Now assuming this dude really was a spy as opposed to someone who was just hanging out with spies then why are you assuming his job at MS was anything but a cover?
It does not make sense to have your deep cover operative do his deep cover work at a place where he is known (well as known as an office drone can be).
Nuclear power is the way to go, pity it wont ever get done though; soon as your Senate, Congress or whoever handles the decisions on these sorts of things decide to move forward on the issue someone is going to stand up and say "Chernobyl", "Three Mile Island" and possibly "dirty bomb" or "fallout (not the game mind you)" and the whole proposition is going to die right there. Even if that does not happen there will be widespread protests with other people chanting the words above. Not to forget that The West have been continually spurning other countries for wanting to build nuclear reactors for years and years, so suddenly deciding to build more reactors of their own is going to put the US in a tough spot geopolitically.
The way I see it though is that for the time being fission plants along with a gradual move towards a hydrogen economy offer the best chance for independence from oil. In the long term though we need to focus on getting a commercially viable Fusion reactor design up and running, it is basically the only fuel source that offers any chance of us not having to hollow out our planet in the long run.
More likely those ATK guys have supplied their stuff to the military and whoever is pushing for them to supply this new NASA project probably was involved in ATKs previous dealings with the military.
These are politicians we are talking about here, for them it is not "the right tool for the job." it is "it worked before, for [something completely different] so it's work just as well for [something vaguely (but not really) similar]".
Oh and they're probably a campaign donor/jobs provider too.
Well someone could call 'spelunking' 'spelunkery'.
Oh an according to that James Tabor dude, serious cavers hate the term 'spelunking'; personally I love it but ten again I rarely go diving into moist caves.
150-200 ms latency in a modern FPS is nearly unforgivable. I played TF2 a lot for a while and if I ever had more than 40-70 ms latency the hit detection would start to suffer and you'd get shot through walls or just not hit.
I expect a system like OnLive might work better with strategy games and other types of games that are not nearly as fast paced as most modern shooters are.
A cooler filled with beer sitting next to your chair is cheaper, faster, and doesn't require a specialized, dedicated refrigerator. And think of all the beer you could buy for the price of one robot (and if the robot were really cool, like Bender, he'd drink all your beer before he could deliver it).
What if it is not my name on the card? What if I don't have a credit card and use gametime cards or use a friend/spouse/partent's credit card to pay with.
... with more and more people being forced to use their real names on the Internet, you'll see a lot less flaming, trolling, and defacing. People I believe will be less quick to turn a discussion into an argument and more interested in understanding one another.
You've never actually been to the internets have you?
I don't understand, how are they going to enforce the whole 'user must use real name'-policy? Are they going to be requiring users to send in copies of their passport/birth certificate/whatever before they'll allow them to create an account?
The whole thing seems to be on a purely honor system, sure the moderators there might be able to prune out all the 'Penis McBoobsfaces' that are going to be showing up over time. But there is no way to actually verify that all the John Smiths on there are actually called John Smith, short of them requiring users to send in proof of identity; I can't possibly imagine that asking users to jump through hoops to verify their identities would classify as a 'sensible business decision'.
Dear Sony (I know your a shiver corporate hivemind is lurking here)
Like to topic says, good job and congratulations on finally turning a profit on your product! You only had to alienate a large section of your customers and potential customers. Hell you even managed to piss off The USAF, so that's something at least.
I can't help but wonder what you could actually use 100Gbit/s for, I mean to the best of my knowledge (which is not all that vast I admit) you'd be hard pressed to find a storage unit that can handle these sorts of speeds.
A big faceless corporation did something horrible to its consumers! I am ever so surprised!
Seriously though, that is the deal with these big companies seemingly all turning evil as of late? I mean they've never been particularly nice, and they've always been inscrutable and faceless but lately they seem to be turning more and more evil.
Well it does happen occasionally that blockbusters get put out on DVD early in Region 5 (wherever that is) in an effort to stamp out rampant piracy in those areas.
Naturally those DVDs put out to "stamp out rampant piracy" end up on the interwebs days after they are released.
It is a false assumption that because the US government had access to plans that outlines the 9/11 attacks that they could or even should do anything about it.
Now I cannot say exactly how much information goes through the intelligence agencies every day, but I am going to assume it is a not insignificant amount. At any given time I am sure that there are several international terrorist groups that are planning to pull some operation and never actually go through with it, and I'm sure a lot of those sound a lot less crazy than the 9/11 attacks.
My point being that intelligence gathering of the sort you need to do to track down terrorists is an inherently "noisy" process which makes it extremely unlikely that you'll ever stop any operation from going live the best you can hope for is stopping one while it is in progress.
Incidentally this is the same reason why Echelon and other large scale monitoring systems are more or less useless for discovering and operation which has not already been identified through other means (HUMINT or whatever); the sheer volume you'd have to sift through to potentially discover anything of interest is simply mindboggling.
That is not true. It has been shown that oil and other point resources do in fact hinder democratic development (in less developed countries):
It is true that sudden wealth generally causes a lot of instability in the area in which it is found. However, look at industrial England for example when they started to industrialize and expand their empire using the advantage offered by their new found power it caused a lot of social and economic unrest in their society. To a certain degree they became much less democratic as power more and more moved into the hands of the wealthy industrialists and away from the previous rulers: the monarchy. Now I am not saying that England got plunged into a Sierra Leone-style wealth-driven civil war, but my point is that any significant change in a society, whether it be wealth or technology will cause unrest and instability; after a while the situation tends to stabilize itself through a variety of means, in England it began with workers' rights and rudimentary welfare laws as well as expansion of civil rights.
The problem with this is that the stabilization usually happens over hundreds of years and we humans simply don't have a concept of things that happen so slowly, we somehow expect to be able to fundamentally change in a few generations or even in a few years. The fact is that any culture that has risen to become a dominant power in our current international society went through a - often very long - period of brutality and fundamentalism and all of them have done horrible things; and it was the very fact that they did and thought these things that they became what they are today.
And the "whole point of communism is to ensure absolute equality for all.
A lot of things are supposed to do all kinds of good things. They look good on paper and intellectually and rationally they look absolutely perfect for doing the things they are supposed to do, then we try to do them and people get involved and that's when the perfect theory gets turned into a horrible practice.
You simply can't categorically state that communism, democracy or some other form of government is intrinsically better than any of the other forms of state. Communism might work out perfectly well in one country (or region) because the local culture there is compatible with communism and the people who run the state somehow manage to avoid (at least some of) the bad policy decisions that have brought down communistic regimes in the past. It is the same with democracy, it works great here in The West because our culture is compatible with it and we've had a long, long time to adapt to it and we've somehow managed to avoid running it into the ground; of course then every once in a while we start a world war.
So my point is when we (as in The West) suddenly arrive on scene in a country which has never been even slightly democratic and attempt to introduce democracy - a form of government which in many way is directly contrary to their previous forms of government - it really should come as no surprise that it turns in to a complete shitstorm.
Slashdot Mirror
Now assuming this dude really was a spy as opposed to someone who was just hanging out with spies then why are you assuming his job at MS was anything but a cover?
It does not make sense to have your deep cover operative do his deep cover work at a place where he is known (well as known as an office drone can be).
Nuclear power is the way to go, pity it wont ever get done though; soon as your Senate, Congress or whoever handles the decisions on these sorts of things decide to move forward on the issue someone is going to stand up and say "Chernobyl", "Three Mile Island" and possibly "dirty bomb" or "fallout (not the game mind you)" and the whole proposition is going to die right there.
Even if that does not happen there will be widespread protests with other people chanting the words above.
Not to forget that The West have been continually spurning other countries for wanting to build nuclear reactors for years and years, so suddenly deciding to build more reactors of their own is going to put the US in a tough spot geopolitically.
The way I see it though is that for the time being fission plants along with a gradual move towards a hydrogen economy offer the best chance for independence from oil. In the long term though we need to focus on getting a commercially viable Fusion reactor design up and running, it is basically the only fuel source that offers any chance of us not having to hollow out our planet in the long run.
You're funny.
That Balmer guy sure is wacky.
More likely those ATK guys have supplied their stuff to the military and whoever is pushing for them to supply this new NASA project probably was involved in ATKs previous dealings with the military.
These are politicians we are talking about here, for them it is not "the right tool for the job." it is "it worked before, for [something completely different] so it's work just as well for [something vaguely (but not really) similar]".
Oh and they're probably a campaign donor/jobs provider too.
Well someone could call 'spelunking' 'spelunkery'.
Oh an according to that James Tabor dude, serious cavers hate the term 'spelunking'; personally I love it but ten again I rarely go diving into moist caves.
150-200 ms latency in a modern FPS is nearly unforgivable. I played TF2 a lot for a while and if I ever had more than 40-70 ms latency the hit detection would start to suffer and you'd get shot through walls or just not hit.
I expect a system like OnLive might work better with strategy games and other types of games that are not nearly as fast paced as most modern shooters are.
A cooler filled with beer sitting next to your chair is cheaper, faster, and doesn't require a specialized, dedicated refrigerator. And think of all the beer you could buy for the price of one robot (and if the robot were really cool, like Bender, he'd drink all your beer before he could deliver it).
Do you want me to get off your lawn?
I'm surprised, really I am.
Also: FP
I assumed you used either the darkest magic or some kind of telepathy; it's how I read and post to Slashdot.
What if it is not my name on the card? What if I don't have a credit card and use gametime cards or use a friend/spouse/partent's credit card to pay with.
... with more and more people being forced to use their real names on the Internet, you'll see a lot less flaming, trolling, and defacing. People I believe will be less quick to turn a discussion into an argument and more interested in understanding one another.
You've never actually been to the internets have you?
I don't understand, how are they going to enforce the whole 'user must use real name'-policy? Are they going to be requiring users to send in copies of their passport/birth certificate/whatever before they'll allow them to create an account?
The whole thing seems to be on a purely honor system, sure the moderators there might be able to prune out all the 'Penis McBoobsfaces' that are going to be showing up over time. But there is no way to actually verify that all the John Smiths on there are actually called John Smith, short of them requiring users to send in proof of identity; I can't possibly imagine that asking users to jump through hoops to verify their identities would classify as a 'sensible business decision'.
Wow this thread sure went downhill fast...
Dear Sony (I know your a shiver corporate hivemind is lurking here)
Like to topic says, good job and congratulations on finally turning a profit on your product!
You only had to alienate a large section of your customers and potential customers. Hell you even managed to piss off The USAF, so that's something at least.
I can't help but wonder what you could actually use 100Gbit/s for, I mean to the best of my knowledge (which is not all that vast I admit) you'd be hard pressed to find a storage unit that can handle these sorts of speeds.
A big faceless corporation did something horrible to its consumers! I am ever so surprised!
Seriously though, that is the deal with these big companies seemingly all turning evil as of late? I mean they've never been particularly nice, and they've always been inscrutable and faceless but lately they seem to be turning more and more evil.
Well it does happen occasionally that blockbusters get put out on DVD early in Region 5 (wherever that is) in an effort to stamp out rampant piracy in those areas.
Naturally those DVDs put out to "stamp out rampant piracy" end up on the interwebs days after they are released.
It is a false assumption that because the US government had access to plans that outlines the 9/11 attacks that they could or even should do anything about it.
Now I cannot say exactly how much information goes through the intelligence agencies every day, but I am going to assume it is a not insignificant amount.
At any given time I am sure that there are several international terrorist groups that are planning to pull some operation and never actually go through with it, and I'm sure a lot of those sound a lot less crazy than the 9/11 attacks.
My point being that intelligence gathering of the sort you need to do to track down terrorists is an inherently "noisy" process which makes it extremely unlikely that you'll ever stop any operation from going live the best you can hope for is stopping one while it is in progress.
Incidentally this is the same reason why Echelon and other large scale monitoring systems are more or less useless for discovering and operation which has not already been identified through other means (HUMINT or whatever); the sheer volume you'd have to sift through to potentially discover anything of interest is simply mindboggling.
So how's the job at Verizon treating you?
(I mean no-one would actually be so bold as to post in defense of the big evil corporation here on Slashdot, surely not)
I would visit the site seeing as how I have no real friends.
Microsoft Sam is my only true friend.
Now if only Iceland hid some forgotten caches of WW2-era war-gold then it would be the perfect placr to build The Crypt
Wow that scathing remark sure took you a long time to think up.
That is not true. It has been shown that oil and other point resources do in fact hinder democratic development (in less developed countries):
It is true that sudden wealth generally causes a lot of instability in the area in which it is found.
However, look at industrial England for example when they started to industrialize and expand their empire using the advantage offered by their new found power it caused a lot of social and economic unrest in their society.
To a certain degree they became much less democratic as power more and more moved into the hands of the wealthy industrialists and away from the previous rulers: the monarchy.
Now I am not saying that England got plunged into a Sierra Leone-style wealth-driven civil war, but my point is that any significant change in a society, whether it be wealth or technology will cause unrest and instability; after a while the situation tends to stabilize itself through a variety of means, in England it began with workers' rights and rudimentary welfare laws as well as expansion of civil rights.
The problem with this is that the stabilization usually happens over hundreds of years and we humans simply don't have a concept of things that happen so slowly, we somehow expect to be able to fundamentally change in a few generations or even in a few years.
The fact is that any culture that has risen to become a dominant power in our current international society went through a - often very long - period of brutality and fundamentalism and all of them have done horrible things; and it was the very fact that they did and thought these things that they became what they are today.
And the "whole point of communism is to ensure absolute equality for all.
A lot of things are supposed to do all kinds of good things. They look good on paper and intellectually and rationally they look absolutely perfect for doing the things they are supposed to do, then we try to do them and people get involved and that's when the perfect theory gets turned into a horrible practice.
You simply can't categorically state that communism, democracy or some other form of government is intrinsically better than any of the other forms of state.
Communism might work out perfectly well in one country (or region) because the local culture there is compatible with communism and the people who run the state somehow manage to avoid (at least some of) the bad policy decisions that have brought down communistic regimes in the past.
It is the same with democracy, it works great here in The West because our culture is compatible with it and we've had a long, long time to adapt to it and we've somehow managed to avoid running it into the ground; of course then every once in a while we start a world war.
So my point is when we (as in The West) suddenly arrive on scene in a country which has never been even slightly democratic and attempt to introduce democracy - a form of government which in many way is directly contrary to their previous forms of government - it really should come as no surprise that it turns in to a complete shitstorm.