Does the constitutional prohibition of ex post facto laws prevent the legalization of illegal activity as a means to annul the culpability of preexisting perpetrators?

Despite beliefs to the contrary, society is nothing but a giant game of Nomic. There may be rules about what you can do, but if you play well enough you can change those rules. Playing well includes the ability to change them retroactively.

And then we won't have athletes representing countries any more, but drug companies.

"Well, GlaxoSmithKline are looking great, taking home four gold medals, two silvers and five bronzes so far. This is sure to push their stock price up substantially for the coming year."

Did not RTFA.

a pool of solder on the table/circuit board, completely detached from the items attempting to be soldered.

It's a proper noun, folks.

BTW, my personal opinion on Lua:

It's a fun language to learn, because at the core it is *so* simple. In less than a week a good scripter can fully wrap their head around everything that Lua has to offer from the scripting side (not the C++ side; that might be another week). It's rather elegant, really, with convenient syntax for integer-based for-loops that automatically create a new copy of the loop variable on each pass for simple closure creation.

However, when you get down to actually typing in itwell, it's not as verbose as Java, but there's some real RSI danger there. With it's simple core come decisions like "not only will we not give you foo++, we won't even give you foo+=1". Try typing things like "frameCounter = frameCounter + 1" many times and you'll start to scream. Every day I scripted in Lua at work I would long for the times when I could use Ruby to actually get something done.

For those who know JavaScript and want to get a glimpse of what Lua is like, I have a page on my site: Learning Lua from JavaScript.

I'll be interested to see if they go for WoW-style "raw", imperative Lua (gobs of functions) or a more OOP-style Lua (NB: my site).

In designing the Lua interface for an old Game UI authoring product I originally went with OOP-style Lua. It was (IMHO) a rather elegant wrapper on our DOM. However, we soon found that the memory thrash of using Lua's lightweight userdata to go back and forth between C++ and Lua resulted in poor performance on consoles, and I ultimately had to redesign the interface to be more WoW-like for our next release.

It was a shame, putting more onus on the scripter to manage objects (tables of properties in Lua) based on a 'pointer' passed around to uniquely identify each element in the DOM, and passing that pointer to all relevant functions. But the performance increase was dramatic.

That's all well and good, but what about digits of tau?

The Retina theoretical limit is based on a 'standard' viewing distance for phone displays. If you wanted HD glasses (using a far focal point) you would need much higher res. Did not RTFA, but perhaps that is the sort of target for this.

Either that or it's just geeky dick wagging. :)

Speakeasy.net cut me off in 1999 when a Windows server I had at home was exploited (MSSQL Server...grr) and infected. I called them, they explained what was up and how to fix it. I 'fixed' it, called them back, and they put me back online...and then offline again 12 hours later because I hadn't cleaned it all up properly. (My then-girlfriend-now-wire really wanted to play Quake 3 Team Arena...I didn't have time to fight Windows!) I fixed it for real, and they put me right online again.

It was frustrating at the time, but I knew then and I know now that what they did was what I wish more companies did.

Or perhaps the robot will take the laws very seriously, to ill effect.

FTA:

"About: ... We use the term graffiti for our work since we are storing data in a way that non-network participants may regard as unsightly or unwanted vandalism. ..."

"Update: ... It was never our intention to maliciously deface sites, ..."

I don't blame them for changing their tune once they came under fire, but I'm surprised that they have both statements on the page at once. Or am I somehow seeing a contradiction where none exists?