China uses year-month-day as format. They are very consistent in that, as they always start "largest first". Addresses (country-province-town-street-number) and names (last name - first name) the same.
However when not using the year when writing a date it becomes ambiguous. They often write month/day. But not always. Especially in Hong Kong where the British standard day/month/year is also commonly followed, that is also how for example you have to write a date on a bank cheque.
The only reliable workaround: today is 11 Mar. Not 11/03 or 03/11.
You don't need a fixed IP to receive mail. For years I've used a dynamic DNS service and that worked just fine. I've even for a while ran a web site off a dynamic DNS, also worked. Not recommended of course, but it works.
When I visit a gamers site, I would expect game ads, and (if they link to a useful page) would be happy to click on them to find out more about the advertised game. Game companies could offer special discounts for people clicking on their ads on those gamers sites - incentive to unblock ads, plus promoting their game directly to their main audience. May hand them a decent number of direct sales, too.
It is of course up to the web site to remain editorial independence, and to mark advertising clearly as advertising.
Most of the advertising you see on the Internet has nothing to do with the content of the site they're on. They're just flashing, distracting pieces of irritation that take away from the experience of the site you try to visit.
What really got me to first block Flash, later block all ads is a news paper that I regular visits and that posts several bright coloured and flashing ads right next to the artical that I'm trying to read.
It's impossible to ignore them. That's of course the purpose of the designer, but it's so bad that I could just not read the article. Moving my browser to have them fall off-screen is a solution, but it's still irritating.
Now I have Flashblock and ABP. I know many web sites make money by showing me ads, but they're simply too distracting. I don't mind a static image. Or a simple text ad, Google style (and when searching for commercial stuff on Google I will unlock them, as the ads tend to give more useful results than the search results).
ABP is simply on for all sites. Maybe there are some that display those acceptable ads, I'm not going to try, sorry about that. Also not going to manually block sites one by one when I run into one with obnoxious ads.
Actually only one site where I see the ads, and that's becuase they serve them by themselves so they're not filtered. That is a trade site, where the ads are from their members, so very appropriate. They sometimes flash (animated GIF) but that's all. And with the limited size, it's not really bothering me. That is advertising that makes sense.
And that same marketing help you to get information about competing products, which in turn means they have to keep their prices to a minimum. So that that this 9-12% fo the cost of living is related to marketing, doesn't mean your cost of living would be 9-12% lower without any marketing. It might even be higher because it's so much easier for shops to mark up prices, as you have such a hard time comparing prices and knowing what's out there to begin with.
And it being a digital currency, any way to disable the stolen coins to make them worthless? Would be interesting, especially in light of the limited number of bitcoin that can exist.
In this case if you're running noscript you don't even see the lock. Would be really a stretch of the imagination to call it "circumvent". And you can even just click "quit asking me" the first time you see the popup and you can select and copy text as usual.
Select text: get pop-up. Click "quit asking me". Select text, press ctrl-C, and it's in the past buffer.
It's so simple I can't even call it a workaround. Basically you can just ignore it. It doesn't even tell WHY you would want a license; it jut asks whether you want to obtain one.
Oh, great. So some stupid DRM scheme and being dependent on someone else to keep their servers running.
Sooner or later they will forget about those servers. When the game stops selling, and server maintenance costs continue to rise. When there are only a hundred players at most at one time playing it, and it's considered not worth it to run a dedicated server for those.
And then suddenly your game is gone. Forever. Can't play it any more. Glad to see they're being punished for that.
When do the publishers finally realise that DRM is self-defeating?
You add DRM to a game (at serious expense), and you must make sure it does not get in the way of the enjoyment of the game by those who bought it. As soon as it gets in the way, people will complain, and you're swamped by negative reviews. And when it doesn't get in the way, it's useless, because the implemented restrictions are never triggered.
And the tricky part is that you're not (re)selling a book or a music album, you're instead (re)selling a copyright license to that content. And that makes the whole thing much less transparent. After all there is no physical object involved as in traditional sales.
Music DRM was mainly removed because the DRM gave Apple full pricing power over the sales of the songs. As long as the labels wanted DRM they were limited to Apple (with their ~80% or more market share). The only way to tap into the iPod market without being limited to a fixed $0.99 price tag per song as Apple demanded, was to sell DRM free.
It's simply self-defeating.
Apple fighting for DRM free music is either keeping up appearances, or Apple not understanding (in the beginning at least) the huge market power their DRM gave them over the publishers.
Yes, there is. Just ignore them. Talk is cheap and these sorts of threats are nothing new. If they want their threats to be taken seriously they will have to actually start doing something,
You mean like actually setting off nuclear bombs and launching long-distance rockets?
This could take another 40 years to work itself out without nuking anybody. N. Korea will eventually return to sanity.
And lets hope they do that in an orderly manner (like China did, and continues to do), and not via a total collapse of the current regime, which I consider the most likely scenario as they're so far down that road already.
They would be concentrated in a relatively small area: the area just north of the border. Of course slowly spreading out.
They arrive all in a very short time.
They don't have homes.
These people speak most likely only Korean, so it's pretty much impossible for them to get jobs (knowing Mandarin or the local version of Chinese is a must for that). As a result, you can expect many to turn to crime just to survive. Thefts, robberies, pickpocketing, prostitution. Later organising themselves to become a "Korean mafia" or so.
South Korea has many troops stationed at the border, not even counting US soldiers in the area. Soldiers that are much better trained and equipped than their northern brethren.
Now I honestly wonder what would happen if DPRK provokes an attack, and ROK responds. Sure DPRK has like a million strong army, many more than ROK has. But that doesn't mean much.
Look at Saddam Hussein's army, and how it virtually dissolved the moment the US invaded the country. A few soldiers were killed, a few maybe taking prisoner, but for the most of them, they just disappeared. There were supposed to be many many soldiers, but I have not heard of any large numbers being taken prisoner or killed. Morale was low, there was virtually no resistance.
This is what I expect from the DPRK army as well. Poorly trained, poorly equipped, and a major incentive to be in the army is that at least you get something to eat. If these soldiers see the troops of ROK possibly supported by US troops seriously invading, it shouldn't take long for them to realise that they're pretty much powerless, and that they'd best defect. Just drop their uniforms, and become part of the civilian society. No consequences as the regime is due to fall in days.
One difference of course is the far more effective propaganda of the DPRK. The people there quite literally don't know anything other than what the state tells them. The limited information available about this country gives me the impression that it's exactly what 1984 described. minus the telescreens spying back on you maybe. People there genuinely love their Great Leader, or however he's called.
Both ROK and PRC are afraid of DPRK collapsing. Both have interest to keep the status quo. PRC is afraid of droves of refugees, ROK is afraid of the cost of rebuilding that country (they also know how tough it was on Germany, and DPRK is possibly worse than the DDR ever was). The only problem here is that DPRK will sooner or later fail, and the longer it takes, the harder it's going to be to pick up the pieces and move on.
Hardening shouldn't be too hard - don't modern black boxes store a lot of digital info about the flight already? With advancing technology I would expect it to be totally feasible to have all this info stored in the black box, in addition to the regular plane's computers.
500 GB per flight, say six hours of flight time for an average flight, and I'm at almost 24 MB/s on data production. That's 240 Mb/s. 4G mobile phone can't do that, and when flying you'll often be out of reach of a mobile phone network. So you need satellite - while that may be able to handle the data, it's costing you an arm and a leg. Besides, most of the data is not that interesting.
What would be viable, though, is for errors to be automatically transmitted. Like an engine that detects an anomaly, indicating it needs maintenance, that such a little bit of information is forwarded to the ground.
Not all the parts can withstand the heat so well. And even heat blasting is not guaranteed to make it all completely sterile, as there is always the outside of the craft that remains in touch with the atmosphere. There are always ways for bacteria to sneak in after all. All they can do is try to make it as hard as possible for germs to get in, and after that make it as hard as possible for those that do, to survive.
Even with the sunstone, I still wonder how it is actually used in navigation.
The sunstone obviously determines the direction of where the sun is located - which can basically be anywhere, particularly in summer in the arctic when the sun doesn't set. I know how to get my heading using the sun (unless it's too high above me, like around midday in summer as I'm a hair south of the Tropic of Cancer) and a watch - it basically relies on knowing where the sun is at that moment, and knowing the actual time.
So now the vikings may have had a way to tell where the sun was, with rather high accuracy, without knowing the time that information is rather useless. So something is definitely missing there. The same accounts for this 1592 vessel, no accurate clocks available yet.
For shortish crossings (a few hours at most out of sight of land) this may work just fine, from experience a seafarer may be able to compensate for the change of direction of the sun. But for anything longer (Norway to Iceland or even to the Americas) that won't work so well any more.
Would be fun to actually do such an experiment. Replace the eyes by cameras to record what's going on, and optionally watch it happen from a short distance by hiding in the crowd.
If the amount of personal information given is anything to go by, I'd say many people consider Facebook on of the most trustworthy web sites of the world...
Slashdot Mirror
China uses year-month-day as format. They are very consistent in that, as they always start "largest first". Addresses (country-province-town-street-number) and names (last name - first name) the same.
However when not using the year when writing a date it becomes ambiguous. They often write month/day. But not always. Especially in Hong Kong where the British standard day/month/year is also commonly followed, that is also how for example you have to write a date on a bank cheque.
The only reliable workaround: today is 11 Mar. Not 11/03 or 03/11.
You don't need a fixed IP to receive mail. For years I've used a dynamic DNS service and that worked just fine. I've even for a while ran a web site off a dynamic DNS, also worked. Not recommended of course, but it works.
You forget another major one: make them on topic.
When I visit a gamers site, I would expect game ads, and (if they link to a useful page) would be happy to click on them to find out more about the advertised game. Game companies could offer special discounts for people clicking on their ads on those gamers sites - incentive to unblock ads, plus promoting their game directly to their main audience. May hand them a decent number of direct sales, too.
It is of course up to the web site to remain editorial independence, and to mark advertising clearly as advertising.
Most of the advertising you see on the Internet has nothing to do with the content of the site they're on. They're just flashing, distracting pieces of irritation that take away from the experience of the site you try to visit.
What really got me to first block Flash, later block all ads is a news paper that I regular visits and that posts several bright coloured and flashing ads right next to the artical that I'm trying to read.
It's impossible to ignore them. That's of course the purpose of the designer, but it's so bad that I could just not read the article. Moving my browser to have them fall off-screen is a solution, but it's still irritating.
Now I have Flashblock and ABP. I know many web sites make money by showing me ads, but they're simply too distracting. I don't mind a static image. Or a simple text ad, Google style (and when searching for commercial stuff on Google I will unlock them, as the ads tend to give more useful results than the search results).
ABP is simply on for all sites. Maybe there are some that display those acceptable ads, I'm not going to try, sorry about that. Also not going to manually block sites one by one when I run into one with obnoxious ads.
Actually only one site where I see the ads, and that's becuase they serve them by themselves so they're not filtered. That is a trade site, where the ads are from their members, so very appropriate. They sometimes flash (animated GIF) but that's all. And with the limited size, it's not really bothering me. That is advertising that makes sense.
And that same marketing help you to get information about competing products, which in turn means they have to keep their prices to a minimum. So that that this 9-12% fo the cost of living is related to marketing, doesn't mean your cost of living would be 9-12% lower without any marketing. It might even be higher because it's so much easier for shops to mark up prices, as you have such a hard time comparing prices and knowing what's out there to begin with.
And it being a digital currency, any way to disable the stolen coins to make them worthless? Would be interesting, especially in light of the limited number of bitcoin that can exist.
In this case if you're running noscript you don't even see the lock. Would be really a stretch of the imagination to call it "circumvent". And you can even just click "quit asking me" the first time you see the popup and you can select and copy text as usual.
Just tried it myself.
Select text: get pop-up. Click "quit asking me". Select text, press ctrl-C, and it's in the past buffer.
It's so simple I can't even call it a workaround. Basically you can just ignore it. It doesn't even tell WHY you would want a license; it jut asks whether you want to obtain one.
Oh, great. So some stupid DRM scheme and being dependent on someone else to keep their servers running.
Sooner or later they will forget about those servers. When the game stops selling, and server maintenance costs continue to rise. When there are only a hundred players at most at one time playing it, and it's considered not worth it to run a dedicated server for those.
And then suddenly your game is gone. Forever. Can't play it any more. Glad to see they're being punished for that.
When do the publishers finally realise that DRM is self-defeating?
You add DRM to a game (at serious expense), and you must make sure it does not get in the way of the enjoyment of the game by those who bought it. As soon as it gets in the way, people will complain, and you're swamped by negative reviews. And when it doesn't get in the way, it's useless, because the implemented restrictions are never triggered.
I haven't read the patent (no intention to) but I bet they will have that covered.
And the tricky part is that you're not (re)selling a book or a music album, you're instead (re)selling a copyright license to that content. And that makes the whole thing much less transparent. After all there is no physical object involved as in traditional sales.
Music DRM was mainly removed because the DRM gave Apple full pricing power over the sales of the songs. As long as the labels wanted DRM they were limited to Apple (with their ~80% or more market share). The only way to tap into the iPod market without being limited to a fixed $0.99 price tag per song as Apple demanded, was to sell DRM free.
It's simply self-defeating.
Apple fighting for DRM free music is either keeping up appearances, or Apple not understanding (in the beginning at least) the huge market power their DRM gave them over the publishers.
Really. You like death and destruction so much that it makes you feel satisfied to see scores of people die? That's sick.
There's no easy solution here
Yes, there is. Just ignore them. Talk is cheap and these sorts of threats are nothing new. If they want their threats to be taken seriously they will have to actually start doing something,
You mean like actually setting off nuclear bombs and launching long-distance rockets?
This could take another 40 years to work itself out without nuking anybody. N. Korea will eventually return to sanity.
And lets hope they do that in an orderly manner (like China did, and continues to do), and not via a total collapse of the current regime, which I consider the most likely scenario as they're so far down that road already.
Yes, they will notice them.
They would be concentrated in a relatively small area: the area just north of the border. Of course slowly spreading out.
They arrive all in a very short time.
They don't have homes.
These people speak most likely only Korean, so it's pretty much impossible for them to get jobs (knowing Mandarin or the local version of Chinese is a must for that). As a result, you can expect many to turn to crime just to survive. Thefts, robberies, pickpocketing, prostitution. Later organising themselves to become a "Korean mafia" or so.
South Korea has many troops stationed at the border, not even counting US soldiers in the area. Soldiers that are much better trained and equipped than their northern brethren.
Now I honestly wonder what would happen if DPRK provokes an attack, and ROK responds. Sure DPRK has like a million strong army, many more than ROK has. But that doesn't mean much.
Look at Saddam Hussein's army, and how it virtually dissolved the moment the US invaded the country. A few soldiers were killed, a few maybe taking prisoner, but for the most of them, they just disappeared. There were supposed to be many many soldiers, but I have not heard of any large numbers being taken prisoner or killed. Morale was low, there was virtually no resistance.
This is what I expect from the DPRK army as well. Poorly trained, poorly equipped, and a major incentive to be in the army is that at least you get something to eat. If these soldiers see the troops of ROK possibly supported by US troops seriously invading, it shouldn't take long for them to realise that they're pretty much powerless, and that they'd best defect. Just drop their uniforms, and become part of the civilian society. No consequences as the regime is due to fall in days.
One difference of course is the far more effective propaganda of the DPRK. The people there quite literally don't know anything other than what the state tells them. The limited information available about this country gives me the impression that it's exactly what 1984 described. minus the telescreens spying back on you maybe. People there genuinely love their Great Leader, or however he's called.
Both ROK and PRC are afraid of DPRK collapsing. Both have interest to keep the status quo. PRC is afraid of droves of refugees, ROK is afraid of the cost of rebuilding that country (they also know how tough it was on Germany, and DPRK is possibly worse than the DDR ever was). The only problem here is that DPRK will sooner or later fail, and the longer it takes, the harder it's going to be to pick up the pieces and move on.
Sundials don't exactly work reliably on a boat.They are highly dependent on being in a fixed direction.
Also these crystals are typically for overcast days, where you can't see the sun.
Hardening shouldn't be too hard - don't modern black boxes store a lot of digital info about the flight already? With advancing technology I would expect it to be totally feasible to have all this info stored in the black box, in addition to the regular plane's computers.
Not likely that it'd be streamed in real time.
500 GB per flight, say six hours of flight time for an average flight, and I'm at almost 24 MB/s on data production. That's 240 Mb/s. 4G mobile phone can't do that, and when flying you'll often be out of reach of a mobile phone network. So you need satellite - while that may be able to handle the data, it's costing you an arm and a leg. Besides, most of the data is not that interesting.
What would be viable, though, is for errors to be automatically transmitted. Like an engine that detects an anomaly, indicating it needs maintenance, that such a little bit of information is forwarded to the ground.
Not all the parts can withstand the heat so well. And even heat blasting is not guaranteed to make it all completely sterile, as there is always the outside of the craft that remains in touch with the atmosphere. There are always ways for bacteria to sneak in after all. All they can do is try to make it as hard as possible for germs to get in, and after that make it as hard as possible for those that do, to survive.
And that is exactly one of the theories on how life started on earth: seeded by meteors carrying alien lifeforms.
So now we can add another theory to the origins of life: bio-contamination left behind by alien visitors.
Even with the sunstone, I still wonder how it is actually used in navigation.
The sunstone obviously determines the direction of where the sun is located - which can basically be anywhere, particularly in summer in the arctic when the sun doesn't set. I know how to get my heading using the sun (unless it's too high above me, like around midday in summer as I'm a hair south of the Tropic of Cancer) and a watch - it basically relies on knowing where the sun is at that moment, and knowing the actual time.
So now the vikings may have had a way to tell where the sun was, with rather high accuracy, without knowing the time that information is rather useless. So something is definitely missing there. The same accounts for this 1592 vessel, no accurate clocks available yet.
For shortish crossings (a few hours at most out of sight of land) this may work just fine, from experience a seafarer may be able to compensate for the change of direction of the sun. But for anything longer (Norway to Iceland or even to the Americas) that won't work so well any more.
Would be fun to actually do such an experiment. Replace the eyes by cameras to record what's going on, and optionally watch it happen from a short distance by hiding in the crowd.
If the amount of personal information given is anything to go by, I'd say many people consider Facebook on of the most trustworthy web sites of the world...