Statistically I'd be more worried about being killed by a shark in the US.
Me too, and I live 1000 miles from the nearest ocean. And in a city with strategic importance. Mind you, I don't live in the US. But if I moved 300 miles south, next door to some missile silos, I'd still be more worried about the sharks.
Am I correct in recalling that there are provisions to suspend presidential voting if martial law is enacted? If so, I'd be concerned about some "imminent widespread threat" which would "obligate" Bush to enact martial law until such time as the threat is diminished. What better time to be in a war with no clear endgame.
You're far more likely to die in a car accident in any given year in the US than you ever are to die by terrorism in the US. How many cars do you interact with every day? When shall we start banning them?
The reaction to the threat is both too far-reaching and too ineffective at reducing the threat. It does do a great deal in restricting people's freedom, which makes one wonder what the true purpose of the anti-terrorism laws was in the first place.
I read about something similar years ago (determining sound frequency without a clock circuit), but the guy I read about was taking his research in a different direction. Multiple FPGAs testing each option and using the best result from a number of chips, with the results spread across all the chips again. His theory was that this would mitigate the unique elements of each chip. The long-term goal was to make very robust chips that would have minimal solutions for the required tasks, presumably for satellites, etc.
Well, there are three things required to make it work. First, tie it to a real currency. Check. Second, don't allow things to be bought by NPCs (basically by the game owner) at anything near market value - think bankruptcy rates. I don't know about that second part. Third, don't allow exploits to sit around uncorrected. Their agreement seems to indicate some level of seriousness about that.
But think about it. What does iTunes sell? Ultimately, musicians' time and bandwidth. And they're making good money. If players can buy/sell time and the company can tax for bandwidth/development, it's just another commodity. People won't pay more for another player's time than they think it's worth, not unlike McDonald's. And somehow I don't think "Chinese" goldfarmers would mind being paid in US dollars (more or less). Hell, I might go be a serf of one kind or another. Just another daily grind...but maybe more fun.
My first impression of the name was "How the hell do you pronounce that?" We? Why? Double-u Two?
Once I was clear on the pronunciation, my first thought was "Well, kinda goofy, but reminds me of 'Whee!'" You know, the sound people make on a roller coaster, when they're excited or having fun?
But then, I've never called a part of my anatomy "wee", and it's been a long time since I called my <insert phallic slang here> a "wee wee". Since before I started school. While I wouldn't be surprised that kids would make the connection to such, I doubt it will deter them from buying the console. I think more jokes will fall along the lines of "I'm gonna go home and play with my wii" or, for the (slightly) older crowd "Wanna go to my place and play with my wii?" Lots of laughs, for the first week or two, I'm sure.
So, why is it a bad name? It's unique, distinctive (read: easily trademarked), and has multiple connotations, none of which are overly offensive and some of which are titillating (hmm, another funny word). And it's been the buzz pretty much everywhere in the gaming world. I wouldn't be surprised if it's touted as one of the most innovative names in the gaming world a couple years from now.
Note that both of the examples you gave require functioning legs (more correctly, nerves to the legs) to work. Until we can capture nervous signals to the legs accurately and before they get disrupted by whatever is causing the paralysis, these options aren't viable for paraplegics. I'm sure that day will come, but this is only half of the solution.
While I don't get floaters, I get the occasional tear film debris, also mentioned in the wiki. I don't know if my near-sightedness has anything to do with, but I can actually focus on them. It's kinda cool seeing a hydra float by every now and then. I've also seen some smaller bacteria in the "string of pearls" configuration.
Wait, are you talking about New Orleans? Because that seems to be far more garden-variety human stupidity than cataclysmic human stupidity. Build a city on a delta (constantly changing waterways), on silt (compresses with time), stopping the seasonal flooding (no replenishment of silt), until the city is below sea-level (flood, anyone?), in a tropical storm area (flood anyone?), with neglected dikes (flood, anyone?), and then blame the destruction on global warming!?!?!?
Now you'll say "Well, that was the biggest storm in a long time." My response: "How long? Where I live, flooding is a problem (city in a hundreds-of-miles wide by hundred-of-miles long floodplain), and we have a river diversion system (in use right now!) that can handle the biggest flood in the last century with capacity to spare. And we're expanding it. Sucks for the city less than 200 miles away that floods damn near every year, but why are they surprised?"
Or how about "But what do you expect us to do? Move the whole city?" No, I expect you to be unsurprised that sinking cities sink! It's not the first one, and it's not even the worst-hit that is still currently inhabitable. Ever hear of Venice? I suggest you read up on their typical conditions before complaining about all the damage done to New Orleans by global warming. Then there's Holland, most of which is below sea level.
When you look at the core of it, the disaster in New Orleans hinges on a very few things. Bad planning (location location location!), bad timing (forces for disaster management deployed in Iraq), bad management (maintain the systems which protect your sub-sea-level city), and bad disaster recovery (be prepared to mobilize when the shit hits the fan).
It's also worth noting that Florida gets hit regularly with similar weather conditions which occurred in New Orleans. Two of the big differences are they are more used to it (better preparation?) and most of their areas are above sea level, even if just barely.
I think, if you want to stretch it, it can be described as a forcefield, emphasis on the "force" and please try to forget about the "field". After all, f=ma. They're supplying the ma, so there must be some f around there somewhere....
Your government doesn't have a *vested interest* in screwing you. For a moment imagine you didn't live in the world's most dysfunctional democracy, and take a look around the world for other examples: say Sweden, Canada, Switzerland.
I was with you until you said Canada. Although I prefer our inept, corrupt government to the Americans' adept, corrupt government.
The nice thing about democracy is that it has a tendency towards mediocrity. That's what happens when you try to please everyone, or even half of them. If you look at history, most of the serious stuff got done by a few people in power, not committees of one stripe or another. The same can be said for many of history's atrocities. Couple that with a nice starting legal framework and some legislative ineptitude and you have a nice stable system where you pay a bunch of self-serving (and some truly dedicated) people to handle the serious shit that happens now and then.
Truth be told, the typical Australian is less like Steve Irwin, and more like that other great Australian export - The Wiggles.
That's really disturbing. I was less concerned about you guys when I figured you were all playing with poisonous snakes and teaching your 2-year-olds how to ride alligators...
It's also worth noting that certain file formats have very redundant information. It's not unusual to compress a 24bpp bitmap file to 10%, similarly for text files. I've also seen many databases compress to 20% but, again, very redundant data. Some formats don't compress much at all, especially those that have some kind of compression built in.
If you applied your logic to every company, Apple should be in trouble for iTunes, Sun for Java and Macromedia for Flash.
It's worth noting that the Sherman Act only applies to Monopolies. The first test is whether they have a monopoly, then whether they're leveraging it to gain a new monopoly. I don't think this can be said for Apple (there are other media player hardware and applications out there, and they aren't a monopoly yet) or Sun (they don't have a monopoly on Java or anything else from what I can see), although it might for Macromedia (I'll give you the monopoly on Flash, but what are they leveraging it to build?).
What I like is that Outlook and Outlook Express both don't show you the link info in the status bar when you hover over a link. So even if you are a little worried, there's no easy way to do the simplest of sanity checks before you take your chances and see if that link is for an IE exploit or is a phishing scam. Of course, I'm not so stupid as to expect that my bank would send me emails (or postcards) about my bank account (and I'll give them hell if they do), so phishing is less likely. But I'm also left with viewing the source of my emails, traipsing through the 3 different formats and miles of tags in text view while hunting for a single link that I'm suspicious of. And all this because there is one thing that Outlook doesn't borrow from IE for.
Of course, the obvious response is to not use MS's pathetic email clients. I use one for work, and the other for archiving hotmail. Nothing else goes through there. Certainly, nothing that I'm overly worried about being intercepted, or that I have control over, is passing through either client.
If the machines were truly secure, they should be able to leave them on a street corner for a week and know that they'd be fine when they came to pick them up.
Do me a favour, and call your local bank to do this with their safe (and your money).
Seriously, now (or not quite yet), we're talking about a computer here, not a James Bond car. Exactly what kind of tamper prevention mechanisms do you want them to put in there? "The new Diebold Electronic Voting Machine. Now with "extreme prejudice" tamper protection". I'll let you vote first.
It's been said before, and apparently needs to be said again - once you have physical access to a computer system, any security can be defeated. The big issue is, can any tampering be detected, and how hard is it to tamper in the first place? That's where the fault lies.
I wish there was a quick way to change your eye-edness.
It's not quick, but practice can fix this. Switch your primary focus from one eye to the other. Objects at different depths are good for this. After a while you'll find that you can switch almost instantly (say, half a second either way) and maintain which eye is primary at will. It's the same thing that's required to switch which hand your write with, or which foot you kick with.
Slashdot Mirror
Statistically I'd be more worried about being killed by a shark in the US.
Me too, and I live 1000 miles from the nearest ocean. And in a city with strategic importance. Mind you, I don't live in the US. But if I moved 300 miles south, next door to some missile silos, I'd still be more worried about the sharks.
Am I correct in recalling that there are provisions to suspend presidential voting if martial law is enacted? If so, I'd be concerned about some "imminent widespread threat" which would "obligate" Bush to enact martial law until such time as the threat is diminished. What better time to be in a war with no clear endgame.
You're far more likely to die in a car accident in any given year in the US than you ever are to die by terrorism in the US. How many cars do you interact with every day? When shall we start banning them?
The reaction to the threat is both too far-reaching and too ineffective at reducing the threat. It does do a great deal in restricting people's freedom, which makes one wonder what the true purpose of the anti-terrorism laws was in the first place.
I read about something similar years ago (determining sound frequency without a clock circuit), but the guy I read about was taking his research in a different direction. Multiple FPGAs testing each option and using the best result from a number of chips, with the results spread across all the chips again. His theory was that this would mitigate the unique elements of each chip. The long-term goal was to make very robust chips that would have minimal solutions for the required tasks, presumably for satellites, etc.
Well, there are three things required to make it work. First, tie it to a real currency. Check. Second, don't allow things to be bought by NPCs (basically by the game owner) at anything near market value - think bankruptcy rates. I don't know about that second part. Third, don't allow exploits to sit around uncorrected. Their agreement seems to indicate some level of seriousness about that.
But think about it. What does iTunes sell? Ultimately, musicians' time and bandwidth. And they're making good money. If players can buy/sell time and the company can tax for bandwidth/development, it's just another commodity. People won't pay more for another player's time than they think it's worth, not unlike McDonald's. And somehow I don't think "Chinese" goldfarmers would mind being paid in US dollars (more or less). Hell, I might go be a serf of one kind or another. Just another daily grind...but maybe more fun.
My first impression of the name was "How the hell do you pronounce that?" We? Why? Double-u Two?
Once I was clear on the pronunciation, my first thought was "Well, kinda goofy, but reminds me of 'Whee!'" You know, the sound people make on a roller coaster, when they're excited or having fun?
But then, I've never called a part of my anatomy "wee", and it's been a long time since I called my <insert phallic slang here> a "wee wee". Since before I started school. While I wouldn't be surprised that kids would make the connection to such, I doubt it will deter them from buying the console. I think more jokes will fall along the lines of "I'm gonna go home and play with my wii" or, for the (slightly) older crowd "Wanna go to my place and play with my wii?" Lots of laughs, for the first week or two, I'm sure.
So, why is it a bad name? It's unique, distinctive (read: easily trademarked), and has multiple connotations, none of which are overly offensive and some of which are titillating (hmm, another funny word). And it's been the buzz pretty much everywhere in the gaming world. I wouldn't be surprised if it's touted as one of the most innovative names in the gaming world a couple years from now.
Note that both of the examples you gave require functioning legs (more correctly, nerves to the legs) to work. Until we can capture nervous signals to the legs accurately and before they get disrupted by whatever is causing the paralysis, these options aren't viable for paraplegics. I'm sure that day will come, but this is only half of the solution.
The big issue here is, this doesn't help my case at all. I just don't want to have to see more of it.
imagine if Manet had been able to copyright French Impressionism, or Picasso cubism, or Renoir portraits.
I personally wouldn't mind if a perpetual copyright and trademark was given to Picasso's cubism...
You're presupposing that nature doesn't select against geeks, right? See, your experiment is flawed from the start.
It's worth noting that Barenaked Ladies are at least 6 times bigger than Avril Lavigne...
Similarly, French law does not and should not apply to those outside France's borders.
Unfortunately, the U.S. government opened the door when it pursued the Skylarov case.
While I don't get floaters, I get the occasional tear film debris, also mentioned in the wiki. I don't know if my near-sightedness has anything to do with, but I can actually focus on them. It's kinda cool seeing a hydra float by every now and then. I've also seen some smaller bacteria in the "string of pearls" configuration.
Wait, are you talking about New Orleans? Because that seems to be far more garden-variety human stupidity than cataclysmic human stupidity. Build a city on a delta (constantly changing waterways), on silt (compresses with time), stopping the seasonal flooding (no replenishment of silt), until the city is below sea-level (flood, anyone?), in a tropical storm area (flood anyone?), with neglected dikes (flood, anyone?), and then blame the destruction on global warming!?!?!?
Now you'll say "Well, that was the biggest storm in a long time." My response: "How long? Where I live, flooding is a problem (city in a hundreds-of-miles wide by hundred-of-miles long floodplain), and we have a river diversion system (in use right now!) that can handle the biggest flood in the last century with capacity to spare. And we're expanding it. Sucks for the city less than 200 miles away that floods damn near every year, but why are they surprised?"
Or how about "But what do you expect us to do? Move the whole city?" No, I expect you to be unsurprised that sinking cities sink! It's not the first one, and it's not even the worst-hit that is still currently inhabitable. Ever hear of Venice? I suggest you read up on their typical conditions before complaining about all the damage done to New Orleans by global warming. Then there's Holland, most of which is below sea level.
When you look at the core of it, the disaster in New Orleans hinges on a very few things. Bad planning (location location location!), bad timing (forces for disaster management deployed in Iraq), bad management (maintain the systems which protect your sub-sea-level city), and bad disaster recovery (be prepared to mobilize when the shit hits the fan).
It's also worth noting that Florida gets hit regularly with similar weather conditions which occurred in New Orleans. Two of the big differences are they are more used to it (better preparation?) and most of their areas are above sea level, even if just barely.
I think, if you want to stretch it, it can be described as a forcefield, emphasis on the "force" and please try to forget about the "field". After all, f=ma. They're supplying the ma, so there must be some f around there somewhere....
Your government doesn't have a *vested interest* in screwing you. For a moment imagine you didn't live in the world's most dysfunctional democracy, and take a look around the world for other examples: say Sweden, Canada, Switzerland.
I was with you until you said Canada. Although I prefer our inept, corrupt government to the Americans' adept, corrupt government.
The nice thing about democracy is that it has a tendency towards mediocrity. That's what happens when you try to please everyone, or even half of them. If you look at history, most of the serious stuff got done by a few people in power, not committees of one stripe or another. The same can be said for many of history's atrocities. Couple that with a nice starting legal framework and some legislative ineptitude and you have a nice stable system where you pay a bunch of self-serving (and some truly dedicated) people to handle the serious shit that happens now and then.
Truth be told, the typical Australian is less like Steve Irwin, and more like that other great Australian export - The Wiggles.
That's really disturbing. I was less concerned about you guys when I figured you were all playing with poisonous snakes and teaching your 2-year-olds how to ride alligators...
Is it wrong to laugh when a robot trips and falls? I found that funny enough to watch the video again.
So talking about this makes me feel a bit like a fish out of water.
Don't worry, it gets easier over time...
It's also worth noting that certain file formats have very redundant information. It's not unusual to compress a 24bpp bitmap file to 10%, similarly for text files. I've also seen many databases compress to 20% but, again, very redundant data. Some formats don't compress much at all, especially those that have some kind of compression built in.
If you applied your logic to every company, Apple should be in trouble for iTunes, Sun for Java and Macromedia for Flash.
It's worth noting that the Sherman Act only applies to Monopolies. The first test is whether they have a monopoly, then whether they're leveraging it to gain a new monopoly. I don't think this can be said for Apple (there are other media player hardware and applications out there, and they aren't a monopoly yet) or Sun (they don't have a monopoly on Java or anything else from what I can see), although it might for Macromedia (I'll give you the monopoly on Flash, but what are they leveraging it to build?).
What I like is that Outlook and Outlook Express both don't show you the link info in the status bar when you hover over a link. So even if you are a little worried, there's no easy way to do the simplest of sanity checks before you take your chances and see if that link is for an IE exploit or is a phishing scam. Of course, I'm not so stupid as to expect that my bank would send me emails (or postcards) about my bank account (and I'll give them hell if they do), so phishing is less likely. But I'm also left with viewing the source of my emails, traipsing through the 3 different formats and miles of tags in text view while hunting for a single link that I'm suspicious of. And all this because there is one thing that Outlook doesn't borrow from IE for.
Of course, the obvious response is to not use MS's pathetic email clients. I use one for work, and the other for archiving hotmail. Nothing else goes through there. Certainly, nothing that I'm overly worried about being intercepted, or that I have control over, is passing through either client.
That sounds reasonable to me, and perhaps less than I would want to see. But it's nothing like what the grandparent poster was looking for.
If the machines were truly secure, they should be able to leave them on a street corner for a week and know that they'd be fine when they came to pick them up.
Do me a favour, and call your local bank to do this with their safe (and your money).
Seriously, now (or not quite yet), we're talking about a computer here, not a James Bond car. Exactly what kind of tamper prevention mechanisms do you want them to put in there? "The new Diebold Electronic Voting Machine. Now with "extreme prejudice" tamper protection". I'll let you vote first.
It's been said before, and apparently needs to be said again - once you have physical access to a computer system, any security can be defeated. The big issue is, can any tampering be detected, and how hard is it to tamper in the first place? That's where the fault lies.
I wish there was a quick way to change your eye-edness.
It's not quick, but practice can fix this. Switch your primary focus from one eye to the other. Objects at different depths are good for this. After a while you'll find that you can switch almost instantly (say, half a second either way) and maintain which eye is primary at will. It's the same thing that's required to switch which hand your write with, or which foot you kick with.