Not only stupid, INCORRECT. Before I was a programmer I worked in a high end restaurant. I made minimum wage (plus tips) and had to pay for any food I ate, the cheapest entree being right around my take home pay for any given day. Getting caught even eating a breadstick while on the job could get you fired, since they were $8 a basket (or two free with a pasta entree). Stuff like steak and lobster was a week's pay.
I did not spend 5 1/2 years in a University racking up $30000 in debt to continue to work for minimum wage in a restaurant. That is what Philosophy majors do, not Engineers.
Free software makes sense if someone is paying you to develop the hardware the software runs on and you can make it proprietary to the hardware, but once you take away the hardware, how do software developers get paid? In the RMS model, the hardware providers pay for software development, but for most real world software houses, this doesn't happen anymore. The next level down would be customers pay for software development, but my experience is customers don't know what they want until they have it.
As a compromise, the company I work for publishes all of our data formats (at least in my division) and nearly everything exports to XML. That means competitors and free software can create their own implementation, and people have. I even know of some GPL3 implementations of parts of our software. They're pretty crappy and very buggy, but they're free. We also use software like Solr and pay for Solr support, which shows non commercial vendors and commercial vendors can coexist - but we could never do this with GPL.
While at it, could you point to where Congress authorized the NSA to spy on domestic calls? It isn't in the Patriot Act.
Actually, it has its roots in the Patriot Act - Congress allowed the NSA to spy on foreign to domestic calls, whereas before the Patriot Act they were not allowed to operate at all on US soil and had to defer all domestic spying to the FBI (as it should be).
The problem is, they took a 1970s court case where the FBI used call metadata (i.e. a list of phone numbers) called by a known criminal who had repeatedly been convicted of threatening young women and making terroristic threats to get a warrant to tap the criminal's phone line when he was making terroristic threats to yet another young woman. The FBI then got a warrant and tapped his line and he was busted calling and threatening this young woman. He then sued the FBI because they hadn't gotten a warrant to get the metadata in the first place, but the court threw it out, so the NSA uses that as justification that they can collect all phone metadata from all US citizens. The tiny problem is the NSA isn't supposed to spy on Americans by law, they're supposed to defer that to the FBI. If I recall correctly, the FBI usually requires a warrant to even collect metadata, but that case was an exception since a person's life was in danger and they had a suspect.
I'm glad Civ I didn't keep statistics. I played the mac version probably 1500 hours straight (yeah, I'm kidding, but I did log insane hours on it). Mac Civ I was closer to PC Civ 2 than PC Civ 1 (especially graphics-wise), and I logged a lot of hours on both mac and PC Civ 2, as well. I didn't buy into Civ 3+ as much, only about 180 hours on Civ 3, 120 on Civ IV, and 155 on Civ V. Civ IV and V include expansions. The Total War series has a similar trend for me, and while I was late to the party and missed Shogun, I logged thousands of hours on Medieval.
I only made it about 75 hours. The cardboard character and repetitive combat got dull. The dragon stuff was amusing for a while, but I got to the point where even the dragons fights were just tedium. It plays too much like its predecessors and all quests are just skin deep with no real overarching consequences. It just reminded me of a quest in Oblivion where if you were female (I played Oblivion through twice, once as male and once as female to see what differences there were... basically minimal, and the game was short if you wanted it to be), a group of female bandits offered for you to join them, but your only option was to betray them and then kill them all. I wanted a choice where I could join the bandits and maybe got to rob a couple of caravans and then maybe faced consequences for it later. If the only choice I get is the one developers made for me, it isn't much of a choice. About the only choice you have in these games in major factions to join, and those have no impact on anything, really. Ooh, I'm a vampire. Ooh, I'm a werewolf. Ooh, I'm bored.
I hate to be cynical, because they are good games, and they did keep my attention for 75 hours (but Morrowind was 300+ for me...), but I feel like I should have some investment in keeping the townsfolk alive rather than just slaughtering them and not feeling bad at all about them. Gothic (the original, the sequels went downhill, probably because the original programming team left) made me feel this way 13 years ago, so I don't think it is too much to ask.
I don't recall any issues with Witcher 1, but Witcher 2 and Skyrim both had serious video driver issues on release and not patching them caused relatively quick crashes for some people, includnig me (for that matter, Witcher 2 died on the intro video for me without a video driver patch). Oblivion had a lot less video issues, but was built on top of a very dated engine that was dying a quick death (in fact, it was largely abandoned by the time Oblivion shipped, with most of its programmers laid off).
I had some issues with saves on both Witcher 1 and Witcher 2, both of which were fixed by going back to an earlier save. Backtracking sucked, but was really the only solution.
I've done a couple of 100s, but I'm hoping that never happens again. I was working Quality Assurance and Systems Engineering on a project for a major customer when 9/11 hit, and exactly 1 month later, the entire team was laid off except me and the documentation writer (all four devs and both full time QA people). We had a fixed deadline to ship to that customer, Jan 1 with 1 month manufacturing lag, so I had to be done by Dec 1, and coding wasn't even complete. The substitute programmers burned the midnight oil and handed me a first working copy mid-November and I worked 117 hours that week first configuring the environment to be like the customers and then testing (tests which were thankfully mostly scripted, but there were 1100 of them), sleeping all but one night in the office, usually about 2-3 hours. Round 2 (after bugfixes) was the next week, where I tallied 106 hours, mainly because I was not allowed to work on Thanksgiving day.
I couldn't go to my managers to ask for help because a) my manager and his direct report got laid off, b) my new manager didn't know the project at all and had just been bumped from peon into management (but she eventually turned out to be the best manager I ever had), and c) training alone would suck up two weeks of my time... but 70% of QA was laid off, so there was nobody to train - everyone else had to be on board for a March product release that had just lost 1/2 its staff (again a customer commitment).
Two months after that, we hired our first 1000 workers (roughly) in India and it probably took 2 months to ramp them up. They may cost 1/3-1/4 as much, but early on many of them were worth what you paid for, which is not much. The cultural taboo of reporting bugs being an insult to the programmers that wrote the code didn't help. After about 5 years, their quality improved and then we started hiring Chinese and had a similar ramp up. Now I think both groups are quite decent, but I don't think firing over 60% of the US workforce without transitioning knowledge was the brightest way to transition to that (and yeah, that is jumping in with both feet...).
There may be a setting to bypass that. While I don't know about Time Warner, I have DISH and the default is for the DVR not to allow external recordings, but you uncheck a menu option with a three letter name (SCV, I believe) and then they are allowed.
My guess is they'll be prevented from buying further media - if they were also acquiring Time Warner media, I think all hell would break loose, but the cable and media parts were split. I really dislike that Comcast is allowed to own NBC and Universal, as it creates all kinds of ground for price gouging, but the US regulators are in the pockets of the corporations, so I only suspect this will get much, much worse before it gets better.
Not necessarily - I've seen flywheels used to store mechanical energy. Supposedly if these are operated in a vacuum with magnetic bearings they are very efficient both at storing and recovering energy with little loss (mechanical bearings have quite a bit of loss). Both molten salt and mechanical storage lose energy over time, however, so if the storage is longer term, batteries are better.
Not sure about Andasol, but the main problem with solar and wind is not storage so much as it is line loss, which I've read can be ~40% because most of these sites are remote (I've heard nuclear can be ~30% for the same reason). Solar is also pretty much worthless in some countries this time of year, like Norway, so northern climes either need to rely on wind/water power or long transmission lines. I've also heard total efficiency of wind turbines can be 30% or lower (lack of wind, transmission loss, etc).
One thought I had was build a "superconductor to the curb" from the solar or wind farm so you just have transmission loss to the houses, but that still probably isn't economically feasible since current high temperature superconductors require temps around -140C or less.
Actually, most are Gen II (if I recall correctly, Gen I was just research reactors). China has some Gen II+. There are also a bunch of Gen III+ reactors out there (I believe Gen III were also only research reactors and production moved to Gen III+). The US is just starting to build Gen III+, partially due to the regulatory snarl in getting them approved.
I'm fairly certain all Gen IV designs require passive safety, but the US abandoned development of these in the 1990s led by John Kerry, largely citing data that applied only to Gen II reactors and proliferation concerns (which is ludicrous - if you're that concerned about proliferation due to continuous reprocessing, make it closed loop and get roughly 80% efficiency of fuel instead of 99.5 and burn up the nations nuclear waste stockpile in the meantime - exactly what Russia is doing) . I'm sure we will be buying these from Russia in a few years, as they are the only country to have them approaching production (well, India is isn't terribly far behind, but the only other one I know of is Japan, and they've not been doing much in the nuclear space recently).
Or just play the orchestral instruments yourself:D
The ones you get with recording software usually sound like crap, anyway (and yes, I'm very biased - I've played cello and bass professionally and have expensive, good sounding instruments, as in one of my instruments cost more than my house, and I have a big house).
I've had the exact same problems with Audacity. It works in a pinch, but in the past two years I've mainly stuck to commercial (Cubase 4 - it's very out of date and unsupported, thus I'm seeing what exists here). Musescore was terrible last time I tried it, and yeah, I agree with you. Wish I still had access to Finale, even a 15 year old version.
True enough - I used to collaborate with bands for years, but lately it's just me, 7 instruments I play at least reasonably competently, and a studio. I mainly use CuBase, not because I particularly like it, but rather because it came with the analog to USB hardware I bought. Even that is getting pretty old, I probably should either upgrade it or get something new, which is why I'm here.
The gathering of metadata is based on an FBI case where they prosecuted a man who had been threatening a young woman by collecting his phone records of calls to the young woman based on prior threats the man had made to other people. The NSA used that as a basis saying they can collect all phone metadata for all citizens and search it without a warrant, as well as provide it to the FBI without a warrant, whereas if the FBI wants to collect this data, they need a warrant.
Note that the NSA is violating their charter and breaking the law just by collecting data between US citizens, so how is this not massively illegal? The NSA is allowed to collect such data between US and foreigners per the Patriot Act and on foreigners based on their charter, but that is not the same thing. If the FBI had created such a thing, I can see it vaguely having a chance at being legal, but not run by the NSA, sorry.
From the Free Online Dictionary: Traitor: "One who betrays one's country, a cause, or a trust, especially one who commits treason."
He certainly didn't betray a country, since the secrets were sent to the US (and ally England, who is not an enemy). Cause or trust? I guess you can say he betrayed the NSA by exposing their lawbreaking. But I ask this: how else do you expose corruption when it is against the law to expose corruption (anyone that works in Classified info commits a felony under the Espionage Act of 1917 by exposing them to anyone that is not supposed to know the secret)? You could say "bring it up with your superiors," which he and others did. Clapper lied under oath and the president supports the programs - there is no higher up you could possibly go. Exposing it to the judicial system is still a felony under the Espionage Act of 1917.
Did he commit treason? Absolutely not under the constitutional definition unless again, the press is the enemy.
Did he commit theft - absolutely, and if he should have any charges filed against him, it should be theft.
Which prominent Republicans committed the exact same crime as Snowden (exposing something classified to the press), but weren't charged with espionage under the Espionage Act of 1917?
Answer: Dick Cheney and Richard Armitage for Plamegate.
A double standard is a double standard. I want to see some heads roll (and I don't care if you're Democrat of Republican). After a few heads of state go down, I think this inane law will be struck down.
If I remember correctly, it was always the plan to go after the oil fields, as the Germans were getting pretty desperate for oil (remember, the US was the #1 supplier of oil at the time, and the sole reason the Japanese declared war with the US because the US refused to supply oil to them - Germany was getting into a similar bind), but the original plan was to do it with tanks only splitting off three panzer divisions, and these tanks could then quickly reunite with the front. Hitler's blunder was he wanted infantry to go with the panzer divisions and split the army, slowing the advance of the southern front significantly.
Even 40s... I still get together with my high school friends and play, at least with the ones that can get away from their kids. Incidentally, I'm the spear wielding cleric (of Odin, otherwise I couldn't wield a spear).
I also played weekly one summer with the co-creator of D&D, Dave Arneson, too, and that was pretty fun. We did Blackmoor as well as D&D mainly. I was never very tight with that group, however, and largely lost touch after that summer (working on gaming night when winter quarter started didn't help).
I would take it a step further - since the top bit in (original, non-extended) ASCII was used for error correction, the 127 characters in the first byte IS ASCII. If you stick to typing just ASCII characters, the UTF-8 generated encoding is indistinguishable from ASCII.
I've also seen odd problems with it, but not nearly as many as I've seen with fixed multibyte sizes (endian related, usually, and I still encounter these on rare occasion even today, with ARM being bi-endian and some UNIX supporting big).
I'm with you there - white space significance always bugged me about Python, though it really originates from a peeve I picked up much earlier from hand-editing Makefiles (I learned make long before automake existed), which also has white space significance. My brother (an electrical engineer) learned Python as his first programming language since BASIC and loves it, however.
In any case, it seems most development is moving to mobile. My company's research division (which I work in) is all ObjectiveC, java, and html5/javascript/webGL. Also server side rendering for graphics on browsers that can't render on their own (like IE, which doesn't natively support webGL).
Having been hemmed in by construction with a crash barrier on my right, a car on my left, a truck in front of me, with myself and the truck already slamming our brakes and then a car in the left lane merging between me and the truck, I had an unavoidable accident. It was 100% my at fault according to the insurance company, too, because I was the last car in the chain (of 26), even though I sustained minor damage to my car and the car that merged in front of me was totaled. I was not ticketed, either, because the officer knew it was not my fault given my statement (the lady that merged in front of me lied and said she had not just merged, but the truck driver collaborated my story - the insurance company settled instead of fighting, unfortunately).
In any case and because of this experience, what I think it will boil down to is whether insurance will cover robodrivers. My guess is they will eventually, because they're better than real drivers. There will be cases where Robodrivers will be found at fault, sure, but like in my case, human error will usually be the cause of it. In any case, as long as they are insured, I don't see a problem.
let's not forget that the NSA's charter explicitly prohibits them from spying on Americans, which they've admittedly done with this program (including American to American communications, which are not exempted by the Patriot act).
My understanding is this program has been invaluable to the FBI for getting warrantless information on suspected drug offenders or dealers (where they typically have to request a warrant), but I've heard nothing about it stopping terrorism in any way.
Since it's a financial crime, I would expect the Secret Service to be handling it and hold the property. The FBI does the investigation but not the arrest and seizure of property. Source - I knew this guy, who got busted by them for piracy (albeit not well - friend of a friend kind of knew him).
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Not only stupid, INCORRECT. Before I was a programmer I worked in a high end restaurant. I made minimum wage (plus tips) and had to pay for any food I ate, the cheapest entree being right around my take home pay for any given day. Getting caught even eating a breadstick while on the job could get you fired, since they were $8 a basket (or two free with a pasta entree). Stuff like steak and lobster was a week's pay.
I did not spend 5 1/2 years in a University racking up $30000 in debt to continue to work for minimum wage in a restaurant. That is what Philosophy majors do, not Engineers.
Free software makes sense if someone is paying you to develop the hardware the software runs on and you can make it proprietary to the hardware, but once you take away the hardware, how do software developers get paid? In the RMS model, the hardware providers pay for software development, but for most real world software houses, this doesn't happen anymore. The next level down would be customers pay for software development, but my experience is customers don't know what they want until they have it.
As a compromise, the company I work for publishes all of our data formats (at least in my division) and nearly everything exports to XML. That means competitors and free software can create their own implementation, and people have. I even know of some GPL3 implementations of parts of our software. They're pretty crappy and very buggy, but they're free. We also use software like Solr and pay for Solr support, which shows non commercial vendors and commercial vendors can coexist - but we could never do this with GPL.
Actually, it has its roots in the Patriot Act - Congress allowed the NSA to spy on foreign to domestic calls, whereas before the Patriot Act they were not allowed to operate at all on US soil and had to defer all domestic spying to the FBI (as it should be).
The problem is, they took a 1970s court case where the FBI used call metadata (i.e. a list of phone numbers) called by a known criminal who had repeatedly been convicted of threatening young women and making terroristic threats to get a warrant to tap the criminal's phone line when he was making terroristic threats to yet another young woman. The FBI then got a warrant and tapped his line and he was busted calling and threatening this young woman. He then sued the FBI because they hadn't gotten a warrant to get the metadata in the first place, but the court threw it out, so the NSA uses that as justification that they can collect all phone metadata from all US citizens. The tiny problem is the NSA isn't supposed to spy on Americans by law, they're supposed to defer that to the FBI. If I recall correctly, the FBI usually requires a warrant to even collect metadata, but that case was an exception since a person's life was in danger and they had a suspect.
I'm glad Civ I didn't keep statistics. I played the mac version probably 1500 hours straight (yeah, I'm kidding, but I did log insane hours on it). Mac Civ I was closer to PC Civ 2 than PC Civ 1 (especially graphics-wise), and I logged a lot of hours on both mac and PC Civ 2, as well. I didn't buy into Civ 3+ as much, only about 180 hours on Civ 3, 120 on Civ IV, and 155 on Civ V. Civ IV and V include expansions. The Total War series has a similar trend for me, and while I was late to the party and missed Shogun, I logged thousands of hours on Medieval.
I only made it about 75 hours. The cardboard character and repetitive combat got dull. The dragon stuff was amusing for a while, but I got to the point where even the dragons fights were just tedium. It plays too much like its predecessors and all quests are just skin deep with no real overarching consequences. It just reminded me of a quest in Oblivion where if you were female (I played Oblivion through twice, once as male and once as female to see what differences there were... basically minimal, and the game was short if you wanted it to be), a group of female bandits offered for you to join them, but your only option was to betray them and then kill them all. I wanted a choice where I could join the bandits and maybe got to rob a couple of caravans and then maybe faced consequences for it later. If the only choice I get is the one developers made for me, it isn't much of a choice. About the only choice you have in these games in major factions to join, and those have no impact on anything, really. Ooh, I'm a vampire. Ooh, I'm a werewolf. Ooh, I'm bored.
I hate to be cynical, because they are good games, and they did keep my attention for 75 hours (but Morrowind was 300+ for me...), but I feel like I should have some investment in keeping the townsfolk alive rather than just slaughtering them and not feeling bad at all about them. Gothic (the original, the sequels went downhill, probably because the original programming team left) made me feel this way 13 years ago, so I don't think it is too much to ask.
I don't recall any issues with Witcher 1, but Witcher 2 and Skyrim both had serious video driver issues on release and not patching them caused relatively quick crashes for some people, includnig me (for that matter, Witcher 2 died on the intro video for me without a video driver patch). Oblivion had a lot less video issues, but was built on top of a very dated engine that was dying a quick death (in fact, it was largely abandoned by the time Oblivion shipped, with most of its programmers laid off).
I had some issues with saves on both Witcher 1 and Witcher 2, both of which were fixed by going back to an earlier save. Backtracking sucked, but was really the only solution.
I've done a couple of 100s, but I'm hoping that never happens again. I was working Quality Assurance and Systems Engineering on a project for a major customer when 9/11 hit, and exactly 1 month later, the entire team was laid off except me and the documentation writer (all four devs and both full time QA people). We had a fixed deadline to ship to that customer, Jan 1 with 1 month manufacturing lag, so I had to be done by Dec 1, and coding wasn't even complete. The substitute programmers burned the midnight oil and handed me a first working copy mid-November and I worked 117 hours that week first configuring the environment to be like the customers and then testing (tests which were thankfully mostly scripted, but there were 1100 of them), sleeping all but one night in the office, usually about 2-3 hours. Round 2 (after bugfixes) was the next week, where I tallied 106 hours, mainly because I was not allowed to work on Thanksgiving day.
I couldn't go to my managers to ask for help because a) my manager and his direct report got laid off, b) my new manager didn't know the project at all and had just been bumped from peon into management (but she eventually turned out to be the best manager I ever had), and c) training alone would suck up two weeks of my time... but 70% of QA was laid off, so there was nobody to train - everyone else had to be on board for a March product release that had just lost 1/2 its staff (again a customer commitment).
Two months after that, we hired our first 1000 workers (roughly) in India and it probably took 2 months to ramp them up. They may cost 1/3-1/4 as much, but early on many of them were worth what you paid for, which is not much. The cultural taboo of reporting bugs being an insult to the programmers that wrote the code didn't help. After about 5 years, their quality improved and then we started hiring Chinese and had a similar ramp up. Now I think both groups are quite decent, but I don't think firing over 60% of the US workforce without transitioning knowledge was the brightest way to transition to that (and yeah, that is jumping in with both feet...).
There may be a setting to bypass that. While I don't know about Time Warner, I have DISH and the default is for the DVR not to allow external recordings, but you uncheck a menu option with a three letter name (SCV, I believe) and then they are allowed.
My guess is they'll be prevented from buying further media - if they were also acquiring Time Warner media, I think all hell would break loose, but the cable and media parts were split. I really dislike that Comcast is allowed to own NBC and Universal, as it creates all kinds of ground for price gouging, but the US regulators are in the pockets of the corporations, so I only suspect this will get much, much worse before it gets better.
Not necessarily - I've seen flywheels used to store mechanical energy. Supposedly if these are operated in a vacuum with magnetic bearings they are very efficient both at storing and recovering energy with little loss (mechanical bearings have quite a bit of loss). Both molten salt and mechanical storage lose energy over time, however, so if the storage is longer term, batteries are better.
Not sure about Andasol, but the main problem with solar and wind is not storage so much as it is line loss, which I've read can be ~40% because most of these sites are remote (I've heard nuclear can be ~30% for the same reason). Solar is also pretty much worthless in some countries this time of year, like Norway, so northern climes either need to rely on wind/water power or long transmission lines. I've also heard total efficiency of wind turbines can be 30% or lower (lack of wind, transmission loss, etc).
One thought I had was build a "superconductor to the curb" from the solar or wind farm so you just have transmission loss to the houses, but that still probably isn't economically feasible since current high temperature superconductors require temps around -140C or less.
Actually, most are Gen II (if I recall correctly, Gen I was just research reactors). China has some Gen II+. There are also a bunch of Gen III+ reactors out there (I believe Gen III were also only research reactors and production moved to Gen III+). The US is just starting to build Gen III+, partially due to the regulatory snarl in getting them approved.
I'm fairly certain all Gen IV designs require passive safety, but the US abandoned development of these in the 1990s led by John Kerry, largely citing data that applied only to Gen II reactors and proliferation concerns (which is ludicrous - if you're that concerned about proliferation due to continuous reprocessing, make it closed loop and get roughly 80% efficiency of fuel instead of 99.5 and burn up the nations nuclear waste stockpile in the meantime - exactly what Russia is doing) . I'm sure we will be buying these from Russia in a few years, as they are the only country to have them approaching production (well, India is isn't terribly far behind, but the only other one I know of is Japan, and they've not been doing much in the nuclear space recently).
Or just play the orchestral instruments yourself :D
The ones you get with recording software usually sound like crap, anyway (and yes, I'm very biased - I've played cello and bass professionally and have expensive, good sounding instruments, as in one of my instruments cost more than my house, and I have a big house).
I've had the exact same problems with Audacity. It works in a pinch, but in the past two years I've mainly stuck to commercial (Cubase 4 - it's very out of date and unsupported, thus I'm seeing what exists here). Musescore was terrible last time I tried it, and yeah, I agree with you. Wish I still had access to Finale, even a 15 year old version.
True enough - I used to collaborate with bands for years, but lately it's just me, 7 instruments I play at least reasonably competently, and a studio. I mainly use CuBase, not because I particularly like it, but rather because it came with the analog to USB hardware I bought. Even that is getting pretty old, I probably should either upgrade it or get something new, which is why I'm here.
The gathering of metadata is based on an FBI case where they prosecuted a man who had been threatening a young woman by collecting his phone records of calls to the young woman based on prior threats the man had made to other people. The NSA used that as a basis saying they can collect all phone metadata for all citizens and search it without a warrant, as well as provide it to the FBI without a warrant, whereas if the FBI wants to collect this data, they need a warrant.
Note that the NSA is violating their charter and breaking the law just by collecting data between US citizens, so how is this not massively illegal? The NSA is allowed to collect such data between US and foreigners per the Patriot Act and on foreigners based on their charter, but that is not the same thing. If the FBI had created such a thing, I can see it vaguely having a chance at being legal, but not run by the NSA, sorry.
From the Free Online Dictionary: Traitor: "One who betrays one's country, a cause, or a trust, especially one who commits treason."
He certainly didn't betray a country, since the secrets were sent to the US (and ally England, who is not an enemy).
Cause or trust? I guess you can say he betrayed the NSA by exposing their lawbreaking. But I ask this: how else do you expose corruption when it is against the law to expose corruption (anyone that works in Classified info commits a felony under the Espionage Act of 1917 by exposing them to anyone that is not supposed to know the secret)? You could say "bring it up with your superiors," which he and others did. Clapper lied under oath and the president supports the programs - there is no higher up you could possibly go. Exposing it to the judicial system is still a felony under the Espionage Act of 1917.
Did he commit treason? Absolutely not under the constitutional definition unless again, the press is the enemy.
Did he commit theft - absolutely, and if he should have any charges filed against him, it should be theft.
For that matter...
Which prominent Republicans committed the exact same crime as Snowden (exposing something classified to the press), but weren't charged with espionage under the Espionage Act of 1917?
Answer: Dick Cheney and Richard Armitage for Plamegate.
A double standard is a double standard. I want to see some heads roll (and I don't care if you're Democrat of Republican). After a few heads of state go down, I think this inane law will be struck down.
If I remember correctly, it was always the plan to go after the oil fields, as the Germans were getting pretty desperate for oil (remember, the US was the #1 supplier of oil at the time, and the sole reason the Japanese declared war with the US because the US refused to supply oil to them - Germany was getting into a similar bind), but the original plan was to do it with tanks only splitting off three panzer divisions, and these tanks could then quickly reunite with the front. Hitler's blunder was he wanted infantry to go with the panzer divisions and split the army, slowing the advance of the southern front significantly.
Even 40s... I still get together with my high school friends and play, at least with the ones that can get away from their kids. Incidentally, I'm the spear wielding cleric (of Odin, otherwise I couldn't wield a spear).
I also played weekly one summer with the co-creator of D&D, Dave Arneson, too, and that was pretty fun. We did Blackmoor as well as D&D mainly. I was never very tight with that group, however, and largely lost touch after that summer (working on gaming night when winter quarter started didn't help).
I would take it a step further - since the top bit in (original, non-extended) ASCII was used for error correction, the 127 characters in the first byte IS ASCII. If you stick to typing just ASCII characters, the UTF-8 generated encoding is indistinguishable from ASCII.
I've also seen odd problems with it, but not nearly as many as I've seen with fixed multibyte sizes (endian related, usually, and I still encounter these on rare occasion even today, with ARM being bi-endian and some UNIX supporting big).
I'm with you there - white space significance always bugged me about Python, though it really originates from a peeve I picked up much earlier from hand-editing Makefiles (I learned make long before automake existed), which also has white space significance. My brother (an electrical engineer) learned Python as his first programming language since BASIC and loves it, however.
In any case, it seems most development is moving to mobile. My company's research division (which I work in) is all ObjectiveC, java, and html5/javascript/webGL. Also server side rendering for graphics on browsers that can't render on their own (like IE, which doesn't natively support webGL).
Having been hemmed in by construction with a crash barrier on my right, a car on my left, a truck in front of me, with myself and the truck already slamming our brakes and then a car in the left lane merging between me and the truck, I had an unavoidable accident. It was 100% my at fault according to the insurance company, too, because I was the last car in the chain (of 26), even though I sustained minor damage to my car and the car that merged in front of me was totaled. I was not ticketed, either, because the officer knew it was not my fault given my statement (the lady that merged in front of me lied and said she had not just merged, but the truck driver collaborated my story - the insurance company settled instead of fighting, unfortunately).
In any case and because of this experience, what I think it will boil down to is whether insurance will cover robodrivers. My guess is they will eventually, because they're better than real drivers. There will be cases where Robodrivers will be found at fault, sure, but like in my case, human error will usually be the cause of it. In any case, as long as they are insured, I don't see a problem.
let's not forget that the NSA's charter explicitly prohibits them from spying on Americans, which they've admittedly done with this program (including American to American communications, which are not exempted by the Patriot act).
My understanding is this program has been invaluable to the FBI for getting warrantless information on suspected drug offenders or dealers (where they typically have to request a warrant), but I've heard nothing about it stopping terrorism in any way.
Since it's a financial crime, I would expect the Secret Service to be handling it and hold the property. The FBI does the investigation but not the arrest and seizure of property. Source - I knew this guy, who got busted by them for piracy (albeit not well - friend of a friend kind of knew him).