As a regular critic of America (whichever of your idiot parties happens to be in charge), I'm not at all amazed by this turn of events.
Europe (the European Union in this case) is composed of several nations with an unfortunate tendency to pay lip service to individual rights, my own country (Britain) being among the worst culprits.
As part of a long-term policy to harmonise law enforcement across the EU, this treaty makes sense on the surface, but it is the cross-border enforcement, put in the treaty by cynical politicians with no regard for their citizens, that makes a nonsense of this treaty.
Here in the UK, we have RIPA (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) which in its final form will embody the worst aspects of the treaty, including the compulsion to give up encryption keys, and allowing even local councils to instigate surveillance against citizens for almost any reason that they can dream up.
Worse still, the EU is working on a new constitution (glad to see they have one, because Britain still hasn't got any written statement of rights and obligations), and the cross-border law enforcement is likely to be a key element of this document.
So your illusions are justly shattered, but Valenti and Ashcroft are still scum, and will remain so in my eyes along with Blair, Straw, Blunkett, Chirac, Aznar (poor man got his ass kicked out, haha), all the EC commissioners and every piece of pondlife that masquerades as a decent human being while shafting his fellow man by imposing iniquitous laws on people who have no choice but to participate in the farce that calls itself democracy.
If you think those CDs or DVDs came from the people running the warez sites, then you're sadly mistaken.
Those CDs are produced in back-alley factories, by people who hire in the tech savvy they need to run their duplicators, and who wouldn't dream of showing themselves publically by sharing the stuff on the Internet.
They are then pushed out via market traders, the ubiquitous 'bloke in the pub', etc.
It's all part of the same scene as organised music piracy, copied brand-name goods, fake perfume and the like, and involves mostly the same people.
If stopping the warez sites serves to reduce the income of these people, then all well and good - but expect to see more fake Fila tops and copied music taking up the slack.
And yes - I do know of what I speak - I know some of the people who do a lot of the above for a living, and have some very nice brand-name copies and an extensive VCD collection as a result.
Turing was a homosexual, true. But not a closet homosexual at all.
His suicide had a lot more to do with the intolerance of the times (homosexuality was illegal in the UK back then, and he still worked for the Security Services) than with any guilt - he had allowed himself to be sentenced to state oestrogen poisoning in 1952, and never accepted that his homosexuality was wrong.
It's a pity he's not around now - homosexuality is almost compulsory in Manchester's 'Gay Village', just round the corner from where he finished his life's work.
The buyback was an attempt to stop the stock price from infringing the terms of the Baystar deal - it had to be pushed over a $10.49 limit to stop penalties being triggered.
I highly doubt he would be using any cyanide - even if it could be shown to break down - it would most likely do very poorly on the plant side.
Nope - cyanide isn't poisomous to plants - in fact it's a precursor to adenine, and can also act as a condensing agent in the formation of polypeptides.
The reason it's poisonous to animals is because it binds strongly to the iron in haemoglobin, stopping oxygen uptake in the blood.
Many plants produce significant amounts of cyanide in their seeds - cherry, almond, apricot, laurel, even apple seeds contain significant traces of cyanide, and even chickpeas (I think the Americans call them garbanzo beans), a staple food for much of the Middle East, contain cyanogens.
I'd be happy to use cyanide to solubilise the gold, but would take even more care over excluding the local wildlife.
If you'd bothered to RTFA, you'd see plenty of examples of both left and right infringing the right to free speech, so your ill-informed whine of leftist bias is a troll at best, and more probably flamebait.
Proper patriots are: Paul Revere, Ben Franklin, Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Woody Guthrie, Andrew Jackson, etc. etc. They aren't idiots who moan about 'leftist bias' or whatever your beef is.
Go back to playing with your George Bush Action Man toy, and stop bothering the rest of us with your stupidity.
Analyzer is a pretty capable tool - especially for those who need to use Win32 for their jobs.
It's ast least as good as Novell's Lanalyzer, and if you're a nuts-and-bolts kind of admin, it has great manual search capability.
It's good enough for people like me, who can read pages and pages of protocol dumps (it's prettier than text!), but I'm surprised that it hasn't gained a wider acceptance, or been ported to sit on top of snort for the more rigid believers.
Just look at the source - CNN, owned by Time Warner, which just happens to own 9 member companies of the RIAA: Atlantic (including Atlantic Catalog Group, Atlantic Classics and Atlantic Nashville), Elektra (including Elektra Asylum, Elektra Catalog Group, Elektra Entertainment and Elektra Musician), and Rhino (including Rhino Exclusive, Rhino Handmade, Rhino Music Video, Rhino Records, Rhino/Slash and Rhino/Warner).
Now explain why 'piracy' might appear ahead of the more likely reasons for the decline in sales, rather than left as an afterthought as it should be.
Well, from the details of the 9 arrests over here (as so far reported), the 'British' conspirators were in possession of about half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, enough to fertilise a lot more than 9 suburban gardens, or alternatively to make a Bali-sized truck bomb.
So far as I know none of the suspects arrested in Britain was a farmer, unless goat-herding in their ancestral villages counts.
The assumption is (and one of the suspects was charged today) that the group were planning one or more large explosions.
NB: I say 'British' in quotes, because all those arrested over here were Pakistanis with British citizenship.
You'll notice that the judge also instructed both parties to inform the court in writing every 90 days of the progress of the IBM case.
This is very good news for Red Hat, as it provides at least three opportunities between now and next April for them to convince the judge that SCO is dragging its feet on the IBM case, being obstructive in discovery, etc. etc., and so persuade the judge to deny SCO's Motion To Dismiss and to make the case move forwards.
Conversely, SCO has to justify its actions every three months without upsetting the judge.
If Red Hat plays the situation correctly, this delay may only last the first 90 days, since there is already ample evidence to show that SCO has been dilatory at best in its handling of the IBM discovery motions.
I think if you go back and reread the original ESR rant, you'll find that he did struggle to set up a networked printer, and that a major contributory factor was a lack of rationality on the part of the CUPS interface.
Please don't presume to be on the same side of the fence as me if you assert that there are no reasonable doubts about the so-called holocaust.
There are, in fact, reasonable doubts about the intent and the extent of what is now called the holocaust, and it is only the current orthodoxy that rails against such doubters, as though holocaust-affirmation is a necessary act of faith in todays world.
Your orthodoxy is as offensive to me as the orthodoxy that denies evolution against all the evidence.
Moon landing doubters, now - there's a different class of lunatics.
What is it about the process of debate that precludes an ad-hominem attack?
If the messenger is bearing a mistaken message, in a manner that invites ridicule, then what, precisely, is wrong with taking the piss (that's modern English for ad-hominem, and much closer to the truth than trying to use Latin phrases without a sense of what is really meant)?
If it was German influence, then the proper course (which I understand is less popular these days than when I learnt German 20-odd years ago) is to capitalise each noun, not just some.
If it's a whim, then by all means indulge yourself, but don't expect to be taken seriously.
And as for age and popularity, 150 years without any evidence to the contrary tends to lead to popularity, while a couple of thousand years of theological squirming and avoidance of evidence leads to the rejection of some silly beliefs by the majority of thinking people.
Help me to understand - if you have the necessary brainpower to be a DBA, sysadmin, etc., then why do you feel the need to hold to a belief system that is palpably inane? Why not concentrate on the facets of that system that remain applicable to the modern world, and will remain so for as long as people are people?
Love, hope and charity - forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those..., blessed are the meek, etc. etc. are all universally applicable, and will ever be so.
Holding to a creation myth that was only finally invented itself during the exile of the priests in Babylon will only serve to dilute the good and moral message that was brought by a good and moral man and his followers.
Believe in a single god if you will, but do not mistake the rantings of priests for a universal truth, for that way leads only to intellectual stagnation.
Re:Finding what one looks for.
on
Methane on Mars?
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Is it just me, or does a propensity to capitalise the first letter of otherwhise unremarkable nouns betray a certain amount of Religious Brainwashing as a Young Person?
Personally, I think is shows that the thinking of such people is mired in early-Victorian (yes - that should be capitalised, as it refers to a person's name) anti-scientific religiosity, and that is why I ignore their outdated and almost universally derided opinions on the origins of life.
RIPA also allows covert surveillance, the interception of communications, and the compiling of databases of information on individuals based on that and other information.
It's a lot more wide-ranging than the simple issue of forced decryption - which is a red herring at any rate, since a simple argument based on natural justice will suffice to kill off any court case brought on that pretext.
It does, for instance, allow the local council to mount a covert investigation against a local ratepayers group who disagree with council policy, and provides guidelines to enable the council to keep within European human rights law as it does so.
A large part (and growing larger) of investigation is the gathering and storage of intelligence about ordinary people, and it is this that has bearing on the downgrading of the DPA by the imposition of RIPA.
A horizontal temperature gradient, starting from a steady state, will warm the air over the warm water more than the air over the cold, causing the warm air to rise and to suck in the air from the cold end of the gradient.
Coriolis does the rest, causing the incoming air to rotate and form the cyclone.
It is the horizontal gradient in the water that provides the differential heating in the air, and leads to the end result that you claim as a cause.
Global warming is just that - a warming, on average, of the globe.
The fact that the majority of the South Atlantic is cooler than average could reflect any one of a number of causes, one of the most likely of which is a warming of the Antarctic leading to increased melting of the icecap, thus releasing lots of cold water into the South Atlantic.
Looking at the chart, this seems plausible, as the concentration of colder water is away from the continental shelf of South America, and appears to skirt around the South Atlantic islands (notice the finger of yellow / orange sticking out from the coast of Argentina).
Cyclone formation is driven by temperature gradients, rather than average temperature, and the fact that the (normally slightly warmer) water on the continental shelf is warmer than usual, whereas the deepwater areas are colder, leads to the conclusion that the temperature gradient is much higher than usual.
So it's not surprising that a cyclone has formed, and the anomalous temperature gradients are perfectly consistent with global warming.
One thing from the map - I'd love to be in a boat off Namibia right now, watching the dolphins and whales - that extra cold water will be full of food, and it'll be a bumper autumn's fishing all along the South-West coast of Africa.
"[When]... and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army."
Slashdot Mirror
It's clean, elegant, and only a few steps from a space elevator...
How Arad needs 30-odd processors to display SMS on a rectalinear grid is beyond me, however,
Europe (the European Union in this case) is composed of several nations with an unfortunate tendency to pay lip service to individual rights, my own country (Britain) being among the worst culprits.
As part of a long-term policy to harmonise law enforcement across the EU, this treaty makes sense on the surface, but it is the cross-border enforcement, put in the treaty by cynical politicians with no regard for their citizens, that makes a nonsense of this treaty.
Here in the UK, we have RIPA (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) which in its final form will embody the worst aspects of the treaty, including the compulsion to give up encryption keys, and allowing even local councils to instigate surveillance against citizens for almost any reason that they can dream up.
Worse still, the EU is working on a new constitution (glad to see they have one, because Britain still hasn't got any written statement of rights and obligations), and the cross-border law enforcement is likely to be a key element of this document.
So your illusions are justly shattered, but Valenti and Ashcroft are still scum, and will remain so in my eyes along with Blair, Straw, Blunkett, Chirac, Aznar (poor man got his ass kicked out, haha), all the EC commissioners and every piece of pondlife that masquerades as a decent human being while shafting his fellow man by imposing iniquitous laws on people who have no choice but to participate in the farce that calls itself democracy.
Those CDs are produced in back-alley factories, by people who hire in the tech savvy they need to run their duplicators, and who wouldn't dream of showing themselves publically by sharing the stuff on the Internet.
They are then pushed out via market traders, the ubiquitous 'bloke in the pub', etc.
It's all part of the same scene as organised music piracy, copied brand-name goods, fake perfume and the like, and involves mostly the same people.
If stopping the warez sites serves to reduce the income of these people, then all well and good - but expect to see more fake Fila tops and copied music taking up the slack.
And yes - I do know of what I speak - I know some of the people who do a lot of the above for a living, and have some very nice brand-name copies and an extensive VCD collection as a result.
His suicide had a lot more to do with the intolerance of the times (homosexuality was illegal in the UK back then, and he still worked for the Security Services) than with any guilt - he had allowed himself to be sentenced to state oestrogen poisoning in 1952, and never accepted that his homosexuality was wrong.
It's a pity he's not around now - homosexuality is almost compulsory in Manchester's 'Gay Village', just round the corner from where he finished his life's work.
Nope - cyanide isn't poisomous to plants - in fact it's a precursor to adenine, and can also act as a condensing agent in the formation of polypeptides.
The reason it's poisonous to animals is because it binds strongly to the iron in haemoglobin, stopping oxygen uptake in the blood.
Many plants produce significant amounts of cyanide in their seeds - cherry, almond, apricot, laurel, even apple seeds contain significant traces of cyanide, and even chickpeas (I think the Americans call them garbanzo beans), a staple food for much of the Middle East, contain cyanogens.
I'd be happy to use cyanide to solubilise the gold, but would take even more care over excluding the local wildlife.
Personally, I'll stick to hydroponically grown homegrown, mixed with arsenic-rich Virginia tobacco. ;)
Any fule kno that!
Understandable, yes.
If you'd bothered to RTFA, you'd see plenty of examples of both left and right infringing the right to free speech, so your ill-informed whine of leftist bias is a troll at best, and more probably flamebait.
Proper patriots are: Paul Revere, Ben Franklin, Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Woody Guthrie, Andrew Jackson, etc. etc. They aren't idiots who moan about 'leftist bias' or whatever your beef is.
Go back to playing with your George Bush Action Man toy, and stop bothering the rest of us with your stupidity.
Analyzer is a pretty capable tool - especially for those who need to use Win32 for their jobs.
It's ast least as good as Novell's Lanalyzer, and if you're a nuts-and-bolts kind of admin, it has great manual search capability.
It's good enough for people like me, who can read pages and pages of protocol dumps (it's prettier than text!), but I'm surprised that it hasn't gained a wider acceptance, or been ported to sit on top of snort for the more rigid believers.
Just look at the source - CNN, owned by Time Warner, which just happens to own 9 member companies of the RIAA: Atlantic (including Atlantic Catalog Group, Atlantic Classics and Atlantic Nashville), Elektra (including Elektra Asylum, Elektra Catalog Group, Elektra Entertainment and Elektra Musician), and Rhino (including Rhino Exclusive, Rhino Handmade, Rhino Music Video, Rhino Records, Rhino/Slash and Rhino/Warner).
Now explain why 'piracy' might appear ahead of the more likely reasons for the decline in sales, rather than left as an afterthought as it should be.
So far as I know none of the suspects arrested in Britain was a farmer, unless goat-herding in their ancestral villages counts.
The assumption is (and one of the suspects was charged today) that the group were planning one or more large explosions.
NB: I say 'British' in quotes, because all those arrested over here were Pakistanis with British citizenship.
This is very good news for Red Hat, as it provides at least three opportunities between now and next April for them to convince the judge that SCO is dragging its feet on the IBM case, being obstructive in discovery, etc. etc., and so persuade the judge to deny SCO's Motion To Dismiss and to make the case move forwards.
Conversely, SCO has to justify its actions every three months without upsetting the judge.
If Red Hat plays the situation correctly, this delay may only last the first 90 days, since there is already ample evidence to show that SCO has been dilatory at best in its handling of the IBM discovery motions.
I don't think it's as black as you paint it.
That's the way I read it, anyway.
There are, in fact, reasonable doubts about the intent and the extent of what is now called the holocaust, and it is only the current orthodoxy that rails against such doubters, as though holocaust-affirmation is a necessary act of faith in todays world.
Your orthodoxy is as offensive to me as the orthodoxy that denies evolution against all the evidence.
Moon landing doubters, now - there's a different class of lunatics.
I promise to read them faithfully, critically, and honestly.
If they are truly reasonable, that should be enough to convince me.
If the messenger is bearing a mistaken message, in a manner that invites ridicule, then what, precisely, is wrong with taking the piss (that's modern English for ad-hominem, and much closer to the truth than trying to use Latin phrases without a sense of what is really meant)?
If it was German influence, then the proper course (which I understand is less popular these days than when I learnt German 20-odd years ago) is to capitalise each noun, not just some.
If it's a whim, then by all means indulge yourself, but don't expect to be taken seriously.
And as for age and popularity, 150 years without any evidence to the contrary tends to lead to popularity, while a couple of thousand years of theological squirming and avoidance of evidence leads to the rejection of some silly beliefs by the majority of thinking people.
Help me to understand - if you have the necessary brainpower to be a DBA, sysadmin, etc., then why do you feel the need to hold to a belief system that is palpably inane? Why not concentrate on the facets of that system that remain applicable to the modern world, and will remain so for as long as people are people?
Love, hope and charity - forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those..., blessed are the meek, etc. etc. are all universally applicable, and will ever be so.
Holding to a creation myth that was only finally invented itself during the exile of the priests in Babylon will only serve to dilute the good and moral message that was brought by a good and moral man and his followers.
Believe in a single god if you will, but do not mistake the rantings of priests for a universal truth, for that way leads only to intellectual stagnation.
Personally, I think is shows that the thinking of such people is mired in early-Victorian (yes - that should be capitalised, as it refers to a person's name) anti-scientific religiosity, and that is why I ignore their outdated and almost universally derided opinions on the origins of life.
It's a lot more wide-ranging than the simple issue of forced decryption - which is a red herring at any rate, since a simple argument based on natural justice will suffice to kill off any court case brought on that pretext.
It does, for instance, allow the local council to mount a covert investigation against a local ratepayers group who disagree with council policy, and provides guidelines to enable the council to keep within European human rights law as it does so.
A large part (and growing larger) of investigation is the gathering and storage of intelligence about ordinary people, and it is this that has bearing on the downgrading of the DPA by the imposition of RIPA.
A horizontal temperature gradient, starting from a steady state, will warm the air over the warm water more than the air over the cold, causing the warm air to rise and to suck in the air from the cold end of the gradient.
Coriolis does the rest, causing the incoming air to rotate and form the cyclone.
It is the horizontal gradient in the water that provides the differential heating in the air, and leads to the end result that you claim as a cause.
assuming a standard Norfolk plough and sufficient Shire Horses for regular changes.
Global warming is just that - a warming, on average, of the globe.
The fact that the majority of the South Atlantic is cooler than average could reflect any one of a number of causes, one of the most likely of which is a warming of the Antarctic leading to increased melting of the icecap, thus releasing lots of cold water into the South Atlantic.
Looking at the chart, this seems plausible, as the concentration of colder water is away from the continental shelf of South America, and appears to skirt around the South Atlantic islands (notice the finger of yellow / orange sticking out from the coast of Argentina).
Cyclone formation is driven by temperature gradients, rather than average temperature, and the fact that the (normally slightly warmer) water on the continental shelf is warmer than usual, whereas the deepwater areas are colder, leads to the conclusion that the temperature gradient is much higher than usual.
So it's not surprising that a cyclone has formed, and the anomalous temperature gradients are perfectly consistent with global warming.
One thing from the map - I'd love to be in a boat off Namibia right now, watching the dolphins and whales - that extra cold water will be full of food, and it'll be a bumper autumn's fishing all along the South-West coast of Africa.
"[When] ... and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army."
Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, Part 1
Does that sound like any Mesopotamian situation of the present day?