"a victim that doesn't want to deal with it shouldn't be in the trial about their rape."
I'm confused by this. Are you saying that if someone is raped and does not remember the rape that the rapist should not be prosecuted? Or just that the victim should not testify? Or what?
What if the rapist administered the drug in question as part of the rape?
"it just means the ACLU is biased, which is pretty well known."
Or pretty widely believed, which is not quite the same thing. The ACLU has fought for causes that you'd consider liberal, and for those you'd consider conservative. It may look like they fight primarily for liberal causes to you - but that is quite likely to be because thats the kind of case that the conservative media tends to like to natter about. Perhaps you should stop watching Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh all the time. I'd certainly suggest you look at what the ACLU has actually done over the years instead of what someone on the tube says they've done.
The ACLU also tends to look liberal because, while it is certainly the case that both liberals and conservatives violate the constitution and individual liberties, conservatives seem to do it more frequently, more deeply and more unapologetically.
Re:My short experience with perl...
on
What is Perl 6?
·
· Score: 1
And at the third level do we switch enclosing characters again? To something completely different, or back to the
square braces? Or do we use parens again?
Enquiring minds (though I'm convinced I'm nowhere near smart enough to actually use Perl) want to know?
Possibility 1 : The consumer - not the ones getting the $7.50 each, but all the rest. The price of CD's would just get bumped a bit - done over the next year or so no one would notice much and the corporate budget would balance.
Possibility 2 : The artist - just add a small surcharge to the cost of producing their next albums. The alternative to paying it would probably be to lose the contract, so who would complain.
Possibility 3 : Sony Employees in general - delay raises and bonuses for a bit and everything will be just fine - they can always blame it on their reduced profits for the year. Reduced because of the payout, of course.
Possibility 4 : Shareholders - lop a penny or so off dividends. Wall Street might notice, but they're probably going to be so lost in admiration for a corporation that got away with it yet again that they'll swarm all overthemselves to load up on Sony.
Possibility 5 : Sony Higher Management - reduce bonuses or salaries for those directly responsible and their managers? Sorry. Can't do that - after all these are the people that make the company profitable (never mind the consumers, artists and general employees).
I should say that I was doing this as a preprocessing step to solve the same problem that Nandor was working on, that of creating wordsquares with the chemical elements as the python program I wrote to solve the problem was taking too long.
Then, in part because I could not run it on some local machines at the university (which seemed to reboot every night), I rewrote it in Haskell to use a trie to hold the word list. The Haskell version (compiled, -O3) with three letter words and the preprocessed word list runs for under two minutes. On an unpreprocessed word list it takes about four minutes. (Also, all
these times are on a machine that is running at least two other compute-intensive processes.) One of these days I'll run it on
the enable word list.
I admit though that I have not verified the output (but I was also solving a slightly different problem - no symbol
was used more than once and no word used more than once). My program also spits out squares twice - rotated
around the diagonal (easy to fix, but relatively uninteresting.)
It would probably run faster in C, but I find Haskell programming to be more fun these days - and I also find it tends to lead to more interesting ideas.
In a week or so (higher priority is doing stuff for classes which start next week) I'll be posting the code to my website but it is not there yet.
One Line (Though a long one)
on
Chemical Words List
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The checkpoint page you point to just lists this as a vulnerability and gives a password protected link to
"FULL ADVISORY and SOLUTION" (caps theirs). Since I don't have a checkpoint login, I have no clue as to what they are saying. I therefore have no reason whatever to believe that they have anything to offer.
Hmmm. They don't have to care about microsoft's bottom line to not be willing to host linux/bsd/... machines.
My ISP only supports windows (not even macos, actually). Is it because they want to support microsoft? No. Its because they want to support as little as possible.
My bank just made me click through on an agreement never to use anything but IE or netscape on windows and IE or Safari on Macos to use their online banking services. (I lied - I use firefox on linux most of the time - but if they find out they can stop my access to online banking.) Is it because they want to support microsoft? No. They want to support as little as they can get away with and make it the users responsibility to lie about their system to use their services. That way, they're covered.
My university's online class listings service only supports IE. Is this to support microsoft. No. They don't care at all about microsoft - they only want to support as little as possible.
I don't need to posit a conspiracy to note that (often for quite justifiable reasons) nobody wants to support anything but microsoft software. I only need to posit microsoft's overwhelming market share.
That this is both a cause and an effect of microsoft's continuing effective monopoly is sad, but understandable.
Indeed, some economists (can't find a reference right now) define a monopoly as low as 75 percent or so. It is measured more in terms of the barrier to competition, or barrier to entry into a market than as complete domination of the market. A company that can effectively bar any competitor from access to its customers (for example, phone companies, cable companies...) has a de facto monopoly in that market.
Should this nonsense actually go through, it is quite likely that vendors of software will lobby seriously (that is, bribe generously) (does anyone else think we need a new word for that - "lobbribe" perhaps?) for open source software to be valued at the same kind of valuation as their proprietary software.
Of course, there are other likely side effects as well.
Companies will hire companies in other states (without software taxation) to host their websites - imagine the tax on a big Oracle setup.
Companies will buy only one copy of (say MS Office) instead of one for each computer (this is probably enough in itself to motivate software vendors to lobby (bribe) the notion out of existence). Unless, "operational" software (OSes etc) are taxed less than "applicational" software (Office, Databases and the like.) In which case, MS will make sure that Office is considered operational software, Oracle will move most of its functionality into its own operating system and charge only a pittance for
the "applicational" part, and so on.
Personally, I'd like to trace the lobbying (bribes) if this actually becomes serious.
Perhaps the way to deal with this is to support it - but only with a couple of amendments :
First, copyright should be changed to expire in 10 years unless the owner pays a fee every
year. That fee should start at the gross fees that the copyrighted material earned in the
last year and would double every year thereafter.
Second, the devices must be changed to allow copying of any non-copyrighted material.
If the article was held up for a year either on request of the government, or because of an implicit threat by them, is this not "prior restraint" on the press? Prior restraint has generally been held in the US to be a serious no-no.
If the NY Times held up the article "just cuz", then they are well on their way to losing any credibility they might have retained over the last few years given the serious lapses they've had in journalistic ethics.
Strict constructionist judges have not frequently looked at the tenth amendment to allow people to keep their rights. Remember that Scalia thinks we all (except, undoubtedly himself) have "too much freedom".
Further remember things like "free speech zones" (for the right to assemble), the recent upholding of the right of the constabulary to require you to show identification in (essentially all circumstances), the fact that driving is not a right but a privledge, arbitrary searches for airline (and perhaps eventually all other public) travel as well as
essentially arbitrary prohibitions against certain people travelling. Note that there have been several recent incidents where people have been arrested or removed from public transportation for not showing id Remember that people are often stopped for just walking around in some neighborhoods (perhaps it is the wrong time of day, perhaps they are just the wrong color).
Finally remember that interstate travel may well be covered by the "commerce clause", which makes it federal jurisdiction and subject to rules imposed by the congress and executive branch.
None of this is precluded by the fourth amendment. Searches and seizures need to be "unreasonable" to be illegal and the courts have found more and more things "reasonable" - especially in the aftermath of the September, 2001 WTC incident.
"People like you scare me. It is a sad testament to what america and its educational system have become."
People like you scare me, you're not paying attention.
If you are in the US, you might try the (occasionally threatened) weather site
run by the National Weather Service. I've found it much nicer than the
commercial sites - clean pages, little extraneous junk, set to do hourly
refreshes. One of my mozilla/firefox tabs is almost always set to the
local page.
There is no constitutional right to travel (though a couple of the rights might be
interpreted that way by a judge with a bit of willingness to do so) so a strict constructionist judge on the Supreme Court would have to rule that
the government has the right to track you.
According to a lecture I heard a number of years ago, the damage to a road (and hence the long term cost of maintaining that road) goes up linearly with the number of miles travelled (seems reasonable), proportionally to the square of the speed (again seems reasonable) and proportionally to the fourth power (!!!!) of the weight (this one I don't know about and have not been able to verify). That is, a car that drives the same speed as me and the same distance but weighs twice as much does sixteen times the damage.
It is not hard to set up a simple spreadsheet to look at different models and pretty much any power over two for the weight produces very interesting damage numbers for large trucks. If the truck is carrying ten times the weight of my car (a rather light truck, actually) it should be contributing $10,000 to highway maintenance for every $1 I am.
Attempts in some states to assess trucks user fees that would be more equitable have been stopped quite effectively by the trucker's lobby.
So, the next truck you pass (or that passes you), remember just how much you are subsidizing it.
I've assigned finding such wordsquare puzzles a few times as a programming problem.
Its a pretty easy recursion problem.
On a similar note, Will Shortz, on the NPR Sunday morning show asked a few weeks
back for word squares (but without the symmetry) but where instead of each cell containing letters, it contains the symbols for the chemical elements. Someday that or a variant of it could well be another good homework assignment/programming contest problem.
Slashdot Mirror
You might want to check up on such things before you make yourself look quite so ignorant, and quite so, um, prejudiced.
I'm confused by this. Are you saying that if someone is raped and does not remember the rape that the rapist should not be prosecuted? Or just that the victim should not testify? Or what? What if the rapist administered the drug in question as part of the rape?
Or pretty widely believed, which is not quite the same thing. The ACLU has fought for causes that you'd consider liberal, and for those you'd consider conservative. It may look like they fight primarily for liberal causes to you - but that is quite likely to be because thats the kind of case that the conservative media tends to like to natter about. Perhaps you should stop watching Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh all the time. I'd certainly suggest you look at what the ACLU has actually done over the years instead of what someone on the tube says they've done.
The ACLU also tends to look liberal because, while it is certainly the case that both liberals and conservatives violate the constitution and individual liberties, conservatives seem to do it more frequently, more deeply and more unapologetically.
Enquiring minds (though I'm convinced I'm nowhere near smart enough to actually use Perl) want to know?
Of course the second paragraph is completely fiction and refers in no way to anything like this
Possibility 1 : The consumer - not the ones getting the $7.50 each, but all the rest. The price of CD's would just get bumped a bit - done over the next year or so no one would notice much and the corporate budget would balance.
Possibility 2 : The artist - just add a small surcharge to the cost of producing their next albums. The alternative to paying it would probably be to lose the contract, so who would complain.
Possibility 3 : Sony Employees in general - delay raises and bonuses for a bit and everything will be just fine - they can always blame it on their reduced profits for the year. Reduced because of the payout, of course.
Possibility 4 : Shareholders - lop a penny or so off dividends. Wall Street might notice, but they're probably going to be so lost in admiration for a corporation that got away with it yet again that they'll swarm all overthemselves to load up on Sony.
Possibility 5 : Sony Higher Management - reduce bonuses or salaries for those directly responsible and their managers? Sorry. Can't do that - after all these are the people that make the company profitable (never mind the consumers, artists and general employees).
You pick.
If you have not read this book, it is very much worth reading (as is most of John McPhee's writing). Highly recommended.
Then, in part because I could not run it on some local machines at the university (which seemed to reboot every night), I rewrote it in Haskell to use a trie to hold the word list. The Haskell version (compiled, -O3) with three letter words and the preprocessed word list runs for under two minutes. On an unpreprocessed word list it takes about four minutes. (Also, all these times are on a machine that is running at least two other compute-intensive processes.) One of these days I'll run it on the enable word list.
I admit though that I have not verified the output (but I was also solving a slightly different problem - no symbol was used more than once and no word used more than once). My program also spits out squares twice - rotated around the diagonal (easy to fix, but relatively uninteresting.)
It would probably run faster in C, but I find Haskell programming to be more fun these days - and I also find it tends to lead to more interesting ideas.
In a week or so (higher priority is doing stuff for classes which start next week) I'll be posting the code to my website but it is not there yet.
Though I'll admit I used a one line python program to construct the regular expression from a file listing the chemical element symbols.
The checkpoint page you point to just lists this as a vulnerability and gives a password protected link to "FULL ADVISORY and SOLUTION" (caps theirs). Since I don't have a checkpoint login, I have no clue as to what they are saying. I therefore have no reason whatever to believe that they have anything to offer.
My ISP only supports windows (not even macos, actually). Is it because they want to support microsoft? No. Its because they want to support as little as possible.
My bank just made me click through on an agreement never to use anything but IE or netscape on windows and IE or Safari on Macos to use their online banking services. (I lied - I use firefox on linux most of the time - but if they find out they can stop my access to online banking.) Is it because they want to support microsoft? No. They want to support as little as they can get away with and make it the users responsibility to lie about their system to use their services. That way, they're covered.
My university's online class listings service only supports IE. Is this to support microsoft. No. They don't care at all about microsoft - they only want to support as little as possible.
I don't need to posit a conspiracy to note that (often for quite justifiable reasons) nobody wants to support anything but microsoft software. I only need to posit microsoft's overwhelming market share.
That this is both a cause and an effect of microsoft's continuing effective monopoly is sad, but understandable.
Indeed, some economists (can't find a reference right now) define a monopoly as low as 75 percent or so. It is measured more in terms of the barrier to competition, or barrier to entry into a market than as complete domination of the market. A company that can effectively bar any competitor from access to its customers (for example, phone companies, cable companies...) has a de facto monopoly in that market.
Of course, there are other likely side effects as well.
Companies will hire companies in other states (without software taxation) to host their websites - imagine the tax on a big Oracle setup.
Companies will buy only one copy of (say MS Office) instead of one for each computer (this is probably enough in itself to motivate software vendors to lobby (bribe) the notion out of existence). Unless, "operational" software (OSes etc) are taxed less than "applicational" software (Office, Databases and the like.) In which case, MS will make sure that Office is considered operational software, Oracle will move most of its functionality into its own operating system and charge only a pittance for the "applicational" part, and so on.
Personally, I'd like to trace the lobbying (bribes) if this actually becomes serious.
Sounds like a vote for C# to me.
Marrying your significant other will not work overly well in the US if he/she is the same gender as you are.
First, copyright should be changed to expire in 10 years unless the owner pays a fee every year. That fee should start at the gross fees that the copyrighted material earned in the last year and would double every year thereafter.
Second, the devices must be changed to allow copying of any non-copyrighted material.
I think this is a reasonable trade off.
If the NY Times held up the article "just cuz", then they are well on their way to losing any credibility they might have retained over the last few years given the serious lapses they've had in journalistic ethics.
Further remember things like "free speech zones" (for the right to assemble), the recent upholding of the right of the constabulary to require you to show identification in (essentially all circumstances), the fact that driving is not a right but a privledge, arbitrary searches for airline (and perhaps eventually all other public) travel as well as essentially arbitrary prohibitions against certain people travelling. Note that there have been several recent incidents where people have been arrested or removed from public transportation for not showing id Remember that people are often stopped for just walking around in some neighborhoods (perhaps it is the wrong time of day, perhaps they are just the wrong color).
Finally remember that interstate travel may well be covered by the "commerce clause", which makes it federal jurisdiction and subject to rules imposed by the congress and executive branch.
None of this is precluded by the fourth amendment. Searches and seizures need to be "unreasonable" to be illegal and the courts have found more and more things "reasonable" - especially in the aftermath of the September, 2001 WTC incident.
"People like you scare me. It is a sad testament to what america and its educational system have become."
People like you scare me, you're not paying attention.
All pirates murder, rape and steal indiscriminately.
Those who murder indiscriminately are terrorists.
Therefore :
All movie/music copiers are terrorists.
(For simplicity, I'll omit the formal symbolic logic and the labeling of each step with the logical rule used.)
Should have included the URL for the site :
weather.gov
If you are in the US, you might try the (occasionally threatened) weather site run by the National Weather Service. I've found it much nicer than the commercial sites - clean pages, little extraneous junk, set to do hourly refreshes. One of my mozilla/firefox tabs is almost always set to the local page.
Piracy is forceful, violent and often results in mayhem, rape and death.
Infringing intellectual property often results in lack of profits.
Not quite the same - but somehow calling someone an "infringer" lacks the exaggerated emotional appeal of calling them a pirate, no?
There is no constitutional right to travel (though a couple of the rights might be interpreted that way by a judge with a bit of willingness to do so) so a strict constructionist judge on the Supreme Court would have to rule that the government has the right to track you.
It is not hard to set up a simple spreadsheet to look at different models and pretty much any power over two for the weight produces very interesting damage numbers for large trucks. If the truck is carrying ten times the weight of my car (a rather light truck, actually) it should be contributing $10,000 to highway maintenance for every $1 I am.
Attempts in some states to assess trucks user fees that would be more equitable have been stopped quite effectively by the trucker's lobby.
So, the next truck you pass (or that passes you), remember just how much you are subsidizing it.
On a similar note, Will Shortz, on the NPR Sunday morning show asked a few weeks back for word squares (but without the symmetry) but where instead of each cell containing letters, it contains the symbols for the chemical elements. Someday that or a variant of it could well be another good homework assignment/programming contest problem.