He is not saying that everything should be designed for maximum durability. He is saying that things should be designed so that they don't break the first itme something a little unusual happens. A bridge which collapses under a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam is defective. A laptop computer sound system which breaks if certain sounds are played with the volume all the way up is also defective. (After all, laptops are frequently operated with he volumn all the way up.) Here Dell is claiming that VLC filtered the sound in a certain way and that their speakers are not designed to play that sound. That is just silly. It is as silly as a highway bridge designer who says that he didn't know that his bridge was suppose to be able to handle bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Actually, no, higher wattage speakers do not automatically draw more power. The power rating on a speaker specifies the amount of power which the amplier can pump through the speaker without damaging it. How much power actually goes into the speaker is determined by the number of volts which the amplifier puts on the line and the impediance of the speaker (which is generally 4 or 8 ohms). With the volume control set to zero there are zero volts on the line and the speaker is consuming zero power, no matter what its rating. As we raise the volume the voltage rises and the speaker starts consuming power and producing sound. As we raise the volume the amplifier will get to a point where it is producing the maximum voltage of which it is physically capable. That may be less than the speaker could endure, but so what?

Saying that speakers with a too-high power rating will blow an amplifier is like saying that tires with a too-high speed rating will cause a car to go too fast. How fast the car goes depends on how strong the engine is and how much you press the gas pedal, not no how strongly the tires are constructed.

I think it probably had more to do with the fact that wages are generally a lot lower in India. This improved Oracle's bargaining position in wage negotiations. If they had offered someone already in the US less then the going rate, he would likely refuse in the hope of getting a better offer. But if this employee refused their offer, he would remain in India and get much less than their lowball offer. Is this unfair, exploitive, and illegal? Of course it is. But the decision to exploit him may have had more to do with his poor bargaining position than his skin color.

I agree with you about the nerdy satisfaction to be had, even for those who do not agree with the theology. The last three quarters of Genesis with its descriptions of early Middle Eastern cultures is fascinating. The book of Ester gives us a look into a vanished culture as well as a being gripping story full of dramatic and subtle turns of events. The gospels are also worth reading, but for a different reason. They completely lack the pomp and solemnity so familiar from artistic depictions. In them Jesus is a dynamic figure who criscrosses the country on foot and whose speeches so anger the establishment that he sometimes has to flee immediately after giving them. Finally, I would recommend the book of Acts for its depictions of the Roman world of the first century including extensive descriptions of sea voyages, legal proceedings, and city life.

Sometimes this is because an activist has staked out the article as his territory. These articles take a position for or against something but contain very little hard information about it. There will also be broken fragments of arguments against the article's position. When an innocent editor starts editing for clarity and style, removes material that does not seem to be relevant, and finds and introduces actually informative sources, the activist sees this as an attack from 'them'. This kind of activist doesn't like to see opposing views described in an evenhanded way (become someone "might mistakenly think they have validity") and doesn't want any marginally relevant and poorly integrated material removed because it represents talking points which he just has to get in.

I have noticed that. Paragraphs tend to deteriorate and eventually become incomprehensible as one person after another adds what he regards as clarifications without intergrating them properly into the whole.

It always applies, but it is sometimes ignored. The abstract construction used by cold fjord tells us that he is talking about how things are supposed to work.

No, the habraabr page is dated yesterday. It is about the same blog posting that we are discussing here.

Sure, war is bad and killing people is bad. But some acts of war are seen as more bad than others. This isn't entirely arbitrary. The more directed and targeted an attack is, the more society is likely to accept it as reasonable and justified. Shooting an advancing soldier immediately furthurs a clear military goal while causing the least damage to non-participants. Planting a land mine in his path may stop him, but it is more likely to kill a child or a farmer years from now. Finding his family and killing them in order to demoralize him is not only unnecessarily crual, it directly harms non-participants, and fails to achieve a military objective since it gives him a personal stake in the fight and inspires others to join up on his side.

Such laws don't "hamper the good guys", they express a consensus about what makes someone a bad guy. Bad guys, blinded by anger or a lust for power make war more painful and destructive than it already is.

It would get boring if the consequences were tacked on in predictable way like the disclaimers and warnings at the end of a prescriptional drug commercial on TV. But the idea of writing realistic consequences into the plot of a video game is interesting. And I don't mean simplistic stuff like "if you shoot civilians without justification, you may bet caught and thrown into the brig". How about a "reputation meter" which would indicate how others view your actions. As it got lower, your enemies would be able to justify the use of more agressive measures against you and parties which had been trying to stay out of it might join in and start fighting you.

This is a pattern which has played out in numerous real wars. Rushing in with advanced weaponry and shooting the place up is fun, but the neigbors really, really resent it. Break too much stuff, shoot to many of the 'wrong' people, disrupt their lives too much, utter too many threats, strut around too much, and they will get angry and try to put you in your place. Before you know it, you will be caught in a quagmire.

I don't the researchers claim that the words directly reflect the writers emotions. When people write persuasively they instead try to stir emotions in their readers. For example, if I write: "I am deaply concerned that our current strategy exposes us to unnecessary risk." I am fear words in the hope that my readers will take what I have to say more seriously.

It appears the key they handed over was their SSL key which is used to encrypt communications with their server as it passes over the Internet. The FBI wanted to wiretap their Internet line and decrypt the communications. They shut down so that there would be no communications.

This is true, corrupt officials have all sorts of underhanded ways to fight a ruling they don't like. I was addressing the narrow question of whether they can reverse it outright simply by passing a law.

The question is not whether if is physically possible for a determined third part to abtain this information. The question is does the sender have a "reasonable expection of privacy". The established legal principle is that when the expectation is high enough, a search warrant is required. Precautions which leave a wiretap on the Internet as the most practical way to obtain the information create a significantly higher expecation of privacy.

Congress can "overrule" court precedent under two circumstances: 1) the law was ruled unconstitutional due to a correctable technical fault such as being too vague or 2) the court ruled that the law did not apply to the specific case and that if congress wants it to apply to such cases in the future it should rewrite it. But congress cannot overrule a court finding that a law violates the constitution by its intent. That requires a constitutional amendment.

You are correct in that a contract in which one party promises not to comply with court orders is unenforcable. But if the law says that a pen register can be used under certain circumstances, the parties absolutely can enter into a contract which prohibits them from creating those circumstances. If the Lavabit contract offered guarantees that the e-mail header information would not or could not be read by employees, that may have created a "reasonable expectation of privacy". Since reasonable expectation of privacy is a very important factor in determining whether monitoring by government officials is legal or illegal, creating such an expecation will in fact increase your legal protection from government monitoring. For example, if you are doing something on your front law, the police may observe. If you go inside and pull down the blinds, they need a search warrant.