SPF most certainly was not written by idiots, although MS's wacky SenderID carries the distinctive odor of cretinism. What you should perhaps understand is that SPF and DomainKeys/DKIM are complementary to each other, while SenderID bears all the hallmarks of yet another "just incompatible enough" Microsoft "extension" to SPF.
So is it an accident? Given that there've been only about 10^5 generations of homo sapiens, whereas bacteria do that every 2-3 years, and they've been around billions of years -- is it just that we've not evolved as far as they? Will our DNA be a lot tighter in 30,000,000 AD (assuming we survive at all)?
On this point, recall that we eukaryotes are in fact heirs to the same ~3.5 billion years of prokaryote evolution that is also the inheritance of present-day bacteria (being that eukaryotes most likely simply emerged as one branch of specialized prokaryotes). It is only in the past 600 million years or so that our lineage diverged from theirs, so it seems inapt to say that we haven't evolved as far as they (or conversely, they as far as we). We're all equally "evolved," as such, but simply in different directions.
(By analogy in the field of comparative linguistics, both Romanian and Brazilian Portuguese are equally descendants of Latin, although they have taken quite different paths in phonology, vocabulary, etc., since their respective schisms from the parent language some ~1500 years ago. Thus it would be odd to say that one of those two descendant languages is "more evolved" than the other, just as it would to say such about prokaryotes and eukaryotes.)
Not to take away from your conjectures, which I found interesting.
I couldn't care less if my friend went out and got a brand new Scion. Sure, the POS will prolly break down in a year, but it's not my money.
I agree with everything else you wrote, but what's with the Scion-bashing? You're talking about Toyota's youth-branded line of cars, right? You know, the same Toyota that makes such notorious "POS" jalopies as, say, the Camry and Lexus SC470, for example?
In case my sarcasm isn't thick enough, let me put it this way: what leads you to believe Scions are prone to break downs within a year? Say what you will about their styling, but reliability is not an issue for which I'd expect a Toyota brand like Scion to be vulnerable.
The study did not say why this phenomenon occurred, but The Sunday Times quoted a specialist in evolutionary psychology as saying it could be because the children of "systemiser" parents appeared to encounter more testosterone in the womb, making their gender more likely to be male.
I sure hope that the "specialist in evolutionary psychology" quoted above is kept nowhere near impressionable students--unless he or she was horribly misquoted or joking, of course. Because the sheer inconcievable ridiculousness that someone purporting to be a specialist in any sort of "evolutionary" anything would state with a straight face that hormonal exposure in utero could in any way influence the gender of a human fetus (with the understanding of "gender" in the chromosomal sense), could make a high school biology teacher cry.
All bets are off, however, if said "specialist" hails from one of the fine institutions of secondary schooling in certain states of the Union which espouse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_designint elligent design, in which case my sympathies are sincerely tendered.
To be fair, the switch to an patent examination model from the older patent registration model was by no means localized (or even initiated by) to the United States. The trend began in Europe (the U.S. having the status of quite the backwater in the mid-19th century), and spread because it had certain advantages at least for those times, and is now by far the dominant model in nearly all industrialized countries. If patent law reform is called for, the effort should be international (given the now quite international nature of patent law generally), not confined to one or another country.
As for the specialized language of patent claims, I understand your concerns about the potential "landmine" issue and share them to some extent. However, while patent claims are indeed written in a stylized manner and use a somewhat odd application of grammar, they are still clearly readable by ordinary persons and certainly are only slightly more specialized than, say, the language in which law statutes are written.
And although law statutes can be complicated and confusing, and written in a specialized form of the language, the public is still expected to conform to them nonetheless, of course:). The same case might be made for patents, which after all are equally as public as laws.
First, let me apologize if I came across too stridently in my first reply--I did not intend to be patronizing or insulting, but after reading what I wrote, I was chagrined that it sounded as harsh as it did.
Now, as for "getting into a state where only people skilled in the special patent language are able to understand the meaning of a patent"--frankly, we reached that point about, say, 150 years ago with the first shift from a patent-registration system (established in the 1780s) to the current patent-examination system in force ever since the 1860s or so:).
Like you, it took me a long time to understand the workings of the patent system and patent law--and often, it seemed extreme or broken. These days, however, my conclusion is that the system works fairly well--although it could always use some fine-tuning, like any decent system of any appreciable complexity. In fact, knowing what I do now about the way patents work (not just in this country but also in the world-wide system of international patent treaties), I marvel at just how well the system does work. At least patents work better than copyrights, and have a much more rational term! (i.e., 20 years from date of filing rather than life-of-the-author-plus-seventy-years, as in copyright.)
The "error" you pointed out is a formalism used all the time in patent claim language--in this case, the claims recites "the at least one field" to indicate the fact that the term "at least one field" was established earlier in the claim. This is in concordance with a practice in claim drafting called "antecedent basis," and in fact this style of referring to a previously-mentioned "at least one field" as "the at least one field" is the preferred practice in patent prosecution.
The important thing to understand is that patent claims are NOT written in normal English, but a stylized and specialized jargon and syntax that have been developed over the decades in response to the requirements of patent law and various court decisions. You can think of patent claim language as comparable (in some senses) to a computer programming language like PERL: although both are based on English, and at first glance resemble written English, they are in fact specialized to a particular task and necessarily depart the rules and grammar of natural English because of that specialization.
There's much misinformation in the parent post--for one thing, the NT kernel was targeted originally for 32-bit MIPS processors (the 64-bit R4000 not yet even having been announced at the time), not the DEC Alpha. Indeed, seeing how DEC was still mucking about with the ill-fated PRISM project and Alpha was not yet a gleam in Rich Witek's eye when coding for NT began in the late 1980s, the claim that NT "was originally written for the 64-bit Alpha CPU" is all the more absurd.
Further, a 64-bit version of Windows has been available for years--on the IA64 architecture.
Finally, do you have any evidence to back up that slander you wrote about David Cutler "basically stealing" code from DEC? I realize this is a long-cherished myth held by certain knee-jerk reactionary MS-obsessed types, but it has been convincingly dispelled in the past. Do you have any new evidence to add, other than mere accusation?
I'm no huge fan of MS, but badmouthing people with accusations of serious misconduct without evidence should be confronted.
For example, you wrote:
"That is, as long as your SO is also Catholic..."
However, the RC church hasn't had a rule like this since at least before Vatican II, in the 1960s. What the RC church does require as a prerequisite to a marriage inside a church, is that the non-RC partner agree to raise any children of the marriage as Catholics. Note, however, that this is only a requirement for the RC church to conduct your wedding in an RC church.
Next item of fatuous slander:
"and the same race..."
Where to begin with this one--how about simply saying that this is utter baloney? Please identify any recent (hell, I'll give you the past 100 years) anti-miscegenation policy promulgated by the RC church. Don't hold your breath.
In fact, the RC church is at least as diverse as any other religion I can think of, including Baha'i and evangelical Christian sects.
Finally:
"and the opposite sex."
Well that would seem to follow logically from the topic at hand, which is procreation. As long as the RC church deems procreation and sexuality to be theologically linked, I don't see this requirement changing. If you consider that a vicious hate crime, you'd still have to recognize that homosexual marriage is anathema to the great majority of Christian, Jewish or Islamic sects in existence.
Please note I am not a believer in Christianity or any other religion, but cheap and disingenuous potshots are a pet peeve of mine (generally regardless the object).
In the United States (and most other common law countries), once a court issues a decision based on a genuine question of law presented in the decided case, that decision generally creates legally binding precedent--in effect, a sort of quasi-legislation. This rule is known as "stare decisis" (transl., "the decision stands"). However, the authority to overturn any such decision lies with the court itself, the legislature, or any courts superior to the court that issued the decision.
Further, courts cannot simply generate law at their whim--any decision they issue only creates precedent to the extent that the decision answered an actual question of law rendered in the case at hand; in other words, although the court is free to opine to its heart's content on any and all topic they wish, their words only have legal effect where they decide an issue actually presented in the case being decided by the court (such spurious discussion is known as "obiter dicta" and although without effect, can be useful as an insight into predicting the outcome of future cases). So, for example, your local traffic court has no authority to start generating legal precedent in the field of copyrights, unless of course a genuine issue of copyright law came up in a case before the traffic court...
Therefore, a decision issued by, say, the appelate (that is, the court of appeals) court of the ninth circuit is binding only on federal district courts within the ninth circuit because the district courts are below the appelate court. Further, there are several circuits in the federal court system, each covering a different geographical or subject-matter jurisdiction (in the case of the Federal Circuit, which decides all patent case appeals, for example). In turn, the various circuits are inferior to the Supreme Court.
Getting back to the point, if a court issues a ruling which includes an interpretation of law on point in the decided case, then that interpretation is binding law in that court's jurisdiction (unless overturned by a higher court) and theoretically has the same legal effect as a statute passed by Congress or your state legislature. So if the courts in your area decide that, for example, use of BitTorrent implies illegal activity, that can be treated as though legislation had been passed to that effect.
Ahem! I refute the following assertions you made: 1) that I am "totally wrong;" and 2) that I am a "dinos-to-birds enthusiast."
First, my post was in response to tunabomber's statement that the T-rex is a 70-million-year-old animal with no relative currently extant. To that assertion I replied that, to the contrary, birds are an extant relative of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Whether birds are descendants of theropods or relatives on a parallel lineage, I think enough evidence exists to assert that at least the minimum threshold for relation is satisfied (among the numerous similarities between birds and certain groups of dinosaurs such as the oviraptors are, for example, the presence of feathers and the furcula). While this evidence certainly does not compel the conclusion that birds descended from dinosaurs, it nonetheless strongly supports the conclusion of close relation between the two, at the very least.
Regarding your second assertion which I dispute, I further wrote that birds "are thought" to be direct descendants of theropod dinosaurs (see, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird#Evolution)--howe ver, I did not state that I myself am a proponent of this theory (although I also did not state that I dispute the theory, either). I am not a paleontologist; and as a lay observer, I do not have the expertise or access to information which would lead me to either conclusion, of course.
Finally, please note that your apparent assertion that if birds were found contemporaneously with dinosaurs, then birds necessarily must not have descended from dinosaurs, is a non-sequitur at least because you did not make clear which types of bird have been found contemporaneously with which types of dinosaur. That assertion is trivially refuted because birds might well have emerged as a distinct descendant class of theropod well before the other lines of theropod dinosaurs went extinct; given such a scenario, finding specimens of birds alongside some late species of maniraptor would hardly be surprising or ruinous to the "birds-from-dinos" theory.
I hope you understand the context of my refutation, which are intended to be respectful and are not meant as a personal attack or to denigrate you. However, I try to be very careful with my language so that conscientious readers won't come to incorrect conclusions; I suppose I failed to achieve that goal in my previous post, since I am here clarifying it after the fact:).
>... an 70 million year old animal that has no
> relative species alive...
Except, of course, all the myriad species of bird--currently thought to be direct descendants of therapod dinosaurs, the same branch of dinosaur to which the T-Rex belongs.:)
How long until companies relocate to Interzone-like scofflaw offshore havens?
Ever heard of Isle of Sark-based scam companies, tax cheats stashing cash in secret Swiss banks, or Cayman Islands-based untaxed megaglobals?
I'm afraid you're a bit behind the times--companies (and individuals) have been using "friendly" countries to shield themselves from the laws of the countries in which they do the bulk of their business since at least the days of sailing ships.
Sorry to deflate your anti-American rant midstream, but your premise is based on an incorrect assumption--namely, that U.S. courts do not enforce foreign judgments.
To the contrary, U.S. courts are quite happy to enforce valid foreign judgments, and in fact do so by the dozens each day.
And if you're talking about criminal extradition, the U.S. routinely extradicts accused U.S. citizens to foreign countries upon their petition--I'd venture to say on a daily basis, as well.
Unlike certain countries, such as Germany (which has a clause in its constitution prohibiting extradition of its citizens) for example, the U.S. has solid extradition treaties (that are applied frequently in *both* directions) with many foreign countries.
As a bit of advice, it doesn't do much for the credibility of your future anti-American badmouthing if you don't at least get your facts straight.
If you think about it, the success of all life on this planet is predicated on the fact that, sooner or later, it dies. This necessitates the ability to reproduce, and reproduction is the key to evolution.
I know this sentiment is common, but I just don't think it's objectively true. Please see below for more on this.
I don't just mean genetic evolution here, either. The advancement of human civilization has always been about the next generation surpassing the accomplishment of their parents. Science, philosophy, economics, art -- you name it. The progress we as a species have made have always come from the student looking at what has been accomplished before them and saying "That's great, but what if..."
That's nice and all--the whole "holistic" view of long-term human societal development and such--but I'm one of those selfish types who just doesn't see much good in the future greatness of humanity if I'm not around to see it.
Aside from the obvious population issues, allowing people (or far worse, some people) to outlive Methusela poses a very real danger of short-circuiting this vital process.
Yes, so? It's not like there's some all-knowing, omnipotent third party out there for whose benefit or amusement this universe was established (at least not as far as I've been convinced). And even if there were, who is he/she/it to dictate how long we can or cannot live?
Understand, this is what has worked for eons -- ever since your ancestors and mine decided to gang up and be more than free-floating amino acids, this is the way it's been.
Actually, your interpretation here is somewhat off. In one sense, the very same original primordial cell that spontaneously emerged from the muck some 3 billion years ago--the progenitor of all us extant organisms--is still alive at this moment. Leaving the issue of multicellular organisms aside, let's turn for simplicity's sake to bacteria:
Bacteria reproduce by mitosis, in which one cell divides its cytoplasm into two sections, duplicates its genetic material and divides one portion into each of the cytoplasm sections, and splits the sections--forming two cells with (nearly) identical genetic material. As such, the two "daughter" cells are essentially the same organism as the "parent"--as this asexual cell division has progressed through the billennia, it is true in one sense that the "original cell" has survived throughout the duration--it simply makes more of itself.
In fact, we animals are also direct continuations of that original cell--although it is only our germ-line cells, not our somatic cells, which survive through each reproductive iteration. In that way, each of our cells can also be said to be the "original" cell.
Ask yourself: is your own inflated sense of self-importance worth short-circuiting that?
This seems like transferrance to me. Even assuming "self-importance" is something to be criticized in a philosophical sense (although if one doesn't consider oneself important, why eat each day?), why do you assume that people who wish to live longer are "self-important?" Is it a moral duty to permit oneself to die (in the absence of extraordinary circumstances) when the ability not to die is available?
Perhaps to you, but not to me. If people who think your way are able to marshall the coercive power to prevent longevity for others (assuming such becomes possible one day), based merely on your own philosophical doctrine of a right-and-proper "circle of life," that might be considered self-important as well:).
I'd rather die knowing my descendants would someday achieve things beyond my imagining than live and help ensure that they don't.
Then so be it--I doubt that enforced longevity would ever be the case. However, I think that within certain parameters, longevity and descendants are not mutually exclusive. Call me a hopeless optimist!
Are you trolling? I ask because you've conflated several issues which are utterly unrelated, and you besmirch "open source" as some sort of WareZ or SerialZ scheme. If you're not trolling, then it's clear you are ignorant of these subjects.
First of all, your first assertion--that "the wonderfulll world of open-source" somehow advocates stealing intellectual property is patently ludicrous. If you care to browse the mailing-list archives for nearly any open-source project, and ReactOS's in particular, you will find a very clear regard for copyright, such that any incoming code contributions are challenged to ensure no non-opensource code is accepted.
Second, you assert that opensource works have "no serious copyright of any kind." Forgive me for asking, but what the hell does that mean? Are you saying that copyright is somehow less valid when licensed under the GPL, when compared to run-of-the-mill garbage click-through or shrink-wrap "licenses"? If so, would you kindly back up this baloney with a factual example? In my experience, the GPL has received favorable enforcement when asserted against infringers in the past; is the same true for click-throughs?
Further, you seem to suffer under the delusion that authors of opensource software are the same individuals who "consider it legit to publish security keys, hacks to encryption algorythms" and so forth. This is utter garbage, again. I defy you to name a single ReactOS or Linux developer (credited by name in the source code) who is a WareZ kiddie.
Finally, the "repackaging" that the ReactOS team finds objectionable is only that this "Ekush" entity is merely removing attributions to the true authors, and redistributing ReactOS-derived software without adhering to the licensing terms under which ReactOS was distributed. I'm sure they could care less if Ekush properly forked the ReactOS code and released their own version while adhering to the ReactOS license, and might even support serious parallel efforts if done for a principled reason--the ability to code-fork is one well-known and universally-acknowldged BENEFITS of opensource. But what happened here is mere blatant piracy, with no attention heeded to the original license.
CLIFF NOTES: get your damn facts straight, stop attributing attitudes or positions to people which they never held, and learn the difference between opensource and warez, you tool.
I'm surprised your experience with NT on the Alpha was so dismal--mine is just the opposite. Rock-solid stability, blazing speed (on my PC164 motherboard with a 400mhz 21164a) compared to the x86 port of NT (remember, NT was developed first on the MIPS platform--and later ported to x86).
I run that same box as a dual-boot machine, running the beta 3 release of Windows 2000/alpha (yep, they released Windows 2000 beta for the Alpha, but killed the project right before the final release) and Linux. For a while, the Win2k/alpha box was my main desktop machine. I never had a problem running any i386 apps, from Office to Netris, on the Alpha since Win2k/alpha had fx!32 integrated into the system. (you'll recall that fx!32 was DEC's binary translator-cum-recompiler, which was a really ingenious little tool to recompile i386 binaries into native Alpha code).
My MIPS Magnum, with its little R4000PC and 128 megs of RAM, also runs NT 4.0 on occasion, although it spends most of its time in NetBSD. The MIPS Magnum was in fact based on the Jazz architecture, which Microsoft developed in-house specifically for writing NT. As mentioned, MS wrote NT for MIPS on this Jazz platform, and later ported it to i386, PowerPC, and Alpha. SUN and Intergraph also wrote a proof-of-concept port of NT to Sparc hardware, but that port was never released publicly.
The MIPS Magnum/Jazz was not a bad hardware architecture for the time, and impressive if only because it is the only hardware platform I'm aware of which Microsoft designed.
Well, more correctly, the claims of the patent are what matter, in light of the disclosure, prosecution history and other tools of claim construal.
It seems that every time a patent-related story is posted here, a million Chicken Littles come out of the woodwork to proclaim that we'll all be sued out of house and home, based on the TITLE of the patent. Please understand that the titles of patents are very general in nature, and in no way does the title of a patent define its scope (unless a really good litigator can convince the judge otherwise!).
Thus, a patent styled "Circular Object For Rolling Motion" almost certainly does not entitle its owner to sue someone who makes wheels--rather, you must look to the *claims* of the patent and construe them in light of the specification and what was said during the procuring of the patent, etc., to determine exactly what (if anything) would actually read on (and ostensibly infringe) the claims of the patent.
The more "crowded" a technology area is with prior art, the narrower the claims of a patent must be. So while almost anything is patentable, in a mature art such as automobile mechanicals, you would have to throw so many limitations into your claims during prosecution that often, someone would actually have to try pretty hard to manufacture a product that infringes your patent.
In this case, I was unable to find the numbers of the patents being asserted by Kodak, so I cannot construe the claims. Until we see the actual patents and claims, any rumination on this subject is silly.
Cliff Notes: regardless the name of a patent, it's the CLAIMS that matter.
The parent is incorrect--minors most certainly *can* own property. What made you think minors can't own anything?
Moreover, they also can enter contracts.
However, minors do have the ability to avoid their obligations under any contract they enter with an adult, except for certain exceptions. So most people are understandably reluctant to contract with minors, clearly--but that doesn't mean that minors *can't* contract.
I think you may be confused. Light always travels at C, unless it collides with something (such as a medium) along its path. It is not possible to "speed up" or "slow down" photons--only the rate at which they are absorbed by the atoms of an intervening medium, if any.
You see, the example you gave most certainly does contain the entire LOTR trilogy, neatly and precisely encoded. The essentially trivial task of deriving the appropriate decoding algorithm is left as an exercise to the reader...
I owned one of these for three months last year--my mistake was being lazy and buying someone else's problem, instead of just doing the damn swap myself.
It was a 1989 white coupe with a '93 Silvia K's redtop sr20det. I miss the sound of the blow-off valve, but the damn chassis was falling apart before my very eyes--rear diff was starting to grind, and the engine would overheat when stopped in traffic for more than thirty seconds because the car still had the old ka24de radiator. tEh st00pid = m3.
Quoth the Rave,,, err, Anonymous Coward: "Oh, well, in that case, since it's ONLY fraud, might as well let them go free."
You didn't understand the argument, or didn't bother to read it, at least. They're not saying computer criminal should "go free," but that the harshness of their punishments should be similar to the punishments meted out for similar crimes not involving computers. Is that really so difficult to support?
No offense, but are you an idiot? I ask because clearly, only an idiot could have missed the dripping sarcasm of the post to which you replied. Yet you flamed away anyway, never bothering to READ what people have written...
Slashdot Mirror
SPF most certainly was not written by idiots, although MS's wacky SenderID carries the distinctive odor of cretinism. What you should perhaps understand is that SPF and DomainKeys/DKIM are complementary to each other, while SenderID bears all the hallmarks of yet another "just incompatible enough" Microsoft "extension" to SPF.
On this point, recall that we eukaryotes are in fact heirs to the same ~3.5 billion years of prokaryote evolution that is also the inheritance of present-day bacteria (being that eukaryotes most likely simply emerged as one branch of specialized prokaryotes). It is only in the past 600 million years or so that our lineage diverged from theirs, so it seems inapt to say that we haven't evolved as far as they (or conversely, they as far as we). We're all equally "evolved," as such, but simply in different directions.
(By analogy in the field of comparative linguistics, both Romanian and Brazilian Portuguese are equally descendants of Latin, although they have taken quite different paths in phonology, vocabulary, etc., since their respective schisms from the parent language some ~1500 years ago. Thus it would be odd to say that one of those two descendant languages is "more evolved" than the other, just as it would to say such about prokaryotes and eukaryotes.)
Not to take away from your conjectures, which I found interesting.
I agree with everything else you wrote, but what's with the Scion-bashing? You're talking about Toyota's youth-branded line of cars, right? You know, the same Toyota that makes such notorious "POS" jalopies as, say, the Camry and Lexus SC470, for example?
In case my sarcasm isn't thick enough, let me put it this way: what leads you to believe Scions are prone to break downs within a year? Say what you will about their styling, but reliability is not an issue for which I'd expect a Toyota brand like Scion to be vulnerable.
All bets are off, however, if said "specialist" hails from one of the fine institutions of secondary schooling in certain states of the Union which espouse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_designint elligent design, in which case my sympathies are sincerely tendered.
As for the specialized language of patent claims, I understand your concerns about the potential "landmine" issue and share them to some extent. However, while patent claims are indeed written in a stylized manner and use a somewhat odd application of grammar, they are still clearly readable by ordinary persons and certainly are only slightly more specialized than, say, the language in which law statutes are written.
And although law statutes can be complicated and confusing, and written in a specialized form of the language, the public is still expected to conform to them nonetheless, of course :). The same case might be made for patents, which after all are equally as public as laws.
Now, as for "getting into a state where only people skilled in the special patent language are able to understand the meaning of a patent"--frankly, we reached that point about, say, 150 years ago with the first shift from a patent-registration system (established in the 1780s) to the current patent-examination system in force ever since the 1860s or so :).
Like you, it took me a long time to understand the workings of the patent system and patent law--and often, it seemed extreme or broken. These days, however, my conclusion is that the system works fairly well--although it could always use some fine-tuning, like any decent system of any appreciable complexity. In fact, knowing what I do now about the way patents work (not just in this country but also in the world-wide system of international patent treaties), I marvel at just how well the system does work. At least patents work better than copyrights, and have a much more rational term! (i.e., 20 years from date of filing rather than life-of-the-author-plus-seventy-years, as in copyright.)
The important thing to understand is that patent claims are NOT written in normal English, but a stylized and specialized jargon and syntax that have been developed over the decades in response to the requirements of patent law and various court decisions. You can think of patent claim language as comparable (in some senses) to a computer programming language like PERL: although both are based on English, and at first glance resemble written English, they are in fact specialized to a particular task and necessarily depart the rules and grammar of natural English because of that specialization.
Further, a 64-bit version of Windows has been available for years--on the IA64 architecture.
Finally, do you have any evidence to back up that slander you wrote about David Cutler "basically stealing" code from DEC? I realize this is a long-cherished myth held by certain knee-jerk reactionary MS-obsessed types, but it has been convincingly dispelled in the past. Do you have any new evidence to add, other than mere accusation?
I'm no huge fan of MS, but badmouthing people with accusations of serious misconduct without evidence should be confronted.
For example, you wrote: "That is, as long as your SO is also Catholic ..."
However, the RC church hasn't had a rule like this since at least before Vatican II, in the 1960s. What the RC church does require as a prerequisite to a marriage inside a church, is that the non-RC partner agree to raise any children of the marriage as Catholics. Note, however, that this is only a requirement for the RC church to conduct your wedding in an RC church.
Next item of fatuous slander:
"and the same race ..."
Where to begin with this one--how about simply saying that this is utter baloney? Please identify any recent (hell, I'll give you the past 100 years) anti-miscegenation policy promulgated by the RC church. Don't hold your breath.
In fact, the RC church is at least as diverse as any other religion I can think of, including Baha'i and evangelical Christian sects.
Finally:
"and the opposite sex."
Well that would seem to follow logically from the topic at hand, which is procreation. As long as the RC church deems procreation and sexuality to be theologically linked, I don't see this requirement changing. If you consider that a vicious hate crime, you'd still have to recognize that homosexual marriage is anathema to the great majority of Christian, Jewish or Islamic sects in existence.
Please note I am not a believer in Christianity or any other religion, but cheap and disingenuous potshots are a pet peeve of mine (generally regardless the object).
Further, courts cannot simply generate law at their whim--any decision they issue only creates precedent to the extent that the decision answered an actual question of law rendered in the case at hand; in other words, although the court is free to opine to its heart's content on any and all topic they wish, their words only have legal effect where they decide an issue actually presented in the case being decided by the court (such spurious discussion is known as "obiter dicta" and although without effect, can be useful as an insight into predicting the outcome of future cases). So, for example, your local traffic court has no authority to start generating legal precedent in the field of copyrights, unless of course a genuine issue of copyright law came up in a case before the traffic court...
Therefore, a decision issued by, say, the appelate (that is, the court of appeals) court of the ninth circuit is binding only on federal district courts within the ninth circuit because the district courts are below the appelate court. Further, there are several circuits in the federal court system, each covering a different geographical or subject-matter jurisdiction (in the case of the Federal Circuit, which decides all patent case appeals, for example). In turn, the various circuits are inferior to the Supreme Court.
Getting back to the point, if a court issues a ruling which includes an interpretation of law on point in the decided case, then that interpretation is binding law in that court's jurisdiction (unless overturned by a higher court) and theoretically has the same legal effect as a statute passed by Congress or your state legislature. So if the courts in your area decide that, for example, use of BitTorrent implies illegal activity, that can be treated as though legislation had been passed to that effect.
First, my post was in response to tunabomber's statement that the T-rex is a 70-million-year-old animal with no relative currently extant. To that assertion I replied that, to the contrary, birds are an extant relative of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Whether birds are descendants of theropods or relatives on a parallel lineage, I think enough evidence exists to assert that at least the minimum threshold for relation is satisfied (among the numerous similarities between birds and certain groups of dinosaurs such as the oviraptors are, for example, the presence of feathers and the furcula). While this evidence certainly does not compel the conclusion that birds descended from dinosaurs, it nonetheless strongly supports the conclusion of close relation between the two, at the very least.
Regarding your second assertion which I dispute, I further wrote that birds "are thought" to be direct descendants of theropod dinosaurs (see, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird#Evolution)--howe ver, I did not state that I myself am a proponent of this theory (although I also did not state that I dispute the theory, either). I am not a paleontologist; and as a lay observer, I do not have the expertise or access to information which would lead me to either conclusion, of course.
Finally, please note that your apparent assertion that if birds were found contemporaneously with dinosaurs, then birds necessarily must not have descended from dinosaurs, is a non-sequitur at least because you did not make clear which types of bird have been found contemporaneously with which types of dinosaur. That assertion is trivially refuted because birds might well have emerged as a distinct descendant class of theropod well before the other lines of theropod dinosaurs went extinct; given such a scenario, finding specimens of birds alongside some late species of maniraptor would hardly be surprising or ruinous to the "birds-from-dinos" theory. I hope you understand the context of my refutation, which are intended to be respectful and are not meant as a personal attack or to denigrate you. However, I try to be very careful with my language so that conscientious readers won't come to incorrect conclusions; I suppose I failed to achieve that goal in my previous post, since I am here clarifying it after the fact :).
> relative species alive
Except, of course, all the myriad species of bird--currently thought to be direct descendants of therapod dinosaurs, the same branch of dinosaur to which the T-Rex belongs. :)
Ever heard of Isle of Sark-based scam companies, tax cheats stashing cash in secret Swiss banks, or Cayman Islands-based untaxed megaglobals?
I'm afraid you're a bit behind the times--companies (and individuals) have been using "friendly" countries to shield themselves from the laws of the countries in which they do the bulk of their business since at least the days of sailing ships.
To the contrary, U.S. courts are quite happy to enforce valid foreign judgments, and in fact do so by the dozens each day.
And if you're talking about criminal extradition, the U.S. routinely extradicts accused U.S. citizens to foreign countries upon their petition--I'd venture to say on a daily basis, as well.
Unlike certain countries, such as Germany (which has a clause in its constitution prohibiting extradition of its citizens) for example, the U.S. has solid extradition treaties (that are applied frequently in *both* directions) with many foreign countries.
As a bit of advice, it doesn't do much for the credibility of your future anti-American badmouthing if you don't at least get your facts straight.
Are you trolling? I ask because you've conflated several issues which are utterly unrelated, and you besmirch "open source" as some sort of WareZ or SerialZ scheme. If you're not trolling, then it's clear you are ignorant of these subjects.
First of all, your first assertion--that "the wonderfulll world of open-source" somehow advocates stealing intellectual property is patently ludicrous. If you care to browse the mailing-list archives for nearly any open-source project, and ReactOS's in particular, you will find a very clear regard for copyright, such that any incoming code contributions are challenged to ensure no non-opensource code is accepted.
Second, you assert that opensource works have "no serious copyright of any kind." Forgive me for asking, but what the hell does that mean? Are you saying that copyright is somehow less valid when licensed under the GPL, when compared to run-of-the-mill garbage click-through or shrink-wrap "licenses"? If so, would you kindly back up this baloney with a factual example? In my experience, the GPL has received favorable enforcement when asserted against infringers in the past; is the same true for click-throughs?
Further, you seem to suffer under the delusion that authors of opensource software are the same individuals who "consider it legit to publish security keys, hacks to encryption algorythms" and so forth. This is utter garbage, again. I defy you to name a single ReactOS or Linux developer (credited by name in the source code) who is a WareZ kiddie.
Finally, the "repackaging" that the ReactOS team finds objectionable is only that this "Ekush" entity is merely removing attributions to the true authors, and redistributing ReactOS-derived software without adhering to the licensing terms under which ReactOS was distributed. I'm sure they could care less if Ekush properly forked the ReactOS code and released their own version while adhering to the ReactOS license, and might even support serious parallel efforts if done for a principled reason--the ability to code-fork is one well-known and universally-acknowldged BENEFITS of opensource. But what happened here is mere blatant piracy, with no attention heeded to the original license.
CLIFF NOTES: get your damn facts straight, stop attributing attitudes or positions to people which they never held, and learn the difference between opensource and warez, you tool.
I'm surprised your experience with NT on the Alpha was so dismal--mine is just the opposite. Rock-solid stability, blazing speed (on my PC164 motherboard with a 400mhz 21164a) compared to the x86 port of NT (remember, NT was developed first on the MIPS platform--and later ported to x86).
I run that same box as a dual-boot machine, running the beta 3 release of Windows 2000/alpha (yep, they released Windows 2000 beta for the Alpha, but killed the project right before the final release) and Linux. For a while, the Win2k/alpha box was my main desktop machine. I never had a problem running any i386 apps, from Office to Netris, on the Alpha since Win2k/alpha had fx!32 integrated into the system. (you'll recall that fx!32 was DEC's binary translator-cum-recompiler, which was a really ingenious little tool to recompile i386 binaries into native Alpha code).
My MIPS Magnum, with its little R4000PC and 128 megs of RAM, also runs NT 4.0 on occasion, although it spends most of its time in NetBSD. The MIPS Magnum was in fact based on the Jazz architecture, which Microsoft developed in-house specifically for writing NT. As mentioned, MS wrote NT for MIPS on this Jazz platform, and later ported it to i386, PowerPC, and Alpha. SUN and Intergraph also wrote a proof-of-concept port of NT to Sparc hardware, but that port was never released publicly.
The MIPS Magnum/Jazz was not a bad hardware architecture for the time, and impressive if only because it is the only hardware platform I'm aware of which Microsoft designed.
Well, more correctly, the claims of the patent are what matter, in light of the disclosure, prosecution history and other tools of claim construal.
It seems that every time a patent-related story is posted here, a million Chicken Littles come out of the woodwork to proclaim that we'll all be sued out of house and home, based on the TITLE of the patent. Please understand that the titles of patents are very general in nature, and in no way does the title of a patent define its scope (unless a really good litigator can convince the judge otherwise!).
Thus, a patent styled "Circular Object For Rolling Motion" almost certainly does not entitle its owner to sue someone who makes wheels--rather, you must look to the *claims* of the patent and construe them in light of the specification and what was said during the procuring of the patent, etc., to determine exactly what (if anything) would actually read on (and ostensibly infringe) the claims of the patent.
The more "crowded" a technology area is with prior art, the narrower the claims of a patent must be. So while almost anything is patentable, in a mature art such as automobile mechanicals, you would have to throw so many limitations into your claims during prosecution that often, someone would actually have to try pretty hard to manufacture a product that infringes your patent.
In this case, I was unable to find the numbers of the patents being asserted by Kodak, so I cannot construe the claims. Until we see the actual patents and claims, any rumination on this subject is silly.
Cliff Notes: regardless the name of a patent, it's the CLAIMS that matter.
The parent is incorrect--minors most certainly *can* own property. What made you think minors can't own anything?
Moreover, they also can enter contracts.
However, minors do have the ability to avoid their obligations under any contract they enter with an adult, except for certain exceptions. So most people are understandably reluctant to contract with minors, clearly--but that doesn't mean that minors *can't* contract.
I think you may be confused. Light always travels at C, unless it collides with something (such as a medium) along its path. It is not possible to "speed up" or "slow down" photons--only the rate at which they are absorbed by the atoms of an intervening medium, if any.
You see, the example you gave most certainly does contain the entire LOTR trilogy, neatly and precisely encoded. The essentially trivial task of deriving the appropriate decoding algorithm is left as an exercise to the reader...
I owned one of these for three months last year--my mistake was being lazy and buying someone else's problem, instead of just doing the damn swap myself.
It was a 1989 white coupe with a '93 Silvia K's redtop sr20det. I miss the sound of the blow-off valve, but the damn chassis was falling apart before my very eyes--rear diff was starting to grind, and the engine would overheat when stopped in traffic for more than thirty seconds because the car still had the old ka24de radiator. tEh st00pid = m3.
Quoth the Rave,,, err, Anonymous Coward:
"Oh, well, in that case, since it's ONLY fraud, might as well let them go free."
You didn't understand the argument, or didn't bother to read it, at least. They're not saying computer criminal should "go free," but that the harshness of their punishments should be similar to the punishments meted out for similar crimes not involving computers. Is that really so difficult to support?
No offense, but are you an idiot? I ask because clearly, only an idiot could have missed the dripping sarcasm of the post to which you replied. Yet you flamed away anyway, never bothering to READ what people have written...
No offense, but are you an idiot? I ask because clearly, only an idiot could have missed the dripping sarcasm of the post to which you replied.
Yet you flamed away anyway, never bothering to READ what people have written...