They must be worried sick about the ISO meeting in February, scheduled for a week after this grand opening. It's make or break time for MS-OOXML.
Meaning there won't be enough time to fully investigate whether these specs are actually useful or just PR BS like every other "Open" thing MS has done. Forgive me for preemptively assuming the latter.
Besides, scox paying novell is not the point. The point is to legally prove that Linux does not use proprietary UNIX technology, and to thereby stop the msft FUD.
Exactly! That's why I was rather confused by this quote from the summary.
"In September, The Wall Street Journal described the ruling against SCO as 'a boon to the open source software movement.' But experts say Unix is filled with technology that carries copyrights tied to many different companies and that it would be a nightmare to open source the Unix code collectively."
Uh, who cares? We don't want their shitty Unix source! We want it to be known far and wide that Linux doesn't contain any of that shitty code! That's the "boon" to open source -- preventing proprietary vendors from being able to say "OooooOOOooh possible IP violaaaaations oooOOOOooh unkown liability ooowaaaah!" in an eerie voice to scare people off from open source! And this, a relatively high profile attempt to turn the vague scary threat of copyright violation into legal fact that fell flat on its face, should help do that.
Go on, come with an idea for a quest or game mechanism and then ask yourselve, how will a user who refuses to read or look at his interface deal with it.
Too true. I can't tell you the number of times I'd be questing with someone, and they'd ask where we should go and I'd say "This way" and shortly we would find the quest objective, and they'd ask "How'd you know where to look?!" and I'd answer "Uh... By reading the quest description. It says 'northwest just past the big mountain' which is where we are."
Crafting is a great example of this. My advice to all new players is to NOT get in to crafting. Pick two gathering professions (or a profession like enchanting that gives you something akin to gathering - disenchanting items in to raw components - but ignore the crafting aspect).
This is terrific advice, and have used it on several characters to easily ensure that they could buy their mounts at the level at which they became available (except epic flying mount of course). In fact easily enough that while leveling I could buy gear upgrades off the AH, including the occasional blue.
I'd recommend against using enchanting as a "gathering" skill, though. The main reason is that while herbalism, mining, and skinning all take something that otherwise has no value (herb nodes, mining nodes, and beast corpses respectively), enchanting takes something that already has value (green, blue or purple drops) and turns them into something that may or may not actually be more valuable. While it's great for melting a bind-on-pickup instance drop or useless (and low vendor value) quest reward, all those BoE greens you find can be sold on the AH for around as much as the typical enchanting reagent.
Herbalism or mining in addition to skinning seems to work best. That way you only need to use one kind of radar to find the nodes, and you not only get extra profit from the endless amounts of beasts you will be killing, you'll also profit from the trails of beasts that -other- people leave behind! I personally take a perverse pleasure in tracing the steps of an opposite-faction player killing in the same area and skinning all their corpses, and give them a/wave when I catch up to them.
Also, with more sim elements in MMORPGs, there could easily be real impact on the game world. Not every quest has to be epic, some could result in minor changes, such as new shops opening up, new cities being founded, factions gaining or losing support, and so forth.
Yeah I gotta admit that I'm deeply disappointed that World of Warcraft seems to be so lacking in the Warcraft department. What is Warcraft without constructing new buildings, and razing those of your enemy?
There's a quest in the Barrens called Counterattack, where a whole mess of Centaurs spawn and start throwing incendiaries at the buildings, along with defensive NPCs on your side, and you have to fight the centaurs long enough until their leader appears then kill him to end the attack. Of course this has no long-lasting consequence (they can't burn down the buildings or anything), but it makes me think of the possibilities...
Imagine if the Crossroads was always under attack by centaurs, with NPCs spawning from a Barracks-like building to fight them off. Players could fight off the centaurs for exp and loot and rep or whatever, or they could try to go get whatever materials to build a Mage Tower so you could have mage npcs helping you, or go raid the Centaur camp and destroy one of their buildings so they lose their stronger units. The players would have to defend their upgraded buildings, or they would be destroyed.
Does this seem like it would be a lot more fun? A dynamic give-and-take between the factions (all of them, not just alliance/horde) to put the War back in Warcraft?
While it still ends up being a "grind", and you are certainly going to be seeing the same things again and again, it seems like a reasonable step towards a more dynamic world where players really do have an impact.
I'm just pointing out that the 40 year life expectancy in the Middle Ages is not a number comparable to the 30 year age of these dinos. That's how long one -could- live, while 40 years was a statistical average across the population.
The point you were making that they may have had children earlier in the Middle Ages as a consequence of the death rate is valid. Just the point of comparison between the ages of the dinos and humans isn't as evident.
Maybe they're just saying that anybody who insists on using ODF because Microsoft has a disproportionate influence over OOXML is fooling themselves, because the same can be said (to an extent) of ODF.
I'm not sure if anyone is literally concerned solely with influence and the degree thereof.
The closely related topic, on which there is a 100% binary on-off difference between OOXML and ODF is that Sun may dictate the standard, it is comprehensible to anyone and thus anyone can write software to read/write it, whereas Microsoft dictates the standard and is the only one capable of fully comprehending and implementing it. THAT is the issue that many have with OOXML, that it's faux-openness. It's a "standard" which depends entirely on Microsoft's proprietary implementations.
Conflating those two issues to make it sound as though one kind of "influence" is the same as the other would be what I'd call a major failing of the study, if not a sign of bias.
Also from what I remember from studying the Middle Ages in school they had around a 40 year life expectancy which is very similar to the Dinos' life expectancy "two females were aged eight and 10, very young for dinosaurs, which lived to about 30."
Just a note about these two numbers. "Life expectancy" is an average value that takes into account the length of time that everyone lives, regardless of cause of death, and like all averages without any other context this can skew your perception. It's not that people died of "old age" at around 40 (presumably due to the harsh life they lived), they could easily live to be 60, 70, or even older. It's that a huge number of people died when they were very young, dragging down the average. What that 40 year life expectancy is really showing you is the effect of the extremely high infant mortality rate in that period.
Whereas the number for dinosaurs is intended to be more of an "upper bound". I don't know how they figure it, but it isn't meant to be the average lifespan of all members of the species, even those killed young. It's more like, that's about the age of the oldest specimens they've found.
if unsigned, stick a bunch of zeros on the front. If signed, stick a bunch of zeros on the front, then swap the previous MSB with the new MSB.
Assuming twos-complement signed integers (a safe assumption if using Unix time), I'd think you'd be better off sign-extending (duplicating the old MSB into all upper bits) rather than zero-extending and swapping msbs.
E.g. going from 4 to 8 bits: 1010 = -2 11111010 = -2 10000010 = -126
Anyway, that's all taken care of under the hood in C when you copy a 32-bit signed source to a 64-bit signed destination, and yeah all the C programmers still around should be able to handle the problem admirably. The biggest problem will just be identifying all the places where 32-bit times are stored in files and other places where it isn't as simple as just re-compiling the code to use a 64-bit integer for time (which is already the default on 64-bit systems, time_t is 64 bits).
Yeah, that's what's doubly so infuriating about Y2K.
They over-hyped it to such a ridiculous degree -- not just the dangers of the bug, but that we were woefully unprepared -- that if you payed any attention to the news you expected planes to start falling out of the sky, power plants to go melt down and explode even if they weren't nuclear, and cats to mate with dogs.
When Y2K passed and their TV broadcast didn't so much as flicker, everyone correctly realized that all the hype was utter BS, and then jumped to the understandable but utterly wrong conclusion that there was never any issue at all, and it was just a scam made up by old programmers.
The truth was in the middle -- where it really, really mattered people already had their shit together, where it mattered a lot but wasn't life or death (or financial institution amounts of money) people busted ass to get their shit together in time, and where it didn't matter it didn't matter.
I don't give a shit. And I mean that in the most literal, non-idiomatic way. If I had a pile of turds in my back yard, and you were to walk up to me and say, "Excuse me, sir, if you would let me relieve you of one of these useless pieces of feces I could guarantee a resolution to the Y2K38 computer issue," I would simply reply, "I'm sorry, but those are my shits, and I'm not giving one."
You are clearly a person who has their shit together.
Part of the game's excellent story came from the fact that you were the lab rat. You could watch GlaDOS peering at you, waiting for you to complete an objective before voicing her sarcasm laden approval of your success.
Another part of the game's excellence is how it was about learning. You had to continually learn how to use this nifty device you were given. This was, of course, backed up by the lab rat atmosphere.
How do you translate these things into a movie?
The answer: You can't, directly. At best you can indirectly translate the game by putting a similar character into the same situation, and somehow compel the audience to feel involved as that character runs around solving the mystery. That is to say, something that would be very, very easy to screw up.
I see your point. A practical example of a similar movie that pulled it off is Cube. It certainly had an element of the 'lab rat' atmosphere, and the fact that it was apparently random people pulled from their lives made it somewhat personal. That movie went with a theme of isolation and nihilism, where there was no apparent scientist studying their rats and in fact no point to the exercise at all. Which left the subjects to go crazy on their own.
I think this movie could be made. Certainly you'd need good people, ones willing to do something off-beat. Not any of the schmucks they usually pick to do game movies.
I am not sure that a postcard can not be considered evidence since there is no assumption of privacy. Kind of like taking in a Mall. Or on a CB Radio. I am not sure that Email is any different but that is up for debate.
Well like I said, I think email is more like a letter in an envelope than a postcard. E-mails are not broadcast to everyone, and every server/admin responsible for sending an email to a recipient can do so without reading the contents of the email unless they take specific steps to do so. Just like a letter, which is trivial to read if you desire to do so, but still considered private.
Talking in a mall is different, because you can't not hear the conversation, so there's no expectation of privacy. And once again, in a legal context this means you expect your privacy will be respected, not that it is difficult or impossible to violate. Nobody would expect people to magically be unable to hear them in a mall, so there is no expectation of privacy.
Also, the 6th District Appeals Court upheld a ruling that email did in fact have an expectation of privacy just like letters, so this opinion carries some legal weight.
If you're paranoid (and i don't mean that as a pejorative) you should definitely encrypt, but at the same time you should be using tamper-proof envelopes as well.
You really don't need to check EVERY rep. Just yours since those are the only ones you can vote for. With all the complaining about the President I am shocked by how many people just ignore their reps.
That's 3 races (Representative and 2 Senators) with very small amounts of coverage as opposed to the single and hugely (was about to say 'well' but I don't think that's true) covered Presidential race. Which I think relates to why people think it's all about the President. They're the ones that get all the attention, and this translates into an expectation that they have much more influence than they really do over what the law becomes.
Though when you get a "unitary executive" like we have now, it turns out that what's legal and not suddenly becomes less important.
email? Does anybody think that email is private? It is sent in clear text so I would say that it is as private as a postcard.
As I say in every discussion of this nature, "private" in the sense of "can a police officer legally look at this and use it as evidence?" is completely different than in the sense of "could a malicious person who wanted to snoop on what I was saying possibly look at this, the law be damned?"
E-mail is about as physically private as a letter. They are fairly trivial to read but it does require you take take deliberate action to do so. As opposed to a post card which could literally fall out of the postman's hand text-up and be read by accident, other people's emails don't just randomly show up on your screen even if you are an email server sysadmin.
And thanks to recent precedent email is becoming -legally- as private as a letter. Which to repeat, is a different standard, and regardless of the fact that letters are easy to read, they are still considered private. So while a malicious mail man could read your mail whenever they chose, a cop who wanted their evidence to stand up at trial could not without a warrant.
We need to remember both of these. First if you want real privacy even from malicious people, you need to encrypt your email. Second, we still need to keep unencrypted email to be legally private, since otherwise the idea is that if the police -can- read your encrypted emails then they don't count as private and thus no warrant is needed.
There is an election coming soon. So for those that really fear this find out where the candidates stand on it. Then vote. BTW don't focus so much on the President BTW take a hard look at your congressional reps.
True that. Sadly enough it's hard enough to get specific answers on what the Presidential candidates' stances are on the subject, much less all the representatives.
what is to keep the machine from printing the wrong data on the paper trail?
The fact that the paper trail is in fact the record that matters.
I guess you could have the booth print the ballot and then the voter check the ballot and then put the ballot in a box...
Yes, that's exactly how you do it. The machine prints the ballot, the voter looks at it and verifies that it is correct, and puts it in the box. The ballot in the box is the vote.
At that point the tally in the machine is just for convenience. If the machine lies and increments the wrong counter but prints the right ballot, then in the recount this will be detected and the correct ballot total reached.
guess you could use OCR but that isn't perfect. Or you could print a barcode that would reflect the ballot that is printed... Unless they hacked that so it didn't match.
It's not that hard to create a ballot that is both human and machine readable. OCR is less than perfect for general purposes, but with a font designed for OCR it works extremely well.
And ultimately the point is to enable hand recounts so that you are never forced to believe what the machine tells you.
If you want to base a currency on something intrinsically valuable to a large number of people, how about, say, fresh water?
Not that I've thought about it before, nor do I think it's your advice, but I immediately don't like the idea of making pollution into a possible form of economic warfare. Not that fresh water isn't important for economies right now, but... This makes it a direct representation. If fresh water is the new gold standard, then water sources like Lake Michigan are the new Fort Knox.
I think the best currency standard that has intrinsic value was suggested, of course, in SMAC: Energy. Using it as a literal currency like in SMAC wouldn't work in reality until energy becomes easy to store and transport without losing half due to inefficiencies, but the role of oil kinda shows that it may work as a backing before then.
The best part about using energy as currency though is that scenes where a guy owes somebody some money, and he says to his creditor "Here's your fucking money!" and then punches, shoots, or lasers them would be funnier on a much deeper level.
Or just accept what you're saying and use a floating currency. That works too.
I just couldnt belive it was going to be so beginner friendly.
It would be utterly ridiculous for them to expect everyone to walk into college already fluent in multiple programming languages.
It's a shame you quit after 1 year, because after establishing the (for you extremely boring and redundant) foundation, they get into a lot of important concepts that would probably have been very useful for you.
If it was that painful then you could have tried to do what I did and talked to the head of the department and tried to talk them into letting you bypass some of the intro-level stuff.
For example, is it immediately obvious what is wrong with the code snippet below?
for (MyMap_t::iterator i = mymap.begin(); i != mymap.end(); ++i) { mymap.erase(i); }
Yeah that's easy, the problem is they're incrementing an iterator that is invalidated by the erase() method. I'm not a specification masochist or guru, I just know that you have to be careful with your iterators when you're erasing things from the data structure, and that basically all of the pointer-based structures in STL have the property that erase() invalidates the iterator you just erased -- which makes a lot of sense knowing how a pointer-based structure is actually implemented.
Which I'll concede still largely proves your point -- it's not like this knowledge was easily won, or that similar problems haven't occurred in my or coworker's code.
Slashdot Mirror
Downloading and full comprehension are different things. As my having to state this proves.
They must be worried sick about the ISO meeting in February, scheduled for a week after this grand opening. It's make or break time for MS-OOXML.
Meaning there won't be enough time to fully investigate whether these specs are actually useful or just PR BS like every other "Open" thing MS has done. Forgive me for preemptively assuming the latter.
Besides, scox paying novell is not the point. The point is to legally prove that Linux does not use proprietary UNIX technology, and to thereby stop the msft FUD.
Exactly! That's why I was rather confused by this quote from the summary.
"In September, The Wall Street Journal described the ruling against SCO as 'a boon to the open source software movement.' But experts say Unix is filled with technology that carries copyrights tied to many different companies and that it would be a nightmare to open source the Unix code collectively."
Uh, who cares? We don't want their shitty Unix source! We want it to be known far and wide that Linux doesn't contain any of that shitty code! That's the "boon" to open source -- preventing proprietary vendors from being able to say "OooooOOOooh possible IP violaaaaations oooOOOOooh unkown liability ooowaaaah!" in an eerie voice to scare people off from open source! And this, a relatively high profile attempt to turn the vague scary threat of copyright violation into legal fact that fell flat on its face, should help do that.
Still, if even one photon in a hundred escapes, it can't be too black, now can it?
99.9% would be 1 in 1000.
referenced by a different post says that the substance has a total reflective index of 0.045 per cent, which would be 4.5 photons in 10000.
That's pretty black. Maybe not "hole in space" black, but probably a reasonable facsimile.
Go on, come with an idea for a quest or game mechanism and then ask yourselve, how will a user who refuses to read or look at his interface deal with it.
Too true. I can't tell you the number of times I'd be questing with someone, and they'd ask where we should go and I'd say "This way" and shortly we would find the quest objective, and they'd ask "How'd you know where to look?!" and I'd answer "Uh... By reading the quest description. It says 'northwest just past the big mountain' which is where we are."
So yeah.
Crafting is a great example of this. My advice to all new players is to NOT get in to crafting. Pick two gathering professions (or a profession like enchanting that gives you something akin to gathering - disenchanting items in to raw components - but ignore the crafting aspect).
/wave when I catch up to them.
This is terrific advice, and have used it on several characters to easily ensure that they could buy their mounts at the level at which they became available (except epic flying mount of course). In fact easily enough that while leveling I could buy gear upgrades off the AH, including the occasional blue.
I'd recommend against using enchanting as a "gathering" skill, though. The main reason is that while herbalism, mining, and skinning all take something that otherwise has no value (herb nodes, mining nodes, and beast corpses respectively), enchanting takes something that already has value (green, blue or purple drops) and turns them into something that may or may not actually be more valuable. While it's great for melting a bind-on-pickup instance drop or useless (and low vendor value) quest reward, all those BoE greens you find can be sold on the AH for around as much as the typical enchanting reagent.
Herbalism or mining in addition to skinning seems to work best. That way you only need to use one kind of radar to find the nodes, and you not only get extra profit from the endless amounts of beasts you will be killing, you'll also profit from the trails of beasts that -other- people leave behind! I personally take a perverse pleasure in tracing the steps of an opposite-faction player killing in the same area and skinning all their corpses, and give them a
Also, with more sim elements in MMORPGs, there could easily be real impact on the game world. Not every quest has to be epic, some could result in minor changes, such as new shops opening up, new cities being founded, factions gaining or losing support, and so forth.
Yeah I gotta admit that I'm deeply disappointed that World of Warcraft seems to be so lacking in the Warcraft department. What is Warcraft without constructing new buildings, and razing those of your enemy?
There's a quest in the Barrens called Counterattack, where a whole mess of Centaurs spawn and start throwing incendiaries at the buildings, along with defensive NPCs on your side, and you have to fight the centaurs long enough until their leader appears then kill him to end the attack. Of course this has no long-lasting consequence (they can't burn down the buildings or anything), but it makes me think of the possibilities...
Imagine if the Crossroads was always under attack by centaurs, with NPCs spawning from a Barracks-like building to fight them off. Players could fight off the centaurs for exp and loot and rep or whatever, or they could try to go get whatever materials to build a Mage Tower so you could have mage npcs helping you, or go raid the Centaur camp and destroy one of their buildings so they lose their stronger units. The players would have to defend their upgraded buildings, or they would be destroyed.
Does this seem like it would be a lot more fun? A dynamic give-and-take between the factions (all of them, not just alliance/horde) to put the War back in Warcraft?
While it still ends up being a "grind", and you are certainly going to be seeing the same things again and again, it seems like a reasonable step towards a more dynamic world where players really do have an impact.
Seriously, though, just say they "can be displayed" not "can only be displayed" -- you think they could at least get that right.
True, but I think it's fair to say that for anyone who actually needed to be told that, "can only" is basically true.
I'm just pointing out that the 40 year life expectancy in the Middle Ages is not a number comparable to the 30 year age of these dinos. That's how long one -could- live, while 40 years was a statistical average across the population.
The point you were making that they may have had children earlier in the Middle Ages as a consequence of the death rate is valid. Just the point of comparison between the ages of the dinos and humans isn't as evident.
Maybe they're just saying that anybody who insists on using ODF because Microsoft has a disproportionate influence over OOXML is fooling themselves, because the same can be said (to an extent) of ODF.
I'm not sure if anyone is literally concerned solely with influence and the degree thereof.
The closely related topic, on which there is a 100% binary on-off difference between OOXML and ODF is that Sun may dictate the standard, it is comprehensible to anyone and thus anyone can write software to read/write it, whereas Microsoft dictates the standard and is the only one capable of fully comprehending and implementing it. THAT is the issue that many have with OOXML, that it's faux-openness. It's a "standard" which depends entirely on Microsoft's proprietary implementations.
Conflating those two issues to make it sound as though one kind of "influence" is the same as the other would be what I'd call a major failing of the study, if not a sign of bias.
Also from what I remember from studying the Middle Ages in school they had around a 40 year life expectancy which is very similar to the Dinos' life expectancy "two females were aged eight and 10, very young for dinosaurs, which lived to about 30."
Just a note about these two numbers. "Life expectancy" is an average value that takes into account the length of time that everyone lives, regardless of cause of death, and like all averages without any other context this can skew your perception. It's not that people died of "old age" at around 40 (presumably due to the harsh life they lived), they could easily live to be 60, 70, or even older. It's that a huge number of people died when they were very young, dragging down the average. What that 40 year life expectancy is really showing you is the effect of the extremely high infant mortality rate in that period.
Whereas the number for dinosaurs is intended to be more of an "upper bound". I don't know how they figure it, but it isn't meant to be the average lifespan of all members of the species, even those killed young. It's more like, that's about the age of the oldest specimens they've found.
1010 = -2
11111010 = -2
Haha, screwed that up, that's -6, not -2.
if unsigned, stick a bunch of zeros on the front. If signed, stick a bunch of zeros on the front, then swap the previous MSB with the new MSB.
Assuming twos-complement signed integers (a safe assumption if using Unix time), I'd think you'd be better off sign-extending (duplicating the old MSB into all upper bits) rather than zero-extending and swapping msbs.
E.g. going from 4 to 8 bits:
1010 = -2
11111010 = -2
10000010 = -126
Anyway, that's all taken care of under the hood in C when you copy a 32-bit signed source to a 64-bit signed destination, and yeah all the C programmers still around should be able to handle the problem admirably. The biggest problem will just be identifying all the places where 32-bit times are stored in files and other places where it isn't as simple as just re-compiling the code to use a 64-bit integer for time (which is already the default on 64-bit systems, time_t is 64 bits).
Yeah, that's what's doubly so infuriating about Y2K.
They over-hyped it to such a ridiculous degree -- not just the dangers of the bug, but that we were woefully unprepared -- that if you payed any attention to the news you expected planes to start falling out of the sky, power plants to go melt down and explode even if they weren't nuclear, and cats to mate with dogs.
When Y2K passed and their TV broadcast didn't so much as flicker, everyone correctly realized that all the hype was utter BS, and then jumped to the understandable but utterly wrong conclusion that there was never any issue at all, and it was just a scam made up by old programmers.
The truth was in the middle -- where it really, really mattered people already had their shit together, where it mattered a lot but wasn't life or death (or financial institution amounts of money) people busted ass to get their shit together in time, and where it didn't matter it didn't matter.
I don't give a shit. And I mean that in the most literal, non-idiomatic way. If I had a pile of turds in my back yard, and you were to walk up to me and say, "Excuse me, sir, if you would let me relieve you of one of these useless pieces of feces I could guarantee a resolution to the Y2K38 computer issue," I would simply reply, "I'm sorry, but those are my shits, and I'm not giving one."
You are clearly a person who has their shit together.
Part of the game's excellent story came from the fact that you were the lab rat. You could watch GlaDOS peering at you, waiting for you to complete an objective before voicing her sarcasm laden approval of your success.
Another part of the game's excellence is how it was about learning. You had to continually learn how to use this nifty device you were given. This was, of course, backed up by the lab rat atmosphere.
How do you translate these things into a movie?
The answer: You can't, directly. At best you can indirectly translate the game by putting a similar character into the same situation, and somehow compel the audience to feel involved as that character runs around solving the mystery. That is to say, something that would be very, very easy to screw up.
I see your point. A practical example of a similar movie that pulled it off is Cube. It certainly had an element of the 'lab rat' atmosphere, and the fact that it was apparently random people pulled from their lives made it somewhat personal. That movie went with a theme of isolation and nihilism, where there was no apparent scientist studying their rats and in fact no point to the exercise at all. Which left the subjects to go crazy on their own.
I think this movie could be made. Certainly you'd need good people, ones willing to do something off-beat. Not any of the schmucks they usually pick to do game movies.
Depends on the post card.
I don't think it'd be hard to read one of the many "DIE, BASTARD!" post cards I have sent.
I am not sure that a postcard can not be considered evidence since there is no assumption of privacy. Kind of like taking in a Mall. Or on a CB Radio. I am not sure that Email is any different but that is up for debate.
Well like I said, I think email is more like a letter in an envelope than a postcard. E-mails are not broadcast to everyone, and every server/admin responsible for sending an email to a recipient can do so without reading the contents of the email unless they take specific steps to do so. Just like a letter, which is trivial to read if you desire to do so, but still considered private.
Talking in a mall is different, because you can't not hear the conversation, so there's no expectation of privacy. And once again, in a legal context this means you expect your privacy will be respected, not that it is difficult or impossible to violate. Nobody would expect people to magically be unable to hear them in a mall, so there is no expectation of privacy.
Also, the 6th District Appeals Court upheld a ruling that email did in fact have an expectation of privacy just like letters, so this opinion carries some legal weight.
If you're paranoid (and i don't mean that as a pejorative) you should definitely encrypt, but at the same time you should be using tamper-proof envelopes as well.
You really don't need to check EVERY rep. Just yours since those are the only ones you can vote for.
With all the complaining about the President I am shocked by how many people just ignore their reps.
That's 3 races (Representative and 2 Senators) with very small amounts of coverage as opposed to the single and hugely (was about to say 'well' but I don't think that's true) covered Presidential race. Which I think relates to why people think it's all about the President. They're the ones that get all the attention, and this translates into an expectation that they have much more influence than they really do over what the law becomes.
Though when you get a "unitary executive" like we have now, it turns out that what's legal and not suddenly becomes less important.
email? Does anybody think that email is private? It is sent in clear text so I would say that it is as private as a postcard.
As I say in every discussion of this nature, "private" in the sense of "can a police officer legally look at this and use it as evidence?" is completely different than in the sense of "could a malicious person who wanted to snoop on what I was saying possibly look at this, the law be damned?"
E-mail is about as physically private as a letter. They are fairly trivial to read but it does require you take take deliberate action to do so. As opposed to a post card which could literally fall out of the postman's hand text-up and be read by accident, other people's emails don't just randomly show up on your screen even if you are an email server sysadmin.
And thanks to recent precedent email is becoming -legally- as private as a letter. Which to repeat, is a different standard, and regardless of the fact that letters are easy to read, they are still considered private. So while a malicious mail man could read your mail whenever they chose, a cop who wanted their evidence to stand up at trial could not without a warrant.
We need to remember both of these. First if you want real privacy even from malicious people, you need to encrypt your email. Second, we still need to keep unencrypted email to be legally private, since otherwise the idea is that if the police -can- read your encrypted emails then they don't count as private and thus no warrant is needed.
There is an election coming soon. So for those that really fear this find out where the candidates stand on it.
Then vote.
BTW don't focus so much on the President BTW take a hard look at your congressional reps.
True that. Sadly enough it's hard enough to get specific answers on what the Presidential candidates' stances are on the subject, much less all the representatives.
what is to keep the machine from printing the wrong data on the paper trail?
The fact that the paper trail is in fact the record that matters.
I guess you could have the booth print the ballot and then the voter check the ballot and then put the ballot in a box...
Yes, that's exactly how you do it. The machine prints the ballot, the voter looks at it and verifies that it is correct, and puts it in the box. The ballot in the box is the vote.
At that point the tally in the machine is just for convenience. If the machine lies and increments the wrong counter but prints the right ballot, then in the recount this will be detected and the correct ballot total reached.
guess you could use OCR but that isn't perfect. Or you could print a barcode that would reflect the ballot that is printed... Unless they hacked that so it didn't match.
It's not that hard to create a ballot that is both human and machine readable. OCR is less than perfect for general purposes, but with a font designed for OCR it works extremely well.
And ultimately the point is to enable hand recounts so that you are never forced to believe what the machine tells you.
If you want to base a currency on something intrinsically valuable to a large number of people, how about, say, fresh water?
Not that I've thought about it before, nor do I think it's your advice, but I immediately don't like the idea of making pollution into a possible form of economic warfare. Not that fresh water isn't important for economies right now, but... This makes it a direct representation. If fresh water is the new gold standard, then water sources like Lake Michigan are the new Fort Knox.
I think the best currency standard that has intrinsic value was suggested, of course, in SMAC: Energy. Using it as a literal currency like in SMAC wouldn't work in reality until energy becomes easy to store and transport without losing half due to inefficiencies, but the role of oil kinda shows that it may work as a backing before then.
The best part about using energy as currency though is that scenes where a guy owes somebody some money, and he says to his creditor "Here's your fucking money!" and then punches, shoots, or lasers them would be funnier on a much deeper level.
Or just accept what you're saying and use a floating currency. That works too.
Giving away my own punchline here, but hey, you still gotta admit it's something you can't do in WoW.
This video explains all.
I just couldnt belive it was going to be so beginner friendly.
It would be utterly ridiculous for them to expect everyone to walk into college already fluent in multiple programming languages.
It's a shame you quit after 1 year, because after establishing the (for you extremely boring and redundant) foundation, they get into a lot of important concepts that would probably have been very useful for you.
If it was that painful then you could have tried to do what I did and talked to the head of the department and tried to talk them into letting you bypass some of the intro-level stuff.
For example, is it immediately obvious what is wrong with the code snippet below?
for (MyMap_t::iterator i = mymap.begin(); i != mymap.end(); ++i) {
mymap.erase(i);
}
Yeah that's easy, the problem is they're incrementing an iterator that is invalidated by the erase() method. I'm not a specification masochist or guru, I just know that you have to be careful with your iterators when you're erasing things from the data structure, and that basically all of the pointer-based structures in STL have the property that erase() invalidates the iterator you just erased -- which makes a lot of sense knowing how a pointer-based structure is actually implemented.
Which I'll concede still largely proves your point -- it's not like this knowledge was easily won, or that similar problems haven't occurred in my or coworker's code.