They're a bureaucracy. Their funding, staff, and political power are based on their work actually mattering to someone. So are the bribes, perks, "business conferences", seminars with "concerned business leaders", political contributions for candidates friendly to their office, etc. So are their after government service careers as patent attorneys or consultants, and the jobs of their peers in industry.
This kind of thing is true of _all_ bureaucracies. It often takes a force from outside, such as a visionary leader or a defining test case, to serously alter such standards. We had some hopes that the "Bilski" case would improve the guidelines, but it merely created new layers of creative interpretation for patent submissions to provide.
This is how solar sails work. The sail is telted to reflects the light and solar wind at an angle, to slow or speed the sail in the course of its orbit.
That only works well inside solar systems, but that's plenty for the immediate future of space travel.
Yes, it's the next fad that just _everyone_ has to wear. this season. Within 5 years, it will be something else, and given the ability of major vendors like Microsoft to get Unicode _wrong_, it's not stable for mission critical applications. If you want your code to remain parseable and cross-platform compatible and stable in both large and small tools, write it in flat, 7-bit ASCII. You also get a significant performance benefit from avoiding the testing and decoding and localization and most especially the _testing_ costs for multiple regions.
Look up "microsoft unicode error" on Google for hundreds if not thousands of examples. ASCII for code is like flat text for email. It assures that you're not simply publishing coding spam, and actually wrote what you meant.
Your use of "no, really, it does not" to then argue against my statement starting the same way is confusing, to say the least. Please be careful with your negatives.
In any case, Justice Stevens of the US Supreme Court disagrees with you, and wrote the opinion.
Dismissal, even with the case in this decsion involving exceptional mishandling of evidency by the prosedcutors, does not prevent refiling of charges. There are apparently some circumstances where a dismissal can bar retrial, but it seems to be mostly a matter of policy, not law. And the decision was a classic one of "there are issues, but we're not blocking it".
No, really, it's not. Dismissed means that if new evidence is found, the charges can be refiled. "Not guilty" means that, even if they found new DNA evidence and a videotape and yoour video diary of the crime, they can't retry you for it, because that would be "double jeopardy".
Go look up "motions to dismiss" and "double jeapordy" to gain a better understanding of the legal distinctions. It's a fascinating topic.
Oh, my. Given that "dismissed" is nowhere near the same thing as "not guilty", Stop pretending that it is: That kind of skewing of the argument is the sort of thing that _will_ seriously irritate a judge, and encourage them to lock you up.
You may be a nice person, and the dismissed charges may be completely bogus, but having them dismissed is merely proof that they didn't think it was worth wasting the court's time, not proof of innocence. And that kind of flawed reasoning is why most crackers should _never_ be allowed to represent themselves in court. They just don't get it, and the judge isn't laughing when they come up with these weird lines of reasoning.
What? No. Go look up "murder", by every legal and most linguistic definition, there are plenty of circumstances under which killing another person is not murder, ranging from accident to self defense to property damage, in some societies.
And human flesh is pretty gamey. The texture and fattiness of most overweight, under exercised makes it like pork, but the urea content is pretty high and makes it taste similar to goat, as well.
It's hardly the first time. Every major manufacturing, farming, and mining economy in the world does this to some extent: the quesiton is how much, and whether nations follow their treaties about it. Look carefully at the history of OPEC to see where the "West got the taste of their own medicine", and at the history of gold trading and spice trading for the last several thousand years.
There certainly is: owners of such/8 address ranges can host the DNS for clients desperate for address space, and provide quite a bit of revenue to help recover their IT costs for maintaining their original infrastructure this long.
If it encourages Oracle to abandon that truly awful Sun "wrap my packages in mislabeled RPM bundles with mislabeled RPM's" practice, and migrate to OpenJDK's far more stable and usable packaging and layout, I'd be all for it. Just as a hint, you don't need to include all the documentation inside the bundle. And you do _not_ need to compress RPM's.
Sun's tendency to insist on their own special sign-ins and wrappers, just to extract the RPM's, caused me and others I worked with to simply throw out Sun Java packaging and switch to IBM or OpenJDK wholesale. If you can't do the packaging right, why would we have confidence in the quality of your software?
It's the argument of someone who isn't a genius to claim that genius does not exist, or is really nothing special. Anyone can throw a football, or bang on a drum. Doing it with the practice and timing to actually entertain, or to reliably reach a wide receiver, or to achieve what Zuckerberg with the interface that people _accepted_ takes some noticeable skill.
Oh, yes! I agree. After all, just because you can use an Imi Galil to open a bottle doesn't make it a bottle opener. (Look it up: it was apparently a problem when they were first manufactured, so the manufacturer included a bottle opener in its later design.)
Oh, AK-47's are very inexpensive, genuine assault weapons. They're considered complete crap for accuracy.
Can you name a single one of those people who can shoot a "Minute Of Accuracy" at 100 yards with a pistol? I'm hardly a frequent shooter, but I've never seen that tight a grouping with a handgun at that kind of range. In fact, I'd want to make sure the firing range had especially good roof and wall protection, to avoid problems with stray shots with a handgun at that range.
On a closed target range, with a high quality target pistol, yes. In real life, with targets at uncalibrated distances without an opportunity to practice at that particular location with that particular elevation.? Not likely. Between the lower velocity rounds, the relatively higher recoil of a lighter weapon even with varous stabilization technologies, and the greater effect of a human pulse and breathing on the position of a firearm held on the end of these multi-jointed objects called "arms", the smaller factors accumulate.
To assume that "a few days of practice can double that range" is to assume that "if it takes 2 men 1 1/2 days to dig a 20 foot trench, it takes 8 men 3 days to dig a 160 foot trench". Too many uncertainties and non-linearities accumulate to make such a guess useful. For example, bullet velocity drops sharply in the first few hundred feet of travel in some pretty non-linear ways. This makes angular forces, such as wind and gravity, have far greater effects. And very small angular factors at the moment of firing, such as the muscular tremors of even a very steady and trained grip, become more and more significant.
These factors apply to all range weapons, whether guns or bows or slings or thrown cow patties.
Well, yes. If you make the barrel of a pistol 2 feet long, you start looking like Jack Nicholson as the Joker handling it. You'll increase the muzzle velocity and reduce the tumbling, so your maximum range will increase. Of course, since your hand always wobbles somewhat, even for a skilled shooter with a 2-handed grip, your grouping will be awful at significant distances, even if your bullets and barrel are the equivalent of a rifle's.
A quick search shows pages like this (http://home.inreach.com/marine/usmc7.html), which lists the effective range of a typical Marine side arm of about 25 meters, and similar pages show the M-16 as having an advertised effective range of about 550 meters for a point target. A 2x scope is great for shooting varmings: not so helpful for shooting at troops several hundred feet away.
Your statement is very strange. The Kent State shooting contributed directly to the US withdrawal from Vietnam by showing the callousness of the Nixon administration and the unjustness of those calling protests "un-American". By remaining, and being shot, they actually helped end the war by exposing the criminal and callous behavior of those leading the war.
Shooting unarmed protesters has, repeatedly, triggered national changes of policy in favor of the people who were shot. Look up "Crispus Attucks" for an example at the core of the US revolution against British rule.
Optics on revolvers don't help for shots hundreds of feet away, they're just not that accurate. Even mounting one in a clamp to adjust the sights only buys limited accuracy at longer distances. (I've done this, working with a friend to calibrate his laser sights: it was fascinating to learn about.)
The kitten picture you're referring to is this one, I think: http://www.funny.co.uk/stuff/art_175-2815-Sniper-Kitten.html. It's not a pistol, it's a plastic toy. It is a very funny picture: if I'm not mistaken, that firearm is a model of the sniper rifle from Halo.
Go to a rifle or pistol range and close your eyes, and I'm sure you can distinguish the sounds of a small pistol from a high velocity, high accuracy rifle. Higher muzzle velocity, longer barrel, more explosive involved, etc. all make the sound different. But a few isolated shots across hundreds of feet of distance, in a noisy environment with angry protesters and loudspeaakers in action raising the noise floor, wearing a helmet? That seems extremely unlikely to allow such a clear distinction: the "sniper" could simply be further away than the pistol wielder.
It's awkward to provide robustly authenticated packages with Bittorrent. Most fools will very casually click on and accept any GPG signature you happen to publish, without verifying it: that's a real risk with open source tools that can be hacked and published by anyone, and caused a very big stir at RedHat when some of their build sservers got hacked. And Bittorrent is so overwhelmed by abuse that someone downloading legal software, such as Linux DVD, may be harassed by their network provider or their school network monitors for using it, where they won't be harassed for bulky HTTP or FTP access, which is easier for the network admins to monitor.
Bittorrent has been useful for CD and DVD distribution by several Linux distributors, such as CentOS.
I've seen numerous instances where the monitoring system, itself, was confused or detached. The results on a chart are then quite confusing, unless you know how to backfill the data in the chart.
Why, no, I've never been asked to do that for a 99.999% uptime SLA monitored site when some confused person in the offsite monitoring station put a bad IP address in/etc/hosts. No, no, no, couldn't happen.
Well, they're not playing devil's advocate. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_advocate).
The "devil's advocate" is a fascinating role: when Roman Catholics try to have someone declared a saint, it was the devil's advocate's role to oppose the practice. The office was abolished last century, and replaced with the "promoter of justice". It was an _embarassing_ job: discrediting miracles and casting doubts on the beliefs of devout people about their favorite potential saint is thankless work.
The results are predictable. Much like the patent office failing to challenge software patents, unless the flaws in the potential saint's proposal are obvious and profound, sainthood is now much more easily granted. The result has been an explosion in the number of new saints, from fewer than 100 in the first part of the 20th century to over 500 in the latter part.
Unfortunately, sort of genuinely skeptical agent is vital to certifying only valid saints, or patents. As Microsoft and EFF and the Apache Foundation are claiming, it's clearly not happening at the patent office. Perhaps the patent office could hire some Jesuits? They tended to provide devil's advocates, before the office was discarded, and people with experience being so "jesuitical" might do wonderful work scraping the legal clutter off of a patent application to expose, and discredit, invalid patents.
You've unfortunately repeted a few business school taught fallacies.
* All the people who made money were cheating, and that those who lost money were cheated. Not at all: like gambing at a casino, if you notice that the crap wheel is misbalanced or the cards are smudged and identifiable, it is not only legal, but to your personal advantage, to keep your mouth shut and take advantage. Other players will be harmed by this, it's true. But keeping it fair is the "house's" job. They take a hefty cut of the money to do just that. If they fail to maintain their equipment or their systems, it's their problem. This is why they have floor walkers and croupiers and bingo callers, to keep the game fair.
* The idea that market rules are based on any one principle, such as giving everyone a fair chance to trade, is demonstrably false. Some groups use it to invest savings. Others use it to gather capital or power. Others use it to launder money, and others use it to manipulate the overall economy. And each of those groups have lobbied and altered the rules for their own purposes.
* Martha Stewart went to jail because she'd gotten out of the stock selling business, and failed to cover her traces, not because "insider trading" is not common. If you think insider trading is uncommon, I urge you to watch the shares held by _family members_ of vice presidents, sold or purchased the week _before_ the stock is locked down by some merger plan or earnings report. The problem is that they get the information even before the lockdown goes into effect. The result is to lockdown the stock against ordinary shareholders getting wind, or of employee options holders flocking en masse to make a trade and raise the pre-announcement trading announcement to a volume where the SEC, or lawyer equipped shareholders, can raise questions and imperil the trades by the inner management and their fellow wealthiest stockholders.
This kind of behavior is, unfortunately, pandemic, especially in companies where the top few stockholders have nothing to do with the real products, but more with "corporate vision". I've recently had to spend a meeting with a whole room of that kind of eager executive in training, each pursuing their corner office and corporate perks, and having to walk with them through the details of why their product was pointless when it was first produced over 20 years ago and why it was still useless.
On what possible basis do you make this claim? We don't know the nature of the material repressed. The fact that the author and publisher received DOD approval for the first printing indicates that they had already successfully avoided sensitive material. Its censorship, and this _was_ censorship, for that printing after previous approval strongly hints that the material was not a security violation, it was _embarassing_ and censored for that reason.
Slashdot Mirror
They're a bureaucracy. Their funding, staff, and political power are based on their work actually mattering to someone. So are the bribes, perks, "business conferences", seminars with "concerned business leaders", political contributions for candidates friendly to their office, etc. So are their after government service careers as patent attorneys or consultants, and the jobs of their peers in industry.
This kind of thing is true of _all_ bureaucracies. It often takes a force from outside, such as a visionary leader or a defining test case, to serously alter such standards. We had some hopes that the "Bilski" case would improve the guidelines, but it merely created new layers of creative interpretation for patent submissions to provide.
This is how solar sails work. The sail is telted to reflects the light and solar wind at an angle, to slow or speed the sail in the course of its orbit.
That only works well inside solar systems, but that's plenty for the immediate future of space travel.
As long as it's after you made the sale, you've made this quartert's quotas and you _don't care_..
Go watch "Glengarry, Glen Ross" to get some fascinating insights into your next sales pitch from HP.
Yes, it's the next fad that just _everyone_ has to wear. this season. Within 5 years, it will be something else, and given the ability of major vendors like Microsoft to get Unicode _wrong_, it's not stable for mission critical applications. If you want your code to remain parseable and cross-platform compatible and stable in both large and small tools, write it in flat, 7-bit ASCII. You also get a significant performance benefit from avoiding the testing and decoding and localization and most especially the _testing_ costs for multiple regions.
Look up "microsoft unicode error" on Google for hundreds if not thousands of examples. ASCII for code is like flat text for email. It assures that you're not simply publishing coding spam, and actually wrote what you meant.
This already works by using a thin layer of gelatin on your fingers, and has been well documented for years.
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0205.html
Your use of "no, really, it does not" to then argue against my statement starting the same way is confusing, to say the least. Please be careful with your negatives.
In any case, Justice Stevens of the US Supreme Court disagrees with you, and wrote the opinion.
http://ftp.resource.org/courts.gov/c/US/434/434.US.497.76-1168.html
Dismissal, even with the case in this decsion involving exceptional mishandling of evidency by the prosedcutors, does not prevent refiling of charges. There are apparently some circumstances where a dismissal can bar retrial, but it seems to be mostly a matter of policy, not law. And the decision was a classic one of "there are issues, but we're not blocking it".
No, really, it's not. Dismissed means that if new evidence is found, the charges can be refiled. "Not guilty" means that, even if they found new DNA evidence and a videotape and yoour video diary of the crime, they can't retry you for it, because that would be "double jeopardy".
Go look up "motions to dismiss" and "double jeapordy" to gain a better understanding of the legal distinctions. It's a fascinating topic.
Oh, my. Given that "dismissed" is nowhere near the same thing as "not guilty", Stop pretending that it is: That kind of skewing of the argument is the sort of thing that _will_ seriously irritate a judge, and encourage them to lock you up.
You may be a nice person, and the dismissed charges may be completely bogus, but having them dismissed is merely proof that they didn't think it was worth wasting the court's time, not proof of innocence. And that kind of flawed reasoning is why most crackers should _never_ be allowed to represent themselves in court. They just don't get it, and the judge isn't laughing when they come up with these weird lines of reasoning.
What? No. Go look up "murder", by every legal and most linguistic definition, there are plenty of circumstances under which killing another person is not murder, ranging from accident to self defense to property damage, in some societies.
And human flesh is pretty gamey. The texture and fattiness of most overweight, under exercised makes it like pork, but the urea content is pretty high and makes it taste similar to goat, as well.
It's hardly the first time. Every major manufacturing, farming, and mining economy in the world does this to some extent: the quesiton is how much, and whether nations follow their treaties about it. Look carefully at the history of OPEC to see where the "West got the taste of their own medicine", and at the history of gold trading and spice trading for the last several thousand years.
There certainly is: owners of such /8 address ranges can host the DNS for clients desperate for address space, and provide quite a bit of revenue to help recover their IT costs for maintaining their original infrastructure this long.
If it encourages Oracle to abandon that truly awful Sun "wrap my packages in mislabeled RPM bundles with mislabeled RPM's" practice, and migrate to OpenJDK's far more stable and usable packaging and layout, I'd be all for it. Just as a hint, you don't need to include all the documentation inside the bundle. And you do _not_ need to compress RPM's.
Sun's tendency to insist on their own special sign-ins and wrappers, just to extract the RPM's, caused me and others I worked with to simply throw out Sun Java packaging and switch to IBM or OpenJDK wholesale. If you can't do the packaging right, why would we have confidence in the quality of your software?
It's the argument of someone who isn't a genius to claim that genius does not exist, or is really nothing special. Anyone can throw a football, or bang on a drum. Doing it with the practice and timing to actually entertain, or to reliably reach a wide receiver, or to achieve what Zuckerberg with the interface that people _accepted_ takes some noticeable skill.
Oh, yes! I agree. After all, just because you can use an Imi Galil to open a bottle doesn't make it a bottle opener. (Look it up: it was apparently a problem when they were first manufactured, so the manufacturer included a bottle opener in its later design.)
Oh, AK-47's are very inexpensive, genuine assault weapons. They're considered complete crap for accuracy.
Can you name a single one of those people who can shoot a "Minute Of Accuracy" at 100 yards with a pistol? I'm hardly a frequent shooter, but I've never seen that tight a grouping with a handgun at that kind of range. In fact, I'd want to make sure the firing range had especially good roof and wall protection, to avoid problems with stray shots with a handgun at that range.
On a closed target range, with a high quality target pistol, yes. In real life, with targets at uncalibrated distances without an opportunity to practice at that particular location with that particular elevation.? Not likely. Between the lower velocity rounds, the relatively higher recoil of a lighter weapon even with varous stabilization technologies, and the greater effect of a human pulse and breathing on the position of a firearm held on the end of these multi-jointed objects called "arms", the smaller factors accumulate.
To assume that "a few days of practice can double that range" is to assume that "if it takes 2 men 1 1/2 days to dig a 20 foot trench, it takes 8 men 3 days to dig a 160 foot trench". Too many uncertainties and non-linearities accumulate to make such a guess useful. For example, bullet velocity drops sharply in the first few hundred feet of travel in some pretty non-linear ways. This makes angular forces, such as wind and gravity, have far greater effects. And very small angular factors at the moment of firing, such as the muscular tremors of even a very steady and trained grip, become more and more significant.
These factors apply to all range weapons, whether guns or bows or slings or thrown cow patties.
Well, yes. If you make the barrel of a pistol 2 feet long, you start looking like Jack Nicholson as the Joker handling it. You'll increase the muzzle velocity and reduce the tumbling, so your maximum range will increase. Of course, since your hand always wobbles somewhat, even for a skilled shooter with a 2-handed grip, your grouping will be awful at significant distances, even if your bullets and barrel are the equivalent of a rifle's.
A quick search shows pages like this (http://home.inreach.com/marine/usmc7.html), which lists the effective range of a typical Marine side arm of about 25 meters, and similar pages show the M-16 as having an advertised effective range of about 550 meters for a point target. A 2x scope is great for shooting varmings: not so helpful for shooting at troops several hundred feet away.
Your statement is very strange. The Kent State shooting contributed directly to the US withdrawal from Vietnam by showing the callousness of the Nixon administration and the unjustness of those calling protests "un-American". By remaining, and being shot, they actually helped end the war by exposing the criminal and callous behavior of those leading the war.
Shooting unarmed protesters has, repeatedly, triggered national changes of policy in favor of the people who were shot. Look up "Crispus Attucks" for an example at the core of the US revolution against British rule.
Optics on revolvers don't help for shots hundreds of feet away, they're just not that accurate. Even mounting one in a clamp to adjust the sights only buys limited accuracy at longer distances. (I've done this, working with a friend to calibrate his laser sights: it was fascinating to learn about.)
The kitten picture you're referring to is this one, I think: http://www.funny.co.uk/stuff/art_175-2815-Sniper-Kitten.html. It's not a pistol, it's a plastic toy. It is a very funny picture: if I'm not mistaken, that firearm is a model of the sniper rifle from Halo.
Go to a rifle or pistol range and close your eyes, and I'm sure you can distinguish the sounds of a small pistol from a high velocity, high accuracy rifle. Higher muzzle velocity, longer barrel, more explosive involved, etc. all make the sound different. But a few isolated shots across hundreds of feet of distance, in a noisy environment with angry protesters and loudspeaakers in action raising the noise floor, wearing a helmet? That seems extremely unlikely to allow such a clear distinction: the "sniper" could simply be further away than the pistol wielder.
It's awkward to provide robustly authenticated packages with Bittorrent. Most fools will very casually click on and accept any GPG signature you happen to publish, without verifying it: that's a real risk with open source tools that can be hacked and published by anyone, and caused a very big stir at RedHat when some of their build sservers got hacked. And Bittorrent is so overwhelmed by abuse that someone downloading legal software, such as Linux DVD, may be harassed by their network provider or their school network monitors for using it, where they won't be harassed for bulky HTTP or FTP access, which is easier for the network admins to monitor.
Bittorrent has been useful for CD and DVD distribution by several Linux distributors, such as CentOS.
I've seen numerous instances where the monitoring system, itself, was confused or detached. The results on a chart are then quite confusing, unless you know how to backfill the data in the chart.
Why, no, I've never been asked to do that for a 99.999% uptime SLA monitored site when some confused person in the offsite monitoring station put a bad IP address in /etc/hosts. No, no, no, couldn't happen.
Well, they're not playing devil's advocate. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_advocate).
The "devil's advocate" is a fascinating role: when Roman Catholics try to have someone declared a saint, it was the devil's advocate's role to oppose the practice. The office was abolished last century, and replaced with the "promoter of justice". It was an _embarassing_ job: discrediting miracles and casting doubts on the beliefs of devout people about their favorite potential saint is thankless work.
The results are predictable. Much like the patent office failing to challenge software patents, unless the flaws in the potential saint's proposal are obvious and profound, sainthood is now much more easily granted. The result has been an explosion in the number of new saints, from fewer than 100 in the first part of the 20th century to over 500 in the latter part.
Unfortunately, sort of genuinely skeptical agent is vital to certifying only valid saints, or patents. As Microsoft and EFF and the Apache Foundation are claiming, it's clearly not happening at the patent office. Perhaps the patent office could hire some Jesuits? They tended to provide devil's advocates, before the office was discarded, and people with experience being so "jesuitical" might do wonderful work scraping the legal clutter off of a patent application to expose, and discredit, invalid patents.
You've unfortunately repeted a few business school taught fallacies.
* All the people who made money were cheating, and that those who lost money were cheated. Not at all: like gambing at a casino, if you notice that the crap wheel is misbalanced or the cards are smudged and identifiable, it is not only legal, but to your personal advantage, to keep your mouth shut and take advantage. Other players will be harmed by this, it's true. But keeping it fair is the "house's" job. They take a hefty cut of the money to do just that. If they fail to maintain their equipment or their systems, it's their problem. This is why they have floor walkers and croupiers and bingo callers, to keep the game fair.
* The idea that market rules are based on any one principle, such as giving everyone a fair chance to trade, is demonstrably false. Some groups use it to invest savings. Others use it to gather capital or power. Others use it to launder money, and others use it to manipulate the overall economy. And each of those groups have lobbied and altered the rules for their own purposes.
* Martha Stewart went to jail because she'd gotten out of the stock selling business, and failed to cover her traces, not because "insider trading" is not common. If you think insider trading is uncommon, I urge you to watch the shares held by _family members_ of vice presidents, sold or purchased the week _before_ the stock is locked down by some merger plan or earnings report. The problem is that they get the information even before the lockdown goes into effect. The result is to lockdown the stock against ordinary shareholders getting wind, or of employee options holders flocking en masse to make a trade and raise the pre-announcement trading announcement to a volume where the SEC, or lawyer equipped shareholders, can raise questions and imperil the trades by the inner management and their fellow wealthiest stockholders.
This kind of behavior is, unfortunately, pandemic, especially in companies where the top few stockholders have nothing to do with the real products, but more with "corporate vision". I've recently had to spend a meeting with a whole room of that kind of eager executive in training, each pursuing their corner office and corporate perks, and having to walk with them through the details of why their product was pointless when it was first produced over 20 years ago and why it was still useless.
On what possible basis do you make this claim? We don't know the nature of the material repressed. The fact that the author and publisher received DOD approval for the first printing indicates that they had already successfully avoided sensitive material. Its censorship, and this _was_ censorship, for that printing after previous approval strongly hints that the material was not a security violation, it was _embarassing_ and censored for that reason.