The truth is actual swordplay against actual full plate armor doesn't do much of anything. There are stories from the renaissance of battles between nobles being fought were the only person who died was an old man killed by heat exhaustion or a heart attack. Sword vs. chain mail uses piercing attacks, this is the type of combat you would find through most of the middle ages.
Creating a high-tech sword faces a few issues. The first is that the spine needs to be strong but capable of taking punishment. The spine is the section which takes most of the actual shock of impact and is used for parrying. The edge needs to be hard, but not so hard that it becomes brittle and breaks when its hit against something. This is the problem with titanium and even stainless steel, they are usually soft and brittle when hard.
As for using a composite laminate of some sort, I am somewhat hesitant. Swords see lots of impact loading because that is what they do. They hit things. Laminates tend to delaminate under any sort of impact. Once they start to delaminate it tends to only get worse from there since the delamination sites allow for crack nucleation, etc. Most composites are also a pain to repair and recycle. As for diamond, its an interesting idea, but diamond is crystalline so it probably would crack easily. Its still an interesting idea though.
BTW weight is not necessarily a bad thing in swords since you actually use the weight of the sword to help you in combat. Most people talk about reducing the weight of swords when a good sword actually only weights somewhere between 1 to 2 kilos if its reasonably sized.
Wrong geography because tantos are asian weapons not european as mentioned in the article post. I was not giving my opinion on european forging techniques. Sorry for the confusion.
BTW eastern and western forging techniques are actually quite different. Eastern techniques used the best parts of the "bloom," that is the piece of steel that resulted from initial refining. Western used the whole bloom. As such, eastern swords tend to be of higher carbon content than western swords. Eastern swords are also forged using clay coat technique to heat treat the swords which was not used in the west.
As for sword fighting traditions, western society lost most of its traditions but there are people like John Clements and the HACA trying to piece the techniques back together. Personally I think that SCA is more of a sport than a martial art, since the techniques using in SCA combat are significantly different than in real sword play. SCA swords use blunt impact so their techniques involve chopping actions where actual sword play uses draw cuts and stabbing. SCA combat is to real western swordplay as kendo is to true eastern swordplay. Close but significantly different in the specifics.
Ok, first of all tantos are Japanese or at least asian long knives. Project Dragon Slayer is trying to build a european patterned double edged sword. Wrong geography.
On the other hand I think this is really cool as engineer working in materials who does kenjutsu in his spare time. Unlike other fields, the best material to use for swords is still basically a good low-alloy steel. Most composites and high tech metals (like titanium) can't hold an edge without becoming too brittle. High alloy steels can't be hardened properly to create a soft spine and hard edge. What might be really interesting is to see if someone could make a composite sword using steel edges and different spine material. It could do some significant weight reduction and probably be made using some of the old pattern welding techniques used in the late dark ages.
The software industry is a service industry masquerading as a manufacturing industry. OS works because people want to "scratch the itch." The problem is the game development is actually a true manufacturing industry not a service industry. Thats one reason why OS games haven't really become popular.
The other reason is of course the cheating issue. A GPL'd game has the source code easily available, it has to by law. So anyone can take that code an recompile it an allow themselves to cheat. This is especially bad in multiplayer. See quake for an example. The GPL and code availability means that lots of good efficient designs have to be discarded because they lack the necessary security. For instance Worldforge has to use an untrusted client and server side AI. It doesn't have a choice, despite the fact that trusted clients and distributed client-side AI would be more efficient.
As for a commentary of current projects. I like worldforge, but they seem to have lost sight of their goal of a MMPOG with all the effort they are putting into this pigs game they're making. However I think in the end they may at least move online roleplaying away from the godawful D&D model of RPGs.
I'm already seeing a ton of posts basically saying the same thing. They basically say this, "George Lucas sucks and he's only in the franchise to make money. The story is going to be written for 10 year olds and all the aliens will be stupid and plastic. The origin trilogy will be soo much better than these."
I would like all of these people to sit back and watch the original trilogy again. Now watch it again. Pay attention this time and ignore any nostalgia you had from when you saw this when you were ten.
Back yet? Good now did you notice anything? Right you probably noticed that the original trilogy has most of the flaws your criticizing Episode One for.
The acting in all of them was dubious at best. Ford was wooden. Hamill was just plain bad ("You're not my father! Its not true!"). Carrie Fisher was high through most of the second and third. Lots of dialogue sucked. Quite often the best actors were the Brits playing minor roles.
They weren't written that well. Why is an astromech droid a great security hacker? Thats one helluva back door in the system. How can a farm boy crop duster turn into a ace pilot with no training? And don't give me lots of "the force" crap. Why can't an ace pilot successfully land a ship in a swamp? Especially if it can hover? "Only Imperial Storm Troopers are so precise"? Please. There are lots more, especially that god awful Tarzan yell in Jedi.
Oh and by the way, lots of aliens looked stupid or plastic in the first movies too. Especially Jedi where the band looked like muppets. Can you honestly say Greedo looked convincing in Star Wars?
Oh and Lucas is almost richer than God so he doesn't need the money. He has ILM pulling in money constantly. He has all the other Star Wars stuff. He doesn't need to spend 200 Million of his own money to make another movie.
The basic problem isn't that Lucas is making bad movies. He isn't, episode one isn't significantly worse then Jedi. The problem is he made another Jedi when people wanted another Empire or A New Hope. And he doesn't have anyone to tell him something is stupid and it should be left out like the overly gratuitous trip through the core in Ep 1. And he's not an especially good director, have you seen his other movies?Remember the horn joke from the set of Star Wars?
His real problem isn't that he's making crappier movies, its that he's making the same level of movies when we want them to be so much better. We want more believable aliens and better writing. We want better acting. So its us who really have to deal with it, not him.
Actually from my extensive cartoon research I have determined that on his first attempt he will either:
a) Leave the parking brake on, preventing him from going anywhere or...
b) Put the darn thing in reverse, driving him backwards into the ground approximately half the length of his ship before he corrects the problem and blasts off properly.
Ok, this is kinda cool, you can put lots of processor power in one box. Of course you probably will have a bottleneck at the bus so it won't actually be that fast a lot of stuff. The real question is what the hell am I going to run on it?
I mean its mac chips which will most likely go into PCs. No software that's straight off the shelf will run on this thing because its too freaking wierd. Definitely not windows (but so what) and most likely not MacOS either (ditto). However I'm betting you can't just throw Mandrake on this either and get it to work. This company is going to put out a custom linux distro just so they can get some practical use out of the concept.
I mean if you're not going to be using Open Source software with this thing you may very well be up the proverbial creek. Thats not a problem for many slashdotters, but if I want to run a commercial analysis package that available in binary only, this architecture is probably right out.
Is anyone surprised at Shaft clobbering Titan AE? Shaft is a mainstream action romp with a big name lead actor and director. Titan is an animated action movie, its not disney and its not especially targetted at the usual childrens audience. Which do you expect to do better at the box office?
I was actually surprised when I first saw the previews for this movie at the begining of the year. An american studio trying to do somewhat adult animation, its a big change from status quo and is mostly likely due to the recent anime influx into america. I am going to go watch this movie if for no other reason than to support the concept of adult animation in America. The real problem this movie faces is that it marketed itself to teens, most of whom are too busy trying to be adults to go to a "kids" movie.
As for some of the other comments. Watch Star Wars again, its predictable and stupid in many parts. If it weren't a pop culture event it would have never done as well as it did. For instance, why can a common droid easily hack a super space stations computers? How can a crop dusting farm boy become an ace fighter pilot with no training? Where are the escape pods on the millenium falcon? Etc, etc, etc. Oh and as for the music in Titan not being a John Williams score like SW, I guess that means they're trying to be original. What a horrible thing.
BTW, three things date movies most - music, hair, and costuming. Watch an Buck Rogers episode and laugh at the early eighties costuming. Transformers: The Movie has eighties rock. Doctor Zhivago has 60s hair. Of course effects date a movie too, but there's not as much you can do about that, other than plan your effects sequences well. Again look at the Death Stars targeting sequence at the end of Star Wars for dated special effects. What was the refresh rate on those rebel monitors anyway?:)
Actually the occurance I was talking about happened several years ago so his mac was a '93ish model that he was trying to get to work in '96ish. You can say the equivalent of upgrade blah blah blah, but frankly he was forty-some year old menswear clerk so you might as well have told him to fly to mars.
Yes, but lost of people can't stand macs because they don't have any backwards compatibility. When I was going to buy my first computer I bought PC because I knew any Mac I bought would not only be obsolete when I bought it, also be unsupported by everyone - even Apple - within a few years. Plus Apple alters its hardware specs enough between models that you can't upgrade the hardware to get it compatible again... You just have to buy a new Mac after 3ish years. Its almost as bad as Microsoft really.
As for Mac users howling, you bet they did. When I told a guy I worked with that his 3 year old mac was too old to play a game he got for his young daughter he was pissed. He should be, by ditching compatibility like that it destroys any value his 3 year old computer had whatsoever.
Last time I checked, IP was not really a time sensitive protocol. It makes sure the packets get there but not when, hence the trouble with webphones and streaming media in the early days. So to use this they're either going to have to record the whole string in a trusted client, a bad idea when security is an issue, or they are going to send the sentence letter-by-letter across the internet, where noise is going to cause serious problems with their time-based metrics. I sense possible implementation problems coming in the future...
Still it might be an interesting way to encrypt stuff on your computer. Not only would you have to know the password phrase to type, but you would also have to be able to type it properly to get access to the data. It makes passwords lots harder to crack and the extra security is almost transparent to the user.
Forging spam sounds like a pretty weak crime to me, but a crime non-the-less. However I think forging email should be some sort of fraud. I have a friend who was fired from his job after some scientologists forged a racist email from his work address.
Developing nations, many of whom don't have consistant proper sanitation, transportation, telephone access, and a host of other problems are being handed universal internet access? Are their governments going to start voting for more bread and circuses next? I suppose they are only doing this because it would be relatively cheap and flashy as opposed to actually fixing their countries problems...
WWI: Alright Germany was the initial aggressor, but they were blamed for the entire war. They were treated badly in the Treaty of Versailles.
WWII: Yes, caused. Germany would have never been the nation it was if it hadn't been for the ToV. Hitler most likely wouldn't have come to power, etc, etc, etc. Most of the Nazis early activities were designed to publicly spite the ToV. Also the ToV created numerous weak states which were easily conquered. It was an awful treaty that still causes problems today in the Balkans.
America was not so isolationist as people think. The common man may have been, but even before Pearl Harbor the US was gearing up for war training troops, etc. Pearl Harbor just galvanized the nation. If anything Japan would have been ignored not Germany.
The Nazi's were butchers, look at the holocaust. However the Japanese were worse. They are the only country in modern times to use widespread chemical and germ warfare. They worked their prisoners to death, "death marched" them, etc. They committed numerous attrocities which unfortunately go overlooked because they were done to the Chinese and other Eastern nations.
Gulf War: The war was about oil and instability. If Saddam Hussein had played his cards right he could have conquered much of the middle east. He could have controlled a large portion of the world's oil production. This would have destabilized much of the world. Widespread war in the Middle East would have also destabilized the region. The US was just lucky that Hussein dug in along the Kuwaiti border instead of rolling over the US early "speed bump" troops.
Little known fact, Bush intentionally mispronouced Hussein's first name. His pronunciaton meant "jackass" or something similar. The correct pronunciation means "great stallion" or "strong warrior" or something like that...
While you are right about war being a matter of national interest, your analyses seem somewhat flawed.
WWI: Started because Austro-Hungary was internally unstable. Germany gets blamed for the war today partly because they were the best killers in WWI, but mostly because of WWII. The Treaty of Versailles broke up Austro-Hungary badly and unfairly penalized Germany when all they did was kill better than everyone else.
WWII: Aptly named because it was caused by the god-awful Treaty of Versailles. USA entered the war in Europe because Britian was a customer and because the Nazis would have won if they hadn't. Infact the worst butchers of the war were not the Nazis (since they only really butchered their own people) but were the Japanese. However they were basically butchering undeveloped nations so they don't get as much publicity.
Korea/Vietnam: Containment. The US backs losers because they want to halt the spread of communism. The US backed a lot of idiots because they opposed communists, see Cuba and most of Central America.
Gulf War: The US and others intervene to halt Iraq because it jeopardized the stability of the entire middle east. One country controlling a significant portion of the worlds oil is bad. The war is actually won by the ground forces, but the air force gets all the credit.
Why are the Balkans still a mess? Because its not an important region in terms of resources and getting peace there is damn near impossible anyway. Its not economically or even philosophically worth trying.
Your post makes it sounds like the US/NATO/UN can just walk in and create peace if they wanted it. This is not the case. The different ethnicities have been at war for nearly 500 years and the only real way to bring lasting peace is to let someone win. It is not really possible for an external power to just walk in and set up a lasting government. See UN/US involvement in Somalia for an example of that.
Anyway right premise, national interest, bad analysis in many cases.
Common Problem in Technical Fields
on
Too Old To Code?
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· Score: 2
The glass ceiling come into play in lots of technical fields. What you were taught starts going obsolete as soon as you graduate, so many employers look for young blood with the latest knowledge. Its especially obvious in computer science because thats a new field (compared to say civil engineering which has been around since the Romans). But its also present in engineering where computer analysis is quickly replacing a lot of older mathematic techniques. Old engineers are having trouble getting jobs too.
The key to a long life in engineering is basically getting far enough up the ladder to get into management. After that you really aren't judged on your technical experise anymore. Its also good idea to jump from the sinking ship early before it drags you down with it.
My dad was basically a lower level engineer for most of his life, mostly due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time when layoffs hit. As he got older it got harder and harder for him to find work as an engineer. He ended up teaching.
There is just one problem with saying KDE is going to "win." Both these environments are open source, only QT isn't truly OS because its not GPL'd. This causes lots of problems and is basically why GNOME was invented in the first place.
GNOME will improve. KDE will improve. GNOME has nothing to hold it back. KDE does currently so I'd have to say that I'm leaning towards GNOME.
It was true to its roots: it had an actual team of people doing all sorts of cool secret agenty stuff the whole time.
You obviously didn't see the same movie I saw. In the first Mission Impossible I saw, the team was killed in the first fifteen minutes. Seeing Emilio Estevez get killed was cool mind you. The rest of the movie was the Ethan Hunt show. It was not about teamwork, it was about Tom Cruise.
MI2 tries too hard to be James Bond. Too much leg, too little plot. I'm currently blaming the movies big faults on John Woo's lack of english skills, the dialogue just does not work on a grand scale. I felt that the team worked much better than in the first one though. The action was cool just not sustainable.
The reason they are different is because Cuba and China are very different countries. For a very long time during the cold war it was very important to play China and Russia against each other. It kept them from creating some kind of global communist power house in asia. Thats why Nixon went to China among other things.
Cuba gets treated differently because its a tiny country that isn't very impressive in world affairs. It makes cigars and little else. It is never going to be a superpower. It does not have 2 billion people to turn into an army. Also American Cuban policy is basically set by the Cuban-American population in Florida. They still want the embargo and the politicians really don't have a good enough reason to piss them off yet. Of course the Elian Gonzalez case may be changing that.
I personally would rather drop the embargo with Cuba before normalizing relations with China. Castro is going to die sometime after all and the US can have much more of a positive influence on Cuba, but I'm not in the US Congress.
Napster technically does nothing illegal. It allows peer file sharing which, in and of itself, is not illegal in any way. However it can be used illegally, in this way it is much like a printing press.
Printing presses are purely legal items. However they can be used for a number of illegal activities, from counterfieting money to illegally printing copyrighted material. Napster is essentially an electronic printing press. It can be used for legitimate file transfers, but it can also be used for illegitimate ones. Adding to this problem is that the illegitimate file transfers are currently dominating the system. I.E. most of the "napster" presses are being used for counterfieting.
Now Napster has a problem. Napster basically is a press which was designed explicitly for counterfieting. It was designed to share mp3's on the internet without regard to their legality or legitimacy. While they aren't doing anything technically wrong, their product is being misused. They should responsibly allow some sort of protections to be put in place to prevent these illegal uses. Make it possible to track down the pirates, etc.
You cannot call Napster a tool which is only useful for people pirating software. You can call it an irresponsible company who should put a stop to its software's illegal uses.
Many Linux users use linux not only because its stable and fast, but because of their own OS/FS political agenda. Many will not accept any software that is not Open Source. This is a big problem for games since writing OS games is very difficult.
First of all, game development is not a service model industry. Its a manufacturing model. OS does not work anywhere near as well under the manufacturing model because its not as "itch" driven like a service model is.
Writing an OS game is difficult in most cases. Why? Because writing a trusted game client using OS is nearly impossible. (Remember what happened with Quake.) There is too much incentive to cheat and few ways to prevent it (since these ways would be included in the source too).
Untrusted clients mean that lots of simple work-arounds can't be used (like the quake lag issue). This also means that the server has to do a lot more work. Worldforge has untrusted OS clients, but they're having trouble running more than a couple clients and their server AI before the load kills it. More server load means more expensive servers. This means the game will not be able to stay free as in beer and even more people will be angry.
Ever hear of the CBLDF, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund? It's a fund to help comic book writers targeted by ridiculous legal action, mainly independent titles.
Last time I checked many of the books CBLDF was supporting were basically porn like Cherry Poptart. Most of the people suing them are not big corporations but are large parent groups who (understandably) don't think that porno comics should be sitting next to Batman on the comic store shelves (where their kids could easily buy them). I tend to agree with the parents. These stories are not meant for children and should be careful not to represent themselves that way. They should be kept in special section (like they are in my comics shop.)
BTW I know Cherry Poptart was started (at least in part) as a parody of many 60s teen comics like Archie. I am just saying that few people buy it solely on the merits of its writing...
Yeah prolly, the link was down when I tried to see the page. (Darn slashdot effect) I was just talking about something that sounded similar due to the description that was given in the post. Sorry for inducing confusion.
Slashdot Mirror
The truth is actual swordplay against actual full plate armor doesn't do much of anything. There are stories from the renaissance of battles between nobles being fought were the only person who died was an old man killed by heat exhaustion or a heart attack. Sword vs. chain mail uses piercing attacks, this is the type of combat you would find through most of the middle ages.
Creating a high-tech sword faces a few issues. The first is that the spine needs to be strong but capable of taking punishment. The spine is the section which takes most of the actual shock of impact and is used for parrying. The edge needs to be hard, but not so hard that it becomes brittle and breaks when its hit against something. This is the problem with titanium and even stainless steel, they are usually soft and brittle when hard.
As for using a composite laminate of some sort, I am somewhat hesitant. Swords see lots of impact loading because that is what they do. They hit things. Laminates tend to delaminate under any sort of impact. Once they start to delaminate it tends to only get worse from there since the delamination sites allow for crack nucleation, etc. Most composites are also a pain to repair and recycle. As for diamond, its an interesting idea, but diamond is crystalline so it probably would crack easily. Its still an interesting idea though.
BTW weight is not necessarily a bad thing in swords since you actually use the weight of the sword to help you in combat. Most people talk about reducing the weight of swords when a good sword actually only weights somewhere between 1 to 2 kilos if its reasonably sized.
Wrong geography because tantos are asian weapons not european as mentioned in the article post. I was not giving my opinion on european forging techniques. Sorry for the confusion.
BTW eastern and western forging techniques are actually quite different. Eastern techniques used the best parts of the "bloom," that is the piece of steel that resulted from initial refining. Western used the whole bloom. As such, eastern swords tend to be of higher carbon content than western swords. Eastern swords are also forged using clay coat technique to heat treat the swords which was not used in the west.
As for sword fighting traditions, western society lost most of its traditions but there are people like John Clements and the HACA trying to piece the techniques back together. Personally I think that SCA is more of a sport than a martial art, since the techniques using in SCA combat are significantly different than in real sword play. SCA swords use blunt impact so their techniques involve chopping actions where actual sword play uses draw cuts and stabbing. SCA combat is to real western swordplay as kendo is to true eastern swordplay. Close but significantly different in the specifics.
Ok, first of all tantos are Japanese or at least asian long knives. Project Dragon Slayer is trying to build a european patterned double edged sword. Wrong geography.
On the other hand I think this is really cool as engineer working in materials who does kenjutsu in his spare time. Unlike other fields, the best material to use for swords is still basically a good low-alloy steel. Most composites and high tech metals (like titanium) can't hold an edge without becoming too brittle. High alloy steels can't be hardened properly to create a soft spine and hard edge. What might be really interesting is to see if someone could make a composite sword using steel edges and different spine material. It could do some significant weight reduction and probably be made using some of the old pattern welding techniques used in the late dark ages.
The software industry is a service industry masquerading as a manufacturing industry. OS works because people want to "scratch the itch." The problem is the game development is actually a true manufacturing industry not a service industry. Thats one reason why OS games haven't really become popular.
The other reason is of course the cheating issue. A GPL'd game has the source code easily available, it has to by law. So anyone can take that code an recompile it an allow themselves to cheat. This is especially bad in multiplayer. See quake for an example. The GPL and code availability means that lots of good efficient designs have to be discarded because they lack the necessary security. For instance Worldforge has to use an untrusted client and server side AI. It doesn't have a choice, despite the fact that trusted clients and distributed client-side AI would be more efficient.
As for a commentary of current projects. I like worldforge, but they seem to have lost sight of their goal of a MMPOG with all the effort they are putting into this pigs game they're making. However I think in the end they may at least move online roleplaying away from the godawful D&D model of RPGs.
Can it turboboost?
I'm downloading your porn for you now, Michael
I'm already seeing a ton of posts basically saying the same thing. They basically say this, "George Lucas sucks and he's only in the franchise to make money. The story is going to be written for 10 year olds and all the aliens will be stupid and plastic. The origin trilogy will be soo much better than these."
I would like all of these people to sit back and watch the original trilogy again. Now watch it again. Pay attention this time and ignore any nostalgia you had from when you saw this when you were ten.
Back yet? Good now did you notice anything? Right you probably noticed that the original trilogy has most of the flaws your criticizing Episode One for.
The acting in all of them was dubious at best. Ford was wooden. Hamill was just plain bad ("You're not my father! Its not true!"). Carrie Fisher was high through most of the second and third. Lots of dialogue sucked. Quite often the best actors were the Brits playing minor roles.
They weren't written that well. Why is an astromech droid a great security hacker? Thats one helluva back door in the system. How can a farm boy crop duster turn into a ace pilot with no training? And don't give me lots of "the force" crap. Why can't an ace pilot successfully land a ship in a swamp? Especially if it can hover? "Only Imperial Storm Troopers are so precise"? Please. There are lots more, especially that god awful Tarzan yell in Jedi.
Oh and by the way, lots of aliens looked stupid or plastic in the first movies too. Especially Jedi where the band looked like muppets. Can you honestly say Greedo looked convincing in Star Wars?
Oh and Lucas is almost richer than God so he doesn't need the money. He has ILM pulling in money constantly. He has all the other Star Wars stuff. He doesn't need to spend 200 Million of his own money to make another movie.
The basic problem isn't that Lucas is making bad movies. He isn't, episode one isn't significantly worse then Jedi. The problem is he made another Jedi when people wanted another Empire or A New Hope. And he doesn't have anyone to tell him something is stupid and it should be left out like the overly gratuitous trip through the core in Ep 1. And he's not an especially good director, have you seen his other movies?Remember the horn joke from the set of Star Wars?
His real problem isn't that he's making crappier movies, its that he's making the same level of movies when we want them to be so much better. We want more believable aliens and better writing. We want better acting. So its us who really have to deal with it, not him.
Actually from my extensive cartoon research I have determined that on his first attempt he will either:
a) Leave the parking brake on, preventing him from going anywhere or...
b) Put the darn thing in reverse, driving him backwards into the ground approximately half the length of his ship before he corrects the problem and blasts off properly.
Ok, this is kinda cool, you can put lots of processor power in one box. Of course you probably will have a bottleneck at the bus so it won't actually be that fast a lot of stuff. The real question is what the hell am I going to run on it?
I mean its mac chips which will most likely go into PCs. No software that's straight off the shelf will run on this thing because its too freaking wierd. Definitely not windows (but so what) and most likely not MacOS either (ditto). However I'm betting you can't just throw Mandrake on this either and get it to work. This company is going to put out a custom linux distro just so they can get some practical use out of the concept.
I mean if you're not going to be using Open Source software with this thing you may very well be up the proverbial creek. Thats not a problem for many slashdotters, but if I want to run a commercial analysis package that available in binary only, this architecture is probably right out.
Is anyone surprised at Shaft clobbering Titan AE? Shaft is a mainstream action romp with a big name lead actor and director. Titan is an animated action movie, its not disney and its not especially targetted at the usual childrens audience. Which do you expect to do better at the box office?
I was actually surprised when I first saw the previews for this movie at the begining of the year. An american studio trying to do somewhat adult animation, its a big change from status quo and is mostly likely due to the recent anime influx into america. I am going to go watch this movie if for no other reason than to support the concept of adult animation in America. The real problem this movie faces is that it marketed itself to teens, most of whom are too busy trying to be adults to go to a "kids" movie.
As for some of the other comments. Watch Star Wars again, its predictable and stupid in many parts. If it weren't a pop culture event it would have never done as well as it did. For instance, why can a common droid easily hack a super space stations computers? How can a crop dusting farm boy become an ace fighter pilot with no training? Where are the escape pods on the millenium falcon? Etc, etc, etc. Oh and as for the music in Titan not being a John Williams score like SW, I guess that means they're trying to be original. What a horrible thing.
BTW, three things date movies most - music, hair, and costuming. Watch an Buck Rogers episode and laugh at the early eighties costuming. Transformers: The Movie has eighties rock. Doctor Zhivago has 60s hair. Of course effects date a movie too, but there's not as much you can do about that, other than plan your effects sequences well. Again look at the Death Stars targeting sequence at the end of Star Wars for dated special effects. What was the refresh rate on those rebel monitors anyway? :)
Actually the occurance I was talking about happened several years ago so his mac was a '93ish model that he was trying to get to work in '96ish. You can say the equivalent of upgrade blah blah blah, but frankly he was forty-some year old menswear clerk so you might as well have told him to fly to mars.
Yes, but lost of people can't stand macs because they don't have any backwards compatibility. When I was going to buy my first computer I bought PC because I knew any Mac I bought would not only be obsolete when I bought it, also be unsupported by everyone - even Apple - within a few years. Plus Apple alters its hardware specs enough between models that you can't upgrade the hardware to get it compatible again... You just have to buy a new Mac after 3ish years. Its almost as bad as Microsoft really.
As for Mac users howling, you bet they did. When I told a guy I worked with that his 3 year old mac was too old to play a game he got for his young daughter he was pissed. He should be, by ditching compatibility like that it destroys any value his 3 year old computer had whatsoever.
Last time I checked, IP was not really a time sensitive protocol. It makes sure the packets get there but not when, hence the trouble with webphones and streaming media in the early days. So to use this they're either going to have to record the whole string in a trusted client, a bad idea when security is an issue, or they are going to send the sentence letter-by-letter across the internet, where noise is going to cause serious problems with their time-based metrics. I sense possible implementation problems coming in the future...
Still it might be an interesting way to encrypt stuff on your computer. Not only would you have to know the password phrase to type, but you would also have to be able to type it properly to get access to the data. It makes passwords lots harder to crack and the extra security is almost transparent to the user.
Forging spam sounds like a pretty weak crime to me, but a crime non-the-less. However I think forging email should be some sort of fraud. I have a friend who was fired from his job after some scientologists forged a racist email from his work address.
Developing nations, many of whom don't have consistant proper sanitation, transportation, telephone access, and a host of other problems are being handed universal internet access? Are their governments going to start voting for more bread and circuses next? I suppose they are only doing this because it would be relatively cheap and flashy as opposed to actually fixing their countries problems...
Gamespot did a feature on the top ten games which should be remade. Doom finished third for atmosphere. A link is here.
WWI: Alright Germany was the initial aggressor, but they were blamed for the entire war. They were treated badly in the Treaty of Versailles.
WWII: Yes, caused. Germany would have never been the nation it was if it hadn't been for the ToV. Hitler most likely wouldn't have come to power, etc, etc, etc. Most of the Nazis early activities were designed to publicly spite the ToV. Also the ToV created numerous weak states which were easily conquered. It was an awful treaty that still causes problems today in the Balkans.
America was not so isolationist as people think. The common man may have been, but even before Pearl Harbor the US was gearing up for war training troops, etc. Pearl Harbor just galvanized the nation. If anything Japan would have been ignored not Germany.
The Nazi's were butchers, look at the holocaust. However the Japanese were worse. They are the only country in modern times to use widespread chemical and germ warfare. They worked their prisoners to death, "death marched" them, etc. They committed numerous attrocities which unfortunately go overlooked because they were done to the Chinese and other Eastern nations.
Gulf War: The war was about oil and instability. If Saddam Hussein had played his cards right he could have conquered much of the middle east. He could have controlled a large portion of the world's oil production. This would have destabilized much of the world. Widespread war in the Middle East would have also destabilized the region. The US was just lucky that Hussein dug in along the Kuwaiti border instead of rolling over the US early "speed bump" troops.
Little known fact, Bush intentionally mispronouced Hussein's first name. His pronunciaton meant "jackass" or something similar. The correct pronunciation means "great stallion" or "strong warrior" or something like that...
While you are right about war being a matter of national interest, your analyses seem somewhat flawed.
WWI: Started because Austro-Hungary was internally unstable. Germany gets blamed for the war today partly because they were the best killers in WWI, but mostly because of WWII. The Treaty of Versailles broke up Austro-Hungary badly and unfairly penalized Germany when all they did was kill better than everyone else.
WWII: Aptly named because it was caused by the god-awful Treaty of Versailles. USA entered the war in Europe because Britian was a customer and because the Nazis would have won if they hadn't. Infact the worst butchers of the war were not the Nazis (since they only really butchered their own people) but were the Japanese. However they were basically butchering undeveloped nations so they don't get as much publicity.
Korea/Vietnam: Containment. The US backs losers because they want to halt the spread of communism. The US backed a lot of idiots because they opposed communists, see Cuba and most of Central America.
Gulf War: The US and others intervene to halt Iraq because it jeopardized the stability of the entire middle east. One country controlling a significant portion of the worlds oil is bad. The war is actually won by the ground forces, but the air force gets all the credit.
Why are the Balkans still a mess? Because its not an important region in terms of resources and getting peace there is damn near impossible anyway. Its not economically or even philosophically worth trying.
Your post makes it sounds like the US/NATO/UN can just walk in and create peace if they wanted it. This is not the case. The different ethnicities have been at war for nearly 500 years and the only real way to bring lasting peace is to let someone win. It is not really possible for an external power to just walk in and set up a lasting government. See UN/US involvement in Somalia for an example of that.
Anyway right premise, national interest, bad analysis in many cases.
The glass ceiling come into play in lots of technical fields. What you were taught starts going obsolete as soon as you graduate, so many employers look for young blood with the latest knowledge. Its especially obvious in computer science because thats a new field (compared to say civil engineering which has been around since the Romans). But its also present in engineering where computer analysis is quickly replacing a lot of older mathematic techniques. Old engineers are having trouble getting jobs too.
The key to a long life in engineering is basically getting far enough up the ladder to get into management. After that you really aren't judged on your technical experise anymore. Its also good idea to jump from the sinking ship early before it drags you down with it.
My dad was basically a lower level engineer for most of his life, mostly due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time when layoffs hit. As he got older it got harder and harder for him to find work as an engineer. He ended up teaching.
There is just one problem with saying KDE is going to "win." Both these environments are open source, only QT isn't truly OS because its not GPL'd. This causes lots of problems and is basically why GNOME was invented in the first place.
GNOME will improve. KDE will improve. GNOME has nothing to hold it back. KDE does currently so I'd have to say that I'm leaning towards GNOME.
It was true to its roots: it had an actual team of people doing all sorts of cool secret agenty stuff the whole time.
You obviously didn't see the same movie I saw. In the first Mission Impossible I saw, the team was killed in the first fifteen minutes. Seeing Emilio Estevez get killed was cool mind you. The rest of the movie was the Ethan Hunt show. It was not about teamwork, it was about Tom Cruise.
MI2 tries too hard to be James Bond. Too much leg, too little plot. I'm currently blaming the movies big faults on John Woo's lack of english skills, the dialogue just does not work on a grand scale. I felt that the team worked much better than in the first one though. The action was cool just not sustainable.
BTW it was Versacchi not Armani.
The reason they are different is because Cuba and China are very different countries. For a very long time during the cold war it was very important to play China and Russia against each other. It kept them from creating some kind of global communist power house in asia. Thats why Nixon went to China among other things.
Cuba gets treated differently because its a tiny country that isn't very impressive in world affairs. It makes cigars and little else. It is never going to be a superpower. It does not have 2 billion people to turn into an army. Also American Cuban policy is basically set by the Cuban-American population in Florida. They still want the embargo and the politicians really don't have a good enough reason to piss them off yet. Of course the Elian Gonzalez case may be changing that.
I personally would rather drop the embargo with Cuba before normalizing relations with China. Castro is going to die sometime after all and the US can have much more of a positive influence on Cuba, but I'm not in the US Congress.
Napster technically does nothing illegal. It allows peer file sharing which, in and of itself, is not illegal in any way. However it can be used illegally, in this way it is much like a printing press.
Printing presses are purely legal items. However they can be used for a number of illegal activities, from counterfieting money to illegally printing copyrighted material. Napster is essentially an electronic printing press. It can be used for legitimate file transfers, but it can also be used for illegitimate ones. Adding to this problem is that the illegitimate file transfers are currently dominating the system. I.E. most of the "napster" presses are being used for counterfieting.
Now Napster has a problem. Napster basically is a press which was designed explicitly for counterfieting. It was designed to share mp3's on the internet without regard to their legality or legitimacy. While they aren't doing anything technically wrong, their product is being misused. They should responsibly allow some sort of protections to be put in place to prevent these illegal uses. Make it possible to track down the pirates, etc.
You cannot call Napster a tool which is only useful for people pirating software. You can call it an irresponsible company who should put a stop to its software's illegal uses.
Many Linux users use linux not only because its stable and fast, but because of their own OS/FS political agenda. Many will not accept any software that is not Open Source. This is a big problem for games since writing OS games is very difficult.
First of all, game development is not a service model industry. Its a manufacturing model. OS does not work anywhere near as well under the manufacturing model because its not as "itch" driven like a service model is.
Writing an OS game is difficult in most cases. Why? Because writing a trusted game client using OS is nearly impossible. (Remember what happened with Quake.) There is too much incentive to cheat and few ways to prevent it (since these ways would be included in the source too).
Untrusted clients mean that lots of simple work-arounds can't be used (like the quake lag issue). This also means that the server has to do a lot more work. Worldforge has untrusted OS clients, but they're having trouble running more than a couple clients and their server AI before the load kills it. More server load means more expensive servers. This means the game will not be able to stay free as in beer and even more people will be angry.
Ever hear of the CBLDF, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund? It's a fund to help comic book writers targeted by ridiculous legal action, mainly independent titles.
Last time I checked many of the books CBLDF was supporting were basically porn like Cherry Poptart. Most of the people suing them are not big corporations but are large parent groups who (understandably) don't think that porno comics should be sitting next to Batman on the comic store shelves (where their kids could easily buy them). I tend to agree with the parents. These stories are not meant for children and should be careful not to represent themselves that way. They should be kept in special section (like they are in my comics shop.)
BTW I know Cherry Poptart was started (at least in part) as a parody of many 60s teen comics like Archie. I am just saying that few people buy it solely on the merits of its writing...
Yeah prolly, the link was down when I tried to see the page. (Darn slashdot effect) I was just talking about something that sounded similar due to the description that was given in the post. Sorry for inducing confusion.