Slashdot Mirror

Stop-motion animation came to this country because of piracy. In fact, the thief was no less than Thomas Edison. He stole Le Voyage dans la Lune from Georges Méliès, by having some of his agents bribe a projectionist for the reels. Edison violated copyright, too, by making hundreds of copies of the movie, which he then showed all over the country. The movie was a smashing success for Edison and the budding American movie industry. For a modern telling of the story, you can go watch episode 12 of the most excellent From the Earth to the Moon.

Méliès was planning to show the movie in America for profit, and he got nothing for it. The loss bankrupted him, and he was forced to sell toys to make a living. Méliès was one of the first movie makers to use: multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted colour. Oh yeah, and he invented the stop-motion substitution, and he was possibly the first to bring fantasy (some say sci-fi) to film. He's the man responsible for that famous picture of the moon with the rocket stuck in it. Most of his movies were recycled during World War I for their cellulose content. What little survives of his work is ground-breaking. Had his movie made him money, he might have been able to preserve his legacy for us to enjoy.

Way to go movie industry, you destroyed one of the most creative filmmakers of all time through commercial piracy. Not just him, but possibly his life's work, too. For anyone in the industry who complains, I say look to your roots. You deserve to reap what you've sown.

Some nation blows up a few ships

And conquers a few other nations. And acts like sub-human savages in those nations.

Such ideas have been proposed before. Have a look at Wikidata for an example.

While the banking program is a closely held secret, administration officials have conducted classified briefings to some members of Congress and the Sept. 11 Commission, the officials said. More lawmakers were briefed in recent weeks, after the administration learned The Times was making inquiries for this article. Swift's 25-member board of directors, made up of representatives from financial institutions around the world, was previously told of the program, but it is not clear if other participants know that American intelligence officials can examine their message traffic.

Bah.... I much rather have a portable computer...

You forgot to add:

Seriously, the majority of edits are perfectly fine, though often misguided. If you focus on fighting vandalism, you'll find vandals everywhere (I know from experience). The only thing Wikipedia has to worry about is to keep the funds coming in.

I think your comments are poorly informed. In fact measured CO2 levels are directly correlated to mean temperatures. This has been shown using measurements of historical data from polar ice samples. From these we can find the age of the sample from the depth, the temperature from the size of the air bubbles, and the amount of CO2 from within the bubbles themselves. Peaks in CO2 correlate to warm periods whereas sharp declines in CO2 mark ice ages with stark precision.

There is a very large, natural variation in CO2 levels over the history of Earth. So far that range is regular and constant within 300 million ppmv over the last 650,000 years we have available. In 1958 this was found to be 315 ppmv, at the peak of recorded history. In 2003 this value was a whopping 376 ppmv. Initial reports say that current levels are over 400 ppmv. That is 33% higher than it has ever been in the last 650,000 years. And that is considering, to paraphrase the movie, that the difference between 300ppmv and 100ppmv in the United States Midwest is the difference between a sunny day and a mile of ice over your head. Nevermind the fact that with China and India the projections estimate C02 levels to sharply rise even higher. This is already WAY TOO HIGH.

As for your 1942-1980 argument, I find it immaterial when faced with the evidence at hand. But I do think there is a potential explanation in air pollution reflecting back solar radiation and masking the effects of global warming. This period of history is well known for its smog and heavy air pollution that was cleaned up through the 1970's and beyond.

There is no doubt that there is a direct correlation between CO2 and global mean temperature. CO2 levels are higher than they have been in the past 650,000 years. The cause of the rise in CO2 is man made. In a review of 932 peer reviewed scientific journal articles related to global warming, zero refuted this chain of logic. A separate review of mass media articles, 56% of the articles were found to openly doubt the science that the scientific community has no doubts about.

Wikipedia Global Warming article

I'm going to break my response into multiple posts because the first one is so long.

The US doesn't torture prisoners. What you're doing is changing the meaning of the word "torture" to cover anything other than keeping them in a 5 star hotel and saying "please" and "thank you" every 5 seconds.

An interesting assertion. This flies flat in the face of pretty much all evidence that's come to light so far. You know, I've stayed in some pretty crappy motels, but I've never had the kind of "service" detainees have had in the care of US forces.

On August 1st 2002, Alberto Gonzalez sent a memo to the President about the use of torture in interrogation of prisoners. In this document, torture defined extremely narrowly. Physical torture is defined as physical punishments that would result in severe physical impairment, organ failure, or death and psychological torture is defined as only acts with threaten the above to the interogated or to a third party and the use of drugs to alter the senses or the personality of the detainee. (You can find more torture documents here.)

This, interestingly, does not cover many of the acts that went on at Abu Ghraib. Beatings that don't cause organ failure, severe impairment, or death don't count as torture under this. Electric shocks don't count as torture under this. Sexual humilation and rape doesn't count as torture under this. Hanging people in stress positions for hours doesn't count as torture under this. Having a prisoner parade around nude and covered in feces doesn't count as torture under this. You can find many images of the abuse on the Wikimedia Commons. Be warned, due to the sexual molestation involved, most of these images are not really safe for work.

Any sane person would consider these acts as having stepped beyond interrogation techniques and into torture.

Of course, even by these harsh and extremist standards, torture went on under US forces. Manadel al-Jamadi was beaten to death in the hands of soldiers at Abu Ghraib. That certainly counts as an interrogation method that leads to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

Prisoner abuse by US forces in the "War on Terror" didn't start in Iraq, though. There were actually several deaths of detainees under US control in Bagram in Afghanistan.

Beyond that, you have Guantanamo Bay prison. The abuses of detainees at Guantanamo either haven't been as severe as those at Bagram and Abu Ghraib, or they've been kept a better secret. There have been numerous prisoners beaten (though not to death), and there is a lot of use of stress positions to cause pain and suffering to coerce prisoners as reports of treats that violated even Gozalez's standards to the family members of detainees. The tactics there that are publicly known are a lot softer than those at other facilities, but are certainly harsher than what's tolerated at prisons in US land, but there are a few things that have gotten out that suggest that some of the accusations of former inmates have some substance.

In one chilling account, Sean Baker, a soldier who served in the 438th Military Police was asked to pretend to be a resistant detainee in a training exercise in 2003. Other guards who were not aware he wasn't a detainee came in a began suffocating and beating him. The beatings did not stop with the codeword for the exercise and only stopped when he yelled that he was a soldier and they found his fatigues under the orange prisoner jumpsuit. Unfortunately, by then the head trauma led to traumatic brain injury and a discharge f

Just upload a crap load of pictures, yours or ones you find randomly on the `net, and then add all the screenshots you wish.

What is 17 billion joules when mad earthlings have tried to Cyclops you?

mac users are too smart to take the bait

Are those the same mac users who have in the past done themselves injuries by trying to cram a graphite powermac into their mouth and suck on it, believing it to be a throat lozenge?

only being able to create two-dimensional constructions like skin

Aaron DeVore, portland oregon, wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pingveno, digg http://digg.com/users/pingveno, wikibooks http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Pingveno, deviantart http://pingveno.deviantart.com/, wikitravel http://wikitravel.org/en/User:Pingveno, wikimedia http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pingveno, last.fm http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pingveno, personal blog http://pingveno.blogspot.com/.

Results 1 - 10 of about 15,000 for pingveno. (0.12 seconds)

Aaron DeVore, portland oregon, wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pingveno, digg http://digg.com/users/pingveno, wikibooks http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Pingveno, deviantart http://pingveno.deviantart.com/, wikitravel http://wikitravel.org/en/User:Pingveno, wikimedia http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pingveno, last.fm http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pingveno, personal blog http://pingveno.blogspot.com/.

Results 1 - 10 of about 15,000 for pingveno. (0.12 seconds)

It's being sold as an audio CD. You have a reasonable expectation that it will work in your audio CD player(s). If it doesn't, then as far as I'm concerned either the CD or the player(s) is faulty. Assuming your player(s) work(s) with other CDs, the implication would be that it's the CD that's faulty. Therefore, you're entitled to a refund, end of story.

Actually, right from the beginning, Philips has made a stand that these copy protected CD's are never sold with the 'CD-Compact Disc' label on it, since they do not comply with the Red Book standard Sony and Philips published back in 1982.

So if you're shopping for a CD and the logo is not on it, it's a good signal to read a the small print. In my experience, you'll often find copyright notices for the copyprotection on there somewhere. :-P

However, it seems to me that right from the beginning this stuff has gone the wrong way. Hackers and pirates are way more inventive that 'regular' consumers, so any copy protection will be cracked (after all, if it was IMPOSSIBLE to get the audio off there, it would never sell), while Joe Average will never get it to play on his car stereo.

I rip all my CD's to my harddisk, since I like variation, and a big harddrive with WinAmp is a much better CD-changer than a real CD-changer ever will be. I have over time bought several DRM'ed CD's, and none of them have EVER given me much trouble ripping them. Most work was one that required the 'black marker on the outer ring' trick.

My two cents...

Now, I understand that you want to see the photo-realistic graphics ...

I don't blame you, I liked FEAR as much as the next guy, but I don't see any benefit to forcing all companies or all platforms to support photo-realistic real time graphics; the cost of these graphics is too expensive. I can only talk about the company I work for, but currently the total budget for Wii games is about 1/3 that of the PS3+XBox 360 games (those games are multi-platform) but there are just as many Wii games as there are PS3+XBox 360 games; in my opinion the Wii games are a lot more fun at this early stage in development (you'll see them at next years E3) but that is just my opinion.

BTW. the graphical improvements of the Wii are nothing to spit at:

(Thanks to the geeks at the PA forums)

Link: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e8/Link comparison6sa.jpg
Samus: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4b/Samu scomparison2.jpg
Mario: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5c/Mari ocomparison9.jpg

What you're noticing from Wii games is that they're very high polygon models that have an insane level of texture detail on them; the Smash Bros. Models are (probably) as high of polygon detail as any character that was ever on the Gamecube with much higher texture resolution, and these are models which will only take up 1/32 of the screen (or less). What is really lacking (compared to the PS3 or the XBox 360) is normal maps and certain material shaders. I've been saying this for a while now and no one seems to listen.

Basically, here is the reason why the Wii doesn't contain hardware for these effects:

When people make a game for the Nintendo DS (or the N64/Playstation) the teams were in the 12-18 person range and the development time was in the 9-12 month range (on most projects that I know of) so you're looking at a development cost of about 1-2 Million dollars; a PS2, Gamecube and XBox game typically had a development team in the 24-36 person range and a time frame of 18-24 months. Now, XBox 360 and PS3 games may require about 40-60 people and 24-30 months to produce meaning that (at the high end) game development would be in the 20 Million dollar range. The Wii on the other hand has development budgets in the PS2/XBox/Gamecube range (or somewhere in the 5 Million dollar range); so as certain large publishers have already announced, it costs about 1/4-1/2 as much to produce a game for the Wii.

The thing I don't think people understand is that if you're doing the same number of texture passes, and same number of models it doesn't really matter too much if you're producing a model with 2-4 times the polygon detail, or 2-4 times the texture detail, because a lot of the time you lose producing higher detailed assets is gained from having to be so concerned with hurting performance. On the other hand, when you start adding normal maps, and material shaders, you add a lot of extra work to produce the same asset.

Now, I understand that you want to see the photo-realistic graphics ...

I don't blame you, I liked FEAR as much as the next guy, but I don't see any benefit to forcing all companies or all platforms to support photo-realistic real time graphics; the cost of these graphics is too expensive. I can only talk about the company I work for, but currently the total budget for Wii games is about 1/3 that of the PS3+XBox 360 games (those games are multi-platform) but there are just as many Wii games as there are PS3+XBox 360 games; in my opinion the Wii games are a lot more fun at this early stage in development (you'll see them at next years E3) but that is just my opinion.

BTW. the graphical improvements of the Wii are nothing to spit at:

(Thanks to the geeks at the PA forums)

Link: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e8/Link comparison6sa.jpg
Samus: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4b/Samu scomparison2.jpg
Mario: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5c/Mari ocomparison9.jpg

What you're noticing from Wii games is that they're very high polygon models that have an insane level of texture detail on them; the Smash Bros. Models are (probably) as high of polygon detail as any character that was ever on the Gamecube with much higher texture resolution, and these are models which will only take up 1/32 of the screen (or less). What is really lacking (compared to the PS3 or the XBox 360) is normal maps and certain material shaders. I've been saying this for a while now and no one seems to listen.

Basically, here is the reason why the Wii doesn't contain hardware for these effects:

When people make a game for the Nintendo DS (or the N64/Playstation) the teams were in the 12-18 person range and the development time was in the 9-12 month range (on most projects that I know of) so you're looking at a development cost of about 1-2 Million dollars; a PS2, Gamecube and XBox game typically had a development team in the 24-36 person range and a time frame of 18-24 months. Now, XBox 360 and PS3 games may require about 40-60 people and 24-30 months to produce meaning that (at the high end) game development would be in the 20 Million dollar range. The Wii on the other hand has development budgets in the PS2/XBox/Gamecube range (or somewhere in the 5 Million dollar range); so as certain large publishers have already announced, it costs about 1/4-1/2 as much to produce a game for the Wii.

The thing I don't think people understand is that if you're doing the same number of texture passes, and same number of models it doesn't really matter too much if you're producing a model with 2-4 times the polygon detail, or 2-4 times the texture detail, because a lot of the time you lose producing higher detailed assets is gained from having to be so concerned with hurting performance. On the other hand, when you start adding normal maps, and material shaders, you add a lot of extra work to produce the same asset.

Now, I understand that you want to see the photo-realistic graphics ...

I don't blame you, I liked FEAR as much as the next guy, but I don't see any benefit to forcing all companies or all platforms to support photo-realistic real time graphics; the cost of these graphics is too expensive. I can only talk about the company I work for, but currently the total budget for Wii games is about 1/3 that of the PS3+XBox 360 games (those games are multi-platform) but there are just as many Wii games as there are PS3+XBox 360 games; in my opinion the Wii games are a lot more fun at this early stage in development (you'll see them at next years E3) but that is just my opinion.

BTW. the graphical improvements of the Wii are nothing to spit at:

(Thanks to the geeks at the PA forums)

Link: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e8/Link comparison6sa.jpg
Samus: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4b/Samu scomparison2.jpg
Mario: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5c/Mari ocomparison9.jpg

What you're noticing from Wii games is that they're very high polygon models that have an insane level of texture detail on them; the Smash Bros. Models are (probably) as high of polygon detail as any character that was ever on the Gamecube with much higher texture resolution, and these are models which will only take up 1/32 of the screen (or less). What is really lacking (compared to the PS3 or the XBox 360) is normal maps and certain material shaders. I've been saying this for a while now and no one seems to listen.

Basically, here is the reason why the Wii doesn't contain hardware for these effects:

When people make a game for the Nintendo DS (or the N64/Playstation) the teams were in the 12-18 person range and the development time was in the 9-12 month range (on most projects that I know of) so you're looking at a development cost of about 1-2 Million dollars; a PS2, Gamecube and XBox game typically had a development team in the 24-36 person range and a time frame of 18-24 months. Now, XBox 360 and PS3 games may require about 40-60 people and 24-30 months to produce meaning that (at the high end) game development would be in the 20 Million dollar range. The Wii on the other hand has development budgets in the PS2/XBox/Gamecube range (or somewhere in the 5 Million dollar range); so as certain large publishers have already announced, it costs about 1/4-1/2 as much to produce a game for the Wii.

The thing I don't think people understand is that if you're doing the same number of texture passes, and same number of models it doesn't really matter too much if you're producing a model with 2-4 times the polygon detail, or 2-4 times the texture detail, because a lot of the time you lose producing higher detailed assets is gained from having to be so concerned with hurting performance. On the other hand, when you start adding normal maps, and material shaders, you add a lot of extra work to produce the same asset.

With the current state of the art, we can only conclude that bug free software is beyond us. Even the space shuttle's avionics software after millions of dollars and a decade of work is not bug free.

Considering that the software is much smaller and does a lot less than a typical desktop machine (imagine if you had to load a new tape to go from email to IM) I think it's safe to say if vendors are made fully liable for bugs there will be no vendors. How many people want to wait 50-100 years for the next release of their favorite OS? How many are ready to spend $100,000 for it?

Even partial liability would do a great deal of harm to the economy. Given tremendous potential liabilities, vendors will be obliged to charge tremendous prices to offset them (either directly or to pay for insurance).

Now, for the article itself. It didn't necessarily say vendors should be held liable for bugs, not even security bugs. It just said we need to align capability with interest. It even made clear that we must be careful HOW we do that or it won't work (the Italy example).

There are many ways to align interest with capability. For example educating consumers to demand security or go elsewhere (yeah, right). Perhaps require the number of bugs in the previous version to be prominantly displayed on all trade dress and marketing materials. If too many security bugs are found (or if they are not patched promptly), the package must display Mr. Yuk for the next few versions.

So, yes vendor reliability could hurt OSS. It would also likely destroy the industry and any others (that is any business larger than mom and pop) that depend on it.

The specs called for two "C" shaped beams to hug a metal rod as so - ]|[ They were assembled like this - [|]

“But it would've been nice to see a comparision between MMCache and eAccelerator as well.”

Windows/Linux users, see it here. Pretend it's rotating, or, sit in a front-loading dryer while viewing. (Note: don't actually sit in a front-loading dryer.)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8d/Peop les_army.jpg

Oh, you mean like in Marx and Engels' Manifesto of the Communist Party -- first printed in London, thus granted copyright February 1848.

In retaliation for muslim ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Kashmir:

http://www.panunkashmir.org/fundamentalism.html

http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:vkcaOQjIS9MJ: www.kashmir-information.com/fundamentalism.html+Is lamic+Fundamentalism+in+Kashmir&hl=en&gl=us&ct=cln k&cd=1&lr=lang_en&client=firefox-a

  Two wrongs don't make a right ideally. However, the only feasable way to deal with terrorism and islamic mob savagery is to retaliate tenfold. America's success in Afghanistan against the Taliban, and Israel's successes in defeating the PLO, and Fatah, and Hamas are proof of that.

  Best I recall, Indians don't do these:
http://www.rawa.us/f-hang.htm
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9 /WTC_attack_9-11.jpg
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/d ecember/13/newsid_3695000/3695057.stm
http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/oct/21franc.htm

  or ram planes full of people into buildings full of people. Nor do they blow up parliaments, or teach hate ahead of maths in schools, madrassas and qutbas. Indians don't behead journalists or anyone. We don't have state sponsored rape gangs.

    India has history, art, science, technology, the world's largest democracy and third largest army.

    If anything, Indians are doing a poor job of taking care of the terrorists. The incompetent and corrupt UPA government seems to learn nothing. If it were the Israelis in Kashmir, the Jihadis would all be urinating in their pants by now, gibbering for mercy like retarded people.

  Great to see some more anti-Hindu sock puppets of Pakistan on slashdot though.

You're inaccurate at best in several places. Please tell me this is just stuff you picked up by reading the internet, and not the result of a formal mathematics education.

It's called Cantor sets, there are more rational numbers than there are whole numbers.

First, the Cantor set is a fractal. You're thinking of Cantor's diagonal argument.

Also, there aren't more rational numbers than there are whole numbers; both are countably infinite. A bijection (one-to-one and onto mapping) can be established by considering rationals as ordered pairs of natural numbers and enumerating thusly. You're thinking of real numbers, which are not countably infinite.

For a really simple example (there are more formal ones out there) take the following series: [snip] As you can see, for every single integer there is a corresponding real number. This list is one-to-one but not onto, the list on the right will never have 1.2 in it's list, therefore there *must* be more real numbers than there are integers. In fact, it turns out that there are an infinatly greater amount of real numbers than there are integers.

Okay, now you've switched from rational to real numbers. But your example still proves nothing. The fact that the function you made up fails to be a bijection doesn't prove that no such bijection exists. By analogy:

There are more natural numbers {1, 2, 3, ...} than there are positive even numbers {2, 4, 6, ...}. Consider the mapping from the evens to the naturals of f(x) = x. So 2 maps to 2, 4 to 4 and so on. Now, the natural numbers 1, 3, 5 and so on don't have corresponding evens. You would, at this point, say that there are more positive even numbers than natural numbers; the argument is the same as the one you made.

You would, however, be wrong; there does exist a bijection from the evens to the naturals using the functions f(x) = x/2. So 2 maps to 1, 4 to 2 and so on. Every positive even number maps to one natural number, and vice versa.

To prove that two infinite sets do not have the same cardinality (that is, the same number of elements, though the concept is extended to include infinities), you can't just make up a bad mapping; you have to prove that no such mapping can possibly exist, like Cantor did.

Don't go to far with this though, I understand that Gregory Cantor went insane trying to find the next greater space :)

Not exactly; the unsolved problem that Cantor never found the solution to was the continuum hypothesis; he asked if there was a space with cardinality between that of the natural numbers (countably infinite) and that of the real numbers (the continuum). It turns out that there answer is independent of standard set theory; it works with it true, and it works with it false. But this is a pretty abstract question, and not as earth-shattering as the initial discovery that there are more reals than there are rational numbers.

"The {{foo}} (variables) syntax is possible to extend, but does not, as far as I have been able to tell, support parameters."

Try Template parameters.

Did anybody motice that he has four wristwatches, two in each arm?

You may personally dislike MediaWiki and Wikimedia, and that's fine, but it's no substitute for facts.

We're using an in-house MediaWiki knowledge-base system here. It's been running for over a year and is a huge step forward from the previous setup we had(which was developed in-house in CF). The hardest part was writing code to export/parse/import from the old system to MediaWiki. Once that was done it's been smooth sailing

Some useful add-ons we've used are:
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1924 (a patch to have restrictions of namespaces to certain groups)
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=814 (LDAP/ActiveDirectory authentication plugin)

It's a great example of a good open source tool beating the hell out of one-off systems developed out of a not-invented-here mentality

We're using an in-house MediaWiki knowledge-base system here. It's been running for over a year and is a huge step forward from the previous setup we had(which was developed in-house in CF). The hardest part was writing code to export/parse/import from the old system to MediaWiki. Once that was done it's been smooth sailing

Some useful add-ons we've used are:
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1924 (a patch to have restrictions of namespaces to certain groups)
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=814 (LDAP/ActiveDirectory authentication plugin)

It's a great example of a good open source tool beating the hell out of one-off systems developed out of a not-invented-here mentality

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/9 6/SNES_800.jpg/700px-SNES_800.jpg
Smooth, powerful, and fun. Great design, Great games. The one time Nintendo was nice to the UK...

There is clearly a shot of the nosecone of the aircraft that hit the Pentagon and it is clearly no 757
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a /Pentagon_security_video1.jpg

Here's the Python wikipedia bot framework

Get going

Chuck Norris, 'natch.

Snake

Norris

The similarity is just too striking. Also note that, if you take the letters S-N-A-K-E and hit them with a roundhouse kick to the neck, they equal N-O-R-R-I-S. Coincidence? I think not.

I'm KILROY! KILROY! KILROY! KILROY! KILROY! Kilroy.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/46/Kilr oy.jpg

Key word here is percieve. The brain percieves these two images as if they were 3D. But they're not. They're 2D. The distinction between 2D and 3D is not in how we percieve it, but what it actually is. Finding Nemo is a two dimensional projection of 3D objects. Just like Quake, or Half-Life or VRML.

We can't judge mathematical concepts after what we may or may not be able to percieve. Mathematical judgements are made on objective truth, not on what we as a species may or may not be able to visualise. For instance, the only way possible to visualize a tesseract is to project it to 3-dimensional or 2-dimensional space. Does this mean that the projected object is, infact, not a 4 dimensional object? OFCOURSE NOT! The object is still 4-dimensional, but the projection is 3 or 2 dimensional.

Same thing with three dimensional objects in webpages or first person shooters.

If you're still not convinced: Tell me, is this a three dimensional object? The answer: ofcourse it is. Whether you make an image of it, or whether you describe a dodecahedron using equations, numbers or words, it's still very much a three dimensional object. Now tell me, is the 2-dimensional projection of it on my screen a three dimensional object? The answer: ofcourse it's not, and it doesn't become three dimensional just because you add another copy of the same image from a slightly different angle next to it. You are measuring things using your own subjective judgements, but you HAVE to measure them using mathematical fact. Any other way is not just wrong, but moronic.

The picture reminds me of this guy(2nd from the left).

The ESRB rated Metroid as E. Is this E material: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9b/Metr onosu-2.png ?

The ESRB also rated Super Metroid as E. Is this E either: http://www.metroid-eu.com/supermetroid_endings/sam usfront1.gif ?

If you want to say "oh, but those are only on for a few seconds", I say so what? You can see them over and over if you want. Sure, they aren't M rated by any stretch of the imagination, but they're ok anyone 6 or older? If they were looking through the lens of today, I'm not sure they'd appreciate those.

Wikipedia *always* needs more coders - the 3-5 that we have just are not enough. Here's the relavant page

One big gimmick after another.

Hmmm... I was thinking of Mr. Magoo and Kazoo and such. I suppose a kazoo would be better than most of the other wind instruments on shown on this page:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wind_in struments

-------

As for shakuhachi... I don't know that nor think it is a proper or even a given name for the average Nihonjin. Kazu is a real, talented, gifted artist. The spellings are different, but in Nippon, I suppose a FEW people might in a drunken state poke fun at him if he showed up at a session with a kazu. But, they might say/ask, "Kah-zhu-o San... Nani-o/Nanji des(u)ka...", and he'd likely reply, "Kuh-zhoo des(u)...", to which another obligatory reply might be... "Soo des(u).... cool..."

But, as a veteran of the USN, I am imagining people would rather some massive/hunkin power-projecting ear-splitting-capable instrument rather than a pocket-sized gizmo... I could be wrong...tho...

You mean these guys?

There was a time when Billy Gates was surrounded by hairy guys.

(There was also this one time, at a party, when I was surrounded by hairy guys... a memorable night, indeed! {wicked grin})

You call this a mirror?
THIS is a mirror.

From Jack Thompsons legal bullying to censorship of Wikitruth.info related content...

Oh yeah, Jack Thompson and Wikitruth.info would have made a perfect pair, they use basically the same methodology, after all...

Too bad Wikitruth.info decided to publish the wrong version of the article, so JT might have some problems cooperating with them.

I read a paper on the justification of high bandwidth systems recently. It outlined as one point, how society has always managed to fill the extra bandiwdth with data, reguardless of what that data may be, increasing the rate of dissemination of data amoung people all over the world. I can only imagine the same applies for scientists.

The article gave the example of the Large Hadron Collider (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collide r) being built by CERN, which is expected to produce data in quantities thousands of times greater then previous accelerator experiements. The need to disseminate this data to locations around the world is critical to its analysis.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10 /MRO_data.jpg
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is expected to produce fairly large quantities of data also.

Along with these are that thousands upon thousands of experiments and measurmeents being taken every moment around the globe. All this data requires storage, transmission and compution. Weather simulations, aerodynamics, radiotelescope data, biochemical simulation, the list goes on.

Of course, if the sheer number of information producing tasks arn't enough, the definitive agument to why so much data is being generated is that with the increase of bandwidth and the power of computer, so too has the accuracy and speed of data collection increased. The micosecond is slow for todays chemical, physical and biological science.

Overall, its the number of experiments, the accuracy, resolution and speed of data generation, and the need for that data to be analysed around the globe that has created the mutual need, and provision of huge bandwidths such as those being investigated and used by I2.

For everyday folk like you and me, just go down to your accounting deparment and ask them how large their largest database is, you'll be suprised how unbelieveably data and bandwidth consuming financeal data has become since the revolution of the internet.

There are significant discrepancies between Tienamman Square and Iraq, especially in that context.

Tienamman Square involved the killing of nonviolent protestors against the government, by their own government. I am no expert on the matter, but it is my belief that their claims of corruption in the government (amongst other things) had at least a significant portion of truth to them. This is only reinforced by what a social taboo Tienamman square has become in China, as well as the state sponsored restriction of information on the topic.

The matter of Iraq is a reactionary military invasion and subsequent occupation of a hostile state. We had every justification to take military military action against them from the moment they refused to honor their obligation to prove they lacked WMD's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_action s_regarding_Iraq [On January 16, 2003 U.N. inspectors discovered 11 empty 122 mm chemical warheads ? components not previously declared by Iraq. Iraq dismissed the warheads as old weapons that had been packed away and forgotten. After performing tests on the warheads, U.N. inspectors believe that they were new. While the warheads are evidence of an Iraqi weapons program, they may not amount to a "smoking gun", according to U.S. officials, unless some sort of chemical agent is also detected. U.N. inspectors believe there to still be large quantities of weapons materials that are still unaccounted for. U.N. inspectors also searched the homes of several Iraqi scientists.]

That, and the major fact that you CAN find information about Iraq, you can raise criticisms against the US government, and you can even get together and protest the invasion of Iraq without worrying about getting squished by a tank! http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/Tian asquare.jpg

If in China you try and say that the government needs some reforms, you can be put in jail. And what you say has no sanctity at all - it has no protection under law, but rather is prosecuted.

Think about that. Your post, if reversed so that you said it in China, about Tienamman Square, could land you in JAIL.

And while the fact that some pretty unaccpetable things have been done by our government, they are generally not allowed to propogate, and are rarely sanctioned by law. While this wire-tapping and PATRIOT act nonsense has some strong criticisms against it, I think that the fact that you are so willing and able to criticize your own country disproves your own argument.

For instance, there's me and then there's other me.

and don't forget... mini me

No, not at all. The software and content are freely available.

But, bandwidth and server capacity would be an issue. It's not run on some vanilla PC...

The Wikimedia server set is described here http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers

You should be more careful what you say, people that actually know about Wikipedia that aren't mindless zealots post here too.
For example, you state that mentions of the http://www.wikipediareview.com/ are not blocked, and yet until Eric Moeller removed it from [[m:Spam_blacklist]] recently it was impossible to add a link to the site. You obviously know about [[m:Spam_blacklist]] as you are a bureaucrat and an admin on en: as well as an admin on meta. In fact just today you added Daniel Brant's sites to [[m:Spam_blacklist]] with an invalid reasoning.

Were these domains used to spam Wikipedia so much so that they cannot be dealt with by blocks and reverts? No, but you added them anyways without regard for the blacklist's purpose.

--An anonymous admin