The two books have almost no plot elements or characters in common,
Well, except for the main character, Pham Nuwen, who is the primary protagonist of Fire and one of the primaries in Deepness. And Deepness sets up how his character ends up in Fire.
I expected it to be good, but it's gone way far above and beyond any expectations I harboured.
That's funny, because I am a HUGE fan of Vernor Vinge's and I was fairly unimpressed by Rainbow's End. I was really surprised that it won. Give that I've never heard of the competing books or authors, I just assumed it was a slow year.
The novel's setting was a fascinating and well-crafter vision of the hyper-info-technologized world of (~2030): I will give it that. But the characters were IMHO unsympathetic and most of the plot - particularly the end - felt forced and gimmicky to me.
Minor spoiler warning...
And, of course, the "librareome project" made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Given that we already have automated book scanning robots, why in 2030 would we go out of our way to shred books to scan them, since that only makes it harder than scanning an intact book? The genome project had to assemble the genome by computing the correct connections of millions of overlapping fragments because with a genome there is no other way to do it yet. But when you have an intact, scannable source it doesn't make any sense to destroy it for digitization purposes : you're only making your life harder.
90% of the people you make web pages for will have no comments at all except, "Can you make the logo fade in and fly around like on www.ultrashitty.com?"
Speaking as a web developer, this is so true it makes me want to cry.
The Muslims have been known to attack and kill people who convert out of Islam.
Christianity does not get a pass, ether. It's comparatively accepting today, but has several hundred years' history of crusades, inquisitions, witch hunts, and the blood libel.
Scientology sues its apostates sometimes, sure. But almost all of the other religions have traditions of killing them -- at least at some points in history.
The fact of the matter is if God doesn't exist, then there's no basis for morality other than "because I said so."
This is not just false, it is one of the most intellectually and morally bankrupt arguments in existence. (Despite the depressing frequency with which it pops up.) You repeat it only because some authority figure told you this is so, not because you have any rational support for the statement. I challenge you to provide a coherent argument exactly why God is the only possible basis for morality. Because that's exactly what you've claimed.
Research has repeatedly shown that the basic moral sense of humanity is remarkably consistent across all cultures and peoples, regardless of their particular religion or the lack thereof: to wit, morality is an innate and biological sense. The argument for why it is an evolved biological function that exists to help community-oriented organisms survive is at this point quite well fleshed out and supported by plenty of research and evidence.
Meanwhile, if you want a well supported argument for morality out of reason, you only need to learn the basics of the field of bioethics, which can develop a moral code far more consistent than anything that has come out of religion. (It starts from "I don't enjoy suffering, therefore other sentient being also likely don't enjoy suffering, so I should not inflict it upon them" and builds from there.)
Furthermore, plenty of philosophers and ethicists over the millennia have developed more-or-less internally consistent moral systems, many of which do not require the existence of a deity. The fact that you do not know of them means nothing.
Moreover, religion's effect on morality can be shown frequently to be a subversion of it: most religions deeply hate outsiders or "sinners" and find reasons to justify killing or otherwise harming them even when the act is counterproductive to one's own welfare. Religion gives young Muslims justification for blowing themselves and others up in the name of an imaginary entity... an act near the absolute bottom end of the moral scale. And Christianity does not get a pass either after centuries of justifying wars, invasions, persecutions and inquisitions: a million times over, people's innate moral sense was perverted by their religion. Even today, so called "Christian Morals" (most of which are in reality brand new creations that exist only to provide a wedge issue for political purposes) can easily be shown to generate boatloads of human suffering by blocking medical research and helping to entrench cycles of poverty, unwanted children, etc.
No religious text in the world provides a particularly consistent moral picture, and yours (I'm assuming yours is the Christian Bible) does a particularly horrendous job of it. Killing is justified - indeed lauded - in some passages and uncategorically banned in others. "Holy" men are praised for offering their virgin daughters to a threatening mob. Eating shellfish and working on Sunday are sometimes listed as capital crimes, yet the proper fate of a raped woman is to be compelled to marry the rapist. A couple dozen little children are killed by God for taunting an old man's baldness. (Oh, won't somebody think of the children?) Instructions to kill sinners are prolific in one testament, yet another provides us with "let he who is without sin cast the first stone".
If that book were actually the source of your morality - or anyone's - we'd all be in pretty deep manure piles. Fortunately, it isn't. Morality is primarily innate and people cherry pick the parts of their particular text that correspond to their pre-existing morality (or political agenda).
The fact that your pastor (or whoever) told you that "only God can give a basis for morality" doesn't make it it so. Your blind repetition of the statement merely exposes your own ignorance (and his/hers), lack of intellectual rigor, unwillingness to seek out new information, and inability to rationally analyze your own belief structure. You have accepted what has been delivered to you as true without any attempt to question, verify, or support.
Time!=work. If it did, Vista would have all those improvements we were promised when Longhorn was announced.
True, but also work!=results. It's still quite possible they worked their asses off, and in fact I suspect that's the case. I just suspect it was poorly planned and conceived and they wasted a few million coder-hours on stuff that got the axe in the end.
A bit like a certain project called Copland from another computer company I know...
Because when you're not paying for it, why not get the top of the line?
Notice that all the other components in the slideshow are real pictures of the actual device, while Vista is a rendered marketing shot? Looks like they didn't get a box.
They stop broadcasting massive amounts of radio waves quickly. We can't see them because advanced civilizations don't waste energy on high-power low-bandwidth broadcast.
The 1950's through 1980's Earth would be detectable from lightyears away because of the massive amount of long-range broadcasting we did, spewing information in all directions using prodigious quantities of energy.
But we're already switching away from broadcast to narrowcast tech like the 'net. Tell me, when all video goes through wires down the internet, and RF is only used for short-range comms like wifi cell phones and low-power comms like shortwave, what would a radio telescope see, looking at Earth from a few parsecs distance? Not much. An OC-3 carries far more data than a TV broadcast, but can't be detected from more than a few meters away. GSM and WiFi can be detected at a few kilometers, but not outside the atmosphere.
Broadcast is inefficient. Any really advanced civilization knows this, and won't be using it for much. If there were a way of detecting narrowband ultra-high-speed internets at 200LY, I suspect we'd see dozens.
So, assuming other civilizations develop something like ourselves, we have a few decades only to detect them between the development of Radio and the development of Intertubes. Maybe some develop wired technologies first, and all their TV was always on Cable. If so, we don't see 'em unless they're trying to be seen.
Last time I checked, you can strip the FairPlay DRM from iTunes music files pretty easily, but nobody has released a tool that does the same for video files purchased from iTunes.
So ya can't yet burn that episode of "Lost" you bought on iTunes to a DVD.
RTFA, read the above comments, and read between the lines.
The rules exist because TSA is worried about the container itself as much as the liquids. Yes, you could take explosive liquids on in lots of little bottles. BUT, as the TSA flack says in the interview, most of the existing explosive liquids are already tested for. They can be seen in x-ray, or can be found by the chemical testing devices employed at security lines.
The liquid bomb plot came up with the new approach of manufacturing explosives onboard from a bunch of liquids that are not themselves explosive and therefore wouldn't set off the detectors. But to do this requires combining the liquids in a reaction chamber at temperature and pressure for some period of time. To make enough of it within the time duration of a flight, that reaction chamber would have to be larger than 3 ounces.
So, by making sure people don't carry any large bottles, then they know you don't have any (disguised) reaction chambers necessary to manufacture explosives onboard in a little homebuilt chemistry lab.
Whether the plot would have worked (many explosives chemists say no) and how realistic or efficacious the TSA's bottle limits are I can't say. But it's not simply about limiting total liquid quantity.
The point is Apple doesn't really care about maintenance costs, or maintenance inconvenience. They care about aesthetics. People are pissed off...
Apparently Apple believes that the emphasis on aesthetics, even at the expense of easy battery replacement, will result in a product that sells better.
It seems to me that they have good reason to believe this. The iPod had the best aesthetics of any MP3 player when it was released, but didn't have a replaceable battery. Yet I seem to recall that the iPod did fairly well in the marketplace.
This whole thread is equivalent to saying: "Can't replace the battery as easily as a Nomad*. Lame."
If the iPhone sells well, Apple will be proven right in their decisions, Slashdot's angstful whinging notwithstanding. You may prefer replaceable batteries. Apple understands the market better than you do. That's why Apple's making fat bank and you aren't.
*Yes, the Nomad had replaceable batteries. It used AAs, or at least mine did.
It would seem pretty straightforward to document uses of your website to sell ads, so that you could sue ISPs for copyright violation. This seems pretty straightforward to me.
1) Generate a unique id for every webpage transmitted. php's uniq() function would be fine. Embed it in the page. 2) Generate a checksum before transmitting the page. Save the id and the checksum, perhaps in a mysql database, when transmitting the page. 3) Embed a javascript that can compute the checksum of the document at the user's end. Have it transmit the checksum back to the server. 4) If the checksum doesn't match, have the javascript transmit the content of the page and it's headers, and perhaps even a traceroute, back to the server. 5) Server stores all of the above in a "pages corrupted in transmission" log.
Log analysis should then give you a list of ISPs who have consistently corrupted your pages, details on what they inserted, and documented # of violations with date and time. You can take this documentation to the court and say "Look! Earthlink/Megapath/AT&T/Whoever has illegally copied my website to market their own advertisements 12,432 times in the last year!". Demand remuneration.
6) Profit! 7) Reduce ISP's willingness to fsck with other people's content and thereby make the world a better place.
8) (Optionally) Have your own javascript strip their ad and/or put a banner at the top that notes "Your ISP has attempted to illegally insert their own advertising into our website, thereby making money off you and me without either of our permission. We strongly suggest you switch internet service providers." -- try to get user pressure on the ISP.
I'm about to head out on a 10-day vacation. When I get back, if one of y'all hasn't written this yet I'll start on it myself.
I do only standards-compliant web design. With no hacks even, if I can avoid it at all. I develop my layouts with simultaneous testing in Safari and FF (which agree on rendering 95%+ of the time), then I go back and try to make them work in IE 5.0 through 7.0. Still with no hacks.
The IE-compatibility phase of my design process consumes about 80% of the total time for a typical site. No amount of experience seems to improve this, either, because I find new bugs every time. I've found at least three IE bugs not documented at positioniseverything.net.
What the hell are you talking about? From TFA, the ohmygod particle was traveling slower than light, if only very slightly slower than light. At the end of a bunch of math:
And thus, approximately: v = 0.9999999999999999999999951 c
Apple's biggest mistake is choosing the Cingular/AT&T network.
They didn't have much choice: AT&T is the customer that was willing to reprogram their network to support the iPhone.
The nonlinear voicemail feature is one of the selling points of the iPhone - it shows you a visual list of your messages. You can click on any one and listen to just that one. All other systems require you to listen to all your messages in order.
That feature required significant redesigning of the mobile network architecture, including the ability to send packets listing all recorded messages as identified by their caller ID. AT&T was willing to do this, Verizon was not.
Agreed. I never played much SC - I was busy in grad school during those years - but I played a zillion games of WCII. When I tried WCIII I was extremely bummed out... when I wanted to be playing god and managing a battle full of dozens or hundreds of units, instead I had to spend all my time babysitting one stupid hero through a few missions to get XP.
When I want to play an RPG, I play a full-blown RPG. When I want to manage a battle, I want to manage a battle. I didn't enjoy a game that gave me a weakened version of both experiences.
.45ACP and 9mm luger are both around a century old, but only in the sense of the specified dimensions. (9x19 luger is 106 years old, in fact.)
Modern rounds can be packed to much higher pressures (a modern 9mm +P+ round packs a much bigger wallop than a 1898 9mm luger round) of faster-burning propellant.
Not to mention expanding bullets. Hollow- and soft-point bullets were invented about 30 years after the Lincoln assassination, and have been improved since then. Polymer-filled expanders are much more recent. Expanding bullets make a dramatic difference in wounding potential.
If you don't want to be part of that world, then don't be.
I work freelance. I set my own hours, I invoice $100/hr, and I work about three billable hours per day (average), plus another hour or so for administrative tasks and paperwork. That makes me a tidy/satisfactory income and leaves me plenty of time to spend on staying in shape and doing non-earning and hobby work, or just studying to stay up on the latest tech. And I have no commute; even though I live in Los Angeles I almost never wait in traffic.
It's 9:07am on a Wednesday. I just finished breakfast while reading Slashdot, now I'm off for an hour-long mountain bike ride before I start work for the day.
Y'all work as if there's nothing else in life. I don't get it. There's more to life than making buxx for somebody else's company. Everyone else I know who has traditional 8-5 jobs working for the man is disillusioned and constantly exhausted. I don't want to be part of that soul-sucking treadmill, so I'm not.
You've constructed a careful counterexample to the GP's point.
The question is, how likely is it? If one can construct hypothetical examples and pretend they are common occurrences, then you can disprove any argument.
That's the problem with this whole argument - on both sides. When people lawfully carry guns, there are examples of both accidents (like this) and people successfully defending themselves and thus stopping rampages like the one that happened in VA.
Unless we know how *often* these things occur, we cannot do a reasonable cost-benefit analysis. And there is no good, objective research because the issue is so socially loaded that what little research exists is horrendously biased for one side or the other. This is my deepest frustration with the entire discussion of "gun control"... it is based entirely on fear and conjecture, from both sides, with no real data. Ever. Argh.
Slashdot Mirror
I still need a blue screen to write code quickly.
... weird. I've always found BSOD's to be a major obstacle to rapid development.
That's
The two books have almost no plot elements or characters in common,
Well, except for the main character, Pham Nuwen, who is the primary protagonist of Fire and one of the primaries in Deepness. And Deepness sets up how his character ends up in Fire.
I expected it to be good, but it's gone way far above and beyond any expectations I harboured.
That's funny, because I am a HUGE fan of Vernor Vinge's and I was fairly unimpressed by Rainbow's End. I was really surprised that it won. Give that I've never heard of the competing books or authors, I just assumed it was a slow year.
The novel's setting was a fascinating and well-crafter vision of the hyper-info-technologized world of (~2030): I will give it that. But the characters were IMHO unsympathetic and most of the plot - particularly the end - felt forced and gimmicky to me.
Minor spoiler warning...
And, of course, the "librareome project" made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Given that we already have automated book scanning robots, why in 2030 would we go out of our way to shred books to scan them, since that only makes it harder than scanning an intact book? The genome project had to assemble the genome by computing the correct connections of millions of overlapping fragments because with a genome there is no other way to do it yet. But when you have an intact, scannable source it doesn't make any sense to destroy it for digitization purposes : you're only making your life harder.
90% of the people you make web pages for will have no comments at all except, "Can you make the logo fade in and fly around like on www.ultrashitty.com?"
Speaking as a web developer, this is so true it makes me want to cry.
The Muslims have been known to attack and kill people who convert out of Islam.
Christianity does not get a pass, ether. It's comparatively accepting today, but has several hundred years' history of crusades, inquisitions, witch hunts, and the blood libel.
Scientology sues its apostates sometimes, sure. But almost all of the other religions have traditions of killing them -- at least at some points in history.
The fact of the matter is if God doesn't exist, then there's no basis for morality other than "because I said so."
... an act near the absolute bottom end of the moral scale. And Christianity does not get a pass either after centuries of justifying wars, invasions, persecutions and inquisitions: a million times over, people's innate moral sense was perverted by their religion. Even today, so called "Christian Morals" (most of which are in reality brand new creations that exist only to provide a wedge issue for political purposes) can easily be shown to generate boatloads of human suffering by blocking medical research and helping to entrench cycles of poverty, unwanted children, etc.
This is not just false, it is one of the most intellectually and morally bankrupt arguments in existence. (Despite the depressing frequency with which it pops up.) You repeat it only because some authority figure told you this is so, not because you have any rational support for the statement. I challenge you to provide a coherent argument exactly why God is the only possible basis for morality. Because that's exactly what you've claimed.
Research has repeatedly shown that the basic moral sense of humanity is remarkably consistent across all cultures and peoples, regardless of their particular religion or the lack thereof: to wit, morality is an innate and biological sense. The argument for why it is an evolved biological function that exists to help community-oriented organisms survive is at this point quite well fleshed out and supported by plenty of research and evidence.
Meanwhile, if you want a well supported argument for morality out of reason, you only need to learn the basics of the field of bioethics, which can develop a moral code far more consistent than anything that has come out of religion. (It starts from "I don't enjoy suffering, therefore other sentient being also likely don't enjoy suffering, so I should not inflict it upon them" and builds from there.)
Furthermore, plenty of philosophers and ethicists over the millennia have developed more-or-less internally consistent moral systems, many of which do not require the existence of a deity. The fact that you do not know of them means nothing.
Moreover, religion's effect on morality can be shown frequently to be a subversion of it: most religions deeply hate outsiders or "sinners" and find reasons to justify killing or otherwise harming them even when the act is counterproductive to one's own welfare. Religion gives young Muslims justification for blowing themselves and others up in the name of an imaginary entity
No religious text in the world provides a particularly consistent moral picture, and yours (I'm assuming yours is the Christian Bible) does a particularly horrendous job of it. Killing is justified - indeed lauded - in some passages and uncategorically banned in others. "Holy" men are praised for offering their virgin daughters to a threatening mob. Eating shellfish and working on Sunday are sometimes listed as capital crimes, yet the proper fate of a raped woman is to be compelled to marry the rapist. A couple dozen little children are killed by God for taunting an old man's baldness. (Oh, won't somebody think of the children?) Instructions to kill sinners are prolific in one testament, yet another provides us with "let he who is without sin cast the first stone".
If that book were actually the source of your morality - or anyone's - we'd all be in pretty deep manure piles. Fortunately, it isn't. Morality is primarily innate and people cherry pick the parts of their particular text that correspond to their pre-existing morality (or political agenda).
The fact that your pastor (or whoever) told you that "only God can give a basis for morality" doesn't make it it so. Your blind repetition of the statement merely exposes your own ignorance (and his/hers), lack of intellectual rigor, unwillingness to seek out new information, and inability to rationally analyze your own belief structure. You have accepted what has been delivered to you as true without any attempt to question, verify, or support.
"You appear to be viewing Japanese pornography. Should I de-pixelate it for you?"
And whoever thought we'd be glad to have clippy back?
Time!=work. If it did, Vista would have all those improvements we were promised when Longhorn was announced.
True, but also work!=results. It's still quite possible they worked their asses off, and in fact I suspect that's the case. I just suspect it was poorly planned and conceived and they wasted a few million coder-hours on stuff that got the axe in the end.
A bit like a certain project called Copland from another computer company I know...
>>Release new operating system, try and make the old one look bad.
Not a lot of work involved there.
Well, not with the second part anyway. First part took them quite a few years, IIRC.
By the time there are browsers that supports this properly AND most people are using them I'll be retired.
Me too. And I'm 33.
/ not impressed with the state of browser standards support, even today.
Fine, she likes Vista. But why Vista Ultimate?
Because when you're not paying for it, why not get the top of the line?
Notice that all the other components in the slideshow are real pictures of the actual device, while Vista is a rendered marketing shot? Looks like they didn't get a box.
They stop broadcasting massive amounts of radio waves quickly. We can't see them because advanced civilizations don't waste energy on high-power low-bandwidth broadcast.
The 1950's through 1980's Earth would be detectable from lightyears away because of the massive amount of long-range broadcasting we did, spewing information in all directions using prodigious quantities of energy.
But we're already switching away from broadcast to narrowcast tech like the 'net. Tell me, when all video goes through wires down the internet, and RF is only used for short-range comms like wifi cell phones and low-power comms like shortwave, what would a radio telescope see, looking at Earth from a few parsecs distance? Not much. An OC-3 carries far more data than a TV broadcast, but can't be detected from more than a few meters away. GSM and WiFi can be detected at a few kilometers, but not outside the atmosphere.
Broadcast is inefficient. Any really advanced civilization knows this, and won't be using it for much. If there were a way of detecting narrowband ultra-high-speed internets at 200LY, I suspect we'd see dozens.
So, assuming other civilizations develop something like ourselves, we have a few decades only to detect them between the development of Radio and the development of Intertubes. Maybe some develop wired technologies first, and all their TV was always on Cable. If so, we don't see 'em unless they're trying to be seen.
Someone with a subscription needs to tag this story Vaporware.
I remember first getting excited about in-game videos of spore something like two years ago. It's starting to feel like we're getting nukem'd again.
No, the rats know ninjitsu and teach it to the turtles.
Last time I checked, you can strip the FairPlay DRM from iTunes music files pretty easily, but nobody has released a tool that does the same for video files purchased from iTunes.
So ya can't yet burn that episode of "Lost" you bought on iTunes to a DVD.
Then why can I take multiple 2 oz containers?
RTFA, read the above comments, and read between the lines.
The rules exist because TSA is worried about the container itself as much as the liquids. Yes, you could take explosive liquids on in lots of little bottles. BUT, as the TSA flack says in the interview, most of the existing explosive liquids are already tested for. They can be seen in x-ray, or can be found by the chemical testing devices employed at security lines.
The liquid bomb plot came up with the new approach of manufacturing explosives onboard from a bunch of liquids that are not themselves explosive and therefore wouldn't set off the detectors. But to do this requires combining the liquids in a reaction chamber at temperature and pressure for some period of time. To make enough of it within the time duration of a flight, that reaction chamber would have to be larger than 3 ounces.
So, by making sure people don't carry any large bottles, then they know you don't have any (disguised) reaction chambers necessary to manufacture explosives onboard in a little homebuilt chemistry lab.
Whether the plot would have worked (many explosives chemists say no) and how realistic or efficacious the TSA's bottle limits are I can't say. But it's not simply about limiting total liquid quantity.
The point is Apple doesn't really care about maintenance costs, or maintenance inconvenience. They care about aesthetics. People are pissed off...
Apparently Apple believes that the emphasis on aesthetics, even at the expense of easy battery replacement, will result in a product that sells better.
It seems to me that they have good reason to believe this. The iPod had the best aesthetics of any MP3 player when it was released, but didn't have a replaceable battery. Yet I seem to recall that the iPod did fairly well in the marketplace.
This whole thread is equivalent to saying: "Can't replace the battery as easily as a Nomad*. Lame."
If the iPhone sells well, Apple will be proven right in their decisions, Slashdot's angstful whinging notwithstanding. You may prefer replaceable batteries. Apple understands the market better than you do. That's why Apple's making fat bank and you aren't.
*Yes, the Nomad had replaceable batteries. It used AAs, or at least mine did.
It would seem pretty straightforward to document uses of your website to sell ads, so that you could sue ISPs for copyright violation. This seems pretty straightforward to me.
1) Generate a unique id for every webpage transmitted. php's uniq() function would be fine. Embed it in the page.
2) Generate a checksum before transmitting the page. Save the id and the checksum, perhaps in a mysql database, when transmitting the page.
3) Embed a javascript that can compute the checksum of the document at the user's end. Have it transmit the checksum back to the server.
4) If the checksum doesn't match, have the javascript transmit the content of the page and it's headers, and perhaps even a traceroute, back to the server.
5) Server stores all of the above in a "pages corrupted in transmission" log.
Log analysis should then give you a list of ISPs who have consistently corrupted your pages, details on what they inserted, and documented # of violations with date and time. You can take this documentation to the court and say "Look! Earthlink/Megapath/AT&T/Whoever has illegally copied my website to market their own advertisements 12,432 times in the last year!". Demand remuneration.
6) Profit!
7) Reduce ISP's willingness to fsck with other people's content and thereby make the world a better place.
8) (Optionally) Have your own javascript strip their ad and/or put a banner at the top that notes "Your ISP has attempted to illegally insert their own advertising into our website, thereby making money off you and me without either of our permission. We strongly suggest you switch internet service providers." -- try to get user pressure on the ISP.
I'm about to head out on a 10-day vacation. When I get back, if one of y'all hasn't written this yet I'll start on it myself.
Internet Explorer's CSS rendering: WYSIWTF
This one had me laughing and crying at once.
I do only standards-compliant web design. With no hacks even, if I can avoid it at all. I develop my layouts with simultaneous testing in Safari and FF (which agree on rendering 95%+ of the time), then I go back and try to make them work in IE 5.0 through 7.0. Still with no hacks.
The IE-compatibility phase of my design process consumes about 80% of the total time for a typical site. No amount of experience seems to improve this, either, because I find new bugs every time. I've found at least three IE bugs not documented at positioniseverything.net.
What the hell are you talking about? From TFA, the ohmygod particle was traveling slower than light, if only very slightly slower than light. At the end of a bunch of math:
And thus, approximately: v = 0.9999999999999999999999951 c
Apple's biggest mistake is choosing the Cingular/AT&T network.
They didn't have much choice: AT&T is the customer that was willing to reprogram their network to support the iPhone.
The nonlinear voicemail feature is one of the selling points of the iPhone - it shows you a visual list of your messages. You can click on any one and listen to just that one. All other systems require you to listen to all your messages in order.
That feature required significant redesigning of the mobile network architecture, including the ability to send packets listing all recorded messages as identified by their caller ID. AT&T was willing to do this, Verizon was not.
Agreed. I never played much SC - I was busy in grad school during those years - but I played a zillion games of WCII. When I tried WCIII I was extremely bummed out ... when I wanted to be playing god and managing a battle full of dozens or hundreds of units, instead I had to spend all my time babysitting one stupid hero through a few missions to get XP.
When I want to play an RPG, I play a full-blown RPG. When I want to manage a battle, I want to manage a battle. I didn't enjoy a game that gave me a weakened version of both experiences.
.45ACP and 9mm luger are both around a century old, but only in the sense of the specified dimensions. (9x19 luger is 106 years old, in fact.)
Modern rounds can be packed to much higher pressures (a modern 9mm +P+ round packs a much bigger wallop than a 1898 9mm luger round) of faster-burning propellant.
Not to mention expanding bullets. Hollow- and soft-point bullets were invented about 30 years after the Lincoln assassination, and have been improved since then. Polymer-filled expanders are much more recent. Expanding bullets make a dramatic difference in wounding potential.
If you don't want to be part of that world, then don't be.
I work freelance. I set my own hours, I invoice $100/hr, and I work about three billable hours per day (average), plus another hour or so for administrative tasks and paperwork. That makes me a tidy/satisfactory income and leaves me plenty of time to spend on staying in shape and doing non-earning and hobby work, or just studying to stay up on the latest tech. And I have no commute; even though I live in Los Angeles I almost never wait in traffic.
It's 9:07am on a Wednesday. I just finished breakfast while reading Slashdot, now I'm off for an hour-long mountain bike ride before I start work for the day.
Y'all work as if there's nothing else in life. I don't get it. There's more to life than making buxx for somebody else's company. Everyone else I know who has traditional 8-5 jobs working for the man is disillusioned and constantly exhausted. I don't want to be part of that soul-sucking treadmill, so I'm not.
You've constructed a careful counterexample to the GP's point.
... it is based entirely on fear and conjecture, from both sides, with no real data. Ever. Argh.
The question is, how likely is it? If one can construct hypothetical examples and pretend they are common occurrences, then you can disprove any argument.
That's the problem with this whole argument - on both sides. When people lawfully carry guns, there are examples of both accidents (like this) and people successfully defending themselves and thus stopping rampages like the one that happened in VA.
Unless we know how *often* these things occur, we cannot do a reasonable cost-benefit analysis. And there is no good, objective research because the issue is so socially loaded that what little research exists is horrendously biased for one side or the other. This is my deepest frustration with the entire discussion of "gun control"