Just because the CPU isn't pointing up, doesn't mean the cooling system can't point up. It does mean that there will have to be space "above" the CPU socket in the case/on the motherboard for the "cooling tower" in whatever orientation, though. The bigger problem would be people who don't have their computer oriented the way they were intended. I work on my tower on its side. I've seen desktops (as opposed to towers) stood on end to save space.
Maybe this "tower" could be a cone shape, so that bubbles always move to the far end as they "rise", even if its on its side. These would work better when upright, but shouldn't stop completely working as long as you don't turn it too far.
Not entirely true. The environment they live in will hardly be sterile. Aside from the microbes within each body, they'll have whatever was in their possessions and on their clothing, if not the atmosphere when they boarded the ship. In addition to that, the fact that it is very difficult to sterilize everything perfectly means that there will still be the chance of infection by something.
Check again- the radiation that's a problem in space takes enormous amounts of lead and concrete to stop; space is full of very high energy radiation, which isn't THAT much of a problem where the space station is thanks to the Earth's Van Allen belt.
Then the solution is far more trivial than trying to maintain a supply of water as shielding: simply generate a large magnetic field around the craft. Unless you fly nearly in front of the path of an oncoming metal-ore asteroid, it won't affect the ballistics enough to significantly increase impacts.
As for the financial burdens, I like the way you think. We have enough problems feeding and educating everyone here in the US, so its imperative that we immediately mothball the army and put all of the former soldiers to work feeding and teaching our populace. Think of how much food the billions we spent on Iraq and Afghanistan could buy! Students in schools run by drill sergeants will no longer suffer from lack of discipline.
Singling out the space program as somehow stealing food from the mouths of the hungry is ignorant of how money is actually spent around here. If the government *really* wanted to feed everyone, they would simply pump up taxes and increase deficit spending to cover the cost of it.
And that ignores the fact that most welfare is provided or at least controlled at the state level. Food stamps? State. Mental healthcare for the homeless? State. Unemployment? State first, then federal. Medicare? Bush wants to make it privately run. WIC services? federal grant, but state controlled. Many other welfare programs (medicaid, various others) are funded by the state and federal government jointly.
Schooling has traditionally been even more local, with funding based on local tax districts, usually with income from property taxes. And guess what? The reason you can't get schoolbooks for your kids isn't because some satellite went into space or a marine was issued a rifle, its because your neighbors refused to pass the school education bond in your tax district and pay a few more cents per thousand dollars of the value of their house. Usually they justify this by being childless and deciding not to pay to educate your children.
In other words, even if we do mothball the army (or NASA) and serve out chunks of the hundreds of billions of dollars (or in the case of NASA, a few billion dollars), theres no guarantee anything you want will get done. The funds may not make it to the individual states to be handed out to people (lets call it "trickle down bureaucracy", where every department and contractor gets a slice of the pie). Old people will demand that it go into social security. Childless people will demand it go into anything as long as "their" money isn't used to educate anyone else's kids. There are plenty of other demands on cash in the government (pay off the deficit, and so on).
Compared to all of that, a trip to Mars is easy to fund. It has a clear material goal (here are people. there is mars. go, people go.) as opposed to education (here are people. here are arbitrary tests and scores which may or may not mean that people are smart. Teach to the test, everyone!).
Because you don't think its possible for a self-sustaining craft to leave our solar system with enough people to sustain a population?
With enough materials (perhaps mined from other planets, like Mars) we could build and power ships far larger with far more people than the ones used to colonize the US. FTL travel may be impossible, but why not get several ships hosting several thousand people each, complete with artificial gravity generation (via spin), parks, some wildlife, and set them loose on a trip covering several generations?
Because its one thing to teach someone how to count to five, and another thing entirely to teach someone how to clean, load, aim, and fire a firearm. First off, the first activity doesn't require extra materials, while the second one does. Secondly, the first activity is mostly a mental process, while the second is a physical process. Finally, (actually an extension of the first one) both of them require practice in order for the lessons to settle in... shooting a gun requires ammo, a target, and somewhere to shoot.
Plus, there is no purple muppet to laugh when you shoot a round.
A lot of the assumptions made in this particular article were clearly innacurate (anyone who has spent five minutes in an Electronic Boutique knows that the average age of a video game purchaser is less than 28)
wow. Where is your EB at, in the kiddie playground at McDonalds? I was just at a GameStop today picking up Final Fantasy Origins, and quite a few of the people came into the store while I was hunting through the disorganized playstation 1 section. All of them but one were adults or children with an adult. One teenage-looking guy came in.
And I suppose your little story also takes into account the people who purchase games online?
and I'll believe this bullshit that somehow games teach kids to kill. People in the media (and our our own representatives) claim that these games are "murder trainers" but they can't even teach you to hold a gun properly. How to aim a gun. In the games, you don't even have to look down the sights on the gun to aim!
Thats just the starting point. The fact is, the only person who makes you do anything is YOU. I grew up on good ol' PBS. Monty Python didn't turn me into a drag racing nun. Or a nude pianist. Red Dwarf didn't turn me into a cat. The Red Green Show didn't make me very handy (I wish it had though, I'm not all that handsome). And that was all before I became a teenager. Add in the Atari 2600 I swapped in for a Nintendo in my 6th grade year, and later for a super nintendo, and according to these idiots, I've turned out to be some kind of saint or something since I haven't shot anyone or tried to fry them with Street Fighter 2 moves.
Ha. Gripe to the human-interface people who get up on their soapbox and beat their drums to the tune of "nobody wants to see that debugging junk, its enough to know their program crashed. It shouldn't have crashed in the first place, so its the programmers fault that it happened."
Ah, its so hard to keep all these detention camps apart. The two people who died didn't die at Guantanamo, they died at a camp in Afghanistan. I wonder if this particular camp was also a temporary thing. And I wonder how many more "temporary" camps are still operating.
What, you expect the government to make sense? Heres a clue for you: this government you speak of doesn't do anything. It doesn't fight wars. It doesn't play in the park with its dog. It doesn't "make sense". "Government" is the label applied to a collection of people who claim a higher amount of authority over other people.
Thats right. Humans do the work. The government has no "ulterior motives" or "conspiracies", instead, some human has a power trip. Or a nervous breakdown. Or types in Jim's "Academic Study Code" as 80 (English Major) instead of 08 (Criminology Major). There could be many number of reasons why an FBI agent didn't interrogate Jim right away. Maybe the file fell behind someone's desk. Maybe some agent put Jim under survelliance to see if anything concrete enough to haul him in would come up. After a year or so, he got bored and started wiretapping corporate headquarters for stock tips. "Steve" was present illegally, so he was breaking the law even if studying to be a pilot was legal (when did it become illegal to learn to fly a plane? Maybe "Steve" just wanted to do cropdusting back in his home country. Or is that illegal too now?).
Jim's captivity results directly from the Patriot Act in this case. Years ago, just associating with "Steve" wasn't enough for an outright arrest warrant. Now, in the more-permissive "we gotta get the terrorists at all costs" environment, the attempt of an apparent English major who used to live with a terrorist to "infiltrate" LEA, was enough to obtain a warrant for the library records, and the library records, on top of all of that was sufficient circumstantial evidence for the arrest warrant.
So lets say that the FBI decides to do the token "Constitutional" thing, and gives Jim his trial after all. The FBI agents show up, and after initial arguments, an agent takes the stand and reads his prepared speech: "We have direct evidence which proves that Jim is engaging in terrorist activities." On cross examination, the agent is unable to actually produce any evidence in court due to the "sensitive nature" of the evidence and its "importance to national security". How does Jim defend against this?
As for Gitmo, lets call it a proof of concept. It proved that the American public was willing to allow the governement agents representing them to indefinitely hold and torture (oh wait, im sorry, according to the PR bits released by the government to the news which you so blindly follow, there was no beatings going on. In fact, the two detainees who died, died of "not-tortured" causes.) non-citizens. And now we have a fellow citizen from Intel, who apparently gave money to a fake charity, and is now being detained. Before you say "well, maybe he did more than just being misled by a false charity", ask yourself why the "justice" department hasn't given him the fair and speedy trial he is entitled to as a citizen of the US. Why haven't they proven he was more than a victim of circumstance?
The Patriotic Act says a lot more than just "the feds can see what books you read", but thats a story for another day.
No, today, I'll tell you the story about Jim. Jim was a fine young man, he just graduated with a degree in criminology. He was an honest and caring individual, who was selfless and brave. He would have been an outstanding police officer some day.
Well, would have been, except that Jim's freshman year, his roommate Steve was arrested. He didn't know the guy too well, Steve always hung out with the "tough crowd" and usually didn't use the room at all, preferring to stay out all night or crash at his girlfriend's place. Anyway, Jim went home for summer break to see his old friends, and when he came back, he had a different roommate. He hadn't heard much about it, and nobody was too keen on talking about it, so he figured he'd just let it slide.
So, after graduating, Jim applied to join the police force. He passed the civil service exams, and waited to hear the good news. And waited. And waited.
Then one day, there was a knock on the door. He got up, to answer it, and suddenly there was a loud bang and the door splintered, then collapsed inwards. 5 armed FBI agents rushed him and threw him to the ground then pinned him down. That was the last anyone heard from Jim. His neighbors thought it was sad that he'd be hauled away, since he seemed like such a nice quiet boy.
The End.
So, what happened?
Well, Jim's life started on the quick road to Hell when the university's random housing lottery placed him with Steve. Except Steve wasn't named Steve. He was just using that name while he was illegally in the US to study piloting airplanes. Then, Jim started checking out books on famous murders, criminology, DNA testing, and the like. His final mistake was applying for a position on the police force, thats when they ran the background check on him.
They punched his name into the database, and out popped the following:
Warning lived with "steve" for one year. Possible terrorist connection.
Well, this was enough for the FBI to get involved, so they went and looked up the list of books Jim had checked out and read. The list certainly was eye-opening. They fed this data into their database (which incidentially had Jim's major incorrectly listed as "English". But that was OK, since it wasn't important for the information to be correct)
The database churned for a few minutes and spat out the following:
Warning subject lived with "steve" for one year. Possible terrorist connection. Warning subject has extensive interest in criminal behavior and violent crimes. Conclusion: HE'S A TERRIST! GET HIM!
So now, Jim's sitting in a cell (if you can call those chain link things in Cuba "cells"). Been there for a few years. They still haven't told him why though. Every now and then they beat him or make him kneel with his head back and his arms straight out for hours on end, but they let up a little after a couple of other guys died. On the up side though, he's gotten to be good friends with this Ali guy in the next cell over, who seems like someone he knew his freshman year.
Moral (if you're still reading):
If you think this kind of thing is bullshit, you seriously underestimate the ability of the US justice system to be perverted. Take a look at the current mess the Houston Police Department is in, using shoddy lab work and practically lying through their teeth to get the conviction. Its not about justice here, no, its about having the big conviction numbers, whether or not the criminals are still roaming the streets. And now the FBI wants to maintain a database on everyone (oops, did I say "maintain"? That kind of suggests some effort in upkeep and keeping it correct) and is using terrorist arrests and secret trials which always end in conviction to convince everyone that they need even more power to catch every last terrorist out there.
I wonder if in addition to a court sanction, falsly accusing someone else of copyright infringement can be construed as libel
If you do it on the stand, its called "perjury" and gives you pretty nifty jail time. If you were a lawyer, when you're done with the jail time, you start looking for a new career.
Considering the RIAA claimed that this guy had several hundred thousand mp3s available, when it turned out to be more like a few thousand, that might be grounds for it.
This might be an interesting way to strike back at the RIAA: Get as many of their lawyers disbarred as we can. Eventually the lawyers, who are rather fond of their cozy lifesucking lifestyle, will figure out that the risk of losing their blood supply is greater than any chance of having a slice of a $97billion settlement.
Yes clearly backwards compatibility is completely overrated. After all, everyone wants to buy all new software every time they buy a new computer. Every developer has an innate lust to redevelop all their software for each new processor generation.
Heck, while we're at it, backwards compatibility in software is holding back the state of the art too! I'm calling for Microsoft's Office 2003 to break the mold and not allow the users to access any documents written in older versions of Office. That will show those Neandrathals who oppose progress by not redoing all of their documents from memory every time a new version comes out!
most people in Japan do not catch the latest anime flick, whereas they are far more likely to watch the latest Hollywood movie that comes over.
This is entirely true, and in more areas than just the cinema. During my first trip to Japan for business, I was amazed that every resturaunt we ate at played Western music. After a few days of this, I asked about it, and it turned out that that was what was popular. Also, during the week we were there, some Whitney Houston album rose to the top of the charts.
I didn't manage to make it out to a movie theater to see what they played (I had wanted to, but the language barrier was a little high. I knew "movie" is "eiga" but didn't know the kanji for it, or how to ask for a movie theater...)
Odd, I recall the place where you change the settings in IE moving from menu to menu around IE3. Even after it finally settled down, the actual location of standard stuff in the configuration kept moving (how do I turn off images in IE to make pages load faster?) Netscape has always managed to keep its Preferences option named Preferences, and always under Edit.
Ignoring the invisible menus in Word, some commonly used formatting options have migrated out of the format paragraph dialog, and a lot of non-paragraph-related options have moved in. "Continuous" section breaks behave in odd (though predictible) ways, as do column breaks.
In the end, perhaps it was an exaggeration. I used to work in a computer lab at a university, providing support for students who came to me because they can't figure out how to rotate text 90 degrees in Word, or because after we upgraded IE all of the pictures the student loads in IE looks funny (IE's option to screw-with-all-pictures defaults to on), so I discovered the hard way every time a new version of Word or whatever was installed and my previously memorized location of Widow and Orphan control options isn't valid anymore.
The only time I have ever had a file become immutable that wasn't because of a command I personally issued to satisfy my curiosity, was because of drive failure causing filesystem corruption.
I wonder if that 7 year old version of windows had been installed on a drive that was 7 years old...
1) She was putting up a fair fight. Her old rig would have run XP (albiet slowly) and all of her devices and software would have run out-of-the-box perfectly on the first try. And she expected to do the same in order to be "mass-friendly".
2) She was playing dirty. Her old rig couldn't have possibly run XP. None of her old gear would have worked with XP at all, slow or not. But she expected to function out of the box with the old gear in order to be "mass-friendly".
In the first case, she had the misconception that XP would not run on her box.
In the second case, there were no misconceptions, but the whole comparison was broken from the start.
So which is it, does she have misconceptions? or doesn't she?
How about one or two *good* ways, instead of half a dozen not-so-good ones?
Do you know why there are 45 "shitty" variations on a theme? Becuase there were 45 different people/groups who had a good idea. And guess what? Each one of those looks oon the distro list and says "gee, why are there 44 shitty variations on my theme?"
Whats *good* for you, might not be good for me. I rock in nvi, suck in emacs. Taking your magical "The One Program" and making it the only thing available is bound to be disasterous: in college, I helped an English PhD candidate proofread her thesis... not for spelling or grammar errors, but for Weird Word Tricks that MS Word did to her. I asked her why she did this in Word instead of TeX or some other real document typesetting system, and the answer was "this is all I had".
Claiming that Linux is somehow alone in this UI problem completely ignores that every new version of *every* piece of software Microsoft releases from the OS to the browser scrambles the locations of the menus and/or options. If they "have the money and resources to hire someone who knows a thing or two about UI design", they must be wasting it, since whoever they hired doesn't know that not suprising the user by moving things they already know about is one of the biggest mainstays of CHI. (Heck, the whole "lets hide options you've never used so its impossible to find them the first time you need them!" idea is the absolute worst idea, ever, from both a pro and a newbie standpoint!) I've never used a macintosh personally (nothing against them, just lack the $ to maintain both a PC and a Mac), but from what I've been hearing in the CHI community, they're going to hell for the changes they've made in OSX.
If given the choice, I believe 99.99% of Americans would rather let an FBI agent rummage through their underwear drawer than die.
Of course, their view might change if they were told that after the FBI agent went through their underwear drawer, they would be arrested and stripped of their citizenship because some secretary accidentially swapped two numbers when they were typing the social security number into the FBI database, and the Feds think you're using a fake SSN to live in the country illegally.
IT growth (or any market growth) will happen in areas where it is rewarded.
These "rewards" you seek are only inherent in a system of free captialism. There is no capitalism here. Move on, lest you be shot for competing against the state-owned monopoly.
What was that new IE technology called that let microsoft decide where you were going today when you clicked on the links? Oh yeah... "Smart Tags"... see, all they need to do is use their "Smart Tags" to turn every google search into a MS search, and they win.
It looks like oxygen toxicity begins at about 10 times sea-level partial pressure of oxygen (article cites 29 lb/sqin). How stuff works explains that the process is very dependent on both pressure (not % of atmosphere!) and time. Early astronauts used 100% oxygen atmospheres at a low pressure without any problems.
The United States demanded that Syria cease meddling in the war with Iraq. The list of demands included that the Syrians quit chrome plating Iraqi soldiers.
but the bit about not producing money any more isn't
I was moving more along the lines of the "confiscation of evidence" that goes on... Wanna know why the drug war lives on despite the fact that its pretty badly failing? It's more than self-funding. Need a bit of extra cash to cover the gold watch for the captain? Just pick a random guy and bust them and see what comes out.
Yeah, sure, if you call "a great litmus test" something that has no inherent qualities that are illegal. Next are they going to charge the street corner under the PATRIOT act, since thats where many drug transactions take place? Or charge the Mint for producing the cash used in the transaction in the first place?
Once the precedent is set, can I use the precedent in my murder trial? They can charge the gun with murder instead of me!
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Just because the CPU isn't pointing up, doesn't mean the cooling system can't point up. It does mean that there will have to be space "above" the CPU socket in the case/on the motherboard for the "cooling tower" in whatever orientation, though. The bigger problem would be people who don't have their computer oriented the way they were intended. I work on my tower on its side. I've seen desktops (as opposed to towers) stood on end to save space.
Maybe this "tower" could be a cone shape, so that bubbles always move to the far end as they "rise", even if its on its side. These would work better when upright, but shouldn't stop completely working as long as you don't turn it too far.
Not entirely true. The environment they live in will hardly be sterile. Aside from the microbes within each body, they'll have whatever was in their possessions and on their clothing, if not the atmosphere when they boarded the ship. In addition to that, the fact that it is very difficult to sterilize everything perfectly means that there will still be the chance of infection by something.
Check again- the radiation that's a problem in space takes enormous amounts of lead and concrete to stop; space is full of very high energy radiation, which isn't THAT much of a problem where the space station is thanks to the Earth's Van Allen belt.
Then the solution is far more trivial than trying to maintain a supply of water as shielding: simply generate a large magnetic field around the craft. Unless you fly nearly in front of the path of an oncoming metal-ore asteroid, it won't affect the ballistics enough to significantly increase impacts.
As for the financial burdens, I like the way you think. We have enough problems feeding and educating everyone here in the US, so its imperative that we immediately mothball the army and put all of the former soldiers to work feeding and teaching our populace. Think of how much food the billions we spent on Iraq and Afghanistan could buy! Students in schools run by drill sergeants will no longer suffer from lack of discipline.
Singling out the space program as somehow stealing food from the mouths of the hungry is ignorant of how money is actually spent around here. If the government *really* wanted to feed everyone, they would simply pump up taxes and increase deficit spending to cover the cost of it.
And that ignores the fact that most welfare is provided or at least controlled at the state level. Food stamps? State. Mental healthcare for the homeless? State. Unemployment? State first, then federal. Medicare? Bush wants to make it privately run. WIC services? federal grant, but state controlled. Many other welfare programs (medicaid, various others) are funded by the state and federal government jointly.
Schooling has traditionally been even more local, with funding based on local tax districts, usually with income from property taxes. And guess what? The reason you can't get schoolbooks for your kids isn't because some satellite went into space or a marine was issued a rifle, its because your neighbors refused to pass the school education bond in your tax district and pay a few more cents per thousand dollars of the value of their house. Usually they justify this by being childless and deciding not to pay to educate your children.
In other words, even if we do mothball the army (or NASA) and serve out chunks of the hundreds of billions of dollars (or in the case of NASA, a few billion dollars), theres no guarantee anything you want will get done. The funds may not make it to the individual states to be handed out to people (lets call it "trickle down bureaucracy", where every department and contractor gets a slice of the pie). Old people will demand that it go into social security. Childless people will demand it go into anything as long as "their" money isn't used to educate anyone else's kids. There are plenty of other demands on cash in the government (pay off the deficit, and so on).
Compared to all of that, a trip to Mars is easy to fund. It has a clear material goal (here are people. there is mars. go, people go.) as opposed to education (here are people. here are arbitrary tests and scores which may or may not mean that people are smart. Teach to the test, everyone!).
Because you said so?
Because you don't think its possible for a self-sustaining craft to leave our solar system with enough people to sustain a population?
With enough materials (perhaps mined from other planets, like Mars) we could build and power ships far larger with far more people than the ones used to colonize the US. FTL travel may be impossible, but why not get several ships hosting several thousand people each, complete with artificial gravity generation (via spin), parks, some wildlife, and set them loose on a trip covering several generations?
Because its one thing to teach someone how to count to five, and another thing entirely to teach someone how to clean, load, aim, and fire a firearm. First off, the first activity doesn't require extra materials, while the second one does. Secondly, the first activity is mostly a mental process, while the second is a physical process. Finally, (actually an extension of the first one) both of them require practice in order for the lessons to settle in... shooting a gun requires ammo, a target, and somewhere to shoot.
Plus, there is no purple muppet to laugh when you shoot a round.
A lot of the assumptions made in this particular article were clearly innacurate (anyone who has spent five minutes in an Electronic Boutique knows that the average age of a video game purchaser is less than 28)
wow. Where is your EB at, in the kiddie playground at McDonalds? I was just at a GameStop today picking up Final Fantasy Origins, and quite a few of the people came into the store while I was hunting through the disorganized playstation 1 section. All of them but one were adults or children with an adult. One teenage-looking guy came in.
And I suppose your little story also takes into account the people who purchase games online?
and I'll believe this bullshit that somehow games teach kids to kill. People in the media (and our our own representatives) claim that these games are "murder trainers" but they can't even teach you to hold a gun properly. How to aim a gun. In the games, you don't even have to look down the sights on the gun to aim!
Thats just the starting point. The fact is, the only person who makes you do anything is YOU. I grew up on good ol' PBS. Monty Python didn't turn me into a drag racing nun. Or a nude pianist. Red Dwarf didn't turn me into a cat. The Red Green Show didn't make me very handy (I wish it had though, I'm not all that handsome). And that was all before I became a teenager. Add in the Atari 2600 I swapped in for a Nintendo in my 6th grade year, and later for a super nintendo, and according to these idiots, I've turned out to be some kind of saint or something since I haven't shot anyone or tried to fry them with Street Fighter 2 moves.
Ha. Gripe to the human-interface people who get up on their soapbox and beat their drums to the tune of "nobody wants to see that debugging junk, its enough to know their program crashed. It shouldn't have crashed in the first place, so its the programmers fault that it happened."
Ah, its so hard to keep all these detention camps apart. The two people who died didn't die at Guantanamo, they died at a camp in Afghanistan. I wonder if this particular camp was also a temporary thing. And I wonder how many more "temporary" camps are still operating.
What, you expect the government to make sense? Heres a clue for you: this government you speak of doesn't do anything. It doesn't fight wars. It doesn't play in the park with its dog. It doesn't "make sense". "Government" is the label applied to a collection of people who claim a higher amount of authority over other people.
Thats right. Humans do the work. The government has no "ulterior motives" or "conspiracies", instead, some human has a power trip. Or a nervous breakdown. Or types in Jim's "Academic Study Code" as 80 (English Major) instead of 08 (Criminology Major). There could be many number of reasons why an FBI agent didn't interrogate Jim right away. Maybe the file fell behind someone's desk. Maybe some agent put Jim under survelliance to see if anything concrete enough to haul him in would come up. After a year or so, he got bored and started wiretapping corporate headquarters for stock tips. "Steve" was present illegally, so he was breaking the law even if studying to be a pilot was legal (when did it become illegal to learn to fly a plane? Maybe "Steve" just wanted to do cropdusting back in his home country. Or is that illegal too now?).
Jim's captivity results directly from the Patriot Act in this case. Years ago, just associating with "Steve" wasn't enough for an outright arrest warrant. Now, in the more-permissive "we gotta get the terrorists at all costs" environment, the attempt of an apparent English major who used to live with a terrorist to "infiltrate" LEA, was enough to obtain a warrant for the library records, and the library records, on top of all of that was sufficient circumstantial evidence for the arrest warrant.
So lets say that the FBI decides to do the token "Constitutional" thing, and gives Jim his trial after all. The FBI agents show up, and after initial arguments, an agent takes the stand and reads his prepared speech: "We have direct evidence which proves that Jim is engaging in terrorist activities." On cross examination, the agent is unable to actually produce any evidence in court due to the "sensitive nature" of the evidence and its "importance to national security". How does Jim defend against this?
As for Gitmo, lets call it a proof of concept. It proved that the American public was willing to allow the governement agents representing them to indefinitely hold and torture (oh wait, im sorry, according to the PR bits released by the government to the news which you so blindly follow, there was no beatings going on. In fact, the two detainees who died, died of "not-tortured" causes.) non-citizens. And now we have a fellow citizen from Intel, who apparently gave money to a fake charity, and is now being detained. Before you say "well, maybe he did more than just being misled by a false charity", ask yourself why the "justice" department hasn't given him the fair and speedy trial he is entitled to as a citizen of the US. Why haven't they proven he was more than a victim of circumstance?
The Patriotic Act says a lot more than just "the feds can see what books you read", but thats a story for another day.
No, today, I'll tell you the story about Jim. Jim was a fine young man, he just graduated with a degree in criminology. He was an honest and caring individual, who was selfless and brave. He would have been an outstanding police officer some day.
Well, would have been, except that Jim's freshman year, his roommate Steve was arrested. He didn't know the guy too well, Steve always hung out with the "tough crowd" and usually didn't use the room at all, preferring to stay out all night or crash at his girlfriend's place. Anyway, Jim went home for summer break to see his old friends, and when he came back, he had a different roommate. He hadn't heard much about it, and nobody was too keen on talking about it, so he figured he'd just let it slide.
So, after graduating, Jim applied to join the police force. He passed the civil service exams, and waited to hear the good news. And waited. And waited.
Then one day, there was a knock on the door. He got up, to answer it, and suddenly there was a loud bang and the door splintered, then collapsed inwards. 5 armed FBI agents rushed him and threw him to the ground then pinned him down. That was the last anyone heard from Jim. His neighbors thought it was sad that he'd be hauled away, since he seemed like such a nice quiet boy.
The End.
So, what happened?
Well, Jim's life started on the quick road to Hell when the university's random housing lottery placed him with Steve. Except Steve wasn't named Steve. He was just using that name while he was illegally in the US to study piloting airplanes. Then, Jim started checking out books on famous murders, criminology, DNA testing, and the like. His final mistake was applying for a position on the police force, thats when they ran the background check on him.
They punched his name into the database, and out popped the following:
Warning lived with "steve" for one year. Possible terrorist connection.
Well, this was enough for the FBI to get involved, so they went and looked up the list of books Jim had checked out and read. The list certainly was eye-opening. They fed this data into their database (which incidentially had Jim's major incorrectly listed as "English". But that was OK, since it wasn't important for the information to be correct)
The database churned for a few minutes and spat out the following:
Warning subject lived with "steve" for one year. Possible terrorist connection.
Warning subject has extensive interest in criminal behavior and violent crimes.
Conclusion: HE'S A TERRIST! GET HIM!
So now, Jim's sitting in a cell (if you can call those chain link things in Cuba "cells"). Been there for a few years. They still haven't told him why though. Every now and then they beat him or make him kneel with his head back and his arms straight out for hours on end, but they let up a little after a couple of other guys died. On the up side though, he's gotten to be good friends with this Ali guy in the next cell over, who seems like someone he knew his freshman year.
Moral (if you're still reading):
If you think this kind of thing is bullshit, you seriously underestimate the ability of the US justice system to be perverted. Take a look at the current mess the Houston Police Department is in, using shoddy lab work and practically lying through their teeth to get the conviction. Its not about justice here, no, its about having the big conviction numbers, whether or not the criminals are still roaming the streets. And now the FBI wants to maintain a database on everyone (oops, did I say "maintain"? That kind of suggests some effort in upkeep and keeping it correct) and is using terrorist arrests and secret trials which always end in conviction to convince everyone that they need even more power to catch every last terrorist out there.
I wonder if in addition to a court sanction, falsly accusing someone else of copyright infringement can be construed as libel
If you do it on the stand, its called "perjury" and gives you pretty nifty jail time. If you were a lawyer, when you're done with the jail time, you start looking for a new career.
Considering the RIAA claimed that this guy had several hundred thousand mp3s available, when it turned out to be more like a few thousand, that might be grounds for it.
This might be an interesting way to strike back at the RIAA: Get as many of their lawyers disbarred as we can. Eventually the lawyers, who are rather fond of their cozy lifesucking lifestyle, will figure out that the risk of losing their blood supply is greater than any chance of having a slice of a $97billion settlement.
Yes clearly backwards compatibility is completely overrated. After all, everyone wants to buy all new software every time they buy a new computer. Every developer has an innate lust to redevelop all their software for each new processor generation.
Heck, while we're at it, backwards compatibility in software is holding back the state of the art too! I'm calling for Microsoft's Office 2003 to break the mold and not allow the users to access any documents written in older versions of Office. That will show those Neandrathals who oppose progress by not redoing all of their documents from memory every time a new version comes out!
most people in Japan do not catch the latest anime flick, whereas they are far more likely to watch the latest Hollywood movie that comes over.
This is entirely true, and in more areas than just the cinema. During my first trip to Japan for business, I was amazed that every resturaunt we ate at played Western music. After a few days of this, I asked about it, and it turned out that that was what was popular. Also, during the week we were there, some Whitney Houston album rose to the top of the charts.
I didn't manage to make it out to a movie theater to see what they played (I had wanted to, but the language barrier was a little high. I knew "movie" is "eiga" but didn't know the kanji for it, or how to ask for a movie theater...)
Odd, I recall the place where you change the settings in IE moving from menu to menu around IE3. Even after it finally settled down, the actual location of standard stuff in the configuration kept moving (how do I turn off images in IE to make pages load faster?) Netscape has always managed to keep its Preferences option named Preferences, and always under Edit.
Ignoring the invisible menus in Word, some commonly used formatting options have migrated out of the format paragraph dialog, and a lot of non-paragraph-related options have moved in. "Continuous" section breaks behave in odd (though predictible) ways, as do column breaks.
In the end, perhaps it was an exaggeration. I used to work in a computer lab at a university, providing support for students who came to me because they can't figure out how to rotate text 90 degrees in Word, or because after we upgraded IE all of the pictures the student loads in IE looks funny (IE's option to screw-with-all-pictures defaults to on), so I discovered the hard way every time a new version of Word or whatever was installed and my previously memorized location of Widow and Orphan control options isn't valid anymore.
The only time I have ever had a file become immutable that wasn't because of a command I personally issued to satisfy my curiosity, was because of drive failure causing filesystem corruption.
I wonder if that 7 year old version of windows had been installed on a drive that was 7 years old...
We can look at this one of two ways:
1) She was putting up a fair fight. Her old rig would have run XP (albiet slowly) and all of her devices and software would have run out-of-the-box perfectly on the first try. And she expected to do the same in order to be "mass-friendly".
2) She was playing dirty. Her old rig couldn't have possibly run XP. None of her old gear would have worked with XP at all, slow or not. But she expected to function out of the box with the old gear in order to be "mass-friendly".
In the first case, she had the misconception that XP would not run on her box.
In the second case, there were no misconceptions, but the whole comparison was broken from the start.
So which is it, does she have misconceptions? or doesn't she?
How about one or two *good* ways, instead of half a dozen not-so-good ones?
Do you know why there are 45 "shitty" variations on a theme? Becuase there were 45 different people/groups who had a good idea. And guess what? Each one of those looks oon the distro list and says "gee, why are there 44 shitty variations on my theme?"
Whats *good* for you, might not be good for me. I rock in nvi, suck in emacs. Taking your magical "The One Program" and making it the only thing available is bound to be disasterous: in college, I helped an English PhD candidate proofread her thesis... not for spelling or grammar errors, but for Weird Word Tricks that MS Word did to her. I asked her why she did this in Word instead of TeX or some other real document typesetting system, and the answer was "this is all I had".
Claiming that Linux is somehow alone in this UI problem completely ignores that every new version of *every* piece of software Microsoft releases from the OS to the browser scrambles the locations of the menus and/or options. If they "have the money and resources to hire someone who knows a thing or two about UI design", they must be wasting it, since whoever they hired doesn't know that not suprising the user by moving things they already know about is one of the biggest mainstays of CHI. (Heck, the whole "lets hide options you've never used so its impossible to find them the first time you need them!" idea is the absolute worst idea, ever, from both a pro and a newbie standpoint!) I've never used a macintosh personally (nothing against them, just lack the $ to maintain both a PC and a Mac), but from what I've been hearing in the CHI community, they're going to hell for the changes they've made in OSX.
If given the choice, I believe 99.99% of Americans would rather let an FBI agent rummage through their underwear drawer than die.
Of course, their view might change if they were told that after the FBI agent went through their underwear drawer, they would be arrested and stripped of their citizenship because some secretary accidentially swapped two numbers when they were typing the social security number into the FBI database, and the Feds think you're using a fake SSN to live in the country illegally.
IT growth (or any market growth) will happen in areas where it is rewarded.
These "rewards" you seek are only inherent in a system of free captialism. There is no capitalism here. Move on, lest you be shot for competing against the state-owned monopoly.
What was that new IE technology called that let microsoft decide where you were going today when you clicked on the links? Oh yeah... "Smart Tags"... see, all they need to do is use their "Smart Tags" to turn every google search into a MS search, and they win.
Oxygen Poisoning info
It looks like oxygen toxicity begins at about 10 times sea-level partial pressure of oxygen (article cites 29 lb/sqin). How stuff works explains that the process is very dependent on both pressure (not % of atmosphere!) and time. Early astronauts used 100% oxygen atmospheres at a low pressure without any problems.
The United States demanded that Syria cease meddling in the war with Iraq. The list of demands included that the Syrians quit chrome plating Iraqi soldiers.
but the bit about not producing money any more isn't
I was moving more along the lines of the "confiscation of evidence" that goes on... Wanna know why the drug war lives on despite the fact that its pretty badly failing? It's more than self-funding. Need a bit of extra cash to cover the gold watch for the captain? Just pick a random guy and bust them and see what comes out.
Yeah, sure, if you call "a great litmus test" something that has no inherent qualities that are illegal. Next are they going to charge the street corner under the PATRIOT act, since thats where many drug transactions take place? Or charge the Mint for producing the cash used in the transaction in the first place?
Once the precedent is set, can I use the precedent in my murder trial? They can charge the gun with murder instead of me!