Comment Re:Don't get too excited. (Score 1) 158
Isn't guilty until proven innocent (or rich) already standard operating procedure over there in the USA?
Isn't guilty until proven innocent (or rich) already standard operating procedure over there in the USA?
What's next? Courts requiring an NDA before you're allowed participate in the justice system?
Unfortunately, the "expectation of privacy" in what people do in their daily lives is gradually being shrunk to the point where soon it will no longer exist. At that point, the brown stains being wiped across the US Constitution will completely obscure the words of 4th Amendment.
This doesn't completely make sense (although I also believe Fluke didn't actively initiate the action).
How would the Customs/Border "Protection" guys know whether or not SparkFun had a license from Fluke? Someone at CBP must have suspected something, and made a few phone calls asking questions first. They can't (legally) just claim Trademark/dress infraction and block passage because some random employee had a feeling in his gut.
They must have contacted someone (either SparkFun or Fluke) who said SparkFun didn't have permission and that the device was infringing. The CBP guy wouldn't have just pulled up the Trademark/dress filing and in his 'expert' capacity to interpret this decided to block the shipment without verifying the current ownership/licensee chain.
If it was SparkFun that sent a poorly written response and got themselves into trouble, then so be it. But, it may have been Fluke answering a simple question without thinking about the final outcome of their action.
Think of this like having the cops turn up at your door asking if you owned the car parked across your driveway, and you simply answer no and close the door. Then later that day your daughter's boyfriend complains that you had his car towed.
Literal Creationism (or "Intelligent design") is primarily an American thing pushed by fundamentalist protestants.
The vast majority of old school mainstream christian religious people (eg. Catholics Anglicans, etc) hold that evolution is a scientifically established principle (supported by both observation and related scientific theories). As far as how a deity fits into their picture, it is generally understood that the biblical stories are allegorical and not literal tellings of an event.
The concept of 'evolution guided by God' is simply a restatement that scientific evidence guides the description of how the universe works, and the random events that coincided to an eventual outcome may have been influenced or set in motion by some divine force. And even then, that is the simplistic layman's way of interpreting the phrase 'you/people were created by god'. With a deep theological understanding, the physical and spiritual aspects of the human condition are not necessarily connected and therefore unconflicted when it comes to changes in how we understand the workings of the known universe.
In general, religious belief does not hinge on anything that can ever be proven/disproven by observation, and is purely the domain of spiritual fulfilment and ideas that exist outside of the physical universe. For these people, there is no need for debate or argument. Science is science. Religion is religion. Their minds are open.
For the biblical fundamentalists that treat their bible as literal tellings of actual events, the 'debate' will never end. Science is religion. Religion is science. Their minds are closed.
These 'debates' are not attention whoring by the religious right, it is attention whoring by the media. More eyeballs for all involved.
Trademark/Copyright/Patent law aren't all inherently viewed as bad when implemented and executed properly. However, there are numerous examples (some of which appear on Slashdot) when the holder/government have overstepped the mark. This creates a feeling that the best solution to stop the abuses is to remove the system all-together. Here are some examples of the good/bad dichotomy:
Trademarks protecting an obvious brand-name: OK
Trademarks protecting a vague/generalised name/design: BAD
Patents protecting a clearly novel, non-obvious and very specific invention: OK
Patents on broad general topics and/or obvious incremental improvements: BAD
Copyright protecting a creator from having their clearly original work from being re-distributed commercially for a short time (14 years): OK
Copyright on a few bars of music that appear in the middle of a song from 75 years ago that could easily have been re-created without ever being exposed to the original: BAD
Muscles are not necessarily damaged by small amounts of activity, but take them beyond their limits too often or too quickly and you get tears, strains and other indirect problems related to interconnects like bones and tendons. Sleep deprivation is not a typical activity and should be likened to overexertion or overuse.
I agree the blurb is sensationalist in its claims, but the observations in the article are still valid within the domain in their claims of how sleep deprivation affects the mice they were testing.
If a population had a few night owls that stood guard all night, there is no reason why those 'owls' couldn't have slept in the back of the cave during the day.
Also, sleep deprivation may be less of an issue for those genetically inclined to need less sleep. Lack of sleep may take its toll in a different way than purely lowering the IQ of those participants. And clearly, for some, there may be no obvious issues at all. A slightly reduced life expectancy may be testable, but if something unrelated kills you first, you'll never know.
Sleep deprivation has been a natural and common occurrence throughout human evolution. It seems highly implausible that "an all-nighter" would cause permanent brain damage in any meaningful sense.
I doubt a single all-nighter is going to cause a measurable change to your long term brain function. However, anything that takes a small toll, may become measurable in aggregate after a given number of occurrences.
Regarding human evolution; people generally sleep when it is dark. And with no unnatural sources of light, historically sleep deprivation would not have been anywhere near as common as it has become in modern society.
It's not that the secondary system is 'cross checking' or comparing results. They are really just monitoring circuits with a particular set of rules embedded in separate circuitry that just makes sure the primary system never breaks those rules. It is effectively the master control and will always 'win' if there is a problem. They are designed to be simple, robust and if possible, completely hardware based.
Some other examples are 'jabber' control hardware lockouts to stop a radio transmitter from crashing and permanently keying active; the watchdog timers in critical systems that will reset the system if it isn't periodically reset; power control systems that shutdown power domains if an overload is detected; etc.
Something like a nuclear power station should have more complex monitoring systems, but the rules are similar. In modern critical system design, the rules are generally set up to require a sanitising channel between the 'internet' and the control network. That channel may be some simple UART to UART based control logic that allows the a subset of general control commands to be issued without the ability to override the primary safety lockouts. If you want to override those, you have to turn up in person.
This type of security has been standard practice for years by the embedded systems engineers. Once people started shoehorning inappropriate solutions into critical system control, that's where it went belly up. That's where you end up with glorified 'web coders' writing what should be done by someone that understands the pitfalls. Sometimes, it's because 'management' has decided to requisition and install something beyond the design parameters set by the engineers.
When they do this in areas with custom plates (or plates that can end/start in a letter) they do the 'A-M', 'N-Z' alternating thing, along with odd/even.
So far there is insufficient proof that Dorian is Satoshi. A few random correlations across huge populations does not evidence make.
Perhaps the real Satoshi has a 5 year old kid and doesn't waste too much time on his pseudonymous accounts anymore. But, he still reads the news, saw this crap turn up and figured he couldn't just let it slide. I know I would have done the same if I was Satoshi and some poor bastard was baselessly getting hounded like that.
Regarding your comment on people who work for the DOD: it isn't like the movies. There are all sorts of people at various levels who may have come in because they worked at a firm that was subcontracted. The people I've worked with in this area aren't all geniuses. In fact most are far from it - most are just regular employees that have been vetted a little more than your average joe to weed out people with a problematic history. Don't you think every company out there wants the best and smartest people? Maybe the NSA somehow manages to find all the well rounded geniuses, and pays them huge amounts of money to keep them. But, the average DOD contractor is definitely not some super-employee like you elude to in your comment.
It also means that the cops will need much more evidence than 'looky right here what we've gone and found on your computer'. Which should apply to everyone anyway.
You could still drag on the window title, and if collapsed, drag on the icon. If that's too small for some people, they could always include an option where dragging on the menu bar text would drag the window.
I suspect the actual extinctions took place much more quickly, while the after effects continued long enough that nothing could recover until the planet had stabilised. It's not like an asteroid or volcanic eruption took place and everything gradually died off over many thousands of years.
It would have been a relatively sudden shock, followed by hell on earth for the event duration, dissipating over the long haul. A few small pockets of relative hospitability would have held out long enough for the rest of the environment to recover and life to re-colonise the rest of the planet.
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. -- Ambrose Bierce