This isn't just about their own population. Violating the sovereignty of a friendly nation's embassy contravenes centuries of international law. This is the kind of action one would only expect from a rogue state.
Among other things, if they do this, you can expect the European Parliament to come down *hard* on one of their member states for violating international law, and therefore damaging the standing of the European Union in international negotiations.
Err, that's specifically what this is designed to solve. If you can show that prior art existed in public before the patent was filed, the patent is void. End of story.
Whereas currently, you have to prove that the patent troll didn't invent the item before the prior art existed. So you've got to go into this complicated discovery process to prove things one way or another. The first-to-file system solves a lot of the he-said she-said nature of current lawsuits as everything relevant is on the public record, simplifying them significantly.
Precisely. The advantage that Android retains over developing for iOS devices, though, is that if Amazon shoot down your application on whatever grounds (such as what happens with Apple), you can always be sure that you'll be able to find another app store to publish through.
What I think that we'll see is 'tiered' app stores - Amazon and perhaps a couple of other companies will run the top tiered app stores where everything is carefully checked and things like pornography is not allowed; then Google and a couple of other companies will run mid-tier app stores which allow pornography and run a relatively small amount of malware-checking; and then there'll be bottom-tier app stores which sell whatever to whoever, including completely illegal software. At least this means that developers won't be completely left out in the cold, although obviously the higher-tier store, the better for most things.
There's no doubt that Bin Laden is a fervent Islamist fundamentalist. Without doubt, he will not be satisfied with anything less than the subjugation and conversion of the entire world to Islam. The real question, though, is how does he continue to attract so many followers and so much support? The vast majority of people, no matter their religion, are perfectly happy spending their life living as best they can (being the "sheeple" that some around here seem to detest so much) - they wouldn't have anything to do with such dangerous ideology if there wasn't something driving them to do it. The way that those who want peace can win is by leaving fanatics left all alone.
I'd beg to differ, to be honest. Voting for your representative rather than your party sounds nice, and in fact before the previous election I supported the idea. Unfortunately, having that situation turn into a reality (3 independents now hold the balance of power here in Australia) has shown what that leads to: pork and unreliable ability to deliver the policies that the party was elected on. I hear a lot of Americans complain about the incompetence of their government; have you ever considered that perhaps it's because of the every-man-for-himself style of legislative body you have? Where every representative has to spend all of their time trying to wrangle things for their seats, as otherwise their seats would get nothing? What if all money spent in a state was purely on the basis of nation-wide policy, rather than individual bits of cash added into legislation purely to benefit the representative's chances of being voted back in? Maybe you wouldn't have so much ineffectiveness in your government
I'm not saying that our system doesn't have problems - far from it, and in many ways the US does it better. But I think that legislating for a whole nation rather than just bits of is a much better fit for a federal legislative body.
Hey, that would have been a really good reason to do it. Unfortunately, the real reason was just to tie the lesson into an upcoming movie about Australia being invaded. She was just teaching the kids how to mount a resistance!:P
Ah, so you prefer the Thai model then, where every time an election happens, the losers' people are bussed into the capital to shut it down (airports, government buildings, etc.), crippling the economy? And then the government might resign, their opponents take over (despite their electoral loss), and then the previous government's supporters are bussed into the capital to shut it down all over again? Crippled government and anarchy - that's the way any respectable country should go.
Every independent survey run found wide support for an R rating for games amoung the Australian community: Link (reference in there to a survey finding 88% support). Atkinson is considerably more conservative than his base on the issue - this is (or was) a politician's individual crusade, not him representing his electorate.
Err, nooo, the big difference is that densely populated Asia is not far enough north to be affected by this. Russia would be knocked out, Mongolia and Kazakhstan would be knocked out, and if it was a really, really bad storm, it might reach Beijing (but to be that bad it'd need to make it well into northern California). But most of China and all of southern and south-east Asia would be fine. Equally, Africa is pretty much immune - only Chile, Argentina, New Zealand's south island and the Australian state Tasmania would be affected in the southern hemisphere (well, along with the researchers at the Antarctic bases, obviously). Meanwhile, half of Europe's population and a fair chunk of the US's would be hit by this. Those densely populated places are where things would get really nasty.
Hmm, I wonder what the impact of fining a governing body whenever its legislative arm makes an unconstitutional law would be. If you, say, issued a fine of 0.001% of their next budget if a law is struck down by SCOTUS, and the money was distributed to all of the other governments in the USA (1/3 to the federal*, the rest to the other states), would people start caring if their representatives were passing stupid laws?
*If it *were* the federal government that passed it, the money should probably be split amoung the states of all of the lawmakers who voted against the bill.
Telling us doesn't do much; on the other hand, the Government has opened up a public consultation on the matter, so telling them might make things happen. Just make sure you keep it reasonable and rational, or you might end up being counter-productive.
Armageddon and other Hollywood flicks have lead us to believe that we have the power to blow apart masses thousands of kilometers wide, which I really don't think we do.
Th-thousands of kilometres?! Good god, how many rogue planets are there? Earth is only 12,000km across.
No, the asteroid that is likely to have wiped out the dinosaurs and created the K-T boundary was estimated to be about 10km in diameter, and that impact is estimated to have had the power of about 100 trillion tonnes of TNT - about 2 million times the size of the largest nuclear bomb ever tested (Wikipedia link).
No comment on whether that would be feasible. It's within the realms of possibility with current technology, but would be incredibly, ridiculously difficult. Still, saving the species may be worth it.
The rear half of a mutant rat, with a nice green-brown mold for extra flavour. Delicious. Unfortunately breakfast was interrupted by the other blokes digging a pit under our position and I lost it in the ensuing fight.
Now, with that out of the way, I too dislike feeling like I'm a pretend character, essentially because I tend to get too sucked in if I allow it. I like my life, I don't want to feel like I need to be someone else to enjoy myself. But I play games to explore other peoples' minds - the minds of the game designers and developers.
Different people have different reasons for playing (or reading or watching). There is no one true way, and I reject any attempt to impose your preferences on my enjoyment.
Finally, his code seems typical of what I've seen from good LISP programmers -- including even at times myself. Poor documentation. The code is simple, elegant, and should "speak for itself". Well it doesn't. Not to someone trying to maintain it.
C programmers -- perhaps because of the nature of the language -- seem less prone to this particular trap, though still bad.
Most likely because it's much easier to verbalise what a small segment of C is doing compared to a small segment of LISP. When writing C, I usually have a mental running commentary of what each line of code is doing. When writing LISP, I found that thinking about what it was doing in English was only stuffing me up, and I really had to let go of that kind of 'verbal thought' and think quite differently - in some ways more mathematically, but in some ways unique to functional programming. All this does make it a little more difficult to write comments for LISP, since 'shifting gears' to write in plain English is a much more difficult leap.
Of course, religion based ethics say no. But what about your own, non-religious ethics?
I can't speak for the GP, but my own non-religious ethics would definitely say no. Using disproportionate influence gained in a manner that is against the agreed-upon rules to do something that affects those who followed the rules and would not want that outcome is not just - when there is general agreement that the rules are appropriate, then breaking them is not the right thing to do, no matter what you believe will result. Unless the rules are clearly unjust, work within them for change.
Followers of Abrahamic (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) religions do what they feel is the good thing to do. Good and evil - morality - requires an absolute arbiter, which they have in their god. I do not believe in a universal arbiter, therefore I do not believe in good or evil. Instead, I see actions as right or wrong - justice as best we can see it with our imperfect understanding. We may not get it right every time, but in accepting that our notion of justice is imperfect we have the capacity to learn and improve.
Yup, one of the funny little twists that result from relativity is something that happened 630 million years ago also happened just now from a different frame of reference, and both are entirely accurate. So from the perpective of the right frame of reference (in this case, it would involve something travelling at 99.9999999999999% of the speed of light from our frame), this is a recent event.
The glitch was "We hadn't realised how many people we were going to piss off with this." I particularly love Amazon's response to the request for more detail in the second link in the parent.
So far as I can see, democracies have never had anything to do with the will of the public, just the will of their elected (from a pitifully small selection of) representatives.
Here's a rarely acknowledged truth about democracies: The main strength of democracies isn't that you can choose who get's in to power. It's that you can easily kick leaders out of power.
The true strength of democracies is that they don't descend into civil war on a regular basis whenever a leader like Nixon or Bush comes along. The idea that you can choose who replaces them is cute, but doesn't really stack up all that well with the facts and, really, isn't nearly as important.
Sorry, but that's utter tripe. Sure, once you've made it you might not have to work hard if you don't want to. But, unless you're born to it, you do have to work hard to get places - even if you're lucky or even corrupt. I used to have this attitude too, figuring that I'd just do the bare minimum of work that would give me the chance of getting that golden luck. It got me absolutely nowhere - if you really want to build a business or launch a product, you've got to work your freaking arse off.
I'm not entirely sure where I got the idea that if I'm working hard then I'm not doing it right, but I know that it sabotaged me for years. Hard work by itself doesn't directly equate into wealth - if you're not working on something that won't be particularly profitable, no matter how hard you work you're not going to get much out of it. But not working hard means you're definitely not going to make it, unless you'd prefer to count on winning the lottery.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't just about their own population. Violating the sovereignty of a friendly nation's embassy contravenes centuries of international law. This is the kind of action one would only expect from a rogue state.
Among other things, if they do this, you can expect the European Parliament to come down *hard* on one of their member states for violating international law, and therefore damaging the standing of the European Union in international negotiations.
The latest is that The Age has prevented the police from taking the computers through legal injunction. Nice to see that occasionally this kind of madness can be stopped sometimes.
Err, that's specifically what this is designed to solve. If you can show that prior art existed in public before the patent was filed, the patent is void. End of story.
Whereas currently, you have to prove that the patent troll didn't invent the item before the prior art existed. So you've got to go into this complicated discovery process to prove things one way or another. The first-to-file system solves a lot of the he-said she-said nature of current lawsuits as everything relevant is on the public record, simplifying them significantly.
Precisely. The advantage that Android retains over developing for iOS devices, though, is that if Amazon shoot down your application on whatever grounds (such as what happens with Apple), you can always be sure that you'll be able to find another app store to publish through.
What I think that we'll see is 'tiered' app stores - Amazon and perhaps a couple of other companies will run the top tiered app stores where everything is carefully checked and things like pornography is not allowed; then Google and a couple of other companies will run mid-tier app stores which allow pornography and run a relatively small amount of malware-checking; and then there'll be bottom-tier app stores which sell whatever to whoever, including completely illegal software. At least this means that developers won't be completely left out in the cold, although obviously the higher-tier store, the better for most things.
There's no doubt that Bin Laden is a fervent Islamist fundamentalist. Without doubt, he will not be satisfied with anything less than the subjugation and conversion of the entire world to Islam. The real question, though, is how does he continue to attract so many followers and so much support? The vast majority of people, no matter their religion, are perfectly happy spending their life living as best they can (being the "sheeple" that some around here seem to detest so much) - they wouldn't have anything to do with such dangerous ideology if there wasn't something driving them to do it. The way that those who want peace can win is by leaving fanatics left all alone.
*cough*
If there's no such thing as free will, there's no such thing as evil. Just saying.
I'd beg to differ, to be honest. Voting for your representative rather than your party sounds nice, and in fact before the previous election I supported the idea. Unfortunately, having that situation turn into a reality (3 independents now hold the balance of power here in Australia) has shown what that leads to: pork and unreliable ability to deliver the policies that the party was elected on. I hear a lot of Americans complain about the incompetence of their government; have you ever considered that perhaps it's because of the every-man-for-himself style of legislative body you have? Where every representative has to spend all of their time trying to wrangle things for their seats, as otherwise their seats would get nothing? What if all money spent in a state was purely on the basis of nation-wide policy, rather than individual bits of cash added into legislation purely to benefit the representative's chances of being voted back in? Maybe you wouldn't have so much ineffectiveness in your government
I'm not saying that our system doesn't have problems - far from it, and in many ways the US does it better. But I think that legislating for a whole nation rather than just bits of is a much better fit for a federal legislative body.
If you bother to RTFS, you'll note that they worked with the content providers - they shut the servers down themselves. No hacking involved.
Hey, that would have been a really good reason to do it. Unfortunately, the real reason was just to tie the lesson into an upcoming movie about Australia being invaded. She was just teaching the kids how to mount a resistance! :P
Ah, so you prefer the Thai model then, where every time an election happens, the losers' people are bussed into the capital to shut it down (airports, government buildings, etc.), crippling the economy? And then the government might resign, their opponents take over (despite their electoral loss), and then the previous government's supporters are bussed into the capital to shut it down all over again? Crippled government and anarchy - that's the way any respectable country should go.
While I'm not in favour of religion myself, Bach's body of work (amoung many, many others) might just disagree with you...
Every independent survey run found wide support for an R rating for games amoung the Australian community: Link (reference in there to a survey finding 88% support). Atkinson is considerably more conservative than his base on the issue - this is (or was) a politician's individual crusade, not him representing his electorate.
Err, nooo, the big difference is that densely populated Asia is not far enough north to be affected by this. Russia would be knocked out, Mongolia and Kazakhstan would be knocked out, and if it was a really, really bad storm, it might reach Beijing (but to be that bad it'd need to make it well into northern California). But most of China and all of southern and south-east Asia would be fine. Equally, Africa is pretty much immune - only Chile, Argentina, New Zealand's south island and the Australian state Tasmania would be affected in the southern hemisphere (well, along with the researchers at the Antarctic bases, obviously). Meanwhile, half of Europe's population and a fair chunk of the US's would be hit by this. Those densely populated places are where things would get really nasty.
Hmm, I wonder what the impact of fining a governing body whenever its legislative arm makes an unconstitutional law would be. If you, say, issued a fine of 0.001% of their next budget if a law is struck down by SCOTUS, and the money was distributed to all of the other governments in the USA (1/3 to the federal*, the rest to the other states), would people start caring if their representatives were passing stupid laws?
*If it *were* the federal government that passed it, the money should probably be split amoung the states of all of the lawmakers who voted against the bill.
Anywho, random thought.
Telling us doesn't do much; on the other hand, the Government has opened up a public consultation on the matter, so telling them might make things happen. Just make sure you keep it reasonable and rational, or you might end up being counter-productive.
Th-thousands of kilometres?! Good god, how many rogue planets are there? Earth is only 12,000km across.
No, the asteroid that is likely to have wiped out the dinosaurs and created the K-T boundary was estimated to be about 10km in diameter, and that impact is estimated to have had the power of about 100 trillion tonnes of TNT - about 2 million times the size of the largest nuclear bomb ever tested (Wikipedia link).
No comment on whether that would be feasible. It's within the realms of possibility with current technology, but would be incredibly, ridiculously difficult. Still, saving the species may be worth it.
The rear half of a mutant rat, with a nice green-brown mold for extra flavour. Delicious. Unfortunately breakfast was interrupted by the other blokes digging a pit under our position and I lost it in the ensuing fight.
Now, with that out of the way, I too dislike feeling like I'm a pretend character, essentially because I tend to get too sucked in if I allow it. I like my life, I don't want to feel like I need to be someone else to enjoy myself. But I play games to explore other peoples' minds - the minds of the game designers and developers.
Different people have different reasons for playing (or reading or watching). There is no one true way, and I reject any attempt to impose your preferences on my enjoyment.
Most likely because it's much easier to verbalise what a small segment of C is doing compared to a small segment of LISP. When writing C, I usually have a mental running commentary of what each line of code is doing. When writing LISP, I found that thinking about what it was doing in English was only stuffing me up, and I really had to let go of that kind of 'verbal thought' and think quite differently - in some ways more mathematically, but in some ways unique to functional programming. All this does make it a little more difficult to write comments for LISP, since 'shifting gears' to write in plain English is a much more difficult leap.
I can't speak for the GP, but my own non-religious ethics would definitely say no. Using disproportionate influence gained in a manner that is against the agreed-upon rules to do something that affects those who followed the rules and would not want that outcome is not just - when there is general agreement that the rules are appropriate, then breaking them is not the right thing to do, no matter what you believe will result. Unless the rules are clearly unjust, work within them for change.
Followers of Abrahamic (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) religions do what they feel is the good thing to do. Good and evil - morality - requires an absolute arbiter, which they have in their god. I do not believe in a universal arbiter, therefore I do not believe in good or evil. Instead, I see actions as right or wrong - justice as best we can see it with our imperfect understanding. We may not get it right every time, but in accepting that our notion of justice is imperfect we have the capacity to learn and improve.
Are these the designs that you're looking for?
Yup, one of the funny little twists that result from relativity is something that happened 630 million years ago also happened just now from a different frame of reference, and both are entirely accurate. So from the perpective of the right frame of reference (in this case, it would involve something travelling at 99.9999999999999% of the speed of light from our frame), this is a recent event.
The glitch was "We hadn't realised how many people we were going to piss off with this." I particularly love Amazon's response to the request for more detail in the second link in the parent.
Yeah, I second that. Apparently they're only happy with the Japanese making new toys if they stay in their own country.
Here's a rarely acknowledged truth about democracies:
The main strength of democracies isn't that you can choose who get's in to power. It's that you can easily kick leaders out of power.
The true strength of democracies is that they don't descend into civil war on a regular basis whenever a leader like Nixon or Bush comes along. The idea that you can choose who replaces them is cute, but doesn't really stack up all that well with the facts and, really, isn't nearly as important.
Sorry, but that's utter tripe. Sure, once you've made it you might not have to work hard if you don't want to. But, unless you're born to it, you do have to work hard to get places - even if you're lucky or even corrupt. I used to have this attitude too, figuring that I'd just do the bare minimum of work that would give me the chance of getting that golden luck. It got me absolutely nowhere - if you really want to build a business or launch a product, you've got to work your freaking arse off.
I'm not entirely sure where I got the idea that if I'm working hard then I'm not doing it right, but I know that it sabotaged me for years. Hard work by itself doesn't directly equate into wealth - if you're not working on something that won't be particularly profitable, no matter how hard you work you're not going to get much out of it. But not working hard means you're definitely not going to make it, unless you'd prefer to count on winning the lottery.