Posts by tapanit 41 posts • joined 20 Jul 2009
'A falling bullet from a "miss" will only reach its terminal velocity on the way down. It's weight is small. So it would be comparable to a hailstone.'
Umm, no. Unless shot straight up, the bullet also has *horizontal* velocity, and that's what'll do the damage. There are well-documented cases of bullets shot randomly in the air causing damage, even killing people.
Crime should primarily be prosecuted in whatever country the perpetrator was at the time. If you can't get adequate prosecution there, it should be fixed there rather than using extradition.
Many countries, though apparently not Britain, allow extradition only to countries where the punishment can't be significantly more severe (notably so Finland, though it doesn't extradite its citizens to the USA in any case, not even voluntarily).
You may well be right that there will be no UK court case and the case will remain open in the USA. I don't think they'd consider him important enough to hijack forcibly though, or even try extradition very hard (maybe from some countries) - I can't see Finland extraditing him for example. But travel to the USA would be out of bounds for him.
Case insensitivity is a major pain if you have to deal with several languages. The lower-upper -conversion is language-dependent - e.g., in several languages accents disappear in capitalization, in Turkish upper case 'i' isn't 'I' but 'İ', in German ß becomes 'SS' (or 'SZ' in some cases) in upper case...
"If however, anyone feels personally abused, threatened, or otherwise uncomfortable due to this process, that is not acceptable."
Given how little it takes for some people to feel uncomfortable, I assume that is not intended to be taken literally (it really couldn't be). Actually, given history of kernel lists and Linus' past behaviour, I suspect it's not intended to be taken seriously at all.
Vladimir Plouzhnikov: "reduction of population is impossible in anything approaching long term."
I rather think it's trivial in the long term: human population will naturally reduce to zero. Possibly it doesn't even take all that long a term.
Even in short term, say a couple of centuries, chances of a catastrophe that'll wipe out 99%+ of the species are not impossibly small.
"the stated point of (some of the) middle-east-based terror groups is to cause more and more disruption in the west to normal functions such as air travel, not by actually disrupting them themselves, but by vaguely implying they PLAN to disrupt them and have the response (from TSA et. al) disrupt them much more."
Indeed. If TSA were judged by the actual impact of their activities, they should be prosecuted for aiding and abetting terrorists.
Actually .africa wasn't rejected as such, but there were two applicants for it and one of them was now rejected (presumably the other will get it, although that's not formally decided yet).
The objection to .gcc was due to potential of confusion with Gulf Cooperation Council (the applicant was Goldman Sachs, or technically their fund GCCIX WLL).
486 is still supported, judging by comments in the changelog. There are some sort-of-486-like processors that are no longer supported, however:
"Note that the 386 is no longer supported, this includes AMD/Cyrix/Intel 386DX/DXL/SL/SLC/SX, Cyrix/TI 486DLC/DLC2, UMC 486SX-S and the NexGen Nx586."
Interesting. My N900 has been rock solid - the only thing I've had problems with is MMS messages (which have never been officially supported), but I've never needed to remove battery or anything like that. And I grieve for its never-materialized successor (N9 does not count, I want a real keyboard).
In some countries it's perfectly legal to record a conversation you're part of, even without other parties knowing about it. In Finland, for example, where it was actually confirmed by the (Finnish) Supreme Court some years back. And yes, obviously such a recording would be usable as evidence.
Indeed. Apparently the only database-safe SSDs in the consumer market are the old and slow Intel 320 series ones (the new "enterprise" series 710 isn't much faster, but much more expensive - it is supposed to last much longer, though).
You might still find some (out of production) OCZ Vertex 2 Pro models on sale somewhere, but are getting scarce (and often very expensive - I just picked a 50GB one - the last available at that store - at €80, but mostly they go for five times that).
Algorithms are indeed often really hard to create. The hard part is usually mathematics. Which isn't patentable either, as you probably know, and for a good reason.
That something is hard to do and should be rewarded doesn't mean patents are a good way of doing so. (Quite a lot of seriously hard mathematics has been created without patents.)
"the human animal seems to be the only species hell bent on screwing itself into the ground over this contentious & self imposed issue, whilst all other existing flora & fauna on this planet will [...] simply adapt"
Well, yes, but "simply adapting" will often mean going extinct. :-)
Of course, that is the way of evolution: as the environment changes, some species will survive while others won't, and there's little doubt that nature as a whole will cope. But from a narrow human viewpoint, it is of some interest if the human species is among the survivors.
The mere name "Hobbit" probably isn't covered by copyright, but it is trademarked.
I doubt they have (or indeed could have) trademark on hominid species... unlike copyright, trademarks are domain-specific (so that, e.g., Apple could be two separate trademarks, Apple Computers and Apple Records), but they may well have registered the trademark for drinks and such. Copyright enters the picture in where images from the film have been used (which Nature &c presumably didn't use).
"I am of the understanding that in UK courts people can be compelled to answer questions by a judge."
I'm quite certain you're wrong, when it come to the accused. The principle against self-incrimination is rather strongly entrenched in various international legal treaties, notably in the European Convention on Human Rights, which I believe is binding in the UK.
Now *witnesses*, i.e., people who are not being accused themselves, can be compelled to speak, but that's not at issue here.
One somewhat counter-intuitive effect of death penalty (and to a lesser degree, harsher punishments in general) is that it reduces the likelyhood of getting caught and convicted, and (even more surprisingly) increases false convictions. So while DP obviously reduces recidivism in those convicted and executed, it might have the opposite effect in total.
Remember, this is in Finland, where heating is needed more often than cooling, and a big problem with air conditioning is preventing heat loss in winter! So they can probably feed any extra heat to the communal central heating system (and get money from it!). Only in summer it'd be a problem at all.
"As to what animal is picked that starts with a "P" for 12.04...who knows?"
Lots of those to choose from (I doubt they have the chuzpah to go for Perky Penguin though), but the next one will be harder... Querulous Quail? Quotidian Quetzal? Queamish Queenfish? Queer Quillback? Quirky Quillfish? Can't think of any more... except Qagga, but an extinct animal would be a bit, err, ominous.
Maybe they'll jump Q and go straight to R (Racy Rat?).
While rsync by itself doesn't keep multiple versions of files, it makes it easy enough, and a number of tools built on it do it automatically. A few have already been mentioned, others include rsnapshot (which needs very little besides rsync itself and perl, but requires editing configuration files manually) and backuppc (which provides web interface).
Looks like this has been fixed in 2.6.30.2, according to
http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0907.2/00706.html:
"[...] Fix NULL pointer dereference in tun_chr_pool() [...]"
After the patch the code in question looks like this:
struct sock *sk;
if (!tun)
return POLLERR;
sk = tun->sk;
I suspect 2.6.30 and 2.6.30.1 won't appear in many distributions.
The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing
Join our daily or weekly newsletters, subscribe to a specific section or set News alerts
Subscribe
