Even in the case of rape? You'll let the mother live with that stigma the rest of her life?
Firstly, a blanket waiver for rape cases would make little sense in the light of the large number of women who yearly make fallacious rape accusations against men with whom they blatantly had consensual sex.
Secondly, there exist a very large number of charities and agencies to support rape victims, single mothers, and unwanted children.
Thirdly, "stigma"? You think that there is something shameful about a rape victim carrying a child to term? Would you describe yourself as part of the problem?
Go fuck yourself, you zealot. Seriously. GO FUCK YOURSELF.
Ah, the specious ad-hominem to cover up the fact that you don't have a good answer to my logical argument. Who sounds like the zealot here? Do you by any chance bomb pro-life campaign offices?
I can give you one example of (what I'd consider) Christian extremism which will claim more lives and do more damage than Muslims with bombs: Sexual Morality. Or more accurately, the refusal of Christians to distribute condoms & discuss abortions in Sub-Saharan African & South/Latin America.
On the subject of contraception, I agree that in the age of endemic sexually-transmitted diseases not making it available is the lesser of two evils, especially for people who may not have the option of abstinence. But abortions? How will not having abortions "claim more lives and do more damage than Muslims with bombs"?
My argument: once sperm meets egg and forms a new set of viable DNA, the resulting embryo new person and killing it is murder just as much as shooting a man in the head. Choosing an arbitrary cut-off between conception and birth is just that, arbitrary, and can easily be farcical: in the UK, there have been several recent cases where premature babies have lived healthy lives, having been born before the legal maximum age at which they could have been aborted.
In a situation where bearing the child to term has a high (> 50% likelihood, say) of killing or causing very severe complications for the mother, I can understand an argument for an abortion; but having an abortion because the mother "Doesn't feel like it" is an abomination. Yes, even in the case of rape. The child, unwanted or not, is an innocent bystander to the crime, and scheduling innocent bystanders to a crime for summary execution isn't in the finest tradition of British (or American) justice.
However, much as I view the legalisation of abortion with distaste, it is the law in this country, and not everyone believes what I do about the morality of abortion. I campaign against it here; and I'll campaign against it anywhere else I feel like doing so.
but they apparently AIN'T gettin' rid-of the never-to-be-sufficiently-retyped "self."
You do realise you can use any variable name for the class reference, right? Calling it "self" is just a convention. In one piece of software I worked on, the convention was to call it "s".
"Church teaching certainly cannot and must not weigh in on every novelty of science, but it has the task to reiterate the great values which are on the line and to propose to faithful and all men of good will ethical-moral principles and direction for new, important questions." "Science certainly cannot and must not weigh in on every novelty of church teaching, but it has the task to reiterate the great values which are on the line and to propose to reasonable and all men of good will rational-logical principles and direction for new, important questions."
Absolutely. 2000 years of Catholic tradition and the work of many philosophers, some of whom are canonised saints, agree with that statement completely. St Thomas Aquinas & St Augustine in particular. What is science but one of the ways in which the beauty & complexity of creation are revealed to us?
Like any tool, technology can be used for good or for ill. I present the example of a hammer: it is equally well suited for hammering nails into my wall and for smashing a car window so I can steal the stereo. It's my apparently risible "ethical-moral principles" which determine the use to which I put it.
Science and religion are not mutually exclusive. In fact, in my view, one is diminished without the other.
For clients and users who are somehow constrained to the GPLv2, nothing changes. Qt is now a triple-licensed toolkit: commercial, GPL version 2 and GPL version 3 (technically, the X11 version is even quadruple-licensed). In the Open Source version, you get to choose which one you want to apply to your code. And if neither option is suitable for your needs, theres always the commercial alternative.
One other thing I would like to point out is the fact that we are future-proofing it. The new license headers say specifically that you may:
(at your option) use any later version of the GNU General Public License if such license has been publicly approved by Trolltech ASA (or its successors, if any) and the KDE Free Qt Foundation.
So, I hope your fears are thoroughly allayed, and you can go about your business today with piece of mind that at least on commercial software vendor understands your software licensing worries.
Heh - check again! The UK plugs may need to have 3 pins but quite often than third pin is plastic and unconnected
Only unearthed devices using power-supply protection described as "double-insulating" may substitute a plastic 3rd pin. Typically, these have (very) heavy insulation on the mains side of the power supply, and then use an internal transformer to "float" the device's electrical workings so that any inadvertent contact with a person just changes the circuit's point of reference without causing a shock. They would not exhibit the symptoms described in this article.
Any devices you might own which have a plastic third pin and don't bear the label "Class 2" or the double insulation symbol are unsafe. Get them looked at by someone competent. As a point of reference, a brief poll of the various devices around me here found one Class 2 device -- the LVDC transformer for my desktop speakers. And a hauling out the schematics, yes, the transformer has a floating secondary.
BTW, the reason you see a lot more Class 1 appliances in the UK is because that is the preferred design for any device that uses more than a trivial amount of power. In a Class 1 device an electrical failure cannot bring the chassis to mains potentials without blowing a fuse, whereas in some pathological cases Class 2 devices fail to fail safe (if that makes sense).
The problem discussed in the article has nothing to do with what sort of plugs are in use. Class 1 devices, properly earthed, are safe. Class 2 devices, properly insulated, are safe. The problem in TFA is that the safety features of the electrical system weren't used properly, thus causing a hazard. Much the same as if you have a Class 1 device without a ground connection -- a charge (which would normally be rapidly dissipated to ground) can very slowly build up on the chassis, leading eventually to a shocking result.
Maybe a better analogue would be make using 'hacker tools' illegal across public networks.
Setting up a private network to learn and experiment should be legal.
What about the ISP sysadmin who receives reports of that one of his clients' systems is spewing spam, and wants to investigate rather than either ignoring the reports or shutting him off without checking? I would imagine that many of the tools required for said investigation could be described as "hacker tools".
I would go as far as saying most closed source software I have come across works fairly well on multile distros, though it is generally fairly trivial things.
What part of, "That is because it is statically linked," did you fail to understand? Static linking of binaries is bad:
Security faults in libraries used cannot easily be fixed in all the programs which use them by upgrading a single (usually small) package.
The installed size of software bloats enormously.
There is a reason the distributions dynamically link applications, and it's not just so as to be obtuse and obstructive to users.
Just for little things like pressing shift-F9 to compile my code, show the errors in a box below, allow me to jump to an error with a single keypress, or if it compiled, run the thing, with barely any input from me. Ok, you can script emacs to do that stuff, but why do I have to bother? Why can't it just *do* this basic task which I've come to expect from an IDE since my Amiga days?
kdevelop isn't brilliant - it's buggy as hell, and don't get me started on its code formatting tools, but it provides me with 8 or 9 basic features I would consider fundamental to working on a large programming project. vi and emacs are just text editors.
Actually, the latest version of Emacs has "compilation mode" available by default -- no scripting required. You click Tools->Compile, and the make output appears with nice clickable links for any errors that might occur. You can have multiple compilation buffers for compiling different parts of a large project where compiling it all would take too long.
Even better than that is the new grep function. Similarly, it provides clickable links which take you exactly to the file & line which matched. One of the nice things about Emacs is that rather than insisting you do it the Emacs way, it just presents a nice interface to the command-line tools you'd otherwise be using. KDevelop, on the other hand, seems to demand that you set things up in the way that it expects (or it did last time I attempted to use it).
Not to mention the fact that Emacs isn't buggy as hell and has excellent code formatting tools. What other 'basic features' are you missing?
The KDE organizer/calendaring system is extremely good -- I use it all the time. It supports multiple calendars as well as calendar export and sharing (although I don't use those features).
Apparently there's an enterprise info sharing server available based on it too.
Then we have Spacex. They have launched 2x and are still not in orbit. The amazing thing is that ALL of their tech is a NASA derivative. That is, they did not do the research (though they are doing a bit of their own development). Currently, the payments for these 2 launches come from where? NASA. So, NASA is funding them. In fact, if you have been following the pace of COTS lately, you would realize that Spacex is putting pressure on NASA to give them a contract to service the ISS very quickly. In addition, NASA is likely to select SpaceDev for the second go of COTS2. They have also hinted that they want guarenteed sales to the ISS after they have launched. Considering that they are going to start by using deltas to launch their vehicle, they will have a good shot at 2010 flights.
Firstly, saying that all of SpaceX's technology is a NASA derivative is somewhat obvious -- because all rocket launcher technology is derived, directly or indirectly, from either from NASA's research or the Russian space agency's.
Secondly, NASA hasn't paid a dime towards the two Falcon 1 launches that have been carried out so far -- they were funded by DARPA, because the Air Force wants cheap access to space too (one of the other goals is very fast order-to-launch capability). NASA is helping to fund the development of Falcon 9 (the heavy launcher) because it looks like a there's a good chance that between the space shuttle program ending and Ares coming online, they'll either be depending on SpaceX or the Russians for access to the space station. It's not SpaceX putting pressure on NASA -- it's NASA being enthusiastic about what SpaceX are doing, and worried about the political ramifications of giving billions of dollars more to the Russians to fly twice as many Soyuz missions.
Finally, the reason SpaceX have had two "failed" launches so far is because they're trying to move much more quickly and cheaply than the traditional approach, which is not to launch anything until they're absolutely certain it'll work flawlessly. Getting it Right First Time is very expensive.
I was at a talk given by Elon Musk about SpaceX recently, and he was saying that the way SpaceX is working is making their design work cost a tenth of what they estimate it would cost Boeing or Lockheed-Martin to do the same thing.
How about subtly shifting each pixel one pixel in a random direction (ensuring that they all end up heading in the same direction for any particular frame) and then making each pixel a slightly different color shade, you'd have to accept a good number of false positives to be able to catch videos in a different location with different colors than the original.
Dead easy to spot. Ever heard of sift descriptors? They're fast to compute, and you only need one or two per frame to be able to uniquely fingerprint a video in a way that's totally resistant to rotation, recolouring, frame rate changes, and most of the other (lame) circumvention techniques suggested in this discussion.
I think you'll find that locking phones in the UK is only permitted because the carrier subsidises the cost of the phone.
Then I guess we'll find out whether the iPhone is locked to a carrier in the UK when it comes out, won't we?
It will be.
And if it is, then what? A bunch of crying and whining?
Probably a consumer rights lawsuit after they void a couple of people's warranties for unlocking. But not from me. I really couldn't give a shit about the iPhone or any of Apple's other predatory business practices.
Moreover, while end-user unlocking of handsets is legal in the US under the current DMCA exemption, the vendor is under NO OBLIGATION to support the phones in such a state with future software/firmware updates. I can hear all the "But what about the UK?" people chiming in now. Apple will do whatever is required by law in any jurisdiction. If a certain jurisdiction REQUIRES unlocked phones, Apple may skip that market entirely (for now). Even in the UK it isn't as clear as some people like to think it is, because the phone technically isn't subsidized, meaning that it may not have to be unlocked after the subsidy is repaid - because there is no subsidy. And a large part of Apple's iPhone strategy with carriers is tight integration for things like the activation process: things that simply aren't supported with anyone but the partner carrier.
I think you'll find that locking phones in the UK is only permitted because the carrier subsidises the cost of the phone.
To build the simplest machines we need half the periodic table in fairly big quantities. That means finding something like and Iron mine and taking all the equipment to dig it out AND make steel alloys with you to build the next thing.
Once again, I must respectfully disagree. The lunar regolith -- the dust that covers the entire satellite -- is extremely high in aluminium oxides, which we can just electrolyse to get (relatively) pure aluminium. That would allow us to manufacture the heavy structural components of spacecraft or space stations, and then import the other (relatively) lightweight components from earth to complete assembly. Or we could even launch the structural components unassembled and carry out assembly in microgravity.
Anyway, the moon is a shit location for a base. There's no atmosphere, therefore no protection from solar radiation or meteors (can they be called that on the moon?). It seems to me the only safe location on the moon is very deep underground, and that's far beyond the current technology of any nation. Reading university England have been working on a way to have robots build shelters for humans on another planet for years, its a mind numbingly hard thing to achieve, and that's just surface buildings. Its not like you can just send a load of construction workers there or anything.
Actually, that's pretty inaccurate. The moon's low gravity and lack of atmosphere are actually major advantages for an industrial base (producing, for instance, giant orbital solar power stations to provide the world with clean energy). The lack of atmosphere also makes it quite a good place to build ultra-sensitive optical & radio telescopes (although advances in computational methods are making that less of an advantage every year). In my opinion, Mars is a much more difficult place to set up a base -- at least the moon's proximity makes it easy to get people back if things go wrong.
As far as radiation goes, one metre of lunar regolith reduces radiation doses due to cosmic rays and even unusually large solar flares to harmless levels. A Radiation Safety Analysis for Lunar Lava Tubes -- this considers lava tubes in particular, but the results are more widely applicable. Several studies have been carried out which suggest that many suitable lava tubes exist on the moon which with a minimum of preparation could be used as shelters for lightweight (possibly inflatable) habitat structures. Robotic technology would be required to (a) survey tubes for suitability and (b) prepare such a site for human arrival.
Finally, while Reading University is a fine institution and has one of the best cybernetics departments in the country, I'm not convinced that they're trying to solve the right problem. I feel that best results would be achieved by developing automated techniques for quickly and accurately surveying large numbers of potential sites, and then developing equipment that can be pre-deployed and then used by humans to prepare a site quickly and easily (i.e. within a few hours) on arrival.
We don't have a right to break other countries laws because we have moral objection to those laws.
Actually, we have a moral obligation to break any country's laws when we have a moral objection to those laws.
By this I mean that we must always follow the moral, rather than the legal. Note that I'm not saying that we should go out of our way to break laws that we consider immoral, which is what the grandparent was implying.
From my point of view, there is no moral argument in favour of the course of action proposed by the submitter. The amount of possible benefit to "oppressed" people[1] is outweighed, in my opinion, by the certain damages caused to those whose zombied systems are used for sending spam, and whose ISP drops them; those system administrators who have to deal with the extra load on their systems caused by this spam; and to those people whose lives are made that little bit more miserable by the spam clogging up their inboxes.
Terry Pratchett, as usual, expresses it quite clearly:
"Now we art all here," said Hastur meaningfully, "we must recount the Deeds of the Day."
"Yeah. Deeds," said Crowley, with the slightly guilty look of one who is attending church for the first time in years and has forgotten which bits you stand up for.
Hastur cleared his throat.
"I have tempted a priest," he said. "As he walked down the street and saw the pretty girls in the sun, I put Doubt into his mind. He would have been a saint, but within a decade we shall have him."
"Nice one," said Crowley, helpfully.
"I have corrupted a politician," said Ligur. "I let him think a tiny bribe would not hurt. Within a year we shall have him."
"They both looked expectantly at Crowley, who gave them a big smile.
"You'll like this," he said.
His smile became even wider and more conspiratorial.
"I tied up every portable telephone system in Central London for forty-five minutes at lunchtime," he said.
There was silence, except for the distant swishing of cars.
"Yes?" said Hastur. "And then what?"
"Look, it wasn't easy," said Crowley.
"That's all?" said Ligur.
"Look, people "
"And exactly what has that done to secure souls for our master?" said Hastur.
Crowley pulled himself together.
What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves. For the rest of the day. The pass-along effects were incalculable. Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.
But you couldn't tell that to demons like Hastur and Ligur.
Fourteenth-century minds, the lot of them. Spending years picking away at one soul. Admittedly it was craftsmanship, but you had to think differently these days. Not big, but wide. With five billion people in the world you couldn't pick the buggers off one by one anymore; you had to spread your effort. But demons like Ligur and Hastur wouldn't understand. They'd never have thought up Welsh-language television, for example. Or value-added tax. Or Manchester. He'd been particularly proud of Manchester.
Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (Ace Books, 1996), pp. 8-9
[1] Of course, many of these people who we consider to be "oppressed" do not think of themselves as oppressed. This is a different philosophical argument, for another time.
In Linux if something pisses you off, you can fix it yourself or contact the developer directly and talk about (or collaborate on) a fix! This assumes you are a geek or know how to communicate with a geek. This assumes that the geek will listen to what you have to say. That the project isn't "his baby."
Gosh, because being polite and asking in a constructive manner is so difficult. Guess what, "OMGyourstuffsux0r" goes down as well with a software developer as it would at your local car workshop.
I admit that cretins like Joerg Schilling give open source software developers a bad name. Sadly, just like with middle-eastern Muslims and Catholic priests, it's the crazy few who damage the reputation of the vast majority.
Gosh, and at 1.whatever GHz, (or even at 333 MHz) that should take all of how long to grab the state before power down and restore on wake up?
(I am an electronic engineer). In some cases, making registers both readable and writable can be impractical due to the physical constraints of the system, namely timing and available area.
I've designed several devices with write-only registers (LCD drivers for mobile phone displays).
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Even in the case of rape? You'll let the mother live with that stigma the rest of her life?
Firstly, a blanket waiver for rape cases would make little sense in the light of the large number of women who yearly make fallacious rape accusations against men with whom they blatantly had consensual sex.
Secondly, there exist a very large number of charities and agencies to support rape victims, single mothers, and unwanted children.
Thirdly, "stigma"? You think that there is something shameful about a rape victim carrying a child to term? Would you describe yourself as part of the problem?
Go fuck yourself, you zealot. Seriously. GO FUCK YOURSELF.
Ah, the specious ad-hominem to cover up the fact that you don't have a good answer to my logical argument. Who sounds like the zealot here? Do you by any chance bomb pro-life campaign offices?
On the subject of contraception, I agree that in the age of endemic sexually-transmitted diseases not making it available is the lesser of two evils, especially for people who may not have the option of abstinence. But abortions? How will not having abortions "claim more lives and do more damage than Muslims with bombs"?
My argument: once sperm meets egg and forms a new set of viable DNA, the resulting embryo new person and killing it is murder just as much as shooting a man in the head. Choosing an arbitrary cut-off between conception and birth is just that, arbitrary, and can easily be farcical: in the UK, there have been several recent cases where premature babies have lived healthy lives, having been born before the legal maximum age at which they could have been aborted.
In a situation where bearing the child to term has a high (> 50% likelihood, say) of killing or causing very severe complications for the mother, I can understand an argument for an abortion; but having an abortion because the mother "Doesn't feel like it" is an abomination. Yes, even in the case of rape. The child, unwanted or not, is an innocent bystander to the crime, and scheduling innocent bystanders to a crime for summary execution isn't in the finest tradition of British (or American) justice.
However, much as I view the legalisation of abortion with distaste, it is the law in this country, and not everyone believes what I do about the morality of abortion. I campaign against it here; and I'll campaign against it anywhere else I feel like doing so.
You do realise you can use any variable name for the class reference, right? Calling it "self" is just a convention. In one piece of software I worked on, the convention was to call it "s".
Absolutely. 2000 years of Catholic tradition and the work of many philosophers, some of whom are canonised saints, agree with that statement completely. St Thomas Aquinas & St Augustine in particular. What is science but one of the ways in which the beauty & complexity of creation are revealed to us?
Like any tool, technology can be used for good or for ill. I present the example of a hammer: it is equally well suited for hammering nails into my wall and for smashing a car window so I can steal the stereo. It's my apparently risible "ethical-moral principles" which determine the use to which I put it.
Science and religion are not mutually exclusive. In fact, in my view, one is diminished without the other.
( -1, RTFA )
Qt is now triple-licensed :
For clients and users who are somehow constrained to the GPLv2, nothing changes. Qt is now a triple-licensed toolkit: commercial, GPL version 2 and GPL version 3 (technically, the X11 version is even quadruple-licensed). In the Open Source version, you get to choose which one you want to apply to your code. And if neither option is suitable for your needs, theres always the commercial alternative. One other thing I would like to point out is the fact that we are future-proofing it. The new license headers say specifically that you may: (at your option) use any later version of the GNU General Public License if such license has been publicly approved by Trolltech ASA (or its successors, if any) and the KDE Free Qt Foundation.So, I hope your fears are thoroughly allayed, and you can go about your business today with piece of mind that at least on commercial software vendor understands your software licensing worries.
Only unearthed devices using power-supply protection described as "double-insulating" may substitute a plastic 3rd pin. Typically, these have (very) heavy insulation on the mains side of the power supply, and then use an internal transformer to "float" the device's electrical workings so that any inadvertent contact with a person just changes the circuit's point of reference without causing a shock. They would not exhibit the symptoms described in this article.
Any devices you might own which have a plastic third pin and don't bear the label "Class 2" or the double insulation symbol are unsafe. Get them looked at by someone competent. As a point of reference, a brief poll of the various devices around me here found one Class 2 device -- the LVDC transformer for my desktop speakers. And a hauling out the schematics, yes, the transformer has a floating secondary.
BTW, the reason you see a lot more Class 1 appliances in the UK is because that is the preferred design for any device that uses more than a trivial amount of power. In a Class 1 device an electrical failure cannot bring the chassis to mains potentials without blowing a fuse, whereas in some pathological cases Class 2 devices fail to fail safe (if that makes sense).
The problem discussed in the article has nothing to do with what sort of plugs are in use. Class 1 devices, properly earthed, are safe. Class 2 devices, properly insulated, are safe. The problem in TFA is that the safety features of the electrical system weren't used properly, thus causing a hazard. Much the same as if you have a Class 1 device without a ground connection -- a charge (which would normally be rapidly dissipated to ground) can very slowly build up on the chassis, leading eventually to a shocking result.
What about the ISP sysadmin who receives reports of that one of his clients' systems is spewing spam, and wants to investigate rather than either ignoring the reports or shutting him off without checking? I would imagine that many of the tools required for said investigation could be described as "hacker tools".
What is this 'public network', anyway?
What part of, "That is because it is statically linked," did you fail to understand? Static linking of binaries is bad:
There is a reason the distributions dynamically link applications, and it's not just so as to be obtuse and obstructive to users.
Actually, the latest version of Emacs has "compilation mode" available by default -- no scripting required. You click Tools->Compile, and the make output appears with nice clickable links for any errors that might occur. You can have multiple compilation buffers for compiling different parts of a large project where compiling it all would take too long.
Even better than that is the new grep function. Similarly, it provides clickable links which take you exactly to the file & line which matched. One of the nice things about Emacs is that rather than insisting you do it the Emacs way, it just presents a nice interface to the command-line tools you'd otherwise be using. KDevelop, on the other hand, seems to demand that you set things up in the way that it expects (or it did last time I attempted to use it).
Not to mention the fact that Emacs isn't buggy as hell and has excellent code formatting tools. What other 'basic features' are you missing?
But it would be a derivative work of the entire GPL source code: code -> binary -> patch.
The KDE organizer/calendaring system is extremely good -- I use it all the time. It supports multiple calendars as well as calendar export and sharing (although I don't use those features).
Apparently there's an enterprise info sharing server available based on it too.
What does Multiple Sclerosis have to do with open source software?
Firstly, saying that all of SpaceX's technology is a NASA derivative is somewhat obvious -- because all rocket launcher technology is derived, directly or indirectly, from either from NASA's research or the Russian space agency's.
Secondly, NASA hasn't paid a dime towards the two Falcon 1 launches that have been carried out so far -- they were funded by DARPA, because the Air Force wants cheap access to space too (one of the other goals is very fast order-to-launch capability). NASA is helping to fund the development of Falcon 9 (the heavy launcher) because it looks like a there's a good chance that between the space shuttle program ending and Ares coming online, they'll either be depending on SpaceX or the Russians for access to the space station. It's not SpaceX putting pressure on NASA -- it's NASA being enthusiastic about what SpaceX are doing, and worried about the political ramifications of giving billions of dollars more to the Russians to fly twice as many Soyuz missions.
Finally, the reason SpaceX have had two "failed" launches so far is because they're trying to move much more quickly and cheaply than the traditional approach, which is not to launch anything until they're absolutely certain it'll work flawlessly. Getting it Right First Time is very expensive.
I was at a talk given by Elon Musk about SpaceX recently, and he was saying that the way SpaceX is working is making their design work cost a tenth of what they estimate it would cost Boeing or Lockheed-Martin to do the same thing.
I think you're trolling.
Dead easy to spot. Ever heard of sift descriptors? They're fast to compute, and you only need one or two per frame to be able to uniquely fingerprint a video in a way that's totally resistant to rotation, recolouring, frame rate changes, and most of the other (lame) circumvention techniques suggested in this discussion.
Then I guess we'll find out whether the iPhone is locked to a carrier in the UK when it comes out, won't we?
It will be.
And if it is, then what? A bunch of crying and whining?
Probably a consumer rights lawsuit after they void a couple of people's warranties for unlocking. But not from me. I really couldn't give a shit about the iPhone or any of Apple's other predatory business practices.
I think you'll find that locking phones in the UK is only permitted because the carrier subsidises the cost of the phone.
Real engineers use the back of an envelope, a pencil and some rules of thumb.
I'm not. I'm just pointing out that you can prove anything with statistics.
America is a rich country. What do those numbers look like when normalized by average household income in each country?
According to this USA Today article Americans give more than twice of the next most charitable country.America is a large country. What do those numbers look like when normalized by population?
Once again, I must respectfully disagree. The lunar regolith -- the dust that covers the entire satellite -- is extremely high in aluminium oxides, which we can just electrolyse to get (relatively) pure aluminium. That would allow us to manufacture the heavy structural components of spacecraft or space stations, and then import the other (relatively) lightweight components from earth to complete assembly. Or we could even launch the structural components unassembled and carry out assembly in microgravity.
Actually, that's pretty inaccurate. The moon's low gravity and lack of atmosphere are actually major advantages for an industrial base (producing, for instance, giant orbital solar power stations to provide the world with clean energy). The lack of atmosphere also makes it quite a good place to build ultra-sensitive optical & radio telescopes (although advances in computational methods are making that less of an advantage every year). In my opinion, Mars is a much more difficult place to set up a base -- at least the moon's proximity makes it easy to get people back if things go wrong.
As far as radiation goes, one metre of lunar regolith reduces radiation doses due to cosmic rays and even unusually large solar flares to harmless levels. A Radiation Safety Analysis for Lunar Lava Tubes -- this considers lava tubes in particular, but the results are more widely applicable. Several studies have been carried out which suggest that many suitable lava tubes exist on the moon which with a minimum of preparation could be used as shelters for lightweight (possibly inflatable) habitat structures. Robotic technology would be required to (a) survey tubes for suitability and (b) prepare such a site for human arrival.
Finally, while Reading University is a fine institution and has one of the best cybernetics departments in the country, I'm not convinced that they're trying to solve the right problem. I feel that best results would be achieved by developing automated techniques for quickly and accurately surveying large numbers of potential sites, and then developing equipment that can be pre-deployed and then used by humans to prepare a site quickly and easily (i.e. within a few hours) on arrival.
Yes.
(If you want a useful answer, ask a meaningful question).
</trollfood>
Actually, we have a moral obligation to break any country's laws when we have a moral objection to those laws.
By this I mean that we must always follow the moral, rather than the legal. Note that I'm not saying that we should go out of our way to break laws that we consider immoral, which is what the grandparent was implying.
From my point of view, there is no moral argument in favour of the course of action proposed by the submitter. The amount of possible benefit to "oppressed" people[1] is outweighed, in my opinion, by the certain damages caused to those whose zombied systems are used for sending spam, and whose ISP drops them; those system administrators who have to deal with the extra load on their systems caused by this spam; and to those people whose lives are made that little bit more miserable by the spam clogging up their inboxes.
Terry Pratchett, as usual, expresses it quite clearly:
"Now we art all here," said Hastur meaningfully, "we must recount the Deeds of the Day."
"Yeah. Deeds," said Crowley, with the slightly guilty look of one who is attending church for the first time in years and has forgotten which bits you stand up for.
Hastur cleared his throat.
"I have tempted a priest," he said. "As he walked down the street and saw the pretty girls in the sun, I put Doubt into his mind. He would have been a saint, but within a decade we shall have him."
"Nice one," said Crowley, helpfully.
"I have corrupted a politician," said Ligur. "I let him think a tiny bribe would not hurt. Within a year we shall have him."
"They both looked expectantly at Crowley, who gave them a big smile.
"You'll like this," he said.
His smile became even wider and more conspiratorial.
"I tied up every portable telephone system in Central London for forty-five minutes at lunchtime," he said.
There was silence, except for the distant swishing of cars.
"Yes?" said Hastur. "And then what?"
"Look, it wasn't easy," said Crowley.
"That's all?" said Ligur.
"Look, people "
"And exactly what has that done to secure souls for our master?" said Hastur.
Crowley pulled himself together.
What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves. For the rest of the day. The pass-along effects were incalculable. Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.
But you couldn't tell that to demons like Hastur and Ligur.
Fourteenth-century minds, the lot of them. Spending years picking away at one soul. Admittedly it was craftsmanship, but you had to think differently these days. Not big, but wide. With five billion people in the world you couldn't pick the buggers off one by one anymore; you had to spread your effort. But demons like Ligur and Hastur wouldn't understand. They'd never have thought up Welsh-language television, for example. Or value-added tax. Or Manchester. He'd been particularly proud of Manchester.
Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (Ace Books, 1996), pp. 8-9
[1] Of course, many of these people who we consider to be "oppressed" do not think of themselves as oppressed. This is a different philosophical argument, for another time.
Gosh, because being polite and asking in a constructive manner is so difficult. Guess what, "OMGyourstuffsux0r" goes down as well with a software developer as it would at your local car workshop.
I admit that cretins like Joerg Schilling give open source software developers a bad name. Sadly, just like with middle-eastern Muslims and Catholic priests, it's the crazy few who damage the reputation of the vast majority.
(I am an electronic engineer). In some cases, making registers both readable and writable can be impractical due to the physical constraints of the system, namely timing and available area.
I've designed several devices with write-only registers (LCD drivers for mobile phone displays).