If you don't fuck with anyone, sooner or later someone will decide that you are weak and fuck with you.
I agree. This is how the world goes round.
The Chinese are already trying to push the US, see how far they can go. Spy plane incident? Spies in Los Alamos? Dumping goods into our markets? We need to fuck with them a little more then we are, in my opinion.
I'm not from China, but why do you assume only Americans (and the odd European here and there) are going to be reading Slashdot? Do you know how offensively aggressive it sounds to hear "I'm gonna fuck with your country"? This is exactly why some people dislike Americans. "All right, let's go fuck with fucking moronic Americans". How does that sound?
And you've got to be kidding if you don't think the US doesn't spy on other countries. In which case, it's just "the game" that other people spy on the US. French agents have been caught before (this is probably not such a good example now since the French are practically "enemies", eh?). I'll bet the Israelis, Germans etc. have their people just... paying attention to what the Americans are doing. Even the British?
Why are they spending all that money are military hardware if they aren't planning on using it?
You answered yourself in the first place. This is a world where if you aren't strong someone will come around and push you around. Don't forget, the mainland Chinese lost millions of people to the Japanese (for which the Japanese STILL have not even brought themselves to officially and properly apologise for, would you believe it). They've fought a war with the Indians. Even when they were both Communist the Russians and the Chinese weren't all that friendly. If you've got a large country, you want a large and modern army. End of story.
We should officially declare Taiwan a legit country and tell the mainland Chinese to go fuck off.
I agree. I believe Taiwan is a country. But, again, you're demonstrating "American Shortsightedness Combined With Arrogance". What on earth makes you think that it's the AMERICANS who should be "declaring Taiwan a legit country"? A significant proportion (more than half if my memory serves) during their last polls indicated they themselves did not want this step to be taken. Considering the minute they do so, the shooting starts, and you are going to be sitting safely at home in the US - I am making the assumption that you are not in the US armed forces and won't be part of those getting shot at while defending Taiwan, assuming Bush doesn't back out of US commitments to do so - and Taiwanese civilians etc. are going to be doing most of the dying, if anyone is going to be declaring Taiwan a legit country it should be the Taiwanese.
Taking away their "most favored nation" trading status
laugh. Are you sure the Americans making the decisions are willing to lose the kind of money they will lose by doing so? Plenty of people in mainland China would be incredibly happy if the US government would lean harder to try to make them start releasing poltiical prisoners etc. - but you're forgetting it's the money that talks, including (especially?) in the US political-economic system.
don't get me wrong, i wish the US would say SCREW YOU and let europe and the rest of the world disintegrate into the mess it would be if the US weren't influencing it.
I am not an American, but I'd like to put in my 2 cents here. I always feel these statements - "the US should do this", "the US would do that" - are always quite pointless because of vagueness. Because what does anyone mean when they say "the US"?
The "US" that would be doing the fighting (and dying) would be quite different from the "US" (government) that makes the decisions. It's been pointed out that the troops fighting in Iraq etc. are all basically there because, well, they're poor. They joined the Army to put food on the table, to get funds for college, etc. (leaving aside those there to Be All That They Can Be). Contrast this to the corporate executives and texan oil billionaires signing the executive orders sending them in. Which "US" is it that should be saying "SCREW YOU" to the rest of the world?
the "US" has also changed, and will continue to change (like everythign else). Is the "US" now the same as that of Eisenhower (sorry not too sure of the name) etc. who'd face down the Nazis? From what I can tell I honestly think quite a few of the past US Presidents really were (at least mostly?) genuinely decent, smart people who were thinking along the interests of the country/people/world(?) when they made their decisions as opposed to thinking of re-election prospects, party affiliation etc.
It really bugs me that something like that which seems to have existed before seems to now be getting... twisted. The Florida election debacle, the possible manipulatability of future electronic voting systems - all these make guys like me worried (and not just because the US has nukes and the biggest fucking army around), because I'm from a country that exists basically because our neighbours didn't want us, while you guys have this document that starts off with "We hold these truths to be self-evident" --> no other country really compares ("oh, we're from X. we're a people and our country has basically always been around" doesn't have quite the same ring to it), and right now it's looking like it's getting really fucked up. I think if the world goes to shit in the future, if there are any historians left they'll point to now and say this is where the shit started.
The impact of the US in Europe during WWII is overrated. USA entered the war late and by that time, Germany was on its way to losing (it lost the Eastern front and lost Battle of Britain). Even if USA did not enter WWII, Germany would have lost (probably 2 years later).
IANA Historian, but I think something needs to be pointed out here: nukes. Germany had their own nuke program. a 2 year delay - I don't know, I don't have the stats, but would that have been enough time for the Germans to have obtained nukes? And they had their V2 rockets to pop them all over the place.
2 years can be a huge difference.
OFF-TOPIC: I remember reading this story (I can't remmber if it was a novel or a short story/novella), something sci-fi/alternate history, i.e. what if Germany *had* won the war? I remember reading about this scene where the protagonist in the story had to queue up in some kind of hall to have his papers checked for his racial designation (or something like that). Can anyone refresh me memory re: the name of the story/author/anything?
IANAL (and also not American, which will be relevant re: below-) but from what I understand, virtually all large US corporations have put in effort into this kind of thing - isnt' there some kind of "Americans with Disabilities Act" which legislates companies over a certain size having to make sure their products/services etc. can be used by, well, Americans with Disabilities?
In which case for legal compliance (plus also the reasons both that they have enough money to make them worth suing, and that they have the resources to throw into developing such things) it is not surprising that they would have such features.
that said, I am NOT saying this out of a knee-jerk anti-MS reaction (but, rather, a knee-jerk anti-all-large-corporations reaction:-)
erm. I would say it 100% wouldn't run Panther - (a) OS X will only run on actual Apple hardware due to the ROM requirements (b) even if the ROM could be supplied as a software file (as is the case for modern Macs), who's going to develop it for the IBM machine? (c) 4-way SMP does not exist on the Mac spectrum, who'll do the necessary work on it?
One thing about all all these calculations and schemes to "deal" with problems like these is that they are not like physical "laws of nature" which cannot be circumvented, and *legal* laws/rules that are basically constructs intended to serve a purpose that is determined by those with the power to do so. Just offhand - if there is a widespread eruption of such cheap webcast stations, what's to stop the RIAA et al to rework the licensing agreements to make it no longer worthwhile? Say, a signup/startup cost of US$100,000 per site, w/o distinction between high-traffic and low-traffic ones? They control the licensing terms, and unless they were unwise enough to declare these to be as they are and unmodifiable in perpetuity, the rug can be pulled out from under you pretty quickly.
Does anyone else think these guys now have a big bulls-eye painted on them? I'm no historian, but from what I remember of revolts that weren't crushed (heads on sticks, bodies swinging from gallows, babies thrown onto bonfires etc.) is that there needs to be a critical mass before being able to withstand the (lethal) reactions of any oppressive tyrant. One single village aflame with the spirit of revolution pretty quickly becomes aflame in a physical sense when the imperial troops arrive.
Some new MS "education initiative" for those special school districts? Something else? How hard is it to replace the education board with different membership with different... priorities?
Then again, maybe I'm just operating under FUD/paranoia....
I've read the various posts and I must say I disagree with almost everybody except the original poster about his mailbox problem -
(a) Mail.app does not specify any limit to mailbox size. Does it give warnings as you approach any filesize that it is unable to handle? "Warning! Mail.app is unable to properly handle mailbox sizes over and above XMB and you are now at X+1MB, please trim" --> if no such alert etc. appears, then why exactly *should* the user be expected to know beforehand "oh I shouldn't do this"? Without any published specification/limitation or in-use alerts then the only "acceptable" effect on the end-user should be a slowdown because, well, that's a pretty damn big mailbox file:-), but it should NOT be considered "user's fault". The analogy that pops to my head now is the 2GB filesize limit on most 32bit filesystems - why exactly should a video-editing user be considered at fault if his video-recording goes past 2GB and he loses data? If "working around the limitations of the system" is the "one true way" of dealing with computers then why on earth did people work on creating filesystems that can exceed 2GB filesizes? If Mail.app will always choke on a 900MB file then Mail.app needs to be fixed. Or at the very least warnings inserted that will alert end users
(b) splitting up the files into smaller individual mailboxes is also not acceptable if Mail.app does not have a function that will allow for searching multiple mailboxes etc. as one single function. I know the old Eudora etc. had this ability - does Mail.app?
(c) Mail.app also has other problems. It's IMAP functioning is primitive and at my workplace woe betide the poor user who tries to connect to the mailserver without pre-specifying the default root path in his preferences (which incidentally cannot be done during the setup "wizard" (I don't know what the non-MS term is), so the user has to intentionally skip the "easy to use" setup sequence, and then manually configure/setup options. When absolutely every other IMAP client on other platforms can do it properly, this is unacceptable.
Right now, the two mail clients I most detest are Outlook and Mail.app.
(a) everyone hates spam (b) MS has the legal resources to really have a go at the spammers (and at the least make sure they get a lot of publicity about it)
Even if they lose, MS will be able to file their legal expenditures under "usefully spent money" in terms of the good publicity they'll buy re: the average joe on the street (and if they win they'll get the PR for free since they'll be recouping $$). All of a sudden they'd no longer be a corporation whose executives were repeatedly caught out prevaricating during their last trial, but instead a corp taking action to help everybody....
Re:Lets's put our money where our mouths are
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Today's SCO News
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You know, this is actually a truly interesting idea. Could it work? i think the way the capitalist system (haha, don't I sound Marxist?:-) is structured, they simply just assume people are going to do things based on a "I've got to get meself more $$$$!!!" basis. In which case is there any legal reason why a bunch of people can't just move in and do what this post suggests?
f you read the article it says that China hasn't got enough IPs for their regular computer users, cell phones or not, and that the Asian countries are building their own adressing infrastructure
The Net is getting more fragmented. I recall some discussion previously about how the original conception of the net, and the use of IP, was to allow everyone to be a peer - you've got an IP, you can do your own thing, webserver, mail, etc.; all this is interfered with by firewalls, NAT, etc. Now there is an additional layer of "segmentation".
The need to shift to IPv6 and build new infrastructure also gives the authorities the opportunity to insert more control infrastructure into their networks' gateways to the wider world. It is known that Google, Cisco etc. have been working with the governments (whether you consider it being strong-armed or not) to help in restricting access to certain sites etc. What happens when (my understanding is getting a bit flaky here, since I don't like working with IPv6) the v6-v4 gateways become points where the governments of the world can put a finger into, for good or ill? Still plenty of countries in the world where the general man on the street has no say as to what form of government they have (and what with the Florida fiasco + Supreme Court intervention in the US, the US isn't all that great a poster-boy for democracy either).
Prevent perfect accuracy. Make it so that a certian percentage of shots always miss, no matter how good the player is.
When I first read this I wanted to disagree strongly. I mean, why penalise the people who truly are good shots?
But then I thought about it a bit more (since I'm on dialup it takes a while for "reply to this" to load:-) I started thinking how this would actually both (a) simulate real-world "chance" occurrences that stymie many a "perfect" plan/setup, and (b) also test a player's ability to recover/compensate when things do not go to plan....
Sometimes it's not about arithmetic isn't it? I'm thinking there would be a non-zero number of volunteers on a "dangerous rescue mission you might die on". It's not "certain death" (and even if it were...).
I mean, you've got a bunch of people who are 100% doomed if you don't do anything. It just boils down to are you the kind of person to say "it's too risky, let them go", or do you just say "I don't care. We have to go".
I've read how archeologists found old bones with holes carved out in them such that they formed crude flutes, and that the notes they would have created would be in the pentatonic scale... and mathematically an octave is a halving of the freq of the wave, so I guess there's really no doubt there's some kind of - whether rooted in auditory-organ biology or Laws of Physics - common basis for all music.
And if it's a question of reversion to "animal" primitivism during the Zion celebration I can understand if the music was what would I guess be commonly termed "tribal". But during the scene it just sounds so entirely "20th-century-E-rave"...
Forget the heat/vibrations, what about the EM?
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Ant Farm PC
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Aren't ants sensitive to electromagnetism/radio-frequency waves? Won't having them so near an EM source as a PC's innards do strange things to their behaviour (I'm presuming it won't be "good"/healthy/conducive for the ants...).
You're also demonstrating knowledge that people who don't already have experience with mainframes won't have. Like, now, I can google for 9672-RB5 and so on, but the real value/worth of it, what it can do, etc., I'll have no idea....
Emulation is fine (and conmicro is indeed the number 1 link when I google for "S/390 emulator") but I kinda feel emulation doesn't "do" it the way an actual, physical box does, that, you know, I can go up to and run my hands all over, feeling the smooth, cold metal underneath my palms while I gently caress.... erm, ok, where was I:-)
(Yes, I am joking. Honest.)
ANYWAYS, what I want to say is, emulation doesn't give the same feel to it as a real box. Linux under VMWare doesn't give me the same kind of compulsion to explore and learn something the way installing it onto a real machine where I muck about with the bootloader, screw up my partitions, reinstall, hack about, run X11/KDE/etc.; the point about emulators (for me anyway) is that you launch them to "do" something, in which case without any kind of directed (classroom?) course I wouldn't want to boot up an emulated "mainframe", because, what would I do with it? learn the equivalent of "ls", "pwd"... and then? Whereas if there was a real box sitting there, it just... calls out to you to go tinker with it, no?
I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's psychological.
You know, I personally wouldn't mind learning Cobol, but I've got no place to "use" it on and develop anything that I'd find useful and therefore no way to both really "learn" it (gotta do an actual non-trivial project to really learn a language, no?) nor any reason to learn it "for" ("to possibly get a job" is no good).
And I personally wouldn't mind learning how to use a mainframe-type thing, but where am I going to find my own mainframe to muck about with? Everybody's got (or can get access to) a linux box to "learn Unix" on. Where on earth am I going to find an S/390? Try and get ahold of an Itanium with OpenVMS (which isn't really "mainframe" mainframe, is it?)?
Absolutely. It didn't have to be that long. And... there's totally no shortage of nipple-viewings available in this world if you want to see nipples, and to have it this repetitively in the movie just... cheapens the whole thing.
Another thing I feel problematic about the rave scene is the music. While I was watching (and listening) I found myself thinking "this sounds nice" + "they definitely made this with soundtrack CD sales in mind" - which is unsurprising (hey show me the $$), but this being the future (since this is in Zion and thus the "real" world plenty-hundreds-of-years further on, not the "current-time-period" world within the Matrix), why does it sound so similar to "current" music? I think this is a problem with all situations where "future-music" is necessary in a movie and it is yet another reason why a need for such should be kept to a minimum (i.e. the scene was too bloody long).
Think about how different current/modern music is from that of just 50 years ago, much less that of hundreds of years back. Yes, we still have classical-music aficionados, "traditional" rock-n-roll fans etc. (and not all of whom were from "those eras"), coexisting with trance-rave-electronica people in this day and age, but I would say the "sound" of this generation is more the latter than the former? (While, say, in the '80s it was big-hair rock/metal bands:-).
Is it supposed to mean that rave/trance is going to be the basis of music from here on down? Or is it that they expect most mainstream audience members to never have heard any rave-parties before and so find it all "fresh and exciting"?
Anyways, I can't think of that many movies where the music of the future "fit", and the ones that did, the music was "background", i.e. "for us" and not "what the characters were listening to". Blade Runner's Vangelis soundtrack?
Slashdot Mirror
thanks. damn, is there anything Philip K. Dick didn't think of?? :-)
If you don't fuck with anyone, sooner or later someone will decide that you are weak and fuck with you.
I agree. This is how the world goes round.
The Chinese are already trying to push the US, see how far they can go. Spy plane incident? Spies in Los Alamos? Dumping goods into our markets? We need to fuck with them a little more then we are, in my opinion.
I'm not from China, but why do you assume only Americans (and the odd European here and there) are going to be reading Slashdot? Do you know how offensively aggressive it sounds to hear "I'm gonna fuck with your country"? This is exactly why some people dislike Americans. "All right, let's go fuck with fucking moronic Americans". How does that sound?
And you've got to be kidding if you don't think the US doesn't spy on other countries. In which case, it's just "the game" that other people spy on the US. French agents have been caught before (this is probably not such a good example now since the French are practically "enemies", eh?). I'll bet the Israelis, Germans etc. have their people just... paying attention to what the Americans are doing. Even the British?
Why are they spending all that money are military hardware if they aren't planning on using it?
You answered yourself in the first place. This is a world where if you aren't strong someone will come around and push you around. Don't forget, the mainland Chinese lost millions of people to the Japanese (for which the Japanese STILL have not even brought themselves to officially and properly apologise for, would you believe it). They've fought a war with the Indians. Even when they were both Communist the Russians and the Chinese weren't all that friendly. If you've got a large country, you want a large and modern army. End of story.
We should officially declare Taiwan a legit country and tell the mainland Chinese to go fuck off.
I agree. I believe Taiwan is a country. But, again, you're demonstrating "American Shortsightedness Combined With Arrogance". What on earth makes you think that it's the AMERICANS who should be "declaring Taiwan a legit country"? A significant proportion (more than half if my memory serves) during their last polls indicated they themselves did not want this step to be taken. Considering the minute they do so, the shooting starts, and you are going to be sitting safely at home in the US - I am making the assumption that you are not in the US armed forces and won't be part of those getting shot at while defending Taiwan, assuming Bush doesn't back out of US commitments to do so - and Taiwanese civilians etc. are going to be doing most of the dying, if anyone is going to be declaring Taiwan a legit country it should be the Taiwanese.
Taking away their "most favored nation" trading status
laugh. Are you sure the Americans making the decisions are willing to lose the kind of money they will lose by doing so? Plenty of people in mainland China would be incredibly happy if the US government would lean harder to try to make them start releasing poltiical prisoners etc. - but you're forgetting it's the money that talks, including (especially?) in the US political-economic system.
don't get me wrong, i wish the US would say SCREW YOU and let europe and the rest of the world disintegrate into the mess it would be if the US weren't influencing it.
I am not an American, but I'd like to put in my 2 cents here. I always feel these statements - "the US should do this", "the US would do that" - are always quite pointless because of vagueness. Because what does anyone mean when they say "the US"?
The "US" that would be doing the fighting (and dying) would be quite different from the "US" (government) that makes the decisions. It's been pointed out that the troops fighting in Iraq etc. are all basically there because, well, they're poor. They joined the Army to put food on the table, to get funds for college, etc. (leaving aside those there to Be All That They Can Be). Contrast this to the corporate executives and texan oil billionaires signing the executive orders sending them in. Which "US" is it that should be saying "SCREW YOU" to the rest of the world?
the "US" has also changed, and will continue to change (like everythign else). Is the "US" now the same as that of Eisenhower (sorry not too sure of the name) etc. who'd face down the Nazis? From what I can tell I honestly think quite a few of the past US Presidents really were (at least mostly?) genuinely decent, smart people who were thinking along the interests of the country/people/world(?) when they made their decisions as opposed to thinking of re-election prospects, party affiliation etc.
It really bugs me that something like that which seems to have existed before seems to now be getting ... twisted. The Florida election debacle, the possible manipulatability of future electronic voting systems - all these make guys like me worried (and not just because the US has nukes and the biggest fucking army around), because I'm from a country that exists basically because our neighbours didn't want us, while you guys have this document that starts off with "We hold these truths to be self-evident" --> no other country really compares ("oh, we're from X. we're a people and our country has basically always been around" doesn't have quite the same ring to it), and right now it's looking like it's getting really fucked up. I think if the world goes to shit in the future, if there are any historians left they'll point to now and say this is where the shit started.
The impact of the US in Europe during WWII is overrated. USA entered the war late and by that time, Germany was on its way to losing (it lost the Eastern front and lost Battle of Britain). Even if USA did not enter WWII, Germany would have lost (probably 2 years later).
IANA Historian, but I think something needs to be pointed out here: nukes. Germany had their own nuke program. a 2 year delay - I don't know, I don't have the stats, but would that have been enough time for the Germans to have obtained nukes? And they had their V2 rockets to pop them all over the place.
2 years can be a huge difference.
OFF-TOPIC: I remember reading this story (I can't remmber if it was a novel or a short story/novella), something sci-fi/alternate history, i.e. what if Germany *had* won the war? I remember reading about this scene where the protagonist in the story had to queue up in some kind of hall to have his papers checked for his racial designation (or something like that). Can anyone refresh me memory re: the name of the story/author/anything?
IANAL (and also not American, which will be relevant re: below-) but from what I understand, virtually all large US corporations have put in effort into this kind of thing - isnt' there some kind of "Americans with Disabilities Act" which legislates companies over a certain size having to make sure their products/services etc. can be used by, well, Americans with Disabilities?
In which case for legal compliance (plus also the reasons both that they have enough money to make them worth suing, and that they have the resources to throw into developing such things) it is not surprising that they would have such features.
that said, I am NOT saying this out of a knee-jerk anti-MS reaction (but, rather, a knee-jerk anti-all-large-corporations reaction :-)
probably won't even run Panther
erm. I would say it 100% wouldn't run Panther - (a) OS X will only run on actual Apple hardware due to the ROM requirements (b) even if the ROM could be supplied as a software file (as is the case for modern Macs), who's going to develop it for the IBM machine? (c) 4-way SMP does not exist on the Mac spectrum, who'll do the necessary work on it?
What this article does is, it states clearly and distinctly WHO is responsible and WHEN/WHERE it happened that MP3s came into existence... .
We better hope the RIAA doesn't send something back in time and Terminate him before he creates the standard!!!
One thing about all all these calculations and schemes to "deal" with problems like these is that they are not like physical "laws of nature" which cannot be circumvented, and *legal* laws/rules that are basically constructs intended to serve a purpose that is determined by those with the power to do so. Just offhand - if there is a widespread eruption of such cheap webcast stations, what's to stop the RIAA et al to rework the licensing agreements to make it no longer worthwhile? Say, a signup/startup cost of US$100,000 per site, w/o distinction between high-traffic and low-traffic ones? They control the licensing terms, and unless they were unwise enough to declare these to be as they are and unmodifiable in perpetuity, the rug can be pulled out from under you pretty quickly.
Hah! The G5 might be a cheese-grater, but plastic it is not! ;)
:-)
ROTFL hahaha... man I wish I had mod points
Does anyone else think these guys now have a big bulls-eye painted on them? I'm no historian, but from what I remember of revolts that weren't crushed (heads on sticks, bodies swinging from gallows, babies thrown onto bonfires etc.) is that there needs to be a critical mass before being able to withstand the (lethal) reactions of any oppressive tyrant. One single village aflame with the spirit of revolution pretty quickly becomes aflame in a physical sense when the imperial troops arrive.
Some new MS "education initiative" for those special school districts? Something else? How hard is it to replace the education board with different membership with different
Then again, maybe I'm just operating under FUD/paranoia...
*smack self*
Your 900MB error was on Entourage and not Mail.app? Wow I need to learn to read...
slink off unhappily
I've read the various posts and I must say I disagree with almost everybody except the original poster about his mailbox problem -
:-), but it should NOT be considered "user's fault". The analogy that pops to my head now is the 2GB filesize limit on most 32bit filesystems - why exactly should a video-editing user be considered at fault if his video-recording goes past 2GB and he loses data? If "working around the limitations of the system" is the "one true way" of dealing with computers then why on earth did people work on creating filesystems that can exceed 2GB filesizes? If Mail.app will always choke on a 900MB file then Mail.app needs to be fixed. Or at the very least warnings inserted that will alert end users
(a) Mail.app does not specify any limit to mailbox size. Does it give warnings as you approach any filesize that it is unable to handle? "Warning! Mail.app is unable to properly handle mailbox sizes over and above XMB and you are now at X+1MB, please trim" --> if no such alert etc. appears, then why exactly *should* the user be expected to know beforehand "oh I shouldn't do this"? Without any published specification/limitation or in-use alerts then the only "acceptable" effect on the end-user should be a slowdown because, well, that's a pretty damn big mailbox file
(b) splitting up the files into smaller individual mailboxes is also not acceptable if Mail.app does not have a function that will allow for searching multiple mailboxes etc. as one single function. I know the old Eudora etc. had this ability - does Mail.app?
(c) Mail.app also has other problems. It's IMAP functioning is primitive and at my workplace woe betide the poor user who tries to connect to the mailserver without pre-specifying the default root path in his preferences (which incidentally cannot be done during the setup "wizard" (I don't know what the non-MS term is), so the user has to intentionally skip the "easy to use" setup sequence, and then manually configure/setup options. When absolutely every other IMAP client on other platforms can do it properly, this is unacceptable.
Right now, the two mail clients I most detest are Outlook and Mail.app.
(a) everyone hates spam
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(b) MS has the legal resources to really have a go at the spammers (and at the least make sure they get a lot of publicity about it)
Even if they lose, MS will be able to file their legal expenditures under "usefully spent money" in terms of the good publicity they'll buy re: the average joe on the street (and if they win they'll get the PR for free since they'll be recouping $$). All of a sudden they'd no longer be a corporation whose executives were repeatedly caught out prevaricating during their last trial, but instead a corp taking action to help everybody...
Wow. These guys sound unhappy.
You know, this is actually a truly interesting idea. Could it work? i think the way the capitalist system (haha, don't I sound Marxist? :-) is structured, they simply just assume people are going to do things based on a "I've got to get meself more $$$$!!!" basis. In which case is there any legal reason why a bunch of people can't just move in and do what this post suggests?
f you read the article it says that China hasn't got enough IPs for their regular computer users, cell phones or not, and that the Asian countries are building their own adressing infrastructure
The Net is getting more fragmented. I recall some discussion previously about how the original conception of the net, and the use of IP, was to allow everyone to be a peer - you've got an IP, you can do your own thing, webserver, mail, etc.; all this is interfered with by firewalls, NAT, etc. Now there is an additional layer of "segmentation".
The need to shift to IPv6 and build new infrastructure also gives the authorities the opportunity to insert more control infrastructure into their networks' gateways to the wider world. It is known that Google, Cisco etc. have been working with the governments (whether you consider it being strong-armed or not) to help in restricting access to certain sites etc. What happens when (my understanding is getting a bit flaky here, since I don't like working with IPv6) the v6-v4 gateways become points where the governments of the world can put a finger into, for good or ill? Still plenty of countries in the world where the general man on the street has no say as to what form of government they have (and what with the Florida fiasco + Supreme Court intervention in the US, the US isn't all that great a poster-boy for democracy either).
Prevent perfect accuracy. Make it so that a certian percentage of shots always miss, no matter how good the player is.
:-) I started thinking how this would actually both (a) simulate real-world "chance" occurrences that stymie many a "perfect" plan/setup, and (b) also test a player's ability to recover/compensate when things do not go to plan... .
When I first read this I wanted to disagree strongly. I mean, why penalise the people who truly are good shots?
But then I thought about it a bit more (since I'm on dialup it takes a while for "reply to this" to load
it would've endangered MORE lives
Sometimes it's not about arithmetic isn't it? I'm thinking there would be a non-zero number of volunteers on a "dangerous rescue mission you might die on". It's not "certain death" (and even if it were...).
I mean, you've got a bunch of people who are 100% doomed if you don't do anything. It just boils down to are you the kind of person to say "it's too risky, let them go", or do you just say "I don't care. We have to go".
I've read how archeologists found old bones with holes carved out in them such that they formed crude flutes, and that the notes they would have created would be in the pentatonic scale... and mathematically an octave is a halving of the freq of the wave, so I guess there's really no doubt there's some kind of - whether rooted in auditory-organ biology or Laws of Physics - common basis for all music.
...
And if it's a question of reversion to "animal" primitivism during the Zion celebration I can understand if the music was what would I guess be commonly termed "tribal". But during the scene it just sounds so entirely "20th-century-E-rave"
Aren't ants sensitive to electromagnetism/radio-frequency waves? Won't having them so near an EM source as a PC's innards do strange things to their behaviour (I'm presuming it won't be "good"/healthy/conducive for the ants...).
You're also demonstrating knowledge that people who don't already have experience with mainframes won't have. Like, now, I can google for 9672-RB5 and so on, but the real value/worth of it, what it can do, etc., I'll have no idea...
My boss has even discussed giving me the old AS400 for my own!
:-)
.
Kickass
chance. But if you show that you are willing to go the extra mile chances are someone will give you an opportunity to prove yourself. If you work hard
Unfortunately I would disagree with you. Your company is one that HAS got old AS/400s to give away... not all/many do...
Thanks;
:-)
... and then? Whereas if there was a real box sitting there, it just... calls out to you to go tinker with it, no?
Emulation is fine (and conmicro is indeed the number 1 link when I google for "S/390 emulator") but I kinda feel emulation doesn't "do" it the way an actual, physical box does, that, you know, I can go up to and run my hands all over, feeling the smooth, cold metal underneath my palms while I gently caress.... erm, ok, where was I
(Yes, I am joking. Honest.)
ANYWAYS, what I want to say is, emulation doesn't give the same feel to it as a real box. Linux under VMWare doesn't give me the same kind of compulsion to explore and learn something the way installing it onto a real machine where I muck about with the bootloader, screw up my partitions, reinstall, hack about, run X11/KDE/etc.; the point about emulators (for me anyway) is that you launch them to "do" something, in which case without any kind of directed (classroom?) course I wouldn't want to boot up an emulated "mainframe", because, what would I do with it? learn the equivalent of "ls", "pwd"
I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's psychological.
For me anyways.
You know, I personally wouldn't mind learning Cobol, but I've got no place to "use" it on and develop anything that I'd find useful and therefore no way to both really "learn" it (gotta do an actual non-trivial project to really learn a language, no?) nor any reason to learn it "for" ("to possibly get a job" is no good).
And I personally wouldn't mind learning how to use a mainframe-type thing, but where am I going to find my own mainframe to muck about with? Everybody's got (or can get access to) a linux box to "learn Unix" on. Where on earth am I going to find an S/390? Try and get ahold of an Itanium with OpenVMS (which isn't really "mainframe" mainframe, is it?)?
Absolutely. It didn't have to be that long. And... there's totally no shortage of nipple-viewings available in this world if you want to see nipples, and to have it this repetitively in the movie just ... cheapens the whole thing.
:-).
Another thing I feel problematic about the rave scene is the music. While I was watching (and listening) I found myself thinking "this sounds nice" + "they definitely made this with soundtrack CD sales in mind" - which is unsurprising (hey show me the $$), but this being the future (since this is in Zion and thus the "real" world plenty-hundreds-of-years further on, not the "current-time-period" world within the Matrix), why does it sound so similar to "current" music? I think this is a problem with all situations where "future-music" is necessary in a movie and it is yet another reason why a need for such should be kept to a minimum (i.e. the scene was too bloody long).
Think about how different current/modern music is from that of just 50 years ago, much less that of hundreds of years back. Yes, we still have classical-music aficionados, "traditional" rock-n-roll fans etc. (and not all of whom were from "those eras"), coexisting with trance-rave-electronica people in this day and age, but I would say the "sound" of this generation is more the latter than the former? (While, say, in the '80s it was big-hair rock/metal bands
Is it supposed to mean that rave/trance is going to be the basis of music from here on down? Or is it that they expect most mainstream audience members to never have heard any rave-parties before and so find it all "fresh and exciting"?
Anyways, I can't think of that many movies where the music of the future "fit", and the ones that did, the music was "background", i.e. "for us" and not "what the characters were listening to". Blade Runner's Vangelis soundtrack?