Thank Hollywood for that. In the movies, all people who use the computer to hack and such only use the keyboard. They NEVER use the mouse. Which is funny because you'll see amazing 3D flying hallways and viruses flying around, and apparently they're controlling everything through key macros or somesuch.
Anyways, the teacher probably thought, "OMG he's using a keyboard, he must be hacking I'm sending him home OMFG ROFL."
I think it's important to remember that what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. I think the planet abides by the same philosophy. So after a few centuries of global warming, it should be indestructible.
If we should need to solve the issue of global warming, it should be fairly easy:
Set up solar reflection panels to direct concentrated rays of sun towards the ice caps, so that not only will the ice melt, it will evaporate as well.
Set up a huge thermal vent so that evaporated water can waft up to space and out of our orbit.
The planet will naturally start to spin faster as a result of reduced mass.
A planet that spins faster will expose any given portion of the planet to the sun for shorter increments, allowing the sun less time to "heat up" the atmosphere.
Furthermore, the evaporated water will freeze once it reaches space, making a nice little shiny reflector shield to block out some of the sun's radiation.
I honestly don't understand why no one consults me about this problem. Thank gosh I can share my productive fruits with the slashdot population.
Phishing will really be a threat once phishers become more sophisticated. I receive about 10 phishing attempts per day, and almost always the scam is given away by one of the following:
1. The phishers attempt to scare me by saying if I don't respond within 24 hours, my account will be disabled. No financial institution would impose a deadline like this, since it's not guaranteed that people check email every day.
2. The phishers have atrocious spelling, like "we noticed some unnusual activity on your account, and we are going to temporally disable it unless you provide your authentication credintials."
I hope game companies start hiring better dedicated AI programmers for their games. In Grand Theft Auto, I hate when my character runs around a fallen bike 3 times trying to figure out how to get on it, while punks with uzis unload clips of lead into my head.
Yeah, haven't you noticed all of the CloudScape adds on Slashdot?
"Test your skills with Java and Win an IPod - Take the Challenge for Java"
"Download the Newest Open Source Database. Easy to Learn and Use. Fast Download. Do It Now!"
I hope Slashdot continues to post articles about their paid sponsors.
I notice that you carefully missed out 'academics' from your list. But why shouldn't politicians and business leaders also be included?
Notice how academics was last on the list? If we're going to talk about science, then it would be refreshing to see science driven by those without a political agenda.
Think, for a moment, what the climate on the earth was like for the vast majority of the 5 billion years it has existed.
Now we're talking! The climate of earth for the past 4.3 billion years has consisted of huge trends that lasted for millenia, the likes and magnitude of which dwarf anything that we have experienced over the past 200 years! Ice ages followed by global warming followed by global flooding followed by ice ages!
What proportion of that time has it been habitable by humans?
Approximately 5 million years, or one thousandth of the earth's history.
What changes brought that about? Over what timescales?
The countdown to climate-change catastrophe is spelt out by a task force of senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the world
I'm glad that senior politicians and business leaders are spearheading this "scientific" effort. We constituates needs someone to put a spin on the issues for us in order to understand them.
"There is an ecological timebomb ticking away," said Stephen Byers, the former transport secretary, who co-chaired the task force that produced the report with the US Republican senator Olympia Snowe.
As always, it's great to see the former transport secretary weigh in on a topic so close to his area of expertise. BTW, Olympia Snowe sounds suspiciously like the name of a hippie child of greenpeace parents.
The report says this point will be two degrees centigrade above the average world temperature prevailing in 1750 before the industrial revolution, when human activities - mainly the production of waste gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), which retain the sun's heat in the atmosphere - first started to affect the climate.
Wow! The earth has been around for 4+ billion years, and it only takes us 250 years to set it on an "irreversible" course of destruction. That kinda power indicates how far we've come since the Ice Age!
So, the production of waste gases started to affect the climate in 1750, huh? Well, let's consider:
In 1750, the population of
the world was only 760 million people.
North America was 5.3 million people.
Europe was 158 million people.
South America was 19 million people.
Africa was 82 million people.
Asia (including Russia) was 493 million people.
Australia was 1.5 million people.
Now, we all can imagine how heavily industrialized South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia was during that time period. Which leaves North America and Europe as the truly industrialized countries.
I find it very interesting (or rather, highly implausible) that just 169 million people were capable of generating a measurable change upon the earth's climate in 1750.
Re:Why don't you just say he's an animation artist
on
New Yorker on Miyazaki
·
· Score: 1
The number of articles that appear on Slashdot regarding Hayao Miyazaki is probably outnumbered by the number of articles regarding Linus Torvalds and Stephen Hawking by a factor of about 10,000 to 1. It's reasonable to assume that a much smaller segment of the Slashdot population has had exposure to Hayao Miyazaki.
"If we don't do anything by about twenty thirty we could have a global warming of exceeding two degrees, and at that point it's believed the Greenland ice sheet would
start to melt in a way that you wouldn't be able to stop it once it started it, it would melt. Take a long time to melt but ultimately it would lead to a sea level rise of seven or eight metres."
That's 25 years away. Maybe these people are a bunch of wackos who just happen to also be well-published climatologists, but are you willing to bet the next generation's well-being on that?
People who are not skeptical tend to have difficulty analyzing the statements of others.
The quoted snippet states that the melting might start in 25 years. Once started, it probably would take thousands of years to gain an appreciable effect. It certainly won't affect the next generation. We'll all be more likely to die from nuclear war.
I also take offense at the quote as suggesting that once something starts to melt, it will melt in a way that can't be stopped. That statement is a scare tactic. If you take an ice cube out of your freezer, and it starts to melt, there's no way you could prevent it from freezing again under the right circumstances (i.e. shoving it back in the freezer.)
I'd like to warn you in advance that I'm going to rant now. This post is intended to reflect my opinion solely; but hopefully there are a few like-minded compatriots out there.
There seem to be a few recurring themes within this topic's threads:
Is it natural for humans to want to look at humans of the opposite sex?
Obviously, it is.
Is it moral to use natural instinct as an excuse to not seek better behavior?
I've always had a real problem with the attitude that "this is what humans do, so why should we strive to do different." Think about how humans operate in impoverished, third-world countries. Little thought or planning goes into the lifestyles of millions of people, simply because the inhabitants don't have a stable enough life or enconomy to afford long-term thinking. Many couples have seven or more children, most of whom die. AIDS is rampant.
That's what humans do, if you want to get technical. We should always strive for better.
Is it moral to use sex appeal to sell games and other items?
It's certainly moral to use sex appeal to sell sexy products. But using sex appeal to sell non-sex-related items? That's just exploitation, manipulation, or what have you. Great example: Sudeki. Supposedly great RPG. The ad shows this hottie little elf in a bikini, holding a staff. The tagline for the ad is "Pray for a frontal assault".
Now, the prude that I am, I have problems with this on so many levels.
Am I supposed to imagine myself playing this game, saying to myself "Oh, I'm about to enter a battle! I hope I get to fight a hot elf chick in a bikini! Please, PLEASE let it be a frontal assault! I want to see her full frontal assault! I want her to frontally assault me and slide up and down me in that gorgeous bikini with the busty cleavage that I JUST CAN'T IGNORE, sliding up and down my body and..." Oh wait, AM I SUPPOSED TO BE PLAYING A GAME HERE, or having a fantasy?
Which leads to my follow-up point... Why advertise like that for a game whose selling point is NOT titillation? If I was a developer for that company, I would be PISSED! Imaginary conversation between game developers:
Fred: See Tom, I told you they would put a hot chick in armor bikini on the advert, and stress her rather than point out all the great features we programmed into the game.
Tom: WTF?!?!?! After all the 90 hour work weeks I put into party combat AI? Why would you EVER pray for a frontal assault? Couldn't they have talked about the dynamic quest system we implemented for RPG stat gaps in between quests???
Fred: See Tom, I told you they would put a hot chick in armor bikini on the advert.
Imaginary conversation between game developer and game player:
Sam: Hey dude, I heard you were a developer on one of those popular RPG games. What was the name of it?
Tom: Sudeki.
Sam: Is that the one that was based on that seven hour movie?
Tom: No, that was Lord of the Rings.
Sam: Oh. What is cool about Sudeki?
Tom: Sudeki has an interactive dynamic quest system to help you level up between important quests.
Sam: Cool! But it's funny, I don't remember seeing any ads or reviews about anything like that.
Tom: Our advertisement said, "Pray for a frontal assault."
Sam: Oh, that one! With the hot elf chick in the metal bikini! Hey, does she really strip down and show her cleavage when she does a frontal assault! I love those games!
How embarrasing for game developers.
How many games could possibly be described by the tagline "Pray for a frontal assault!", if there was a hot chick on the ad? Nearly all of them, I'd presume. This is just generic crap.
I really hope IBM opens up the following patent (quoted from Forbes.com 06/24/02):
The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points.
For the past few years I've been fantasizing about writing a killer app video game where thin lines get fat. But I've always been afraid I'd be sued by IBM.
They say World of Warcraft® has sold through more than 600,000 units to customers in North America, Australia, and New Zealand...
...also shattered all previous concurrency records in North America, achieving over 200,000 simultaneous players during the holiday period.
Let me get this straight... 1 out of 3 WoW players were playing simultaneously at some point? Despite the time zone difference between USA and New Zealand?
Am I the only one that finds that hard to believe?
It seems like for all the trouble he went through to set up this hoax, it would actually have been easier to hook up the X10 to his computer and plop a real webcam outside.
Haven't you ever seen any Hollywood movies? Doing something like that only requires a few typed commands on the keyboard! You don't even need a mouse!
And, if he wanted to, he could zoom in on and "enhance" a single pixel until it looked like his christmas lights.
Now if only these guys can figure out how to enable the Bluetooth features on my v710 phone...
Try the discussion forums over at wirelessadvisor.com
I posted a teaser message there once regarding the Motorola T720. By using the USB modem cable and a COM port sniffer, I determined that extended AT modem commands were used to synchronize the phone with the desktop. By posting my findings, someone took the initiative and started a Yahoo! group for hacking the T720. Within a month, the group had 400 members and within five months the group had collectively hacked the T720.
In fairness to the jackasses, there was a recent court ruling that set a precedent along those lines.
Well then I guess the FAA can't ban WiFi, because that's soley the jurisdiction of the FCC.
In response to a previous post, I notice that people come up with all these little "of course the FAA can do whatever they want, they're little territories in the sky and they need to be safe." But that's not logic. If the FAA has power granted by congress, then go ahead and quote that. But I don't want to hear any argument that even sounds remotely like "Well it's a bus and buses can ban WiFi because they need to be safe, but otherwise Nothing! trumps the FCC."
First, I like the WiFi, that would be great. The only thing that worries me is that people will start using it for VOIP to get around any anti-cellphone regulations.
Uhm, if you're not using a cellphone, then you don't have to worry about anti-cellphone regulations. There's nothing to "get around". Second, the FAA has its own ban on cell phones in airplanes.
I would be inclined to agree. But a bunch of wannabe-lawyer jackasses on/. don't. There was an article on/. about a college campus apartment that tried to ban wifi routers. Said wannabe-lawyer jackasses kept posting on/. "Nothing trumps the FCC! Nothing trumps the FCC!" I think you've just opened the same can of worms flamewar.
You just bring a laptop (or they could loan you one on selected flights) and you play with the people on the plane with you
Uhm, yeah. Have you ever actually tried that? I can barely fit my 15" laptop on the seat tray in front of me, let alone use the mouse at the same time. Pray the guy in front of you doesn't recline his seat - you'll have to close your LCD panel half way to even use it. Even in first class, in the bulkhead with the laptop on my actual lap, it was a pain (and I'm not referring to toasting my testes).
I actually went out and bought a 13" Sony VAIO laptop so that I could use it on the plane.
Small software houses pose problems for IP lawyers. First, they don't have any money. They barely make any money. They might make enough for the initial developer to get by, but when you're talking about the kind of money these companies are looking for, that's nothing. They'll spit at it.
You forget something critical. When a company sues others for patent infringement, they usually start with a few small guys first, to build up some capital and establish a track record before going after the big dogs.
Ownership and property rights will probably be around for awhile, but free markets are threatened by intellectual property laws when generic products infringe upon enforced intellectual property ownership.
What if we vote a socialist into office? Does that mean we're still 100% capitalist, just because we collectively voted for someone?
It means we're still capitalist until the way that citizens elect their leaders is changed.
I think that flawed beyond reason is a bit of a harsh evaluation. But I do agree that because each person does not have 100% ability to vote a particular candidate into an elected position, we're not at a position of 100% capitalism.
However, if 99 citizens out of 100 vote for elected officials that support taxes, that means that 99% of the county supports taxes implicitly, either because the voters believe in taxes, or because voters believe the taxes are necessary or are a necessary compromise. That implicit consent does lend itself to my opinion that capitalism is supported by free vote.
I believe that citizens have 100% power to elect whomever they want. Thus, electing someone who supports taxes is implicit consent to pay taxes.
However, since voting is a group behavior, and one person's voice doesn't always count, I agree that the minority of voters are involuntarily paying taxes that the majority of voters believe in, or believe are a necessary compromise associated with the candidates for whom they've voted.
To say that capitalism isn't going anywhere because communism failed is a faulty assumption. It might end up being true, but your argument is malformed.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you saying that taping a piece of cardboard to a steel door makes it easy to bypass? Wow, I'm gonna get me to a bank...
Anyways, the teacher probably thought, "OMG he's using a keyboard, he must be hacking I'm sending him home OMFG ROFL."
If we should need to solve the issue of global warming, it should be fairly easy:
- Set up solar reflection panels to direct concentrated rays of sun towards the ice caps, so that not only will the ice melt, it will evaporate as well.
- Set up a huge thermal vent so that evaporated water can waft up to space and out of our orbit.
- The planet will naturally start to spin faster as a result of reduced mass.
- A planet that spins faster will expose any given portion of the planet to the sun for shorter increments, allowing the sun less time to "heat up" the atmosphere.
- Furthermore, the evaporated water will freeze once it reaches space, making a nice little shiny reflector shield to block out some of the sun's radiation.
I honestly don't understand why no one consults me about this problem. Thank gosh I can share my productive fruits with the slashdot population.1. The phishers attempt to scare me by saying if I don't respond within 24 hours, my account will be disabled. No financial institution would impose a deadline like this, since it's not guaranteed that people check email every day.
2. The phishers have atrocious spelling, like "we noticed some unnusual activity on your account, and we are going to temporally disable it unless you provide your authentication credintials."
I hope game companies start hiring better dedicated AI programmers for their games. In Grand Theft Auto, I hate when my character runs around a fallen bike 3 times trying to figure out how to get on it, while punks with uzis unload clips of lead into my head.
"Test your skills with Java and Win an IPod - Take the Challenge for Java"
"Download the Newest Open Source Database. Easy to Learn and Use. Fast Download. Do It Now!" I hope Slashdot continues to post articles about their paid sponsors.
I have no idea who Sam Paisano is, on the other hand.
Tell me what you really think.
I notice that you carefully missed out 'academics' from your list. But why shouldn't politicians and business leaders also be included?
Notice how academics was last on the list? If we're going to talk about science, then it would be refreshing to see science driven by those without a political agenda.
Think, for a moment, what the climate on the earth was like for the vast majority of the 5 billion years it has existed.
Now we're talking! The climate of earth for the past 4.3 billion years has consisted of huge trends that lasted for millenia, the likes and magnitude of which dwarf anything that we have experienced over the past 200 years! Ice ages followed by global warming followed by global flooding followed by ice ages!
What proportion of that time has it been habitable by humans?
Approximately 5 million years, or one thousandth of the earth's history.
What changes brought that about? Over what timescales?
Not sure what this question asks.
I'm glad that senior politicians and business leaders are spearheading this "scientific" effort. We constituates needs someone to put a spin on the issues for us in order to understand them.
"There is an ecological timebomb ticking away," said Stephen Byers, the former transport secretary, who co-chaired the task force that produced the report with the US Republican senator Olympia Snowe.
As always, it's great to see the former transport secretary weigh in on a topic so close to his area of expertise. BTW, Olympia Snowe sounds suspiciously like the name of a hippie child of greenpeace parents.
The report says this point will be two degrees centigrade above the average world temperature prevailing in 1750 before the industrial revolution, when human activities - mainly the production of waste gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), which retain the sun's heat in the atmosphere - first started to affect the climate.
Wow! The earth has been around for 4+ billion years, and it only takes us 250 years to set it on an "irreversible" course of destruction. That kinda power indicates how far we've come since the Ice Age!
So, the production of waste gases started to affect the climate in 1750, huh? Well, let's consider:
In 1750, the population of
- the world was only 760 million people.
- North America was 5.3 million people.
- Europe was 158 million people.
- South America was 19 million people.
- Africa was 82 million people.
- Asia (including Russia) was 493 million people.
- Australia was 1.5 million people.
Now, we all can imagine how heavily industrialized South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia was during that time period. Which leaves North America and Europe as the truly industrialized countries.I find it very interesting (or rather, highly implausible) that just 169 million people were capable of generating a measurable change upon the earth's climate in 1750.
The number of articles that appear on Slashdot regarding Hayao Miyazaki is probably outnumbered by the number of articles regarding Linus Torvalds and Stephen Hawking by a factor of about 10,000 to 1. It's reasonable to assume that a much smaller segment of the Slashdot population has had exposure to Hayao Miyazaki.
The quoted snippet states that the melting might start in 25 years. Once started, it probably would take thousands of years to gain an appreciable effect. It certainly won't affect the next generation. We'll all be more likely to die from nuclear war.
I also take offense at the quote as suggesting that once something starts to melt, it will melt in a way that can't be stopped. That statement is a scare tactic. If you take an ice cube out of your freezer, and it starts to melt, there's no way you could prevent it from freezing again under the right circumstances (i.e. shoving it back in the freezer.)
There seem to be a few recurring themes within this topic's threads:
Is it natural for humans to want to look at humans of the opposite sex?
Is it moral to use natural instinct as an excuse to not seek better behavior?
Is it moral to use sex appeal to sell games and other items?
Imaginary conversation between game developer and game player:
How embarrasing for game developers.
How many games could possibly be described by the tagline "Pray for a frontal assault!", if there was a hot chick on the ad? Nearly all of them, I'd presume. This is just generic crap.
This is proof that the entertainment c
I really hope IBM opens up the following patent (quoted from Forbes.com 06/24/02):
The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points.
For the past few years I've been fantasizing about writing a killer app video game where thin lines get fat. But I've always been afraid I'd be sued by IBM.
Maybe now my dreams can come true.
Let me get this straight... 1 out of 3 WoW players were playing simultaneously at some point? Despite the time zone difference between USA and New Zealand?
Am I the only one that finds that hard to believe?
Haven't you ever seen any Hollywood movies? Doing something like that only requires a few typed commands on the keyboard! You don't even need a mouse!
And, if he wanted to, he could zoom in on and "enhance" a single pixel until it looked like his christmas lights.
Now if only these guys can figure out how to enable the Bluetooth features on my v710 phone...
Try the discussion forums over at wirelessadvisor.com
I posted a teaser message there once regarding the Motorola T720. By using the USB modem cable and a COM port sniffer, I determined that extended AT modem commands were used to synchronize the phone with the desktop. By posting my findings, someone took the initiative and started a Yahoo! group for hacking the T720. Within a month, the group had 400 members and within five months the group had collectively hacked the T720.
Well then I guess the FAA can't ban WiFi, because that's soley the jurisdiction of the FCC.
In response to a previous post, I notice that people come up with all these little "of course the FAA can do whatever they want, they're little territories in the sky and they need to be safe." But that's not logic. If the FAA has power granted by congress, then go ahead and quote that. But I don't want to hear any argument that even sounds remotely like "Well it's a bus and buses can ban WiFi because they need to be safe, but otherwise Nothing! trumps the FCC."
First, I like the WiFi, that would be great. The only thing that worries me is that people will start using it for VOIP to get around any anti-cellphone regulations. Uhm, if you're not using a cellphone, then you don't have to worry about anti-cellphone regulations. There's nothing to "get around". /. don't. There was an article on /. about a college campus apartment that tried to ban wifi routers. Said wannabe-lawyer jackasses kept posting on /. "Nothing trumps the FCC! Nothing trumps the FCC!" I think you've just opened the same can of worms flamewar.
Second, the FAA has its own ban on cell phones in airplanes. I would be inclined to agree. But a bunch of wannabe-lawyer jackasses on
You just bring a laptop (or they could loan you one on selected flights) and you play with the people on the plane with you
Uhm, yeah. Have you ever actually tried that? I can barely fit my 15" laptop on the seat tray in front of me, let alone use the mouse at the same time. Pray the guy in front of you doesn't recline his seat - you'll have to close your LCD panel half way to even use it. Even in first class, in the bulkhead with the laptop on my actual lap, it was a pain (and I'm not referring to toasting my testes).
I actually went out and bought a 13" Sony VAIO laptop so that I could use it on the plane.
Small software houses pose problems for IP lawyers. First, they don't have any money. They barely make any money. They might make enough for the initial developer to get by, but when you're talking about the kind of money these companies are looking for, that's nothing. They'll spit at it.
You forget something critical. When a company sues others for patent infringement, they usually start with a few small guys first, to build up some capital and establish a track record before going after the big dogs.
In pursuudo epso, epo no madis teht hadi.
Ownership and property rights will probably be around for awhile, but free markets are threatened by intellectual property laws when generic products infringe upon enforced intellectual property ownership.
It means we're still capitalist until the way that citizens elect their leaders is changed.
I think that flawed beyond reason is a bit of a harsh evaluation. But I do agree that because each person does not have 100% ability to vote a particular candidate into an elected position, we're not at a position of 100% capitalism.
However, if 99 citizens out of 100 vote for elected officials that support taxes, that means that 99% of the county supports taxes implicitly, either because the voters believe in taxes, or because voters believe the taxes are necessary or are a necessary compromise. That implicit consent does lend itself to my opinion that capitalism is supported by free vote.
I believe that citizens have 100% power to elect whomever they want. Thus, electing someone who supports taxes is implicit consent to pay taxes.
However, since voting is a group behavior, and one person's voice doesn't always count, I agree that the minority of voters are involuntarily paying taxes that the majority of voters believe in, or believe are a necessary compromise associated with the candidates for whom they've voted.
To say that capitalism isn't going anywhere because communism failed is a faulty assumption. It might end up being true, but your argument is malformed.