Thus turning yourself into the "bad guy" in the eyes of everyone who uses that ISP, by far the majority of whom were not in any way involved in the attack, while not seriously curbing the operations of this ISP in any way unless your site is a major Internet concern.
He also seemed to be putting some responsibility on WildTangent to work toward fixing those problems, though.
Consider me the devil's advocate here, I guess. I don't know the full story, but I'm seeing the possibility that this guy's not all bad - his methods could use some work(opt-in rather than opt-out as I've already mentioned, say), but there is the possibility of a good motive here.
Granted, there's also the possibility that the quoted text file in the ancestor post is a complete lie, but I definitely have no way of checking that.
"Making a good 'M' rated game...Takes maturity on the part of the developer. Assuming an "M" rating when creating a game should be a freedom to not worry about toning down the game's flavor, not an excuse to add meaningless cursing, sexuality, and violence."
Exactly! I'm all in favour of using mature, even adult concepts in a video game, but the rating should not be the focus. If a company knows that such-and-such game is targeting mature players, they should really just make it the best game they can, THEN rate it, or work under the limits of e.g. and M rating and then rate it down to T or E if it winds up not really needing the M.
Those who set out "to make an M rated game" are really missing the point, and probably won't fare too well. But those who simply aren't afraid of their game being M rated have that much more freedom in what they put in it, since they have other ways(not necessarily better ways) to make it a good game.
Looking back, I consider a couple of factors as being important in whether or not I've liked games. I've listed them as "possible problems" here, but they can be turned on their head for "possible advantages". Thus:
Is it a chore to play? If the interface is clunky or the gameplay is too much like work, I likely won't play it very much. If it's largely based on events beyond my control(the path an enemy happens to take out of several possible, for instance; a "good" path allows me to slip by, a "bad" one gets me jumped by a horribly overpowering force), ESPECIALLY combined with a poor save system(making it harder to get to that point and retry), I likely won't play. Sadly, Halo's multiplayer interface suffers from this to some degree(and the total lack of respawn protection doesn't help), though, despite having a CPU that's technically below req, I think it's overall a very good game; this, like the other factors, can be a factor without being a crippling one.
Is it over too quickly? If I can play through the game in a mere few hours on my first run-through, it's too soon.
Does it drag on too long? Contrariwise, if I feel I'm not making progress, I'll put it aside for something that yields SOME gratification.
Is the gameplay too limited? If the plot is extremely linear, if there's only one(or are very few) correct approach(es) to any problem, I'd rather read a book or watch a movie. Then at least I'm not wasting my own energy to make things progress. Now, there are some mindless games I don't mind, but usually there's at least some choice in how to handle things, even in scrolling shooters.
Is it believable? Fantasy and sci-fi notwithstanding, a game should be consistent with itself. Horrible, glaring plot holes, a patchy and ill-presented backstory, all those things make me less likely to keep going.
Is it stable? If the game keeps crashing, I'll abandon it. Neverwinter Nights, for instance, and especially Battlezone II, are very intolerant of task-switching on my machine, prone to locking it up from time to time. (BZII often requires a hard power-cycle even if I play without once switching away from it, as when I quit, the system frequently hangs or becomes so unstable it can't even shut down properly.
Is the story plain or absent? I do play some mindless games, but overall, I tend to like those with a well-written plot and backstory, especially one that's at least somewhat novel.
Is it overdone? I don't need yet another shooter unless it offers something that's not so common.
Does it feel unpolished or unfinished? Some games just feel like they were rushed out the door, as though the developers were tired of working on it; or they just ignore their own potential and don't take things far enough.
Nowhere on this list does the rating of the game enter into it. Things that contribute to the rating generally can be classed under something else - excess gore c
What if, instead, only Company A handled payments, and the Companies B got told "Pass" or "Fail - reason" and collected from Company A on their own?
Isn't that the way remote logins work? The actual password doesn't get sent over to your terminal to test - you SSH in, give your login/password, and either you get logged in, or you're told the login/password combination is incorrect(which doesn't even tell you whether or not it's a valid login, much less anything about the password).
I use Opera's Wand tool. It can be a bit irritating at times, but for a few sites where I have multiple logins, or those sites for which I have one login and it tends to boot me out a fair bit, it's nice. Sure beats cookies.
Now, you can bet I'd go in and scrub my passwords if anyone else used my computer, and I don't use it for, say, banking sites(where the consequences of being cracked would be just too great), but for run-of-the-mill stuff, it's handy.
And it isn't made or broken by MS keeping servers online.
I think part of the issue is that P2P programs are at least partly marketed to people who want to find MP3s instead of getting the music themselves(or software, etc., but my introduction to P2P was in music-only Napster days). If they are advertising their services as aids in breaking the law(international law, no less), that's a problem.
I have no direct experience with BitTorrent(I know, geek--), but from what I've heard, more of the material to be found there is legitimate in such redistribution - for Linux ISOs, a number of the distros are probably quite thankful that some of the onus is taken off of their own servers - in addition to the fact that if the download is coming from several sources, it often gets around bottlenecks. I know modern P2P apps do that too, but it's not presented so strongly as a focus.
Now, people could certainly use Kazaa or similar programs to distribute their legitimate files, but this is not what it's known for, and all the disclaimers in the world won't change that.
It greatly depends on how you market it. Example: By touting a brute-force password cracker as a security tool - to ensure that the passwords on your system aren't too easily cracked - you are highlighting a positive aspect[1]; but if you describe it as a cracking tool, i.e. something with which to gain entry into a system without knowing the proper credentials, you are deliberately assisting in a crime[2]. See my sig, but that might be known as conspiracy to commit a crime depending on how it's looked at. It's certainly aiding and abetting any hypothetical criminal that wants to break into someone else's system.
[1]: I have such a utility on my FreeBSD box to test local passwords. I believe it's in the ports collection as security/crack but I don't have access to the box at this second to check. [2]: It also would involve some additional steps to circumvent security measures that try to prevent a brute-force approach; the utility I use, IIRC, relies on access to the passwd file and not the usual login procedures, which impose a timeout on a failed password attempt. Unless you are using this ONLY to test robustness of a system you administer and/or own, there's no legitimate reason to attempt to bypass this routine.
And all of this is to be done, remember, by an automated system for identifying connections within pre-existing content. It should be able to tell who's right and who's full of it, dammit!
How is Google breaking any law by providing links to sites which reference the search terms? The information is already public, Google is merely collating it.
The analogy doesn't hold because you're severely altering the basic premise, not because the logic is flawed. It's a case of "If you use our software and hurt yourself with it, don't blame us" for Microsoft, and "If you use our service and are hurt by what other people say, don't blame us" for Google. Misuse is implied to some degree or other in each case; it IS possible to use Windows safely, and many, many people use Google each day without having a fit.
"Risk analysis" doesn't need to mean "flailing away at the absolute greatest risk factor to no gain". As mentioned in the grandparent post, there's not much that CPU cycles can do to reduce the incidence of car accidents - but they CAN give concrete results to studies of protein folding, and that is likely to result in, if not cures, viable treatments for a variety of genetic disorders. It's a far more efficient way to deal with a problem than abstaining from everything that makes life something approaching fun or worthwhile: solid gains for, really, negligible cost.
Either way, my mistake. I was thinking of magnesium, but now I remember that thermite, indeed, doesn't take too much to ignite. And it's even more violent when it does(though there's definitely a reason magnesium is used in spelunkers' lights; maybe not so much heat, but it sure is bright).
Oh, and it wouldn't take much to oxidise iron filings. Not so easy is aluminum, whose surface oxidises into a tough aluminum oxide layermore or less instantly on exposure to air, but nevertheless, fine filings would oxidise in fairly short order - especially if they were "cooked" a little in a humid environment.
Given the readiness with which aluminum oxidises, it does make sense for the iron oxide to be reduced - especially since thermite was used to weld iron rails together.
I've seen a tiny fraction of the case-modding stuff out there. Given that a great deal of it seems to center around windows or all-out clear cases, and fancy/EL/UV-fluorescent/just-plain-lit-up cables to see inside them, I think they qualify as scantily-clad, easily. And the computer won't complain if you keep dressing it less and less, as long as you've got parts where it counts; and free software means it doesn't keep nagging you for any more money than you WANT to spend on it! Add porn into the mix, and...
Based on another thing mentioned in the summary(don't have universal net access, much less BitTorrent, from work to see the darn thing yet), I now have this temptation to look up the formula for thermite whenever I finally manage to upgrade from my current unstable POS. Take the old shell somewhere sheltered and put it on a nice, durable surface, don welding glasses, light up a blowtorch, and let 'er rip.
Saw the thermite reaction only once in Chemistry, admittedly, but it still seems like a fun way to destroy my hated crashmaster box. Chem rather than CompSci, but isn't that still a nerdy way to do things?
Of course, if thermite is how they actually achieve the 3000 degree iron that's mentioned, so much the better.
Indeed. Food is a necessity of life. Speeding is not. Similarly, Microsoft can still manage to stay in business with fairer business practises. A fine is punitive, not assessed for something that is necessary, so it should thus be steep enough to at least make the perpetrator think.
Of course, some offences have steeper penalties than others, but it's for the EU to determine what sort of offence Microsoft has committed. If they think it warrants a traffic-ticket penalty, so mote it be. People in the EU can no doubt communicate with their representatives if they feel that's not an appropriate penalty.
Now, if Microsoft is found to be using downright illegal methods to keep a stranglehold on their corner of local economy(using one wrong to achieve another), things might need another look - because then, they are threatening people's livelihood; that of the people running their competition. If those companies are forced under by shady practises, those people suddenly find the necessities of life to be a little harder to get.
Even ignoring the fact that neither Alex nor St. John is an uncommon name(there could be more specific context that I'm not aware of, and my limited net access at work makes it hard to even try checking), this could qualify as "advice from one who's intimately aware of the problem". Sure, it's not as good as a bug-free product in the first place, but do you think the average consumer wants to wait for something to be made bug-free? Of course not - they want the next big thing and they want it yesterday.
Just as certain potentially-dangerous code in the OS has to be excepted from virus scanners(deltree anyone?), there are legitimate uses for things that might otherwise be considered spyware. Note, too, that the quoted text states it's not the only notice of these activities, but is for people who didn't read through the privacy agreement. In addition, there's a way to turn it off.
Maybe there's a better way to do things(there usually is, no matter what's being discussed), but don't slam them any harder than they deserve. Besides, given the apathy of the average user(who might be willing to ignore a minor glitch if it doesn't severely detract from their game-playing, even assuming it's one they notice at all), having something that automatically identifies problems with its dependencies isn't THAT bad an idea - though perhaps it should be opt-in instead of opt-out.
Contrariwise, if someone takes your CDs without your permission, they haven't gained the rights to them because YOU still have them.
The sibling post by someone actually from NZ probably has more details, but the short version is, it's not a transfer of legal rights if the property itself was illegally transferred.
You still own it, in either case(though I suppose if you voluntarily destroyed it, that would be a sign that you no longer wish to do so). Stealing something doesn't mean the thief owns it, and "in case the original is damaged/destroyed" is the whole point of backing up a CD/tape/whatever, isn't it?
What I learned in Biology is that it's not just whether the species CAN interbreed - it's whether, in their respective usual habitats, they WILL. Dogs and wolves can, and to a sufficiently great degree that it poses a threat to wolves, but dogs in their "natural habitat" - close to human dwellings - aren't as likely to because wolves aren't as likely to be nearby.
It's fuzzy, but taxonomy is like that. I've still seen relatively recent pages - and I wish I remember where - that included skunks among Mustelidae, though the generally accepted mode of thought is that they're seperate, as Mephitidae.
I like that definition of dual-planet, though astronomers just might have a fit over calling Charon a planet. Still, the barycenter of that system is definitely in space rather than within one body or another.
Pluto and Charon are also far closer together - both in absolute terms and scaled by size - than Earth and Luna. But it's the mutual center of rotation that I think is more important.
The odds of having a center of gravity within a planet's atmosphere are, on solid worlds, pretty darn slim. But when gas giants are included, that elevates the problem to new levels of complexity. How do you define "within the atmosphere"? A planet's atmosphere doesn't have a very firm boundary; it just gets increasingly vacuous.
If an astronomer out there knows how the boundary of an atmosphere is designed, I think that would be the better outer limit for dual-planet vs planet-moon: if the barycenter is not within the average diameter of either body, atmospheres included, it's a multiple-planet system.
Having a naturally-occurring, balanced system with more than two such bodies would seem highly unlikely, but, hell, life is highly unlikely. Given enough trials, though, one will eventually succeed. Anyway, the definition of "planet" might need to be amended so as to include the possibility of orbiting with another body such that the barycenter is in space, and declaring that those two, if they otherwise meet the definitions, are still planets. (If the smaller one couldn't pull itself into a spheroid, it's not a planet, so the whole argument here is moot.)
The fact that people have been doing it for tens of thousands of years isn't even the core of things. Traditions, after all, aren't always as valid as they were even years, much less millenia ago.
In this case, though, some form of sex - even if it's just the sperm donor beating off - is still required for the next generation to even be around. Since the people who most publicly proclaim the evils of sex seem to be the most strongly against cloning research, they seem to have backed themselves into a corner...
As for the ones that claim the time-honoured tradition of marriage makes it okay, I invite them to take a long, hard look at what marriage was like not all that long ago - say, back before women's suffrage. Or go back farther, to biblical times, when women were essentially property.
Personally, I don't see why adult, consenting sex in any form is demonised, but that's how the rules presently stand, and breaking them isn't the best way to get them changed.
The grandparent poster isn't too far off, though, by stating that governments etc. seem to deal with sex by pretending it doesn't happen - or at least, something that isn't done for recreation. After all, if people entertained themselves by having sex instead of being good little consumers, businesses and the government representatives they cozy up to would stand to lose income, and we can't have that, can we?
Now, I have absolutely no data to support this hypothesis, but I think that if sex was viewed less as something to be ashamed of, it might not have so much of an undisputably negative element(child molestation etc.). Not sure what if any effect this would have on more violent forms of rape(I agree with the statement that rape is more a crime of violence than of sex), but I still think it'd be a good thing if sex had less of a stigma. And this comes from someone who doesn't even get any on that regular a basis.
Alternately, since the two thoughts are closely related(the second needing the first for context to make any worthwhile statement), the second clause could be phrased as a dependent clause, thus:
"The linked story says 6 megabytes of memory, but we don't believe 'em."
Humans cannot subsist on an all-natural diet of only plants. One of the vitamins(K, I think, or B12; don't have a textbook handy) is not found in plant matter. Its absence over time leads to pernicious anemia.
Bread is usually fortified with this vitamin, which is why modern-day vegetarians can get by. This leads me to believe it may be B12, since K is a fat-soluble vitamin, overdose of which is much more likely to be nasty than with the water-soluble B complex. Excess of those can strain the kidneys, but it'd have to be rather extreme.
I am not a biochemist, but I did study it in university.
"However, if the trust is misplaced (as this article suggests) then all this notification is kind of pointless."
Which is the crux of the whole issue.
Even a properly-registered, fully-valid SSL certificate only proves(to a reasonable extent) that the entity is what it claims to be. It's still up to the user to determine that said entity is trustworthy. It's that way in e-mail with PGP/GPG keys, SSL-encrypted web pages are no different.
Browsers should probably be set up to pop up a warning if plaintext is used for SSL, since it violates the very security SSL is supposed to ensure. Also, checking around for a company's reputation is a good idea. Is there a central site that keeps track of reputable dealers versus known scams?
All that said, the only reason internet transactions are any more problematic than those in person is that you don't know exactly where the person on the other end is - which is also a problem for phone payments. Certainly, identifying an encrypted credit card order, much less decrypting it, is not a task for the faint of heart; with so much network traffic, it's next to impossible to pull stuff like that unless you're specifically monitoring on one end or the other, right? Even if you do spot encrypted traffic, it might be a credit card transaction, or it might be account management of some kind, or it might just be someone connecting to a bulletin board that's set up to use SSL.
(As an aside, I suddenly have a renewed urge to get SSL working properly on my FreeBSD box, even though I don't handle anything remotely related to financial data or business secrets. Perhaps it's time to hit O'Reilly again.)
Slashdot Mirror
Thus turning yourself into the "bad guy" in the eyes of everyone who uses that ISP, by far the majority of whom were not in any way involved in the attack, while not seriously curbing the operations of this ISP in any way unless your site is a major Internet concern.
He also seemed to be putting some responsibility on WildTangent to work toward fixing those problems, though.
Consider me the devil's advocate here, I guess. I don't know the full story, but I'm seeing the possibility that this guy's not all bad - his methods could use some work(opt-in rather than opt-out as I've already mentioned, say), but there is the possibility of a good motive here.
Granted, there's also the possibility that the quoted text file in the ancestor post is a complete lie, but I definitely have no way of checking that.
Exactly! I'm all in favour of using mature, even adult concepts in a video game, but the rating should not be the focus. If a company knows that such-and-such game is targeting mature players, they should really just make it the best game they can, THEN rate it, or work under the limits of e.g. and M rating and then rate it down to T or E if it winds up not really needing the M.
Those who set out "to make an M rated game" are really missing the point, and probably won't fare too well. But those who simply aren't afraid of their game being M rated have that much more freedom in what they put in it, since they have other ways(not necessarily better ways) to make it a good game.
Looking back, I consider a couple of factors as being important in whether or not I've liked games. I've listed them as "possible problems" here, but they can be turned on their head for "possible advantages". Thus:
Nowhere on this list does the rating of the game enter into it. Things that contribute to the rating generally can be classed under something else - excess gore c
What if, instead, only Company A handled payments, and the Companies B got told "Pass" or "Fail - reason" and collected from Company A on their own?
Isn't that the way remote logins work? The actual password doesn't get sent over to your terminal to test - you SSH in, give your login/password, and either you get logged in, or you're told the login/password combination is incorrect(which doesn't even tell you whether or not it's a valid login, much less anything about the password).
I use Opera's Wand tool. It can be a bit irritating at times, but for a few sites where I have multiple logins, or those sites for which I have one login and it tends to boot me out a fair bit, it's nice. Sure beats cookies.
Now, you can bet I'd go in and scrub my passwords if anyone else used my computer, and I don't use it for, say, banking sites(where the consequences of being cracked would be just too great), but for run-of-the-mill stuff, it's handy.
And it isn't made or broken by MS keeping servers online.
I think part of the issue is that P2P programs are at least partly marketed to people who want to find MP3s instead of getting the music themselves(or software, etc., but my introduction to P2P was in music-only Napster days). If they are advertising their services as aids in breaking the law(international law, no less), that's a problem.
I have no direct experience with BitTorrent(I know, geek--), but from what I've heard, more of the material to be found there is legitimate in such redistribution - for Linux ISOs, a number of the distros are probably quite thankful that some of the onus is taken off of their own servers - in addition to the fact that if the download is coming from several sources, it often gets around bottlenecks. I know modern P2P apps do that too, but it's not presented so strongly as a focus.
Now, people could certainly use Kazaa or similar programs to distribute their legitimate files, but this is not what it's known for, and all the disclaimers in the world won't change that.
It greatly depends on how you market it. Example: By touting a brute-force password cracker as a security tool - to ensure that the passwords on your system aren't too easily cracked - you are highlighting a positive aspect[1]; but if you describe it as a cracking tool, i.e. something with which to gain entry into a system without knowing the proper credentials, you are deliberately assisting in a crime[2]. See my sig, but that might be known as conspiracy to commit a crime depending on how it's looked at. It's certainly aiding and abetting any hypothetical criminal that wants to break into someone else's system.
[1]: I have such a utility on my FreeBSD box to test local passwords. I believe it's in the ports collection as security/crack but I don't have access to the box at this second to check.
[2]: It also would involve some additional steps to circumvent security measures that try to prevent a brute-force approach; the utility I use, IIRC, relies on access to the passwd file and not the usual login procedures, which impose a timeout on a failed password attempt. Unless you are using this ONLY to test robustness of a system you administer and/or own, there's no legitimate reason to attempt to bypass this routine.
And all of this is to be done, remember, by an automated system for identifying connections within pre-existing content. It should be able to tell who's right and who's full of it, dammit!
How is Google breaking any law by providing links to sites which reference the search terms? The information is already public, Google is merely collating it.
The analogy doesn't hold because you're severely altering the basic premise, not because the logic is flawed. It's a case of "If you use our software and hurt yourself with it, don't blame us" for Microsoft, and "If you use our service and are hurt by what other people say, don't blame us" for Google. Misuse is implied to some degree or other in each case; it IS possible to use Windows safely, and many, many people use Google each day without having a fit.
Gay XOR female.
"Risk analysis" doesn't need to mean "flailing away at the absolute greatest risk factor to no gain". As mentioned in the grandparent post, there's not much that CPU cycles can do to reduce the incidence of car accidents - but they CAN give concrete results to studies of protein folding, and that is likely to result in, if not cures, viable treatments for a variety of genetic disorders. It's a far more efficient way to deal with a problem than abstaining from everything that makes life something approaching fun or worthwhile: solid gains for, really, negligible cost.
Either way, my mistake. I was thinking of magnesium, but now I remember that thermite, indeed, doesn't take too much to ignite. And it's even more violent when it does(though there's definitely a reason magnesium is used in spelunkers' lights; maybe not so much heat, but it sure is bright).
Oh, and it wouldn't take much to oxidise iron filings. Not so easy is aluminum, whose surface oxidises into a tough aluminum oxide layermore or less instantly on exposure to air, but nevertheless, fine filings would oxidise in fairly short order - especially if they were "cooked" a little in a humid environment.
Given the readiness with which aluminum oxidises, it does make sense for the iron oxide to be reduced - especially since thermite was used to weld iron rails together.
I've seen a tiny fraction of the case-modding stuff out there. Given that a great deal of it seems to center around windows or all-out clear cases, and fancy/EL/UV-fluorescent/just-plain-lit-up cables to see inside them, I think they qualify as scantily-clad, easily. And the computer won't complain if you keep dressing it less and less, as long as you've got parts where it counts; and free software means it doesn't keep nagging you for any more money than you WANT to spend on it! Add porn into the mix, and...
Remind me again why girlfriends are so desirable?
Based on another thing mentioned in the summary(don't have universal net access, much less BitTorrent, from work to see the darn thing yet), I now have this temptation to look up the formula for thermite whenever I finally manage to upgrade from my current unstable POS. Take the old shell somewhere sheltered and put it on a nice, durable surface, don welding glasses, light up a blowtorch, and let 'er rip.
Saw the thermite reaction only once in Chemistry, admittedly, but it still seems like a fun way to destroy my hated crashmaster box. Chem rather than CompSci, but isn't that still a nerdy way to do things?
Of course, if thermite is how they actually achieve the 3000 degree iron that's mentioned, so much the better.
Indeed. Food is a necessity of life. Speeding is not. Similarly, Microsoft can still manage to stay in business with fairer business practises. A fine is punitive, not assessed for something that is necessary, so it should thus be steep enough to at least make the perpetrator think.
Of course, some offences have steeper penalties than others, but it's for the EU to determine what sort of offence Microsoft has committed. If they think it warrants a traffic-ticket penalty, so mote it be. People in the EU can no doubt communicate with their representatives if they feel that's not an appropriate penalty.
Now, if Microsoft is found to be using downright illegal methods to keep a stranglehold on their corner of local economy(using one wrong to achieve another), things might need another look - because then, they are threatening people's livelihood; that of the people running their competition. If those companies are forced under by shady practises, those people suddenly find the necessities of life to be a little harder to get.
Even ignoring the fact that neither Alex nor St. John is an uncommon name(there could be more specific context that I'm not aware of, and my limited net access at work makes it hard to even try checking), this could qualify as "advice from one who's intimately aware of the problem". Sure, it's not as good as a bug-free product in the first place, but do you think the average consumer wants to wait for something to be made bug-free? Of course not - they want the next big thing and they want it yesterday.
Just as certain potentially-dangerous code in the OS has to be excepted from virus scanners(deltree anyone?), there are legitimate uses for things that might otherwise be considered spyware. Note, too, that the quoted text states it's not the only notice of these activities, but is for people who didn't read through the privacy agreement. In addition, there's a way to turn it off.
Maybe there's a better way to do things(there usually is, no matter what's being discussed), but don't slam them any harder than they deserve. Besides, given the apathy of the average user(who might be willing to ignore a minor glitch if it doesn't severely detract from their game-playing, even assuming it's one they notice at all), having something that automatically identifies problems with its dependencies isn't THAT bad an idea - though perhaps it should be opt-in instead of opt-out.
Gah. That's supposed to be "more relevance," not "more details".
Contrariwise, if someone takes your CDs without your permission, they haven't gained the rights to them because YOU still have them.
The sibling post by someone actually from NZ probably has more details, but the short version is, it's not a transfer of legal rights if the property itself was illegally transferred.
You still own it, in either case(though I suppose if you voluntarily destroyed it, that would be a sign that you no longer wish to do so). Stealing something doesn't mean the thief owns it, and "in case the original is damaged/destroyed" is the whole point of backing up a CD/tape/whatever, isn't it?
What I learned in Biology is that it's not just whether the species CAN interbreed - it's whether, in their respective usual habitats, they WILL. Dogs and wolves can, and to a sufficiently great degree that it poses a threat to wolves, but dogs in their "natural habitat" - close to human dwellings - aren't as likely to because wolves aren't as likely to be nearby.
It's fuzzy, but taxonomy is like that. I've still seen relatively recent pages - and I wish I remember where - that included skunks among Mustelidae, though the generally accepted mode of thought is that they're seperate, as Mephitidae.
I like that definition of dual-planet, though astronomers just might have a fit over calling Charon a planet. Still, the barycenter of that system is definitely in space rather than within one body or another.
Pluto and Charon are also far closer together - both in absolute terms and scaled by size - than Earth and Luna. But it's the mutual center of rotation that I think is more important.
The odds of having a center of gravity within a planet's atmosphere are, on solid worlds, pretty darn slim. But when gas giants are included, that elevates the problem to new levels of complexity. How do you define "within the atmosphere"? A planet's atmosphere doesn't have a very firm boundary; it just gets increasingly vacuous.
If an astronomer out there knows how the boundary of an atmosphere is designed, I think that would be the better outer limit for dual-planet vs planet-moon: if the barycenter is not within the average diameter of either body, atmospheres included, it's a multiple-planet system.
Having a naturally-occurring, balanced system with more than two such bodies would seem highly unlikely, but, hell, life is highly unlikely. Given enough trials, though, one will eventually succeed. Anyway, the definition of "planet" might need to be amended so as to include the possibility of orbiting with another body such that the barycenter is in space, and declaring that those two, if they otherwise meet the definitions, are still planets. (If the smaller one couldn't pull itself into a spheroid, it's not a planet, so the whole argument here is moot.)
The fact that people have been doing it for tens of thousands of years isn't even the core of things. Traditions, after all, aren't always as valid as they were even years, much less millenia ago.
In this case, though, some form of sex - even if it's just the sperm donor beating off - is still required for the next generation to even be around. Since the people who most publicly proclaim the evils of sex seem to be the most strongly against cloning research, they seem to have backed themselves into a corner...
As for the ones that claim the time-honoured tradition of marriage makes it okay, I invite them to take a long, hard look at what marriage was like not all that long ago - say, back before women's suffrage. Or go back farther, to biblical times, when women were essentially property.
Personally, I don't see why adult, consenting sex in any form is demonised, but that's how the rules presently stand, and breaking them isn't the best way to get them changed.
The grandparent poster isn't too far off, though, by stating that governments etc. seem to deal with sex by pretending it doesn't happen - or at least, something that isn't done for recreation. After all, if people entertained themselves by having sex instead of being good little consumers, businesses and the government representatives they cozy up to would stand to lose income, and we can't have that, can we?
Now, I have absolutely no data to support this hypothesis, but I think that if sex was viewed less as something to be ashamed of, it might not have so much of an undisputably negative element(child molestation etc.). Not sure what if any effect this would have on more violent forms of rape(I agree with the statement that rape is more a crime of violence than of sex), but I still think it'd be a good thing if sex had less of a stigma. And this comes from someone who doesn't even get any on that regular a basis.
Alternately, since the two thoughts are closely related(the second needing the first for context to make any worthwhile statement), the second clause could be phrased as a dependent clause, thus:
"The linked story says 6 megabytes of memory, but we don't believe 'em."
Not my comment, but I was aware of the option. Just in case you haven't seen it above since posting: Opera does this.
Humans cannot subsist on an all-natural diet of only plants. One of the vitamins(K, I think, or B12; don't have a textbook handy) is not found in plant matter. Its absence over time leads to pernicious anemia.
Bread is usually fortified with this vitamin, which is why modern-day vegetarians can get by. This leads me to believe it may be B12, since K is a fat-soluble vitamin, overdose of which is much more likely to be nasty than with the water-soluble B complex. Excess of those can strain the kidneys, but it'd have to be rather extreme.
I am not a biochemist, but I did study it in university.
"However, if the trust is misplaced (as this article suggests) then all this notification is kind of pointless."
Which is the crux of the whole issue.
Even a properly-registered, fully-valid SSL certificate only proves(to a reasonable extent) that the entity is what it claims to be. It's still up to the user to determine that said entity is trustworthy. It's that way in e-mail with PGP/GPG keys, SSL-encrypted web pages are no different.
Browsers should probably be set up to pop up a warning if plaintext is used for SSL, since it violates the very security SSL is supposed to ensure. Also, checking around for a company's reputation is a good idea. Is there a central site that keeps track of reputable dealers versus known scams?
All that said, the only reason internet transactions are any more problematic than those in person is that you don't know exactly where the person on the other end is - which is also a problem for phone payments. Certainly, identifying an encrypted credit card order, much less decrypting it, is not a task for the faint of heart; with so much network traffic, it's next to impossible to pull stuff like that unless you're specifically monitoring on one end or the other, right? Even if you do spot encrypted traffic, it might be a credit card transaction, or it might be account management of some kind, or it might just be someone connecting to a bulletin board that's set up to use SSL.
(As an aside, I suddenly have a renewed urge to get SSL working properly on my FreeBSD box, even though I don't handle anything remotely related to financial data or business secrets. Perhaps it's time to hit O'Reilly again.)