I read Mission Earth before I got to Battlefield Earth. In all honesty I thought the first was pretty cool but the second one was great up to the point where the movie version ended.
Battlefield Earth isn't nearly as awful as the movie. The story is actually quite good up to about 2/3 of the way through it when the baddy planet was destroyed and all of a sudden the Earthlings have to settle the debts the (bad guys, what were they again? trollocs or something) left behind using Earth as collateral. At that point the book became annoying.
What this is like is calling information and asking for the number to Kroger and being connected to Safeway instead, or whatever company was paying the most to get the RBOC to connect people to their grocery store instead of Kroger.
Silliness. This is more like a landowner getting in trouble for allowing Safeway to build on his property and display their sign when there is clearly a Kroger across the street. Just because directions to Kroger take you by Safeway doesn't make it illegal. Home Depot and Lowes purposefully build their stores near each other to increase the chance that directions leading people to one of them will direct them to the other.
Try a google search for anything and look notice which links are labelled "Sponsored Links." How hard was that to notice? If competitors are google-bombing or using some other nefarious means to bring their results up on LVMH trademarks then Google is doubly protected because that exactly the kind of thing they try to stop.
Here, I have to disagree. Putting up billboards across the street is not the same thing. This is more like putting a phone tap on the line, and setting it up so that each time someone calls Geico, they get an intercept telling them how wonderful State Farm is.
It's probably more like an advert on a train timed to show off State Farm ads when the train is pulling up to the Geico stops. The ads can be ignored.
I think the bigger factor here is that Google was bringing to France foreign competition to French companies. As protectionist as much of their government has been lately the simplest explanation is that their judicial system is the same.
Yes. I get good karma for insulting various people.
100,000 people are laughing at the expense of two companies unilaterally distrusted and convicted many times over of being foul players in their fields. Two companies whose net effect has been to reduce the options available to everyone by catering to the base whims of most of them. It's like direct democracy or mob-rule.
Yes errors are possible, but it's a programming language, and not Microsofts responsibility. With a case like programming it is the programmers responsibility to release code without exploits...
If Microsoft wrote a language that prevented errors and exploits...
MS would win major karma and popularity points by displaying a "Wal-Mart is evil" or "Wal-Mart ate my community" message on bootup or something. Meanwhile Wal-Mart will pull MS products from its shelves.
The raw well-lubed power of MS OEM dominance will finally be pitted against a hypnotically deteriorative superpower capable of harnessing the buying power of the worlds lowest common denominator.
Also, there's the problem of attrition. Google is probably already going to be dealing with this issue soon, as many of their brightest engineers already have millions in stock options, but a company that has a lot of instant millionaires one day may end up with a lot of resignation letters the next.
What is the chance that Google is paying these employees anywhere near the amount of money the employees have created for the company? They've already told their stockholders that the company would run their way. Their way happens to be a little different and it doesn't involve redundant labour. Employees are being treated according to their value and that more than anything else will keep them around.
from ANBU, a group that actually cares about this
on
Fansubbers Under Fire
·
· Score: 2, Informative
ANBU is an anime fansubbing group I hold in high regard for the quality of their work. This is what they have to say about the legality of fansubs...
What are the legalities behind fansubbing?
This section pertains to information regarding licensed works and their legality. ANBU is a fan subtitling group, not endorsed or affiliated to any company or author. As a result, ANBU is subject to various laws and restrictions imposed by several International and U.S. Codes. Furthermore, ANBU respects the wishes and license of American companies. This is why ANBU has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to licensed materials. All such materials must cease distribution as soon as the license has been made official and public. Fansubs in themselves are illegal, testing our luck when a work has been licensed in our country is asking for trouble.
Many emails come to us saying that, "I am not in the United States, so send us the fansubs." This is not possible. As several members of our fansub group reside in the United States, as well as our web server - we are subject to the laws of the country we reside in. Furthermore, as our website is hosted in the United States, it can be seen as facilitating and encouraging such distribution, and we would be held fully responsible.
If you enjoy our fansubs, and would like to continue to see us produce more, you would not ask us to participate in any endeavor that would endanger any of our staff and cause any litigation to occur as a result of our free service to the community.
In a more detailed note, we will outline several of the laws regarding this topic for your perusal.
17 USC Title 17 (U.S. Copyright Code)
17.1.106 (paraphrased): The owner of a copyright has the exclusive right to do and authorize the following:
1) Reproduce the work in copies
2) Prepare derivative works
"...the fair use of a copyrighted work, (...) for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright."
This means that only the owner/creator has the right to reproduce (copy or distribute) any of their works. It also includes 'derivative' works which means, anything made from the original is also covered under this. Essentially this means that Fansubs, which are a derivative of the original work, cannot be distributed without the exclusive consent of the copyright owner. Derivative works can also include screenshots, movie clips, and music videos using the works.
Many people try to state that fansubbing is included under 'fair use', however it is very specific as to what constitutes 'fair use' and translations are not.
Berne Convention Article 2 - Literary and Artistic Works Covered
2.1 The expression "literary and artistic works" shall include every production in the literary, scientific and artistic domain, whatever may be the mode or form of its expression, such as books, pamphlets and other writings; lectures, addresses, sermons and other works of the same nature; dramatic or dramatico-musical works; choreographic works and entertainments in dumb show; musical compositions with or without words; cinematographic works to which are assimilated works expressed by a process analogous to cinematography; works of drawing, painting, architecture, sculpture, engraving and lithography; photographic works to which are assimilated works expressed by a process analogous to photography; works of applied art; illustrations, maps, plans, sketches and three-dimensional works relative to geography, topography, architecture or science.
2.6 The works mentioned in this article shall enjoy protection in all countries of the Union. This protection shall operate for the benefit of the author and his successors in title.
This essentially states that the work of an author in any nation who signed the convention, is protected in every nation under the convention. See below for an ent
Take it up with Miyazaki, Pixar, Dreamworks SKG, Tim Burton, Aardman Animations (Wallace and Gromit), Tool, Tarantino, and anyone who's ever used CG in a movie.
Who is accountable for the security of the linux kernel?
When was the last time Microsoft took responsibility for damage done by what they call security? How many billions of dollars of virus damage have you been held accountable for?
The several thousand people whose names are written in GPL licenses are responsible for making it so secure.
Don't ask about accountability from us when you, who would rather pay attention to IP infringement than damage done by your software's flaws, doesn't have it. Bitch.
I really don't see this happening, seeing the (lack of ) sucess of web-apliances that we hear so much about.
That all happened back when we were still trying to get high speed internet to the home. In countries that have cheap high speed internet doing things like managing your image library won't be bottlenecked at your connection. If you have a 10mbit connection you can download pretty much all of your environmental data (assume 25 megs) in about 30 seconds. If the OS is a kiosk type device that's always running you'll "boot" into your data which will take a whole 30 seconds to load. 30 seconds is a major improvement over current startup speeds for a system.
Getting access to your pictures will seem just as fast as it does now since you will likely be browsing a virtual filesystem of thumbnails. Loading an image into your GoogleImager program would be a matter of loading the GoogleImager from the computer's harddrive while the image is downloaded somewhere.
How many programs take less time to start than the time required to download (at >10mbit) the file they're loading? If Google can circumvent the Windows decay rate they've already won.
Hell, you don't even have to load any environmental data or actually bring the pictures to your computer. Have you ever used VNC, X-Win, or Remote Desktop? Image loading your 10MB image into GoogleGIMP using their hardware to buffer the whole thing. For $1/(Gigabyte of user data)/year I'd gladly put my parents on that setup (if only DSL and Cable weren't the only thing available in my area). High-end gaming is incompatible with this setup, but I'm sure my parents would't mind that at all.
Umm, why the hell would a self-contained/self-sustaining system need to be connected to an external network in the first place?
Sorry, you work at a Nuclear Power Plant? Check your frelling AOL/Yahoo/Hotmail e-mail on your own damn computer, on your own damn time.
The self-contained/self-sustaining system isn't connecting externally.
The only computers at power plants that are capable of connecting to the internet are in no way capable of contacting a core system. Employees are encouraged to get there work done on time and do whatever they want online that doesn't involve porn.
Sounds like what happens when you're using a hash table to organize your data. At first everything slides neatly into a place in the table that wasn't already occupied. After a while though, the table is getting crowded and you have to start implementing some sort of algorithm to get things into locations that'll you'll eventually be able to use.
The same idea happens with system memory. Your computer loads the program from the harddrive into main memory (RAM) and parts of that is paged into your caches using some algorithm. Now, when nothing is running on your computer and you're just giving it new commands it fills up those caches and the main memory really quickly. But after a while main memory is a jumble and the cache is mapped all over the place. It takes 1000 times longer to pull stuff from the hard drive that you need and it also takes a lot of use of certain pieces of memory before the memory manager will decide its worth keeping in main memory for faster recall and not flushing out to the hard drive.
We figured out memory hierarchies a long time ago. Newer technology has given us a difference between L1 and L2 cache, but we're still depending on the same basic idea of spreading out data between the really expensive quick memory and the dirt cheap, expansive, and incrementally slow outer levels of memory. The concept just works. There's no reason not to believe nature settled upon the same system on a vastly more complex scale. We've taken almost 100 years to get the memory hierarchy we have now and we've done over time is speed up the system and subdivide the memory levels more and more. Nature has had billions or years to give our minds all sorts of levels. It's no wonder we think most of our brain is unused. Tape backups in the basement look unused but everyone knows they're storing something.
First of all, no. The ends never justify the means. When you find yourself using people not as an end unto themselves, find different means.
Second of all, I know a girl who been getting hospitalized for months on end ever since she was vaccinated as a child. The vaccine is responsible for destroying her liver, among other things. Vaccines do nasty things to a percentage of the population.
Third of all, and this applies to all foreign aid (except of course for countries that have been developed thanks to foreign money--current count: 0), when there are mouths to feed, and you feed them, you now have even more mouths to feed. If you think its ok to make a small percentage of the population who receives vaccines so sick (there's no was she would have lived long outside a 1st world country, and she's not being killed naturally, this was purely for the betterment of society as a whole) then why not go whole hog and let the whole lot of them go?
Anyones who's ever been annoyed at the idea of antivirus companies should cringe at the idea of vaccines. You can write all the code you want to identify and stop a virus, but the vulnerability only goes away when the program gets fixed. Vaccines don't stay in the gene pool. Natural immunity does.
I guess you missed all the OpenSecrets.org links and Slashdot articles about how heavily the media industry supplements the campaigns of the Democrats. For example: Frtiz Hollings (D-Disney).
Software companies (esp. big ones like MS and IBM) donate down the line between the two parties so don't blame anti-piracy laws on any one party.
I'm not sure we actually lose memories. I count emotions as heuristics based on our memories, ideas that have a lot of information behind them but we can't really backtrace to figure out what is involved. Our emotions are statistical approximations based on ideas and experiences we can no longer afford to keep in conscious memory.
The appeal of the game Go to me is just that. When you've seen your 1000th game you don't remember all the patterns and sequences in all the previous games. You simply can't keep track of which opening moves lead to which outcomes. There are more moves in the game than molecules in a galaxy so it's silly to expect full recognition. What you do get though is how you felt about certain moves as you saw them. You learned to enjoy the quick attack at the opponent or the slow tactfulness that drew out an opponents mistakes. Read enough Go games and you'll begin to see what an experienced player is feeling as he makes his moves. You'll see it because you'll remember the feeling you got when that kind of move was made before. You won't have at hand a mental reference chart for what was a brutish invasion and what was sly trickery based on the specific pattern of the stones. Instead you'll have an approximation attached to a feeling which makes that move vaguely recognizable even though you've never seen it before.
Computers don't have the capacity for heuristics and pattern recognition that people do which is why a three month Go player can soundly beat any Go computer. People have a complex system of feelings which allow us to index and categorize all the experiences of our lives without ever having to remember those experiences explicitly. Go is deep enough that it will show you how someone's head is connected.
I have several bonsai all over my computer desk, on the computer speakers, and sitting in the window by my desk. Azaleas are perfectly suited for indoor life. Also nice is the rabbit's foot fern on one of the speakers which just looks weird and multiplies as fast as a spider plant. Behind my computer (a laptop permanently fixed on my desk) is a small cluster of palms of some sort which enjoy the heat that my laptop's fan pumps out at them.
Occasionally the fern will droop down low enough to get in the way of my screen. This is a really good indicator that the plants need watering.
If it's successful, maybe our men and women in uniform will have to team up with the United Auto Workers to fight the robo-threat to their jobs.
Oh my god. Did the poster just imply the future need for military unions to keep soldiers in their jobs. All these complaints we hear from Selective Service (Weekend Warriors, the people paid to be prepared for war and yet some were somehow suprised when they were sent off to war) people sent off to war and now there's a complaint that there might be redundancies in the military.
Can anyone imagine a military functioning with a union?
Does google limit search results to documents that contain every single word you've queried for?...
Oh. I see. In that case the complexity only increases with the number of times the document is passed over for each word, or 3.2x which is probably over twice as high as the average number of times a document needs to be scanned for a word before finding that it doesn't contain a word...
32 word searching increases the complexity of the search many times over. For a ten word search you're usually talking about finding all documents with all ten words, ordering them by how many of the searched terms were found, and then by their linked-to values. With 32 you're finding ~3.2x as many documents, comparing for 3.2x as many words in each documents, and then finding how popular they were.
I've always been kind of curious as to why MS wouldn't want Firefox to become ubiquitous. How does Firefox hurt them? Right now they've got Avalon rolling along pretty well, they've got their XAML GUI tools, they've got Windows Lognhorn eclipsing the market soon and I'm sure there'll be something bigger and better with it that neatly supplants the need for ActiveX.
As near as I can tell the only thing that could be keeping them embedded in the browser market would have to be Google. If Google successfully comes out with some sort of internet based office suite that doesn't depend on IE (or Windows for that matter) then that might be it for Office (but also for OpenOffice, an odd possibility). If MS can get into that market first though then I'm not sure why they wouldn't want the system to be available to all browsers. Then, without having to pay attention to OS, they can create their software in one single way that can be paid for and used by people on any OS around.
Is MS trying to avoid cross-platform internet technologies or something? Is it their history of using the OS to cripple competitors products that keeps everyone so concerned about their use of IE, the browser that manages to cripple competitors products over the internet?
Slashdot Mirror
I read Mission Earth before I got to Battlefield Earth. In all honesty I thought the first was pretty cool but the second one was great up to the point where the movie version ended.
Battlefield Earth isn't nearly as awful as the movie. The story is actually quite good up to about 2/3 of the way through it when the baddy planet was destroyed and all of a sudden the Earthlings have to settle the debts the (bad guys, what were they again? trollocs or something) left behind using Earth as collateral. At that point the book became annoying.
I was in 8th grade at the time.
What this is like is calling information and asking for the number to Kroger and being connected to Safeway instead, or whatever company was paying the most to get the RBOC to connect people to their grocery store instead of Kroger.
Silliness. This is more like a landowner getting in trouble for allowing Safeway to build on his property and display their sign when there is clearly a Kroger across the street. Just because directions to Kroger take you by Safeway doesn't make it illegal. Home Depot and Lowes purposefully build their stores near each other to increase the chance that directions leading people to one of them will direct them to the other.
Try a google search for anything and look notice which links are labelled "Sponsored Links." How hard was that to notice? If competitors are google-bombing or using some other nefarious means to bring their results up on LVMH trademarks then Google is doubly protected because that exactly the kind of thing they try to stop.
Here, I have to disagree. Putting up billboards across the street is not the same thing. This is more like putting a phone tap on the line, and setting it up so that each time someone calls Geico, they get an intercept telling them how wonderful State Farm is.
It's probably more like an advert on a train timed to show off State Farm ads when the train is pulling up to the Geico stops. The ads can be ignored.
I think the bigger factor here is that Google was bringing to France foreign competition to French companies. As protectionist as much of their government has been lately the simplest explanation is that their judicial system is the same.
Yes. I get good karma for insulting various people.
100,000 people are laughing at the expense of two companies unilaterally distrusted and convicted many times over of being foul players in their fields. Two companies whose net effect has been to reduce the options available to everyone by catering to the base whims of most of them. It's like direct democracy or mob-rule.
Yes errors are possible, but it's a programming language, and not Microsofts responsibility. With a case like programming it is the programmers responsibility to release code without exploits...
If Microsoft wrote a language that prevented errors and exploits...
That's bordering on paradox.
My head hurts.
I propose a Battle Royale: Microsoft vs Wal-Mart!
MS would win major karma and popularity points by displaying a "Wal-Mart is evil" or "Wal-Mart ate my community" message on bootup or something. Meanwhile Wal-Mart will pull MS products from its shelves.
The raw well-lubed power of MS OEM dominance will finally be pitted against a hypnotically deteriorative superpower capable of harnessing the buying power of the worlds lowest common denominator.
I was expecting
article = women.opinion("sex").strcat(women.opinion("video games"));
not
article = women.opinion("sex+videogames");
My women don't play video games. I think a two part article on sex and video games would be much more useful than sex in video games.
Hey bud. You're infringing on a trademark. 33% of what you make off your suit against the grandparent and everyone walks away happy. Deal?
Also, there's the problem of attrition. Google is probably already going to be dealing with this issue soon, as many of their brightest engineers already have millions in stock options, but a company that has a lot of instant millionaires one day may end up with a lot of resignation letters the next.
What is the chance that Google is paying these employees anywhere near the amount of money the employees have created for the company? They've already told their stockholders that the company would run their way. Their way happens to be a little different and it doesn't involve redundant labour. Employees are being treated according to their value and that more than anything else will keep them around.
ANBU is an anime fansubbing group I hold in high regard for the quality of their work. This is what they have to say about the legality of fansubs...
What are the legalities behind fansubbing?
This section pertains to information regarding licensed works and their legality. ANBU is a fan subtitling group, not endorsed or affiliated to any company or author. As a result, ANBU is subject to various laws and restrictions imposed by several International and U.S. Codes. Furthermore, ANBU respects the wishes and license of American companies. This is why ANBU has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to licensed materials. All such materials must cease distribution as soon as the license has been made official and public. Fansubs in themselves are illegal, testing our luck when a work has been licensed in our country is asking for trouble.
Many emails come to us saying that, "I am not in the United States, so send us the fansubs." This is not possible. As several members of our fansub group reside in the United States, as well as our web server - we are subject to the laws of the country we reside in. Furthermore, as our website is hosted in the United States, it can be seen as facilitating and encouraging such distribution, and we would be held fully responsible.
If you enjoy our fansubs, and would like to continue to see us produce more, you would not ask us to participate in any endeavor that would endanger any of our staff and cause any litigation to occur as a result of our free service to the community.
In a more detailed note, we will outline several of the laws regarding this topic for your perusal.
17 USC Title 17 (U.S. Copyright Code)
17.1.106 (paraphrased): The owner of a copyright has the exclusive right to do and authorize the following:
1) Reproduce the work in copies
2) Prepare derivative works
"...the fair use of a copyrighted work, (...) for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright."
This means that only the owner/creator has the right to reproduce (copy or distribute) any of their works. It also includes 'derivative' works which means, anything made from the original is also covered under this. Essentially this means that Fansubs, which are a derivative of the original work, cannot be distributed without the exclusive consent of the copyright owner. Derivative works can also include screenshots, movie clips, and music videos using the works.
Many people try to state that fansubbing is included under 'fair use', however it is very specific as to what constitutes 'fair use' and translations are not.
Berne Convention Article 2 - Literary and Artistic Works Covered
2.1 The expression "literary and artistic works" shall include every production in the literary, scientific and artistic domain, whatever may be the mode or form of its expression, such as books, pamphlets and other writings; lectures, addresses, sermons and other works of the same nature; dramatic or dramatico-musical works; choreographic works and entertainments in dumb show; musical compositions with or without words; cinematographic works to which are assimilated works expressed by a process analogous to cinematography; works of drawing, painting, architecture, sculpture, engraving and lithography; photographic works to which are assimilated works expressed by a process analogous to photography; works of applied art; illustrations, maps, plans, sketches and three-dimensional works relative to geography, topography, architecture or science.
2.6 The works mentioned in this article shall enjoy protection in all countries of the Union. This protection shall operate for the benefit of the author and his successors in title.
This essentially states that the work of an author in any nation who signed the convention, is protected in every nation under the convention. See below for an ent
Animation is a technique, not a genre.
Take it up with Miyazaki, Pixar, Dreamworks SKG, Tim Burton, Aardman Animations (Wallace and Gromit), Tool, Tarantino, and anyone who's ever used CG in a movie.
Who is accountable for the security of the linux kernel?
When was the last time Microsoft took responsibility for damage done by what they call security? How many billions of dollars of virus damage have you been held accountable for?
The several thousand people whose names are written in GPL licenses are responsible for making it so secure.
Don't ask about accountability from us when you, who would rather pay attention to IP infringement than damage done by your software's flaws, doesn't have it. Bitch.
I really don't see this happening, seeing the (lack of ) sucess of web-apliances that we hear so much about.
That all happened back when we were still trying to get high speed internet to the home. In countries that have cheap high speed internet doing things like managing your image library won't be bottlenecked at your connection. If you have a 10mbit connection you can download pretty much all of your environmental data (assume 25 megs) in about 30 seconds. If the OS is a kiosk type device that's always running you'll "boot" into your data which will take a whole 30 seconds to load. 30 seconds is a major improvement over current startup speeds for a system.
Getting access to your pictures will seem just as fast as it does now since you will likely be browsing a virtual filesystem of thumbnails. Loading an image into your GoogleImager program would be a matter of loading the GoogleImager from the computer's harddrive while the image is downloaded somewhere.
How many programs take less time to start than the time required to download (at >10mbit) the file they're loading? If Google can circumvent the Windows decay rate they've already won.
Hell, you don't even have to load any environmental data or actually bring the pictures to your computer. Have you ever used VNC, X-Win, or Remote Desktop? Image loading your 10MB image into GoogleGIMP using their hardware to buffer the whole thing. For $1/(Gigabyte of user data)/year I'd gladly put my parents on that setup (if only DSL and Cable weren't the only thing available in my area). High-end gaming is incompatible with this setup, but I'm sure my parents would't mind that at all.
Umm, why the hell would a self-contained/self-sustaining system need to be connected to an external network in the first place?
Sorry, you work at a Nuclear Power Plant? Check your frelling AOL/Yahoo/Hotmail e-mail on your own damn computer, on your own damn time.
The self-contained/self-sustaining system isn't connecting externally.
The only computers at power plants that are capable of connecting to the internet are in no way capable of contacting a core system. Employees are encouraged to get there work done on time and do whatever they want online that doesn't involve porn.
I'll put it in simpler terms.
Disease spreads proportionally to the concentration of people. The faster you save them the faster it spreads.
Sounds like what happens when you're using a hash table to organize your data. At first everything slides neatly into a place in the table that wasn't already occupied. After a while though, the table is getting crowded and you have to start implementing some sort of algorithm to get things into locations that'll you'll eventually be able to use.
The same idea happens with system memory. Your computer loads the program from the harddrive into main memory (RAM) and parts of that is paged into your caches using some algorithm. Now, when nothing is running on your computer and you're just giving it new commands it fills up those caches and the main memory really quickly. But after a while main memory is a jumble and the cache is mapped all over the place. It takes 1000 times longer to pull stuff from the hard drive that you need and it also takes a lot of use of certain pieces of memory before the memory manager will decide its worth keeping in main memory for faster recall and not flushing out to the hard drive.
We figured out memory hierarchies a long time ago. Newer technology has given us a difference between L1 and L2 cache, but we're still depending on the same basic idea of spreading out data between the really expensive quick memory and the dirt cheap, expansive, and incrementally slow outer levels of memory. The concept just works. There's no reason not to believe nature settled upon the same system on a vastly more complex scale. We've taken almost 100 years to get the memory hierarchy we have now and we've done over time is speed up the system and subdivide the memory levels more and more. Nature has had billions or years to give our minds all sorts of levels. It's no wonder we think most of our brain is unused. Tape backups in the basement look unused but everyone knows they're storing something.
The A/V companies got mad that they didn't think of the virus first.
What good is antivirus software if it can't protect against all viruses? How better to protect against them to have written them yourself?
-1 flamebait
First of all, no. The ends never justify the means. When you find yourself using people not as an end unto themselves, find different means.
Second of all, I know a girl who been getting hospitalized for months on end ever since she was vaccinated as a child. The vaccine is responsible for destroying her liver, among other things. Vaccines do nasty things to a percentage of the population.
Third of all, and this applies to all foreign aid (except of course for countries that have been developed thanks to foreign money--current count: 0), when there are mouths to feed, and you feed them, you now have even more mouths to feed. If you think its ok to make a small percentage of the population who receives vaccines so sick (there's no was she would have lived long outside a 1st world country, and she's not being killed naturally, this was purely for the betterment of society as a whole) then why not go whole hog and let the whole lot of them go?
Anyones who's ever been annoyed at the idea of antivirus companies should cringe at the idea of vaccines. You can write all the code you want to identify and stop a virus, but the vulnerability only goes away when the program gets fixed. Vaccines don't stay in the gene pool. Natural immunity does.
I guess you missed all the OpenSecrets.org links and Slashdot articles about how heavily the media industry supplements the campaigns of the Democrats. For example: Frtiz Hollings (D-Disney).
Software companies (esp. big ones like MS and IBM) donate down the line between the two parties so don't blame anti-piracy laws on any one party.
I'll bet you think tort reform, phone company monopolies, and poor U.S. education standards are the fault of Republicans too. Hell, even our bloated government bureaucracy is 69'ing the Democrats.
I'm not sure we actually lose memories. I count emotions as heuristics based on our memories, ideas that have a lot of information behind them but we can't really backtrace to figure out what is involved. Our emotions are statistical approximations based on ideas and experiences we can no longer afford to keep in conscious memory.
The appeal of the game Go to me is just that. When you've seen your 1000th game you don't remember all the patterns and sequences in all the previous games. You simply can't keep track of which opening moves lead to which outcomes. There are more moves in the game than molecules in a galaxy so it's silly to expect full recognition. What you do get though is how you felt about certain moves as you saw them. You learned to enjoy the quick attack at the opponent or the slow tactfulness that drew out an opponents mistakes. Read enough Go games and you'll begin to see what an experienced player is feeling as he makes his moves. You'll see it because you'll remember the feeling you got when that kind of move was made before. You won't have at hand a mental reference chart for what was a brutish invasion and what was sly trickery based on the specific pattern of the stones. Instead you'll have an approximation attached to a feeling which makes that move vaguely recognizable even though you've never seen it before.
Computers don't have the capacity for heuristics and pattern recognition that people do which is why a three month Go player can soundly beat any Go computer. People have a complex system of feelings which allow us to index and categorize all the experiences of our lives without ever having to remember those experiences explicitly. Go is deep enough that it will show you how someone's head is connected.
Chess is tricky. Go humbles me.
I have several bonsai all over my computer desk, on the computer speakers, and sitting in the window by my desk. Azaleas are perfectly suited for indoor life. Also nice is the rabbit's foot fern on one of the speakers which just looks weird and multiplies as fast as a spider plant. Behind my computer (a laptop permanently fixed on my desk) is a small cluster of palms of some sort which enjoy the heat that my laptop's fan pumps out at them.
Occasionally the fern will droop down low enough to get in the way of my screen. This is a really good indicator that the plants need watering.
If it's successful, maybe our men and women in uniform will have to team up with the United Auto Workers to fight the robo-threat to their jobs.
Oh my god. Did the poster just imply the future need for military unions to keep soldiers in their jobs. All these complaints we hear from Selective Service (Weekend Warriors, the people paid to be prepared for war and yet some were somehow suprised when they were sent off to war) people sent off to war and now there's a complaint that there might be redundancies in the military.
Can anyone imagine a military functioning with a union?
Does google limit search results to documents that contain every single word you've queried for? ...
Oh. I see. In that case the complexity only increases with the number of times the document is passed over for each word, or 3.2x which is probably over twice as high as the average number of times a document needs to be scanned for a word before finding that it doesn't contain a word...
That's not too hard. Why is there a limit?
32 word searching increases the complexity of the search many times over. For a ten word search you're usually talking about finding all documents with all ten words, ordering them by how many of the searched terms were found, and then by their linked-to values. With 32 you're finding ~3.2x as many documents, comparing for 3.2x as many words in each documents, and then finding how popular they were.
So, um, wow.
I've always been kind of curious as to why MS wouldn't want Firefox to become ubiquitous. How does Firefox hurt them? Right now they've got Avalon rolling along pretty well, they've got their XAML GUI tools, they've got Windows Lognhorn eclipsing the market soon and I'm sure there'll be something bigger and better with it that neatly supplants the need for ActiveX.
As near as I can tell the only thing that could be keeping them embedded in the browser market would have to be Google. If Google successfully comes out with some sort of internet based office suite that doesn't depend on IE (or Windows for that matter) then that might be it for Office (but also for OpenOffice, an odd possibility). If MS can get into that market first though then I'm not sure why they wouldn't want the system to be available to all browsers. Then, without having to pay attention to OS, they can create their software in one single way that can be paid for and used by people on any OS around.
Is MS trying to avoid cross-platform internet technologies or something? Is it their history of using the OS to cripple competitors products that keeps everyone so concerned about their use of IE, the browser that manages to cripple competitors products over the internet?