I personally think this is the right decision. While obviously there is a line where replacement turns into enhancement, unless it's clearly crossed I'm in favor of letting everybody who has the ability compete. The IAAF did not show that there was enhancement (and even so, his best 400m time of 46.56s is over a second off the Olympic qualifying time of 45.55s).
My favorite part, where the panel finds that the IAAF biased the testing against him, and then told the press they were DQ'ing him before voting on it is here:
60. At this stage, in the Panel's view, the process began to go "off the rails". The correspondence between the IAAF nad Prof. Bruggemann shos that his instructions were to carry out the testing only when Mr Pistorius was running in a straight line after the acceleration phase. By the time that the IAAF commissioned the Cologne tests it was known that this was the part of the race in which Mr Pistorius usually ran at his fastest.
61. [...] IAAF's officials must have known that, by excluding the start and the acceleration phase, the results would create a distorted view of Mr Pistorius' advantages and/or disadvantages. [...]
62. The stori is not enhances by the fact that Dr. Robert Gailey, the scientist nominated by Mr Pistorius [...] was effectively "frozen out" to such an extent that he declined to attend the Cologne tests. He was informed that he would be allowed to attend only as an observer, with no input on the testing protocol or on the analysis.
68. The impression of prejudgement is also enhanced by the fact that Dr. Locatelli and other IAAF officials told the press before the vote was taken that Mr Pistorius would be banned from IAAF sanctioned events.
70. In the Panel's view, the manned in which the IAAF hendled the situation of MR Pistorius in the period from July 2007 to January 2008 fell short of the high standards that the international sporting community is entitield to expect from a federation such as the IAAF.
I've followed the/. headlines over this lack of a deal, and have been generally surprised by the neoliberals ordaining that the yahoo board had a duty to sell the company for short-term advantage. Despite the fact that under any decent discount rate, the whole proposal represented little more than a bet.
It's hard to argue that nuking Japan was substantially different from the previous fire bombing campaigns. That aside, I think one of the best pieces of evidence that the US substantially values human life is that in the wars the US has fought since WWII massive strategic air campaigns weren't used.
If you compare US tactics during WWII to those employed more recently, its hard to escape the conclusion that the US currently substantially values the lives of foreigners. If the US didn't, Iraq would be strewn with land-mines, Baghdad and other cities, would be burned out shells and the response to mortar attacks on US bases would be to counter-battery the area with massive heavy artillery and bombing.
It actually turns out this is relates to fairly important issues. For example a person's ability to detect guns or explosives is inversely correlated with the frequency of the same (data: go look at Wolfe & Horowitz). People perform badly in low frequency testing.
If there is some relaible way to 'perk them up' for their stint, or wake them up when they're dosing, it'll be a good and cheap way to improve real security.
Totally accurate description, though..
on
eBay Sues Craigslist
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"Untapped gold mine" means that there is an extractable, non-renewable resource that can be tapped for immediate revenue. I think it's a very apt description for how a company like eBay would look at craigslist:
A resource that they could extract advertising revenue for ~10-20 quarters, while destroying its value, and then move on to the next mine.
Craigslist current business model, however, can be better described as something like a tree farm or sustainable exploitation of a fishery, where the revenue production is comparatively modest in the short term, but consistent in the long term.
You make a really good point that I forgot about... that RIAA lawyers do seem to want to submit things like blog comments, etc that have no legal bearing to the judge in many cases.
At the same time though, since I was asking for an opinion in the colloquial meaning, I don't think my original request is too burdensome, since Mr. Beckerman, like anybody else can free himself from the burden by temporarily becoming an AC.
Should you *know*? No. But as our resident high profile copyright lawyer, who's enlisting our help against the RIAA, I would certainly appreciate it if you offered an educated opinion...
And besides, what's Ask Slashdot going to get besides a whole bunch of IANAL preceded rants in this type of submission?
One major problem is just the attitude that you sight, which is that drugs are assumed to provide performance enhancement, but yet no studies have been done on how much if any affect this is in different sports, which lead to overly broad and abusive enforcement.
Until we have done the studies, you can't say that any drug is performance enhancing in any given endeavor because there is no evidence to support the statement. Lots of people, even if smart and even if scientists, doing something does not provide scientific evidence until it has been properly controlled etc.
People base a hell of a lot on first impressions.. Although in theory this isn't the best approach, unless we have a new enlightenment one would be wise to "overdress", always.
High-end chips have low yields..
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
·
· Score: 1
The issue with apple is that they only order a few lines of processors, all of which are at the top-end of the scale, which has the lowest yields in the manufacturing process. Notice how Intel gave Apple exclusive access to their quad-core 3ghz CPUs for the MacPro a few months before anybody else got them http://techreport.com/discussions.x/12176. If Apple is capable of saturating Intel's high-end production line for a single chip on a desktop machine, AMD wouldn't have a change to keep up with their high-end laptop demand.
Until we figure out how a water buffalo can be an individual at one spatial scale, and part of a herd as a texture at another scale... just in vision... we won't have smart computers.
If you're going to count per capita government debt, then you better also count per capita government capital. If you add up the land (~33% of total US acreage), natural resources, buildings, dams, etc, etc that the government controls (which, as far as I can tell from google, has never been done), we're all sitting prettily in the black, and will be doing so for a very long time.
While many of the things addressed in the article, especially about trying to shift the social environments of many colleges are troubling, in the end I don't think universities are going to be very easily overcome as centers of free speech and dissent. The really simplified reason behind this in my opinion is this: smart engaged people who's world view comes from 'the left' tend to make great teachers, and great teachers have profound impacts on their students opinion and thought processes. Smart engaged people who's world view comes from the right tend to make great leaders. Since the end of WWII, where the Montgomery GI bill opened education to the masses, we've seen two social trends:
First in the 1960s, the teachers had the first shot at a huge proportion of the population who hadn't been able to go to college, or spend much of their time formulating ideological positions. Then in the 1980s, the right produced a number of charismatic leaders, exemplified by Reagan and Gingrich, who focused their ideological positions through the media in a very compelling manner. The problem with the cult of leadership is that is has problems clearly conveying its ideas since it is based on personality and media control rather than pedagogy and individual interaction, the message drifts as the charismatic pull it in different directions for their own benefit. This the the stage we're at now.
As the media message either fractures or continues to diverge from the reality most people experience, they'll go back to the sources of information that are personally tangible: the teachers. This type of broad social cycle won't easily be broken by increasing surveillance, etc, because the lag times to acceptance are on the same scale as the social oscillations and surveillance doesn't work very well in communities that it isn't implicitly accepted in.
You are totally correct on the literature.. I was posting quickly;) Rao & Ballard in particular I think influence Hawkins works (not to mention that Rao was one of the people who convinced me to go into neuroscience.. but I digress). The problem with Lee & Mumford is that it's now been known for quite a while that V1 receptive fields are not static, but dynamic in really cool ways.. Check out Ohzawa's videos for example.
The idea of algorithms like this, which are supervised learning systems, is that you train them to recognize 'hidden statistics.' These tend to be things that people have little trouble recognizing (eg. faces), but that we haven't been able to describe analytically for computers. So, you're certainly right that the main job of the programmer is to choose an effective algorithm, and then train it on the available data. It turns out, though, that there are an essentially unlimited number of unique and distinct supervised learning systems available the test.
So the most important task in setting up an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) like this grant is attempting, is to pick the class of learning systems that perform best on the data to explore. This generally can't be done to any optimum criteria until the system designer gains familiarity with the systems and dataset... so it winds up being a subjective judgment of the designer rather than a rigorous examination of the possibilities... or else this process winds up being recursive;)
In this case, it happens that clustering algorithms like ART or HTM have an excellent track record classifying satellite or radar based imaging.
The good news is that this is all math! There's no need to believe anything one way or another! Sorta exciting huh? You can go and examine all the ART algorithms (I linked wikipedia because it has the PDFs linked.. did you notice? But here's Grossberg's homepage, just in case), and you can go read about HTM. According to Hawkins, HTM has some magical, er I mean, proprietary, component that separates it from ART. I've seen Hawkins speak... in fact, I saw him speak at BU with Steve Grossberg in the audience. He amused the audience by showing a demo that was completely indistinguishable from an ART1 implementation that takes about half an hour to program, and most of the people present had done themselves.
He then failed to answer any substantive questions (including Steve asking him how his model differed from ART), referring us all to online videos of his lectures. I personally asked about how he could reconcile this article with his predictions.. which assume a cortical hierarchy based on 'distance' (in synapses) from primary sensory cortices, rather than examining the relative lamination of various cortices. I notice since then the wikipedia article "On Intelligence" has had its 'experimental prediction' claims toned down quite a bit.
As it happens in terms of books though, Grossberg has written several and has a ton of peer reviewed articles on this very subject. Hawkins to my knowledge doesn't have a single peer-reviewed article on HTM or anything related.
Although it is certainly a major engineering challenge to get this type of classification to work over multiple modalities of data in any coherent way, as far as I can tell this project doesn't represent any breakthrough in approach or capability.
So many cyclists have died because of carbon fiber fork failures, and even very experienced ones.
I'm also a cyclist. I know lots of other cyclists, nearly everybody I know uses carbon fiber frames and forks, as I do myself. I've never heard of one failing in such a way that it killed the user. I mean, you do wear a helmet right?
I just tried googling carbon forks death, forks of death etc, and found absolutely nothing about people dying from catastrophic carbon fork failures.
And that doesn't even account for the fact that when an aluminum fork fails, it will be similarly catastrophic in terms of controlling the bike.
I think the thing that shocks me most is that many universities law faculties aren't going off on the current cases. I mean, these are supposed to be the 'liberal' part of the law. And ONLY Harvard is PUBLICLY strong enough to defend these charges? Where is that oft touted liberal element in the US university system?
But getting back to the core of the matter, I have to wonder why colleges are bending over about a matter so core to their own liability:
Colleges 'pirate' thousands of documents every year in a way that is NOT allowed by current US copyright law.. and they want to believe it's students.. not professors downloading papers that their library hasn't subscribed to? Taking a hard line on music copyright will only kill the colleges that take it up! They won't only drive away students... but also professors who suddenly can't do their research because of miserable libraries (BU COUGH).
The thing that I didn't like about the Kreacher change of heart, is that he's shortly ignoring the mudblood/blood traitor issues that seemed to be such a key to not only his, but to Regulus' opinions. I could believe him having a dramatic change of allegiance... but from the other books, I could never see him doing so without also having some mumbled reservations under his breath.
On the Dumbledore front.. I agree, she didn't exactly leave him off the hook. The issue that I was trying to get at was that he got to come back and explain everything to Harry, to vindicate himself in his new, tolerant and forgiven state. I think it would have made him a more compelling character in the end, if one was left with certain knowledge on the sister.. or if Harry had never gotten a chance to absolve him, and his acts with respect to his family were framed only by Aberforth/Bathilda/Doge/Muriel's accounts, so both Harry and the reader were left to decide on their own.
I did too, but that's just probably because I've been spoiled by GRRM, who leaves every character hanging on the threads of their own making. My issue wasn't particularly the randomness of the deaths, but that JKR went out of her way earlier (see my above response in this thread) to make it seem like there was some level of planning in the deaths that wasn't evident from the actual text. But yet, at the same time, there was a deus ex machina when Harry was in a sticky spot... and that just rubbed me the wrong way.
That's true, but the thing is JKR made a big deal a few months ago about how two characters got condemned and one got a reprieve.. which would imply that there was some level of planning in who died that wasn't very apparent from reading the book.
J. K. Rowling: Yeah, one character got a reprieve.
Richard: Oh really?
JK: Yeah.
Judy: I mean you are, I just...
JK: But I have to say two die that I didn't intend to die.
J: Oh no, two much loved ones?
JK: Well, you know, a price has to be paid.
R: Significant?
JK: We are dealing with pure evil! So they don't target the extras, do they? They go straight for the main characters... Or I do.
Maybe it's that I read waaaay too much speculation about it, all with interesting theories on how Harry would defeat Voldemort without having to introduce trick wands.... but I just felt that she took the easiest possible route out of the story, giving characters dramatic about-faces when necessary. I mean... Kreacher suddenly becoming Harry's biggest fan? Cop out. Percy's sudden change of allegiance, apology and starting to joke? Excuse me?
I also felt that she let Dumbledore off the hook, and his character would have been much more compelling if he had killed his sister (or something similar)... or maybe, just maybe, we didn't have to have Dumbledore re-appear and explain everything? I mean come on. Add to that most of the deaths just didn't make sense. Except for Mad-Eye (and possibly Dobby), basically all the other major deaths were random, they had no purpose in the story and didn't advance the plot in any major way. The only sacrificial death was Harry, and he didn't even die (and don't get me started on the overly sappy epilogue).
Generally, I think the book was missing most of JKR's trademark wit, that made the rest of the story so enjoyable... and had too much of her maddening 'hand of god' habit of introducing new magical concepts to get the characters out of sticky situations instead of them having to figure a way out themselves.
SSBN = Submarine, Ballistic Missile, Nuclear Power SS = Submarine SSN = Submarine, Nuclear Power (generally attack) SSB = Submarine, Ballistic Missile SSG = Submarine, Cruise Missile SSGN = Submarine, Cruise Missile, Nuclear Power
Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs) are as far as I know all nuclear tipped. Sub launched cruise missiles on the other hand, usually carry a conventional warhead.
I rarely comment in threads like this, since I'm not a developer... but I think you're missing the point... in the Jan 23rd 2006 e-mail, Jamie asked MS to tell him where he was in violation, they never did until the lawyer hard copies over a year later (May 25, 2007). The developer (Jamie) seemed, throughout the entire exchange (I did read it) to be willing to ditch the offending offering if they'd just give him a reason why, they never did. The MS manager was never willing to actually respond to the central point of the entire exchange:
What were the violation(s)?
I have no clue what happened in the conference calls, nor do I for the legal decision.. But there is no way that I could consider MS' actions in this case defensible from the e-mails. He asked, they didn't answer.. he put out an olive branch, they responded with the stick... he removed the material, they tried to rub it in and poke him in the eye.
Slashdot Mirror
I personally think this is the right decision. While obviously there is a line where replacement turns into enhancement, unless it's clearly crossed I'm in favor of letting everybody who has the ability compete. The IAAF did not show that there was enhancement (and even so, his best 400m time of 46.56s is over a second off the Olympic qualifying time of 45.55s).
My favorite part, where the panel finds that the IAAF biased the testing against him, and then told the press they were DQ'ing him before voting on it is here: 60. At this stage, in the Panel's view, the process began to go "off the rails". The correspondence between the IAAF nad Prof. Bruggemann shos that his instructions were to carry out the testing only when Mr Pistorius was running in a straight line after the acceleration phase. By the time that the IAAF commissioned the Cologne tests it was known that this was the part of the race in which Mr Pistorius usually ran at his fastest.
61. [...] IAAF's officials must have known that, by excluding the start and the acceleration phase, the results would create a distorted view of Mr Pistorius' advantages and/or disadvantages. [...]
62. The stori is not enhances by the fact that Dr. Robert Gailey, the scientist nominated by Mr Pistorius [...] was effectively "frozen out" to such an extent that he declined to attend the Cologne tests. He was informed that he would be allowed to attend only as an observer, with no input on the testing protocol or on the analysis.
68. The impression of prejudgement is also enhanced by the fact that Dr. Locatelli and other IAAF officials told the press before the vote was taken that Mr Pistorius would be banned from IAAF sanctioned events.
70. In the Panel's view, the manned in which the IAAF hendled the situation of MR Pistorius in the period from July 2007 to January 2008 fell short of the high standards that the international sporting community is entitield to expect from a federation such as the IAAF.
I've followed the /. headlines over this lack of a deal, and have been generally surprised by the neoliberals ordaining that the yahoo board had a duty to sell the company for short-term advantage. Despite the fact that under any decent discount rate, the whole proposal represented little more than a bet.
Even if regulated accounting doesn't float your boat, the ideas of Fischer Black (eg. http://www.amazon.com/Fischer-Black-Revolutionary-Idea-Finance/dp/0471457329/ref=sr_11_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1210920867&sr=11-1
) can't be ignored. Under that light, the entire deal seems to be more involved in noise trading than any solid economic expansion.
It's hard to argue that nuking Japan was substantially different from the previous fire bombing campaigns. That aside, I think one of the best pieces of evidence that the US substantially values human life is that in the wars the US has fought since WWII massive strategic air campaigns weren't used.
If you compare US tactics during WWII to those employed more recently, its hard to escape the conclusion that the US currently substantially values the lives of foreigners. If the US didn't, Iraq would be strewn with land-mines, Baghdad and other cities, would be burned out shells and the response to mortar attacks on US bases would be to counter-battery the area with massive heavy artillery and bombing.
It actually turns out this is relates to fairly important issues. For example a person's ability to detect guns or explosives is inversely correlated with the frequency of the same (data: go look at Wolfe & Horowitz). People perform badly in low frequency testing.
If there is some relaible way to 'perk them up' for their stint, or wake them up when they're dosing, it'll be a good and cheap way to improve real security.
"Untapped gold mine" means that there is an extractable, non-renewable resource that can be tapped for immediate revenue. I think it's a very apt description for how a company like eBay would look at craigslist:
A resource that they could extract advertising revenue for ~10-20 quarters, while destroying its value, and then move on to the next mine.
Craigslist current business model, however, can be better described as something like a tree farm or sustainable exploitation of a fishery, where the revenue production is comparatively modest in the short term, but consistent in the long term.
You make a really good point that I forgot about... that RIAA lawyers do seem to want to submit things like blog comments, etc that have no legal bearing to the judge in many cases.
At the same time though, since I was asking for an opinion in the colloquial meaning, I don't think my original request is too burdensome, since Mr. Beckerman, like anybody else can free himself from the burden by temporarily becoming an AC.
Should you *know*? No. But as our resident high profile copyright lawyer, who's enlisting our help against the RIAA, I would certainly appreciate it if you offered an educated opinion...
And besides, what's Ask Slashdot going to get besides a whole bunch of IANAL preceded rants in this type of submission?
Yes I would. I don't know if you follow what the WADA is doing in sports. Try:
http://rant-your-head-off.com/WordPress/
http://wadawatch.blogspot.com/
One major problem is just the attitude that you sight, which is that drugs are assumed to provide performance enhancement, but yet no studies have been done on how much if any affect this is in different sports, which lead to overly broad and abusive enforcement.
Until we have done the studies, you can't say that any drug is performance enhancing in any given endeavor because there is no evidence to support the statement. Lots of people, even if smart and even if scientists, doing something does not provide scientific evidence until it has been properly controlled etc.
People base a hell of a lot on first impressions.. Although in theory this isn't the best approach, unless we have a new enlightenment one would be wise to "overdress", always.
The issue with apple is that they only order a few lines of processors, all of which are at the top-end of the scale, which has the lowest yields in the manufacturing process. Notice how Intel gave Apple exclusive access to their quad-core 3ghz CPUs for the MacPro a few months before anybody else got them http://techreport.com/discussions.x/12176. If Apple is capable of saturating Intel's high-end production line for a single chip on a desktop machine, AMD wouldn't have a change to keep up with their high-end laptop demand.
Until we figure out how a water buffalo can be an individual at one spatial scale, and part of a herd as a texture at another scale... just in vision... we won't have smart computers.
If you're going to count per capita government debt, then you better also count per capita government capital. If you add up the land (~33% of total US acreage), natural resources, buildings, dams, etc, etc that the government controls (which, as far as I can tell from google, has never been done), we're all sitting prettily in the black, and will be doing so for a very long time.
While many of the things addressed in the article, especially about trying to shift the social environments of many colleges are troubling, in the end I don't think universities are going to be very easily overcome as centers of free speech and dissent. The really simplified reason behind this in my opinion is this: smart engaged people who's world view comes from 'the left' tend to make great teachers, and great teachers have profound impacts on their students opinion and thought processes. Smart engaged people who's world view comes from the right tend to make great leaders. Since the end of WWII, where the Montgomery GI bill opened education to the masses, we've seen two social trends:
First in the 1960s, the teachers had the first shot at a huge proportion of the population who hadn't been able to go to college, or spend much of their time formulating ideological positions. Then in the 1980s, the right produced a number of charismatic leaders, exemplified by Reagan and Gingrich, who focused their ideological positions through the media in a very compelling manner. The problem with the cult of leadership is that is has problems clearly conveying its ideas since it is based on personality and media control rather than pedagogy and individual interaction, the message drifts as the charismatic pull it in different directions for their own benefit. This the the stage we're at now.
As the media message either fractures or continues to diverge from the reality most people experience, they'll go back to the sources of information that are personally tangible: the teachers. This type of broad social cycle won't easily be broken by increasing surveillance, etc, because the lag times to acceptance are on the same scale as the social oscillations and surveillance doesn't work very well in communities that it isn't implicitly accepted in.
You are totally correct on the literature.. I was posting quickly ;) Rao & Ballard in particular I think influence Hawkins works (not to mention that Rao was one of the people who convinced me to go into neuroscience.. but I digress). The problem with Lee & Mumford is that it's now been known for quite a while that V1 receptive fields are not static, but dynamic in really cool ways.. Check out Ohzawa's videos for example.
The idea of algorithms like this, which are supervised learning systems, is that you train them to recognize 'hidden statistics.' These tend to be things that people have little trouble recognizing (eg. faces), but that we haven't been able to describe analytically for computers. So, you're certainly right that the main job of the programmer is to choose an effective algorithm, and then train it on the available data. It turns out, though, that there are an essentially unlimited number of unique and distinct supervised learning systems available the test.
;)
So the most important task in setting up an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) like this grant is attempting, is to pick the class of learning systems that perform best on the data to explore. This generally can't be done to any optimum criteria until the system designer gains familiarity with the systems and dataset... so it winds up being a subjective judgment of the designer rather than a rigorous examination of the possibilities... or else this process winds up being recursive
In this case, it happens that clustering algorithms like ART or HTM have an excellent track record classifying satellite or radar based imaging.
The good news is that this is all math! There's no need to believe anything one way or another! Sorta exciting huh? You can go and examine all the ART algorithms (I linked wikipedia because it has the PDFs linked.. did you notice? But here's Grossberg's homepage, just in case), and you can go read about HTM. According to Hawkins, HTM has some magical, er I mean, proprietary, component that separates it from ART. I've seen Hawkins speak... in fact, I saw him speak at BU with Steve Grossberg in the audience. He amused the audience by showing a demo that was completely indistinguishable from an ART1 implementation that takes about half an hour to program, and most of the people present had done themselves.
He then failed to answer any substantive questions (including Steve asking him how his model differed from ART), referring us all to online videos of his lectures. I personally asked about how he could reconcile this article with his predictions.. which assume a cortical hierarchy based on 'distance' (in synapses) from primary sensory cortices, rather than examining the relative lamination of various cortices. I notice since then the wikipedia article "On Intelligence" has had its 'experimental prediction' claims toned down quite a bit.
As it happens in terms of books though, Grossberg has written several and has a ton of peer reviewed articles on this very subject. Hawkins to my knowledge doesn't have a single peer-reviewed article on HTM or anything related.
While loaded with buzzwords, this really involves nothing that's really new. The HTM is just a rehash of Adaptive Resonance Theory .ps.gz file).
And applications like this aren't exactly new (this link downloads a
Although it is certainly a major engineering challenge to get this type of classification to work over multiple modalities of data in any coherent way, as far as I can tell this project doesn't represent any breakthrough in approach or capability.
I'm also a cyclist. I know lots of other cyclists, nearly everybody I know uses carbon fiber frames and forks, as I do myself. I've never heard of one failing in such a way that it killed the user. I mean, you do wear a helmet right?
I just tried googling carbon forks death, forks of death etc, and found absolutely nothing about people dying from catastrophic carbon fork failures.
And that doesn't even account for the fact that when an aluminum fork fails, it will be similarly catastrophic in terms of controlling the bike.
I think the thing that shocks me most is that many universities law faculties aren't going off on the current cases. I mean, these are supposed to be the 'liberal' part of the law. And ONLY Harvard is PUBLICLY strong enough to defend these charges? Where is that oft touted liberal element in the US university system?
But getting back to the core of the matter, I have to wonder why colleges are bending over about a matter so core to their own liability:
Colleges 'pirate' thousands of documents every year in a way that is NOT allowed by current US copyright law.. and they want to believe it's students.. not professors downloading papers that their library hasn't subscribed to? Taking a hard line on music copyright will only kill the colleges that take it up! They won't only drive away students... but also professors who suddenly can't do their research because of miserable libraries (BU COUGH).
The thing that I didn't like about the Kreacher change of heart, is that he's shortly ignoring the mudblood/blood traitor issues that seemed to be such a key to not only his, but to Regulus' opinions. I could believe him having a dramatic change of allegiance... but from the other books, I could never see him doing so without also having some mumbled reservations under his breath.
On the Dumbledore front.. I agree, she didn't exactly leave him off the hook. The issue that I was trying to get at was that he got to come back and explain everything to Harry, to vindicate himself in his new, tolerant and forgiven state. I think it would have made him a more compelling character in the end, if one was left with certain knowledge on the sister.. or if Harry had never gotten a chance to absolve him, and his acts with respect to his family were framed only by Aberforth/Bathilda/Doge/Muriel's accounts, so both Harry and the reader were left to decide on their own.
I did too, but that's just probably because I've been spoiled by GRRM, who leaves every character hanging on the threads of their own making. My issue wasn't particularly the randomness of the deaths, but that JKR went out of her way earlier (see my above response in this thread) to make it seem like there was some level of planning in the deaths that wasn't evident from the actual text. But yet, at the same time, there was a deus ex machina when Harry was in a sticky spot... and that just rubbed me the wrong way.
Maybe it's that I read waaaay too much speculation about it, all with interesting theories on how Harry would defeat Voldemort without having to introduce trick wands.... but I just felt that she took the easiest possible route out of the story, giving characters dramatic about-faces when necessary. I mean... Kreacher suddenly becoming Harry's biggest fan? Cop out. Percy's sudden change of allegiance, apology and starting to joke? Excuse me?
I also felt that she let Dumbledore off the hook, and his character would have been much more compelling if he had killed his sister (or something similar)... or maybe, just maybe, we didn't have to have Dumbledore re-appear and explain everything? I mean come on. Add to that most of the deaths just didn't make sense. Except for Mad-Eye (and possibly Dobby), basically all the other major deaths were random, they had no purpose in the story and didn't advance the plot in any major way. The only sacrificial death was Harry, and he didn't even die (and don't get me started on the overly sappy epilogue).
Generally, I think the book was missing most of JKR's trademark wit, that made the rest of the story so enjoyable... and had too much of her maddening 'hand of god' habit of introducing new magical concepts to get the characters out of sticky situations instead of them having to figure a way out themselves.
SSBN = Submarine, Ballistic Missile, Nuclear Power
SS = Submarine
SSN = Submarine, Nuclear Power (generally attack)
SSB = Submarine, Ballistic Missile
SSG = Submarine, Cruise Missile
SSGN = Submarine, Cruise Missile, Nuclear Power
Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs) are as far as I know all nuclear tipped.
Sub launched cruise missiles on the other hand, usually carry a conventional warhead.
I rarely comment in threads like this, since I'm not a developer... but I think you're missing the point... in the Jan 23rd 2006 e-mail, Jamie asked MS to tell him where he was in violation, they never did until the lawyer hard copies over a year later (May 25, 2007). The developer (Jamie) seemed, throughout the entire exchange (I did read it) to be willing to ditch the offending offering if they'd just give him a reason why, they never did. The MS manager was never willing to actually respond to the central point of the entire exchange:
What were the violation(s)?
I have no clue what happened in the conference calls, nor do I for the legal decision.. But there is no way that I could consider MS' actions in this case defensible from the e-mails. He asked, they didn't answer.. he put out an olive branch, they responded with the stick... he removed the material, they tried to rub it in and poke him in the eye.