So register one twitter account per outlet, have them all tweet power usage, then register another twitter account that retweets all the others and then tweets the total usage. Once you start generating that much twitter traffic, CNN will eventually start publishing your tweets on the front page of their website, since their primary news gathering activity these days is reading and re-posting "hot" twitter feeds. Then, you can just log on to cnn.com whenever you want to know your power usage.
This is a valid concern. Once you introduce deodorant into their lifestyle the female of the species will start to naturally gravitate toward the males that smell less like an old shoe and more like Old Spice. This will naturally encourage more of the males to use the deodorant. From there it's only a matter of time before these things are drenching themselves in Axe body spray and getting fake tans.
I don't see why an atheist would object on philosophical grounds. However, I can see why an atheist, being bombarded by religion on a daily basis in real life, would enjoy a game more if it had no religion in it. Personally, I accepted religion in the game but never really concentrated on developing it so the true impact it could have on a game was largely lost on me. The way I played the game, the religions were more of a pointless nuisance than anything else. Others who played the game differently probably have a different point of view on it, but I'm totally indifferent toward the fact that religion was left out this time around.
Exactly. It does exactly what it's supposed to do: Instead of having a single mega-corp have complete control of your data, it does completely the opposite and lets everyone in the world have complete control of your data! It truly is the anti-Facebook.
MySpace was mostly popular among young people, particularly teenagers. Unfortunately for them, teenagers are notoriously fickle and amenable to change. Facebook serves a far wider demographic, many of whom are highly resistant to change. I don't think displacing Facebook is necessarily impossible, but it will be far more difficult than displacing MySpace was, and I don't see how the Diaspora model in particular could pull it off. I guess we'll see, though.
Yeah, until you actually have a product, I won't believe it. I wonder how many people still have reservations on TWA's moon-shuttle vehicle that they were promoting back in 1969.
I still have my reservation. I've tried to call and confirm it, but those TWA guys have been really difficult to get a hold of for the past few years for some reason. Are you trying to suggest they might try to put me in an aisle seat when I specifically requested the window? That would really piss me off.
The internet was designed to keep computers connected during a nuclear war.
That's a common, but untrue, myth. The Internet was designed to survive large network outages primarily because the early networks were extremely unreliable, not because of any desire to survive nuclear attack. The Internet was primarily designed, and used, for facilitating communication between researchers in far-flung locations. In that aspect, it could be argued that the intention was social in nature from the very beginning, and anonymity wasn't ever really expected or designed for.
Having said that, the explosion of popularity of the Internet caused anonymity to become a highly prized side effect of the nature of the network, and many things that exist on the Internet today (for better or worse) might not exist without the ability to effectively hide one's true identity. These days the trend is heading back toward using real identities, which wouldn't necessarily be so alarming if it wasn't for the huge increase in the capabilities of data mining.
Back in the day, you could use your real name everywhere and people still wouldn't necessarily know all that much about you. Now, companies are able to gather and share enormous amounts of information about you through their ability to store and process massive amounts of information, something that was simply not possible as recently as 10 years ago. Couple this with the social networking scene that actively encourages people to share ever more information on (intentionally) poorly secured networks run by companies whose entire business model revolves around gleaning useful information from all that data, and it's not hard to imagine a future where everyone is able to instantly find out everything about everyone else. For those of us who still value our privacy, this is a troubling development.
I once played Call of Duty for 72 hours straight. On my way to the 7-11 to get another case of Code Red I heard a loud bang right behind me. Instantly I spun around, dove to the ground, and emptied the clips on the two handguns I keep strapped to my sides at all times in order to fend off any crazy baseball-bat-wielding maniacs (I play a lot of Grand Theft Auto too). Anyway, it turns out it was just a school bus full of kids backfiring, but the incident gave me a lot of confidence in my ability to react quickly in any given situation. Shame about the kids, though.
The included games (other than possibly Lost Levels) are also already available on the Wii's Virtual Console for about 5 bucks each. I guess this could be an interesting collector's item for Mario enthusiasts, but for the average schmo just looking for a trip down memory lane, the virtual console route seems like a cheaper and easier way to get these particular games.
On the contrary, I don't think networks do the miniseries thing nearly enough. When you have a finite work that wouldn't fit into a 2 hour movie, a miniseries is the perfect treatment for it. These days, the solution tends to be to either cut all the good stuff out and make an incomprehensible 2 hour movie or try to make the material into a multi-season series where you have to add tons of filler if it gets popular because the original source material was too thin or the planned story arc too short for that many episodes (see: Lost, also arguably the third season of Battlestar Galactica).
Just like with any format, there have been really great miniseries and some really tragically terrible ones. You can't say the entire format is bad because it can be used to make bad works though.
You can use a repulsor beam like this to bring things within your grasp if it's positioned properly, much like women can increase their own attraction by bringing their much uglier friend with them to the bars. In practical terms, your large gravitational pull is actually counteracted by a natural repulsor beam (also generated by your weight) that keeps women away from you. If this new beam were to be placed directly behind your target, it may be able to successfully counteract your own repulsive field enough to draw the women in, or at least allow them to enter into a stable orbit around you. After that, you just have to turn up the charm and you're golden.
Yeah um...that was totally intentional because the future is actually entirely populated by people from the distance past due to a freak time machine accident. Yeah, that's the ticket.
This is why you should never shoot blindly into the sky. Sure you think it's harmless, but your great-great-great-great(etc)-grandparents won't think it's so funny when they get attacked out of the blue by an alien race from another star system seeking revenge for your errant shot that just happened to kill their beloved leader. Your celebratory gunfire after your local sports team wins some meaningless (from a pan-galactic perspective) competition could end up sparking an interstellar war.
I totally agree with letting kids play on computers (supervised of course) with a cheap keyboard and mouse. That way, if they do spontaneously decide to throw the thing or throw all their weight on it, the worst that can happen is you have to go spend another 20 bucks on replacements. That's much more sensible than allowing them to play around with a $600 iPad.
Sure, it's great until the kid spontaneously decides to pick it up and throw it across the room. 18 month olds do not have good impulse control and are just barely starting to perceive that actions have consequences. I guess if you have lots of money to throw around you could give your 18 month old a fragile $600 device, but I think the smarter move would be to go with something designed to survive the kind of abuse kids that age tend to dish out to their toys.
It's in the Politics section. As incredibly depressing as it may be, Glenn Beck crying on camera and Colbert making fun of him represents the height of political discourse these days, so it fits.
We don't debate things anymore, we have competing demagogues shouting past each other, lying, and using naked appeals to emotion to push their agendas. Beck is the most visible at the moment, but he's certainly not the first nor the last. Hell, they don't even really debate things in the halls of Congress anymore, they just shout their talking points at each other to rile up the extremists on either end of the political spectrum because they're apparently the only ones who still vote.
Meanwhile, comedians like Colbert try to point out the absurdity of it all, and everyone has a good laugh, and no one changes their behavior. A rally at the Lincoln memorial would accomplish nothing. Beck's followers would either ignore it or use it as fuel to steer even further toward the extreme and follow Beck even closer. Beck's detractors would have a good laugh about it, but they're already convinced Beck is a nutbar so it's preaching to the choir for them.
On the other hand, if it was well-executed it would probably give Colbert a ratings boost, so at least he and the guys over at Comedy Central would get something out of it.
This is just grandstanding really. A nuclear bunker data center is no more secure from law enforcement than any other data center. Sure, you get better protection from natural disasters and whatnot, but if the cops come in with a court order to shut it down, the nuclear bunker people are no safer than anyone else unless they plan on hiring an army and defending the place to the death. Even then, the government just needs to get a court order to force all of their upstream network providers to cut them off and they'll be just as screwed as any other data center. After all, "leaking" documents to a collection of servers underground is not particularly effective if those servers can't connect to the Internet.
The survivability of Wikileaks in Sweden is entirely dependent on the Swedish government's willingness to let them be there, and nothing else. The servers could exist in a cave underground or a data center with a big sign that says "Wikileaks is here" in downtown Stockholm. Either way, if the Swedish governments decides they want it gone, it's going to be gone.
It could have been much worse. That giant anthropomorphic pitcher actually did burst through my wall. The entire side of our house caved in. The dog sustained a massive head injury from a flying brick and hasn't been the same since. My left arm was shattered, and my sister suffered compound fractures to both legs that prematurely ended her dancing career. That fat bastard pitcher just stood there with that self-righteous grin on his face while everyone was screaming and crying.
We tried to get some kind of legal remedy, but let's just say you'd be amazed at how many lawyers can be bought with the proceeds from selling sugar water. Please, if you must drink Kool Aid do so outside and away from any structures. To this day I shake uncontrollably every time I see some kid drinking Kool Aid near a brick wall.
You only shell out for the "extra" stuff if you're a freshman who doesn't know better or you have some sort of learning disability and you need all the extra study material provided online. In my experience, very very few classes actually require any of the online stuff provided by textbook publishers. For most books the online stuff is mostly just sample quizzes and other such things which can be useful (especially if your professor creates his or her tests entirely from the publisher's test bank), but is almost never worth the extra money.
You, the soldier, and most of the other posters seem to be confused by the difference between profiting and profiteering. Profiteering is specifically the act of exacting exorbitant or excessive profits, usually on essential goods that are in short supply during a crisis. Companies like Halliburton or Blackwater could be considered profiteers because they charge the government huge amounts of money, and rake in enormous profits, for providing essential goods and services during a crisis (even though in this case it's a crisis of the government's own making). If we were under any kind of rationing for this war, someone who had access to rationed goods and sold them back to the public at exorbitant prices would be profiteering as well. The black market for essential goods in the war zones of Iraq (assuming there is such a thing) is profiteering if the amounts charged are excessive.
On the other hand, a game manufacturer who charges the same amount of money for a war game (a decidedly nonessential good) that they charge for any other game, and makes their standard profit from it, is not profiteering. They make a profit, but it's not profiteering because the good they're selling is not essential and the profits are not exorbitant. The only part of the definition of profiteering that applies to them is the fact that they're taking advantage of a crisis to increase sales by making the game based on the current war. Likewise, the soldier is not profiteering by accepting his meager paycheck for his services. Profiting (barely), but not profiteering.
Clearly there's room for hand waving when you start talking about what exactly constitutes an excessive profit or an essential good, but I can't see how the game developer or the soldier could be considered profiteers (or Senator McCain for that matter).
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So register one twitter account per outlet, have them all tweet power usage, then register another twitter account that retweets all the others and then tweets the total usage. Once you start generating that much twitter traffic, CNN will eventually start publishing your tweets on the front page of their website, since their primary news gathering activity these days is reading and re-posting "hot" twitter feeds. Then, you can just log on to cnn.com whenever you want to know your power usage.
Sheesh, do we have to think of everything?
This is a valid concern. Once you introduce deodorant into their lifestyle the female of the species will start to naturally gravitate toward the males that smell less like an old shoe and more like Old Spice. This will naturally encourage more of the males to use the deodorant. From there it's only a matter of time before these things are drenching themselves in Axe body spray and getting fake tans.
I don't see why an atheist would object on philosophical grounds. However, I can see why an atheist, being bombarded by religion on a daily basis in real life, would enjoy a game more if it had no religion in it. Personally, I accepted religion in the game but never really concentrated on developing it so the true impact it could have on a game was largely lost on me. The way I played the game, the religions were more of a pointless nuisance than anything else. Others who played the game differently probably have a different point of view on it, but I'm totally indifferent toward the fact that religion was left out this time around.
Exactly. It does exactly what it's supposed to do: Instead of having a single mega-corp have complete control of your data, it does completely the opposite and lets everyone in the world have complete control of your data! It truly is the anti-Facebook.
MySpace was mostly popular among young people, particularly teenagers. Unfortunately for them, teenagers are notoriously fickle and amenable to change. Facebook serves a far wider demographic, many of whom are highly resistant to change. I don't think displacing Facebook is necessarily impossible, but it will be far more difficult than displacing MySpace was, and I don't see how the Diaspora model in particular could pull it off. I guess we'll see, though.
Yeah, until you actually have a product, I won't believe it. I wonder how many people still have reservations on TWA's moon-shuttle vehicle that they were promoting back in 1969.
I still have my reservation. I've tried to call and confirm it, but those TWA guys have been really difficult to get a hold of for the past few years for some reason. Are you trying to suggest they might try to put me in an aisle seat when I specifically requested the window? That would really piss me off.
The internet was designed to keep computers connected during a nuclear war.
That's a common, but untrue, myth. The Internet was designed to survive large network outages primarily because the early networks were extremely unreliable, not because of any desire to survive nuclear attack. The Internet was primarily designed, and used, for facilitating communication between researchers in far-flung locations. In that aspect, it could be argued that the intention was social in nature from the very beginning, and anonymity wasn't ever really expected or designed for.
Having said that, the explosion of popularity of the Internet caused anonymity to become a highly prized side effect of the nature of the network, and many things that exist on the Internet today (for better or worse) might not exist without the ability to effectively hide one's true identity. These days the trend is heading back toward using real identities, which wouldn't necessarily be so alarming if it wasn't for the huge increase in the capabilities of data mining.
Back in the day, you could use your real name everywhere and people still wouldn't necessarily know all that much about you. Now, companies are able to gather and share enormous amounts of information about you through their ability to store and process massive amounts of information, something that was simply not possible as recently as 10 years ago. Couple this with the social networking scene that actively encourages people to share ever more information on (intentionally) poorly secured networks run by companies whose entire business model revolves around gleaning useful information from all that data, and it's not hard to imagine a future where everyone is able to instantly find out everything about everyone else. For those of us who still value our privacy, this is a troubling development.
I once played Call of Duty for 72 hours straight. On my way to the 7-11 to get another case of Code Red I heard a loud bang right behind me. Instantly I spun around, dove to the ground, and emptied the clips on the two handguns I keep strapped to my sides at all times in order to fend off any crazy baseball-bat-wielding maniacs (I play a lot of Grand Theft Auto too). Anyway, it turns out it was just a school bus full of kids backfiring, but the incident gave me a lot of confidence in my ability to react quickly in any given situation. Shame about the kids, though.
The included games (other than possibly Lost Levels) are also already available on the Wii's Virtual Console for about 5 bucks each. I guess this could be an interesting collector's item for Mario enthusiasts, but for the average schmo just looking for a trip down memory lane, the virtual console route seems like a cheaper and easier way to get these particular games.
On the contrary, I don't think networks do the miniseries thing nearly enough. When you have a finite work that wouldn't fit into a 2 hour movie, a miniseries is the perfect treatment for it. These days, the solution tends to be to either cut all the good stuff out and make an incomprehensible 2 hour movie or try to make the material into a multi-season series where you have to add tons of filler if it gets popular because the original source material was too thin or the planned story arc too short for that many episodes (see: Lost, also arguably the third season of Battlestar Galactica).
Just like with any format, there have been really great miniseries and some really tragically terrible ones. You can't say the entire format is bad because it can be used to make bad works though.
You can use a repulsor beam like this to bring things within your grasp if it's positioned properly, much like women can increase their own attraction by bringing their much uglier friend with them to the bars. In practical terms, your large gravitational pull is actually counteracted by a natural repulsor beam (also generated by your weight) that keeps women away from you. If this new beam were to be placed directly behind your target, it may be able to successfully counteract your own repulsive field enough to draw the women in, or at least allow them to enter into a stable orbit around you. After that, you just have to turn up the charm and you're golden.
Yeah um...that was totally intentional because the future is actually entirely populated by people from the distance past due to a freak time machine accident. Yeah, that's the ticket.
This is why you should never shoot blindly into the sky. Sure you think it's harmless, but your great-great-great-great(etc)-grandparents won't think it's so funny when they get attacked out of the blue by an alien race from another star system seeking revenge for your errant shot that just happened to kill their beloved leader. Your celebratory gunfire after your local sports team wins some meaningless (from a pan-galactic perspective) competition could end up sparking an interstellar war.
Maybe they were dictating...
Freedom: $500K (that's real freedom from the system folks)
You're way off. Everybody knows freedom costs a buck o five.
So just out of curiosity: If you really enjoy doing web-based development, why did you go for a masters degree?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out the secret to a successful CERT is retsyn.
I totally agree with letting kids play on computers (supervised of course) with a cheap keyboard and mouse. That way, if they do spontaneously decide to throw the thing or throw all their weight on it, the worst that can happen is you have to go spend another 20 bucks on replacements. That's much more sensible than allowing them to play around with a $600 iPad.
Sure, it's great until the kid spontaneously decides to pick it up and throw it across the room. 18 month olds do not have good impulse control and are just barely starting to perceive that actions have consequences. I guess if you have lots of money to throw around you could give your 18 month old a fragile $600 device, but I think the smarter move would be to go with something designed to survive the kind of abuse kids that age tend to dish out to their toys.
It's in the Politics section. As incredibly depressing as it may be, Glenn Beck crying on camera and Colbert making fun of him represents the height of political discourse these days, so it fits.
We don't debate things anymore, we have competing demagogues shouting past each other, lying, and using naked appeals to emotion to push their agendas. Beck is the most visible at the moment, but he's certainly not the first nor the last. Hell, they don't even really debate things in the halls of Congress anymore, they just shout their talking points at each other to rile up the extremists on either end of the political spectrum because they're apparently the only ones who still vote.
Meanwhile, comedians like Colbert try to point out the absurdity of it all, and everyone has a good laugh, and no one changes their behavior. A rally at the Lincoln memorial would accomplish nothing. Beck's followers would either ignore it or use it as fuel to steer even further toward the extreme and follow Beck even closer. Beck's detractors would have a good laugh about it, but they're already convinced Beck is a nutbar so it's preaching to the choir for them.
On the other hand, if it was well-executed it would probably give Colbert a ratings boost, so at least he and the guys over at Comedy Central would get something out of it.
This is just grandstanding really. A nuclear bunker data center is no more secure from law enforcement than any other data center. Sure, you get better protection from natural disasters and whatnot, but if the cops come in with a court order to shut it down, the nuclear bunker people are no safer than anyone else unless they plan on hiring an army and defending the place to the death. Even then, the government just needs to get a court order to force all of their upstream network providers to cut them off and they'll be just as screwed as any other data center. After all, "leaking" documents to a collection of servers underground is not particularly effective if those servers can't connect to the Internet.
The survivability of Wikileaks in Sweden is entirely dependent on the Swedish government's willingness to let them be there, and nothing else. The servers could exist in a cave underground or a data center with a big sign that says "Wikileaks is here" in downtown Stockholm. Either way, if the Swedish governments decides they want it gone, it's going to be gone.
Yes, it would be a shame if this stuff ended up ruining the fragile ecosystem of the landfill.
It could have been much worse. That giant anthropomorphic pitcher actually did burst through my wall. The entire side of our house caved in. The dog sustained a massive head injury from a flying brick and hasn't been the same since. My left arm was shattered, and my sister suffered compound fractures to both legs that prematurely ended her dancing career. That fat bastard pitcher just stood there with that self-righteous grin on his face while everyone was screaming and crying.
We tried to get some kind of legal remedy, but let's just say you'd be amazed at how many lawyers can be bought with the proceeds from selling sugar water. Please, if you must drink Kool Aid do so outside and away from any structures. To this day I shake uncontrollably every time I see some kid drinking Kool Aid near a brick wall.
You only shell out for the "extra" stuff if you're a freshman who doesn't know better or you have some sort of learning disability and you need all the extra study material provided online. In my experience, very very few classes actually require any of the online stuff provided by textbook publishers. For most books the online stuff is mostly just sample quizzes and other such things which can be useful (especially if your professor creates his or her tests entirely from the publisher's test bank), but is almost never worth the extra money.
You, the soldier, and most of the other posters seem to be confused by the difference between profiting and profiteering. Profiteering is specifically the act of exacting exorbitant or excessive profits, usually on essential goods that are in short supply during a crisis. Companies like Halliburton or Blackwater could be considered profiteers because they charge the government huge amounts of money, and rake in enormous profits, for providing essential goods and services during a crisis (even though in this case it's a crisis of the government's own making). If we were under any kind of rationing for this war, someone who had access to rationed goods and sold them back to the public at exorbitant prices would be profiteering as well. The black market for essential goods in the war zones of Iraq (assuming there is such a thing) is profiteering if the amounts charged are excessive.
On the other hand, a game manufacturer who charges the same amount of money for a war game (a decidedly nonessential good) that they charge for any other game, and makes their standard profit from it, is not profiteering. They make a profit, but it's not profiteering because the good they're selling is not essential and the profits are not exorbitant. The only part of the definition of profiteering that applies to them is the fact that they're taking advantage of a crisis to increase sales by making the game based on the current war. Likewise, the soldier is not profiteering by accepting his meager paycheck for his services. Profiting (barely), but not profiteering.
Clearly there's room for hand waving when you start talking about what exactly constitutes an excessive profit or an essential good, but I can't see how the game developer or the soldier could be considered profiteers (or Senator McCain for that matter).