In effect, responsible admins are now safer -- the attack time has been reduced by 57 days (ok, there was the 5 day grace, so really only 52). Still, the response time from Microsoft is AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE better.
That's only true if you think that the timing of the Google engineer's release of the hole and people beginning to exploit it is entirely coincidental. On the other hand if you think there might be a causal link to explain the exploit appearing shortly after he told everyone how to exploit it, admins are in fact more vulnerable now.
And comparing the "response times" is only possible if you think that the two responses - releasing a hotfix that removes functionality and releasing an update that fixes the problem - are identical. If the security update comes out in the near future then all the Google engineer has done is inconvenience users by forcing Microsoft to remove functionality that otherwise would not have been a risk in the window before a patch was released.
What is the target purpose for this? Research experiments that could be done? What kind of safety goggles are used with this (material/wavelength tint/etc) and what kind of clothing/protective gear will NOT set on fire if accidental exposure should occur? Also, what kind of battery life are we looking at? (or is this a plug in stationary laser?)
As far as I can tell (and as I've pointed out a few times, notably here) the target purpose is making money for wickedlasers while harming consumers. I can't see what research would require a comparatively expensive laser that's been styled as a lightsaber. I can, however, see the possibility for causing extreme harm by selling a laser that is designed to look like a toy, but which can (and, if you use it as they suggest, almost certainly will) cause blindness, permanent vision problems, cancer and serious burns and which is supplied with what seem to be totally inadequate safety goggles.
That would seem to me fair. This isn't even on the same scale as lawn darts, it's a product that is almost impossible to use without the possibility of serious harm to yourself or others, but which is being marketed as a cool gadget and sold as a consumer-grade toy. To shamelessly quote from myself:
Using a blue laser this powerful can apparently (according to their own explanation):
-Cause blindness based only on diffuse scattering, eg off a wall, and at a considerable distance -Cause cancer from direct contact or diffuse scattering -Cause temporary or permanent damage to vision based on even more diffuse scattering, eg an inability to perceive the colour green -Burn skin or clothes on contact
The marketing encourages people to burn things and play with their "lightsaber", despite the fact that by their own admission doing so is likely to cause burns, vision damage and cancer. I find it incredibly irresponsible for a company to market something like this as a "cool toy". (and this is what they are doing - everything from the styling of the laser as a lightsaber, to the name "WickedLasers", to the samples sent to magazines like MAXIM and the emphasis on its awesome burning power is designed to market this as a toy, whatever they claim).
(PS I've just noticed that they claim that safety goggles with an optical density of 3+ are required to protect against accidental exposure to this laser, and that they suggest goggles with an optical density of 4.4+ to offer sufficient protection. But the goggles they supply (http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Green_532nm_LaserShields_Goggles-20-16.html) only seem to offer a density of 2+ at the wavelength of this laser. So the safety equipment they supply is, by their own admission, not adequate. Are they trying to behave as irresponsibly as possible? This company is trying to turn a profit on a product is likely blind or maim people trying to use it, especially if they rely on the provided "protective" gear. How is that even legal?)
Exactly. This is up there with making a gun that looks like a water pistol in terms of responsibility. If (or when?) someone is badly hurt I hope WickedLasers are forced to face the consequences of their decisions. This is one area where I think government regulation would certainly be desirable; companies should not be able to try to make a profit out of something so irresponsible, unethical and downright dangerous.
Except that that isn't actually the description from the right laser (the article seems to have got itself a bit confused about that). This light is the "Arctic" model, which doesn't seem to be designed for tactical operations so much as for causing permanent and terrible injury while making money for wickedlasers.
Designing this as a lightsaber (a "wicked" one, no less) and advertising it in magazines like MAXIM seems like a sick joke when you read about the effects it causes. Using a blue laser this powerful can apparently (according to their own explanation):
-Cause blindness based only on diffuse scattering, eg off a wall, and at a considerable distance -Cause cancer from direct contact or diffuse scattering -Cause temporary or permanent damage to vision based on even more diffuse scattering, eg an inability to perceive the colour green -Burn skin or clothes on contact
The marketing encourages people to burn things and play with their "lightsaber", despite the fact that by their own admission doing so is likely to cause burns, vision damage and cancer. I find it incredibly irresponsible for a company to market something like this as a "cool toy". (and this is what they are doing - everything from the styling of the laser as a lightsaber, to the name "WickedLasers", to the samples sent to magazines like MAXIM and the emphasis on its awesome burning power is designed to market this as a toy, whatever they claim).
(PS I've just noticed that they claim that safety goggles with an optical density of 3+ are required to protect against accidental exposure to this laser, and that they suggest goggles with an optical density of 4.4+ to offer sufficient protection. But the goggles they supply (http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Green_532nm_LaserShields_Goggles-20-16.html) only seem to offer a density of 2+ at the wavelength of this laser. So the safety equipment they supply is, by their own admission, not adequate. Are they trying to behave as irresponsibly as possible? This company is trying to turn a profit on a product is likely blind or maim people trying to use it, especially if they rely on the provided "protective" gear. How is that even legal?)
And yet it's being marketed as a toy - the company that sells it is called "wicked lasers", it's styled like a lightsaber, they've sent samples to magazines like MAXIM and their marketing push is basically "look how cool it is when you can burn stuff!". I find it very difficult to imagine someone buying one of these and using it safely - if only because with a laser this powerful, and designed in this way, there are so few safe uses. You can't use it inside, because it'll set fire to your house; you can't use it outside because it might reflect off something or hit someone/something and end up blinding someone.
If this becomes at all popular people are going to be blinded, maimed or killed by it. If that happens, I for one would like to see the company held responsible for its creation; making something this dangerous and then making it look like a toy is irresponsible, and they should have to take responsibility if their marketing works.
Again I'm no expert, but I don't think this does have so many uses - according to comments above you can already get laser diodes of comparable power for rather less, which would probably be more useful for a plotter than this. What this adds is the styling as a toy and as a weapon and the ability for people to buy one without any interest in making something.
This was exactly my thought. I'm not a laser expert, but according to some of the comments on this article even a diffuse reflection can instantly blind - this seems like exactly the sort of product that should not be sold by a responsible company, and I would even go so far as to say should be banned or heavily regulated by the government. All it would take is one accident and someone could blind their friends, family or self - or a deliberate user could permanently blind people as "prank".
As the summary suggest, a laser of this power is a weapon. I would like to see it accompanied by the same conditions of sale and use as a gun, since the risks are, if not the same, at least comparable - as with guns it would seem to me reasonable to prohibit its use within a city, since just as with a gun a misplaced "shot" is dangerous in a densely populated area.
Reading the safety warnings my reaction turned from "wow" to "this is horrible" - the name "wicked lasers", the marketing focused around burning things, the lightsaber styling - this is a weapon that is being marketed as a cool toy. It's incredibly irresponsible.
I've just upgraded my PC, pretty much exactly 5 years after buying it. Never came across a game I couldn't play, although the graphics began to look dated compared to modern hardware - just like with a 5 year old console.
I don't think you have to upgrade a gaming PC any more often than every 5 years - unless you want to.
If I've understood you correctly, that shouldn't be a problem; a third party can't normally sue to enforce someone else's rights. You can't have it both ways; if you're sufficiently divorced from Microsoft to avoid the "estoppel shield" you would have no right of action.
I don't know what Microsoft's promises were so I can't comment on that.
Again I add the disclaimer that I'm not your lawyer and you shouldn't take legal advice from people on the internet!
If what you're worried about Microsoft going back on their word and suing you, you shouldn't have anything to worry about - if they have indeed promised not to sue then you're protected by the principle of equitable estoppel - i.e. that if you act on their promise they cannot simply change their minds if it would be to your detriment.
Note - I am not your lawyer, don't rely on my advice! Plus, I'm assuming you're in America or the UK, where this principle exists.
If you're willing to question the definition of 'is', then any perfectly simple English sentence (including a one word sentence) can be reduced to a tangle of gibberish, but I argue that that is more a case of willful confusion rather than any inherent lack of clarity.
While that's certainly true, it isn't what I did. I'm not talking about "meaningfully contorting" anything, I'm suggesting that you cannot interpret this article unambiguously; there isn't enough information. In a manner of speaking, any interpretation will be a contortion, meaningful or not, because you have to bring in more information than is available in order to make sense of the article.
If you don't believe me I repeat my challenge to try to answer the questions I posed definitively.
Like most things, the meaning and intent is perfectly clear to anyone who actually wants to know what it says. Only those who hope it doesn't forbid what they want to do find it the least bit ambiguous.
If that were true then I wouldn't have been able to reel off a whole list of points that were not clear to me from reading the quotation.
The point isn't really whether each person finds the meaning clear, it's whether the phrases have only one possible interpretation - and that clearly isn't the case. If you don't believe me try answering all my questions and then playing "devil's advocate" - I think you'll find that you can't arrive at an interpretation that allows no doubt.
Perhaps you should choose your philosophical leaders more carefully, because I don't think Derrida ever considered the word 'blue'. The hindmost words are defined ostensibly -- by going outside and pointing at something, by reference to sensory data.
But isn't that rather the point? The word itself cannot embody anything fixed - the moment you aren't pointing at the exact colour you want to refer to the word is defined only by other words, which is to say not really defined at all. Taking the word "blue" as an example, blue is defined (as Derrida claimed all words are defined) by its difference to other words - that is to say we know that something is blue because it isn't red, green, magenta or any of the other colour definitions; in effect there is a gap and blue fills that gap.
Now let's say you go outside and point to the sky, saying "blue". Have you defined the word blue? Well, no - you've provided an example of blue. Does the fact that the sky is blue make anything else either more or less blue? And what if I disagree? What if I think the sky is not blue at all, but red? To what authority could we appeal to settle the question, since if we don't agree on what is blue we presumably don't agree on what is green or pink or yellow or any other colour and so any definition is bound to be contentious.
Again what you are saying is true but has no relevance here. I did not include the comma simply because I did not quote that part of the article; this has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not the sections I quoted were vague.
I suspect that you're bringing up the comma because you want to interpret only the second half of the article as having legal effect. While I would be happy to discuss with you whether or not that is appropriate, it remains totally irrelevant to the point I was making.
While it is undoubtedly true that punctuation in the original document is important when interpreting it, I don't see how that fact is relevant to any of the points I made in my comment. Moreover I did not forget the comma, it simply was not included in any of the short extracts I quoted.
None of the other phrases offer any substantial confusion to most people reading it today.
If that were true then I wouldn't have been able to reel off a whole list of points that were not clear to me from reading the quotation.
The point isn't really whether people find the phrases confusing, it's whether the phrases have only one possible interpretation - and that clearly isn't the case. If you don't believe me try answering them all and then playing "devil's advocate" - I think you'll find that you can't arrive at an interpretation that allows no doubt.
****A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.****
How the fuck is that vague? What part of SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED do people not understand?!?!?!
"A well regulated militia" - what exactly is a militia? When exactly does one become "well regulated" "the right" - is this an absolute right? Can it be contingent on something else, such as obeying the law? "the people" - who are the people? Does it refer to individuals or the collective? If it's the former, is it everyone, or only adults? What about foreign citizens? "keep and bear" - What exactly does this entail? Does the right to "keep and bear" also give the right to buy and sell? Can you bear the guns everywhere or only to certain places? "bear Arms" - what exactly are the arms? Does it include all weapons or only those envisioned by the framers? "shall not be infringed" - When is the right infringed - is it infringed if some guns are banned or only if all guns are banned? What about if all guns are banned but other weaponry is available? What if guns are not banned but are made prohibitively expensive - does this infringe on the right?
If you've ever read a modern contract you'll know the lengths lawyers have to go to to try to remove all uncertainty - and they almost never succeed. Derrida said that since every word is defined only by other words it doesn't matter how far back you go, you can never get to a solid anchor; change the underlying assumptions that the reader of a text holds and you change the meaning of the text, even though the words are still the same. Even if you could give an absolutely solid answer to every question I posed above - and you can't, no-one can - there would still be more questions. As the GP said - human language is vague.
I think the point is that the UPTO doesn't have the expertise to build any of this in-house, so they're looking for someone to do it for them and in the meantime letting Google give access to the information. Seems a reasonable solution to me.
I wish people would stop quoting large percent increases. They get the math wrong more often than not, so it is hard to tell what is intended.
The current average cost for the Nature group's journals is $4,465; under the 2011 pricing scheme, that would rise to more than $17,000 per journal, according to the California Digital Library.
The new price is about four times higher than the old price, a 300% increase, not a 400% increase.
*COUGH* three times higher... or four times the price.... kettle, Meet pot!
Is that really an error? I would have said "four times higher" was synonymous with "four times the price", so I Googled it and I can't find any examples of usage other than x times higher = now x times the previous level. Or am I wrong?
That's not true - XP users can purchase the upgrade version of Windows 7. From http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/get/upgrade-considerations.aspx : "All editions of Windows XP and Windows Vista qualify you to upgrade. So, if you're running either on your PC today, buy a package labeled "Upgrade"."
I wasn't differentiating between some highly-technical mechanical dispersal system and some guy popping a different canister in a $5 dispenser mounted at each entrance, as they basically do the same thing.
I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. There are two parts to the system: smell creation and smell dispersal, and it's the first of these that I think was being referred to by the "aroma space". In the context of the comment that spawned this discussion - the idea of "Smell-O-Vision" - ideally you'd want to be able to continuously create the smells to match the action on-screen; in a 90-minute movie I suspect there would simply be too many smells to make individual smell canisters a real option, so you'd want a device that mixed new smells to be dispersed.
Re:Any concept of what's involved in migration?
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Time To Dump XP?
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· Score: 1
I know the hardware requirements claim that it needs 2GB of RAM, but I had (until I upgraded) Windows 7 running on an Athlon 3000+ with 512 MB of RAM without any problems - it ran significantly faster than my kludged-up XP install had. If you have a 5-7 year old P4 with 512MB of RAM you can probably run Windows 7 on it while saving up to replace the box.
"Generating a system that would be flexible enough to cover a wide range of the "aroma space" is much more difficult."
Not at all. The big mall we have here in town manages numerous smells during all business hours.
I don't think he's referring to the ability to have a number of smells at once but rather the ability for one device to create any given smell; your mall example would only be capable of this by loading in canisters with all the smells you need, which is a less flexible solution.
One thing that would prevent the dissemination of fingerprints to authorities would be to hash the output of the mathematical fingerprint transform
I suspect the transform takes care of that anyway - it effectively creates a hash from a small number of points on the fingerprint. I'd be amazed if you could recover a print from it.
In addition, don't store any other data about the person.
Why? This is a school library - I don't really see that there's much risk of the data being used for nefarious purposes, and any anonymity would be illusory anyway since the librarian and teachers will probably know the kids' names. And storing information about the users would be enormously useful - for example to chase up late books and fines.
I'm struggling to think of any plausible scenario where it would be dangerous to store the names of children alongside their borrowings - especially since there are unlikely to be any "dangerous" books in a school library anyway. This seems to me a reasonable use of the technology - saves kids carrying and inevitably losing library cards and doesn't provide any information that the school didn't have already.
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In effect, responsible admins are now safer -- the attack time has been reduced by 57 days (ok, there was the 5 day grace, so really only 52). Still, the response time from Microsoft is AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE better.
That's only true if you think that the timing of the Google engineer's release of the hole and people beginning to exploit it is entirely coincidental. On the other hand if you think there might be a causal link to explain the exploit appearing shortly after he told everyone how to exploit it, admins are in fact more vulnerable now.
And comparing the "response times" is only possible if you think that the two responses - releasing a hotfix that removes functionality and releasing an update that fixes the problem - are identical. If the security update comes out in the near future then all the Google engineer has done is inconvenience users by forcing Microsoft to remove functionality that otherwise would not have been a risk in the window before a patch was released.
What is the target purpose for this? Research experiments that could be done? What kind of safety goggles are used with this (material/wavelength tint/etc) and what kind of clothing/protective gear will NOT set on fire if accidental exposure should occur? Also, what kind of battery life are we looking at? (or is this a plug in stationary laser?)
As far as I can tell (and as I've pointed out a few times, notably here) the target purpose is making money for wickedlasers while harming consumers. I can't see what research would require a comparatively expensive laser that's been styled as a lightsaber. I can, however, see the possibility for causing extreme harm by selling a laser that is designed to look like a toy, but which can (and, if you use it as they suggest, almost certainly will) cause blindness, permanent vision problems, cancer and serious burns and which is supplied with what seem to be totally inadequate safety goggles.
This product is awful.
That would seem to me fair. This isn't even on the same scale as lawn darts, it's a product that is almost impossible to use without the possibility of serious harm to yourself or others, but which is being marketed as a cool gadget and sold as a consumer-grade toy. To shamelessly quote from myself:
Using a blue laser this powerful can apparently (according to their own explanation):
-Cause blindness based only on diffuse scattering, eg off a wall, and at a considerable distance
-Cause cancer from direct contact or diffuse scattering
-Cause temporary or permanent damage to vision based on even more diffuse scattering, eg an inability to perceive the colour green
-Burn skin or clothes on contact
The marketing encourages people to burn things and play with their "lightsaber", despite the fact that by their own admission doing so is likely to cause burns, vision damage and cancer. I find it incredibly irresponsible for a company to market something like this as a "cool toy". (and this is what they are doing - everything from the styling of the laser as a lightsaber, to the name "WickedLasers", to the samples sent to magazines like MAXIM and the emphasis on its awesome burning power is designed to market this as a toy, whatever they claim).
(PS I've just noticed that they claim that safety goggles with an optical density of 3+ are required to protect against accidental exposure to this laser, and that they suggest goggles with an optical density of 4.4+ to offer sufficient protection. But the goggles they supply (http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Green_532nm_LaserShields_Goggles-20-16.html) only seem to offer a density of 2+ at the wavelength of this laser. So the safety equipment they supply is, by their own admission, not adequate. Are they trying to behave as irresponsibly as possible? This company is trying to turn a profit on a product is likely blind or maim people trying to use it, especially if they rely on the provided "protective" gear. How is that even legal?)
Exactly. This is up there with making a gun that looks like a water pistol in terms of responsibility. If (or when?) someone is badly hurt I hope WickedLasers are forced to face the consequences of their decisions. This is one area where I think government regulation would certainly be desirable; companies should not be able to try to make a profit out of something so irresponsible, unethical and downright dangerous.
Except that that isn't actually the description from the right laser (the article seems to have got itself a bit confused about that). This light is the "Arctic" model, which doesn't seem to be designed for tactical operations so much as for causing permanent and terrible injury while making money for wickedlasers.
Designing this as a lightsaber (a "wicked" one, no less) and advertising it in magazines like MAXIM seems like a sick joke when you read about the effects it causes. Using a blue laser this powerful can apparently (according to their own explanation):
-Cause blindness based only on diffuse scattering, eg off a wall, and at a considerable distance
-Cause cancer from direct contact or diffuse scattering
-Cause temporary or permanent damage to vision based on even more diffuse scattering, eg an inability to perceive the colour green
-Burn skin or clothes on contact
The marketing encourages people to burn things and play with their "lightsaber", despite the fact that by their own admission doing so is likely to cause burns, vision damage and cancer. I find it incredibly irresponsible for a company to market something like this as a "cool toy". (and this is what they are doing - everything from the styling of the laser as a lightsaber, to the name "WickedLasers", to the samples sent to magazines like MAXIM and the emphasis on its awesome burning power is designed to market this as a toy, whatever they claim).
(PS I've just noticed that they claim that safety goggles with an optical density of 3+ are required to protect against accidental exposure to this laser, and that they suggest goggles with an optical density of 4.4+ to offer sufficient protection. But the goggles they supply (http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Green_532nm_LaserShields_Goggles-20-16.html) only seem to offer a density of 2+ at the wavelength of this laser. So the safety equipment they supply is, by their own admission, not adequate. Are they trying to behave as irresponsibly as possible? This company is trying to turn a profit on a product is likely blind or maim people trying to use it, especially if they rely on the provided "protective" gear. How is that even legal?)
This laser is not a toy
And yet it's being marketed as a toy - the company that sells it is called "wicked lasers", it's styled like a lightsaber, they've sent samples to magazines like MAXIM and their marketing push is basically "look how cool it is when you can burn stuff!". I find it very difficult to imagine someone buying one of these and using it safely - if only because with a laser this powerful, and designed in this way, there are so few safe uses. You can't use it inside, because it'll set fire to your house; you can't use it outside because it might reflect off something or hit someone/something and end up blinding someone.
If this becomes at all popular people are going to be blinded, maimed or killed by it. If that happens, I for one would like to see the company held responsible for its creation; making something this dangerous and then making it look like a toy is irresponsible, and they should have to take responsibility if their marketing works.
Again I'm no expert, but I don't think this does have so many uses - according to comments above you can already get laser diodes of comparable power for rather less, which would probably be more useful for a plotter than this. What this adds is the styling as a toy and as a weapon and the ability for people to buy one without any interest in making something.
This was exactly my thought. I'm not a laser expert, but according to some of the comments on this article even a diffuse reflection can instantly blind - this seems like exactly the sort of product that should not be sold by a responsible company, and I would even go so far as to say should be banned or heavily regulated by the government. All it would take is one accident and someone could blind their friends, family or self - or a deliberate user could permanently blind people as "prank".
As the summary suggest, a laser of this power is a weapon. I would like to see it accompanied by the same conditions of sale and use as a gun, since the risks are, if not the same, at least comparable - as with guns it would seem to me reasonable to prohibit its use within a city, since just as with a gun a misplaced "shot" is dangerous in a densely populated area.
Reading the safety warnings my reaction turned from "wow" to "this is horrible" - the name "wicked lasers", the marketing focused around burning things, the lightsaber styling - this is a weapon that is being marketed as a cool toy. It's incredibly irresponsible.
I've just upgraded my PC, pretty much exactly 5 years after buying it. Never came across a game I couldn't play, although the graphics began to look dated compared to modern hardware - just like with a 5 year old console.
I don't think you have to upgrade a gaming PC any more often than every 5 years - unless you want to.
If I've understood you correctly, that shouldn't be a problem; a third party can't normally sue to enforce someone else's rights. You can't have it both ways; if you're sufficiently divorced from Microsoft to avoid the "estoppel shield" you would have no right of action.
I don't know what Microsoft's promises were so I can't comment on that.
Again I add the disclaimer that I'm not your lawyer and you shouldn't take legal advice from people on the internet!
If what you're worried about Microsoft going back on their word and suing you, you shouldn't have anything to worry about - if they have indeed promised not to sue then you're protected by the principle of equitable estoppel - i.e. that if you act on their promise they cannot simply change their minds if it would be to your detriment.
Note - I am not your lawyer, don't rely on my advice! Plus, I'm assuming you're in America or the UK, where this principle exists.
If you're willing to question the definition of 'is', then any perfectly simple English sentence (including a one word sentence) can be reduced to a tangle of gibberish, but I argue that that is more a case of willful confusion rather than any inherent lack of clarity.
While that's certainly true, it isn't what I did. I'm not talking about "meaningfully contorting" anything, I'm suggesting that you cannot interpret this article unambiguously; there isn't enough information. In a manner of speaking, any interpretation will be a contortion, meaningful or not, because you have to bring in more information than is available in order to make sense of the article.
If you don't believe me I repeat my challenge to try to answer the questions I posed definitively.
Like most things, the meaning and intent is perfectly clear to anyone who actually wants to know what it says. Only those who hope it doesn't forbid what they want to do find it the least bit ambiguous.
If that were true then I wouldn't have been able to reel off a whole list of points that were not clear to me from reading the quotation.
The point isn't really whether each person finds the meaning clear, it's whether the phrases have only one possible interpretation - and that clearly isn't the case. If you don't believe me try answering all my questions and then playing "devil's advocate" - I think you'll find that you can't arrive at an interpretation that allows no doubt.
Perhaps you should choose your philosophical leaders more carefully, because I don't think Derrida ever considered the word 'blue'. The hindmost words are defined ostensibly -- by going outside and pointing at something, by reference to sensory data.
But isn't that rather the point? The word itself cannot embody anything fixed - the moment you aren't pointing at the exact colour you want to refer to the word is defined only by other words, which is to say not really defined at all. Taking the word "blue" as an example, blue is defined (as Derrida claimed all words are defined) by its difference to other words - that is to say we know that something is blue because it isn't red, green, magenta or any of the other colour definitions; in effect there is a gap and blue fills that gap.
Now let's say you go outside and point to the sky, saying "blue". Have you defined the word blue? Well, no - you've provided an example of blue. Does the fact that the sky is blue make anything else either more or less blue? And what if I disagree? What if I think the sky is not blue at all, but red? To what authority could we appeal to settle the question, since if we don't agree on what is blue we presumably don't agree on what is green or pink or yellow or any other colour and so any definition is bound to be contentious.
Again what you are saying is true but has no relevance here. I did not include the comma simply because I did not quote that part of the article; this has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not the sections I quoted were vague.
I suspect that you're bringing up the comma because you want to interpret only the second half of the article as having legal effect. While I would be happy to discuss with you whether or not that is appropriate, it remains totally irrelevant to the point I was making.
While it is undoubtedly true that punctuation in the original document is important when interpreting it, I don't see how that fact is relevant to any of the points I made in my comment. Moreover I did not forget the comma, it simply was not included in any of the short extracts I quoted.
None of the other phrases offer any substantial confusion to most people reading it today.
If that were true then I wouldn't have been able to reel off a whole list of points that were not clear to me from reading the quotation.
The point isn't really whether people find the phrases confusing, it's whether the phrases have only one possible interpretation - and that clearly isn't the case. If you don't believe me try answering them all and then playing "devil's advocate" - I think you'll find that you can't arrive at an interpretation that allows no doubt.
Also, human language is vague.
****A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.****
How the fuck is that vague? What part of SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED do people not understand?!?!?!
"A well regulated militia" - what exactly is a militia? When exactly does one become "well regulated"
"the right" - is this an absolute right? Can it be contingent on something else, such as obeying the law?
"the people" - who are the people? Does it refer to individuals or the collective? If it's the former, is it everyone, or only adults? What about foreign citizens?
"keep and bear" - What exactly does this entail? Does the right to "keep and bear" also give the right to buy and sell? Can you bear the guns everywhere or only to certain places?
"bear Arms" - what exactly are the arms? Does it include all weapons or only those envisioned by the framers?
"shall not be infringed" - When is the right infringed - is it infringed if some guns are banned or only if all guns are banned? What about if all guns are banned but other weaponry is available? What if guns are not banned but are made prohibitively expensive - does this infringe on the right?
If you've ever read a modern contract you'll know the lengths lawyers have to go to to try to remove all uncertainty - and they almost never succeed. Derrida said that since every word is defined only by other words it doesn't matter how far back you go, you can never get to a solid anchor; change the underlying assumptions that the reader of a text holds and you change the meaning of the text, even though the words are still the same. Even if you could give an absolutely solid answer to every question I posed above - and you can't, no-one can - there would still be more questions. As the GP said - human language is vague.
I think the point is that the UPTO doesn't have the expertise to build any of this in-house, so they're looking for someone to do it for them and in the meantime letting Google give access to the information. Seems a reasonable solution to me.
I wish people would stop quoting large percent increases. They get the math wrong more often than not, so it is hard to tell what is intended.
The current average cost for the Nature group's journals is $4,465; under the 2011 pricing scheme, that would rise to more than $17,000 per journal, according to the California Digital Library.
The new price is about four times higher than the old price, a 300% increase, not a 400% increase.
*COUGH* three times higher... or four times the price.... kettle, Meet pot!
Is that really an error? I would have said "four times higher" was synonymous with "four times the price", so I Googled it and I can't find any examples of usage other than x times higher = now x times the previous level. Or am I wrong?
Upgrade is out, because you're on XP
That's not true - XP users can purchase the upgrade version of Windows 7. From http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/get/upgrade-considerations.aspx : "All editions of Windows XP and Windows Vista qualify you to upgrade. So, if you're running either on your PC today, buy a package labeled "Upgrade"."
I wasn't differentiating between some highly-technical mechanical dispersal system and some guy popping a different canister in a $5 dispenser mounted at each entrance, as they basically do the same thing.
I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. There are two parts to the system: smell creation and smell dispersal, and it's the first of these that I think was being referred to by the "aroma space". In the context of the comment that spawned this discussion - the idea of "Smell-O-Vision" - ideally you'd want to be able to continuously create the smells to match the action on-screen; in a 90-minute movie I suspect there would simply be too many smells to make individual smell canisters a real option, so you'd want a device that mixed new smells to be dispersed.
I know the hardware requirements claim that it needs 2GB of RAM, but I had (until I upgraded) Windows 7 running on an Athlon 3000+ with 512 MB of RAM without any problems - it ran significantly faster than my kludged-up XP install had. If you have a 5-7 year old P4 with 512MB of RAM you can probably run Windows 7 on it while saving up to replace the box.
"Generating a system that would be flexible enough to cover a wide range of the "aroma space" is much more difficult."
Not at all. The big mall we have here in town manages numerous smells during all business hours.
I don't think he's referring to the ability to have a number of smells at once but rather the ability for one device to create any given smell; your mall example would only be capable of this by loading in canisters with all the smells you need, which is a less flexible solution.
One thing that would prevent the dissemination of fingerprints to authorities would be to hash the output of the mathematical fingerprint transform
I suspect the transform takes care of that anyway - it effectively creates a hash from a small number of points on the fingerprint. I'd be amazed if you could recover a print from it.
In addition, don't store any other data about the person.
Why? This is a school library - I don't really see that there's much risk of the data being used for nefarious purposes, and any anonymity would be illusory anyway since the librarian and teachers will probably know the kids' names. And storing information about the users would be enormously useful - for example to chase up late books and fines.
I'm struggling to think of any plausible scenario where it would be dangerous to store the names of children alongside their borrowings - especially since there are unlikely to be any "dangerous" books in a school library anyway. This seems to me a reasonable use of the technology - saves kids carrying and inevitably losing library cards and doesn't provide any information that the school didn't have already.