Well, Planetside (an MMOFPS) has done this since the beginning. When you capture a base or a tower it stays captured and becomes a spawn point for your side. Then because of the lattice structure between bases, it opens up new bases that are vulnerable to attack. The lattice structure is there to cause a front line to the battles.
Whether or not it's "OK" is no longer relevant during a war. When you're in a literal life-and-death struggle, questions become simplified down to actions and consequences. You're already resorting to significant voilence to force others to accept your will. Or you're resorting to violence to defend yourself against the same. It's not a game with rules. Countries follow "conventions" only because of anticipated repercussions if they break them.
So they might cyberbomb the sites in Estonia, but only if the results are worth the consequences.
The net effect of the exploitation for us, from a purely monetary standpoint, is that money that was circulating in our country is now circulating in another country, making our country poorer.
This is simply not true. If you'd taken even a first year macro-economics course, you'd realize that in order for us to buy goods from China, the importer has to sell our currency to purchase Chinese currency. In doing so, someone out there has to purchase our currency from him, and the general reasons for doing that is to purchase something we export or to make an investment in our economy. The fact is that Chinese money circulates in China and our money (with a couple exceptions) circulates in our country.
For an example, consider this scenario. I am Canadian and I live in Canada. All of my living expenses are paid in Canadian Dollars (mortgage, car payment, utilities, food, etc.). However, for about 5 years I worked for a US company and was paid in US dollars. You could consider me an exporter of engineering services. My employer had to sell my services to customers in US dollars and pay all of his expenses (including my salary) in US dollars. Once those US dollars were in my US bank account, I still couldn't use them directly in Canada (you have to ignore the case that some Canadian restaurants near the border might accept US dollars because they still have to pay all their expenses in Canadian, so at some point the money has to be exchanged).
So every two weeks I'd phone up my bank and sell almost all of my US currency for Canadian currency and have it transferred to my Canadian account in Canada. But the fact is that those US dollars still existed. For a short time the bank owned them (they keep a reserve of both currencies). Then, by putting that small amount of money on the currency trading market, the pool of US dollars was increased ever-so-slightly and the pool of Canadian currency was decreased by the same amount. In real terms, perhaps the exchange rate changed by 0.000001% or something. Ultimately, the supply of US dollars on the market went up, and the supply of Canadian dollars went down.
Somewhere out there people make business decisions about what country to buy their stuff from based on the exchange rate and relative prices. Those US dollars I put on the market were then purchased by someone who had another currency and most likely wanted to purchase something from the US. Perhaps it was the GM dealership in Canada that I purchased my vehicle from (the VIN number starts with a 1 so I know it was manufactured in the US). Somehow GM had to take my Canadian dollars that I paid for the vehicle and sell some of them for US dollars to pay the expenses at the plant where it was built.
If you don't think it has an effect, consider this... back in 2001 when I started working for a US company, I was exchanging every US dollar for 1.6 Canadian dollars, and at the time, given relative salaries, etc., it made a lot of sense for me to do it. Now the exchange rate is near 1 to 1. That changes my economic incentives drastically. The market was pushing Americans to purchase goods and services externally back in 2001, but now you can see lines of Canadians heading to the US to shop every weekend because the market is pushing Canadians to buy from the US. In a free currency market, trade will tend to balance. (Not that the Chinese currency market is free by any means.)
Consider the opposite. Let's say that China keeps selling crazy amounts of stuff to the US without buying anything in return. The Chinese exporter has to sell the US dollars that the Americans paid with and buy Chinese Yuan (sp?) to pay the expenses of the plant. Over time this will decrease the amount of Yuan available and increase the amount of US dollars available on the market. This can't continue for long until the Yuan is so scarce and the US dollar is so available that the exchange rate swings wildly to the point where it doesn't make sense for (a) Americans to continue purchasing Chinese products or (b) Chinese not to purchase American products.
I think I saw that on the Red Green show. Only instead of a 12VDC to 120VAC inverter, he tried to use a step up transformer. Which might even work if you hooked up a DPDT toggle switch and jiggled it back and forth 60 times per second...
This is actually quite striking. I worked on a solar/wind project last year and the solar panel we were using was an 80W rated panel (normally provides a little over 60W in full sunlight at these latitudes), but I never realized how much your eyes compensate for the variation in illumination levels. When it was cloudy in the winter, even when you could see perfectly well and thought it was rather bright outside, the solar panel was only pumping out about 2 or 3 watts.
The idea is that it tends to be windy and sunny alternately, which is somewhat true, so they market wind and solar as a good combo, but the fact is the amount you have to spend to get the same power from wind is way more than the equivalent amount for solar, and trust me there are lots of times when it was calm and overcast for weeks.
Still I think the most economical setup would be to find a way to reduce the hardware as much as possible. Let's say you have air conditioning for instance. Take a solar panel, use it to charge a single 12V auto battery, and then use a voltage sensitive relay to turn on a surplus 12V marine air conditioner. Basically the solar charges up the battery. When there's enough power in there, the air conditioner kicks on and runs for 15 minutes or so and drains the charge out of the battery. The sunnier it is, the more the air conditioner runs, and that means your central air (powered by the grid) runs less. The benefit is that you don't need to fuss with inverters and big battery packs.
I have a friend who regularly hires people for her department. She said when she's about to hire someone, she will check facebook for them, and because by default everyone in your "network" can see your profile, and your network is your city, she can generally see everything in someone's profile.
She uses the information she finds there, along with other information from the interview and resume, to judge a person's ability to do the job, and their character. She definitely thinks that if you're stupid enough to post really embarrassing conversations with your friends on your wall, then you just may not be that bright, and certainly you're not aware of how your actions have effects on how people perceive you. Hence, it could count against you.
My wife and I went to a resort in Cuba back in 2003. They did have (albeit slow) internet at the resort.
Some things about Cuba - the locals we met were some of the nicest people we've met anywhere in the world. Everyone in the country gets (at the time) the equivalent of $13 US per *month* to live, and that's it. Still, nobody ever asked anything from us (unlike Jamaica) and they would bend over backwards to do anything to help you. It was more likely for them to give *us* things, like on our first day there, one gentleman was making a grass hopper out of palm leaves on his break, and when his break was over he gave it to my wife and was offended when I reached for my wallet (I was used to the people who approach you in other places, like Peru, France, Mexico, even on our visit to New Orleans in '02, and I suppose in most major cities, doing some kind of performance to try and get some money out of you).
One of the most poignant moments was a long discussion we had with one woman who worked on the resort. She was asking us about some of the places we'd been able to travel (mostly Europe at the time), and she was telling us about her eventual goal to travel the world. It's not particularly easy for Cubans to travel. They have to get a travel permit from the government. It's quite expensive, and I believe it has to be for an officially sanctioned reason. Still she was determined to go, and I hope she eventually gets her wish.
But we were struck by how tragic it was that all these amazing people are practically being held hostage in their own country, cut off from the rest of the world. As far as I'm concerned, the more we can engage the common people in Cuba, through the internet, travel, trade, etc., the less time it will take for their country to reform, and for them to catch up with the rest of the western world. I really think the US embargo is completely counter-productive.
Years ago a friend of my (then) girlfriend forwarded an email she got from some modelling agency, addressed to her using her first name (first name happened to be Jennifer), and she wondered how the agency got her university email address. I noticed that the original email was sent to about 30 or so email addresses, all from the same university domain name, and all starting with "J". I went to the university in question's web site, to the student directory, and found that you couldn't get a list of all students, you couldn't search by gender, and you couldn't just enter the first initial and get all students starting with that initial, but you could search by last or even first name. Of course Jennifer is one of the most common female names in our generation, and if you searched for Jennifer, you got the exact list of email addresses in the original email.
So I suppose, some enterprising marketer at the modelling agency realized a good way to send targetted email to women in their early 20's who may be a little desperate for money is to search for common female names in the university directory, and spam them.
So I certainly hope the university stopped that practice.
They're not necessarily talking about making you just live longer as a frail old person. They're talking about making people live longer with the body of a 20, 30, or 40 year old.
What I think is a bigger concern is the number of employers who will now Google your name before hiring you. They could easily be fooled into thinking that these are legitimate search results.
Given the choice, I'd rather be diagnosed with cancer than be in a car accident and have trauma to my head. Even though cancer is a terminal illness, there's a good chance (statistically speaking) that I could be in remission and live a long otherwise healthy life. But if you have a head injury, there's practically so little funding that your chances of getting the treatment you need to recover are slim. That's because, like a previous poster said, people will donate money to a disease that can be explained in short choppy sentences, but neurological disorders can't.
But also interesting is what would happen to the cancer fundraising industry if all of a sudden all the newspapers' front page headline was, "Cancer Cured". My wife works at the hospital, and she sees that the amount of money that comes into the hospital from charities that raise enormous amounts of money to "fight cancer" is unbelievable. Everyone in the cancer unit gets new computers every year, has all the best equipment, etc., while the units right next to them, also treating terminally ill patients are still running Windows 95 and have waiting lists months or years long.
If you look at cancer survival rates now (in most part because of all the money that's been pumped into fighting cancer), it's pretty close to a "cured" disease already. For instance, consider if someone came up with a treatment of Parkinson's that reversed the disease in 75% of the sufferers - wouldn't we call that a cure? But everyone in the cancer community (medically) are always very careful never to say that anyone is cured - rather they are in "remission". After all, if word got out that cancer wasn't the death sentence everyone thinks it is, all the money would dry up (and along with it the big budgets and high salaries).
So if this new treatment really does cure cancer, and sounds like it has none of the terrible side effects of current treatments, it might be a boon for other illnesses that desperately need funding too. I think it's pretty exciting.
It depends. If you consider menopause to be a normal consequence of aging in women, and you eliminate aging (i.e. everyone has the body of a 20 year old) then it stands to reason that women will not go through menopause.
Perhaps, but as a citizen of a country that is a net energy exporter (Canada), I'd rather the money go to our oil industry than the US government.:) However, I can see that someone in a different position might see things from another perspective.
The fact is, for all the environmentalists out there screaming to put regulations on carbon emissions, etc., the price of energy is the only thing that's going to have a substantial impact on the amount of fuel we use. People are actually considering more fuel efficient vehicles, and at my place of work people are taking advantage of opportunities to work from home once in a while. Especially when their commute is over one hour. If we keep it up, people might move closer to work.
About as guilty as when I walk up to a phone booth, pull out the phone book and look up the address of a place I'm looking for, and then leave the phone booth without using the phone.
I'm glad people are aware of what's going on and are leery of it. We need to talk about it. But I just don't see the public in North America allowing it to happen here, not in this scale. Our culture values personal freedoms much more than the Chinese culture. No matter how much the government tries to scare us into these kinds of things for our own protection, our cultural heritage provides a certain amount of immunity to this kind of thing.
What's needed her is a good rational reminder of why our people value personal freedoms. It's not so that you can download music for free, it's to prevent individuals from gaining too much power over the masses. Too bad we can't enlist a good influencer like Michael Moore to explain it in prole speak for us... It seems that big brother always has the best orators.
The first thing I thought when companies started selling carbon nanotubes for research was that we had no idea how toxic this stuff could be. The most obvious question was what would it do to your lungs when inhaled. Not a big surprise.
I would disagree. When you shout fire, the *people* in the theatre stampede out the door, crushing people under their feet. Why would we hold the man who shouted fire accountable for the deaths when it was the actual panicked people who killed the others. Along the same lines, if some religious leader does tell his followers to kill the non-believers, we still need to hold the followers to account - they weren't really coerced.
For example, a political leader that starts a revolution to overthrow an oppressive government, by the same logic, you might call him a murderer due to all the people who die in the civil war, but it's the individuals who did the killing. It's precisely this type of speech that "freedom of speech" laws are meant to protect.
That's why I'm against any restriction on freedom of speech. You may want to hold the "ringleader" accountable, but in all these cases, there are other followers who did the actual killing who are the ones that rightfully should be held accountable for their actions.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Planetside (an MMOFPS) has done this since the beginning. When you capture a base or a tower it stays captured and becomes a spawn point for your side. Then because of the lattice structure between bases, it opens up new bases that are vulnerable to attack. The lattice structure is there to cause a front line to the battles.
It kind of tastes like chicken. In fact, if you take the blue pill, everything tastes like chicken, and vice versa.
Vice versa... so if you take the chicken, everything tastes like the blue pill?
Whether or not it's "OK" is no longer relevant during a war. When you're in a literal life-and-death struggle, questions become simplified down to actions and consequences. You're already resorting to significant voilence to force others to accept your will. Or you're resorting to violence to defend yourself against the same. It's not a game with rules. Countries follow "conventions" only because of anticipated repercussions if they break them.
So they might cyberbomb the sites in Estonia, but only if the results are worth the consequences.
The net effect of the exploitation for us, from a purely monetary standpoint, is that money that was circulating in our country is now circulating in another country, making our country poorer.
This is simply not true. If you'd taken even a first year macro-economics course, you'd realize that in order for us to buy goods from China, the importer has to sell our currency to purchase Chinese currency. In doing so, someone out there has to purchase our currency from him, and the general reasons for doing that is to purchase something we export or to make an investment in our economy. The fact is that Chinese money circulates in China and our money (with a couple exceptions) circulates in our country.
For an example, consider this scenario. I am Canadian and I live in Canada. All of my living expenses are paid in Canadian Dollars (mortgage, car payment, utilities, food, etc.). However, for about 5 years I worked for a US company and was paid in US dollars. You could consider me an exporter of engineering services. My employer had to sell my services to customers in US dollars and pay all of his expenses (including my salary) in US dollars. Once those US dollars were in my US bank account, I still couldn't use them directly in Canada (you have to ignore the case that some Canadian restaurants near the border might accept US dollars because they still have to pay all their expenses in Canadian, so at some point the money has to be exchanged).
So every two weeks I'd phone up my bank and sell almost all of my US currency for Canadian currency and have it transferred to my Canadian account in Canada. But the fact is that those US dollars still existed. For a short time the bank owned them (they keep a reserve of both currencies). Then, by putting that small amount of money on the currency trading market, the pool of US dollars was increased ever-so-slightly and the pool of Canadian currency was decreased by the same amount. In real terms, perhaps the exchange rate changed by 0.000001% or something. Ultimately, the supply of US dollars on the market went up, and the supply of Canadian dollars went down.
Somewhere out there people make business decisions about what country to buy their stuff from based on the exchange rate and relative prices. Those US dollars I put on the market were then purchased by someone who had another currency and most likely wanted to purchase something from the US. Perhaps it was the GM dealership in Canada that I purchased my vehicle from (the VIN number starts with a 1 so I know it was manufactured in the US). Somehow GM had to take my Canadian dollars that I paid for the vehicle and sell some of them for US dollars to pay the expenses at the plant where it was built.
If you don't think it has an effect, consider this... back in 2001 when I started working for a US company, I was exchanging every US dollar for 1.6 Canadian dollars, and at the time, given relative salaries, etc., it made a lot of sense for me to do it. Now the exchange rate is near 1 to 1. That changes my economic incentives drastically. The market was pushing Americans to purchase goods and services externally back in 2001, but now you can see lines of Canadians heading to the US to shop every weekend because the market is pushing Canadians to buy from the US. In a free currency market, trade will tend to balance. (Not that the Chinese currency market is free by any means.)
Consider the opposite. Let's say that China keeps selling crazy amounts of stuff to the US without buying anything in return. The Chinese exporter has to sell the US dollars that the Americans paid with and buy Chinese Yuan (sp?) to pay the expenses of the plant. Over time this will decrease the amount of Yuan available and increase the amount of US dollars available on the market. This can't continue for long until the Yuan is so scarce and the US dollar is so available that the exchange rate swings wildly to the point where it doesn't make sense for (a) Americans to continue purchasing Chinese products or (b) Chinese not to purchase American products.
This is pretty basic economics.
The transformer would work as a low pass filter, so in theory the output would be "less square" than the input.
I think I saw that on the Red Green show. Only instead of a 12VDC to 120VAC inverter, he tried to use a step up transformer. Which might even work if you hooked up a DPDT toggle switch and jiggled it back and forth 60 times per second...
This is actually quite striking. I worked on a solar/wind project last year and the solar panel we were using was an 80W rated panel (normally provides a little over 60W in full sunlight at these latitudes), but I never realized how much your eyes compensate for the variation in illumination levels. When it was cloudy in the winter, even when you could see perfectly well and thought it was rather bright outside, the solar panel was only pumping out about 2 or 3 watts.
The idea is that it tends to be windy and sunny alternately, which is somewhat true, so they market wind and solar as a good combo, but the fact is the amount you have to spend to get the same power from wind is way more than the equivalent amount for solar, and trust me there are lots of times when it was calm and overcast for weeks.
Still I think the most economical setup would be to find a way to reduce the hardware as much as possible. Let's say you have air conditioning for instance. Take a solar panel, use it to charge a single 12V auto battery, and then use a voltage sensitive relay to turn on a surplus 12V marine air conditioner. Basically the solar charges up the battery. When there's enough power in there, the air conditioner kicks on and runs for 15 minutes or so and drains the charge out of the battery. The sunnier it is, the more the air conditioner runs, and that means your central air (powered by the grid) runs less. The benefit is that you don't need to fuss with inverters and big battery packs.
I have a friend who regularly hires people for her department. She said when she's about to hire someone, she will check facebook for them, and because by default everyone in your "network" can see your profile, and your network is your city, she can generally see everything in someone's profile.
She uses the information she finds there, along with other information from the interview and resume, to judge a person's ability to do the job, and their character. She definitely thinks that if you're stupid enough to post really embarrassing conversations with your friends on your wall, then you just may not be that bright, and certainly you're not aware of how your actions have effects on how people perceive you. Hence, it could count against you.
My wife and I went to a resort in Cuba back in 2003. They did have (albeit slow) internet at the resort.
Some things about Cuba - the locals we met were some of the nicest people we've met anywhere in the world. Everyone in the country gets (at the time) the equivalent of $13 US per *month* to live, and that's it. Still, nobody ever asked anything from us (unlike Jamaica) and they would bend over backwards to do anything to help you. It was more likely for them to give *us* things, like on our first day there, one gentleman was making a grass hopper out of palm leaves on his break, and when his break was over he gave it to my wife and was offended when I reached for my wallet (I was used to the people who approach you in other places, like Peru, France, Mexico, even on our visit to New Orleans in '02, and I suppose in most major cities, doing some kind of performance to try and get some money out of you).
One of the most poignant moments was a long discussion we had with one woman who worked on the resort. She was asking us about some of the places we'd been able to travel (mostly Europe at the time), and she was telling us about her eventual goal to travel the world. It's not particularly easy for Cubans to travel. They have to get a travel permit from the government. It's quite expensive, and I believe it has to be for an officially sanctioned reason. Still she was determined to go, and I hope she eventually gets her wish.
But we were struck by how tragic it was that all these amazing people are practically being held hostage in their own country, cut off from the rest of the world. As far as I'm concerned, the more we can engage the common people in Cuba, through the internet, travel, trade, etc., the less time it will take for their country to reform, and for them to catch up with the rest of the western world. I really think the US embargo is completely counter-productive.
That's interesting.
Years ago a friend of my (then) girlfriend forwarded an email she got from some modelling agency, addressed to her using her first name (first name happened to be Jennifer), and she wondered how the agency got her university email address. I noticed that the original email was sent to about 30 or so email addresses, all from the same university domain name, and all starting with "J". I went to the university in question's web site, to the student directory, and found that you couldn't get a list of all students, you couldn't search by gender, and you couldn't just enter the first initial and get all students starting with that initial, but you could search by last or even first name. Of course Jennifer is one of the most common female names in our generation, and if you searched for Jennifer, you got the exact list of email addresses in the original email.
So I suppose, some enterprising marketer at the modelling agency realized a good way to send targetted email to women in their early 20's who may be a little desperate for money is to search for common female names in the university directory, and spam them.
So I certainly hope the university stopped that practice.
Pretty sure the GP meant ferrous. I'd always heard it called magnetic core memory but ferrous works too.
They're not necessarily talking about making you just live longer as a frail old person. They're talking about making people live longer with the body of a 20, 30, or 40 year old.
What I think is a bigger concern is the number of employers who will now Google your name before hiring you. They could easily be fooled into thinking that these are legitimate search results.
Given the choice, I'd rather be diagnosed with cancer than be in a car accident and have trauma to my head. Even though cancer is a terminal illness, there's a good chance (statistically speaking) that I could be in remission and live a long otherwise healthy life. But if you have a head injury, there's practically so little funding that your chances of getting the treatment you need to recover are slim. That's because, like a previous poster said, people will donate money to a disease that can be explained in short choppy sentences, but neurological disorders can't.
If this works, I think it's great.
But also interesting is what would happen to the cancer fundraising industry if all of a sudden all the newspapers' front page headline was, "Cancer Cured". My wife works at the hospital, and she sees that the amount of money that comes into the hospital from charities that raise enormous amounts of money to "fight cancer" is unbelievable. Everyone in the cancer unit gets new computers every year, has all the best equipment, etc., while the units right next to them, also treating terminally ill patients are still running Windows 95 and have waiting lists months or years long.
If you look at cancer survival rates now (in most part because of all the money that's been pumped into fighting cancer), it's pretty close to a "cured" disease already. For instance, consider if someone came up with a treatment of Parkinson's that reversed the disease in 75% of the sufferers - wouldn't we call that a cure? But everyone in the cancer community (medically) are always very careful never to say that anyone is cured - rather they are in "remission". After all, if word got out that cancer wasn't the death sentence everyone thinks it is, all the money would dry up (and along with it the big budgets and high salaries).
So if this new treatment really does cure cancer, and sounds like it has none of the terrible side effects of current treatments, it might be a boon for other illnesses that desperately need funding too. I think it's pretty exciting.
It depends. If you consider menopause to be a normal consequence of aging in women, and you eliminate aging (i.e. everyone has the body of a 20 year old) then it stands to reason that women will not go through menopause.
Perhaps, but as a citizen of a country that is a net energy exporter (Canada), I'd rather the money go to our oil industry than the US government. :) However, I can see that someone in a different position might see things from another perspective.
The fact is, for all the environmentalists out there screaming to put regulations on carbon emissions, etc., the price of energy is the only thing that's going to have a substantial impact on the amount of fuel we use. People are actually considering more fuel efficient vehicles, and at my place of work people are taking advantage of opportunities to work from home once in a while. Especially when their commute is over one hour. If we keep it up, people might move closer to work.
But how guilty do we really feel?
About as guilty as when I walk up to a phone booth, pull out the phone book and look up the address of a place I'm looking for, and then leave the phone booth without using the phone.
As a male who likes to leave lots of "roadmaps" and such in my code for future programmers, I feel that my masculinity has been challenged.
I'm glad people are aware of what's going on and are leery of it. We need to talk about it. But I just don't see the public in North America allowing it to happen here, not in this scale. Our culture values personal freedoms much more than the Chinese culture. No matter how much the government tries to scare us into these kinds of things for our own protection, our cultural heritage provides a certain amount of immunity to this kind of thing.
What's needed her is a good rational reminder of why our people value personal freedoms. It's not so that you can download music for free, it's to prevent individuals from gaining too much power over the masses. Too bad we can't enlist a good influencer like Michael Moore to explain it in prole speak for us... It seems that big brother always has the best orators.
The first thing I thought when companies started selling carbon nanotubes for research was that we had no idea how toxic this stuff could be. The most obvious question was what would it do to your lungs when inhaled. Not a big surprise.
I would disagree. When you shout fire, the *people* in the theatre stampede out the door, crushing people under their feet. Why would we hold the man who shouted fire accountable for the deaths when it was the actual panicked people who killed the others. Along the same lines, if some religious leader does tell his followers to kill the non-believers, we still need to hold the followers to account - they weren't really coerced.
For example, a political leader that starts a revolution to overthrow an oppressive government, by the same logic, you might call him a murderer due to all the people who die in the civil war, but it's the individuals who did the killing. It's precisely this type of speech that "freedom of speech" laws are meant to protect.
That's why I'm against any restriction on freedom of speech. You may want to hold the "ringleader" accountable, but in all these cases, there are other followers who did the actual killing who are the ones that rightfully should be held accountable for their actions.
If someone killed your one year old child, is it not murder then?
Can we let parents off the hook for screwing up their kids before they age of two, as long as they kill the kid before they become "sentient"?
It sounds ludicrous to me.