Copyright is supposed to be a quid pro quo arrangement. The owner gets protection for X years, and the work is supposed to enter the public domain after that. Put the work in a vault and let it grow mold, and voila, you got the protection for the time you were making money, then didn't have to pay off.
When one person pays first, and the other pays back later, and somehow someone ends up being ripped off, who in your general experience is the 'ripper' and who the 'ripee'? I know of very few cases where the one who is supposed to pay first manages to successfuly rip off the one who pays back later, and a lot of cases where it runs the other way.
Why is it generally considered good advice not to give the guy who is building a new addition on your house all the money in advance? How many business contracts carefully specify when different job parts and money's are exchanged to keep either side from risking too much? Would you sign a contract where someone was supposed to pay up 70 years after their death, yet that contract specifically said the person was not even required to make a will or designate who would be the person to contact when that contract finally came due?
The proof that many consumers have been brainwashed is simple. They have come to believe copyright naturally runs counter to the trend they have observed first hand in dozens of other cases and apply as common sense over a vast range of normal activities.
Yeah, the only way to save that section would have been to have some really big weapons also included, and have them armored enough that the machine guns on the big bots were ineffective and some people had to go to up close infantry modes. Then when they take one down, it could become apparent that killing 99% of the sentinels wassn't going to be enough, as they would try to repair the big stuff, so everyone had to change tactics to take out the big things more thoroughly or nail all those sentinels that weren't just pouring through the obvious breach and sticking with the herd.
Of course, that would make no sense. The sentinels would have to fight like souless machines, or they would break and run in the face of such a high casualty rate, and they'ed have to be like machines again for their command to rely on the proper numbers of them following a contingency plan to break off and repair a damaged big machine with such inhuman precision.
The only thing that could have made a scene like that better would be if the Zion-oids were trying to get one of those cool EMV's with the EMP weapons, you know like in the first movie, back into the combat zone, and the tactical command was of divided opinion on whether it would help, but the rank and file soldiers just assumed it would and went with it. I figure that would have never flown, as no audience would tolerate the idea that the people in charge in a war might not all agree or make the best calls, or worse that the best decision might be less than blindingly obvious. I mean, next they'll be saying Eisenhower was unsure D-day was going to work.
"I would say, however, that most companies are not in the same boat."
Perhaps this is the real source of the problem. I once worked for a company that made videotapes, while simultaneously holding a one weekend a month position in a military frontline combat unit that required a few clearances. I came back after 5 months on active duty status at a school I still can't mention (just kidding, I could tell you, but then I'd have to bore you to death), and my boss asked if I thought corporate security could use any of the techniques the DoD used.
I made the mistake of mentioning the signs that were occasionally posted. reading "Armed response authorized - If you open this door, you will die.". I pointed out that that probably wasn't what they wanted just for corporate security. My boss said (approximately) "We take our security just a seriously as the government does.", but I still didn't expect anything to come of it.
Yep, they tried it, on the master tape vault, protecting video masters to nothing more sensitive than ten year old low budget action adventure flicks. Most of the employees figured it was a joke, but enough didn't that there was eventually a lot of appologising needed. I never heard if there were actual legal problems, but the whole company has since basically moved to Mexico under NAFTA so they're probably moot.
When I was doing it, we often called it paranoia too. It's just we're fully trained professional paranoids, while you are, at best, a talented amateur.
Physical locks vary a lot, not just by the model but from year to year.
In the 88 to 89 Toyota trucks, the vast majority of them could be opened with a Toyota key with all notches cut about 1/32nd inch deep.
Around this time, you could get a new key to fit your Volvo, Mazda or Saab by giving the dealer the last 3 digits of the VIN, visable through the windshield. Some dealers checked to see if the requestor actually owned the car, most didn't.
Mustangs around '79 had a lot of different ignition keys, but only half a dozen or so trunk keys.
I don't remember which vehicle it was, but there was one make and model year about 1990 where your key would match 1 out of every 8 such cars. Most mechanicallly keyed cars today are more in the range of 1 in 200 or better, but even that doesn't sound very reliable.
Most electronic keys use some variant on a pseudo-random generation approach. In a typical design 256 codes are sent each time, and a new one generated by boxes in the car and installed in the key device as the oldest one is dropped. That way, if little Jimmy plays star trek with daddy's new electronic key, he has to phaser his buddies 256 times, out of reach of the car, before the key and the in-car chip no longer have a code in common. If they still share at least one code, they will resync withhout a service call. 256 common codes out of several trillion possible is still very good overall odds.
Caffine is a diuretic, but the cola dehydration claim is only about a half truth. Studies have found that people who are sensitive to caffine or aren't regular cola drinkers can dehydrate themselves through frequent urination, and it can be a real risk in a very hot, dry setting, but the effect tapers off in most people after about a week's steady caffine use. For a large majority, the risk becomes trivial. If you're actually hiking the desert, working in a foundry, or are a borderline diabetic or person with a previous history of heat injuries, you should probably avoid colas completely while those circumstances last, but then that's good advice for the 15 million borderline diabetics in America anyway. If you are normally sedentary and just started hiking deserts or working in 120 degree heat, avoid them until you are adapted, then use moderation. If you work outdoors in the sun and it gets above 80 F, or you play active sports, you probably want to use water or an electrolite drink at least half the time.
Any article needs to be targeted at a particular audience. In fact, it's a sign of incompetent writing if a crical reader can't figure out what audience would find the article relevant.
Even if I hadn't RTFA'ed, from the parts you quote alone, I would gather that the target audience is intended to exclude people who don't yet really have an opinion on MS Windows security one way or the other. It also is designed to exclude people who still think Microsoft is largely secure and those who already think OS X has significant vulnerabilities. It still leaves a fairly broad range, i.e. people who think both OS's are about the same, AND people who think OS X is better but not by a huge amount. It also still includes people who think any significant PART of OS X's better security history comes from being a lower profile target. Does such a target audience exist?
I try to avoid the tendency to define my audience by telling the reader what he thinks myself, but then my editor says I end up naturally longwinded as a result. Even for professional writers, it's very hard to avoid both mistakes at once. If you try recasting the sentence to define an audience without resorting to this method, you might see how long and compounded the sentence gets trying to avoid it. If you can avoid writing like you're patronizing your readers, keep it tight, short and focused, and do both consistently over the course of a career, you need to be the one writing the articles.
If you're going to totally lack a sense of humor, you are hearby barred from using the phrase "inna you head".
Seriously, what you read as an anti-human screed was a strongly pro-human screed with included ironic tones parodying some of the "Oh humans are evil" crap already posted. I'm sorry you missed that, so please feel free to mod me un-funny until I give up trying to use any subtler methods and confine all humor to various In Sovier Russia..., ??? Profit!, and Imagine a Beowolf cluster of.. jokes.
Don't be silly! If we start trying to influence the whole universe, we might have to grow up enough to take on the job, and you know where that would lead? Just because you have this crazy idea that we could do better than a bunch of blind natural processes, particularly If we recognize we are part of that nature ourselves and have a role to play.
"The radio industry doesn't particularly care about the recording industry..."
The radio industry would like to be able to not care one way or the other, but financial constraints make that impossible. The recording industry provides their content, and the bigger corporations in the recording industry prepackage it so the radio industry doesn't have to pay for more staff just to winnow through the rest. With their current business model, the radio industry needs not just a recording industry but one controlled by a few huge, monolithic leaders.
For the same reason I don't think there is a subtle conspiracy to control the vote, and there are 30,000 members of that subtle conspiracy in my state alone, and none of them ever slip up, and the news media is in on it too, and oh Ghod, it's like that movie, the Net, they're everywhere I tell you.
If the tech takes the time to undo everything needed to get at the EPROMs, that's going to pad the recorded time the case is open. Unless he adjusts the clock, the times the machine would show are consistent with a major overhaul, and not just reloading a paper roll or running normal diagnostics. For many of those tasks, the machine is normally transported to a central facility, so it would be unusual for him to do them in the field. So to cheat, he would have to change that data too. Oh, and there are multiple plastic or wire seals with individual serial numbers on the case itself, various switches, and several interior compartments, so the tech has to succesfully tamper with those. After he gets a false time recorded, he will have to change it back as well, or I start up a machine Tuesday at 7 AM and record that the time counter on the strip just now printed out for my inspection is off by an hour or so.
Assuming he has the knowledge to do all the adjustments correctly, whatwever he changes it to better agree with his recorded hours on the job, or else his boss and a third party have to be in on it too. When you pull all the maintenance data from all the machines, it gets aggregated and if any two times overlap, (which effectively says he was in 2 places at once), the information is immediately flagged and goes to an auditor. The people who check this are not the ones who use the job sheet the tech turns in to figure his hours for the week, because his job sheet includes things that happen outside the machines, such as drive times. If those people see that it supposedly took the tech three minutes or two hours to drive 15 miles between poling places, they are supposed to alert the auditor to check on the machine data too, so now the tech has to keep his hand logged records compatable with what the machine shows, AND with what his paymaster knows about the real world situation, or somebody has a fair chance to catch him.
Paymasters will often accept the tech's word for some descrepancies, i.e. the tech can call in and say he just now got to polling place X, because the traffic was heavy, and he could probably generate some slack time. But each time he does that, he gains the ability to tamper with one or two machines out of the hundred or so in his area. How many of them does he have to fix to actually change the election? Probably not just one or two, maybe more like 25 or 50. It's like any other job, you can't be the one who has odd scheduling problems all the time or it stands out.
Meanwhile I'm doing things like running one machine only during busy phases, and when it gets about an hour before close of polls, I decide to stop using that machine when 100 people have used it. The totals out of it better be 100 votes or less (remember not all voters check every box they can check, some choose to vote for just some of the available offices), and the Tech has no way of knowing which machines I may have used for this. If he's rigged just one of my machines, it may well be the one I choose not to use much. I've got other ways to spot something odd, for example I know that almost everyone voting in a presidential race is going to pick a presidential candidate, and If I see a machine where a bunch more people had an opinion on the local dog catcher race, than cared about the national race I'm likely to bring that to some people's attention. (I'm an independant - I'd mention it to people in whichever party seemed affected, but yeah, you're trusting me to mean that) What keeps people doing my job from helping the tech slide by? There are at least three people looking at these paper records immediately as they are printed, and matching various numbers to other records that are transported in locked pouche
Having worked as an election official, I can tell you my state produces a paper trail that includes a printout of the system state at close of polls, and yet that printout is far from useless.
The paper trail doesn't prove that the machine operators and judges didn't do some tricks, such as falsifying signatures on the rolls for people they knew weren't going to show up and then voting "for" them, but that's a trick that is risky until the polls are officially closed, and it assumes all the judges and machine operators will collude. For some other possible cheats, the paper trail is very useful.
First, the time stamp on the print out is some proof that extra votes weren't loaded into the machine before the polls were opened or after they were supposed to be closed. It records the last maintenance dates when the machine was opened as well as the election day's use, so suspicious patterns of access have a chance of being detected, and there are presumably people who will ask why a particular machine was opened three times and stayed open for 45 minutes when the record show all the maintenance required was replacing an empty paper roll.
Second, one copy, signed by all workers, is supposed to be made immediately available to the press and representitives of the parties and independant candidates, and stays at the polling place. Tampering after this time, when the votes are aggregated above precinct level, is made more difficult because it can at least be checked against those precinct counts.
But, this only works if the press or other organizations get the counts for every precinct and process those numbers themselves as the election comission does the same thing with the electronic cartridges. If the local newspapers, parties and candidates don't check much, those extra copies usually end up being taken down from the polling place door the next day and thrown in the trash.
One of the reasons election fraud is still possible is the local party offices don't get enough volunteers to observe individual polling places, and the newspapers usually feel they are doing their job if they bother to call and ask me who won, let alone be standing there in person 5 minutes before the polls close. Yes, they've frequently been willing to take my unsupported word for the numbers, if they ask at all. I've also seen reporters whose math skills were so bad they couldn't check the totals even with the calculator I loaned them.
"even if Diebold (or other E-voting terminal manufacturer) doesn't manipulate elections, the possibility that they could casts a shadow of doubt over the whole democratic process."
For example, some candidate wins a close election by a tie-breaking procedure. Assume for the sake of arguement that his party doesn't cheat (or at least not more than the the opposition), and the final result is 'fair'. What happens when the new elected official hits a rough spot, and slips in the polls? A lot of the people who don't like him much that week will convert their mental doubts about the process to certainty that the process was crooked. Now maybe the official did something unpopular, but in agreement with his party platform and in no way illegal, to provoke the drop in the polls. But the public won't stay focused on that for long, they will start demanding new investigations of the "improprieties", so instead of demanding the laws or the system be changed, to end deficit spending, for example, the public at large will focus on the particular person, i.e. by demanding impeachment.
Not trusting the election system means the public will focus its concern on the winners of close elections, and the drawback is this takes focus away from noticing signs of possible corruption where the candidate won by a landslide. There's a certain presumption is saying "If he didn't cheat in the election, _as easy as it is_, we can quit watching him", which ignores that many elections are not close enough to need to cheat.
I'm not sure some of the Arab world thinks we have a good side, let alone wants to get on it. I'd happily settle for certain Arab leaders not claiming that the problem with Palestine and Israel was sucking up resources they could use to improve their own people's lives, and spending that money on them, especially since they aren't really sending it to Palestine.
If you mean whether the picolinates of some metals are advantageous to take already in that form, the body uses picolinic acid with Zinc, Chromium, and some other metals as part of the assembly process where these ions get linked into organic compounds like Carboxypeptidase or Carbonic Anhydrase. (Carbonic Anhydrase keeps the CO2 in your bloodstream from forming bubbles. It's something that you really don't want to run short of, even for a few minutes).
Why it _may_ matter what the counter ion is is that these ions aren't all in a near normal Ph 7 aquaeous solution at those assembly sites, as this is not done in the bloodstream, but inside specialized cells of the liver that seem to operate internally with a pretty skewed Ph, and maniupulating the Zinc ion involves breaking bonds that would be stable there except for some enzymes, using other enzymes to do the assembly, and then yet other enzymes to keep the compound stable until it is transported from the cells where it was built into the bloodstream.
This is _not_ all rigorously proven, but the absorption rates in the intestinal villi areas that handle Zinc compounds seem to support it, and we can propose an evolutionary mechanism for such preferential absorption - that our latest few sets of ancestors tended to be omnivores who got much of their Zinc intake from herbivore flesh, particularly livers. This theory predicts that some common prey animals should be less selective than hominids in what forms of Zinc they uptake well, and that we might see similarities between us and chimps on this point, which are both claims not really thoroughly tested as yet, and having ambiguous results so far.
One point in favor of this theory is that vitamin C seems to work this way - We need it, most herbivorous mammals make it internally.
It's also possible that the ions do inevitably disassociate partway through the process, (particularly in transport from the villi to the liver, which must be through the bloodstream or we've really got something wrong in our understanding of basic anatomy) but having appropriate amounts of the other materials nearby to remake the Picolinates helps speed up the overall processes. Maybe the liver is excreting some signal to the villi that tells them how much Zinc, Chromium, etc. to absorb, but the signal compound is made based on the negative ion and the liver doesn't signal for the metals directly. That way, one signal hormone would work for a variety of minerals that are mostly rare enough your body could normally always use more of whichever of them is around at the moment.
Your earlier post suggested you knew some fair amount of chemistry, but you didn't actually spell out the distinction between chemical toxicity and thermal burns, so I broke it down for other readers, _not_ to imply you didn't, but because some readers might think I meant what are sometimes called "chemical burns" where the tissues are supposedly damaged by rapid dehydration but not necessarily by actual great heat.
Since you were posting to a thread about Zinc whiskers and writing about risks in operating rooms, it looks like you were already considering the effect of "Lots of surface area = Hey! This is going to be absorbed a lot faster than a solid chunk." too, but neither one of us actually came out and explicitly said that part, so for the record, your point makes more sense keeping that in mind.
The preferred Zinc compound for mineral supplements is usually Zinc Picolinate, which is the form most readily metabolized by humans. Zinc Oxide is frequently the form used in mixed multi-vitamin and mineral tablets, but some nutritionists argue that the manufacturers are cutting corners to save a few cents there.
Zinc Oxide is also absorbed very, very slowly through the skin (as when used in sunblock cremes, so that most of the sunblock's Zinc is washed off instead of entering the body). Pure Zinc metal is not nearly as reactive as sodium or calcium, so it really isn't very toxic compared to them. People eat pennies frequently (4 year old people that is), with few harmful effects, although pennies are mostly zinc with a copper surface.
For comparison, a significant amount of pure sodium won't just give you chemical poisoning, it will oxidize so rapidly with contact with air or water, and liberate so much heat in the process, that the burns you would get from handling or swallowing it would probably kill you as fast as the toxicity, or even quicker.
Yes, Zinc metal fiber in a hospital environment isn't nearly what I would call perfectly safe. Pennies usually pass before too much dissolves, and getting a lot of metal fibers inside a surgical incision before closing is not such a benign environment. Still, there are a lot worse possibilities for substances to get in a wound.
Someone designed a Dalek skin for characters in Quake 2, and it prompted someone else to design the Spider-Dalek version. I always just assumed that was from the later years of Dr. Who and not an original idea, but put 8 scythe like legs on a hemisphere with a Dalek upper torso, and you should be able to get modern kids peeing their jammies every time they hear "Exterminate! Exterminate!"
So the evil master villians are so powerful they have editied all spacetime to remove every trace of those pathetic cone shaped robots with the plunger thingees - "Bwaahahahahaha! Not only are they gone, but it is as though they have never existed! In fact we purged them so thoroughly I forget their puny race's name!"
In the USA, Universal threw the original Creature of the Black Lagoon gillman suit in the trash, and if memory serves it ended up in Forrest J. Ackerman's collection for a time, and now the Universal theme park has had to pay to get it back, or were in negotiations over it still, one.
Desilu trashcanned the original phasers and tricorders from original trek, and let someone take Dr. McCoy's instruments home and use them on the dining table (they were originally modern design saltshakers, and for a while they were again).
This sort of thing happened a lot until about the invention of e-bay.
Roger Zelazny - Great fantasy and SF author, Royalties showing lots of signs they would increase rapidly in the next few years - his Amber series optioned for film, much of his other work coming back into print, books-on-tape versions which he was getting the income both as writer and narrator, and even talk of theme park rides based on his work.
Roger died still in middle age, of a relatively nasty form of cancer, with huge medical bills, kids at or near college age, and someone else having to be hired to read the last two books of the series to finish out that particular contract. Not only were there lots of bills to pay immediately, but the death caused lots of legal delays in getting money already owed. He had a 2 novel connected work about half finished, and Jane Lindskold finished it up, but the publisher decided since she was a relative unknown, they would have to be scrunched together into a 1 book version. How much extra effort was that already, and wouldn't it have been even worse if his copyrights had ended at death?
This makes two terms in the Drake equation that are apparently close to unity (Likelyhood of a star having planets), and (Likelyhood that simple life will develop into complex, multicellular life). It's a pity that some of the others, like (likelyhood a technological civilization survives long enough to be detected), may be very close to 0.
NASA focused the Hubble on very long exposure deep lookback shots for quite a while, with single exposures that took 3 days or so, to get images of very faint galaxies early in time. As fundamental gains in cosmology kept resulting, the program went with its successes, and other projects to look at stuff nearer by were pushed to the back burner, many of them repeatedly. When it was first announced that the shuttle could not be used safely to sustain the HST, NASA found itself with a lot of astronomers who had been promised they would get a turn later, and were now being told there might be no later.
You certainly can argue that planet searches are less significant than the origin problem for the whole universe, but then, what isn't? NASA being reluctant to break promises to researchers or go to further extremes in favoring one type of research over all others is a sign they are considering their mandate to serve the public properly. I don't want my state university to stop awarding PhD's in astronomy to anyone who isn't working on cosmology related projects, I dont want other tools, like the Keck scopes on Mauna Loa, to be scrambling to fit in a load of projects, all considered NASA rejects, and so I don't want NASA thinking like the only astronomy worth doing is cosmology.
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The Goshtak distims the Doshes.
Copyright is supposed to be a quid pro quo arrangement. The owner gets protection for X years, and the work is supposed to enter the public domain after that. Put the work in a vault and let it grow mold, and voila, you got the protection for the time you were making money, then didn't have to pay off.
When one person pays first, and the other pays back later, and somehow someone ends up being ripped off, who in your general experience is the 'ripper' and who the 'ripee'? I know of very few cases where the one who is supposed to pay first manages to successfuly rip off the one who pays back later, and a lot of cases where it runs the other way.
Why is it generally considered good advice not to give the guy who is building a new addition on your house all the money in advance? How many business contracts carefully specify when different job parts and money's are exchanged to keep either side from risking too much? Would you sign a contract where someone was supposed to pay up 70 years after their death, yet that contract specifically said the person was not even required to make a will or designate who would be the person to contact when that contract finally came due?
The proof that many consumers have been brainwashed is simple. They have come to believe copyright naturally runs counter to the trend they have observed first hand in dozens of other cases and apply as common sense over a vast range of normal activities.
Yeah, the only way to save that section would have been to have some really big weapons also included, and have them armored enough that the machine guns on the big bots were ineffective and some people had to go to up close infantry modes. Then when they take one down, it could become apparent that killing 99% of the sentinels wassn't going to be enough, as they would try to repair the big stuff, so everyone had to change tactics to take out the big things more thoroughly or nail all those sentinels that weren't just pouring through the obvious breach and sticking with the herd.
Of course, that would make no sense. The sentinels would have to fight like souless machines, or they would break and run in the face of such a high casualty rate, and they'ed have to be like machines again for their command to rely on the proper numbers of them following a contingency plan to break off and repair a damaged big machine with such inhuman precision.
The only thing that could have made a scene like that better would be if the Zion-oids were trying to get one of those cool EMV's with the EMP weapons, you know like in the first movie, back into the combat zone, and the tactical command was of divided opinion on whether it would help, but the rank and file soldiers just assumed it would and went with it. I figure that would have never flown, as no audience would tolerate the idea that the people in charge in a war might not all agree or make the best calls, or worse that the best decision might be less than blindingly obvious. I mean, next they'll be saying Eisenhower was unsure D-day was going to work.
Thanks - I just dug through my "spare parts" drawer and made US $23.50. Who woulda believed it, those dimes and quarters add up.
"I would say, however, that most companies are not in the same boat."
Perhaps this is the real source of the problem. I once worked for a company that made videotapes, while simultaneously holding a one weekend a month position in a military frontline combat unit that required a few clearances. I came back after 5 months on active duty status at a school I still can't mention (just kidding, I could tell you, but then I'd have to bore you to death), and my boss asked if I thought corporate security could use any of the techniques the DoD used.
I made the mistake of mentioning the signs that were occasionally posted. reading "Armed response authorized - If you open this door, you will die.". I pointed out that that probably wasn't what they wanted just for corporate security. My boss said (approximately) "We take our security just a seriously as the government does.", but I still didn't expect anything to come of it.
Yep, they tried it, on the master tape vault, protecting video masters to nothing more sensitive than ten year old low budget action adventure flicks. Most of the employees figured it was a joke, but enough didn't that there was eventually a lot of appologising needed. I never heard if there were actual legal problems, but the whole company has since basically moved to Mexico under NAFTA so they're probably moot.
When I was doing it, we often called it paranoia too. It's just we're fully trained professional paranoids, while you are, at best, a talented amateur.
Physical locks vary a lot, not just by the model but from year to year.
In the 88 to 89 Toyota trucks, the vast majority of them could be opened with a Toyota key with all notches cut about 1/32nd inch deep.
Around this time, you could get a new key to fit your Volvo, Mazda or Saab by giving the dealer the last 3 digits of the VIN, visable through the windshield. Some dealers checked to see if the requestor actually owned the car, most didn't.
Mustangs around '79 had a lot of different ignition keys, but only half a dozen or so trunk keys.
I don't remember which vehicle it was, but there was one make and model year about 1990 where your key would match 1 out of every 8 such cars. Most mechanicallly keyed cars today are more in the range of 1 in 200 or better, but even that doesn't sound very reliable.
Most electronic keys use some variant on a pseudo-random generation approach. In a typical design 256 codes are sent each time, and a new one generated by boxes in the car and installed in the key device as the oldest one is dropped. That way, if little Jimmy plays star trek with daddy's new electronic key, he has to phaser his buddies 256 times, out of reach of the car, before the key and the in-car chip no longer have a code in common. If they still share at least one code, they will resync withhout a service call. 256 common codes out of several trillion possible is still very good overall odds.
Caffine is a diuretic, but the cola dehydration claim is only about a half truth. Studies have found that people who are sensitive to caffine or aren't regular cola drinkers can dehydrate themselves through frequent urination, and it can be a real risk in a very hot, dry setting, but the effect tapers off in most people after about a week's steady caffine use. For a large majority, the risk becomes trivial. If you're actually hiking the desert, working in a foundry, or are a borderline diabetic or person with a previous history of heat injuries, you should probably avoid colas completely while those circumstances last, but then that's good advice for the 15 million borderline diabetics in America anyway. If you are normally sedentary and just started hiking deserts or working in 120 degree heat, avoid them until you are adapted, then use moderation. If you work outdoors in the sun and it gets above 80 F, or you play active sports, you probably want to use water or an electrolite drink at least half the time.
Any article needs to be targeted at a particular audience. In fact, it's a sign of incompetent writing if a crical reader can't figure out what audience would find the article relevant.
Even if I hadn't RTFA'ed, from the parts you quote alone, I would gather that the target audience is intended to exclude people who don't yet really have an opinion on MS Windows security one way or the other. It also is designed to exclude people who still think Microsoft is largely secure and those who already think OS X has significant vulnerabilities. It still leaves a fairly broad range, i.e. people who think both OS's are about the same, AND people who think OS X is better but not by a huge amount. It also still includes people who think any significant PART of OS X's better security history comes from being a lower profile target. Does such a target audience exist?
I try to avoid the tendency to define my audience by telling the reader what he thinks myself, but then my editor says I end up naturally longwinded as a result. Even for professional writers, it's very hard to avoid both mistakes at once. If you try recasting the sentence to define an audience without resorting to this method, you might see how long and compounded the sentence gets trying to avoid it. If you can avoid writing like you're patronizing your readers, keep it tight, short and focused, and do both consistently over the course of a career, you need to be the one writing the articles.
If you're going to totally lack a sense of humor, you are hearby barred from using the phrase "inna you head".
Seriously, what you read as an anti-human screed was a strongly pro-human screed with included ironic tones parodying some of the "Oh humans are evil" crap already posted. I'm sorry you missed that, so please feel free to mod me un-funny until I give up trying to use any subtler methods and confine all humor to various In Sovier Russia..., ??? Profit!, and Imagine a Beowolf cluster of.. jokes.
Don't be silly! If we start trying to influence the whole universe, we might have to grow up enough to take on the job, and you know where that would lead? Just because you have this crazy idea that we could do better than a bunch of blind natural processes, particularly If we recognize we are part of that nature ourselves and have a role to play.
"The radio industry doesn't particularly care about the recording industry..."
The radio industry would like to be able to not care one way or the other, but financial constraints make that impossible. The recording industry provides their content, and the bigger corporations in the recording industry prepackage it so the radio industry doesn't have to pay for more staff just to winnow through the rest. With their current business model, the radio industry needs not just a recording industry but one controlled by a few huge, monolithic leaders.
For the same reason I don't think there is a subtle conspiracy to control the vote, and there are 30,000 members of that subtle conspiracy in my state alone, and none of them ever slip up, and the news media is in on it too, and oh Ghod, it's like that movie, the Net, they're everywhere I tell you.
If the tech takes the time to undo everything needed to get at the EPROMs, that's going to pad the recorded time the case is open. Unless he adjusts the clock, the times the machine would show are consistent with a major overhaul, and not just reloading a paper roll or running normal diagnostics. For many of those tasks, the machine is normally transported to a central facility, so it would be unusual for him to do them in the field. So to cheat, he would have to change that data too. Oh, and there are multiple plastic or wire seals with individual serial numbers on the case itself, various switches, and several interior compartments, so the tech has to succesfully tamper with those. After he gets a false time recorded, he will have to change it back as well, or I start up a machine Tuesday at 7 AM and record that the time counter on the strip just now printed out for my inspection is off by an hour or so.
Assuming he has the knowledge to do all the adjustments correctly, whatwever he changes it to better agree with his recorded hours on the job, or else his boss and a third party have to be in on it too. When you pull all the maintenance data from all the machines, it gets aggregated and if any two times overlap, (which effectively says he was in 2 places at once), the information is immediately flagged and goes to an auditor. The people who check this are not the ones who use the job sheet the tech turns in to figure his hours for the week, because his job sheet includes things that happen outside the machines, such as drive times. If those people see that it supposedly took the tech three minutes or two hours to drive 15 miles between poling places, they are supposed to alert the auditor to check on the machine data too, so now the tech has to keep his hand logged records compatable with what the machine shows, AND with what his paymaster knows about the real world situation, or somebody has a fair chance to catch him.
Paymasters will often accept the tech's word for some descrepancies, i.e. the tech can call in and say he just now got to polling place X, because the traffic was heavy, and he could probably generate some slack time. But each time he does that, he gains the ability to tamper with one or two machines out of the hundred or so in his area. How many of them does he have to fix to actually change the election? Probably not just one or two, maybe more like 25 or 50. It's like any other job, you can't be the one who has odd scheduling problems all the time or it stands out.
Meanwhile I'm doing things like running one machine only during busy phases, and when it gets about an hour before close of polls, I decide to stop using that machine when 100 people have used it. The totals out of it better be 100 votes or less (remember not all voters check every box they can check, some choose to vote for just some of the available offices), and the Tech has no way of knowing which machines I may have used for this. If he's rigged just one of my machines, it may well be the one I choose not to use much. I've got other ways to spot something odd, for example I know that almost everyone voting in a presidential race is going to pick a presidential candidate, and If I see a machine where a bunch more people had an opinion on the local dog catcher race, than cared about the national race I'm likely to bring that to some people's attention. (I'm an independant - I'd mention it to people in whichever party seemed affected, but yeah, you're trusting me to mean that) What keeps people doing my job from helping the tech slide by? There are at least three people looking at these paper records immediately as they are printed, and matching various numbers to other records that are transported in locked pouche
Having worked as an election official, I can tell you my state produces a paper trail that includes a printout of the system state at close of polls, and yet that printout is far from useless.
The paper trail doesn't prove that the machine operators and judges didn't do some tricks, such as falsifying signatures on the rolls for people they knew weren't going to show up and then voting "for" them, but that's a trick that is risky until the polls are officially closed, and it assumes all the judges and machine operators will collude. For some other possible cheats, the paper trail is very useful.
First, the time stamp on the print out is some proof that extra votes weren't loaded into the machine before the polls were opened or after they were supposed to be closed. It records the last maintenance dates when the machine was opened as well as the election day's use, so suspicious patterns of access have a chance of being detected, and there are presumably people who will ask why a particular machine was opened three times and stayed open for 45 minutes when the record show all the maintenance required was replacing an empty paper roll.
Second, one copy, signed by all workers, is supposed to be made immediately available to the press and representitives of the parties and independant candidates, and stays at the polling place. Tampering after this time, when the votes are aggregated above precinct level, is made more difficult because it can at least be checked against those precinct counts.
But, this only works if the press or other organizations get the counts for every precinct and process those numbers themselves as the election comission does the same thing with the electronic cartridges. If the local newspapers, parties and candidates don't check much, those extra copies usually end up being taken down from the polling place door the next day and thrown in the trash.
One of the reasons election fraud is still possible is the local party offices don't get enough volunteers to observe individual polling places, and the newspapers usually feel they are doing their job if they bother to call and ask me who won, let alone be standing there in person 5 minutes before the polls close. Yes, they've frequently been willing to take my unsupported word for the numbers, if they ask at all. I've also seen reporters whose math skills were so bad they couldn't check the totals even with the calculator I loaned them.
"even if Diebold (or other E-voting terminal manufacturer) doesn't manipulate elections, the possibility that they could casts a shadow of doubt over the whole democratic process."
For example, some candidate wins a close election by a tie-breaking procedure. Assume for the sake of arguement that his party doesn't cheat (or at least not more than the the opposition), and the final result is 'fair'. What happens when the new elected official hits a rough spot, and slips in the polls? A lot of the people who don't like him much that week will convert their mental doubts about the process to certainty that the process was crooked. Now maybe the official did something unpopular, but in agreement with his party platform and in no way illegal, to provoke the drop in the polls. But the public won't stay focused on that for long, they will start demanding new investigations of the "improprieties", so instead of demanding the laws or the system be changed, to end deficit spending, for example, the public at large will focus on the particular person, i.e. by demanding impeachment.
Not trusting the election system means the public will focus its concern on the winners of close elections, and the drawback is this takes focus away from noticing signs of possible corruption where the candidate won by a landslide. There's a certain presumption is saying "If he didn't cheat in the election, _as easy as it is_, we can quit watching him", which ignores that many elections are not close enough to need to cheat.
I'm not sure some of the Arab world thinks we have a good side, let alone wants to get on it. I'd happily settle for certain Arab leaders not claiming that the problem with Palestine and Israel was sucking up resources they could use to improve their own people's lives, and spending that money on them, especially since they aren't really sending it to Palestine.
If you mean whether the picolinates of some metals are advantageous to take already in that form, the body uses picolinic acid with Zinc, Chromium, and some other metals as part of the assembly process where these ions get linked into organic compounds like Carboxypeptidase or Carbonic Anhydrase. (Carbonic Anhydrase keeps the CO2 in your bloodstream from forming bubbles. It's something that you really don't want to run short of, even for a few minutes).
Why it _may_ matter what the counter ion is is that these ions aren't all in a near normal Ph 7 aquaeous solution at those assembly sites, as this is not done in the bloodstream, but inside specialized cells of the liver that seem to operate internally with a pretty skewed Ph, and maniupulating the Zinc ion involves breaking bonds that would be stable there except for some enzymes, using other enzymes to do the assembly, and then yet other enzymes to keep the compound stable until it is transported from the cells where it was built into the bloodstream.
This is _not_ all rigorously proven, but the absorption rates in the intestinal villi areas that handle Zinc compounds seem to support it, and we can propose an evolutionary mechanism for such preferential absorption - that our latest few sets of ancestors tended to be omnivores who got much of their Zinc intake from herbivore flesh, particularly livers. This theory predicts that some common prey animals should be less selective than hominids in what forms of Zinc they uptake well, and that we might see similarities between us and chimps on this point, which are both claims not really thoroughly tested as yet, and having ambiguous results so far.
One point in favor of this theory is that vitamin C seems to work this way - We need it, most herbivorous mammals make it internally.
It's also possible that the ions do inevitably disassociate partway through the process, (particularly in transport from the villi to the liver, which must be through the bloodstream or we've really got something wrong in our understanding of basic anatomy) but having appropriate amounts of the other materials nearby to remake the Picolinates helps speed up the overall processes. Maybe the liver is excreting some signal to the villi that tells them how much Zinc, Chromium, etc. to absorb, but the signal compound is made based on the negative ion and the liver doesn't signal for the metals directly. That way, one signal hormone would work for a variety of minerals that are mostly rare enough your body could normally always use more of whichever of them is around at the moment.
Your earlier post suggested you knew some fair amount of chemistry, but you didn't actually spell out the distinction between chemical toxicity and thermal burns, so I broke it down for other readers, _not_ to imply you didn't, but because some readers might think I meant what are sometimes called "chemical burns" where the tissues are supposedly damaged by rapid dehydration but not necessarily by actual great heat.
Since you were posting to a thread about Zinc whiskers and writing about risks in operating rooms, it looks like you were already considering the effect of "Lots of surface area = Hey! This is going to be absorbed a lot faster than a solid chunk." too, but neither one of us actually came out and explicitly said that part, so for the record, your point makes more sense keeping that in mind.
The preferred Zinc compound for mineral supplements is usually Zinc Picolinate, which is the form most readily metabolized by humans. Zinc Oxide is frequently the form used in mixed multi-vitamin and mineral tablets, but some nutritionists argue that the manufacturers are cutting corners to save a few cents there.
Zinc Oxide is also absorbed very, very slowly through the skin (as when used in sunblock cremes, so that most of the sunblock's Zinc is washed off instead of entering the body). Pure Zinc metal is not nearly as reactive as sodium or calcium, so it really isn't very toxic compared to them. People eat pennies frequently (4 year old people that is), with few harmful effects, although pennies are mostly zinc with a copper surface.
For comparison, a significant amount of pure sodium won't just give you chemical poisoning, it will oxidize so rapidly with contact with air or water, and liberate so much heat in the process, that the burns you would get from handling or swallowing it would probably kill you as fast as the toxicity, or even quicker.
Yes, Zinc metal fiber in a hospital environment isn't nearly what I would call perfectly safe. Pennies usually pass before too much dissolves, and getting a lot of metal fibers inside a surgical incision before closing is not such a benign environment. Still, there are a lot worse possibilities for substances to get in a wound.
Someone designed a Dalek skin for characters in Quake 2, and it prompted someone else to design the Spider-Dalek version. I always just assumed that was from the later years of Dr. Who and not an original idea, but put 8 scythe like legs on a hemisphere with a Dalek upper torso, and you should be able to get modern kids peeing their jammies every time they hear "Exterminate! Exterminate!"
So the evil master villians are so powerful they have editied all spacetime to remove every trace of those pathetic cone shaped robots with the plunger thingees - "Bwaahahahahaha! Not only are they gone, but it is as though they have never existed! In fact we purged them so thoroughly I forget their puny race's name!"
In the USA, Universal threw the original Creature of the Black Lagoon gillman suit in the trash, and if memory serves it ended up in Forrest J. Ackerman's collection for a time, and now the Universal theme park has had to pay to get it back, or were in negotiations over it still, one.
Desilu trashcanned the original phasers and tricorders from original trek, and let someone take Dr. McCoy's instruments home and use them on the dining table (they were originally modern design saltshakers, and for a while they were again).
This sort of thing happened a lot until about the invention of e-bay.
Roger Zelazny - Great fantasy and SF author, Royalties showing lots of signs they would increase rapidly in the next few years - his Amber series optioned for film, much of his other work coming back into print, books-on-tape versions which he was getting the income both as writer and narrator, and even talk of theme park rides based on his work.
Roger died still in middle age, of a relatively nasty form of cancer, with huge medical bills, kids at or near college age, and someone else having to be hired to read the last two books of the series to finish out that particular contract. Not only were there lots of bills to pay immediately, but the death caused lots of legal delays in getting money already owed. He had a 2 novel connected work about half finished, and Jane Lindskold finished it up, but the publisher decided since she was a relative unknown, they would have to be scrunched together into a 1 book version. How much extra effort was that already, and wouldn't it have been even worse if his copyrights had ended at death?
This makes two terms in the Drake equation that are apparently close to unity (Likelyhood of a star having planets), and (Likelyhood that simple life will develop into complex, multicellular life). It's a pity that some of the others, like (likelyhood a technological civilization survives long enough to be detected), may be very close to 0.
"Actually, if they're going to try to determine atmospheric composition, I think they might _have_ to use a wavelength attenuated by atmosphere"
Yes, but at the other end.
NASA focused the Hubble on very long exposure deep lookback shots for quite a while, with single exposures that took 3 days or so, to get images of very faint galaxies early in time. As fundamental gains in cosmology kept resulting, the program went with its successes, and other projects to look at stuff nearer by were pushed to the back burner, many of them repeatedly. When it was first announced that the shuttle could not be used safely to sustain the HST, NASA found itself with a lot of astronomers who had been promised they would get a turn later, and were now being told there might be no later.
You certainly can argue that planet searches are less significant than the origin problem for the whole universe, but then, what isn't? NASA being reluctant to break promises to researchers or go to further extremes in favoring one type of research over all others is a sign they are considering their mandate to serve the public properly. I don't want my state university to stop awarding PhD's in astronomy to anyone who isn't working on cosmology related projects, I dont want other tools, like the Keck scopes on Mauna Loa, to be scrambling to fit in a load of projects, all considered NASA rejects, and so I don't want NASA thinking like the only astronomy worth doing is cosmology.