"Tron wasn't sci-fi, and wasn't trying to be. It was pure fantasy."
When I was a kid, those fuzzy, black-light posters were real popular. I had several in my bedroom, all of them some sort of D&Dish, Boris Vallejo-type, fantasy scene.
I actually had a few dreams that were visually very close to the posters, dreams in a world of solid blacks and heavily contrasting colors, almost neon in their purity.
I was totally flabbergasted when I saw Tron for the first time. It looked very much like my dreams.
"Wikileaks provides an extremely useful service, one which is only possible on the Internet, considering its widely accessible scale. Here's to hoping things get straightened out -_-;;"
I think it is too late.
I've donated to Wikileaks in the past, but I am not going to in the future, and for one reason alone.
It is my honest opinion that Wikileaks has been compromised. Funding is one thing (and I agree that is what probably idled WL in the first place, months ago), but this leaking of diplomatic cables was just too much for Julian to handle. My guess is that the US government took the kid gloves off, infiltrated his communications, verified that he actually DOES have the documents, then cornered him somewhere and gave him an ultimatum--go on like nothing has happened, and report to us, or die. Such an arrangement would give the government some degree of control of any future leaks--killing Assange would not. The government knows full well, after this last huge leak, that more then likely it WILL happen again and contingencies need to be made.
Another post points out the importance of these documents. This cannot be underestimated. In the past, people have simply disappeared over stuff like this, inexplicably stepped out of windows, etc. The treatment afforded to Manning should speak for itself--the man had shit he wasn't supposed to--important shit. Assange could quite possibly hold the ability to change the course of wars in his hands.
I don't expect the US government to play by the rules as far as Assange is concerned. To be blunt, I am amazed the man is still alive. Why is he? I figured some Icelandic banker would have had a contract put out on the man, or something to that effect, by now. People have been killed for far less--why is he still alive?
"I've observed many times that stupidity is contagious."
That doesn't necessarily mean a smart person will succumb.
While that loud-mouthed moron gets the crowd riled up, spreads his/her idiocy, his/her stupidity is still apparent to some. Those people usually know when things are about to get out of hand...and they get the fuck out of Dodge.
What does that leave you? A crowd of people stupid enough to either participate in the madness, or too oblivious to know when to bail.
The smart ones leave and the "collective intelligence" of the crowd plummets.
I'm not sure about evolution as far as ravens are concerned, but I do know nature throws us some curve balls every once in a while, and ravens are most definitely one of them.
There was some researcher visiting Fairbanks, AK when I lived there. He was trying to catch ravens for some study he was doing and needed 20 birds. After a few weeks of not catching a single one, the local newspaper caught wind of what he was doing and ran a story on him. The first paragraph explained his lack of success. He had been using cheese puffs as bait in the parking lot of the local supermarket. He had a firing net to cover the birds when they came to investigate...only they never came, even when the lot usually had ravens all over the place.
A reader finally figured it out. There was a McDonald's right next to the lot. He should have been using French Fries. The ravens knew something wasn't right and refused to touch his bait.
I've seen them open zipped containers to steal food (the cargo compartments on snow machines are easy prey)...and then CLOSE THEM.
I watched my cat carry on a 10 minute conversation with one. Obviously some sort of speech between the two...never seen anything like it before, or since.
I've heard one make the sound of dripping water, then fly down and drink from my rain barrel.
After 10 years in Alaska, I've only seen one dead raven. It had been fried on the power line above my friends truck while he was sitting in it eating his lunch. Plonk!...in the back of the truck it fell. It is so rare to find a dead raven that the Dept. of Fish and Game wanted the corpse for study.
Even with a 160F annual temperature variation, they never seem to be affected by the weather. I watched one trying how to figure out how to eat a rock-solid, 1-pound package of hamburger meat at -45F in a Sam's Club parking lot. He eventually dragged under the tail pipe of an idling car to thaw it out(people leave their cars idling while they shop when it is that cold). I know people that would never have figured that out.
I can completely understand the high reverence native cultures afford the creature.
"I'd help you buddy, but every night between 8:30 and 10:00pm I'm working on my microwave disruptor beam. If it happens any other time, let me know and I'll be glad to pop over and take a look."
Mike, that you?
In all seriousness, I knew a guy up in Alaska that was trying to do exactly that.
He lived on some undeveloped property, raised pigs and collected old cars--his neighbor prided himself on his carefully manicured yard. They did not get along. Things got tense until one day the neighbor called the cops on him during a BBQ...and the war started.
One day, I'm over at his place and he takes out this finely-crafted, solid brass gizmo with all sorts of gears and worm screws in it, about 4 inches to a side. Barely concealing his excitement, he explained that he got it from a buddy that used to work at the local Airforce base, and that it was used by aircraft landing in the dark or on aircraft carriers. It was the core of a device he was constructing--a microwave cannon...to be used in the war.
Apparently he had managed to obtain a device that directed microwaves into a tight, adjustable beam. I guess it was used as part of a microwave guidance system for aircraft. Anyways, he had also had a large section of copper pipe silvered and polished on the inside and had fitted a microwave generator from a commercial-grade microwave oven onto the device. Amazingly, the generator fit PERFECTLY into the beam focuser, almost as if it was Destiny guiding his hands (or the industry has standards for such things).
I moved out of the state before he finished it. As far as I know, his girlfriend had convinced him not to finish it. To be honest, the guy was starting to scare me as I began to think he might actually be on to something usable for it's intended purpose.
I told him that if it actually worked, and he settled matters with his neighbor in a more civilized manner, he could always mount the thing on a lazy-susan, put it in the middle of his yard, get a clock motor to spin it slowly in circles, and he could simply turn it on to mow his yard. Flatest mow-job in town.
"It does *not* mean that the FCC doesn't care, or that they won't investigate interference."
Investigate it yourself.
Go from house to house, both sides of your street, pounding on doors, yelling "I'm gunna start kicking some ass if you don't stop interfering with my WiFi Signal! Pussy! C'mon!".
The guy that DOESN'T come outside and kick your ass is the culprit. Speak to him privately after you get out of the hospital. I'm sure the two of you can come to a reasonable solution to the issue if you just relax and work things out rationally.
VOTERS put those regulations in place--a majority of voters. And they were the ones doing the dragging.
Don't confuse a few backward, southern states with the rest of the country. Hell, for that matter, don't confuse a bunch of greedy, plantation owners (and their money) with the rest of the country.
I am a voting Washingtonian and I thought I'd throw my two cents into the kitty.
"Yes, but you see he's not just griping, he says he's paralyzed with the fear of it. Therein lies the problem and the cowardice."
At first, I was kind of shocked that anyone would even EXPECT non-disclosure when it comes to petition signing. After all, the signatures must be validated, but in hindsight, I began to see some issues.
MY biggest concern is that simple harassment of petition signers might evolve into concerted, specific harassment by special interest groups in an effort to sway voting/signing on specific issues--from medical marijuana supporters having their houses broken into to simply being outed in such a way as to use petition signers as a tool for the opposition (such as researching petitioners and correlating arrest records of such people to the names on the petition to give the impression the people that signed are overwhelmingly criminals, etc.)
But there are two sides to every coin, no?
Every single complaint that I have heard regarding the disclosure of petition signers can also be viewed as a "feature"--that same data can be used by ANY group to track abuses/manipulation of petitions/petition signers, as well as make perfectly clear their intentions. Disclosure can also be used by ME to make sure that nobody is signing petitions under my name.
In the end, I thought transparency was more important then privacy as far as this matter is concerned. It is one of the very few instances where I thought privacy should take a back seat to the common good, and trust me, I value privacy very highly. Twas not an easy decision--the very reason it ended up in the lap of SCOTUS.
"Maybe I'm just stating the obvious, but a balloon filled with helium doesn't need power to stay airborne, unless things changed since my time. Though who knows, balloons these days..."
To state the REALLY obvious, which you seemed to miss, is that a helium filled balloon also will not sink in WATER, and thus my suggesting it become a submarine would seem to MOST as a joke--as it was intended to be...and apparently not a very good one.
"On most platforms, processes are more expensive than threads."
To be honest, I don't think it really even matters.
While having this very page open in one process, I just opened 20 more Firefox processes, all loading the Slashdot main page. I simply clicked my shortcut for it 20 times in rapid succession, and they were all opened and loaded within 3 seconds of my last click.
I then closed them all (except this one), then quickly did the same thing, but opened 20 news tabs (in this process!) to the same page. They were all opened and loaded within 3 seconds of my last click.
Doing both of these things never resulted in more then a 2% increase in RAM usage and CPU usage dropped to less then 6% when the last process/thread opened, all on a P4 Processor with Win Xp and 2GB RAM. No crashes, no stutters, everything worked as intended both methods.
If I can't tell the difference at that point, what does any of this matter?
It's like the difference between 60fps in a video game and 70fps. Either is more then good enough.
you flood the network with "ghosts"... 1,000+ spoofed IP packets for every 1 real one. sort of like under siege dark territory with the ghost satellites.
it isn't perfect, but provides enough ambiguity to make a counter attack almost pointless for a considerable time."
And Comcast nukes your connection.
Seriously, ISPs are already miffed about the bandwidth usage of P2P systems. Intentionally throwing garbage down them intertubes will not only plug them up, but give the likes of Comcast another excuse for traffic-shaping that they could use as leverage when speaking before congress critters, and we don't want that, do we?
Fucking magnets, how do they work? And I don't wanna talk to a scientist Y'all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed
That's unambiguously anti-science."
I agree, but to further your point I would also add that the entire Juggalo "movement" (if you could call it that) is really a not-too-subtle attempt to groom the next generation of gullible, ill-informed, bigoted and unnecessarily prejudicial right-wing, religious conservative voters--voters incapable of smelling a rat when it runs for office.
The last generation has been screwed over too many times and can no longer be relied upon to put people like Bush Jr. in office...for a second term.
The moon is essentially "dead", right? No seismic activity to speak of (other then from gravitational forces), no molten core (am I right?) and is pretty much a large rock.
Wouldn't all of the heavy metals, during the course of the moon's existence, have gravitated towards the core leaving the core with a high concentration of heavy metals that would be relatively easy to mine? Big, deep holes drilled straight down to the good stuff?
Power all the tech needed with solar, crack the water for breathable O2 and usable hydrogen?
Funny you should say that. They are not one in the same, but it seems the Italians have replaced one with the other and expect the same results. Maybe they should go back to the previous technology.
From the Wikipedia disambiguation page for "Soothsayer":
"In Roman and Etruscan religious practice, a haruspex (plural haruspices; Latin auspex, plural auspices) was a man trained to practice a form of divination called haruspicy, hepatoscopy or hepatomancy. Haruspicy is the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals, especially the livers of sacrificed sheep and poultry. The rites were paralleled by other rites of divination such as the interpretation of lightning strikes, of the flight of birds (augury), and of other natural omens. Practitioners during the period of Roman dominance gradually adopted the title 'auspex' from the older word 'haruspex', or from the Latin 'avis' (bird) and 'specere' or 'spectare' (to look/see)."
It might be noted, however, that the Auspex were horrible at predicting violent, volcanic eruptions, possibly explaining their weak representation in the current era. I think geologists are a little more reliable in that department.
The Slashdot moderation systems is a system of layers.
Users are randomly assigned "moderation points" that can be spent moderating a post upwards "+1", or down with "-1" and include a "tag".
Once spent, the points are painted onto ping pong balls--"+" balls and "-" balls. These are then thrown together in a large hopper and fed down a tube to the squirrel cage. In this cage, dozens of specially trained squirrels sort the ping pong balls according to size and shape and drop them down appropriate tubes to be further sorted by the next stage of squirrels. Once fully sorted, each ping pong ball is individually routed through a pipe that determines the tag that will be applied. The ping pong balls are then routed back to the beginning of the system. The ping pong balls are siphoned off from various points throughout the system at the same rate that posts are made. Each ping pong ball is then assigned to a random post, and there ya have it--Slashdot moderation.
Conrad crashed through the woods with abandon, his pet bear thundering along behind him. He had even named the bear something highly noticeable--Lord British. Running through the backwoods of Britannia was a hobby of Conrad's. Some assumed he was looking for dilapidated, old houses--an archaeologist of opportunistic bent. This was not so.
His very name an attempt at concealment amongst a crowd, Conrad strove to blend into his surroundings as much as one could in such a world. His dress was that of a commoner, removed from the corpse of an unfortunate Noble of Magincia. To be there, before your very eyes, yet gone forever in a blink. The bear was a ruse, as well.
Conrad would pass by a residence of the woods, perhaps a lonely lathe and plaster clad hut, or maybe an unguarded small tower, looking for his next meal. He would pass by these abodes in haste, never faltering in his steps. It was the residents that he looked keenly for--the indication of work to be done.
When Conrad spotted someone at home he would continue on his way a short time, stop behind a tree, out of sight--and kill Lord British.
After claiming the strips of bear meat that he would later use to tame another bear, Conrad stealthed. He slowly moved back towards the residence, careful not to move so quickly that his footfall might be heard. He crept up, slowly, watching for movement of the unwary soul inside the house, slowly, until he stood right next to the front door, cloaked in a shroud of secrecy and suspense.
One wrong move could change events for the worse in short order.
Conrad set himself ready for the wait. It could be a long time before his mark stepped into the snare. Uncertainty was the name of the game now. All was in the hands of his mark, now.
The bear was a nice touch, suggested by one of Conrad's fellow nefarians. People see you go by with a bear in tow, they don't expect you to be around without him anytime soon. Lord British existed only to give the appearance of passing by without stopping.
Conrad waited, the sounds of footfalls inside the house, the occasional snipping of shears on cloth--the home of a tailor apparently. The sounds of doors opening and closing, chests being slammed shut. Containers. Always a good sign at times like these.
It happened so fast, Conrad had not the time to be hesitant. Reaction became action.
The owner of the house opened the front door without warning, and without seeing Conrad hidden amongst the hedges, walked a short distance off into the woods and began slamming a hatchet into a nearby tree and piling up wood at the base. Conrad moved like a silk banner of war in the wind, silently slipping through the frame of the door...and was held in place--an unseen force held him still at the worst possible moment, right on the sill of the door he needed to be through quickly.
Worse, the hammering of the hatchet stopped abruptly. Conrad squirmed, the feeling of impending doom upon him. He was about to be caught.
The grip of ice eased slightly--he took a step. Then another. One more step and he was in. With less then a second to spare, the tailoring lumberjack stepped back into the house, gliding past Conrad, missing him by a single step. Conrad held still, not a breath left his lips.
What was that that held him so? Most vexing. Most vexing, indeed. It had almost been his undoing.
Conrad was born to wait. From the day of his birth, he waited. He now got comfortable in his small corner of the room that the hut's front door had opened onto. It was modestly decorated, obviously the home of a craftsman, the tools of his trade hung from the walls. Conrad watched him work. The crafter seemed to be preoccupied, sometimes just standing there for long stretches of time. Conrad waited.
Then it happened--the craftsman simply disappeared. He had gone to sleep for the evening, presumably, and had left Conrad to the darkness of the room. Conrad stepped from the darkness, took a single candle from his pack, set it on the table in the
The one thing I don't get is why Nature is gouging their content providers and why UC is PAYING for being content providers in the first place. Peer reviewing, editorial work, actual submissions? Don't people usual GET paid for this?
"I don't think he's referring to the ability to have a number of smells at once but rather the ability for one device to create any given smell; your mall example would only be capable of this by loading in canisters with all the smells you need, which is a less flexible solution."
I wasn't differentiating between some highly-technical mechanical dispersal system and some guy popping a different canister in a $5 dispenser mounted at each entrance, as they basically do the same thing.
"And by posting that piece of work anonymously, you just missed out on hundreds of geeks that would have otherwise "friended" you and become your legion of slashdot fans."
I think that was the point.
We already know what HIS idea of being "friended" is.
Slashdot Mirror
"Tron wasn't sci-fi, and wasn't trying to be. It was pure fantasy."
When I was a kid, those fuzzy, black-light posters were real popular. I had several in my bedroom, all of them some sort of D&Dish, Boris Vallejo-type, fantasy scene.
I actually had a few dreams that were visually very close to the posters, dreams in a world of solid blacks and heavily contrasting colors, almost neon in their purity.
I was totally flabbergasted when I saw Tron for the first time. It looked very much like my dreams.
"Wikileaks provides an extremely useful service, one which is only possible on the Internet, considering its widely accessible scale. Here's to hoping things get straightened out -_-;;"
I think it is too late.
I've donated to Wikileaks in the past, but I am not going to in the future, and for one reason alone.
It is my honest opinion that Wikileaks has been compromised. Funding is one thing (and I agree that is what probably idled WL in the first place, months ago), but this leaking of diplomatic cables was just too much for Julian to handle. My guess is that the US government took the kid gloves off, infiltrated his communications, verified that he actually DOES have the documents, then cornered him somewhere and gave him an ultimatum--go on like nothing has happened, and report to us, or die. Such an arrangement would give the government some degree of control of any future leaks--killing Assange would not. The government knows full well, after this last huge leak, that more then likely it WILL happen again and contingencies need to be made.
Another post points out the importance of these documents. This cannot be underestimated. In the past, people have simply disappeared over stuff like this, inexplicably stepped out of windows, etc. The treatment afforded to Manning should speak for itself--the man had shit he wasn't supposed to--important shit. Assange could quite possibly hold the ability to change the course of wars in his hands.
I don't expect the US government to play by the rules as far as Assange is concerned. To be blunt, I am amazed the man is still alive. Why is he? I figured some Icelandic banker would have had a contract put out on the man, or something to that effect, by now. People have been killed for far less--why is he still alive?
"...or a Homeland Security agent working to thwart an act of bioterrorism"
Thwart an act of bio-terrorism?
How do ANY of these devices detect biological contaminants before they are released? Wouldn't that be "verifying an act of bio-terrorism"?
Silly marketing pinheads.
"I've observed many times that stupidity is contagious."
That doesn't necessarily mean a smart person will succumb.
While that loud-mouthed moron gets the crowd riled up, spreads his/her idiocy, his/her stupidity is still apparent to some. Those people usually know when things are about to get out of hand...and they get the fuck out of Dodge.
What does that leave you? A crowd of people stupid enough to either participate in the madness, or too oblivious to know when to bail.
The smart ones leave and the "collective intelligence" of the crowd plummets.
"I don't know either, perhaps someone can frame it as a car analogy."
The light is green. Go, motherfucker.
I'm not sure about evolution as far as ravens are concerned, but I do know nature throws us some curve balls every once in a while, and ravens are most definitely one of them.
There was some researcher visiting Fairbanks, AK when I lived there. He was trying to catch ravens for some study he was doing and needed 20 birds. After a few weeks of not catching a single one, the local newspaper caught wind of what he was doing and ran a story on him. The first paragraph explained his lack of success. He had been using cheese puffs as bait in the parking lot of the local supermarket. He had a firing net to cover the birds when they came to investigate...only they never came, even when the lot usually had ravens all over the place.
A reader finally figured it out. There was a McDonald's right next to the lot. He should have been using French Fries. The ravens knew something wasn't right and refused to touch his bait.
I've seen them open zipped containers to steal food (the cargo compartments on snow machines are easy prey)...and then CLOSE THEM.
I watched my cat carry on a 10 minute conversation with one. Obviously some sort of speech between the two...never seen anything like it before, or since.
I've heard one make the sound of dripping water, then fly down and drink from my rain barrel.
After 10 years in Alaska, I've only seen one dead raven. It had been fried on the power line above my friends truck while he was sitting in it eating his lunch. Plonk!...in the back of the truck it fell. It is so rare to find a dead raven that the Dept. of Fish and Game wanted the corpse for study.
Even with a 160F annual temperature variation, they never seem to be affected by the weather. I watched one trying how to figure out how to eat a rock-solid, 1-pound package of hamburger meat at -45F in a Sam's Club parking lot. He eventually dragged under the tail pipe of an idling car to thaw it out(people leave their cars idling while they shop when it is that cold). I know people that would never have figured that out.
I can completely understand the high reverence native cultures afford the creature.
"I'd help you buddy, but every night between 8:30 and 10:00pm I'm working on my microwave disruptor beam. If it happens any other time, let me know and I'll be glad to pop over and take a look."
Mike, that you?
In all seriousness, I knew a guy up in Alaska that was trying to do exactly that.
He lived on some undeveloped property, raised pigs and collected old cars--his neighbor prided himself on his carefully manicured yard. They did not get along. Things got tense until one day the neighbor called the cops on him during a BBQ...and the war started.
One day, I'm over at his place and he takes out this finely-crafted, solid brass gizmo with all sorts of gears and worm screws in it, about 4 inches to a side. Barely concealing his excitement, he explained that he got it from a buddy that used to work at the local Airforce base, and that it was used by aircraft landing in the dark or on aircraft carriers. It was the core of a device he was constructing--a microwave cannon...to be used in the war.
Apparently he had managed to obtain a device that directed microwaves into a tight, adjustable beam. I guess it was used as part of a microwave guidance system for aircraft. Anyways, he had also had a large section of copper pipe silvered and polished on the inside and had fitted a microwave generator from a commercial-grade microwave oven onto the device. Amazingly, the generator fit PERFECTLY into the beam focuser, almost as if it was Destiny guiding his hands (or the industry has standards for such things).
I moved out of the state before he finished it. As far as I know, his girlfriend had convinced him not to finish it. To be honest, the guy was starting to scare me as I began to think he might actually be on to something usable for it's intended purpose.
I told him that if it actually worked, and he settled matters with his neighbor in a more civilized manner, he could always mount the thing on a lazy-susan, put it in the middle of his yard, get a clock motor to spin it slowly in circles, and he could simply turn it on to mow his yard. Flatest mow-job in town.
"If the quick, cheap and easy fail then you assign resources to the problem."
You're hired.
"It does *not* mean that the FCC doesn't care, or that they won't investigate interference."
Investigate it yourself.
Go from house to house, both sides of your street, pounding on doors, yelling "I'm gunna start kicking some ass if you don't stop interfering with my WiFi Signal! Pussy! C'mon!".
The guy that DOESN'T come outside and kick your ass is the culprit. Speak to him privately after you get out of the hospital. I'm sure the two of you can come to a reasonable solution to the issue if you just relax and work things out rationally.
""The US said it is sure that most criminals use ICQ""
They know this because ICQ is really the main communication system of the CIA. It was all the NSA would let them play with.
"They were dragged kicking and screaming."
Bullshit.
VOTERS put those regulations in place--a majority of voters. And they were the ones doing the dragging.
Don't confuse a few backward, southern states with the rest of the country. Hell, for that matter, don't confuse a bunch of greedy, plantation owners (and their money) with the rest of the country.
I am a voting Washingtonian and I thought I'd throw my two cents into the kitty.
"Yes, but you see he's not just griping, he says he's paralyzed with the fear of it. Therein lies the problem and the cowardice."
At first, I was kind of shocked that anyone would even EXPECT non-disclosure when it comes to petition signing. After all, the signatures must be validated, but in hindsight, I began to see some issues.
MY biggest concern is that simple harassment of petition signers might evolve into concerted, specific harassment by special interest groups in an effort to sway voting/signing on specific issues--from medical marijuana supporters having their houses broken into to simply being outed in such a way as to use petition signers as a tool for the opposition (such as researching petitioners and correlating arrest records of such people to the names on the petition to give the impression the people that signed are overwhelmingly criminals, etc.)
But there are two sides to every coin, no?
Every single complaint that I have heard regarding the disclosure of petition signers can also be viewed as a "feature"--that same data can be used by ANY group to track abuses/manipulation of petitions/petition signers, as well as make perfectly clear their intentions. Disclosure can also be used by ME to make sure that nobody is signing petitions under my name.
In the end, I thought transparency was more important then privacy as far as this matter is concerned. It is one of the very few instances where I thought privacy should take a back seat to the common good, and trust me, I value privacy very highly. Twas not an easy decision--the very reason it ended up in the lap of SCOTUS.
"Maybe I'm just stating the obvious, but a balloon filled with helium doesn't need power to stay airborne, unless things changed since my time. Though who knows, balloons these days..."
To state the REALLY obvious, which you seemed to miss, is that a helium filled balloon also will not sink in WATER, and thus my suggesting it become a submarine would seem to MOST as a joke--as it was intended to be...and apparently not a very good one.
"yeah. cause theres no possible use whatsoever for something that can stay in the sky, powered, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."
Maybe, when the sun is down, it can become the world's first tidal-powered submarine.
"On most platforms, processes are more expensive than threads."
To be honest, I don't think it really even matters.
While having this very page open in one process, I just opened 20 more Firefox processes, all loading the Slashdot main page. I simply clicked my shortcut for it 20 times in rapid succession, and they were all opened and loaded within 3 seconds of my last click.
I then closed them all (except this one), then quickly did the same thing, but opened 20 news tabs (in this process!) to the same page. They were all opened and loaded within 3 seconds of my last click.
Doing both of these things never resulted in more then a 2% increase in RAM usage and CPU usage dropped to less then 6% when the last process/thread opened, all on a P4 Processor with Win Xp and 2GB RAM. No crashes, no stutters, everything worked as intended both methods.
If I can't tell the difference at that point, what does any of this matter?
It's like the difference between 60fps in a video game and 70fps. Either is more then good enough.
"'see my comment [slashdot.org] above...
you flood the network with "ghosts"... 1,000+ spoofed IP packets for every 1 real one. sort of like under siege dark territory with the ghost satellites.
it isn't perfect, but provides enough ambiguity to make a counter attack almost pointless for a considerable time."
And Comcast nukes your connection.
Seriously, ISPs are already miffed about the bandwidth usage of P2P systems. Intentionally throwing garbage down them intertubes will not only plug them up, but give the likes of Comcast another excuse for traffic-shaping that they could use as leverage when speaking before congress critters, and we don't want that, do we?
"The original song has the lyrics:
Fucking magnets, how do they work? And I don't wanna talk to a scientist Y'all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed
That's unambiguously anti-science."
I agree, but to further your point I would also add that the entire Juggalo "movement" (if you could call it that) is really a not-too-subtle attempt to groom the next generation of gullible, ill-informed, bigoted and unnecessarily prejudicial right-wing, religious conservative voters--voters incapable of smelling a rat when it runs for office.
The last generation has been screwed over too many times and can no longer be relied upon to put people like Bush Jr. in office...for a second term.
I always wondered about this.
The moon is essentially "dead", right? No seismic activity to speak of (other then from gravitational forces), no molten core (am I right?) and is pretty much a large rock.
Wouldn't all of the heavy metals, during the course of the moon's existence, have gravitated towards the core leaving the core with a high concentration of heavy metals that would be relatively easy to mine? Big, deep holes drilled straight down to the good stuff?
Power all the tech needed with solar, crack the water for breathable O2 and usable hydrogen?
"They're Geologists, not soothsayers."
Funny you should say that. They are not one in the same, but it seems the Italians have replaced one with the other and expect the same results. Maybe they should go back to the previous technology.
From the Wikipedia disambiguation page for "Soothsayer":
"In Roman and Etruscan religious practice, a haruspex (plural haruspices; Latin auspex, plural auspices) was a man trained to practice a form of divination called haruspicy, hepatoscopy or hepatomancy. Haruspicy is the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals, especially the livers of sacrificed sheep and poultry. The rites were paralleled by other rites of divination such as the interpretation of lightning strikes, of the flight of birds (augury), and of other natural omens. Practitioners during the period of Roman dominance gradually adopted the title 'auspex' from the older word 'haruspex', or from the Latin 'avis' (bird) and 'specere' or 'spectare' (to look/see)."
It might be noted, however, that the Auspex were horrible at predicting violent, volcanic eruptions, possibly explaining their weak representation in the current era. I think geologists are a little more reliable in that department.
The Slashdot moderation systems is a system of layers.
Users are randomly assigned "moderation points" that can be spent moderating a post upwards "+1", or down with "-1" and include a "tag".
Once spent, the points are painted onto ping pong balls--"+" balls and "-" balls. These are then thrown together in a large hopper and fed down a tube to the squirrel cage. In this cage, dozens of specially trained squirrels sort the ping pong balls according to size and shape and drop them down appropriate tubes to be further sorted by the next stage of squirrels. Once fully sorted, each ping pong ball is individually routed through a pipe that determines the tag that will be applied. The ping pong balls are then routed back to the beginning of the system. The ping pong balls are siphoned off from various points throughout the system at the same rate that posts are made. Each ping pong ball is then assigned to a random post, and there ya have it--Slashdot moderation.
I hope that helps.
Maybe Ewe should take another route, one that was quite successful the last time he did it.
"I think he's a jerk. This might be PR but I don't want to keep getting punched in the head." Jeff Sneider, 2006
If they don't agree with you, beat the shit out of them.
Conrad crashed through the woods with abandon, his pet bear thundering along behind him. He had even named the bear something highly noticeable--Lord British.
Running through the backwoods of Britannia was a hobby of Conrad's. Some assumed he was looking for dilapidated, old houses--an archaeologist of opportunistic bent. This was not so.
His very name an attempt at concealment amongst a crowd, Conrad strove to blend into his surroundings as much as one could in such a world. His dress was that of a commoner, removed from the corpse of an unfortunate Noble of Magincia. To be there, before your very eyes, yet gone forever in a blink. The bear was a ruse, as well.
Conrad would pass by a residence of the woods, perhaps a lonely lathe and plaster clad hut, or maybe an unguarded small tower, looking for his next meal. He would pass by these abodes in haste, never faltering in his steps. It was the residents that he looked keenly for--the indication of work to be done.
When Conrad spotted someone at home he would continue on his way a short time, stop behind a tree, out of sight--and kill Lord British.
After claiming the strips of bear meat that he would later use to tame another bear, Conrad stealthed. He slowly moved back towards the residence, careful not to move so quickly that his footfall might be heard. He crept up, slowly, watching for movement of the unwary soul inside the house, slowly, until he stood right next to the front door, cloaked in a shroud of secrecy and suspense.
One wrong move could change events for the worse in short order.
Conrad set himself ready for the wait. It could be a long time before his mark stepped into the snare. Uncertainty was the name of the game now. All was in the hands of his mark, now.
The bear was a nice touch, suggested by one of Conrad's fellow nefarians. People see you go by with a bear in tow, they don't expect you to be around without him anytime soon. Lord British existed only to give the appearance of passing by without stopping.
Conrad waited, the sounds of footfalls inside the house, the occasional snipping of shears on cloth--the home of a tailor apparently. The sounds of doors opening and closing, chests being slammed shut. Containers. Always a good sign at times like these.
It happened so fast, Conrad had not the time to be hesitant. Reaction became action.
The owner of the house opened the front door without warning, and without seeing Conrad hidden amongst the hedges, walked a short distance off into the woods and began slamming a hatchet into a nearby tree and piling up wood at the base. Conrad moved like a silk banner of war in the wind, silently slipping through the frame of the door...and was held in place--an unseen force held him still at the worst possible moment, right on the sill of the door he needed to be through quickly.
Worse, the hammering of the hatchet stopped abruptly. Conrad squirmed, the feeling of impending doom upon him. He was about to be caught.
The grip of ice eased slightly--he took a step. Then another. One more step and he was in. With less then a second to spare, the tailoring lumberjack stepped back into the house, gliding past Conrad, missing him by a single step. Conrad held still, not a breath left his lips.
What was that that held him so? Most vexing. Most vexing, indeed. It had almost been his undoing.
Conrad was born to wait. From the day of his birth, he waited. He now got comfortable in his small corner of the room that the hut's front door had opened onto. It was modestly decorated, obviously the home of a craftsman, the tools of his trade hung from the walls. Conrad watched him work. The crafter seemed to be preoccupied, sometimes just standing there for long stretches of time. Conrad waited.
Then it happened--the craftsman simply disappeared. He had gone to sleep for the evening, presumably, and had left Conrad to the darkness of the room. Conrad stepped from the darkness, took a single candle from his pack, set it on the table in the
Money talks.
The one thing I don't get is why Nature is gouging their content providers and why UC is PAYING for being content providers in the first place. Peer reviewing, editorial work, actual submissions? Don't people usual GET paid for this?
"I don't think he's referring to the ability to have a number of smells at once but rather the ability for one device to create any given smell; your mall example would only be capable of this by loading in canisters with all the smells you need, which is a less flexible solution."
I wasn't differentiating between some highly-technical mechanical dispersal system and some guy popping a different canister in a $5 dispenser mounted at each entrance, as they basically do the same thing.
"And by posting that piece of work anonymously, you just missed out on hundreds of geeks that would have otherwise "friended" you and become your legion of slashdot fans."
I think that was the point.
We already know what HIS idea of being "friended" is.