Problem there: an ambassador cannot 'step down', he or she can only be recalled by the sending state. Additionally, ambassadors are, you could say, the personification of the sending state in the receiving state. If she was instructed to sign the treaty, that's what she has to do, carry out the will of her country. She may protest through her official channels, say that it's a bad idea, and ACTA is evil, but in the end, if Slovenia doesn't change its mind, she is practically obligated to sign it due to her position.
Diplomacy is one of those areas where you don't really have the opportunity to exercise free will, if not having a say in how things get done. But what gets done is not, and usually never was, up to you.
I'm not sure GIMP is better than Photoshop. At the very least, Photoshop has a much more organized UI, which I can navigate through much easier.
Best of both worlds would be an "Advanced Mode", where you can change all the settings, but for the average consumers, most settings may be hidden away, and make the whole thing "just work". Unless something goes wrong, or you want to tweak something, you may never even have to see all the settings and variables.
Actually, my Nexus S seems to have configured itself to use IMAP with my Yahoo account. At the very least, the server addresses say imap.mail.yahoo.com, and everything I do gets replicated on the servers at the next synchronization, including moving messages (finally, the newest email app can do that too) and deleting.
I have all my mail on my yahoo account, despite having a Google account as well. It's just that I created the Yahoo! one way back, around 1996-7, and have been using it ever since, and at this point, migrating over to Gmail would be too much of a hassle, and quite frankly, I like Yahoo!'s UI much more than Gmail's (folders, for example, easy-to-use hotkeys, etc). I've seen the storage expansions, from 20 MB to 100, then 500, then 1GB, and finally infinite, the new UI and the "All-New Yahoo! Mail"-campaign, hell, I even have access to the Premium features like disposable addresses (something else Gmail lacks), without paying anything (though I don't know why, possibly as a reward for long-standing use?).
Regarding searches, I've long since switched over to Google, but for me, mail will always be on Yahoo!, even though I don't use anything else from the company any more.
Just because one uses/used AOL, there was no reason to hate them. That's stereotyping, just like if I said you're an overweight savant with glasses five centimeters thick, who live in their parents' converted basement and owns six hundred Star Wars and Star Trek action figures, just because you commented on Slashdot. Simply not true (I think). Even if it happened to be true in your case, it certainly isn't in mine, so the stereotype is already broken.
And if he does? You just have to be smart with what information you enter, and what you do with it, and there, no risk at all.
Seriously, there's no real reason to hate on Facebook, at the very least, not this time. As for the users, there's no reason to hate on them at all just because they use Facebook.
It's an in-universe thing. The city Doktor Sleepless is set in has its police duties contracted out, and people need to buy personal protection. Everyone wears multifunctional RFID-tags called Spyme (obvious pun is obvious), that carry personal information, including your protection status. If the nearby officer reads your tag and sees you haven't paid for this month, you might as well get eviscerated right in front of his eyes, and won't move a muscle. The masks Sleepless gives to a gang jam these tags, and let the gang run free in the city with no fear of retribution.
V for Vendetta and Doktor Sleepless are pioneers of this. Doktor Sleepless's masks carry the added bonus of jamming all RFID tags in a limited area, letting the wearer act free.
The Promethean group of programs used for the Promethean Planet whiteboards comes to mind (which also includes tools for collaboration and student polling, that you may or may not use), or even Microsoft PowerPoint. Granted, they won't be a science-fiction movie-style 3D projection, but even such an anchor would be helpful to students. If the school (district) has money to burn, an in-house team of graphics designers and coders/specialists may come into play too (though I have yet to see that), or they could buy pre-made content like you suggest. But in the first round, teachers would likely have to improvise with PowerPoint or proprietary software for the hardware (Promethean Planet, in my case). Which is a problem in itself: they lack the knowledge and skills to fully utilize the systems, leading to lower impact and efficiency, and less interest in using them. I suspect once a big investment is made, and skilled specialists brought on board, the impact of these systems would rapidly improve as teachers begin to use them...
You don't even need a lot of resources, you just need to utilize what you have effectively. Electronic aids are highly useful in most subjects, except for the most abstract ones, such as literature. Even in history, you can display a timeline of events, show tactical replays of battles, etc. When it comes to mathematics, the pros shine: projection allows the teacher to present a visual anchors for abstract concepts, such as functions and equations, so students can memorize methods much better.
Actually, it's only illegal if you commercialize it. You're free to make backups of copyrighted software and music for your own use, you may even be asked to provide proof of purchase or the original, but you can only be prosecuted if you profit from creating backups.
Actually, armies all over the world are considered sustainable by default. That is to say, they will always receive enough money to at least keep their equipment in working order, regardless of the economic state of the rest of the country, since they are the only thing that stands between the state and utter annihilation. If any state is at the point where they can't even allocate this much, then they are teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, and not in the way the Eurozone is doing nowadays...
Suggestion one: if your school has a football field, try implementing something like XKCD suggests. Who knows, maybe the kids will learn some perspective.
Suggestion two: convert them to near-infrared imaging, and let the physics teachers and the art club go nuts with them.
"Just and justifiable": Meaning those countries who obviously cannot benefit from the extracted resources (for example due to not having the infrastructure to refine and use them) get less or nothing, while those countries that put in the brunt of the work (those with manned space programs) get more. The only way to invite participation is to acknowledge it, but the hands of future lawmakers are tied by the current Outer Space Agreement, which needs to be taken into account when creating the new framework, and which says that "Outer space and all celestial objects are the common province of all mankind".
So whether you think it's communism (which it isn't), or not, this is the only way it can go.
I'm not a US citizen, but I'd even donate money to the US government, if it meant they'd go public with the Cheyenne mountain complex...
Joke aside, both you and grandparent make a good point. However, the legal framework for space exploration/exploitation must be laid down first. The one we ahve right now is not exactly conducive, nor enforceable. We need one that lets nations take ownership/stewardship of extraterrestrial territories, an empowered UN authority to oversee spaceflight and extraterrestrial resource extraction, and shares the fruits of the exploration in a just and justifiable manner to encourage participation.
A question regarding the Crossfire capability: does it automatically enable in, say, a laptop (specifically, an ASUS K53TA) with an A4 APU and a Radeon 6550? Or is it actually the part where ATI Control asks me which graphics core it should use for a given application?
This. We had to sign the university copyright notice before submitting the thesis. It had three levels: no library access, access from on-site, free access (although this applied only to the electronic version, the print version was expected not to go into circulation of any kind).
Not build, although that's an option too (orbital assembly enables the construction of larger frames than possible to launch economically), rather just a refueling stop after breaking Earth orbit. After all, it takes a lot less delta-v to break orbit from Earth to Moon to Mars than it takes from Earth to Mars in one go...
The two routes are presented as exclusive, and only differ in the order of the targets. I say there's a third route: Moon, Mars+Asteroid, Beyond.
Landing on an asteroid is orders of magnitude more difficult than on the Moon or a planet: chances are a lot greater that you'll miss, and there's not a lot of possibilities for in-situ resource utilization, while return windows are possibly few and far between. It would be safer and more profitable to go to an asteroid at the same time we're building presence on Mars. Hell, Mars has two asteroids for moons, perfect practice ground. The way I see this would be a hybrid of the two scenarios outlined: we deploy a deep space habitat, set up a permanently crewed base on the Moon as a 'pit stop', then take advantage of the lower gravity to launch towards Mars, and later, still from the Moon, towards an interesting asteroid. The first asteroid mission could even be the deployment of a thruster to send the asteroid into a more accessible and safer orbit as a starting point.
This would allow us the most time to test new technologies before plunging into the most dangerous missions during the exploration phase, then to leverage those technologies in the exploitation phase that inevitably (and rightly) follows.
There's one significant difference, though: in Yahoo's folders, putting a message in one removes it from the Inbox folder, the default landing space for all messages; while in Gmail, you just stick a Label on it, but the message itself remains visible in the Inbox too, which leads to clutter, even in the short term. I prefer my messages sorted thematically, so that I can only see the specific subset I want at any time. In Gmail, I can't make this distinction, I will always see all my messages in the Inbox, not just the ones I haven't applied a label to.
I'm 22, and my primary email address is, and has been ever since 1996, a Yahoo, and I find their email front end THE best on the net so far: keyboard shortcuts (even if they recently removed the ability to sort into folders with the number keys alone, they just require one more keypress), easily managed, can generate disposable 'decoy' addresses, and has proper folders instead of Gmail's "Labels" (which also have their merits, but I prefer folders). I really hope they won't axe the Mail service, even if they dump everything else, that is one thing worth saving.
[...]an amendment to the laws will be made [...] China shall be aloud[sic] to mine asteroids peacefully as long as certain conditions are met.
Precisely what needs to be done. As it stands, the Outer Space Treaty forbids this. What I argue for is an overhaul of the treaty: the private sector needs to be included into the framework, and the whole definition of the legal status of outer space needs to be set in that metaphorical stone, and a sub-type that's immune to the green paper (there is such, see, for example, humanitarian laws).
Then, under the newly reworked treaty, all nations may begin mining, but there's going to be one serious caveat: the resources mined must be shared, at least part of them, among all nations. This comes from the current treaty, which will forever leave its mark on space law, and includes the passage that "Outer space is the common province of all mankind". This cannot be erased, and by extension, applies to the extracted resources too.
It can't really make exceptions, given that the basic framework is already in place, and in international law, you can't contradict an already established practice. Once it's set, it's set in metaphorical stone.
I'd quite like to see how it would pan out though, just not in this scenario. If the slit-eyes screw up, I'm going to have to add Iron Maiden's "When Two Worlds Collide" to my life's soundtrack, and I don't want that, no matter how awesome the song is...
Slashdot Mirror
Problem there: an ambassador cannot 'step down', he or she can only be recalled by the sending state. Additionally, ambassadors are, you could say, the personification of the sending state in the receiving state. If she was instructed to sign the treaty, that's what she has to do, carry out the will of her country. She may protest through her official channels, say that it's a bad idea, and ACTA is evil, but in the end, if Slovenia doesn't change its mind, she is practically obligated to sign it due to her position.
Diplomacy is one of those areas where you don't really have the opportunity to exercise free will, if not having a say in how things get done. But what gets done is not, and usually never was, up to you.
I'm not sure GIMP is better than Photoshop. At the very least, Photoshop has a much more organized UI, which I can navigate through much easier.
Best of both worlds would be an "Advanced Mode", where you can change all the settings, but for the average consumers, most settings may be hidden away, and make the whole thing "just work". Unless something goes wrong, or you want to tweak something, you may never even have to see all the settings and variables.
Actually, my Nexus S seems to have configured itself to use IMAP with my Yahoo account. At the very least, the server addresses say imap.mail.yahoo.com, and everything I do gets replicated on the servers at the next synchronization, including moving messages (finally, the newest email app can do that too) and deleting.
I have all my mail on my yahoo account, despite having a Google account as well. It's just that I created the Yahoo! one way back, around 1996-7, and have been using it ever since, and at this point, migrating over to Gmail would be too much of a hassle, and quite frankly, I like Yahoo!'s UI much more than Gmail's (folders, for example, easy-to-use hotkeys, etc).
I've seen the storage expansions, from 20 MB to 100, then 500, then 1GB, and finally infinite, the new UI and the "All-New Yahoo! Mail"-campaign, hell, I even have access to the Premium features like disposable addresses (something else Gmail lacks), without paying anything (though I don't know why, possibly as a reward for long-standing use?).
Regarding searches, I've long since switched over to Google, but for me, mail will always be on Yahoo!, even though I don't use anything else from the company any more.
Just because one uses/used AOL, there was no reason to hate them. That's stereotyping, just like if I said you're an overweight savant with glasses five centimeters thick, who live in their parents' converted basement and owns six hundred Star Wars and Star Trek action figures, just because you commented on Slashdot. Simply not true (I think). Even if it happened to be true in your case, it certainly isn't in mine, so the stereotype is already broken.
And if he does? You just have to be smart with what information you enter, and what you do with it, and there, no risk at all.
Seriously, there's no real reason to hate on Facebook, at the very least, not this time. As for the users, there's no reason to hate on them at all just because they use Facebook.
It's an in-universe thing. The city Doktor Sleepless is set in has its police duties contracted out, and people need to buy personal protection. Everyone wears multifunctional RFID-tags called Spyme (obvious pun is obvious), that carry personal information, including your protection status. If the nearby officer reads your tag and sees you haven't paid for this month, you might as well get eviscerated right in front of his eyes, and won't move a muscle.
The masks Sleepless gives to a gang jam these tags, and let the gang run free in the city with no fear of retribution.
V for Vendetta and Doktor Sleepless are pioneers of this. Doktor Sleepless's masks carry the added bonus of jamming all RFID tags in a limited area, letting the wearer act free.
The Promethean group of programs used for the Promethean Planet whiteboards comes to mind (which also includes tools for collaboration and student polling, that you may or may not use), or even Microsoft PowerPoint. Granted, they won't be a science-fiction movie-style 3D projection, but even such an anchor would be helpful to students.
If the school (district) has money to burn, an in-house team of graphics designers and coders/specialists may come into play too (though I have yet to see that), or they could buy pre-made content like you suggest. But in the first round, teachers would likely have to improvise with PowerPoint or proprietary software for the hardware (Promethean Planet, in my case). Which is a problem in itself: they lack the knowledge and skills to fully utilize the systems, leading to lower impact and efficiency, and less interest in using them. I suspect once a big investment is made, and skilled specialists brought on board, the impact of these systems would rapidly improve as teachers begin to use them...
You don't even need a lot of resources, you just need to utilize what you have effectively. Electronic aids are highly useful in most subjects, except for the most abstract ones, such as literature. Even in history, you can display a timeline of events, show tactical replays of battles, etc. When it comes to mathematics, the pros shine: projection allows the teacher to present a visual anchors for abstract concepts, such as functions and equations, so students can memorize methods much better.
No, they expect more originality in a photo. Which, as we all know, is worth a thousand words.
When can we have a perfectly secure, instantaneous communicator that even works across universes and can be carried by tiny humanoids?
Actually, it's only illegal if you commercialize it. You're free to make backups of copyrighted software and music for your own use, you may even be asked to provide proof of purchase or the original, but you can only be prosecuted if you profit from creating backups.
Actually, armies all over the world are considered sustainable by default. That is to say, they will always receive enough money to at least keep their equipment in working order, regardless of the economic state of the rest of the country, since they are the only thing that stands between the state and utter annihilation. If any state is at the point where they can't even allocate this much, then they are teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, and not in the way the Eurozone is doing nowadays...
Suggestion one: if your school has a football field, try implementing something like XKCD suggests. Who knows, maybe the kids will learn some perspective.
Suggestion two: convert them to near-infrared imaging, and let the physics teachers and the art club go nuts with them.
"Just and justifiable": Meaning those countries who obviously cannot benefit from the extracted resources (for example due to not having the infrastructure to refine and use them) get less or nothing, while those countries that put in the brunt of the work (those with manned space programs) get more.
The only way to invite participation is to acknowledge it, but the hands of future lawmakers are tied by the current Outer Space Agreement, which needs to be taken into account when creating the new framework, and which says that "Outer space and all celestial objects are the common province of all mankind".
So whether you think it's communism (which it isn't), or not, this is the only way it can go.
I'm not a US citizen, but I'd even donate money to the US government, if it meant they'd go public with the Cheyenne mountain complex...
Joke aside, both you and grandparent make a good point. However, the legal framework for space exploration/exploitation must be laid down first. The one we ahve right now is not exactly conducive, nor enforceable. We need one that lets nations take ownership/stewardship of extraterrestrial territories, an empowered UN authority to oversee spaceflight and extraterrestrial resource extraction, and shares the fruits of the exploration in a just and justifiable manner to encourage participation.
A question regarding the Crossfire capability: does it automatically enable in, say, a laptop (specifically, an ASUS K53TA) with an A4 APU and a Radeon 6550? Or is it actually the part where ATI Control asks me which graphics core it should use for a given application?
This. We had to sign the university copyright notice before submitting the thesis. It had three levels: no library access, access from on-site, free access (although this applied only to the electronic version, the print version was expected not to go into circulation of any kind).
Not build, although that's an option too (orbital assembly enables the construction of larger frames than possible to launch economically), rather just a refueling stop after breaking Earth orbit. After all, it takes a lot less delta-v to break orbit from Earth to Moon to Mars than it takes from Earth to Mars in one go...
The two routes are presented as exclusive, and only differ in the order of the targets. I say there's a third route: Moon, Mars+Asteroid, Beyond.
Landing on an asteroid is orders of magnitude more difficult than on the Moon or a planet: chances are a lot greater that you'll miss, and there's not a lot of possibilities for in-situ resource utilization, while return windows are possibly few and far between.
It would be safer and more profitable to go to an asteroid at the same time we're building presence on Mars. Hell, Mars has two asteroids for moons, perfect practice ground. The way I see this would be a hybrid of the two scenarios outlined: we deploy a deep space habitat, set up a permanently crewed base on the Moon as a 'pit stop', then take advantage of the lower gravity to launch towards Mars, and later, still from the Moon, towards an interesting asteroid. The first asteroid mission could even be the deployment of a thruster to send the asteroid into a more accessible and safer orbit as a starting point.
This would allow us the most time to test new technologies before plunging into the most dangerous missions during the exploration phase, then to leverage those technologies in the exploitation phase that inevitably (and rightly) follows.
There's one significant difference, though: in Yahoo's folders, putting a message in one removes it from the Inbox folder, the default landing space for all messages; while in Gmail, you just stick a Label on it, but the message itself remains visible in the Inbox too, which leads to clutter, even in the short term. I prefer my messages sorted thematically, so that I can only see the specific subset I want at any time. In Gmail, I can't make this distinction, I will always see all my messages in the Inbox, not just the ones I haven't applied a label to.
I'm 22, and my primary email address is, and has been ever since 1996, a Yahoo, and I find their email front end THE best on the net so far: keyboard shortcuts (even if they recently removed the ability to sort into folders with the number keys alone, they just require one more keypress), easily managed, can generate disposable 'decoy' addresses, and has proper folders instead of Gmail's "Labels" (which also have their merits, but I prefer folders).
I really hope they won't axe the Mail service, even if they dump everything else, that is one thing worth saving.
[...]an amendment to the laws will be made [...] China shall be aloud[sic] to mine asteroids peacefully as long as certain conditions are met.
Precisely what needs to be done. As it stands, the Outer Space Treaty forbids this. What I argue for is an overhaul of the treaty: the private sector needs to be included into the framework, and the whole definition of the legal status of outer space needs to be set in that metaphorical stone, and a sub-type that's immune to the green paper (there is such, see, for example, humanitarian laws).
Then, under the newly reworked treaty, all nations may begin mining, but there's going to be one serious caveat: the resources mined must be shared, at least part of them, among all nations. This comes from the current treaty, which will forever leave its mark on space law, and includes the passage that "Outer space is the common province of all mankind". This cannot be erased, and by extension, applies to the extracted resources too.
It can't really make exceptions, given that the basic framework is already in place, and in international law, you can't contradict an already established practice. Once it's set, it's set in metaphorical stone.
I'd quite like to see how it would pan out though, just not in this scenario. If the slit-eyes screw up, I'm going to have to add Iron Maiden's "When Two Worlds Collide" to my life's soundtrack, and I don't want that, no matter how awesome the song is...