we manufacture a soft product called the US dollar
The value of the US Dollar is almost entirely dependant on it's status as the dominant international means of exchange for oil trades. This is where the bulk of "spare" USD "manufactured" goes.
In effect, it represents an enormous loan. There are a number of problems with this strategy for propping up your currency.
Sooner or later, people want their "value" back. (they traded something to get the dollars, and whoever ends up with them will want their "value" for them.).
If the amount of oil on the market should decrease (as it is), the amount of USD used to purchase it should decrease (unless, say, some untoward events were to occur that raised the price per barrel enormously).
Should anyone consider trading oil for something else, like Flainian Popple Beads or (I dunno) Euros, the enormous crowd of people demanding value for their dollars will totally hump your economy
Of course, noone would ever suggest that you'd do anything so rash as to start a war to raise the price of oil, or to prevent oil trading in Euros.
The "strength" of an economy does not relate to the (misplaced) trust that people have in that economy, it relates to the ability of that economy to add value to the greater world economy, through extraction of resources, production of goods, and provision of services. Not printing treasury bonds which you have no means of backing.
Countries with agricultural (read sustinance) economies do not have the foregn exchange to purchase food from the US.
And they can't gain the foreign exchange because they cannot produce export goods (like cotton) at a price that competes with the subsidised American exports.
In effect, the US government is using your tax dollars to help your farmers to overproduce crops that would have no natural market without the subsidy, in exchange for the kickback when their lobbyists come-a-callin'.
It's a legal loophole that allows those accepting contributions from the farming lobby to siphon money out of the taxpayers pocket into their campaign funds. Which is presumably why no-one has bothered to end it.
Never mind the enormous damage it causes, both abroad and to your own arable land (dumping huge quantities of NPK fertiliser just doesn't cut it), your water supply (glyphosate run-off from all that Roundup Ready(tm) maize), and your health (from all the High Fructose Corn Syrup which wouldn't be economical without the high sugar import tariffs that you also impose).
It never rings true to me that capitalists can bleat on about the power of the market, and then impose protectionist policies like these. If they actually believed their own hooey, they'd drop all those tariffs and "let the market decide".
Well, I bet the former shopkeepers feel like their life was stolen.
They were almost inevitably providing services relevant to local people, at a certain reasonable markup.
Now, I'm not saying they were all angels working solely for the good of the community. They were businessmen, and out to make a profit just as Tesco are. But the shops that came in after them obviously have to have take more money in order to support their new, higher rent. Which means more money departing from this community and falling into the pockets of the rich landlord.
Net effect? The local populace get poorer, the local shopkeepers probably have to move to another town and start over. Tesco probably sold it's holding of land on to another landlord when it realised it wanted to do nothing with it, and probably insisted on making a handsome profit so as to show something for the effort of buying it (at a profitable price for the original landlord) in the first place. That handsome profit needs to be paid for somehow by the new owner, who will take it out in rent. He'll also want a profit for himself as well.
Winners : Tesco, Previous Landlord & New Landlord.
Losers : Shopkeepers, community, consumers (who are now paying their traditional markups, plus the markup for the profits of the Winners).
Yes, legally speaking, it's all above board. But don't expect me to find it palatable that while some people earn their living through real work providing goods and services, others can "earn" a living just by signing a piece of paper which ensures that a percentage of the labours of the real workers ends up in their pocket.
I would suspect that what makes Ability office more attractive than OOo is that Ability is a closed-source product that requires a registration key to function, whereas OOo is licensed under the LGPL and therefore while you can charge for support, you can't legally prevent people from just copying it around as much as they like, or even just being told that "Tesco Office is really just this great free product, so why the hell should you shell out £20 for it!".
Tesco DO have a rosier image than Wal-Mart in this country, but if anything they are in a more powerful position ; they hold a whopping 31% of the grocery market, something that Wal-Mart can only consider a wet dream, even in it's home country where it commands a "mere" 19% of the market. It is commonly said that of every £7 spent in the UK, one of them is spent in Tesco.
As great as OOo is, I can't see an organization that commercially powerful choosing to put it on their shelves as a product, as the competition can undercut them every time (download the same software for zero marginal cost).
Ability must be thanking their lucky stars though.
I suspect this is a question that occupies the minds of the Bush White House quite a lot these days...
More relevant is the question, "What is the USA going to do when people holding US dollars want some value back?"
At the moment, the answer is "Yipe!". As the rest of this thread points out, when you have lost the bulk of your manufacturing base, your primary natural resource (oil) is in decline, and the only remaining asset advantages you are have are in Intellectual Property, you're pretty much screwed as far as producing value is concerned. The IP is a nice asset, but it's a double edged sword ; it can typically be stolen, copied, or reverse engineered for a fraction of the cost it took to develop, and quite frankly, the US is not in the position to exploit good IP because it farms the bulk of its real production abroad. The microprocessor market is one of the last examples where the production occurs in the states, and with the Chinese producing "compatible" processor designs and fabricating them it looks like this kind of advantage will not last.
Meanwhile, the US deficit has historically been propped up by the enormous free loans provided by the US Dollar being the de-facto trading currency for oil. The most interesting observation regarding this is that Iraq was highly coincidentally, invaded just around the time it was looking to trade oil on a market based on the Euro instead of the Dollar.
Did the US invade Iraq just to prevent trading in Euros? Whether they did or they didn't, the question still remains ; just HOW could the US regain it's economic stature?
There are only two answers I can see
i) Create a new economy based on renewable energy and resources that services the needs of the USA and export the IP involved in creating it.
ii) Conquer places that have the cheap natural resources that the "old" US economy was based upon.
I'm sure the first is feared by the incumbent economic power, as it represents a giant shift away from the structure that has granted them that power.
The second could only work because the USA still has the nuclear deterrent - any other island nation so far away from it's main source of energy who threatened such a thing would rapidly be cut off by its oil suppliers. Which is a nasty thought, because if the only thing the US has to hold over the producers of oil is "send us the Texas Tea or your kids ain't going to need a nightlite to see in the dark no more", it's going to require someone to be made an example of before anyone takes it seriously.
Might I suggest to any games industry personnel reading that they consult a lawyer as to whether the following is possible.
Jack Thompson has had such a negative effect on the games industry in general (through a continuous succession of lawsuits that have been costly to the industry, but importantly, repeatedly proven to be baseless). If at all possible, an injunction should be sought that forbids him from soliciting for any kind of legal representation involving the games industry, or for working on cases involving the games industry. Any such case discovered to be associated with Mr Thompson should immediately be thrown out of court and costs charged to Mr Thompsons team.
I doubt that it's legally possible, of course, but it would be satisfying.
I don't see the legal downside of deleting files from your own hardware, even if it happens to be in the possession of a theif.
It's quite the inverse of what the **AA want, which is to be able to delete files on hardware that they do NOT own, as long as they claim "ownership" of the contents.
In this case, the due process is surely that you
Own the hardware, legally
Know the password
Deserve to be able to delete your own files from your own hard drive.
This is no different to deleting files from your FTP server that happens to be located in a facility that was invaded by a foreign power or a bunch of revolutionaries. Do your rights to control the system of software in the hardware end, because your physical possession of that hardware has been truncated against your will?
The ONLY possible legal downside I can see here is that technically, if you destroy files over a network connection paid for by your theif, you are misappropriating his resource without his authorization in order to do so. Kind of a swings/roundabouts situation though....
It doesn't say this at all. It says that 1Kg of hydrogen has a similar chemical energy to a gallon of gasoline.
Given the relative atomic mass of carbon and hydrogen, and that gasoline is a hydrocarbon fuel, I can, without reference to a chemistry textbook, immediately reckon in my head that this is not a wild or outlandish claim.
Perhaps you should read more carefully, before dismissing an established, repected commentary out of hand?
Of course, given that you need heavy, specialized storage equipment to carry any substantial mass of hydrogen around with you, it works out at much more than 1Kg of H2 + support equipment == 1 gallon gasoline.
But it's a far stretch to assume that they can figure out how to control the whole park just because they're familiar with the OS running on the servers...
Why is this implausible? As I recall, she reboots the park systems by executing a shell script that's labelled clearly as a restart program (and with the programmers name, no less).
A familiarity with the OS is required, to know i) what a shell script is, and ii) likely places to find useful scripts in the filesystem. But beyond that, in any OS environment set up and used by a user of any technical prowess, you are likely to find conveniences put in place by the user to make their day-to-day work easier. This seems to go double in a user environment that is primarily command line based. The character exploits just such a convenience. It's not at all implausible.
What I did find implausible was that any serious hacker would use such a ridiculous file browser, but Nedry, as a character (and a barely concealed anagram of "Nerdy" besides) was a fat-assed, lazy, arrogant, git, and as such may have kept the thing around to mystify and dazzle management types. Or maybe some VP in SFX just said "Command line? Not photogenic!"
Well, as you point out, one solution is to patch the code for yourself. If IE *didn't* have the feature of being able to selectively disable UI elements, what do you think your chances of successfully badger Microsoft to implement it would be? An academic question, but one worth thinking about. A less academic thing to think about is the risk of IE infecting your machines, and the extra work required to negate this risk, and to repair damage when it occurs.
My second suggestion would be to set up a transparent proxy redirecting port 80 traffic through your proxy server. Voila ; ALL port 80 traffic now goes through the proxy.
Or just lock off traffic through port 80, and openly publish the settings for your proxy server.
In fact, that's the best idea for a government institution in terms of IP law that I've heard in a long time ; a department whose sole occupation is to debunk existing patents.
You could argue that it would encourage innovation merely because it reduces the cost of performing patent searches by weeding out a certain amount of the crap that already exists, making patent lawyers cheaper.
The patent office subsist from the fees they earn from patent applications and therefore have no real incentive to examine patents rigorously ; if they can pass a patent quickly, they will, because they can't let it cost them more than the filing fees to do so (on average).
An "un-patent" office would have no such concern, because it's funding would be independant of the number of patents filed. Of course, they'd be prone to the same possibilities for bribes as patent clerks (fat brown envelopes taken in order to go and debunk a few perpetual motion machines instead of "one-click" shopping, say).
The idea fits nicely with the ideas of "competition" that capitalists claim to support anyhow ; the patent office is not at present such an environment ; with the exception of the ending of patent terms (which can be worked around by patenting some minutiae of the existing process and gaining another 17 years), there is no real attrition.
Alas, the Tugrik is not available in the standard character set, but a capital T is close (the tugrik has two cross bars). But the capital R is for South African Rand. And the Euro symbol has to be escaped for HTML (I think a sibling poster had this trouble).
There don't appear to be any currencies which use symbols close enough to "o" or "M" though. "O" I can understand for it's similarity to "0" (who wants their currency to be "Zeros"?), but M? MONEY. Honestly. Someone invade somewhere and change the currency to "Monetary Units".
What is the obsession with machine voting anyway? The only advantage seems to be counting speed. Since by the time all the ballots are in, counting speed makes ZERO difference to the outcome of a fair election, it's an irrelevancy - what's a few more hours against an elected term that will go on for years?
The absolute requirement for me is that your voting system be comprehensible and auditable by the common man. Because it concerns us all. The system with the widest comprehensibility is pencil and paper.
While pencil and paper isn't flawless, the key difference is that it's a system that a lot of people understand. Irregularities are far easier to recognise by the common man. With a machine system, only someone who understands the machine can spot the system being subverted.
Print ballots. With boxes on. You make a mark in the box, you voted for that person. No chads, no hanging. And anyone who can count can see that the right thing is done.
Sure, introduce machine systems to help make it harder to subvert the voter system. But the basic counting mechanism should be a wet thumb and a box of rubber bands.
Use the mythrename perl script that renames the programs to something more helpful than their time and channel of recording. And then, since your boxes are unconnected in any way, dump the files to a removable media, and load them into the folder configured for MythVideo on the other box.
They won't show up in the "recorded media" database tree, but in the "external media" ("Watch Video") tree. Which is fair enough, because that's what they are.
The alternate interpretation is that if they submit the license to the OSI, this may be construed as admission by Microsoft that OSI approved licenses have some kind of legal weight.
Since MS would like nothing better than the GPL and its ilk to be shot down in flames in court, confidence in the whole legal standing of OSS to be destroyed, and Linus Torvalds forced to roam the streets begging for pickled herrings, I'm willing to be that even if a developer on the team had piped up and said, "Hey, lets submit this license to the OSI!", the legal team would have deployed a crack team of guys-with-briefcases very soon after.
You assert that VB6 has a limit of 32KB for arrays of UDTs.
I don't think this is true. In fact, I just tried it... you'll note that I've tested your assertion about space by allocating rather more than 32KB in both a single struct and an array of that struct. I've also tested limits on the number of array elements (you were restricted to (2^15)-1 elements in VB3 arrays, but not in VB6). You are limited to 64KB in a static struct... I can honestly say that I never ran up against that, even when porting code with some enormous (1KB) structs in it.
Of course, if you can post some code that demonstrates your assertion, I'll eat my words.
' "Long" in VB6 is a 4-byte signed integer Private Type BigType Stuff(16377) As Long End Type ' This defines a fixed-length 1KB string struct Private Type SmallerType Stuff As String * 1024 End Type
Private Sub Test()
Dim bigArray(5) As BigType Dim ii As Long Dim otherBigArray(1024) As SmallerType
' 5 of these is an array 320KB in size For ii = 0 To 4 bigArray(ii).Stuff(0) = 1 Next ii
' And heres a megabyte of "!" For ii = 0 To 1023 otherBigArray(ii).Stuff = String$(1024, "!") Next ii
The thing it lacks is a UI designer ; both VB.NET and C# have nice graphical UI designers that stream the design to a code module. The code itself can be inspected and to a limited extent, tampered with. In contrast to the VB6 IDE, the code is not concealed from the programmer by the IDE. In VB6, you could manually tamper with forms, or even write your own, if you were highly comfortable with the forms language that VB used, but you had to close the IDE to do so. And some properties ended up serialized to a binary resource, where you had very little hope of tampering with them.
IronPython can construct UI by using the same kind of code ; the creation of WinForms elements. Of course, until it has a UI designer, it will be a manual, and thus onerous task.
This is down to how the bulbs work in the first place ; ionized gas exciting a flourescent coating.
This requires an initial burst of energy to get the gas ionized quickly. Once there are sufficient ions and free electrons knocking about, the process cascades and is self perpetuating as long as you continue to feed it energy.
Sounds like the little circuit that provides that initial burst of power in your bulbs has blown out (maybe the capacitor is dead). But the gas will ionize under a lower potential, eventually, it just takes a longer time to get enough ions to pass over that "cascade" threshold.
Ultimately, the energy all ends up as heat anyway ; the kinetic motion is eventually randomized. Putting the waves through power generation systems has the same net effect in the end, but some useful work is done along the way.
Regardless of the amount of kinetic energy you cream off the fringes, the gravity of the moon is still shifting the same mass of water on any given day. I don't think you'll have any net effect on the earth-moon dynamic, even if you start storing the energy through carbon sequestration or other processes (don't think the temperature of the earth effects interplanetary gravitation).
Heroin is legal for prescription here in the UK, as it's an astoundingly effective treatment for pain. But doctors are less likely to prescribe it now since the conviction of Harold Shipman, a general practitioner who murdered over 200 victims with overdoses of opiates. Doses which are technically considered harmful are commonly prescribed in cases where the reduction in lifespan is less significant than the reduction in suffering. This practice has reduced somewhat as doctors are understandably keen not to be accused of murder.
While I think this if faulty thinking, at least it's better than a religious reason... that's right up there with Jehova's Witnesses refusing blood transfusions.
I've seen an article where the authors tried this they used distilled water and a sealed case to make a "full-immersion" watercooled system.
It didn't work (but didn't destroy the components), until they tried it with oil instead. The theory they expounded was that water, as a polar solvent, has effects on charge that a long-chain hydrocarbon doesn't. The capacitance of the water was throwing off the timing of the more sensitive components of the system.
Because you may not have the luxury of exchanging messages over a secure channel all the time.
The scenario is typically this ; your field agent is issued with his book of OTPs at home base ; you can be sure of the security of this distribution channel because you have vetted your staff, have armed guards, big EM shielded rooms, etc.
The agent then moves to Enemy Country X, where the phones are routinely tapped by the government, postal mail is all steamed open, and the only ISPs are government sanctioned and snoop all their traffic for subversive content. The agent can exchange messages in the knowledge the content is secure, because he (and HQ) both have their OTP books. Of course, if the signals corp of ECX are any good, they'll detect someone exchanging encrypted messages and bag him, unless he takes steps to obfuscate the message (which is where stenanography comes in).
Slashdot Mirror
we manufacture a soft product called the US dollar
The value of the US Dollar is almost entirely dependant on it's status as the dominant international means of exchange for oil trades. This is where the bulk of "spare" USD "manufactured" goes.
In effect, it represents an enormous loan. There are a number of problems with this strategy for propping up your currency.
- Sooner or later, people want their "value" back. (they traded something to get the dollars, and whoever ends up with them will want their "value" for them.).
- If the amount of oil on the market should decrease (as it is), the amount of USD used to purchase it should decrease (unless, say, some untoward events were to occur that raised the price per barrel enormously).
- Should anyone consider trading oil for something else, like Flainian Popple Beads or (I dunno) Euros, the enormous crowd of people demanding value for their dollars will totally hump your economy
Of course, noone would ever suggest that you'd do anything so rash as to start a war to raise the price of oil, or to prevent oil trading in Euros.The "strength" of an economy does not relate to the (misplaced) trust that people have in that economy, it relates to the ability of that economy to add value to the greater world economy, through extraction of resources, production of goods, and provision of services. Not printing treasury bonds which you have no means of backing.
And they can't gain the foreign exchange because they cannot produce export goods (like cotton) at a price that competes with the subsidised American exports.
In effect, the US government is using your tax dollars to help your farmers to overproduce crops that would have no natural market without the subsidy, in exchange for the kickback when their lobbyists come-a-callin'.
It's a legal loophole that allows those accepting contributions from the farming lobby to siphon money out of the taxpayers pocket into their campaign funds. Which is presumably why no-one has bothered to end it.
Never mind the enormous damage it causes, both abroad and to your own arable land (dumping huge quantities of NPK fertiliser just doesn't cut it), your water supply (glyphosate run-off from all that Roundup Ready(tm) maize), and your health (from all the High Fructose Corn Syrup which wouldn't be economical without the high sugar import tariffs that you also impose).
It never rings true to me that capitalists can bleat on about the power of the market, and then impose protectionist policies like these. If they actually believed their own hooey, they'd drop all those tariffs and "let the market decide".
They were almost inevitably providing services relevant to local people, at a certain reasonable markup.
Now, I'm not saying they were all angels working solely for the good of the community. They were businessmen, and out to make a profit just as Tesco are. But the shops that came in after them obviously have to have take more money in order to support their new, higher rent. Which means more money departing from this community and falling into the pockets of the rich landlord.
Net effect? The local populace get poorer, the local shopkeepers probably have to move to another town and start over. Tesco probably sold it's holding of land on to another landlord when it realised it wanted to do nothing with it, and probably insisted on making a handsome profit so as to show something for the effort of buying it (at a profitable price for the original landlord) in the first place. That handsome profit needs to be paid for somehow by the new owner, who will take it out in rent. He'll also want a profit for himself as well.
Winners : Tesco, Previous Landlord & New Landlord.
Losers : Shopkeepers, community, consumers (who are now paying their traditional markups, plus the markup for the profits of the Winners).
Yes, legally speaking, it's all above board. But don't expect me to find it palatable that while some people earn their living through real work providing goods and services, others can "earn" a living just by signing a piece of paper which ensures that a percentage of the labours of the real workers ends up in their pocket.
Tesco DO have a rosier image than Wal-Mart in this country, but if anything they are in a more powerful position ; they hold a whopping 31% of the grocery market, something that Wal-Mart can only consider a wet dream, even in it's home country where it commands a "mere" 19% of the market. It is commonly said that of every £7 spent in the UK, one of them is spent in Tesco.
As great as OOo is, I can't see an organization that commercially powerful choosing to put it on their shelves as a product, as the competition can undercut them every time (download the same software for zero marginal cost).
Ability must be thanking their lucky stars though.
I suspect this is a question that occupies the minds of the Bush White House quite a lot these days...
More relevant is the question, "What is the USA going to do when people holding US dollars want some value back?"
At the moment, the answer is "Yipe!". As the rest of this thread points out, when you have lost the bulk of your manufacturing base, your primary natural resource (oil) is in decline, and the only remaining asset advantages you are have are in Intellectual Property, you're pretty much screwed as far as producing value is concerned. The IP is a nice asset, but it's a double edged sword ; it can typically be stolen, copied, or reverse engineered for a fraction of the cost it took to develop, and quite frankly, the US is not in the position to exploit good IP because it farms the bulk of its real production abroad. The microprocessor market is one of the last examples where the production occurs in the states, and with the Chinese producing "compatible" processor designs and fabricating them it looks like this kind of advantage will not last.
Meanwhile, the US deficit has historically been propped up by the enormous free loans provided by the US Dollar being the de-facto trading currency for oil. The most interesting observation regarding this is that Iraq was highly coincidentally, invaded just around the time it was looking to trade oil on a market based on the Euro instead of the Dollar.
Did the US invade Iraq just to prevent trading in Euros? Whether they did or they didn't, the question still remains ; just HOW could the US regain it's economic stature?
There are only two answers I can see
i) Create a new economy based on renewable energy and resources that services the needs of the USA and export the IP involved in creating it.
ii) Conquer places that have the cheap natural resources that the "old" US economy was based upon.
I'm sure the first is feared by the incumbent economic power, as it represents a giant shift away from the structure that has granted them that power.
The second could only work because the USA still has the nuclear deterrent - any other island nation so far away from it's main source of energy who threatened such a thing would rapidly be cut off by its oil suppliers. Which is a nasty thought, because if the only thing the US has to hold over the producers of oil is "send us the Texas Tea or your kids ain't going to need a nightlite to see in the dark no more", it's going to require someone to be made an example of before anyone takes it seriously.
Utter twaddle.
Might I suggest to any games industry personnel reading that they consult a lawyer as to whether the following is possible.
Jack Thompson has had such a negative effect on the games industry in general (through a continuous succession of lawsuits that have been costly to the industry, but importantly, repeatedly proven to be baseless). If at all possible, an injunction should be sought that forbids him from soliciting for any kind of legal representation involving the games industry, or for working on cases involving the games industry. Any such case discovered to be associated with Mr Thompson should immediately be thrown out of court and costs charged to Mr Thompsons team.
I doubt that it's legally possible, of course, but it would be satisfying.
It's quite the inverse of what the **AA want, which is to be able to delete files on hardware that they do NOT own, as long as they claim "ownership" of the contents.
In this case, the due process is surely that you
This is no different to deleting files from your FTP server that happens to be located in a facility that was invaded by a foreign power or a bunch of revolutionaries. Do your rights to control the system of software in the hardware end, because your physical possession of that hardware has been truncated against your will?
The ONLY possible legal downside I can see here is that technically, if you destroy files over a network connection paid for by your theif, you are misappropriating his resource without his authorization in order to do so. Kind of a swings/roundabouts situation though....
Ach, shoot, we spent it on USB ports. Never mind.
It doesn't say this at all. It says that 1Kg of hydrogen has a similar chemical energy to a gallon of gasoline.
Given the relative atomic mass of carbon and hydrogen, and that gasoline is a hydrocarbon fuel, I can, without reference to a chemistry textbook, immediately reckon in my head that this is not a wild or outlandish claim.
Perhaps you should read more carefully, before dismissing an established, repected commentary out of hand?
Of course, given that you need heavy, specialized storage equipment to carry any substantial mass of hydrogen around with you, it works out at much more than 1Kg of H2 + support equipment == 1 gallon gasoline.
Am I that old?
It's a reel of tape. My grandad had a similar recorder that I used to play with in my youth.
Dang youngsters. Get off my lawn.
Why is this implausible? As I recall, she reboots the park systems by executing a shell script that's labelled clearly as a restart program (and with the programmers name, no less).
A familiarity with the OS is required, to know i) what a shell script is, and ii) likely places to find useful scripts in the filesystem. But beyond that, in any OS environment set up and used by a user of any technical prowess, you are likely to find conveniences put in place by the user to make their day-to-day work easier. This seems to go double in a user environment that is primarily command line based. The character exploits just such a convenience. It's not at all implausible.
What I did find implausible was that any serious hacker would use such a ridiculous file browser, but Nedry, as a character (and a barely concealed anagram of "Nerdy" besides) was a fat-assed, lazy, arrogant, git, and as such may have kept the thing around to mystify and dazzle management types. Or maybe some VP in SFX just said "Command line? Not photogenic!"
Well, as you point out, one solution is to patch the code for yourself. If IE *didn't* have the feature of being able to selectively disable UI elements, what do you think your chances of successfully badger Microsoft to implement it would be? An academic question, but one worth thinking about. A less academic thing to think about is the risk of IE infecting your machines, and the extra work required to negate this risk, and to repair damage when it occurs.
My second suggestion would be to set up a transparent proxy redirecting port 80 traffic through your proxy server. Voila ; ALL port 80 traffic now goes through the proxy.
Or just lock off traffic through port 80, and openly publish the settings for your proxy server.
In fact, that's the best idea for a government institution in terms of IP law that I've heard in a long time ; a department whose sole occupation is to debunk existing patents.
You could argue that it would encourage innovation merely because it reduces the cost of performing patent searches by weeding out a certain amount of the crap that already exists, making patent lawyers cheaper.
The patent office subsist from the fees they earn from patent applications and therefore have no real incentive to examine patents rigorously ; if they can pass a patent quickly, they will, because they can't let it cost them more than the filing fees to do so (on average).
An "un-patent" office would have no such concern, because it's funding would be independant of the number of patents filed. Of course, they'd be prone to the same possibilities for bribes as patent clerks (fat brown envelopes taken in order to go and debunk a few perpetual motion machines instead of "one-click" shopping, say).
The idea fits nicely with the ideas of "competition" that capitalists claim to support anyhow ; the patent office is not at present such an environment ; with the exception of the ending of patent terms (which can be worked around by patenting some minutiae of the existing process and gaining another 17 years), there is no real attrition.
Alas, the Tugrik is not available in the standard character set, but a capital T is close (the tugrik has two cross bars). But the capital R is for South African Rand. And the Euro symbol has to be escaped for HTML (I think a sibling poster had this trouble).
There don't appear to be any currencies which use symbols close enough to "o" or "M" though. "O" I can understand for it's similarity to "0" (who wants their currency to be "Zeros"?), but M? MONEY. Honestly. Someone invade somewhere and change the currency to "Monetary Units".
Nice Table of Currency Symbols
Absolutely.
What is the obsession with machine voting anyway? The only advantage seems to be counting speed. Since by the time all the ballots are in, counting speed makes ZERO difference to the outcome of a fair election, it's an irrelevancy - what's a few more hours against an elected term that will go on for years?
The absolute requirement for me is that your voting system be comprehensible and auditable by the common man. Because it concerns us all. The system with the widest comprehensibility is pencil and paper.
While pencil and paper isn't flawless, the key difference is that it's a system that a lot of people understand. Irregularities are far easier to recognise by the common man. With a machine system, only someone who understands the machine can spot the system being subverted.
Print ballots. With boxes on. You make a mark in the box, you voted for that person. No chads, no hanging. And anyone who can count can see that the right thing is done.
Sure, introduce machine systems to help make it harder to subvert the voter system. But the basic counting mechanism should be a wet thumb and a box of rubber bands.
Use the mythrename perl script that renames the programs to something more helpful than their time and channel of recording. And then, since your boxes are unconnected in any way, dump the files to a removable media, and load them into the folder configured for MythVideo on the other box.
They won't show up in the "recorded media" database tree, but in the "external media" ("Watch Video") tree. Which is fair enough, because that's what they are.
The alternate interpretation is that if they submit the license to the OSI, this may be construed as admission by Microsoft that OSI approved licenses have some kind of legal weight.
Since MS would like nothing better than the GPL and its ilk to be shot down in flames in court, confidence in the whole legal standing of OSS to be destroyed, and Linus Torvalds forced to roam the streets begging for pickled herrings, I'm willing to be that even if a developer on the team had piped up and said, "Hey, lets submit this license to the OSI!", the legal team would have deployed a crack team of guys-with-briefcases very soon after.
I don't think this is true. In fact, I just tried it ... you'll note that I've tested your assertion about space by allocating rather more than 32KB in both a single struct and an array of that struct. I've also tested limits on the number of array elements (you were restricted to (2^15)-1 elements in VB3 arrays, but not in VB6). You are limited to 64KB in a static struct... I can honestly say that I never ran up against that, even when porting code with some enormous (1KB) structs in it.
Of course, if you can post some code that demonstrates your assertion, I'll eat my words.
The thing it lacks is a UI designer ; both VB.NET and C# have nice graphical UI designers that stream the design to a code module. The code itself can be inspected and to a limited extent, tampered with. In contrast to the VB6 IDE, the code is not concealed from the programmer by the IDE. In VB6, you could manually tamper with forms, or even write your own, if you were highly comfortable with the forms language that VB used, but you had to close the IDE to do so. And some properties ended up serialized to a binary resource, where you had very little hope of tampering with them.
IronPython can construct UI by using the same kind of code ; the creation of WinForms elements. Of course, until it has a UI designer, it will be a manual, and thus onerous task.
This is down to how the bulbs work in the first place ; ionized gas exciting a flourescent coating.
This requires an initial burst of energy to get the gas ionized quickly. Once there are sufficient ions and free electrons knocking about, the process cascades and is self perpetuating as long as you continue to feed it energy.
Sounds like the little circuit that provides that initial burst of power in your bulbs has blown out (maybe the capacitor is dead). But the gas will ionize under a lower potential, eventually, it just takes a longer time to get enough ions to pass over that "cascade" threshold.
Ultimately, the energy all ends up as heat anyway ; the kinetic motion is eventually randomized. Putting the waves through power generation systems has the same net effect in the end, but some useful work is done along the way.
Regardless of the amount of kinetic energy you cream off the fringes, the gravity of the moon is still shifting the same mass of water on any given day. I don't think you'll have any net effect on the earth-moon dynamic, even if you start storing the energy through carbon sequestration or other processes (don't think the temperature of the earth effects interplanetary gravitation).
Heroin is legal for prescription here in the UK, as it's an astoundingly effective treatment for pain. But doctors are less likely to prescribe it now since the conviction of Harold Shipman, a general practitioner who murdered over 200 victims with overdoses of opiates. Doses which are technically considered harmful are commonly prescribed in cases where the reduction in lifespan is less significant than the reduction in suffering. This practice has reduced somewhat as doctors are understandably keen not to be accused of murder.
While I think this if faulty thinking, at least it's better than a religious reason... that's right up there with Jehova's Witnesses refusing blood transfusions.
I've seen an article where the authors tried this they used distilled water and a sealed case to make a "full-immersion" watercooled system.
It didn't work (but didn't destroy the components), until they tried it with oil instead. The theory they expounded was that water, as a polar solvent, has effects on charge that a long-chain hydrocarbon doesn't. The capacitance of the water was throwing off the timing of the more sensitive components of the system.
Because you may not have the luxury of exchanging messages over a secure channel all the time.
The scenario is typically this ; your field agent is issued with his book of OTPs at home base ; you can be sure of the security of this distribution channel because you have vetted your staff, have armed guards, big EM shielded rooms, etc.
The agent then moves to Enemy Country X, where the phones are routinely tapped by the government, postal mail is all steamed open, and the only ISPs are government sanctioned and snoop all their traffic for subversive content. The agent can exchange messages in the knowledge the content is secure, because he (and HQ) both have their OTP books. Of course, if the signals corp of ECX are any good, they'll detect someone exchanging encrypted messages and bag him, unless he takes steps to obfuscate the message (which is where stenanography comes in).
"Sintered Armorgel ; feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books"
Maybe they should ask Neal Stephenson about using that as an ad slogan.