How about I'll call it British English, and you call it English? That way we'll both be happy.
I agree that it seems reasonable just to refer to it as English, as the previous poster says, 'English English' seems redundant.
After all, 'British English' ought by denfinition to refer to the version of English spoken throughout the Kingdom of Scotland as well as the Kingdom of England (not to mention the Principality of Wales and the Province of Northern Ireland). However, Scottish English - aka Scottish Standard English - is a seperate beast (or should that be beastie). The cultural influces from Gaelic and Scots mean not just the vocabulary varies - the actual grammar does too.
To me, it only seems appropriate to use the more general term British English in specific circumstances.
.o0('course furriners aye seem to nae ken the difference atween 'England' and 'Britain', an' I da suppose that helps onybody work out fit the richt thing tae cry it is.)
Both tube and underground are acceptable for what Americans commonly refer to as the 'Subway' (but we invented both trains, and had the worlds first underground railway so we are sticking with 'the tube'). IME, tourists tend to call it the Underground but most Londoners refer to it as 'the tube' (there are underground railways in other cities in England and Scotland, no idea what they are referred to as locally, but I'd assume the same applies).
OT: In some parts of Scotland, calling someone a 'tube' is also a form of mild insult, though it's a been a few years since I last heard it used, it may have slipped out of common usage.
The term 'subway' in the UK incidentally, usually refers to a pedestrian underpass (most signs that refer to underpasses call them 'subways', which confuses tourists looking for the nearest underground station no end), though everyone would understand what someone speaking American English meant by Subway.
This also applies to other words like 'pants' (which over here means underpants aka knickers aka kecks, but not trousers unless being used by someone speaking American English) and 'fanny' (which in the UK has a very different meaning) - people seem to be able to put things in context, though it's a bit odd seing words like 'fanny' mentioned in Friends at ~9am on some morning re-run (_not_ a word that would be used by any UK program going out at that sort of time - any more than they'd use the word 'cunt' - but deemed acceptible because of it's dual meaning status).
I'd agree with the previous poster that I'd use telly (but never tube) to describe the TV, it's also often refered to simply as 'the box' (as in "Whats on the box tonight?").
Ummm im pretty sure that 6 billion lumps of coal is the same size, but that's ok...
No it wouldn't be, for industrial purposes (or even for boilers/heating in large houses) they don't burn the small little lumps they sell in bags at garages, they burn really large chunks of it (about 3-4 times the size of a tennis ball).
If you look at the amount of coal alone we've dug (let alone other large mining operations, especially strip mining ones) you'd realise how small a problem storage is, it really is a non issue.
We are going on about using Dino-juice for fuel, but turning to sun/supernova-juice isnt going to help. Fission is not a renewable resource.
Wrong it would help enormously; 40% of the carbon dioxide pollution in the US comes from power plants.
On the other hand hydrogen fusion has a *lot* of source material on the earth in all that water
People have been saying that for years and we still don't have hydrogen power plants, the estimated dates for implimentation just keep slipping. Advocating waiting we continue to use fossile fuels until we can build working hydrogen power plants is irresponsible in my view.
The fact is for the last 50 years we have known how to built nuclear power plants and we still don't have a hydrogen power plant. In the mean time, because people arn't backing nuclear power (in favour of other designs 'on the horizon'), we just continue to burn huge amounts of fossile fuel.
Hmm, somewhere in that pro-nuclear prose you forgot about the part where the toxic waste doesn't break down for hundreds of thousands of years!!
And what about the huge amount of garbage we generate every day that is completely non biodegradeable that we have no problem stuffing into landfill sites, never to see again?
The amount of waste from a nuclear power plant is really just peanuts in comparison, even when you consider the additional space needed for secure containment and long term storage.
The vast majority of the earth is uninhabitable by us and not used by unique lifeforms, that is to say there is plenty of space to store the waste responsibly. As well as being wasteland, their is the sea and space of course. The UK government has just published a report today (Monday, April 4th) on the very topic comparing all of those options.
Frankly I'm more worried about the amounts of Styrofoam and entirely non biodegradable plastics that are clogging landfil sites that are quite capeable of hanging around long after the formerly radioactive material becomes entirely safe, and of the horrendous damange so-called environmental advocates have done in slowing the adoption of nuclear power, which in many regions is the only realistic alternative source of power generation to fossil fuels or environmentally devastating hydro schemes.
Not that im not a nuclear supportor, but do you have any idea what 6 Billion tennis balls looks like
It sounds huge, it's still considerably smaller than 6 billion lumps of coal. (and of course, one lump of coal would be hard pressed to be used to generate enough electricity on burning to recharge a laptop once, let alone meet all my electricity needs for the rest of my life).
To be fair, it's not as if we are short of space to put the stuff either, the is a huge amount of uninhabitable stable land to store this type of material.
In fact, a report for the UK government just concluded this morning that they are recommending storing the stuff above ground at monitored sites, in preference to shooting the stuff in to space (which is quite feasible, given the relatively small quantities generated) or sinking it to the bottom of the sea, just because there is so much space.
In the west, I expect many of us generate more than a tennis balls worth of garbage every day, let alone in a lifetime, which I think really puts it into perspective.
Sure, it COULD be, but in most cases isn't. In fact, there's a pretty solid percentage of North America that still runs on coal, while is not as bad as it used to be but still pretty dirty.
Then address the actual problem, i.e. use less coal powered electricity stations.
Hydro, solar and to a lesser extent wind as well as of course nuclear are great options here.
As far as nuclear power goes, I wonder what's better, relying on oil or nuclear power?
Then you should probably hold off on expressing an opinion before you wade into the discussion. Any 10 year old should be able to tell you the answer to that is very clearly Nuclear.
If one persons electricity needs for their entire life time were met using electricity generated from a Nuclear power plant, the total amount of nuclear waste generated as a result would be approximately the size of a tennis ball.
You then simply collect large amounts of it together, encase it securely (in reality quite easy to do, large amount of concrete come in handy here) and dump it somewhere, e.g. in the sea. Given 3/4 of the planet's surface is water and it has valleys several miles deep, finding space to put isn't going to be a problem). If you think this is bad, consider that each of us in the western world uses more landfill space than this on a DAILY basis, and it's easy to see how trivial the problem of disposal of the tiny amount of waste generated is. The result is something that's completely inert too!
Let's take a long hard look at the safety aspect too...
The worst nuclear disaster in history was Chernobyl, which has killed 30 people.
The worst coal disaster in history (to my knowledge) was at Benxihu Colliery which killed over 1500 people.
Oil, as we know from very recent events, is also far more dangerous (as seen from events in Texas). The Piper Alpha disaster alone killed over 150 people (and that was in a supposedly well maintained modern Western environment).
Across the world, have been quite literally hundreds of coal and oil retrieval & power-plant related disasters in the last century, with tens of thousands of people killed. Gas and oil are inherently extremely dangerous to handle, coal mining especially so. Nuclear disasters make for far more sensationalist news though, so one disaster at a very poorly run nuclear power plant (which should never have been allowed to run, and wouldn't in any Western country) and so people who can't be bothered to do any research, decide that nuclear is 'bad'.
Nuclear power isn't the only answer, in particular it's not a great solution for unstable regions of the world (politically or geologically), but for Western regions, like North America and Europe it's far and away the best solution we have for a sustainable reliable energy source, that is by and large environmentally friendly to boot.
My PowerBook actually has light sensors in it, just under the speakers on the right and left and side. I think it's an option in certain models, the ones that have backlight keyboard support (though it might also be in the ones that don't have backlit keyboards, I'm not sure).
It automatically dims the display, and adjusts the brightness of the backlit keyboard depending on the ambiant light level. Quite handy to have the screen dimmed automatically when I'm in a low light situation.
Although, I have this disabled at the moment (it can be turned off via the control panel) as I found it was a little distratcing in 'twilight' to have the screen frequantly bounce between brighter and darker. Ideally, I'd like it to prevent the brightness levels yo-yo'ing so much in twilight conditions (e.g. by more gradually changing the brightness if it finds it's changing frequently).
If you think about it, it's almost like a concession to Windows's application model.
Actually I think it's more inteded to be a return to the origional Apple concept of 'Desk Accessories' which appeared in System 1.0. This included Calculator, Puzzle, a clock/calendar, Notepad and Scrapbook.
I'm really looking forward to having them back (at the moment I have stickies, the address book, iCal and the calculator in the Dock and Dashboard sounds like a much better solution).
While I think the original complaint about the grammar checker is over the top and not justified (I think the current grammar checker it's good enough to be serviceable, and for all practical purposes it doesn't seem feasible to make it something this guy would seem to be happy with anyway) I do dismay at current spell checkers.
The Mac OS X spell checker is/slightly/ better than Microsoft's one I find, both are no where near as good as Google IME. It's not actually that hard to write a better spell checker either (having written one myself), and it makes me wonder why they are so poor at suggesting words for trivial misspellings that should be easy to match.
20 USD for 9 levels (giving N hours of entertainment) compared with 18.50+ USD for a regular cinema ticket here (which gives 1.5-2 hours of entertainment) is entirely reasonable, even assuming a 10 USD (or third rate outlet 5 USD) ticket price, it still represents very good for money as far as entertainment goes, the same comparison is valid with music (where it's commonly ~7-14 USD per CD) or with buying a typical DVD.
People get a vast amount of entertainment time out of games but seem to be able to entirely dissasociate the amount of money they pay with how much entertainment ('bang') they get for their buck. It's one thing to bemoan a lack of quality (and say, expect and actual ending, or ensure that levels are not repetitive clones - with reference to both Halo, Halo 2 and a number of other titles, including BF:Vietnam where they pulled the same 'reuse the same level' crap), but it's another to moan about the cost of a decent offering if levels still cost less than a cup of coffee.
I find the amount of whining about the price of perfectly good titles often ridiculous, especially as games get increasingly complex and time consuming to develop. This is also true in relation to people complaning about paying sums of 8-10 USD a month for MMOG's (especially when you the same people will spend 3-6 times that on cable, yet don't actually watch 3-6 times more cable).
But that's going off topic just a little..
Now (speaking for experience) building half decent Wolfenstein levels was very easy. Doom/Doom2 were a little bit more involved, but pretty easy still, I did a few of those (not to say that stuff like Aliens:TC wasn't still impressive). Quake and Quake 2 were a bit more tricky, requiring 3D modelling, art and map design skills. At this time, dedicated model markers as well as artists, level designers, and coders are starting to have to appear as entirely separate entities (not so many sole level developers as their used to be due to the time and complexity required in making a decent level). Quake 3 and UT upped the bar still further.
These days, with games UT2K4 and Doom 3 (in particular) it's vastly more complex and to turn out a decent set of levels or mods - you need an entire team of people, you often find you have separate people doing music, sound, art, modelling, animation, level design, scripting even UI work (and often someone else just to co-ordinate things and run the web site and forums for a mod).
In fairness, you don't need other people to pitch in (beyond testing) if all you want to do is build a new network only level that reuses *only* existing elements - but even doing that (once a fairly simple task you could master in an hour or two) takes many, many times longer Doom 3 or UT than doing really enjoyable levels in Doom/Doom 2 ever did.
FWIW, I don't know about other people, but for me (building a solo level), it's something like an hours vs. weeks comparison as far as time-to-build-a-decent level goes. Personally, I find it a lot easier to learn a new programming language than to get my head round the newer level editors used by the likes of UT2K3/2K4 and Doom 3.
Now there varying levels of bang-per-buck, and I probably wouldn't be all that tempted to buy them at 20 USD either unless I'd heard the levels were especially good, but it still beats the crap out of a lot of other forms of entertainment and in that light isn't unreasonable at all IMO.
Fans are going to get many, many hours of entertainment out of them with their friends online. And what about those who don't want to pay? Well they can just play the free ones that are going to be released now, and then just play the rest in a few months (as Bungie say up front, all the maps will be available for free download in a few months).
On the topic of the accessibility of modern level design tools...
Personally, I'd much prefer to have seen Doom 3 be true to it's roots - as I see it - in the sense of providing greater accessibility to level designers and artis
ts obviously true - how could they sell gear worth that much for so little and still pay all the manufacturers of it?
Think about it dumbass.
Um what do you think is in the X-Box, magic gold dust?
It uses outdated (in PC terms) standardised components, to deliver performance significantly less than your averag Joe Users PC (never mind dedicated gamer rig).
Let's look at the cost of the Mac Mini (330 UKP) with X-Box (100 UKP) shall we? Only ~200 UKP more for the Mac Mini, which Apple clearly make a (no doubt small) profit on.
The Mac Mini, clearly has better components than those used in in the X-Box, and it trivial to account for the difference. Let's look at them shall we?
The 330 UKP model has a slot loading DVD-ROM/CD Writer (compared to the X-Box's basic DVD-ROM/CD-ROM only tray drive), a 40 GB 2.5" (laptop sized) Hard Disk (compared to a standard 4/8 GB HD in the X-Box), 256 MB RAM and a Radeon 9200 with 32 MB of dedicated VRAM (that's 4 times more than the X-Boxes 64 MB of shared system RAM/VRAM), DVI output and it uses a 1.2 Ghz G4 CPU (rather than a more common tweaked P3 733 Mhz design found in the X-Box).
Adding other factors that also drive down the price of the X-Box even more, they are of course huge, many times bigger than a Mac Mini, this of course means they can be built cheaper.
Lastly, let's not for get one of the most important factors (vastly differing components aside) being a console the X-Boxes will be produced and sold in far greater volume than the Mac Mini, in fact MS claim to have sold 20 Million of them.
No wonder the Home and Entertainment just posted a profit last quarter.
Money is being lost somewhere; and if you seriously believe they are making a profit on the Xbox hardware at it's current $150 price point, then perhaps you can explain where the rest of the money they are losing is coming from.
Marketing, personnel (including provision of building space and equipment) and associated development/research costs are always far bigger sinks (especially at MS, who plunge huge amounts into Research).
Anyone who thinks that buying a console and not buying any games hurts Microsoft is daft as a brush ("Oh no, we sold another console!").
I saw one at my local GAME store and it was toally borked.:/
Started up, obayed a few touch screen/button presses, then seemed to 'crash' at the same point and wouldn't go beyond that, couldn't play any games (it seemed to be a demo system with a few games, but of course I don't know as I didn't work).
For me the unit is far too bulky considering the screen size. I would rather have one large high res screen, than two smaller low res screens. I think the PSP will kick bottom when they finally release it here (and it will be Nintendo's fault for clearly dropping the ball on this one IMO).
I really don't get Nintendo were thinking with this design. Clamshell design can be good (as Sonys Clie range has shown) why didn't they just build a product with a single large screen and 3D support?
I can see having two screens give potential for interesting gameplay (but it sill seems silly to be me that top one is still so small and no serious 3D support AFAIK). However, I can see almost no value in touch screen on a gaming system as using a pen on a system like that is not as nice an input for gameplaying (and I think the screen is only more likely to break and the pen get lost, so worse overall than no touch screen IMO).
Actually I think you spot on, and fortunately to a great extent this is the way WoW already works.:)
As another user points out, all the really good items are soul bound (so can't be traded or sold, except to NPC's for a comparitively small amount).
They almost all occur in instanced dungeons, or as a result of a one time quest too, so that cuts out malicious camping.
The only one down side of having so much good stuff as quest rewards WoW is that the current implimentation hurts crafters quite a bit (very expensive to do a crafting skill to a high level, and fairly low rewards, most are more of a money sink than anything you can profit by, which is not entirely bad and the lesser of two evils but it would be nice if people could also have had ways to make money).
That's not a risk, it's the point of BSD licensing.
You most certainly cannot use someone elses code under the BSD license and pretend you wrote it, which is what's happened in this case.
If Pear had been released under the BSD license, the 'developers' of CherryOS would still be in violation of the license by claming they wrote it and that it's an origional work.
If you don't care if someone takes your work and gets full credit for it, then there is no point in licensing it under the BSD license, just release it as Public Domain and be done with it, but it's rather implausible to claim that those who release code under the BSD license don't care about getting credit when that's the one big restriction it has.
I'm not the parent poster, but to quote the post to which you refer:
Really, just strolling into the airport and creating an unnecessary problem doesn't help anyone.
I'm sure people have said the same thing about Rosa Parks when she refused to sit at the back of us bus "Oh look at her causing trouble! That doesn't help anyone and just made the poor bus drivers life more difficult.".
It seems the disagreement here is that you seem to see this protest as 'unnecessary', where as others (myself included) think it is quite justfied.
I think there are enough gross abuses of power by governments, most of which cost time and money to impliment but deliver no real benefit to citizens but do deliver rather convenient oppertinuties for air time to politians (IMO a primary reason why terror legislation is so in vouge in the USA and UK).
I am relieved when I see someone prostest publically against this sort of thing, it's something most of us can't afford to do when we have to worry about holding down our jobs just to keep a roof over our head.
If I were a multimilionare like John Gilmore I like to think I'd make a professional pain-the-ass of myself to draw attention to similar scandalous legislation (and the equally inept execution of it by trusted officals).
Objective C was invented long before NeXT existed. Hell, it was before the first Macintosh came out, when Steve Jobs would have thought you were crazy if you suggested someone could force him out of Apple so he'd found another computer company.
To be fair, an actual working compiler wasn't released till 86, after the debut of the Macintosh, and when it was it was licensed by NeXT shortly afterward. That, and I don't think many people would have gotten the joke if I'd said StepStone;-).
They have the appropriate background and training to decide whether or not a crime has been committed: ISPs don't. They can actually do something in the case of a crime: ISPs can't
ISP's can do something about crime on their network, and the law even requires that they are obliged to.
If they have what they have every reason to believe is legitimate report of illegal activity, they would almost certainly be open to state prosecution, just as any other business (such as nightclub owner who was similarly complicit in response to reports to drug dealing on their premises).
Why place the burden of evidence gathering upon the service provider? That's the job of police. No one else is qualified to conduct a criminal investigation.
The task of gathering and providing evidence for the police in a criminal investigation is already something service providers are required to do, by law (a simple practical arrangement, given the inherent complexity and the relative infancy of the technology).
I have worked for many ISP's (including pan european carriers & service providers, as I do today) and I know that ISP's are of course already responsible for gathering and providing evidence to the police in this type of incident, and that this practice is common place in a police investigation, as it is with telecoms providers generally.
I would note that "gathering evidence" is not the same thing as "conducting criminal investigation", just as a "report" does not simply equate to a mere "rumour".
I again refute that this justifies requires the passing of new ludicrously specific (but rather conveniently popular and high profile) legislation - in preference to the rather simpler enforcement and improvement of existing legislation.
I assert that it has rather more to do with being seen to do something, than actually doing something.
You assume wrongly, reporting hearsay to the police is not required anywhere.
This has nothing to do with 'reporting hearsay' (the law does not say they should 'report hearsay', hearsay is not a crime here - posession of indecent images is the crime).
I know that commonly in western countries service providers may not ignore reports of crime on their service as things stand already.
If for any reason that's not the case in Australia, the appropriate solution - as I've already suggested - is to fix the law so that as a generic service provider (that is as corporation, not specifically an internet provider) they are required to do some investigation into or simply to forward to the authorities, reports of illegal activity on their service (the latter seemingly the easiest to implement).
There is no good reason to have a law specifically aimed at internet service providers with regard to the specific crime of accessing illegally images of child pornography, it's ridiculous. On what grounds should they be expected to forward information about this one specific crime, but not about information they may have about other crimes such rape, murder, abduction or fraud?
surely its more efficient not to post until you have thought the question through?
Slashdot Mirror
How about I'll call it British English, and you call it English? That way we'll both be happy.
.o0('course furriners aye seem to nae ken the difference atween 'England' and 'Britain', an' I da suppose that helps onybody work out fit the richt thing tae cry it is.)
I agree that it seems reasonable just to refer to it as English, as the previous poster says, 'English English' seems redundant.
After all, 'British English' ought by denfinition to refer to the version of English spoken throughout the Kingdom of Scotland as well as the Kingdom of England (not to mention the Principality of Wales and the Province of Northern Ireland). However, Scottish English - aka Scottish Standard English - is a seperate beast (or should that be beastie). The cultural influces from Gaelic and Scots mean not just the vocabulary varies - the actual grammar does too.
To me, it only seems appropriate to use the more general term British English in specific circumstances.
Both tube and underground are acceptable for what Americans commonly refer to as the 'Subway' (but we invented both trains, and had the worlds first underground railway so we are sticking with 'the tube'). IME, tourists tend to call it the Underground but most Londoners refer to it as 'the tube' (there are underground railways in other cities in England and Scotland, no idea what they are referred to as locally, but I'd assume the same applies).
OT: In some parts of Scotland, calling someone a 'tube' is also a form of mild insult, though it's a been a few years since I last heard it used, it may have slipped out of common usage.
The term 'subway' in the UK incidentally, usually refers to a pedestrian underpass (most signs that refer to underpasses call them 'subways', which confuses tourists looking for the nearest underground station no end), though everyone would understand what someone speaking American English meant by Subway.
This also applies to other words like 'pants' (which over here means underpants aka knickers aka kecks, but not trousers unless being used by someone speaking American English) and 'fanny' (which in the UK has a very different meaning) - people seem to be able to put things in context, though it's a bit odd seing words like 'fanny' mentioned in Friends at ~9am on some morning re-run (_not_ a word that would be used by any UK program going out at that sort of time - any more than they'd use the word 'cunt' - but deemed acceptible because of it's dual meaning status).
I'd agree with the previous poster that I'd use telly (but never tube) to describe the TV, it's also often refered to simply as 'the box' (as in "Whats on the box tonight?").
Enough troll, begone.
Another one for the muppet list...
Ummm im pretty sure that 6 billion lumps of coal is the same size, but that's ok...
No it wouldn't be, for industrial purposes (or even for boilers/heating in large houses) they don't burn the small little lumps they sell in bags at garages, they burn really large chunks of it (about 3-4 times the size of a tennis ball).
If you look at the amount of coal alone we've dug (let alone other large mining operations, especially strip mining ones) you'd realise how small a problem storage is, it really is a non issue.
We are going on about using Dino-juice for fuel, but turning to sun/supernova-juice isnt going to help. Fission is not a renewable resource.
Wrong it would help enormously; 40% of the carbon dioxide pollution in the US comes from power plants.
On the other hand hydrogen fusion has a *lot* of source material on the earth in all that water
People have been saying that for years and we still don't have hydrogen power plants, the estimated dates for implimentation just keep slipping. Advocating waiting we continue to use fossile fuels until we can build working hydrogen power plants is irresponsible in my view.
The fact is for the last 50 years we have known how to built nuclear power plants and we still don't have a hydrogen power plant. In the mean time, because people arn't backing nuclear power (in favour of other designs 'on the horizon'), we just continue to burn huge amounts of fossile fuel.
Hmm, somewhere in that pro-nuclear prose you forgot about the part where the toxic waste doesn't break down for hundreds of thousands of years!!
And what about the huge amount of garbage we generate every day that is completely non biodegradeable that we have no problem stuffing into landfill sites, never to see again?
The amount of waste from a nuclear power plant is really just peanuts in comparison, even when you consider the additional space needed for secure containment and long term storage.
The vast majority of the earth is uninhabitable by us and not used by unique lifeforms, that is to say there is plenty of space to store the waste responsibly. As well as being wasteland, their is the sea and space of course. The UK government has just published a report today (Monday, April 4th) on the very topic comparing all of those options.
Frankly I'm more worried about the amounts of Styrofoam and entirely non biodegradable plastics that are clogging landfil sites that are quite capeable of hanging around long after the formerly radioactive material becomes entirely safe, and of the horrendous damange so-called environmental advocates have done in slowing the adoption of nuclear power, which in many regions is the only realistic alternative source of power generation to fossil fuels or environmentally devastating hydro schemes.
Not that im not a nuclear supportor, but do you have any idea what 6 Billion tennis balls looks like
It sounds huge, it's still considerably smaller than 6 billion lumps of coal. (and of course, one lump of coal would be hard pressed to be used to generate enough electricity on burning to recharge a laptop once, let alone meet all my electricity needs for the rest of my life).
To be fair, it's not as if we are short of space to put the stuff either, the is a huge amount of uninhabitable stable land to store this type of material.
In fact, a report for the UK government just concluded this morning that they are recommending storing the stuff above ground at monitored sites, in preference to shooting the stuff in to space (which is quite feasible, given the relatively small quantities generated) or sinking it to the bottom of the sea, just because there is so much space.
In the west, I expect many of us generate more than a tennis balls worth of garbage every day, let alone in a lifetime, which I think really puts it into perspective.
Sure, it COULD be, but in most cases isn't. In fact, there's a pretty solid percentage of North America that still runs on coal, while is not as bad as it used to be but still pretty dirty.
Then address the actual problem, i.e. use less coal powered electricity stations.
Hydro, solar and to a lesser extent wind as well as of course nuclear are great options here.
As far as nuclear power goes, I wonder what's better, relying on oil or nuclear power?
Then you should probably hold off on expressing an opinion before you wade into the discussion. Any 10 year old should be able to tell you the answer to that is very clearly Nuclear.
If one persons electricity needs for their entire life time were met using electricity generated from a Nuclear power plant, the total amount of nuclear waste generated as a result would be approximately the size of a tennis ball.
You then simply collect large amounts of it together, encase it securely (in reality quite easy to do, large amount of concrete come in handy here) and dump it somewhere, e.g. in the sea. Given 3/4 of the planet's surface is water and it has valleys several miles deep, finding space to put isn't going to be a problem). If you think this is bad, consider that each of us in the western world uses more landfill space than this on a DAILY basis, and it's easy to see how trivial the problem of disposal of the tiny amount of waste generated is. The result is something that's completely inert too!
Let's take a long hard look at the safety aspect too...
The worst nuclear disaster in history was Chernobyl, which has killed 30 people.
The worst coal disaster in history (to my knowledge) was at Benxihu Colliery which killed over 1500 people.
Oil, as we know from very recent events, is also far more dangerous (as seen from events in Texas). The Piper Alpha disaster alone killed over 150 people (and that was in a supposedly well maintained modern Western environment).
Across the world, have been quite literally hundreds of coal and oil retrieval & power-plant related disasters in the last century, with tens of thousands of people killed. Gas and oil are inherently extremely dangerous to handle, coal mining especially so. Nuclear disasters make for far more sensationalist news though, so one disaster at a very poorly run nuclear power plant (which should never have been allowed to run, and wouldn't in any Western country) and so people who can't be bothered to do any research, decide that nuclear is 'bad'.
Nuclear power isn't the only answer, in particular it's not a great solution for unstable regions of the world (politically or geologically), but for Western regions, like North America and Europe it's far and away the best solution we have for a sustainable reliable energy source, that is by and large environmentally friendly to boot.
My PowerBook actually has light sensors in it, just under the speakers on the right and left and side. I think it's an option in certain models, the ones that have backlight keyboard support (though it might also be in the ones that don't have backlit keyboards, I'm not sure).
It automatically dims the display, and adjusts the brightness of the backlit keyboard depending on the ambiant light level. Quite handy to have the screen dimmed automatically when I'm in a low light situation.
Although, I have this disabled at the moment (it can be turned off via the control panel) as I found it was a little distratcing in 'twilight' to have the screen frequantly bounce between brighter and darker. Ideally, I'd like it to prevent the brightness levels yo-yo'ing so much in twilight conditions (e.g. by more gradually changing the brightness if it finds it's changing frequently).
If you think about it, it's almost like a concession to Windows's application model.
Actually I think it's more inteded to be a return to the origional Apple concept of 'Desk Accessories' which appeared in System 1.0. This included Calculator, Puzzle, a clock/calendar, Notepad and Scrapbook.
I'm really looking forward to having them back (at the moment I have stickies, the address book, iCal and the calculator in the Dock and Dashboard sounds like a much better solution).
5.5) Do not eat iPod Shuffle (this step is also critical)
While I think the original complaint about the grammar checker is over the top and not justified (I think the current grammar checker it's good enough to be serviceable, and for all practical purposes it doesn't seem feasible to make it something this guy would seem to be happy with anyway) I do dismay at current spell checkers.
/slightly/ better than Microsoft's one I find, both are no where near as good as Google IME. It's not actually that hard to write a better spell checker either (having written one myself), and it makes me wonder why they are so poor at suggesting words for trivial misspellings that should be easy to match.
The Mac OS X spell checker is
20 USD for 9 levels (giving N hours of entertainment) compared with 18.50+ USD for a regular cinema ticket here (which gives 1.5-2 hours of entertainment) is entirely reasonable, even assuming a 10 USD (or third rate outlet 5 USD) ticket price, it still represents very good for money as far as entertainment goes, the same comparison is valid with music (where it's commonly ~7-14 USD per CD) or with buying a typical DVD.
People get a vast amount of entertainment time out of games but seem to be able to entirely dissasociate the amount of money they pay with how much entertainment ('bang') they get for their buck. It's one thing to bemoan a lack of quality (and say, expect and actual ending, or ensure that levels are not repetitive clones - with reference to both Halo, Halo 2 and a number of other titles, including BF:Vietnam where they pulled the same 'reuse the same level' crap), but it's another to moan about the cost of a decent offering if levels still cost less than a cup of coffee.
I find the amount of whining about the price of perfectly good titles often ridiculous, especially as games get increasingly complex and time consuming to develop. This is also true in relation to people complaning about paying sums of 8-10 USD a month for MMOG's (especially when you the same people will spend 3-6 times that on cable, yet don't actually watch 3-6 times more cable).
But that's going off topic just a little..
Now (speaking for experience) building half decent Wolfenstein levels was very easy. Doom/Doom2 were a little bit more involved, but pretty easy still, I did a few of those (not to say that stuff like Aliens:TC wasn't still impressive). Quake and Quake 2 were a bit more tricky, requiring 3D modelling, art and map design skills. At this time, dedicated model markers as well as artists, level designers, and coders are starting to have to appear as entirely separate entities (not so many sole level developers as their used to be due to the time and complexity required in making a decent level). Quake 3 and UT upped the bar still further.
These days, with games UT2K4 and Doom 3 (in particular) it's vastly more complex and to turn out a decent set of levels or mods - you need an entire team of people, you often find you have separate people doing music, sound, art, modelling, animation, level design, scripting even UI work (and often someone else just to co-ordinate things and run the web site and forums for a mod).
In fairness, you don't need other people to pitch in (beyond testing) if all you want to do is build a new network only level that reuses *only* existing elements - but even doing that (once a fairly simple task you could master in an hour or two) takes many, many times longer Doom 3 or UT than doing really enjoyable levels in Doom/Doom 2 ever did.
FWIW, I don't know about other people, but for me (building a solo level), it's something like an hours vs. weeks comparison as far as time-to-build-a-decent level goes. Personally, I find it a lot easier to learn a new programming language than to get my head round the newer level editors used by the likes of UT2K3/2K4 and Doom 3.
Now there varying levels of bang-per-buck, and I probably wouldn't be all that tempted to buy them at 20 USD either unless I'd heard the levels were especially good, but it still beats the crap out of a lot of other forms of entertainment and in that light isn't unreasonable at all IMO.
Fans are going to get many, many hours of entertainment out of them with their friends online. And what about those who don't want to pay? Well they can just play the free ones that are going to be released now, and then just play the rest in a few months (as Bungie say up front, all the maps will be available for free download in a few months).
On the topic of the accessibility of modern level design tools...
Personally, I'd much prefer to have seen Doom 3 be true to it's roots - as I see it - in the sense of providing greater accessibility to level designers and artis
ts obviously true - how could they sell gear worth that much for so little and still pay all the manufacturers of it?
Think about it dumbass.
Um what do you think is in the X-Box, magic gold dust?
It uses outdated (in PC terms) standardised components, to deliver performance significantly less than your averag Joe Users PC (never mind dedicated gamer rig).
Let's look at the cost of the Mac Mini (330 UKP) with X-Box (100 UKP) shall we? Only ~200 UKP more for the Mac Mini, which Apple clearly make a (no doubt small) profit on.
The Mac Mini, clearly has better components than those used in in the X-Box, and it trivial to account for the difference. Let's look at them shall we?
The 330 UKP model has a slot loading DVD-ROM/CD Writer (compared to the X-Box's basic DVD-ROM/CD-ROM only tray drive), a 40 GB 2.5" (laptop sized) Hard Disk (compared to a standard 4/8 GB HD in the X-Box), 256 MB RAM and a Radeon 9200 with 32 MB of dedicated VRAM (that's 4 times more than the X-Boxes 64 MB of shared system RAM/VRAM), DVI output and it uses a 1.2 Ghz G4 CPU (rather than a more common tweaked P3 733 Mhz design found in the X-Box).
Adding other factors that also drive down the price of the X-Box even more, they are of course huge, many times bigger than a Mac Mini, this of course means they can be built cheaper.
Lastly, let's not for get one of the most important factors (vastly differing components aside) being a console the X-Boxes will be produced and sold in far greater volume than the Mac Mini, in fact MS claim to have sold 20 Million of them.
No wonder the Home and Entertainment just posted a profit last quarter.
Money is being lost somewhere; and if you seriously believe they are making a profit on the Xbox hardware at it's current $150 price point, then perhaps you can explain where the rest of the money they are losing is coming from.
Marketing, personnel (including provision of building space and equipment) and associated development/research costs are always far bigger sinks (especially at MS, who plunge huge amounts into Research).
Anyone who thinks that buying a console and not buying any games hurts Microsoft is daft as a brush ("Oh no, we sold another console!").
Microsoft takes a loss on every console sold, so even if he wasn't supporting the software companies, Microsoft still lost money.
Do you really think that's true?
I bet you belive the urban legend that Gillette lose money on the razors but make it up on the blades too!
It's a safe bet they make a profit on both, just vastly greater margins on the game titles themselves.
I saw one at my local GAME store and it was toally borked. :/
Started up, obayed a few touch screen/button presses, then seemed to 'crash' at the same point and wouldn't go beyond that, couldn't play any games (it seemed to be a demo system with a few games, but of course I don't know as I didn't work).
For me the unit is far too bulky considering the screen size. I would rather have one large high res screen, than two smaller low res screens. I think the PSP will kick bottom when they finally release it here (and it will be Nintendo's fault for clearly dropping the ball on this one IMO).
I really don't get Nintendo were thinking with this design. Clamshell design can be good (as Sonys Clie range has shown) why didn't they just build a product with a single large screen and 3D support?
I can see having two screens give potential for interesting gameplay (but it sill seems silly to be me that top one is still so small and no serious 3D support AFAIK). However, I can see almost no value in touch screen on a gaming system as using a pen on a system like that is not as nice an input for gameplaying (and I think the screen is only more likely to break and the pen get lost, so worse overall than no touch screen IMO).
Actually I think you spot on, and fortunately to a great extent this is the way WoW already works. :)
As another user points out, all the really good items are soul bound (so can't be traded or sold, except to NPC's for a comparitively small amount).
They almost all occur in instanced dungeons, or as a result of a one time quest too, so that cuts out malicious camping.
The only one down side of having so much good stuff as quest rewards WoW is that the current implimentation hurts crafters quite a bit (very expensive to do a crafting skill to a high level, and fairly low rewards, most are more of a money sink than anything you can profit by, which is not entirely bad and the lesser of two evils but it would be nice if people could also have had ways to make money).
That's not a risk, it's the point of BSD licensing.
You most certainly cannot use someone elses code under the BSD license and pretend you wrote it, which is what's happened in this case.
If Pear had been released under the BSD license, the 'developers' of CherryOS would still be in violation of the license by claming they wrote it and that it's an origional work.
If you don't care if someone takes your work and gets full credit for it, then there is no point in licensing it under the BSD license, just release it as Public Domain and be done with it, but it's rather implausible to claim that those who release code under the BSD license don't care about getting credit when that's the one big restriction it has.
LOL v. good. :-)
I'm not the parent poster, but to quote the post to which you refer:
Really, just strolling into the airport and creating an unnecessary problem doesn't help anyone.
I'm sure people have said the same thing about Rosa Parks when she refused to sit at the back of us bus
"Oh look at her causing trouble! That doesn't help anyone and just made the poor bus drivers life more difficult.".
It seems the disagreement here is that you seem to see this protest as 'unnecessary', where as others (myself included) think it is quite justfied.
I think there are enough gross abuses of power by governments, most of which cost time and money to impliment but deliver no real benefit to citizens but do deliver rather convenient oppertinuties for air time to politians (IMO a primary reason why terror legislation is so in vouge in the USA and UK).
I am relieved when I see someone prostest publically against this sort of thing, it's something most of us can't afford to do when we have to worry about holding down our jobs just to keep a roof over our head.
If I were a multimilionare like John Gilmore I like to think I'd make a professional pain-the-ass of myself to draw attention to similar scandalous legislation (and the equally inept execution of it by trusted officals).
Objective C was invented long before NeXT existed. Hell, it was before the first Macintosh came out, when Steve Jobs would have thought you were crazy if you suggested someone could force him out of Apple so he'd found another computer company.
;-).
To be fair, an actual working compiler wasn't released till 86, after the debut of the Macintosh, and when it was it was licensed by NeXT shortly afterward. That, and I don't think many people would have gotten the joke if I'd said StepStone
I don't think that's entirely fair. OpenStep / Objective-C were cross platform at a source level, but still required a recompile.
.:-)
.oO( Perhaps I should have said 'cross platform compatilbilty solution' rather than 'Java-like platform'. )
True of course, and I didn't really intend for it to be anything other than humerous
They have the appropriate background and training to decide whether or not a crime has been committed: ISPs don't. They can actually do something in the case of a crime: ISPs can't
ISP's can do something about crime on their network, and the law even requires that they are obliged to.
If they have what they have every reason to believe is legitimate report of illegal activity, they would almost certainly be open to state prosecution, just as any other business (such as nightclub owner who was similarly complicit in response to reports to drug dealing on their premises).
Why place the burden of evidence gathering upon the service provider? That's the job of police. No one else is qualified to conduct a criminal investigation.
The task of gathering and providing evidence for the police in a criminal investigation is already something service providers are required to do, by law (a simple practical arrangement, given the inherent complexity and the relative infancy of the technology).
I have worked for many ISP's (including pan european carriers & service providers, as I do today) and I know that ISP's are of course already responsible for gathering and providing evidence to the police in this type of incident, and that this practice is common place in a police investigation, as it is with telecoms providers generally.
I would note that "gathering evidence" is not the same thing as "conducting criminal investigation", just as a "report" does not simply equate to a mere "rumour".
I again refute that this justifies requires the passing of new ludicrously specific (but rather conveniently popular and high profile) legislation - in preference to the rather simpler enforcement and improvement of existing legislation.
I assert that it has rather more to do with being seen to do something, than actually doing something.
You assume wrongly, reporting hearsay to the police is not required anywhere.
This has nothing to do with 'reporting hearsay' (the law does not say they should 'report hearsay', hearsay is not a crime here - posession of indecent images is the crime).
I know that commonly in western countries service providers may not ignore reports of crime on their service as things stand already.
If for any reason that's not the case in Australia, the appropriate solution - as I've already suggested - is to fix the law so that as a generic service provider (that is as corporation, not specifically an internet provider) they are required to do some investigation into or simply to forward to the authorities, reports of illegal activity on their service (the latter seemingly the easiest to implement).
There is no good reason to have a law specifically aimed at internet service providers with regard to the specific crime of accessing illegally images of child pornography, it's ridiculous. On what grounds should they be expected to forward information about this one specific crime, but not about information they may have about other crimes such rape, murder, abduction or fraud?
surely its more efficient not to post until you have thought the question through?
Quite.
This was fixed more than a month ago in Sun Java. Lame response time, Apple.
A superior implimentation of a Java-like platform was delivered long before Oak, in NeXT's Objective-C. Lame implimentation, Sun.