When the level editors first came out, I edited the map Lowdark to put a Cyberdemon in one of the item rooms. My buddy and I used to murder each other on that map - we'd always race each other for the good stuff in that room. He never played single player and remembering his scream when he beat me to the treasure room and found it occupied makes me smile over 20 years later.
I also played through the entire first 7 levels of the game without taking a hit for some stupid contest that was going around. It took quite a few tries.That pales compared to my buddy losing his composure though.
220kg of Poly-urethane and fiberglass - even with the range they claim (which is good) this vehicle will never be viable outside of 3rd world markets. It's never going to pass a safety test because it's a deathtrap. Still it may find a niche market and I am a fan of non-petroleum concepts.
Just drop it somewhere out of your car on the freeway at 55mph...must've come loose on its own. Maybe drag one of the pieces a bit first so it looks like one, then the other dropped off.
OR call the bomb squad and report a suspicious device on your car. BOOM. Tell the FBI to arrest the bomb squad. They love blowing up shit.
Corn is not an efficient source of ethanol. It's cheap because it's subsidized massively by the US gov't. There are many more efficient ways to generate ethanol.
Also hydrogen would be a decent fuel source as well. We are stuck in an oil age because the largest companies in the world want it that way. It's frightening how big "oil" companies are.
This has nothing to do with technology. Prince is a 52 year-old vegan (supposedly) devout Jehovah's Witness with narcissistic personality disorder. I am surprised that anyone following any sort of religion would allow such a flagrant waste of money as his home seems to be but then I never professed to understand this (or really any other) religion and perhaps he donates generously to someone, somewhere.
His view on the Internet and gadgets are only related to his inability to extract cash from this venue for his music. Sadly, it appears like has far too much money and spends it poorly. His wishful thinking that this Internet thing and these computer gadgets should all just go away to simplify his cash delivery model is not going to amount to nothing more than 5 minutes of ridicule on the very medium he claims is dead.
As a Canadian, I am half-bored by this and half-annoyed. This is ridiculous.
Another US organization slammed Canada as being a hotbed of music piracy because our CD sales had dropped off 7.4%. The US market had dropped off over 10% but nothing was said about that.
What if hundreds of thousands or even millions of westerners drew and posted online depictions of the prophet Mohammed? Would that finally make the point that secular cultures are not bound by religious law and enjoy the freedom to ignore dogma as desired? Would that finally show them that trying to enforce your religious directives on other cultures is pointless and going to backfire?
Or would the more extremist sects and individuals declare a Fatwa against all those participating? Wouldn't that leave them brutally outnumbered?
Most Muslims are peace-loving. It'd be an interesting experiment. If we could get critical mass on something like this, what sort of numbers could we get?
We have tribunals and judges well-versed in case law and guidelines in order to interpret whether or not an utterance or written item can be considered hateful...this determination is made by looking for the motivational intent of the item in question.
The tribunal ruled against a group of Muslim complainants in regards to a Macleans article essentially warning people about the potential for a Muslim-ruled world.
The cartoons themselves were also brought before a tribunal:
Six weeks vacation? What sort of crack are you smoking? Basic employment guidelines are 2 weeks paid vacation per year for a full-time employee. You can also simply be paid for that and not given the time off in some circumstances. A good unionized job probably gets you 3-4 weeks to start and moves you up with seniority but you are only guaranteed 2 weeks.
Yes we do get "free" health care. That means that our monthly user fees are based on our income (from free for the right poor people on income support or with a decent work medical plan all the way up to over a hundred per month for a family, at least in my province. That does not include prescriptions though and some user fees. We pay less than our southern neighbors for prescriptions, but we do still pay. We do get subsidization, again based on our income and also possibly by having a decent work medical plan. Still, given some of the horror stories I've heard from US friends in car accidents, I won't move south without a hell of a medical plan...
I see that most people are commenting on just the headline without understanding the issues because they haven't read the...
wait, this is slashdot. I suppose it's not surprising.
Still this is one time that not reading the article is going to bite you in the ass.
A custodial parent does have the right to discipline their child. This parent could remove access and legally post (from their account) comments on their child's wall. Whether or not they have the right to hack the kids account is really not clear at this point. First, a parent doing this is generally violating the terms of use agreement of the website in question. Second, there are specific laws in some regions regarding this type of approach which would make it a crime.
This situation is pretty clear - the mom vastly overstepped her bounds and needs to be smacked for it. If it were my kid and they were living with me, I'd ask to see their account - if they refused to show it to me or I saw things that were troubling, I'd deal with them by denying access to the computer at my house and grounding them unless they deleted their account permanently or cleaned it up.
Parents do have ways to coerce their kids into cooperating. If the kids want to call family services falsely to get mom and dad back, go ahead. Their new home isn't likely to have a computer or parents that care or necessarily even be that safe an environment. Foster parents cover the gamut from loving, capable people to those who are prone to abuse children. I would never let my kid blackmail me. Don't like the rules, you may leave...my dad said that and I hate to parrot him now but he was right. Boundaries are too important to make deals and give up moral authority on.
"We cannot rely on statistics alone to protect us from catastrophe; such a strategy is like refusing to buy fire insurance because blazes are infrequent. Our country simply cannot afford to wait for the first modern occurrence of a devastating NEO impact before taking steps to adequately address this threat. We may not have the luxury of a second chance, for time is not necessarily on our side. If we do not act now, and we subsequently learn too late of an impending collision against which we cannot defend, it will not matter who should have moved to prevent the catastrophe . . . only that they failed to do so when they had the opportunity to prevent it. "
We do have the technology. We do have the money. We have a moral obligation to our species to protect it.
Seriously...not anything big but something Tunguska sized would do, especially over a moderately populated area.
We spend peanuts on detecting potential collisions that could be the cause of the next extinction event. Mark my words, there'll be more money spent on earthquake analysis for Haiti and other "sensational" causes than will be spent on detecting PHOs (potentially hazardous objects) in the next 10 years. I am not denigrating the need to spend money on Haiti - that's a tragedy for sure - but when you look at how reactive we are with public money (New Orleans, anyone? Despite warnings, no one saw this coming?) when a much smaller amount spent up-front would potentially save not just a lot more lives but a lot more money....if better building codes had been in force in Haiti - how many more people would have survived? How much money would have been saved?
I despair for our race. If we saw a dinosaur killer coming and had a program in place already we could probably survive it. Asteroids move slowly but are heavy and require a lot of time/energy to deflect so we would see them early and be able to react...comets move much, much faster but are lighter so presumably if we had the detection gear and a few mass drivers in space already, we could deal with it in a safe time frame.
So give us our Haiti or Katrina from space, please. Make it hurt but not too much - just enough to wake up the people handing out government cash.
Wiping out the middle east with an asteroid this size would be impossible.
Assuming you could wipe out the ENTIRE middle east, or at least the prickly parts that are likely to make war on each other, wouldn't solve war for 10 minutes.
Korea Africa (several conflicts) South America (arms races are starting down there now) US-Russian tension is slowly building up Economic conflicts
but far more importantly:
China - India - Pakistan (all nuclear armed, many border disputes, all trying to up their status in the world and with massive resource shortages coming) - this axis is going to make the middle east look like a snowball fight.
We don't know how to be peaceful. Stop blaming the middle east.
This isn't about desroying Israel. Iran's leadership would not kill the Palestinians they claim as bretheren in faith. You can't selectively nuke a tiny country like Israel without massive casualties throughout the region. The fallout isn't selective based on religion.
So why would Iran build nukes - if that's what they are really about? Perhaps they are planning on developing the technology as a deterrent for the US and Europe. Iran can develop an ICBM that can reach the US - they are scientifically capable of it.
Or they could just be refining Uranium for electricity like they claim.
This is totally to remove the defence of an open wireless network for filesharers. The Australians were already considering legislation to "protect copyright holders" more stringently and this is simply playing into their hands.
I can't believe that any police force has enough time on their hands to focus on this instead of real crime issues. How many people die from open wireless networks?
This is so stupid - clearly their force needs to be downsized.
"He said working prototypes of the cargo-screening ferret could be ready for testing within two years, with potential deployment within around five years."
Seems sort of early to be claiming it's been created...
Many discussions between real nerds about seemingly trivial OS topics have gone on for far more than book-length of obscure, historical and political commentary. I sort of find it humbling how much history there is for a lot of the components of UNIX.
I am inclined to stay out of these conversations. I never advertise my point of view because I can't be bothered to try and convert the evangelists to my point of view. I won't convince them, they won't convince me; we'd just end up annoying co-workers and further marginalizing ourselves socially at work.
It is exciting to see this sort of development on the server front, though these technologies never seem to offer the huge advantage we'd expect. The fact that multiple companies are going in multiple directions for storage technology is excellent for the marketplace.
It seems unlikely that this will really benefit servers because generally for applications that need high IOPS numbers, you're looking at a SAN or some sort of fibre-optic storage.
Database and related apps (like SAP, Oracle, or Exchange) needs a lot of space and while SAN technology is expensive, it provides a lot of advantage over in-chassis storage devices. I can't see it being that useful. I suppose for a small Exchange or Oracle deployment that needs high IOPS without needing a lot of space or the redundancy features of a SAN, it might find some use.
All of this technology is still useful though if for closing off technology development along certain lines when a product dead-ends or for future product development where the underlying technology has merit.
Part of the reason for the sales line is also that people are finding it impossible to move their code off of mainframes. You need to continue to support the environment, and that means upgrades. Plus, as long as it's sitting there, a lot of CIOs feel they should try to leverage it more or add some pizazz. We had a Linux partition on our box for 2 years that never even was installed with the OS. Our mainframe team wouldn't let anyone touch it and they didn't know anything about Linux.
Our shop still has PL/1 code (unsupported though it is) and utterly failed at moving it to a smaller platform. Large *NIX boxes can indeed see mainframe RAS and throughput, yet we can't get our developers to consider building new applications because the cost of redevelopment dwarfs any hardware or maintenance costs.
We don't necessarily want to keep it (our mainframe support team is aging rapidly and just try to find young people taking mainframe courses who don't work for IBM) but we can't get rid of it. That leads to a sure-fire upgrade every 3-4 years.
Also - if anyone had reference numbers to the throughput of various mainframe models - please feel free to post a link. I have not ever been able to find anything comparable to mid-range systems.
An inexpensive Sun M5000 can do 16GB/s on the I/O bus and has a peak cpu/mem throughput of 64GB/s - that's not bad at all. If you go for their bigger boxes, the numbers become pretty amazing. How does this compare to the z-series line?
Unknown doesn't mean alien or vastly different than known terrestrial microbes - it would be nice if a little more detail was included.
At this point it seems like none of the deeply hidden microbes that have been found have been harmful to human life, but that could also be due to the limited interaction with them.
I wouldn't want to get a cut on the rock wall. It is probable that any bacteria would be supsceptible to our normal first or second line antibiotics, having never been exposed to them before but I still wouldn't want to volunteer for first case of infection from a newly discovered bug.
Slashdot Mirror
When the level editors first came out, I edited the map Lowdark to put a Cyberdemon in one of the item rooms. My buddy and I used to murder each other on that map - we'd always race each other for the good stuff in that room. He never played single player and remembering his scream when he beat me to the treasure room and found it occupied makes me smile over 20 years later.
I also played through the entire first 7 levels of the game without taking a hit for some stupid contest that was going around. It took quite a few tries.That pales compared to my buddy losing his composure though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airpod
Let's assume that Wikipedia is accurate here...
220kg of Poly-urethane and fiberglass - even with the range they claim (which is good) this vehicle will never be viable outside of 3rd world markets. It's never going to pass a safety test because it's a deathtrap. Still it may find a niche market and I am a fan of non-petroleum concepts.
They should offer data restores from the NSA for a price...
* Accidentally delete an email? Just call the NSA and we'll send you a copy of it.
Just drop it somewhere out of your car on the freeway at 55mph...must've come loose on its own. Maybe drag one of the pieces a bit first so it looks like one, then the other dropped off.
OR call the bomb squad and report a suspicious device on your car. BOOM. Tell the FBI to arrest the bomb squad. They love blowing up shit.
Corn is not an efficient source of ethanol. It's cheap because it's subsidized massively by the US gov't. There are many more efficient ways to generate ethanol.
Also hydrogen would be a decent fuel source as well. We are stuck in an oil age because the largest companies in the world want it that way. It's frightening how big "oil" companies are.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporations_by_market_capitalization
At least BP dropped off the top 10.
This has nothing to do with technology. Prince is a 52 year-old vegan (supposedly) devout Jehovah's Witness with narcissistic personality disorder. I am surprised that anyone following any sort of religion would allow such a flagrant waste of money as his home seems to be but then I never professed to understand this (or really any other) religion and perhaps he donates generously to someone, somewhere.
His view on the Internet and gadgets are only related to his inability to extract cash from this venue for his music. Sadly, it appears like has far too much money and spends it poorly. His wishful thinking that this Internet thing and these computer gadgets should all just go away to simplify his cash delivery model is not going to amount to nothing more than 5 minutes of ridicule on the very medium he claims is dead.
when you pry from my cold, dead hands.
As a Canadian, I am half-bored by this and half-annoyed. This is ridiculous.
Another US organization slammed Canada as being a hotbed of music piracy because our CD sales had dropped off 7.4%. The US market had dropped off over 10% but nothing was said about that.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4996/125/
The US should manage its own problems - it has enough. We should manage ours - we have enough, too. This is a joke but it's an offensive one.
What if hundreds of thousands or even millions of westerners drew and posted online depictions of the prophet Mohammed? Would that finally make the point that secular cultures are not bound by religious law and enjoy the freedom to ignore dogma as desired? Would that finally show them that trying to enforce your religious directives on other cultures is pointless and going to backfire?
Or would the more extremist sects and individuals declare a Fatwa against all those participating? Wouldn't that leave them brutally outnumbered?
Most Muslims are peace-loving. It'd be an interesting experiment. If we could get critical mass on something like this, what sort of numbers could we get?
Anyone interested in helping me start this?
I didn't say it was a lot - just that it wasn't completely free. I was agreeing that we had cheaper medical care.
I thought the OP was on crack in regards to the six weeks vacation. That's France or something - not Canada.
We have tribunals and judges well-versed in case law and guidelines in order to interpret whether or not an utterance or written item can be considered hateful...this determination is made by looking for the motivational intent of the item in question.
For example:
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20081010/muslim_complaint_081010/20081010?hub=Canada
The tribunal ruled against a group of Muslim complainants in regards to a Macleans article essentially warning people about the potential for a Muslim-ruled world.
The cartoons themselves were also brought before a tribunal:
http://newatheism.blogspot.com/2008/01/mohammed-cartoons-and-civil-rights-in_28.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Levant#Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy
The complaints generated by this were dismissed or withdrawn. There is some sanity here.
Six weeks vacation? What sort of crack are you smoking? Basic employment guidelines are 2 weeks paid vacation per year for a full-time employee. You can also simply be paid for that and not given the time off in some circumstances. A good unionized job probably gets you 3-4 weeks to start and moves you up with seniority but you are only guaranteed 2 weeks.
Yes we do get "free" health care. That means that our monthly user fees are based on our income (from free for the right poor people on income support or with a decent work medical plan all the way up to over a hundred per month for a family, at least in my province. That does not include prescriptions though and some user fees. We pay less than our southern neighbors for prescriptions, but we do still pay. We do get subsidization, again based on our income and also possibly by having a decent work medical plan. Still, given some of the horror stories I've heard from US friends in car accidents, I won't move south without a hell of a medical plan...
I see that most people are commenting on just the headline without understanding the issues because they haven't read the...
wait, this is slashdot. I suppose it's not surprising.
Still this is one time that not reading the article is going to bite you in the ass.
A custodial parent does have the right to discipline their child. This parent could remove access and legally post (from their account) comments on their child's wall. Whether or not they have the right to hack the kids account is really not clear at this point. First, a parent doing this is generally violating the terms of use agreement of the website in question. Second, there are specific laws in some regions regarding this type of approach which would make it a crime.
This situation is pretty clear - the mom vastly overstepped her bounds and needs to be smacked for it. If it were my kid and they were living with me, I'd ask to see their account - if they refused to show it to me or I saw things that were troubling, I'd deal with them by denying access to the computer at my house and grounding them unless they deleted their account permanently or cleaned it up.
Parents do have ways to coerce their kids into cooperating. If the kids want to call family services falsely to get mom and dad back, go ahead. Their new home isn't likely to have a computer or parents that care or necessarily even be that safe an environment. Foster parents cover the gamut from loving, capable people to those who are prone to abuse children. I would never let my kid blackmail me. Don't like the rules, you may leave...my dad said that and I hate to parrot him now but he was right. Boundaries are too important to make deals and give up moral authority on.
From an open letter to congress, here:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=9866
"We cannot rely on statistics alone to protect us from catastrophe; such a strategy is like refusing to buy fire insurance because blazes are infrequent. Our country simply cannot afford to wait for the first modern occurrence of a devastating NEO impact before taking steps to adequately address this threat. We may not have the luxury of a second chance, for time is not necessarily on our side. If we do not act now, and we subsequently learn too late of an impending collision against which we cannot defend, it will not matter who should have moved to prevent the catastrophe . . . only that they failed to do so when they had the opportunity to prevent it. "
We do have the technology. We do have the money. We have a moral obligation to our species to protect it.
Reference:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=9866
Seriously...not anything big but something Tunguska sized would do, especially over a moderately populated area.
We spend peanuts on detecting potential collisions that could be the cause of the next extinction event. Mark my words, there'll be more money spent on earthquake analysis for Haiti and other "sensational" causes than will be spent on detecting PHOs (potentially hazardous objects) in the next 10 years. I am not denigrating the need to spend money on Haiti - that's a tragedy for sure - but when you look at how reactive we are with public money (New Orleans, anyone? Despite warnings, no one saw this coming?) when a much smaller amount spent up-front would potentially save not just a lot more lives but a lot more money....if better building codes had been in force in Haiti - how many more people would have survived? How much money would have been saved?
I despair for our race. If we saw a dinosaur killer coming and had a program in place already we could probably survive it. Asteroids move slowly but are heavy and require a lot of time/energy to deflect so we would see them early and be able to react...comets move much, much faster but are lighter so presumably if we had the detection gear and a few mass drivers in space already, we could deal with it in a safe time frame.
So give us our Haiti or Katrina from space, please. Make it hurt but not too much - just enough to wake up the people handing out government cash.
Wiping out the middle east with an asteroid this size would be impossible.
Assuming you could wipe out the ENTIRE middle east, or at least the prickly parts that are likely to make war on each other, wouldn't solve war for 10 minutes.
Korea
Africa (several conflicts)
South America (arms races are starting down there now)
US-Russian tension is slowly building up
Economic conflicts
but far more importantly:
China - India - Pakistan (all nuclear armed, many border disputes, all trying to up their status in the world and with massive resource shortages coming) - this axis is going to make the middle east look like a snowball fight.
We don't know how to be peaceful. Stop blaming the middle east.
This isn't about desroying Israel. Iran's leadership would not kill the Palestinians they claim as bretheren in faith. You can't selectively nuke a tiny country like Israel without massive casualties throughout the region. The fallout isn't selective based on religion.
So why would Iran build nukes - if that's what they are really about? Perhaps they are planning on developing the technology as a deterrent for the US and Europe. Iran can develop an ICBM that can reach the US - they are scientifically capable of it.
Or they could just be refining Uranium for electricity like they claim.
This is totally to remove the defence of an open wireless network for filesharers. The Australians were already considering legislation to "protect copyright holders" more stringently and this is simply playing into their hands.
I can't believe that any police force has enough time on their hands to focus on this instead of real crime issues. How many people die from open wireless networks?
This is so stupid - clearly their force needs to be downsized.
"He said working prototypes of the cargo-screening ferret could be ready for testing within two years, with potential deployment within around five years."
Seems sort of early to be claiming it's been created...
Many discussions between real nerds about seemingly trivial OS topics have gone on for far more than book-length of obscure, historical and political commentary. I sort of find it humbling how much history there is for a lot of the components of UNIX.
I am inclined to stay out of these conversations. I never advertise my point of view because I can't be bothered to try and convert the evangelists to my point of view. I won't convince them, they won't convince me; we'd just end up annoying co-workers and further marginalizing ourselves socially at work.
It is exciting to see this sort of development on the server front, though these technologies never seem to offer the huge advantage we'd expect. The fact that multiple companies are going in multiple directions for storage technology is excellent for the marketplace.
It seems unlikely that this will really benefit servers because generally for applications that need high IOPS numbers, you're looking at a SAN or some sort of fibre-optic storage.
Database and related apps (like SAP, Oracle, or Exchange) needs a lot of space and while SAN technology is expensive, it provides a lot of advantage over in-chassis storage devices. I can't see it being that useful. I suppose for a small Exchange or Oracle deployment that needs high IOPS without needing a lot of space or the redundancy features of a SAN, it might find some use.
All of this technology is still useful though if for closing off technology development along certain lines when a product dead-ends or for future product development where the underlying technology has merit.
Part of the reason for the sales line is also that people are finding it impossible to move their code off of mainframes. You need to continue to support the environment, and that means upgrades. Plus, as long as it's sitting there, a lot of CIOs feel they should try to leverage it more or add some pizazz. We had a Linux partition on our box for 2 years that never even was installed with the OS. Our mainframe team wouldn't let anyone touch it and they didn't know anything about Linux.
Our shop still has PL/1 code (unsupported though it is) and utterly failed at moving it to a smaller platform. Large *NIX boxes can indeed see mainframe RAS and throughput, yet we can't get our developers to consider building new applications because the cost of redevelopment dwarfs any hardware or maintenance costs.
We don't necessarily want to keep it (our mainframe support team is aging rapidly and just try to find young people taking mainframe courses who don't work for IBM) but we can't get rid of it. That leads to a sure-fire upgrade every 3-4 years.
Also - if anyone had reference numbers to the throughput of various mainframe models - please feel free to post a link. I have not ever been able to find anything comparable to mid-range systems.
An inexpensive Sun M5000 can do 16GB/s on the I/O bus and has a peak cpu/mem throughput of 64GB/s - that's not bad at all. If you go for their bigger boxes, the numbers become pretty amazing. How does this compare to the z-series line?
You think our atmosphere always had this much oxygen in it?
I wish I had mod points - this is awesome.
Unknown doesn't mean alien or vastly different than known terrestrial microbes - it would be nice if a little more detail was included.
At this point it seems like none of the deeply hidden microbes that have been found have been harmful to human life, but that could also be due to the limited interaction with them.
I wouldn't want to get a cut on the rock wall. It is probable that any bacteria would be supsceptible to our normal first or second line antibiotics, having never been exposed to them before but I still wouldn't want to volunteer for first case of infection from a newly discovered bug.