That was my first thought when I saw this in the Firehose too. The National Academy of Sciences should give a thorough and unbiased report on any scientifically sound connections (or more likely, the complete lack thereof) between violent gaming and those few out of all the millions who play them who go on to commit violent acts, or they are not doing their job.
I thought that the Slashdot collective might have been a little more foward looking supportive of this idea with a mind to finally putting a major nail into the rhetoric and bullshit pseudo-science surrounding the issue. Perhaps then people might focus on the societal and environmental issues that ultimately lead people to resort to this kind of action without any alarm bells being set off in the period running up to it, and maybe addressing those instead. You know - the cause rather than the effect?
Nah, who am I kidding. I was expecting the NRA and/or religion to get dragged into it and I wasn't disappointed.
Got into a discussion about this recently over the recent (and on-going) flooding in the UK. If the sea level and temperatures both rise, then a logical expectation of that would be that more water would evaporate off the oceans into the atmosphere, subsequently returning as rain and snow. That would entail more runoff and a corresponding rise in river levels and increased risk of flooding, particularly given the growing pressure on housing in some areas resulting in flood plains being used for development.
It's not just the people with beachfront properties that need to be worried...
Syria almost certainly does have Internet access still available by satellite service providers - satellite phones do work there after all. As with your example though, the service provider's IP space and the area being provided services need not be in the same locale. Chances are anyone still accessing the Internet in Syria will be geolocated to wherever the downlink station is - most probably elsewhere in the Middle East or Europe.
At this point, I think "nowhere fast" is probably what they are trying to achieve. It's a lost cause, so the longer the studios can keep things tied up in a legal limbo, the better it is for them.
To be honest, I tend to agree - and I submitted this story.:) That's why I included the rider about this new record maybe creating enough interest in the Flight/Space Sim genre to attract some attention from the rest of the industry and get a few more titles into production. It might be co-incidence, but I'm sure the early successes of the Star Citizen campaign might have prompted the Elite: Dangerous annoucement to be made a little earlier than might have been planned. I admit, I'm really stoked about the potential for SC and hope it turns out as at least as amazing as Chris is promising, but for me the real story here is the potential for a revival of the flight sim genre instead of the same old stuff from FPSs and WoW/Farmville style grinders.
As for the Crowdfunding stories though - I think it's past time they got their own topic that people could select to ignore in their preferences.
The total budget for SC isn't $4.25m plus whatever extra they take in the next few days from the crowd funding alone. Chris has some "proper" VC-style backers as well who will be providing the bulk of the funding on top of the crowd funding effort, so the idea behind the crowdfunding was to judge the potential size of the market for the game and likely return on investment for the main backers. The specifics are not public, but the inference was clearly that they would be contributing additional funds in proportion to the crowdfunding revenue and number of backers; that could be on a 1:1 basis, a 2:1 basis or whatever - only RSI knows. Chris certainly isn't a n00b at this, so I'm sure he's aware how much money it is really likely to cost to implement the features promised for each milestone of the crowdfunding and the backers will be providing the necessary additional funds.
Not for system generation, no. It's not been stated how they plan to implement things like planet textures, nebula structures, commodity prices and so on, so that may well turn out to be procedural in the final game. Atmospheres that can be flown through have not been ruled out of Star Citizen yet, but since refuelling stations seem to be tied to gas giants, it's a very real possibility that Star Citizen might have some analogue to Elite's fuel scoop. For star system generation though, I think it's more of a concious design decision rather than a requirement.
David Braben has gone for a large, procedurally generated, universe that is likely to have thousands of star systems and tens of thousands of worlds and installations. Chris Roberts has gone for a smaller number (50-80, depending on final funding) of hand crafted star systems that might contain a total of several hundred worlds and installations with the intention to add more content (at no extra cost to the player, I might add) over the following months. Both approaches are equally valid in my book; it would be very hard for Elite's procedural approach to have the kind of in-jokes that Star Citizen's hand crafting approach makes trivial, such as having one of the bread basket systems called "Kellogg" (yes, really!), so think of it as a quality vs. quantity kind of thing. Regardless of how good (or bad) the two games turn out, I think the universe in Star Citizen will probably feel more immersive and authentic than the one in Elite: Dangerous, and that can only be a good thing for the game's longevity.
For those reasons I put funding into BOTH games.:)
Exactly what I think has got so many people to back Star Citizen, although I'm sure having Chris Robert's name attached helped more than a little. Apart from the religion aspect (which might be for the best, given how touchy people can be about it) all of the items you listed are part of the game Chris' has outlined on the SC site. And yes, that includes the shiny explosions; some of the early in-game footage already looks amazing, and it's not even made it to alpha yet.
The real news here though is that there is demonstrably a massive interest in reviving the Space Sim genre, something that the conventional AAA title publishers and their backers have neglected for years in favour of sport sims, FPSs and Facebook plugins. While I doubt that Star Citizen and David Braben's new Elite game are going to have the financial successes of current AAA titles in those other genres, it might encourage one or more of them to maybe take note and produce some big-budget space sims of their own, which is the ultimate goal of Chris' project. Even if a few of the game really suck (likely), at least there will be some more choice out there that the same-old games that we keep seeing churned out on an annual basis at the moment, and that can't be bad, can it?
I don't think the degree of an individual's political leaning to the left or right has much to do with how they feel about the situation in Israel, but I do agree that this is absolutely attention seeking by Anonymous (or more likely an Anti-Semite subset thereof), and pretty uninformed attention seeking at that, which is probably doing their overall "cause", such as it is, far more harm than good. I'm expecting some visible signs of a schism within the ranks of Anonymous over this before the day is out.
I'm sure that Assad attacking Israel would work out brilliantly. Assad's government has been unable to put down (an accurate description, I'd say) a civil war that has been raging for over 18 months now, so you are suggesting he divert military resources from trying to do that to open a second front against Israel? Avoiding some rather obvious parallels about second fronts, that didn't work out too well for Syria the last time they tried it, and that was with the assistance of Egypt (then the UAR) and Jordan. Not to mention the obvious excuse it would give some nations just itching to get much more overtly involved in Syria's internal struggles the "justification" they need to do so, despite the risk of igniting the whole of the Middle East when Iran et al inevitably get involved as well.
Probably also worth pointing out that, unlike the US etc., the UK has no legal recognition of the right to free speech. Stupid acts like this, especially coming so soon after the recent case of offensive postings to Facebook etc. in the case of the missing April Jones, are not going to help convince politicians that maybe this is something that needs changing.
Sounds like a good idea, but I suspect there would be a problem with signal power and/or fuel. A deep space relay would need to be able to either receive signals from any direction, at any time, or to point a directional antennae towards a given point in the sky whenever a signal is due. The former approach means that it becomes a lot more difficult to pickup a faint signal and the latter is almost certainly going to require fuel in order to either keep the satellite stable as antennae move around or to reorientate the entire satellite to point an antennae in the right direction.
What might motivate this kind of plan would be when we finally get serious about sending actual people to Mars or some other distant object for an extended duration where the communications issues can't simply be worked around by timing the mission to ensure that the DSN can always provide coverage. You can afford to "hibernate" a robotic probe if it goes behind the sun for a couple months, and if you do lose communication you can ultimately just shrug your shoulders and give up on it. That's simply not going to be an option for humans for whom an extended break in comms could well mean the difference between life and death - if someone were taken ill and medical advice were needed, for instance - as well as the more mundane but still more or less essential need to be in some kind of contact with family back on Earth.
Well, personally, I'd class mid-2003 through mid-2007 as the "mid-00's", so submitter is fine in my book, but since you are splitting hairs, maybe he was referring to Google's original purchase of Android Inc. which happened in August 2005? I'd saying being bought by Google, at a time when there was a fair bit of speculation that Google was interesting in mobile, would get a lot of people started with finding out something about this "Android" thing.
Say what you want about the censorship itself, but at least the approach taken by likes of China and now North Korea's is more in keeping with the spirit of the Internet that some of the sweeping proposals coming from the more fundamental groups at the moment. Given that some content and topics are, for whatever reason, prohibited in a given area of the world (and some quite rightly so), I'd much rather have the Chinese / North Korean approach of "This is our section of the Internet, and we'll take responsibility for censoring it as we see fit while the rest of you can route around the damage and do want you want on your section." than the approach being proposed by certain other groups to block the whole lot, everywhere - including where it is a perfectly legal and accepted social norm.
Perhaps you missed the skepticism in my second point - you know, all those question marks and the use of the word "seriously"?
Of course on-line polls are often easy to manipulate, as Slashdot's poll box likes to remind us, but given the options on this particular poll why would the manipulators apparently single out the options for supporting Linux or MacOS when there are other, more entertaining options? There is also the complication that you need to pick three options, so if someone were poll stuffing then they are being quite clever about it, because there isn't much sign of any obvious anomalies with the other options. Combine that with the fact that, so far at least, RSI's forums and polls seem to be remarkably free of trolls and griefers, etc., I suspect that the results are probably fairly close to an accurate reflection of the voting. Hence my raised eyebrows and somewhat skeptical nature of my second point.
Sure, I can see a number of PC (MS or Mac) users might dual-boot Linux, and I can certainly see both Linux and Mac users wanting a major game that doesn't require Windows or a console to play, but those percentages just seem plain weird, even for such a specific demographic as space/flight sim fans. Has the recent drought of flightsims on Windows really pushed so many flight sim fans to Linux for their fix? Then there's the 23% wanting a Linux port vs. only 8% for MacOS, despite the latter being by far the more popular choice of the two according to all of the online statistics I've seen.
Because Chris felt that consoles couldn't deliver his vision for the game and originally wanted the game to be PC only. There was a lot of call from fans on the game forums asking about Linux/Mac ports, so now he's looking into the possibility of providing support for those platforms. It's called listening to your target audience, and it's nice to see a company that is actually prepared to do that these days.
What I find far more interesting is the current poll standings for the additional platform support; 23% of the voters want a Linux port vs. only 8% for MacOS. Seriously? Almost a quarter of space/flight sim fans run Linux? I know FlightGear is good, but who knew?
Kickstarter is only providing part of the funding. The bulk of the funding has been made at the main site for the game, and the combined total of both sites is currently standing at just over $2.7m.
Probably very little, given how quickly they reacted to Apple ignoring the spirit of the law last week. Frankly, I'm stunned that Apple seriously expected that any kind of special treatment of the message posting wasn't doing to get picked up given the level of tech press interest in the UK - the story has even been on the front page of the BBC news site. I'm guessing we'll have wait a few days to find out whether they are going to get another chance to do the right thing by the spirit of the law, or we're just going to go straight to contempt of court and see some more serious punitive action - like having to put the message in place of that nice picture of the iPad Mini.
Nope, definitely not fixed. There appear to be two options for the text appearing in the initial page view:
You are running NoScript, or similar, which prevents the dynamic sizing script from working and have sufficient vertical resolution for the default image scaling to include the text below the four images below the iPad Mini
You have a display in portrait mode, which seems to break the script, so I guess Apple needed those 14 days after all.
If you are in landscape mode, and enable scripting for "apple.com", then the bottom of the webpage will be just below the four images, every time.
What precedent? The newspaper is under no obligation to hand over whatever information that it has without a court order, including a simple "Yes/No" answer to an unofficial query from the judge about whether the poster was a member of the jury as a first step in a formal request for the information. A court order makes it official, legally binding, and covers the newspaper from any issues about revealling sources and such like. As long as the information goes straight into the judge's shredder should it turn out that the poster wasn't a member of the jury, then no harm and most definitely no foul.
Perhaps they are planning on avoiding the use of diesel? Most of the EU's main rail networks have been electrified for years, so if the Swedes are serious about making this environmentally efficient then I suspect they'd be looking at freighting the garbage in bulk on trains using that. As long as you can generate more power from a given train load of garbage that it takes to freight it then you are on to a winner - and that's before you consider the environmental and ecological impact of just dumping it all into landfill.
Well, then they just demonstrated a quite stunning level of ignorance of their proclaimed religion, didn't they? Maybe the local Iman should have pointed out that the Koran quite clearly labels Jesus as a prophet and a Messenger of Allah, agrees with the New Testament of the Bible about the Virgin Birth and many other points of Jesus' supposed life and teachings therein. So, walking around with a sign saying "Allah's Messenger = Satan"... maybe they ought to go and try that in somewhere like Afghanistan or the Pakistani FATA and see how long can they keep their head or avoid getting stoned.
As a poster above pointed out, quite often Christian Fundamentalists have not actually read the Bible, and the same is also true about Muslim Fundamentalists, it seems.
Pretty much my first thought too. Any chump can pick up the basics of a new UI, which is just as well for the manufacturers of all these touch-enabled phone, tablets and other devices, otherwise we'd still be stuck prodding at menus with a fiddly little stylus that is far too small to be comfortable. This kind of thing completely misses the point about why people are reluctant to embrace change in new software deployment.
IT staff tend to dislike upgrades/new versions because they often have to figure out how to push an install out to hundreds of users or more, all the while trying to keep downtime to a minimum, ensuring that all the legacy applications still work and that there are no policy or network share breakages. IT users in general, including the IT staff, tend to dislike it because they will have to relearn how to do things that they could previously do without thinking; a very useful ability when you are under pressure. Even simple little things, like the switch from "Shift-DEL / Shift-INS" to "Ctrl-X / Ctrl-V" for cut and paste, can become a major pain until you get used to them and retrain the muscle memories. Neither of those issues are addressed by a three year old, or any-other-year old for that matter, being able to pick up the fundamentals of a new UI in a matter of hours.
Now, if the three year old had managed to figured out a solution to even some of the problems behind people's reluctance to upgrade, even accidentally, then I'd be genuinely interested in Windows 8, not to mention that it would probably also become the biggest hit Microsoft has ever had.
Slashdot Mirror
That was my first thought when I saw this in the Firehose too. The National Academy of Sciences should give a thorough and unbiased report on any scientifically sound connections (or more likely, the complete lack thereof) between violent gaming and those few out of all the millions who play them who go on to commit violent acts, or they are not doing their job.
I thought that the Slashdot collective might have been a little more foward looking supportive of this idea with a mind to finally putting a major nail into the rhetoric and bullshit pseudo-science surrounding the issue. Perhaps then people might focus on the societal and environmental issues that ultimately lead people to resort to this kind of action without any alarm bells being set off in the period running up to it, and maybe addressing those instead. You know - the cause rather than the effect?
Nah, who am I kidding. I was expecting the NRA and/or religion to get dragged into it and I wasn't disappointed.
Yeah, "Obviously photoshopped pics, or it didn't happen", Iran!
Got into a discussion about this recently over the recent (and on-going) flooding in the UK. If the sea level and temperatures both rise, then a logical expectation of that would be that more water would evaporate off the oceans into the atmosphere, subsequently returning as rain and snow. That would entail more runoff and a corresponding rise in river levels and increased risk of flooding, particularly given the growing pressure on housing in some areas resulting in flood plains being used for development.
It's not just the people with beachfront properties that need to be worried...
Syria almost certainly does have Internet access still available by satellite service providers - satellite phones do work there after all. As with your example though, the service provider's IP space and the area being provided services need not be in the same locale. Chances are anyone still accessing the Internet in Syria will be geolocated to wherever the downlink station is - most probably elsewhere in the Middle East or Europe.
At this point, I think "nowhere fast" is probably what they are trying to achieve. It's a lost cause, so the longer the studios can keep things tied up in a legal limbo, the better it is for them.
To be honest, I tend to agree - and I submitted this story. :) That's why I included the rider about this new record maybe creating enough interest in the Flight/Space Sim genre to attract some attention from the rest of the industry and get a few more titles into production. It might be co-incidence, but I'm sure the early successes of the Star Citizen campaign might have prompted the Elite: Dangerous annoucement to be made a little earlier than might have been planned. I admit, I'm really stoked about the potential for SC and hope it turns out as at least as amazing as Chris is promising, but for me the real story here is the potential for a revival of the flight sim genre instead of the same old stuff from FPSs and WoW/Farmville style grinders.
As for the Crowdfunding stories though - I think it's past time they got their own topic that people could select to ignore in their preferences.
The total budget for SC isn't $4.25m plus whatever extra they take in the next few days from the crowd funding alone. Chris has some "proper" VC-style backers as well who will be providing the bulk of the funding on top of the crowd funding effort, so the idea behind the crowdfunding was to judge the potential size of the market for the game and likely return on investment for the main backers. The specifics are not public, but the inference was clearly that they would be contributing additional funds in proportion to the crowdfunding revenue and number of backers; that could be on a 1:1 basis, a 2:1 basis or whatever - only RSI knows. Chris certainly isn't a n00b at this, so I'm sure he's aware how much money it is really likely to cost to implement the features promised for each milestone of the crowdfunding and the backers will be providing the necessary additional funds.
Not for system generation, no. It's not been stated how they plan to implement things like planet textures, nebula structures, commodity prices and so on, so that may well turn out to be procedural in the final game. Atmospheres that can be flown through have not been ruled out of Star Citizen yet, but since refuelling stations seem to be tied to gas giants, it's a very real possibility that Star Citizen might have some analogue to Elite's fuel scoop. For star system generation though, I think it's more of a concious design decision rather than a requirement.
:)
David Braben has gone for a large, procedurally generated, universe that is likely to have thousands of star systems and tens of thousands of worlds and installations. Chris Roberts has gone for a smaller number (50-80, depending on final funding) of hand crafted star systems that might contain a total of several hundred worlds and installations with the intention to add more content (at no extra cost to the player, I might add) over the following months. Both approaches are equally valid in my book; it would be very hard for Elite's procedural approach to have the kind of in-jokes that Star Citizen's hand crafting approach makes trivial, such as having one of the bread basket systems called "Kellogg" (yes, really!), so think of it as a quality vs. quantity kind of thing. Regardless of how good (or bad) the two games turn out, I think the universe in Star Citizen will probably feel more immersive and authentic than the one in Elite: Dangerous, and that can only be a good thing for the game's longevity.
For those reasons I put funding into BOTH games.
Exactly what I think has got so many people to back Star Citizen, although I'm sure having Chris Robert's name attached helped more than a little. Apart from the religion aspect (which might be for the best, given how touchy people can be about it) all of the items you listed are part of the game Chris' has outlined on the SC site. And yes, that includes the shiny explosions; some of the early in-game footage already looks amazing, and it's not even made it to alpha yet.
The real news here though is that there is demonstrably a massive interest in reviving the Space Sim genre, something that the conventional AAA title publishers and their backers have neglected for years in favour of sport sims, FPSs and Facebook plugins. While I doubt that Star Citizen and David Braben's new Elite game are going to have the financial successes of current AAA titles in those other genres, it might encourage one or more of them to maybe take note and produce some big-budget space sims of their own, which is the ultimate goal of Chris' project. Even if a few of the game really suck (likely), at least there will be some more choice out there that the same-old games that we keep seeing churned out on an annual basis at the moment, and that can't be bad, can it?
I don't think the degree of an individual's political leaning to the left or right has much to do with how they feel about the situation in Israel, but I do agree that this is absolutely attention seeking by Anonymous (or more likely an Anti-Semite subset thereof), and pretty uninformed attention seeking at that, which is probably doing their overall "cause", such as it is, far more harm than good. I'm expecting some visible signs of a schism within the ranks of Anonymous over this before the day is out.
I'm sure that Assad attacking Israel would work out brilliantly. Assad's government has been unable to put down (an accurate description, I'd say) a civil war that has been raging for over 18 months now, so you are suggesting he divert military resources from trying to do that to open a second front against Israel? Avoiding some rather obvious parallels about second fronts, that didn't work out too well for Syria the last time they tried it, and that was with the assistance of Egypt (then the UAR) and Jordan. Not to mention the obvious excuse it would give some nations just itching to get much more overtly involved in Syria's internal struggles the "justification" they need to do so, despite the risk of igniting the whole of the Middle East when Iran et al inevitably get involved as well.
Probably also worth pointing out that, unlike the US etc., the UK has no legal recognition of the right to free speech. Stupid acts like this, especially coming so soon after the recent case of offensive postings to Facebook etc. in the case of the missing April Jones, are not going to help convince politicians that maybe this is something that needs changing.
Sounds like a good idea, but I suspect there would be a problem with signal power and/or fuel. A deep space relay would need to be able to either receive signals from any direction, at any time, or to point a directional antennae towards a given point in the sky whenever a signal is due. The former approach means that it becomes a lot more difficult to pickup a faint signal and the latter is almost certainly going to require fuel in order to either keep the satellite stable as antennae move around or to reorientate the entire satellite to point an antennae in the right direction.
What might motivate this kind of plan would be when we finally get serious about sending actual people to Mars or some other distant object for an extended duration where the communications issues can't simply be worked around by timing the mission to ensure that the DSN can always provide coverage. You can afford to "hibernate" a robotic probe if it goes behind the sun for a couple months, and if you do lose communication you can ultimately just shrug your shoulders and give up on it. That's simply not going to be an option for humans for whom an extended break in comms could well mean the difference between life and death - if someone were taken ill and medical advice were needed, for instance - as well as the more mundane but still more or less essential need to be in some kind of contact with family back on Earth.
Well, personally, I'd class mid-2003 through mid-2007 as the "mid-00's", so submitter is fine in my book, but since you are splitting hairs, maybe he was referring to Google's original purchase of Android Inc. which happened in August 2005? I'd saying being bought by Google, at a time when there was a fair bit of speculation that Google was interesting in mobile, would get a lot of people started with finding out something about this "Android" thing.
Say what you want about the censorship itself, but at least the approach taken by likes of China and now North Korea's is more in keeping with the spirit of the Internet that some of the sweeping proposals coming from the more fundamental groups at the moment. Given that some content and topics are, for whatever reason, prohibited in a given area of the world (and some quite rightly so), I'd much rather have the Chinese / North Korean approach of "This is our section of the Internet, and we'll take responsibility for censoring it as we see fit while the rest of you can route around the damage and do want you want on your section." than the approach being proposed by certain other groups to block the whole lot, everywhere - including where it is a perfectly legal and accepted social norm.
Perhaps you missed the skepticism in my second point - you know, all those question marks and the use of the word "seriously"?
Of course on-line polls are often easy to manipulate, as Slashdot's poll box likes to remind us, but given the options on this particular poll why would the manipulators apparently single out the options for supporting Linux or MacOS when there are other, more entertaining options? There is also the complication that you need to pick three options, so if someone were poll stuffing then they are being quite clever about it, because there isn't much sign of any obvious anomalies with the other options. Combine that with the fact that, so far at least, RSI's forums and polls seem to be remarkably free of trolls and griefers, etc., I suspect that the results are probably fairly close to an accurate reflection of the voting. Hence my raised eyebrows and somewhat skeptical nature of my second point.
Sure, I can see a number of PC (MS or Mac) users might dual-boot Linux, and I can certainly see both Linux and Mac users wanting a major game that doesn't require Windows or a console to play, but those percentages just seem plain weird, even for such a specific demographic as space/flight sim fans. Has the recent drought of flightsims on Windows really pushed so many flight sim fans to Linux for their fix? Then there's the 23% wanting a Linux port vs. only 8% for MacOS, despite the latter being by far the more popular choice of the two according to all of the online statistics I've seen.
Because Chris felt that consoles couldn't deliver his vision for the game and originally wanted the game to be PC only. There was a lot of call from fans on the game forums asking about Linux/Mac ports, so now he's looking into the possibility of providing support for those platforms. It's called listening to your target audience, and it's nice to see a company that is actually prepared to do that these days.
What I find far more interesting is the current poll standings for the additional platform support; 23% of the voters want a Linux port vs. only 8% for MacOS. Seriously? Almost a quarter of space/flight sim fans run Linux? I know FlightGear is good, but who knew?
Kickstarter is only providing part of the funding. The bulk of the funding has been made at the main site for the game, and the combined total of both sites is currently standing at just over $2.7m.
Probably very little, given how quickly they reacted to Apple ignoring the spirit of the law last week. Frankly, I'm stunned that Apple seriously expected that any kind of special treatment of the message posting wasn't doing to get picked up given the level of tech press interest in the UK - the story has even been on the front page of the BBC news site. I'm guessing we'll have wait a few days to find out whether they are going to get another chance to do the right thing by the spirit of the law, or we're just going to go straight to contempt of court and see some more serious punitive action - like having to put the message in place of that nice picture of the iPad Mini.
If you are in landscape mode, and enable scripting for "apple.com", then the bottom of the webpage will be just below the four images, every time.
What precedent? The newspaper is under no obligation to hand over whatever information that it has without a court order, including a simple "Yes/No" answer to an unofficial query from the judge about whether the poster was a member of the jury as a first step in a formal request for the information. A court order makes it official, legally binding, and covers the newspaper from any issues about revealling sources and such like. As long as the information goes straight into the judge's shredder should it turn out that the poster wasn't a member of the jury, then no harm and most definitely no foul.
Perhaps they are planning on avoiding the use of diesel? Most of the EU's main rail networks have been electrified for years, so if the Swedes are serious about making this environmentally efficient then I suspect they'd be looking at freighting the garbage in bulk on trains using that. As long as you can generate more power from a given train load of garbage that it takes to freight it then you are on to a winner - and that's before you consider the environmental and ecological impact of just dumping it all into landfill.
Well, then they just demonstrated a quite stunning level of ignorance of their proclaimed religion, didn't they? Maybe the local Iman should have pointed out that the Koran quite clearly labels Jesus as a prophet and a Messenger of Allah, agrees with the New Testament of the Bible about the Virgin Birth and many other points of Jesus' supposed life and teachings therein. So, walking around with a sign saying "Allah's Messenger = Satan"... maybe they ought to go and try that in somewhere like Afghanistan or the Pakistani FATA and see how long can they keep their head or avoid getting stoned.
As a poster above pointed out, quite often Christian Fundamentalists have not actually read the Bible, and the same is also true about Muslim Fundamentalists, it seems.
Of course it would. Chances are it would also be csh'ed, ksh'ed and zsh'ed (amongst others) as well.
Pretty much my first thought too. Any chump can pick up the basics of a new UI, which is just as well for the manufacturers of all these touch-enabled phone, tablets and other devices, otherwise we'd still be stuck prodding at menus with a fiddly little stylus that is far too small to be comfortable. This kind of thing completely misses the point about why people are reluctant to embrace change in new software deployment.
IT staff tend to dislike upgrades/new versions because they often have to figure out how to push an install out to hundreds of users or more, all the while trying to keep downtime to a minimum, ensuring that all the legacy applications still work and that there are no policy or network share breakages. IT users in general, including the IT staff, tend to dislike it because they will have to relearn how to do things that they could previously do without thinking; a very useful ability when you are under pressure. Even simple little things, like the switch from "Shift-DEL / Shift-INS" to "Ctrl-X / Ctrl-V" for cut and paste, can become a major pain until you get used to them and retrain the muscle memories. Neither of those issues are addressed by a three year old, or any-other-year old for that matter, being able to pick up the fundamentals of a new UI in a matter of hours.
Now, if the three year old had managed to figured out a solution to even some of the problems behind people's reluctance to upgrade, even accidentally, then I'd be genuinely interested in Windows 8, not to mention that it would probably also become the biggest hit Microsoft has ever had.