So this person, a felon convicted of child molestation and now on probation, moves to another country? Did he tell that country's immigration service that he was a convicted felon? And they still let him have legal citizenship? Did his probation allow him to travel without restriction? (If not, he better be commited to staying permanently out of the country he has left, because he has new charges there whenever he goes back.). Assumeing that his old residence becomes aware he has an IP in that nation, why do they need to DoS it, when they can tell his host country that the felon has just committed a new crime and demand his immediate extradition, and get it? Assume instead that the old country doesn't even know about the connection. As soon as they inform the new country, most will try to arrest the felon just for entering their country under false pretenses. Some may just send him back, but others will build their own case, including gathering evidence of his activites in the new countery, that can be turned over.
If you're looking at a real case involving the USA instead of a hypothetical one. US law now allows trying a US citizen for child molestation done overseas upon their return to the US. When they US gets one of these guys back, they will send investigators to a place like Indonesia, just to see what he might have done there. We pay costs for several such investigations every year.
Oh, you meant move to one of the few countries that won't automatically extradite for rape of a child, like Yemen or North Korea. That's true, on finding out that that's what crawled across their border, they will just take a 9 mm round and blow the pervert's face off from the back, without bothering with a new trial. (although Yemen, being on a strict budget, sometimes burns them alive instead). Surviving in such places takes money and powerful connections most pedophiles don't have.
Oh, you meant a pervert with a few hundred thousand to pay the necessary bribes to hide out? One who knows some highly placed government officials there? Yes he could move around a lot, as you put it. Unless those connections are very good, and the money flows like water, he'll probably end up sleeping in a different place every night, spending all his resources on staying on the run, constantly sweating whether that new false passport is going to work this time...
You're right, this can fall under various "facilitation" or "conspiracy to" type laws. Your analogy to drug dealing looks valid as an interpretation of what the law says can happen (IANAL).
With that said, remember almost no one actually knowingly lets drug dealers just use their vacation home for free, so this is not what usually does happen even though it theoretically can. When this kind of thing comes up in a real world drug case, the investigators look to see if the neighbors made complaints about the number of vehicles stopping for five minustes out front, and audit bank accounts and such, so that they end up going to court able to prove that the property owner both knew of specific crimes, and got financial kickbacks from them, making him a drug dealer too and not just a facilitator.
Maybe 1 time in 1,000, the law actually gets used to make the claim that someone facilitated without themselves profiting, because there is probably someone that is either stupid enough to do it, or smart enough to cover the finacial traces to where a better case can't be made, but still, in many jurisdictions, it has never come up this way.
This makes (some of) the RIAA/MPAA type actions near unique, in that they have been willing to try and get convictions commonly on a legal basis that is rare to non-existent elsewhere.
A jury, knowing that property owner a 'coincidentally' seems to be leasing to several groups running crack houses and 'coincidentally' has several hundered thousand more in assets than his reported income would suggest, will easily decide it's all more than coincidence.
How will juries deal with the idea that the accused people for this crime are commonly crooks who aren't making any money from their act? What's their motive? Should be interesting to see how this turns out.
The Delta Four launch scheduled for Saturday had to be postponed. The good news is the next window isn't 2 months away, it's Tues. afternoon (the 21st) if they decide to go for it. The D4 Heavy version is the first version of the D4 to use three main booster rockets, forming a booster theoretically capable of servicing the ISS at much less cost to orbit than the shuttle. While the "multi-barrel" design is just becoming operational, regular Delta IVs with the same engine have entered successful service in 2003.
The Delta IV Heavy is staged from Nasa's pad 37B, which last saw service as the launchpad for the Saturn 1B Apollo missions.
The Delta 4 Heavy supports payloads of up to about 50,000 pounds to low-Earth orbit (i.e. the International Space Station). It can put about 29,000 pounds into Geosyncronous orbit 22,300 miles above the planet, or 22,000 pounds to the moon, or about 17,500 pounds to Mars.
The IV Heavy's possible successors, clustering more first stage rockets, include a 7 tube design with MORE lift than the Saturn 5.
XML can be orders of magnetude easier. It always should be. (I don't like to use the word always, but this is a genuine ALWAYS, as in XML should NEVER approach the complexity of Perl or C++). However, coders frequently don't take maximum advantage of XML's simplicity.
Just look at the XML parts of Winamp 5. Colors are specified on a scale running from about +4,000 to -4,000 for each shade, instead of say 24 bit RGB, and including other required settings. Various parts of the skin may get variable names like "Glass Highlight", "Glass Substrate Highlight", "Glass Shadow Highlight", "Glassy Text Area", "Glassy Text Substrate Area" and "Glassy Text Shadow Substrate Highlight Area", all in the same skin, or buttons defined only as the "Hard Button Group" and the "Soft Button Group", with no method except hack in some value and run the program, to figure out which is which. Some skins with 80 colors themes or so include a 150 Kb+ XML file.
These examples come from skins with good, professional graphics, and even well written code in other areas. i.e. some people who are actually coding whole new functions into the Maki code still don't hesitate to write XML like this to accompany it. At this rate, we could use an obfuscated XML contest.
"much" is one thing, "or at all" is another. I'm old enough to have built up much of my music collection on Tape and CD - in fact until recently, I still owned a few of those disk shaped black things with the grooves that you played with a bigger black thing with a little arm and a needle.
There's a tendency to keep things because you might listen to them very occasionally, i.e. I better not throw away that old LP of Uriah Heep's "Demons and Wizards", because I might want to play it again once just to think about how different I was in the 70's.
I keep seasonal things - horror movies on VHS that I might watch near Halloween, Christmas music, things I may play once a year or even once in several years.
I keep stuff I doubt I will ever listen too again, but it's rare, and I might be able to trade it to someone for something else I like more. At one point, I had 14 VHS copies of the horror flick "Dagon" just because they were on a bargain table at 50 cents each, and I knew I could trade them for other stuff.
Some people focus heavily on completeing a set. I knew on guy who collected all the DAW SF paperback series as it came out, and instead of fileing them in alphabetical order with the rest of his books, had them all grouped together in numerical order. (For those that don't remember, Early DAW actually had numbers on the spines, starting at 001 and going up. Black numbers, black titles and RED author's names on solid bright lemon yellow. A lengthy row of them looked more like a police tape festooned crime scene than a library.).
Re:DNA versus other digital data
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Digital Packrats
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· Score: 1
An ethical and highly developed civilization might choose to apply various limits to the simulation for the comfort and ease of the simulation's users. This modifies your conditions a bit. We have to assume not only that the simulation process is possible, but that there is a reason why we don't see the occasional red text across the top and bottom of our visual field, reading "Sensitive participants are strongly cautioned...", or the odds drop.
I don't remember signing a necro-max liability waver before I got here.
Probably Not! (Here's why). The general trick if you are going for maximum profit is to first sue a small company, and get a successful precident. It costs you less to fight the action against a smaller company, and improves your chances of getting the really big money later by giving you some already recorded findings that the court will generally accept and not let your opponent delay over. Taking on Opera (for example), first, and Microsoft second or later makes more sense if it's all about the cash.
For a publicly traded company, this is even more plausable. Winning a small decision that seems to forshadow a bigger win can really drive up the price of stock without costing much at all to implement.
The chief reason people are concerned that this lawsuit might be the first of a series is probably SCO's lawsuits. After all, SCO avoided going after smaller fry first and went for IBM. However: 1. That doesn't seem to be working too well, and other companies are at least as likely on observing it to avoid the strategy as imitate it. 2. There's no indicators that Eolas has been secretly coached in this strategy, backed by (say) the veiled resources of the powerful Lynx Megacorporation in an attempt to regain browser dominance for Eolas's hidden puppeteer.
Your explanation for the web of trust is cogent, well grounded in reality and still manages to capture the essentials of the process. Nicely done , Sir! One nitpick, however:
In Alice and Bob explanations, the C party is usually Carol.
Here's a wiki entry that discusses real life as it applies to cryptography. Its arguements parellel and support some of yours nicely, while also explaining Carol, Dave, and the others.
What part of "multiple meanings don't matter here" is so hard to understand?
That accusation of piracy in the press starts with a lawyer. That lawyer often can't even use the word in court , but he can try to bias the public at large by using the word in a press statement.
You are defending a baldfaced lie. The lie is that this word "piracy" is appearing in the news just because it is a popular coloquialism and people spontaniously adopt it. It is appearing in the news because a lawyer is using the media to try and preinfluence juries. That lawyer will commonly throw out the term half a dozen times in a single press release to make sure it sticks and gets used.
My 'rambling' is relevant because Reuters.com is reporting on a crime, to an audience that includes potential members of a jury, and is pushing a loophole in the boundaries of the law as it specifically restrains the right of free speech vrs. the right to a fair trial. They are choosing the sensationalistic interpretation over the more responsible one. Your argument boils down to "fair coverage vrs. unfair coverage, it's just a matter of semantics."
I urge you to take your "words have multiple meanings" to an airport and talk about what a BOMB Gigli was. There are plenty of places where some meanings are, and should be, rejected. Court reporting allows only for narrower definitions than general reporting, and professional news coverage allows less than in normal conversation.
Piracy means taking control of a ship at sea. In a court of law, it means that, period.
If someone commits a burglary, do we charge them with rape, because the property owner feels metaphorically raped?
If someone says they feel betrayed by a "friend" who divulges a confidence, do we support a legal charge of treason?
It used to be that exaggerating a crime report in a news article was a great method to deliberately stir up a lynch mob. That's one of the reasons why newspapers have been essentially compelled by law to start reporting "aledged" crimes until the facts are all in as determined by a jury. Restrictions on colorful, metaphorical language in a crime report are responsible journalism, not pedantry. They are also at least partly mandated by law. Unless you are prepared to tell a judge "Words have multiple meanings. Get over it, grow up...", maybe you ought to rethink who is making the rediculous arguements here.
No one in their right mind is likely to take this metaphor of piracy literally, right? I would even agree with that point, but...
1. Some news sources aren't above trying to get as much wiggle room as possible in their crime reporting. Some news sources even seem to try to sensationalize things just a bit. Before you focus too much on how a word like piracy would come across as used in this case, ask yourself, what kind of misquote could come about in a worst case scenario. Picture somebody writing with a personal grudge against one of the accused, submitting it to a source such as the National Enquirer, and being edited on a slow news day. 2. there is a legal situation between the US and the World Court at the Hague, which has some autority to try real pirates. The US will not extradite US citizens even when the charge has merit. A number of European political watchdog groups document the US's 'non-cooperation", and lobby politically. Perhaps because they gather information using volunteers for whom English is often a second language, they have often had trouble finding out the real facts in cases where the slang term piracy replaces the legal one. I'd argue that we do have people "in their right minds", and ones with more purpose to be involved than casual readers, still having trouble not drawing the wrong conclusion here. It's not like organizations such as these can call the US State Department to clarify things. 3. Some things are simply mistakes, and even if the majority makes them, they are still mistakes. This looks like one of them.
These are both rules where there are appropriate exceptions. The meta-rule behind them doesn't have any exceptions at all, in English.
(That meta-rule does get bent a bit in classical German, but most native German speakers are much clearer on when to follow German formal usage on their verbs-at-the-end-of-sentence rules, than we English speakers seem to be for analogous rules in our language).
I'm referring to the rule, apparently hardwired into the human speech center, that structure in language is indicated by proximity. A conjunction is normally placed between two terms for the same reason that a mathematical operator is normally placed between two numbers. A preposition is not normally left at the end of a sentence, because the thought is easier to understand if the preposition can be placed closer to what it modifies. Breaking these rules when they are invoked merely to mimic Latinate structure is unlikely to draw anyone's ire*, but the risk lies, as you put it, in making it (more) difficult to understand what the writer is trying to say, by imposing extra distance.
In the same way as your examples, dependent clauses normally take a placement that makes it easy to see what they depend on. (There, I broke a rule, rather than write "that on which they depend", which would sound stilted and archaic, but nicely Latinate). Pronouns, particularly possessive ones, occur both close to the nouns they are derived from, and only after at least one use of the noun.
* Except possibly Dean Irwin Pettybone Prufrock, head of Dear Old U's romance languages department, but he's a spooty-head.
How often do you actually write the name of the Old Man of the Mountain? Even including all the times you quote e.e. cummings, for most of us,that wouldn't add up to a yearly occurrence, unless of course, you are Robert Anton Wilson. Fortunately, there's outlining, where a lowercase Roman numeral i is ubiquitous. A program that tries to fix poor writing and ends up breaking outlining functions might as well throw in Clippy.
The idustry keeps targeting young listeners by this strategy. When the economy gets rocky, those young listeners lose their disposable income disproportionately. So the recording industry is deliberately choosing to bet that the economy simply won't hit a speedbump. As just a rough guess, if the inflation rates rise to say 8-10%, the recording industry will see about a 25% drop in sales to match. A couple of quarters of classic "stagflation" combining that inflation rate with a flat or even slumping GNP, might equate to about a 50% drop. Long before the economy got bad enough to bring back breadlines in the major cities, the industry would crash and burn totally.
What surprises me in this is the number of people high in the industry that have claimed they strongly disagree with the current administration's economic policy, but seem to be betting the farm on it.
Niven and Barnes used this trick for a minor puzzle in the novel "The California Voodoo Game" (part of the Dream Park series). The poser swapped two letter R's that could only be told apart by color.
It's just about impossible that a tecnic that makes robotic spacecraft all that much more self sufficient will be confined to just robotic space travel for long. If NASA is successful, we will see widespread robotization here on Earth as a consequence.
30 years from now, this will be characterized as a 'mere spin off', and instead of bitching about Moonrocks, ignorant people will be saying "We spent billions to send robot probes to Pluto, and all we got was a bunch of contaminated Helium."
Ad-Aware has just about totally stopped me from charging people I halfway like. When someone agrees to a. change to Mozilla or Firefox, and b. Install ad-Aware, and learn how to use it, I will usually help them not only with that, but fix a few other niggling little nuisances their PC suffers from. If they are blindly loyal to IE, they tend to get charged about 30 bucks an hour.
I only charge one relative, but he's a second cousin that is convinced he can make more money in the market if he has an even faster connection. He is currently using cable internet because they said it was up to 5 times faster than local DSL, ignoring that he can't get that speed during the hours the market trades, and when he heard that the cable speeds tend to be faster early in the morning (like 4 A.M.), he decided to start trading on forign exchanges, even though he knows next to nothing about the companies involved, because he's that convinced the extra speed somehow matters. He hears a distorted explanation of resetting MTU's in the Windows registry for faster access systems, from one of his clueless friends, and I get another call. Him, I charge for calls.
It's genuinely a good thing, AND I don't deny that it does take some real work to get observer status with WIPO. That said, why should this be the case? Why can't any group, or even private individual, get recognized observer status with an organization like WIPO by filing a simple request, or a simple exchange of letters, or at worst, passing the sort of background check that it takes to get a good line of credit? Why does WIPO, basically just another legislative lobbying organization, make it cost effort more like getting a somewhere above top-secret clearance with the NRC, rather than the equivalent of applying for a position with mall security?
Except that Apollo returned three astronauts, 110 Kg. of moonrocks, assorted equipment, AND the capsule that was technically the command module, AND the service modules themselves could have been included in the return weight if we weren't just letting them burn up (They certainly made it back to Earth's vicinity, if not technically Earth itself). At the very least, all those parts of the CM and SM that were just needed to keep astronauts alive and functioning can be included in weight available for cargo in an alternate design. This includes breathing mixture (and scrubbers, fans to keep air circulating, and associated wiring and controls), food and water, (and refrigeration and other associated mass), fuel for the onboard heaters (and the heaters themselves, shell insulation, etc.), plus things that aren't absolutely essential for life itself but are for the mission, i.e. onboard communications and computing gear, etc.
Mass of the combined CSM for actual lunar landing missions was 30,329 Kg. (Encyclopedia Aeronautica).
How much of that would be actual He3 in a cargo design is a different question. So is how fast a load of He3 has to return to Earth - Apollo was designed for short travel times, largely because of consumables limits. A tank of He3 doesn't need to worry if it takes months to get across the system.
Realistically, our costs would be those to put a crew on the Moon, sustain them for the time needed to 'mine' He3, and bring them home, plus the costs to put a delivery system for the He3 into place, whether it's one big capsule with all elements including its fuel shipped up from Earth, or a bunch of 10 gallon barrels with cheap transponders, spray on ablative shields and a local He3 powered mass driver throwing them at the Pacific recovery zone.
At pragmatically foreseeable levels of technology, we have to ship some people there and back at least once to get our 25 tons, but we don't necessarily have to ship people back and forth every time we move some He3. If they can process a 20 year supply in a few weeks on the Moon we could be talking about sending up and recovering one living crew, once, for the total life of the program.
Costs might vary widely depending on what percentage of pods you can recover with a given design - maybe cheap ones that we lose 50% to reentry stresses would still actually work out cheaper overall. Can we make He3 tight barrels out of material already found on the Lunar surface? Haven't the foggiest - We don't even know how to get a sustained fusion reaction out of the stuff yet.
If you figure the personnel costs might be only a share of a larger project, to put people on the Moon for several reasons and not just this one, the project requires less to justify itself (but the overall committment required becomes bigger, naturally). Depending on just what methods are possible, transportation costs may be a deal killer, or quite workable.
The U.S. military has tested hundreds of thousands of people to see what they can do after getting X number of hours sleep each night for Y number of days with X having values less than 6 (often down to 0) and Y often having values greater than 14. We are talking young, healthy people who have been screened for many medical conditions, who get lots of exercise and a healthy diet before beginning such tests, (and I specifically don't think anyone in their right mind would argue that the average coder can withstand more physical stress without risk of permanent health damage than long range recon, seals, or green berets).
Not only that, but in addition to simulated life or death situations, the military has seen the effects of sleep deprivation on a number of the realest of real life or death situations, some of which could also have profound bottom line impact on the whole institution,(so somehow I also don't think motivation is somehow higher for coders).
Any management team that expects positive results from 80 hour+ weeks for 6 weeks or more is expecting its people to outperform all those whimpy Airborne Rangers and such, and if they are really crazy enough to think that's possible, need to be encouraged to personally go tell some group of Huaah!~ types off. That should take care of the problem.
The Comics Code was written by some obviously less than professional people. As just one example of that, it contained the neologism "werewolfism", because the people involved had never heard of the word lycanthropy.
The code enforced a 'Dick Tracy villian' mentality, where criminals should not be made physically attractive, so characters such as "Flathead" and "The Brow" came along to fit the code. (Hey kids, deformed people are all criminals, and handsome people are all honest!).
It had a general rule that crime must not pay, but it also more specifically prohibited showing crooked cops or elected officials, even if they got their comeuppance in the end (Hey kids, you can always trust those in power to be honest and decent!).
It banned showing any realistic method to commit any crime, so Batman had to stop murderers who used endless variations on "Aluvium Phosdex, the shaving creme atom", to poison their victims because the code effectively prohibited mentioning arsenic.
It prohibited all drug abuse references, so one message that couldn't be preached to the kids was "Heroin will kill ya, m-kay?". The first comic that had normally been code compliant to publish an issue that lost the code sticker from their cover was DC's Green Lantern/Green Arrow, when it showed sidekick "Speedy" getting strung out - with a nickname like that, Green Arrow should have seen it coming.
I've got mixed feelings about having a code for video games at all, but I am damned sure they don't need a code like that one. One thing to remember is that, when there are things you don't want kids to hear, there are always people ready to add "any criticism of our benevolent leaders" to that list.
The jude was right in making this distinction (IMHO). A keystroke logger isn't capturing e-mail, it's capturing a series of key strokes that may become e-mail. We have laws against somebody tampering with conventional mail. They don't apply to reading the letter over someobody's shoulder as they write it, but only to after it's sealed in an envelope and a stamp affixed. They don't cover taking carbon paper out of a wastebasket, or removing a typewriter ribbon and taking data from it, or scrubbing a pencil across a notepad to bring out the impressions the sheet above it left, or any of dozens of other tricks. Note any of those acts can be illegal under other laws, for example, trespass, but those laws are usually state or local laws, not federal, because nothing is passing across interstate lines.
Slashdot Mirror
So this person, a felon convicted of child molestation and now on probation, moves to another country? Did he tell that country's immigration service that he was a convicted felon? And they still let him have legal citizenship? Did his probation allow him to travel without restriction? (If not, he better be commited to staying permanently out of the country he has left, because he has new charges there whenever he goes back.).
Assumeing that his old residence becomes aware he has an IP in that nation, why do they need to DoS it, when they can tell his host country that the felon has just committed a new crime and demand his immediate extradition, and get it? Assume instead that the old country doesn't even know about the connection. As soon as they inform the new country, most will try to arrest the felon just for entering their country under false pretenses. Some may just send him back, but others will build their own case, including gathering evidence of his activites in the new countery, that can be turned over.
If you're looking at a real case involving the USA instead of a hypothetical one. US law now allows trying a US citizen for child molestation done overseas upon their return to the US. When they US gets one of these guys back, they will send investigators to a place like Indonesia, just to see what he might have done there. We pay costs for several such investigations every year.
Oh, you meant move to one of the few countries that won't automatically extradite for rape of a child, like Yemen or North Korea. That's true, on finding out that that's what crawled across their border, they will just take a 9 mm round and blow the pervert's face off from the back, without bothering with a new trial. (although Yemen, being on a strict budget, sometimes burns them alive instead). Surviving in such places takes money and powerful connections most pedophiles don't have.
Oh, you meant a pervert with a few hundred thousand to pay the necessary bribes to hide out? One who knows some highly placed government officials there? Yes he could move around a lot, as you put it. Unless those connections are very good, and the money flows like water, he'll probably end up sleeping in a different place every night, spending all his resources on staying on the run, constantly sweating whether that new false passport is going to work this time...
You're right, this can fall under various "facilitation" or "conspiracy to" type laws.
Your analogy to drug dealing looks valid as an interpretation of what the law says can happen (IANAL).
With that said, remember almost no one actually knowingly lets drug dealers just use their vacation home for free, so this is not what usually does happen even though it theoretically can. When this kind of thing comes up in a real world drug case, the investigators look to see if the neighbors made complaints about the number of vehicles stopping for five minustes out front, and audit bank accounts and such, so that they end up going to court able to prove that the property owner both knew of specific crimes, and got financial kickbacks from them, making him a drug dealer too and not just a facilitator.
Maybe 1 time in 1,000, the law actually gets used to make the claim that someone facilitated without themselves profiting, because there is probably someone that is either stupid enough to do it, or smart enough to cover the finacial traces to where a better case can't be made, but still, in many jurisdictions, it has never come up this way.
This makes (some of) the RIAA/MPAA type actions near unique, in that they have been willing to try and get convictions commonly on a legal basis that is rare to non-existent elsewhere.
A jury, knowing that property owner a 'coincidentally' seems to be leasing to several groups running crack houses and 'coincidentally' has several hundered thousand more in assets than his reported income would suggest, will easily decide it's all more than coincidence.
How will juries deal with the idea that the accused people for this crime are commonly crooks who aren't making any money from their act? What's their motive? Should be interesting to see how this turns out.
The Delta Four launch scheduled for Saturday had to be postponed. The good news is the next window isn't 2 months away, it's Tues. afternoon (the 21st) if they decide to go for it. The D4 Heavy version is the first version of the D4 to use three main booster rockets, forming a booster theoretically capable of servicing the ISS at much less cost to orbit than the shuttle. While the "multi-barrel" design is just becoming operational, regular Delta IVs with the same engine have entered successful service in 2003.
l ta4heavy.html/
e lta4/delta4.htm/
The Delta IV Heavy is staged from Nasa's pad 37B, which last saw service as the launchpad for the Saturn 1B Apollo missions.
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/delta/d310/041201de
http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/delta/d
The Delta 4 Heavy supports payloads of up to about 50,000 pounds to low-Earth orbit (i.e. the International Space Station). It can put about 29,000 pounds into Geosyncronous orbit 22,300 miles above the planet, or 22,000 pounds to the moon, or about 17,500 pounds to Mars.
The IV Heavy's possible successors, clustering more first stage rockets, include a 7 tube design with MORE lift than the Saturn 5.
XML can be orders of magnetude easier. It always should be. (I don't like to use the word always, but this is a genuine ALWAYS, as in XML should NEVER approach the complexity of Perl or C++). However, coders frequently don't take maximum advantage of XML's simplicity.
Just look at the XML parts of Winamp 5. Colors are specified on a scale running from about +4,000 to -4,000 for each shade, instead of say 24 bit RGB, and including other required settings. Various parts of the skin may get variable names like "Glass Highlight", "Glass Substrate Highlight", "Glass Shadow Highlight", "Glassy Text Area", "Glassy Text Substrate Area" and "Glassy Text Shadow Substrate Highlight Area", all in the same skin, or buttons defined only as the "Hard Button Group" and the "Soft Button Group", with no method except hack in some value and run the program, to figure out which is which. Some skins with 80 colors themes or so include a 150 Kb+ XML file.
These examples come from skins with good, professional graphics, and even well written code in other areas. i.e. some people who are actually coding whole new functions into the Maki code still don't hesitate to write XML like this to accompany it. At this rate, we could use an obfuscated XML contest.
"much" is one thing, "or at all" is another. I'm old enough to have built up much of my music collection on Tape and CD - in fact until recently, I still owned a few of those disk shaped black things with the grooves that you played with a bigger black thing with a little arm and a needle.
There's a tendency to keep things because you might listen to them very occasionally, i.e. I better not throw away that old LP of Uriah Heep's "Demons and Wizards", because I might want to play it again once just to think about how different I was in the 70's.
I keep seasonal things - horror movies on VHS that I might watch near Halloween, Christmas music, things I may play once a year or even once in several years.
I keep stuff I doubt I will ever listen too again, but it's rare, and I might be able to trade it to someone for something else I like more. At one point, I had 14 VHS copies of the horror flick "Dagon" just because they were on a bargain table at 50 cents each, and I knew I could trade them for other stuff.
Some people focus heavily on completeing a set. I knew on guy who collected all the DAW SF paperback series as it came out, and instead of fileing them in alphabetical order with the rest of his books, had them all grouped together in numerical order. (For those that don't remember, Early DAW actually had numbers on the spines, starting at 001 and going up. Black numbers, black titles and RED author's names on solid bright lemon yellow. A lengthy row of them looked more like a police tape festooned crime scene than a library.).
An ethical and highly developed civilization might choose to apply various limits to the simulation for the comfort and ease of the simulation's users. This modifies your conditions a bit. We have to assume not only that the simulation process is possible, but that there is a reason why we don't see the occasional red text across the top and bottom of our visual field, reading "Sensitive participants are strongly cautioned...", or the odds drop.
I don't remember signing a necro-max liability waver before I got here.
Why back anything up when 6 out of 10 people you meet also have a copy? ;-)
Probably Not! (Here's why).
The general trick if you are going for maximum profit is to first sue a small company, and get a successful precident. It costs you less to fight the action against a smaller company, and improves your chances of getting the really big money later by giving you some already recorded findings that the court will generally accept and not let your opponent delay over. Taking on Opera (for example), first, and Microsoft second or later makes more sense if it's all about the cash.
For a publicly traded company, this is even more plausable. Winning a small decision that seems to forshadow a bigger win can really drive up the price of stock without costing much at all to implement.
The chief reason people are concerned that this lawsuit might be the first of a series is probably SCO's lawsuits. After all, SCO avoided going after smaller fry first and went for IBM. However: 1. That doesn't seem to be working too well, and other companies are at least as likely on observing it to avoid the strategy as imitate it. 2. There's no indicators that Eolas has been secretly coached in this strategy, backed by (say) the veiled resources of the powerful Lynx Megacorporation in an attempt to regain browser dominance for Eolas's hidden puppeteer.
Your explanation for the web of trust is cogent, well grounded in reality and still manages to capture the essentials of the process. Nicely done , Sir! One nitpick, however:
In Alice and Bob explanations, the C party is usually Carol.
Here's a wiki entry that discusses real life as it applies to cryptography. Its arguements parellel and support some of yours nicely, while also explaining Carol, Dave, and the others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob/
What part of "multiple meanings don't matter here" is so hard to understand?
That accusation of piracy in the press starts with a lawyer. That lawyer often can't even use the word in court , but he can try to bias the public at large by using the word in a press statement.
You are defending a baldfaced lie. The lie is that this word "piracy" is appearing in the news just because it is a popular coloquialism and people spontaniously adopt it. It is appearing in the news because a lawyer is using the media to try and preinfluence juries. That lawyer will commonly throw out the term half a dozen times in a single press release to make sure it sticks and gets used.
My 'rambling' is relevant because Reuters.com is reporting on a crime, to an audience that includes potential members of a jury, and is pushing a loophole in the boundaries of the law as it specifically restrains the right of free speech vrs. the right to a fair trial. They are choosing the sensationalistic interpretation over the more responsible one. Your argument boils down to "fair coverage vrs. unfair coverage, it's just a matter of semantics."
I urge you to take your "words have multiple meanings" to an airport and talk about what a BOMB Gigli was. There are plenty of places where some meanings are, and should be, rejected. Court reporting allows only for narrower definitions than general reporting, and professional news coverage allows less than in normal conversation.
Piracy means taking control of a ship at sea. In a court of law, it means that, period.
If someone commits a burglary, do we charge them with rape, because the property owner feels metaphorically raped?
If someone says they feel betrayed by a "friend" who divulges a confidence, do we support a legal charge of treason?
It used to be that exaggerating a crime report in a news article was a great method to deliberately stir up a lynch mob. That's one of the reasons why newspapers have been essentially compelled by law to start reporting "aledged" crimes until the facts are all in as determined by a jury. Restrictions on colorful, metaphorical language in a crime report are responsible journalism, not pedantry. They are also at least partly mandated by law. Unless you are prepared to tell a judge "Words have multiple meanings. Get over it, grow up...", maybe you ought to rethink who is making the rediculous arguements here.
No one in their right mind is likely to take this metaphor of piracy literally, right? I would even agree with that point, but...
1. Some news sources aren't above trying to get as much wiggle room as possible in their crime reporting. Some news sources even seem to try to sensationalize things just a bit. Before you focus too much on how a word like piracy would come across as used in this case, ask yourself, what kind of misquote could come about in a worst case scenario. Picture somebody writing with a personal grudge against one of the accused, submitting it to a source such as the National Enquirer, and being edited on a slow news day.
2. there is a legal situation between the US and the World Court at the Hague, which has some autority to try real pirates. The US will not extradite US citizens even when the charge has merit. A number of European political watchdog groups document the US's 'non-cooperation", and lobby politically. Perhaps because they gather information using volunteers for whom English is often a second language, they have often had trouble finding out the real facts in cases where the slang term piracy replaces the legal one. I'd argue that we do have people "in their right minds", and ones with more purpose to be involved than casual readers, still having trouble not drawing the wrong conclusion here. It's not like organizations such as these can call the US State Department to clarify things.
3. Some things are simply mistakes, and even if the majority makes them, they are still mistakes. This looks like one of them.
Blinkpad!
Col. Klinkpad!
Drink Pink Ink? Shades of Dr. Seuss!
These are both rules where there are appropriate exceptions. The meta-rule behind them doesn't have any exceptions at all, in English.
(That meta-rule does get bent a bit in classical German, but most native German speakers are much clearer on when to follow German formal usage on their verbs-at-the-end-of-sentence rules, than we English speakers seem to be for analogous rules in our language).
I'm referring to the rule, apparently hardwired into the human speech center, that structure in language is indicated by proximity. A conjunction is normally placed between two terms for the same reason that a mathematical operator is normally placed between two numbers. A preposition is not normally left at the end of a sentence, because the thought is easier to understand if the preposition can be placed closer to what it modifies. Breaking these rules when they are invoked merely to mimic Latinate structure is unlikely to draw anyone's ire*, but the risk lies, as you put it, in making it (more) difficult to understand what the writer is trying to say, by imposing extra distance.
In the same way as your examples, dependent clauses normally take a placement that makes it easy to see what they depend on. (There, I broke a rule, rather than write "that on which they depend", which would sound stilted and archaic, but nicely Latinate). Pronouns, particularly possessive ones, occur both close to the nouns they are derived from, and only after at least one use of the noun.
* Except possibly Dean Irwin Pettybone Prufrock, head of Dear Old U's romance languages department, but he's a spooty-head.
How often do you actually write the name of the Old Man of the Mountain? Even including all the times you quote e.e. cummings, for most of us,that wouldn't add up to a yearly occurrence, unless of course, you are Robert Anton Wilson. Fortunately, there's outlining, where a lowercase Roman numeral i is ubiquitous. A program that tries to fix poor writing and ends up breaking outlining functions might as well throw in Clippy.
The idustry keeps targeting young listeners by this strategy. When the economy gets rocky, those young listeners lose their disposable income disproportionately. So the recording industry is deliberately choosing to bet that the economy simply won't hit a speedbump. As just a rough guess, if the inflation rates rise to say 8-10%, the recording industry will see about a 25% drop in sales to match. A couple of quarters of classic "stagflation" combining that inflation rate with a flat or even slumping GNP, might equate to about a 50% drop. Long before the economy got bad enough to bring back breadlines in the major cities, the industry would crash and burn totally.
What surprises me in this is the number of people high in the industry that have claimed they strongly disagree with the current administration's economic policy, but seem to be betting the farm on it.
Niven and Barnes used this trick for a minor puzzle in the novel "The California Voodoo Game" (part of the Dream Park series). The poser swapped two letter R's that could only be told apart by color.
You missed a great chance to use the "You Insensitive Clod" header there.
It's just about impossible that a tecnic that makes robotic spacecraft all that much more self sufficient will be confined to just robotic space travel for long. If NASA is successful, we will see widespread robotization here on Earth as a consequence.
30 years from now, this will be characterized as a 'mere spin off', and instead of bitching about Moonrocks, ignorant people will be saying "We spent billions to send robot probes to Pluto, and all we got was a bunch of contaminated Helium."
Ad-Aware has just about totally stopped me from charging people I halfway like. When someone agrees to a. change to Mozilla or Firefox, and b. Install ad-Aware, and learn how to use it, I will usually help them not only with that, but fix a few other niggling little nuisances their PC suffers from. If they are blindly loyal to IE, they tend to get charged about 30 bucks an hour.
I only charge one relative, but he's a second cousin that is convinced he can make more money in the market if he has an even faster connection. He is currently using cable internet because they said it was up to 5 times faster than local DSL, ignoring that he can't get that speed during the hours the market trades, and when he heard that the cable speeds tend to be faster early in the morning (like 4 A.M.), he decided to start trading on forign exchanges, even though he knows next to nothing about the companies involved, because he's that convinced the extra speed somehow matters. He hears a distorted explanation of resetting MTU's in the Windows registry for faster access systems, from one of his clueless friends, and I get another call. Him, I charge for calls.
We can handle that with the vacuum breathing dust sharks with frickin lasers.
It's genuinely a good thing, AND I don't deny that it does take some real work to get observer status with WIPO. That said, why should this be the case? Why can't any group, or even private individual, get recognized observer status with an organization like WIPO by filing a simple request, or a simple exchange of letters, or at worst, passing the sort of background check that it takes to get a good line of credit? Why does WIPO, basically just another legislative lobbying organization, make it cost effort more like getting a somewhere above top-secret clearance with the NRC, rather than the equivalent of applying for a position with mall security?
Except that Apollo returned three astronauts, 110 Kg. of moonrocks, assorted equipment, AND the capsule that was technically the command module, AND the service modules themselves could have been included in the return weight if we weren't just letting them burn up (They certainly made it back to Earth's vicinity, if not technically Earth itself). At the very least, all those parts of the CM and SM that were just needed to keep astronauts alive and functioning can be included in weight available for cargo in an alternate design. This includes breathing mixture (and scrubbers, fans to keep air circulating, and associated wiring and controls), food and water, (and refrigeration and other associated mass), fuel for the onboard heaters (and the heaters themselves, shell insulation, etc.), plus things that aren't absolutely essential for life itself but are for the mission, i.e. onboard communications and computing gear, etc.
Mass of the combined CSM for actual lunar landing missions was 30,329 Kg. (Encyclopedia Aeronautica).
How much of that would be actual He3 in a cargo design is a different question. So is how fast a load of He3 has to return to Earth - Apollo was designed for short travel times, largely because of consumables limits. A tank of He3 doesn't need to worry if it takes months to get across the system.
Realistically, our costs would be those to put a crew on the Moon, sustain them for the time needed to 'mine' He3, and bring them home, plus the costs to put a delivery system for the He3 into place, whether it's one big capsule with all elements including its fuel shipped up from Earth, or a bunch of 10 gallon barrels with cheap transponders, spray on ablative shields and a local He3 powered mass driver throwing them at the Pacific recovery zone.
At pragmatically foreseeable levels of technology, we have to ship some people there and back at least once to get our 25 tons, but we don't necessarily have to ship people back and forth every time we move some He3. If they can process a 20 year supply in a few weeks on the Moon we could be talking about sending up and recovering one living crew, once, for the total life of the program.
Costs might vary widely depending on what percentage of pods you can recover with a given design - maybe cheap ones that we lose 50% to reentry stresses would still actually work out cheaper overall. Can we make He3 tight barrels out of material already found on the Lunar surface? Haven't the foggiest - We don't even know how to get a sustained fusion reaction out of the stuff yet.
If you figure the personnel costs might be only a share of a larger project, to put people on the Moon for several reasons and not just this one, the project requires less to justify itself (but the overall committment required becomes bigger, naturally). Depending on just what methods are possible, transportation costs may be a deal killer, or quite workable.
The U.S. military has tested hundreds of thousands of people to see what they can do after getting X number of hours sleep each night for Y number of days with X having values less than 6 (often down to 0) and Y often having values greater than 14. We are talking young, healthy people who have been screened for many medical conditions, who get lots of exercise and a healthy diet before beginning such tests, (and I specifically don't think anyone in their right mind would argue that the average coder can withstand more physical stress without risk of permanent health damage than long range recon, seals, or green berets).
Not only that, but in addition to simulated life or death situations, the military has seen the effects of sleep deprivation on a number of the realest of real life or death situations, some of which could also have profound bottom line impact on the whole institution,(so somehow I also don't think motivation is somehow higher for coders).
Any management team that expects positive results from 80 hour+ weeks for 6 weeks or more is expecting its people to outperform all those whimpy Airborne Rangers and such, and if they are really crazy enough to think that's possible, need to be encouraged to personally go tell some group of Huaah!~ types off. That should take care of the problem.
The Comics Code was written by some obviously less than professional people. As just one example of that, it contained the neologism "werewolfism", because the people involved had never heard of the word lycanthropy.
The code enforced a 'Dick Tracy villian' mentality, where criminals should not be made physically attractive, so characters such as "Flathead" and "The Brow" came along to fit the code. (Hey kids, deformed people are all criminals, and handsome people are all honest!).
It had a general rule that crime must not pay, but it also more specifically prohibited showing crooked cops or elected officials, even if they got their comeuppance in the end (Hey kids, you can always trust those in power to be honest and decent!).
It banned showing any realistic method to commit any crime, so Batman had to stop murderers who used endless variations on "Aluvium Phosdex, the shaving creme atom", to poison their victims because the code effectively prohibited mentioning arsenic.
It prohibited all drug abuse references, so one message that couldn't be preached to the kids was "Heroin will kill ya, m-kay?". The first comic that had normally been code compliant to publish an issue that lost the code sticker from their cover was DC's Green Lantern/Green Arrow, when it showed sidekick "Speedy" getting strung out - with a nickname like that, Green Arrow should have seen it coming.
I've got mixed feelings about having a code for video games at all, but I am damned sure they don't need a code like that one. One thing to remember is that, when there are things you don't want kids to hear, there are always people ready to add "any criticism of our benevolent leaders" to that list.
The jude was right in making this distinction (IMHO). A keystroke logger isn't capturing e-mail, it's capturing a series of key strokes that may become e-mail. We have laws against somebody tampering with conventional mail. They don't apply to reading the letter over someobody's shoulder as they write it, but only to after it's sealed in an envelope and a stamp affixed. They don't cover taking carbon paper out of a wastebasket, or removing a typewriter ribbon and taking data from it, or scrubbing a pencil across a notepad to bring out the impressions the sheet above it left, or any of dozens of other tricks. Note any of those acts can be illegal under other laws, for example, trespass, but those laws are usually state or local laws, not federal, because nothing is passing across interstate lines.