I rather think that the amendment does allow the surveillance of U.S. persons, as long as they are not the "target" of the surveillance, and as long as they are speaking to a person reasonably believed to be a non-U.S. person who is not in the U.S.. I was careful not to claim it allowed it for evidentiary purposes, although that claim may have indeed by too careful.
FISA may have contained no prohibition against targeting non-U.S. persons on U.S. soil (I admit to not having read the original legislation), but I think that you'd agree with me that such actions have a fair chance of not being allowed by the courts because of the fourth amendment (of course, I can't say anything about throwing the people in a military brig, but I am not sure if the evidence has to be collected legally in such proceedings anyway). Thus I make the argument that we can let the courts sort it out and that defining the powers of FISA is hardly of overreaching importance, compared to accountability.
You wrote quite a post there, but it seems that the only thing I may have really been wrong about is whether the old FISA explicitly required warrants for the surveilance of non-U.S. persons in the U.S.
I just did take a gander at the original text of the bill, and you can see quite clearly that in 1802the original bill allowed warrantless wiretapping only in the case of communications between two foreign powers or terrorists (and as you say, there is no mention of whether the individuals representing said powers are in the U.S.). I don't think there is a huge amount of outrage over that, since, again, as you have said, it has been the case for decades. The old FISA explicitly says, however, that surveillance may be conducted when "there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party;" I suppose the amendment does explicitly define this as a U.S. citizen or a foreign national with a valid visa, but the original seems to imply that a U.S. person is a person who is in the U.S., although the NSA claims that U.S. persons have been defined by federal law and executive order as citizens and permanent residents.
The amendments do change the oft-repeated exclusive means clause...instead of FISA being the exclusive means by which surveillance of U.S. persons is conducted, now it is the exclusive means by which domestic surveillance is conducted. I agree that this bodes well for "any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States" (i.e. those with temporary visas), although one could only hope that the courts would continue to rule that the constitution applies to all those within the U.S., whether resident or not. If, for example, the court were to decide that the constitution does not apply to U.S. citizens when not in the U.S., then it seems to me that under the new "domestic surveillance" phrasing, U.S. citizens abroad could be surveilled freely, just not using FISA procedure, especially if the gathering were not done inside the U.S..
I'm not a lawyer, so I may have missed some intricacy of the text, but it seems to me that, at best, this bill reiterates the protections of those visiting the U.S., protections which could have only have been denied in any case by a rather loose reading of the constitution by courts, while at worst, it allows the warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens and persons, as long as they are communicating with a foreign person located outside the U.S. who is the explicit target of the surveillance (a provision which itself is arguably unconstitutional). At this point it occurs to me that I have been throwing "evidentiary" around rather loosely...it really does not say that surveillance of U.S. persons who are not the target can or cannot be used for any purpose. Thus, I brought up Al-Haramain, making tha
Right, FISA as a whole...he considered it absolutely vital to grant Bush...expanded wiretapping powers...at the cost of a chance to discover the extent of his lawbreaking through civil discovery. Claiming that the FISA amendments are necessary to clarify the scope of the law is bullshit. Check out Al-Haramain v. Bush: the lawsuit with clear standing. If they manage to get around the stifling state secrets privilege, it seems likely that they will have Bush's actions declared illegal under pre-amended FISA. So basically, you're left with Obama buying Bush's argument that 72 hours is just way too burdensome a time limit to apply for a warrant in the FISA court, which does nothing but grant these warrants; he needs an easier process drawn out over weeks including appeals, with looser burdens for application. Obama thinks that giving Bush more of what he wants is so absolutely vital that we might as well de-facto pardon him while they're at it, for what should have been the biggest scandal since COINTELPRO.
Even without the immunity, I would have been troubled (read: appalled and outraged) by his vote. What kind of message does it send to make FISA even easier to comply with after Bush blatantly ignores it? You do know this this bill...actually legalizes warrantless wiretapping, I'm sure. As long as "the target" is an overseas foreigner (excuse me, as long as they reasonably believe this to be the case), they can listen to the overseas calls of American citizens without a warrant...using a broad and automated system. Take a gander at the pertinent section of the bill. You still need a FISA warrant to wiretap a U.S. citizen as the target for evidentiary purposes...well, you need one in a week anyway.
So, can you still sit there are justify this vote? Exactly what part of this bill is strengthening the rule of law and executive accountability? You know the lawsuit I linked earlier in the post...the plaintiff can still be wiretapped warrantlessly, only with the full protection of law this time! Not for evidentiary purposes, but if I recall a certain executive order correctly, all it takes to freeze someone's assets for supporting terrorism is for the AG to say "he's a bad bad man." A great day for Obama and America, to be sure.
A healthy society? I have to agree with my sibling poster, your post sounds like hippy bullshit to me. Pedophilia is a psychological condition. I even hesitate to say disorder, since by that definition, you could say that homosexuality was a psychological disorder--a deviation from the norm in sexual desire, which is not particularly useful for reproduction. Really, the only thing 'psychological disorder' means is that someone has an uncommon psyche, which in some cases makes functioning in our society more difficult, and in those cases people are often treated. In that sense, pedophilia is a psychological disorder, since it is a condition that makes it very hard for sufferers to be content in our society. Now, there is of course a big difference between pedophilia and more mundane differences of psychology, since people can be homosexual without violating anyone's rights, or agoraphobic, or autistic, or even ponyplay fetishists or furries without violating the rights of other people! To physically act on true pedophilia, however, almost certainly involves violating the rights of a prepubescent child who probably does not even have the capacity to consent. It is a condition that can make a criminal behavior seem very desirable, and is a serious problem.
I did a little cautious googling about child abuse statistics, without much success. I admit that I am a little reluctant to send words like 'child sex' or 'pedophile' in a query. I sometimes wonder if I should do all of my googling though proxies, since some day Andrew Cuomo might come knocking on my door, for all I know.
Nevertheless, in the absence of good data, I will posit that there are a lot more pedophiles out there than there are people actually sexually abusing children. Perhaps even many of the people sexually abusing (post-pubescent) children are not really pedophiles, to draw a distinction between general 'sexual abuse,' most often perpetrated by family members, and 'kidnapping and raping'. I think that there is reason to believe, that there are lots of pedophiles 'out there' who do not sexually abuse children, and lot of non-pedophiles who do commit sexual crimes. I really doubt that all of the ardent consumers of lolicon hentai pornography, for example, are raping children. That would be a tough conspiracy to hide. Nevertheless, despite the fact that lolicon hentai is legal (in the Japan and the U.S., for now), I don't think there is much of a commercial market for it, even in Japan. People draw it because they want to. It seems very likely that there are a lot of people out there who find children sexually attractive, but don't act on their desires with real children, no doubt either because they think that it is ethically or morally wrong to have sex with unconsenting children, or because they are deterred by the threat of legal punishment and societal ostracism. It is no secret that all sorts of sexual desires of other kinds can be and are repressed.
This brings me to a "startling" line of reasoning. I think that there are only two possible arguments for the criminalization of the possession of child pornography. The first has been made in this thread, and it is that criminalizing child pornography reduces the demand for it. The second is that such pornography will encourage pedophiles to escalate to violating real children.
I'm afraid that I think that the demand argument has been, at best, extended to cover situations to which it has little application. There is no way in hell that pedophiles who are sexually abusing children in the United States are doing so out of a profit motive. Actual child rape carries, without a doubt, the worst punishment of any crime. Assuming that a real child rapist avoids a life sentence, they are likely to die in prison at the hands of other prisoners, and if not, upon their release, they can kiss goodbye things like "jobs," "friends," and say hello to the scarlet letter of our day: sex offender registries. If s
It's really lucky then that constitutional rights don't derive from citizenship! Being in the country is enough. On domestic flights, there is no excuse.
I managed to escape the airport and get to my hotel in the game, but I wouldn't put much money on my remembering many of the specific words that I 'learned' in the airport in an hour. Without some sort of review mechanism, I don't see this being very effective. Of course, perhaps if I play this eight hours a day I would just soak it in by immersion, but I think that it is more likely that I would kill myself from the boredom first. Not that learning languages is that horrible, but this is more painful than just reading a book (well, a book and a 'set of tapes'). As it is, it seems the point of the game is to not starve to death. A noble goal, to be sure...
I think that the game would greatly benefit from a 'journal' function or something that lets me revisit past vocabulary and grammar lessons (and pinyin reference!) if I feel so inclined...then it really would be like an interactive language program, but with avatars that starve to death. I suppose that the big benefit would be getting to try out your stuff with other players...I imagine that at this point in the beta, everyone is too embarrassed by their hideous accents and word pacing to try out their Mandarin on the other players (that is my excuse).
Ah, one last observation. When you 'observe' the conversations, it seems to me that sometimes the two people involved have different accents, and pronounce certain words slightly differently. A heads-up as to what accent everyone is demonstrating would be nice, so I don't end up speaking a mixture of Beijing-accent, Shanghai-accent, and ignorant farmboy accent (for all I know).
Overall, a pretty good effort for a beta, I suppose. Actually, I used to play FFXI in the middle of the night to try out my Japanese--not a very good way to learn kanji, I'll admit, but at least there was more to do in the game than starve to death. Perhaps some sort of happy medium between these extremes is possible?
Rather, I think it is the writers of this exam who are missing something. I looked those over, and immediately came to the conclusion that the third question is the hardest of the three. First question? Easy, quadratic equation, or some factoring, no trouble. Second question, likewise factoring. Third question, though...solve for a and b, two independent variables given in a single equation with three independent variables, and then use this result to somehow determine the minimum of an expression of x. I was a bit daunted...I glanced at the expression, and immediately realized (by means of a simple derivative) that the minimum would be found at x = -4, but still, the first part hounded me. Clearly, a and b could only be solved for in terms of the other two variables, but that wouldn't help at all in determining the answer to the second part.
I belatedly realized that they apparently wanted me to factor the quadratic equation into a squared expression with x added to an integer (a), and an additive remainder (b), the canonical form for a parabola, and then use my knowledge of the general shape of parabolas to realize that the lowest point of the parabola was at (-4, 5). What an exhausting and treacherously worded question! What about the other infinity of solutions (x, a, b) that satisfy the equation? Eh? EH??? In conclusion, I think they should have given everybody that answered (4, 5) to the first part of the question partial credit in proportion to the fraction of the solution space that they mapped, and taken the difference out of the test writers' salaries.
"Lala is an online music service where you can listen, upload, trade, and buy music. Unforuntely[sic] it requires javascript, similar to most major websites on the internet."
I agree that the ban on online gambling (or rather, financial transactions with online gambling sites) is a pretty bad idea, but I don't think that you can claim that it is unconstitutional. The interstate commerce clause seems sufficient for its constitutionality (and for offshore gambling sites, it is foreign trade, which is even more clear-cut).
Of course, the interstate commerce clause has become a monster far beyond all imagination of the framers, but at least this is a more valid application than shutting down and jailing, say, Californian growers of medicinal marijuana who have no plans for export.
In some committee meeting where they were discussing the Global Online Freedom Act (not the actual Yahoo hearings), one of the congressmen mentioned those very conditions enumerated in the summary as what he thought would constitute an acceptable settlement. Perhaps Yahoo hopes that by giving in, they won't pass the Act?
I saw that (after posting); clearly the representation rules are more complex. It might still be a sine qua non for the bug, but there is admittedly no real evidence for that.
It seems that every broken number so far is of the form (10.2*2^n) * (6425*2^-n), or of the form (154.2*2^n) * (425*2^-n).
The only further interesting observation I have about that is that 6425=5^2*257 and 65535=3*5*17*257, which suggestively shares the factor 257. 19275=5^2*3*257, however, does not produce the effect (perhaps because 3.4*5=17?). We can't stray too far from this form while still having non-repeating operands. The other number is 425=5^2*17, which follows the same pattern, except with 17 instead of 257.
I also checked 2^32-1=4294967295=3*5*17*257*65527 with 10.2, etc., but that worked.
These rules also apply between cells (e.g. let A2=A1*25, if A1=771/5*17, A2 will be 100000, if A1=2621.4, A2 will be 65535).
It seems that as long as in the course of left-to-right evaluation disaster will strike only if 10.2*2^n (51/5*2^n) or 154.2*2^n (257/5*2^n) is an intermediate term, for integer values of n. I suppose we can also conclude that muti-cell expressions are evaluated as a single expression, instead of storing intermediate results. The only hypothesis I have is that there is some weird issue in the factorization-to-rational code for arbitrary precision arithmetic, where bad canceling causes some boundary condition. That doesn't do much to explain the strange invariance up to powers of 2, and the location of the boundary at 2^16-1, however. I suppose in a prime factorization, 2^n will be at the end of the list, and thus might not affect the deadly intermediate result in this case. This makes me wonder what happens if I hook the file up with the ODBC driver, but I don't care that much;p.
As someone else noted, the saved document contains this:
It sounds like they are doing small-number math in one representation (perhaps they use short fixed-width decimal representations) and then switching to another method (arbitrary length decimal numbers?) at the binary-inspired boundary 2^16...but somehow they got it mixed up with a different decimal boundary in the edge case.
Clearly the error is weirdly subtle, if 5.1*12850 gives the bugged behavior, but 8.5*7710 works just fine. In fact, I verified that all permutations of a bugged combination =A*B of the form =A/2*B*2 are bugged. Further...all of the buggy decimal values have no perfect floating point binary representation. 77.1 has an infinite binary expansion using IEE 754, while 8.5 has an exact representation. It seems likely that they are only using their BCD format (or whatever) when binary floating (or fixed) point just won't cut it, but then their internal->decimal conversion code chokes on 2^16 for some reason, while the binary (whether it is floating or fixed point) conversion works just fine (possibly because it doesn't have a boundary at 2^16--maybe it has its own threshold bugs;p).
at the amount of venom being poured out in this thread against the girl. I agree that it would be way too much not to expect the TSA to pounce on you if you walk around with anything looking vaguely like bombs do in movies...but I think the mature response would have been to release her with a warning about scaring timid federal employees after they (easily) verified that in fact the device was merely a breadboard, some LEDs and a battery stuck to a sweatshirt. Last time I checked, being naive wasn't a real crime.
Instead, undoubtedly embarrassed by the then-growing trend of Bostonian overreactions to LED devices, they said she was lucky they didn't shoot her (with a submachine gun. In a crowded airport. Since when are people carrying around MP5s in American airports anyway?!?), and then they charged her with "possessing a hoax device." Basically, with looking too suspicious. How dastardly! Well, good luck proving criminal intent on that one.
Then GPUs will have to become very CPU-like (and indeed, they have already added looping...) to handle the heavy conditional branching inherent in most modern ray-tracing acceleration structures. The ATI-AMD merger suggests to me that we will see a growing convergence between CPU and GPU.
Beyond the graphical advantages and disadvantages of raytraced gaming, it would obviate the need for advanced DirectX/OpenGL support (and GPUs--although you probably won't save any money since you'll need a quad-processor, many-core rig instead).
Without DirectX, there would be less tying games to Windows (or Vista). I don't think that DirectSound has nearly the same attraction, anyway. We'd probably seem more multiplatform releases.
Although it is a good guess, sadly your assumption that virus is in the fourth declension is also totally wrong. Perversely enough, it is neuter in the second even with the '-us' suffix, so the plural is actually 'vira.'
As for 'virii,' well, my mind drew a blank, but William Whittaker's Words claims that virii is the genetive singular of 'virium,' (verdancy), the noun form of 'vireo.' As for whether that form was ever actually used, though...the perseus project server appears to be melting down, or I would check.
Indeed, studies have concluded that antibiotics are over-prescribed and used almost as a placebo in some cases, but I don't think you can really blame allergic reactions on such inappropriate prescriptions. If you sister had been suffering from a bacterial infection, you think that she shouldn't have tried antibiotics then? Besides, I can't take medical advice from people who can't spell "viruses."
It seems possible that the last "40 million Americans" with analog televisions will never upgrade (at least as long as their current televisions continue to function) unless they are forced to by the sudden disappearance of analog channels. Waiting indefinitely for this to happen is a waste of bandwidth.
In the case of cable, the extension is even more dubious, since you can't claim as much economic hardship from upgrading TVs (everyone is paying $50+/mo. already, you could probably find a small TV for not much more than that).
Perhaps because many of the best films of our time were released when the only choices were 'PG' and 'G'? The canonical example, I think, would be The Graduate, which was rated 'PG' when released, and very recently was re-released as a 40th anniversary edition, earning an 'R' this time around.
Fine submissions like these cause me to wonder if perhaps the recent upswing in anti-kdawson sentiment isn't entirely unjustified...
The headline and summary was so priceless that I just had to read TFA. I assumed that TFS had as usual grossly mischaracterized TFA. This was, however, not the case (yay L.A. Times!). The thing that jumped out at me was that this study was conducted on a bunch of college students (i.e. undergrads looking for extra credit in intro psych classes) at UCLA and NYU. If you consider the percentage of liberal students at UCLA, I wonder if there might not be just a tad of selection bias inherent here...not to mention the libertarian objection that the political spectrum is poorly characterized in a linear fashion.
Although I couldn't find the original paper, this other article (no registration with google referrer) was more informative, quoting someone who actually was connected with the study, and another psych professor who points out that this study (of 43 students) might not be the pinnacle of statistical rigor.
On the other hand, I guess we can feel fully justified in drawing conclusions about conservatives students NYU and UCLA;). I know that my own alma mater can count Ann Coulter, for one, amongst the 15 or so of its alumni who were strongly republican as undergrads...Ironically, this study will probably promote its own conclusion, though, when Prof. Amodio becomes the core of a republican talking point on the apparent liberal bias of America's university faculties.
I would speculate that this thread has so few posts not because BSD is dying, but because any BSD user dedicated enough to browse slashdot and find this "article" hidden in the BSD section has probably already figured out how to install software (even linux binaries, if you're in to that sort of thing;p).
Whereas adherents of certain [cough] linux distribtions have started flame threads longer than this one over the comparative merits of their various package systems, the BSD users have little to say on this topic, because the current system works just fine (not to mention the treatment of this topic in the FreeBSD Handbook is more informative than the article).
This may come as a surprise to you, but many people would find it quite inconvenient to burn their music collection to cds, rip the cds, and then reencode said music. In fact, I would go so far as to say that many people would be unable to do this.
Encoding music may not be as hard as encoding video, but most people who buy music from the iTMS do not read slashdot, do not know what lame, or even VBR is, and couldn't pull off a two-pass encode if their life depended on it. And even if they could, it would take a while and be inconvenient as hell.
So, even if the DRM can be circumvented in this manner, it is inconvenient enough that you might as well not buy from iTMS in the first place. Without using PlayFair to crack the DRM, it makes no sense to play your AACs on anything but an iPod. (The one exception is, of course, just burning the AACs to cds and leaving them there, to play in normal cd players.)
I would agree with this strategy if it actually worked, but if we look at Microsoft's example, it doesn't. Windows worms generally come out after the patch to fix the vulnerability that they exploit is released. Now, while Microsoft's "if we didn't release pathes, there would be no worms" logic is rather specious, that doesn't mean that most worms aren't indeed developed by reverse engineering the patches.
Consequently, if Apple does not release the details of an exploit, I would argue that this behavior only makes it marginally harder for a virus writer to produce a virus, since the specifics have to be extrapolated from the patch anyway. For users, however, the inconvenience is much greater, because they do not grasp the import of the security flaws, and so do not bother to patch their systems immediately.
Until now, this strategy has worked for Apple, simply because no one has bothered to write a successful OS-X worm. If that were ever to happen, I imagine a significant number of users would be caught with their pants down.
I actually agree, this seems like a great move by MS, and a way to make.NET the "Total Windows Solution" that it was originally marketed as. Using XAML, you could harness "the power of.NET" without breaking out your copy of VS.NET and writing and comiling a whole application.
Hell, I guess that was the gist of the response to the last question in the interview--it's just that Miguel de Icaza (reasonably) found the implications of this to be scary.
Indeed, I guess that this vision could come to pass, and the implications would indeed be scary, but that would really be the fault of content providers; One would expect Microsoft to provide a means to access the proprietary aspects of Longhorn with this: that is what makes it so wonderful (from a "Total Windows Solution" perspective). If people start using this to provide web content which can only be run on Windows machines, well, that is hardly Microsoft's fault, even if it was their goal. That would be akin to everyone posting their data in Word documents instead of an open format like pdf. This is an annoying practice from an interoperability perspective, but that doesn't mean that MS Word shouldn't have been developed.
Slashdot Mirror
Say something meaningful--the magnets were about 2 degrees Kelvin.
I rather think that the amendment does allow the surveillance of U.S. persons, as long as they are not the "target" of the surveillance, and as long as they are speaking to a person reasonably believed to be a non-U.S. person who is not in the U.S.. I was careful not to claim it allowed it for evidentiary purposes, although that claim may have indeed by too careful.
FISA may have contained no prohibition against targeting non-U.S. persons on U.S. soil (I admit to not having read the original legislation), but I think that you'd agree with me that such actions have a fair chance of not being allowed by the courts because of the fourth amendment (of course, I can't say anything about throwing the people in a military brig, but I am not sure if the evidence has to be collected legally in such proceedings anyway). Thus I make the argument that we can let the courts sort it out and that defining the powers of FISA is hardly of overreaching importance, compared to accountability.
You wrote quite a post there, but it seems that the only thing I may have really been wrong about is whether the old FISA explicitly required warrants for the surveilance of non-U.S. persons in the U.S.
I just did take a gander at the original text of the bill, and you can see quite clearly that in 1802the original bill allowed warrantless wiretapping only in the case of communications between two foreign powers or terrorists (and as you say, there is no mention of whether the individuals representing said powers are in the U.S.). I don't think there is a huge amount of outrage over that, since, again, as you have said, it has been the case for decades. The old FISA explicitly says, however, that surveillance may be conducted when "there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party;" I suppose the amendment does explicitly define this as a U.S. citizen or a foreign national with a valid visa, but the original seems to imply that a U.S. person is a person who is in the U.S., although the NSA claims that U.S. persons have been defined by federal law and executive order as citizens and permanent residents.
The amendments do change the oft-repeated exclusive means clause...instead of FISA being the exclusive means by which surveillance of U.S. persons is conducted, now it is the exclusive means by which domestic surveillance is conducted. I agree that this bodes well for "any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States" (i.e. those with temporary visas), although one could only hope that the courts would continue to rule that the constitution applies to all those within the U.S., whether resident or not. If, for example, the court were to decide that the constitution does not apply to U.S. citizens when not in the U.S., then it seems to me that under the new "domestic surveillance" phrasing, U.S. citizens abroad could be surveilled freely, just not using FISA procedure, especially if the gathering were not done inside the U.S..
I'm not a lawyer, so I may have missed some intricacy of the text, but it seems to me that, at best, this bill reiterates the protections of those visiting the U.S., protections which could have only have been denied in any case by a rather loose reading of the constitution by courts, while at worst, it allows the warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens and persons, as long as they are communicating with a foreign person located outside the U.S. who is the explicit target of the surveillance (a provision which itself is arguably unconstitutional). At this point it occurs to me that I have been throwing "evidentiary" around rather loosely...it really does not say that surveillance of U.S. persons who are not the target can or cannot be used for any purpose. Thus, I brought up Al-Haramain, making tha
Right, FISA as a whole...he considered it absolutely vital to grant Bush...expanded wiretapping powers...at the cost of a chance to discover the extent of his lawbreaking through civil discovery. Claiming that the FISA amendments are necessary to clarify the scope of the law is bullshit. Check out Al-Haramain v. Bush: the lawsuit with clear standing. If they manage to get around the stifling state secrets privilege, it seems likely that they will have Bush's actions declared illegal under pre-amended FISA. So basically, you're left with Obama buying Bush's argument that 72 hours is just way too burdensome a time limit to apply for a warrant in the FISA court, which does nothing but grant these warrants; he needs an easier process drawn out over weeks including appeals, with looser burdens for application. Obama thinks that giving Bush more of what he wants is so absolutely vital that we might as well de-facto pardon him while they're at it, for what should have been the biggest scandal since COINTELPRO.
Even without the immunity, I would have been troubled (read: appalled and outraged) by his vote. What kind of message does it send to make FISA even easier to comply with after Bush blatantly ignores it? You do know this this bill...actually legalizes warrantless wiretapping, I'm sure. As long as "the target" is an overseas foreigner (excuse me, as long as they reasonably believe this to be the case), they can listen to the overseas calls of American citizens without a warrant...using a broad and automated system. Take a gander at the pertinent section of the bill. You still need a FISA warrant to wiretap a U.S. citizen as the target for evidentiary purposes...well, you need one in a week anyway.
So, can you still sit there are justify this vote? Exactly what part of this bill is strengthening the rule of law and executive accountability? You know the lawsuit I linked earlier in the post...the plaintiff can still be wiretapped warrantlessly, only with the full protection of law this time! Not for evidentiary purposes, but if I recall a certain executive order correctly, all it takes to freeze someone's assets for supporting terrorism is for the AG to say "he's a bad bad man." A great day for Obama and America, to be sure.
A healthy society? I have to agree with my sibling poster, your post sounds like hippy bullshit to me. Pedophilia is a psychological condition. I even hesitate to say disorder, since by that definition, you could say that homosexuality was a psychological disorder--a deviation from the norm in sexual desire, which is not particularly useful for reproduction. Really, the only thing 'psychological disorder' means is that someone has an uncommon psyche, which in some cases makes functioning in our society more difficult, and in those cases people are often treated. In that sense, pedophilia is a psychological disorder, since it is a condition that makes it very hard for sufferers to be content in our society. Now, there is of course a big difference between pedophilia and more mundane differences of psychology, since people can be homosexual without violating anyone's rights, or agoraphobic, or autistic, or even ponyplay fetishists or furries without violating the rights of other people! To physically act on true pedophilia, however, almost certainly involves violating the rights of a prepubescent child who probably does not even have the capacity to consent. It is a condition that can make a criminal behavior seem very desirable, and is a serious problem.
I did a little cautious googling about child abuse statistics, without much success. I admit that I am a little reluctant to send words like 'child sex' or 'pedophile' in a query. I sometimes wonder if I should do all of my googling though proxies, since some day Andrew Cuomo might come knocking on my door, for all I know.
Nevertheless, in the absence of good data, I will posit that there are a lot more pedophiles out there than there are people actually sexually abusing children. Perhaps even many of the people sexually abusing (post-pubescent) children are not really pedophiles, to draw a distinction between general 'sexual abuse,' most often perpetrated by family members, and 'kidnapping and raping'. I think that there is reason to believe, that there are lots of pedophiles 'out there' who do not sexually abuse children, and lot of non-pedophiles who do commit sexual crimes. I really doubt that all of the ardent consumers of lolicon hentai pornography, for example, are raping children. That would be a tough conspiracy to hide. Nevertheless, despite the fact that lolicon hentai is legal (in the Japan and the U.S., for now), I don't think there is much of a commercial market for it, even in Japan. People draw it because they want to. It seems very likely that there are a lot of people out there who find children sexually attractive, but don't act on their desires with real children, no doubt either because they think that it is ethically or morally wrong to have sex with unconsenting children, or because they are deterred by the threat of legal punishment and societal ostracism. It is no secret that all sorts of sexual desires of other kinds can be and are repressed.
This brings me to a "startling" line of reasoning. I think that there are only two possible arguments for the criminalization of the possession of child pornography. The first has been made in this thread, and it is that criminalizing child pornography reduces the demand for it. The second is that such pornography will encourage pedophiles to escalate to violating real children.
I'm afraid that I think that the demand argument has been, at best, extended to cover situations to which it has little application. There is no way in hell that pedophiles who are sexually abusing children in the United States are doing so out of a profit motive. Actual child rape carries, without a doubt, the worst punishment of any crime. Assuming that a real child rapist avoids a life sentence, they are likely to die in prison at the hands of other prisoners, and if not, upon their release, they can kiss goodbye things like "jobs," "friends," and say hello to the scarlet letter of our day: sex offender registries. If s
It's really lucky then that constitutional rights don't derive from citizenship! Being in the country is enough. On domestic flights, there is no excuse.
I managed to escape the airport and get to my hotel in the game, but I wouldn't put much money on my remembering many of the specific words that I 'learned' in the airport in an hour. Without some sort of review mechanism, I don't see this being very effective. Of course, perhaps if I play this eight hours a day I would just soak it in by immersion, but I think that it is more likely that I would kill myself from the boredom first. Not that learning languages is that horrible, but this is more painful than just reading a book (well, a book and a 'set of tapes'). As it is, it seems the point of the game is to not starve to death. A noble goal, to be sure...
I think that the game would greatly benefit from a 'journal' function or something that lets me revisit past vocabulary and grammar lessons (and pinyin reference!) if I feel so inclined...then it really would be like an interactive language program, but with avatars that starve to death. I suppose that the big benefit would be getting to try out your stuff with other players...I imagine that at this point in the beta, everyone is too embarrassed by their hideous accents and word pacing to try out their Mandarin on the other players (that is my excuse).
Ah, one last observation. When you 'observe' the conversations, it seems to me that sometimes the two people involved have different accents, and pronounce certain words slightly differently. A heads-up as to what accent everyone is demonstrating would be nice, so I don't end up speaking a mixture of Beijing-accent, Shanghai-accent, and ignorant farmboy accent (for all I know).
Overall, a pretty good effort for a beta, I suppose. Actually, I used to play FFXI in the middle of the night to try out my Japanese--not a very good way to learn kanji, I'll admit, but at least there was more to do in the game than starve to death. Perhaps some sort of happy medium between these extremes is possible?
Rather, I think it is the writers of this exam who are missing something. I looked those over, and immediately came to the conclusion that the third question is the hardest of the three. First question? Easy, quadratic equation, or some factoring, no trouble. Second question, likewise factoring. Third question, though...solve for a and b, two independent variables given in a single equation with three independent variables, and then use this result to somehow determine the minimum of an expression of x. I was a bit daunted...I glanced at the expression, and immediately realized (by means of a simple derivative) that the minimum would be found at x = -4, but still, the first part hounded me. Clearly, a and b could only be solved for in terms of the other two variables, but that wouldn't help at all in determining the answer to the second part.
I belatedly realized that they apparently wanted me to factor the quadratic equation into a squared expression with x added to an integer (a), and an additive remainder (b), the canonical form for a parabola, and then use my knowledge of the general shape of parabolas to realize that the lowest point of the parabola was at (-4, 5). What an exhausting and treacherously worded question! What about the other infinity of solutions (x, a, b) that satisfy the equation? Eh? EH??? In conclusion, I think they should have given everybody that answered (4, 5) to the first part of the question partial credit in proportion to the fraction of the solution space that they mapped, and taken the difference out of the test writers' salaries.
"Lala is an online music service where you can listen, upload, trade, and buy music. Unforuntely[sic] it requires javascript, similar to most major websites on the internet."
Whew, rather defensive there...
I agree that the ban on online gambling (or rather, financial transactions with online gambling sites) is a pretty bad idea, but I don't think that you can claim that it is unconstitutional. The interstate commerce clause seems sufficient for its constitutionality (and for offshore gambling sites, it is foreign trade, which is even more clear-cut).
Of course, the interstate commerce clause has become a monster far beyond all imagination of the framers, but at least this is a more valid application than shutting down and jailing, say, Californian growers of medicinal marijuana who have no plans for export.
In some committee meeting where they were discussing the Global Online Freedom Act (not the actual Yahoo hearings), one of the congressmen mentioned those very conditions enumerated in the summary as what he thought would constitute an acceptable settlement. Perhaps Yahoo hopes that by giving in, they won't pass the Act?
I saw that (after posting); clearly the representation rules are more complex. It might still be a sine qua non for the bug, but there is admittedly no real evidence for that.
It seems that every broken number so far is of the form (10.2*2^n) * (6425*2^-n), or of the form (154.2*2^n) * (425*2^-n).
The only further interesting observation I have about that is that 6425=5^2*257 and 65535=3*5*17*257, which suggestively shares the factor 257. 19275=5^2*3*257, however, does not produce the effect (perhaps because 3.4*5=17?). We can't stray too far from this form while still having non-repeating operands. The other number is 425=5^2*17, which follows the same pattern, except with 17 instead of 257.
I also checked 2^32-1=4294967295=3*5*17*257*65527 with 10.2, etc., but that worked.
Interestingly, the following fail:
=(5*5*257)*(3*17/5)=(5*5*17)*(3*257/5)
=(5*5*17)*(3/5*257)
=25*154.2*17
=25*10.2*257
=(17*154.2)*25
=(771/5*17)*25
=(3*257/5*17)*25
=5*5*(257*3/5*17)
=(257*(51/5))*25
=(5*5*17)*(3*51.4)
but these don't:
=2621.4*25=(257*51/5)*25
=(257/5*51)*25
=(257*17*(3/5))*25
=5*(13107/5)*5
=(13107/5)*5*5
=(5*5)*(3*17*51.4)
These rules also apply between cells (e.g. let A2=A1*25, if A1=771/5*17, A2 will be 100000, if A1=2621.4, A2 will be 65535).
It seems that as long as in the course of left-to-right evaluation disaster will strike only if 10.2*2^n (51/5*2^n) or 154.2*2^n (257/5*2^n) is an intermediate term, for integer values of n. I suppose we can also conclude that muti-cell expressions are evaluated as a single expression, instead of storing intermediate results. The only hypothesis I have is that there is some weird issue in the factorization-to-rational code for arbitrary precision arithmetic, where bad canceling causes some boundary condition. That doesn't do much to explain the strange invariance up to powers of 2, and the location of the boundary at 2^16-1, however. I suppose in a prime factorization, 2^n will be at the end of the list, and thus might not affect the deadly intermediate result in this case. This makes me wonder what happens if I hook the file up with the ODBC driver, but I don't care that much ;p.
As someone else noted, the saved document contains this:
<c r="A1"><f>6425*10.2</f><v>65534.999999999993</v></c>so there is apparently an entirely different code path with direct floating-point evaluation.
It sounds like they are doing small-number math in one representation (perhaps they use short fixed-width decimal representations) and then switching to another method (arbitrary length decimal numbers?) at the binary-inspired boundary 2^16...but somehow they got it mixed up with a different decimal boundary in the edge case.
;p).
Clearly the error is weirdly subtle, if 5.1*12850 gives the bugged behavior, but 8.5*7710 works just fine. In fact, I verified that all permutations of a bugged combination =A*B of the form =A/2*B*2 are bugged. Further...all of the buggy decimal values have no perfect floating point binary representation. 77.1 has an infinite binary expansion using IEE 754, while 8.5 has an exact representation. It seems likely that they are only using their BCD format (or whatever) when binary floating (or fixed) point just won't cut it, but then their internal->decimal conversion code chokes on 2^16 for some reason, while the binary (whether it is floating or fixed point) conversion works just fine (possibly because it doesn't have a boundary at 2^16--maybe it has its own threshold bugs
at the amount of venom being poured out in this thread against the girl. I agree that it would be way too much not to expect the TSA to pounce on you if you walk around with anything looking vaguely like bombs do in movies...but I think the mature response would have been to release her with a warning about scaring timid federal employees after they (easily) verified that in fact the device was merely a breadboard, some LEDs and a battery stuck to a sweatshirt. Last time I checked, being naive wasn't a real crime.
Instead, undoubtedly embarrassed by the then-growing trend of Bostonian overreactions to LED devices, they said she was lucky they didn't shoot her (with a submachine gun. In a crowded airport. Since when are people carrying around MP5s in American airports anyway?!?), and then they charged her with "possessing a hoax device." Basically, with looking too suspicious. How dastardly! Well, good luck proving criminal intent on that one.
Then GPUs will have to become very CPU-like (and indeed, they have already added looping...) to handle the heavy conditional branching inherent in most modern ray-tracing acceleration structures. The ATI-AMD merger suggests to me that we will see a growing convergence between CPU and GPU.
Beyond the graphical advantages and disadvantages of raytraced gaming, it would obviate the need for advanced DirectX/OpenGL support (and GPUs--although you probably won't save any money since you'll need a quad-processor, many-core rig instead).
Without DirectX, there would be less tying games to Windows (or Vista). I don't think that DirectSound has nearly the same attraction, anyway. We'd probably seem more multiplatform releases.
Although it is a good guess, sadly your assumption that virus is in the fourth declension is also totally wrong. Perversely enough, it is neuter in the second even with the '-us' suffix, so the plural is actually 'vira.'
As for 'virii,' well, my mind drew a blank, but William Whittaker's Words claims that virii is the genetive singular of 'virium,' (verdancy), the noun form of 'vireo.' As for whether that form was ever actually used, though...the perseus project server appears to be melting down, or I would check.
Indeed, studies have concluded that antibiotics are over-prescribed and used almost as a placebo in some cases, but I don't think you can really blame allergic reactions on such inappropriate prescriptions. If you sister had been suffering from a bacterial infection, you think that she shouldn't have tried antibiotics then? Besides, I can't take medical advice from people who can't spell "viruses."
It seems possible that the last "40 million Americans" with analog televisions will never upgrade (at least as long as their current televisions continue to function) unless they are forced to by the sudden disappearance of analog channels. Waiting indefinitely for this to happen is a waste of bandwidth.
In the case of cable, the extension is even more dubious, since you can't claim as much economic hardship from upgrading TVs (everyone is paying $50+/mo. already, you could probably find a small TV for not much more than that).
Perhaps because many of the best films of our time were released when the only choices were 'PG' and 'G'? The canonical example, I think, would be The Graduate, which was rated 'PG' when released, and very recently was re-released as a 40th anniversary edition, earning an 'R' this time around.
Fine submissions like these cause me to wonder if perhaps the recent upswing in anti-kdawson sentiment isn't entirely unjustified...
The headline and summary was so priceless that I just had to read TFA. I assumed that TFS had as usual grossly mischaracterized TFA. This was, however, not the case (yay L.A. Times!). The thing that jumped out at me was that this study was conducted on a bunch of college students (i.e. undergrads looking for extra credit in intro psych classes) at UCLA and NYU. If you consider the percentage of liberal students at UCLA, I wonder if there might not be just a tad of selection bias inherent here...not to mention the libertarian objection that the political spectrum is poorly characterized in a linear fashion.
Although I couldn't find the original paper, this other article (no registration with google referrer) was more informative, quoting someone who actually was connected with the study, and another psych professor who points out that this study (of 43 students) might not be the pinnacle of statistical rigor.
On the other hand, I guess we can feel fully justified in drawing conclusions about conservatives students NYU and UCLA ;). I know that my own alma mater can count Ann Coulter, for one, amongst the 15 or so of its alumni who were strongly republican as undergrads...Ironically, this study will probably promote its own conclusion, though, when Prof. Amodio becomes the core of a republican talking point on the apparent liberal bias of America's university faculties.
She's probably worried that someone will say the word "bridge."
I would speculate that this thread has so few posts not because BSD is dying, but because any BSD user dedicated enough to browse slashdot and find this "article" hidden in the BSD section has probably already figured out how to install software (even linux binaries, if you're in to that sort of thing ;p).
Whereas adherents of certain [cough] linux distribtions have started flame threads longer than this one over the comparative merits of their various package systems, the BSD users have little to say on this topic, because the current system works just fine (not to mention the treatment of this topic in the FreeBSD Handbook is more informative than the article).
This may come as a surprise to you, but many people would find it quite inconvenient to burn their music collection to cds, rip the cds, and then reencode said music. In fact, I would go so far as to say that many people would be unable to do this.
Encoding music may not be as hard as encoding video, but most people who buy music from the iTMS do not read slashdot, do not know what lame, or even VBR is, and couldn't pull off a two-pass encode if their life depended on it. And even if they could, it would take a while and be inconvenient as hell.
So, even if the DRM can be circumvented in this manner, it is inconvenient enough that you might as well not buy from iTMS in the first place. Without using PlayFair to crack the DRM, it makes no sense to play your AACs on anything but an iPod. (The one exception is, of course, just burning the AACs to cds and leaving them there, to play in normal cd players.)
I would agree with this strategy if it actually worked, but if we look at Microsoft's example, it doesn't. Windows worms generally come out after the patch to fix the vulnerability that they exploit is released. Now, while Microsoft's "if we didn't release pathes, there would be no worms" logic is rather specious, that doesn't mean that most worms aren't indeed developed by reverse engineering the patches.
Consequently, if Apple does not release the details of an exploit, I would argue that this behavior only makes it marginally harder for a virus writer to produce a virus, since the specifics have to be extrapolated from the patch anyway. For users, however, the inconvenience is much greater, because they do not grasp the import of the security flaws, and so do not bother to patch their systems immediately.
Until now, this strategy has worked for Apple, simply because no one has bothered to write a successful OS-X worm. If that were ever to happen, I imagine a significant number of users would be caught with their pants down.
I actually agree, this seems like a great move by MS, and a way to make .NET the "Total Windows Solution" that it was originally marketed as. Using XAML, you could harness "the power of .NET" without breaking out your copy of VS.NET and writing and comiling a whole application.
Hell, I guess that was the gist of the response to the last question in the interview--it's just that Miguel de Icaza (reasonably) found the implications of this to be scary.
Indeed, I guess that this vision could come to pass, and the implications would indeed be scary, but that would really be the fault of content providers; One would expect Microsoft to provide a means to access the proprietary aspects of Longhorn with this: that is what makes it so wonderful (from a "Total Windows Solution" perspective). If people start using this to provide web content which can only be run on Windows machines, well, that is hardly Microsoft's fault, even if it was their goal. That would be akin to everyone posting their data in Word documents instead of an open format like pdf. This is an annoying practice from an interoperability perspective, but that doesn't mean that MS Word shouldn't have been developed.