests. He's still got wiggle room in there should somebody discover that (especially in the word "purpose"), but he'll find himself increasingly marginalized if somebody manages to meet his challenge. (Not that he's not marginalized already by the vast majority of the scientific community, but perhaps that would be sufficient to keep him from being quoted in the New York Times.)
Proving things from a molecular level to the organelle level that Behe talks most about will be extremely difficult, because of the orders of magnitude you mention. Here, he's lowered the bar to a mere three molecules. I'll be interested to see how he reacts if somebody manages to place such a demonstration in front of him.
I get a fair number of junk faxes as it is. There's no business relationship; it's an unlisted fax number. The FCC can open the "floodgates" as far as they want with regulations if they're not going to prosecute anybody.
By contrast, the Do Not Call list appears to be more or less working. The few political and charity calls that still get through don't bother me much.
I don't know why telemarketers are respecting the DNC, but the junk faxers are fearless. Maybe junk faxes are less expensive to send, so they're more akin to spam than telemarketing?
I don't suppose it's any more useless than the rest of the studies done in the sociology department. (And that may be enough to stop right there.)
I consider it kind of an interesting question: is the US Intelligent Design movement having any effect on Canadians? I imagine that Canadians, at least, would like to know if they have to worry about encroaching creationism. And if there is, to begin to have a direction in which to fight it.
The professor considers the board's refusal evidence of what he was trying to demonstrate: that anti-evolutionism isn't restricted to the US.
I haven't looked at the study design; many sociology studies are badly designed and statistically biased. So maybe the study is a bad one. The title "Detrimental effects of popularizing anti-evolution's intelligent design..." certainly suggests that he's starting with a biased point of view. And you may not be able to do a good one for a mere $40,000. But I consider the question that it proposes to answer interesting.
I hadn't noticed that. OK, that moves it from "clever" to "brilliant".