I agree that prognostication gets harder as technological progress accelerates (as do gripping science fiction premises), and that science fiction is becoming less fantastical because we are so familiar with technology similar to what we find in those stories. What seems to be missing these days, however, is the social, human element. For example, growing up I read a lot of golden age science fiction, most of the technology of which has been either now realized, or seems utterly laughable. (As an odd result of this, I've spent the better part of the decade thinking of myself as "living in the future".) In most of those stories, the technology featured prominently as a MacGuffin, a starting point for the real story.
So you have cheap nuclear power, enough to waste in broadcasting it wirelessly, and everyone says its safe. How do you know? What do you do when you find out it's not, and the most transformative 20 years in history prove a colossal mistake? So you have institutionalized slavery (robots), not just over bodies, but minds. How do you keep the system running? Is it even moral to enslave something you've built from the ground up? So your entire economy has come to rely in some way on a single cheap service. To what extent are the people offering that service entitled to run your society? Most of these questions have been touched on and answered again and again in science ficition, but the common element is not technology. Rather, the common element is how people cause and react to change on a grand scale.
Unfortunately, many readers tend to fixate on the technology itself, and the social message (the real meat of the tale) gets lost. After that, you degrade into what we have now: science fantasy. Exercises in world-building for the sake of world building, exotic new toys like lightsabers, super-science that acts as an instant stand-in for magic, and all the other little bits that used to be just scenery moving center stage. There's just enough there to look like science fiction, when all it really is is adventure fantasy.
Making the equations "symmetrical" for both electric and magnetic charges does not make them any more elegant or powerful
Discussion of the existence of monopoles or true magneto current -- seriously, people -- this sentence is glaringly false. In fact, the use of magnetic charge and magneto have been integral* to electromagnetic analysis for more than 50 years now. Using the symmetric form of Maxwell's equations. The fields created by all sources and media inside an arbitrary closed surface can be analogously modeled as charge and current distributions over the surface. This is what allows you to equivalently model the open end of a driven waveguide as a rectangular patch of magneto current, an electric dipole antenna as a "cigar band" of magneto current wrapping around the feed gap. All of which, I should add, makes the equations much easier to solve. Hell if nothing else the addition of a magnetic boundary conditions can allow numeric models to converge much more quickly.
Arguing that the phenomenon discovered does not truly uncover a magnetic monopole is one thing. Arguing that there is no benefit to symmetrical equations is as silly as that there is no benefit to expressing the equations in the "bastardly" phasor vector notation when a simple set of 12 differential equations of 12 variables would suffice.
Another important thing to remember that menus hide unused and rarely-used features. In most modern software that's actually a pretty good thing, as very few people need or want to leverage every single feature of an application in one session. It makes it harder to discover those features, but once you learn where they are the first time around, it's a solved problem. By presenting the user with large blocks of mostly unwanted toolbars, the ribbon scheme steals valuable vertical space without offering any usability savings over the initial discovery. You still have to switch between ribbon states to find half the features you want, and select from drop-down lists of icons insted of drop-down menus of options.
This will mesh better with Microsoft's vision of a modern application, for what that's worth. It might make some features easier to discover (I know people who are still surprised to learn about Firefox's keywords feature). Even so, I doubt it will be more popular than the current design, lead to significant changes in the way people use Firefox's features, or be worth the loss of valuable vertical real-estate. The only good thing I can say about it is that most people don't need to use menus in Firefox as it is, and the ribbon can probably be hidden like the URL bar, menu bar, and toolbars can already be hidden.
They're not really playing to the ignorance of their base, as it's not their base that they're trying to convince. They're trying to convince the Copyright Office, which is almost as bad because they cannot be reasonably expected to understand the intricacies of cellular network technology. That burden lies with the network operators and the FCC. As for the question of whether jailbreaking is good policy from a copyright perspective, the Copyright Office shouldn't care much about potential network problems.
Now from a technical perspective: AT&T is a GSM/EDGE/UTMS network. If the iPhone is supposed to work on their network, it conforms to those international, well-vetted standards. (An part of those standards is the use of a SIM card specifically so a user can separate the handset from the network.) There shouldn't be anything that an iPhone can do on their network that any other cell modem couldn't do. TFA isn't coming up for me, so I'm not sure what Apple's specific claims are, but I have a hard time imagining that AT&T gave them some unique, magic software key to a very well-defined tower structure.
Unfortunately, taxes are part of the problem in Michigan. Businesses just can't afford to operate under the tax burden there, so they were fleeing the state even before the recession. States have to compete for cash just like everyone else. Just like a vendor can cut prices and make it up in volume, so too can a state lower taxes and make it up in an increase in business. That such drastic cuts are necessary is not just a sign of the times, but also a sign of a state that just refuses to compete.
The.xxx and.sex refusals were political, but in a grander sense than you indicated. The Bush administration didn't want them because it seemed as if it was giving a electronic blessing to smut (and mostly because the constituency that got them elected actually does hate smut). Some parents and filtering organizations speculated it would make porn easier to filter, and most of the porn industry opposed it because they believed they would ultimately be forced to move to such a domain, which would marginalize their businesses by shunting them off to an internet red-light district. All this debate is completely independent of what kind of content actually belongs in such a domain.
It failed for the political reason that pretty much no one actually wanted it.
Sadly, half of the firefox plug-ins I now consider indispensable are the ones that disable functionality or return the user interface to an older style and functionality. Firefox was destined for bloat once they committed to building-in features that would have been more useful as pre-bundled, official extensions (like the anti-phishing technology).
In general, I find the books I want to read either 1) get popular enough that they eventually drop down to a reasonable price, 2) are just popular enough that it's available without a wait at the library, or 3) is so obscure that I can buy one of the 30 copies that are actually still available for a couple of hundred bucks on Amazon.
Note that the one I would most be interested in an electronic copy of (legal or not), is the one that is least likely to have an electronic copy.
There are only a few books out there that are both popular enough that a good number of people want to read them, and yet not popular enough that buying the book is actually easier than hunting down the torrent or scanning yourself. Those writers will probably get hit hardest, and the gap between immensely successful writers and sort-of-successful writers may widen because of it. As an industry-wide problem though, I doubt it'll ever have the effect that it's had on, say, the music industry.
The trouble is "regional" here means almost exclusively "the northeast". There are two great commuter sinks -- New York and DC -- that produce enough jobs by virtue of the industries that are pretty much stuck there. People have to commute in from somewhere, because the cities just can't support that many full-time occupants. You have many dense housing areas within an hour or so of a few dense work areas.
In most of the rest of the country, that just doesn't hold: a commute doesn't mean an hour on a train so much as 15-30 minutes in a car. Trains are a less than ideal solution, either because the housing areas are too sparsely populated, or there's no single major work commute destination, or the housing ares are too spread out to justify the claim that a handfull of stations can actually reduce the total traffic. Congestion just shifts around, and the time commuters thought the would save is lost trying to get to the trains.
Also, the densest cities -- which probably have the most congestion and could benefit most from rail -- would have to reclaim land from existing roads, thereby worsening congestion for all motor traffic so that a train carrying a few people can pass by once every half-hour or so.
Trains make sense when you have a lot of fairly dense areas within a hour's drive of each other that people frequently travel between. Japan, parts of western Europe, and the American northeast fit the bill. America as a whole does not.
If 3D visualization is that helpful, is being immersed within the scene really that good of an idea? I'd hate to think that thousands of dollars would be spent on every session in this thing, only to discover that the team had their backs towards the "insightful" portion of the graphics. Is there any reason this couldn't be done with a desktop unit the size of a beach ball and a pair of headphones? For that matter, is there any compelling reason that this couldn't be done better with a couple of flat screens and surround sound?
Actually, "We're Not Entirely Honest" = "We have no idea how to give you an accurate estimate." As someone whose found himself sucked into the battery/mobile power side of a project recently, I can understand why they'd face difficulties.
When it comes to batteries, there are really only three options for measuring how much power is stored: completely drain it over several cycles to see what you get (which is how the manufacturer confirms capacity, but isn't too useful in situ); test the voltage across the terminals and estimate absed on pre-measured battery curves (which is difficult because voltages don't change dramatically until they're nearly drained); or, in some chemistries, measure the temperature changes in the battery (which detects inreactions that don't happen until the battery is almost completely drained). In practice, all you can do is take the manufacturer-specified capacity, derate that based on conditions in your application, and test to see if you came close.
In general, pulling more current from a battery disproportionately decreases remaining capacity. In general, it's pretty difficult to respond to sudden surges and lulls in power consumption for a user's unknown power cycle needs without making your estimate jump all over the place. In general, the problem is just a pain in the neck. It's like ordering a margarita with margarita-flavored ice cubes from a waiter whose never seen you before, then demanding to know exactly how long before you'll need to refill it (regardless of whether you intended to chug it or nurse it).
I'm no expert, but you don't have to be to see it's not a trivial problem.
That's not "normally" illegal. That's "always" illegal. Luckily for many reporters, the authorities are often spread to thin to track down real criminals, so the chance of them wasting resources on a reporter are slim unless it would actually help to catch the fugitive in a particularly high-profile case. Reporters still go to jail every once in a while for refusing to name a source, or doing something stupid.
Also, have a little consideration about the guys who come after you. And not just in your company.
Customers will come to you looking for technical manuals. They will come to you for a detailed description of that proprietary protocol you swore up and down (five years ago) that no one would ever have to hack a driver for. They will come to seeking graphs of figures of merit swept over frequency. And whether that customer is paying client integrating your product as a small, just-make-it-work component, a later team building on your product, or (God help them) someone else picking up your contract after your company just stopped bothering, your continued business will depend on getting those customers something they can use.
The best advice I can give you? Write down everything, give it a VERY descriptive filename (with a date), commit it to a repository, and save or print a copy to PDF. Your day-to-day needs may very, but for sake of the people who come after you, create documents -- not just files, and sure as hell not a massive wiki database dump, but complete documents -- that will survive your project.
Now California police also reserve the right to take DNA from anyone they arrest for any reason. Which means if they can ever make the process an order of magnitude cheaper and faster, they could assemble a very large database very quickly with just the laws already on the books.
My grades plummeted in middle school because of Dragon Realms. It was a little weird when they objected to AOL charging $10 a month for all games by going solo and charging $10 a month just for DR (that's right, I was once an AOLer). Still, a lot of good times. I wonder if my name is finally off the "wanted for pickpocketing" sign in east town square....
You're probably being a bit literal with the word "image", which is taken to mean "quatilties of" or "fundamental nature". That is, "in God's image" means "having fundamental qualities similar to those of God" such as moral responsibility, and recognition of one's self and one's place in the world, and other qualities of man which allow them to manifest God's will.
[flimsy excuse for a reference]
For a similar situation: in Dune, the Orange Catholic Bible states "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a Man", though the Bene Gesserit explain that they really mean "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
[/flimsy excuse for a reference]
First, I would point out that this is not really news. The Vatican has actually had a plan for approaching and converting alien life just in case it should be discovered for decades. (In fact, the plan was one of the programs that Madalyn Murray O'Hair frequently liked to joke about.)
This particular comment (the parent) is actually one of the few good comments I've seen so far. Since medieval times theologians have wondered, "did the Son of Man come to save everyone, or just humans?" There were a surprising number of medieval philosophers who were concerned with question -- should a race of sentient cyclopean starfish be discovered -- of whether human Jesus was sent to save their souls, or whether they would have to wait for cyclopean starfish Jesus.
In any case, this isn't a deviation from established Vatican protocol, and isn't news. Not for Catholics, and not even for people who just care about alien stories.
"The trade" is standardized by the IEEE, ISO, and other bodies. All of them have recognized standards that bring unit prefixes for bytes/bits such as "kilo", "mega", "giga" et al into line with SI units.
(A poster above claimed that "gibi" (giga-binary) and similar -bi definitions are an invention of Wikipedia. In fact, they are part of a never-passed, proposed IEEE standard.)
If anyone is sufficiently aware of technology to believe giga- can denote 1024^3 (contrary to all training in the metric system received in school), then they should also be aware that there is ambiguity in the definitions. Any reasonable person -- yes, that mythical, sensible, reasonable person all law is based upon -- who is aware of the ambiguity should also be aware that companies may take advantage of the definition which costs them less, particularly when it is the industry-approved definition. If the reasonable cannot conclude that the company is taking the costly route based on common sense alone, then he should ask for clarification.
Now before everyone who was weened in an era of lazy nomenclature jumps in and tells me that this is unfair, or stupid, or greedy (and it is), consider what it means that a technology company has to pay out a large settlement for actually _conforming_ to industry standards set forth by the IEEE.
FTA: : I have revoked the licensing under the GNU General Public
License (herein after referred to as "the GPL") for the
atscap version 1.1 codebase, all prior versions of the
atscap codebase and all the various release candidates of
the atscap codebase.
I have also revoked the licensing under the GPL for the
pchdtvr version 1.0 codebase, all prior versions of the
pchdtvr codebase and all release candidates of the pchdtvr
codebase, including all of the various interim pchdtvr
versions after version 1.0 and before the name was changed
to atscap.
He used the phrase "revoked". Furthermore, he said it would be in everyone's best interest to unistall and/or destroy all copies of his code that they may have. While this demonstrates his tenuous grasp on the ideas behind the GPL, he still made those claims in his post
Wu's position is that 'it is time to recognize a simpler principle for fair use: work that adds to the value of the original, as opposed to substituting for the original, is fair use. This simple concept would bring much clarity to the problems of secondary authorship on the web.'
So his definition of Fair Use is a work which uses the original work, but is at the same time substantially contributes to it by adding primarily new work or including substantial additional commentary or editting....
I'm no lawyer, but doesn't that sound like a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_workDirivite Work? Wouldn't that mean his definition of "fair use" is pretty much the same as "usable only with permission"?
Just a reminder that any amount can be tagged at any time for this sort of thing. (All funds are reported for taxes; the unusually large transaction reporting is to prevent money laundering.) Mandatory reporting starts at an _attempted_ transaction of $10,000.00, but any attempted transaction can be reported. For example, suppose you try to deposit $10,000, and the teller says "hold on, this takes some extra paperwork because we have to report it," so you then try to instead deposit only $900, or even cancel the transaction altogether. The fact that you never got around to depositing the $10,000 is irrelevant: the teller saw $10,000, and it still has to be reported. (True story; very dumb drug lord.)
As for the broken ATM analogy, it's not just an academic exerciese. Diebold ATMs were every bit as crappy as their voting machines. The letter of the law is that the customer is responsible for anything that is obviously a mistake on the bank's part. It seems a bit backwards, I know, but most reasonable people know that an extra $100,000.00 in their account is not a free gift, and this logic deflates a lot of otherwise interesting scams. False deposits that are corrected later (like yours) are the main reason, as it ensures that anyone who withdrew and spent that accidental money is unambiguously legally in the wrong. In your case, you never used it, and it looks like someone corrected it, so I wouldn't worry.
I'm pretty sure the fiery Eye of Sauron is part of the general LOTR license. At the very least I remember seeing it used as a graphic for the old LOTR CCG back when it came out, so I don't think the movie interpretation would be considered unique enough to require rights for a similar interpetation. (Fair warning: I haven't played the game so I have no idea how similar it is.)
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that prognostication gets harder as technological progress accelerates (as do gripping science fiction premises), and that science fiction is becoming less fantastical because we are so familiar with technology similar to what we find in those stories. What seems to be missing these days, however, is the social, human element. For example, growing up I read a lot of golden age science fiction, most of the technology of which has been either now realized, or seems utterly laughable. (As an odd result of this, I've spent the better part of the decade thinking of myself as "living in the future".) In most of those stories, the technology featured prominently as a MacGuffin, a starting point for the real story.
So you have cheap nuclear power, enough to waste in broadcasting it wirelessly, and everyone says its safe. How do you know? What do you do when you find out it's not, and the most transformative 20 years in history prove a colossal mistake? So you have institutionalized slavery (robots), not just over bodies, but minds. How do you keep the system running? Is it even moral to enslave something you've built from the ground up? So your entire economy has come to rely in some way on a single cheap service. To what extent are the people offering that service entitled to run your society? Most of these questions have been touched on and answered again and again in science ficition, but the common element is not technology. Rather, the common element is how people cause and react to change on a grand scale.
Unfortunately, many readers tend to fixate on the technology itself, and the social message (the real meat of the tale) gets lost. After that, you degrade into what we have now: science fantasy. Exercises in world-building for the sake of world building, exotic new toys like lightsabers, super-science that acts as an instant stand-in for magic, and all the other little bits that used to be just scenery moving center stage. There's just enough there to look like science fiction, when all it really is is adventure fantasy.
Making the equations "symmetrical" for both electric and magnetic charges does not make them any more elegant or powerful
Discussion of the existence of monopoles or true magneto current -- seriously, people -- this sentence is glaringly false. In fact, the use of magnetic charge and magneto have been integral* to electromagnetic analysis for more than 50 years now. Using the symmetric form of Maxwell's equations. The fields created by all sources and media inside an arbitrary closed surface can be analogously modeled as charge and current distributions over the surface. This is what allows you to equivalently model the open end of a driven waveguide as a rectangular patch of magneto current, an electric dipole antenna as a "cigar band" of magneto current wrapping around the feed gap. All of which, I should add, makes the equations much easier to solve. Hell if nothing else the addition of a magnetic boundary conditions can allow numeric models to converge much more quickly.
Arguing that the phenomenon discovered does not truly uncover a magnetic monopole is one thing. Arguing that there is no benefit to symmetrical equations is as silly as that there is no benefit to expressing the equations in the "bastardly" phasor vector notation when a simple set of 12 differential equations of 12 variables would suffice.
*No pun intended.
Another important thing to remember that menus hide unused and rarely-used features. In most modern software that's actually a pretty good thing, as very few people need or want to leverage every single feature of an application in one session. It makes it harder to discover those features, but once you learn where they are the first time around, it's a solved problem. By presenting the user with large blocks of mostly unwanted toolbars, the ribbon scheme steals valuable vertical space without offering any usability savings over the initial discovery. You still have to switch between ribbon states to find half the features you want, and select from drop-down lists of icons insted of drop-down menus of options.
This will mesh better with Microsoft's vision of a modern application, for what that's worth. It might make some features easier to discover (I know people who are still surprised to learn about Firefox's keywords feature). Even so, I doubt it will be more popular than the current design, lead to significant changes in the way people use Firefox's features, or be worth the loss of valuable vertical real-estate. The only good thing I can say about it is that most people don't need to use menus in Firefox as it is, and the ribbon can probably be hidden like the URL bar, menu bar, and toolbars can already be hidden.
They're not really playing to the ignorance of their base, as it's not their base that they're trying to convince. They're trying to convince the Copyright Office, which is almost as bad because they cannot be reasonably expected to understand the intricacies of cellular network technology. That burden lies with the network operators and the FCC. As for the question of whether jailbreaking is good policy from a copyright perspective, the Copyright Office shouldn't care much about potential network problems.
Now from a technical perspective: AT&T is a GSM/EDGE/UTMS network. If the iPhone is supposed to work on their network, it conforms to those international, well-vetted standards. (An part of those standards is the use of a SIM card specifically so a user can separate the handset from the network.) There shouldn't be anything that an iPhone can do on their network that any other cell modem couldn't do. TFA isn't coming up for me, so I'm not sure what Apple's specific claims are, but I have a hard time imagining that AT&T gave them some unique, magic software key to a very well-defined tower structure.
Unfortunately, taxes are part of the problem in Michigan. Businesses just can't afford to operate under the tax burden there, so they were fleeing the state even before the recession. States have to compete for cash just like everyone else. Just like a vendor can cut prices and make it up in volume, so too can a state lower taxes and make it up in an increase in business. That such drastic cuts are necessary is not just a sign of the times, but also a sign of a state that just refuses to compete.
The .xxx and .sex refusals were political, but in a grander sense than you indicated. The Bush administration didn't want them because it seemed as if it was giving a electronic blessing to smut (and mostly because the constituency that got them elected actually does hate smut). Some parents and filtering organizations speculated it would make porn easier to filter, and most of the porn industry opposed it because they believed they would ultimately be forced to move to such a domain, which would marginalize their businesses by shunting them off to an internet red-light district. All this debate is completely independent of what kind of content actually belongs in such a domain.
It failed for the political reason that pretty much no one actually wanted it.
Sadly, half of the firefox plug-ins I now consider indispensable are the ones that disable functionality or return the user interface to an older style and functionality. Firefox was destined for bloat once they committed to building-in features that would have been more useful as pre-bundled, official extensions (like the anti-phishing technology).
In general, I find the books I want to read either 1) get popular enough that they eventually drop down to a reasonable price, 2) are just popular enough that it's available without a wait at the library, or 3) is so obscure that I can buy one of the 30 copies that are actually still available for a couple of hundred bucks on Amazon.
Note that the one I would most be interested in an electronic copy of (legal or not), is the one that is least likely to have an electronic copy.
There are only a few books out there that are both popular enough that a good number of people want to read them, and yet not popular enough that buying the book is actually easier than hunting down the torrent or scanning yourself. Those writers will probably get hit hardest, and the gap between immensely successful writers and sort-of-successful writers may widen because of it. As an industry-wide problem though, I doubt it'll ever have the effect that it's had on, say, the music industry.
If there's a rash of break-ins in your hometown you don't recommend that every home owner goes out and buys a gun
I'm a Texan engineer: the only problem that can't be solved by a better gun is the problem of how to build a better gun.
The trouble is "regional" here means almost exclusively "the northeast". There are two great commuter sinks -- New York and DC -- that produce enough jobs by virtue of the industries that are pretty much stuck there. People have to commute in from somewhere, because the cities just can't support that many full-time occupants. You have many dense housing areas within an hour or so of a few dense work areas.
In most of the rest of the country, that just doesn't hold: a commute doesn't mean an hour on a train so much as 15-30 minutes in a car. Trains are a less than ideal solution, either because the housing areas are too sparsely populated, or there's no single major work commute destination, or the housing ares are too spread out to justify the claim that a handfull of stations can actually reduce the total traffic. Congestion just shifts around, and the time commuters thought the would save is lost trying to get to the trains.
Also, the densest cities -- which probably have the most congestion and could benefit most from rail -- would have to reclaim land from existing roads, thereby worsening congestion for all motor traffic so that a train carrying a few people can pass by once every half-hour or so.
Trains make sense when you have a lot of fairly dense areas within a hour's drive of each other that people frequently travel between. Japan, parts of western Europe, and the American northeast fit the bill. America as a whole does not.
If 3D visualization is that helpful, is being immersed within the scene really that good of an idea? I'd hate to think that thousands of dollars would be spent on every session in this thing, only to discover that the team had their backs towards the "insightful" portion of the graphics. Is there any reason this couldn't be done with a desktop unit the size of a beach ball and a pair of headphones? For that matter, is there any compelling reason that this couldn't be done better with a couple of flat screens and surround sound?
"We're Not Entirely Honest" = We've been lying
Actually, "We're Not Entirely Honest" = "We have no idea how to give you an accurate estimate." As someone whose found himself sucked into the battery/mobile power side of a project recently, I can understand why they'd face difficulties.
When it comes to batteries, there are really only three options for measuring how much power is stored: completely drain it over several cycles to see what you get (which is how the manufacturer confirms capacity, but isn't too useful in situ); test the voltage across the terminals and estimate absed on pre-measured battery curves (which is difficult because voltages don't change dramatically until they're nearly drained); or, in some chemistries, measure the temperature changes in the battery (which detects inreactions that don't happen until the battery is almost completely drained). In practice, all you can do is take the manufacturer-specified capacity, derate that based on conditions in your application, and test to see if you came close.
In general, pulling more current from a battery disproportionately decreases remaining capacity. In general, it's pretty difficult to respond to sudden surges and lulls in power consumption for a user's unknown power cycle needs without making your estimate jump all over the place. In general, the problem is just a pain in the neck. It's like ordering a margarita with margarita-flavored ice cubes from a waiter whose never seen you before, then demanding to know exactly how long before you'll need to refill it (regardless of whether you intended to chug it or nurse it).
I'm no expert, but you don't have to be to see it's not a trivial problem.
That's not "normally" illegal. That's "always" illegal. Luckily for many reporters, the authorities are often spread to thin to track down real criminals, so the chance of them wasting resources on a reporter are slim unless it would actually help to catch the fugitive in a particularly high-profile case. Reporters still go to jail every once in a while for refusing to name a source, or doing something stupid.
Also, have a little consideration about the guys who come after you. And not just in your company.
Customers will come to you looking for technical manuals. They will come to you for a detailed description of that proprietary protocol you swore up and down (five years ago) that no one would ever have to hack a driver for. They will come to seeking graphs of figures of merit swept over frequency. And whether that customer is paying client integrating your product as a small, just-make-it-work component, a later team building on your product, or (God help them) someone else picking up your contract after your company just stopped bothering, your continued business will depend on getting those customers something they can use.
The best advice I can give you? Write down everything, give it a VERY descriptive filename (with a date), commit it to a repository, and save or print a copy to PDF. Your day-to-day needs may very, but for sake of the people who come after you, create documents -- not just files, and sure as hell not a massive wiki database dump, but complete documents -- that will survive your project.
Now California police also reserve the right to take DNA from anyone they arrest for any reason. Which means if they can ever make the process an order of magnitude cheaper and faster, they could assemble a very large database very quickly with just the laws already on the books.
My grades plummeted in middle school because of Dragon Realms. It was a little weird when they objected to AOL charging $10 a month for all games by going solo and charging $10 a month just for DR (that's right, I was once an AOLer). Still, a lot of good times. I wonder if my name is finally off the "wanted for pickpocketing" sign in east town square....
You're probably being a bit literal with the word "image", which is taken to mean "quatilties of" or "fundamental nature". That is, "in God's image" means "having fundamental qualities similar to those of God" such as moral responsibility, and recognition of one's self and one's place in the world, and other qualities of man which allow them to manifest God's will.
[flimsy excuse for a reference]
For a similar situation: in Dune, the Orange Catholic Bible states "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a Man", though the Bene Gesserit explain that they really mean "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
[/flimsy excuse for a reference]
First, I would point out that this is not really news. The Vatican has actually had a plan for approaching and converting alien life just in case it should be discovered for decades. (In fact, the plan was one of the programs that Madalyn Murray O'Hair frequently liked to joke about.)
This particular comment (the parent) is actually one of the few good comments I've seen so far. Since medieval times theologians have wondered, "did the Son of Man come to save everyone, or just humans?" There were a surprising number of medieval philosophers who were concerned with question -- should a race of sentient cyclopean starfish be discovered -- of whether human Jesus was sent to save their souls, or whether they would have to wait for cyclopean starfish Jesus.
In any case, this isn't a deviation from established Vatican protocol, and isn't news. Not for Catholics, and not even for people who just care about alien stories.
"The trade" is standardized by the IEEE, ISO, and other bodies. All of them have recognized standards that bring unit prefixes for bytes/bits such as "kilo", "mega", "giga" et al into line with SI units.
(A poster above claimed that "gibi" (giga-binary) and similar -bi definitions are an invention of Wikipedia. In fact, they are part of a never-passed, proposed IEEE standard.)
If anyone is sufficiently aware of technology to believe giga- can denote 1024^3 (contrary to all training in the metric system received in school), then they should also be aware that there is ambiguity in the definitions. Any reasonable person -- yes, that mythical, sensible, reasonable person all law is based upon -- who is aware of the ambiguity should also be aware that companies may take advantage of the definition which costs them less, particularly when it is the industry-approved definition. If the reasonable cannot conclude that the company is taking the costly route based on common sense alone, then he should ask for clarification.
Now before everyone who was weened in an era of lazy nomenclature jumps in and tells me that this is unfair, or stupid, or greedy (and it is), consider what it means that a technology company has to pay out a large settlement for actually _conforming_ to industry standards set forth by the IEEE.
FTA: : I have revoked the licensing under the GNU General Public License (herein after referred to as "the GPL") for the atscap version 1.1 codebase, all prior versions of the atscap codebase and all the various release candidates of the atscap codebase.
I have also revoked the licensing under the GPL for the pchdtvr version 1.0 codebase, all prior versions of the pchdtvr codebase and all release candidates of the pchdtvr codebase, including all of the various interim pchdtvr versions after version 1.0 and before the name was changed to atscap.
He used the phrase "revoked". Furthermore, he said it would be in everyone's best interest to unistall and/or destroy all copies of his code that they may have. While this demonstrates his tenuous grasp on the ideas behind the GPL, he still made those claims in his post
Wu's position is that 'it is time to recognize a simpler principle for fair use: work that adds to the value of the original, as opposed to substituting for the original, is fair use. This simple concept would bring much clarity to the problems of secondary authorship on the web.'
So his definition of Fair Use is a work which uses the original work, but is at the same time substantially contributes to it by adding primarily new work or including substantial additional commentary or editting....
I'm no lawyer, but doesn't that sound like a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_workDirivite Work? Wouldn't that mean his definition of "fair use" is pretty much the same as "usable only with permission"?
Just a reminder that any amount can be tagged at any time for this sort of thing. (All funds are reported for taxes; the unusually large transaction reporting is to prevent money laundering.) Mandatory reporting starts at an _attempted_ transaction of $10,000.00, but any attempted transaction can be reported. For example, suppose you try to deposit $10,000, and the teller says "hold on, this takes some extra paperwork because we have to report it," so you then try to instead deposit only $900, or even cancel the transaction altogether. The fact that you never got around to depositing the $10,000 is irrelevant: the teller saw $10,000, and it still has to be reported. (True story; very dumb drug lord.)
As for the broken ATM analogy, it's not just an academic exerciese. Diebold ATMs were every bit as crappy as their voting machines. The letter of the law is that the customer is responsible for anything that is obviously a mistake on the bank's part. It seems a bit backwards, I know, but most reasonable people know that an extra $100,000.00 in their account is not a free gift, and this logic deflates a lot of otherwise interesting scams. False deposits that are corrected later (like yours) are the main reason, as it ensures that anyone who withdrew and spent that accidental money is unambiguously legally in the wrong. In your case, you never used it, and it looks like someone corrected it, so I wouldn't worry.
Obligatory IANAL
I'm pretty sure the fiery Eye of Sauron is part of the general LOTR license. At the very least I remember seeing it used as a graphic for the old LOTR CCG back when it came out, so I don't think the movie interpretation would be considered unique enough to require rights for a similar interpetation. (Fair warning: I haven't played the game so I have no idea how similar it is.)