No, this is why Browncoats are hated, no matter what the discussion they still manage to make it about Firefly.
For the love of crap: a man is attacked for helping Iranian dissidents, and you jump in the thread with the wisdom of River Tam? Really?
Look, it's over. The show got canceled. Get over it. Move on. It was never that good to start with, it just achieved mythological status because (a) Joss Whedon was involved and (b) the show wasn't treated well by Fox. In reality, it was a poor concept that didn't really work and would never have gained an audience had the show had a normal run.
Ahem, every sentence in my original submission was 100% technically correct.
1. The next Xbox is, according to all the experts, going to be called the Xbox 360 and based upon IBM's PowerPC.
2. IBM used SLT to manufacture the System/360. (I never said the Xbox 360, I just said the 360.)
3. There's a lot of speculation about the new Xbox being smaller and more portable, etc, than the old one.
This is exactly the opposite of, say, the story about Linus Torvalds where a flamebait quote was made up and attributed to him on the front page.
Now, if you'll excuse me, my submission has resulted in a flood of job offers from various sources: the marketing departments of AT&T and MCI, the sales teams of various car dealerships, and the Mail In Rebate R&D lab at Office Depot Corporation.
The great news is, if Microsoft does use SLT to build the new XBox, it'll be the size of two football fields, making it 37% smaller than the current console...
What's the deal with Opera's "!" as the third character of the HTML, HEAD, and BODY tags anyway? It sounds to me like incompatability for the sake of incompatability.
Netscape patented the original HTML, HEAD, and BODY tags. While the patents were almost certainly bogus, most browsers switched to supporting a syntax with an exclamation point as the third character, and you can interchange them pretty much consistantly.
Microsoft's IE still supports the original keywords of course, but that's because Microsoft pretty much came out at the beginning and said they'd challenge the patent in court if need be, and Netscape backed down (or at least didn't sue.)
Opera et al though had more to fear from a lawsuit and adopted the "!"s instead.
You're right, if it wasn't for the built in extentions to IIS and Apache to translate HEAD to HE!D, etc, on the fly for non-Netscape browsers, we'd all be stuck with Netscape and IE.
Slashdot has been widely unavailable to me ever since they switched to Exodus West or whatever it was. Front page only loads roughly half the time,
comments rarely go through...and it's only on Slashdot.
Blame SPEWS. They've been blacklisting cw.net, through which Exodus gets its connectivity, for the last six months.
I got the term wrong. However, Google did find a bunch of links when I checked.
Also check out AMD Rumors which covered the topic pretty well in 1999. Also Ars Technica carried a good story about it in 2000.
Really great CPU. I gather the fact that Hammer was more capable and that the best performance they could manage out of a 333MHz TwoStone running in Intel mode was equivalent to a 266MHz Pentium II, sank the chip.
Gah. I hate that. I rely on memory before posting and then go off and check the details and realise I've screwed up.
Ok, in order:
The chipset's name was TwoStone. Wags involved in the testing phase refered to it as TombStone. It was supposed to refer to the fact that two "different" CPUs were on the same silicon chip. Not that you'll be able to Google for it under the correct name, I've never seen anyone else refer to this project.
It wasn't 16 banks of 16384 48 bit registers, it was 16384 48 bit registers divided into 16 banks. The first 11 or so were equivalent to the x86 registers, and a flag in the status bit was used to determine which mode the CPU was running in and which bank of registers the processes had access to. As I understand it, Intel mode actually took the form of a ROM emulation of the x86 chip. Remember almost all modern CPU architectures, with the exception of the x86 range, have hundreds of registers.
The TwoStone project was cancelled two years after it started, not two years ago. And, yeah, I've got it all fumbled over the Dresden plant. This was built in 1999, and the question looking over my papers was whether it should be extended in capacity to build TwoStones. As I understand it, in 2002 that's exactly what they did.
This has been an on-off project since the cancelation of AMD's TombStone chip, the 48 bit RISC/CISC hybrid that was finally ditched two years ago when they switched development to Hammer for a full 64 bit architecture.
It's a pity, I got to play with early development wafers of TombStone and I liked the multilayered approach which means you had Intel compatability but on a process by process basis could switch into an enviroment where you had 16384 48 bit registers to play with (and 16 banks of these so the overhead for task switching was non-existant.) Even better was that all of this worked transparently, a standard Intel OS could do things the way it always did without knowing that some processes were running in 48 bit mode.
The original intention was that the Dresden plant be built to build TombStones, but after years of delays and with TombStone itself running behind and the Hammer project appearing more and more marketable, AMD finally pulled the project in 1999. Then there was talk of reviving it in 2000, only for the entire thing to be delayed once again until 2002, when the need for general expansion made the development of a new plant in Europe critical anyway. The old plans were dusted off, and now AMD has the plant it deserves.
Some of the ideas in TombStone have made their way into Hammer, so I guess the technology isn't completely lost, and it's good to see a technology manufacturer expanding.
1/10/2003: Integrated Java VM into kernel and replaced/usr/bin and/bin with keithw's java byte-code versions. Platform independence, here we come!
This is great news, although as I understand it, this doesn't mean Java itself is integrated, just the byte-code JVM part of the thing./bin/sh, for example, uses BSD type calls, but it's compiled Java byte code (using jgcc) rather than i386 code.
And this is great because it's a start on making binary formats less of an issue. Sure, there's always going to be those who want the fastest versions of, say, "rm", but for the rest of us, being able to compile something on one system and then just move it across anywhere will help tremendously.
Does anyone know if the OpenBSD and NetBSD projects are doing anything similar?
Agreed, but it's difficult to get anything cheap with that kind of resolution. One of the more obscure technologies being used, but to the best of my knowledge only Linux LapStations use them at the moment (you can get the specs here), is a vibrating LCD screen which makes an 800x600 panel effectively 1600x1200.
It's cheap (the manufacturer uses dirt cheap 800x600 panels, even the contrast is enhanced by the vibration mode) but not exactly in common use. I've got a LapStation with it, and find the screen bearable and usable, but then I used to use interlace mode on an Amiga whereas most people I knew thought the screen was unusable in that mode.
There are other problems with LapStations that means I can't really recommend them, but they're interesting PCs for the technology if nothing else.
But that's exactly the point. You're either going to want to play sounds through the sound card or listen to the CD ROM. You wouldn't normally do both at once.
I thought it'd be a problem when installing software while listening to music but in practice that's not something you do anyway so...
I got a LinuxLapStation earlier this year, and I'm delighted with it. 1600x1200 accelerated LCD color screen, 128M of RAM, 20G hard disk, ethernet and modem built into motherboard, and an 8 hour battery life preinstalled with Linux (RH6.2, though looking at their website you can now get RH 7.1 together with recent Debian and Mandrake installations.
There are some downsides. The CPU is an embedded AMD 486DX clone, running at 66MHz, to keep the power down. The graphics card is 8 bit, the sound card is some crude chipset which can't be used at the same time as the CD ROM because they share an interrupt (though why would you want to?) and the external floppy unit is the size of a car battery - although it does contain a couple of PCI slots. The mouse alternative is basically two "volume control" type rollers on either side of the laptop, left for up and down, right for left and right. And charging the battery has to be done with an external unit - you can't plug in the charger or have the laptop running off the mains while you wait.
Still, it's excellent. I've dropped it a few times without any negative consequences, and it's pretty cheap - it's probably the only sub-$500 new laptop I've seen.
FWIW it was a Pan-Am flight (103) that was downed after Reagan bombed Libya, with Thatcher's help. The result of that tragedy were several hundred casualties, part of a town in Scotland destroyed, and many thousands eventually thrown out of work when the airline went bankrupt.
An eye for an eye leaves the world blind. There should be a response to this latest tragedy. If the right response is to send in the Seals to grab Bin Laden, or just to build a higher WTC and send the bastards a message that they cannot win, it should be chosen because it's right, not because it's popular.
Britain has been doing this for years, and they've never had any problems with terrorism on this scale.
Congratulations. You've just destroyed your already stupid argument.
Britain does have a major terrorist problem. It is quite possible for the same thing that happened yesterday to happen in the UK, security isn't much tighter and from what I saw X-rays and searches wouldn't have achieved anything.
Furthermore, why would terrorists obey your laws on encryption etc, when they're certainly not going to obey laws about cold-blooded murder?
Britain has done all of the things you proposed, and the only time we've been near peace was when people involved in the violence decided enough was enough and too many innocent people were being hurt, and wanted to talk to a government that was prepared to listen. The Prevention of Terrorism Act and stunts like Internment and the SAS killing of terrorists in Gibraltar have done little but fuel the hate and remove the moral highground from the forces of democracy.
Iraq expects to be bombed anyway - so does not fear retaliation.
The bombing of Iraq has almost certainly seen hundreds, possibly thousands, of civilians killed. This might "justify" mass-murder to "eye-for-eye" type terrorists.
And Iraq, from what I could see, was the only nation in the world to actually support the bombings afterwards. Everyone else, without exception, condemned it, Arafat, Gadaffi, etc. Iraq by contrast praised the bombings and the lavished complements on the killers themselves.
Why isn't the media focussing on this? My guess is two-fold: First, there is evidence, albiet weak, that Bin-Laden is involved. This doesn't seem to me to be unlikely even if Iraq was involved. The second is that this is perhaps the nightmare scenario for the media, US government, and some of those advocating the most extreme measures at the moment: What if you really can't do anything to the barbarians who organised this attrocity? What if you can't teach them a lesson, because if they were capable of being taught it, they'd have "learned" by now? What if the act might even have been inspired by a desire to get back at the West for previous lessons?
...because we all know that the terrorists will cooperate with such invasions of privacy, and will make sure they don't use encryption or code words or any of the other stuff routinely used by criminals who, to be quite honest, are routinely bugged anyway.
This "It's awful, so awful that we must throw logic out of the window when we come up with 'solutions' and anyone who disagrees is a goddamned terrorist themselves" crap has got to stop. Wiretapping laws making it easy to monitor drugs users are not going to stop terrorism. Bombing asprin factories or civilians in a few capital cities of countries friendly towards terrorism isn't going to help either (though a nuke in Belfast right now might solve a few problems.)
If you don't handle this correctly, you'll end up in a nasty, unpleasant, dictatorship - a dictatorship not unlike those espoused by those who thought it worth their while committing today's attrocity. Who will have won then?
Very few. One of the arguments against this crap is that terrorists are amongst those who are going to be the last people to obey a draconian law on encryption.
But you can guarantee they have sympathy by taking an extreme reaction.
I'd like to think that retaliation by the US would be limited to finding the actual people who did it. But, if the past is anything to go by, that's highly unlikely. US retaliation in the past has comprised of things like blowing up toy factories, and bombing Tripoli.
An eye for an eye leaves the world blind. Take it from someone who's British, and has seen the damage of what goes on in Northern Ireland every day, that killing as many of your enemy as possible rarely, if ever, leaves you in a stronger position in the long run.
I really want to see a congressman stand up in the house and demand bans on CDs, DVDs, video tapes, books, and anything else that can be copied, together with the associated players "which convert these tools of piracy into audio and video which can easily be copied by anyone with the right tools!"
...ANYONE who is breathing, consistantly, all over the steering wheel perhaps.
Modern vehicles have fairly complex air circulation systems within their cabs, hence the ease with which driver and passenger can have different climate controls, and stuff.
I'm not saying it's a good or bad thing, the suggestions that the device disable the engine seem more reasonable to some extent, although I can see problems with that approach in emergencies, etc. But I doubt your suggestion of how it might fail is valid, and therefore a real reason to oppose it.
Oh, before I forget. The subplot involving the android is that he wants to have feelings, and much of the show will be about the amusing quest he faces reconsiling his digital logical self, and the emotional maturity of humanity. He has pointy ears too.
It's ok. They have some other plots lined up, such as one episode where the crew's minds are taken over by a mysterious invisible alien force, and another where an android gets trapped on the holodeck (by travelling through time to the days of DS9, etc, obviously) and then cannot tell for sure if the surroundings are real or just holographic.
Spoilt ballot papers in most elections are counted, and are examined by members of both parties. The figures may rarely be reported by the press, but they are published.
The only country I've come across where spoilt ballots are rarely examined by politicians is the USA, largely because of the obsession with mechanising everything involved in elections.
If you want to guarantee your reason for not voting will not be heard, don't turn up. 90% of the time politicians assume that you stayed at home because everything's hunky-dory and you have nothing to complain about.
If you want to guarantee a message is read by the politicians, put it on a spoilt ballot. Representatives of both parties will read it, which is more than can be said than for writing them letters or signing petitions.
Because this isn't a case of government mandating action in isolation, it's a case where government has mandated action because the popular vote demanded it does.
Believe it or not, many people died to give Australians, and the inhabitants of most other democratic countries, the vote. This is something which, outside of the US, most people in my experience feel strongly about. This is why even in those cases where there's a hair's width margin between the political parties, in most democratic countries, turn out at elections is normally 60-80% of eligable voters, even without a legal mandate. It's somewhat ironic that the US, comprised of people who perhaps made the most important and bloody fight to get the right to vote, and not just once against the British but again 100 years later, and again 40 years ago, regularly have turn-outs of less than 30% of people with the legal right to vote, a turnout that even when massaged in the usual way ("...of registered voters") rarely exceeds a dismal 50%.
It seems to be lost on many Slashdot posters that democratic governments often pass laws because they're laws that people want. The laws against murder, theft, rape, kidnapping, torture, assault, fraud, etc, are all examples of such laws. People do feel strongly about the vote, about its importance, about the struggle to get it. And they have the right to demand their government ensure that right, and responsibility, is taken seriously.
And the DJ is sending out the content without regard to where it goes. So, yes, route from the server is relevent.
As far as good faith efforts go: Go back and read what I wrote:
This is a case of an American publication choosing a distributor that happens to distribute internationally - knowing that the distributor distributes internationally, and without making any efforts, effective or even good faith, to have the distribution of the newspaper limited.
The good faith reference has nothing to do with complying with every law, it has to do with restricting the distribution. An example of a good faith effort to restrict the distribution was quoted: namely the use of IP filtering.
Nor does the fact that the user initiated a transaction make much difference. When I go to a shop and buy a magazine, I am also initiating a transaction. Does that mean that magazines sold in shops are not distributed using known distribution networks? Does that mean publishers are not liable because, while they deliberately handed magazines to a distributor knowing that these transactions would take place, they didn't actually initiate the buying of each magazine?
Ultimately the DJ made the decision to publish on the Internet. They made it knowing that the Internet would distribute their content internationally by default, and they made no effort to reduce the further distribution of their content.
It sucks. It's not nice. It shows that libel laws are increasingly out-of-touch with reality. Moreso, it shows national laws governing content are a threat to the Internet. But that doesn't make the procedure any less fair. DJ trades on the Internet in Australia, Britain, France, Canada, indeed, absolutely everywhere except Afghanistan. They're thus liable under the laws of those countries. And without a good faith effort to limit distribution to countries whose laws the DJ may find awkward, they absolutely should be answerable to those laws.
Slashdot Mirror
No, this is why Browncoats are hated, no matter what the discussion they still manage to make it about Firefly.
For the love of crap: a man is attacked for helping Iranian dissidents, and you jump in the thread with the wisdom of River Tam? Really?
Look, it's over. The show got canceled. Get over it. Move on. It was never that good to start with, it just achieved mythological status because (a) Joss Whedon was involved and (b) the show wasn't treated well by Fox. In reality, it was a poor concept that didn't really work and would never have gained an audience had the show had a normal run.
1. The next Xbox is, according to all the experts, going to be called the Xbox 360 and based upon IBM's PowerPC.
2. IBM used SLT to manufacture the System/360. (I never said the Xbox 360, I just said the 360.)
3. There's a lot of speculation about the new Xbox being smaller and more portable, etc, than the old one.
This is exactly the opposite of, say, the story about Linus Torvalds where a flamebait quote was made up and attributed to him on the front page.
Now, if you'll excuse me, my submission has resulted in a flood of job offers from various sources: the marketing departments of AT&T and MCI, the sales teams of various car dealerships, and the Mail In Rebate R&D lab at Office Depot Corporation.
The great news is, if Microsoft does use SLT to build the new XBox, it'll be the size of two football fields, making it 37% smaller than the current console...
Microsoft's IE still supports the original keywords of course, but that's because Microsoft pretty much came out at the beginning and said they'd challenge the patent in court if need be, and Netscape backed down (or at least didn't sue.) Opera et al though had more to fear from a lawsuit and adopted the "!"s instead.
You're right, if it wasn't for the built in extentions to IIS and Apache to translate HEAD to HE!D, etc, on the fly for non-Netscape browsers, we'd all be stuck with Netscape and IE.
Also check out AMD Rumors which covered the topic pretty well in 1999. Also Ars Technica carried a good story about it in 2000.
Really great CPU. I gather the fact that Hammer was more capable and that the best performance they could manage out of a 333MHz TwoStone running in Intel mode was equivalent to a 266MHz Pentium II, sank the chip.
Ok, in order:
- The chipset's name was TwoStone. Wags involved in the testing phase refered to it as TombStone. It was supposed to refer to the fact that two "different" CPUs were on the same silicon chip. Not that you'll be able to Google for it under the correct name, I've never seen anyone else refer to this project.
-
It wasn't 16 banks of 16384 48 bit registers, it was 16384 48 bit registers divided into 16 banks. The first 11 or so were equivalent to the x86 registers, and a flag in the status bit was used to determine which mode the CPU was running in and which bank of registers the processes had access to. As I understand it, Intel mode actually took the form of a ROM emulation of the x86 chip. Remember almost all modern CPU architectures, with the exception of the x86 range, have hundreds of registers.
-
The TwoStone project was cancelled two years after it started, not two years ago. And, yeah, I've got it all fumbled over the Dresden plant. This was built in 1999, and the question looking over my papers was whether it should be extended in capacity to build TwoStones. As I understand it, in 2002 that's exactly what they did.
Yeah, I screwed up... my bad. Sorry about that.It's a pity, I got to play with early development wafers of TombStone and I liked the multilayered approach which means you had Intel compatability but on a process by process basis could switch into an enviroment where you had 16384 48 bit registers to play with (and 16 banks of these so the overhead for task switching was non-existant.) Even better was that all of this worked transparently, a standard Intel OS could do things the way it always did without knowing that some processes were running in 48 bit mode.
The original intention was that the Dresden plant be built to build TombStones, but after years of delays and with TombStone itself running behind and the Hammer project appearing more and more marketable, AMD finally pulled the project in 1999. Then there was talk of reviving it in 2000, only for the entire thing to be delayed once again until 2002, when the need for general expansion made the development of a new plant in Europe critical anyway. The old plans were dusted off, and now AMD has the plant it deserves.
Some of the ideas in TombStone have made their way into Hammer, so I guess the technology isn't completely lost, and it's good to see a technology manufacturer expanding.
And this is great because it's a start on making binary formats less of an issue. Sure, there's always going to be those who want the fastest versions of, say, "rm", but for the rest of us, being able to compile something on one system and then just move it across anywhere will help tremendously.
Does anyone know if the OpenBSD and NetBSD projects are doing anything similar?
Agreed, but it's difficult to get anything cheap with that kind of resolution. One of the more obscure technologies being used, but to the best of my knowledge only Linux LapStations use them at the moment (you can get the specs here), is a vibrating LCD screen which makes an 800x600 panel effectively 1600x1200.
It's cheap (the manufacturer uses dirt cheap 800x600 panels, even the contrast is enhanced by the vibration mode) but not exactly in common use. I've got a LapStation with it, and find the screen bearable and usable, but then I used to use interlace mode on an Amiga whereas most people I knew thought the screen was unusable in that mode.
There are other problems with LapStations that means I can't really recommend them, but they're interesting PCs for the technology if nothing else.
But that's exactly the point. You're either going to want to play sounds through the sound card or listen to the CD ROM. You wouldn't normally do both at once.
I thought it'd be a problem when installing software while listening to music but in practice that's not something you do anyway so...
I got a LinuxLapStation earlier this year, and I'm delighted with it. 1600x1200 accelerated LCD color screen, 128M of RAM, 20G hard disk, ethernet and modem built into motherboard, and an 8 hour battery life preinstalled with Linux (RH6.2, though looking at their website you can now get RH 7.1 together with recent Debian and Mandrake installations.
There are some downsides. The CPU is an embedded AMD 486DX clone, running at 66MHz, to keep the power down. The graphics card is 8 bit, the sound card is some crude chipset which can't be used at the same time as the CD ROM because they share an interrupt (though why would you want to?) and the external floppy unit is the size of a car battery - although it does contain a couple of PCI slots. The mouse alternative is basically two "volume control" type rollers on either side of the laptop, left for up and down, right for left and right. And charging the battery has to be done with an external unit - you can't plug in the charger or have the laptop running off the mains while you wait.
Still, it's excellent. I've dropped it a few times without any negative consequences, and it's pretty cheap - it's probably the only sub-$500 new laptop I've seen.
FWIW it was a Pan-Am flight (103) that was downed after Reagan bombed Libya, with Thatcher's help. The result of that tragedy were several hundred casualties, part of a town in Scotland destroyed, and many thousands eventually thrown out of work when the airline went bankrupt.
An eye for an eye leaves the world blind. There should be a response to this latest tragedy. If the right response is to send in the Seals to grab Bin Laden, or just to build a higher WTC and send the bastards a message that they cannot win, it should be chosen because it's right, not because it's popular.
Britain does have a major terrorist problem. It is quite possible for the same thing that happened yesterday to happen in the UK, security isn't much tighter and from what I saw X-rays and searches wouldn't have achieved anything.
Furthermore, why would terrorists obey your laws on encryption etc, when they're certainly not going to obey laws about cold-blooded murder?
Britain has done all of the things you proposed, and the only time we've been near peace was when people involved in the violence decided enough was enough and too many innocent people were being hurt, and wanted to talk to a government that was prepared to listen. The Prevention of Terrorism Act and stunts like Internment and the SAS killing of terrorists in Gibraltar have done little but fuel the hate and remove the moral highground from the forces of democracy.
Why isn't the media focussing on this? My guess is two-fold: First, there is evidence, albiet weak, that Bin-Laden is involved. This doesn't seem to me to be unlikely even if Iraq was involved. The second is that this is perhaps the nightmare scenario for the media, US government, and some of those advocating the most extreme measures at the moment: What if you really can't do anything to the barbarians who organised this attrocity? What if you can't teach them a lesson, because if they were capable of being taught it, they'd have "learned" by now? What if the act might even have been inspired by a desire to get back at the West for previous lessons?
...because we all know that the terrorists will cooperate with such invasions of privacy, and will make sure they don't use encryption or code words or any of the other stuff routinely used by criminals who, to be quite honest, are routinely bugged anyway.
This "It's awful, so awful that we must throw logic out of the window when we come up with 'solutions' and anyone who disagrees is a goddamned terrorist themselves" crap has got to stop. Wiretapping laws making it easy to monitor drugs users are not going to stop terrorism. Bombing asprin factories or civilians in a few capital cities of countries friendly towards terrorism isn't going to help either (though a nuke in Belfast right now might solve a few problems.)
If you don't handle this correctly, you'll end up in a nasty, unpleasant, dictatorship - a dictatorship not unlike those espoused by those who thought it worth their while committing today's attrocity. Who will have won then?
Very few. One of the arguments against this crap is that terrorists are amongst those who are going to be the last people to obey a draconian law on encryption.
No, you certainly can't.
But you can guarantee they have sympathy by taking an extreme reaction.
I'd like to think that retaliation by the US would be limited to finding the actual people who did it. But, if the past is anything to go by, that's highly unlikely. US retaliation in the past has comprised of things like blowing up toy factories, and bombing Tripoli.
An eye for an eye leaves the world blind. Take it from someone who's British, and has seen the damage of what goes on in Northern Ireland every day, that killing as many of your enemy as possible rarely, if ever, leaves you in a stronger position in the long run.
Quite. I vote we start with CDs and DVDs.
I really want to see a congressman stand up in the house and demand bans on CDs, DVDs, video tapes, books, and anything else that can be copied, together with the associated players "which convert these tools of piracy into audio and video which can easily be copied by anyone with the right tools!"
...ANYONE who is breathing, consistantly, all over the steering wheel perhaps.
Modern vehicles have fairly complex air circulation systems within their cabs, hence the ease with which driver and passenger can have different climate controls, and stuff.
I'm not saying it's a good or bad thing, the suggestions that the device disable the engine seem more reasonable to some extent, although I can see problems with that approach in emergencies, etc. But I doubt your suggestion of how it might fail is valid, and therefore a real reason to oppose it.
Oh, before I forget. The subplot involving the android is that he wants to have feelings, and much of the show will be about the amusing quest he faces reconsiling his digital logical self, and the emotional maturity of humanity. He has pointy ears too.
It's ok. They have some other plots lined up, such as one episode where the crew's minds are taken over by a mysterious invisible alien force, and another where an android gets trapped on the holodeck (by travelling through time to the days of DS9, etc, obviously) and then cannot tell for sure if the surroundings are real or just holographic.
Exciting stuff. I can't wait to see it...
No, he isn't guilty, any more than a visitor to a "coffee shop" in Amsterdam is guilty of committing a drugs offense under US law.
What Sklyarov does in Russia is between him and the Russian government.
Spoilt ballot papers in most elections are counted, and are examined by members of both parties. The figures may rarely be reported by the press, but they are published.
The only country I've come across where spoilt ballots are rarely examined by politicians is the USA, largely because of the obsession with mechanising everything involved in elections.
If you want to guarantee your reason for not voting will not be heard, don't turn up. 90% of the time politicians assume that you stayed at home because everything's hunky-dory and you have nothing to complain about.
If you want to guarantee a message is read by the politicians, put it on a spoilt ballot. Representatives of both parties will read it, which is more than can be said than for writing them letters or signing petitions.
Because this isn't a case of government mandating action in isolation, it's a case where government has mandated action because the popular vote demanded it does.
Believe it or not, many people died to give Australians, and the inhabitants of most other democratic countries, the vote. This is something which, outside of the US, most people in my experience feel strongly about. This is why even in those cases where there's a hair's width margin between the political parties, in most democratic countries, turn out at elections is normally 60-80% of eligable voters, even without a legal mandate. It's somewhat ironic that the US, comprised of people who perhaps made the most important and bloody fight to get the right to vote, and not just once against the British but again 100 years later, and again 40 years ago, regularly have turn-outs of less than 30% of people with the legal right to vote, a turnout that even when massaged in the usual way ("...of registered voters") rarely exceeds a dismal 50%.
It seems to be lost on many Slashdot posters that democratic governments often pass laws because they're laws that people want. The laws against murder, theft, rape, kidnapping, torture, assault, fraud, etc, are all examples of such laws. People do feel strongly about the vote, about its importance, about the struggle to get it. And they have the right to demand their government ensure that right, and responsibility, is taken seriously.
As far as good faith efforts go: Go back and read what I wrote:
The good faith reference has nothing to do with complying with every law, it has to do with restricting the distribution. An example of a good faith effort to restrict the distribution was quoted: namely the use of IP filtering.
Nor does the fact that the user initiated a transaction make much difference. When I go to a shop and buy a magazine, I am also initiating a transaction. Does that mean that magazines sold in shops are not distributed using known distribution networks? Does that mean publishers are not liable because, while they deliberately handed magazines to a distributor knowing that these transactions would take place, they didn't actually initiate the buying of each magazine?
Ultimately the DJ made the decision to publish on the Internet. They made it knowing that the Internet would distribute their content internationally by default, and they made no effort to reduce the further distribution of their content.
It sucks. It's not nice. It shows that libel laws are increasingly out-of-touch with reality. Moreso, it shows national laws governing content are a threat to the Internet. But that doesn't make the procedure any less fair. DJ trades on the Internet in Australia, Britain, France, Canada, indeed, absolutely everywhere except Afghanistan. They're thus liable under the laws of those countries. And without a good faith effort to limit distribution to countries whose laws the DJ may find awkward, they absolutely should be answerable to those laws.