Err, yeah, using HTML tags to indicate where the name of the student has been censored is a really smart idea.... so the first line of the quote should read: "Today in class, CENSORED had a program launched [...]. I had told CENSORED to close the program [...]"
While Firefox is indeed a great browser, it is a largely irrelevant part of this sage -- kid runs unauthorized application, is told not to, disobeys instructions and talks back.
I agree. The TFA does indeed tell us that the detention was due to the disobedience and nothing else:
Today in class, had a program launched called Foxfire.exe. I had told to close the program and to resume work but he told me that it was just a different browser and that he was doing his work. I had given him two warnings but he insisted that it was just a "better" browser and that he wasn't doing anything wrong. I had then issued his detention.
Incidentally, isn't it scary that a teacher appears to have no clue on how to use the past tenses of the English language?
On the one hand, Wikipedia is a useful source of information and people can benefit from these proofs. On the other hand, how does one choose which proofs to include and which not to?
That says it all, really. On one hand information that is clearly useful and valuable can be presented, on the other hand we can bicker about how we write it down exactly, even though that doesn't really matter as a proof is a proof as long as it's correct.
To elaborate a little bit, some proofs are more elegant than others. Some require more knowledge than others. You can prove Pythagoras' theorem on two pages using only elementary geometry or in two lines using vectors. Which version you present depends on your audience, but that doesn't change the fact that you should present one. Proofs are useful, they help you understand not only that a theorem is correct but, much more importantly, why it is correct; so why is there even a discussion about whether or not to include proofs? Especially on a system like Wikipedia, where multiple versions of a proof can coexist peacefully (in theory) on a page - it's not like you'd have to choose one over all others (like you might have to, for instance, when teaching a class or giving a talk).
So - what's the problem? Unless it's political, in which case, well, you know, *yawn*.
Sure. And there is a market for maybe 5 computers in the world, 640K is enough for anybody, we don't need telephones because we have good messenger boys, flight of heavier-than-air vehicles is impossible, rail travel at high speed is impossible because humans would be unable to breathe and asphyxiate etc etc. Oh, and just for you:
To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth - all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances. --Lee DeForest
Have you learned nothing from past absolute statements?
Basically, if the law requires Vodaphone to comply with A, B and C then they have all right to be pissed if their competitors can ignore A, B or C without consequences.
Yeah, but let's not forget that Vodafone wanted the IPhone too (In German). They didn't get it because they didn't want to give Apple a share of the profits. Do you think they would have sued themselves if they had gotten an exclusive contract though? I'd say this is more of a case of "if we can't have the exclusive deal, then nobody shall".
Yeah, but there are rules to character formation - it's not like you have to remember every stroke for every character in order. IIRC, the general order of construction (at least with the traditional Chinese chars) is from top left to bottom right.
But that is interesting in itself - I would assume that most people, consciously or unconsciously, apply similar rules when they draw, i.e. where to start and where to stop. Wouldn't this mean potential hackers would at least have a better starting point at cracking this graphical password than with a normal one?
Also, one of the strengths of traditional passwords is that you can actually generate crazy random passwords which are still easy to remember. With a picture, I would assume that becomes more unlikely, so, in combination with the above, dictionary attacks should become easier.
Finally, since not the picture itself is stored but rather the sequence of strokes and the number of times the pen is lifted, I wonder how large that encoding is? Can't it simply be brute-forced directly? I guess it depends on how strokes are encoded - if it's angle and length as well as starting point it may be difficult to brute-force, but since the system has to account for variability in the user's drawing, it should be possible to exploit that in brute-force attacks. Whether it's sufficient or not, I don't know.
any functioning CD player will interpret the CD identically.
If you're trying to say that your CD will sound identically on every CD player, this is completely untrue. First, different CD players will deal with errors on the disc differently. But much more critically, the most important part of the interpretation of the data on the CD by the player is the transformation from a digital input signal into an analog output signal and here, there are huge differences which will affect what you hear. This is why you will hear a big difference between a 20$ discman connected to semi-decent amp and speakers and a $500 CD player connected to the same system. Some CD players use upsamplers, others don't. Some CD players have a transistor-based output stage (which range from very cheap (e.g. in a discman) to extremely good), others use valves and all these factors define, in fact, how the CD player interprets your CD. The same CD, even though it is an exact copy, will not be the same on every player.
If your point is that different copies of the same CD will sound the same on the same player, then this is quite likely to be true, bar some errors on the discs, and certainly more so than for vinyls.
But is the chemical the smell, and is the wavelength the colour?
Well, yes, since these represent the necessary and sufficient stimuli for you to perceive the smell as the smell of roses or the colour as the colour red. I don't think there's a need to go philosophical on this point.
What you are really talking about, I think, is the experience of perceiving a smell or odour. Then it's very clear that everything depends on who is doing the smelling/looking and nobody is going to argue that electronicc noses experience these stimuli in the same way we do. So yes, an electronic nose would have a priori problems with qualifying smells in subjective ways (smells good, bad, refreshing, stale) unless you specifically train it with lots of examples from all those categories. But that's not really the point of an electronic nose, it's more about detecting toxins and perhaps reverse-engineering certain odours (e.g. just what did the chef put into that lovely sauce of his?).
I also wonder how it works on things where the 'known' composition can vary. Will it mis-identify them like some other robot did identifying a reporter's hand as bacon (or something similar)?
It depends on what you want to do. If you want to identify a complex odour based on the mix of chemicals you've encountered, then yes, that can happen.
When you design such a system, you take lots of samples from all the inputs that vary so that you get a good idea of the possible variation for every given input (so you train the system with 50 roses, tulips and pieces of bacon instead of just one each). If you were to plot the inputs in a multidimensional space (one dimension per chemical you can detect, and the metric is the concentration of said chemical) you would thus not get e.g. a single point for the odour 'rose', another single point for the odour 'tulip' and a third point for the odour 'bacon'; you would get entire clouds of points.
If you're lucky, there will be plenty of empty space between the clouds and then you can easily train a classifier to discriminate between the odours (sometimes as simply as computing the distance between the odour you detect to the centre of each cloud and going for the closest cloud). If there is some overlap, you can still train a classifier and will be alright most of the time, just sometimes you'll have to qualify your ouput with a probability if your input falls into the overlap region (80% chance it's a rose, 20% it's a tulip). If there is heavy overlap, you're pretty much screwed unless you can think of a funky nonlinear transformation of the input which achieves a better separtion of the the different classes.
So yeah, misclassifications can happen, it depends on your input space and how the classifier deals with it. Especially novel stimuli can be a problem, I'd imagine.
As for the nose, how do they know that what is smells is correct? Surely it's a bit like colour in that it is entirely subjective as to how it is represented: does everyone see red in the same way as I do? Do roses smell the same to everyone?
No, this is not subjective. The same rose will give off the same chemicals regardless of who does the smelling. The same colour red has always the same wavelength regardless of who does the looking. Differences in perception only start in the brain (and sensory organs) but we can still have a clear definition of 'smells like roses' in terms of constitutent chemicals and 'is red' in terms of wavelength.
How the electronic nose really 'perceives' this is of lesser importance as long as it can reliably and correctly identify the odours and tell us about them. So you can easily test that the nose works like you expect by exposing it to random mixes of odours and compare the response of the nose to the (known) actual composition of the odour.
Some of the ninjas were female with at least one definitely promising to be on the attractive end of the scale - would you have wanted rescuing from them?;) Unless of course the rescuing were to be done by attractive female pirates... mmmyeah, I can see the attraction there...;)
... doesn't mean everyone else agrees. From a security expert, I find this a very strange attitude - surely one should always consider the worst case scenario and never dismiss any technique or approach as "something the bad guys won't use, because it's too cumbersome/difficult/whatever." If nothing else, that technique then has an immediate appeal to the bad guys because it is one you were not expecting.
'It doesn't make sense that someone selling out the company can't just leave with a USB.'
Oh, I think that makes a lot of sense. Imagine the scenario: "Oh, hi Peter, sorry to bother you, but we have a suspicion that someone from the inside might be leaking sensitive information to our competitors. Do you mind if we have a quick look at your USB stick?"
Would you rather be caught with: a) All the company's secrets b) Pictures of your daughter
And yeah, you could be encrypting all that information, but even an encrypted file would be more suspicious than a picture of your cute daughter.
Hello, my name is Logo kid. You killed my turtle, prepare to die!
But, seriously, no, I don't think we'll actually be fighting over this. Logo no longer has any importance in my life, as I'm sure Basic hasn't in yours. It was simply fun while it lasted, way back in the good old days. Heck, I can't even remember enough Logo to make an informed argument in its favour;) I do remember that I was writing some pretty funky GUI driven games in it at the end, but that's about it. Oh, and it kinda encouraged me to use a lot of goto's, which I guess is kinda bad.
But no, this won't be a new nerd-fight because I doubt anyone cares enough about it. It is far more important to teach those blasphemous vi people the error of their ways! (I'm kidding, I'm kidding)
My own political thought is what I call a Unanimocracy: a law doesn't get passed without unanimous consent. If you can't get it at the National level, try at the State level. Keep going down the ladder of size until you might end up with a law passed only in a home, or even only by an individual who restricts themselves.
Oh dear, this is severely flawed in so many ways. First, if people could actually agree with each other unanimously at a national or even world-wide level, heck, we would be living in a completely different society and I doubt there'd even be governments in the form we have them. You don't need a law if everyone agrees this is the right thing anyway.
Second, this going down until you find consent is just stupid. Not every law is about restricting yourself, some are about restricting other groups of people, others are about giving you rights - basically, laws regulate human relations. In your system, what will happen is that every individual will propose laws as he pleases and they will then always be unanimously adopted by at least himself. As a result, everyone will live by their own laws. There is a name for such a system: it is called Anarchy.
The next step? Come on, the Swiss have been doing this for centuries. They may do it the old-fashioned pen and paper way but it is more sophisticated since a referendum is only strictly required for constitutional changes but optional for changes in law unless at least 50.000 (I think) people request a referendum on this change in law. So they only ask the entire population if at least a sizeable minority actually cares about the topic under discussion.
This is not new and definitely not a new step in democracy - if anything it's a step backwards from the representative democracies we have now to direct democracies the Athenians (I think) had when they invented the entire thing ages ago.
So what will come first for the entire US, Gay or Robot marriage?
Gay. I see a very simple scale here: 1. Marriage between members of the same species capable of producing offspring 2. Marriage between members of the same species not capable of producing offspring 3. Marriage between members of different sentient species 4. Marriage between living and artificial beings 5. Marriage between a sentient and a non-sentient species
Regardless of whether you would see gay marriage as equivalent to hetero marriages or not, marrying a robot is still a huge step from gay marriage.
First, you could argue that robots, are not, technically, alive, but in that case it's like marrying your dildo and that definitely won't happen before gay marriage. If we do assume that they will be considered alive, by some definition, but not sentient then it would be like marrying a goat (which will almost surely never happen). If they are, by some definition, sentient and can to consent to the union, waters are still very muddy since it is easily argued that they have been programmed that way and that their choice is therefore not really a choice. So one could argue that even a marriage between man and some sentient alien lifeworm will be approved before marriage between man and machine.
I've often been amazed how bad the aerodynamics of Science Fiction are. The X wing is a pretty good example, with those huge laser weapons on the ends of the wings that guarantee flutter problems in the wings. I also find it hilarious that the leading edges of the wings are flat.
I would have thought that, for obvious reasons, aerodynamics are not a big issue when designing a spacecraft...
Well, I think that the requirements listed by the GP are simply not adequate. This is no personal attack, I know these are thaught in school, it's just that life is an incredibly difficult thing to define and 6 (rather loosely defined) words simply won't do. As a simple example,if all the above are considered a requirement, a mule, which cannot reproduce, would by definition not be alive. Just look up life on wikipedia for a taster of how difficult it is to define.
Having said that, one of the reasons a virus is not considered alive is because it is not made of cells. Now, whether or not living organisms *need* to be built of cells is again another debate, but that's what the general consensus seems to be. Also, to answer the question strictly, a virus does not grow, it has no metabolism (respiration, nutrition, discretion), no sensitivity, movement is highly debatable and while it does reproduce, it cannot do so independently.
I am far from being an Apple fanboy, but I would just like to pick your statements apart anyway. I own a 2nd gen Nano.
It locks you down to using iTunes, makes it difficult to use multiple machines or move music around
The latter two points are criticisms of iTunes, not the iPod itself. As for the first one, funny thing, I have never in my life installed iTunes but my Nano works just fine, out of the box as it were, in amarok under Kubuntu.
doesn't have particularly high sound quality
I don't know how it compares to other mp3 players in terms of sound quality, but I don't buy an mp3 player for a sound quality that matches my hi fi equipment. An mp3 player is just the modern version of a walkman, it's nice to have it on the bus/underground/whatever, basically when you're on the move. You have to deal with lots of ambient noise, even when wearing in-ear phones and the fact that you're using a lossy codec in the first place. It is a matter of taste and perception, granted, but pristine sound quality is in my opinion not a deciding factor when buying a portable player.
and doesn't support a lot of music formats.
Who needs a lot of music formats? This criticism really should read "doesn't support Ogg Vorbis", which really is a shame. But Ogg Vorbis simply missed its chance of becoming a mainstream music format and its too late now. Joe Average doesn't care about free vs proprietary codecs and the file size advantage.ogg had for similar quality is irrelevant now that hard disks are so ridiculously large that anyone can either encode mp3s at --preset insane or just rip to flac and transcode when needed. How exactly Ogg Vorbis missed the boat could probably spawn an entire thread and it is a shame, but it has missed it and that's that. So as far as required codecs go, mp3, like it or not, appears to do the trick for most people.
I see a crowd mentality at work here -- people buy and then vigorously defend having bought an iPod, not because it's better than the competition, but because it's what your friends have.
Funnily enough, my friends are all sensible people who own cheap-but-functional mp3 players from Samsung and the like. I used to own an iRiver H360 I think, big brick and when I decided I wanted a new one, my choices narrowed down to the iRiver Clix (I think that's what it was called) and the Nano. I originally wanted the Clix and the Nano only made it on the list because it had a higher storage capacity. A quick check for Linux compatibility found a million threads with people not getting the Clix to work without major hassle thanks to it using Microsoft's MTP and no serious issues with the Nano, except that Rockbox wouldn't work on it. So I bought the Nano. If the Clix had been a mass storage device, I would have bought the Clix. But to this day, I really don't regret buying the Nano - it works with amarok, it has a good battery life and that's my needs covered.
Granted, I see some advantages to the bigger iPods -- lots of storage is a good thing, and halfway decent battery life likewise. But the smaller ones? Just because it's branded "Apple"?
No, because, after choosing through elimination, it is the only name left on the list.
Well, for those who are interested, the Spiegel mentions that a cubic centimeter of that stuff would weigh about a billion metric tons on earth - what's your teaspoon made of?;)
Consumers won't buy into either format until they see some signs of stability.
I think you are almost correct, but I don't think such a stability can ever happen as both BluRay and HD are too big to simply be killed off by the other, so consumers won't choose one format over the other. I think the market will continue to grow on this trickle charge until cheap combo drives become commonly available. With those drives, consumers don't have to worry about who's gonna win or lose, they've got a drive which will play their movies either way, in other words, they have security. For HD vs BluRay, this will be a stalemate or at best an unspectacular technical victory by points.
Prosecutor: What did you see? Witness: I....don't remember...
Well, as a witness, would you prefer that or the alternative? Prosecutor: I have no witnesses, your honor, they have all died from heart attacks and car crashes within the last 5 days.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Start with Al-Kashi's theorem (in tex here since I don't want to dream up some pseudo-ascii notations right now):
$\left\Vert \vec{AB}\right\Vert ^{2}=\left\Vert \vec{AC}\right\Vert ^{2}+\left\Vert \vec{CB}\right\Vert ^{2}+2\times\left\Vert \vec{CA}\right\Vert \times\left\Vert \vec{CB}\right\Vert \times\cos\left(\vec{CA},\vec{CB}\right)$
and simply consider the case where the angle in C is a right angle.
Err, yeah, using HTML tags to indicate where the name of the student has been censored is a really smart idea.... so the first line of the quote should read: "Today in class, CENSORED had a program launched [...]. I had told CENSORED to close the program [...]"
To elaborate a little bit, some proofs are more elegant than others. Some require more knowledge than others. You can prove Pythagoras' theorem on two pages using only elementary geometry or in two lines using vectors. Which version you present depends on your audience, but that doesn't change the fact that you should present one. Proofs are useful, they help you understand not only that a theorem is correct but, much more importantly, why it is correct; so why is there even a discussion about whether or not to include proofs? Especially on a system like Wikipedia, where multiple versions of a proof can coexist peacefully (in theory) on a page - it's not like you'd have to choose one over all others (like you might have to, for instance, when teaching a class or giving a talk).
So - what's the problem? Unless it's political, in which case, well, you know, *yawn*.
Sure. And there is a market for maybe 5 computers in the world, 640K is enough for anybody, we don't need telephones because we have good messenger boys, flight of heavier-than-air vehicles is impossible, rail travel at high speed is impossible because humans would be unable to breathe and asphyxiate etc etc. Oh, and just for you:
To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth - all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances.
--Lee DeForest
Have you learned nothing from past absolute statements?
Yeah, but there are rules to character formation - it's not like you have to remember every stroke for every character in order. IIRC, the general order of construction (at least with the traditional Chinese chars) is from top left to bottom right.
But that is interesting in itself - I would assume that most people, consciously or unconsciously, apply similar rules when they draw, i.e. where to start and where to stop. Wouldn't this mean potential hackers would at least have a better starting point at cracking this graphical password than with a normal one?
Also, one of the strengths of traditional passwords is that you can actually generate crazy random passwords which are still easy to remember. With a picture, I would assume that becomes more unlikely, so, in combination with the above, dictionary attacks should become easier.
Finally, since not the picture itself is stored but rather the sequence of strokes and the number of times the pen is lifted, I wonder how large that encoding is? Can't it simply be brute-forced directly? I guess it depends on how strokes are encoded - if it's angle and length as well as starting point it may be difficult to brute-force, but since the system has to account for variability in the user's drawing, it should be possible to exploit that in brute-force attacks. Whether it's sufficient or not, I don't know.
If you're trying to say that your CD will sound identically on every CD player, this is completely untrue. First, different CD players will deal with errors on the disc differently. But much more critically, the most important part of the interpretation of the data on the CD by the player is the transformation from a digital input signal into an analog output signal and here, there are huge differences which will affect what you hear. This is why you will hear a big difference between a 20$ discman connected to semi-decent amp and speakers and a $500 CD player connected to the same system. Some CD players use upsamplers, others don't. Some CD players have a transistor-based output stage (which range from very cheap (e.g. in a discman) to extremely good), others use valves and all these factors define, in fact, how the CD player interprets your CD. The same CD, even though it is an exact copy, will not be the same on every player.
If your point is that different copies of the same CD will sound the same on the same player, then this is quite likely to be true, bar some errors on the discs, and certainly more so than for vinyls.
What you are really talking about, I think, is the experience of perceiving a smell or odour. Then it's very clear that everything depends on who is doing the smelling/looking and nobody is going to argue that electronicc noses experience these stimuli in the same way we do. So yes, an electronic nose would have a priori problems with qualifying smells in subjective ways (smells good, bad, refreshing, stale) unless you specifically train it with lots of examples from all those categories. But that's not really the point of an electronic nose, it's more about detecting toxins and perhaps reverse-engineering certain odours (e.g. just what did the chef put into that lovely sauce of his?).
It depends on what you want to do. If you want to identify a complex odour based on the mix of chemicals you've encountered, then yes, that can happen.
When you design such a system, you take lots of samples from all the inputs that vary so that you get a good idea of the possible variation for every given input (so you train the system with 50 roses, tulips and pieces of bacon instead of just one each). If you were to plot the inputs in a multidimensional space (one dimension per chemical you can detect, and the metric is the concentration of said chemical) you would thus not get e.g. a single point for the odour 'rose', another single point for the odour 'tulip' and a third point for the odour 'bacon'; you would get entire clouds of points.
If you're lucky, there will be plenty of empty space between the clouds and then you can easily train a classifier to discriminate between the odours (sometimes as simply as computing the distance between the odour you detect to the centre of each cloud and going for the closest cloud). If there is some overlap, you can still train a classifier and will be alright most of the time, just sometimes you'll have to qualify your ouput with a probability if your input falls into the overlap region (80% chance it's a rose, 20% it's a tulip). If there is heavy overlap, you're pretty much screwed unless you can think of a funky nonlinear transformation of the input which achieves a better separtion of the the different classes.
So yeah, misclassifications can happen, it depends on your input space and how the classifier deals with it. Especially novel stimuli can be a problem, I'd imagine.
How the electronic nose really 'perceives' this is of lesser importance as long as it can reliably and correctly identify the odours and tell us about them. So you can easily test that the nose works like you expect by exposing it to random mixes of odours and compare the response of the nose to the (known) actual composition of the odour.
Some of the ninjas were female with at least one definitely promising to be on the attractive end of the scale - would you have wanted rescuing from them? ;) Unless of course the rescuing were to be done by attractive female pirates... mmmyeah, I can see the attraction there... ;)
"Oh, hi Peter, sorry to bother you, but we have a suspicion that someone from the inside might be leaking sensitive information to our competitors. Do you mind if we have a quick look at your USB stick?"
Would you rather be caught with:
a) All the company's secrets
b) Pictures of your daughter
And yeah, you could be encrypting all that information, but even an encrypted file would be more suspicious than a picture of your cute daughter.
Hello, my name is Logo kid. You killed my turtle, prepare to die!
;) I do remember that I was writing some pretty funky GUI driven games in it at the end, but that's about it. Oh, and it kinda encouraged me to use a lot of goto's, which I guess is kinda bad.
But, seriously, no, I don't think we'll actually be fighting over this. Logo no longer has any importance in my life, as I'm sure Basic hasn't in yours. It was simply fun while it lasted, way back in the good old days. Heck, I can't even remember enough Logo to make an informed argument in its favour
But no, this won't be a new nerd-fight because I doubt anyone cares enough about it. It is far more important to teach those blasphemous vi people the error of their ways! (I'm kidding, I'm kidding)
Second, this going down until you find consent is just stupid. Not every law is about restricting yourself, some are about restricting other groups of people, others are about giving you rights - basically, laws regulate human relations. In your system, what will happen is that every individual will propose laws as he pleases and they will then always be unanimously adopted by at least himself. As a result, everyone will live by their own laws. There is a name for such a system: it is called Anarchy.
The next step? Come on, the Swiss have been doing this for centuries. They may do it the old-fashioned pen and paper way but it is more sophisticated since a referendum is only strictly required for constitutional changes but optional for changes in law unless at least 50.000 (I think) people request a referendum on this change in law. So they only ask the entire population if at least a sizeable minority actually cares about the topic under discussion.
This is not new and definitely not a new step in democracy - if anything it's a step backwards from the representative democracies we have now to direct democracies the Athenians (I think) had when they invented the entire thing ages ago.
Gay. I see a very simple scale here:
1. Marriage between members of the same species capable of producing offspring
2. Marriage between members of the same species not capable of producing offspring
3. Marriage between members of different sentient species
4. Marriage between living and artificial beings
5. Marriage between a sentient and a non-sentient species
Regardless of whether you would see gay marriage as equivalent to hetero marriages or not, marrying a robot is still a huge step from gay marriage.
First, you could argue that robots, are not, technically, alive, but in that case it's like marrying your dildo and that definitely won't happen before gay marriage. If we do assume that they will be considered alive, by some definition, but not sentient then it would be like marrying a goat (which will almost surely never happen). If they are, by some definition, sentient and can to consent to the union, waters are still very muddy since it is easily argued that they have been programmed that way and that their choice is therefore not really a choice. So one could argue that even a marriage between man and some sentient alien lifeworm will be approved before marriage between man and machine.
Wow, I think you just pulverised the previous time record for going Godwin on some random topic.
Well, I think that the requirements listed by the GP are simply not adequate. This is no personal attack, I know these are thaught in school, it's just that life is an incredibly difficult thing to define and 6 (rather loosely defined) words simply won't do. As a simple example,if all the above are considered a requirement, a mule, which cannot reproduce, would by definition not be alive. Just look up life on wikipedia for a taster of how difficult it is to define.
Having said that, one of the reasons a virus is not considered alive is because it is not made of cells. Now, whether or not living organisms *need* to be built of cells is again another debate, but that's what the general consensus seems to be. Also, to answer the question strictly, a virus does not grow, it has no metabolism (respiration, nutrition, discretion), no sensitivity, movement is highly debatable and while it does reproduce, it cannot do so independently.
Well, amusingly enough, he does seem to exist on Facebook. In the Microsoft network, plenty of friends at Microsoft, it might just be the real thing.
Well, for those who are interested, the Spiegel mentions that a cubic centimeter of that stuff would weigh about a billion metric tons on earth - what's your teaspoon made of? ;)
Well, as a witness, would you prefer that or the alternative?
Prosecutor: I have no witnesses, your honor, they have all died from heart attacks and car crashes within the last 5 days.