Opera also has the images control down on the right hand end of the status bar. It also has the option of selecting 'cached images' option. Very useful.
No Script is a pain. I don't think it is a good recomendation. One that hasn't been mentioned here is flash block, since alot of bandwidth heavy sites pimp flash items it'll replace each with button to click. Also remember to install the filterset updater firefox extension along with adblock plus.
Both Opera and Firefox allow you to type about:config and get into the the low-level settings of the browser, many of which will take effect straight away. (an awesome feature, every application should have this). I suggest manually adjusting your browser memory and disk caches to the largest ammount you can get away with. turn of everything with 'prefetch' in the name.
{stuff to look for in Firefox 'about:config'
browser.cache.disk.capacity 128000 or 256000, bigger numbers work ok but too big may cause issues.
Check that the following is set to true:
browser.cache.disk enable = true,
browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl = true (but this not secure)
network.http.use-cache = true
Set value to false:
network.prefetch-next = false
network.http.keep-alive = false (may save you just a little traffic) also: network.http.proxy.keep-alive = false
Or else just use the below settings (firefox's default is 6)
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server = 2
}
So sure, you can block all kinds of stuff from downloading and cache/proxy tricks, but there is one overlooked trick, and that's hitting the stop button as soon as you have what you want to see on the page. It should stop anything more downloading.
Seriously, how much of the code of fedora 9 is redundant?. Your average distro is a big collection of gpl code from various smaller projects, and I assume the 10 billion figure is the calculated value of the entire code base. Cutting down on outright duplicated effort and cutting out things that can be left to 3rd parties to develop for your product you could code from scratch an equivalent OS for MUCH less. The only part that would be somewhat unshrinkable would be the kernel, but even that i be simplified.
So cutting off all the fat, I think you could build something close to fedora 9 for under $1bn at full price. Just look at how much functionality can be packed into some of the mini distributions going around, when you choose just to have one browser, one mail client etc etc. That's a clue.
A flaw in the code is not necessary to take over windows PCs. Back in the day [others not me] used to scan IP ranges for people with file sharing enabled out to the internet [i deny i ever did this hehe]. I must stress it's stupidly simple to inadvertently leave your windows network and shares wide open to the world. It takes someone to enable file sharing on the ICS host, enable it in the firewall on both network adapters. There are no warnings to the user that this will expose any shares to the world. [Add to that the number of blank passwords to administrator accounts out there:S]. Even today I rekon 1 in 40 windows machines on a broadband cable/adsl [and not behind a port blocking router] is vunerable in this way. Few ISPs in my area are clued up to blocking the appropriate ports it seems. All it would take is a simple pop up window if you try to enable file sharing on your internet facing network adaptor. (I wonder would this put a big dent in the botnet population?)
Personally, I don't actually care too much, everyone should have their equipment behind a decent dedicated firewall end of story. Relying on a firewall in the same OS was always going to be a less than ideal solution, let alone one by microsoft.
While I get this is a good way to sneak beneficial nutrients into the diets of people who may otherwise have no interest nor motivation in seeking them, I have one problem with it: Considering alcohol consumption is a risk factor for many types of cancer (and being loaded with empty calories contributing to other health problems), this better be a no/low-alcohol beer or there may be no net benefit to consuming this versus not drinking any beer at all. Ok sure, one standard drink per day has not been shown to be a problem. This is not the behaviour of your typical beer affictionado. There may be a trend to drink more, just because it's perceived to be healthy.
I do think reservatol has huge potential though, I'm sure Ray Kurzweil is already taking it along with his 250 pills a day. I also agree with finding feasible ways to improve the nutrition of existing food products rather than changing the habits of millions of consumers (which requires delivering boot to ass of corporates over their marketing amongst other things).
Yet, why not investigate economic ways to put it in milk or processed grains? Hell why not bundle it along with xylitol and omega 3 in things we eat commonly? We could all but wipe out everything from tooth decay to heart disease, to dementia in one go.
The experts agree the tech world will be somewhat insulated from the financial market eating itself. We hope. Given that, if consumers no longer have to cash to burn on over priced iStuff that supports the big silicon, then they will start looking for free alternatives. If anything there will be a gravity drawing consumers away from things that cost money to things that don't. I'd not be surprised to see a influx during a depression of participants to the Web 2.0 which would mitigate loss of Ad revenue that supports these services.
As for open systems and their development, I think many miffed, out of work programmers might jump on the FOSS bandwagon in a recession - and consumers who can't afford expensive broken operating systems may pirate an older version or pick up linux to put on a older machine. Oh and watch for used goods markets gaining strength.
This is a very common observation on slashdot with any DRM, and i've often pointed it out myself before someone beats me to it (darn you). Interestingly I don't see this much in the blogsphere.
Having worked in a (closed long time ago) games store buying and selling used (and selling new) PC and console games, I can say the used games outsold new full price games 10 to 1 and we made more money off them for sure. We blacklisted Steam based games amongst others that had DRM that blocked second hand transfers. We were eventually instructed not to re-sell, but to send of trade-ins likely to their desctruction. Who by, I'm not saying. But I guess the idea was to get unwanted second hand copies off the market. We of course had regular purchasers of used games who would return them a little later as trade-ins or sell, we did what we could to prevent piracy (we wouldn't buy back a game we'd obviously sold, but they could pull the barcode off or something) that was a contributor to the downfall of that store.
Portal would be a very interesting game to play multiplayer. I see no reason why it wouldn't. There would need to be a few changes but it adds a interesting dimension being able to, for example, stick a portal high on a ceiling, and to place another around a corner for a player to step on...
I'm not saying it because I'm a optimist. But I think life is highly abundant wherever it can exist it will exist. I'd like to point out that for billions of years there was no multi-cellular life on earth, and once a few cells got stuck together it's only been a few hundred million to get to here. We could have, infact been here 3-3.1 billion years ago if conditions were right. So I'd place money on the upper bound, but it depends if we're talking sentient intelligence species you could have a philosophical conversation with or a genuine technological civilization such as our own.
So if there are between 5x10-7 and 10,000 civilizations in our galaxy, where are they? The answer I think will be interesting - we simply do not know what happens to intelligent species after they evolve. The problem is with the fallacy known as the fermi paradox is that there are far to many plausible reasons why intellegent species may rise and fall, or simply decide not to show up despite having plenty of time to do it.
I consider it vastly more likely that the majority of sentient creatures in the universe have no hands or similar useful appendages and therefore never acquire technology. I reason that planets with oceans (like our own right up to mega planets with water oceans 100s of km deep)would be vastly more abundant platforms for evolution of life in the universe than land area on earthlike planets.
If we could go out in a billion star ships and turn over every rock in the galaxy maybe we'd find most sentient life will be something like a whale or dolphin.
We seem to forget what wanders about on land contemplating financial markets and marvelling at smart phones, is only a vunerably small portion of the bio mass on this rock, and here the oceans are ruled by Cetaceans who in our own example have been here longer than us, and have had some of the highly developed brain structures they share with us millions of years longer, they used to populate hundreds of millions.. but we've eaten most of them). They'd probably persist after cataclysms that would wipe us out. (Octopii and squid are also relatively intellegent too, there's a hint that the format of a ET might be) So with the majority of ET life being underwater there's little opportunity for tool making by hypothetical aquatic beings, let alone harnessing technologies we have done - which all largely stem from the ability to make fire and bootstrap from there. Consider that the majority of these oceans would be lidded by ice (like Europa) and these types of environments will vastly outnumber earth-like planets in that perfect habitable zone around the right kind of stable star.
So considering planets with habitable land area, in a stable orbit around a stable star, avoiding bombardment or supernova sterilization long enough for life to make the leap to multicellular and upwards, are a rarity - it becomes worse, there are still reasons why ETs may not show up.
Life could evolve at the bottom of a big gravity well -- a much larger planet with such an escape velocity that makes space travel difficult. The planet could have permanent cloud cover, thus the beings inhabiting it never see the sky and never wonder what's out there. They could also be very large like elephants, and therefore won't be inclined to be building flying machines. They could also have a geology absent of fossil fuels, no easy fuel for an industrial revolution. They may just refine a peaceful culture that's stable over longer periods of time and not particularly adventurous.
They may also not develop the right kind of intelligence. Or they may be pathologically self destructive. Our desire to explore and exploit is derived from our ancestors nomadic lifestyle. Without this background we may never have dreamed up the idea of exploring beyond our own world. So who's to stay an intelligent species would inevitably bother beaming signals out to space let alone traveling?
On earth, every single rock we look under, every tiny
In some ways it'd be stupid not to include a kill switch. The increasing power of smart phones means we'll be soon seeing rogue applications. This won't stop crapware of course, but at least it gives an option to stop malware type apps dead their it's tracks. The existence of the kill switch may not really be a deterrent to spyware houses looking to exploit the mobile platform, but hey it's something.
Hopefully this is used well to cull dodgy troublesome and harmful applications from the ecosystem because the trade off is a potential for abuse of power, but google isn't evil... right?
Interesting, why the arbitrary version target of 5.0-8.0? Back in the 1990s they may have suggested starting at 2.0 or 3.0 to do the same thing and imply some product maturity...
Thus I predict that by 2020, senior management types will be asking development leads to start at version 15-18 as this dodges the stigma of 10.0 releases.
99.8% of individual gamers... but what percentage of sales?
Assuming blindly that statistic has some fact to it (which it doesn't), I would bet that 2/1000 gamers outspend the average for the group 10 to 1 at least. Considering anyone who's bought a game once in the last 10 years but is still playing it once every 6 months is probably considered a gamer... you could believe it if I sad those few gamers who care about DRM are very important customers.
Buy a game and you have small but real chance of going to DRM hell. You also cannot sell your game second hand, and after a while it will no longer be supported and you won't even be able to use it. Add to that DRM has a higher chance of causing the game to fail completely when you try to use it on future operating system versions (or even just driver versions).
Download a cracked game and it's yours for ever and you can install it anywhere anytime. You're also incredibly unlikely to ever get caught.
I've also come to realise that DRM is not about piracy, at all. No it's not. Infact it's obvious: It's only about shutting down the second hand games market. If a geeky 13 year old pirates $1,000 worth of software, there are no real sales lost because it is something he wouldn't have otherwise purchased (or been able to). But because every second hand purchase wholly or partly replaces a brand new sale. This money is denied from the bottom line of the big companies.
A sucess story like Steam has not only completely prevented the second hand trade of games like CS and HL2 but also prevented these games from being pirated. The pawn broker I used to work at had blacklisted a number of these games from their shelves because of the number of refunds we had to give out. (I also notice you cannot hire these games in the few stores that hire out PC games. Interestingly 2 or 3 of the rental stores I know of that have PC games haven't procured anything new since the end of 2006, is there a war on PC Game rentals too?).
Any industry would LOVE to be able to legislate out the second hand market for it's produce, and believe me they do try. But they'd never get away with it, we'd be rioting in the streets. Yet this is what is happening here.
I'm not 100% certain either, but I'm fairly sure if the noise sounds quieter then less energy is being imparted on the little hairs that sensse sound inside your cochlea.
If you have two waves canceling each other out at a specific point, if you measure at that point you won't detect or be able to gather excess energy from the sound wave.
People using noise canceling headphones in place of ear plugs while working with heavy machinery and I'm not aware of anyone doing extra damage to their hearing this way.
Gosh, I thought, when using chrome, it's almost as if it's a early Beta.
Which is exactly what it is. Although the google definition of Beta is a little different (Heck I'd say it's more honest considering what some other companies do with shipping products too soon)
Clearly google released chrome as it was to test the waters. They don't need to have a browser on the market, so they won't forge ahead with it unless a big positive reaction reveals it would be worth while.
Gallium is a metal, liquid at room temperature that attacks aluminum and its alloys. It is not a significantly restricted substance and could be dangerous on an aircraft. I believe mercury also attacks aluminum.
Jupiter has density of 1.326 gcm. So thats 28.6416 for this object. Just to be pedantic.
This kind of density boggles the mind. What could have this density? Tungsten, Platninum? Osmium is not getting close.
Considering the mind boggling surface gravity of a object like this, we don't know how many materials behave under incredible pressure, for example the centre core of the earth, while largely iron, is more like crystal. The core of jupiter might be shrouded in metallic hydrogen. Indeed we understand very little about such conditions. Density could be largely due to immense compression of materials that would be otherwise less dense?
Realisticly this will just turn out be a core of a hypermetallic brown dwarf or something that has had it's outer layers stripped.
The kid used only one proxy. Not too smart, oh well. This would have been very interesting if he'd taken reasonable steps to cover his tracks. Using Tor for example. I would really have love to see that put to the test in something like this.
I don't understand the assumption that a submarine-aircraft would have to be made heavy and thus be too heavy to fly. Therefore the idea is suggested to be not likely to work at all or will be too compromised to be good at either role.
Rather than resisting water pressure with a heavy pressure hull, it is only necessary to equalize pressure internally and externally. Also consider that humans can readily withstand pressure to a depth of 20-30 metres (just don't try surface in a hurry).
It then becomes not necessary to reinforce all but a few sensitive systems against pressure at depth. That said it's not as simple as taking a F-22 and filling the avionics full of scotch guard and drilling some drain holes. But landing say a helicopter on water, flooding it and having it perform adequately underwater is not a monumental engineering challenge.
In such a craft you could still have a small pressure vessel for crew and sensitive systems, while the rest of the vechicle is filled with ballast water and the resulting compressed air. We are still talking about weight penalties in additional systems and design, so it's still a vehicle that's neither a good aircraft nor a good submarine.
I also think Darpa would be better off with a some VTOL design considering the difficulties in taking off from water. Something like a submarine apache would be quite an achievement. I'm forgetting that the F-22 design is VTOL capable, now that would be a scary machine for any enemy to go up against.
Shoot me for having a higher opinion of this place than I should, but I disagree, there are bright and influential people contributing here.
Alot of contributors here are fairly clued up and quite a few are in positions of influence in the IT world. There's probably old greybeards here that contributed to building the internet back in the day.
So if that's the consensus of opinion on Slashdot, it's not dogma, it's pretty well rooted in expert opinion.
I would point out that people attracted to games will be more mentally active and less of a cognitive couch-potato that the average person. Mentally active people are more likely to have will power to get off the couch. Active mind leads to an active body, and vice versa.
Personally, between my mentally challenging job, rss feed overload and too much gaming, I find TV not only to be boring but I can't bloody sit still long enough to watch lowest common-denominator anyway. I could imagine if I was a fat sloth I would have a corresponding pattern in what mental activities I do.
A good session of hard core online gaming must spike your adrenaline, as well as dopamine and other enjoyable neurotransmitters. And judging by the way people behave the competition must get some testosterone going too.
People also don't tend to eat while playing games, it's kinda hard... er... although caffeine and sugar consumption must be a confounding factor here.
Eating [|mindless face stuffing] in front of TV is of a common filthy habit. (Is that a result of being exposed to junk food advertising - I often wonder if there is a direct psychological link between seeing food on TV and a corresponding increase in likelyhood of desiring a snack. Then I think, well duh of course, that's the idea)
Slashdot Mirror
Opera also has the images control down on the right hand end of the status bar. It also has the option of selecting 'cached images' option. Very useful.
No Script is a pain. I don't think it is a good recomendation. One that hasn't been mentioned here is flash block, since alot of bandwidth heavy sites pimp flash items it'll replace each with button to click. Also remember to install the filterset updater firefox extension along with adblock plus.
Flash blocker linkage: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433
Both Opera and Firefox allow you to type about:config and get into the the low-level settings of the browser, many of which will take effect straight away. (an awesome feature, every application should have this). I suggest manually adjusting your browser memory and disk caches to the largest ammount you can get away with. turn of everything with 'prefetch' in the name.
{stuff to look for in Firefox 'about:config'
browser.cache.disk.capacity 128000 or 256000, bigger numbers work ok but too big may cause issues.
Check that the following is set to true:
browser.cache.disk enable = true,
browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl = true (but this not secure)
network.http.use-cache = true
Set value to false:
network.prefetch-next = false
network.http.keep-alive = false (may save you just a little traffic) also: network.http.proxy.keep-alive = false Or else just use the below settings (firefox's default is 6)
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server = 2 }
So sure, you can block all kinds of stuff from downloading and cache/proxy tricks, but there is one overlooked trick, and that's hitting the stop button as soon as you have what you want to see on the page. It should stop anything more downloading.
Seriously, how much of the code of fedora 9 is redundant?. Your average distro is a big collection of gpl code from various smaller projects, and I assume the 10 billion figure is the calculated value of the entire code base. Cutting down on outright duplicated effort and cutting out things that can be left to 3rd parties to develop for your product you could code from scratch an equivalent OS for MUCH less. The only part that would be somewhat unshrinkable would be the kernel, but even that i be simplified.
So cutting off all the fat, I think you could build something close to fedora 9 for under $1bn at full price. Just look at how much functionality can be packed into some of the mini distributions going around, when you choose just to have one browser, one mail client etc etc. That's a clue.
A flaw in the code is not necessary to take over windows PCs. Back in the day [others not me] used to scan IP ranges for people with file sharing enabled out to the internet [i deny i ever did this hehe]. I must stress it's stupidly simple to inadvertently leave your windows network and shares wide open to the world. It takes someone to enable file sharing on the ICS host, enable it in the firewall on both network adapters. There are no warnings to the user that this will expose any shares to the world. [Add to that the number of blank passwords to administrator accounts out there :S]. Even today I rekon 1 in 40 windows machines on a broadband cable/adsl [and not behind a port blocking router] is vunerable in this way. Few ISPs in my area are clued up to blocking the appropriate ports it seems. All it would take is a simple pop up window if you try to enable file sharing on your internet facing network adaptor. (I wonder would this put a big dent in the botnet population?)
Personally, I don't actually care too much, everyone should have their equipment behind a decent dedicated firewall end of story. Relying on a firewall in the same OS was always going to be a less than ideal solution, let alone one by microsoft.
Oh, you can skip a step there: Some of us have no feature of anatomy resembling a spine!
While I get this is a good way to sneak beneficial nutrients into the diets of people who may otherwise have no interest nor motivation in seeking them, I have one problem with it: Considering alcohol consumption is a risk factor for many types of cancer (and being loaded with empty calories contributing to other health problems), this better be a no/low-alcohol beer or there may be no net benefit to consuming this versus not drinking any beer at all. Ok sure, one standard drink per day has not been shown to be a problem. This is not the behaviour of your typical beer affictionado. There may be a trend to drink more, just because it's perceived to be healthy.
I do think reservatol has huge potential though, I'm sure Ray Kurzweil is already taking it along with his 250 pills a day. I also agree with finding feasible ways to improve the nutrition of existing food products rather than changing the habits of millions of consumers (which requires delivering boot to ass of corporates over their marketing amongst other things).
Yet, why not investigate economic ways to put it in milk or processed grains? Hell why not bundle it along with xylitol and omega 3 in things we eat commonly? We could all but wipe out everything from tooth decay to heart disease, to dementia in one go.
The experts agree the tech world will be somewhat insulated from the financial market eating itself. We hope. Given that, if consumers no longer have to cash to burn on over priced iStuff that supports the big silicon, then they will start looking for free alternatives. If anything there will be a gravity drawing consumers away from things that cost money to things that don't. I'd not be surprised to see a influx during a depression of participants to the Web 2.0 which would mitigate loss of Ad revenue that supports these services.
As for open systems and their development, I think many miffed, out of work programmers might jump on the FOSS bandwagon in a recession - and consumers who can't afford expensive broken operating systems may pirate an older version or pick up linux to put on a older machine. Oh and watch for used goods markets gaining strength.
This is a very common observation on slashdot with any DRM, and i've often pointed it out myself before someone beats me to it (darn you). Interestingly I don't see this much in the blogsphere.
Having worked in a (closed long time ago) games store buying and selling used (and selling new) PC and console games, I can say the used games outsold new full price games 10 to 1 and we made more money off them for sure. We blacklisted Steam based games amongst others that had DRM that blocked second hand transfers. We were eventually instructed not to re-sell, but to send of trade-ins likely to their desctruction. Who by, I'm not saying. But I guess the idea was to get unwanted second hand copies off the market. We of course had regular purchasers of used games who would return them a little later as trade-ins or sell, we did what we could to prevent piracy (we wouldn't buy back a game we'd obviously sold, but they could pull the barcode off or something) that was a contributor to the downfall of that store.
Portal would be a very interesting game to play multiplayer. I see no reason why it wouldn't. There would need to be a few changes but it adds a interesting dimension being able to, for example, stick a portal high on a ceiling, and to place another around a corner for a player to step on ...
I'm not saying it because I'm a optimist. But I think life is highly abundant wherever it can exist it will exist. I'd like to point out that for billions of years there was no multi-cellular life on earth, and once a few cells got stuck together it's only been a few hundred million to get to here. We could have, infact been here 3-3.1 billion years ago if conditions were right. So I'd place money on the upper bound, but it depends if we're talking sentient intelligence species you could have a philosophical conversation with or a genuine technological civilization such as our own.
So if there are between 5x10-7 and 10,000 civilizations in our galaxy, where are they? The answer I think will be interesting - we simply do not know what happens to intelligent species after they evolve. The problem is with the fallacy known as the fermi paradox is that there are far to many plausible reasons why intellegent species may rise and fall, or simply decide not to show up despite having plenty of time to do it.
I consider it vastly more likely that the majority of sentient creatures in the universe have no hands or similar useful appendages and therefore never acquire technology. I reason that planets with oceans (like our own right up to mega planets with water oceans 100s of km deep)would be vastly more abundant platforms for evolution of life in the universe than land area on earthlike planets.
If we could go out in a billion star ships and turn over every rock in the galaxy maybe we'd find most sentient life will be something like a whale or dolphin.
We seem to forget what wanders about on land contemplating financial markets and marvelling at smart phones, is only a vunerably small portion of the bio mass on this rock, and here the oceans are ruled by Cetaceans who in our own example have been here longer than us, and have had some of the highly developed brain structures they share with us millions of years longer, they used to populate hundreds of millions.. but we've eaten most of them). They'd probably persist after cataclysms that would wipe us out. (Octopii and squid are also relatively intellegent too, there's a hint that the format of a ET might be)
So with the majority of ET life being underwater there's little opportunity for tool making by hypothetical aquatic beings, let alone harnessing technologies we have done - which all largely stem from the ability to make fire and bootstrap from there. Consider that the majority of these oceans would be lidded by ice (like Europa) and these types of environments will vastly outnumber earth-like planets in that perfect habitable zone around the right kind of stable star.
So considering planets with habitable land area, in a stable orbit around a stable star, avoiding bombardment or supernova sterilization long enough for life to make the leap to multicellular and upwards, are a rarity - it becomes worse, there are still reasons why ETs may not show up.
Life could evolve at the bottom of a big gravity well -- a much larger planet with such an escape velocity that makes space travel difficult. The planet could have permanent cloud cover, thus the beings inhabiting it never see the sky and never wonder what's out there. They could also be very large like elephants, and therefore won't be inclined to be building flying machines. They could also have a geology absent of fossil fuels, no easy fuel for an industrial revolution. They may just refine a peaceful culture that's stable over longer periods of time and not particularly adventurous.
They may also not develop the right kind of intelligence. Or they may be pathologically self destructive. Our desire to explore and exploit is derived from our ancestors nomadic lifestyle. Without this background we may never have dreamed up the idea of exploring beyond our own world. So who's to stay an intelligent species would inevitably bother beaming signals out to space let alone traveling?
On earth, every single rock we look under, every tiny
In some ways it'd be stupid not to include a kill switch. The increasing power of smart phones means we'll be soon seeing rogue applications. This won't stop crapware of course, but at least it gives an option to stop malware type apps dead their it's tracks. The existence of the kill switch may not really be a deterrent to spyware houses looking to exploit the mobile platform, but hey it's something.
Hopefully this is used well to cull dodgy troublesome and harmful applications from the ecosystem because the trade off is a potential for abuse of power, but google isn't evil... right?
Everyone knows there is no wind in space so teh picture must be faked, proof they filming in desert in nevada!
Also more proof.. human footprint! http://www.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/phoenixsfoot.jpg
Interesting, why the arbitrary version target of 5.0-8.0? Back in the 1990s they may have suggested starting at 2.0 or 3.0 to do the same thing and imply some product maturity...
Thus I predict that by 2020, senior management types will be asking development leads to start at version 15-18 as this dodges the stigma of 10.0 releases.
99.8% of individual gamers... but what percentage of sales?
Assuming blindly that statistic has some fact to it (which it doesn't), I would bet that 2/1000 gamers outspend the average for the group 10 to 1 at least. Considering anyone who's bought a game once in the last 10 years but is still playing it once every 6 months is probably considered a gamer... you could believe it if I sad those few gamers who care about DRM are very important customers.
If anything, DRM offers an incentive to pirate.
Buy a game and you have small but real chance of going to DRM hell. You also cannot sell your game second hand, and after a while it will no longer be supported and you won't even be able to use it. Add to that DRM has a higher chance of causing the game to fail completely when you try to use it on future operating system versions (or even just driver versions).
Download a cracked game and it's yours for ever and you can install it anywhere anytime. You're also incredibly unlikely to ever get caught.
I've also come to realise that DRM is not about piracy, at all. No it's not. Infact it's obvious: It's only about shutting down the second hand games market.
If a geeky 13 year old pirates $1,000 worth of software, there are no real sales lost because it is something he wouldn't have otherwise purchased (or been able to). But because every second hand purchase wholly or partly replaces a brand new sale. This money is denied from the bottom line of the big companies.
A sucess story like Steam has not only completely prevented the second hand trade of games like CS and HL2 but also prevented these games from being pirated. The pawn broker I used to work at had blacklisted a number of these games from their shelves because of the number of refunds we had to give out. (I also notice you cannot hire these games in the few stores that hire out PC games. Interestingly 2 or 3 of the rental stores I know of that have PC games haven't procured anything new since the end of 2006, is there a war on PC Game rentals too?).
Any industry would LOVE to be able to legislate out the second hand market for it's produce, and believe me they do try. But they'd never get away with it, we'd be rioting in the streets. Yet this is what is happening here.
I'm not 100% certain either, but I'm fairly sure if the noise sounds quieter then less energy is being imparted on the little hairs that sensse sound inside your cochlea.
If you have two waves canceling each other out at a specific point, if you measure at that point you won't detect or be able to gather excess energy from the sound wave.
People using noise canceling headphones in place of ear plugs while working with heavy machinery and I'm not aware of anyone doing extra damage to their hearing this way.
Any experts want to weigh in on that?
Gosh, I thought, when using chrome, it's almost as if it's a early Beta.
Which is exactly what it is. Although the google definition of Beta is a little different (Heck I'd say it's more honest considering what some other companies do with shipping products too soon)
Clearly google released chrome as it was to test the waters. They don't need to have a browser on the market, so they won't forge ahead with it unless a big positive reaction reveals it would be worth while.
Gallium is a metal, liquid at room temperature that attacks aluminum and its alloys. It is not a significantly restricted substance and could be dangerous on an aircraft. I believe mercury also attacks aluminum.
Jupiter has density of 1.326 gcm. So thats 28.6416 for this object. Just to be pedantic.
This kind of density boggles the mind. What could have this density? Tungsten, Platninum? Osmium is not getting close.
Considering the mind boggling surface gravity of a object like this, we don't know how many materials behave under incredible pressure, for example the centre core of the earth, while largely iron, is more like crystal. The core of jupiter might be shrouded in metallic hydrogen. Indeed we understand very little about such conditions. Density could be largely due to immense compression of materials that would be otherwise less dense?
Realisticly this will just turn out be a core of a hypermetallic brown dwarf or something that has had it's outer layers stripped.
I believe Adam and Jamie made a lead balloon float sucessfully..
The kid used only one proxy. Not too smart, oh well. This would have been very interesting if he'd taken reasonable steps to cover his tracks. Using Tor for example. I would really have love to see that put to the test in something like this.
This is exactly the trap with Tor.
I don't understand the assumption that a submarine-aircraft would have to be made heavy and thus be too heavy to fly. Therefore the idea is suggested to be not likely to work at all or will be too compromised to be good at either role.
Rather than resisting water pressure with a heavy pressure hull, it is only necessary to equalize pressure internally and externally. Also consider that humans can readily withstand pressure to a depth of 20-30 metres (just don't try surface in a hurry).
It then becomes not necessary to reinforce all but a few sensitive systems against pressure at depth. That said it's not as simple as taking a F-22 and filling the avionics full of scotch guard and drilling some drain holes. But landing say a helicopter on water, flooding it and having it perform adequately underwater is not a monumental engineering challenge.
In such a craft you could still have a small pressure vessel for crew and sensitive systems, while the rest of the vechicle is filled with ballast water and the resulting compressed air. We are still talking about weight penalties in additional systems and design, so it's still a vehicle that's neither a good aircraft nor a good submarine.
I also think Darpa would be better off with a some VTOL design considering the difficulties in taking off from water. Something like a submarine apache would be quite an achievement. I'm forgetting that the F-22 design is VTOL capable, now that would be a scary machine for any enemy to go up against.
So, I hear the prototype airplane that flew underground, lost power and crashed into the surface?
Shoot me for having a higher opinion of this place than I should, but I disagree, there are bright and influential people contributing here. Alot of contributors here are fairly clued up and quite a few are in positions of influence in the IT world. There's probably old greybeards here that contributed to building the internet back in the day.
So if that's the consensus of opinion on Slashdot, it's not dogma, it's pretty well rooted in expert opinion.
I would point out that people attracted to games will be more mentally active and less of a cognitive couch-potato that the average person. Mentally active people are more likely to have will power to get off the couch. Active mind leads to an active body, and vice versa.
Personally, between my mentally challenging job, rss feed overload and too much gaming, I find TV not only to be boring but I can't bloody sit still long enough to watch lowest common-denominator anyway. I could imagine if I was a fat sloth I would have a corresponding pattern in what mental activities I do.
A good session of hard core online gaming must spike your adrenaline, as well as dopamine and other enjoyable neurotransmitters. And judging by the way people behave the competition must get some testosterone going too.
People also don't tend to eat while playing games, it's kinda hard... er... although caffeine and sugar consumption must be a confounding factor here.
Eating [|mindless face stuffing] in front of TV is of a common filthy habit. (Is that a result of being exposed to junk food advertising - I often wonder if there is a direct psychological link between seeing food on TV and a corresponding increase in likelyhood of desiring a snack. Then I think, well duh of course, that's the idea)