And they can prove that those files were actually shared with at least one third party (themselves).
Um, how ? How can they prove - beyond reasonable doubt or even more likely than not - that they actually downloaded the files from the suspect, as opposed to downloading from somewhere else or ripping the files themselves ?
It's hard to take a source seriously, though, when stuff like this found:
Don't think of applications that reside on either client or server, but build applications that reside in the space between devices. ("Software above the level of a single device")
What does that even mean? From a development perspective, what practices enable me to write software "between" devices?
It means a combination of server and specialized client software. World of Warcraft, for example. Or, possibly, P2P programs like Freenet, BitTorrent or Gnutella; after all, a single Gnutella servent is completely worthless, it is only when you have several communicating with each other that the network becomes useful. Or even the Internet itself - the network as a whole is certainly distinct from any single server or router, and can't really be said to reside in any one of them.
Mind you, this concept is anything but new; in fact it applies to all social constructs too, and in fact to anything that has more than one part.
In defense of porn, you can't really expect them to scale new heights of originality with their subject matter. There's only so many variations of suck/lick/fuck you can do.
They could, however, find actors who can keep it up - hard as iron they aren't, or even tin. Not that I can blame the men, considering what most of those women look like...
"Why do you think the internet was born?" MILITARY AND UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATION, DUMBASS! NOT PORN!
Arpanet was born for military and university communication. Internet, as we know it today, has about as much to do with Arpanet as your cells have to do with whatever pond scum first arose in primordial oceans (or where ever life began). Sure, they're technically related, but...
Maybe Internet was not born because of porn, but it sure acted as a midwife.
Yes, light that barely misses the event horizon is bent so that it appears to come from a source much closer (in an angular sense) to the black hole. But not light that would actually be occluded by the black hole -- that light is still blocked.
As you may know, the bending of light in gravitational field was first observed by checking the positions of stars during a solar eclipse. Stars that were near Sun in the sky had apparently been moved away from it, just as Einstein predicted. And the phenomenon would be much stronger in a stronger gravitational field
Basically, what I'm saying is that a star that would normally be occluded by the event horizon may have its apparent position moved away from the hole so much that it becomes un-occluded. In fact that's what Einstein's ring is: an object behind the black hole that's been moved away from the hole in all directions, making it appear as a doughnut.
Can't explain it any better without resorting to diagrams, sorry. But yes, you can indeed see behind black holes.
You can't see through the black hole, but it will lens light around it. Unfortunately it pulls in the wrong direction to see things directly behind it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_ring
Um, the page you linked to said that the phenomenon occurs when "the source, lens and observer are all aligned", in other words, the thing being observed is directly behind the hole. The diagram on the page further confirms this, as does logic (just think what direction a beam of light that just barely misses the event horizon bends).
Curtains are also untrustworthy and should not be relied on for access restriction. A sufficiently bright light, or one of the proper wavelength, can penetrate them without significant hindrance.
Unless you make them from a flat sheetlike black hole. Or would light with wavelength much larger than the diameter of the event horizon in the largest direction still pass by ?
Or maybe you could paint on the flat black hole itself, using it as your canvas. That way no one would be able to see, much less copy, your painting:).
Where do our desires come from? If they come from the our bodies and ultimately the universe, then that's determinism. If they come from nothingness, then you have free will. It is not a false dichotomy. There is either causality or there is not.
The problem is that you equate free will with non-causality. Basically your argument makes free will into a non-deterministic random number generator. But of course that would not make you free in any meaningful sense, it would just mean that your actions are controlled by random dice rolls as opposed to by laws of physics.
Besides, unpredictable people are not "free", they are insane.
The basic problem is that free will is an abstract philosophical concept (and ill-defined one at that), based on observing one's own mental processes from the inside, and as such cannot be directly mapped into any physical conditions. As a result, any attempt to use laws of physics to prove the matter either way will end up producing absurd results. Garbage in, garbage out.
If someone wants to live in rural Kansas, then it is THEIR PERSONAL CHOICE. Which is to say, they need to consider transport, communications, food, heating, etc. The consider all the factors and decide if they're going to move there or not.
If you want to live in a land with government regulations, then it is YOUR PERSONAL CHOICE. Which is to say, you need to consider any perceived loss of liberty, free market idealism, etc. Consider all the factors and decide if you're going to move there or not.
:)
What on EARTH is person A (the State)
The State is not a person. It is an organization. Please don't add state personhood to the mess that it corporate personhood.
doing *making* person B (telecomms) provide cable to person C (man in rural Kansas)?
Well, the whole purpose of the State is to make persons, even fictitious ones such as telecomms, act in a way that benefits public interest or at least doesn't harm it too much. If the State has no right to force person B to do something B doesn't want to do, or not do something B wants to do, then why does the State exist, exactly speaking ?
what business is it of A what C does?
Since A doesn't, in your example, force or prevent C to or from doing anything, your question is meaningless in this context. In the general sense, however, that is what A exist for: to set limits on what you can and cannot do, and under what conditions. The alternative is anarchy, which in practice means rule of the strongest; in other words, tyranny.
why on earth is A forcing B through the threat of jail and fines to lay his cabling in the middle of nowhere?
It isn't. B is free to not lay any cabling anywhere. However, A enforces that if B wants to lay cabling anywhere, it must agree to lay cabling everywhere as a precondition of being allowed to lay it anywhere. It's an all-or-nothing deal, but one which B is free to refuse, if the investors think they can't get sufficient return of investment from it.
The answer ultimately is that person A has no idea what freedom and liberty really mean and, co-incidentally, is voted into office by person C.
In their most extreme form they mean the right and ability to do anything, anywhere and anytime, to anyone, without any possible consequences. In any kind of society you can not have them in that extreme, since that would mean taking protection of law from everyone else, prompting them to kill you to eliminate your threat; it thus becomes a matter of balancing freedom vs. security.
So no, in all likelihood person A would not agree with you on what is the right amount of personal freedom in society, since that is likely a matter of taste. That's one of the reason why voting systems exist.
If person A forced person C, through the threat of jail and fines, to BURN HIS MONEY IN A BONFIRE, we would be OUTRAGED. If however person A forces person C to lose his money, not by burning it, but by running a loss making telecoms service which he doesn't want to do, we...applaud?
Actually, person B (to whom I presume you were referring to - person C is not running any telecom service) is free to shutdown his operations anytime. No one is forcing him to run his business at loss. Unless, of course, B entered some kind of contract to provide sercice for X years, but that was B's decision then.
Oh, and you can't put B - a corporation - into a jail. It's not a physical entity, after all.
The railways, if they were worth building (financially, which is to say, people would have paid what was necessary for their services, which meant they really did need them, since they were putting their money where their mouth was)
Which, of course, assumes that the people in the community has sufficient funds available to build a railroad there. Something may well be absolutely neccessary for the people to survive, but still cost more than they have money available.
Your argument works fine for luxuries in a situation where a person can afford some, but not all, of them; it does not work when one lacks the funds to get basic neccesities - which both telecommunications and transportation are nowadays.
So if you can't buy gas, neither the train nor the cars move very quickly. It's starting to come together...:)
Except that trains use wood, electricity or diesel oil as their power source. I've never heard anyone suggest they'd run on gas. Or did you mean water vapour, AKA steam ? But steam cars weren't very fast...
Of course you can. For example, I just did "cat/dev/random | strings", and out came the string "Hpooh". I could register that as a trademark and begin selling, say, hamburgers under it. That would be my trademark, then.
Besides, a digital signature is generated algorithmically and deterministically, not randomly.
It's for everyone: if companies are forced to sell where wouldn't sell, this would affect the prices and quality of service for everyone.
Except the people who, thanks to this decision, can't get any service whatsoever.
There are cases where even "evil monopolists" should be left to do certain aspects of their business without regulators messing in it.
Anything that's vital for the proper functioning of society, and has a tendency towards a natural monopoly - water, electricity, telecommunications, transportation - should be controlled by the society and not by "market forces".
"Blender sucks" and "Blender is the best I can afford" aren't in any way in conflict.
I could be wrong about what you're referring to, since you didn't bother to specify - maybe you're referring to the second definition in some encyclopedia or dictionary, or maybe my second point, or maybe my second paragraph ? Who knows.
Once you insert an ORDER BY clause into your query, the DB automatically has to process all the data before it can send you any results. Without an order by, sure, the DB can do what you said.
No. Using an ORDER BY and LIMIT together allows the database to use an index (assuming the column in question has one) to retrieve only the first n rows from the ordered set. This is true for at least PostgreSQL, dunno about MySQL.
A classic example is a forum or wiki, where each post or topic is represented by a table row, and there are no relations to other tables.
Except that a post may well reference other posts. I'm not sure if it's possible to have foreign keys that check against another column in the same table, thought. But posters, and their personal preferences, should be separated to another table, as shoudl articles.
Good point. Al lot of "small" Web applications are actually "single application - single database". In addition to that, many are heavily read oriented with very few writes and manipulate data that is not very critical. In environment like this, having "application level" data consistency might be quick and dirty solution that actually works quite well in practice.
However, I'm under impression that many people learn these quick and dirty solutions first and never quite take the time u understand why the "slow and clean" solutions were invented in the first place.
Fast and clean solution: use "directorid INTEGER REFERENCES directors.id ON UPDATE CASCADE ON DELETE CASCADE" in the "CREATE TABLE" query.
Slow and dirty solution: every time you're about to insert something into the table containing the "directorid" column, first do "SELECT id FROM directors WHERE id = x", check that you got a row, and pray no one will remove or change that row after you've inserted the new row.
Why on Earth would anyone take the dirty solution, even if the data is not critical, is beyond me. This is one of the situations where doing the right thing is much less work than doing the dirty hack.
And its interface still sucks, and people stick with it because of cognitive dissonance, not merit.
Blender's merit is that it is Free Open Source. This means that you don't need to pay for it, and can customize it to your heart's content, by yourself or in cooperation with other people. It also means that you can make 3D pictures and animations without paying anyone anything, and the results won't have watermarks or any crap like that.
Sure, the UI sucks. I've never seen a 3D program who's UI didn't suck. Keyboard is meant for inputting character sequences, and mouse is meant for indicating locations in a 2-dimensional screen; they are about as horrible tools for working in 3D as can be. And of course you are usually modeling and animating solid objects with volume and mass, while most (all ?) 3D programs model the objects in the scene as polygons with neither, leading to all sorts of interesting problems such as surfaces penetrating themselves. There's various ways to give the illusion of mass (such as jiggle deformers), but in the end they are just hacks to cover the fundamentally flawed model of treating 3D objects as just surfaces.
This got a bit of-topic, but anyway: People don't stick with Blender because of cognitive dissonance. They stick with Blender because it's the best alternative they have. Not everyone who wants to do 3D graphics can afford Maya or other proprietary packages, and some may just want to hack around with it.
Summa summarum: Blender sucks, perhaps a bit more than some other 3D programs, but it is still the best alternative for many people, so they stick with it.
If everyone's the equivalent of a dev team member, then what's to stop everyone from making a monster at the start that dies in one hit and drops a trillion gold?
Inflation. With such monsters gold becomes worthless in player-player transactions very soon. And you can't just make the monster drop more gold ad infinity, since even Bigints have numerical limits.
Simply scale the prices of computer-controlled vendors by median gold income of the players who are buying that item. That way the law of supply and demand kicks in while still allowing infinite supply of basic supplies, and this kind of scamming becomes pointless.
Or simply make a game where the players are gods (read "Deities & Demigods" D&D-book to get an idea of the applicable game mechanics) instead of rat-killers. With the right attitude it could become absolutely hilarious and very engaging gameplay - just look at pretty much any mythology to see the possibilities for political scheming and over-the-top action; and of course such a game doesn't need to be the least bit balanced powerwise. Begin at divine level 0 quasideity (who has to do a heroic deed to advance to level 1 demigod, which acts as a tutorial) and work your way up to level 20 greater god; and of course dying isn't a problem, since everyone has Revujenation (which rises the slain deity from the dead after a while).
"which there probably aren't for you, unless you want to use over 2GB of memory"
Don't you mean 4GB? Last time I checked 256^(32/8) == 4294967296 or 4GB:/
Remember, if the kernel is in the same address space than the user program, it needs a large enough piece of the address space to map all physical memory. In other words, if you have 2GB of RAM, the address space of 4GB gets split into 2GB kernel and 2GB user program; if you have 3GB of RAM, the user program can only have 1GB of address space since the kernel now needs 3GB.
There are ways around this - namely, don't keep all physical memory permanently mapped by the kernel, but rather have a small window and change memory mappings to make it point to whatever physical page you need - but they add overhead. A 64-bit processor shouldn't have such problems, having many orders of magnitude greater address space than it is possible to connect physical RAM to it in the foreseeable future.
In fact the default mapping in Linux is to use 768 MB chunk for the kernel, so the currently popular 1GB machine would already start feeling the hit with the default settings...
Med-I-Cal, Inc. has filed a patent on a revolutionary new method of improving muslce tone. From an interview with company CEO Mr. Smith:
"After long and expensive testing, we have found that repeatedly lifting heavy objects for as little as 15 minutes each day causes muscle mass in adults to increase and the amount of body fat to decrease without any of the side effects our current line of hormonal products may, under extremely rare circumstances and with no liability to us, show. We are seeking to bring such objects with an easy to grip handle into the market within the next 10 years."
Mr. Smith also stated that the makers of many piratical weightlifting products currently flooding the market would face "heavy consequences" and proceeded to pick up and throw a car towards a 3rd-story window in a fit of hormone-induced rage. Luckily a passing taxi driver was able to stop the car in midflight and bring it down safely with his amazing psychokinetic powers, the result of strenuously exercising his brain for years beyond human limits.
Mr. Smith and the taxi driver then engaged in a superpowered fight that reduced most of downtown into smoking rubble. The fight ended in a draw when the smoke caused the combatants to lose sight of each other and wander off. The taxi drivers union settled out of court to use their mind powers to restore the city, heal the injured and raise the dead, a task that took them approximately 15 minutes. Mr. Smith, being the head of a large corporation, was not accused despite having started the fight.
Actually, no. Having "grown up" in Southern California, whenever I saw the oracle, I thought of the Gypsy fortune-teller from the original Pirates of the Caribbean, which I believe was the intent.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, how ? How can they prove - beyond reasonable doubt or even more likely than not - that they actually downloaded the files from the suspect, as opposed to downloading from somewhere else or ripping the files themselves ?
It means a combination of server and specialized client software. World of Warcraft, for example. Or, possibly, P2P programs like Freenet, BitTorrent or Gnutella; after all, a single Gnutella servent is completely worthless, it is only when you have several communicating with each other that the network becomes useful. Or even the Internet itself - the network as a whole is certainly distinct from any single server or router, and can't really be said to reside in any one of them.
Mind you, this concept is anything but new; in fact it applies to all social constructs too, and in fact to anything that has more than one part.
They could, however, find actors who can keep it up - hard as iron they aren't, or even tin. Not that I can blame the men, considering what most of those women look like...
But that Kung Fu porn I once saw was hilarious :).
Arpanet was born for military and university communication. Internet, as we know it today, has about as much to do with Arpanet as your cells have to do with whatever pond scum first arose in primordial oceans (or where ever life began). Sure, they're technically related, but...
Maybe Internet was not born because of porn, but it sure acted as a midwife.
Actually, I'd be more worried of being improsoned without trial or access to a lawyer for being a suspicious person, and never again seeing home.
No, it means that non-subscribers have to pay extra. After all, not having to watch advertisements on your phone is a privilege, not a right.
As you may know, the bending of light in gravitational field was first observed by checking the positions of stars during a solar eclipse. Stars that were near Sun in the sky had apparently been moved away from it, just as Einstein predicted. And the phenomenon would be much stronger in a stronger gravitational field
Basically, what I'm saying is that a star that would normally be occluded by the event horizon may have its apparent position moved away from the hole so much that it becomes un-occluded. In fact that's what Einstein's ring is: an object behind the black hole that's been moved away from the hole in all directions, making it appear as a doughnut.
Can't explain it any better without resorting to diagrams, sorry. But yes, you can indeed see behind black holes.
No, that's Russia - 2nd world society. In a 3rd world society the problem doesn't arise since no newspapers get printed.
Um, the page you linked to said that the phenomenon occurs when "the source, lens and observer are all aligned", in other words, the thing being observed is directly behind the hole. The diagram on the page further confirms this, as does logic (just think what direction a beam of light that just barely misses the event horizon bends).
Unless you make them from a flat sheetlike black hole. Or would light with wavelength much larger than the diameter of the event horizon in the largest direction still pass by ?
Or maybe you could paint on the flat black hole itself, using it as your canvas. That way no one would be able to see, much less copy, your painting :).
The problem is that you equate free will with non-causality. Basically your argument makes free will into a non-deterministic random number generator. But of course that would not make you free in any meaningful sense, it would just mean that your actions are controlled by random dice rolls as opposed to by laws of physics.
Besides, unpredictable people are not "free", they are insane.
The basic problem is that free will is an abstract philosophical concept (and ill-defined one at that), based on observing one's own mental processes from the inside, and as such cannot be directly mapped into any physical conditions. As a result, any attempt to use laws of physics to prove the matter either way will end up producing absurd results. Garbage in, garbage out.
If you want to live in a land with government regulations, then it is YOUR PERSONAL CHOICE. Which is to say, you need to consider any perceived loss of liberty, free market idealism, etc. Consider all the factors and decide if you're going to move there or not.
:)
The State is not a person. It is an organization. Please don't add state personhood to the mess that it corporate personhood.
Well, the whole purpose of the State is to make persons, even fictitious ones such as telecomms, act in a way that benefits public interest or at least doesn't harm it too much. If the State has no right to force person B to do something B doesn't want to do, or not do something B wants to do, then why does the State exist, exactly speaking ?
Since A doesn't, in your example, force or prevent C to or from doing anything, your question is meaningless in this context. In the general sense, however, that is what A exist for: to set limits on what you can and cannot do, and under what conditions. The alternative is anarchy, which in practice means rule of the strongest; in other words, tyranny.
It isn't. B is free to not lay any cabling anywhere. However, A enforces that if B wants to lay cabling anywhere, it must agree to lay cabling everywhere as a precondition of being allowed to lay it anywhere. It's an all-or-nothing deal, but one which B is free to refuse, if the investors think they can't get sufficient return of investment from it.
In their most extreme form they mean the right and ability to do anything, anywhere and anytime, to anyone, without any possible consequences. In any kind of society you can not have them in that extreme, since that would mean taking protection of law from everyone else, prompting them to kill you to eliminate your threat; it thus becomes a matter of balancing freedom vs. security.
So no, in all likelihood person A would not agree with you on what is the right amount of personal freedom in society, since that is likely a matter of taste. That's one of the reason why voting systems exist.
Actually, person B (to whom I presume you were referring to - person C is not running any telecom service) is free to shutdown his operations anytime. No one is forcing him to run his business at loss. Unless, of course, B entered some kind of contract to provide sercice for X years, but that was B's decision then.
Oh, and you can't put B - a corporation - into a jail. It's not a physical entity, after all.
Which, of course, assumes that the people in the community has sufficient funds available to build a railroad there. Something may well be absolutely neccessary for the people to survive, but still cost more than they have money available.
Your argument works fine for luxuries in a situation where a person can afford some, but not all, of them; it does not work when one lacks the funds to get basic neccesities - which both telecommunications and transportation are nowadays.
Except that trains use wood, electricity or diesel oil as their power source. I've never heard anyone suggest they'd run on gas. Or did you mean water vapour, AKA steam ? But steam cars weren't very fast...
Of course you can. For example, I just did "cat /dev/random | strings", and out came the string "Hpooh". I could register that as a trademark and begin selling, say, hamburgers under it. That would be my trademark, then.
Besides, a digital signature is generated algorithmically and deterministically, not randomly.
Except the people who, thanks to this decision, can't get any service whatsoever.
Anything that's vital for the proper functioning of society, and has a tendency towards a natural monopoly - water, electricity, telecommunications, transportation - should be controlled by the society and not by "market forces".
"Blender sucks" and "Blender is the best I can afford" aren't in any way in conflict.
I could be wrong about what you're referring to, since you didn't bother to specify - maybe you're referring to the second definition in some encyclopedia or dictionary, or maybe my second point, or maybe my second paragraph ? Who knows.
Once you insert an ORDER BY clause into your query, the DB automatically has to process all the data before it can send you any results. Without an order by, sure, the DB can do what you said.
No. Using an ORDER BY and LIMIT together allows the database to use an index (assuming the column in question has one) to retrieve only the first n rows from the ordered set. This is true for at least PostgreSQL, dunno about MySQL.
Except that a post may well reference other posts. I'm not sure if it's possible to have foreign keys that check against another column in the same table, thought. But posters, and their personal preferences, should be separated to another table, as shoudl articles.
Fast and clean solution: use "directorid INTEGER REFERENCES directors.id ON UPDATE CASCADE ON DELETE CASCADE" in the "CREATE TABLE" query.
Slow and dirty solution: every time you're about to insert something into the table containing the "directorid" column, first do "SELECT id FROM directors WHERE id = x", check that you got a row, and pray no one will remove or change that row after you've inserted the new row.
Why on Earth would anyone take the dirty solution, even if the data is not critical, is beyond me. This is one of the situations where doing the right thing is much less work than doing the dirty hack.
Blender's merit is that it is Free Open Source. This means that you don't need to pay for it, and can customize it to your heart's content, by yourself or in cooperation with other people. It also means that you can make 3D pictures and animations without paying anyone anything, and the results won't have watermarks or any crap like that.
Sure, the UI sucks. I've never seen a 3D program who's UI didn't suck. Keyboard is meant for inputting character sequences, and mouse is meant for indicating locations in a 2-dimensional screen; they are about as horrible tools for working in 3D as can be. And of course you are usually modeling and animating solid objects with volume and mass, while most (all ?) 3D programs model the objects in the scene as polygons with neither, leading to all sorts of interesting problems such as surfaces penetrating themselves. There's various ways to give the illusion of mass (such as jiggle deformers), but in the end they are just hacks to cover the fundamentally flawed model of treating 3D objects as just surfaces.
This got a bit of-topic, but anyway: People don't stick with Blender because of cognitive dissonance. They stick with Blender because it's the best alternative they have. Not everyone who wants to do 3D graphics can afford Maya or other proprietary packages, and some may just want to hack around with it.
Summa summarum: Blender sucks, perhaps a bit more than some other 3D programs, but it is still the best alternative for many people, so they stick with it.
Inflation. With such monsters gold becomes worthless in player-player transactions very soon. And you can't just make the monster drop more gold ad infinity, since even Bigints have numerical limits.
Simply scale the prices of computer-controlled vendors by median gold income of the players who are buying that item. That way the law of supply and demand kicks in while still allowing infinite supply of basic supplies, and this kind of scamming becomes pointless.
Or simply make a game where the players are gods (read "Deities & Demigods" D&D-book to get an idea of the applicable game mechanics) instead of rat-killers. With the right attitude it could become absolutely hilarious and very engaging gameplay - just look at pretty much any mythology to see the possibilities for political scheming and over-the-top action; and of course such a game doesn't need to be the least bit balanced powerwise. Begin at divine level 0 quasideity (who has to do a heroic deed to advance to level 1 demigod, which acts as a tutorial) and work your way up to level 20 greater god; and of course dying isn't a problem, since everyone has Revujenation (which rises the slain deity from the dead after a while).
Remember, if the kernel is in the same address space than the user program, it needs a large enough piece of the address space to map all physical memory. In other words, if you have 2GB of RAM, the address space of 4GB gets split into 2GB kernel and 2GB user program; if you have 3GB of RAM, the user program can only have 1GB of address space since the kernel now needs 3GB.
There are ways around this - namely, don't keep all physical memory permanently mapped by the kernel, but rather have a small window and change memory mappings to make it point to whatever physical page you need - but they add overhead. A 64-bit processor shouldn't have such problems, having many orders of magnitude greater address space than it is possible to connect physical RAM to it in the foreseeable future.
In fact the default mapping in Linux is to use 768 MB chunk for the kernel, so the currently popular 1GB machine would already start feeling the hit with the default settings...
Med-I-Cal, Inc. has filed a patent on a revolutionary new method of improving muslce tone. From an interview with company CEO Mr. Smith:
"After long and expensive testing, we have found that repeatedly lifting heavy objects for as little as 15 minutes each day causes muscle mass in adults to increase and the amount of body fat to decrease without any of the side effects our current line of hormonal products may, under extremely rare circumstances and with no liability to us, show. We are seeking to bring such objects with an easy to grip handle into the market within the next 10 years."
Mr. Smith also stated that the makers of many piratical weightlifting products currently flooding the market would face "heavy consequences" and proceeded to pick up and throw a car towards a 3rd-story window in a fit of hormone-induced rage. Luckily a passing taxi driver was able to stop the car in midflight and bring it down safely with his amazing psychokinetic powers, the result of strenuously exercising his brain for years beyond human limits.
Mr. Smith and the taxi driver then engaged in a superpowered fight that reduced most of downtown into smoking rubble. The fight ended in a draw when the smoke caused the combatants to lose sight of each other and wander off. The taxi drivers union settled out of court to use their mind powers to restore the city, heal the injured and raise the dead, a task that took them approximately 15 minutes. Mr. Smith, being the head of a large corporation, was not accused despite having started the fight.
No, she was a clear ripoff off the Voodoo Lady.