Here where? Based on Slashdot generally being US-ian, do you mean in the United States? This might end up being a very useful random factoid for later retrieval.
Would you say that the specific state this legal action occurs in has a large or a small influence on the proceedings? I can't imagine something like this going higher than state level.
I think it's because they - the "old men", the gnomes of Zurich, the PNAC advocates, Bob Page and Walton Simons et al - actually do realize what freedom of speech and the 4th Estate and human rights mean in terms of impeding their personal agendas, and so it isn't in their interests to empower or uphold it.
These autonomous sentries are a lot easier to spot and deactivate...
Therein lies one of the reasons land-mines (and by extension, IEDs) won't go away. For a fraction of the price of a single turret, a third world military can give a superior land force a real headache. Land-mines are an immense bitch to detect and neutralize reliably and at speed. I do look forward to the day that whole game changes completely. I'm sure there's some quantum weirdness-based sensor technology around about the time quantum computers finally work that will make land-mines and IEDs obsolete.
Whoever invents the flawless land-mine/IED detector should immediately receive a Nobel Prize.
Then it's time to look forward to the guy who discovers the Holtzmann effect, allowing personal shield technology that stops bullets and shrapnel, that causes a localized anti-matter/nuclear explosion when hit with coherent light above a minimum critical wattage and forces soldiers to fight hand-to-hand again. I don't know what prize to give that guy but it better be awesome.
I sincerely hope you remember to extract the botnet details/logins/addresses and the passwords for his own computers from him or at the very least get him to send out the kill code before you finish him.
Just a shot in the dark, but when you have a site like WikiLieaks, there's going to be some greasing of the palms I'd imagine. If I were him, a good portion of that capital immediately went into a "Plan B" or even a "Dead Man's Trigger" scenario for the very reasons you point out in your second paragraph.
This fits right in with the hints that Singapore is currently in the process of redeveloping itself as a data center haven.
It's not a bad idea. Highly educated workforce, stable government that is business-friendly, an economy that's kept it's head above water in both a recent recession and the Asian currency crisis. It's also in a prime geographical location, sitting between India, Australia, HK, China, Korea and Japan, plus all the other Asian countries yet to have their internet infrastructure mature.
Disadvantage? Sure. There's a "little firewall of Singapore" that slows everything down and screws up certain services that don't work through a proxy. But that will change. The latest advertising gimmicks from Singapore-based internet providers now have premium tiers that have "guaranteed overseas speeds". It's quite funny really.
I'm replying to AC, so I know it's very likely a waste of time, but in case anybody comes across this comment, I must say that jokes aside, China does have a pretty vibrant game dev scene.
Unfortunately it is extreme bias - lingual mostly - that means no one in the "West" sees Chinese games. Just go to any Popular Bookstore in Singapore, head to the games section, and you'll see a dozen or so Mandarin language games that include a 3 Kingdoms clone, an MMO called Granado Espada that is exclusively Far East Asian in distribution, and a ton of Chinese RPGs.
The bias is a real shame because there is this absolutely awesome 3 Kingdoms collectible card game which was specifically designed with an arcade machine laid out like a tabletop board game. You place your cards on it according to the rules, the table somehow recognises the cards and your cards' units appear on a screen in real-time. Moving your armies consists of physically moving the card around the tabletop, pro rated for that unit's speed. Special moves are done with card gestures like describing a tight circle or repeatedly "bashing" the location of an enemy unit where you believe it appears on the tabletop. It's genius! I think Magic: The Gathering would be absolutely amazing if it had this variation.
I hope whoever thought we needed a series of Stargate: Relationship Drama and No Action got fired..
They could stay with the Drama but No Action formula, but ship over the writers who do the South Korean dramas which have literally-frothing-at-the-mouth rabid fans across all of Asia, language barrier notwithstanding, and always seem to be able to tell their story within a single season of 20 or so episodes.
There must be something universal in their tropes or stories that hooks people across all cultural barriers and it might just be a good story as well. I mean, it's not like the actors and actresses are any prettier or any better at acting, and they achieve a lot with just a crew set up in a soundstage apartment, office and the occasional exterior shot.
Heck, maybe even do something crazy like commission the manga-ka who wrote Kimagure Orange Road or even Sailor Moon to write a story outline and flesh it out for TV. Couldn't possibly end up worse than what's already on air.
I'm imagining a Tim Curry as an aged Tuxedo Moon, taking on an apprentice to pass on the super secret skills of his "Magic Tackle" and his "Mask with Lazors" and a new female guest star every week to be saved with their massive phallic starship of "mysterious orifice".....oh and origin. Every episode is "We're gonna die, let's have sex...OH! The ship saved us....sorry, gotta dump you now..."
Found the reference in case anyone was interested: It was BBC's Forum podcast on 30th August 2010 and the study was by French neuroscientist Stanislas Duran (not 100% about the spelling of his name)
Oh to have perfect recall! I would have provided a link.
There was a BBC radio show called Forum that interviewed someone using MRI to study the relationship between the written language and the brain. He refines your statement by saying that oral communication not only developed very early, but that we are also genetically hardwired to have it. Every known human community - no matter how primitive or isolated - has a spoken language and an oral tradition.
This was indirectly supported when the MRIs showed not one but two parts of the brain involved in the activity of reading. It was a part of the visual cortex that dealt with pattern-finding that then communicated with the part of the brain that dealt with oral communication. That link does not exist unless the owner of the brain is born and raised in a literate society. In an illiterate subject, those two parts of the brain do not talk each other when presented with writing.
You see, there isn't actually a part of the brain that deals with "reading". It's actually 2 parts of the brain - one for finding patterns in the environment or nature and the other for creating meaningful noises with syntax - co-opted into something neither was actually designed for.
The concept of an alphabet, the written word or a formalized system of pictoglyphs that actually communicate more than just sacred dates or gods is in comparison, not at all as inevitable. It took ages before the "cornstalk slashes on clay" of Sumeria actually became something more.
Kind of creepy that a Google Image search of "Terry Norman" shows only three very small photos that might be him and nothing else. Mostly just text devoted to him and his role but no idea what he looks like today. Wikipedia article says he was tracked down to Bangor, Maine in 2006.
Part of me thinks the interface between you and the device needs to be more... interactive for lack of a better word.
The word you're looking for is feedback. I took the course in Cybernetics at Reading and the first year pretty much revolved entirely around feedback systems. The online dictionary definition of cybernetics waffles on and on and fails to mention that feedback is a huge part of it. It sort of sideways behind-your-back refers to it using the term "control", but unless you are an engineer and understand the word "control" the way an engineer does, that vague reference flies right past you.
What you just described is a direct and perfect example. Relevant from item 11 onwards (John McEnroe could arguably be the Shatner of tennis while no one gives a flying sugary toroid what fancy names we give for non-fat non-dairy lattes).
FRIENDLY WARNING: The Mindset List will make some of you suddenly realise just how out of phase you are to current popular culture.
That said, I don't feel bad at all that the young'uns totally missed out on getting to enjoy Heather Locklear in her youthful, blonde glory in TJ Hooker. I think we're even getting to the point where Bon Jovi aren't even relevant anymore, so except for showing up occasionally in the tabloids in connection to her ex-husband, she's pretty much completely off the pop culture radar.
But have you seen how much a bear poops in a single no. 2 session? You wouldn't inconvenience the morning joggers, you'd block the sidewalk!>/p>
What about winter? Hibernation? Unless you went for one of the tropical bears, like a Sun Bear....but I hear they aren't too aggressive. And the whole endangered species list and animal trades acts might be a little bit of a hassle.
No please, don't say such cool things knowing it will never be true.
Seriously, with Google's wallet, you could actually pay for a decent writer to rescue the farce that is Tekken. Don't get me wrong, I love the game as a fighter and it works quite nice as a Double Dragon style beat-em-up. But with those amazing cutscenes...it looked beautiful but they were re-donkey-lous.
Nina is what...40? 50 years old now? But she's the sex symbol and so some cryogenic-hibernation handwavium keeps her in her 20s. Paul doesn't even have that excuse. He should be looking as dodgy as Dolph Lundgren by now. Weirdly, Heihachi makes sense. He's a centenarian by now. All the bad mojo or something.
The various war gods they fight are just lame. It's approaching SNK territory. First was the Aztec-ish Ogre. Then Heihachi's dad with the ridiculous facial hair. Most recently some weird Egyptian beast made of ice that definitely suffered from SNK Boss Syndrome as well as SNK lameness.
Ultimately it would be nice to hire some fresh creative non-Japanese brains to come in and sweep away the tropes and stereotypes that stained the latest release. Alisa and Lars were irritating and lazy additions to the roster, Lars being a decent re-hash of Heihachi karate (who'da'thunk the old man liked Swedish blondes). The robot-girl however was getting into Darkstalkers tongue-in-cheek territory which I can't tell is intentional or not.
How do I ask Google to add Klingon to their list of supported languages in Google Translate?
You could just be getting your cat to walk back and forth across your keyboard. There are definitely Trekkies among Google's ranks that could spend their "20% private project time" adding it to the service.
You know coding is quite a heavy thing to just throw at a kid. Him being from the "gratification-right-now" generation will make him quit long before anything cool can be done with coding.
How about leading him into mods? You can get results very quickly and pretty much for free after an initial investment. Get him a copy of Oblivion GOTY or Fallout 3, introduce him to TESNexus.com or fallout3nexus.com, download Blender, some of the easily available scripting wikis and forums and away he goes.
He can have a replica of his favourite Final Fantasy weapon in a couple of days, usable in-game. There are at least a dozen mods of Cloud's Buster sword he can reverse engineer to teach himself the shapes and the textures and how to make a file usable by the game engine. Immediate reward. May make him plug at it long enough to begin modeling NPCs and elaborate armour.
Slashdot Mirror
Here where? Based on Slashdot generally being US-ian, do you mean in the United States? This might end up being a very useful random factoid for later retrieval.
Would you say that the specific state this legal action occurs in has a large or a small influence on the proceedings? I can't imagine something like this going higher than state level.
I think it's because they - the "old men", the gnomes of Zurich, the PNAC advocates, Bob Page and Walton Simons et al - actually do realize what freedom of speech and the 4th Estate and human rights mean in terms of impeding their personal agendas, and so it isn't in their interests to empower or uphold it.
I recommend this article by zunguzungu wordpress showing that all the attention has been wrongly directed at Assange. It is a classic "look over there, that's more interesting!' distraction. Also the best independent personal commentary on this whole Wikileaks mess that I've ever had the pleasure of reading.
These autonomous sentries are a lot easier to spot and deactivate...
Therein lies one of the reasons land-mines (and by extension, IEDs) won't go away. For a fraction of the price of a single turret, a third world military can give a superior land force a real headache. Land-mines are an immense bitch to detect and neutralize reliably and at speed. I do look forward to the day that whole game changes completely. I'm sure there's some quantum weirdness-based sensor technology around about the time quantum computers finally work that will make land-mines and IEDs obsolete.
Whoever invents the flawless land-mine/IED detector should immediately receive a Nobel Prize.
Then it's time to look forward to the guy who discovers the Holtzmann effect, allowing personal shield technology that stops bullets and shrapnel, that causes a localized anti-matter/nuclear explosion when hit with coherent light above a minimum critical wattage and forces soldiers to fight hand-to-hand again. I don't know what prize to give that guy but it better be awesome.
Kurgan-Batman. The very thought of it...
I sincerely hope you remember to extract the botnet details/logins/addresses and the passwords for his own computers from him or at the very least get him to send out the kill code before you finish him.
Just a shot in the dark, but when you have a site like WikiLieaks, there's going to be some greasing of the palms I'd imagine. If I were him, a good portion of that capital immediately went into a "Plan B" or even a "Dead Man's Trigger" scenario for the very reasons you point out in your second paragraph.
This fits right in with the hints that Singapore is currently in the process of redeveloping itself as a data center haven.
It's not a bad idea. Highly educated workforce, stable government that is business-friendly, an economy that's kept it's head above water in both a recent recession and the Asian currency crisis. It's also in a prime geographical location, sitting between India, Australia, HK, China, Korea and Japan, plus all the other Asian countries yet to have their internet infrastructure mature.
Disadvantage? Sure. There's a "little firewall of Singapore" that slows everything down and screws up certain services that don't work through a proxy. But that will change. The latest advertising gimmicks from Singapore-based internet providers now have premium tiers that have "guaranteed overseas speeds". It's quite funny really.
I'm replying to AC, so I know it's very likely a waste of time, but in case anybody comes across this comment, I must say that jokes aside, China does have a pretty vibrant game dev scene.
Unfortunately it is extreme bias - lingual mostly - that means no one in the "West" sees Chinese games. Just go to any Popular Bookstore in Singapore, head to the games section, and you'll see a dozen or so Mandarin language games that include a 3 Kingdoms clone, an MMO called Granado Espada that is exclusively Far East Asian in distribution, and a ton of Chinese RPGs.
The bias is a real shame because there is this absolutely awesome 3 Kingdoms collectible card game which was specifically designed with an arcade machine laid out like a tabletop board game. You place your cards on it according to the rules, the table somehow recognises the cards and your cards' units appear on a screen in real-time. Moving your armies consists of physically moving the card around the tabletop, pro rated for that unit's speed. Special moves are done with card gestures like describing a tight circle or repeatedly "bashing" the location of an enemy unit where you believe it appears on the tabletop. It's genius! I think Magic: The Gathering would be absolutely amazing if it had this variation.
I hope whoever thought we needed a series of Stargate: Relationship Drama and No Action got fired..
They could stay with the Drama but No Action formula, but ship over the writers who do the South Korean dramas which have literally-frothing-at-the-mouth rabid fans across all of Asia, language barrier notwithstanding, and always seem to be able to tell their story within a single season of 20 or so episodes.
There must be something universal in their tropes or stories that hooks people across all cultural barriers and it might just be a good story as well. I mean, it's not like the actors and actresses are any prettier or any better at acting, and they achieve a lot with just a crew set up in a soundstage apartment, office and the occasional exterior shot.
Heck, maybe even do something crazy like commission the manga-ka who wrote Kimagure Orange Road or even Sailor Moon to write a story outline and flesh it out for TV. Couldn't possibly end up worse than what's already on air.
I'm imagining a Tim Curry as an aged Tuxedo Moon, taking on an apprentice to pass on the super secret skills of his "Magic Tackle" and his "Mask with Lazors" and a new female guest star every week to be saved with their massive phallic starship of "mysterious orifice".....oh and origin. Every episode is "We're gonna die, let's have sex...OH! The ship saved us....sorry, gotta dump you now..."
Offtopic but whatever: Could Norcs be the foul progeny of Northmen and Orcs?
Found the reference in case anyone was interested: It was BBC's Forum podcast on 30th August 2010 and the study was by French neuroscientist Stanislas Duran (not 100% about the spelling of his name)
Oh to have perfect recall! I would have provided a link.
There was a BBC radio show called Forum that interviewed someone using MRI to study the relationship between the written language and the brain. He refines your statement by saying that oral communication not only developed very early, but that we are also genetically hardwired to have it. Every known human community - no matter how primitive or isolated - has a spoken language and an oral tradition.
This was indirectly supported when the MRIs showed not one but two parts of the brain involved in the activity of reading. It was a part of the visual cortex that dealt with pattern-finding that then communicated with the part of the brain that dealt with oral communication. That link does not exist unless the owner of the brain is born and raised in a literate society. In an illiterate subject, those two parts of the brain do not talk each other when presented with writing.
You see, there isn't actually a part of the brain that deals with "reading". It's actually 2 parts of the brain - one for finding patterns in the environment or nature and the other for creating meaningful noises with syntax - co-opted into something neither was actually designed for.
The concept of an alphabet, the written word or a formalized system of pictoglyphs that actually communicate more than just sacred dates or gods is in comparison, not at all as inevitable. It took ages before the "cornstalk slashes on clay" of Sumeria actually became something more.
Kind of creepy that a Google Image search of "Terry Norman" shows only three very small photos that might be him and nothing else. Mostly just text devoted to him and his role but no idea what he looks like today. Wikipedia article says he was tracked down to Bangor, Maine in 2006.
The word you're looking for is feedback. I took the course in Cybernetics at Reading and the first year pretty much revolved entirely around feedback systems. The online dictionary definition of cybernetics waffles on and on and fails to mention that feedback is a huge part of it. It sort of sideways behind-your-back refers to it using the term "control", but unless you are an engineer and understand the word "control" the way an engineer does, that vague reference flies right past you.
Agreed. Banning or criminalizing this app is like trying to cure the disease by just treating the (one) symptom that betrayed it's presence.
ADS-B itself and the ground systems that use it in an official capacity need to be updated for a more paranoid world.
Some IRL Sith Lords find your lack of faith disturbing. That ticklish feeling in your throat? That's not a cough. That's a warning.
Ever heard of The Mindset List?
What you just described is a direct and perfect example. Relevant from item 11 onwards (John McEnroe could arguably be the Shatner of tennis while no one gives a flying sugary toroid what fancy names we give for non-fat non-dairy lattes).
FRIENDLY WARNING: The Mindset List will make some of you suddenly realise just how out of phase you are to current popular culture.
That said, I don't feel bad at all that the young'uns totally missed out on getting to enjoy Heather Locklear in her youthful, blonde glory in TJ Hooker. I think we're even getting to the point where Bon Jovi aren't even relevant anymore, so except for showing up occasionally in the tabloids in connection to her ex-husband, she's pretty much completely off the pop culture radar.
What? No Mark Zuckerberg?
But have you seen how much a bear poops in a single no. 2 session? You wouldn't inconvenience the morning joggers, you'd block the sidewalk!>/p>
What about winter? Hibernation? Unless you went for one of the tropical bears, like a Sun Bear....but I hear they aren't too aggressive. And the whole endangered species list and animal trades acts might be a little bit of a hassle.
No please, don't say such cool things knowing it will never be true.
Seriously, with Google's wallet, you could actually pay for a decent writer to rescue the farce that is Tekken. Don't get me wrong, I love the game as a fighter and it works quite nice as a Double Dragon style beat-em-up. But with those amazing cutscenes...it looked beautiful but they were re-donkey-lous.
Nina is what...40? 50 years old now? But she's the sex symbol and so some cryogenic-hibernation handwavium keeps her in her 20s. Paul doesn't even have that excuse. He should be looking as dodgy as Dolph Lundgren by now. Weirdly, Heihachi makes sense. He's a centenarian by now. All the bad mojo or something.
The various war gods they fight are just lame. It's approaching SNK territory. First was the Aztec-ish Ogre. Then Heihachi's dad with the ridiculous facial hair. Most recently some weird Egyptian beast made of ice that definitely suffered from SNK Boss Syndrome as well as SNK lameness.
Ultimately it would be nice to hire some fresh creative non-Japanese brains to come in and sweep away the tropes and stereotypes that stained the latest release. Alisa and Lars were irritating and lazy additions to the roster, Lars being a decent re-hash of Heihachi karate (who'da'thunk the old man liked Swedish blondes). The robot-girl however was getting into Darkstalkers tongue-in-cheek territory which I can't tell is intentional or not.
That dude's soul patch is unscientific....
How do I ask Google to add Klingon to their list of supported languages in Google Translate?
You could just be getting your cat to walk back and forth across your keyboard. There are definitely Trekkies among Google's ranks that could spend their "20% private project time" adding it to the service.
re-boot once approved software is re-installed.
I don't like the use of this word "approved" anymore.
My Swedish keyboard uses the same key-press. Norwegian too. I'd imagine all European QWERTY keyboards would be the same.
Not sure about French AZERTY though....any Romantic slashdotters care to confirm?
You know coding is quite a heavy thing to just throw at a kid. Him being from the "gratification-right-now" generation will make him quit long before anything cool can be done with coding.
How about leading him into mods? You can get results very quickly and pretty much for free after an initial investment. Get him a copy of Oblivion GOTY or Fallout 3, introduce him to TESNexus.com or fallout3nexus.com, download Blender, some of the easily available scripting wikis and forums and away he goes.
He can have a replica of his favourite Final Fantasy weapon in a couple of days, usable in-game. There are at least a dozen mods of Cloud's Buster sword he can reverse engineer to teach himself the shapes and the textures and how to make a file usable by the game engine. Immediate reward. May make him plug at it long enough to begin modeling NPCs and elaborate armour.