Although I might be deadly wrong , I think the fall of the American empire will be caused by the reverse effect which caused its rise : it is closing on itself whereas it was its openness which gave it an edge over everybody (that and the WW2 effect where the US was spared the brunt of the war & destructions). The tightening of the fist will result in [foreign] people trusting less the US. First it started on diplomatic level, then it went to the academic level (I don't know many of us which would want to do a conference in the US due to all privacy issue) we are now at the level where joe blows start being conscientious of it, and if it continue that way, it will reach the economical level (why do business with the US when other country will have less restriction and allow more profits?).
At that final step what will be left of the US will be the hulk of its former self. Mind you it would still be a super power (most probably) but it would be not "the dream of liberty" anymore, just a country like any other.
Blizzard (or at least the worker there) as far as I can tell has always tried to not rush, and make sure all major bug are out before getting a title out. Which is how they got their reputation. But on a short term point of view, this is a loss for the share holder, since more money is spent whereas they could already release the title at an earlier point. So now blizzard get strengthened by activision dev cycle : rush everything out. Spend less money on title. Churn them quicker. Customer might lose a bit on the change, but share holder on the short term might not.
The problem is : they are not doing classified stuff. And AFAIK their results are public domain. Blackmailing them would be like to blackmail linus torvald and require a copy of Linux.
sensationalism. I am sorry, but even if 100% of the murder crime were committed by stranger (which th4ey are not, there is a good reason the husband/wife/family is suspected first), and even if 100% were committed with gun (which they are NOT), I don't think calling a 900 murder rate for a population of 55.000.000 could be called PREYING in any kind.
The fact is, as it was already discussed in Slashdot , some type of weapon LOWER the barrier to usage. For the same reason police are more readily using a taser than a baton, joe-anybody in a situation where rage/violence escalate will have a lower barrier to violence using a firearm than say, a knive or a blunt object. Any discussion ignoring that fact is doomed to be propaganda. Allowing the population at large to get firearms, don't mean that people will be able to defend themselves better, it means that John & Jane Doe which would normally not have committed a crime because knifing would have been too much for their stomach, would readily take the firearm and fire a bullet from a safe distance.
I think this is because we remember that we are even more angry now. On top of an OS which should not show the same error and bad quality as in the past, it has abusive DRM showed down your throat, and an abusive driver certificate problem. So yes, it is definitively worst than any other OS you cited. At least those previous disaster OS, were only disaster from the quality of the code, not because they wanted to play NANNY with what i could do or not do.
I don't use linux, and I think if you check my post history you will find out I never (not that I recall) was a windows-hater. But Vista intrusive DRM changed that.
Science will never disprove god, and it ain't the job of science. But as science explain more and more, even up to the point we are nearing a reproduction of the apparition of life, domain once reserved to the "sacred & religious", the god of the gap back down to the shadow. I guess that there will be a point where only the primal move/big bang/or whatever could be assigned to such a god of the gap. And nothing afterward. This is what i think most of those attacking science want to fight against. The relegation of their god of the gap to an initial push, without intervention afterward.
It has been a long time I moderated, but if I remember the FAQ, -1 overrated or +1 underrated are usually not for comment at the 0/1 threshold but for already rated comments. It make no sense thus to mod the above as overrated. Troll, Off topic, and other negative comment would have been far better than an "overrated" (over rated against... what ?).
I wonder if they do the same for Europe. because there are quite stringent law on the right to know what is collected as info on you , and a right of rectification. Now granted this is usually for database but it could very well bite them very hard if people start making request (for example to the CNIL in France).
Advertising works because you pay attention to something you already know and it continue make you remembering the brand, or it show you something new and you memorize it. But if you are literally drowned in an advertising world, there is so much you can memorize, and either you will memorize only a few good one, or you will memorize negatively the worst one (some of the worst 80th ad showing women in general as dumbwitt blondy made me swear I will never buy from their brand, and yes it was a brand directed at my segment). What I mean is that with an overdosis of ad as we have today, they will be ineffective, and making more ad to appear on more place (OS, fridge, t shirt animated ad, aniamted ad in the U bahn etc...) will make it worse.
Now , for the last 3 years I had no tv, and for the last years I had flashblock, scriptblock, popunder/popover block. I also automatically skip any ad in the middle, not even paying attention of the content of the ad. I am in other word ad-starved. When I go to my friends & family and get a sample of ad from their tv, those have bigger effect on me because I never see ads.
That is food for thought for the marketing and advertiser : maybe a return to minimalism would mean a return to effectiveness....
Don't be silly. The quest to keep control on US side is not based on free speech, diversity, melting pot and American way of life and whatnot. It is based on keeping the control on what is a vital part of all society : the communications pipelines. On both side it has been recognized it is a form of power and now both keep to get/keep as much of it as possible.
Like star or heart or circle, or square. Ever wondered why mentalist magician act work so wonderfully when they ask the public to chose a shape ? That's because most people will always chose the same shape. I am not sure if you increase or decrease the security because the dictionary attack would be easier (a few form that many people would use) but the possibility for each form would be higher than a simple lower case/upper case...
Having somebody NOT speaking through a cell phone but to another persons, except that another person in one group never answer, and in another group answer with a completely unrelated conversation. If the study cited in the BBC article is spot on, then both those should trigger the same level of annoyance.
Same argument as many other innocuous item which can be used to enable crime. Like crowbar for example. Why do you think crowbar can still be sold without liability ? For a simple reason. You cannot say/predict all the usage an item will be put to by somebody. You say whatever safe usage is, then this is over. At least in any sane country it is so.
Smoking. You can smoke as much as you wish, outside, in your own car, at your home, for all I care you can breath in a permanent smog, at your own private places. But as soon as you go in a public place(*), then you are blowing YOUR smoke in MY lung. In such case the government was right to step in and forbid it. You wanna exhale your poisons ? Do it where I won't have to be forced to inhale it...
(*) public place being defined in my own country as place where a member of the public can have access without invitation. Example : private place open to public like restaurants and shops, governmental facilities and buildings, transportation, etc...
"funny, many of the magnets on my fridge are made of plastic. would this device cause them to fall off?"
Open them. They are plain magnet with a plastic coating.
"the $3 cable was absolute shit. complete garbage.
the $30 was fantastic, a great improvement.
the $300 cable was better than the $30, but the difference was so slight, i could see a difference by zooming in and looking at a 10ms sample."
Characteristic of a cable are C,L and R. If your cable has identical characteristic, then it will sound the same. PERIOD. It does not matter how much it cost. And in my experience, 3$ cable have enough identical C,L and R that the resulting difference in signal might be seeable with a good oscilloscope, but NOT audible to human ears. And that is all the point of getting an audio quality good enough for human ear, not to fool your neighbor labrador into howling.
mr Randy was so flushed with insane people thinking they have power, that they changed the challenge rule so that only if you have a media presence you can do the challenge. Maybe those guy match the criteria, since they were interviewed ?
You know how many compartment there is in a plane ? 3 (eco, business, first), 5 maybe in some airline (eco + etc...) ? Well do know how many booking class there is ? 26+. All letter of the alphabet used. For example first could be FOA (first foully booked, ID discount, upgraded, etc...) business could be CDIRZ (from full fare to every kind of stuff, including ID's). Eco could be anything like MHSPQWT etc... All those represent different type of fares.
Now combine with how the booking is done (full fare, ID, upgrade/downgrade/FFs, week end fare, internet fare, bid pricing, block space, and I pass many other stuff). The worst case scenario I saw was booking twice the same place at 5 minutes itnerval and getting different fares because somebody canx a res on the same compartment/fare, and the fare optimisation progs had kicked in because the plane was underbooked...
The end result is quite a mess, where roughly only a computer today can really look thru. And then there are the various airport tax. Ever tryed to re-issue a ticket with 10 - 16 taxes because the pax goes onto 3 different countries/airport ?
As for ryan air, last time I looked at their price model, they had really cheapo place, but if you look at a plane on a whole, the average price of the place comes roughly the same as a more traditional airlines, and more expansive when you count extra fees, *AND* the way from the ryan-air special hub which is lost in the country side (example: ryan air frankfurt airport is in reality 120 km I think away from frankfurt. FRA on the other hand is about 20/30 km, they got also smacked for false advertising on price).
If I recall correctly, Cerenkov radiation is because the speed of the electron is quicker than photon speed in water. Thus the blue glow. In crystal this is due to gaps, and electron being quicker to higher orbitals and slowly decaying. Not the same reason/effect. PS: wanna freak out a nuclear physicist ? Put some bluish metal in a water with a blue light source, then leave it exposed somewhere....
Your spine would long give in if it is not muscled/solid enough to lift those hundreds of pound. Sure some people do lift as much , but they are trained for it, and as far as I know are not adverse to accident. Then also there is the center of gravity, unless you lift your 100's of pound like an those alter-lifting pros do, you could have serious problem when your gravity center is suddenly out of the body. Which naturally limit what you can take on, although the second one is probably a detail in comparison to the first one.
Well there are many I can. The 30 kph limit ? Are you in a neighborhood with kids ? See I can find reason. Speed limit of 30 on top of a climb ? You might not be able to see what's behind the climb. Go with 70 kph, and the cyclist which is behind get stamped. Go on 30 kph and you have time to brake or slow down or take him over. 30 kph where inhabitation are ? I lived near a place where 80+ kph was allowed. Needless to say there was NEVER a silence even at night. Then they reduced it to 50 kph on the freeway in the middle of the city, and 30 kph on the exit. That was a blessing. I bet you just started fuming at the 30 kph sign, without even trying to check why it is there.
Furthermore to all those which say that the speed limitation are there to get money from driver , that is on par with 9/11 truther. True there might be a very minor percentage of speed limit sign which are not readable (I would be surprised if it reach above the 1%, for all i drive I ever saw 2 of those). But the majority is clear and way ahead enough of the zone. The truth of those which say they have to pay ticket and fume at those sign cropping up, is that They are too dumb to udnerstand that jsut by slowing down under the limit they will not pay a fine. See I showed you a way easy enough to avoid paying a fine ! Slow down under the limit ! Incredible isn't it ?. You don't like it ? write traffic authorithy. But Nothing give you the right to speed over the limit and endanger the other. IMHO speed limit fine are yet not hefty enough that people feel entitled to break them.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I might be deadly wrong , I think the fall of the American empire will be caused by the reverse effect which caused its rise : it is closing on itself whereas it was its openness which gave it an edge over everybody (that and the WW2 effect where the US was spared the brunt of the war & destructions). The tightening of the fist will result in [foreign] people trusting less the US. First it started on diplomatic level, then it went to the academic level (I don't know many of us which would want to do a conference in the US due to all privacy issue) we are now at the level where joe blows start being conscientious of it, and if it continue that way, it will reach the economical level (why do business with the US when other country will have less restriction and allow more profits?).
At that final step what will be left of the US will be the hulk of its former self. Mind you it would still be a super power (most probably) but it would be not "the dream of liberty" anymore, just a country like any other.
/devil advocate
/devil advocate
Blizzard (or at least the worker there) as far as I can tell has always tried to not rush, and make sure all major bug are out before getting a title out. Which is how they got their reputation. But on a short term point of view, this is a loss for the share holder, since more money is spent whereas they could already release the title at an earlier point. So now blizzard get strengthened by activision dev cycle : rush everything out. Spend less money on title. Churn them quicker. Customer might lose a bit on the change, but share holder on the short term might not.
And where is the original review by the above persons ? Or how one can see it in some sort of internet archive if it was deleted ?
The problem is : they are not doing classified stuff. And AFAIK their results are public domain. Blackmailing them would be like to blackmail linus torvald and require a copy of Linux.
sensationalism. I am sorry, but even if 100% of the murder crime were committed by stranger (which th4ey are not, there is a good reason the husband/wife/family is suspected first), and even if 100% were committed with gun (which they are NOT), I don't think calling a 900 murder rate for a population of 55.000.000 could be called PREYING in any kind.
The fact is, as it was already discussed in Slashdot , some type of weapon LOWER the barrier to usage. For the same reason police are more readily using a taser than a baton, joe-anybody in a situation where rage/violence escalate will have a lower barrier to violence using a firearm than say, a knive or a blunt object. Any discussion ignoring that fact is doomed to be propaganda. Allowing the population at large to get firearms, don't mean that people will be able to defend themselves better, it means that John & Jane Doe which would normally not have committed a crime because knifing would have been too much for their stomach, would readily take the firearm and fire a bullet from a safe distance.
I think this is because we remember that we are even more angry now. On top of an OS which should not show the same error and bad quality as in the past, it has abusive DRM showed down your throat, and an abusive driver certificate problem. So yes, it is definitively worst than any other OS you cited. At least those previous disaster OS, were only disaster from the quality of the code, not because they wanted to play NANNY with what i could do or not do.
I don't use linux, and I think if you check my post history you will find out I never (not that I recall) was a windows-hater. But Vista intrusive DRM changed that.
Science will never disprove god, and it ain't the job of science. But as science explain more and more, even up to the point we are nearing a reproduction of the apparition of life, domain once reserved to the "sacred & religious", the god of the gap back down to the shadow. I guess that there will be a point where only the primal move/big bang/or whatever could be assigned to such a god of the gap. And nothing afterward. This is what i think most of those attacking science want to fight against. The relegation of their god of the gap to an initial push, without intervention afterward.
Bad science is bad science, pre-trial, during and post trial. And that include during investigation. So no there is no difference.
It has been a long time I moderated, but if I remember the FAQ, -1 overrated or +1 underrated are usually not for comment at the 0/1 threshold but for already rated comments. It make no sense thus to mod the above as overrated. Troll, Off topic, and other negative comment would have been far better than an "overrated" (over rated against ... what ?).
I wonder if they do the same for Europe. because there are quite stringent law on the right to know what is collected as info on you , and a right of rectification. Now granted this is usually for database but it could very well bite them very hard if people start making request (for example to the CNIL in France).
Well, keeping the price high anyway.
:).
Keep the price and the buyer high
Advertising works because you pay attention to something you already know and it continue make you remembering the brand, or it show you something new and you memorize it. But if you are literally drowned in an advertising world, there is so much you can memorize, and either you will memorize only a few good one, or you will memorize negatively the worst one (some of the worst 80th ad showing women in general as dumbwitt blondy made me swear I will never buy from their brand, and yes it was a brand directed at my segment). What I mean is that with an overdosis of ad as we have today, they will be ineffective, and making more ad to appear on more place (OS, fridge, t shirt animated ad, aniamted ad in the U bahn etc...) will make it worse.
Now , for the last 3 years I had no tv, and for the last years I had flashblock, scriptblock, popunder/popover block. I also automatically skip any ad in the middle, not even paying attention of the content of the ad. I am in other word ad-starved. When I go to my friends & family and get a sample of ad from their tv, those have bigger effect on me because I never see ads.
That is food for thought for the marketing and advertiser : maybe a return to minimalism would mean a return to effectiveness....
Don't be silly. The quest to keep control on US side is not based on free speech, diversity, melting pot and American way of life and whatnot. It is based on keeping the control on what is a vital part of all society : the communications pipelines. On both side it has been recognized it is a form of power and now both keep to get/keep as much of it as possible.
Like star or heart or circle, or square. Ever wondered why mentalist magician act work so wonderfully when they ask the public to chose a shape ? That's because most people will always chose the same shape. I am not sure if you increase or decrease the security because the dictionary attack would be easier (a few form that many people would use) but the possibility for each form would be higher than a simple lower case/upper case...
Having somebody NOT speaking through a cell phone but to another persons, except that another person in one group never answer, and in another group answer with a completely unrelated conversation. If the study cited in the BBC article is spot on, then both those should trigger the same level of annoyance.
Same argument as many other innocuous item which can be used to enable crime. Like crowbar for example. Why do you think crowbar can still be sold without liability ? For a simple reason. You cannot say/predict all the usage an item will be put to by somebody. You say whatever safe usage is, then this is over. At least in any sane country it is so.
Smoking. You can smoke as much as you wish, outside, in your own car, at your home, for all I care you can breath in a permanent smog, at your own private places. But as soon as you go in a public place(*), then you are blowing YOUR smoke in MY lung. In such case the government was right to step in and forbid it. You wanna exhale your poisons ? Do it where I won't have to be forced to inhale it...
(*) public place being defined in my own country as place where a member of the public can have access without invitation. Example : private place open to public like restaurants and shops, governmental facilities and buildings, transportation, etc...
The movie transformer sucked so much that even the "pirate" were shy of putting a copy on P2P and mark themselves as "having bad taste".
Apparently vinyl are not great for sound, but for rolling a joint.
Mind you, this was modded insightful instead of funny, so maybe there is some truth behind : junkies prefers vinyl to CD.
"funny, many of the magnets on my fridge are made of plastic. would this device cause them to fall off?"
Open them. They are plain magnet with a plastic coating.
"the $3 cable was absolute shit. complete garbage.
the $30 was fantastic, a great improvement.
the $300 cable was better than the $30, but the difference was so slight, i could see a difference by zooming in and looking at a 10ms sample."
Characteristic of a cable are C,L and R. If your cable has identical characteristic, then it will sound the same. PERIOD. It does not matter how much it cost. And in my experience, 3$ cable have enough identical C,L and R that the resulting difference in signal might be seeable with a good oscilloscope, but NOT audible to human ears. And that is all the point of getting an audio quality good enough for human ear, not to fool your neighbor labrador into howling.
mr Randy was so flushed with insane people thinking they have power, that they changed the challenge rule so that only if you have a media presence you can do the challenge. Maybe those guy match the criteria, since they were interviewed ?
You know how many compartment there is in a plane ? 3 (eco, business, first), 5 maybe in some airline (eco + etc...) ? Well do know how many booking class there is ? 26+. All letter of the alphabet used. For example first could be FOA (first foully booked, ID discount, upgraded, etc...) business could be CDIRZ (from full fare to every kind of stuff, including ID's). Eco could be anything like MHSPQWT etc... All those represent different type of fares.
Now combine with how the booking is done (full fare, ID, upgrade/downgrade/FFs, week end fare, internet fare, bid pricing, block space, and I pass many other stuff). The worst case scenario I saw was booking twice the same place at 5 minutes itnerval and getting different fares because somebody canx a res on the same compartment/fare, and the fare optimisation progs had kicked in because the plane was underbooked... The end result is quite a mess, where roughly only a computer today can really look thru. And then there are the various airport tax. Ever tryed to re-issue a ticket with 10 - 16 taxes because the pax goes onto 3 different countries/airport ?
As for ryan air, last time I looked at their price model, they had really cheapo place, but if you look at a plane on a whole, the average price of the place comes roughly the same as a more traditional airlines, and more expansive when you count extra fees, *AND* the way from the ryan-air special hub which is lost in the country side (example: ryan air frankfurt airport is in reality 120 km I think away from frankfurt. FRA on the other hand is about 20/30 km, they got also smacked for false advertising on price).
If I recall correctly, Cerenkov radiation is because the speed of the electron is quicker than photon speed in water. Thus the blue glow. In crystal this is due to gaps, and electron being quicker to higher orbitals and slowly decaying. Not the same reason/effect. PS: wanna freak out a nuclear physicist ? Put some bluish metal in a water with a blue light source, then leave it exposed somewhere....
Your spine would long give in if it is not muscled/solid enough to lift those hundreds of pound. Sure some people do lift as much , but they are trained for it, and as far as I know are not adverse to accident. Then also there is the center of gravity, unless you lift your 100's of pound like an those alter-lifting pros do, you could have serious problem when your gravity center is suddenly out of the body. Which naturally limit what you can take on, although the second one is probably a detail in comparison to the first one.
Well there are many I can. The 30 kph limit ? Are you in a neighborhood with kids ? See I can find reason. Speed limit of 30 on top of a climb ? You might not be able to see what's behind the climb. Go with 70 kph, and the cyclist which is behind get stamped. Go on 30 kph and you have time to brake or slow down or take him over. 30 kph where inhabitation are ? I lived near a place where 80+ kph was allowed. Needless to say there was NEVER a silence even at night. Then they reduced it to 50 kph on the freeway in the middle of the city, and 30 kph on the exit. That was a blessing. I bet you just started fuming at the 30 kph sign, without even trying to check why it is there.
Furthermore to all those which say that the speed limitation are there to get money from driver , that is on par with 9/11 truther. True there might be a very minor percentage of speed limit sign which are not readable (I would be surprised if it reach above the 1%, for all i drive I ever saw 2 of those). But the majority is clear and way ahead enough of the zone. The truth of those which say they have to pay ticket and fume at those sign cropping up, is that They are too dumb to udnerstand that jsut by slowing down under the limit they will not pay a fine. See I showed you a way easy enough to avoid paying a fine ! Slow down under the limit ! Incredible isn't it ?. You don't like it ? write traffic authorithy. But Nothing give you the right to speed over the limit and endanger the other. IMHO speed limit fine are yet not hefty enough that people feel entitled to break them.