I for one can't wait to live in a world powered by nuclear power. All those nasty carbon emissions replaced by radioactive waste that will hang around for a few hundred million years. No more carbon clouds mean we will have a nice clear view of those green skies and mutant pigs flying around.
They're trying to change their business model to one where you pay per view. Thats why they're not interested in downloadable movies. That is only one model. Other companies are looking at actively encouraging downloads, and paying for the movies by including product placement ads throughout the film.
I have travelled extensively through poor African and Pacific nations. I have dressed in many different ways, although usually in clothing similar to what I wear down the street in the first world nation I live in.
Not only have the people in the ghettos valued human life highly, they are not afraid to show it.
I have epilepsy and after having a seizure at a slum in Nairobi I found that while unconscious I had been collected, taken to a taxi and the fare paid to take me to a hospital. My passport, wallet etc was safe and sound.
If you are too scared to explore some of these countries yourself, I don't think you should paint their people as blood-thirsty tyrants.
The wheels are much higher (less birds) and slower (birds can react to and avoid them).
I agree it is mostly legend about the wind turbines causing widespread bird deaths. I think it is worth highlighting a little known piece of wind-industry greenwash though.
Although the turbines these days are much larger and spin much more slowly, the turbines are in fact more dangerous to birds. This is because the speed of the turbines is measured at the tip of the blades. The blades are so huge now that they move slowly at the tip, but get to within a few feet of the centre and they blades move much faster than the older turbines.
That the turbines are taller means some birds get to avoid them more easily, but it also means that other bird varieties, which fly at higher altitudes are more likely to hit them.
As I say, all in all I love windpower, and I think charges of them killing birds are overblown (pun intended) but I also want to see truth in the debate.
This whole article seems to rest on the premise that humans left Africa en masse about 60,000 years ago. This is likely, but still a hotly contested theory. A rival theory contends that modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) originated about the same time from Homo erectus, whose bones have been found in Asia and Africa (the multiregional theory).
It stands to reason that the tests on mitochondrial DNA of a group in Africa is only useful if you assume everyone left Africa sometime after 60,000 years ago.
Given there are numerous sites in Australia that claim to have artefacts stretching back at least that far (and possibly 176,000 years ago) it is very likely there were pockets of humans in other parts of the world much earlier than 60,000 years.
This research actually only shows that there is evidence of a population crash in Africa. Not that homo sapiens across the world had a population crash.
I won't bore you with a detailed explanation of German defamation laws, but they are far more restrictive than the laws in the USA.
While online websites sometimes avoid defamation by quickly changing defamatory comments before they cause much damage, a published book does not have the same ability to be wiped clean in an instant.
What is to stop someone maliciously creating a defamatory article about themselves, waiting for Wikipedia to be published, then suing the company that produced the book?
I think it would be a brave publisher who would cede control to the millions of Wikipedia contributors.
They are not actually banned if you have a lawful reason for having one. So if a university lecturer needed one to point to a diagram during a lecture, he/she would still be able to. If you are a raver wanting to flash one around at a party, that could arguably be a lawful reason for having one too.
What this law really means, as far as I can ascertain, is that it is illegal to use a laser pointer for nefarious purposes, like shining into pilots' eyes to annoy them, possibly endangering those on board.
As an Australian I would like to say this sounds pretty reasonable. We don't have a bill of rights, and if we did I doubt the right to put a planeload of people in danger would be in there.
I would write down here about the world's youngest political prisoner, who was seized by Chinese thugs as part of an organised attempt to destroy a religion, but I wouldn't want to get Slashdot banned too.
Suing a torrent site for copyright infringement is something akin to suing a map-maker because a thief used the information to find a bank that was robbed (and yes, I know that with copyright infringement nothing is physically stolen), or suing a telephone company because two criminals used the network to plan a heist.
If all someone is doing is using information from a torrent site to find another party, and is not actively connecting the two copyright infringers Napster-style, then surely they can defend the accusations.
Interesting to say that lots of US satellites are nuclear powered. According to this article Defense has given up wanting to use them, and the previous rule was that you needed the permission of the president.
I have sometimes wondered what Opera aficionados make of opera.com
I am sure someone at Slashdot will know how Opera got its name. I kind of guessed that some geek way back bought the domain name thinking it would be worth millions, then in the end used it for a company cause it was cool to have a generic domain.
Some domain names have been useful though. In Australia people sell ".au.com" domains, which are obviously sub-domains, quite different to Australia's official ".com.au" domains.
According to journalist Xavier La Canna the group being investigated caused a DDoS attack at a Philadelphia university in February 2006 in which computer access was denied to about 4000 university students and staff.
Sometimes the inconvenience is more than just the monetary loss.
Imagine you were a uni student awaiting your examination results, or a researcher who couldn't get vital information to perform an experiment.
"surface temperatures of 150+ degrees F during summer days" Your post loses much credibility when you pluck ridiculous figures out of the air and use them to make an argument.
Given the hottest temperature ever recorded in the United States is 56.7 degrees celsius (134.1 degrees fahrenheit) I find it impossible to believe this small part of America regularly gets temperatures of above 65.6 degrees celsius (150F).
As an aside I find it not so amazing that these rocks move about, but that similar phenomenon doesn't seem to happen elsewhere in deserts where you get similar extremes of temperatures, rock types, and often windy weather. Let's hope Google earth kicks into action and someone observes this phenomenon soon.
That high-res picture is much clearer. Am I the only one who thinks they can see a face on the moon in them? Look at the bottom right hand section. What looks like a side-profile of large, thick lips and an afro hairdo.
"You post won't however, make you seem geographically educated. Eurasia is the name given to the continent which includes Europe and Asia"
Don't be so sure. That Europe and Asia is a single continental landmass is not 100 per cent accurate. The reason the Himalayas are so huge is because you effectively have a subduction zone where two pieces of continental lithosphere meet. The Indian Plate and the Eurasian Plate.
So in a nutshell, Eurasia is a single continental landmass if you exlude India, which is politically part of Asia. Ipso facto, Eurasia geographically refers to Europe and Asia, minus India.
I have epilepsy and have lived with it all my life. This story interests me as much as what it doesn't say, as for what it does say.
I have undergone brain surgery to alleviate my symptoms and take piles of medicine, but nothing has worked.
What I want to know are what are the side-effects from this type of equipment. The brain is a very sensitive organ. Just a few neurons misfiring out of the billions in the brain can cause seizures or other symptoms.
Stopping the brain from overheating is one thing, but stopping natural heat fluctuations in the brain may have unintended consequences.
We are talking here about the most complex organ in the body. Mess with it at your own risk, as I have discovered.
Since surgery I can barely tell the difference between different house keys, because the surgery to my right temporal lobe affected my visual memory.
I use VOIP avidly, but I studiously avoid Skype. The reason is pretty straight forward. For the cost of Skype-out services I can use an Australian VOIP provider that charges less than half as much.
Skype to Skype is great, but it only works well in countries with reliable, fast internet connections. These countries are overwhelmingly in Western Europe, North America and Australasia (plus a large chunk of East Asia).
I can already call any of these places for less than a cent a minute from my Australian VOIP provider. Countries that are expensive to call using VOIP (I make plenty of calls to East Africa and the Pacific) are places that still have most users on dial-up.
So to re-cap, Skype is pretty much useless for me, because where it works it is uncompetitive, and where it would be competitive, it doesn't work.
Why does the world seem to turn a blind eye to China's crap? If a terrorist group did this, we'd be at war. But since it's China, somehow we'll work around it.
This sort of thing is routinely accepted by all countries. China puts up with US intelligence agencies hacking into their systems, the US puts up with Russian, Chinese, North Korean, Iranian etc etc hackers trying to get into their systems.
You may remember a few years ago China shot down a US spy plane above their skies. The US defence was that the surveillance was just routine spying.
There is nothing new in this behaviour, and a huge distinction between this and the actions of terrorists. China didn't fly a plane into the Pentagon to get access to those computers and didn't kill anyone to get the information.
Their government is 100x worse than any middle eastern country, constantly imprisoning their own people and doing horrible horrible things (including murder). And because we can get cheap toys we turn a blind eye? That's the ultimate hypocrisy.
I agree with you China gets away with lots of shit because they are such an important trading partner. You may want to look at what the US gets away with because of their size too.
I am thinking specifically "extraordinary rendition" where the US kidnaps people and ships them off to countries where they can be legally tortured, often with very little reason.
The US also runs a camp in Cuba where detainees (you apparently can't call them prisoners until they have been charged with something) are routinely tortured, something the US government admits (they admitted to water-boarding, considered torture).
The US often abuses its trade position to demand concessions from smaller countries, and to deny access to US markets to countries such as Australia (who can produce sugar more cheaply and efficiently that US farmers can).
With all this intimidation of web surfers, I am beginning to get suspicious the Chinese delegation must have had their fingers crossed when the promised to alleviate human rights abuses in their country in time for the 2008 Olympic Games.
Nah, I guess it is impossible to believe that with the eye of the world on their country, China would continue to hold the world's youngest political prisoner, the Panchen Lama, and kill prisoners so they can harvest their organs. They clearly wouldn't continue to block access to websites that hold views contrary to the wishes of their government either (even though the information is considered the truth by the rest of the world).
Given so many people here have detailed knowledge of Russian law, can anyone tell me whether this ruling will pave the way for the site to re-open?
From the article: AllofMP3.com was shut down earlier last month under pressure from the United States, which has made the protection of intellectual property rights a central issue in negotiations over Russia's accession to the World Trade Organization.
Access to MP3Sparks.com, a mirror site used by MediaServices, remained blocked Wednesday.
Oh yeah, not that complicated, until you consider that in the USA a billion is a thousand million, but in most of the world it is a million million. Or that a sextillion is derived from prefix "sex" which means six, (as in a sextet of ale) but is actually a one followed by 21 zeros.
A septillion (from the word for seven) contains 24 zeros.
So what you may ask is a one followed by 22 naughts? 10 sextillion. A one followed by 23 naughts? 100 sextillion. And yet instead of a one followed by 24 naughts being 1000 sextillion, it is all of a sudden a septillion, even though it has nothing whatsoever to do with the number seven.
I don't even know why I care about all of this. I got to this thread late and the chances of anyone reading my post in the developers section of Slashdot are next to zero. Of course next to zero would be one and minus one. Oh gawd, don't get me started on that....
What is the situation in other countries? It makes a mockery of the whole system if US webstations have to pay royalities for playing a Beatles song, but the same song played by an Australian or British webstation is exempt/has cheaper fees.
After all, when it comes down to it the stations are more or less competing against each other.
It is kinda fun watching the RIAA trying to piece together their egg of influence after it was cracked by the sledgehammer of globalisation.
Slashdot Mirror
I for one can't wait to live in a world powered by nuclear power. All those nasty carbon emissions replaced by radioactive waste that will hang around for a few hundred million years.
No more carbon clouds mean we will have a nice clear view of those green skies and mutant pigs flying around.
They're trying to change their business model to one where you pay per view. Thats why they're not interested in downloadable movies.
That is only one model. Other companies are looking at actively encouraging downloads, and paying for the movies by including product placement ads throughout the film.
Your caricature of third world life is laughable.
I have travelled extensively through poor African and Pacific nations. I have dressed in many different ways, although usually in clothing similar to what I wear down the street in the first world nation I live in.
Not only have the people in the ghettos valued human life highly, they are not afraid to show it.
I have epilepsy and after having a seizure at a slum in Nairobi I found that while unconscious I had been collected, taken to a taxi and the fare paid to take me to a hospital. My passport, wallet etc was safe and sound.
If you are too scared to explore some of these countries yourself, I don't think you should paint their people as blood-thirsty tyrants.
The wheels are much higher (less birds) and slower (birds can react to and avoid them).
I agree it is mostly legend about the wind turbines causing widespread bird deaths. I think it is worth highlighting a little known piece of wind-industry greenwash though.
Although the turbines these days are much larger and spin much more slowly, the turbines are in fact more dangerous to birds. This is because the speed of the turbines is measured at the tip of the blades. The blades are so huge now that they move slowly at the tip, but get to within a few feet of the centre and they blades move much faster than the older turbines.
That the turbines are taller means some birds get to avoid them more easily, but it also means that other bird varieties, which fly at higher altitudes are more likely to hit them.
As I say, all in all I love windpower, and I think charges of them killing birds are overblown (pun intended) but I also want to see truth in the debate.
This whole article seems to rest on the premise that humans left Africa en masse about 60,000 years ago. This is likely, but still a hotly contested theory. A rival theory contends that modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) originated about the same time from Homo erectus, whose bones have been found in Asia and Africa (the multiregional theory).
It stands to reason that the tests on mitochondrial DNA of a group in Africa is only useful if you assume everyone left Africa sometime after 60,000 years ago.
Given there are numerous sites in Australia that claim to have artefacts stretching back at least that far (and possibly 176,000 years ago) it is very likely there were pockets of humans in other parts of the world much earlier than 60,000 years.
This research actually only shows that there is evidence of a population crash in Africa. Not that homo sapiens across the world had a population crash.
I won't bore you with a detailed explanation of German defamation laws, but they are far more restrictive than the laws in the USA.
While online websites sometimes avoid defamation by quickly changing defamatory comments before they cause much damage, a published book does not have the same ability to be wiped clean in an instant.
What is to stop someone maliciously creating a defamatory article about themselves, waiting for Wikipedia to be published, then suing the company that produced the book?
I think it would be a brave publisher who would cede control to the millions of Wikipedia contributors.
They are not actually banned if you have a lawful reason for having one. So if a university lecturer needed one to point to a diagram during a lecture, he/she would still be able to. If you are a raver wanting to flash one around at a party, that could arguably be a lawful reason for having one too.
What this law really means, as far as I can ascertain, is that it is illegal to use a laser pointer for nefarious purposes, like shining into pilots' eyes to annoy them, possibly endangering those on board.
As an Australian I would like to say this sounds pretty reasonable. We don't have a bill of rights, and if we did I doubt the right to put a planeload of people in danger would be in there.
I would have thought the first step was killing the cow or pig. I guess it is back to the drawing board.
I wonder if people in China will get access to the Wikipedia entry on the Panchen Lama to get some information about what happened to him, or if this will be among the pages that are still banned.
I would write down here about the world's youngest political prisoner, who was seized by Chinese thugs as part of an organised attempt to destroy a religion, but I wouldn't want to get Slashdot banned too.
Suing a torrent site for copyright infringement is something akin to suing a map-maker because a thief used the information to find a bank that was robbed (and yes, I know that with copyright infringement nothing is physically stolen), or suing a telephone company because two criminals used the network to plan a heist.
If all someone is doing is using information from a torrent site to find another party, and is not actively connecting the two copyright infringers Napster-style, then surely they can defend the accusations.
Interesting to say that lots of US satellites are nuclear powered. According to this article Defense has given up wanting to use them, and the previous rule was that you needed the permission of the president.
I have sometimes wondered what Opera aficionados make of opera.com
I am sure someone at Slashdot will know how Opera got its name. I kind of guessed that some geek way back bought the domain name thinking it would be worth millions, then in the end used it for a company cause it was cool to have a generic domain.
Some domain names have been useful though. In Australia people sell ".au.com" domains, which are obviously sub-domains, quite different to Australia's official ".com.au" domains.
According to journalist Xavier La Canna the group being investigated caused a DDoS attack at a Philadelphia university in February 2006 in which computer access was denied to about 4000 university students and staff.
Sometimes the inconvenience is more than just the monetary loss.
Imagine you were a uni student awaiting your examination results, or a researcher who couldn't get vital information to perform an experiment.
"surface temperatures of 150+ degrees F during summer days"
Your post loses much credibility when you pluck ridiculous figures out of the air and use them to make an argument.
Given the hottest temperature ever recorded in the United States is 56.7 degrees celsius (134.1 degrees fahrenheit) I find it impossible to believe this small part of America regularly gets temperatures of above 65.6 degrees celsius (150F).
As an aside I find it not so amazing that these rocks move about, but that similar phenomenon doesn't seem to happen elsewhere in deserts where you get similar extremes of temperatures, rock types, and often windy weather. Let's hope Google earth kicks into action and someone observes this phenomenon soon.
That high-res picture is much clearer. Am I the only one who thinks they can see a face on the moon in them? Look at the bottom right hand section. What looks like a side-profile of large, thick lips and an afro hairdo.
I away consipiracy theorists' take on this.
The funniest thing I found about the post you linked to was the sig from the guy you were trolling.
"My Karma ran over your dogma."
Indeed in this case, it looks like it did.
"You post won't however, make you seem geographically educated. Eurasia is the name given to the continent which includes Europe and Asia"
Don't be so sure. That Europe and Asia is a single continental landmass is not 100 per cent accurate. The reason the Himalayas are so huge is because you effectively have a subduction zone where two pieces of continental lithosphere meet. The Indian Plate and the Eurasian Plate.
So in a nutshell, Eurasia is a single continental landmass if you exlude India, which is politically part of Asia. Ipso facto, Eurasia geographically refers to Europe and Asia, minus India.
I have epilepsy and have lived with it all my life. This story interests me as much as what it doesn't say, as for what it does say.
I have undergone brain surgery to alleviate my symptoms and take piles of medicine, but nothing has worked.
What I want to know are what are the side-effects from this type of equipment. The brain is a very sensitive organ. Just a few neurons misfiring out of the billions in the brain can cause seizures or other symptoms.
Stopping the brain from overheating is one thing, but stopping natural heat fluctuations in the brain may have unintended consequences.
We are talking here about the most complex organ in the body. Mess with it at your own risk, as I have discovered.
Since surgery I can barely tell the difference between different house keys, because the surgery to my right temporal lobe affected my visual memory.
I use VOIP avidly, but I studiously avoid Skype. The reason is pretty straight forward. For the cost of Skype-out services I can use an Australian VOIP provider that charges less than half as much.
Skype to Skype is great, but it only works well in countries with reliable, fast internet connections. These countries are overwhelmingly in Western Europe, North America and Australasia (plus a large chunk of East Asia).
I can already call any of these places for less than a cent a minute from my Australian VOIP provider. Countries that are expensive to call using VOIP (I make plenty of calls to East Africa and the Pacific) are places that still have most users on dial-up.
So to re-cap, Skype is pretty much useless for me, because where it works it is uncompetitive, and where it would be competitive, it doesn't work.
Why does the world seem to turn a blind eye to China's crap? If a terrorist group did this, we'd be at war. But since it's China, somehow we'll work around it.
This sort of thing is routinely accepted by all countries. China puts up with US intelligence agencies hacking into their systems, the US puts up with Russian, Chinese, North Korean, Iranian etc etc hackers trying to get into their systems.
You may remember a few years ago China shot down a US spy plane above their skies. The US defence was that the surveillance was just routine spying.
There is nothing new in this behaviour, and a huge distinction between this and the actions of terrorists. China didn't fly a plane into the Pentagon to get access to those computers and didn't kill anyone to get the information.
Their government is 100x worse than any middle eastern country, constantly imprisoning their own people and doing horrible horrible things (including murder). And because we can get cheap toys we turn a blind eye? That's the ultimate hypocrisy.
I agree with you China gets away with lots of shit because they are such an important trading partner. You may want to look at what the US gets away with because of their size too.
I am thinking specifically "extraordinary rendition" where the US kidnaps people and ships them off to countries where they can be legally tortured, often with very little reason.
The US also runs a camp in Cuba where detainees (you apparently can't call them prisoners until they have been charged with something) are routinely tortured, something the US government admits (they admitted to water-boarding, considered torture).
The US often abuses its trade position to demand concessions from smaller countries, and to deny access to US markets to countries such as Australia (who can produce sugar more cheaply and efficiently that US farmers can).
With all this intimidation of web surfers, I am beginning to get suspicious the Chinese delegation must have had their fingers crossed when the promised to alleviate human rights abuses in their country in time for the 2008 Olympic Games.
Nah, I guess it is impossible to believe that with the eye of the world on their country, China would continue to hold the world's youngest political prisoner, the Panchen Lama, and kill prisoners so they can harvest their organs. They clearly wouldn't continue to block access to websites that hold views contrary to the wishes of their government either (even though the information is considered the truth by the rest of the world).
From the article:
AllofMP3.com was shut down earlier last month under pressure from the United States, which has made the protection of intellectual property rights a central issue in negotiations over Russia's accession to the World Trade Organization.
Access to MP3Sparks.com, a mirror site used by MediaServices, remained blocked Wednesday.
Oh yeah, not that complicated, until you consider that in the USA a billion is a thousand million, but in most of the world it is a million million. Or that a sextillion is derived from prefix "sex" which means six, (as in a sextet of ale) but is actually a one followed by 21 zeros.
A septillion (from the word for seven) contains 24 zeros.
So what you may ask is a one followed by 22 naughts? 10 sextillion. A one followed by 23 naughts? 100 sextillion. And yet instead of a one followed by 24 naughts being 1000 sextillion, it is all of a sudden a septillion, even though it has nothing whatsoever to do with the number seven.
I don't even know why I care about all of this. I got to this thread late and the chances of anyone reading my post in the developers section of Slashdot are next to zero. Of course next to zero would be one and minus one. Oh gawd, don't get me started on that....
As with most megafauna that "died out" this is far from certain. There is lots of evidence that most megafauna simply downsized.
ie Macropus Titan in Australia downsized to become the red kangaroo.
With the mammoths, there is every reason to believe they downsized a bit and became the Asian elephants we know so well from India, Thailand etc.
What is the situation in other countries? It makes a mockery of the whole system if US webstations have to pay royalities for playing a Beatles song, but the same song played by an Australian or British webstation is exempt/has cheaper fees.
After all, when it comes down to it the stations are more or less competing against each other.
It is kinda fun watching the RIAA trying to piece together their egg of influence after it was cracked by the sledgehammer of globalisation.