The difference between America and China is that you are free to speak your criticisms of the American Government without fear of punishment from said Government.
Phew! Well that makes it all better then. No problems here, I can talk about it!
Preserving (at least for a little while longer) your current business model at the cost of pissing off a tiny fraction of your customer base isn't necessarily the worst trade.
There's no guarantee they were actually preserving their business model at all, though. Indeed, I don't think there was much benefit to them from shutting down BNetD at all when you boil it right down. The "lost sales due to piracy" bogeyman is just that, in my opinion, a bogeyman. I'm fine with making an effort to prevent piracy, but I think a balanced approach makes a lot more sense than kneejerk knockdowns of legitimate projects. And just for clarity... by legitimate I mean actually legitimate, not things like "this allows you to play *cough* homebrew games *cough* like this enjoyable monochrome table tennis game, oh, and on a completely unrelated note here's a list of 1,500 commercial games that are known to work through sheer coincidence and certainly not due to any specific work on my part".
Anyway, I really don't think they would've lost much from letting BNetD go, like you said the vast bulk of their revenue no longer comes from anything related to Battle.Net. They had no plans to continue making games for Battle.Net at that time, either. Warcraft 3, nevermind the earlier Diablo and Warcraft games, were already on their long march into the sunset. The vast majority of gamers who played those games already owned valid CDkeys, so it made no difference whether they were playing on Battle.Net or BNetD. Sure, the games were still for sale (I'm pretty sure you can still find Diablo 1 on store shelves, crazy) but I'm not even convinced the occasional people who buy those would stop even if there was a BNetD they could play with no CDkey. Battle.Net still has the critical mass of people. Anyone who was playing on BNetD solely for the lack of CDKey checking is probably a person who wasn't going to buy the game anyway. Even if they were, I think trading a bit of monetary gravy from sales of their many-year-old games to get a legion of hardcore geeks and hackers to sing their praises to everyone and build a massive community around their games, could be as beneficial as the shutting down BNetD option.... WoW, which due to the basic nature of the game is essentially un-BNetD-able.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. That link is just one of many examples. I actually downloaded (from The Pirate Bay) and ran my own WoW server for a time. It was pretty simple, and there are already well-established projects out there working to replicate all the server-side content like quests and NPC texts and such (it helps that most of that information has already been very thoroughly cataloged in third-party sites like thottbot). Most of the rest of the stuff like graphics, maps, items are part of the client data and can be easily extracted from a trial version.
So, far from being un-BNetD-able, it has already been done. It has just been driven underground by Blizzard's treatment of the community.
Why do both CPU manufacturers include those shitty, awful heatsinks anyway? Do they want people to think their processors overheat and are loud and suck? And that's before the fan starts shrieking and sticking due to dead bearing or crap oil or clogged with dust. I haven't gotten a CPU with a good stock heatsink since the Pentium III. Hell, if AMD or Intel decided to contract out to Zalman or something, they could suddenly start marketing their CPUs as super quiet and cool and power efficient and probably eat up a bunch of market share. People are tired of the noise and heat.
But look at this from another perspective: They wanted to be able to send any CD-Key they want to Blizzard and get a yes/no response. Does that really make sense from a copy protection point of view?
I don't see the issue. I can already send any CD-Key I want to Blizzard and get a yes/no response. It's a little more inconvenient as I have to start up the game and try to connect to a network game, but it's not like the ability isn't there. If the concern is that they could do it *faster*, that's an easy problem to solve, and simple involves forcing a delay in response, on the server side if necessary.
But again, this is all a lot of work for a company who has no interest in supporting people's rights to use the products they buy outside of Blizzard's own carefully chaperoned sandbox. So a lawsuit was the obvious choice. I'm not disagreeing that it wasn't an obvious choice for them, of course it was. I'm saying they need to change their whole world outlook so that perhaps that's not the obvious choice anymore. Your community and your fans are what counts in the long term, not your short-term profits.
If, for the noblest of noble reasons, I tried to create my own server to authenticate Windows XP/Vista boxes, could I reaaaaaaaaaaallllllly go crying about how big bad mean ol Microsoft was bullying me with their lawyers?
If your server was just going to be a passthrough to authenticate through Microsoft's own servers, I don't see the problem. And either way, as long as it was really for the "noblest of noble reasons" I would still support you, and any smart company would too.
Companies -- and this goes beyond gaming, beyond even computers -- need to start remembering who butters their damn bread. The customer may not always be right, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't always treat them with all due respect.
Actually, bnetd tried to discuss the issue with blizzard so they could authenticate against their CD-key servers. It's not like the effort wasn't made. Blizzard refused, because they would much rather sue them out of existence. And that's exactly what they did.
Thanks for the info. If I hadn't already posted I'd vote you up informative, but since I have, I'll have to settle for telling you you're informative instead.
Seriously though, thanks, I didn't realize that moving to on-die cache would've made such a drastic difference in transistor count. Very interesting.
Bah, Windows 3.11 ran fine on my 486sx 4MB dual-scan passive color AST laptop. Not that I used Windows much. Slackware mostly, and DOS for games (wow, how times have changed... not. sigh)
On the other side of the coin, the design for an original Pentium had around 5 million transistors. Modern processors have more like 300 million. What's changed? Well, dual-core, and 64-bit, sure. But a lot of those extra transistors are to create extra pipelines or additional specialized instructions or even specialized pipelines that only run specialized instructions to compensate for the fact that the clock speeds just won't ramp up as quickly as designers want. Perhaps if we were able to start cranking up the clock speeds again, it would be possible to start streamlining those pipelines and instruction sets into something more manageable for keeping your signals properly synchronized.
The specs on the latest Samsung SSD (if accurate) beat out the fastest magnetic media you can buy: 100MB/Sec read, 80MB/sec write.
Not really true. Seagate's Cheetah 15K.5 300GB, being (last I checked) the fastest magnetic media you can buy, can easily beat that. It peaks at 135MB/sec. Some other 15,000 rpm drives can post comparable numbers.
I still agree with your post in general, but that specific statement is untrue.
I used to know a guy who always did this, except he did it quite intentionally, as a challenge to himself (I guess he was chronically bored or something). His goal was to write programs in as few lines as possible, where "line" was synonymous with "semicolon". Insane recursive functions with enormous nested chains of trinary "condition ? result : else" operators were the norm.
Code that was written while drunk, high, or half-asleep I will be deeply suspicious of, and probably needs to be refactored immediately. Anything else probably needs refactoring as well, but less urgently.
The benefits of superconductors that do not need (much) energy wasted on active cooling are potentially huge, affecting almost all areas of engineering and science. Electrical losses in power distribution could be essentially completely eliminated. Propulsion and transportation (extremely efficient motors, essentially frictionless maglev for everything) would probably be the first large change to really affect society. Superconductors could also potentially solve our energy storage dilemma. Chemical batteries? Flywheels? How quaint. Magnetism in general would probably become a major part of our lives. It would have an impact on space technology as well, though I can't say for certain what. But perhaps some way of using superconducting magnets to harness the interplanetary magnetic field could be devised. There are definitely major implications of resistance-free conductors for electronics and computers as well.
But that's just what we know will happen. It's entirely possible that the development of an easily usable material having such a unique relationship with electricity and magnetism, may spark a rush of development leading to revolutionary new things we've never even conceptualized before, the same way the early development of electricity did. Who knows. It will be very exciting, anyway, no matter how it turns out.
As a former Palm user, I've gotta agree. I was a Palm user back during the heady Palm V days, when Palm was undisputed king of PDAs. Definitely resting on their laurels was a huge factor. WinCE was adding multimedia features, had better resolution, and way better color support than PalmOS could handle. Syncing a WinCE device became easier and easier. Extending a WinCE device with external memory cards, add-ons like wireless adapters started happening. Palm just sat there. They added half-assed color support, but didn't really try very hard to make it catch on. People might not have known they even wanted to have color, but when offered the choice of WinCE with vibrant, deep-color displays and the vast majority of applications taking full advantage of the colorful display, the decision was obvious.
There was only one bright light for the Palm community, and that was Handspring. They were at least moving, and in the right direction. Palm gave them no support, and their means were limited as they did not control the OS. Eventually Palm bought them and they promptly stopped innovating. And that was pretty much the end of any hope that Palm would ever become the dominant PDA manufacturer again.
I have no idea what they were spending all that time doing, but whatever they were doing it clearly wasn't improving things in a tangible way for the vast, vast majority of users, and that's where they failed. It was like a hard drive manufacturer who instead of trying to increase the capacity of their drives, decided to stay with the same capacity and instead do things like increase power efficiency and reliability... Fine, and there's a niche for that, but if you're sitting in a majority position and decide to focus on a niche instead, that may not be the wisest of business choices unless you see some sort of massive reward in that niche. In Palm's case, whatever niche they saw, there was no reward there. And even if there were, there's a point where you will even fall out of your niche if you don't start paying attention to other areas of your business. I don't think anyone cares how reliable a hard drive is if it's only 10MB and I can now get 4GB solid state drives, or 1TB spinning disks.
Actually the Radeon line did not start at 7000. The first Radeon (R100-based) was called simply that: "ATI Radeon". Later there was a "Radeon 32" and "Radeon 64". But yes, they did eventually settle on the 7000 series as their naming scheme.
Partially, I think the idea was that they could sell this reactor to other countries without the risk of nuclear proliferation associated with enriched uranium, although the relatively difficulty of attaining enriched uranium was also a factor I think it had more to do with the proliferation risks than the actual sourcing of the material. This was unfortunately justified when India used their Canadian/US-built CIRUS research reactor to create enough plutonium for their first nuclear bomb. Being strongly against nuclear weapons in any form, Canadians generally felt pretty betrayed by this, and the concept behind the CANDU reactor was cemented.
If two objects at this same point collide and explode, then some of the matter will have gained additional energy and will escape the gravity well, the rest of the body will spiral to its doom.
Yeah, you'd think that, wouldn't you? Unfortunately, relativistic physics do not follow the same rules as newtonian physics, and the former are the rules you need to use for anything that may potentially have enough energy to escape a black hole.
Nope. The light, radiowaves, whatever we might use to detect this disturbance would also travel at the speed of light. Put simply, information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Outside of science fiction, and pending further discoveries in physics, there is absolutely no way to realistically know anything beyond the speed of light, everything we see or detect has already happened. The speed of light is a harsh mistress indeed.
The only thing we can do is rely on predictions based on our existing knowledge of physics that a light-speed event will soon begin, or continue. But we will never be able to know for certain that it's happened until it's upon us. By analogy, we know the sun will continue shining its light at us because we know that even in the worst case scenario, a collapse of its internal fusion reactions would take millions of years and we could see signs that such an event was happening, such as seeing that its hydrogen fuel supplies were about to run out. However, if there is some previously unknown method of collapse that is instantaneous and the sun looked entirely normal until it happened, then it would be entirely possible that the sun has already shut down and in 1 to 8 minutes we are about to realize that today is definitely not a good day.
The same is true of almost any genre of stuff you can find on TPB. It is the way it is because it's a public tracker. Private ratio trackers have more incentive for people to seed older stuff.
If you have more than one computer on a LAN and you're using the Avast Free version, you're technically violating the licence agreement. Add a linux/samba domain controller to the mix, and the program begins actively warning you that you're violating the licence agreement. Even if it's for personal use only. I confirmed this with the support representatives.
Personally, I ultimately solved this problem by buying Avast Pro, though there was much grumbling before I did so. Avast is a nice program, agreed, but you're right that it's far from 100% free.
I have heard people claim it is because people pay for their bandwidth yet I don't see a anyone setting up a sender has to get permission first policy for all email.
You burn people out that way. Instead, turn down the guy who can do integral approximations in his head and hire the guy who took an hour but did it all on paper without taking a break.
There's a recipe for disaster. When the pressure is on, the guy who's gonna crack is the one who spends 12 hours methodically searching through the code for the point where the data is becoming corrupted, instead of the guy who knows intuitively that the only place the data is in a state where it might get corrupted in that particular way is in function X in file Y. You don't burn out from doing integrals in your head. You burn out from working harder than you're reasonably able to, for longer than you're reasonably able to. I think the second guy is in danger of that much more than the first guy.
they'll do their work in 10 minutes and bill you for 2 hours because that's the time it takes for everyone else
Seems perfectly reasonable to me, unless you're also getting paid superstar hourly wages. If you get paid the same as everyone else, why does the company magically deserve more out of you than they deserve out of everyone else who they pay the same? You don't get extra talents for free, I am not a package deal. You get exactly what you pay for.
A bit passive aggressive you say? Certainly, it is. I should hold out for however much money I feel I am worth and give them 100% of my ability. But life isn't perfect, we've all worked our share of shit jobs for shit pay because sometimes the situation demands it. Anyone who busts their ass for shit pay is naive at best. There's no reason or motivation to do so. I'm not saying you should be a lazy asshole, either, you were hired with the expectation that you would achieve a certain level of performance, and you should meet that expectation, that's your responsibility. You are getting paid after all, even if it's not as much as you think you're worth.
Personally, I do get superstar hourly wages, and I do my work accordingly. Some companies are smarter about how this works than others. Most companies realize that even on salary, my pay rate comes with the expectation that I will only be working, on average, about 40 hours a week. Yes, I am on call at all times and always willing to fix problems as quickly as possible. But that doesn't mean I start working 80 hour weeks for free just because IT decides they're going to spend the next month installing a new topology for the database cluster.
And before the rest of you start, yeah, go ahead, make your jokes about how I'm going to get canned in six months. I won't. But if it makes you feel better, keep thinking that.
Only by laypeople, as far as I know. For as long as I can remember in modern astronomy, it's been thought that the Earth (as in the big hunk of rock, not any of its fancy accessories like say, life, or water... minor but important point there) would actually survive, barely. Scientists generally believed the mass loss from the inflating, overpressured sun losing its grip on its outer atmosphere would be sufficient to allow Earth to escape destruction as its orbit would be slowly spiralling outwards while the sun lost mass. It would still ultimately end up being far too close to the inflated sun not to be burnt to a crisp, but the rocky body of the planet itself would survive. Now it turns out the drag from all that mass being lost would be enough to slow the Earth's orbit down to the point where it would indeed be consumed.
Yes, but you've used fewer bullets to do the job. Fewer bullets is what we're going for here, metaphorically speaking.
But what he's saying is that the Earth and the human race are still going to end up dead, even though we've used less bullets. Continuing along with the metaphor, with 1 bullet there might be a chance the target would live. Maybe even with 2, or 3. But the difference between 13 and 15 is absolutely negligible, the same way a 3% worldwide reduction is completely negligible.
What tangible difference has been made to the situation by "using less bullets" metaphorically speaking? What are those two unused bullets going to do for you, since the guy is still dead regardless? Nothing, except that perhaps we can erroneously feel a bit smug for the next little while before everything collapses.
And assuming you're talking about a round trip, which "latency" generally does, that doubles again to 480ms. Which is about the typical minimum ping time for your run-of-the-mill satellite internet these days. Switching delays are fairly negligible on that sort of a timescale, even with huge numbers of connections provided you're using fairly modern technology. Look at the cellphone networks: this is a solved problem.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference between America and China is that you are free to speak your criticisms of the American Government without fear of punishment from said Government.
Phew! Well that makes it all better then. No problems here, I can talk about it!
Preserving (at least for a little while longer) your current business model at the cost of pissing off a tiny fraction of your customer base isn't necessarily the worst trade.
... WoW, which due to the basic nature of the game is essentially un-BNetD-able.
There's no guarantee they were actually preserving their business model at all, though. Indeed, I don't think there was much benefit to them from shutting down BNetD at all when you boil it right down. The "lost sales due to piracy" bogeyman is just that, in my opinion, a bogeyman. I'm fine with making an effort to prevent piracy, but I think a balanced approach makes a lot more sense than kneejerk knockdowns of legitimate projects. And just for clarity... by legitimate I mean actually legitimate, not things like "this allows you to play *cough* homebrew games *cough* like this enjoyable monochrome table tennis game, oh, and on a completely unrelated note here's a list of 1,500 commercial games that are known to work through sheer coincidence and certainly not due to any specific work on my part".
Anyway, I really don't think they would've lost much from letting BNetD go, like you said the vast bulk of their revenue no longer comes from anything related to Battle.Net. They had no plans to continue making games for Battle.Net at that time, either. Warcraft 3, nevermind the earlier Diablo and Warcraft games, were already on their long march into the sunset. The vast majority of gamers who played those games already owned valid CDkeys, so it made no difference whether they were playing on Battle.Net or BNetD. Sure, the games were still for sale (I'm pretty sure you can still find Diablo 1 on store shelves, crazy) but I'm not even convinced the occasional people who buy those would stop even if there was a BNetD they could play with no CDkey. Battle.Net still has the critical mass of people. Anyone who was playing on BNetD solely for the lack of CDKey checking is probably a person who wasn't going to buy the game anyway. Even if they were, I think trading a bit of monetary gravy from sales of their many-year-old games to get a legion of hardcore geeks and hackers to sing their praises to everyone and build a massive community around their games, could be as beneficial as the shutting down BNetD option.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. That link is just one of many examples. I actually downloaded (from The Pirate Bay) and ran my own WoW server for a time. It was pretty simple, and there are already well-established projects out there working to replicate all the server-side content like quests and NPC texts and such (it helps that most of that information has already been very thoroughly cataloged in third-party sites like thottbot). Most of the rest of the stuff like graphics, maps, items are part of the client data and can be easily extracted from a trial version.
So, far from being un-BNetD-able, it has already been done. It has just been driven underground by Blizzard's treatment of the community.
Why do both CPU manufacturers include those shitty, awful heatsinks anyway? Do they want people to think their processors overheat and are loud and suck? And that's before the fan starts shrieking and sticking due to dead bearing or crap oil or clogged with dust. I haven't gotten a CPU with a good stock heatsink since the Pentium III. Hell, if AMD or Intel decided to contract out to Zalman or something, they could suddenly start marketing their CPUs as super quiet and cool and power efficient and probably eat up a bunch of market share. People are tired of the noise and heat.
Next up, videocards, ugh.
But look at this from another perspective: They wanted to be able to send any CD-Key they want to Blizzard and get a yes/no response. Does that really make sense from a copy protection point of view?
I don't see the issue. I can already send any CD-Key I want to Blizzard and get a yes/no response. It's a little more inconvenient as I have to start up the game and try to connect to a network game, but it's not like the ability isn't there. If the concern is that they could do it *faster*, that's an easy problem to solve, and simple involves forcing a delay in response, on the server side if necessary.
But again, this is all a lot of work for a company who has no interest in supporting people's rights to use the products they buy outside of Blizzard's own carefully chaperoned sandbox. So a lawsuit was the obvious choice. I'm not disagreeing that it wasn't an obvious choice for them, of course it was. I'm saying they need to change their whole world outlook so that perhaps that's not the obvious choice anymore. Your community and your fans are what counts in the long term, not your short-term profits.
If, for the noblest of noble reasons, I tried to create my own server to authenticate Windows XP/Vista boxes, could I reaaaaaaaaaaallllllly go crying about how big bad mean ol Microsoft was bullying me with their lawyers?
If your server was just going to be a passthrough to authenticate through Microsoft's own servers, I don't see the problem. And either way, as long as it was really for the "noblest of noble reasons" I would still support you, and any smart company would too.
Companies -- and this goes beyond gaming, beyond even computers -- need to start remembering who butters their damn bread. The customer may not always be right, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't always treat them with all due respect.
Actually, bnetd tried to discuss the issue with blizzard so they could authenticate against their CD-key servers. It's not like the effort wasn't made. Blizzard refused, because they would much rather sue them out of existence. And that's exactly what they did.
No, he meant to tell Steve Jobs that "the guy" (pointing at Ballmer) said the iPod was inferior.
Then Ballmer would need to throw a chair to defend himself.
Thanks for the info. If I hadn't already posted I'd vote you up informative, but since I have, I'll have to settle for telling you you're informative instead.
Seriously though, thanks, I didn't realize that moving to on-die cache would've made such a drastic difference in transistor count. Very interesting.
Bah, Windows 3.11 ran fine on my 486sx 4MB dual-scan passive color AST laptop. Not that I used Windows much. Slackware mostly, and DOS for games (wow, how times have changed... not. sigh)
On the other side of the coin, the design for an original Pentium had around 5 million transistors. Modern processors have more like 300 million. What's changed? Well, dual-core, and 64-bit, sure. But a lot of those extra transistors are to create extra pipelines or additional specialized instructions or even specialized pipelines that only run specialized instructions to compensate for the fact that the clock speeds just won't ramp up as quickly as designers want. Perhaps if we were able to start cranking up the clock speeds again, it would be possible to start streamlining those pipelines and instruction sets into something more manageable for keeping your signals properly synchronized.
The specs on the latest Samsung SSD (if accurate) beat out the fastest magnetic media you can buy: 100MB/Sec read, 80MB/sec write.
Not really true. Seagate's Cheetah 15K.5 300GB, being (last I checked) the fastest magnetic media you can buy, can easily beat that. It peaks at 135MB/sec. Some other 15,000 rpm drives can post comparable numbers.
I still agree with your post in general, but that specific statement is untrue.
I used to know a guy who always did this, except he did it quite intentionally, as a challenge to himself (I guess he was chronically bored or something). His goal was to write programs in as few lines as possible, where "line" was synonymous with "semicolon". Insane recursive functions with enormous nested chains of trinary "condition ? result : else" operators were the norm.
Code that was written while drunk, high, or half-asleep I will be deeply suspicious of, and probably needs to be refactored immediately. Anything else probably needs refactoring as well, but less urgently.
The benefits of superconductors that do not need (much) energy wasted on active cooling are potentially huge, affecting almost all areas of engineering and science. Electrical losses in power distribution could be essentially completely eliminated. Propulsion and transportation (extremely efficient motors, essentially frictionless maglev for everything) would probably be the first large change to really affect society. Superconductors could also potentially solve our energy storage dilemma. Chemical batteries? Flywheels? How quaint. Magnetism in general would probably become a major part of our lives. It would have an impact on space technology as well, though I can't say for certain what. But perhaps some way of using superconducting magnets to harness the interplanetary magnetic field could be devised. There are definitely major implications of resistance-free conductors for electronics and computers as well.
But that's just what we know will happen. It's entirely possible that the development of an easily usable material having such a unique relationship with electricity and magnetism, may spark a rush of development leading to revolutionary new things we've never even conceptualized before, the same way the early development of electricity did. Who knows. It will be very exciting, anyway, no matter how it turns out.
As a former Palm user, I've gotta agree. I was a Palm user back during the heady Palm V days, when Palm was undisputed king of PDAs. Definitely resting on their laurels was a huge factor. WinCE was adding multimedia features, had better resolution, and way better color support than PalmOS could handle. Syncing a WinCE device became easier and easier. Extending a WinCE device with external memory cards, add-ons like wireless adapters started happening. Palm just sat there. They added half-assed color support, but didn't really try very hard to make it catch on. People might not have known they even wanted to have color, but when offered the choice of WinCE with vibrant, deep-color displays and the vast majority of applications taking full advantage of the colorful display, the decision was obvious.
There was only one bright light for the Palm community, and that was Handspring. They were at least moving, and in the right direction. Palm gave them no support, and their means were limited as they did not control the OS. Eventually Palm bought them and they promptly stopped innovating. And that was pretty much the end of any hope that Palm would ever become the dominant PDA manufacturer again.
I have no idea what they were spending all that time doing, but whatever they were doing it clearly wasn't improving things in a tangible way for the vast, vast majority of users, and that's where they failed. It was like a hard drive manufacturer who instead of trying to increase the capacity of their drives, decided to stay with the same capacity and instead do things like increase power efficiency and reliability... Fine, and there's a niche for that, but if you're sitting in a majority position and decide to focus on a niche instead, that may not be the wisest of business choices unless you see some sort of massive reward in that niche. In Palm's case, whatever niche they saw, there was no reward there. And even if there were, there's a point where you will even fall out of your niche if you don't start paying attention to other areas of your business. I don't think anyone cares how reliable a hard drive is if it's only 10MB and I can now get 4GB solid state drives, or 1TB spinning disks.
Actually the Radeon line did not start at 7000. The first Radeon (R100-based) was called simply that: "ATI Radeon". Later there was a "Radeon 32" and "Radeon 64". But yes, they did eventually settle on the 7000 series as their naming scheme.
Partially, I think the idea was that they could sell this reactor to other countries without the risk of nuclear proliferation associated with enriched uranium, although the relatively difficulty of attaining enriched uranium was also a factor I think it had more to do with the proliferation risks than the actual sourcing of the material. This was unfortunately justified when India used their Canadian/US-built CIRUS research reactor to create enough plutonium for their first nuclear bomb. Being strongly against nuclear weapons in any form, Canadians generally felt pretty betrayed by this, and the concept behind the CANDU reactor was cemented.
If two objects at this same point collide and explode, then some of the matter will have gained additional energy and will escape the gravity well, the rest of the body will spiral to its doom.
Yeah, you'd think that, wouldn't you? Unfortunately, relativistic physics do not follow the same rules as newtonian physics, and the former are the rules you need to use for anything that may potentially have enough energy to escape a black hole.
Nope. The light, radiowaves, whatever we might use to detect this disturbance would also travel at the speed of light. Put simply, information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Outside of science fiction, and pending further discoveries in physics, there is absolutely no way to realistically know anything beyond the speed of light, everything we see or detect has already happened. The speed of light is a harsh mistress indeed.
The only thing we can do is rely on predictions based on our existing knowledge of physics that a light-speed event will soon begin, or continue. But we will never be able to know for certain that it's happened until it's upon us. By analogy, we know the sun will continue shining its light at us because we know that even in the worst case scenario, a collapse of its internal fusion reactions would take millions of years and we could see signs that such an event was happening, such as seeing that its hydrogen fuel supplies were about to run out. However, if there is some previously unknown method of collapse that is instantaneous and the sun looked entirely normal until it happened, then it would be entirely possible that the sun has already shut down and in 1 to 8 minutes we are about to realize that today is definitely not a good day.
The same is true of almost any genre of stuff you can find on TPB. It is the way it is because it's a public tracker. Private ratio trackers have more incentive for people to seed older stuff.
If you have more than one computer on a LAN and you're using the Avast Free version, you're technically violating the licence agreement. Add a linux/samba domain controller to the mix, and the program begins actively warning you that you're violating the licence agreement. Even if it's for personal use only. I confirmed this with the support representatives.
Personally, I ultimately solved this problem by buying Avast Pro, though there was much grumbling before I did so. Avast is a nice program, agreed, but you're right that it's far from 100% free.
I have heard people claim it is because people pay for their bandwidth yet I don't see a anyone setting up a sender has to get permission first policy for all email.
You haven't been looking very hard.
You burn people out that way. Instead, turn down the guy who can do integral approximations in his head and hire the guy who took an hour but did it all on paper without taking a break.
There's a recipe for disaster. When the pressure is on, the guy who's gonna crack is the one who spends 12 hours methodically searching through the code for the point where the data is becoming corrupted, instead of the guy who knows intuitively that the only place the data is in a state where it might get corrupted in that particular way is in function X in file Y. You don't burn out from doing integrals in your head. You burn out from working harder than you're reasonably able to, for longer than you're reasonably able to. I think the second guy is in danger of that much more than the first guy.
they'll do their work in 10 minutes and bill you for 2 hours because that's the time it takes for everyone else
Seems perfectly reasonable to me, unless you're also getting paid superstar hourly wages. If you get paid the same as everyone else, why does the company magically deserve more out of you than they deserve out of everyone else who they pay the same? You don't get extra talents for free, I am not a package deal. You get exactly what you pay for.
A bit passive aggressive you say? Certainly, it is. I should hold out for however much money I feel I am worth and give them 100% of my ability. But life isn't perfect, we've all worked our share of shit jobs for shit pay because sometimes the situation demands it. Anyone who busts their ass for shit pay is naive at best. There's no reason or motivation to do so. I'm not saying you should be a lazy asshole, either, you were hired with the expectation that you would achieve a certain level of performance, and you should meet that expectation, that's your responsibility. You are getting paid after all, even if it's not as much as you think you're worth.
Personally, I do get superstar hourly wages, and I do my work accordingly. Some companies are smarter about how this works than others. Most companies realize that even on salary, my pay rate comes with the expectation that I will only be working, on average, about 40 hours a week. Yes, I am on call at all times and always willing to fix problems as quickly as possible. But that doesn't mean I start working 80 hour weeks for free just because IT decides they're going to spend the next month installing a new topology for the database cluster.
And before the rest of you start, yeah, go ahead, make your jokes about how I'm going to get canned in six months. I won't. But if it makes you feel better, keep thinking that.
Only by laypeople, as far as I know. For as long as I can remember in modern astronomy, it's been thought that the Earth (as in the big hunk of rock, not any of its fancy accessories like say, life, or water... minor but important point there) would actually survive, barely. Scientists generally believed the mass loss from the inflating, overpressured sun losing its grip on its outer atmosphere would be sufficient to allow Earth to escape destruction as its orbit would be slowly spiralling outwards while the sun lost mass. It would still ultimately end up being far too close to the inflated sun not to be burnt to a crisp, but the rocky body of the planet itself would survive. Now it turns out the drag from all that mass being lost would be enough to slow the Earth's orbit down to the point where it would indeed be consumed.
Yes, but you've used fewer bullets to do the job. Fewer bullets is what we're going for here, metaphorically speaking.
But what he's saying is that the Earth and the human race are still going to end up dead, even though we've used less bullets. Continuing along with the metaphor, with 1 bullet there might be a chance the target would live. Maybe even with 2, or 3. But the difference between 13 and 15 is absolutely negligible, the same way a 3% worldwide reduction is completely negligible.
What tangible difference has been made to the situation by "using less bullets" metaphorically speaking? What are those two unused bullets going to do for you, since the guy is still dead regardless? Nothing, except that perhaps we can erroneously feel a bit smug for the next little while before everything collapses.
And assuming you're talking about a round trip, which "latency" generally does, that doubles again to 480ms. Which is about the typical minimum ping time for your run-of-the-mill satellite internet these days. Switching delays are fairly negligible on that sort of a timescale, even with huge numbers of connections provided you're using fairly modern technology. Look at the cellphone networks: this is a solved problem.