You'd be shocked over the amount of wars fought over 'special dirt', or shiny but worthless metal, or salt. In any case, if China and Japan duke it out, it won't be about dirt, it will be about a century long conflict (which incidentally has had Japan framed up as the villains more often than China) that was never properly resolved after the end of WWII. Kind of how WWII itself was caused by the never properly resolved conflict known as WWI.
Actually, someone did come up with such an idea. See, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass, and so the idea was lost.
(I find it interesting that Adams, an avowed atheist, boils down Jesus' message to "how great it would be to be nice to people for a change'. I think if that if half the Christians would understand that much the world might be a much better place.)
However, the critical components (Foundation, electrical, plumbing, ect) is done by professionals.
It is a great example because those professionals are quite often working on volunteer time themselves. Just like how a lot of OSS projects are contributed to by amateurs and students, but often the deeper, more advanced work is done by professional coders and designers.
So saying "The Russian government is wrong on this issue" could be considered an attack. Maybe that is taking it to the extreme, but what if it's "The Russian government is wrong and the Russian people shouldn't stand for it". And then there is the slightly more blunt "...and the Russian people should rise up against it". So at what point does that become aggression? I ask in all honesty, I feel like this could have a major chilling effect on negotiations between nations where legitimate arguments could be construed as aggression.
No, even with sarcasm the AC still has the meaning wrong. The phrase "Security through obscurity" doesn't refer to closed source code, and it doesn't refer to not disclosing known flaws. It refers, exclusively, to things like 'no one will ever go to www.example.com/admin so there's no need to require credentials on the admin page'. Or 'no one will ever try to randomly telnet into port 6424, we'll output all the debug stuff there'. Or 'no one will every to to call this unpublished function'.
You forgot one: Unless it's a violent or significant crime, orit generates revenue the police just aren't interested. In my experience, police spend 90% of their active time doing the later.
eyewitness testimony from air force pilots is statistically on equal footing as the testimony from cab drivers.
Actually it's quite a bit worse than that. Pilots, military pilots even more so, are trained to make the most worrying assumptions possible. Strange noise coming from engine 1 doesn't mean engine 1 needs a tune up, it means engine 1 is going to fail and you should take immediate action to mitigate that. Bright light in the sky isn't Venus, it's a hostile aircraft (and there are optical illusions that can cause even 100% stable celestial objects to appear to zip about the sky when you're flying an aircraft).
Now take the same vigilance and paranoia and crank it up to 11, these people guard the most powerful weapons humanity has ever produced. I'd be willing to bet that they get weekly briefings on how important their job is and how crucial it is to guard those weapons from all enemies. Given a constant state of vigilance, a constantly reinforced sense of danger and importance, it isn't surprising that they might see things that in other circumstances would be brushed off with a perfectly normal explanation.
1W... really? You burn about 120 Calories per mile running, and a human in very good shape can reasonably run 10 mph for a long period of time. That's 1200 Calories per hour comes out to be just about 1400W. Now granted, you're body isn't going to be 100% efficient in converting that chemical energy to mechanical, but I would bet that it's at least 15%. Or if you don't trust math, go to a science museum where they have a 100W light bulb hooked up to a stationary bike and hop on, you might just surprise yourself.
The flap is meant to produce thrust, not lift I would think. The cockpit moving up and down is just a question of Newtons 2nd law, it isn't really gaining altitude or losing altitude, just changing the center of mass. I would like to know, however, how far it can fly with flapping vs how far it can glide without. That would at least give some idea of how effective it is.
Another interesting question would be what kind of wattage the operator is putting out. Is it something the average human can do or did the guy train for it for months? Is it something sustainable (200 watts lets say) or just a 30 second sprint that leaves him exhausted. Either way, it looks like they've done amazing work, especially keeping in mind that even human powered propeller aircraft are extremely difficult to make and fly.
Make fun of him all you want for #2 and #3, and please disparage him for either being a child molester or at the very least being socially retarded as to not know how creepy he was.
But #1 never happened. His autopsy confirmed that he had never bleached his skin, that he in fact suffered from an extreme case of vitiligo. In fact, all the evidence points to him being very uncomfortable with his loss of pigmentation; supposedly the reason that he started wearing the single glove was to hide the start of it on his hand, and he never brought it up in any of the interviews he did. It just seems harsh to me to make fun of someone after their death for having a disease that they were so obviously ashamed of.
The basic point was to take control of the privacy fight, attack the systems they are using to track you rather than passively respond to their attacks on you privacy. It's a pretty much accepted fact that in the world of computers, it's easier to be on the attack than the defense, look how long it took to get Spam under some kind of control, and we're still fighting a never ending battle with malware creators. An extension especially I feel has promise because it could be relatively easily updated in response to changing tactics by the trackers. If they start to cull commonly used cookies, maybe start to generate fake cookies from scratch. If they single out cookies with identifiable information, start sharing the data portion of the cookie but swap out the identifying information. If they start using cached images and javascript, start scrambling suspicious images or sharing them instead of cookies. Take the fight to their servers, rather than keeping it on your doorstep.
There are a lot of science nerds who don't know offhand what a Rankine is. Asked without context, I know for sure that I wouldn't be able to come up with the definition. At least -470 degrees -460 degrees Fahrenheit gets across the idea of 'really, unbelievably, unimaginably cold' to most everyone, and 'most everyone' is the target audience of most news sites.
Oh god... I just realized the unfortunate implications of mylittlepony.com and horsesluts9.com. I swear, I was trying to go for 3 complete unrelated, contradictory things and instead I just came up with something more than a little disturbing. I fail at life forever apparently. Still don't know how particle physics fits in, I leave that to someone else's deranged imagination.
As long as the majority of users are at leastreluctantly willing to purchase a digital download you won't have a choice much longer. The publishers will see it as a more than even trade if they keep 75% of their sales during move to digital downloads. The costs saved in production and distribution (you didn't really think they would pass those savings on did you?), the money saved by reducing piracy (if you can download a game, you must have broadband, therefore you should be able to sign in every time you play. Yes, even single player games), and the money saved by eliminating completely the 2nd hand market will all outshine any lost sales to the physical media hold outs. And once the change happens and there are no AAA titles on physical media how long do you really think the hold outs will last before they give in and start downloading their favorite games?
Rather than disabling and trying to defeat all these tracking mechanisms I think it would be easier to flood them with false information. Someone should set up a cookie sharing site and FF extension that trades (safe, non-identifying) cookies amongst all the users of that extension. Why yes, I did visit mylittlepony.com directly between visits to journalofparticlephysics.edu and horsesluts9.com, why do you ask?
Or just create a website, DIYCarFixes.com or something, upload a few videos, then make the upload process available for everyone, create a ranking and tagging system to remove the chaff, and post ads to Autozone and the like. If you still want to make the videos yourself have featured, HD quality, downloadable (for a small 1 time fee) videos that the users vote on to decide what gets made first. If content is too expensive to make then let your users make the content, it's worked for countless sites already, all you need to do is create enough to attract an initial audience.
My nephew just turned 4 a little while back. Sadly, he has a speech impediment that has made him difficult, if not impossible, to understand until very recently. Over over the past 6 months or so his speech has improved considerable and we finally know... that the kid swears like a sailor, he's probably been swearing for years and no one ever knew it. Seriously, we're all in the kitchen and we hear "Holy shit!" come out of the living room, go in to see what's going on and he's watching Sesame Street. Obviously we tried and failed to not laugh, so I can't imagine we helped the situation any.
You're begging the question "will human population continue to increase?" The answer is almost assuredly 'no', looking at cultures that have high standards of living the rate of population change is already 0 or below, having children is not a biological imperative at the same level that we have always assumed. It can be turned off to the point where population growth is stopped.
Given this fact, and I know this sounds ludicrous at first blush, population will be controlled by market forces. Why don't people have 6-10 kids anymore? It's all nice and snarky to say that the current generation is selfish, but the fact is that every generation has felt that way about the next generation, it is unlikely to be true. There has to be a reason, and the most likely culprit is cost, it is simply more expensive to raise a child today than it was 40 years ago largely because of all the 'advances' in child education and care. Eventually, the costs associated with having a child will outweigh the perceived benefit of having children. It has already happened with millions of young adults who have chosen to wait to have kids until they are more economically developed, despite the risks associated with having children in your 30's instead of your 20's.
Careful reading of his more recent works, not just the two you mentioned but going back 5-10 years, you do notice some things in his works degrading; not enough to hurt the overall quality of the book, but enough that you can tell something is happening. The largest change is a reduction in vocabulary, but there is also the fact that tend to be more straightforward, with less metaphors and colorful language.
Like I said, the ideas are all still sound, the humor is fun and entertaining, there are no gaping plot holes left unfilled, but I suspect that you could make a pretty interesting study on the effects of Alzheimer's on language by studying his books. And you'd certainly have a good sample of his writing (what is he up to now, 30 books? 40?
No guerilla force will survive for a week under those conditions.
You're right, in a week the guerrilla force would be gone, to be replaced by every able bodied man in the country taking up open arms. When you give every local commander the power to decimate (in the literal, Roman army sense) a village or family because he thinks the attack comes from there... good God, do you even realize what you're saying? Do you really think that every military commander is going use that power the way it was designed? How long until a woman fighting off a rapist is considered 'attacking the troops'. What would you do if your daughter was raped by an invading army, and when she fought back she, he children, and her neighbors were murdered for it? You'd run out of bullets before you killed all the locals who were trying to kill you.
Now granted, maybe that's what you want so you have an excuse to gut the country of fighting aged individuals, but if you really think people will just cower down and fear you (for generations, unless you intend to stay there forever) while you're slaughtering their (mostly innocent) friends and family you're a little bit insane. Guess what, there's a reason why we have a pain in the ass court system, it's because justice is hard to get right.
As much as I love poking fun at conservative politicians, the guy had a point. He was speaking out against volcano monitoring as part of an economic stimulus package, not as part of the general budget. He was using it as a valid example of how special interest groups (in this case, some researchers who happened to have contacts in a senator's office) had managed to earmark some of the stimulus for things that would do very little to increase consumer spending.
If you consider Original Sin to be a nature that is anything less than perfect
But, according to theology, we were created perfect. It was only the actions of Adam and Eve, going against the will of God, that made us imperfect and requiring baptism. So if you're going to say that aliens are imperfect that would mean that they had a fall similar to humanity's.
That's fine, it answers the question as well as anything, though it does raise the question of why so many of God's sentient creatures chose to disobey him. To paraphrase a Douglas Adams quote: If he the type of guy to go around putting bricks under hats and waiting for people to kick them? Is he hiding in the corner of the garden just waiting for someone to eat that fruit so he can jump out and say "Aha!"?
Slashdot Mirror
You'd be shocked over the amount of wars fought over 'special dirt', or shiny but worthless metal, or salt. In any case, if China and Japan duke it out, it won't be about dirt, it will be about a century long conflict (which incidentally has had Japan framed up as the villains more often than China) that was never properly resolved after the end of WWII. Kind of how WWII itself was caused by the never properly resolved conflict known as WWI.
Actually, someone did come up with such an idea. See, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass, and so the idea was lost.
(I find it interesting that Adams, an avowed atheist, boils down Jesus' message to "how great it would be to be nice to people for a change'. I think if that if half the Christians would understand that much the world might be a much better place.)
However, the critical components (Foundation, electrical, plumbing, ect) is done by professionals.
It is a great example because those professionals are quite often working on volunteer time themselves. Just like how a lot of OSS projects are contributed to by amateurs and students, but often the deeper, more advanced work is done by professional coders and designers.
So saying "The Russian government is wrong on this issue" could be considered an attack. Maybe that is taking it to the extreme, but what if it's "The Russian government is wrong and the Russian people shouldn't stand for it". And then there is the slightly more blunt "...and the Russian people should rise up against it". So at what point does that become aggression? I ask in all honesty, I feel like this could have a major chilling effect on negotiations between nations where legitimate arguments could be construed as aggression.
No, even with sarcasm the AC still has the meaning wrong. The phrase "Security through obscurity" doesn't refer to closed source code, and it doesn't refer to not disclosing known flaws. It refers, exclusively, to things like 'no one will ever go to www.example.com/admin so there's no need to require credentials on the admin page'. Or 'no one will ever try to randomly telnet into port 6424, we'll output all the debug stuff there'. Or 'no one will every to to call this unpublished function'.
Yeah, volunteers have never put up a building before.
You forgot one: Unless it's a violent or significant crime, orit generates revenue the police just aren't interested. In my experience, police spend 90% of their active time doing the later.
eyewitness testimony from air force pilots is statistically on equal footing as the testimony from cab drivers.
Actually it's quite a bit worse than that. Pilots, military pilots even more so, are trained to make the most worrying assumptions possible. Strange noise coming from engine 1 doesn't mean engine 1 needs a tune up, it means engine 1 is going to fail and you should take immediate action to mitigate that. Bright light in the sky isn't Venus, it's a hostile aircraft (and there are optical illusions that can cause even 100% stable celestial objects to appear to zip about the sky when you're flying an aircraft).
Now take the same vigilance and paranoia and crank it up to 11, these people guard the most powerful weapons humanity has ever produced. I'd be willing to bet that they get weekly briefings on how important their job is and how crucial it is to guard those weapons from all enemies. Given a constant state of vigilance, a constantly reinforced sense of danger and importance, it isn't surprising that they might see things that in other circumstances would be brushed off with a perfectly normal explanation.
1W... really? You burn about 120 Calories per mile running, and a human in very good shape can reasonably run 10 mph for a long period of time. That's 1200 Calories per hour comes out to be just about 1400W. Now granted, you're body isn't going to be 100% efficient in converting that chemical energy to mechanical, but I would bet that it's at least 15%. Or if you don't trust math, go to a science museum where they have a 100W light bulb hooked up to a stationary bike and hop on, you might just surprise yourself.
The flap is meant to produce thrust, not lift I would think. The cockpit moving up and down is just a question of Newtons 2nd law, it isn't really gaining altitude or losing altitude, just changing the center of mass. I would like to know, however, how far it can fly with flapping vs how far it can glide without. That would at least give some idea of how effective it is.
Another interesting question would be what kind of wattage the operator is putting out. Is it something the average human can do or did the guy train for it for months? Is it something sustainable (200 watts lets say) or just a 30 second sprint that leaves him exhausted. Either way, it looks like they've done amazing work, especially keeping in mind that even human powered propeller aircraft are extremely difficult to make and fly.
Make fun of him all you want for #2 and #3, and please disparage him for either being a child molester or at the very least being socially retarded as to not know how creepy he was.
But #1 never happened. His autopsy confirmed that he had never bleached his skin, that he in fact suffered from an extreme case of vitiligo. In fact, all the evidence points to him being very uncomfortable with his loss of pigmentation; supposedly the reason that he started wearing the single glove was to hide the start of it on his hand, and he never brought it up in any of the interviews he did. It just seems harsh to me to make fun of someone after their death for having a disease that they were so obviously ashamed of.
The basic point was to take control of the privacy fight, attack the systems they are using to track you rather than passively respond to their attacks on you privacy. It's a pretty much accepted fact that in the world of computers, it's easier to be on the attack than the defense, look how long it took to get Spam under some kind of control, and we're still fighting a never ending battle with malware creators. An extension especially I feel has promise because it could be relatively easily updated in response to changing tactics by the trackers. If they start to cull commonly used cookies, maybe start to generate fake cookies from scratch. If they single out cookies with identifiable information, start sharing the data portion of the cookie but swap out the identifying information. If they start using cached images and javascript, start scrambling suspicious images or sharing them instead of cookies. Take the fight to their servers, rather than keeping it on your doorstep.
There are a lot of science nerds who don't know offhand what a Rankine is. Asked without context, I know for sure that I wouldn't be able to come up with the definition. At least -470 degrees -460 degrees Fahrenheit gets across the idea of 'really, unbelievably, unimaginably cold' to most everyone, and 'most everyone' is the target audience of most news sites.
Oh god... I just realized the unfortunate implications of mylittlepony.com and horsesluts9.com. I swear, I was trying to go for 3 complete unrelated, contradictory things and instead I just came up with something more than a little disturbing. I fail at life forever apparently. Still don't know how particle physics fits in, I leave that to someone else's deranged imagination.
As long as the majority of users are at leastreluctantly willing to purchase a digital download you won't have a choice much longer. The publishers will see it as a more than even trade if they keep 75% of their sales during move to digital downloads. The costs saved in production and distribution (you didn't really think they would pass those savings on did you?), the money saved by reducing piracy (if you can download a game, you must have broadband, therefore you should be able to sign in every time you play. Yes, even single player games), and the money saved by eliminating completely the 2nd hand market will all outshine any lost sales to the physical media hold outs. And once the change happens and there are no AAA titles on physical media how long do you really think the hold outs will last before they give in and start downloading their favorite games?
Rather than disabling and trying to defeat all these tracking mechanisms I think it would be easier to flood them with false information. Someone should set up a cookie sharing site and FF extension that trades (safe, non-identifying) cookies amongst all the users of that extension. Why yes, I did visit mylittlepony.com directly between visits to journalofparticlephysics.edu and horsesluts9.com, why do you ask?
Or just create a website, DIYCarFixes.com or something, upload a few videos, then make the upload process available for everyone, create a ranking and tagging system to remove the chaff, and post ads to Autozone and the like. If you still want to make the videos yourself have featured, HD quality, downloadable (for a small 1 time fee) videos that the users vote on to decide what gets made first. If content is too expensive to make then let your users make the content, it's worked for countless sites already, all you need to do is create enough to attract an initial audience.
My nephew just turned 4 a little while back. Sadly, he has a speech impediment that has made him difficult, if not impossible, to understand until very recently. Over over the past 6 months or so his speech has improved considerable and we finally know... that the kid swears like a sailor, he's probably been swearing for years and no one ever knew it. Seriously, we're all in the kitchen and we hear "Holy shit!" come out of the living room, go in to see what's going on and he's watching Sesame Street. Obviously we tried and failed to not laugh, so I can't imagine we helped the situation any.
You accidentally the whole password into the search bar?
You're begging the question "will human population continue to increase?" The answer is almost assuredly 'no', looking at cultures that have high standards of living the rate of population change is already 0 or below, having children is not a biological imperative at the same level that we have always assumed. It can be turned off to the point where population growth is stopped.
Given this fact, and I know this sounds ludicrous at first blush, population will be controlled by market forces. Why don't people have 6-10 kids anymore? It's all nice and snarky to say that the current generation is selfish, but the fact is that every generation has felt that way about the next generation, it is unlikely to be true. There has to be a reason, and the most likely culprit is cost, it is simply more expensive to raise a child today than it was 40 years ago largely because of all the 'advances' in child education and care. Eventually, the costs associated with having a child will outweigh the perceived benefit of having children. It has already happened with millions of young adults who have chosen to wait to have kids until they are more economically developed, despite the risks associated with having children in your 30's instead of your 20's.
Careful reading of his more recent works, not just the two you mentioned but going back 5-10 years, you do notice some things in his works degrading; not enough to hurt the overall quality of the book, but enough that you can tell something is happening. The largest change is a reduction in vocabulary, but there is also the fact that tend to be more straightforward, with less metaphors and colorful language.
Like I said, the ideas are all still sound, the humor is fun and entertaining, there are no gaping plot holes left unfilled, but I suspect that you could make a pretty interesting study on the effects of Alzheimer's on language by studying his books. And you'd certainly have a good sample of his writing (what is he up to now, 30 books? 40?
Google would like to announce its new gOS. It comes equipped with Lotus Notes and a machine gun.
Hold on now, I think you need a permit to distribute something as dangerous as Lotus Notes. And I'm pretty sure using it on people is a war crime.
No guerilla force will survive for a week under those conditions.
You're right, in a week the guerrilla force would be gone, to be replaced by every able bodied man in the country taking up open arms. When you give every local commander the power to decimate (in the literal, Roman army sense) a village or family because he thinks the attack comes from there... good God, do you even realize what you're saying? Do you really think that every military commander is going use that power the way it was designed? How long until a woman fighting off a rapist is considered 'attacking the troops'. What would you do if your daughter was raped by an invading army, and when she fought back she, he children, and her neighbors were murdered for it? You'd run out of bullets before you killed all the locals who were trying to kill you.
Now granted, maybe that's what you want so you have an excuse to gut the country of fighting aged individuals, but if you really think people will just cower down and fear you (for generations, unless you intend to stay there forever) while you're slaughtering their (mostly innocent) friends and family you're a little bit insane. Guess what, there's a reason why we have a pain in the ass court system, it's because justice is hard to get right.
As much as I love poking fun at conservative politicians, the guy had a point. He was speaking out against volcano monitoring as part of an economic stimulus package, not as part of the general budget. He was using it as a valid example of how special interest groups (in this case, some researchers who happened to have contacts in a senator's office) had managed to earmark some of the stimulus for things that would do very little to increase consumer spending.
If you consider Original Sin to be a nature that is anything less than perfect
But, according to theology, we were created perfect. It was only the actions of Adam and Eve, going against the will of God, that made us imperfect and requiring baptism. So if you're going to say that aliens are imperfect that would mean that they had a fall similar to humanity's.
That's fine, it answers the question as well as anything, though it does raise the question of why so many of God's sentient creatures chose to disobey him. To paraphrase a Douglas Adams quote: If he the type of guy to go around putting bricks under hats and waiting for people to kick them? Is he hiding in the corner of the garden just waiting for someone to eat that fruit so he can jump out and say "Aha!"?