Fascinating. I mean, it's fascinating that it wasn't there--I always think of it as being one of those things there's a paragraph or two on in the popular 8th grade american history texts. (Although the wikipedia article is much more detailed.)
If you make contact with an alien culture you're potentially interfering in their development, and their culture might be destroyed or radically changed by the alteration. But if you don't, the economy suffers.
I don't just mean in terms of bigger markets, either. We tend to look on globalization as a bad thing when it comes to primitive cultures, but that doesn't mean they look at it that way. They may worry sometimes about losing hold of the way things were, about change, but that doesn't mean they don't want modern medicine and running water.
Granted, that doesn't necessarily mean they want everything else in our society... but a Prime Directive without exceptions is really a pretty terrible thing. It's seeing two kids on a street and knowing one of them's about to get hit by a car, and not warning them about it. Alien technologies--or our technologies for aliens--may well save lives and give new ways of doing things.
Economics and morality are sometimes on the same side.
The other person first rule and the Ladies first rule. (And I think there's something stronger about the Ladies first rule when there's a queen on the English throne, at least traditionally.)
It's post-college professional school. Law school (In the states, anyway) was undergraduate a long time ago, I think, but it was a really long time ago.
Then again, the NYC public school system was once the wonder of the world.
Small tax cuts sometimes go to the "wealthy" (By which I mean, the professionals, as opposed to the CEOs), but these are the people who really get shafted by paying very, very high taxes, yet they don't have enough money to pay for really good tax evasion, which is what the rich (and major corporations) do. Honestly, it's some of the doctors and lawyers who are shafted the hardest by our tax codes. Now, it's more important not to shaft the people who can barely afford to eat, but that doesn't make it right to shaft the professionals.
Slightly O/T, but this brings up an interesting question: can't anybody in the world use Jar-Jar Binks without legally infringing on Lucas' copyright, since Binks is a pre-packaged parody of himself? (The same would apply to the donkey in Shrek, though perhaps more so since he's just Eddie Murphy and is the same character in so many things it would be hard to argue a new copyright existed just because he was a talking ass.)
-- IANAL. This post is a joke. If you use it as legal advice, you probably deserve to get sued.
What do you want to learn, and how do you want to learn it? Keep in mind that something like half, or maybe more, of all college students wind up majoring in something other than what they intend to major in, and a liberal arts college may give you more flexibility in terms of deciding to take your education in a new direction. Also, even a small CS department can be pretty good.
The tech college will be more useful from a technical perspective; the liberal arts college will probably be more useful from a social perspective. Some of the most valuable people in technology are the ones who can network, who can communicate the concepts of their field well to people outside it, while still being able to work competently in the field itself. There's more than just IT in the world, after all.
Note, also, that the most important part of a CS education is learning how to think about CS, rather than learning specific programming skills. It's important to know how to program, but it's more important to know how to think about and learn new languages, which is something you pick up at least as easily from a good theory-grounded curriculum (given that it's not ONLY theory) as you do from a code-and-click curriculum.
And most geeky people are interested in a variety of fields, not just IT. Picking up a course on Developmental Psychology or the History of War or Terrorism or Anthropology can be a lot of fun, and let's be honest--CS courses can get repetitive after a while. Learn concepts, do projects at keyboards. Yes, it's fun, but is it really all you want to do at college?
And ultimately, of course, the real question is the environment. It's critical to learn at college, of course, but the truth is you that you can always learn things, especially if you can learn from a book or from practicing. But you don't always get the opportunity to work with the best minds in a field or to surround yourself with a really great peer group--one that's intellectually challenging and stimulating, and where you can absolutely feel at home. Take advantage of that opportunity. Ask students what they think about the profs at least as much as what they think of the subject matter. And ask how much of a chance they get to work independently within their departments.
Yeah, but if this guy messes up again, the state can't claim they didn't know how bad he was--they're now aware of his incompetence, which probably increases their liability the next time he screws up. Keeping him might be the right thing to do if they can make sure he learns from it--but it's probably the wrong thing to do from a risk-management perspective.
It's not to get a pat on the head--there tend to be three reasons people poke their head up in class. (1) They're stuck in the overachieving freshman mentality, where they're effectively talking heads who aren't necessarily that productive. (2) Class participation counts towards their grade, and they need to spew up something once or twice a class to make sure they get that percentage of their grade. In terms things that are only tangentially related, maybe it's a choice between vaguely interesting BS and BS they've already covered in class. Which would you choose? (3) They're actually curious about something. Like a CS student who's learning about handles for the first time, who thinks `hey, could that be used for garbage collection?'
Granted, those are for issues remotely related to the topic. Someone who raises their hand during a CS class and asks about the fall of Rome might just need to be whacked on the head.
Tee-hee. Man stepped out of the cave, made fire and saw that it was bright, invented the wheel and the agricultural revolution, passed through the ancient times when some groundwork for science and philosophy was laid, and then dark ages. Then he saw the new nation-building necessitated by the infantry revolution, which helped lead us towards the renaissance and the industrial revolution, literacy rates climbed and productivity multiplied a thousandfold, we climbed into the sky and walked on the moon, and now we send probes to other worlds...
But then a rock interrupted the process! =) It was always a perfectly nice little rock, sitting there minding its own business, just contemplating inertia for a few million years, when suddenly BAM!
Ah! Sorry, it turns out I'm wrong: it is legal to pass on the right (provided you have two or more lanes or someone's turning left), it's just... not preferred.
That only gets people to slow down momentarily, then they speed up slowly as soon as they're past you. When the cops want to slow down a road, they drive in the left lane (in drive-on-the-right countries) at whatever speed they don't want you to exceed. Since in most states (I don't know if it's true in all) you're not legally allowed to pass on the right, there's no way past them.
Pretty much all of the Print-On-Demand in the US is done, ultimately, through LSI. Their titles are available through Ingram, from whom every bookstore buys. So if you want a POD title, you can get it online from Barnes and Noble, or you can special order it through your local bookstore.
I've been a loyal amazon shopper for years. No longer. They're leveraging their market share to prevent sales of thousands of books because they want a bigger cut, and rather than just wanting a bigger cut (which would be easy to get in many cases, if they refused to sell books with a "short discount"), they they want to do the printing and get paid ridiculously high amounts for it.
It has been the golden age of printing for a little while, now, when it was relatively cheap and easy to publish, and the gatekeepers of the market weren't the only way to go to press. Sure, it meant you could order a lot of junk if you wanted to--but you could also order a lot of Indie stuff, and a lot of things that didn't seem like they'd sell a million copies. The profit margins on book publication are low, especially for the time and work that goes into writing a decent book in the first place--the opportunity cost really makes the profit margins negative in most cases. For hundreds and hundreds of small presses, this lowers them further.
Buy at Barnes and Noble, or special-order through your local bookseller.
is cultural. If the culture of a policing body is not to tolerate anything shady, to take pride in their honesty, and *never* to cover up or look the other way when something happens to a fellow officer, then corruption diminishes tremendously. But when it becomes socially acceptable within the police to look the other way or not get involved when you know an officer is breaking the law, corruption thrives.
That's not to say other things aren't important--things like transparency and accountability to their communities--but that's the single biggest thing you can do to prevent corruption. (After making sure cops aren't terribly paid, anyway.) There are some parts of our society where being a tattle-tale is the right thing to do, and it should be venerated--I don't mean going after people and trying to get them to engage in illegal activities, but I do mean reporting them when you have reason to believe it's likely they're engaging in those activities. (That's an important distinction--at least a number of police forces run undercover investigations where they encourage people to commit crime in order to prosecute them, where they're enabling the crime if not causing it.)
I've ever heard. And I've played catch with rock hammers.
MS did it because they wanted to consolidate a larger advertising and search engine position, and a major internet portal. It was probably still a bad decision, but who can really say what the results would have been ten years down the line?
Look at what MS Stock did. It had broken out of a major rut--a rut not justified by its earnings--for the first time in years following an earnings report last year. Now it's down 24% off its high. Twenty-Four percent. Balmer has lost $3.6 Billion, Gates has lost twice that, and even employees who've only lost twenty or fifty or seventy thousand aren't happy about it--because that is a big chunk of their savings. Now that price change isn't all yahoo, by any stretch of the imagination. But a big chunk of is it from the Yahoo offer.
You don't take that hit for an offer you aren't interested in following through on.
If I go to a white supremacist web site, that doesn't necessarily mean I endorse their views. Even if I download their materials it doesn't--maybe I just find it disgusting and want to show it to someone who won't believe it's as bad as it is. Maybe I want to study it and figure out something about the psychology of the people involved. The same thing applies to terrorism, and... well, pretty much anything a student reads, or any person reads. *Reading* should not be a crime, with the possible exception of some classified/secret documents... whose classification is beyond the scope of this paragraph. =)
As the end of WWII in Europe approached, the German Army started coming west for the purpose of surrendering. They were being closed in on from two sides, but they went to the Western Front because the Geneva Convention was in effect, and prisoners were relatively well treated.
That being said, the western allies might not have been so friendly if the Germans had gotten as close to DC as they did to Moscow.
And that being said, the Germans got pretty damn close to London.
Rules of War do matter. Not always, but sometimes. And even if they had never mattered, practically, in the history of the world, it would still be right to make them and try to live up to them. I'd rather know soldiers who were proud of saving lives than soldiers who were proud of taking them--but who were, of course, damned good at killing when they had to.
> all of the changes I noticed were done for time.
Look at the kind of language used. For example:
"I will kill you if you touch him."
"You fool. No man can kill me. Die, now."
"I am no man. AAaaagggh!"
comes from, limiting myself almost exclusively to dialog:
`Begone, fould dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion! Leave the dead in peace!'
`Come not between the Nazgul and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless eye.'
`Do what you will; but I will hinder it, if I may.'
`Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!'
Then Merry heard of all sounds, in that hour the strangest. It seemed that Dernhelm laughed, and the clear voice was like the ring of steel. `But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Eowyn I am, Eomund's daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.'
comes from, in truth:
Then out of the blackness in his mind he thought that he heard Dernhelm speaking; yet now the voice seemed strange, recalling some other voice that he had known.
`Begone, fould dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion! Leave the dead in peace!'
`Come not between the Nazgul and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless eye.'
A sword rang as it was drawn. `Do what you will; but I will hinder it, if I may.'
`Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!'
Then Merry heard of all sounds in that hour the strangest. It seemed that Dernhelm laughed, and the clear voice was like the ring of steel. `But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Eowyn I am, Eomund's daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For loving or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.'
The winged creature screamed at her, but the Ringwraith made no answer, and was silent, as if in sudden doubt. Very amazement for a moment conquered Merry's fear. He opened his eyes and the blackness was lifted from them. There some paces from him sat the great beast, and all seemed dark about it, and above it loomed the Nazgul Lord like a shadow of despair. A little to the left facing them stood she whom he had called Dernhelm. But the helm of her secrecy had fallen from her, and her bright hair, released from its bonds, gleamed with pale gold upon her shoulders. Her eyes grey as the sea were hard and fell, and yet tears were on her cheek. A sword was in her hand, and she raised her shield against the horror of her enemy's eyes.
Eowyn it was, and Dernhelm also. For into Merry's mind flashed the memory of the face that he saw at the riding from Dunharrow: the face of one that goes seeking death, having no hope. Pity filled his heart and great wonder, and suddenly the slow-kindled courage of his race awoke. He clenched his hand. She should not die, so fair, so desperate! At least she should not die alone, unaided.
The face of their enemy was not turned towards him, but still he hardly dared to move, dreading lest the deadly eyes should fall on him. Slowly, slowly he began to crawl aside; but the Black Captain, in doubt and malice intent upon the woman before him, heeded him no more than a worm in the mud.
Suddenly the great beast beat its hideous wings, and the wind of them was foul. Again it leaped into the air, and then swiftly fell down upon Eowyn, shrieking, striking with beak and claw.
Still she did not blench: maiden of the Rohirrim, child of kings, slender but as a steel-blade, fair but terrible. A swift stroke she dealt, skilled and deadly. The outstretched neck she clove asunder, and the hewn head fell like a stone. Backward she sprang as the huge sh
His secret key consisted of the choice of CDs and the fact that he XORed them together. Since he posted it on Slashdot, it's now it's his public secret key. As opposed to his secret secret key. Unfortunately, publicity and secrecy are not commutative.
Slashdot Mirror
Fascinating. I mean, it's fascinating that it wasn't there--I always think of it as being one of those things there's a paragraph or two on in the popular 8th grade american history texts. (Although the wikipedia article is much more detailed.)
Anyway, isn't this stuff fun? =)
Didn't you see this in your history classes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable
If you make contact with an alien culture you're potentially interfering in their development, and their culture might be destroyed or radically changed by the alteration. But if you don't, the economy suffers.
I don't just mean in terms of bigger markets, either. We tend to look on globalization as a bad thing when it comes to primitive cultures, but that doesn't mean they look at it that way. They may worry sometimes about losing hold of the way things were, about change, but that doesn't mean they don't want modern medicine and running water.
Granted, that doesn't necessarily mean they want everything else in our society... but a Prime Directive without exceptions is really a pretty terrible thing. It's seeing two kids on a street and knowing one of them's about to get hit by a car, and not warning them about it. Alien technologies--or our technologies for aliens--may well save lives and give new ways of doing things.
Economics and morality are sometimes on the same side.
The other person first rule and the Ladies first rule. (And I think there's something stronger about the Ladies first rule when there's a queen on the English throne, at least traditionally.)
It's post-college professional school. Law school (In the states, anyway) was undergraduate a long time ago, I think, but it was a really long time ago.
Then again, the NYC public school system was once the wonder of the world.
But my understanding is that at most law schools, using laptops for note-taking is standard practice these days.
Any current law students want to confirm or deny?
Small tax cuts sometimes go to the "wealthy" (By which I mean, the professionals, as opposed to the CEOs), but these are the people who really get shafted by paying very, very high taxes, yet they don't have enough money to pay for really good tax evasion, which is what the rich (and major corporations) do. Honestly, it's some of the doctors and lawyers who are shafted the hardest by our tax codes. Now, it's more important not to shaft the people who can barely afford to eat, but that doesn't make it right to shaft the professionals.
> I hope they add a talking donkey.
Slightly O/T, but this brings up an interesting question: can't anybody in the world use Jar-Jar Binks without legally infringing on Lucas' copyright, since Binks is a pre-packaged parody of himself? (The same would apply to the donkey in Shrek, though perhaps more so since he's just Eddie Murphy and is the same character in so many things it would be hard to argue a new copyright existed just because he was a talking ass.)
--
IANAL. This post is a joke. If you use it as legal advice, you probably deserve to get sued.
What do you want to learn, and how do you want to learn it? Keep in mind that something like half, or maybe more, of all college students wind up majoring in something other than what they intend to major in, and a liberal arts college may give you more flexibility in terms of deciding to take your education in a new direction. Also, even a small CS department can be pretty good.
The tech college will be more useful from a technical perspective; the liberal arts college will probably be more useful from a social perspective. Some of the most valuable people in technology are the ones who can network, who can communicate the concepts of their field well to people outside it, while still being able to work competently in the field itself. There's more than just IT in the world, after all.
Note, also, that the most important part of a CS education is learning how to think about CS, rather than learning specific programming skills. It's important to know how to program, but it's more important to know how to think about and learn new languages, which is something you pick up at least as easily from a good theory-grounded curriculum (given that it's not ONLY theory) as you do from a code-and-click curriculum.
And most geeky people are interested in a variety of fields, not just IT. Picking up a course on Developmental Psychology or the History of War or Terrorism or Anthropology can be a lot of fun, and let's be honest--CS courses can get repetitive after a while. Learn concepts, do projects at keyboards. Yes, it's fun, but is it really all you want to do at college?
And ultimately, of course, the real question is the environment. It's critical to learn at college, of course, but the truth is you that you can always learn things, especially if you can learn from a book or from practicing. But you don't always get the opportunity to work with the best minds in a field or to surround yourself with a really great peer group--one that's intellectually challenging and stimulating, and where you can absolutely feel at home. Take advantage of that opportunity. Ask students what they think about the profs at least as much as what they think of the subject matter. And ask how much of a chance they get to work independently within their departments.
Good points, though I think even a first-year should know better.
Solely, but as I'm not coding for part of an organization at the moment, that doesn't really mean much. =) Does yours?
Yeah, but if this guy messes up again, the state can't claim they didn't know how bad he was--they're now aware of his incompetence, which probably increases their liability the next time he screws up. Keeping him might be the right thing to do if they can make sure he learns from it--but it's probably the wrong thing to do from a risk-management perspective.
It's not to get a pat on the head--there tend to be three reasons people poke their head up in class. (1) They're stuck in the overachieving freshman mentality, where they're effectively talking heads who aren't necessarily that productive. (2) Class participation counts towards their grade, and they need to spew up something once or twice a class to make sure they get that percentage of their grade. In terms things that are only tangentially related, maybe it's a choice between vaguely interesting BS and BS they've already covered in class. Which would you choose? (3) They're actually curious about something. Like a CS student who's learning about handles for the first time, who thinks `hey, could that be used for garbage collection?'
Granted, those are for issues remotely related to the topic. Someone who raises their hand during a CS class and asks about the fall of Rome might just need to be whacked on the head.
Tee-hee. Man stepped out of the cave, made fire and saw that it was bright, invented the wheel and the agricultural revolution, passed through the ancient times when some groundwork for science and philosophy was laid, and then dark ages. Then he saw the new nation-building necessitated by the infantry revolution, which helped lead us towards the renaissance and the industrial revolution, literacy rates climbed and productivity multiplied a thousandfold, we climbed into the sky and walked on the moon, and now we send probes to other worlds...
But then a rock interrupted the process! =) It was always a perfectly nice little rock, sitting there minding its own business, just contemplating inertia for a few million years, when suddenly BAM!
Ouch.
Ah! Sorry, it turns out I'm wrong: it is legal to pass on the right (provided you have two or more lanes or someone's turning left), it's just... not preferred.
That only gets people to slow down momentarily, then they speed up slowly as soon as they're past you. When the cops want to slow down a road, they drive in the left lane (in drive-on-the-right countries) at whatever speed they don't want you to exceed. Since in most states (I don't know if it's true in all) you're not legally allowed to pass on the right, there's no way past them.
Pretty much all of the Print-On-Demand in the US is done, ultimately, through LSI. Their titles are available through Ingram, from whom every bookstore buys. So if you want a POD title, you can get it online from Barnes and Noble, or you can special order it through your local bookstore.
I've been a loyal amazon shopper for years. No longer. They're leveraging their market share to prevent sales of thousands of books because they want a bigger cut, and rather than just wanting a bigger cut (which would be easy to get in many cases, if they refused to sell books with a "short discount"), they they want to do the printing and get paid ridiculously high amounts for it.
It has been the golden age of printing for a little while, now, when it was relatively cheap and easy to publish, and the gatekeepers of the market weren't the only way to go to press. Sure, it meant you could order a lot of junk if you wanted to--but you could also order a lot of Indie stuff, and a lot of things that didn't seem like they'd sell a million copies. The profit margins on book publication are low, especially for the time and work that goes into writing a decent book in the first place--the opportunity cost really makes the profit margins negative in most cases. For hundreds and hundreds of small presses, this lowers them further.
Buy at Barnes and Noble, or special-order through your local bookseller.
But in the 80s, most scientists dismissed global warming.
(I'm not making the case for the end of the world; I'd have to learn the math and get evil lackeys.)
is cultural. If the culture of a policing body is not to tolerate anything shady, to take pride in their honesty, and *never* to cover up or look the other way when something happens to a fellow officer, then corruption diminishes tremendously. But when it becomes socially acceptable within the police to look the other way or not get involved when you know an officer is breaking the law, corruption thrives.
That's not to say other things aren't important--things like transparency and accountability to their communities--but that's the single biggest thing you can do to prevent corruption. (After making sure cops aren't terribly paid, anyway.) There are some parts of our society where being a tattle-tale is the right thing to do, and it should be venerated--I don't mean going after people and trying to get them to engage in illegal activities, but I do mean reporting them when you have reason to believe it's likely they're engaging in those activities. (That's an important distinction--at least a number of police forces run undercover investigations where they encourage people to commit crime in order to prosecute them, where they're enabling the crime if not causing it.)
I've ever heard. And I've played catch with rock hammers.
MS did it because they wanted to consolidate a larger advertising and search engine position, and a major internet portal. It was probably still a bad decision, but who can really say what the results would have been ten years down the line?
Look at what MS Stock did. It had broken out of a major rut--a rut not justified by its earnings--for the first time in years following an earnings report last year. Now it's down 24% off its high. Twenty-Four percent. Balmer has lost $3.6 Billion, Gates has lost twice that, and even employees who've only lost twenty or fifty or seventy thousand aren't happy about it--because that is a big chunk of their savings. Now that price change isn't all yahoo, by any stretch of the imagination. But a big chunk of is it from the Yahoo offer.
You don't take that hit for an offer you aren't interested in following through on.
If I go to a white supremacist web site, that doesn't necessarily mean I endorse their views. Even if I download their materials it doesn't--maybe I just find it disgusting and want to show it to someone who won't believe it's as bad as it is. Maybe I want to study it and figure out something about the psychology of the people involved. The same thing applies to terrorism, and... well, pretty much anything a student reads, or any person reads. *Reading* should not be a crime, with the possible exception of some classified/secret documents... whose classification is beyond the scope of this paragraph. =)
As the end of WWII in Europe approached, the German Army started coming west for the purpose of surrendering. They were being closed in on from two sides, but they went to the Western Front because the Geneva Convention was in effect, and prisoners were relatively well treated.
That being said, the western allies might not have been so friendly if the Germans had gotten as close to DC as they did to Moscow.
And that being said, the Germans got pretty damn close to London.
Rules of War do matter. Not always, but sometimes. And even if they had never mattered, practically, in the history of the world, it would still be right to make them and try to live up to them. I'd rather know soldiers who were proud of saving lives than soldiers who were proud of taking them--but who were, of course, damned good at killing when they had to.
> all of the changes I noticed were done for time.
Look at the kind of language used. For example:
"I will kill you if you touch him."
"You fool. No man can kill me. Die, now."
"I am no man. AAaaagggh!"
comes from, limiting myself almost exclusively to dialog:
`Begone, fould dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion! Leave the dead in peace!'
`Come not between the Nazgul and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless eye.'
`Do what you will; but I will hinder it, if I may.'
`Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!'
Then Merry heard of all sounds, in that hour the strangest. It seemed that Dernhelm laughed, and the clear voice was like the ring of steel. `But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Eowyn I am, Eomund's daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.'
comes from, in truth:
Then out of the blackness in his mind he thought that he heard Dernhelm speaking; yet now the voice seemed strange, recalling some other voice that he had known.
`Begone, fould dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion! Leave the dead in peace!'
`Come not between the Nazgul and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless eye.'
A sword rang as it was drawn. `Do what you will; but I will hinder it, if I may.'
`Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!'
Then Merry heard of all sounds in that hour the strangest. It seemed that Dernhelm laughed, and the clear voice was like the ring of steel. `But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Eowyn I am, Eomund's daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For loving or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.'
The winged creature screamed at her, but the Ringwraith made no answer, and was silent, as if in sudden doubt. Very amazement for a moment conquered Merry's fear. He opened his eyes and the blackness was lifted from them. There some paces from him sat the great beast, and all seemed dark about it, and above it loomed the Nazgul Lord like a shadow of despair. A little to the left facing them stood she whom he had called Dernhelm. But the helm of her secrecy had fallen from her, and her bright hair, released from its bonds, gleamed with pale gold upon her shoulders. Her eyes grey as the sea were hard and fell, and yet tears were on her cheek. A sword was in her hand, and she raised her shield against the horror of her enemy's eyes.
Eowyn it was, and Dernhelm also. For into Merry's mind flashed the memory of the face that he saw at the riding from Dunharrow: the face of one that goes seeking death, having no hope. Pity filled his heart and great wonder, and suddenly the slow-kindled courage of his race awoke. He clenched his hand. She should not die, so fair, so desperate! At least she should not die alone, unaided.
The face of their enemy was not turned towards him, but still he hardly dared to move, dreading lest the deadly eyes should fall on him. Slowly, slowly he began to crawl aside; but the Black Captain, in doubt and malice intent upon the woman before him, heeded him no more than a worm in the mud.
Suddenly the great beast beat its hideous wings, and the wind of them was foul. Again it leaped into the air, and then swiftly fell down upon Eowyn, shrieking, striking with beak and claw.
Still she did not blench: maiden of the Rohirrim, child of kings, slender but as a steel-blade, fair but terrible. A swift stroke she dealt, skilled and deadly. The outstretched neck she clove asunder, and the hewn head fell like a stone. Backward she sprang as the huge sh
> Take my word for it--no one is going to make any such claims about Yahoo! Answers any time soon.
> Do you want your vote counted by people who can't read a contract?
Don't be silly! The don't have to know how to count. They only need to write code.
His secret key consisted of the choice of CDs and the fact that he XORed them together. Since he posted it on Slashdot, it's now it's his public secret key. As opposed to his secret secret key. Unfortunately, publicity and secrecy are not commutative.