Yes, I am placing the burden on you. You are the only person who can define what is "Unwanted". And for the most part that burden is not a large one. For cases that it is, ie excessive amounts of spam, and phone calls I believe that fixes need to be explored. However I do not believe legislation is the way to fix these excesses.
I could be wrong but I would say junk mail is in (for the most part) an acceptable equilibrium. The costs of sending such mailers has to be balenced with the value received. As of now email has no such limit, ie the cost doesnt accuratly track the volume and places an unbalanced burden on the receiver/receiver's provider.
It's like saying, "If you don't want your car to be stolen, don't leave it where someone can jimmy the lock and hot wire it. It's a free country, leave your car locked up in a vault."
It is nothing of the sort. Stealing a car is illegal, and rightly so the victim is deprived of a possetion of value. It is more like saying, "If you do not want to hear that preacher/protestor/political activist on the street corner, go a different way." or, "If you do not want to listen to the Jehova's Witness/Mormon/Political Activist on your doorstep, politly ask/yell/insult them and close/slam the door."
Although I think I understand your frustration, I do not agree with your solution. Poor behaviour, annoyances, etc should not be legistlated against but socialy and economically made unviable.
Fine, you do not like unsolicited (e)mail? Use your rights and install software with a whitelist. Dont like unsolicited phone calls, find a technical solution (my brother uses a whitelistlike system). Finally if you feel so threatened by solicitors, MOVE, go find yourself a nice gated community. After all you are a responsible, thinking, and reasoning human being.
Like it or not you are a member of a free society. This calls for certain sacrifices as some people so convieniently forget. You will hear things you do not agree with, you will be confronted by advertising, and you might even have to spend some of your precious time doing so.
Telephones, email, mail, and even your front doorstep are all ways you provide an interface to society around you. Let's work on ways to intelligently limit unwanted communication without blithly passing more laws. Societal pressures, technical measures, and personal patience are the solutions we require to this (spam) and other problems.
Boulder startup gets deal with major optics player By Anthony Lane For the Camera
A Boulder-based startup, which makes technology that greatly improves the clarity of images through a lens, is poised to grow after signing a deal with one of the world's premier lens and microelectronics makers.
CDM Optics is a private company with sales last year of about $1 million, according to R.C. "Merc" Mercure, CDM's chairman and chief executive.
Next year, sales are expected to double with CDM's new partnership with the optical engineering company Carl Zeiss, a renowned manufacturer of microscopes, lenses and other instruments.
"The world's oldest optical company has joined forces with the most modern," said Ed Dowski, vice-president of CDM Optics.
The moving parts and multiple lenses of microscopes and certain cameras are precisely engineered to control aberrations and to produce a sharp image where someone wants it -- on a piece of paper, a slide or a computer screen.
Over centuries, scientists have devised ways to make sharp images of ever-smaller and more distant objects, but could do little to overcome the unchanging rules governing light and the formation of a focused image.
"There were no revolutionary changes in optics for 200 years," said Dowski.
CDM Optics produces an unusual type of "lens." Added to a standard lens, it produces images that actually appear blurry.
In fact, "There doesn't seem to be any part of the image that is more focused than any other," said Mercure, who was the co-founder of Ball Brothers Research Corp., which became Ball Aerospace.
A uniformly unfocused image may seem an unlikely goal, but after being digitally processed, the result is an image that is entirely in focus.
Mercure holds a poster with four pictures of a pack of crayons. Two were produced with a standard digital camera and the other two with a digital camera equipped with CDM's Wavefront Coding technology.
In one of the images from the standard camera, only a few crayons in the middle of the pack are in focus. To bring more of the crayons into focus, the photographer would have to decrease the size of the hole through which light enters the camera.
In the resulting image, more crayons are in focus, but it appears grainy as a result of less light hitting the camera's digital detector.
The difference between the two pictures produced with CDM's technology is more dramatic. The first is hazy -- it is an unprocessed image that would not ordinarily be seen.
In the second picture, all of the crayons from front to back are in focus without the graininess from the standard camera.
Dowski said applications for the technology that allows lenses to produce such images are numerous.
"You can either make lenses cheaper, sharper or both," he said.
Sharper images may be beneficial for many types of optics. A microscope, for instance, may magnify an object to 100 times its actual size with only a sliver 1 micron thick in focus.
"We can give a microscope up to 15 microns of focus," Mercure said.
One area in which this improved depth of field might be useful is in vitro fertilization. Ordinarily, a doctor produces a great number of embryos and monitors them for several days before implanting several. The goal is cause a successful pregnancy while minimizing the number of multiple births.
The problem is that after about three days, embryos are difficult to monitor with an ordinary microscope. The embryologist must guess which embryos are most likely produce a successful pregnancy.
Using Wavefront Coding technology, Mercure said, embryologists should be able to monitor the embryos for four or five days, thus reducing the number of embryos that must be implanted to have the same chance of a successful pregnancy.
Huh? Did you read the article? Silly question. How in the name of common sense did you come to the conclusion this is a destabilizing weapon? This has much less to do with ICBM (usually Nuclear) than with shooting down short range tactical missle (possibly equiped with nuclear/chem/bio payloads).
The Gulf War featured numerous Scud missles launched by Iraq with no more than a general "gee I hope it hits my enemy not my friend".
In short this would be a normal battlefield weapon used to increase the effectiveness of our military and reduce friendly or innocent casualties. It "destabilizes" no more or less than the USA developing a better gun or fighter.
This is a chemical laser. Capacity for this prototype is listed at 20 shots. I am guessing that the problems of refilling make a space based platform much less attractive. Also this is targetted at Non-ICBM type missles, for that a airborn platform should be more effective, not to mention flexible
This is not intended to defend the aircraft from Air-Air missles, rather to destroy surface to surface missles, specifically the Non-Intercontinental type (although it may help fulfil that role as well).
The arguement of the cumbersome nature of a 747 was directed towards getting them in the right area at the right time, and into the air soon enough (scramble).
At this point it looks from the article as if they are having a hard enough time converting a large and relatively stable aircraft into a laser platform. Given the article states a capacity for 20 shots size is still a big issue with this laser. I am sure given time, money, and success in this they will attempt to move onto smaller and more manuverable aircraft.
Imagining the next generation air decoy system consisting of a large banner of really pretty naked lady trailing behind an airplane, or large picture of hot naked chicks on the ground where you want your enemys to drop thier bombs, or a large holoprojector of.. oh wait you probly get the idea by now:)
Once again generalization, blanket statements, and incomplete skimming of a comment have given life to the word flamebait. heh i love it when that happens.
Windows, of the 9x family are self centered bastards who refuse to live well with other os's. They even hate their older wiser cousins of the NT variety. Luckily they are stupid bastards too and as long as you install them first other, better OS's can sneak in and live with 9x.
Terrorism: The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons. (from dictionary.com)
Sabotage: 1.(omitted) 2. Treacherous action to defeat or hinder a cause or an endeavor; deliberate subversion.
I Agree. Viruses are not terrorism (Unless maybe if a virus was purposely targeted to kill people via airtraffic control or hospital records). A computer virus is more akin to wreaking the productivity of a factory by dropping a wrench into the machinery. They are inconvenient, disruptive, and even damaging but hardly make you fear for life and limb.
Erector sets are cool, i recall my mom letting me play with them when i was 3 (i think) and i was too interested in playing with them to bother putting them in my mouth. Great fun. Overall though I remember lego being the toy that attracted me the most. The range of representation afforded by legos greatly surpassed that of the erector set IMHO. I think part of the lack of popularity of Meccano / Erector could be that it was too realistic. By that point in my life I would go take something important apart:) or work with my dad fixing something. Lego on the other hand depends a great deal on imagination and using a bunch of funny looking blocks to build the world's greatest space ship or a fort of Indestructability.
Along this line of reasoning the decline of British engineering would be more accuratley attributed the trend away from do-it-yourselfism. This itself a symptom of our increasing consumerism. The decline of Erector with respect to lego is more likely a symptom of the decline of British engineering rather than its cause.
Now excuse me i am going to go take apart my roomate's cd player:).
How dare you! oh wait you said you were just kidding:).
I like the idea of sending healthy livestock like a million sheep. Take a herd of sheep and a bunch of hungry people. Drive said sheep over minefield in question. Have large mutton feast celebrating the clearing of the minefield. Breed remaining sheep and repeat. This would help the land mine problem in a sick kind of humorous way and also help the people eat. See this thread at Kuro5hin for the original reference.
"An idyllic, peaceful expanse of sheep, the contented "Baaah"ing, punctuated with explosions and sheep flying into the air."
--Kaki Nix Sain (on kuro5hin)
I was able to import a word 2000 document with equations. They viewed alright but were not editable. OpenOffice brings up a warning that the equation was created with a newer (yeah right) version of equation editor and blanks out the equation. Saving the word document through word to word 95 format did not help. However saving as rich text converted the equation objects to a graphic format that OpenOffice seemed to like just fine. Alright enough charity download it yourself and play with it:).
I cannot try it on linux right now but it looks and functions pretty well in windows 2000 ( i downloaded it today and have tried it for all of 5 minutes).
link (follow the link on the index page, from what i remember geocites does not like direct image linking.)
Here is a screenshot of an existing word 2000 document with an embedded excel object opened sucessfully in OpenOffice. Elsewhere in the document (a 42 page technical document) some tables are too wide and some automatic page numbering is right aligned instead of centered. All in all a good translation of a moderatly complex word document. I am impressed.
Although your analysis and advice are good i believe the target is in error. The question says nothing about games. Some of the pitfalls of designing any software for a PS(2) would be the lack of experienced people to go to when you get stuck with some esoteric "feature" or bug in the ps2 environment.
What would be a cool non-game piece of software to implement on a PS2? Some of the suggestions I have are: striped down photoshop style program, get a coupld of electrical engineers to make you a keyboard and make some simple office components. Now these are pretty tame and unoriginal ideas I expect better from the rest of slashdot.
So now we have robots going around independent of conventional sources of energy for sustinence knocking everthing they see over so they can capture the gravitational potential
Think it wont happen just wait till *you* get knocked over by some contraption just so it can recharge
Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...
on
Handling the Loads
·
· Score: 1
Hmm interesting thoughts. Reading through comments on other sites about the "war" that would result from this would be in the form of the ongoing conflict in the middle east and ireland rather than a conventional war between nations.
Bush, I hope and pray does the right thing and has good people around him(no one is perfect after all:)) to respond to this situation in the best possible way.
China may have lots of people and the largest military but in this situation I dont see that they would be interested or capable of doing anything to start a world war with the united states if memory serves me correctly they dont currently have a navy to invade taiwan. The possiblity of war exists but I believe a World War is not the type we would face more like a korea or the aformentioned guerilla terrorist war.
DD
I hope everyone in the USA and abroad encourages and supports Bush in making the correct decision. And conversly comes down on him like a load of bricks if he makes the incorrect decision. One positive result of this disaster is an increased desire on my part to be informed about my country's (USA) foreign policy.
Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...
on
Handling the Loads
·
· Score: 1
This is one of several posts that I have seen commenting on the horrible possiblity of a world war. How exactly would this happen? A world war, at least in the context of 1 and 2 involved most of the major nations in the world in a protracted and heated conflict. Ok granted we got one side set up the USA and every other country in the world (except IRAQ and possibly a couple others) who have denouced this attack as a BAD thing. Where are we going to find enough people to say this was a good thing and have the power to fight?
Most governments will at the very least condemn an attack like this because terrorism destabilizes. Their leadership depends on at least some stability.
the 1-65 hz figure is for a demonstration mode whereby the backlight sequences through each of the RBG diode arrays. They want you to see the transistions in other words. The power savings comes through the use of RGB LEDs to make white light.
How does this improve the color of the lcd display? I thought that the purpose of a backlight just that, illumination just like that lamp on your desk not coloring. I guess if the led backlight has a better (ie more white) spectrum than a traditional backlight it would allow the colors of an lcd to show through more accuratly.
And I think the switching rate would be 10Mhz not the 60Hz another poster mentioned.
I simply must get my hands on this technology. Think of the time it would save I can have it do all my slashdoting for me.
Sure it would start out as a troll. It would dominate the first post scene with it's superior reading and the wisdom of an 18 month old. But over time it would learn and grow to actually read the articles referenced and even background research on the net. From this it would write intelligent responses that would bless the hearts of collective slashdot readers everwhere.
Best of all I would no longer spend all my time reading slashdot and writing intelligent posts, Hal the karma whore would do all that for me.
Simple good advice in theory. In practice updating a windows box is not always as easy as is should be. Let me rephrase that, it is extremely "easy" unless the system dies a horrible death by blue screen and has to be rebuilt. Microsoft patches are a sort of mystical fix (no source) that you apply on their word that it will not trash your system. Most linux and specifically unix style patches target the problem more directly with open code and even in a worst case dont trash the OS if they fail.
Advirtising seems to be a fact of life now. Get used to it. This new strategy by Gator and others is just part of that. We should not fight against advirtising itself, just to keep that advirtising from adversly interfering with our lives.
The big issue we (as consumers, businesses are another story) should have with this type of practice is it should be voluntary. As long as someone knows they are getting the gator competitor advertising service it is fine, even useful (reference the car buying service). It's when they secretly install the software and make it difficult to get rid of when we sic the slashdot trolls on them.
"There ought to be some way to compel him to donate the cells needed "
Aieee, that opens up a whole new can of worms. Compeled to donate cells for cancer research, hmm seems harmless enough.
Compeled to donate cells for "eternal youth" type research, ok thats not so bad but getting worse.
How about compeled to donate cells for military research (ie disease resistance, strength, intelligence, etc.)
personally i only see dangers in compelling someone to "donate" (btw donate usually connotates a voluntary action) something they dont want to.
Personally I think an agreement along the lines of organ donor agreements of today would be the most elegant solution (noticing we dont compel people to donate organs that could save many lives even though it's no skin of their backs (figurativly)).
Hmm little bitter are we. Do all of us a favor, go visit mexico (the real Mexico not just the tourist locations), russia or some other non-first world country. Then stop bitching about how the USA is so terrible. Sure things are wrong with the country (school shootings, prejudice, copyright, MPAA, etc.) and problably always will be to some extent. I feel incredibly blessed to live in the USA problems and all. So instead of retreating into cynicism and bitterness go enjoy a nice public park, drive your car (God knows mosts of the rest of the world cant), and advocate change and improvement for the ills in this country (then go feel safe and thankful that you will not be arrested or killed for your opinions).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I am placing the burden on you. You are the only person who can define what is "Unwanted". And for the most part that burden is not a large one. For cases that it is, ie excessive amounts of spam, and phone calls I believe that fixes need to be explored. However I do not believe legislation is the way to fix these excesses.
I could be wrong but I would say junk mail is in (for the most part) an acceptable equilibrium. The costs of sending such mailers has to be balenced with the value received. As of now email has no such limit, ie the cost doesnt accuratly track the volume and places an unbalanced burden on the receiver/receiver's provider.
It's like saying, "If you don't want your car to be stolen, don't leave it where someone can jimmy the lock and hot wire it. It's a free country, leave your car locked up in a vault."
It is nothing of the sort. Stealing a car is illegal, and rightly so the victim is deprived of a possetion of value. It is more like saying, "If you do not want to hear that preacher/protestor/political activist on the street corner, go a different way." or, "If you do not want to listen to the Jehova's Witness/Mormon/Political Activist on your doorstep, politly ask/yell/insult them and close/slam the door."
Although I think I understand your frustration, I do not agree with your solution. Poor behaviour, annoyances, etc should not be legistlated against but socialy and economically made unviable.
Fine, you do not like unsolicited (e)mail? Use your rights and install software with a whitelist. Dont like unsolicited phone calls, find a technical solution (my brother uses a whitelistlike system). Finally if you feel so threatened by solicitors, MOVE, go find yourself a nice gated community. After all you are a responsible, thinking, and reasoning human being.
Like it or not you are a member of a free society. This calls for certain sacrifices as some people so convieniently forget. You will hear things you do not agree with, you will be confronted by advertising, and you might even have to spend some of your precious time doing so.
Telephones, email, mail, and even your front doorstep are all ways you provide an interface to society around you. Let's work on ways to intelligently limit unwanted communication without blithly passing more laws. Societal pressures, technical measures, and personal patience are the solutions we require to this (spam) and other problems.
Some more info from
Boulderdailycamera
Boulder startup gets deal with major optics player
By Anthony Lane
For the Camera
A Boulder-based startup, which makes technology that greatly improves the clarity of images through a lens, is poised to grow after signing a deal with one of the world's premier lens and microelectronics makers.
CDM Optics is a private company with sales last year of about $1 million, according to R.C. "Merc" Mercure, CDM's chairman and chief executive.
Next year, sales are expected to double with CDM's new partnership with the optical engineering company Carl Zeiss, a renowned manufacturer of microscopes, lenses and other instruments.
"The world's oldest optical company has joined forces with the most modern," said Ed Dowski, vice-president of CDM Optics.
The moving parts and multiple lenses of microscopes and certain cameras are precisely engineered to control aberrations and to produce a sharp image where someone wants it -- on a piece of paper, a slide or a computer screen.
Over centuries, scientists have devised ways to make sharp images of ever-smaller and more distant objects, but could do little to overcome the unchanging rules governing light and the formation of a focused image.
"There were no revolutionary changes in optics for 200 years," said Dowski.
CDM Optics produces an unusual type of "lens." Added to a standard lens, it produces images that actually appear blurry.
In fact, "There doesn't seem to be any part of the image that is more focused than any other," said Mercure, who was the co-founder of Ball Brothers Research Corp., which became Ball Aerospace.
A uniformly unfocused image may seem an unlikely goal, but after being digitally processed, the result is an image that is entirely in focus.
Mercure holds a poster with four pictures of a pack of crayons. Two were produced with a standard digital camera and the other two with a digital camera equipped with CDM's Wavefront Coding technology.
In one of the images from the standard camera, only a few crayons in the middle of the pack are in focus. To bring more of the crayons into focus, the photographer would have to decrease the size of the hole through which light enters the camera.
In the resulting image, more crayons are in focus, but it appears grainy as a result of less light hitting the camera's digital detector.
The difference between the two pictures produced with CDM's technology is more dramatic. The first is hazy -- it is an unprocessed image that would not ordinarily be seen.
In the second picture, all of the crayons from front to back are in focus without the graininess from the standard camera.
Dowski said applications for the technology that allows lenses to produce such images are numerous.
"You can either make lenses cheaper, sharper or both," he said.
Sharper images may be beneficial for many types of optics. A microscope, for instance, may magnify an object to 100 times its actual size with only a sliver 1 micron thick in focus.
"We can give a microscope up to 15 microns of focus," Mercure said.
One area in which this improved depth of field might be useful is in vitro fertilization. Ordinarily, a doctor produces a great number of embryos and monitors them for several days before implanting several. The goal is cause a successful pregnancy while minimizing the number of multiple births.
The problem is that after about three days, embryos are difficult to monitor with an ordinary microscope. The embryologist must guess which embryos are most likely produce a successful pregnancy.
Using Wavefront Coding technology, Mercure said, embryologists should be able to monitor the embryos for four or five days, thus reducing the number of embryos that must be implanted to have the same chance of a successful pregnancy.
The same increase in depth of field
Fun Fun. Perhaps the addition of a dehumidifier to the system would keep the system in equilibrium.
Huh? Did you read the article? Silly question. How in the name of common sense did you come to the conclusion this is a destabilizing weapon? This has much less to do with ICBM (usually Nuclear) than with shooting down short range tactical missle (possibly equiped with nuclear/chem/bio payloads).
The Gulf War featured numerous Scud missles launched by Iraq with no more than a general "gee I hope it hits my enemy not my friend".
In short this would be a normal battlefield weapon used to increase the effectiveness of our military and reduce friendly or innocent casualties. It "destabilizes" no more or less than the USA developing a better gun or fighter.
This is a chemical laser. Capacity for this prototype is listed at 20 shots. I am guessing that the problems of refilling make a space based platform much less attractive. Also this is targetted at Non-ICBM type missles, for that a airborn platform should be more effective, not to mention flexible
This is not intended to defend the aircraft from Air-Air missles, rather to destroy surface to surface missles, specifically the Non-Intercontinental type (although it may help fulfil that role as well).
The arguement of the cumbersome nature of a 747 was directed towards getting them in the right area at the right time, and into the air soon enough (scramble).
At this point it looks from the article as if they are having a hard enough time converting a large and relatively stable aircraft into a laser platform. Given the article states a capacity for 20 shots size is still a big issue with this laser. I am sure given time, money, and success in this they will attempt to move onto smaller and more manuverable aircraft.
Imagining the next generation air decoy system consisting of a large banner of really pretty naked lady trailing behind an airplane, or large picture of hot naked chicks on the ground where you want your enemys to drop thier bombs, or a large holoprojector of .. oh wait you probly get the idea by now :)
DD
Once again generalization, blanket statements, and incomplete skimming of a comment have given life to the word flamebait. heh i love it when that happens.
Windows, of the 9x family are self centered bastards who refuse to live well with other os's. They even hate their older wiser cousins of the NT variety. Luckily they are stupid bastards too and as long as you install them first other, better OS's can sneak in and live with 9x.
DD
Terrorism: The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons. (from dictionary.com)
Sabotage: 1.(omitted) 2. Treacherous action to defeat or hinder a cause or an endeavor; deliberate subversion.
I Agree. Viruses are not terrorism (Unless maybe if a virus was purposely targeted to kill people via airtraffic control or hospital records). A computer virus is more akin to wreaking the productivity of a factory by dropping a wrench into the machinery. They are inconvenient, disruptive, and even damaging but hardly make you fear for life and limb.
DD
Erector sets are cool, i recall my mom letting me play with them when i was 3 (i think) and i was too interested in playing with them to bother putting them in my mouth. Great fun. Overall though I remember lego being the toy that attracted me the most. The range of representation afforded by legos greatly surpassed that of the erector set IMHO. I think part of the lack of popularity of Meccano / Erector could be that it was too realistic. By that point in my life I would go take something important apart :) or work with my dad fixing something. Lego on the other hand depends a great deal on imagination and using a bunch of funny looking blocks to build the world's greatest space ship or a fort of Indestructability.
:).
Along this line of reasoning the decline of British engineering would be more accuratley attributed the trend away from do-it-yourselfism. This itself a symptom of our increasing consumerism. The decline of Erector with respect to lego is more likely a symptom of the decline of British engineering rather than its cause.
Now excuse me i am going to go take apart my roomate's cd player
DD
How dare you! oh wait you said you were just kidding :).
I like the idea of sending healthy livestock like a million sheep. Take a herd of sheep and a bunch of hungry people. Drive said sheep over minefield in question. Have large mutton feast celebrating the clearing of the minefield. Breed remaining sheep and repeat. This would help the land mine problem in a sick kind of humorous way and also help the people eat. See this thread at Kuro5hin for the original reference.
"An idyllic, peaceful expanse of sheep, the contented "Baaah"ing, punctuated with explosions and sheep flying into the air."
--Kaki Nix Sain (on kuro5hin)
DD
I was able to import a word 2000 document with equations. They viewed alright but were not editable. OpenOffice brings up a warning that the equation was created with a newer (yeah right) version of equation editor and blanks out the equation. Saving the word document through word to word 95 format did not help. However saving as rich text converted the equation objects to a graphic format that OpenOffice seemed to like just fine. Alright enough charity download it yourself and play with it :).
DD
link
(follow the link on the index page, from what i remember geocites does not like direct image linking.)
Here is a screenshot of an existing word 2000 document with an embedded excel object opened sucessfully in OpenOffice. Elsewhere in the document (a 42 page technical document) some tables are too wide and some automatic page numbering is right aligned instead of centered. All in all a good translation of a moderatly complex word document. I am impressed.
Although your analysis and advice are good i believe the target is in error. The question says nothing about games. Some of the pitfalls of designing any software for a PS(2) would be the lack of experienced people to go to when you get stuck with some esoteric "feature" or bug in the ps2 environment.
What would be a cool non-game piece of software to implement on a PS2? Some of the suggestions I have are: striped down photoshop style program, get a coupld of electrical engineers to make you a keyboard and make some simple office components. Now these are pretty tame and unoriginal ideas I expect better from the rest of slashdot.
DD
So now we have robots going around independent of conventional sources of energy for sustinence knocking everthing they see over so they can capture the gravitational potential
Think it wont happen just wait till *you* get knocked over by some contraption just so it can recharge
Hmm interesting thoughts. Reading through comments on other sites about the "war" that would result from this would be in the form of the ongoing conflict in the middle east and ireland rather than a conventional war between nations.
:)) to respond to this situation in the best possible way.
Bush, I hope and pray does the right thing and has good people around him(no one is perfect after all
China may have lots of people and the largest military but in this situation I dont see that they would be interested or capable of doing anything to start a world war with the united states if memory serves me correctly they dont currently have a navy to invade taiwan. The possiblity of war exists but I believe a World War is not the type we would face more like a korea or the aformentioned guerilla terrorist war.
DD
I hope everyone in the USA and abroad encourages and supports Bush in making the correct decision. And conversly comes down on him like a load of bricks if he makes the incorrect decision. One positive result of this disaster is an increased desire on my part to be informed about my country's (USA) foreign policy.
This is one of several posts that I have seen commenting on the horrible possiblity of a world war. How exactly would this happen? A world war, at least in the context of 1 and 2 involved most of the major nations in the world in a protracted and heated conflict. Ok granted we got one side set up the USA and every other country in the world (except IRAQ and possibly a couple others) who have denouced this attack as a BAD thing. Where are we going to find enough people to say this was a good thing and have the power to fight?
Most governments will at the very least condemn an attack like this because terrorism destabilizes. Their leadership depends on at least some stability.
DD
the 1-65 hz figure is for a demonstration mode whereby the backlight sequences through each of the RBG diode arrays. They want you to see the transistions in other words. The power savings comes through the use of RGB LEDs to make white light.
How does this improve the color of the lcd display? I thought that the purpose of a backlight just that, illumination just like that lamp on your desk not coloring. I guess if the led backlight has a better (ie more white) spectrum than a traditional backlight it would allow the colors of an lcd to show through more accuratly.
And I think the switching rate would be 10Mhz not the 60Hz another poster mentioned.
I simply must get my hands on this technology. Think of the time it would save I can have it do all my slashdoting for me.
Sure it would start out as a troll. It would dominate the first post scene with it's superior reading and the wisdom of an 18 month old. But over time it would learn and grow to actually read the articles referenced and even background research on the net. From this it would write intelligent responses that would bless the hearts of collective slashdot readers everwhere.
Best of all I would no longer spend all my time reading slashdot and writing intelligent posts, Hal the karma whore would do all that for me.
DD
Simple good advice in theory. In practice updating a windows box is not always as easy as is should be. Let me rephrase that, it is extremely "easy" unless the system dies a horrible death by blue screen and has to be rebuilt. Microsoft patches are a sort of mystical fix (no source) that you apply on their word that it will not trash your system. Most linux and specifically unix style patches target the problem more directly with open code and even in a worst case dont trash the OS if they fail.
Advirtising seems to be a fact of life now. Get used to it. This new strategy by Gator and others is just part of that. We should not fight against advirtising itself, just to keep that advirtising from adversly interfering with our lives.
The big issue we (as consumers, businesses are another story) should have with this type of practice is it should be voluntary. As long as someone knows they are getting the gator competitor advertising service it is fine, even useful (reference the car buying service). It's when they secretly install the software and make it difficult to get rid of when we sic the slashdot trolls on them.
DD
"There ought to be some way to compel him to donate the cells needed "
Aieee, that opens up a whole new can of worms. Compeled to donate cells for cancer research, hmm seems harmless enough.
Compeled to donate cells for "eternal youth" type research, ok thats not so bad but getting worse.
How about compeled to donate cells for military research (ie disease resistance, strength, intelligence, etc.)
personally i only see dangers in compelling someone to "donate" (btw donate usually connotates a voluntary action) something they dont want to.
Personally I think an agreement along the lines of organ donor agreements of today would be the most elegant solution (noticing we dont compel people to donate organs that could save many lives even though it's no skin of their backs (figurativly)).
Hmm little bitter are we. Do all of us a favor, go visit mexico (the real Mexico not just the tourist locations), russia or some other non-first world country. Then stop bitching about how the USA is so terrible. Sure things are wrong with the country (school shootings, prejudice, copyright, MPAA, etc.) and problably always will be to some extent. I feel incredibly blessed to live in the USA problems and all. So instead of retreating into cynicism and bitterness go enjoy a nice public park, drive your car (God knows mosts of the rest of the world cant), and advocate change and improvement for the ills in this country (then go feel safe and thankful that you will not be arrested or killed for your opinions).
:)
Have A happy day.