They have to enter the bloodstream before they work and so they could just as well be pills. And they should be, since these compounds are extremely bitter, worse than anything even achievable with coffee. But, people won't buy them in that form, because they have the impression that cough syrup won't work unless it coats the throat. So they are sold as disgusting sweet syrups.
I always figured it was so the drugs would hit the blood a little faster: they're predissolved, not having to dissolve into the cold water that tablets have to be swallowed with, and have minimum liquid for maximum osmotic pressure. Surely that outweighs the taste problem?
Then again, I like the taste of single malt whisky...
The entire thing is/about/ companies being set to invest money in iris scanning technology and research due to the patent being removed. These companies would have done so long ago had there been no patent.
They're wrong. This is about the new opportunities for feeding at the Homeland Security trough, which by pure coincidence happens to be at about the time the patent expires.
So, you've bought into the propaganda campaign of the **AA, forcing an inappropriate word to make a behavior seem more heinous than it is, and the guy who understands the REAL meaning of the word is the moron?
"Pirate" has long been applied to much more than just ships on the high seas. For example, Thomas Babington Macaulay used it in a well-known 1841 speech before Parliament, speaking against a proposal to unreasonably extend copyright terms:
"I am so sensible, Sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress?..."
An eloquent speech that shows not just the proper uses of "pirate", but also the evil and futility of the Disney Copyright Extension Act.
No, the unemployment rate is supposedly a measure of the number of people who could work but aren't. Trouble is, the beancounters are constantly adding exemptions to who is "truly" unemployed. E.g., people ages 13-18, many of whom could be usefully apprenticed to good effect but rot in educational day care. And people who want to work but have given up looking. And people who can only get a part time job that doesn't pay enough to live on.
The true percentage of people who could probably work but aren't is something like 40-50%.
A lot of that can be mitigated with good software, good GPS receivers, and perhaps differential GPS. However, these things are not compatible with a cheap system designed by the UK government.
By dismissing everything without analysis, or worse only analysing things you can easily prove incorrect you are doing worse for science than these people.
No. Once I find something that is obviously wrong and the result of a total ignorance of reality, I can stop reading. A chain of reasoning is only as strong as its weakest link, and the first ten feet of their chain is made of silly putty and damp tissue.
...is like looking at Newton's work with alchemy and concluding from that his physics must be pseudoscientific crackpottery as well.
The difference is that Newton kept his math/physics and his alchemy separate. He didn't mix the shit and the soup together in one big pot and tell the dinner guests to just pick out the tasty parts.
At times, I watched our position/speed. It would occasionally show us going from 40mph to 90mph to 10mph over the space of a few seconds. At other times it would match the spedometer very closely.
AFAIK, the system in question uses GPS to find the location on a map, the map to determine what speed zone you're in, and the speedometer to determine if you're breaking the zone's limit. So GPS accuracy is not an insoluble problem.
75 is unreasonable everywhere exctp for those weirdo western states where you have hundreds of miles between bizarro small towns with populations less than 2,000.
What about a four lane divided highway with full-lane shoulders, 50 foot of cleared land to each side, and fences to keep the dumber animals out? That's how a lot of the major highways here in Oklahoma are done. (Does it count as a weirdo western state? The population density is high enough to justify a few top-notch highways and land is cheap enough to build them.) The posted limit is 75, and 100 would be reasonably safe if it weren't for the career idiots.
The speed limits are there for a reason (safety) and it's not to line anyone's pockets with money.
I know of at least one case of a small town that was ordered by the state to take down speed limit signs. They had set up a speed trap on a nicely engineered bit of state highway that was probably the best and safest stretch for miles.
I have no respect for the average driver.
I have active hatred of them. If they tried with guns what they do with cars, I could cut their throats and bleed 'em out real slow and the judge would give me a commendation. But no, cars are somehow magically exempt from the assault statutes.
I have a lot of respect for law enforcement.
Never had your car towed and had to walk home for forgetting to pay your car tax, have you?
How do they manage to survive as species without the benefit of variation from sexual reproduction?
The workers, which are most exposed to the big nasty world, get half their genes from each parent. That gives some variation, and the (cloned) fertile ants have their food and water thoroughly filtered by the workers, which gives them protection that most parthenogenic species don't get. This genetic system was only recently discovered and the investigations are very preliminary, so it isn't yet known if crossing-over occurs rarely.
one has an X chromosone, the other a Y - this can be a pretty significant difference.
Sex determination in ants is by haplodiploidy: females have the full set of double chromosomes, whilst males only have one of each chromosome. The sterile workers get all their father's chromosomes, and half of their mother's chromosomes, which makes them 75% genetically related to each other, and that is what makes altruism evolutionarily favored among workers.
I don't think it's fair to discount Plasma Cosmology as a fringe theory based on its merits.
I do. They claim that comets carry extreme electric charges. Well, the electrical capacitance between a comet and the sun is at most perhaps a few hundred microfarads. Assume it to be C = 200 uF, and assume that the primordial voltage on the comet is V = 500 million volts. The amount of charge is then Q = C*V = 100,000 coulombs. If the unavoidable leakage current due to the solar wind was a paltry one microampere (utterly optimistic), the charge would be completely exhausted in only 3,171 years.
Moreover, the results of that discharge current would be to produce 250 watts of gamma radiation. It is difficult to understand how that kind of radiation flux could be missed despite exhaustive observations.
In short, trivial application of high school physics blows their hypothesis out of the water. They are idiot crackpots.
Should the person who screwed up be allowed to continue? Of course not; given the power to make such transactions they failed in a grotesque manner.
In a way that was trivially predictable and trivially preventable.
A high-performance jet fighter like the F-18 has enough control power to tear its wings off. Yet the pilot doesn't have to keep his eye glued to a force meter and pray his hand doesn't twitch: the computers predict imminent failure and forcibly prevent it. He is free to do his real job: kick ass and take names.
Other heads will roll, but before you chop the heads off of the people who allowed someone to do something massively stupid, you first fire the person who actually did something massively stupid.
Bullshit. There is no person so competent that they never fuck things up beyond all recognition. All competent engineers know that operators screw up, and they protect their systems accordingly. Steam boilers have pressure relief valves, jet aircraft have airframe protection software, nuclear reactors have failsafe features like the sahara desert has sand, cars won't let you shift into gear without pressing the brake pedal, hot plates have thermal fuses, Windows Explorer asks "are you sure you want to delete config.sys?", et-frickin-cetera.
In this case, the computer should have said "You are about to be a market mover for a thousand pissant stocks. [Take the $15M loss on the chin.] [Safe me from myself.]"
She, unfortunately for her, accidentally made a purchase even more major than she had intended.
Or was working on two orders at the same time and the user interface tricked her into getting the fulfillments backwards. (Buying $250M in one swell foop is a lot different for penny stocks than blue chips.) The whole point of children's games like "mother may I" or "red light, green light" is that context can trick people into making exactly the wrong decision. It isn't a matter of inexperience or irresponsibility either: a lot of aircraft pilots have gotten into clouds and ended up flying into the ground, upside down. When a bunch of different people keep making the exact same mistake over and over again, it can only be the fault of the situation they are being placed in, and the solution is better engineering.
Why is it so hard to make a safe weight-loss pill?
Because the body has numerous redundant control systems to avoid starvation. Knock out one with a pill and negative feedback just turns up the knob on others.
And a good thing too, because otherwise plants would be able to easily evolve toxins to keep us from eating them.
HTTP is legally enforceable, but robots.txt is merely a gentleman's agreement. That seems a hard distinction to draw: both are just conventions adopted for interoperability.
The HTTP standards claim to be an exact convention for doing things. Poking random data into random TCP ports is unlikely to even constitute a well-formed request; therefore the presence of a well-formed request constitutes strong evidence that the client has read and understands the HTTP specification.
Regarding robots.txt, read the excerpt I posted. The spec itself says it is optional and unenforced. The difference between the two seems clear.
I'm not aware of any legislation anywhere that says merely violating HTTP would be a crime,...
The courts accept common conventions. If a building has a sign that says "Joe's Burgers" and an unlocked door, it is not trespass to walk inside and ask to buy a cup of coffee; they can toss you out, but not shoot you in the head. Conversely, if the social convention is that there are no obligations, just an opportunity for generosity, as with the robots standard, then a court cannot legislate generosity from the bench.
"Whatever is not technically prevented is by definition permitted." If this were really the case, there would be no crime of trespass, since the owner should have made the trespass impossible.
In retail sales, putting price tags on articles in public is an "offer to treat", an offer to negotiate. A potential customer can pick the merchandise up and examine it, and it is not valdalism, trespass, or theft. My position is that serving HTTP on its well-known port is also an offer to treat using GET requests.
This is followed by negotiation using the limited access that has been granted. In a store, the buyer fondles and inspects the item and carries it to the seller. In HTTP, the client sends a request.
If the negotation is unsuccessful, rejection is given. In a store, the seller says "No way, $5 is already too cheap! Put it back on the shelf!" With HTTP, the server says "409, cough up a credit card number!"
If negotiation succeeds, the transaction executes. In a store, the person walks away with their new purchase. With HTTP, the server swallows the CC# and transmits the requested data.
Likewise, loitering is analogous to a denial of service attack. Everything has exact parallels with existing jurisprudence. The protocol designers did this on purpose, because they wanted it to be useful for people.
The law is not yet clear here, and it's not clear what would be reasonable.
I think it can be clear. The problem is that too many complaintants don't really know what the hell they're complaining about, and being able to explain something clearly is a rare skill. That combination leaves judges floundering in a sea of ignorance.
In any case, it sounds like HMS were infringing the copyrights of the sites they scraped, and that probably is cut-and-dried.
I inferred that they were gathering lists of people/companies/court results/etc. I think the main problem is that the state agencies were publishing valuable information but not bothering to cover the cost of access, and intimidating people who ran up their bills. To analogize, "Mr. Smith, you've been monopolizing the public records room for two days. Time to go." That's a valid strategy, if inefficient and a bit unjust. But that doesn't make Mr. Smith a criminal if he hires a string of college students to do his research, each of which gets the heave-ho after a couple of days.
You're way off beam if you're thinking about changes to the server. It is not necessary for a client to cause changes to the server to constitute illegal unauthorized access.
Go read the HTTP specification. It clearly spells out ways for the site operator to say "go away, I don't want to talk to you" with mathematical precision. Conversely, a site operator can give a 200 OK response status which means "thanks for your request; here's the information I want you to have".
Clearly harm can be done by somebody merely reading information they are not entitled to get.
Which is why many sites use the security specs that were explicitly designed for controlling access. They force you to sign contracts, enter credit card numbers, answer riddles, type in some squiggly looking numbers, whatever the operator feels like. In that context, giving information away to anybody just for asking, and then crying foul, it egregiously stupid and has no legal recourse.
...blocking their IP and adding a robots.txt line makes the intention clear.
Go read the Robots Exclusion Standard. It explicitly says the standard is optional, voluntary, unenforced, and not obeyed by all current and future robots. Blocking an IP address likewise does not convey intent.
Given that there are formally standardized ways for conveying the intent, with mathetical precision and total lack of ambiguity, vague claims of intent and policy after the fact are unenforceable.
The cause of action here is not breach of contract but trespass to chattels.
By definition, the reply to an HTTP GET response encodes the site operator's policies. The 200 OK response means they want you to have some information, which follows. The 401 Unauthorized response means that need to try again with an HTTP auth password supplied by the site operator. The 409 Conflict response indicates that for some reason the request cannot be fulfilled; it is followed by instructions for how to resolve the problem, such as a acceptable use contract form, or a credit card payment form. (AFAIK, nobody uses 409 because 200 with instructions and a form works just as well; browsers don't show the response code so nobody knows the difference.)
There is even a 503 Service Unavailable response, which lets you tell the client to piss off for any amount of time you choose. If you gave a 503 with a billion second delay, it would be illegal for a user to click the reload button on their browser.
If a web site operator places restrictions on the use of that site (either explicitly or through robots.txt files), and those are violated, then it a trespass to chattels cause of action can be found.
And my point is that the restrictions are expressed by the site operator to the user by the status code of each HTTP reply. If the operator says 200 OK, the contents they want you to see follow.
ROBOTS.TXT is just an voluntary gentleman's convention amongst certain bot authors. It postdates HTTP and does not modify the meaning of that standard. It is not authoritative; there is not even any way to obtain a legally-definitive copy of it. The authority statement from the Robots Exclusion Standard comes right out and says as much:
It is not an official standard backed by a standards body, or owned by any commercial organisation. It is not enforced by anybody, and there no guarantee that all current and future robots will use it. Consider it a common facility the majority of robot authors offer the WWW community to protect WWW server against unwanted accesses by their robots.
Any judge who finds that "violating" ROBOTS.TXT is a crime (pardon my French) is an asshole.
robots.txt is the moral (and in some cases, legal) equivalent of an "authorized persons only" or "no soliciting sign".
Nope. Operating an HTTP server on port 80 of a TCP/IP interface on the public Internet is a solicitation to issue GET requests. It is analogous to posting a sign that says "free public library". The standards specifications specifically define that HTTP GET requests do not cause any changes to the server and are therefore harmless (modulo superfluous requests that constitute a denial of service).
The standards authors realized that not all libraries should be free to the public, and specified cookies and other access control methods.
HTTP authentication, conversely, is like a lock; trying to prevent rather than prohibit access.
The specification defines HTTP POST requests as potentially causing permanent changes to the server. They are instructions to perform actions, not mere requests for public information. The client therefore must only issue POST requests pursuant to the server operator's wishes, and those wishes can be expressed by an HTML form containing a contract.
Accessing a computer system in a way specifically prohibited by the owner is illegal in most jurisdictions, and a good thing too.
And with HTTP, the owner gives access permission by fulfilling GET requests and denies permission by requiring a particular POST request first.
Slashdot Mirror
Then again, I like the taste of single malt whisky...
Oooh! Thanks for the reference. I never would have found that with a web search.
The true percentage of people who could probably work but aren't is something like 40-50%.
A lot of that can be mitigated with good software, good GPS receivers, and perhaps differential GPS. However, these things are not compatible with a cheap system designed by the UK government.
Good point. I got the plasma cosmology crapola confused with the electric comet crapola.
Moreover, the results of that discharge current would be to produce 250 watts of gamma radiation. It is difficult to understand how that kind of radiation flux could be missed despite exhaustive observations.
In short, trivial application of high school physics blows their hypothesis out of the water. They are idiot crackpots.
A high-performance jet fighter like the F-18 has enough control power to tear its wings off. Yet the pilot doesn't have to keep his eye glued to a force meter and pray his hand doesn't twitch: the computers predict imminent failure and forcibly prevent it. He is free to do his real job: kick ass and take names.
Bullshit. There is no person so competent that they never fuck things up beyond all recognition. All competent engineers know that operators screw up, and they protect their systems accordingly. Steam boilers have pressure relief valves, jet aircraft have airframe protection software, nuclear reactors have failsafe features like the sahara desert has sand, cars won't let you shift into gear without pressing the brake pedal, hot plates have thermal fuses, Windows Explorer asks "are you sure you want to delete config.sys?", et-frickin-cetera.In this case, the computer should have said "You are about to be a market mover for a thousand pissant stocks. [Take the $15M loss on the chin.] [Safe me from myself.]"
Or was working on two orders at the same time and the user interface tricked her into getting the fulfillments backwards. (Buying $250M in one swell foop is a lot different for penny stocks than blue chips.) The whole point of children's games like "mother may I" or "red light, green light" is that context can trick people into making exactly the wrong decision. It isn't a matter of inexperience or irresponsibility either: a lot of aircraft pilots have gotten into clouds and ended up flying into the ground, upside down. When a bunch of different people keep making the exact same mistake over and over again, it can only be the fault of the situation they are being placed in, and the solution is better engineering.And a good thing too, because otherwise plants would be able to easily evolve toxins to keep us from eating them.
Regarding robots.txt, read the excerpt I posted. The spec itself says it is optional and unenforced. The difference between the two seems clear.
The courts accept common conventions. If a building has a sign that says "Joe's Burgers" and an unlocked door, it is not trespass to walk inside and ask to buy a cup of coffee; they can toss you out, but not shoot you in the head. Conversely, if the social convention is that there are no obligations, just an opportunity for generosity, as with the robots standard, then a court cannot legislate generosity from the bench. In retail sales, putting price tags on articles in public is an "offer to treat", an offer to negotiate. A potential customer can pick the merchandise up and examine it, and it is not valdalism, trespass, or theft. My position is that serving HTTP on its well-known port is also an offer to treat using GET requests.This is followed by negotiation using the limited access that has been granted. In a store, the buyer fondles and inspects the item and carries it to the seller. In HTTP, the client sends a request.
If the negotation is unsuccessful, rejection is given. In a store, the seller says "No way, $5 is already too cheap! Put it back on the shelf!" With HTTP, the server says "409, cough up a credit card number!"
If negotiation succeeds, the transaction executes. In a store, the person walks away with their new purchase. With HTTP, the server swallows the CC# and transmits the requested data.
Likewise, loitering is analogous to a denial of service attack. Everything has exact parallels with existing jurisprudence. The protocol designers did this on purpose, because they wanted it to be useful for people.
I think it can be clear. The problem is that too many complaintants don't really know what the hell they're complaining about, and being able to explain something clearly is a rare skill. That combination leaves judges floundering in a sea of ignorance. I inferred that they were gathering lists of people/companies/court results/etc. I think the main problem is that the state agencies were publishing valuable information but not bothering to cover the cost of access, and intimidating people who ran up their bills. To analogize, "Mr. Smith, you've been monopolizing the public records room for two days. Time to go." That's a valid strategy, if inefficient and a bit unjust. But that doesn't make Mr. Smith a criminal if he hires a string of college students to do his research, each of which gets the heave-ho after a couple of days.Given that there are formally standardized ways for conveying the intent, with mathetical precision and total lack of ambiguity, vague claims of intent and policy after the fact are unenforceable.
There is even a 503 Service Unavailable response, which lets you tell the client to piss off for any amount of time you choose. If you gave a 503 with a billion second delay, it would be illegal for a user to click the reload button on their browser.
And my point is that the restrictions are expressed by the site operator to the user by the status code of each HTTP reply. If the operator says 200 OK, the contents they want you to see follow.ROBOTS.TXT is just an voluntary gentleman's convention amongst certain bot authors. It postdates HTTP and does not modify the meaning of that standard. It is not authoritative; there is not even any way to obtain a legally-definitive copy of it. The authority statement from the Robots Exclusion Standard comes right out and says as much:
Any judge who finds that "violating" ROBOTS.TXT is a crime (pardon my French) is an asshole.
The standards authors realized that not all libraries should be free to the public, and specified cookies and other access control methods.
The specification defines HTTP POST requests as potentially causing permanent changes to the server. They are instructions to perform actions, not mere requests for public information. The client therefore must only issue POST requests pursuant to the server operator's wishes, and those wishes can be expressed by an HTML form containing a contract. And with HTTP, the owner gives access permission by fulfilling GET requests and denies permission by requiring a particular POST request first.Yeah, it's really inexcusable, and IMHO the main reason that Windows is such a cesspit of unsecurable software.