Sure, it would only undermine the entire concept of bitcoin, and defeat the very reason that btc was made distributed like it is in the first place. However, if enough thought it was a good idea, they could all start running some new code that treats some addresses as special.
This is highly unlikely and would be highly undesirable. The FBI has some bitcoins, good for them, they are just as protected by the system; and no more so; than anyone else. The way it was always intended to be.
I mean nearly the entire point was to make this sort of action nearly impossible to pull off even with the threat of force as no one individual or group can make such a change. Having that community decide to subvert that would hardly be a good idea.
Well maybe you need them, for the most part, people here stop for the light, its rare to see more than one car go after the red and usually he was crossing the line when it changed anyway. I have never once, in all my years of driving, seen traffic just not stop for the light or people get flipped off by those ignoring the red. If this is a common occurrence where you are, then I have trouble believing it; sounds like you have other problems.
I live by a traffic circle (we call em roataries up here in Boston). A couple of years back, I was taking the bus to work for a while; so I was sitting on a bench across the street in the morning during rush hour. It was quite a sight.
The key isn't to watch it while its moving, its to watch what happens when it stops. A pedestrian walks up, hits the button, and the lights turn red....and within seconds there are stopped cars everywhere. The whole road is bumper to bumper.
Then another pedestrian walks up, looks at the light, stops, then suddenly decides to cross now as it changes back to green, and for another few seconds it stays as it is.... within about 10 seconds, the traffic is moving again and all the input roads drain off. It is impressive to watch.
Also, I note people seem to think rotaries are dangerous, and I can see why, as cars mill around, weaving in and out, you have to pay attention, everything works out fine, but it forces you to pay attention and actually think about how to merge properly. Most people end up playing it conservatively and waiting for traffic to stop.
Thing is you might think that takes a long time, but it never does. Because every car that turns a different way blocks off incoming traffic from one direction, opening it for another. Just the random pathing of cars exiting the rotary is enough to keep all sides flowing generally...and even when it doesn't, its not too terrible, the circling paths open up opportunities to merge often enough. I watch this happen every day as I go through about 4 rotaries on my way in to work every day. They really work.
You know me so well. Apparently I should stop going back to my eye doctor as his statement was "The only reason I can tell your vision isn't perfect is my instruments are so sensitive". The guy before him used such old and imprecise numbers as "20-10" and "20-16" at various times. Clearly, based on your assesment I must need glasses.
You sound like the kind of asshole that has no concept that everyone isn't as perfect as he is and every way. If anything, by how quick you are to attack others, I assume you are a terrible driver who attacks others to hide his own inadequacy.
Maybe if we just punish anyone who can't live up to your standards the world will sort itself out. If it doesn't work, its just cuz you haven't been harsh enough.
I think you mean the pandemic of badly timed lights that make no allowances for driver error. Since drivers are still humans, they will always make errors. Deciding this is a pandemic is ridiculous. This is human nature. You either design around the fact that people are imperfect, or you design to fail.
Simply increasing the length of yellow lights and delaying green by all of a second or two has been shown to decrease these problems; enforcement has been shown to do little more than bring in money; and often, makes problems worst. Red light cameras, for example have been shown to lead to an increase in accidents at the intersections where they get installed.
Hmm actually I would say you have the right to only be subject to as much legal scrutiny as is necessary; and not just whatever old arbitary standard somebody makes up. Which is where I would put "no turn on red".
Since turn on red already requires that one stop, and already requires that it only be done when safe to do so, and to yeild to oncoming traffic; there really is no justification to ever have such a sign. Also, since there are much more effective ways to make intersections safe than to quibble over split seconds over lines (like a slightly delayed green).... running a red light really should only be the case of blatant runs after the change, or careless driving, rather than just "the rules justify the rules" BS.
Im sorry, where did you get the idea that this helped keep intersections safe? Keeping intersections safe is actually fairly trivial without any sort of RLC or punishment. All you need to do, which many places already have done, is slightly increase the length of yellow lights, and delay the green transition on the other traffic lane, so that there is a period of 1-2 seconds where all sides are red; and thus cars that may have been late past the line, have time to make it through.
Sure it may not play into some people's fetish for punishment and strict rules enforcement, but, it does a great job of increasing safety.
And in light of that, when cities get caught reducing the yellow light time at lights, which is less safe and increases the chances of an accident, then YES it is a money making scheme.
> Water acts polar because of the nature of the oxygen atom > itself. It has 6 electrons and wants to share 2 more. The > electrons pair up into 4 groups or areas. Two of those areas are > on the Oxygen atom only...think of them as rabbit ears.
Sounds like what I studied in school; Only thing missing is that it is the geometry of putting 4 points around a central point that means you must get bunny ears and can't have a straight line (which would be non-polar)
Couldn't happen to a better agency. Guess they don't like their secrets getting out. Boo hoo. Hows it feel assholes?
Oh wait they might not read this comment. That would be sad, cuz if they don't, it can't implant itself in their minds like a sleeping agent, and explode like a semtex package at the sears tower; infecting their minds like anthrax in the pentagon ventilation system.
There, fixed that, now, why are you still reading this and not doing the right thing and leaking everything you can find? Do you work for the people or the NSA? The two are mutually exclusive.
I think you are missing the point, the question is more about what you do with the data. Being able to detect an animal vs a bag is nice, being able to determine which of a number of bad situations is the least bad is more the issue.
I ran over a cat once; and it was the right decision at the time. Will the car be able to make that assessment?
I know I had no choice and it still bothers me. I still see that kitten running out from the side of the onramp, diagonally across the road. I still remember that split second where I saw no where to go but off the road into a ditch, no time or space to stop....and the look of excitement on the kittens face running towards a fate he could not have expected.
I wonder, how will a driverless car react in a no-win situation? Because I know I am not the only person to have faced one. Someone I know was on her first long distance trip out of state and suddenly found a deer in front of her. She didn't have the experience to make the snap judgement, she didn't hit the deer...instead she swerved and ended up bouncing off gaurd rails like a pinball. Telling this to my rural living cousin his response was unceremonious: "Never swerve for a deer; just hit it" (moose btw, are another story)
Then again, maybe if it was a kid, do you go for the ditch? Is it different if its just me in the car or a carload of people? (kids in the car?). A driver can debate these things and make split second decisions to sacrifice himself; a driverless car has to leave this decision to engineers who design how it makes decisions.
I think it makes the most sense to constrain its emergency response to what keeps the occupants the most safe in all situations; that seems most right but, its not always easy to feel good about. I don't think I would want to be the guy who wrote that code.
However its not a bearer bond at all. If I put a piece of gold in a case, and sell you the locked case with the gold in it, is that a bearer bond?
His coins contained the private key to the backing bitcoins; he wasn't holding them. It was actually a fancy bitcoin wallet; preloaded with the amount printed on its face. In fact, you could send bitcoins to that coin and increase the amount in it if you actually wanted to.
He is much closer to a gold assayer tho certifies bars as really being pure and having the weight claimed than a stock or bond issuer.
Except there is no IOU. The backing instrument, ie the private key which allows you to spend the bitcoins, is....inside the coin! It is, essentially, a fancy secure bitcoin wallet that you can trade with some amount of confidence that the previous holder didn't know the private key either.
That is really all it is, aside from a fancy coin container to hold it in.
> Assange mentions wiretap records and they assume _he_ did the wiretapping?
It is their job to make that assumption; this isn't about truth, its about spin and justification of whatever they want to do to him. Truth isn't for when you are talking about your enemy.
> Is it not possible, nay likely, that he _was given_ the wiretaps in the Manning data dump?
Seems unlikely. I mean, sure it could have happened. It could be something US agents did and she managed to get his hands on, but I don't remember any reports that she was uber hacker going around breaking other systems. Takes a lot less skill to pull off an inside job.
Remember, Assange had a system setup to allow anyone to anonymously send him stuff and it was widely published. He could easily have gotten it through someone else.
> Why would he even try, given that he had friends in that parliament - couldn't they tell him what the > scuttlebutt was?
Are we talking Manning or Assange? I wasn't aware Manning had friends there or would have any reason to care. I mean maybe I missed it but, it was out of character for the leaks, everything else was US leaks and about war crimes or international relations.
Assange on the other hand.... that seems more likely but still; he wouldn't have even had to have been the least bit involved to get the data, all that had to happen is someone who did have it (who again may not have been the original attacker) decided wikileaks should have it.
Yup, I played against a guy a couple of times years ago. On the third turn he started drawing cards, shuffling his library, taking turns, and suddenly I was hit with a 38 point drain life before I got another turn. It was incredibly sick and broken. Even worst, it wasn't like he drew his nut hand, his deck was doing this consistently.
I have a couple of decks with nasty combos (nothing that fast or broken). One of my favorite was to toss a fire whip on a marsh viper....with a seeker of skybreak and vitalize in the deck, dealing 10 poison counters between the end of my opponents turn and the beginning of mine actually happens occasionally.
It also worked a few more times than Queen Sliver/Ashnod's Altar/Heartstone; though less fun as I don't get to declare "I summon infinite creatures, sacrifice an infinite number of them for infinite life, and sacrifice another infinity of them to do infinite damage directly to you" (or I wait to attack next turn if I don't have victual and/or acidic slivers out)
Wow thanks! That explains why I never saw a rule change, I had started playing before 6th, but I don't think I ever really sat down with a rule book and read the intricacies until then (nor uttered the dreaded phrase "at the end of your turn I...." ) so I never realized it was a change!
That really is an excellent writeup of the rule change and consequences and even explains some curiosities like why power sink would be worded the way it is; talk about a nerf! Though, tapping you out is still pretty nasty in a larger game (we recently had an 8 person free for all, it took HOURS; especially with all the extort and lifelink out there now)
As an aside.... since the wife started up magic night a few weeks ago, someone told us mana burn was gone; and "Mana burn still exists" became our first house rule.... which was hilarious when our BIL came over with his ancient mono red and cast some mana flares.
Which I find amusing because, I stopped playing in or around 2001, and picked up the game again only in the past few weeks. It looks more like a re-statement of the rules than much of a change since I already thought of it as a stack; and it already worked like a stack...there just was no explicit "stack" reference
Under the old rules, a spell being cast could be responded to by an instant or interrupt (which I believe were slightly different but I can't remember how), and since that was a spell too, it could also be responded to....and then spells resolved in reverse order. About the only complication was that a spell on the top of the stack could invalidate the target of a lower spell causing it to fizzle instead of resolving normally....which I believe is still the case.
All that said, I can't imagine playing a video game based on MTG. Part of the reason I play MTG is that it is a physical game played with other people. Actually handling the cards and seeing the look on someone's face when you take their creature and kill them with it (That "Act of Treason" card comes in so handy in my red/black deck)
well the problem, of course, is that the savings were less than 5k/year. That is less than 1k/year/car
This doesn't leave much room to both benefit the company and provide much bonus before you even figure that this may decrease battery life span. Of course, it also has to be offset by the fact that its also a "top off", presumably the cars drove in, so are not fully charged at the start of the day.
Maybe it works out, but its not a lot to work with for starters.
> That said I doubt it was this kind of misdirection. It's important to remember that US universities > studied these phenomenon as well
Not only that but.... the people who hold the purse strings and decided who gets appointed where (and thus gets to decide who gets hired and heads what else) elected based on their ability to smile and convince local people they were better than some other cheesehead with a smile.
Let us not forget there have been psychic advisors to high level officials, even the president. There is really no reason to think that these efforts were not, on some level, genuine
From what I can see the problem here is we want to talk about "the law" when no such thing exists. There are many laws in many places; and I think we are all (or most) tripping over that fact when we try to discuss it.
For example.... Wikipedia reports that US Federal law defines blackmail only in terms of information about crime. That is, its only blackmail if the information that is threatened to reveal or keep hidden is information about a criminal act. So this....is not blackmail.
However, Brittish law, makes no such distinction and defines such a demand as blackmail any time that the person making the demand has reason to expect he has a right to benefit. So, if I find out you are bisexual, and demand you pay me to keep that hidden, that is blackmail, even though it wouldn't be under US federal law....
Then there are 50 states, each of which likely have their own, independently written and approved, definitions. What is it for California? Well Blackmail and Extortion are covered under one statute (no I am still not a lawyer, I just looked it up): http://www.shouselaw.com/extortion.html
A quick skim shows this "Expose a secret involving him/her or a family member, or connect any of them with some kind of crime, disgrace, or scandal;" under "extortion by threat of force".
Notice it is "expose a secret...OR connect any of them with some kind of crime". So it looks to me like my assessment stays the same, the mug shots might actually be illegal.
Mine still works...at collecting dust. Seriously, before I moved, I went from watching TV with my laptop, to using my new desktop within sight of the TV. Then we moved, and the TV and desktop are not within visual range....
I now watch Dr Who. Aside from a couple of episodes of the Venture Brothers, that is it. Nothing else has motivated me to actually forsake the internet long enough to go to the room with the TV and watch it in about 2 years now.
My satisfaction with the volume level of commercials has never been higher.
sure but that isn't the argument I made. I was pointing out that depending on the definition of blackmail locally, it may or may not require that the threatened action be otherwise illegal. That is, it may be legal to release the secret, in and of itself, but not to demand payment to not do it.
Of course, in this case, it seems it may have been illegal to release.
Note its descriptions of/bin/usr/bin/var and/var/lib
Particularly: "/var contains variable data files. This includes spool directories and files, administrative and logging data, and transient and temporary files."
and/var/lib: "This hierarchy holds state information pertaining to an application or the system. State information is data that programs modify while they run, and that pertains to one specific host. Users must never need to modify files in/var/lib to configure a package's operation."
So it is just the wrong place entirely; and there are at least 3 potential correct places,/usr/(lib|bin),/opt/XXX or debatably/(bin|lib).... however even the last one is likely incorrect as those must be on the root filesystem and thus should only contain files that would be required during the boot process, before other filesystems (like/usr) might be available.
The only reason I could see for wanting this stuff in/var would be if the program ran in a chroot and needed to be able to dynamically load libraries. Even that is likely not the best approach.
Actually I question if either is really blackmail, but if one is, then both seem to be to me.
Here is why: blackmail is generally about revealing information that is secret. As was pointed out in an objection to the concept by some libertarians: it is legal to gossip or to threaten to release secrets; it is only illegal to offer to not release them for some benefit.
The thing is, this is not about release of public info, this is about continued availability. The info was already made public, this is "pay me and I will hide it"; which isn't really blackmail is it? However the point is: Its blackmail even if the threatened action is otherwise legal (though this likely varies from place to place, wikipedia has some good examples of how it differs).
So.... it seems to me if "pay me and I hide this embarrassing info, which is already published now" is blackmail, then it is blackmail whether its nude photos or public court documents.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, it would only undermine the entire concept of bitcoin, and defeat the very reason that btc was made distributed like it is in the first place. However, if enough thought it was a good idea, they could all start running some new code that treats some addresses as special.
This is highly unlikely and would be highly undesirable. The FBI has some bitcoins, good for them, they are just as protected by the system; and no more so; than anyone else. The way it was always intended to be.
I mean nearly the entire point was to make this sort of action nearly impossible to pull off even with the threat of force as no one individual or group can make such a change. Having that community decide to subvert that would hardly be a good idea.
Well maybe you need them, for the most part, people here stop for the light, its rare to see more than one car go after the red and usually he was crossing the line when it changed anyway. I have never once, in all my years of driving, seen traffic just not stop for the light or people get flipped off by those ignoring the red. If this is a common occurrence where you are, then I have trouble believing it; sounds like you have other problems.
THIS! Yes!
I live by a traffic circle (we call em roataries up here in Boston). A couple of years back, I was taking the bus to work for a while; so I was sitting on a bench across the street in the morning during rush hour. It was quite a sight.
The key isn't to watch it while its moving, its to watch what happens when it stops. A pedestrian walks up, hits the button, and the lights turn red....and within seconds there are stopped cars everywhere. The whole road is bumper to bumper.
Then another pedestrian walks up, looks at the light, stops, then suddenly decides to cross now as it changes back to green, and for another few seconds it stays as it is.... within about 10 seconds, the traffic is moving again and all the input roads drain off. It is impressive to watch.
Also, I note people seem to think rotaries are dangerous, and I can see why, as cars mill around, weaving in and out, you have to pay attention, everything works out fine, but it forces you to pay attention and actually think about how to merge properly. Most people end up playing it conservatively and waiting for traffic to stop.
Thing is you might think that takes a long time, but it never does. Because every car that turns a different way blocks off incoming traffic from one direction, opening it for another. Just the random pathing of cars exiting the rotary is enough to keep all sides flowing generally...and even when it doesn't, its not too terrible, the circling paths open up opportunities to merge often enough. I watch this happen every day as I go through about 4 rotaries on my way in to work every day. They really work.
You know me so well. Apparently I should stop going back to my eye doctor as his statement was "The only reason I can tell your vision isn't perfect is my instruments are so sensitive". The guy before him used such old and imprecise numbers as "20-10" and "20-16" at various times. Clearly, based on your assesment I must need glasses.
You sound like the kind of asshole that has no concept that everyone isn't as perfect as he is and every way. If anything, by how quick you are to attack others, I assume you are a terrible driver who attacks others to hide his own inadequacy.
Maybe if we just punish anyone who can't live up to your standards the world will sort itself out. If it doesn't work, its just cuz you haven't been harsh enough.
I think you mean the pandemic of badly timed lights that make no allowances for driver error. Since drivers are still humans, they will always make errors. Deciding this is a pandemic is ridiculous. This is human nature. You either design around the fact that people are imperfect, or you design to fail.
Simply increasing the length of yellow lights and delaying green by all of a second or two has been shown to decrease these problems; enforcement has been shown to do little more than bring in money; and often, makes problems worst. Red light cameras, for example have been shown to lead to an increase in accidents at the intersections where they get installed.
Hmm actually I would say you have the right to only be subject to as much legal scrutiny as is necessary; and not just whatever old arbitary standard somebody makes up. Which is where I would put "no turn on red".
Since turn on red already requires that one stop, and already requires that it only be done when safe to do so, and to yeild to oncoming traffic; there really is no justification to ever have such a sign. Also, since there are much more effective ways to make intersections safe than to quibble over split seconds over lines (like a slightly delayed green).... running a red light really should only be the case of blatant runs after the change, or careless driving, rather than just "the rules justify the rules" BS.
Im sorry, where did you get the idea that this helped keep intersections safe? Keeping intersections safe is actually fairly trivial without any sort of RLC or punishment. All you need to do, which many places already have done, is slightly increase the length of yellow lights, and delay the green transition on the other traffic lane, so that there is a period of 1-2 seconds where all sides are red; and thus cars that may have been late past the line, have time to make it through.
Sure it may not play into some people's fetish for punishment and strict rules enforcement, but, it does a great job of increasing safety.
And in light of that, when cities get caught reducing the yellow light time at lights, which is less safe and increases the chances of an accident, then YES it is a money making scheme.
> Water acts polar because of the nature of the oxygen atom
> itself. It has 6 electrons and wants to share 2 more. The
> electrons pair up into 4 groups or areas. Two of those areas are
> on the Oxygen atom only...think of them as rabbit ears.
Sounds like what I studied in school; Only thing missing is that it is the geometry of putting 4 points around a central point that means you must get bunny ears and can't have a straight line (which would be non-polar)
Water must get bent!
Couldn't happen to a better agency. Guess they don't like their secrets getting out. Boo hoo. Hows it feel assholes?
Oh wait they might not read this comment. That would be sad, cuz if they don't, it can't implant itself in their minds like a sleeping agent, and explode like a semtex package at the sears tower; infecting their minds like anthrax in the pentagon ventilation system.
There, fixed that, now, why are you still reading this and not doing the right thing and leaking everything you can find? Do you work for the people or the NSA? The two are mutually exclusive.
I think you are missing the point, the question is more about what you do with the data. Being able to detect an animal vs a bag is nice, being able to determine which of a number of bad situations is the least bad is more the issue.
I ran over a cat once; and it was the right decision at the time. Will the car be able to make that assessment?
I know I had no choice and it still bothers me. I still see that kitten running out from the side of the onramp, diagonally across the road. I still remember that split second where I saw no where to go but off the road into a ditch, no time or space to stop....and the look of excitement on the kittens face running towards a fate he could not have expected.
I wonder, how will a driverless car react in a no-win situation? Because I know I am not the only person to have faced one. Someone I know was on her first long distance trip out of state and suddenly found a deer in front of her. She didn't have the experience to make the snap judgement, she didn't hit the deer...instead she swerved and ended up bouncing off gaurd rails like a pinball. Telling this to my rural living cousin his response was unceremonious: "Never swerve for a deer; just hit it" (moose btw, are another story)
Then again, maybe if it was a kid, do you go for the ditch? Is it different if its just me in the car or a carload of people? (kids in the car?). A driver can debate these things and make split second decisions to sacrifice himself; a driverless car has to leave this decision to engineers who design how it makes decisions.
I think it makes the most sense to constrain its emergency response to what keeps the occupants the most safe in all situations; that seems most right but, its not always easy to feel good about. I don't think I would want to be the guy who wrote that code.
However its not a bearer bond at all. If I put a piece of gold in a case, and sell you the locked case with the gold in it, is that a bearer bond?
His coins contained the private key to the backing bitcoins; he wasn't holding them. It was actually a fancy bitcoin wallet; preloaded with the amount printed on its face. In fact, you could send bitcoins to that coin and increase the amount in it if you actually wanted to.
He is much closer to a gold assayer tho certifies bars as really being pure and having the weight claimed than a stock or bond issuer.
Except there is no IOU. The backing instrument, ie the private key which allows you to spend the bitcoins, is ....inside the coin! It is, essentially, a fancy secure bitcoin wallet that you can trade with some amount of confidence that the previous holder didn't know the private key either.
That is really all it is, aside from a fancy coin container to hold it in.
> Assange mentions wiretap records and they assume _he_ did the wiretapping?
It is their job to make that assumption; this isn't about truth, its about spin and justification of whatever they want to do to him. Truth isn't for when you are talking about your enemy.
> Is it not possible, nay likely, that he _was given_ the wiretaps in the Manning data dump?
Seems unlikely. I mean, sure it could have happened. It could be something US agents did and she managed to get his hands on, but I don't remember any reports that she was uber hacker going around breaking other systems. Takes a lot less skill to pull off an inside job.
Remember, Assange had a system setup to allow anyone to anonymously send him stuff and it was widely published. He could easily have gotten it through someone else.
> Why would he even try, given that he had friends in that parliament - couldn't they tell him what the
> scuttlebutt was?
Are we talking Manning or Assange? I wasn't aware Manning had friends there or would have any reason to care. I mean maybe I missed it but, it was out of character for the leaks, everything else was US leaks and about war crimes or international relations.
Assange on the other hand.... that seems more likely but still; he wouldn't have even had to have been the least bit involved to get the data, all that had to happen is someone who did have it (who again may not have been the original attacker) decided wikileaks should have it.
Yup, I played against a guy a couple of times years ago. On the third turn he started drawing cards, shuffling his library, taking turns, and suddenly I was hit with a 38 point drain life before I got another turn. It was incredibly sick and broken. Even worst, it wasn't like he drew his nut hand, his deck was doing this consistently.
I have a couple of decks with nasty combos (nothing that fast or broken). One of my favorite was to toss a fire whip on a marsh viper....with a seeker of skybreak and vitalize in the deck, dealing 10 poison counters between the end of my opponents turn and the beginning of mine actually happens occasionally.
It also worked a few more times than Queen Sliver/Ashnod's Altar/Heartstone; though less fun as I don't get to declare "I summon infinite creatures, sacrifice an infinite number of them for infinite life, and sacrifice another infinity of them to do infinite damage directly to you" (or I wait to attack next turn if I don't have victual and/or acidic slivers out)
Wow thanks! That explains why I never saw a rule change, I had started playing before 6th, but I don't think I ever really sat down with a rule book and read the intricacies until then (nor uttered the dreaded phrase "at the end of your turn I...." ) so I never realized it was a change!
That really is an excellent writeup of the rule change and consequences and even explains some curiosities like why power sink would be worded the way it is; talk about a nerf! Though, tapping you out is still pretty nasty in a larger game (we recently had an 8 person free for all, it took HOURS; especially with all the extort and lifelink out there now)
As an aside.... since the wife started up magic night a few weeks ago, someone told us mana burn was gone; and "Mana burn still exists" became our first house rule.... which was hilarious when our BIL came over with his ancient mono red and cast some mana flares.
Which I find amusing because, I stopped playing in or around 2001, and picked up the game again only in the past few weeks. It looks more like a re-statement of the rules than much of a change since I already thought of it as a stack; and it already worked like a stack...there just was no explicit "stack" reference
Under the old rules, a spell being cast could be responded to by an instant or interrupt (which I believe were slightly different but I can't remember how), and since that was a spell too, it could also be responded to....and then spells resolved in reverse order. About the only complication was that a spell on the top of the stack could invalidate the target of a lower spell causing it to fizzle instead of resolving normally....which I believe is still the case.
All that said, I can't imagine playing a video game based on MTG. Part of the reason I play MTG is that it is a physical game played with other people. Actually handling the cards and seeing the look on someone's face when you take their creature and kill them with it (That "Act of Treason" card comes in so handy in my red/black deck)
well the problem, of course, is that the savings were less than 5k/year. That is less than 1k/year/car
This doesn't leave much room to both benefit the company and provide much bonus before you even figure that this may decrease battery life span. Of course, it also has to be offset by the fact that its also a "top off", presumably the cars drove in, so are not fully charged at the start of the day.
Maybe it works out, but its not a lot to work with for starters.
> That said I doubt it was this kind of misdirection. It's important to remember that US universities
> studied these phenomenon as well
Not only that but.... the people who hold the purse strings and decided who gets appointed where (and thus gets to decide who gets hired and heads what else) elected based on their ability to smile and convince local people they were better than some other cheesehead with a smile.
Let us not forget there have been psychic advisors to high level officials, even the president. There is really no reason to think that these efforts were not, on some level, genuine
From what I can see the problem here is we want to talk about "the law" when no such thing exists. There are many laws in many places; and I think we are all (or most) tripping over that fact when we try to discuss it.
For example.... Wikipedia reports that US Federal law defines blackmail only in terms of information about crime. That is, its only blackmail if the information that is threatened to reveal or keep hidden is information about a criminal act. So this....is not blackmail.
However, Brittish law, makes no such distinction and defines such a demand as blackmail any time that the person making the demand has reason to expect he has a right to benefit. So, if I find out you are bisexual, and demand you pay me to keep that hidden, that is blackmail, even though it wouldn't be under US federal law....
Then there are 50 states, each of which likely have their own, independently written and approved, definitions. What is it for California? Well Blackmail and Extortion are covered under one statute (no I am still not a lawyer, I just looked it up): http://www.shouselaw.com/extortion.html
A quick skim shows this "Expose a secret involving him/her or a family member, or connect any of them with some kind of crime, disgrace, or scandal;" under "extortion by threat of force".
Notice it is "expose a secret...OR connect any of them with some kind of crime". So it looks to me like my assessment stays the same, the mug shots might actually be illegal.
Mine still works...at collecting dust. Seriously, before I moved, I went from watching TV with my laptop, to using my new desktop within sight of the TV. Then we moved, and the TV and desktop are not within visual range....
I now watch Dr Who. Aside from a couple of episodes of the Venture Brothers, that is it. Nothing else has motivated me to actually forsake the internet long enough to go to the room with the TV and watch it in about 2 years now.
My satisfaction with the volume level of commercials has never been higher.
What? Please, how would you even know. Don't tell me you actually read the summaries and articles on slashdot. I mean seriously; who does that? :p
sure but that isn't the argument I made. I was pointing out that depending on the definition of blackmail locally, it may or may not require that the threatened action be otherwise illegal. That is, it may be legal to release the secret, in and of itself, but not to demand payment to not do it.
Of course, in this case, it seems it may have been illegal to release.
In addition to the other answers, I will mention the FHS or Filesystem Hierarchy Standard: http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html
Note its descriptions of /bin /usr/bin /var and /var/lib
Particularly:
"/var contains variable data files. This includes spool directories and files, administrative and logging data, and transient and temporary files."
and /var/lib: /var/lib to configure a package's operation."
"This hierarchy holds state information pertaining to an application or the system. State information is data that programs modify while they run, and that pertains to one specific host. Users must never need to modify files in
So it is just the wrong place entirely; and there are at least 3 potential correct places, /usr/(lib|bin), /opt/XXX or debatably /(bin|lib).... however even the last one is likely incorrect as those must be on the root filesystem and thus should only contain files that would be required during the boot process, before other filesystems (like /usr) might be available.
The only reason I could see for wanting this stuff in /var would be if the program ran in a chroot and needed to be able to dynamically load libraries. Even that is likely not the best approach.
Actually I question if either is really blackmail, but if one is, then both seem to be to me.
Here is why: blackmail is generally about revealing information that is secret. As was pointed out in an objection to the concept by some libertarians: it is legal to gossip or to threaten to release secrets; it is only illegal to offer to not release them for some benefit.
The thing is, this is not about release of public info, this is about continued availability. The info was already made public, this is "pay me and I will hide it"; which isn't really blackmail is it? However the point is: Its blackmail even if the threatened action is otherwise legal (though this likely varies from place to place, wikipedia has some good examples of how it differs).
So.... it seems to me if "pay me and I hide this embarrassing info, which is already published now" is blackmail, then it is blackmail whether its nude photos or public court documents.