Articles 4 and 5 of Convention IV (Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War):
Art. 4. Persons protected by the Convention are those who, at a given moment and in any manner whatsoever, find themselves, in case of a conflict or occupation, in the hands of a Party to the conflict or Occupying Power of which they are not nationals.
Nationals of a State which is not bound by the Convention are not protected by it. Nationals of a neutral State who find themselves in the territory of a belligerent State, and nationals of a co-belligerent State, shall not be regarded as protected persons while the State of which they are nationals has normal diplomatic representation in the State in whose hands they are.
The provisions of Part II are, however, wider in application, as defined in Article 13.
Persons protected by the Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field of 12 August 1949, or by the Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea of 12 August 1949, or by the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War of 12 August 1949, shall not be considered as protected persons within the meaning of the present Convention.
Art. 5 Where in the territory of a Party to the conflict, the latter is satisfied that an individual protected person is definitely suspected of or engaged in activities hostile to the security of the State, such individual person shall not be entitled to claim such rights and privileges under the present Convention as would, if exercised in the favour of such individual person, be prejudicial to the security of such State.
Where in occupied territory an individual protected person is detained as a spy or saboteur, or as a person under definite suspicion of activity hostile to the security of the Occupying Power, such person shall, in those cases where absolute military security so requires, be regarded as having forfeited rights of communication under the present Convention.
In each case, such persons shall nevertheless be treated with humanity and, in case of trial, shall not be deprived of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed by the present Convention. They shall also be granted the full rights and privileges of a protected person under the present Convention at the earliest date consistent with the security of the State or Occupying Power, as the case may be.
See here for a list of signatories to the Geneva conventions. You'll note that Afghanistan signed in 1956, although I'll confess I'm not 100% sure if that was still relevant at the time
The best way to educate people who are utterly clueless is to provide competent teachers.
In my experience, it generally costs more than $100 to train a teacher. And it's easily possible for a laptop to contain more information than $100 worth of books. I would be seriously surprised if these criticisms were anything that the clever folk at MIT hadn't thought through in great depth.
I have it on good authority (martial arts instructor) that the idea of killing someone by hitting their nose is an urban legend. Nose cartilage isn't tough enough to break through the skull.
Can anyone confirm or deny this?
Speaking from the sidelines, I would note that it didn't appear to be a strawman he was attacking there. The profit motive had absolutely nothing to do with any of the discoveries you listed. Philanthropy may have had something to do with it but, as America is currently one of the least philanthropic nations in the world (speaking in terms of charitable donations as a percentage of GDP), I severely doubt that good deeds of this sort will be sufficient to make up the shortfall.
Because, when you have the casual business users on your side, it's harder for anyone to play legalistic silly buggers (software patents, IP "contamination" etc) with Linux.
Didn't go too badly - at least to the extent that it was a completely different Windows virus that clobbered the Russian stock exchange, causing God knows what damage.
The courses I took were called "quantum mechanics" regardless of whether it was relativistic/non-relativistic.
The courses at my uni appear to distinguish between vanilla Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory. Of these I've only taken the former, so I'm aware that my lingo may not be up to scratch.
If you're classing quantum mechanics as something that's insufficiently understood, I'd strongly disagree - we're currently way past that to quantum field theory.
I don't think this is an accurate representation of Occam's Razor - apart from anything else, science doesn't do "true", it's just does "best explanation". It's more like:
For a multifunction F from the set of inputs of a system to the set of outputs of a system (i.e. the data we posess about the system), define a set of postulates E as being an explanation for the system if using those postulates as constraints for the system does not exclude any valid input/output pair in F. Define an ordering "simplicity" on the family of explanations as E E' iff E contains fewer postulates than E' ("fewer" isn't necessarily well-defined, but hey). Then assume the least element of the family of explanations for a given multifunction to be true until other data presents itself.
Of course, there's another approach that is also used in science:
For an explanation E, define F_E as the multifunction of input/output pairs that are not excluded by E. Define a partial ordering E = E' iff F_E is a subset of F_E'. Then for any chain in the related poset and any data multifunction F0, the least element E0 of the chain such that F0 is a partial function of F_E0 is the most scientifically valid explanation.
Translated: always choose the most falsifiable explanation.
I'm pretty sure that the second approach isn't a corollary of the first, so I'd say that the valid approach is to apply some kind of product of the two to produce a new partial ordering. Scientific hypothesising then becomes a trade-off between lowering the number of necessary postulates and lowering the number of possible alternative outcomes. Epicycles score badly on *both* counts, and I personally would say that belief in God does too.
Why yes, I am a mathematician (maths student anyway). How did you guess?
If you find internal consistency (within the dogma of a religion, including their trusted documents) and external consistency with the outer (earth/cosmos) and inner (conscience/mind) world, then you can start taking it seriously.
Thanks for validating my acceptance of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. May you always be touched by His Noodly Appendage!
No seriously. The filter you propose wouldn't even catch the travesty that was epicycles. There's a reason why Occam's razor is such an integral part of scientific philosophy.
What Europe asked for, IIRC, was documentation. Microsoft has so far failed to produce any of a sufficient standard (i.e. that can be actually understood by a programmer), so they're apparently offering source code as a substitute. For a fee, of course.
And the original article was pointing out that having a bloody well-designed operating system in no way means you're immune to hacking. It was railing against OSX as a panacea, not an OS. As such, the GP's post was in fact dead on.
Strictly from a customer-is-always-right point of view, what's their excuse? Not enough testors? Not enough programmers? Not enough managers?
I'd go with "not enough clearly-defined interfaces". If software producers are forced to use undocumented APIs to get their product working fast/well enough, it seems obvious that any behind-the-scenes changes are going to break a whole load of products.
when you're accountable to that many customers with so many "supported" configurations, it takes a while to test. They don't have the luxury of most linux distro's where if it breaks some obscure program they can go "whupps, well, tell the author to write a fix for his app".
And yet Debian manages to consistently not break stuff despite supporting more architectures than Microsoft could dream of.
Apart from that time a while back when they had to transition between GCC versions, that could have been better managed. I hold out hope that one day GCC will come out with some specification to ensure binary compatibility.
It's not popularity per se, it's really a desire to do harm to something geeks believe did not earn its popularity honestly.
I'd point out that the majority of geeks who code Windows viruses are Windows geeks, and the majority of geeks who genuinely loathe Microsoft mostly use a UNIX variant - either Linux or one of the BSDs. Are you seriously suggesting that there's a large number of Linux geeks who are buying Windows, investigating the grisly depths of the Windows API at painful length and wasting their time producing viruses, all just to piss Bill off? This seems a little implausible...
Apart from anything else, most Linux geeks I know see contributing to open source as a more than sufficient two fingers to Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
Articles 4 and 5 of Convention IV (Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War):
Art. 4. Persons protected by the Convention are those who, at a given moment and in any manner whatsoever, find themselves, in case of a conflict or occupation, in the hands of a Party to the conflict or Occupying Power of which they are not nationals.
Nationals of a State which is not bound by the Convention are not protected by it. Nationals of a neutral State who find themselves in the territory of a belligerent State, and nationals of a co-belligerent State, shall not be regarded as protected persons while the State of which they are nationals has normal diplomatic representation in the State in whose hands they are.
The provisions of Part II are, however, wider in application, as defined in Article 13.
Persons protected by the Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field of 12 August 1949, or by the Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea of 12 August 1949, or by the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War of 12 August 1949, shall not be considered as protected persons within the meaning of the present Convention.
Art. 5 Where in the territory of a Party to the conflict, the latter is satisfied that an individual protected person is definitely suspected of or engaged in activities hostile to the security of the State, such individual person shall not be entitled to claim such rights and privileges under the present Convention as would, if exercised in the favour of such individual person, be prejudicial to the security of such State.
Where in occupied territory an individual protected person is detained as a spy or saboteur, or as a person under definite suspicion of activity hostile to the security of the Occupying Power, such person shall, in those cases where absolute military security so requires, be regarded as having forfeited rights of communication under the present Convention.
In each case, such persons shall nevertheless be treated with humanity and, in case of trial, shall not be deprived of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed by the present Convention. They shall also be granted the full rights and privileges of a protected person under the present Convention at the earliest date consistent with the security of the State or Occupying Power, as the case may be.
See here for a list of signatories to the Geneva conventions. You'll note that Afghanistan signed in 1956, although I'll confess I'm not 100% sure if that was still relevant at the time
In my experience, it generally costs more than $100 to train a teacher. And it's easily possible for a laptop to contain more information than $100 worth of books. I would be seriously surprised if these criticisms were anything that the clever folk at MIT hadn't thought through in great depth.
I have it on good authority (martial arts instructor) that the idea of killing someone by hitting their nose is an urban legend. Nose cartilage isn't tough enough to break through the skull. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
Oh, it's quite easy...
Speaking from the sidelines, I would note that it didn't appear to be a strawman he was attacking there. The profit motive had absolutely nothing to do with any of the discoveries you listed. Philanthropy may have had something to do with it but, as America is currently one of the least philanthropic nations in the world (speaking in terms of charitable donations as a percentage of GDP), I severely doubt that good deeds of this sort will be sufficient to make up the shortfall.
Why should I care about the "casual office user"?
Because, when you have the casual business users on your side, it's harder for anyone to play legalistic silly buggers (software patents, IP "contamination" etc) with Linux.
imagine a differentiable manifold
You aren't a mathematics student by any chance are you? I hope to god you are otherwise I shall lose all faith in the human race...
Didn't go too badly - at least to the extent that it was a completely different Windows virus that clobbered the Russian stock exchange, causing God knows what damage.
The courses I took were called "quantum mechanics" regardless of whether it was relativistic/non-relativistic.
The courses at my uni appear to distinguish between vanilla Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory. Of these I've only taken the former, so I'm aware that my lingo may not be up to scratch.
If you're classing quantum mechanics as something that's insufficiently understood, I'd strongly disagree - we're currently way past that to quantum field theory.
Does it matter if you can still derive predictions?
I don't think this is an accurate representation of Occam's Razor - apart from anything else, science doesn't do "true", it's just does "best explanation". It's more like:
For a multifunction F from the set of inputs of a system to the set of outputs of a system (i.e. the data we posess about the system), define a set of postulates E as being an explanation for the system if using those postulates as constraints for the system does not exclude any valid input/output pair in F. Define an ordering "simplicity" on the family of explanations as E E' iff E contains fewer postulates than E' ("fewer" isn't necessarily well-defined, but hey). Then assume the least element of the family of explanations for a given multifunction to be true until other data presents itself.
Of course, there's another approach that is also used in science:
For an explanation E, define F_E as the multifunction of input/output pairs that are not excluded by E. Define a partial ordering E = E' iff F_E is a subset of F_E'. Then for any chain in the related poset and any data multifunction F0, the least element E0 of the chain such that F0 is a partial function of F_E0 is the most scientifically valid explanation.
Translated: always choose the most falsifiable explanation.
I'm pretty sure that the second approach isn't a corollary of the first, so I'd say that the valid approach is to apply some kind of product of the two to produce a new partial ordering. Scientific hypothesising then becomes a trade-off between lowering the number of necessary postulates and lowering the number of possible alternative outcomes. Epicycles score badly on *both* counts, and I personally would say that belief in God does too.
Why yes, I am a mathematician (maths student anyway). How did you guess?
I am aware that Occam's razor is a Rule of Least Entities. My comment stands.
No seriously. The filter you propose wouldn't even catch the travesty that was epicycles. There's a reason why Occam's razor is such an integral part of scientific philosophy.
[/flamebait]
What Europe asked for, IIRC, was documentation. Microsoft has so far failed to produce any of a sufficient standard (i.e. that can be actually understood by a programmer), so they're apparently offering source code as a substitute. For a fee, of course.
So MS get ordered to hand over documentation for their protocols. They do so. It's crap and they're ordered to go back and do it properly.
So they respond with "figure it out yourself. After paying us some cash obviously."
Does anyone actually think this is an acceptable response?
See here: http://metalgearsolid.org/news/show_news.php?subac tion=showfull&id=1137806430
And since when do airports have to pay the public bus services* for the passengers they deliver?
And the original article was pointing out that having a bloody well-designed operating system in no way means you're immune to hacking. It was railing against OSX as a panacea, not an OS. As such, the GP's post was in fact dead on.
Apart from anything else, most Linux geeks I know see contributing to open source as a more than sufficient two fingers to Microsoft.