I'm actually generally interested in that now- I know explosives are obviously used for demolitions and mining and construction and whatnot; but the military gets through an awfully large amount of ordinance during a conflict, and there are an awful lot of conflicts going on at any given time. I wonder what the ratio of violent:non-violent consumption is?
Oil spills mean good news for some microbes and whatnot, bad news for plenty else. When some of the "plenty else" are endangered, and others are major cash-generating produce, that tends to make oil spills not so good from a human point of view.
Incidentally, this isn't the world's first oil spill; the effects of them have been observed many times before, some of them continually now for decades.
People do plant trees for all sorts of reasons. Trees are planted along side motorways to block the sites and sounds of it to the local residents. There are tree farms for timber. Town garden parks are planted full of trees and other plants for pleasure-seeking urbanites.
None of these uses can be easily increased in size. A tree farm is only as big as the land the farmer has, motorway sound barriers only follow a motorway, and a park is only as big as the space for a park is.
You could plany GM super trees in these places if there were a benefit, but you couldn't just plant more trees.
On the whole, the space available for tree-planting is ever shrinking. That doesn't mean tress aren't planted.
China's been trying that one for 30 years. It hasn't exactly worked so far- 3 decades since implementation and population continues to rise year-on-year by millions. Good luck reducing the population by 270 million people in only 50 years more.
A two-child policy would be a little more tolerable, and would still result in a shrinking population (seeing as not all babies will have a full 2 children of their own, thanks to homosexuality, inferitility, early death, etc.). Would be a less extreme upheaval of demographics, too.
You'd have a hard enough time selling even that much to your general electorate, though.
Timber is a great way of storing carbon- you grown the stuff into trees, use the trees to make houses, furniture, novelty ornaments, etc., and then expect those objects to last for decades. The population sems to keep on growing, so there's a big demand for the stuff. When it wears out (and so goes to the great biodegradation pit in the sky) it gets replaced with more timber. It's obviously not a limitless way of storing carbon, but it is a good way of tieing up a good chunk of the stuff.
Mind you, if you just...ahem...burn the hemp, you're not really storing much of anything at all.
I'd say that 2 screens ISN'T innovative, and probably wasn't even for the first company that did it. It's a good idea, yes. And the DS is an excellent console in an awful lot of ways. But is adding an extra screen actually an innovation, or just a logical extension of existing technology?
Innovation usually implies doing something non-obvious, or doing something which may have been obvious but was very very tricky. Outputting to multiple displays has been possible for pretty much as long as there have been displays. And using two screens with a hinge in the middle (so it can fold) instead of one large unfoldable screen seems like a good enough idea that it isn't surprising that handheld manufacturers have been doing it since the '70s.
Making CPUs with higher clock speed isn't innovative, it's just a (clever, high tech, applaudable) improvement on what already exists. Making single CPUs with multiple cores on one die- that was an innovation.
I can play as a Nazi U-Boat captain blasting civilian vessels under the noses of their escorts in Silent Hunter (and a hundred other sub sims). I can play a knight of Christendom annihilating towns and cities through the Middle East in Medieval: Total War (and a hundred other medieval themed games). Or I can play as a US (and sometimes even VC) soldier rampaging through the jungle of Vietnam, in a war that claimed some 3 million civilian lives, in Battlefield Vietnam (and a great many others).
Video games have been made about terrible conflicts countless times in the past. Some are irreverent, some are moving, some are merely factual. Offence is in the eye of the beholder.
Of course the Berlin Wall is still pretty recent and raw, so I can't say I blame the uproar. But at least this game sounds like it was trying to make a point.
Maybe you didn't read the article (I know, I know, new here...).
The employees in question are employed by United Space Alliance- a private company owned by Boeing and Lockheed. It was of course a company whose sole purpose was to sell shuttle parts to NASA, but they're a private company all the same.
NASA have had the money, and NASA has the scientists, and NASA has the will-power to do these things. But the actual implementation of these crazy machines has always been the business of private companies.
I'm not sure I understand all of the fuss over Obama's big space plans. All it seems to me is the handing off of the design, project management and sub-contracting aspects to the company who was already doing the building. As long as NASA keeps bringing money for contracts and a scientific agenda to pursue, I can't see this as a calamity.
So are we claiming that development on Stuxnet started on 9/5/1979 in reaction to this execution? (Did Siemans even make industrial control computers in the 70s?) Or are we claiming that the "authors of such a sophisticated piece of malware" decided to plant a trail of clues, like some sort of cartoon villains?
They would have got away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling Symantec engineers.
Trademark law was originally a consumer protection mechanism. The concept was that the customer should not be tricked into buying something under the false belief that it was manufactured by someone it was not.
Imagine I started a company called "Red Rose Glassware", and made drinking glasses and bowls and stuff. I made a good reputation, and my products became more desirable than my rivals. A rival starts a company called "Roses Glassware"- I can legitimately complain that they've done that just to trick customers and leech off of my good reputation.
The mitigating factors are always supposed to be 1) That the names are in direct competition or are used for comparable products, and 2) That there is a real possibility of the newer company's products being mistaken for the original's.
American union law gets weirder the more I hear about it.
In the UK, you can join any union you want. Most unions have limitations over what sort of employees they'll represent, but most careers will have a choice of many.
I am in a single-company union, which only admits employees of the company I work for, plus associates (contractors, pension-scheme members, etc), but I could have joined one of the several financial services unions (being the industry my employer is in) instead, or one of the unions that represent my actual career. My GF is a teacher, and there are more different teaching unions she could have chosen from than I can count in my head.
Also, I don't understand the anti-union attitude some otherwise sane Americans seem to have. Even most businesses in the UK recognise the value of unionised staff- a singe point of negotiation, and plausible cover for unpopular yet unavoidable decisions ("I know you don't like it, but even the unions agree its necessary..."). They have their drawbacks- such as stopping a company squeezing their staff as a viable way out of tight spots or of boosting profits- but then I wouldn't shed any tears over that.
The etymology of both terms is interesting, incidentally.
Warrior (kinda obviously) means "person who makes war", and is of the same route (war-er, basically).
But soldier technically means mercenary- from the Latin "solidus", which was a coin, and the route word of a lot of words to do with money ("sold", for example).
That thread has depressed me. Half of the replies are "lul, right on" or "england sux", and the other half set about correcting all the damned punchlines.
Well TFA linked is from one of the major national dailies- and was a double page spread, if I recall (admittedly somewhere near the middle, but you know how it is, there are a lot of big stories being covered today). The story is also the "Most Popular" in the England section of the BBC news website. I'm sure the story got good coverage on the relevant local news circuit too.
While there will probably be some bastards who will still demonize the poor guy, you can't exactly blame the press for not covering it.
Saying "it was probably using a 0day and therefore immune to firewalls" is pointless; if you're assuming the malware has the magic-bullet to bypass an up-to-date desktop firewall, you might as well assume it can bypass all server and hardware firewalls just as easily.
Firewalls won't stop a user executing stupid code on their own machine (AV might, but not a firewall), but it could stop the malware firing off infections to every other machine in the network.
And when they're free and auto-updating, why bother going to the effort to turn them off?
Half of the garage door designs out there are orders of magnitude less secure than a modern car (with alarms, immobilisers, and all the other gizmos you'd expect). A fairly large proportion of them out there can be opened with nothing but a wire coat-hanger. (I actually had a friend back at school who's parent's had lost the key to their garage door years earlier, and just kept a coat-hanger in their hall for that very purpose)
My garage contains a locked car, locked bikes, locked cabinets, and nothing else I'd miss too much if it were gone.
Which is how it should be, really. Totally in the spirit of OSS.
They've released the code, meaning anyone from hobbyists to (OSS) rival games companies can make use of it and release new and interesting software, and the owners of copies of the game get the source code so they can truly control their purchase forever.
Meanwhile the developer keeps control of the "creative" bit, and keeps an incentive for people to buy the game from them.
If only this were a model that other software companies could grasp, the software world would be a much better place.
You don't need to trademark your name for that. That comes right under the normal misrepresentation of goods laws (or whatever trade laws are local to you), not to mention somewhere within the libel/defamation/lieing-about-a-person-in-some-way laws.
He's relatively clear in dismissing a literal intelligent design version of creationism as nonsense. That would mean that a literal Adam and Eve, and the literal events of Genesis, did not happen as written either.
If you take Genesis as some sort of elaborate metaphor, I'm sure you can broaden it to include aliens.
IANAChristian, incidentally, so official interpretations may vary.
With a proprietary fork, you remain stuck with what you've always used (data lock in is usually a barrier to following the fork and migrating), but you witness a large proportion of the development and user-base drop away, leaving your system under-supported and backwawrd.
With fewer barrier to migrating from one OSS fork to another, and more code liable to cross stream, this problem is far minimalised.
Still not a great situation to be in, but far better than it might be.
It falls over. It even stays knocked over. It doesn't even struggle. And eventualy you decide to place it back on it's feet so it can get about it's daily chores again.
And then it smothers you with a pillow while you're asleep.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm actually generally interested in that now- I know explosives are obviously used for demolitions and mining and construction and whatnot; but the military gets through an awfully large amount of ordinance during a conflict, and there are an awful lot of conflicts going on at any given time. I wonder what the ratio of violent:non-violent consumption is?
A Google-quest for tomorrow, I think.
Pelicans and crabs don't exactly do well on oil.
Oil spills mean good news for some microbes and whatnot, bad news for plenty else. When some of the "plenty else" are endangered, and others are major cash-generating produce, that tends to make oil spills not so good from a human point of view.
Incidentally, this isn't the world's first oil spill; the effects of them have been observed many times before, some of them continually now for decades.
People do plant trees for all sorts of reasons. Trees are planted along side motorways to block the sites and sounds of it to the local residents. There are tree farms for timber. Town garden parks are planted full of trees and other plants for pleasure-seeking urbanites.
None of these uses can be easily increased in size. A tree farm is only as big as the land the farmer has, motorway sound barriers only follow a motorway, and a park is only as big as the space for a park is.
You could plany GM super trees in these places if there were a benefit, but you couldn't just plant more trees.
On the whole, the space available for tree-planting is ever shrinking. That doesn't mean tress aren't planted.
China's been trying that one for 30 years. It hasn't exactly worked so far- 3 decades since implementation and population continues to rise year-on-year by millions. Good luck reducing the population by 270 million people in only 50 years more.
A two-child policy would be a little more tolerable, and would still result in a shrinking population (seeing as not all babies will have a full 2 children of their own, thanks to homosexuality, inferitility, early death, etc.). Would be a less extreme upheaval of demographics, too.
You'd have a hard enough time selling even that much to your general electorate, though.
It's fine as long as you expect it to last.
Timber is a great way of storing carbon- you grown the stuff into trees, use the trees to make houses, furniture, novelty ornaments, etc., and then expect those objects to last for decades. The population sems to keep on growing, so there's a big demand for the stuff. When it wears out (and so goes to the great biodegradation pit in the sky) it gets replaced with more timber. It's obviously not a limitless way of storing carbon, but it is a good way of tieing up a good chunk of the stuff.
Mind you, if you just...ahem...burn the hemp, you're not really storing much of anything at all.
I'd say that 2 screens ISN'T innovative, and probably wasn't even for the first company that did it. It's a good idea, yes. And the DS is an excellent console in an awful lot of ways. But is adding an extra screen actually an innovation, or just a logical extension of existing technology?
Innovation usually implies doing something non-obvious, or doing something which may have been obvious but was very very tricky. Outputting to multiple displays has been possible for pretty much as long as there have been displays. And using two screens with a hinge in the middle (so it can fold) instead of one large unfoldable screen seems like a good enough idea that it isn't surprising that handheld manufacturers have been doing it since the '70s.
Making CPUs with higher clock speed isn't innovative, it's just a (clever, high tech, applaudable) improvement on what already exists. Making single CPUs with multiple cores on one die- that was an innovation.
*woosh*
Lot of that today. Must be bloody windy.
I can play as a Nazi U-Boat captain blasting civilian vessels under the noses of their escorts in Silent Hunter (and a hundred other sub sims). I can play a knight of Christendom annihilating towns and cities through the Middle East in Medieval: Total War (and a hundred other medieval themed games). Or I can play as a US (and sometimes even VC) soldier rampaging through the jungle of Vietnam, in a war that claimed some 3 million civilian lives, in Battlefield Vietnam (and a great many others).
Video games have been made about terrible conflicts countless times in the past. Some are irreverent, some are moving, some are merely factual. Offence is in the eye of the beholder.
Of course the Berlin Wall is still pretty recent and raw, so I can't say I blame the uproar. But at least this game sounds like it was trying to make a point.
Maybe you didn't read the article (I know, I know, new here...).
The employees in question are employed by United Space Alliance- a private company owned by Boeing and Lockheed. It was of course a company whose sole purpose was to sell shuttle parts to NASA, but they're a private company all the same.
NASA have had the money, and NASA has the scientists, and NASA has the will-power to do these things. But the actual implementation of these crazy machines has always been the business of private companies.
I'm not sure I understand all of the fuss over Obama's big space plans. All it seems to me is the handing off of the design, project management and sub-contracting aspects to the company who was already doing the building. As long as NASA keeps bringing money for contracts and a scientific agenda to pursue, I can't see this as a calamity.
So are we claiming that development on Stuxnet started on 9/5/1979 in reaction to this execution? (Did Siemans even make industrial control computers in the 70s?) Or are we claiming that the "authors of such a sophisticated piece of malware" decided to plant a trail of clues, like some sort of cartoon villains?
They would have got away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling Symantec engineers.
Trademark law was originally a consumer protection mechanism. The concept was that the customer should not be tricked into buying something under the false belief that it was manufactured by someone it was not.
Imagine I started a company called "Red Rose Glassware", and made drinking glasses and bowls and stuff. I made a good reputation, and my products became more desirable than my rivals. A rival starts a company called "Roses Glassware"- I can legitimately complain that they've done that just to trick customers and leech off of my good reputation.
The mitigating factors are always supposed to be
1) That the names are in direct competition or are used for comparable products, and
2) That there is a real possibility of the newer company's products being mistaken for the original's.
American union law gets weirder the more I hear about it.
In the UK, you can join any union you want. Most unions have limitations over what sort of employees they'll represent, but most careers will have a choice of many.
I am in a single-company union, which only admits employees of the company I work for, plus associates (contractors, pension-scheme members, etc), but I could have joined one of the several financial services unions (being the industry my employer is in) instead, or one of the unions that represent my actual career. My GF is a teacher, and there are more different teaching unions she could have chosen from than I can count in my head.
Also, I don't understand the anti-union attitude some otherwise sane Americans seem to have. Even most businesses in the UK recognise the value of unionised staff- a singe point of negotiation, and plausible cover for unpopular yet unavoidable decisions ("I know you don't like it, but even the unions agree its necessary..."). They have their drawbacks- such as stopping a company squeezing their staff as a viable way out of tight spots or of boosting profits- but then I wouldn't shed any tears over that.
The etymology of both terms is interesting, incidentally.
Warrior (kinda obviously) means "person who makes war", and is of the same route (war-er, basically).
But soldier technically means mercenary- from the Latin "solidus", which was a coin, and the route word of a lot of words to do with money ("sold", for example).
It's all just meaningless semantics, I know.
That thread has depressed me. Half of the replies are "lul, right on" or "england sux", and the other half set about correcting all the damned punchlines.
OP was excellent though.
Well TFA linked is from one of the major national dailies- and was a double page spread, if I recall (admittedly somewhere near the middle, but you know how it is, there are a lot of big stories being covered today). The story is also the "Most Popular" in the England section of the BBC news website. I'm sure the story got good coverage on the relevant local news circuit too.
While there will probably be some bastards who will still demonize the poor guy, you can't exactly blame the press for not covering it.
Saying "it was probably using a 0day and therefore immune to firewalls" is pointless; if you're assuming the malware has the magic-bullet to bypass an up-to-date desktop firewall, you might as well assume it can bypass all server and hardware firewalls just as easily.
Firewalls won't stop a user executing stupid code on their own machine (AV might, but not a firewall), but it could stop the malware firing off infections to every other machine in the network.
And when they're free and auto-updating, why bother going to the effort to turn them off?
Half of the garage door designs out there are orders of magnitude less secure than a modern car (with alarms, immobilisers, and all the other gizmos you'd expect). A fairly large proportion of them out there can be opened with nothing but a wire coat-hanger. (I actually had a friend back at school who's parent's had lost the key to their garage door years earlier, and just kept a coat-hanger in their hall for that very purpose)
My garage contains a locked car, locked bikes, locked cabinets, and nothing else I'd miss too much if it were gone.
Which is how it should be, really. Totally in the spirit of OSS.
They've released the code, meaning anyone from hobbyists to (OSS) rival games companies can make use of it and release new and interesting software, and the owners of copies of the game get the source code so they can truly control their purchase forever.
Meanwhile the developer keeps control of the "creative" bit, and keeps an incentive for people to buy the game from them.
If only this were a model that other software companies could grasp, the software world would be a much better place.
You don't need to trademark your name for that. That comes right under the normal misrepresentation of goods laws (or whatever trade laws are local to you), not to mention somewhere within the libel/defamation/lieing-about-a-person-in-some-way laws.
He's relatively clear in dismissing a literal intelligent design version of creationism as nonsense. That would mean that a literal Adam and Eve, and the literal events of Genesis, did not happen as written either.
If you take Genesis as some sort of elaborate metaphor, I'm sure you can broaden it to include aliens.
IANAChristian, incidentally, so official interpretations may vary.
You can nuke a disease. Patient tends not to survive, but in no way would you still call them "infected".
With a proprietary fork, you remain stuck with what you've always used (data lock in is usually a barrier to following the fork and migrating), but you witness a large proportion of the development and user-base drop away, leaving your system under-supported and backwawrd.
With fewer barrier to migrating from one OSS fork to another, and more code liable to cross stream, this problem is far minimalised.
Still not a great situation to be in, but far better than it might be.
They probably pay for their bandwidth, you know. At the very least it might cost them some pennies.
It falls over. It even stays knocked over. It doesn't even struggle. And eventualy you decide to place it back on it's feet so it can get about it's daily chores again.
And then it smothers you with a pillow while you're asleep.
I've been trying to work out what Attack Formations 1 through 6 might be.
Why eat hamburger when you can have steak?