This is very much a David vs. Goliath thing, the HUB guy wants MTS to go easy on the bill because they have money. MTS has dropped all responsibility because it's not their equipment that was hacked, but this guy has come back with "you should have notified me earlier of abnormal usage on my phone lines".
While I'm very loath to defend large companies, no matter how I twist it, I just can't see a single reason why MTS should pay because someone else's equipment got hacked. You can't drop responsibility you never had in the first place.
The HUB guy will have to lay off one of his staff unless MTS goes easy on this bill.
Since these were overseas calls, someone will end up paying the bill. If that someone is MTS, maybe they'll end up having to lay off one of their staff.
His only method of leverage on MTS is to speak to the newspaper. That's the reason he's risking public embarrassment.
So basically, it's the "McDonald's must pay because someone spilled coffee on themselves" all over again. Except that this time the MTS can't even be accused of serving coffe that's actually hot. And the victim is supposed to be a security expert, so he really should know how to secure his own equipment, which leads me to the conclusion that he was willfully negligent; he simply couldn't be bothered to secure them.
Since it will actually INCREASE the greenhouse effect (after all, it takes a LOT of energy to spray a half-inch of water into the air),
And lets not forget that water vapour is a greenhouse gas. Making this the equivalent of trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline onto it.
you won't have to worry about tropical storms - they'll no longer be confined just to the tropics.
There's always been small tornadoes outside of tropics. They're rare, short-living and too weak to doo much damage besides damaging some roots, but they exist. Of course, even real tropical storms would likely be less of a problem here in North, since the structures tend to be sturdier in the first place; however, I wonder if tropical and sub-tropical regions simply become unlivable ? You can't rebuild New Orleans every year, and most big cities of the world sit on a shore, so they would also flood when hit by a major storm. And, since most scyscrapers seem to have an exterior made entirely of glass, they'd be ruined; the superstructure would withstand wind forces, but the insides would become a gutted skeleton.
Should us on the subarctic begin stocking up with weapons and supplies to deal with the hordes of refugees from the warmer regions ?
Most people that consider themselves atheist ARE against all "faith based things" - it's just that religion is the most pervasive and damaging one in our society at present, and so is an important target.
Most people who declare themselves atheists follow that declaration with a tirade which would make any firebrand preacher proud. Zealotry is the problem, not what it's aimed at or against; and frankly, we're never going to be rid of it, no matter how culture might evolve, because it is inherently rewarding to whip yourself into a frenzy, chant with the crowd, and feel you're part of the good fight against the infidels/heretics/imperialists/cultists/whatever.
If religion were stamped out tomorrow, we would probably then be complaining primarily about horoscopes in the newspaper (they cause people to act irrationally and often to the detriment of the society around them, so while it's nowhere near as bad as religion, that would be next on my personal hit-list).
Horoscopes don't cause people to act irrationally. Rather, irrational people pick a source of guidance randomly. If newspapers didn't publish horoscopes, they'd simply go to fortune-tellers or read their palms or tea leaves or whatever.
Besides, aren't horoscopes in newspapers usually of the "you need to be cautious in your affairs" variety ? You'd think following that kind of advice would be an improvement, at least for the kind of person who'd believe in horoscopes in the first place;).
Geez...rather that all this unionization, and all...why don't we go back more to where everyone IS more of an indy contractor, and let them negotiate for pay and benefits. That way..the cream will rise to the top, and get paid top rate....the lesser ones...well, may have to pick another field to work in?
Then who will do the grunt work ? The cream ? The people getting paid "top rate" (compared to what, if no one else works in the field ?) ? They'll do the job of a code monkey, and have the companies keep paying them high wages ?
Look, I understand it's natural to think of yourself as the cream of the crop, it comes up over and over again from car drivers to military leaders; but the awful truth is that most of the people working in any given field are mediocre (by definition), so the chances are that you are mediocre, not cream. And even if you actually are the cream, the mediocre people are still the majority, so democratic systems tend towards mediocrity - the nondemocratic ones tend towards rule by the most ruthless bastard, which is worse.
How it's supposed to work is that the union allows the employees to bargain collectively, making them equal with the employers (assuming that they too bargain collectively). When both sides have equal power - neither can survive without the other - it usually results in a fair deal, in any negotiation. That's how it works here in Finland, dunno about the US.
But for God's sake...lets not put even more impediments in front of people that are good, have half a brain, and can earn to their maximum potential.
You can always earn to your maximum potential, that's a tautology. As for the rest, it's a bit hypocritical to say that others should find another field to work in if the conditions in this one aren't optimal to them just so that they can be kept optimal to you.
I bolded the quote to show what their real problem was. They had a shit load of threads trying to use a single socket and of course there was huge overhead involved due to the mutex lock (Semaphore on kernel side) on a shared resource (the socket). So they blame Linux instead of them selves for such a half-ass implementation of sending out packets from multiple threads with a single socket. They would have gotten the same exact result if they tried it with a single TCP connection socket and attempted to have multiple threads firing off packets with that. If you want multiple threads sending out packets use multiple sockets... Wow what a concept!
Your attitude is reminds me of a response I recently got to a bug in Firefox 3 here on Slashdot: the page which triggered the bug is "stupid", and it's not the Firefox developers fault that the program locks up when it encounters a "stupid" page. Thus it's a low priority to fix it, since it only affects users of "stupid" pages; hardly even a bug at all !
As for this UDP issue, I find it very hard to believe that a properly designed system needs to hold the lock long enough to cause significant lock contention. We are talking about adding a single item to a linked list or a comparable operation. It takes - what, setting two pointers ? Or three if it's a doubly linked list.
Besides, threads are just processes which share more context than processes in general. And a socket is just a logical construct the operating system uses in its network API. There's no inherent reason why two threads sending UDP packets over a single UDP socket should be any slower than sending them over different sockets, or two separate processes sending them over different ports, since they ultimately leave through the same hardware interface. If it is indeed slower, then that is because of the design choices a particular implementation has taken. These choices may or may not be justified; however, the user is not "stupid" simply because he didn't realize you would make these particular choices instead of some other, possibly equally reasonable ones.
Sorry for my ranting, but it just pisses me off when moron programmers blame the operating system for their own stupidity.
It is always hard to hear criticism of things you hold dear. That doesn't mean that the bearer of the bad news is a moron.
You shouldn't think about that too much, because there's no one there to remove a president if he decides to stick around. Its kind of scary, really. At best, you could hope for a rouge general to take him out by force, but hopefully not overstay his welcome.
At best you could hope that the people he tries giving orders to would realize that he doesn't have any official or lawful power anymore and refuse to obey. His successor would then call the cops/order the guards to throw him physically out of the White House.
This, of course, requires that people aren't conditioned to blind obedience from early childhood, which I find increasingly unlikely.
And it's just not possible for the teachers to have their eyes on all 30 students in a class at all times, to ensure nobody's doing what they're not supposed to.
Then perhaps the state should put its money into hiring more teachers instead of buying computers and trying to prevent people from actually using them.
That's a great way to prepare them for the real world, isn't it, where corporate computers are locked down pretty hard.
You don't "essentially own" a corporate computer, now do you ? You aren't expected to lug it with you home every night either; or if you do, you're paid to do so, for it is a burden. That's what a locked-down computer is to its user.
Either give them unlocked laptops, and accept the fact that teenagers will surf for "obscene" material, or if you can't, put the money into something useful instead, such as desktops at school. Locked-down laptops won't do anyone any good, and will in fact likely result in actual harm - after all, they'll get hacked, after the hacker will get sued in court, reinforcing the concept of blind adherence to rules for him and others and thus further speeding the collapse into fascism of Western civilization.
The best thing the country could do is NOT bail out banks but bail out home owners. the cost of this bail out will be enough to PAY OFF most of those toxic loans in FULL. Why not instead just allow the home owners to refinance at a lower rate they can afford directly from the fed?
If it helps corporations, it is capitalism, which is Good. If it helps the people, it is socialism, which is Evil. Remember: when you're helping grandma keep her house, you're promoting communism.
Look, it's simple. All you need is one law for peanuts:
Foods which contain peanuts need to be labelled as such, unless it's FUCKING OBVIOUS* that they contain peanuts.
Or you can simply have a law that says "Foods which contain peanuts need to be labelled as such", and avoid an endless flood of court cases about what is or is not obvious and to whom. Or does the "FUCKING OBVIOUS" clause give some benefit besides pandering to the chorus of shitheads singing "stupid people should die" to show how FUCKING TOUGH they are?
McDonalds coffee is such a shitty, freeze dried process that it was necessary for them to heat their water much hotter than it normally takes to brew coffee, so hot it really could cause serious harm while 'normal' coffee just hurt, unless directly exposed to the eyes or sensitive membranes.
Coffee is normally brewed in boiling water. Does McDonalds perhaps use a pressure cooker ? And I assure you that boiling water is quite hot enough to cause serious harm.
Freeze-drying coffee would make it easier, not harder, to brew; freeze-drying results in a porous substance which is usually very water soluble, so it would actually make it possible to "brew" it at room temperature.
I'm honestly impressed that the drive itself holds up so well, even after the laser has gouged a disc.
The laser ? That makes me think... An above poster suggested that Microsoft might use 360's internal accelerometer to shut the drive down if the 360 is moved. Suppose they are doing the opposite - turning the laser on full blast ? You know, give people an "incentive" to buy their games over and over again, and prevent used game market ?
This one is about Microsoft knowing that the XBox would scratch disks IF MOVED WHILE THE DISKS WERE SPINNING. There's nothing here on Microsoft knowing that the disks would scratch even if not moved.
The former implies the latter. If the disks can be scratched when the device is moved around while they're playing, then that implies that there is some sharp, hard surface near them they might hit while they're wobbling around. However, wobbling can be introduced by other sources than moving the whole assembly around: uneven heating, harmonic vibrations, certain patterns of changes in DVD spin speed, a slightly less than perfect fit between two parts of the machinery...
And besides, if the sharp and hard bit, the one which scratches the disks, is within a few millimetres of the disk surface, as it would have to be for any wobbling to take it into contact with the disk, what's to say that it won't be a few millimetre closer in some units ? These things are manufactured as cheaply as possibly, so it's entirely possible that the tendency to scratch disks varies wildly with different units; in fact, some might scratch each and every disk they encounter.
So, what are you trying to say here? That a person commits statutory rape, (by your own admission you state this to be true) and is then arrested for it, and suffers consequences for it?
Calling fucking a consenting 17-year old a "statutory rape" is similar to calling copyright infringement "piracy" or jews marrying gentiles a "holocaust": an attempt to make something that isn't the least bit wrong seem horrible. In reality, after the initial witch-hunt hysteria, it fails to do anything except piss on victims of real rape, piracy and Holocaust, and simultaneously dilute said words to the point of irrelevance. A bit like is happening to "sex offender", thanks to the sex offender registry, where you can get for peeing in bushes.
The charges were probably dropped because the sheriff could have been brought up on child neglect. However, again... by your own statement, THE CRIME HAPPENED.
It is obvious from the context that the charges had nothing to do with any crime, but were brought up simply because the sheriff felt like abusing his position for personal vengeance. Selective enforcement is the tool of a tyrant.
Let this be a lesson to anyone... just because someone is looking the other way when seeing you do something doesn't mean that it wasn't illegal or criminal in the first place.
The real lesson here is to avoid people who have gotten pee in their head due to their position, and if they have any real power, their relatives too.
Yep, gotta say...everyone knows, or ought to, that you don't mess with kids, even if it seems reasonable at the time. In that specific case, why not just nix the physical stuff until 18?
Better yet, avoid anyone - child or adult - with connections to law enforcement or any other source of power which could be abused in vengeance. There are plenty of pretty women out there; why pick the one who comes with such baggage ?
For example, I can buy a CDS contract on Ford, betting that Ford will default on its debt and the same time I don't own one single cent in Ford stocks, bonds, whatever. I am merely speculating that Ford will go belly up. If it does, AIG will owe me big money.
So, hypothetically speaking, it would be in your best interests in that situation to make sure that Ford does go belly up ? Sure, you might not be able to do it alone, but what if you and a lot of your friends took CDS contracts on Ford and then cooperated ? And if you and your friends just happened to be shareholders of a rival bank to AIG, you would get a nice bonus: AIG loses money, giving your bank a competitive edge.
Kinda makes me wonder about the real causes of this financial crisis...
Of course, they're incompetent: there's not a single sign that they're any more competent now than when they raided Steve Jackson Games and every cracker they were incompetent enough to bother in Operation Sun Devil, and failed to get a single conviction.
You could require all men to carry guns. How far do you think the gunmen in Bombay would have made it if they knew every man they came upon would shoot back?
Guns have long range. Shoot a few people in a thick crowd from a hidden location and watch the fireworks when some run and the rest will start shooting at anyone suspicious, meaning each other.
Certainly this plan has a lot of side effects, but it is not completely without merit.
Yes it is. It is roughly analogous to DOS'ing every machine named in the headers of a spam message.
Re:Does it always produce true responses?
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Torture in Games
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· Score: 1
Regardless of how 'effective' torture is, are we - as citizens responsible for electing the government - prepared to accept that done in our name?
We, as human beings, are willing and eager to accept absolutely anything that we think will benefit us in any way, for any price, as long as someone else pays it. That has been proven beyond any shadow of doubt again and again through the entire human history.
Are we prepared to accept the atrocities at Guantanamo bay (and I have no doubt similar/worse things elsewhere that haven't been 'noticed') as a price for 'more security'?
Since the camp is still operational years after being founded, and is run by a democratic republic who's government could be forced by the populace to shut it down, I'd say yes.
Are we prepared to accept the possiblity of global nuclear war as the price for maintaining our 'deterrence'?
Since each country that can is hoarding nuclear weapons, despite the many times the world has become within the brink of global nuclear war, I'd say yes.
Being the biggest and the nastiest and the scariest comes at the price of having to back it up occasionally. At what point do we say 'too much'?
None. Being biggest and nastiest and scariest is simply too much fun; it drowns out whatever feeble noises the bully's conscience might make.
It will be a very, very long time before 64 bit addresses seem small.
What if I have a database of IP6 addresses, and want it to scale linearly to all possible such addresses ? The most straightforward way to do that would be to simply translate the address to a memory location; for example, the pointer to a database record for a given address is given by the formula (base + address * recordsize). Since IP6 addresses are 128 bits long, even a 128-bit address space would be insufficient here.
Granted, this is a pretty artificial example; however, the fact remains that a huge address space is useful in itself, even if the actual physical memory comes nowhere near to filling it.
Who was the genius that modded this interesting? 128 bit computing is a joke. Even if we had anythin resembling the amount of memory you need to make 128 bit computing worthwhile (That's 16.8 million Terabytes of RAM,) it is likely that this hypothetical computer (if any possible use on the desktop could be conceived) would have something on the order of 2048 cores, if not many more.
Actually, I can imagine several game concepts where this would be extremely useful. Imagine a SimCity which actually simulates every resident and building (no, Societies doesn't count, I'm talking about something like SC4 on steroids). Or an RPG game where the whole world is always being simulated at full detail, guided by a complex AI for each character - the current ones are so limited in part because you have very little storage space and computing power per character.
Heck, even for pure FPS games, this would allow proper physical simulation for the whole world. I, for one, welcome our new 10 Million Terabyte Overlords.
What I'm really looking forward to is 256-bit addressing, because then I can have an in-memory relational database with a separate record for every atom in the planet.
But what about every possible combination they can form ?
Re:Does it always produce true responses?
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Torture in Games
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· Score: 2, Informative
I don't think he's talking about torture to obtain a confession, but rather torture to obtain actionable information.
Such as the names of your fellow witches ?
I would imagine an interrogation could be set up so that the subject is asked questions with only concrete and verifiable answers.
That would require that you have some way of obtaining the answers independent of torture, which makes the torture pointless.
I suppose you could try to set up a scenario where you'd "train" the victim to tell the truth with questions who's answer you know, before switching to the actual stuff of interest, but that takes time and is still not really trustworthy.
Or he'd do what he needed to do in order to survive because there'd be no one around to ask for a handout. I suppose you think it's impossible for people to hunt for food, make clothes from animal skins, and build their own shelters?
Perfectly possible. Enjoy your life expectancy of 30.
Life expectancy of 30 for a hunter-gatherer assumes that there are other people around to take care of you when you're ill or injured. For a lone human, the first time you get unlucky is also the last.
Oh yes, true, but what's to stop those people banding together and taking what he's hunted/made?
What's stopping them from hunting him ? Cannibalism hasn't been exactly rare in this world, but even assuming they're not interested in his flesh, he's hunting in their territory and is unlikely to have anything to offer which someone in the tribe couldn't already do.
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While I'm very loath to defend large companies, no matter how I twist it, I just can't see a single reason why MTS should pay because someone else's equipment got hacked. You can't drop responsibility you never had in the first place.
Since these were overseas calls, someone will end up paying the bill. If that someone is MTS, maybe they'll end up having to lay off one of their staff.
So basically, it's the "McDonald's must pay because someone spilled coffee on themselves" all over again. Except that this time the MTS can't even be accused of serving coffe that's actually hot. And the victim is supposed to be a security expert, so he really should know how to secure his own equipment, which leads me to the conclusion that he was willfully negligent; he simply couldn't be bothered to secure them.
And lets not forget that water vapour is a greenhouse gas. Making this the equivalent of trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline onto it.
There's always been small tornadoes outside of tropics. They're rare, short-living and too weak to doo much damage besides damaging some roots, but they exist. Of course, even real tropical storms would likely be less of a problem here in North, since the structures tend to be sturdier in the first place; however, I wonder if tropical and sub-tropical regions simply become unlivable ? You can't rebuild New Orleans every year, and most big cities of the world sit on a shore, so they would also flood when hit by a major storm. And, since most scyscrapers seem to have an exterior made entirely of glass, they'd be ruined; the superstructure would withstand wind forces, but the insides would become a gutted skeleton.
Should us on the subarctic begin stocking up with weapons and supplies to deal with the hordes of refugees from the warmer regions ?
Most people who declare themselves atheists follow that declaration with a tirade which would make any firebrand preacher proud. Zealotry is the problem, not what it's aimed at or against; and frankly, we're never going to be rid of it, no matter how culture might evolve, because it is inherently rewarding to whip yourself into a frenzy, chant with the crowd, and feel you're part of the good fight against the infidels/heretics/imperialists/cultists/whatever.
Horoscopes don't cause people to act irrationally. Rather, irrational people pick a source of guidance randomly. If newspapers didn't publish horoscopes, they'd simply go to fortune-tellers or read their palms or tea leaves or whatever.
Besides, aren't horoscopes in newspapers usually of the "you need to be cautious in your affairs" variety ? You'd think following that kind of advice would be an improvement, at least for the kind of person who'd believe in horoscopes in the first place ;).
Then who will do the grunt work ? The cream ? The people getting paid "top rate" (compared to what, if no one else works in the field ?) ? They'll do the job of a code monkey, and have the companies keep paying them high wages ?
Look, I understand it's natural to think of yourself as the cream of the crop, it comes up over and over again from car drivers to military leaders; but the awful truth is that most of the people working in any given field are mediocre (by definition), so the chances are that you are mediocre, not cream. And even if you actually are the cream, the mediocre people are still the majority, so democratic systems tend towards mediocrity - the nondemocratic ones tend towards rule by the most ruthless bastard, which is worse.
How it's supposed to work is that the union allows the employees to bargain collectively, making them equal with the employers (assuming that they too bargain collectively). When both sides have equal power - neither can survive without the other - it usually results in a fair deal, in any negotiation. That's how it works here in Finland, dunno about the US.
You can always earn to your maximum potential, that's a tautology. As for the rest, it's a bit hypocritical to say that others should find another field to work in if the conditions in this one aren't optimal to them just so that they can be kept optimal to you.
Your attitude is reminds me of a response I recently got to a bug in Firefox 3 here on Slashdot: the page which triggered the bug is "stupid", and it's not the Firefox developers fault that the program locks up when it encounters a "stupid" page. Thus it's a low priority to fix it, since it only affects users of "stupid" pages; hardly even a bug at all !
As for this UDP issue, I find it very hard to believe that a properly designed system needs to hold the lock long enough to cause significant lock contention. We are talking about adding a single item to a linked list or a comparable operation. It takes - what, setting two pointers ? Or three if it's a doubly linked list.
Besides, threads are just processes which share more context than processes in general. And a socket is just a logical construct the operating system uses in its network API. There's no inherent reason why two threads sending UDP packets over a single UDP socket should be any slower than sending them over different sockets, or two separate processes sending them over different ports, since they ultimately leave through the same hardware interface. If it is indeed slower, then that is because of the design choices a particular implementation has taken. These choices may or may not be justified; however, the user is not "stupid" simply because he didn't realize you would make these particular choices instead of some other, possibly equally reasonable ones.
It is always hard to hear criticism of things you hold dear. That doesn't mean that the bearer of the bad news is a moron.
At best you could hope that the people he tries giving orders to would realize that he doesn't have any official or lawful power anymore and refuse to obey. His successor would then call the cops/order the guards to throw him physically out of the White House.
This, of course, requires that people aren't conditioned to blind obedience from early childhood, which I find increasingly unlikely.
Then perhaps the state should put its money into hiring more teachers instead of buying computers and trying to prevent people from actually using them.
In Soviet Russia, the system conditions you!
In Capitalist America, it goes after your children.
You don't "essentially own" a corporate computer, now do you ? You aren't expected to lug it with you home every night either; or if you do, you're paid to do so, for it is a burden. That's what a locked-down computer is to its user.
Either give them unlocked laptops, and accept the fact that teenagers will surf for "obscene" material, or if you can't, put the money into something useful instead, such as desktops at school. Locked-down laptops won't do anyone any good, and will in fact likely result in actual harm - after all, they'll get hacked, after the hacker will get sued in court, reinforcing the concept of blind adherence to rules for him and others and thus further speeding the collapse into fascism of Western civilization.
If it helps corporations, it is capitalism, which is Good. If it helps the people, it is socialism, which is Evil. Remember: when you're helping grandma keep her house, you're promoting communism.
Or you can simply have a law that says "Foods which contain peanuts need to be labelled as such", and avoid an endless flood of court cases about what is or is not obvious and to whom. Or does the "FUCKING OBVIOUS" clause give some benefit besides pandering to the chorus of shitheads singing "stupid people should die" to show how FUCKING TOUGH they are?
Coffee is normally brewed in boiling water. Does McDonalds perhaps use a pressure cooker ? And I assure you that boiling water is quite hot enough to cause serious harm.
Freeze-drying coffee would make it easier, not harder, to brew; freeze-drying results in a porous substance which is usually very water soluble, so it would actually make it possible to "brew" it at room temperature.
The laser ? That makes me think... An above poster suggested that Microsoft might use 360's internal accelerometer to shut the drive down if the 360 is moved. Suppose they are doing the opposite - turning the laser on full blast ? You know, give people an "incentive" to buy their games over and over again, and prevent used game market ?
Only half joking...
The former implies the latter. If the disks can be scratched when the device is moved around while they're playing, then that implies that there is some sharp, hard surface near them they might hit while they're wobbling around. However, wobbling can be introduced by other sources than moving the whole assembly around: uneven heating, harmonic vibrations, certain patterns of changes in DVD spin speed, a slightly less than perfect fit between two parts of the machinery...
And besides, if the sharp and hard bit, the one which scratches the disks, is within a few millimetres of the disk surface, as it would have to be for any wobbling to take it into contact with the disk, what's to say that it won't be a few millimetre closer in some units ? These things are manufactured as cheaply as possibly, so it's entirely possible that the tendency to scratch disks varies wildly with different units; in fact, some might scratch each and every disk they encounter.
Calling fucking a consenting 17-year old a "statutory rape" is similar to calling copyright infringement "piracy" or jews marrying gentiles a "holocaust": an attempt to make something that isn't the least bit wrong seem horrible. In reality, after the initial witch-hunt hysteria, it fails to do anything except piss on victims of real rape, piracy and Holocaust, and simultaneously dilute said words to the point of irrelevance. A bit like is happening to "sex offender", thanks to the sex offender registry, where you can get for peeing in bushes.
It is obvious from the context that the charges had nothing to do with any crime, but were brought up simply because the sheriff felt like abusing his position for personal vengeance. Selective enforcement is the tool of a tyrant.
The real lesson here is to avoid people who have gotten pee in their head due to their position, and if they have any real power, their relatives too.
Better yet, avoid anyone - child or adult - with connections to law enforcement or any other source of power which could be abused in vengeance. There are plenty of pretty women out there; why pick the one who comes with such baggage ?
So, hypothetically speaking, it would be in your best interests in that situation to make sure that Ford does go belly up ? Sure, you might not be able to do it alone, but what if you and a lot of your friends took CDS contracts on Ford and then cooperated ? And if you and your friends just happened to be shareholders of a rival bank to AIG, you would get a nice bonus: AIG loses money, giving your bank a competitive edge.
Kinda makes me wonder about the real causes of this financial crisis...
Well of course they are. It's a job requirement for people working for an evil overlord in a magical girl show, after all ;).
"Sun Devil" indeed !
Guns have long range. Shoot a few people in a thick crowd from a hidden location and watch the fireworks when some run and the rest will start shooting at anyone suspicious, meaning each other.
Yes it is. It is roughly analogous to DOS'ing every machine named in the headers of a spam message.
We, as human beings, are willing and eager to accept absolutely anything that we think will benefit us in any way, for any price, as long as someone else pays it. That has been proven beyond any shadow of doubt again and again through the entire human history.
Since the camp is still operational years after being founded, and is run by a democratic republic who's government could be forced by the populace to shut it down, I'd say yes.
Since each country that can is hoarding nuclear weapons, despite the many times the world has become within the brink of global nuclear war, I'd say yes.
None. Being biggest and nastiest and scariest is simply too much fun; it drowns out whatever feeble noises the bully's conscience might make.
What if I have a database of IP6 addresses, and want it to scale linearly to all possible such addresses ? The most straightforward way to do that would be to simply translate the address to a memory location; for example, the pointer to a database record for a given address is given by the formula (base + address * recordsize). Since IP6 addresses are 128 bits long, even a 128-bit address space would be insufficient here.
Granted, this is a pretty artificial example; however, the fact remains that a huge address space is useful in itself, even if the actual physical memory comes nowhere near to filling it.
Actually, I can imagine several game concepts where this would be extremely useful. Imagine a SimCity which actually simulates every resident and building (no, Societies doesn't count, I'm talking about something like SC4 on steroids). Or an RPG game where the whole world is always being simulated at full detail, guided by a complex AI for each character - the current ones are so limited in part because you have very little storage space and computing power per character.
Heck, even for pure FPS games, this would allow proper physical simulation for the whole world. I, for one, welcome our new 10 Million Terabyte Overlords.
But what about every possible combination they can form ?
Such as the names of your fellow witches ?
That would require that you have some way of obtaining the answers independent of torture, which makes the torture pointless.
I suppose you could try to set up a scenario where you'd "train" the victim to tell the truth with questions who's answer you know, before switching to the actual stuff of interest, but that takes time and is still not really trustworthy.
Life expectancy of 30 for a hunter-gatherer assumes that there are other people around to take care of you when you're ill or injured. For a lone human, the first time you get unlucky is also the last.
What's stopping them from hunting him ? Cannibalism hasn't been exactly rare in this world, but even assuming they're not interested in his flesh, he's hunting in their territory and is unlikely to have anything to offer which someone in the tribe couldn't already do.