Hint: persians and arabs are to each other what french and germans are to each other. Long term neighbours that hate each other's guts in private and are all smiles in public. Though the advantage of having a theocratic monarchy is that you don't have to care for appearances much and actually sneer rather then smile in public.
I, for one, do not believe that the New Testament speaks only Christ's words and teachings, especially considering that considerable portions were written hundreds of years after his death.
Hundreds of years? The latest possible date for *any* of the books is 150AD. The most likely date places the most recent one (Revelation) as being written in 95AD.
The very concept of hell is attributed to roman papacy, iirc somewhere around 500-1000 AD. It's one of the defining concepts of christianity as a religion. He's talking about MODIFICATIONS of the books, which took place all over the time when bible was latin only, and hence reserved for priests only - which made modifications to the text very easy - just make sure that monks that copied bibles were instructed to insert necessary corrections. This was notable in differences found between dead sea scrolls (which contained much of the "real" bible of that time) and the bible we have today, one of which was the very existence of hell - concept that came around the same time to islam and christianity as a tool for subjugating the masses.
This isn't even considering that Jesus, like Luther centuries later, wasn't necessarily seeking to create a new religion, rather he was attempting to modify the existing Hebrew religion.
Pretty much everything Jesus taught in his day flew directly in the face of what Judaism taught at the time. The leaders of Judaism where his biggest opponents. In fact, his blasphemy by their definition was so horrible as to warrant the worst possible sentence they had at their disposal. Not exactly what anyone would (with any seriousness) call a "modification" of an existing religion.
You are contradicting yourself. Remember what Luther's teachings did to christianity - they largely morphed religion from medieval monstrosity it was to something that actually remotely resembled modern christianity and was very progressive for its time.
In this regard, Luther was not much different from Jesus, if we assume Jesus actually existed (which is another topic entirely). They both took an inherently violent religion aimed at subjugating the masses and extracting funds from them into a religion that attempted to actually SERVE the masses instead. Similarities are many, main being the attempt to make religion more accessible to masses by allowing preaching to be done in a language understood by the uneducated masses.
If you seriously think that housewife and tween crowd that follows that coverage resulting in media frenzy you're seeing will care for uncensored internet access in some far away country that's a quarter of planet away, you're in for a sore disappointment.
Humans are self centered, egoistic and generally unemphatic crowd when it's something that happens far away. But shove them a live webcam of a bird nest, and you'll have thousands upon thousands of angry housewives screaming up hell at politicians to "help that poor little bird that got pushed out of the nest by it's bigger siblings". We had that here next door in Finland. It was the most disgusting and clear show just why Churchill was dead on with his famous "best argument against democracy" quote.
What "precedence" did WoW set for MMO's except make getting to max level easy, and raid content an almost given win even if a few people couldn't play their way out of a tin can?
EQ, UO set precedences, WoW dumbed things down, but has better graphics and youtube rage videos.
WoW set the precedence that MMO can function on it's end-game content rather then leveling, and then did what blizzard always does - polished the hell out of it, making so that no one comes even close. This is why pretty much all other MMO's largely die off a few months after release now - leveling part ends, and people notice that end-game is non-existent in comparison to WoW, both in quality and in quantity. So you have massive influx of new players at start, they spend a few months leveling, and then they go back to WoW once again appreciating just how good they have it in WoW.
As for difficulty, mind you, if you seriously think that you can take heroic Lich King on, all's good for you. Most servers in the world still don't have ANYONE who downed him. Hell, many still struggle with heroic Putricide, which isn't nearly as hard and vast majority of players is barely doing any hard modes. So yes, it's hard, unless you count top five percentile, and call everyone else dumb.
Have you actually seen those two films? I got them to watch with a girlfriend, and we actually fell asleep in the middle of the second one, and mind you, it wasn't the "exhausted happy"-kind but "holy shit this movie is boring"-kind. Between the clear attempt to copy the original without having a clue how to actually write such a movie without it ending up a pale shadow of original and tasteless hardcore porn with classic "zero emotion in actors" problem that most 1k+ scenes porn actresses have, it was devastatingly boring.
There's much more exciting porn to watch with a girlfriend or alone. There are a whole lot better movies to watch that aren't porn. Sure, it's a best of its kind - a fusion of two different genres. It's just that it's such a bastard child of two, it ended up crippled and horrifyingly bad in every conceivable way.
Really, the biggest problem of the porn industry is the "professionals". It seems to be impossible for them to be anything more then literally sex machines once they get enough experience under the belt, which completely destroys much of the movie's feel, and which is why amateur porn is so much more popular. Amateurs seem human, rather then some weird sex bots that are great at taking positions that require an hour daily at the gym practicing, and similar amount of emotion to that of a bot.
There is a funny thing about that law. Up to this point, NOT A SINGLE COMPANY USED IT. Because there is a clause in the law stating that to use the law to monitor your employees, you are required to inform a government official in charge of privacy investigation, essentially making it public that you're using the law. And the public backlash because of the law was so heavy, that not a single company wants to be known as "the first company to start using that unfair snooping law".
So the law is in place, but no one wants the bad rep for using it. So it's not being used. A sort of classic nordic common sense, very similar to what we did when christians came with their crusades to bring the religion. Obey them while they have the upper hand, but dig your idols back from the ground when the guys with big swords leave. Same here, once the big money behind the law lobby has gone away, the pressure has been put not to actually put law to use.
This sort of common sense is why our criminal law allows police to conduct immediate house searches without court warrant based on suspicion of any crime with potential punishment of 6 months jail or more. It's there, and it's used to catch mainly marijuana growers and resellers. But its abuse for purposes other then that is minimal-to-nonexistent, because folks at police know - if they abuse it even once in a noticeable way, they'll lose the law. It's that mutual respect between the law and it's executors and general population that is unique to Nordic countries, and why authorities tend to have more leeway legally, and yet rarely if every abuse it clocking lowest corruption figures in the world.
Stick with Nokia for that. They have over 50% of low end market world wide, and their cheap low end phones are excellent beating most of their competition into oblivion. To quote one of their main competitors "we have to invest heavily into smart phones, because we can't compete with nokia in cheap ones" (Sony Eriksson's CEO a few months ago talking about their heavy investment into smartphones at the cost of reducing presence in low end).
These aren't advertised much outside third world countries, but they are for sale. You just have to look at retail, rather then at various operators.
I can largely confirm various Peltors working beautifully. They're the stuff that officers leading the firing range used in the army too - though they used lower end stuff.
And they're comfortable enough to sleep in. I used to sleep in pair of basic sound dampening peltors when 155mm cannons were shooting 50m away and I needed sleep. You can feel ground shaking a bit when they fire, but sound won't wake you up - dampening is that good. Your ears get a bit sweaty, and you'll feel them if you try to turn on the side, but they're comfortable enough to fall asleep on your back with.
Floppy image is intuitive because it's fairly universal - even if you're young enough not to have used one, you still have seen enough of the image associated with saving something to know what it means.
I don't understand this statement. Here in Nordic countries, mobile operators are actively advertising 3G internet as something that average people would want to replace their normal home DSL/cable with. I would assume normal home connections eat a whole lot more bandwidth then any smart phone/tablet. It's very profitable when you do it right.
I think you actually mean "AT&T knows that it will earn more money selling non-unlimited data plans..." This is quite likely, especially considering how much it usually costs to go over, and how well apple fans have rolled over when it came to moving extra money out of their pockets and into apple/apple subsidiaries' pockets. Also known as "profit margin".
If they're genuinely good guys, I'll document that too. Do you have any links to back up your story?
Your story could be a true example of software patents being used to prevent mega-corps from abusing their power, but it's exactly the sort of story a PR department would come up with regardless of the truth.
So it comes down to numbers and proofs. Can anyone help me look for documents to answer: * Has CSIRO promised to only sue companies that broke deals with CSIRO?
Who would ever promise something like that and why? Examples please. Such promise would make about as much sense as putting a cart ahead of the horse. You're supposed to make "deals" based on patents you own, not the other way around.
* Does CSIRO has massive royalties to pay? (their law suits are estimated to be worth more than a billion USD, so the royalties owed would have to be of this magnitude to justify continued enforcement)
This screams of "I want to invent something once and get paid for life" mentality. This is NOT the way patent law was originally meant for. CSIRO does what patent law WAS ORIGINALLY MEANT FOR - funnel the money back into the research. Not royalties. Royalties in these cases will always be parasitic in nature, sucking off the resources from the actual research.
* Where are the agreements that these companies signed with CSIRO?
Most likely, like most contracts, these are not public documents. They can obviously be examined by court of law, however courts are required by law, for obvious reasons, not to disclose such contracts to random people. Essentially, we have no way of ever finding out, unless one of the parties decides to come out and show the contracts to us, and doing so would most likely weaken said party's negotiating position. Therefore we are highly unlikely to ever see any of the documents.
* Which companies signed the contracts?
This is a PATENT. You do not need to sign a contract to owe money for using technology based on a patent. Usually contract is signed after weighing the patent and its usefulness - not the other way around as you seem to imply.
* Why can't CSIRO take them to court for breach of contract?
They are doing this as we discuss the topic, and have been doing it for some time now. Read the OP.
You have to remember, this isn't a general user that can rely on "OS is rare enough in the wild not to really be afraid of mass-reproducing viruses" which is the main reason why mac is considered "more secure" then windows.
Google's problems are with TARGETED malware, specifically tailored for them, not generic mass-reproducing stuff. For this, mac is arguably much worse choice then windows - it likely has similar total amount of critical flaws, being a large general-use PC OS, but amount of flaws that aren't patched/known to anyone but black market sellers is likely to be far higher then those on windows, as on windows, such flaws are profitable enough to exploit with large-scale infections, forcing microsoft to close them up on a regular basis as they come up. On mac OS, you can have similar flaws stay around for much longer time due to far smaller amount of general malware using these flaws. And to this date, the #1 way the flaws come out is through malware using them and getting snagged by honeypot machines on the net.
I would expect that when this rollout is complete, black market for mac OS zero-day flaws will get a whole lot more active then it is now, due to additional value of google likely having a mac machine in an important part of its infrastructure..
Therefore I find it rather strange that *strategic* choice landed of mac OS when switching from windows OS. Linux on the other hand makes much more sense, as google folks themselves can actually tailor the OS to their own needs, including simply sandboxing browsers and other software they deem "vulnerable". I can understand it as a kneejerk "anything but windows" reaction, but in the long run, it just doesn't make much sense.
1. Families where children have better computer skills then their parents. 2. Overly religious (often falsely called "moral") people who want to prevent their partner/family from watching what they deem immoral.
Considering the large amount of such families, I'd suggest that if they could implement such a filter, it would have quite a few people who'd opt to use it.
I find it quite hilarious how many people have already forgotten the main reason why all those APIs, or specifically the API package called "directx10" was never released for XP. It was to sell the unholy abomination that was vista. But it sure is fun to pretend that XP is some sort of uber-old tech and microsoft didn't implement dx10 for it because it's so old. I mean all those user-made mods to make dx10 work on XP clearly don't exist!
XP is perfectly fine. It's a great OS, with significantly lower system requirements. Heck, outside the inane "but w7 works on my shitty, prehistoric laptop just as well as XP! HONEST!" claims, even game publishers with their infamous dishonesty when it comes to minimum system requirements have grasped that they have to essentially print "will need one extra gigabyte of RAM to run the game if you're using w7 instead of xp" on their game boxes. Check yourself if if you don't believe me. Pretty much every single modern game says "minimum requirements: x GB ram for xp, x+1 GB of ram for vista/w7". Because games actually need a somewhat responsive system to be playable, rather then one that is swapping like mad all the time because the operating system needs the extra ram.
There is literally no hope, and that's not even a joke. There seriously isn't.
That's what aristocrats kept telling the people right until the French Revolution. Apparently when everything fails, the good old "kill, rape and pillage the fuckers" still works wonderfully. Back then, being rich made you a target, the more riches, the bigger target, the more the mob tortured you before you lost your head.
Moments like these, one has to wonder if pro-gun folks, regardless of their political inclination and their "government must fear us" agenda is dead on.
The non-overly religious pakistani that WE - the westerners, should very, very much care about. Because they are the only thing that stands between nukes and religious fanatics.
If that isn't a reason enough for anyone living in the West, I don't know what could possibly be one.
Don't forget the already existing and most effective countermeasure of all - Multiple Independent Delivery Vehicle (aka MIRV). Pretty much all modern ballistic missiles have a MIRV warhead as multiple smaller charges are far more effective then one big charge. This means that warhead will essentially break up on re-entry into smaller warheads and outer carrier warhead components. Now, the major issue that Patriot hit with SCUDs in desert storm was that missiles used by Iraqi tended to elongate and twist upon entry of the atmosphere due to changes Iraqi made to the missile to make it go faster, confusing patriot's targeting system, causing it to lose lock on the missile for a fraction of a second and reacquire tail section of the missile rather then a warhead.
And that was for a slow medium range missile with a single warhead. Now consider the scenario of ballistic intercept where missile moves at far greater speeds and amount of large debris as well as warheads is greater then that of a SCUD by a very large number. Not to even mention the ease of inserting one warhead that would carry radar jamming hardware instead of a warhead if interceptors ever reached a meaningful accuracy.
Countermeasures for current intercept missile are already built into the ballistic missiles. That's the worst part of the misinformation being spread about the interceptor system, as well as testing - they are shooting interceptors at solid targets that consist of one large metallic piece, rather then what a real warhead would be. And even then, success rate is abysmal.
Citation required. That's not something that happens in practice. Adults are supposed to know better. If they choose to do otherwise, then they should be punished. Now there may be some wiggle room if the adult doesn't know that the other one is still a minor, but in general the adult knows better.
You do realise that well over 1/4 of the total human population disagrees with you today, and pretty much 100% disagreed with you just 100 years ago? 14-year old woman usually had one child in the recent past if she was married "on time". This isn't some amazing exception as hollywood-based morale likes to paint it. It's reality, and is responsible for very survival of our species back when life expectancy was way shorter and waiting for 18 till having first sexual relations would've likely wiped out the species. Woman who stayed unmarried until 18 was considered "defective" in the same way woman who's 40 and is unmarried is considered one today, and marriage was the main way to start having sex back then, and still is in many countries.
Many "think of the children" people use largely same arguments as used by spanish inquisition and similar organisations in the past. That is not really new, or even scary. Scary is how they don't even understand this when faced with contradicting facts, even when they are well educated and smart individuals. No one is as cruel, dangerous and murderous as someone who believes in the cause fanatically, labeling all evidence to the contrary heretical. Which is what the current movement does - if you dare to criticise decisions like these, you're a pedo lover. There's no middle ground. Just like all who dared to criticise inquisition were witches.
And it works. People are SCARED to criticise, even in obvious cases like ones where age difference is minimal, or where there is clear love between parties ending in marriage and happy life together. Because even when all the evidence is on your side, the believing, fanatical masses will lynch the messenger without feeling a shred of guilt certain in their faith that messenger is inhuman monster.
This isn't limited to this topic either. Same goes for many causes which tend to favor fanatisism as their main pillar of support, such as religious terrorism for example.
And nokia s60 phones already had this for over a year. Pretty much any Nokia S60 smartphone + SIM card with 3G internet contract + nokia PC software = free tethering to any USB equipped laptop.
Or, if you want to be truly innovative, get application called joikuspot and have your phone act as a Wi-Fi 3G modem.
No, you just want something for free. If you're too cheap to afford a single penny, then I'd question your ability to afford a computer. Even a homeless person could scrounge up the bare minimum necessary to show at least a little respect to the developers.
I've never used linux on a machine I own in my entire life, I'm about as far as it gets from an open source advocate, and I can tell you that TIME IT TAKES TO JUMP THROUGH HOOPS to get the payment done from many developed countries is equivalent to earning about twice to thrice the money if I used the same time to work.
And I'm not exaggerating. In some places, it's even harder. In some, it's impossible. People don't care if developer gets paid, just like when you buy a used car, you don't care if ingenious engineers who designed it get paid. They care for VALUE the product represents to them vs cost.
In this case, making the payment can add a huge cost to the purchase. It has nothing to do with being cheap. It has everything to do with being human and wanting to survive. People who spend for ideological rather then practical reasons often find themselves in position where they can't do either very fast.
I really hope a single cruise missile can't take out an aircraft carrier, if they can, then you have far bigger problems that missiles in merchant ships. They or their escorts should have the defenses to evade or destroy most missile types.
Actually, exact opposite. Both NATO and Russian sides have pretty near perfect countermeasures for opponent's strengths. The much, MUCH nastier anti-ship missile which is installed on Russian missile cruisers and attack submarines that routinely tail US aircraft carrier task forces is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-700_Granit NATO gave it a very appropriate name: Shipwreck. Because that's what it does. I recall one of the military buff forums state that folks at NATO estimated the normal 4-missile swarm was expected to disable aircraft carrier and kill at least one of the aegis cruisers with something around 90% likelihood, while disabling the carrier only carried a 95%+ likelihood for a standard task force with three aegis cruisers and air patrols, while a swarm of 8 would literally devastate the task force entirely.. It's essentially unstoppable by any current defense weapon short of having anti-missile ship sitting on top of the sub and killing the missiles as they surface.
One has to understand, no one really wants to KILL a modern aircraft carrier in a first strike. You want to disable it, making sure that nothing can take off or land. For this, one modern cruise missile is more then enough (iirc less then 10% tilt means that nothing lands or takes off from the modern carrier). After this, the main threat for airborne/submarine force are aegis ships for air threats and anti-sub warfare ships for submarines. Those are the things you go for next, rather then finishing the aircraft carrier off. In this regard you are correct, there are few options if you want to kill a ship size of an aircraft carrier outright, and most of them are nuclear. Notably, above missiles can fit a 500kt nuclear warhead for such a task, as did many other cold-war era anti-ship missile weaponry.
Notably, this goes vice versa for NATO forces and Russian military. The main reason NATO utterly obliterated Iraq both times is because NATO forces are specifically designed to counter Russian-style "heavy armor assault" through far more advanced attack craft and helicopters which literally ate tanks alive once air superiority was achieved with tremendous efficiency. It is simply much easier to target the weakest link in the enemy doctrine then to defend it from such attack. Essentially NATO and Russian weapon systems are designed from get-go to be fairly exact and accurate counters for each other. This is something neither side likes to advertise much either - military hardware is expensive and no one likes to publicize that the other side has effective counters for it.
The most important question is - which missile is INSIDE that container. Most of the top-of-the-line anti-ship cruise missiles are not exported from Russia due to legal restrictions and military secrecy which would reduce the efficiency of the system significantly.
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For the record, nothing makes world peaceful like a nice nuclear conflagration. Sticks and stones make for awfully inefficient weapons.
Hint: persians and arabs are to each other what french and germans are to each other. Long term neighbours that hate each other's guts in private and are all smiles in public. Though the advantage of having a theocratic monarchy is that you don't have to care for appearances much and actually sneer rather then smile in public.
I, for one, do not believe that the New Testament speaks only Christ's words and teachings, especially considering that considerable portions were written hundreds of years after his death.
Hundreds of years? The latest possible date for *any* of the books is 150AD. The most likely date places the most recent one (Revelation) as being written in 95AD.
The very concept of hell is attributed to roman papacy, iirc somewhere around 500-1000 AD. It's one of the defining concepts of christianity as a religion. He's talking about MODIFICATIONS of the books, which took place all over the time when bible was latin only, and hence reserved for priests only - which made modifications to the text very easy - just make sure that monks that copied bibles were instructed to insert necessary corrections. This was notable in differences found between dead sea scrolls (which contained much of the "real" bible of that time) and the bible we have today, one of which was the very existence of hell - concept that came around the same time to islam and christianity as a tool for subjugating the masses.
This isn't even considering that Jesus, like Luther centuries later, wasn't necessarily seeking to create a new religion, rather he was attempting to modify the existing Hebrew religion.
Pretty much everything Jesus taught in his day flew directly in the face of what Judaism taught at the time. The leaders of Judaism where his biggest opponents. In fact, his blasphemy by their definition was so horrible as to warrant the worst possible sentence they had at their disposal. Not exactly what anyone would (with any seriousness) call a "modification" of an existing religion.
You are contradicting yourself. Remember what Luther's teachings did to christianity - they largely morphed religion from medieval monstrosity it was to something that actually remotely resembled modern christianity and was very progressive for its time.
In this regard, Luther was not much different from Jesus, if we assume Jesus actually existed (which is another topic entirely). They both took an inherently violent religion aimed at subjugating the masses and extracting funds from them into a religion that attempted to actually SERVE the masses instead. Similarities are many, main being the attempt to make religion more accessible to masses by allowing preaching to be done in a language understood by the uneducated masses.
If you seriously think that housewife and tween crowd that follows that coverage resulting in media frenzy you're seeing will care for uncensored internet access in some far away country that's a quarter of planet away, you're in for a sore disappointment.
Humans are self centered, egoistic and generally unemphatic crowd when it's something that happens far away. But shove them a live webcam of a bird nest, and you'll have thousands upon thousands of angry housewives screaming up hell at politicians to "help that poor little bird that got pushed out of the nest by it's bigger siblings".
We had that here next door in Finland. It was the most disgusting and clear show just why Churchill was dead on with his famous "best argument against democracy" quote.
What "precedence" did WoW set for MMO's except make getting to max level easy, and raid content an almost given win even if a few people couldn't play their way out of a tin can?
EQ, UO set precedences, WoW dumbed things down, but has better graphics and youtube rage videos.
WoW set the precedence that MMO can function on it's end-game content rather then leveling, and then did what blizzard always does - polished the hell out of it, making so that no one comes even close. This is why pretty much all other MMO's largely die off a few months after release now - leveling part ends, and people notice that end-game is non-existent in comparison to WoW, both in quality and in quantity. So you have massive influx of new players at start, they spend a few months leveling, and then they go back to WoW once again appreciating just how good they have it in WoW.
As for difficulty, mind you, if you seriously think that you can take heroic Lich King on, all's good for you. Most servers in the world still don't have ANYONE who downed him. Hell, many still struggle with heroic Putricide, which isn't nearly as hard and vast majority of players is barely doing any hard modes. So yes, it's hard, unless you count top five percentile, and call everyone else dumb.
Have you actually seen those two films? I got them to watch with a girlfriend, and we actually fell asleep in the middle of the second one, and mind you, it wasn't the "exhausted happy"-kind but "holy shit this movie is boring"-kind. Between the clear attempt to copy the original without having a clue how to actually write such a movie without it ending up a pale shadow of original and tasteless hardcore porn with classic "zero emotion in actors" problem that most 1k+ scenes porn actresses have, it was devastatingly boring.
There's much more exciting porn to watch with a girlfriend or alone. There are a whole lot better movies to watch that aren't porn. Sure, it's a best of its kind - a fusion of two different genres. It's just that it's such a bastard child of two, it ended up crippled and horrifyingly bad in every conceivable way.
Really, the biggest problem of the porn industry is the "professionals". It seems to be impossible for them to be anything more then literally sex machines once they get enough experience under the belt, which completely destroys much of the movie's feel, and which is why amateur porn is so much more popular. Amateurs seem human, rather then some weird sex bots that are great at taking positions that require an hour daily at the gym practicing, and similar amount of emotion to that of a bot.
There is a funny thing about that law. Up to this point, NOT A SINGLE COMPANY USED IT.
Because there is a clause in the law stating that to use the law to monitor your employees, you are required to inform a government official in charge of privacy investigation, essentially making it public that you're using the law. And the public backlash because of the law was so heavy, that not a single company wants to be known as "the first company to start using that unfair snooping law".
So the law is in place, but no one wants the bad rep for using it. So it's not being used. A sort of classic nordic common sense, very similar to what we did when christians came with their crusades to bring the religion. Obey them while they have the upper hand, but dig your idols back from the ground when the guys with big swords leave. Same here, once the big money behind the law lobby has gone away, the pressure has been put not to actually put law to use.
This sort of common sense is why our criminal law allows police to conduct immediate house searches without court warrant based on suspicion of any crime with potential punishment of 6 months jail or more. It's there, and it's used to catch mainly marijuana growers and resellers. But its abuse for purposes other then that is minimal-to-nonexistent, because folks at police know - if they abuse it even once in a noticeable way, they'll lose the law.
It's that mutual respect between the law and it's executors and general population that is unique to Nordic countries, and why authorities tend to have more leeway legally, and yet rarely if every abuse it clocking lowest corruption figures in the world.
Stick with Nokia for that. They have over 50% of low end market world wide, and their cheap low end phones are excellent beating most of their competition into oblivion. To quote one of their main competitors "we have to invest heavily into smart phones, because we can't compete with nokia in cheap ones" (Sony Eriksson's CEO a few months ago talking about their heavy investment into smartphones at the cost of reducing presence in low end).
These aren't advertised much outside third world countries, but they are for sale. You just have to look at retail, rather then at various operators.
I can largely confirm various Peltors working beautifully. They're the stuff that officers leading the firing range used in the army too - though they used lower end stuff.
And they're comfortable enough to sleep in. I used to sleep in pair of basic sound dampening peltors when 155mm cannons were shooting 50m away and I needed sleep. You can feel ground shaking a bit when they fire, but sound won't wake you up - dampening is that good. Your ears get a bit sweaty, and you'll feel them if you try to turn on the side, but they're comfortable enough to fall asleep on your back with.
Floppy image is intuitive because it's fairly universal - even if you're young enough not to have used one, you still have seen enough of the image associated with saving something to know what it means.
I don't understand this statement. Here in Nordic countries, mobile operators are actively advertising 3G internet as something that average people would want to replace their normal home DSL/cable with. I would assume normal home connections eat a whole lot more bandwidth then any smart phone/tablet. It's very profitable when you do it right.
I think you actually mean "AT&T knows that it will earn more money selling non-unlimited data plans..." This is quite likely, especially considering how much it usually costs to go over, and how well apple fans have rolled over when it came to moving extra money out of their pockets and into apple/apple subsidiaries' pockets. Also known as "profit margin".
If they're genuinely good guys, I'll document that too. Do you have any links to back up your story?
Your story could be a true example of software patents being used to prevent mega-corps from abusing their power, but it's exactly the sort of story a PR department would come up with regardless of the truth.
So it comes down to numbers and proofs. Can anyone help me look for documents to answer:
* Has CSIRO promised to only sue companies that broke deals with CSIRO?
Who would ever promise something like that and why? Examples please. Such promise would make about as much sense as putting a cart ahead of the horse. You're supposed to make "deals" based on patents you own, not the other way around.
* Does CSIRO has massive royalties to pay? (their law suits are estimated to be worth more than a billion USD, so the royalties owed would have to be of this magnitude to justify continued enforcement)
This screams of "I want to invent something once and get paid for life" mentality. This is NOT the way patent law was originally meant for. CSIRO does what patent law WAS ORIGINALLY MEANT FOR - funnel the money back into the research. Not royalties. Royalties in these cases will always be parasitic in nature, sucking off the resources from the actual research.
* Where are the agreements that these companies signed with CSIRO?
Most likely, like most contracts, these are not public documents. They can obviously be examined by court of law, however courts are required by law, for obvious reasons, not to disclose such contracts to random people.
Essentially, we have no way of ever finding out, unless one of the parties decides to come out and show the contracts to us, and doing so would most likely weaken said party's negotiating position.
Therefore we are highly unlikely to ever see any of the documents.
* Which companies signed the contracts?
This is a PATENT. You do not need to sign a contract to owe money for using technology based on a patent. Usually contract is signed after weighing the patent and its usefulness - not the other way around as you seem to imply.
* Why can't CSIRO take them to court for breach of contract?
They are doing this as we discuss the topic, and have been doing it for some time now. Read the OP.
You have to remember, this isn't a general user that can rely on "OS is rare enough in the wild not to really be afraid of mass-reproducing viruses" which is the main reason why mac is considered "more secure" then windows.
Google's problems are with TARGETED malware, specifically tailored for them, not generic mass-reproducing stuff. For this, mac is arguably much worse choice then windows - it likely has similar total amount of critical flaws, being a large general-use PC OS, but amount of flaws that aren't patched/known to anyone but black market sellers is likely to be far higher then those on windows, as on windows, such flaws are profitable enough to exploit with large-scale infections, forcing microsoft to close them up on a regular basis as they come up. On mac OS, you can have similar flaws stay around for much longer time due to far smaller amount of general malware using these flaws. And to this date, the #1 way the flaws come out is through malware using them and getting snagged by honeypot machines on the net.
I would expect that when this rollout is complete, black market for mac OS zero-day flaws will get a whole lot more active then it is now, due to additional value of google likely having a mac machine in an important part of its infrastructure..
Therefore I find it rather strange that *strategic* choice landed of mac OS when switching from windows OS. Linux on the other hand makes much more sense, as google folks themselves can actually tailor the OS to their own needs, including simply sandboxing browsers and other software they deem "vulnerable". I can understand it as a kneejerk "anything but windows" reaction, but in the long run, it just doesn't make much sense.
Skype has been working over any data connection on nokia phones for years, both via 3rd party applications as well as native one.
Heck, the main complaint is that native skype app on nokia won't give you video calling at the moment, unlike the 3rd party apps that do.
I can see two possible uses for such a filter.
1. Families where children have better computer skills then their parents.
2. Overly religious (often falsely called "moral") people who want to prevent their partner/family from watching what they deem immoral.
Considering the large amount of such families, I'd suggest that if they could implement such a filter, it would have quite a few people who'd opt to use it.
I find it quite hilarious how many people have already forgotten the main reason why all those APIs, or specifically the API package called "directx10" was never released for XP.
It was to sell the unholy abomination that was vista.
But it sure is fun to pretend that XP is some sort of uber-old tech and microsoft didn't implement dx10 for it because it's so old. I mean all those user-made mods to make dx10 work on XP clearly don't exist!
XP is perfectly fine. It's a great OS, with significantly lower system requirements. Heck, outside the inane "but w7 works on my shitty, prehistoric laptop just as well as XP! HONEST!" claims, even game publishers with their infamous dishonesty when it comes to minimum system requirements have grasped that they have to essentially print "will need one extra gigabyte of RAM to run the game if you're using w7 instead of xp" on their game boxes.
Check yourself if if you don't believe me. Pretty much every single modern game says "minimum requirements: x GB ram for xp, x+1 GB of ram for vista/w7". Because games actually need a somewhat responsive system to be playable, rather then one that is swapping like mad all the time because the operating system needs the extra ram.
I mean, seriously? What do they have to lose for giving us pre-rooted phones?
Control.
There is literally no hope, and that's not even a joke. There seriously isn't.
That's what aristocrats kept telling the people right until the French Revolution. Apparently when everything fails, the good old "kill, rape and pillage the fuckers" still works wonderfully. Back then, being rich made you a target, the more riches, the bigger target, the more the mob tortured you before you lost your head.
Moments like these, one has to wonder if pro-gun folks, regardless of their political inclination and their "government must fear us" agenda is dead on.
The non-overly religious pakistani that WE - the westerners, should very, very much care about. Because they are the only thing that stands between nukes and religious fanatics.
If that isn't a reason enough for anyone living in the West, I don't know what could possibly be one.
Don't forget the already existing and most effective countermeasure of all - Multiple Independent Delivery Vehicle (aka MIRV). Pretty much all modern ballistic missiles have a MIRV warhead as multiple smaller charges are far more effective then one big charge. This means that warhead will essentially break up on re-entry into smaller warheads and outer carrier warhead components. Now, the major issue that Patriot hit with SCUDs in desert storm was that missiles used by Iraqi tended to elongate and twist upon entry of the atmosphere due to changes Iraqi made to the missile to make it go faster, confusing patriot's targeting system, causing it to lose lock on the missile for a fraction of a second and reacquire tail section of the missile rather then a warhead.
And that was for a slow medium range missile with a single warhead. Now consider the scenario of ballistic intercept where missile moves at far greater speeds and amount of large debris as well as warheads is greater then that of a SCUD by a very large number. Not to even mention the ease of inserting one warhead that would carry radar jamming hardware instead of a warhead if interceptors ever reached a meaningful accuracy.
Countermeasures for current intercept missile are already built into the ballistic missiles. That's the worst part of the misinformation being spread about the interceptor system, as well as testing - they are shooting interceptors at solid targets that consist of one large metallic piece, rather then what a real warhead would be. And even then, success rate is abysmal.
Citation required. That's not something that happens in practice. Adults are supposed to know better. If they choose to do otherwise, then they should be punished. Now there may be some wiggle room if the adult doesn't know that the other one is still a minor, but in general the adult knows better.
You do realise that well over 1/4 of the total human population disagrees with you today, and pretty much 100% disagreed with you just 100 years ago?
14-year old woman usually had one child in the recent past if she was married "on time". This isn't some amazing exception as hollywood-based morale likes to paint it. It's reality, and is responsible for very survival of our species back when life expectancy was way shorter and waiting for 18 till having first sexual relations would've likely wiped out the species. Woman who stayed unmarried until 18 was considered "defective" in the same way woman who's 40 and is unmarried is considered one today, and marriage was the main way to start having sex back then, and still is in many countries.
Many "think of the children" people use largely same arguments as used by spanish inquisition and similar organisations in the past. That is not really new, or even scary. Scary is how they don't even understand this when faced with contradicting facts, even when they are well educated and smart individuals. No one is as cruel, dangerous and murderous as someone who believes in the cause fanatically, labeling all evidence to the contrary heretical. Which is what the current movement does - if you dare to criticise decisions like these, you're a pedo lover. There's no middle ground. Just like all who dared to criticise inquisition were witches.
And it works. People are SCARED to criticise, even in obvious cases like ones where age difference is minimal, or where there is clear love between parties ending in marriage and happy life together. Because even when all the evidence is on your side, the believing, fanatical masses will lynch the messenger without feeling a shred of guilt certain in their faith that messenger is inhuman monster.
This isn't limited to this topic either. Same goes for many causes which tend to favor fanatisism as their main pillar of support, such as religious terrorism for example.
And nokia s60 phones already had this for over a year. Pretty much any Nokia S60 smartphone + SIM card with 3G internet contract + nokia PC software = free tethering to any USB equipped laptop.
Or, if you want to be truly innovative, get application called joikuspot and have your phone act as a Wi-Fi 3G modem.
No, you just want something for free. If you're too cheap to afford a single penny, then I'd question your ability to afford a computer. Even a homeless person could scrounge up the bare minimum necessary to show at least a little respect to the developers.
I've never used linux on a machine I own in my entire life, I'm about as far as it gets from an open source advocate, and I can tell you that TIME IT TAKES TO JUMP THROUGH HOOPS to get the payment done from many developed countries is equivalent to earning about twice to thrice the money if I used the same time to work.
And I'm not exaggerating. In some places, it's even harder. In some, it's impossible.
People don't care if developer gets paid, just like when you buy a used car, you don't care if ingenious engineers who designed it get paid. They care for VALUE the product represents to them vs cost.
In this case, making the payment can add a huge cost to the purchase. It has nothing to do with being cheap. It has everything to do with being human and wanting to survive. People who spend for ideological rather then practical reasons often find themselves in position where they can't do either very fast.
I really hope a single cruise missile can't take out an aircraft carrier, if they can, then you have far bigger problems that missiles in merchant ships. They or their escorts should have the defenses to evade or destroy most missile types.
Actually, exact opposite. Both NATO and Russian sides have pretty near perfect countermeasures for opponent's strengths. The much, MUCH nastier anti-ship missile which is installed on Russian missile cruisers and attack submarines that routinely tail US aircraft carrier task forces is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-700_Granit
NATO gave it a very appropriate name: Shipwreck. Because that's what it does. I recall one of the military buff forums state that folks at NATO estimated the normal 4-missile swarm was expected to disable aircraft carrier and kill at least one of the aegis cruisers with something around 90% likelihood, while disabling the carrier only carried a 95%+ likelihood for a standard task force with three aegis cruisers and air patrols, while a swarm of 8 would literally devastate the task force entirely.. It's essentially unstoppable by any current defense weapon short of having anti-missile ship sitting on top of the sub and killing the missiles as they surface.
One has to understand, no one really wants to KILL a modern aircraft carrier in a first strike. You want to disable it, making sure that nothing can take off or land. For this, one modern cruise missile is more then enough (iirc less then 10% tilt means that nothing lands or takes off from the modern carrier). After this, the main threat for airborne/submarine force are aegis ships for air threats and anti-sub warfare ships for submarines. Those are the things you go for next, rather then finishing the aircraft carrier off. In this regard you are correct, there are few options if you want to kill a ship size of an aircraft carrier outright, and most of them are nuclear. Notably, above missiles can fit a 500kt nuclear warhead for such a task, as did many other cold-war era anti-ship missile weaponry.
Notably, this goes vice versa for NATO forces and Russian military. The main reason NATO utterly obliterated Iraq both times is because NATO forces are specifically designed to counter Russian-style "heavy armor assault" through far more advanced attack craft and helicopters which literally ate tanks alive once air superiority was achieved with tremendous efficiency. It is simply much easier to target the weakest link in the enemy doctrine then to defend it from such attack. Essentially NATO and Russian weapon systems are designed from get-go to be fairly exact and accurate counters for each other. This is something neither side likes to advertise much either - military hardware is expensive and no one likes to publicize that the other side has effective counters for it.
The most important question is - which missile is INSIDE that container. Most of the top-of-the-line anti-ship cruise missiles are not exported from Russia due to legal restrictions and military secrecy which would reduce the efficiency of the system significantly.
Which is why you should always be a pirate and use the third option: your very own ship to sail away with the booty!