And, in response to user requests, the developers at NCSoft implemented the ability to buy server transfers in City of Heroes/Villains, so you can move your characters from one server to another to play with your friends.
And establish a rule that, once you compete in the Unlimited Games, you are forever barred from competing in an unaugmented event, regardless of sport.
In mariner terminology, the chief was usually the second in command on a ship, even if outranked by the pilot and mates. The captain and pilot would decide where to sail, but the chief would be in charge of how, including keeping the boat afloat, which took precedence over any orders except scuttling.
It is different in civilian and military usage. In the Royal Navy, for example, the Captain was the commander of the ship, but until the development of a professional officer corps, the captain's primary skill was being able to fight his ship -- and originally was in direct command only of the Marine unit aboard the ship; the sailing master was the person who actually directed the sailing of the ship. The sailing master (shortened to master) was a warrant officer, along with the master's mates, and ate in the wardroom with the ship's officers, who were above him in the chain of command; the promotion of warrant officers was under the control of various boards and commissions, not captains, unlike the midshipmen and rates. The sailing master eventually became a commissioned office, becoming the navigation officer.
I suspect that people like Osama bin Laden are laughing their asses off watching things like this... A relatively trivial (in their eyes) expenditure of manpower and materiel, and they get to sit back and watch our country voluntarily dismantle the freedoms that it was founded to preserve, doing to itself what they don't have the force to accomplish by their own actions.
"We had to destroy your freedom in order to save it."
Must be the materials used to construct it; I looked at the first picture and the Heinkel He-111Z came to mind -- a pair of He-111 bombers linked by a center wing section, used during WWII to tow the Messerschmidt Me-321 Gigant assault glider.
A tsunami may be only a few feet higher than average sea level as it crosses oceans, but when the mass of water piles up as it reaches shore, the runup can go hundreds of feet above sea level. If you're standing on the slope at a height of 800 feet above sea level, and the tsunami starts, which is more 'real' about the height of the tsunami -- the hundred-foot height of the wave in the open water of the bay, or that the runup is going to scour the ground clean almost a thousand feet farther up the slope than where you're standing?
An editorial by John W. Campbell in Analog reprinted from 1958 described "hyperdemocracy" as being characterized by an extreme interpretation of equality: Equality of opportunity is measured by equality of results. If the proportion of women to men graduating college with science or engineering degrees is lower than proportion of women to men in the population, that is prima facie evidence that women are being discriminated against in these degree programs, and therefore quotas need to be set up to ensure that an 'adequate' number of women get science or engineering degrees, even if we have to deny more-qualified men admission in order to make room for them.
The same 'justification' is behind all the affirmative action programs, where the solution is not to raise the educational level of [insert minority here] until they can compete on a level playing field with [insert majority here], but to require that fixed percentages of [minority] be admitted, whether or not they are qualified, and then mandate spending more on them to bring them up to academic standard. This does not ensure that [minority] gets an equal opportunity, rather, this is proving to them that they aren't equal, and require special condescending bend-over-backward treatment to salve the majority's conscience by making it look as if they're equal, freeing the majority from actually having to address the root problem.
However, unless Blizzard and their lawyers are completely brain-dead, there will be some sort of presentation of the Terms of Service when you connect to their servers that requires you to explicitly agree to abide by the ToS before you can log into the game. Any rights you may have to the physical copy of the software are separate from the license you are granted to use that software connected to Blizzard's servers. The ToS for connecting to the servers would, I expect, also specify what you are and are not permitted to do with the client software when used to connect to the servers, and the use Glider makes of the Warden software would therefore be in violation of the ToS.
Under the doctrine of first sale, you own the copy of the software that you bought -- but as soon as you use that software to connect to servers operated by the company, they can put clauses in the ToS that you must agree to if you want to play the game. The ToS could specify that the end-user is required to put the software box in a glass case and genuflect toward it three times before logging in, and until the customers actually read the ToS and get sufficiently bent out of shape over it to pressure the company to remove such asshattery, they're agreeing to do so every time they click the 'I Accept' button to get past the ToS and log into the game servers, and can be prosecuted for failing to comply.
I happened to catch part of a program on the History Channel this morning that was talking about Rodinia and how the coalition of the continents into a supercontinent disrupted ocean currents, allowing the poles to become colder, expanding the continuously-frozen area until the process ran away, completely covering the Earth in ice until the eruptions that accompanied the breakup of the supercontinent threw CO2 and methane into the air that couldn't be absorbed into the oceans (covered as they were by ice), building up to the point where the greenhouse effect melted a permanent ice-free zone, which (being darker than the ice) would absorb more heat, triggering a positive feedback. The program described this happening in a single freeze-and-thaw, although some 'snowball earth' theories suggest that there were several freezovers as the CO2/methane levels rose and fell until the Cambrian Explosion. It seemed to me, though, that the arguments for Rodinia and Snowball Earth can also be explained by other theories, and that drawing conclusions about conditions that far in the past based on evidence that can accumulate in different ways is going to remain somewhat speculative.
Seagate announced three new consumer-level hard drives today, which it claims are the 'industry's first 1.5-terabyte desktop and half-terabyte notebook hard drives.'
Unfortunately, as TFA notes, Seagate is not the first one on the market with a 500Gb laptop drive:
Despite Seagate's claims, the new 500GB Momentus are not the first "half-terabyte notebook hard drives." Not only have Hitachi and Fujistu already announced their 500GB, 2.5-inch hard drives earlier this year, but Samsung's 500GB, 2.5-inch, Sprintpoint M6 (model HM500LI) has been shipping since March.
Just the first and last name is unlikely to be unique; I know (from having gotten calls for each of them and checking the phone book after the second one) that there were at one time at least three other people in the city where I live who had the same first and last name as I do, and after being asked whether I'd ever used a different SSN when I was going to the blood bank to donate, discovered that there was someone who worked where I did who not only had the same first and last name, but the same birthdate -- not just month and day, but year as well.
If you're going to police the area for your spent brass after you shoot someone, you're better off using a revolver, which won't toss empty cartridges all over the place. Beyond that, if you're doing it someplace where you don't already have your prints all over the place, thin gloves will keep you from leaving fingerprints in the first place... and you can dispose of the spent brass and gloves in widely-scattered places unrelated to the crime. If you're near the ocean, toss them in; the effect of the ions in the salt water will make any residual markings on the brass unrecoverable fairly quickly.
What I find amusing about this announcement is that the VOIP encryption methods are reported to be vulnerable to "bugging", while Homeland Security et al. is blatting on about how it is vital to national security that they be allowed to require all ISPs to install back doors in their VOIP setups to allow them to tap and monitor VOIP calls. I guess Homeland Security can't afford to pay for decent IT security people.
It's a good idea, and a pity that it's so expensive. Hopefully the cost will come down again in time. The article also doesn't mention whether this is the cost to install such a system during construction, or to retrofit it to an existing building. I expect that costs to pipe light into the interior of multi-story buildings will be significantly higher because of the difficulties in installing light pipes down through several floors of existing office space, while planning for such pipes in an architectural job would lower the cost.
I remember how exciting the touch screens seemed in the late 80s, but when using them reality set in - you quickly fatigue holding your arm up to touch a screen.
The term in the programming community for that was, IIRC, 'gorilla arm', from the way your arm felt when you tried to move it after a while. I suspect, though, that a significant part of this was due to technology -- a display was a large CRT, that had a depth roughly equivalent to the width of the screen, and there was a mindset that the display was something that sat out in front of you for you to look at. Aside from a number of 'table' video games, it took LCD displays to make displays something that you could reasonably mount in the same position as the key panel for a register. If the iPhone's touch screen had to be used held at eye level at arm's length, I expect that it would still be looking for its first thousand sales.
I'm not sure that the analogy you draw is on all fours -- given statements Microsoft has made about requiring a new codebase, drawing that analogy for Windows 7 would be better, but virtually all applications written for XP will run on Vista without changes, while D&D4e has made changes that may require significant editing for compatibility. Now, Microsoft might require that a company stop selling an XP version and put in Vista-Specific code in order to be able to put the "Designed for Windows Vista" cachet on their product, but they're not forcing companies to discontinue all existing XP-compatible products in order to get any Vista branding.
What I find most amusing about this is that Microsoft is trying to game the system in whatever way is most beneficial to them. As we saw in a recent Slashdot article, Microsoft tried to duck paying royalty taxes in India by claiming that their transaction with customers was a sale, only to have their position shot down by the tax authorities pointing out that the product EULA clearly states "this product is licensed, not sold". As a transaction which bears all the characteristics of a sale, however, Microsoft only got money when the customer 'bought' their product. By introducing a subscription-based product, they tap into the Holy Grail of cash flow -- being able to charge a customer over and over again for the same product.
Not only that, but with a subscription-based mechanism, Microsoft gains the legal right to intrude into customers' computers to take action if they believe that the terms of the subscription may be being violated, which I would expect Microsoft to contend gives them carte blanch to monitor your system.
It would make for an interesting precedent, though, had the court been savvy enough to tell Microsoft "Very well; we accept your sworn declaration that purchase of a Microsoft product constitutes a sale, not a license. We hereby declare all EULAs associated with Microsoft products to be null and void; all purchases of Microsoft products, past and future, fall under the doctrine of first sale. Microsoft is hereby ordered to remove all forms of activation restriction from their products, and make freely available a tool to remove any such restriction from existing products."
It's hard to predict a phase change in technology; it can be so far out of people's conception of how things work that, without making a wild-assed guess at scientific breakthroughs, simple extrapolation won't work. And Clarke kept his writing grounded, for the most part, in the technology that he could extrapolate.
There is a story/article written, by, IIRC, Dean Ing, where he looks at the "high-tech object falls through time warp into the past and changes history by suddenly advancing technology" story theme and considers what would happen if a ramjet-powered missile does this and is recovered by the US Navy in (I think) the late 1930s. The 'motor' is an open tube, without moving parts, but it was obviously operating from the discolored metal. There is a mass of circuitry, wires printed on a material like Bakelite connected to tiny bricks of ceramic with tinier plates of unbelievably-pure silicon and germanium inside them. There's some kind of tube arrangement leading forward to something vaguely similar to a radar array, but much too small to do anything. The point he was making was that a breakthrough in technology can take further advances out of the range of what people could predict or understand with only pre-breakthrough technology to work from.
I've heard that they've also tried "space pizza" prototypes as well.
Reading the article, it seemed obvious to me what the solution is likely to be. Cook them, let them cool to room temperature, cut into slices, package them airtight, and then use existing technology for food irradiation to render them shelf-stable at room temperature. Packaging them as separate slices would likely make them easier to handle, albeit at the expense of extra packaging material (although I think that there would be an interesting publicity shot in a group of astronauts around a pizza floating in the middle of the cabin). There might be some issues with arranging how they sit in the launch vehicle to ensure that they're not placed sideways to acceleration -- 3G across the surface of the pizza would rip the toppings right off.
But it will be a head shot only, since you have to glue the picture to the inside of the case cover so that the Stirling engine can be exposed to the coolness. Putting the picture outside the case wouldn't help, since the case itself obstruct the flow of cool.
Slashdot Mirror
And, in response to user requests, the developers at NCSoft implemented the ability to buy server transfers in City of Heroes/Villains, so you can move your characters from one server to another to play with your friends.
And establish a rule that, once you compete in the Unlimited Games, you are forever barred from competing in an unaugmented event, regardless of sport.
In mariner terminology, the chief was usually the second in command on a ship, even if outranked by the pilot and mates. The captain and pilot would decide where to sail, but the chief would be in charge of how, including keeping the boat afloat, which took precedence over any orders except scuttling.
It is different in civilian and military usage. In the Royal Navy, for example, the Captain was the commander of the ship, but until the development of a professional officer corps, the captain's primary skill was being able to fight his ship -- and originally was in direct command only of the Marine unit aboard the ship; the sailing master was the person who actually directed the sailing of the ship. The sailing master (shortened to master) was a warrant officer, along with the master's mates, and ate in the wardroom with the ship's officers, who were above him in the chain of command; the promotion of warrant officers was under the control of various boards and commissions, not captains, unlike the midshipmen and rates. The sailing master eventually became a commissioned office, becoming the navigation officer.
I suspect that people like Osama bin Laden are laughing their asses off watching things like this... A relatively trivial (in their eyes) expenditure of manpower and materiel, and they get to sit back and watch our country voluntarily dismantle the freedoms that it was founded to preserve, doing to itself what they don't have the force to accomplish by their own actions.
"We had to destroy your freedom in order to save it."
Must be the materials used to construct it; I looked at the first picture and the Heinkel He-111Z came to mind -- a pair of He-111 bombers linked by a center wing section, used during WWII to tow the Messerschmidt Me-321 Gigant assault glider.
"Good man, bad man -- dirty man wins!"
-- Donna Barr, "Warhorse"
A tsunami may be only a few feet higher than average sea level as it crosses oceans, but when the mass of water piles up as it reaches shore, the runup can go hundreds of feet above sea level. If you're standing on the slope at a height of 800 feet above sea level, and the tsunami starts, which is more 'real' about the height of the tsunami -- the hundred-foot height of the wave in the open water of the bay, or that the runup is going to scour the ground clean almost a thousand feet farther up the slope than where you're standing?
An editorial by John W. Campbell in Analog reprinted from 1958 described "hyperdemocracy" as being characterized by an extreme interpretation of equality: Equality of opportunity is measured by equality of results. If the proportion of women to men graduating college with science or engineering degrees is lower than proportion of women to men in the population, that is prima facie evidence that women are being discriminated against in these degree programs, and therefore quotas need to be set up to ensure that an 'adequate' number of women get science or engineering degrees, even if we have to deny more-qualified men admission in order to make room for them.
The same 'justification' is behind all the affirmative action programs, where the solution is not to raise the educational level of [insert minority here] until they can compete on a level playing field with [insert majority here], but to require that fixed percentages of [minority] be admitted, whether or not they are qualified, and then mandate spending more on them to bring them up to academic standard. This does not ensure that [minority] gets an equal opportunity, rather, this is proving to them that they aren't equal, and require special condescending bend-over-backward treatment to salve the majority's conscience by making it look as if they're equal, freeing the majority from actually having to address the root problem.
I just hope he and Teri Smith Tyler are never allowed together; the resultant concretion of raving lunacy might go supernova and destroy the Earth.
However, unless Blizzard and their lawyers are completely brain-dead, there will be some sort of presentation of the Terms of Service when you connect to their servers that requires you to explicitly agree to abide by the ToS before you can log into the game. Any rights you may have to the physical copy of the software are separate from the license you are granted to use that software connected to Blizzard's servers. The ToS for connecting to the servers would, I expect, also specify what you are and are not permitted to do with the client software when used to connect to the servers, and the use Glider makes of the Warden software would therefore be in violation of the ToS.
Under the doctrine of first sale, you own the copy of the software that you bought -- but as soon as you use that software to connect to servers operated by the company, they can put clauses in the ToS that you must agree to if you want to play the game. The ToS could specify that the end-user is required to put the software box in a glass case and genuflect toward it three times before logging in, and until the customers actually read the ToS and get sufficiently bent out of shape over it to pressure the company to remove such asshattery, they're agreeing to do so every time they click the 'I Accept' button to get past the ToS and log into the game servers, and can be prosecuted for failing to comply.
I happened to catch part of a program on the History Channel this morning that was talking about Rodinia and how the coalition of the continents into a supercontinent disrupted ocean currents, allowing the poles to become colder, expanding the continuously-frozen area until the process ran away, completely covering the Earth in ice until the eruptions that accompanied the breakup of the supercontinent threw CO2 and methane into the air that couldn't be absorbed into the oceans (covered as they were by ice), building up to the point where the greenhouse effect melted a permanent ice-free zone, which (being darker than the ice) would absorb more heat, triggering a positive feedback. The program described this happening in a single freeze-and-thaw, although some 'snowball earth' theories suggest that there were several freezovers as the CO2/methane levels rose and fell until the Cambrian Explosion. It seemed to me, though, that the arguments for Rodinia and Snowball Earth can also be explained by other theories, and that drawing conclusions about conditions that far in the past based on evidence that can accumulate in different ways is going to remain somewhat speculative.
Unfortunately, as TFA notes, Seagate is not the first one on the market with a 500Gb laptop drive:
Just the first and last name is unlikely to be unique; I know (from having gotten calls for each of them and checking the phone book after the second one) that there were at one time at least three other people in the city where I live who had the same first and last name as I do, and after being asked whether I'd ever used a different SSN when I was going to the blood bank to donate, discovered that there was someone who worked where I did who not only had the same first and last name, but the same birthdate -- not just month and day, but year as well.
If you're going to police the area for your spent brass after you shoot someone, you're better off using a revolver, which won't toss empty cartridges all over the place. Beyond that, if you're doing it someplace where you don't already have your prints all over the place, thin gloves will keep you from leaving fingerprints in the first place... and you can dispose of the spent brass and gloves in widely-scattered places unrelated to the crime. If you're near the ocean, toss them in; the effect of the ions in the salt water will make any residual markings on the brass unrecoverable fairly quickly.
What I find amusing about this announcement is that the VOIP encryption methods are reported to be vulnerable to "bugging", while Homeland Security et al. is blatting on about how it is vital to national security that they be allowed to require all ISPs to install back doors in their VOIP setups to allow them to tap and monitor VOIP calls. I guess Homeland Security can't afford to pay for decent IT security people.
The term in the programming community for that was, IIRC, 'gorilla arm', from the way your arm felt when you tried to move it after a while. I suspect, though, that a significant part of this was due to technology -- a display was a large CRT, that had a depth roughly equivalent to the width of the screen, and there was a mindset that the display was something that sat out in front of you for you to look at. Aside from a number of 'table' video games, it took LCD displays to make displays something that you could reasonably mount in the same position as the key panel for a register. If the iPhone's touch screen had to be used held at eye level at arm's length, I expect that it would still be looking for its first thousand sales.
In virtually all the SF I've read, 'space lawyer' carried a degree of denigration over and above that of a simple lawyer, however.
I'm not sure that the analogy you draw is on all fours -- given statements Microsoft has made about requiring a new codebase, drawing that analogy for Windows 7 would be better, but virtually all applications written for XP will run on Vista without changes, while D&D4e has made changes that may require significant editing for compatibility. Now, Microsoft might require that a company stop selling an XP version and put in Vista-Specific code in order to be able to put the "Designed for Windows Vista" cachet on their product, but they're not forcing companies to discontinue all existing XP-compatible products in order to get any Vista branding.
What I find most amusing about this is that Microsoft is trying to game the system in whatever way is most beneficial to them. As we saw in a recent Slashdot article, Microsoft tried to duck paying royalty taxes in India by claiming that their transaction with customers was a sale, only to have their position shot down by the tax authorities pointing out that the product EULA clearly states "this product is licensed, not sold". As a transaction which bears all the characteristics of a sale, however, Microsoft only got money when the customer 'bought' their product. By introducing a subscription-based product, they tap into the Holy Grail of cash flow -- being able to charge a customer over and over again for the same product.
Not only that, but with a subscription-based mechanism, Microsoft gains the legal right to intrude into customers' computers to take action if they believe that the terms of the subscription may be being violated, which I would expect Microsoft to contend gives them carte blanch to monitor your system.
It would make for an interesting precedent, though, had the court been savvy enough to tell Microsoft "Very well; we accept your sworn declaration that purchase of a Microsoft product constitutes a sale, not a license. We hereby declare all EULAs associated with Microsoft products to be null and void; all purchases of Microsoft products, past and future, fall under the doctrine of first sale. Microsoft is hereby ordered to remove all forms of activation restriction from their products, and make freely available a tool to remove any such restriction from existing products."
Oh, my God, they're going to create Ice-9 ! We have to stop them, or the world is doomed!
--
This has been a test of the Emergency Sarcasm System.
Those of you who took it seriously deserve to.
It's hard to predict a phase change in technology; it can be so far out of people's conception of how things work that, without making a wild-assed guess at scientific breakthroughs, simple extrapolation won't work. And Clarke kept his writing grounded, for the most part, in the technology that he could extrapolate.
There is a story/article written, by, IIRC, Dean Ing, where he looks at the "high-tech object falls through time warp into the past and changes history by suddenly advancing technology" story theme and considers what would happen if a ramjet-powered missile does this and is recovered by the US Navy in (I think) the late 1930s. The 'motor' is an open tube, without moving parts, but it was obviously operating from the discolored metal. There is a mass of circuitry, wires printed on a material like Bakelite connected to tiny bricks of ceramic with tinier plates of unbelievably-pure silicon and germanium inside them. There's some kind of tube arrangement leading forward to something vaguely similar to a radar array, but much too small to do anything. The point he was making was that a breakthrough in technology can take further advances out of the range of what people could predict or understand with only pre-breakthrough technology to work from.
Reading the article, it seemed obvious to me what the solution is likely to be. Cook them, let them cool to room temperature, cut into slices, package them airtight, and then use existing technology for food irradiation to render them shelf-stable at room temperature. Packaging them as separate slices would likely make them easier to handle, albeit at the expense of extra packaging material (although I think that there would be an interesting publicity shot in a group of astronauts around a pizza floating in the middle of the cabin). There might be some issues with arranging how they sit in the launch vehicle to ensure that they're not placed sideways to acceleration -- 3G across the surface of the pizza would rip the toppings right off.
But it will be a head shot only, since you have to glue the picture to the inside of the case cover so that the Stirling engine can be exposed to the coolness. Putting the picture outside the case wouldn't help, since the case itself obstruct the flow of cool.