In financial circles the UK is also often called "Treasure Island" because somehow everything can be sold at a higher price there than on the continent. Even products that are the same as on the continent are more expensive there (and no it's not the VAT)
I do not know where to put this so I'll attach it to this post. Germany has experimented extensively with breeder-type reactors but we sunk nearly 7 bilion german marks (3.5 billion Euro) into those projects without going anywhere.
The concept of pebble-bed reactors was developed in the 1950s by a german scientist named Rudolf Schulten. The first prototype had been in use between 1966 and 1988 when the project was discontinued after the chernobyl incident. The protoype used helium as a coolant but other inert substances like nitrogen or carbon dioxide are also possible maybe even water but all sources I could find claim that these designs used inert gases as coolant and moderator. Pebble-bed reactors use either uranium, thorium or plutonium for the reaction and produce new fissionable material during the reaction.
There were also plans to build a commercial type reactor using this design but the reactor was never finished due to technical difficulties with the handling of the pebbles themselves and because of safety concerns following the destruction of the chernobyl plant.
There was also another type of breeder which used uranium as fuel and natrium as coolant but there were so many technical difficulties and safety concerns (mainly with the handling of the hot liquid natrium (300 C) that the reactor was never used at all.
Research into breeder technology was cancelled after 1986 mainly because of the chernobyl incident. The other main concern was that breeder type reactors produce fissionable materials. If you use uranium as fuel you will get plutonium as product. So some were concerened that this material might be used to build bombs. This was especially a concern with the natrium-cooled reactor since it didn't use fuel enclosed in pebbles like the other reactors did.
Interesting enough JMS even suggested being part of season four of enterprise but get rejected by Berman. Seems to me that Berman cannot even see talent if it jumps him in the face and bites his nose off.
"No it didn't. I created one, and I never had a key. Closed beta probably did (I wasn't involved in that)."
Yes it did. I also created one for Open Beta and a key was required. Fileplanet Subscribers allegedly got theirs by E-Mail. I subscribed through Blizzards open beta Page and the open beta key was listet right there on the account creation page (As a Graphic to discourage webcrawlers). and you had to enter it before continuing the registration. Hell the key even had the form xxxxxx-yyyyyy-open-beta.
"Based on the politcal slant on Slashdot, I would say yes. Techies tend to sway Left by a large factor. Then again, Slashdot IS worldwide. And most people on the internet by virtue of being international, tend to be very liberal. I'm not saying this in a bad way, but that would be the facts."
I think that it's just a matter of perspective.
I for exymple wouldn't agree with you that slashdot is left-wing but that is largely because I have a different definition of what is being left-wing. That's because in Europe even the US democratic party would be considered conservative in some countries.
So maybe if you look at slashdot from the US POV you might be under the impression that it's rather left-wing. For me it's not. I would classify slashdot as center with a very slight lean to the left.
"Pre WW2 Germany had one of the lowest rates of car ownership in Europe, Volkswagen did not deliver a single car to the people before the outbreak of war and almost all freight continued to be moved by rail. The autobahn were designed from the start to move troops and tanks. The propaganda angle was that Germany was moving into the motor age."
That's just plain wrong. The very first Autobahn (as they are called in germany) was the AVUS in Berlin, which had been finished in 1921. The second one was built in Italy and was finished in 1923. Plans to build several more motorways in germany had been considered by the german government in the weimar republic but had to be postponed because the project couldn't be funded due to the high reparations payments to france and the economic downturn at the end of the 1920's.
What you most probably mean is the "Reichsautbahnen", which were built during the third reich. BUt all they did was to take the old plans from the weimar republic and make them real. The major difference between these and the original plans was that the nazis extended them to include more motorways than originally planned (By the start of the war 3.300 Kilometers had been completed. Preparations began in 1933 so it tokk them five years to build all that) and also to impose some kind of standard on the construction of them. But those motorways would to some extend have been built even if there had not been a nazi germany.
"(...) and incentives for sterilization ("You want an increase on your welfare check/a free country club membership/a large tax cut/a new car? Go get a vasectomy or tubaligation."). It's not my responsibility to parent the children of folks who should never have had kids in the first place, and I should not be punished for their inteptitude either"
If you'd have posted this comment in a german forum or a forum where there are human rights activists or african americans you would be flamed for your comment 'till kingdom come.
You do realise that the idea to provide such "incentives" for abortion and sterilisation isn't new and that such incentives were often provided by racist or fascist governments all over the world to keep "unworthy life" from reproducing itself?
I'd not trust a country which heeds violence more than nudity to make these incentives anything more than a way to keep poor people from having kids. Hell I'd not even trust my own country.
Where would you draw the line? Not so long ago governments actually paid to have drug addicts, handicapped persons, poor people, aborigines, people with african heritage and all other kinds of "unworthy life", who were deemed unsuitable for raising children, sterilized. More often than not against their will.
I wouldn't trust your judgement as to who is a good parent and who isn't and I wouldn't even trust my own judgement on this matter. But at least I know my history and every country which had such policies abused them to eliminate certain unwanted elements from the gene-pool. Either by using money or force.
All in all every parent should have access to parenting classes, child care facilities should be everywhere and be affordable (because when you need three jobs to survive you simply cannot care enough for your child), contraceptives should be provided at low or no cost, hell even legalize abortion if you have to (we Europeans did at least). Everything else should be the free choice of the people concerned and this choice shouldn't be influenced by some kind of "incentive" because as history has shown many times over, this sooner or later leads to blackmailing people into doing things they otherwise wouldn't have done.
See the Apartheid regime (colored people), Nazi germany ("unworthy life"), The United states prior to 1950 (african americans), Australia (handicapped people and aborigines), Holland (handicapped people and mentally ill people) etc. etc.
"Uh... How do you know? If they're just developing this technology, then no one has ever benefitted from it before and you can't be sure whether or not the brain can cope."
I know because there are other conditions which, to some extend, lead to the same phenomenon. If you are suffering from strabismus or nystagmus since birth the same could happen to you. If you suffer from strabismus then you get diplopic images since right and left eye are not parallel.
The brain cannot cope with this kind of double vision because it cannot combine the two images (from the left and right eye) to form a threedimensional image.
So the brain ignores the image from the weaker of the two eyes and the part of the visual cortex, which processes the images from this eye will no longer be used.
This leads to bad vision which cannot be corrected with glasses or lasik since its the visual cortex who cannot correctly process the data.
If this remains untreated to the age of six or seven you will never recover your vision. Due to strabismus and nystagmus the vision of my right eye is only at 5% so i am a good example of that myself.
A popular treatment for this is to use eyepatches. You disable perception from the better eye and force the brain to use the weaker one so that this part of the visual cortex will also be trained. But this treatment has to start when you are still young for it to have any effect.
HTH
Jeff
p.s. i hope i have explaned it correctly since i am not a native speaker (Had to look up some words in the dictionary)
These devices won't restore eyesight to people who were born blind. Only those who, at one time in their life, actually could see will profit from such technical replacements.
When you are born you are nearly blind. It takes four to six years for the visual cortex to develop fully. After the age of six this development stops and thats the end of it.
If you are born blind then the cortex will not be trained and no magic eye surgery will restore your vision, because after the age of six the visual cortex will no longer adapt to the new situation.
Even if your eyes are restored to 20/20 vision you will not see a thing because your vision center doesn't know how to interpret the pictures. So these kinds of surgery will only help people which went blind and not those who were born blind. (Still cool stuff)
This poor guy may have been arrested for the development of Netsky/Sasser but according to several IT-Newspapers in germany he was not the only one who was developing them. There were some backings and partners who may have made him their scapegoat although these are mainly rumors.
This guy has also been blamed for phatbot although that one was developed by a different person meanwhile arrested (which at some time in the past had made contact to the Netsky Author)
Yeah Netsky and Sasser have gained much more notoriety but actually phatbot has been (and still is) the more dangerous worm/trojan/backdoor around in 2004.
There are currently several thousend different modifications of phatbot around and in contrast to Netsky/Sasser, phatboy infected systems are being commercially exploited as spam relays for UCE/UBE and Hatemail. In Europe neofascist/neonazi groups use phatboy to finance and also to distribute their propaganda.
You can buy lists with the ips of compromised phatboy-infected computers to use for your own spam-enterprise. There are even groups which will code you your own version custom-built to your likings.
Strangely the author of Netsky/Sasser has gained much more public interest. Yeah it was probably more annoying and a real hassle for the sysadmins. On the other hand phatboy is more dangerous than netsky and is actively exploited with criminal intent. Although the writer of phatbot has been arrested as well (coincidently also a german) all you ever hear about is the author of sasser.
I feel a bit proud that games from german or european game designers are as popular in the rest of the world as they are here.
Most of the classics have already been named so i will not repeat them. For those of you who seek games which are out of print in the US have you considered importing them over from germany or other places in europe? Of all the mentioned out-of-print games at least RoboRally and Scotland Yard are available here in germany and there may be others I don't think of at the moment.
My all time favourites are:
Civilisation and its successor age of renaiscance.
Diplomacy. No other game can kill friendships that easily. (Once one of our friends walked out vowing that he "would not ever play any game with us again" after being backstabbed more than once during negotiations.
Also one of those games which can take hours or even days to finish when several expert players play it. (The phrase: "let's play a quick diplomacy became some kind of running gag)
Settlers of Catan Carcassonne
I'd highly recommend the lord of the rings boardgame as one of only a few truly cooperative gaming experiences.
Robo Rally Junta Kreml
If you take the term board game not quite literally i'd recommend battletech.
First of all Zigbee is no protocol for wireless sensor networks. The curently supported network topology is to inflexible and the maximum number of devices per subnet (255) is not nearly big enough that Zigbee is of much use for ambitious installations. There are better solutions for sensor nets and zigbees priorities lie in differentz directions than that.
Secondly neither 802.15.4 (The phy and mac layer) nor the Zigbee Protocol (network and app layers) are fully specified. The current specs lack important sections like flexible network topologies (currently only some kind of tree topology is supported), ad-hoc-networking, location of devivces and several other features which the Zigbee alliance proposed and announced but are not documented right now.
In its current form zigbee is not much more than some kind of "low power usb". You can network up to 255 devices with several kilobit/s datarate, but that is about all you can do. All the features that make up good sensor networks are either not yet specified or not even part of the proposed zigbee spec.
There are other and better suited projects for such applications and there are many other companies which have 2,4 GHz sulutions ready for at least to years now. Nordic VLSI for example with their nRF24E1 (www.nvlsi.no). Although in my opinion there are other frequency-bands better suited than 2,4 GHz. It might be licence-free but is much to crowded to be of good use. Because of that many companies also offer 868/422 MHz solutions.
These solutions might lack the zigbee ready logo, but there are numerous other projects which are in my opinion better suited for sensor networks. The most popular being at the moment tinyos (http://webs.cs.berkeley.edu/tos/) an open source os for sensor networks with an extensive library of protocol modules to use fpr your own sensor application. You can even download circuit plans for your own custom design.
This doesn't come as a surprise at all. For decades the United States have relied heavily on immigration to sustain their technological dominance.
In the fourties, fifties and sixties they had the top notch european scientists which either fled europe during world war II (e.g. Einstein) or were "picked up" by the allied forced after the breakdown of Nazi germany (e.g. Wernher von Braun). Also the increased military spending during the cold war added much to the technological and scientific leadership.
And nowadays the united states benefit from Immigrants leaving China, Korea or India to come tu the US. And there are still enough euroipean scientists which choose teh US because of the excellent working conditions there compared to most european countries. Try a scientific search engine of your choice. A high percentage of the scientific papers you'll find there have at least one co-author which is not a american.
Mind you this doesn't mean that there are only immigrants doing your scientific reasearch but the US relies heavily on those brain drain of other countries.
Alas since 9/11 the US is doing everything it can to stop those immigrants from coming over to their country. Strict immigration laws. Surveillance of immigrants from countries which might be allied to the axis of terror or which didn't bend over when the US asked, etc. pp.. The first casualties of the "war on terrorism" were those scientists which wanted to work in the US.
So immigration has dropped 25% percent in the last year and the Ivy-League Colleges and Universities are already complaining because student echange programmes are not very much sought after. Many of my colleages who two years ago wanted to go to the US are now considering to work elsewhere.
The american educational system is not able to produce enough scientifically skilled people to satisfy their own demand so immigration of highly skilled people is vital to their economy.
With all the sanctions regarding immigrants these skilled people turn to other countries and are lost to the US.
Jeff
p.s. just to prevent spelling and grammar flames: I am not a native speaker.
"Seriously, i have a nokia 6600, what can the Zire's do that the 6600 cant."
The Zire is much cheaper. Here in Germany the unsubsidized price of an Nokia 6600 is 590 Euro and the unsubsidized price for an SonyEricsson P900 is 799 Euro. The Zire 31 costs only 160 Euro so i can get one of those and a mobile and be still cheaper than one of your smartphones.
The 6600 also has no handwriting recognition or graffiti support and no touchscreen. It is therefore a good data viewer but don't try to enter anything worthwhile with the standard phone keys.
The only phones which you can actually use as a PDA surrogate would be the P900 or the Handspring Treo. Maybe the Motorola MPX with Windows Smartphone Edition or the SPV. The P900 is rather pricey and the Treo and the Windows Smartphones not available in most parts of europe (notable exception Switzerland)
The killer reason why i won't use neither the 6600 nor the P900 is the integrated camera. Nearly every company we do business with has a "no cameras allowed" policy. So if i had one of those camera phones i wouldn't be granted access to those companies. Every development lab i know of has such policies in place. But when i am in the field i need to be reachable by phone.
In my opinion business phones with integrated camera are a stupid idea but nobody is asking me;-)
Every user which develops applications is a good thing. Talent is only 20% of art. The other 80% come from experience and practice. Nobody is a born coder. Some of the greatest developers in the industry started their career with such development tools. And it took them years of coding to get them where they are today.
Every new application is an argument for using that particular platform even if it is only a mediocre program.
A Linus Torvalds had 12 years working on the linux kernel-code to take him from an apprentice student programmer to the wizkid he is today.
Without gcc and similar free development tools we would never have had something like the current BSDs, Linux, Apache, Gnome, KDE you name it.
Even Microsoft releases the basic development tools for free. (Platform SDK)
This benefits everybody. Without free development tools we would have to pay premium for even the simplest programs and would be very limited in choice because only those who could afford the $1500 Visual Studio or the $3000 IBM Tools could develop applications.
"It is sad that programming is becoming yet another wannabe art and is rather ceasing to be an art altogether."
Elitist bullshit. Even Dali or Picasso had to do mundane tasks to earn their living and it took them decades to perfect their art.
Art lies in the eye of the beholder. The more people are practicing it the more will come out of it. The beginners can learn from the professionals (reading code for example) and the professionals have enough competition so that they are not likely to grow content with what they have accomplished already.
This is what is driving on every art form. Those who would like to limit it are the ones who fear to lose their renown, fame or status.
p.s. i apologise in advance for the spelling and grammar mistakes i am not a native speaker.
I don't want to flame your spelling but the building is called "Hofbrauhaus" (There should be an umlaut instead of the a but slashdot obviously doesn't allow them) which translates to something like court brewery because it once was the brewery of the bavarian royal family.
Also Hitler did not plan to overthrow the government in the "Hofbrauhaus" but in the "Buergerbraukeller". Also the SA didn't exist at that time.
In germany, where i live, we have something called the "Fernabsatzgesetz" regarding purchases made by phone or internet.
The argument goes something like this: Since you have no way of testing the product before you buy it (since you ordered it through the internet) the law grants you the right to return the product within 14 days of your purchase without giving reasons why you'd returned it provided two conditions hold:
1. The product was not damaged by you since you opened it
and
2. The product was not costum built for you.
If either one of these conditions doesn't hold you will have to keep it. A product is custom built if it deviates from the basic or standard product in a way which cannot be undone. So simple upgrades like more memory or a better graphics-adapter don't count as custom built since theses modification can be undone by the vendor.
A personal engraving for your iPod on the other hand would count as custom built.
Of course since in your case it is not a law but only company policy you have to stick to their rules and Apple clearly states that any upgrade counts as custom built and makes the item exempt from the return policy.
So no it's not terrible wrong. Just because you were to lazy to read the terms of service doesn't make the apple bad.
According to the figures presented by Steve Jobs at the last MacWorld San Francisco about four million users have switched to OS X. According to Jobs about 40% of the installed base are using OS X.
So if there were actually "hundreds of thousands" of pirated copies of Halo it would mean that between 5 and 10 % of all OS X users copied Halo. It would also mean that on the mac more people pirated the game than there were copies sold for the Windows platform. I find this highly improbable. If compared to other mac game sales it is even less likely.
Maybe they are just frustrated because nobody seems to buy their bad port?
1. If you refer to eisbrechers music as being rap then you either never heard a song by them or your definition of rap is quite unusual. In your definition wumpscut, rammstein, Das Ich or such bands would also count as german rap;-)
Best chances to hear one of their songs is at one of the many wave/gothic clubs in germany. Most probably during one of their industrial/noise sessions. (Mind you those genre names mean slightly different things in europe)
Both members have excellent track records making goth music and producing other bands of the genre. Before Eisbrecher they were rather succesful with their band Megaherz.
2. As far as I know they aren't on top of any german scene let alone the rap scene. Their debut has only recently been released in germany and they are currently not listet in the german 100 and aren't even listed in the german alternative charts. So I would not say they are top in germany at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
Also because light fuel oil was basically leftovers from the Gasoline production process
LA to Seattle 1100 miles
London to Warsaw 1050 miles
In financial circles the UK is also often called "Treasure Island" because somehow everything can be sold at a higher price there than on the continent. Even products that are the same as on the continent are more expensive there (and no it's not the VAT)
The Smart roadster will not be released at all because it is no longer in production by Smart
Because yours is the correct citation. The quote is from a very famous german author named Friedrich Schiller. From Johanna von Orleans.
I do not know where to put this so I'll attach it to this post. Germany has experimented extensively with breeder-type reactors but we sunk nearly 7 bilion german marks (3.5 billion Euro) into those projects without going anywhere.
The concept of pebble-bed reactors was developed in the 1950s by a german scientist named Rudolf Schulten. The first prototype had been in use between 1966 and 1988 when the project was discontinued after the chernobyl incident. The protoype used helium as a coolant but other inert substances like nitrogen or carbon dioxide are also possible maybe even water but all sources I could find claim that these designs used inert gases as coolant and moderator. Pebble-bed reactors use either uranium, thorium or plutonium for the reaction and produce new fissionable material during the reaction.
There were also plans to build a commercial type reactor using this design but the reactor was never finished due to technical difficulties with the handling of the pebbles themselves and because of safety concerns following the destruction of the chernobyl plant.
There was also another type of breeder which used uranium as fuel and natrium as coolant but there were so many technical difficulties and safety concerns (mainly with the handling of the hot liquid natrium (300 C) that the reactor was never used at all.
Research into breeder technology was cancelled after 1986 mainly because of the chernobyl incident. The other main concern was that breeder type reactors produce fissionable materials. If you use uranium as fuel you will get plutonium as product. So some were concerened that this material might be used to build bombs. This was especially a concern with the natrium-cooled reactor since it didn't use fuel enclosed in pebbles like the other reactors did.
Jeff
Interesting enough JMS even suggested being part of season four of enterprise but get rejected by Berman. Seems to me that Berman cannot even see talent if it jumps him in the face and bites his nose off.
Jeff
"No it didn't. I created one, and I never had a key. Closed beta probably did (I wasn't involved in that)."
Yes it did. I also created one for Open Beta and a key was required. Fileplanet Subscribers allegedly got theirs by E-Mail. I subscribed through Blizzards open beta Page and the open beta key was listet right there on the account creation page (As a Graphic to discourage webcrawlers). and you had to enter it before continuing the registration. Hell the key even had the form xxxxxx-yyyyyy-open-beta.
Jeff
"Based on the politcal slant on Slashdot, I would say yes. Techies tend to sway Left by a large factor. Then again, Slashdot IS worldwide. And most people on the internet by virtue of being international, tend to be very liberal. I'm not saying this in a bad way, but that would be the facts."
I think that it's just a matter of perspective.
I for exymple wouldn't agree with you that slashdot is left-wing but that is largely because I have a different definition of what is being left-wing. That's because in Europe even the US democratic party would be considered conservative in some countries.
So maybe if you look at slashdot from the US POV you might be under the impression that it's rather left-wing. For me it's not. I would classify slashdot as center with a very slight lean to the left.
Jeff
"Pre WW2 Germany had one of the lowest rates of car ownership in Europe, Volkswagen did not deliver a single car to the people before the outbreak of war and almost all freight continued to be moved by rail. The autobahn were designed from the start to move troops and tanks. The propaganda angle was that Germany was moving into the motor age."
That's just plain wrong. The very first Autobahn (as they are called in germany) was the AVUS in Berlin, which had been finished in 1921. The second one was built in Italy and was finished in 1923. Plans to build several more motorways in germany had been considered by the german government in the weimar republic but had to be postponed because the project couldn't be funded due to the high reparations payments to france and the economic downturn at the end of the 1920's.
What you most probably mean is the "Reichsautbahnen", which were built during the third reich. BUt all they did was to take the old plans from the weimar republic and make them real. The major difference between these and the original plans was that the nazis extended them to include more motorways than originally planned (By the start of the war 3.300 Kilometers had been completed. Preparations began in 1933 so it tokk them five years to build all that) and also to impose some kind of standard on the construction of them. But those motorways would to some extend have been built even if there had not been a nazi germany.
Jeff
It's alwa
"(...) and incentives for sterilization ("You want an increase on your welfare check/a free country club membership/a large tax cut/a new car? Go get a vasectomy or tubaligation."). It's not my responsibility to parent the children of folks who should never have had kids in the first place, and I should not be punished for their inteptitude either"
If you'd have posted this comment in a german forum or a forum where there are human rights activists or african americans you would be flamed for your comment 'till kingdom come.
You do realise that the idea to provide such "incentives" for abortion and sterilisation isn't new and that such incentives were often provided by racist or fascist governments all over the world to keep "unworthy life" from reproducing itself?
I'd not trust a country which heeds violence more than nudity to make these incentives anything more than a way to keep poor people from having kids. Hell I'd not even trust my own country.
Where would you draw the line? Not so long ago governments actually paid to have drug addicts, handicapped persons, poor people, aborigines, people with african heritage and all other kinds of "unworthy life", who were deemed unsuitable for raising children, sterilized. More often than not against their will.
I wouldn't trust your judgement as to who is a good parent and who isn't and I wouldn't even trust my own judgement on this matter. But at least I know my history and every country which had such policies abused them to eliminate certain unwanted elements from the gene-pool. Either by using money or force.
All in all every parent should have access to parenting classes, child care facilities should be everywhere and be affordable (because when you need three jobs to survive you simply cannot care enough for your child), contraceptives should be provided at low or no cost, hell even legalize abortion if you have to (we Europeans did at least). Everything else should be the free choice of the people concerned and this choice shouldn't be influenced by some kind of "incentive" because as history has shown many times over, this sooner or later leads to blackmailing people into doing things they otherwise wouldn't have done.
See the Apartheid regime (colored people), Nazi germany ("unworthy life"), The United states prior to 1950 (african americans), Australia (handicapped people and aborigines), Holland (handicapped people and mentally ill people) etc. etc.
Jeff
"Uh... How do you know? If they're just developing this technology, then no one has ever benefitted from it before and you can't be sure whether or not the brain can cope."
I know because there are other conditions which, to some extend, lead to the same phenomenon. If you are suffering from strabismus or nystagmus since birth the same could happen to you. If you suffer from strabismus then you get diplopic images since right and left eye are not parallel.
The brain cannot cope with this kind of double vision because it cannot combine the two images (from the left and right eye) to form a threedimensional image.
So the brain ignores the image from the weaker of the two eyes and the part of the visual cortex, which processes the images from this eye will no longer be used.
This leads to bad vision which cannot be corrected with glasses or lasik since its the visual cortex who cannot correctly process the data.
If this remains untreated to the age of six or seven you will never recover your vision. Due to strabismus and nystagmus the vision of my right eye is only at 5% so i am a good example of that myself.
A popular treatment for this is to use eyepatches. You disable perception from the better eye and force the brain to use the weaker one so that this part of the visual cortex will also be trained. But this treatment has to start when you are still young for it to have any effect.
HTH
Jeff
p.s. i hope i have explaned it correctly since i am not a native speaker (Had to look up some words in the dictionary)
Just some clarification.
These devices won't restore eyesight to people who were born blind. Only those who, at one time in their life, actually could see will profit from such technical replacements.
When you are born you are nearly blind. It takes four to six years for the visual cortex to develop fully. After the age of six this development stops and thats the end of it.
If you are born blind then the cortex will not be trained and no magic eye surgery will restore your vision, because after the age of six the visual cortex will no longer adapt to the new situation.
Even if your eyes are restored to 20/20 vision you will not see a thing because your vision center doesn't know how to interpret the pictures. So these kinds of surgery will only help people which went blind and not those who were born blind. (Still cool stuff)
BTW. It is the same with deafness.
No that has been a phatbot infection.
This poor guy may have been arrested for the development of Netsky/Sasser but according to several IT-Newspapers in germany he was not the only one who was developing them. There were some backings and partners who may have made him their scapegoat although these are mainly rumors.
This guy has also been blamed for phatbot although that one was developed by a different person meanwhile arrested (which at some time in the past had made contact to the Netsky Author)
Jeff
Yeah Netsky and Sasser have gained much more notoriety but actually phatbot has been (and still is) the more dangerous worm/trojan/backdoor around in 2004.
There are currently several thousend different modifications of phatbot around and in contrast to Netsky/Sasser, phatboy infected systems are being commercially exploited as spam relays for UCE/UBE and Hatemail. In Europe neofascist/neonazi groups use phatboy to finance and also to distribute their propaganda.
You can buy lists with the ips of compromised phatboy-infected computers to use for your own spam-enterprise. There are even groups which will code you your own version custom-built to your likings.
Strangely the author of Netsky/Sasser has gained much more public interest. Yeah it was probably more annoying and a real hassle for the sysadmins. On the other hand phatboy is more dangerous than netsky and is actively exploited with criminal intent. Although the writer of phatbot has been arrested as well (coincidently also a german) all you ever hear about is the author of sasser.
Jeff
I feel a bit proud that games from german or european game designers are as popular in the rest of the world as they are here.
Most of the classics have already been named so i will not repeat them. For those of you who seek games which are out of print in the US have you considered importing them over from germany or other places in europe? Of all the mentioned out-of-print games at least RoboRally and Scotland Yard are available here in germany and there may be others I don't think of at the moment.
My all time favourites are:
Civilisation and its successor age of renaiscance.
Diplomacy. No other game can kill friendships that easily. (Once one of our friends walked out vowing that he "would not ever play any game with us again" after being backstabbed more than once during negotiations.
Also one of those games which can take hours or even days to finish when several expert players play it. (The phrase: "let's play a quick diplomacy became some kind of running gag)
Settlers of Catan
Carcassonne
I'd highly recommend the lord of the rings boardgame as one of only a few truly cooperative gaming experiences.
Robo Rally
Junta
Kreml
If you take the term board game not quite literally i'd recommend battletech.
Jeff
First of all Zigbee is no protocol for wireless sensor networks. The curently supported network topology is to inflexible and the maximum number of devices per subnet (255) is not nearly big enough that Zigbee is of much use for ambitious installations. There are better solutions for sensor nets and zigbees priorities lie in differentz directions than that.
Secondly neither 802.15.4 (The phy and mac layer) nor the Zigbee Protocol (network and app layers) are fully specified. The current specs lack important sections like flexible network topologies (currently only some kind of tree topology is supported), ad-hoc-networking, location of devivces and several other features which the Zigbee alliance proposed and announced but are not documented right now.
In its current form zigbee is not much more than some kind of "low power usb". You can network up to 255 devices with several kilobit/s datarate, but that is about all you can do. All the features that make up good sensor networks are either not yet specified or not even part of the proposed zigbee spec.
There are other and better suited projects for such applications and there are many other companies which have 2,4 GHz sulutions ready for at least to years now. Nordic VLSI for example with their nRF24E1 (www.nvlsi.no). Although in my opinion there are other frequency-bands better suited than 2,4 GHz. It might be licence-free but is much to crowded to be of good use. Because of that many companies also offer 868/422 MHz solutions.
These solutions might lack the zigbee ready logo, but there are numerous other projects which are in my opinion better suited for sensor networks. The most popular being at the moment tinyos (http://webs.cs.berkeley.edu/tos/) an open source os for sensor networks with an extensive library of protocol modules to use fpr your own sensor application. You can even download circuit plans for your own custom design.
Jeff
This doesn't come as a surprise at all.
For decades the United States have relied heavily on immigration to sustain their technological dominance.
In the fourties, fifties and sixties they had the top notch european scientists which either fled europe during world war II (e.g. Einstein) or were "picked up" by the allied forced after the breakdown of Nazi germany (e.g. Wernher von Braun). Also the increased military spending during the cold war added much to the technological and scientific leadership.
And nowadays the united states benefit from Immigrants leaving China, Korea or India to come tu the US. And there are still enough euroipean scientists which choose teh US because of the excellent working conditions there compared to most european countries. Try a scientific search engine of your choice. A high percentage of the scientific papers you'll find there have at least one co-author which is not a american.
Mind you this doesn't mean that there are only immigrants doing your scientific reasearch but the US relies heavily on those brain drain of other countries.
Alas since 9/11 the US is doing everything it can to stop those immigrants from coming over to their country. Strict immigration laws. Surveillance of immigrants from countries which might be allied to the axis of terror or which didn't bend over when the US asked, etc. pp.. The first casualties of the "war on terrorism" were those scientists which wanted to work in the US.
So immigration has dropped 25% percent in the last year and the Ivy-League Colleges and Universities are already complaining because student echange programmes are not very much sought after. Many of my colleages who two years ago wanted to go to the US are now considering to work elsewhere.
The american educational system is not able to produce enough scientifically skilled people to satisfy their own demand so immigration of highly skilled people is vital to their economy.
With all the sanctions regarding immigrants these skilled people turn to other countries and are lost to the US.
Jeff
p.s. just to prevent spelling and grammar flames: I am not a native speaker.
"Seriously, i have a nokia 6600, what can the Zire's do that the 6600 cant."
;-)
The Zire is much cheaper. Here in Germany the unsubsidized price of an Nokia 6600 is 590 Euro and the unsubsidized price for an SonyEricsson P900 is 799 Euro. The Zire 31 costs only 160 Euro so i can get one of those and a mobile and be still cheaper than one of your smartphones.
The 6600 also has no handwriting recognition or graffiti support and no touchscreen. It is therefore a good data viewer but don't try to enter anything worthwhile with the standard phone keys.
The only phones which you can actually use as a PDA surrogate would be the P900 or the Handspring Treo. Maybe the Motorola MPX with Windows Smartphone Edition or the SPV. The P900 is rather pricey and the Treo and the Windows Smartphones not available in most parts of europe (notable exception Switzerland)
The killer reason why i won't use neither the 6600 nor the P900 is the integrated camera. Nearly every company we do business with has a "no cameras allowed" policy. So if i had one of those camera phones i wouldn't be granted access to those companies. Every development lab i know of has such policies in place. But when i am in the field i need to be reachable by phone.
In my opinion business phones with integrated camera are a stupid idea but nobody is asking me
Jeff
Are you sure that you set up iTunes correctly? m4a is the extension for aac-files.
Jeff
"Oh please. Who exactly will benefit, and how?"
Every user which develops applications is a good thing. Talent is only 20% of art. The other 80% come from experience and practice. Nobody is a born coder. Some of the greatest developers in the industry started their career with such development tools. And it took them years of coding to get them where they are today.
Every new application is an argument for using that particular platform even if it is only a mediocre program.
A Linus Torvalds had 12 years working on the linux kernel-code to take him from an apprentice student programmer to the wizkid he is today.
Without gcc and similar free development tools we would never have had something like the current BSDs, Linux, Apache, Gnome, KDE you name it.
Even Microsoft releases the basic development tools for free. (Platform SDK)
This benefits everybody. Without free development tools we would have to pay premium for even the simplest programs and would be very limited in choice because only those who could afford the $1500 Visual Studio or the $3000 IBM Tools could develop applications.
"It is sad that programming is becoming yet another wannabe art and is rather ceasing to be an art altogether."
Elitist bullshit. Even Dali or Picasso had to do mundane tasks to earn their living and it took them decades to perfect their art.
Art lies in the eye of the beholder. The more people are practicing it the more will come out of it. The beginners can learn from the professionals (reading code for example) and the professionals have enough competition so that they are not likely to grow content with what they have accomplished already.
This is what is driving on every art form. Those who would like to limit it are the ones who fear to lose their renown, fame or status.
p.s. i apologise in advance for the spelling and grammar mistakes i am not a native speaker.
"Hitler in the Haufbrauhause"
I don't want to flame your spelling but the building is called "Hofbrauhaus" (There should be an umlaut instead of the a but slashdot obviously doesn't allow them) which translates to something like court brewery because it once was the brewery of the bavarian royal family.
Also Hitler did not plan to overthrow the government in the "Hofbrauhaus" but in the "Buergerbraukeller". Also the SA didn't exist at that time.
Just to clarify things.
In germany, where i live, we have something called the "Fernabsatzgesetz" regarding purchases made by phone or internet.
The argument goes something like this: Since you have no way of testing the product before you buy it (since you ordered it through the internet) the law grants you the right to return the product within 14 days of your purchase without giving reasons why you'd returned it provided two conditions hold:
1. The product was not damaged by you since you opened it
and
2. The product was not costum built for you.
If either one of these conditions doesn't hold you will have to keep it. A product is custom built if it deviates from the basic or standard product in a way which cannot be undone. So simple upgrades like more memory or a better graphics-adapter don't count as custom built since theses modification can be undone by the vendor.
A personal engraving for your iPod on the other hand would count as custom built.
Of course since in your case it is not a law but only company policy you have to stick to their rules and Apple clearly states that any upgrade counts as custom built and makes the item exempt from the return policy.
So no it's not terrible wrong. Just because you were to lazy to read the terms of service doesn't make the apple bad.
Regards
Jeff
According to the figures presented by Steve Jobs at the last MacWorld San Francisco about four million users have switched to OS X. According to Jobs about 40% of the installed base are using OS X.
So if there were actually "hundreds of thousands" of pirated copies of Halo it would mean that between 5 and 10 % of all OS X users copied Halo. It would also mean that on the mac more people pirated the game than there were copies sold for the Windows platform. I find this highly improbable. If compared to other mac game sales it is even less likely.
Maybe they are just frustrated because nobody seems to buy their bad port?
Regards
Jeff
1. If you refer to eisbrechers music as being rap then you either never heard a song by them or your definition of rap is quite unusual. In your definition wumpscut, rammstein, Das Ich or such bands would also count as german rap ;-)
Best chances to hear one of their songs is at one of the many wave/gothic clubs in germany. Most probably during one of their industrial/noise sessions. (Mind you those genre names mean slightly different things in europe)
Both members have excellent track records making goth music and producing other bands of the genre. Before Eisbrecher they were rather succesful with their band Megaherz.
2. As far as I know they aren't on top of any german scene let alone the rap scene. Their debut has only recently been released in germany and they are currently not listet in the german 100 and aren't even listed in the german alternative charts. So I would not say they are top in germany at the moment.
Greetings from germany
Jef