Actually, it's still DRM - the codec automatically de-activiting itself is DRM, and the fact that the codec is proprietary at all is DRM - because the codec is used to decode the DRM features on the DVD itself. This is actually a perfect example of the hassles that legitimate users get with DRM, that simply do not effect non-legitimate users.
Let's assume we have a C language implementation from the day when an integer was 16 bits and a long was 32 bits. For this C language host, the expression -32768 does *not* do what one first supposes: represent the least possible 16-bit signed integer value, because this is parsed as the negation operator applied to the long integer constant 32768. How stupid. Give me back my high minus sign!
Eh? I'm not an old fogey, so maybe C implementations back then sucked, but -32768 does indead mean the least possible 16 bit signed value. And C doesn't have a (binary) negation operator. "-32768" is a constant, it's not parsed or imlemented as "0 - 32768".
The constant ambiguity between subtracting a positive constant and adding a negative constant does *not* help one in recalling to mind the derivation of the formula involved (with the original symmetries intact).
I don't know what number system they use in APL, but in the one the rest of the universe uses, adding a negative and subtracting a positive are mathematically identical.
I must however reserve the innermost circle of hell, following along in P.J. Plaugher's footsteps, for those who implement malloc(0) to cause an "instructional" abend.
If you could provide a situation where malloc(0) wasn't a logic error, then perhaps the people implementing it might be more interested in making it work.
In fairness to the OP, if, like many programmers these days, you've never programmed or seen anything *but* C/C++ and Java, you might think the syntax is very different.
He's doing more harm than that - Jack Thompson has (either as the defense attorey himself, or as a consultant, don't recall) attempted to use the "video games made me do it" defense in *criminal* cases. I don't actually think this is about money to him - I think the man is outright clinically obsessed. I believe that he's legitimate to the extent that he actually believes the crap he spews, and believes in his righteousness, even in the face of conflicting evidence and his own hypocricsy. Sane people, especially manipulating bastards trying to ride the "think of the children" wave to politcal power, do not have send 14 year old children long, insult laden emails. They don't call people on the phone and personally abuse him. I don't think he's a political beast at all, except to the extent that he tries to gain political capital to push his agenda. One fearsome thing is that he does occasionally manage to make the mainstream media, without even being on shows where he's showcased as a nut. In general, though, I suspect that most major media outlets are familiar with him and feature him for the vitriol and controversy which leads to viewers and page hits.
The legislature has delegated the job of deciding what the requirements for patents are to the PTO. Thats why the patent office gets to decide if business patents are okay or not, or whether you need to actually implement something before you can patent it, or whether or not you can implement living things.
This is untrue. The patent office stopped requiring concrete implementation decades ago. All you have to do is demonstrate (generally in some extremely contrived way, with lots of pseudo-technical terminology, to someone who has no idea what you're talking about) feasability of implementation.
Also, pingflooding is simply a generic term for sending lots and lots of ping packets to saturate a network connection. It's effective to a greater or lesser degree against any networked entity, assuming the attacker has more bandwidth than the attacker. Modern DDOS zombie networks use more sophisticated versions, but even a simple ping -f can shut someone down if they have a small enough pipe (T1 vs a dialup user, for example).
Not one of those sources provides a definition that disagrees with me. In fact, they all agree with me, although the meat of the Wikipedia article focuses on network DOS attacks. Network DOSes, because of the media attention and the focus on Internet computing in the last few years, are the most familiar to people but common knowledge is not the limit of the technical usage of the term, which predates the Internet.
Windows naming conventions aside, anything that perform operations on behalf of something else is often referred to as a service. In OS design classes, you will often hear people referring to memory management as an OS service, for example. The term is absolutely *not* limited to network daemons on the internet. Go back 10 or 15 years in computer science and the term "application" wasn't even that common - people referred to services instead.
A Denial of Service attack denies you access to a service. It doesn't have to crash your box, or take it off the network. Anything that will hang or crash or flood a service (applications are services) is a DOS. They've been called that since before kiddies found out about pingflooding.
Well, I'm not sure that I'd accept the conventional wisdom as being evidence of the best course, especially in an area like economics where true expirimentation is essentially impossible. A common fallacy of economic theory is assuming that all actors are fully informed and will always act in thier best interest. Even if you did, it only follows as being sound economic policy if the maximation of tax revenue is your only goal, as opposed to things like what you do with that tax revenue. And yet one final time, you're making the assumption that these monarchs had the ability to improve tax collection methods more than they did, which is unsupported.
It can't, but that doesn't meant the Laffer curve is infallible. It makes certain assumptions, like there are no external actors it doesn't account for. A 100% controlled economy can easily exist, with all wealth and production controlled by the state, and still have greater than 0 productivity.
You don't need to do an experiment to see what would happen - it's the current state on a global scale today. It's also pretty intuitve - people *want* to be in the rich area, but the cost of moving and gaining a foothold in the area with a higher cost of living is greater than the ability of someone in the poor area to raise. And while the poorer area may have a better "economy", the area with the greater worker protections will have a generally higher quality of living.
The rich have economic power, by virtue of controlling the medium of economies, and can manipulate economic policy. Thats not really news. I think it might be interesting if you did something like add a 100% tax cap after $500,000 of income. Nobody would have any incentive to make that much money any more - but the money that goes to extreme (CEO level) salaries and from huge investments doesn't just go away. Think of it as the accelerated version of trickle down economics.
It's worth pointing out that at the time when monarchs could personaly pocket tax income (and it's pretty much never been that straightforwardly simple, even when "tax" meant "tribute"), social infrastructure, including the ability to assess and collect tax, was far, far more primitive. It's not apples and apples.
Probably because Montsano are a bunch of assholes with lots of money and the fine lines drawn by the patent office are much blurrier in a courtroom.
However, in legal cases by Monstano are used as precedent, you may very well be able to sue a woman for bearing a child, if the father had been treated using patented gene therapy techniques and carried patented, altered genes.
It's not quite the same. They're patenting a mechanism that is required to manipulate that gene. I'm not sure if theres an obvious analogy thats not "they're patenting the gene". From a purely conceptual standpoint, it's similiar to patenting mathematical functions. No, the numbers themselves are not patented, but the mechanisms by which you can manipulate the numbers are.
This is almost but not entirely wrong. The Windows registry is a tree-based hierarchy. Every node in the tree has it's own permissions capability, with the same ACL functionality as the filesystem. This level of security isn't commonly used, but there you go - it's there.
A centralized, OS provided API to manage and store configuration information is *good*. It reduces program complexity while increasing robustness and allows a single, common way to access configuration information for any program. Quick, whats the file format for a config under Unix?
Now, the Windows registry is hardly the best possible implementation of this. But it *is* better than flatfiles (exporting registry keys isn't any harder than exporting config files, if they aren't in a single guaranteed place. Which they aren't). OS X does it better, and has better app installation/registration to boot, but that doesn't mean that theres something *fundamentally* wrong with the Registry.
This actually brings to mind something which has bugged me for a long time. Why the hell are JS dialogs modal?
while (1) {alert("nope!");}
Will DOS any browser in use today. You'll have to kill it via some OS level functionality, because alerts are modal and prevent interaction with the browser chrome. I understand that the JS spec is based on "run to completion", but is there any reason why JS alerts (and confirms, etc) shouldn't be model to the document canvas (disabling interaction with the canvas, but not browser chrome) rather than the browser itself?
I suspect that IEs "dynamic CSS" JavaScript exrepssions, which can contain arbitrary JavaScript, are also a XSS vulnerability just waiting to happen. The ability to do this may have something to do with why script tags are parsed in stylesheets at all.
Why don't you provide some evidence? I gave you examples to contradict the point you were trying to make... yet you just continue to talk while waving your hands.
I'm not even sure where to begin here. I'll note for the record that you provided no evidence, linked to no court cases (which aren't relevent, but you mentioned them), and produced no articles or descriptions of ways in which the poor, oppressed religious right are being under represented. So fuck off if you think it's my obligation to refute *your* hand waving. Its like being challenged to prove that grass is often green.
Are you seriously telling me that you think that the Bush administration is hostile to religion? The President who publically and repeatedly proclaims his faith, who often mentions his prayer and consultation with religious authorities regarding his political decisions, who has publically and repeatedly stated a need for more religious involvment, who created an official "Prayer Week", who enjoys essentially unanimous support from right-wing religious leaders, and who has created and crafted public policy that matches his religious beliefs?
14 anthrax spores or a grenade are not a WMD. They are a biological weapon and an explosive device, respectivly. Tear gas is a chemical weapon but not a WMD. The definition of a WMD is that it causes *mass* destruction.
If you actually want to be intelligent about it, the topic is a little more compicated than that as well - it's a known fact that at one time Saddam did indeed have WMD, and that he had a program to develop more. However, all the evidence points to Saddam actually disabling his remaining weapon stockpiles as well as the programs, as he said he did.
Actually, most military hardware does find it's way into the consumer market. Also, are you telling me that traveling to the moon/mars/whatever is commercially exploitable.
Thats what I just said - the Bush administration (and the Clinton one before him, to a lesser degree) are business oriented and support commercial and military research (to stupidly ridiculou degrees, if you ask me - public money funds research that private companies get to hold patents on), but are less interested in pure science, which gives only long term commercial results if any at all. NASA is a partial exception, although it might be worth considering the new push for the weaponization of space is affecting the willingess to fund space exploration.
I wouldn't characterize it as "very strong", but yes, they do command some political base. But so do white supremacists, black supremacists, Neo Nazi groups...
You're competely out of touch if you think the fundamentalist religious right (Christian, for this purpose) doesn't command enormous political power in the US.
I'd agree with "sympathises", but you need to define "caters". Because the period of the Bush presidency has represented one of the largest drawbacks of religion in government in America's history. There have been numerous court cases resulting in repeal of various religious connections in governments. I'll be curious to read your response and look over the references you will provide to support your argument.
The Bush administration has *coincided* with a number of court cases affecting religous activites, but the Bush administration (thats the executive branch, if you didn't pay attention in high school) not only has not "represented" any such thing it has actively worked to accomplish the opposite goal. And if you the kind of court cases being heard represent any sort of "drawback" for religion in government you're being willfully blind. In fact, the only recent court case that involved religion in government even tangetally (as opposed to government support and representation of religion) was the 10 commandments in the courthouse case. And while some may have thought the outcome of that was insulting, it was in no way a drawback.
Well, as I've already alluded to, it's not such a "simple fact", and whatever power they may have, it's not a "great deal of political power".
Well, yes it is. It's that simple.
It's as if you are trying to compare the "religious right" to the oil industry, or the defense industry.
The two intersect to a non-zero degree, and yes the defense and oil lobbies are more powerful, but that does not mean that religious leaders don't have great power in Washington.
And tell me, if the whole "intelligent design" is really an example, where is the legislation to support it? I never saw a bill passed through congress mandating intelligent design.
And, of course, Washington and the federal government are not the only governments in this country.
Okay, lets do a quick comparison of that Dan Rather thing real quick. Dan Rather does a report on a memo, which he believes to be true. He should have investigated more throughly, as a matter of integrity, but did not, presumably because the memo coincided with his beliefs and his personal agenda. When the memo was attacked by the opposition, he fiercly defended it for a short time before it's falsness was proved, and he resigned in disgrace amongst massive flames from right-wing pundits and politicians. And liberals don't like to talk very much about it. Okay.
Lets compare that with GWB, who's not a journalist, so we're getting a little offtopic, but it's my post and I'll cry if I want to. GWB reports and publicizes information which he believes to be true (I grant him the benefit of the doubt here), without making a through investigation, presumable because the information he had fit his beliefs and his personal agenda. When the information was attacked by the opposition, he fiercly defended it for a long time. When it's falseness was proved beyond a doubt, he spun and buried the story to the best of his ability, never published a retractrion or apology, and certainly didn't resign. And conservatives don't like to talk about it.
a "WMD" that is incapable of causing mass destruction is not a WMD, by definition. So yes, you'd be wrong if you answered that in the affirmative. Additionally, the gas you're talking about was discovered *after* the invasion, as a roadside bomb, and the question was asking about evidence of pre-invasion WMD stocks.
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Actually, it's still DRM - the codec automatically de-activiting itself is DRM, and the fact that the codec is proprietary at all is DRM - because the codec is used to decode the DRM features on the DVD itself. This is actually a perfect example of the hassles that legitimate users get with DRM, that simply do not effect non-legitimate users.
Eh? I'm not an old fogey, so maybe C implementations back then sucked, but -32768 does indead mean the least possible 16 bit signed value. And C doesn't have a (binary) negation operator. "-32768" is a constant, it's not parsed or imlemented as "0 - 32768".
The constant ambiguity between subtracting a positive constant and adding a negative constant does *not* help one in recalling to mind the derivation of the formula involved (with the original symmetries intact).
I don't know what number system they use in APL, but in the one the rest of the universe uses, adding a negative and subtracting a positive are mathematically identical.
I must however reserve the innermost circle of hell, following along in P.J. Plaugher's footsteps, for those who implement malloc(0) to cause an "instructional" abend.
If you could provide a situation where malloc(0) wasn't a logic error, then perhaps the people implementing it might be more interested in making it work.
In fairness to the OP, if, like many programmers these days, you've never programmed or seen anything *but* C/C++ and Java, you might think the syntax is very different.
The legislature has delegated the job of deciding what the requirements for patents are to the PTO. Thats why the patent office gets to decide if business patents are okay or not, or whether you need to actually implement something before you can patent it, or whether or not you can implement living things.
This is untrue. The patent office stopped requiring concrete implementation decades ago. All you have to do is demonstrate (generally in some extremely contrived way, with lots of pseudo-technical terminology, to someone who has no idea what you're talking about) feasability of implementation.
Also, pingflooding is simply a generic term for sending lots and lots of ping packets to saturate a network connection. It's effective to a greater or lesser degree against any networked entity, assuming the attacker has more bandwidth than the attacker. Modern DDOS zombie networks use more sophisticated versions, but even a simple ping -f can shut someone down if they have a small enough pipe (T1 vs a dialup user, for example).
Not one of those sources provides a definition that disagrees with me. In fact, they all agree with me, although the meat of the Wikipedia article focuses on network DOS attacks. Network DOSes, because of the media attention and the focus on Internet computing in the last few years, are the most familiar to people but common knowledge is not the limit of the technical usage of the term, which predates the Internet.
Windows naming conventions aside, anything that perform operations on behalf of something else is often referred to as a service. In OS design classes, you will often hear people referring to memory management as an OS service, for example. The term is absolutely *not* limited to network daemons on the internet. Go back 10 or 15 years in computer science and the term "application" wasn't even that common - people referred to services instead.
A Denial of Service attack denies you access to a service. It doesn't have to crash your box, or take it off the network. Anything that will hang or crash or flood a service (applications are services) is a DOS. They've been called that since before kiddies found out about pingflooding.
Well, I'm not sure that I'd accept the conventional wisdom as being evidence of the best course, especially in an area like economics where true expirimentation is essentially impossible. A common fallacy of economic theory is assuming that all actors are fully informed and will always act in thier best interest. Even if you did, it only follows as being sound economic policy if the maximation of tax revenue is your only goal, as opposed to things like what you do with that tax revenue. And yet one final time, you're making the assumption that these monarchs had the ability to improve tax collection methods more than they did, which is unsupported.
It can't, but that doesn't meant the Laffer curve is infallible. It makes certain assumptions, like there are no external actors it doesn't account for. A 100% controlled economy can easily exist, with all wealth and production controlled by the state, and still have greater than 0 productivity.
The rich have economic power, by virtue of controlling the medium of economies, and can manipulate economic policy. Thats not really news. I think it might be interesting if you did something like add a 100% tax cap after $500,000 of income. Nobody would have any incentive to make that much money any more - but the money that goes to extreme (CEO level) salaries and from huge investments doesn't just go away. Think of it as the accelerated version of trickle down economics.
It's worth pointing out that at the time when monarchs could personaly pocket tax income (and it's pretty much never been that straightforwardly simple, even when "tax" meant "tribute"), social infrastructure, including the ability to assess and collect tax, was far, far more primitive. It's not apples and apples.
However, in legal cases by Monstano are used as precedent, you may very well be able to sue a woman for bearing a child, if the father had been treated using patented gene therapy techniques and carried patented, altered genes.
It's not quite the same. They're patenting a mechanism that is required to manipulate that gene. I'm not sure if theres an obvious analogy thats not "they're patenting the gene". From a purely conceptual standpoint, it's similiar to patenting mathematical functions. No, the numbers themselves are not patented, but the mechanisms by which you can manipulate the numbers are.
A centralized, OS provided API to manage and store configuration information is *good*. It reduces program complexity while increasing robustness and allows a single, common way to access configuration information for any program. Quick, whats the file format for a config under Unix? Now, the Windows registry is hardly the best possible implementation of this. But it *is* better than flatfiles (exporting registry keys isn't any harder than exporting config files, if they aren't in a single guaranteed place. Which they aren't). OS X does it better, and has better app installation/registration to boot, but that doesn't mean that theres something *fundamentally* wrong with the Registry.
while (1) {alert("nope!");} Will DOS any browser in use today. You'll have to kill it via some OS level functionality, because alerts are modal and prevent interaction with the browser chrome. I understand that the JS spec is based on "run to completion", but is there any reason why JS alerts (and confirms, etc) shouldn't be model to the document canvas (disabling interaction with the canvas, but not browser chrome) rather than the browser itself?
I suspect that IEs "dynamic CSS" JavaScript exrepssions, which can contain arbitrary JavaScript, are also a XSS vulnerability just waiting to happen. The ability to do this may have something to do with why script tags are parsed in stylesheets at all.
I'm not even sure where to begin here. I'll note for the record that you provided no evidence, linked to no court cases (which aren't relevent, but you mentioned them), and produced no articles or descriptions of ways in which the poor, oppressed religious right are being under represented. So fuck off if you think it's my obligation to refute *your* hand waving. Its like being challenged to prove that grass is often green.
Are you seriously telling me that you think that the Bush administration is hostile to religion? The President who publically and repeatedly proclaims his faith, who often mentions his prayer and consultation with religious authorities regarding his political decisions, who has publically and repeatedly stated a need for more religious involvment, who created an official "Prayer Week", who enjoys essentially unanimous support from right-wing religious leaders, and who has created and crafted public policy that matches his religious beliefs?
If you actually want to be intelligent about it, the topic is a little more compicated than that as well - it's a known fact that at one time Saddam did indeed have WMD, and that he had a program to develop more. However, all the evidence points to Saddam actually disabling his remaining weapon stockpiles as well as the programs, as he said he did.
Thats what I just said - the Bush administration (and the Clinton one before him, to a lesser degree) are business oriented and support commercial and military research (to stupidly ridiculou degrees, if you ask me - public money funds research that private companies get to hold patents on), but are less interested in pure science, which gives only long term commercial results if any at all. NASA is a partial exception, although it might be worth considering the new push for the weaponization of space is affecting the willingess to fund space exploration.
You're competely out of touch if you think the fundamentalist religious right (Christian, for this purpose) doesn't command enormous political power in the US.
I'd agree with "sympathises", but you need to define "caters". Because the period of the Bush presidency has represented one of the largest drawbacks of religion in government in America's history. There have been numerous court cases resulting in repeal of various religious connections in governments. I'll be curious to read your response and look over the references you will provide to support your argument.
The Bush administration has *coincided* with a number of court cases affecting religous activites, but the Bush administration (thats the executive branch, if you didn't pay attention in high school) not only has not "represented" any such thing it has actively worked to accomplish the opposite goal. And if you the kind of court cases being heard represent any sort of "drawback" for religion in government you're being willfully blind. In fact, the only recent court case that involved religion in government even tangetally (as opposed to government support and representation of religion) was the 10 commandments in the courthouse case. And while some may have thought the outcome of that was insulting, it was in no way a drawback.
Well, as I've already alluded to, it's not such a "simple fact", and whatever power they may have, it's not a "great deal of political power".
Well, yes it is. It's that simple.
It's as if you are trying to compare the "religious right" to the oil industry, or the defense industry.
The two intersect to a non-zero degree, and yes the defense and oil lobbies are more powerful, but that does not mean that religious leaders don't have great power in Washington.
And tell me, if the whole "intelligent design" is really an example, where is the legislation to support it? I never saw a bill passed through congress mandating intelligent design.
And, of course, Washington and the federal government are not the only governments in this country.
Lets compare that with GWB, who's not a journalist, so we're getting a little offtopic, but it's my post and I'll cry if I want to. GWB reports and publicizes information which he believes to be true (I grant him the benefit of the doubt here), without making a through investigation, presumable because the information he had fit his beliefs and his personal agenda. When the information was attacked by the opposition, he fiercly defended it for a long time. When it's falseness was proved beyond a doubt, he spun and buried the story to the best of his ability, never published a retractrion or apology, and certainly didn't resign. And conservatives don't like to talk about it.
a "WMD" that is incapable of causing mass destruction is not a WMD, by definition. So yes, you'd be wrong if you answered that in the affirmative. Additionally, the gas you're talking about was discovered *after* the invasion, as a roadside bomb, and the question was asking about evidence of pre-invasion WMD stocks.