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http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reversed_Earth_map_1000x500.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversed_map

I can understand why this decision turned out the way it did. Placing a tracking device on your vehicle is about the same as following you around with an unmarked vehicle.

The primary difference being that it can be conducted en masse - i.e. its possible to track thousands of vehicles without committing any significant manpower. I have a similar problem with ANPR - one unattended machine can do what would otherwise take thousands of officers to do.

The cliched response to both of these examples is "you have no expectation of privacy in public" - but that is a legal principle formulated in a simpler time before automation (especially automation on the back-end) was even conceivable. I think a principle more suited to the current situation (which will only become more extreme as the automation on the back-end becomes more and more capable) is that if surveillance requires resources not normally available to the average citizen then it requires a warrant. I think a principle along those lines more closely matches how the average joe sees the world, which is pretty much the definition of "reasonable."

As the purpose of a warrant is to maintain oversight to prevent abuse, it makes even more sense because more power always equals more temptation for abuse so being able to do something that a normal person can't reasonably do is practically by definition more opportunity for abuse.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/UVB-76#Alphabetic_body

Apparently, UVB-76 is promoting Turkish websites.

Although my theory is that the recent fires in Russia might have caused the operators to leave, or the equipment to malfunction. The message might be a "we're gone for a while" or a "we're back".

*shrug*

A moron in a hurry might indeed believe that "Jedi X" is somehow about Star Wars, but given the lack of any and all Star Wars imagery, not to mention actually registered or specifically used Star Wars related trademarks (like Star Wars, that starts just about every game title, the most likely candidates, for confusion, LucasFilms or similar) and the rather straightforward description of what it does (let's you control computers in conjunction with a special input device, no implications of anything Star Wars related), no one else should.

Yes, it uses a word coined in context of Star Wars but unlike, say, "Star Wars" it isn't generally used on it's own to identify related products, and certainly nothing that would amount to a glorified input driver. On the other hand it is commonly used by the general public to identify various things with Jedi-like attributes, that are not otherwise related to Star Wars, this is what the company is aiming at, not trying to confuse the general public that they getting genuine Star Wars software.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/UVB-76#Patterns

I'm not seeing a walmart.

I'm glad you were good enough to mention the artists, since it seems they never get the recognition they deserve. Some of the artwork they produced for Atari is exceptional. Unfortunately, much of this work has disappeared, either thrown away or stolen by people at Atari. Among the creators of the "Atari look":

Cliff Spohn is a talented and sought after portraitist of real people, sports figures in particular.
http://www.artworkoriginals.com/JAAAAAOU.htm

Steve Hendricks also usually focused on portraiture and has created some of the most evocative and distinctive work to come out of Atari.
http://www.sundancecreative.com/

Rick Guidice often worked with NASA doing space illustration.
http://www.nasaimages.org/luna/servlet/view/search?q=Guidice&search=Search
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Rick_Guidice
http://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/advart.html

James Kelly is not just an artist, he was one of Atari's art directors for many years.
http://www.orangecountyfineart.com/kelly.htm
http://www.slideshare.net/aditaciobanu/james-kelly-painting-nx-power-lite-presentation

Bob Flemate is someone I unfortunately haven't found much information on. He worked on Atari arcade cabinets and created the marvelous Atari 400/800 Space Invaders cover art.
http://thenewgamer.com/content/archives/gamephemera_space_invaders_atari_400_800

George Opperman was one of Atari's first artists and art director, and is notable for designing the original, iconic, and difficult to reproduce Atari "fuji" logo. The logo is meant to resemble the letter "A" and represents two players facing each other with the Pong "net" between them.
http://www.arcade-history.com/index.php?page=person&name=George+Opperman
http://www.cooganphoto.com/gravitar/cabinets.html

Hiro Kimura has had the honor of creating three US postage stamps.
https://shop.usps.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10001&storeId=10052&productId=10001795&langId=-1&parent_category_rn=&parent_category_rn=10000003&categoryId=10000028&top_category=10000003
http://www.virtualstampclub.com/images/flagcity.jpg
http://www.virtualstampclub.com/images/99chalk.jpg

Warren Chang was a staff artist at Atari for two years, starting in 1981. His beautiful work can be described as classical realism and has garnered several awards.
http://warrenchang.com/

I thought I recognised the name Gimmelwald. After a bit of Wikipedia'ing, it is where I thought, in the Lauterbrunnen valley. And what a valley that is, classic U shaped glacial valley.

That mountain face you are talking about is very possibly the north face of the Eiger. The description of hundreds of metres of vertical rock, and the fact that a local only knew of 1 person to have climbed it screams the Eiger to me. Have a look at some of the pictures on that WP article, and they will probably be familiar.... an amazingly beautiful part of the world.

fire perhaps, ambulance not so much. ambulance ride and bag of saline cost me $1700 for my wife.

What the fuck kind of backward, un-neighbourly, bunch of bastards would considering opening up emergency healthcare to private profit?

Perhaps if you are from some country utterly oppressed by the Anglo-American economic empire, where the state can't afford to maintain the health of the population, due to crushing debt?

Maybe you are just from a country run by psychopaths?

American cars are seen very popular and often seen as the luxury alternative to cheap Chinese cars.

Unfortunately, most of the products of the US car industry are insufficiently fuel efficient to meet China's fuel economy standards. This means US cars have to be built as local Chinese/US ventures, which reduces the economic benefits. It's significant then, that the Chinese versions of US cars are able to economically meet and surpass China's fuel efficiency standards (5.7 L/100 Km)... unlike the domestic US versions when have relied on lax US governmental standards (8.7 L/100 Km) as an excuse to build cheaper, less technologically advanced machines. It's sad really - in a way the US's reliance on maintaining older tech standards through Government fiat (under the guise of the "free market") reminds me of how the British Empire stagnated from 1850 to 1914. Secure within the largest trading empire in history, it structured its trade to funnel through the island of Great Britain and protected its domestic firms against external competition and as a result they grew fat and weak and lazy. Outside the British Empire, the emerging powers of the United States and Germany were effectively locked out of this market. As a result, they had to compete by through lower prices and more advanced technology. By the time the UK realised what a situation it had got itself into, the UK balance of trade deficit amounted to 5% of its GDP (even with its economic embargoes), Germany had taken half of Europe and the United States was selling its superior products in every country in the world.

American cars are seen very popular and often seen as the luxury alternative to cheap Chinese cars.

Unfortunately, most of the products of the US car industry are insufficiently fuel efficient to meet China's fuel economy standards. This means US cars have to be built as local Chinese/US ventures, which reduces the economic benefits. It's significant then, that the Chinese versions of US cars are able to economically meet and surpass China's fuel efficiency standards (5.7 L/100 Km)... unlike the domestic US versions when have relied on lax US governmental standards (8.7 L/100 Km) as an excuse to build cheaper, less technologically advanced machines. It's sad really - in a way the US's reliance on maintaining older tech standards through Government fiat (under the guise of the "free market") reminds me of how the British Empire stagnated from 1850 to 1914. Secure within the largest trading empire in history, it structured its trade to funnel through the island of Great Britain and protected its domestic firms against external competition and as a result they grew fat and weak and lazy. Outside the British Empire, the emerging powers of the United States and Germany were effectively locked out of this market. As a result, they had to compete by through lower prices and more advanced technology. By the time the UK realised what a situation it had got itself into, the UK balance of trade deficit amounted to 5% of its GDP (even with its economic embargoes), Germany had taken half of Europe and the United States was selling its superior products in every country in the world.

And it does... here
and here

use google for the rest.

Hardly surprising, I doubt it would be in any way economical.

According to Wikipedia, while noting there are major caveats to the data collection, there are more than 5x as many OSX than Linux users. Furthermore, I think it's a reasonable assumption to say that far more Linux users will be dual-booting or whatever into Windows for gaming, or using Wine. There's also the potential PR backfire if it doesn't work great, or even just by the more extreme open source (or anti-DRM, or whatever) evangelists.

On the Mac, by contrast, nearly all sales are going to be extra. In fact it's practically a captive market - if Steam didn't instantly create a monopoly on Mac gaming then I doubt they'll have to try very hard to achieve it.

When you see the orbiters they look like they just rolled out of the factory. Anything you read about orbiters deteriorating is a lie. They are pristine.

While I agree that they may be in near perfect flight condition, this photo of Discovery prior to entering the VAB (meaning after leaving the Shuttle Processing Facility) for STS-131 says otherwise. Yes, it's in pristine MECHANICAL condition, but to say it LOOKS pristine is a bit farfetched.

If you look at the map of the Sykes-Picot Agreement you'll see that they had considered that.

The Shia area of current Iraq would be a British colony, while the Sunni part would be a French protectorate. Too bad the Kurds were completely forgotten in the pact.

PDAs don't exist anymore, but handheld computers do. Nokia's latest is a mobile phone, but the N800 and N810 both weren't and are relatively cheap now. There are also things like the SmartQ 5, which are quite cheap, and are full-featured computers that fit into a pocket.

And a big whoosh for you. There are numerous theories that the works attributed to Shakespeare were written by someone else, with Bacon and Marlowe being the two primary contenders. There isn't much historical evidence to support either, but that's never stopped conspiracy theories before...

Technological singularity.

The singularity reference was a joke, I think. Basically, if there are a ton of super-intelligent AIs around, people will have other things to worry about than what OSes they used to run before some bored super-intelligent AI finally wrote an OS that doesn't suck.

Hey, it worked for ISO/microsoft, it should work for the RIAA.

Chupacabras are only found on the American continents. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Moose#Habitat_and_range Our moose have been invisible since 1910 when they developed cloaking technology :D

The act becomes retroactively illegal based on subsequent illegal acts--or plans to commit illegal acts--which is just stupid.

It makes more sense if you understand the concept of mens rea. The act does not become illegal retroactively as you say; it is illegal or not, at the time you make the recording, based on your state of mind at that same time. In other words, you're guilty if and only if you're thinking to do harm, which is actually pretty universal in criminal law (setting aside criminal negligence and "victimless crimes"). IANAL.

Where I come, farmers have money. Agriculture in these parts builds cities. Not the other way around.

How would you do without all those farming subsidies? Those subsidies are in effect a tax that impacts denser populations (say, $60/person/year in the US) to directly enable the less-dense regions' farming way of life (to the tune of about $20B/year).

Title of the article is "'Zombie ants' controlled by parasitic fungus for 48m years". Of course, the news is that we have just discovered it isn't new :-)
Here's a medical one

Would you say that showing one inch of cleavage is "dressing immodestly"?

From which part of Iran do you come from?

Couldn't possibly happen, because the Russians have prior art on this: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Russian_Woodpecker

You're more right than you know. If the Russians can promulgate a conspiracy theory sufficient to shut down HAARP, they can harm US R&D efforts in long-range communications, and in so doing, have a direct impact on US military capability.

Wouldn't surprise me that we tried the same thing with regards to making them feel sensitive about their OTH radars :)

Couldn't possibly happen, because the Russians have prior art on this: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Russian_Woodpecker

The conspiracy-theories for the Russian Woodpecker were primarily mind control and weather modification.

But then again, if they didn't patent it, maybe we could use it after all.

Sarcasm alert - I know that citing patents and prior art against secret government weapons is silly. Sometimes the secret government weapons are, too.

I actually like Budweiser

I always just check Wikipedia's Firefox page which gives a planned date of November 2010 currently.

All biology experiments so far seem to point to the fact that the DNA chain indeed contains all the information needed to build an organism.

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. *Every* experiment? Really? Name some of the crucial ones? And while you're at it, here are some keywords that you may find useful in your searching: epigenetics, methylation, histones, maternal imprinting and morphogenesis.

Yes and no. Such posters didn't last long... (and were actually quite far from truth at the start of ww2)

It sounds like you are describing Tor. What you describe would probably be best achieved by running a transparent Tor proxy on a home router. Searching around, it sounds like some of the fancier firmwares (dd-wrt/openwrt) support that with some work. An easy solution would be interesting.

Well, I don't know if it's a new idea.

I always wondered why Tatra trucks had cambered tires, but they are cambered in the exact opposite way from what this story is talking about. So now I am thinking, maybe this tilt, when the top of the tire is looking outward from the truck body, helps the tire to live longer?

Also, food allergies seem to be a symptom of lack of breastfeeding and using formula instead. Obviously, virtually everybody breastfeeds in third world countries.

It's not obvious at all that everyone breastfeeds in third world countries. In fact, efforts such as the Nestle boycott came about precisely because of companies successfully pushing the use of infant formula in developing countries.

I have a simpler explanation for the lack of food allergies in developing countries. In places where even normal people have trouble procuring adequate nutrition, children who have fatal allergies tend to die quickly. That's why you never encounter severe allergies in developing countries -- the ones who were born with them are already dead.

Part of what you mention sounds like the closed-source HTML IM client Meebo which uses libpurple (Pidgin) for communicating with IM networks. Its Javascript interface may qualify as a "HTML5 window manager". I have seen some "desktop in a browser window" projects, although I can't remember any at the moment.

AIM (and possibly other IM protocols) supports "direct connect" which does what you describe for IM... although just having OTR (end-to-end encryption for IM -- I use it with most of my IM contacts, partially because it is built into Adium which is basically the standard IM client for Mac OS X) is pretty good. It does not protect you from frequency analysis which direct connect does, but at least the IM server doesn't know what you are saying.

Yes but remember, this is Japan. Tentacle porn there has existed since The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife.

Have a look at https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Shakers for an example.

Many of the worlds problems can be traced to having the wrong number of young people. I imagine if the neanderthals had produced more young people we would look different now. In a few years, the world will have BIG problems with China. Rumour has it that they have enough young people, just not enough female ones.

I guess you never know when you will need an M-16 with a large clip to take down your own country's elected government.

Pet peeve of mine.

This is a Clip
This is a Magazine

The clip is used to feed rounds into the magazine. The magazine may either be fixed like on an M1 Garand or Removable like on an M-16.

I guess you never know when you will need an M-16 with a large clip to take down your own country's elected government.

Pet peeve of mine.

This is a Clip
This is a Magazine

The clip is used to feed rounds into the magazine. The magazine may either be fixed like on an M1 Garand or Removable like on an M-16.

... but not quite enough. A typical car weighs 3000lbs. The article (ok, the summary -- I didn't read the article) doesn't say what the weight gain is, but let's assume the difference between "obese" and "not obese" is 30lbs. A typical car has a drag coefficient of .4. And we're driving 45mph. There's also an unknown amount of parasitic drag in the drivetrain.

The equation

Ok, I don't have the time or inclination to figure this out. But I bet .7% is pretty high.

Speaking as someone never that great at maths...

4+3+2=( )+2

WTF is that meant to mean? My issue is not the = but rather the ( ).

Surely the question should be:

"If 4+3+2=x+2

then what is the value of x?"

Or, if you've not gotten into the whole letters representing numbers thing yet, follow the textbook staple of the underline for filling in the blanks, i.e. "4+3+2=__+2".

If I see ( ) my assumption is there is meant to be a self-contained operation going on there, it's an instruction of the order of calculations. Everything that happens inside the brackets either has to be calculated first before you can calculate the rest, or you need to first rearrange the formula.

x(y+z) means you either add y+z before you can multiply result by x, or rearrange formula to xy+xz.

The students probably misunderstood the parenthesis as if it was "(4+3+2=___)+2=?". This probably still isn't right but there's a logic to it.

Oh and I failed by Higher maths mock exam. My dad's friend, an engineer, started tutoring me and I got a good B (67-69%, probably scraping me into the upper quartile) in the end. The tutoring did it's job within the first hour. We went through my answers where he was immediately surprised I'd beaten some difficult questions. Turned out there was one thing I didn't know about which repeatedly gave me no chance in certain topics, as I recall we wondered if I'd simply been off sick the day it had been taught. 10 minutes of discussion and a few examples later it was learned and the next couple of lessons were clearly unnecessary and we decided to stop.

If the mock papers hadn't been marked by a pool of teachers, and/or our class size had been less than the 30-something we had, then the teacher probably would have picked it up himself.

The force then met resistance from the Taliban and (under UN authorization) removed the government.

Not true - the UN Security Council did not authorise the removal of the government; it only approved the creation of the International Security Assistance Force after the government had been replaced.

The treaty is called the United Nations Charter. Perhaps you've heard of it. "All nations" haven't signed it, but the United States signed it on 26 June, 1945. Article 2, Principle 4 of the treaty reads:

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

The treaty makes it illegal to use force against any state without a specific resolution of support from the UN Security Council, which was not granted in the case of Afghanistan or Iraq. It might be argued that the invasion of Afghanistan was an act of self-defence following the attacks of 11 September, 2001, but no such justification exists for the invasion of Iraq.

That makes it an illegal war. Illegal, not in some vague rhetorical sense, but in the very specific sense of breaking a treaty that the United States signed.

I'm not sure that this is to much of an issue, unless there is some kind of tone-mapping involved it would be near impossible to see the indirect lighting while have the direct component at the correct exposure level. I think that the way most games pump up the ambient term in order to show the contents of the shadows looks bad, it kills the contrast.

Go in a dark room, aim a bright flashlight at a ceiling, and see what happens.

I will see a great deal of bounce light, but now if I take a photo of it, correctly exposing the directly lit area, I probably won't.
Human eyes have a much greater dynamic range than a camera sensor or computer screen, and hence we see things very differently.

Indeed, I should have made myself clearer, when I said that global illumination isn't particularly visible, I'm only talking about when the direct light is exposed correctly, as is usually the case when you're looking at an environment illuminated by a flash (or a flash-light that's close to the camera :) ) . However when the direct light is overexposed, for example a room lit by a window, then the indirect is very important.

The only place which would be "constantly" in the umbra from the Sun would be the L2 LaGrange point, opposite the sun. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Lagrange_points2.svg The Sun-staring SOHO uses the opposite L1 to stay OUT of the umbra. However, it's roughly a million miles from earth. So, let's just say no and build another one.

Any other place that you "park it" will end up revolving into view of the Sun. Sorry. I didn't design this system.

As highlighted in my post. Canada uses the imperial gallon, 4.55L.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Metrication_in_Canada

Is it really? Perhaps I can get some education here. *nix systems come with a tool called shred, which overwrites a file multiple times with random data to provide secure deletion. We also have tools like dban, which will do basically the same thing to the whole drive. How securely do tools like these erase data?

While the name of the bill is actually funny, haha, the rest of the submission makes a big deal out of nothing.

According to the Constitution only the House can originate a bill of revenue [1]

In order to comply with this clause, the Senate typically takes a revenue-raising bill that has already been passed in the House of Representatives and amends it (or replaces it entirely) with its own bill. [2]

For instance, TARP (Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008), was originally passed by the House as the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act. [3]

The Keynesians do have one strong point in their favor: there's a lot of evidence that Keynesian spending helped during the Great Depression. I mean, look at what happened to the national debt during WWII, when the US managed to crawl out of the mess they were in:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/USDebt.png
Bush and Obama haven't gone anywhere remotely near where FDR went to finance that war.

The EMH supporters, on the other hand, have not had their theories demonstrably having the effects they expected.

Of course, there's another way of looking at this: all software sucks, all hardware sucks, all economic theories suck. We haven't come remotely close to figuring it out.

Please go to meta wiki and insult the following idiot cock sucking stewards that work for the bastard Jimbo Wales (he rapes babies by the way)

Pathoschild
Bsadowski1
Mike.Lifeguard
Shanel
Mercy
Jyothis
J.delanoy
DerHexer
Dferg
Drini
Leinad
M7

Create insulting accounts attacking them, use the alt-gr key when typing vowels to get around the username filters.