If it was wrong, then withdraw the paper because it is wrong. Why mention creationism at all. Oh wait, he didn't realize it was wrong until it was quoted by creationists, and we know THEY can't be right, so it was withdrawn BECAUSE of them, not because it was wrong.
You should withdraw this post because it is wrong.
He re-read the paper because of the quotes by creationists. It was re-reading the paper that revealed the errors in the paper. It was the errors is the paper that caused him to withdraw it.
Do you get it? He withdrew the paper because it was wrong. Creationists drove him to discover that it was wrong, but their quotes are not WHY it was withdrawn.
I don't have a problem with the scientific method. However Evolution isn't PART of the scientific method, because it hasn't predicted ANYTHING.
Of course it has. Experiments done on flies and bacteria have borne out the predictions of evolution, and frequently we discover fossils belonging to an intermediary species predicted by evolution. Hell, DNA itself was predicted by evolutionary theory, in particular a biological method of passing traits from parent to offspring that does NOT include traits acquired during life.
When scientists can create life from inert matter, I'll agree that evolution conforms to the scientific method
Evolution does not attempt to explain the origins of life, it only explains the diversification of life. Stop acting like you respect the scientific method when you can't even apply it.
I suppose that's true from some perspective, since Ireland was part of the United Kingdom and thus England wasn't "other countries". But it is you who needs to learn some history, since you obviously don't know a damn thing about how England ruled Ireland, and where the majority of Irish crops went.
Hint: The Irish don't just love potatoes so much that given the choice they would still grow nothing else.
The Irish Potato Famine happened because potato crops were the only thing they could grow on tiny plots of land in sufficient quantity to both pay their English Lords and feed themselves (the latter being the optional part), so when the potato crop failed they didn't have any other food. Other areas had a more diverse potato crop, but more importantly they had other crops entirely and thus even had all their potatoes died, it wouldn't have caused a famine (or at least not anywhere near the scale of the Great Famine) because they had other food to eat. The Irish had no other food source by design of the English, thus causing mass starvation.
There's still a lesson in diversity and computer security to be learned here. But it includes the harsher lesson that human leaders often don't care about the necessity for diversity and the cost to security (and thus the IT department), and can impose a homogeneity that is even worse than an IT department that just didn't consider diversity to be important.
They believe that having rolled many sixes recently, they are "due for a 1 or a 2" even though the probability of rolling a particular number on a die is independent of previous rolls.
My goodness, this is simply untruth! While it may be so in the white halls of academia, where such things as "fair dice" and "independent events" are bandied about as though they actually exist in their perfect mathematical forms, it isn't so in the harsh reality of the craps table! Allow me to explain. You see, when you roll a die and it lands as a six, this means that the one side is facing down. While bouncing and rolling each side of the die will contact the table only momentarily, but just prior to stopping the die will have one side contacting the table and will move ever so slightly until friction eliminates its remaining kinetic energy. This friction creates heat on the one, which is held in by the felt table, while the six is facing up and exposed to the air currents and thus is cooled. As hot objects expand and cool objects contract, and a less dense object is more buoyant than a dense one, this creates a natural tendency for the subsequent roll to favor landing one-up rather than six-up. Successive rolls of six will only increase this heat differential. So you see, the gambler's intuition is correct that they are "due" for a one as the odds every increasingly push the die in that direction.
I have myself used this fact to acquire vast sums of money from casinos, to the point where I was able to purchase a casino myself. You should come and visit and play at my craps table. I'm sure with my the knowledge I've given you, you will soon be buying the casino from me!
I wouldn't assume it's selling out everywhere anymore. I don't think Austin is typical, we have higher than the normal geeks-per-capita. There's plenty of anecdotal evidence of people in cities who find them readily. It would probably be safe to say that it is selling -nearly- the amount shipped. In either case Nintendo's accountants at least probably aren't worried about the difference.:)
Isn't it a bit odd that Sony or MS have to release a major game to increase sales, but nintendo can sell on it's hype alone?
Of course what you meant to say is that "but Nintendo can sell based on its existing game library alone?"
Or are you seriously suggesting that the Wii is selling based on hype, but Halo 3/Xbox360 is not... despite the huge marketing campaign designed to hype the game.
The bottom line is that regardless of whether you personally like the Wii or not, many, many people do like the Wii and are going to buy one and find the existing library of games very fun.
What this really means is that there were a lot of people who didn't find the Xbox360 interesting enough to buy until it got its own Halo game.
See, you're still operating under the delusion that because the courts are only capable of exercising their Constitutionally exclusive right to decide issues of law under the auspices of a court case, that their decision has no effect anywhere else, and that other people have the power to make binding decisions on the interpretation of law elsewhere.
This is not true. The Attorney General can never make a binding decision on a matter of law. Much like your personal lawyer can give you legal advice which you are free to act upon, his statement that something is legal or not does not make it so. The AG saying spying is legal or not does not make it so, so even if he says "this is legal" and Bush acts upon it, that does not mean it is legal. That's not what "Separation of Powers" means. It means that the Executive branch has some powers which do NOT include deciding issues of law, and the Judicial branch DOES have this power while not having any of the powers of the executive branch. If the Court has not had the opportunity to decide an issue of law because no case has been brought, that does NOT mean that someone else (like the AG) gets to decide, it means the issue is UNDECIDED because ONLY the judiciary has that power.
A clear example of this was when the former Attorney General Ashcroft actually said that the NSA program was illegal, but Bush went ahead with it anyway. Not even George Bush was operating under the un-Constitutional irrational belief that the AG's opinion is in any way binding. But for some reason you are.
And you're also wrong that the 4th Amendment requirement for warrants for searches only matters in criminal prosecutions. It is the LAW, and the law doesn't only apply in a courtroom. A courtroom is just the place where you get your ass handed to you by the a judge for breaking the law. If the police search your home without a warrant, not only will any prosecution they bring against you be thrown out, but then you can turn around and sue the police department, once again bringing the issue before the court, and if they decide in your favor then the appropriate penalties will be applied to the government. If the police department's legal counsel told them that the warrantless search was legal, that is irrelevant.
If the police don't bring any criminal charges against you, you can still sue them for the illegal search, because they broke the law. You are utterly wrong that due process for convictions is the only reason the 4th matters. It matters because a warrantless search is illegal under the Constitution.
You say regarding the precedent of requiring warrants that "they must be respected by the executive branch of government in order to get conviction in criminal cases" which demonstrates your profound misunderstanding. The reality is that they must respect this precedent because to do otherwise would be illegal, and absolutely charges can be brought against the government for breaking the law. That is why they must comply with the 4th Amendment.
This ties in with your delusion that court decisions only impact the other branches of government when they are required to interact with the courts, i.e. criminal prosecutions the executive branch wishes to bring. This is blatantly false. Court precedent frequently causes sweeping changes to how the Executive branch is allowed to operate in things that have nothing to do with any future criminal prosecutions they might want to get. A recent example was when someone challenged the military (i.e. executive, non-judicial) tribunals to try terror suspects, and when the court issued their decision that these tribunals as designed were illegal, the military (i.e. executive) had to STOP and CHANGE how they formed their tribunals, even though they were EXPLICITLY not for the purpose of traditional criminal prosecution.
Maybe you should call them up and let them know that the court's precedents are non-binding outside
Why do they use the term 0,5kg, when they could have said 500g?
Smaller numbers are easier to conceptualize, regardless of the units.
And at the opposite end of the scale, CPUs are described using hundredths of nanometers. e.g. Intel's 0.45nm vs. AMD's 0.90nm architecture. Switch to picometers already.
Because Intel's latest process is not 0.45nm, they're 45 nm. They used to say a few years ago ".13 micron" meaning micrometers or 130nm, but once they got below 100 nm they switched which should have made you happy but you weren't reading the measurements right in the first place so you're still pissed, but also wrong. Or from the future. Who can tell these days?
What are you saying? That if I call 911 saying there's somebody in my house who's already killed somebody and is about to kill me, that they should first go to the court and ask for a warrant before coming over to my house to try to, you know, stop me from being killed? How exactly is that supposed to go down at the courthouse, anyway?
SWAT: "Hey, Your Honor. We just got a 911 call down at dispatch and some guy says some crazy guy is in his house and about to kill him."
Judge: "My goodness! I assume your team is en route, and you're in communication with them so if they arrive and feel they have to break into the house to make sure the occupant is safe that you will have my approval? I appreciate your diligence. Send me the phone record with the address and I'll have a search warrant for you in no time."
SWAT: "Actually, we haven't sent a team yet. We were waiting for the warrant first, before taking any action. I mean, what if the call was just a sick prank?"
Judge: "What? Why? It's not like I can tell if it's a prank or not. How will we know until you send a team over to investigate? And you'd better hurry, because if it's not a prank, someone's life will be in danger. Tell your team not to wait on the paper work, you have clearly established probable cause and can act as you feel is necessary on the scene."
SWAT: "I don't know. A buddy of mine who posts on slashdot said something like I should always verify before responding... though now that you mention it... not sure how that works. I mean, I guess we could have just gone there and approached as though it were a live fire situation, but cautious and alert, like we were trained, and if it's a mistake and we just find some guy walking around his back yard we'll try not to scare him too bad."
Judge: "If it's just some guy, he'll probably be pretty scared. But better safe than sorry."
SWAT: "Oh, I just got a call. Turns out it was real. Shooter killed the caller, then himself. Oopsie!"
I mean seriously. The SWAT team can't verify that the phone company caller ID system is accurate and free of bugs in the time between a call and them hauling ass to the possible victim's house. They need to respond in a timely fashion to such things, and the law and court rulings are on their side here that in these circumstances they can proceed without a warrant. There's really nothing they could have done better -- they arrived at the scene, the only place any "verification" is possible, and when the situation was different they drew down.
The part that matters -- now that they know the system is hackable, what do they do to fix it? This part really has little to do with SWAT, it's more to do with the department and how they can press the telcos.
Uh... what constitution is that in? It's not in the US Constitution.
Hundreds of years of precident have establish that 4th Ammendment rights apply to mail, telegraph, telephone, and recently email and SMS messages. You've actually heard of the 4th right, and it's application to wiretaps, right? There's only hundreds of years of precidant, you can't seriously have read the Constitution with any context and not know.
No... the people who support the FISA law are arguing that a judge should have to issue a warrant for the NSA to be allowed to gather certain intelligence. The constitution establishes a separation of powers. The entity capable of determining for the NSA or any other executive agency whether something is constitutional or not is the AG, specifically, the Office of Legal Council or OLC.
Did you just hear that phrase, or have you read the Constitution? "Separation of powers" doesn't mean within each branch, that branch itself is sovereign and no other branch can tell it what to do (a naive but wrong intepretation). It means that of all the powers a government might have to control not just the people but the government itself, each branch is given a distinct set of powers that hold sway over and counterballance the powers that the other branches have over them. There is a section where it is described what each branch is given the power to do, and yes that includes powers that govern the branches of government other than their own.
Article 3, Section 2 gives the judiciary the explicit power to decide cases involving the government itself, including all branches, that arise under the laws passed by Congress or the Constitution itself, the highest law of the land. You're confused thinking that because this "deciding" power is only executed within the auspices of a court case, that this is the only place the power applies. This is wrong. What the Constitution is saying is that "deciding" conflicts of law is a power exclusive to the Judiciary, so only decisions made there are enforceable under law. The FBI (executive branch) cannot put you in federal prison (executive branch) in accordance legalities and penalties defined in the U.S. Code (legislative branch) unless they bring you before the court (judicial branch) and the court rules that the laws are in harmony with the execution of those laws and with the Constitution itself.
What that means is that the Attorney General's opinion is nothing more than that -- an opinion. He can advise the President on what he believes is legal, and accuse some party before the court of doing something illegal. But his mere advice or accusation means nothing. Until the issue is brought before the court, no penalty is applied to the accused. And if someone accuses the government, only the court decides if the law applies and penalties can applied to the government. And that decision, in either case, is binding. And these decisions, since the inception of the Constitution, have included the issuance of warrants to allow the executive branch to conduct searches in accordance with the 4th Amendment. A binding decision on whether the 4th Amendment is respected or not.
You should really read the Constitution. I think once you read what it actually say, and what powers it grants to each branch regarding the actions of the other two branches, you will eventually come to appreciate a design where each section of an isolated branch of government with a different agenda is able to poke their fingers into the workings of another. When the checks and balances work, it does a very nice job of preventing any particular power of the government from being used too wantonly.
But just to reiterate -- yes, the Courts have the power to tell law enforcement agencies that they can or can't conduct surveillance, and there's no way you can have any clue and seriously be questioning this power.
I guess that really boils it down right there. It begs the question of -- Why is a judge in charge of what the NSA should be doing when the Constitution says that the president is in charge?
Uh... Because the Constitution also says that the President can't tell the NSA to spy on people without a warrant issued by a judge.
That's the only thing the judge is involved with. The judge isn't telling the NSA what to do, he's telling them whether what they've been told to do is Constitutional or not.
Of course if what they're doing is Unconstitutional, then the President should tell them to stop doing it. But that's only the case with Presidents who uphold their oath to uphold the Constitution. Thus the current problem.
Bullshit. It has always been a requirement when ANY party to a conversation being listened to was in the United States for a warrant to be issued. The target of the surveillance is irrelevant, it's the involvement of someone afforded the protections of the U.S. Constitution that is relevant. Intelligence agencies have long complained about this very requirement because it means they have to be very careful listening in on foreign conversations without a warrant because if one side turns out to be a citizen in the U.S. then they can't record it. This requirement is enshrined in FISA, the very law that the administration ignored.
And the RESTORE Act tries to undo this requirement, which would of course be unnecessary if you were correct and this requirement never existed. But, of course, it did.
And since Bush has admitted that his program targeted people in the U.S. with warrantless surveillance, it sure as hell is cut-and-dry that he broke the 4th Amendment regardless of your argument.
Of course as the other poster pointed out, all this legal ass-covering would be a pretty hilarious response to something that was not illegal at all. Since Bush's only defense of his program is that he, as President, does not have to comply with the law in matters of National Security, it would be rather hilarious if he could much more easily claim that he was in fact complying with the law without referring to unlisted Constitutional powers. But really, why bother, when they've guaranteed the issue will never be tried by a court?
Agree, 100%. It still doesn't change my position that being anywhere near a SWAT raid is dangerous, because SWAT is dangerous. Justifiably dangerous - used right, trained right, equiped right. It's just that you use them when you expect people to be killed or seriously injured - using SWAT increases the likelyhood of it being the bad guys.
Yeah, and I highly agree with what you said elsewhere that using SWAT to serve routine warrants just to justify the cost of the program is a bad idea exactly because SWAT is what it is. SWAT can make a dangerous situation safer for innocents, but they can certainly make a relatively safe situation more dangerous than it need be.
LOL you cant really be saying this, your as bad as the Republicans who blindly let their party leave its core values (small government) under the guise of 'well we dont have a super majority, but when we do, then things will be different'... What a sad joke. The dems have more than enough power to stop *everything* this administration wants to do, they just dont want to fight for it...
Yeah. They may not be able to get the supermajority in the senate, they may not be able to override a Presidential veto, but they do have all they power they need to do the one thing they were by and large elected to do: End the war in Iraq.
It's simple. All they have to do is refuse to vote for any defense spending bill that does not include a deadline for troop withdrawal. Bush will veto it. So they make another bill, with the deadline, and send that one to Bush. He can veto that one too. Doesn't matter. If he wants any money for his war at all, then he will eventually have to sign the bill or withdraw simply by virtue of not having any money to continue. All they have to do is have a spine. That's it. There's no trick to it, no challenge.
So Bush and the Republicans will accuse them of not supporting the troops. So what? They've already accused the Dems of that plenty of times. The fact is that right now the majority of Americans disagree, and we think that supporting the troops means bringing them home. Are the Democrats really that scared of Bush's barbs and jibes? Do they really think their approval ratings are as low as Bush's because they "don't support the troops"? When it's so obvious that their ratings are low because they have utterly failed to perform the task they were voted in to perform? We want them to stand up to Bush. We want them to laugh off Bush's hypocritical criticism.
It comes down to this: Are the Democrats in Congress really just a bunch of spineless idiots? Or is doing what the people want, despite the obvious gains in popularity it would give them, not really on their agenda? Well, probably a lot of the former, but even more the latter. More and more it seems like the difference between Democrat and Republican is completely artificial, and their stated platforms have very little to do with their true intentions. The main difference, it seems, is which subset of the population they try to sucker into given them their chance to hold the reigns of power, and the lies they use to do it.
We'll see in 2008 (well, 2009 really). We'll see if they actually roll back fascism and the damage done to our rights, if the new President tries to end the war. Or will they suddenly find that unrealistic, too politically difficult, or even threatening to national security! We'll see. But in the meantime the hairs raise on the back of my neck when I think about it.
I'm not seeing any of that. NOTHING indicates ANY problem with the process. Just that they do not want to follow the process.
Oh, there's a problem with the process all right. The problem is that even though the FISA court is widely regarded as a 'rubber-stamp' court that grants very nearly all warrant requests, they do at some point require the most basic of evidence to establish probable cause in accordance with the 4th Amendment to the Constitution.
And the Admin can't do that. So you see, this is a serious problem with the process.
No, really. That's their problem with the system. It requires the tiniest scrap of justification for a search, based on a presumption of innocence, and this isn't how our admins work. If they had the tiniest scrap of evidence, then they could have gotten their FISA warrant no problem and this would have never become an issue. They didn't get the warrants, so they don't have the evidence. That's not the way this administration works -- with evidence, that is. They much prefer massive dragnets that might by luck actually catch someone who is truly worthy of surveillance, though this would only be coincidence since they are so poorly targeted. Obviously no court, even FISA, would find that such a dragnet meets the requirements of the 4th Amendment, so they bypass it.
It's not that different than the mentality behind Abu Ghraib or Gitmo -- in many cases they actually have no evidence at all that the person being detained is an insurgent or terrorist, but that only matters if the detainment is ever able to be questioned before an actual court. Since that's not going to happen, they just arrest everyone who looks funny (or is turned in for a reward by a warlord), treat them like a terrorist under the assumption that they are, and maybe after a few years decide that they weren't worth keeping after all and let the suspect go if they feel like it. Us U.S. citizens are just damn lucky that they are so far only able to do this to us in secret by listening in on us, not actually dragging us off to secret prisons. Much. Yet.
That might have worked fifteen years ago, when the NSA was only using hundreds of thousands of 15 nm CMOS processors in their surveillance super clusters (a super cluster is a cluster placed above another cluster).
Now that they have their trillion-node quantum computer cluster with Strong AI they can easily detect sarcasm and insincerity, and you have surely been marked as a dissident.
The cops will not even attempt to be subtle once they start moving in.
Of course they will. The whole point of the 'no-knock warrant' is that when they suspect that there are armed suspects inside they don't want those suspects ready and waiting for when the police kick in the door. They don't start shouting "police!" until after they kick in the door, and I don't know about you, but between the adrenaline that'd shoot into my veins and the brick that'd shoot into my pants I'm not so sure I'd get what they were saying. It's nice to be all emotionally detached, but that's the opposite of how most people would be when they suddenly find their home invaded by semi-auto-wielding men in black screaming at them.
Fortunately the guy heard them, and they found him out in the open, and holding a knife not the described weapon. But "It's usually not all that difficult to tell the difference between a police raid and a home invasion" in general is just not true. Not in the split seconds in which most of the mistakes will occur.
Yeah, people don't seem to realize that SWAT was created specifically for dealing with likely or already occurring firefights, particularly those in which regular police forces are likely to be out-gunned. In fact several departments started their SWAT programs after their revolver-and-shotgun-toting regular police got in prolonged shootouts with men with fully automatic rifles.
In this case, as far as they knew, shots had already been fired, someone was dead and more possibly to follow. They absolutely would be entering that situation with the expectation that they would be firing, and waiting to ask questions first would not be an option.
It's a testament to their skill and training that nobody was hurt. As far as I'm concerned they did everything right. The hacker, though, should have the book thrown at him, and the department needs to work seriously with the telephone companies to address this issue.
A friend of mine had the police bust into his parent's home when he was a teenager. The police had the wrong house -- iirc, it was the right street address but the wrong street -- and thought they were busting in on a major drug lab. In their zeal to uncover this den of villainy, they put my friend and his father in the hospital. Got an apology from the department and that's it. Probably could have sued, but that's not the point. The point is that they were badly hurt, and worse ever since then my friend has had non-stop problems with the police because whenever he sees a police officer he has a panic attack and runs, which surprise the cop finds suspicious.
All because of a mistaken address. A mistake. This was a deliberate attempt to trick a SWAT team into thinking they were going into a life-and-death situation with all that implies for a heavily armed police force. Anything could have happened here, and it's lucky as hell no one was seriously hurt. This should not be treated lightly -- both the perpetrator, and the flaw itself that made it possible.
Play again, get to level 15 and find out that because you forgot to pick up a pocket handkerchief at level 4, you're screwed and you have to start over.
It doesn't work that way. You can backtrack, so if you want something from a previous level you can just go there and get it. Also, Nethack isn't a Sierra adventure game. You don't need The Funny Twig for The Knothole Button and there's no replacement for that twig even though in the background there's a whole forest that is surely littered with twigs. There are usually many ways to solve a problem. For example, to beat Medusa, you just need some way to not see her. Any method of blinding yourself works (and there are quite a few ways, blindfolds are just the simplest and easiest to control). My favorite method of beating Medusa is to use a Wand of Polymorph and a Ring of Polymorph Control to turn myself into a creature that is immune to her gaze (doesn't have eyes, is already made of stone, etc).
I've always thought it a hallmark of bad game design if it's possible to screw up your game such that you can't possibly win, in such a way that you don't find out about it until much later.
It's basically impossible to do this in Nethack without trying. Like, you could find the Amulet of Yendor (the artifact you're trying to find), then find some really weird place to hide the amulet and then forget about it, like dig a whole, put the amulet in it, then fill up the whole with a boulder and forget where you buried it. Don't know why you'd do that.
It is possible to be rapidly killed by something, and for that something to be a surprise the first time you see it. However this is Nethack, and just because you don't have the thing you need to beat the bad guy doesn't mean there's nothing you can do... you'll almost certainly have something in your bag that gives you a chance to run away.
With the short games of 10 years ago, it's fair enough to require repetition, but to find out 30 hours into an RPG that you forgot your coat, and your coat contains the keys for the blast-o-rocket you parked on Mars in the pre-story, and that you'll have to restart? No.
Well, first off a successful ascension in Nethack is around 6-10 hours of play (and the game is well over 10 years old). Second, your mistakes usually have rather immediate consequences like being killed. And the game does kill you, and this does mean you have to re-play, but the randomly generated dungeons are part of why the game has such good replay value. But in the end, Nethack is nothing like the puzzle-oriented adventure-games-dressed-as-rpgs that you're thinking of.
Slashdot Mirror
If it was wrong, then withdraw the paper because it is wrong. Why mention creationism at all. Oh wait, he didn't realize it was wrong until it was quoted by creationists, and we know THEY can't be right, so it was withdrawn BECAUSE of them, not because it was wrong.
You should withdraw this post because it is wrong.
He re-read the paper because of the quotes by creationists. It was re-reading the paper that revealed the errors in the paper. It was the errors is the paper that caused him to withdraw it.
Do you get it? He withdrew the paper because it was wrong. Creationists drove him to discover that it was wrong, but their quotes are not WHY it was withdrawn.
I don't have a problem with the scientific method. However Evolution isn't PART of the scientific method, because it hasn't predicted ANYTHING.
Of course it has. Experiments done on flies and bacteria have borne out the predictions of evolution, and frequently we discover fossils belonging to an intermediary species predicted by evolution. Hell, DNA itself was predicted by evolutionary theory, in particular a biological method of passing traits from parent to offspring that does NOT include traits acquired during life.
When scientists can create life from inert matter, I'll agree that evolution conforms to the scientific method
Evolution does not attempt to explain the origins of life, it only explains the diversification of life. Stop acting like you respect the scientific method when you can't even apply it.
I suppose that's true from some perspective, since Ireland was part of the United Kingdom and thus England wasn't "other countries". But it is you who needs to learn some history, since you obviously don't know a damn thing about how England ruled Ireland, and where the majority of Irish crops went.
Hint: The Irish don't just love potatoes so much that given the choice they would still grow nothing else.
2000 lbs is a ton of hellfire missiles
Hehe. Nice one!
The Irish Potato Famine happened because potato crops were the only thing they could grow on tiny plots of land in sufficient quantity to both pay their English Lords and feed themselves (the latter being the optional part), so when the potato crop failed they didn't have any other food. Other areas had a more diverse potato crop, but more importantly they had other crops entirely and thus even had all their potatoes died, it wouldn't have caused a famine (or at least not anywhere near the scale of the Great Famine) because they had other food to eat. The Irish had no other food source by design of the English, thus causing mass starvation.
There's still a lesson in diversity and computer security to be learned here. But it includes the harsher lesson that human leaders often don't care about the necessity for diversity and the cost to security (and thus the IT department), and can impose a homogeneity that is even worse than an IT department that just didn't consider diversity to be important.
Maybe he's a Cauliflower, you insensitive clod!
They believe that having rolled many sixes recently, they are "due for a 1 or a 2" even though the probability of rolling a particular number on a die is independent of previous rolls.
My goodness, this is simply untruth! While it may be so in the white halls of academia, where such things as "fair dice" and "independent events" are bandied about as though they actually exist in their perfect mathematical forms, it isn't so in the harsh reality of the craps table! Allow me to explain. You see, when you roll a die and it lands as a six, this means that the one side is facing down. While bouncing and rolling each side of the die will contact the table only momentarily, but just prior to stopping the die will have one side contacting the table and will move ever so slightly until friction eliminates its remaining kinetic energy. This friction creates heat on the one, which is held in by the felt table, while the six is facing up and exposed to the air currents and thus is cooled. As hot objects expand and cool objects contract, and a less dense object is more buoyant than a dense one, this creates a natural tendency for the subsequent roll to favor landing one-up rather than six-up. Successive rolls of six will only increase this heat differential. So you see, the gambler's intuition is correct that they are "due" for a one as the odds every increasingly push the die in that direction.
I have myself used this fact to acquire vast sums of money from casinos, to the point where I was able to purchase a casino myself. You should come and visit and play at my craps table. I'm sure with my the knowledge I've given you, you will soon be buying the casino from me!
I wouldn't assume it's selling out everywhere anymore. I don't think Austin is typical, we have higher than the normal geeks-per-capita. There's plenty of anecdotal evidence of people in cities who find them readily. It would probably be safe to say that it is selling -nearly- the amount shipped. In either case Nintendo's accountants at least probably aren't worried about the difference. :)
Isn't it a bit odd that Sony or MS have to release a major game to increase sales, but nintendo can sell on it's hype alone?
... despite the huge marketing campaign designed to hype the game.
Of course what you meant to say is that "but Nintendo can sell based on its existing game library alone?"
Or are you seriously suggesting that the Wii is selling based on hype, but Halo 3/Xbox360 is not
The bottom line is that regardless of whether you personally like the Wii or not, many, many people do like the Wii and are going to buy one and find the existing library of games very fun.
What this really means is that there were a lot of people who didn't find the Xbox360 interesting enough to buy until it got its own Halo game.
See, you're still operating under the delusion that because the courts are only capable of exercising their Constitutionally exclusive right to decide issues of law under the auspices of a court case, that their decision has no effect anywhere else, and that other people have the power to make binding decisions on the interpretation of law elsewhere.
This is not true. The Attorney General can never make a binding decision on a matter of law. Much like your personal lawyer can give you legal advice which you are free to act upon, his statement that something is legal or not does not make it so. The AG saying spying is legal or not does not make it so, so even if he says "this is legal" and Bush acts upon it, that does not mean it is legal. That's not what "Separation of Powers" means. It means that the Executive branch has some powers which do NOT include deciding issues of law, and the Judicial branch DOES have this power while not having any of the powers of the executive branch. If the Court has not had the opportunity to decide an issue of law because no case has been brought, that does NOT mean that someone else (like the AG) gets to decide, it means the issue is UNDECIDED because ONLY the judiciary has that power.
A clear example of this was when the former Attorney General Ashcroft actually said that the NSA program was illegal, but Bush went ahead with it anyway. Not even George Bush was operating under the un-Constitutional irrational belief that the AG's opinion is in any way binding. But for some reason you are.
And you're also wrong that the 4th Amendment requirement for warrants for searches only matters in criminal prosecutions. It is the LAW, and the law doesn't only apply in a courtroom. A courtroom is just the place where you get your ass handed to you by the a judge for breaking the law. If the police search your home without a warrant, not only will any prosecution they bring against you be thrown out, but then you can turn around and sue the police department, once again bringing the issue before the court, and if they decide in your favor then the appropriate penalties will be applied to the government. If the police department's legal counsel told them that the warrantless search was legal, that is irrelevant.
If the police don't bring any criminal charges against you, you can still sue them for the illegal search, because they broke the law. You are utterly wrong that due process for convictions is the only reason the 4th matters. It matters because a warrantless search is illegal under the Constitution.
You say regarding the precedent of requiring warrants that "they must be respected by the executive branch of government in order to get conviction in criminal cases" which demonstrates your profound misunderstanding. The reality is that they must respect this precedent because to do otherwise would be illegal, and absolutely charges can be brought against the government for breaking the law. That is why they must comply with the 4th Amendment.
This ties in with your delusion that court decisions only impact the other branches of government when they are required to interact with the courts, i.e. criminal prosecutions the executive branch wishes to bring. This is blatantly false. Court precedent frequently causes sweeping changes to how the Executive branch is allowed to operate in things that have nothing to do with any future criminal prosecutions they might want to get. A recent example was when someone challenged the military (i.e. executive, non-judicial) tribunals to try terror suspects, and when the court issued their decision that these tribunals as designed were illegal, the military (i.e. executive) had to STOP and CHANGE how they formed their tribunals, even though they were EXPLICITLY not for the purpose of traditional criminal prosecution.
Maybe you should call them up and let them know that the court's precedents are non-binding outside
Why do they use the term 0,5kg, when they could have said 500g?
Smaller numbers are easier to conceptualize, regardless of the units.
And at the opposite end of the scale, CPUs are described using hundredths of nanometers. e.g. Intel's 0.45nm vs. AMD's 0.90nm architecture. Switch to picometers already.
Because Intel's latest process is not 0.45nm, they're 45 nm. They used to say a few years ago ".13 micron" meaning micrometers or 130nm, but once they got below 100 nm they switched which should have made you happy but you weren't reading the measurements right in the first place so you're still pissed, but also wrong. Or from the future. Who can tell these days?
What are you saying? That if I call 911 saying there's somebody in my house who's already killed somebody and is about to kill me, that they should first go to the court and ask for a warrant before coming over to my house to try to, you know, stop me from being killed? How exactly is that supposed to go down at the courthouse, anyway?
SWAT: "Hey, Your Honor. We just got a 911 call down at dispatch and some guy says some crazy guy is in his house and about to kill him."
Judge: "My goodness! I assume your team is en route, and you're in communication with them so if they arrive and feel they have to break into the house to make sure the occupant is safe that you will have my approval? I appreciate your diligence. Send me the phone record with the address and I'll have a search warrant for you in no time."
SWAT: "Actually, we haven't sent a team yet. We were waiting for the warrant first, before taking any action. I mean, what if the call was just a sick prank?"
Judge: "What? Why? It's not like I can tell if it's a prank or not. How will we know until you send a team over to investigate? And you'd better hurry, because if it's not a prank, someone's life will be in danger. Tell your team not to wait on the paper work, you have clearly established probable cause and can act as you feel is necessary on the scene."
SWAT: "I don't know. A buddy of mine who posts on slashdot said something like I should always verify before responding... though now that you mention it... not sure how that works. I mean, I guess we could have just gone there and approached as though it were a live fire situation, but cautious and alert, like we were trained, and if it's a mistake and we just find some guy walking around his back yard we'll try not to scare him too bad."
Judge: "If it's just some guy, he'll probably be pretty scared. But better safe than sorry."
SWAT: "Oh, I just got a call. Turns out it was real. Shooter killed the caller, then himself. Oopsie!"
I mean seriously. The SWAT team can't verify that the phone company caller ID system is accurate and free of bugs in the time between a call and them hauling ass to the possible victim's house. They need to respond in a timely fashion to such things, and the law and court rulings are on their side here that in these circumstances they can proceed without a warrant. There's really nothing they could have done better -- they arrived at the scene, the only place any "verification" is possible, and when the situation was different they drew down.
The part that matters -- now that they know the system is hackable, what do they do to fix it? This part really has little to do with SWAT, it's more to do with the department and how they can press the telcos.
Uh... what constitution is that in? It's not in the US Constitution.
Hundreds of years of precident have establish that 4th Ammendment rights apply to mail, telegraph, telephone, and recently email and SMS messages. You've actually heard of the 4th right, and it's application to wiretaps, right? There's only hundreds of years of precidant, you can't seriously have read the Constitution with any context and not know.
No... the people who support the FISA law are arguing that a judge should have to issue a warrant for the NSA to be allowed to gather certain intelligence. The constitution establishes a separation of powers. The entity capable of determining for the NSA or any other executive agency whether something is constitutional or not is the AG, specifically, the Office of Legal Council or OLC.
Did you just hear that phrase, or have you read the Constitution? "Separation of powers" doesn't mean within each branch, that branch itself is sovereign and no other branch can tell it what to do (a naive but wrong intepretation). It means that of all the powers a government might have to control not just the people but the government itself, each branch is given a distinct set of powers that hold sway over and counterballance the powers that the other branches have over them. There is a section where it is described what each branch is given the power to do, and yes that includes powers that govern the branches of government other than their own.
Article 3, Section 2 gives the judiciary the explicit power to decide cases involving the government itself, including all branches, that arise under the laws passed by Congress or the Constitution itself, the highest law of the land. You're confused thinking that because this "deciding" power is only executed within the auspices of a court case, that this is the only place the power applies. This is wrong. What the Constitution is saying is that "deciding" conflicts of law is a power exclusive to the Judiciary, so only decisions made there are enforceable under law. The FBI (executive branch) cannot put you in federal prison (executive branch) in accordance legalities and penalties defined in the U.S. Code (legislative branch) unless they bring you before the court (judicial branch) and the court rules that the laws are in harmony with the execution of those laws and with the Constitution itself.
What that means is that the Attorney General's opinion is nothing more than that -- an opinion. He can advise the President on what he believes is legal, and accuse some party before the court of doing something illegal. But his mere advice or accusation means nothing. Until the issue is brought before the court, no penalty is applied to the accused. And if someone accuses the government, only the court decides if the law applies and penalties can applied to the government. And that decision, in either case, is binding. And these decisions, since the inception of the Constitution, have included the issuance of warrants to allow the executive branch to conduct searches in accordance with the 4th Amendment. A binding decision on whether the 4th Amendment is respected or not.
You should really read the Constitution. I think once you read what it actually say, and what powers it grants to each branch regarding the actions of the other two branches, you will eventually come to appreciate a design where each section of an isolated branch of government with a different agenda is able to poke their fingers into the workings of another. When the checks and balances work, it does a very nice job of preventing any particular power of the government from being used too wantonly.
But just to reiterate -- yes, the Courts have the power to tell law enforcement agencies that they can or can't conduct surveillance, and there's no way you can have any clue and seriously be questioning this power.
I guess that really boils it down right there. It begs the question of -- Why is a judge in charge of what the NSA should be doing when the Constitution says that the president is in charge?
Uh... Because the Constitution also says that the President can't tell the NSA to spy on people without a warrant issued by a judge.
That's the only thing the judge is involved with. The judge isn't telling the NSA what to do, he's telling them whether what they've been told to do is Constitutional or not.
Of course if what they're doing is Unconstitutional, then the President should tell them to stop doing it. But that's only the case with Presidents who uphold their oath to uphold the Constitution. Thus the current problem.
Bullshit. It has always been a requirement when ANY party to a conversation being listened to was in the United States for a warrant to be issued. The target of the surveillance is irrelevant, it's the involvement of someone afforded the protections of the U.S. Constitution that is relevant. Intelligence agencies have long complained about this very requirement because it means they have to be very careful listening in on foreign conversations without a warrant because if one side turns out to be a citizen in the U.S. then they can't record it. This requirement is enshrined in FISA, the very law that the administration ignored.
And the RESTORE Act tries to undo this requirement, which would of course be unnecessary if you were correct and this requirement never existed. But, of course, it did.
And since Bush has admitted that his program targeted people in the U.S. with warrantless surveillance, it sure as hell is cut-and-dry that he broke the 4th Amendment regardless of your argument.
Of course as the other poster pointed out, all this legal ass-covering would be a pretty hilarious response to something that was not illegal at all. Since Bush's only defense of his program is that he, as President, does not have to comply with the law in matters of National Security, it would be rather hilarious if he could much more easily claim that he was in fact complying with the law without referring to unlisted Constitutional powers. But really, why bother, when they've guaranteed the issue will never be tried by a court?
Agree, 100%. It still doesn't change my position that being anywhere near a SWAT raid is dangerous, because SWAT is dangerous. Justifiably dangerous - used right, trained right, equiped right. It's just that you use them when you expect people to be killed or seriously injured - using SWAT increases the likelyhood of it being the bad guys.
Yeah, and I highly agree with what you said elsewhere that using SWAT to serve routine warrants just to justify the cost of the program is a bad idea exactly because SWAT is what it is. SWAT can make a dangerous situation safer for innocents, but they can certainly make a relatively safe situation more dangerous than it need be.
It's worse than that. Now they have Genuine People Personalities. [wikipedia.org] Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.
I dunno... for some reason I find the idea of Marvin being the AI behind government surveillance vaguely comforting.
Now one of those gibbering happy door AIs, that's scary.
LOL you cant really be saying this, your as bad as the Republicans who blindly let their party leave its core values (small government) under the guise of 'well we dont have a super majority, but when we do, then things will be different'... What a sad joke. The dems have more than enough power to stop *everything* this administration wants to do, they just dont want to fight for it...
Yeah. They may not be able to get the supermajority in the senate, they may not be able to override a Presidential veto, but they do have all they power they need to do the one thing they were by and large elected to do: End the war in Iraq.
It's simple. All they have to do is refuse to vote for any defense spending bill that does not include a deadline for troop withdrawal. Bush will veto it. So they make another bill, with the deadline, and send that one to Bush. He can veto that one too. Doesn't matter. If he wants any money for his war at all, then he will eventually have to sign the bill or withdraw simply by virtue of not having any money to continue. All they have to do is have a spine. That's it. There's no trick to it, no challenge.
So Bush and the Republicans will accuse them of not supporting the troops. So what? They've already accused the Dems of that plenty of times. The fact is that right now the majority of Americans disagree, and we think that supporting the troops means bringing them home. Are the Democrats really that scared of Bush's barbs and jibes? Do they really think their approval ratings are as low as Bush's because they "don't support the troops"? When it's so obvious that their ratings are low because they have utterly failed to perform the task they were voted in to perform? We want them to stand up to Bush. We want them to laugh off Bush's hypocritical criticism.
It comes down to this: Are the Democrats in Congress really just a bunch of spineless idiots? Or is doing what the people want, despite the obvious gains in popularity it would give them, not really on their agenda? Well, probably a lot of the former, but even more the latter. More and more it seems like the difference between Democrat and Republican is completely artificial, and their stated platforms have very little to do with their true intentions. The main difference, it seems, is which subset of the population they try to sucker into given them their chance to hold the reigns of power, and the lies they use to do it.
We'll see in 2008 (well, 2009 really). We'll see if they actually roll back fascism and the damage done to our rights, if the new President tries to end the war. Or will they suddenly find that unrealistic, too politically difficult, or even threatening to national security! We'll see. But in the meantime the hairs raise on the back of my neck when I think about it.
I'm not seeing any of that. NOTHING indicates ANY problem with the process. Just that they do not want to follow the process.
Oh, there's a problem with the process all right. The problem is that even though the FISA court is widely regarded as a 'rubber-stamp' court that grants very nearly all warrant requests, they do at some point require the most basic of evidence to establish probable cause in accordance with the 4th Amendment to the Constitution.
And the Admin can't do that. So you see, this is a serious problem with the process.
No, really. That's their problem with the system. It requires the tiniest scrap of justification for a search, based on a presumption of innocence, and this isn't how our admins work. If they had the tiniest scrap of evidence, then they could have gotten their FISA warrant no problem and this would have never become an issue. They didn't get the warrants, so they don't have the evidence. That's not the way this administration works -- with evidence, that is. They much prefer massive dragnets that might by luck actually catch someone who is truly worthy of surveillance, though this would only be coincidence since they are so poorly targeted. Obviously no court, even FISA, would find that such a dragnet meets the requirements of the 4th Amendment, so they bypass it.
It's not that different than the mentality behind Abu Ghraib or Gitmo -- in many cases they actually have no evidence at all that the person being detained is an insurgent or terrorist, but that only matters if the detainment is ever able to be questioned before an actual court. Since that's not going to happen, they just arrest everyone who looks funny (or is turned in for a reward by a warlord), treat them like a terrorist under the assumption that they are, and maybe after a few years decide that they weren't worth keeping after all and let the suspect go if they feel like it. Us U.S. citizens are just damn lucky that they are so far only able to do this to us in secret by listening in on us, not actually dragging us off to secret prisons. Much. Yet.
That might have worked fifteen years ago, when the NSA was only using hundreds of thousands of 15 nm CMOS processors in their surveillance super clusters (a super cluster is a cluster placed above another cluster).
Now that they have their trillion-node quantum computer cluster with Strong AI they can easily detect sarcasm and insincerity, and you have surely been marked as a dissident.
The cops will not even attempt to be subtle once they start moving in.
Of course they will. The whole point of the 'no-knock warrant' is that when they suspect that there are armed suspects inside they don't want those suspects ready and waiting for when the police kick in the door. They don't start shouting "police!" until after they kick in the door, and I don't know about you, but between the adrenaline that'd shoot into my veins and the brick that'd shoot into my pants I'm not so sure I'd get what they were saying. It's nice to be all emotionally detached, but that's the opposite of how most people would be when they suddenly find their home invaded by semi-auto-wielding men in black screaming at them.
Fortunately the guy heard them, and they found him out in the open, and holding a knife not the described weapon. But "It's usually not all that difficult to tell the difference between a police raid and a home invasion" in general is just not true. Not in the split seconds in which most of the mistakes will occur.
Yeah, people don't seem to realize that SWAT was created specifically for dealing with likely or already occurring firefights, particularly those in which regular police forces are likely to be out-gunned. In fact several departments started their SWAT programs after their revolver-and-shotgun-toting regular police got in prolonged shootouts with men with fully automatic rifles.
In this case, as far as they knew, shots had already been fired, someone was dead and more possibly to follow. They absolutely would be entering that situation with the expectation that they would be firing, and waiting to ask questions first would not be an option.
It's a testament to their skill and training that nobody was hurt. As far as I'm concerned they did everything right. The hacker, though, should have the book thrown at him, and the department needs to work seriously with the telephone companies to address this issue.
A friend of mine had the police bust into his parent's home when he was a teenager. The police had the wrong house -- iirc, it was the right street address but the wrong street -- and thought they were busting in on a major drug lab. In their zeal to uncover this den of villainy, they put my friend and his father in the hospital. Got an apology from the department and that's it. Probably could have sued, but that's not the point. The point is that they were badly hurt, and worse ever since then my friend has had non-stop problems with the police because whenever he sees a police officer he has a panic attack and runs, which surprise the cop finds suspicious.
All because of a mistaken address. A mistake. This was a deliberate attempt to trick a SWAT team into thinking they were going into a life-and-death situation with all that implies for a heavily armed police force. Anything could have happened here, and it's lucky as hell no one was seriously hurt. This should not be treated lightly -- both the perpetrator, and the flaw itself that made it possible.
I'll see you in court, God!
Good luck with that. God is wanted in like 37 states for missing court appearances. He's notoriously flakey that way.
Play again, get to level 15 and find out that because you forgot to pick up a pocket handkerchief at level 4, you're screwed and you have to start over.
It doesn't work that way. You can backtrack, so if you want something from a previous level you can just go there and get it. Also, Nethack isn't a Sierra adventure game. You don't need The Funny Twig for The Knothole Button and there's no replacement for that twig even though in the background there's a whole forest that is surely littered with twigs. There are usually many ways to solve a problem. For example, to beat Medusa, you just need some way to not see her. Any method of blinding yourself works (and there are quite a few ways, blindfolds are just the simplest and easiest to control). My favorite method of beating Medusa is to use a Wand of Polymorph and a Ring of Polymorph Control to turn myself into a creature that is immune to her gaze (doesn't have eyes, is already made of stone, etc).
I've always thought it a hallmark of bad game design if it's possible to screw up your game such that you can't possibly win, in such a way that you don't find out about it until much later.
It's basically impossible to do this in Nethack without trying. Like, you could find the Amulet of Yendor (the artifact you're trying to find), then find some really weird place to hide the amulet and then forget about it, like dig a whole, put the amulet in it, then fill up the whole with a boulder and forget where you buried it. Don't know why you'd do that.
It is possible to be rapidly killed by something, and for that something to be a surprise the first time you see it. However this is Nethack, and just because you don't have the thing you need to beat the bad guy doesn't mean there's nothing you can do... you'll almost certainly have something in your bag that gives you a chance to run away.
With the short games of 10 years ago, it's fair enough to require repetition, but to find out 30 hours into an RPG that you forgot your coat, and your coat contains the keys for the blast-o-rocket you parked on Mars in the pre-story, and that you'll have to restart? No.
Well, first off a successful ascension in Nethack is around 6-10 hours of play (and the game is well over 10 years old). Second, your mistakes usually have rather immediate consequences like being killed. And the game does kill you, and this does mean you have to re-play, but the randomly generated dungeons are part of why the game has such good replay value. But in the end, Nethack is nothing like the puzzle-oriented adventure-games-dressed-as-rpgs that you're thinking of.
Oh, that's easy. I don't think they've sent robot dragonflies to the Middle East because they sent cyborg squirrels instead.