...and the internet happened because of the National Information Infrastructure bill......which was proposed by, written by, and championed by Al Gore.
See, Clinton wasn't responsible for the boom in the late 90's. It was an entirely different Democrat!
I'm an east coast liberal transplanted into the deep red state of South Dakota. So my vote doesn't matter one bit, but I cast it anyway. There was no line; it's a small town and we have nice weather today.
The problem is that 'waterproofing' is a short-term guarantee. Water is insidious, it dissolves almost anything (although some things like metals very slowly), and it will eventually creep inside of any 'waterproof' container. That's why there's such a problem designing radioactive dumps like Yucca Mountain -- water would eventually eat its way into the vitrified radioactive cask.
Gas station underground tanks can survive for 10-20 years and still be waterproof. But most of the infrastructure in NYC is a hundred years old. There isn't anything waterproof in that city. Even brand new structures are probably permeable to water, if the designers just never thought it would be an issue.
To have an effective anti-viral, you need to know what virus you're defending against. A would-be assassin could make a targeted virus out of a dozen or more base strains -- ebola, smallpox, hemorrhagic fever, maybe even the common cold. You might not know about the virus until the target began showing symptoms.
Maybe high-value targets could take an omnibus anti-virus, protecting them against all likely viral attacks. But if that's open-access as well, the assassins should be able to find (or engineer) a virus to run around it. This could become an interesting shell game.
The Gawker sites have backup blogs that are now up. Gawker is at http://live.gawker.com/ Lifehacker is at http://live.lifehacker.com/ and so on. They seem to have already thought of a backup plan, albeit not a complete one.
Questions about site backup should be sent to Gizmodo, anyhow.
I've made three posts in response to this article, and only mentioned the comic in two of them. If I can't mention my comic in response to an article which is precisely relevant, when can I?
Thanks for your review of my faces; you must be looking only at the current post, with the two male main characters. My female faces and a few other males in the comic have less blocky features. But I know my limitations as an artist -- I'm a writer first and foremost. Hope you read a few more pages and enjoy the story!
The Palestines and Jews designed viruses to wipe out each other. Someone in Asia created a plague to kill everyone with red hair. China was largely devastated when their population fell victim to a targeted airborne rabies. The global police force used a targeted viral outbreak to crush and occupy Korea. Oslo, Seattle, Mexico City, and Hong Kong were sites of accidental viral releases that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
...and I think I'm underestimating the actual technology. In my comic's timeline we're not supposed to have targeted plagues until 2030 or so.
Biowarfare is no freakin' joke. It's bad enough when superpowers have them, but when maniacs have the knowledge to design viruses in their own basement this world is going to have serious problems. (How are people going to get that knowledge? In my comic I blamed the Open Source movement...and with projects like AMOS, they may prove me right.)
Theoretically you can put in a generation limit; a mutation that appears only after a number of generations that kills the virus and makes it untenable. That's easier to do with bacteria, but it might still be possible with virus agents. Then even if the infectious agent mutates, it will still die out after X number of replications, limiting your plague to a small region.
Damnit, this technology is the entire conceit behind my comic Genocide Man, but it's not supposed to exist until the year 2030 or so. The 21st century is consistently being more lethal than even I predicted.
The soft underbellies were mostly organs and guts -- nutritious but not meaty. The meatiest parts of the triceratops were the huge neck muscles.
It's not clear whether the T-Rex killed the triceratops himself, or found and ate already dead carcasses. But either way, the scientists have concluded from bite marks that this is how the feasting went.
This is not entirely true. I know of plenty of potential content creation uses for tablets in businesses -- filling out forms, taking notes, product validation (with the imbedded camera), group presentation mockups, etc. It's obvious that Microsoft is aiming to get its foot into the potential corporate tablet market, and is not really competing with Apple for the recreational content consumer market.
The key word repeated up there is 'potential'. Is this tablet good enough to make corporations change their practices to use it, and is there enough demand to support a corporate tablet industry at all? Those are the questions that are going to determine whether Surface survives or not.
One thing to note, however, is that Janeway's crew were not all starfleet. She had a lot of terrorists and revolutionaries working under her. In that situation I would expect a captain to be even more hard-ass than usual, to maintain discipline and order.
There's also the obvious benefit that if you can make petrol, then you can make pretty much any other type of hydrocarbon. Being able to do that with processivity is a huge breakthrough in and of itself.
This. The next news article will be, 'Scientists Turn Air Into Plastic', and it should get a lot more attention.
Note that Romney has said he will not end the mortgage deduction on middle class houses, but he didn't answer whether he'd end it for wealthy homeowners.
But the basic answer to your question is that the math doesn't add up. It can't add up. What Romney is counting on is that his policies will create perpetual 4% growth in the country, and that growth will add to tax revenues as everyone gets wealthier. It's 'revenue neutral' because although he will drastically cut taxes, there should be more to tax once the magical growth starts.
His plan makes perfect sense if you believe in market confidence fairies and the Ayn Rand fiction of people who only produce when they're treated like kings. He believes the country isn't growing because it's in a bad mood, and lower taxes will put everyone in a good mood again. That's the sum total of his economic theory.
In short, the Romney plan is complete crap. I know you didn't want anti-Romney propaganda, but there's just no way to talk about that plan in a realistic fashion without pointing out that it's based on fantasy.
If you're not sure what practical application this research contributes to, consider this: We can now create genetic offspring of infertile people. More than that, we can now create genetic offspring of people without their knowledge or consent. All we need is a stem cell sample. Note recent research that enables skin cells to be turned into stem cells.
It shouldn't be long before companies are advertising services like 'Have George Clooney's baby' or 'Father Christina Hendricks' child'. That's just the tip of the iceberg. The first child with two daddies -- literally -- is just around the corner.
I do know that needing to wear a helmet has dissuaded me from renting a bike. I'm not going to put on a helmet that some stranger has been wearing. I saw a bike rental place in Chicago this summer when I was sightseeing, and I thought about getting one, but decided not to when I read that I had to wear their helmet as well.
If I had my own bike, though, I wouldn't have a problem wearing my own helmet. However, I don't own a bike -- I have a car for transportation, and an elliptical machine for exercise.
"Coming up on your shitty cable news program, TERRORIST PEDOPHILES can print out NEARLY ANY AUTOMATIC DEATH WEAPON AT HOME!
Those would be dumbass terrorist pedophiles, then. If they were smart they'd just print out their own child-sized sex doll. Or wait, would that be illegal too?
You realize that when you speak like this about a person, you become that which you claim to hate
No. If you call someone a 'fucking moron' out of anger then yes, you are lowering yourself to their level. But you can call someone a 'moron' because that really is the most apt word to describe what they are, and add the adjective 'fucking' to emphasize just how perfectly they match that derogatory term, and that's okay.
It is not debasing yourself to call people what they really are. Glen Beck is emphatically a moron. It's okay to admit that, and I would say it's insightful to announce it to others.
Perhaps if your citizens were better armed, stories like this would turn out better: http://www.borderlandbeat.com/...
That's a terrible example. Sure, there are a gazillion guns in the Borderlands, but whenever you shoot anyone they just respawn at a Hyperion 'New U' station. They have so many guns mostly to protect against skags and bullymongs.
What we really need to do is make Siren powers illegal. Once we figure out how to 3D print those then we're in trouble.
But in a world with much more present and pressing issues like war, hunger, unemployment, recession, etc. you can't very well expect every newspaper to lead with a "Average Global Temps Expected to Rise By 1-2 Degrees Celsius Over the Next 50-100 years" headline.
That's a shame, because global warming is likely to lead to a ten-fold increase in war, hunger, unemployment and recession.
When going after your second boss fight, you find pin-up posters of Moxxy in a storage container. They're not quite naked; she's wearing lacy g-strings. There might be more later -- my gunzerker is only level 8 so far. I've met Moxxy at her new bar, and I'm hopeful she'll have work for me to do in later levels.
In general, though, I think they've toned down the raunchiness just a tad. The profanity is gone (the 'Angel' says 'darn', then corrects herself and says, 'Oh, sorry -- drat.') and while there's more gun and gib porn than ever there have been no adult situations so far. But then again I am only level 8, maybe it appears later.
But they are selling it and promoting it as a functional Desktop OS.
If Microsoft said that Win8 was only for tablets, phones, and game consoles then I don't think anyone would have a problem with it. But they're promoting it as the next evolution of their Desktop OS, even though it is terrible for most desktop PC tasks. (Nevermind what PARC researchers have to say; the gaming-oriented review of Windows 8 at Kotaku is blistering.)
For tablets, phones, and game consoles Windows 8 might be a big step forward. But for PC application users it's a step back to the 1990s, and they have a good reason to complain about that.
Diablo 3 is almost the same as Diablo 2 pre-LoD with better graphics and a gameplay rebalanced toward more casual players than hardcore one:
It's not a matter of 'easier' or 'more difficult', or even of 'casual' or 'hardcore'. D2 had great gameplay balance. D3's balance is shitty, in my humble opinion.
In normal difficulty D3 is super-easy, which does appeal to casual players. But in Hell difficulty and above it requires hardcore dedication, grinding, and the auction house in order to have a chance. So the appeal to casual players disappears quickly. The end game appeals only to hardcore players, or possibly to the very rich.
In contrast D2 was challenging for new players in normal difficulty and ramped up smoothly with the players' skill.
There are only two reasons to continue playing games like this -- the end game, or replayability. The end game for D3 is hardcore only. Because of the 'everyone can have all builds' design decision, D3 has zero replay value once you have tried all the classes. D3 was a complete design mistake, and its appeal is a pale shadow of the appeal of D2.
That said, it's a fine game to waste 40 hours with and then walk away. I don't think Blizzard wants players to do that, but it's the only reasonable way to play D3.
Slashdot Mirror
...and the internet happened because of the National Information Infrastructure bill... ...which was proposed by, written by, and championed by Al Gore.
See, Clinton wasn't responsible for the boom in the late 90's. It was an entirely different Democrat!
I'm an east coast liberal transplanted into the deep red state of South Dakota. So my vote doesn't matter one bit, but I cast it anyway. There was no line; it's a small town and we have nice weather today.
I think the original poster is saying that an 86.3% chance will come true 97% of the time.
Between him, you, and me, one of us doesn't understand statistics.
The problem is that 'waterproofing' is a short-term guarantee. Water is insidious, it dissolves almost anything (although some things like metals very slowly), and it will eventually creep inside of any 'waterproof' container. That's why there's such a problem designing radioactive dumps like Yucca Mountain -- water would eventually eat its way into the vitrified radioactive cask.
Gas station underground tanks can survive for 10-20 years and still be waterproof. But most of the infrastructure in NYC is a hundred years old. There isn't anything waterproof in that city. Even brand new structures are probably permeable to water, if the designers just never thought it would be an issue.
To have an effective anti-viral, you need to know what virus you're defending against. A would-be assassin could make a targeted virus out of a dozen or more base strains -- ebola, smallpox, hemorrhagic fever, maybe even the common cold. You might not know about the virus until the target began showing symptoms.
Maybe high-value targets could take an omnibus anti-virus, protecting them against all likely viral attacks. But if that's open-access as well, the assassins should be able to find (or engineer) a virus to run around it. This could become an interesting shell game.
The Gawker sites have backup blogs that are now up. Gawker is at http://live.gawker.com/ Lifehacker is at http://live.lifehacker.com/ and so on. They seem to have already thought of a backup plan, albeit not a complete one.
Questions about site backup should be sent to Gizmodo, anyhow.
I've made three posts in response to this article, and only mentioned the comic in two of them. If I can't mention my comic in response to an article which is precisely relevant, when can I?
Thanks for your review of my faces; you must be looking only at the current post, with the two male main characters. My female faces and a few other males in the comic have less blocky features. But I know my limitations as an artist -- I'm a writer first and foremost. Hope you read a few more pages and enjoy the story!
In my comic Genocide Man:
The Palestines and Jews designed viruses to wipe out each other.
Someone in Asia created a plague to kill everyone with red hair.
China was largely devastated when their population fell victim to a targeted airborne rabies.
The global police force used a targeted viral outbreak to crush and occupy Korea.
Oslo, Seattle, Mexico City, and Hong Kong were sites of accidental viral releases that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
...and I think I'm underestimating the actual technology. In my comic's timeline we're not supposed to have targeted plagues until 2030 or so.
Biowarfare is no freakin' joke. It's bad enough when superpowers have them, but when maniacs have the knowledge to design viruses in their own basement this world is going to have serious problems. (How are people going to get that knowledge? In my comic I blamed the Open Source movement...and with projects like AMOS, they may prove me right.)
Theoretically you can put in a generation limit; a mutation that appears only after a number of generations that kills the virus and makes it untenable. That's easier to do with bacteria, but it might still be possible with virus agents. Then even if the infectious agent mutates, it will still die out after X number of replications, limiting your plague to a small region.
Damnit, this technology is the entire conceit behind my comic Genocide Man, but it's not supposed to exist until the year 2030 or so. The 21st century is consistently being more lethal than even I predicted.
The soft underbellies were mostly organs and guts -- nutritious but not meaty. The meatiest parts of the triceratops were the huge neck muscles.
It's not clear whether the T-Rex killed the triceratops himself, or found and ate already dead carcasses. But either way, the scientists have concluded from bite marks that this is how the feasting went.
This is not entirely true. I know of plenty of potential content creation uses for tablets in businesses -- filling out forms, taking notes, product validation (with the imbedded camera), group presentation mockups, etc. It's obvious that Microsoft is aiming to get its foot into the potential corporate tablet market, and is not really competing with Apple for the recreational content consumer market.
The key word repeated up there is 'potential'. Is this tablet good enough to make corporations change their practices to use it, and is there enough demand to support a corporate tablet industry at all? Those are the questions that are going to determine whether Surface survives or not.
One thing to note, however, is that Janeway's crew were not all starfleet. She had a lot of terrorists and revolutionaries working under her. In that situation I would expect a captain to be even more hard-ass than usual, to maintain discipline and order.
There's also the obvious benefit that if you can make petrol, then you can make pretty much any other type of hydrocarbon. Being able to do that with processivity is a huge breakthrough in and of itself.
This. The next news article will be, 'Scientists Turn Air Into Plastic', and it should get a lot more attention.
Note that Romney has said he will not end the mortgage deduction on middle class houses, but he didn't answer whether he'd end it for wealthy homeowners.
But the basic answer to your question is that the math doesn't add up. It can't add up. What Romney is counting on is that his policies will create perpetual 4% growth in the country, and that growth will add to tax revenues as everyone gets wealthier. It's 'revenue neutral' because although he will drastically cut taxes, there should be more to tax once the magical growth starts.
His plan makes perfect sense if you believe in market confidence fairies and the Ayn Rand fiction of people who only produce when they're treated like kings. He believes the country isn't growing because it's in a bad mood, and lower taxes will put everyone in a good mood again. That's the sum total of his economic theory.
In short, the Romney plan is complete crap. I know you didn't want anti-Romney propaganda, but there's just no way to talk about that plan in a realistic fashion without pointing out that it's based on fantasy.
If you're not sure what practical application this research contributes to, consider this: We can now create genetic offspring of infertile people. More than that, we can now create genetic offspring of people without their knowledge or consent. All we need is a stem cell sample. Note recent research that enables skin cells to be turned into stem cells.
It shouldn't be long before companies are advertising services like 'Have George Clooney's baby' or 'Father Christina Hendricks' child'. That's just the tip of the iceberg. The first child with two daddies -- literally -- is just around the corner.
I do know that needing to wear a helmet has dissuaded me from renting a bike. I'm not going to put on a helmet that some stranger has been wearing. I saw a bike rental place in Chicago this summer when I was sightseeing, and I thought about getting one, but decided not to when I read that I had to wear their helmet as well.
If I had my own bike, though, I wouldn't have a problem wearing my own helmet. However, I don't own a bike -- I have a car for transportation, and an elliptical machine for exercise.
"Coming up on your shitty cable news program, TERRORIST PEDOPHILES can print out NEARLY ANY AUTOMATIC DEATH WEAPON AT HOME!
Those would be dumbass terrorist pedophiles, then. If they were smart they'd just print out their own child-sized sex doll. Or wait, would that be illegal too?
You realize that when you speak like this about a person, you become that which you claim to hate
No. If you call someone a 'fucking moron' out of anger then yes, you are lowering yourself to their level. But you can call someone a 'moron' because that really is the most apt word to describe what they are, and add the adjective 'fucking' to emphasize just how perfectly they match that derogatory term, and that's okay.
It is not debasing yourself to call people what they really are. Glen Beck is emphatically a moron. It's okay to admit that, and I would say it's insightful to announce it to others.
Perhaps if your citizens were better armed, stories like this would turn out better: //www.borderlandbeat.com/ ...
http:
That's a terrible example. Sure, there are a gazillion guns in the Borderlands, but whenever you shoot anyone they just respawn at a Hyperion 'New U' station. They have so many guns mostly to protect against skags and bullymongs.
What we really need to do is make Siren powers illegal. Once we figure out how to 3D print those then we're in trouble.
But in a world with much more present and pressing issues like war, hunger, unemployment, recession, etc. you can't very well expect every newspaper to lead with a "Average Global Temps Expected to Rise By 1-2 Degrees Celsius Over the Next 50-100 years" headline.
That's a shame, because global warming is likely to lead to a ten-fold increase in war, hunger, unemployment and recession.
When going after your second boss fight, you find pin-up posters of Moxxy in a storage container. They're not quite naked; she's wearing lacy g-strings. There might be more later -- my gunzerker is only level 8 so far. I've met Moxxy at her new bar, and I'm hopeful she'll have work for me to do in later levels.
In general, though, I think they've toned down the raunchiness just a tad. The profanity is gone (the 'Angel' says 'darn', then corrects herself and says, 'Oh, sorry -- drat.') and while there's more gun and gib porn than ever there have been no adult situations so far. But then again I am only level 8, maybe it appears later.
But they are selling it and promoting it as a functional Desktop OS.
If Microsoft said that Win8 was only for tablets, phones, and game consoles then I don't think anyone would have a problem with it. But they're promoting it as the next evolution of their Desktop OS, even though it is terrible for most desktop PC tasks. (Nevermind what PARC researchers have to say; the gaming-oriented review of Windows 8 at Kotaku is blistering.)
For tablets, phones, and game consoles Windows 8 might be a big step forward. But for PC application users it's a step back to the 1990s, and they have a good reason to complain about that.
No, but judging by how often his yet-to-be-published article has been cited, they will.
Diablo 3 is almost the same as Diablo 2 pre-LoD with better graphics and a gameplay rebalanced toward more casual players than hardcore one:
It's not a matter of 'easier' or 'more difficult', or even of 'casual' or 'hardcore'. D2 had great gameplay balance. D3's balance is shitty, in my humble opinion.
In normal difficulty D3 is super-easy, which does appeal to casual players. But in Hell difficulty and above it requires hardcore dedication, grinding, and the auction house in order to have a chance. So the appeal to casual players disappears quickly. The end game appeals only to hardcore players, or possibly to the very rich.
In contrast D2 was challenging for new players in normal difficulty and ramped up smoothly with the players' skill.
There are only two reasons to continue playing games like this -- the end game, or replayability. The end game for D3 is hardcore only. Because of the 'everyone can have all builds' design decision, D3 has zero replay value once you have tried all the classes. D3 was a complete design mistake, and its appeal is a pale shadow of the appeal of D2.
That said, it's a fine game to waste 40 hours with and then walk away. I don't think Blizzard wants players to do that, but it's the only reasonable way to play D3.