Thinking of "curves" in space-time is an interesting analogy for gravity, but still doesn't address the mechanism - sure, the planet may be on a "45 degree" incline in spacetime, but what forces it down... and not up? You would nearly have to posit the existence of some constant stream of gravitons coming at 'right angles' to three-dimensional space in order to actually push things 'down the well'.
The best explantion for this I've ever heard deals entirely with special relativity and never touches quantum mechanics. The author I read (Epstein) discusses what he calls 'Slow Time'. An object is always moving in four dimenions, even if it appears at rest to an observer, because it is moving forward in time as well. Since all dimensions of space and time are warped by the presence of matter, and not just space, if the object being observed is closer to a source of gravity (on a steeper part of the curve of space-time), he will start to experience time shortening or time dialation sooner and more strongly than you, the observer. His straight-line path through time starts to curve toward the source of gravity. This time-dialation acts as a vector force to 'push' him towards the source of gravity.
You can read more about the interperatation of Special Relativity in this book: Relativity Visualized
Harry Knowles, editor in chief of the Web's Ain't It Cool News and an avid fan of newspaper comics. "I think there's been three great strips that have gone away over the last five, 10 years that I really miss: 'Bloom County,' 'Calvin and Hobbes' and 'The Far Side.' Those are the three strips that never should have ceased."
These strips ended when they should have... ie... when their authors no longer felt inspired to write them and were growing bored with their work.
Was Calvin and Hobbes one of the best comics ever? Yes. Was is miserably repetitive near the end and growing more and more unfunny? Sadly, yes. If it had continued on, it would have been nothing but a constant rehash of the same jokes and concepts with no new content... like Peanuts and Garfield both became.
Outland was pretty miserable compared to Bloom County. I have high hopes for 'Opus', but I'm also a realist. It may be just as poor as Outland was, IMHO.
"It's not like we were doing anything illegal," said Torres. "This is a 12-year-old girl, for crying out loud."
Public perception is that file sharing is NOT illegal. When there's a gap bewteen public perception and law, public perception usually wins. Public perception was that alcohol was not worthy of being banned. We no longer have prohibition. Public perception of drugs is that 'Drugs are bad, M'Kay?'. The negative effects of the drug war are felt more by non-voting minorities than the white majority, so the horrific drug crime laws we have in this country are allowed to continue.
The RIAA and other **AAs aren't convincing anyone. Young mothers and children beleive that file sharing is an OK thing to do. Therefore, it is and will continue to be. Law or no, public perception is going to win this one.
Most *good* sci-fi I see any more is from amatuer or indy writers. Most of what's published in the last few years has been crap, and what's not crap is usually cautionary rather than expectant.
Compare 3001 (Clarke) to 2001 or 2010. 3001 was a boring, unexciting book. What parts were interesting were so cautionary, they weren't fun to read.
Have to agree here. ISPs should never permanently filter traffic. The good network engineer will termporarily block traffic on a certain port or via a certain protocol, but will never simply block a port permanently.
The best book I've ever seen for explaining special relativistic motion is Relativity Visualized by Lewis Caroll Epstein. It explains relativity via graphics and illustrations, and do it yourself excercises. While the math is there if you're interested, you don't have to understand the math in order to understand the content.
Enstein's theories were also empirically unprovable until recent advances in avionics, minaturization, and electronics. It turns out, decades after he began to speak about 'Special Relativity', you can indeed fly an atomic clock around the world and measure that it has undergone relativistic time dialation.
String theory, IMHO, is a return to the mindset of physicists and scientists who relied on the 'Aether' as a medium for energy and movement through the vacumn of empty space. I personally think it will undergo many, many revisions before the concepts its pointing at are understood.
We did eventually understand relativistic motion, however, so we probably will eventually understand the extension of subatomic particles into multi-demensional space, too.
Yasuku Godai is just about as Anti-hero as you can get. He goes from being a struggling college student-wannabe ('Ronin' means a masterless samurai and has been used as a euphamism for a highschool student who couldn't pass his entrance exams), to a struggling student teacher, to a day-care temp, to unemployed, to a strip-club promoter, to a strip-club day-care temp, to a pro day-care instructor. The only super-power he displays is his limitless ability to suffer at the hands of his neighbors.
His main love intrest is the widowed manager of a small apartment building.
Godai's 'triumph' at the end of the series is not beating some supervillan or even his nosy, perverted neighbor Yotsuya, but finally growing enough of a spine to deal with his family, friends, get a decent job, and marry the woman he loves.
It sounds boring as hell, but it's a wonderful, funny, and even heart-rending story.
Manga tend to last a certain amount of time and then end. They don't frequently switch writers and/or artists. Popular stories are not necessarily stretched and reinvented in order to increase sales. (This point is arguable. There were 37 volums of Ranma 1/2 IIRC.) Artists are treated as talents rather than commodities.
Who reads and sells more comic books than any other nation in the world?
I highly doubt that SCO is peforming this attack themselves. There are simply too many others willing to do it for them.
If a SCO executive ordered the self-attack, and a loyal SCO IT person (I want a shot of what he's drinking) carried it out, when the FBI comes calling, how far up the tree would the IT person point when he was arrested?
If a SCO executive was pinpointed in ordering a DOS (unlikely, but hey, Enron being publicly exposed was unlikely), how would that affect the Linux lawsuit? IANAL, but it seems like SCO execs would have nothing to gain from DOSing theirselves and only fines or Jail-time to face.
The 'Open' Internet was never unbiased or ucensored. It sure seemed that way, until you remember that a handful of sysadmins controlled which groups got created on usenet and which groups were censored. Those with more networking hardware got to make more of the decisions because more of the traffic passed through their equipment. You blocked 'alt.borkborkbork' in one key place and it got blocked to a great deal of the people who could keep it alive today.
'Unbiased' will never enter into the equation. Sorry.
'Uncensored', however, describes the vast number of people who can and do use the Internet and any other communication outlet they can in a myriad of ways to spread their own ideologies, their own software, their own news coverage, and their own gossip. As soon as one avenue for this kind of information is blocked, another springs up.
As soon as Napster was shut down, Kazaa and Gnutella became more popular. With Kazaa and Gnutella's decline in popularity due to the rabid, power-mongering influence of copyright interests (RIAA Lawsuits), other, more immune file sharing apps are gaining acceptance.
Think of the net as a huge, self-regenerating organism. Its cells are not computers, but people who want to spread information via whatever method possible.
At first it's simple and dedicated solely to its own task. As it's attacked and parisited, it begins to develop defenses and immunities to those attacks. Unlike natural selection, which required brute-force trial and error combinations to build those defenses, the Internet has thinking logical minds building its defenses, which include spam filters, intelligent routing, firewall, mail, and other message protocols, data encryption, steganography, high-bandwidth transmission pipes, error correction, and other tools to control the 'background radiation'.
I, for one, use data encryption in almost every kind of computer-to-computer file transmission I make, just out of habit. Do you?
If you don't beleive that the net is building its own defenses, note the truly desperate measures the aforementioned copyright interests are going to now in order to try to stop the evolutionary tide. The RIAA knows it can't keep up technologically with the HUGE number of people people sharing files, so it's attempting to change they way they behave with organized legislation and 'public education' drives.
The Internet, the people who write software and share data of any kind, is disorganized and seems unable to act in response fast enough. The million monkeys on a million typewriters eventually spouts software like Freenet. Freenet, while hard to use when compared to Kazaa or Napster, is almost completely immune from RIAA, MPAA, or publishing industry attacks, and may even be immune from the best efforts of law enforcement and repressive governments.
Just today, the RIAA leaked that it can track files by their MD5 sums. How long will it be (later this evening) before someone writes code that will pad MP3s in a way that skews their MD5 sums but leaves the music listenable? How long will it be before that code or something very much like it makes its way into WASTE or Gnutella? Even if this code is made illegal and the writer/perpetrator goes to jail, how will the media industry stop it when it's already in the hands of the public?
We're not just developing technological defenses either, but mental and social defenses. The EFF makes it possible for anyone to fax their senator and other legislators for free. (http://action.eff.org/) Various internet websites publish details about public figures and public officials, especially those with the clout to make change.
Yeah, my hard drive is about to take a world class a**-f***ing.
Doctor Who The Prisoner Hitchhikers Guide (Radio. Didn't care much for the TV.) Blake's 7 Red Dwarf Faulty Towers Monty Python Etc... Etc...
The real wonderful thing to think about here is not all the free video and audio, but the way having all this free video and audio around will inspire new writers to create stories like these.
20-25 percent of homeless people are seriously mentally ill.
http://www.nrchmi.com/facts/facts_question_3.asp
They're sick, get sicker, and cause more problems for everyone around them, including other homeless, because they can't really get treatment for their diseases.
If we're spending money to try and improve the situation of the homeless, making more free mental and medical help available will do a hell of a lot more than a tracking system.
Don't Buy Diamonds
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 5, Informative
They're not really rare. As the article states, Debeers has a stockpile and controls the supply ruthlessly with tactics that makes Microsoft look like reasonable.
They pretty much ignored an antitrust judgement, have been held responsible for untold exploitation of black African minors, and have been accused of much worse. In the article, one of the interviewees recalls and indirect death threat and treats the journalist with suspicion, fearful that he is an agent of Debeers.
Yes, ladies, we know they look pretty. They may also be more responsible for more terrorism than drugs, certainly more than Bush/Ascroft would like you to beleive.
Re:Neat, now let's talk practical.
on
Contiki Ported To x86
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Practical? How about a good solution for impoverished communities worldwide that need web access to do things like report on the ways they're being repressed, tortured, enslaved, etc?
If a community can buy a single 386 and accompanying network setup for $100, then they can probably get a c64 quality computer for around $20, saving $80 of those dollars for things like food and bromine tablets for water purification.
This guy explains relativity concepts and the ideas behind those concepts without making you understand eight yards of derivative calculus. The theories are presented in a visual style so that even a novice, unitiated reader can get them. He then goes on to explain the consequences of those theories and details how they effect the universe, again with the unitiated reader in mind.
Being that morse code was originally developed to encode messages to send them over long distances, the only reason it should be used is for fondness... or those who like to do the translation from text/speech to morse in their head.
We have much better encodings for messages now that are more easily understood by most modern electronics... ASCII and Unicode... although they're still just series of dots and dashes.
Correct. The RIAAs goal here is to make a big deal out of what happens to the file sharers THEY sue.
Lawsuits have been mostly targetted at Verizon users and have been 'mysteriously' targetted away from AOL/Time Warner users. (Hmm... I wonder why?)
The goal here is to create a scare tactic. They want to be able to say 'If you share music, we'll do this to you!'.
Like TheInquirer said, though. Our current legal system just isn't up to prosecuting over a sixth of our population and probably isn't up to prosecuting over a thousandth. The RIAA companies KNOW they can't do anything about the reality of file-sharing. They also know that if they do much more, then they're going to start seriously alienating their customer base. (If they haven't already. I haven't spoken to ANYBODY about the recent lawsuits who didn't say they felt upset about ever buying records or CDs.) The only way they can acheive their goal is to create the peception of a new criminal class, and sadly for the RIAA, it's not working. CNN is running a story this morning more or less martyring Justin Frankel and talking about the bonuses of using WASTE.
Even the people who are theoretically on the music industry's side-- CNN being yet another AOL/TW company-- are standing against the RIAAs wave of mass stupidity.
Yeah, write it in Java, and then anyone who has trouble installing the VM will never be able to run it.
If your game cannot be installed by a complete moron, chances are, it won't get popular enough to acheive any kind of critical mass. Yeah, VB and Access are a piss-poor choice of design language here, but Java is just asking for nobody to ever run the game. Even if they already have a VM installed, you have to make sure it's the RIGHT VM (Yeah, MS's fault) and that you don't have a funky enivronment variable munging up your classpaths.
My suggestions?
For sheer compatibility's sake, the game should be written in ANSI C and use a non-platform specific database format (Dare I say it? XML delimited data?) to keep its data in.
This is the cracker who sold the ripped AVI... This is the international conglomo-retail store who sold the DVD. This is the employee who works for the international conglomo-retail store who makes just above minimum wage, but has insurance premiums so high he can't afford to go to the doctor when he's sick. This is the movie studio who supplies the movie to the retail store. This is the producer who works for the movie studio. This is the movie star who works for the producer. This is the condom the producer used when he fucked the movie starr. This is the movie star's self-worth and future career lying on the floor next to the condom. This is the heroin the movie star injected herself with to try to cope with the feelings of loss, degredation, and betrayal. This is the shotgun she shot herself with after the producer told her she was worthless because she's 'losing money to file-sharers'.
1 metric fuckload is approximately equal to 1 Bazillion LoC's, or 1x10^10 metric ass-loads. Remembr that 1 metric ass-load is equal to 10 metric butt-loads.
Each 'strand' is one curving segment of hair that can be manipulated and curved to a great degree. Compare to typical japanese-animated hair, which has only two segements, the front hair that covers the character's face, and the back that appears behind their face. Yeah, I know it sounds like they only have 16 hairs, but it looks quite a bit better than that. Check out this character picture for a clearer idea of what each 'strand' really is:
Since Netscape and Moz are based on the same code, it's only realistic that the production relaeses of both apps should be released simultaneously.
Viruses as Control over Big Brother?
on
Gates and Security
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Microsoft is doing what corporations do-- They make money by whatever means they can. If that means setting up Orwelling controls for overzealous LEOs, then so be it. Is Microsoft doing that? Probably not intentionally, but they're putting the infrstructure in place to make it happen regardless.
Reading about Sobig.E this morning made me start to think about the positive effects of viruses and computer problems.
One of the most changing impacts is that anyone who spends any time around computers at all gains a healthy respect of what kind of effort is needed to keep your personal information on your computer and out of the hands of malicious crackers. I upset my mother deeply a few months ago when I demonstrated to her that her computer was infected by one of the CodeRed variants. It was most disturbing for her to have me read the contents of her 'My Documents' directory off to her over the phone. She immediately installed firewall software and the kind of virus scanning software I recommended.
It's becoming more and more likely for people to want to protect themselves and their computers from informational damage, wether it comes from malicious information vandals or belligerant, mammoth-like corporations.
Slashdot Mirror
Thinking of "curves" in space-time is an interesting analogy for gravity, but still doesn't address the mechanism - sure, the planet may be on a "45 degree" incline in spacetime, but what forces it down... and not up? You would nearly have to posit the existence of some constant stream of gravitons coming at 'right angles' to three-dimensional space in order to actually push things 'down the well'.
The best explantion for this I've ever heard deals entirely with special relativity and never touches quantum mechanics. The author I read (Epstein) discusses what he calls 'Slow Time'. An object is always moving in four dimenions, even if it appears at rest to an observer, because it is moving forward in time as well. Since all dimensions of space and time are warped by the presence of matter, and not just space, if the object being observed is closer to a source of gravity (on a steeper part of the curve of space-time), he will start to experience time shortening or time dialation sooner and more strongly than you, the observer. His straight-line path through time starts to curve toward the source of gravity. This time-dialation acts as a vector force to 'push' him towards the source of gravity.
You can read more about the interperatation of Special Relativity in this book: Relativity Visualized
Harry Knowles, editor in chief of the Web's Ain't It Cool News and an avid fan of newspaper comics. "I think there's been three great strips that have gone away over the last five, 10 years that I really miss: 'Bloom County,' 'Calvin and Hobbes' and 'The Far Side.' Those are the three strips that never should have ceased."
These strips ended when they should have... ie... when their authors no longer felt inspired to write them and were growing bored with their work.
Was Calvin and Hobbes one of the best comics ever? Yes. Was is miserably repetitive near the end and growing more and more unfunny? Sadly, yes. If it had continued on, it would have been nothing but a constant rehash of the same jokes and concepts with no new content... like Peanuts and Garfield both became.
Outland was pretty miserable compared to Bloom County. I have high hopes for 'Opus', but I'm also a realist. It may be just as poor as Outland was, IMHO.
Oh, Mr. Breathed. Two words, 'Web Comic'.
"It's not like we were doing anything illegal," said Torres. "This is a 12-year-old girl, for crying out loud."
Public perception is that file sharing is NOT illegal. When there's a gap bewteen public perception and law, public perception usually wins. Public perception was that alcohol was not worthy of being banned. We no longer have prohibition. Public perception of drugs is that 'Drugs are bad, M'Kay?'. The negative effects of the drug war are felt more by non-voting minorities than the white majority, so the horrific drug crime laws we have in this country are allowed to continue.
The RIAA and other **AAs aren't convincing anyone. Young mothers and children beleive that file sharing is an OK thing to do. Therefore, it is and will continue to be. Law or no, public perception is going to win this one.
Most *good* sci-fi I see any more is from amatuer or indy writers. Most of what's published in the last few years has been crap, and what's not crap is usually cautionary rather than expectant.
Compare 3001 (Clarke) to 2001 or 2010. 3001 was a boring, unexciting book. What parts were interesting were so cautionary, they weren't fun to read.
Here's a good site with a few amatuer authors.
Have to agree here. ISPs should never permanently filter traffic. The good network engineer will termporarily block traffic on a certain port or via a certain protocol, but will never simply block a port permanently.
The best book I've ever seen for explaining special relativistic motion is Relativity Visualized by Lewis Caroll Epstein. It explains relativity via graphics and illustrations, and do it yourself excercises. While the math is there if you're interested, you don't have to understand the math in order to understand the content.
Enstein's theories were also empirically unprovable until recent advances in avionics, minaturization, and electronics. It turns out, decades after he began to speak about 'Special Relativity', you can indeed fly an atomic clock around the world and measure that it has undergone relativistic time dialation.
String theory, IMHO, is a return to the mindset of physicists and scientists who relied on the 'Aether' as a medium for energy and movement through the vacumn of empty space. I personally think it will undergo many, many revisions before the concepts its pointing at are understood.
We did eventually understand relativistic motion, however, so we probably will eventually understand the extension of subatomic particles into multi-demensional space, too.
Yasuku Godai is just about as Anti-hero as you can get. He goes from being a struggling college student-wannabe ('Ronin' means a masterless samurai and has been used as a euphamism for a highschool student who couldn't pass his entrance exams), to a struggling student teacher, to a day-care temp, to unemployed, to a strip-club promoter, to a strip-club day-care temp, to a pro day-care instructor. The only super-power he displays is his limitless ability to suffer at the hands of his neighbors.
His main love intrest is the widowed manager of a small apartment building.
Godai's 'triumph' at the end of the series is not beating some supervillan or even his nosy, perverted neighbor Yotsuya, but finally growing enough of a spine to deal with his family, friends, get a decent job, and marry the woman he loves.
It sounds boring as hell, but it's a wonderful, funny, and even heart-rending story.
Manga tend to last a certain amount of time and then end. They don't frequently switch writers and/or artists. Popular stories are not necessarily stretched and reinvented in order to increase sales. (This point is arguable. There were 37 volums of Ranma 1/2 IIRC.) Artists are treated as talents rather than commodities.
Who reads and sells more comic books than any other nation in the world?
I highly doubt that SCO is peforming this attack themselves. There are simply too many others willing to do it for them.
If a SCO executive ordered the self-attack, and a loyal SCO IT person (I want a shot of what he's drinking) carried it out, when the FBI comes calling, how far up the tree would the IT person point when he was arrested?
If a SCO executive was pinpointed in ordering a DOS (unlikely, but hey, Enron being publicly exposed was unlikely), how would that affect the Linux lawsuit? IANAL, but it seems like SCO execs would have nothing to gain from DOSing theirselves and only fines or Jail-time to face.
The 'Open' Internet was never unbiased or ucensored. It sure seemed that way, until you remember that a handful of sysadmins controlled which groups got created on usenet and which groups were censored. Those with more networking hardware got to make more of the decisions because more of the traffic passed through their equipment. You blocked 'alt.borkborkbork' in one key place and it got blocked to a great deal of the people who could keep it alive today.
'Unbiased' will never enter into the equation. Sorry.
'Uncensored', however, describes the vast number of people who can and do use the Internet and any other communication outlet they can in a myriad of ways to spread their own ideologies, their own software, their own news coverage, and their own gossip. As soon as one avenue for this kind of information is blocked, another springs up.
As soon as Napster was shut down, Kazaa and Gnutella became more popular. With Kazaa and Gnutella's decline in popularity due to the rabid, power-mongering influence of copyright interests (RIAA Lawsuits), other, more immune file sharing apps are gaining acceptance.
Think of the net as a huge, self-regenerating organism. Its cells are not computers, but people who want to spread information via whatever method possible.
At first it's simple and dedicated solely to its own task. As it's attacked and parisited, it begins to develop defenses and immunities to those attacks. Unlike natural selection, which required brute-force trial and error combinations to build those defenses, the Internet has thinking logical minds building its defenses, which include spam filters, intelligent routing, firewall, mail, and other message protocols, data encryption, steganography, high-bandwidth transmission pipes, error correction, and other tools to control the 'background radiation'.
I, for one, use data encryption in almost every kind of computer-to-computer file transmission I make, just out of habit. Do you?
If you don't beleive that the net is building its own defenses, note the truly desperate measures the aforementioned copyright interests are going to now in order to try to stop the evolutionary tide. The RIAA knows it can't keep up technologically with the HUGE number of people people sharing files, so it's attempting to change they way they behave with organized legislation and 'public education' drives.
The Internet, the people who write software and share data of any kind, is disorganized and seems unable to act in response fast enough. The million monkeys on a million typewriters eventually spouts software like Freenet. Freenet, while hard to use when compared to Kazaa or Napster, is almost completely immune from RIAA, MPAA, or publishing industry attacks, and may even be immune from the best efforts of law enforcement and repressive governments.
Just today, the RIAA leaked that it can track files by their MD5 sums. How long will it be (later this evening) before someone writes code that will pad MP3s in a way that skews their MD5 sums but leaves the music listenable? How long will it be before that code or something very much like it makes its way into WASTE or Gnutella? Even if this code is made illegal and the writer/perpetrator goes to jail, how will the media industry stop it when it's already in the hands of the public?
We're not just developing technological defenses either, but mental and social defenses. The EFF makes it possible for anyone to fax their senator and other legislators for free. (http://action.eff.org/) Various internet websites publish details about public figures and public officials, especially those with the clout to make change.
Remember who originally reported on Monica Lewinsky? Matt Drudge. Who all will report on the fact that George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld more or less set up undercover CIA agents to take the fall for the Iraq-Nigeria scandal?
The Internet is under attack, but without attack, it will never become stronger and immune to those attacks.
Makes you wonder for a second what they're doing with the [SECRET - EYES ONLY] hardware.
My guess is that they're working on NP-hard, but useful problems, like finding ways to crack hard encryption via shortcuts that work half the time.
Yeah, my hard drive is about to take a world class a**-f***ing.
Doctor Who
The Prisoner
Hitchhikers Guide (Radio. Didn't care much for the TV.)
Blake's 7
Red Dwarf
Faulty Towers
Monty Python
Etc... Etc...
The real wonderful thing to think about here is not all the free video and audio, but the way having all this free video and audio around will inspire new writers to create stories like these.
I wish I had mod points for the above.
p
20-25 percent of homeless people are seriously mentally ill.
http://www.nrchmi.com/facts/facts_question_3.as
They're sick, get sicker, and cause more problems for everyone around them, including other homeless, because they can't really get treatment for their diseases.
If we're spending money to try and improve the situation of the homeless, making more free mental and medical help available will do a hell of a lot more than a tracking system.
They're not really rare. As the article states, Debeers has a stockpile and controls the supply ruthlessly with tactics that makes Microsoft look like reasonable.
They pretty much ignored an antitrust judgement, have been held responsible for untold exploitation of black African minors, and have been accused of much worse. In the article, one of the interviewees recalls and indirect death threat and treats the journalist with suspicion, fearful that he is an agent of Debeers.
Yes, ladies, we know they look pretty. They may also be more responsible for more terrorism than drugs, certainly more than Bush/Ascroft would like you to beleive.
Practical? How about a good solution for impoverished communities worldwide that need web access to do things like report on the ways they're being repressed, tortured, enslaved, etc?
If a community can buy a single 386 and accompanying network setup for $100, then they can probably get a c64 quality computer for around $20, saving $80 of those dollars for things like food and bromine tablets for water purification.
Relativity Visualized
by Lewis Carroll Epstein.
(ISBN 0-935218-05-X)
This guy explains relativity concepts and the ideas behind those concepts without making you understand eight yards of derivative calculus. The theories are presented in a visual style so that even a novice, unitiated reader can get them. He then goes on to explain the consequences of those theories and details how they effect the universe, again with the unitiated reader in mind.
Being that morse code was originally developed to encode messages to send them over long distances, the only reason it should be used is for fondness... or those who like to do the translation from text/speech to morse in their head.
We have much better encodings for messages now that are more easily understood by most modern electronics... ASCII and Unicode... although they're still just series of dots and dashes.
Correct. The RIAAs goal here is to make a big deal out of what happens to the file sharers THEY sue.
t e.fileshare/index.html
Lawsuits have been mostly targetted at Verizon users and have been 'mysteriously' targetted away from AOL/Time Warner users. (Hmm... I wonder why?)
The goal here is to create a scare tactic. They want to be able to say 'If you share music, we'll do this to you!'.
Like TheInquirer said, though. Our current legal system just isn't up to prosecuting over a sixth of our population and probably isn't up to prosecuting over a thousandth. The RIAA companies KNOW they can't do anything about the reality of file-sharing. They also know that if they do much more, then they're going to start seriously alienating their customer base. (If they haven't already. I haven't spoken to ANYBODY about the recent lawsuits who didn't say they felt upset about ever buying records or CDs.) The only way they can acheive their goal is to create the peception of a new criminal class, and sadly for the RIAA, it's not working. CNN is running a story this morning more or less martyring Justin Frankel and talking about the bonuses of using WASTE.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/07/29/priva
Even the people who are theoretically on the music industry's side-- CNN being yet another AOL/TW company-- are standing against the RIAAs wave of mass stupidity.
Yeah, write it in Java, and then anyone who has trouble installing the VM will never be able to run it.
If your game cannot be installed by a complete moron, chances are, it won't get popular enough to acheive any kind of critical mass. Yeah, VB and Access are a piss-poor choice of design language here, but Java is just asking for nobody to ever run the game. Even if they already have a VM installed, you have to make sure it's the RIGHT VM (Yeah, MS's fault) and that you don't have a funky enivronment variable munging up your classpaths.
My suggestions?
For sheer compatibility's sake, the game should be written in ANSI C and use a non-platform specific database format (Dare I say it? XML delimited data?) to keep its data in.
The part they don't tell you:
This is the cracker who sold the ripped AVI...
This is the international conglomo-retail store who sold the DVD.
This is the employee who works for the international conglomo-retail store who makes just above minimum wage, but has insurance premiums so high he can't afford to go to the doctor when he's sick.
This is the movie studio who supplies the movie to the retail store.
This is the producer who works for the movie studio.
This is the movie star who works for the producer.
This is the condom the producer used when he fucked the movie starr.
This is the movie star's self-worth and future career lying on the floor next to the condom.
This is the heroin the movie star injected herself with to try to cope with the feelings of loss, degredation, and betrayal.
This is the shotgun she shot herself with after the producer told her she was worthless because she's 'losing money to file-sharers'.
1 metric fuckload is approximately equal to 1 Bazillion LoC's, or 1x10^10 metric ass-loads.
Remembr that 1 metric ass-load is equal to 10 metric butt-loads.
Each 'strand' is one curving segment of hair that can be manipulated and curved to a great degree. Compare to typical japanese-animated hair, which has only two segements, the front hair that covers the character's face, and the back that appears behind their face. Yeah, I know it sounds like they only have 16 hairs, but it looks quite a bit better than that. Check out this character picture for a clearer idea of what each 'strand' really is:
w w.wired.com/news/images/full/sinbad_b800_f.jpg
http://a1112.g.akamai.net/7/1112/492/2002091437/w
Since Netscape and Moz are based on the same code, it's only realistic that the production relaeses of both apps should be released simultaneously.
Microsoft is doing what corporations do-- They make money by whatever means they can. If that means setting up Orwelling controls for overzealous LEOs, then so be it. Is Microsoft doing that? Probably not intentionally, but they're putting the infrstructure in place to make it happen regardless.
Reading about Sobig.E this morning made me start to think about the positive effects of viruses and computer problems.
One of the most changing impacts is that anyone who spends any time around computers at all gains a healthy respect of what kind of effort is needed to keep your personal information on your computer and out of the hands of malicious crackers. I upset my mother deeply a few months ago when I demonstrated to her that her computer was infected by one of the CodeRed variants. It was most disturbing for her to have me read the contents of her 'My Documents' directory off to her over the phone. She immediately installed firewall software and the kind of virus scanning software I recommended.
It's becoming more and more likely for people to want to protect themselves and their computers from informational damage, wether it comes from malicious information vandals or belligerant, mammoth-like corporations.