--Did the first European settlers in the US forget where they came from? I just don't think so.
maybe the first settlers didn't forget, but how much does the average american of today feel they owe to europe? no much I'd guess and thats only a few hundred years AND it doesn't take the best part of a millenium to get back to the old country. Rememeber the original purpose of colonisation of the new world was for the glory of the Spanish,Portugese, British crown etc. Is that why the US has propelled itself to being the only remaining superpower? For the glory of the Queen? I think not. Imagine, thousands of years to reach you new home, thousands more years to turn it into a place capable of, and willing to, spend a fortune building new ships and providing huge numbers of settlers to go on a colonise new planets. All this assumes no internal politics gets in the way, which is surprising given that in order to coordinate enough to launch a single mission to the stars, a species would have to be pretty martial in order to provide enough will to actually do it, and how much more martial than us could you get without actually blowing up your own planet?
--We have a space faring life form that has the tech to go everywhere...and then you believe they would have sudden amnesia on planetfall???
Thats not what I'm saying exactly. Some kind of neglecting of advanced tech is almost inevitable given the relative importance of rapid development of production capability and life support. What I'm saying is that the tech required for space exploration can only be explored when a society has reached a critical mass whereby it can both afford the time and resources required for further exploration and sees the necessity for it. It's rather like asking whether you would support a 5% rise in tax to support the building of a giant model elephant. It might be a really cool thing but wouldn't money be better spent on better healthcare? Or perhaps growing enough food to live. These are the kinds of realities which would face a newly colonised planet without further support from the home planet.Going back to your comparison to the US settlers, what were they doing while Europe was fighting wars and expanding every way they could? They were trying to grow crops and grind out a living, AND they could export stuff back to Europe to buy livestock, weapons food, etc which would arrive some months later. How would they have survived had it taken a few hundred years for the essential supplies to arrive?
All in all I dont think it would be possible to build a collection of planets with similar cultures, who all knew of the existnce of the other and were able to act as a single block without FTL transport, and given current human nature I'm not sure we could realistically do it even with FTL tech.
Of course, Fermi's Paradox assumes that intersteller flight is possible. It also fails to take into account that without FTL flight empire building would be impossible. What you would end up with would be a collection of diverse planets with similar species on who would have little idea of where they came from. Without a link back to a home planet each spaceship seeking to colonise a planet would have a few tens of thousands of people at a maximum, who would have to build a new society from scratch. These new societies would then have to develop a spacefaring culture before moving on. Chances are there would be no desire to do this until the new planet was fully colonised and so the progress would be painfully slow, with no central control, and potentially without any knowledge of any other planets colonised by the parent species. Many generations would grow up and the story of where they came from could simply be lost in the past. For example, how much do we really know about human society from when there were only a few tens of thousands of us living in central Africa? OK, its not quite the same, but it would only take one major disaster early on to send the colonists back into the dark ages.
A virus like culture like this (virus like because they just spread without central control) would have little need for broadcasting info across the galaxy and the only time you would see any sign of them would be when they turned up on your doorstep wanting your planet. Even then, if they turned up here they'd probably take one look at this place, decide it was too dirty and polluted and turn around to go onto the next planet.
I'm a BIG fan of scan. I do all my PC bit shopping online and have bought stuff in the past from Scan, CCL and overclockers-UK. I have to say that my best experience has always been with Scan, delivery next day by a friendly courier (for which the price has just fallen from £10 to £7) and a no quible returns policy. I have to admit, one of the major factors in my online purchasing decisions is the simplicity and speed of the website. Scan's is quick, clean and simple, with easy navigation and a logical layout, whereas Dabs, Jungle etc leave a LOT to be desired. Jungle in particular has a hideous website which is very slow to load and slow to use. My employer uses Jungle as their prefered supplier for some unknown reason, and they always seem to take ages to deliver an order and frequently seem to have to wait 7 days for the parts to be in stock.
I think I was being slightly ironic. My current job will not actually use a QA dept at all because nearly all of the bugs are ironed out at integration (Also because the deadline is so tight). No one likes to give buggy objects to their colleagues but it happens, usually because you can't see the wood for the trees and miss something stupid.
Everything we write is a separate COM object. This means every software engineer is capable of, and responsible for finding and fixing bugs using either the current integrated software or individual test apps in VB or similar. We also run a bugzilla bug base so each programmer can report an error directly to the author of the bug. I can't imagine a bug in the architecture reaching a tester when a modular structure lends itself so well to modelling in UML, and any flaw in that would raise it's head during implementation and integration.
Never the less, my point still holds true I think. If your testing regime comes up with no bugs, no small coding errors and no intermittent glitches then the testing is inadequate and you should look harder. After all, we are only human.
The point of testing is to find bugs. If you're not finding bugs then you're not testing hard enough because ALL software contains bugs.
I once heard of a place where the testing people were actually paid a small bonus for each bug they found, and the programmers bonus was based on the number of bugs found in their code, and the time it took them to write it in the first place.
The job of a programmer is to write code, not to find bugs, so you write code that seems to work and send it off for testing. It then comes back with a list of bugs as long as your arm, mostly to do with integration testing, and you fix'em. You send it back for more testing and it comes back with a short list of bugs caused by your previous fixes and you fix 'em. Eventually someone decides that bugs are sufficiently rare, or unimportant (ie minor glitches which could be difficult to fix quickly) that it is time to release the software. Then you get a long list of bug reports from your customers when they blatently and wantonly start using your software in a totally different way to which you had thought they would use it thus breaking things you thought worked.
Every time I meant Gigabytes I wrote Gb. OK I should have said GB. As I understand it the accepted version for bits is Gbits however in fact Giga is the wrong prefix. Giga means 10^9 so in fact we should be talking about mebibytes and gibibytes (2^20 and 2^30) with symbols MiB and GiB. Actually hard drive tend to use the power of ten prefixes when talking about drive capacity, whereas OS's tend to use powers of 2 which is why your formatted size is so much less once you boot up.
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
It all depends about how pedantic you want to be.
As for speed, don't forget that if the data density is 33 times greater than a GXP 120, so will be the maximum data transfer rate. Imagine being able to get a sustained data transfer rate of 1.65 GiB per second. It'd be my boot drive.
Just one more quick thing. One was 116 GigaBYTES in^-2 and the other was 29.7 Giga BITS in^-2 which is 3.45 GigaBYTES in^-2 so the ratio of 116/3.45 GigaBytes is the same as (1 Trillion bits ^-2)/ (29.7 Billion bits in^-2)
Quantum tunneling has little to do with a charge difference between two plates and everything to do with an individual electron having enough kinetic energy that it's Schrodinger wave function has a significant value on the far side of a barrier.
What they are doing is rather like bouncing a tennis ball against a wall and all of a sudden the ball just appears on the other side of the wall. This isn't the same as throwing it hard enough that it goes through making a hole in the wall, it just has a finite possibility that it could exist on the far side, and then it is.
The technological problem is that the barrier has to be small enough that the wave function can have a high enough value on the far side that tunneling can occur in large numbers, then the kinetic energy of the electron has to be reduced rapidly so it can't tunnel back, or the electron must be drawn away from the boundary by a potential difference.
I too heard this some time ago, but I believe it was dropped because the harmless gas in question was a either a strong greenhouse gas or a destroyer of ozone.
btw. it's Corus steel (I know, it's a very silly name)
The label duplicates millions of CDs and gets them into shops.
With digital tech the cost of recording can come right down. The major blocker which forces artist into an unholy alliance with the recording industry is that they control all the TV and radio airplay and all the distribution networks (ie record shops).
Using P2P and internet distribution could remove the need for music publishing companies especially if you decide you don't need to disribute music on CDs. Promotion might come from a larger number of niche internet sites, and the old favorite, word of mouth (or keyboard).
RIAA is in a panic because it can see a future where it is no longer relevant. It is desperately trying to create a new role for itself as a cop by getting laws passed to keep it alive.
The important thing to recognise is that P2P networks needent harm artists if a scheme like the one KaZaa and verizon are proposing comes off. Thus the hollings bill and similar can be seen not to be protecting copyright, but protecting the business model of a monopoly. It becomes clear that the RIAA is using copyright to allow them to keep screwing over both the public and the artists. I fail to see how the state can support such blackmail in law.
Oh no!! You don't believe all this crap your US media is feeding you about the rise of anti-semetism and the far right in Europe do you?
OK, the UK does have a problem in some of its northern cities with tensions between asian and white area, but this is all really about economics really. The anti-immigrant sentiment as you call it, is aimed at illegal immigrants who stow away on train and lorries to get to the UK. 80-90% of whom are economic migrants anyway. as fo those who really are political refugees, many of them are breaking the EU rules on seeking refugee status by not applying for asylum in the first EU country they enter.
The anti-semetism angle is a red herring. There is total apathy towards the Jewish people. It's just not an issue in this country. Just because we don't pussy foot around them, and actually have the courage of our convictions to say that Israel is behaving in a barbaric, arrogant and short sighted manner, it doesn't mean we're all about to start marching around waving swastikas.
Only a country that elected someone like dubya could be right wing enough to actually support the heavy handed use of tanks, F-16's and Apache gunships against civilians. It's hardly any wonder that Palestinians and other Islamic people are lining up to join Al-Qaeda and kill Americans.
France has always been a hotbed of fascism for years and this years vote was only a slight shift towards La Pen. Don't forget that 80% of france voted against him in the final round of voting. However isn't it slighly ironic that the nation most associated with rising fascism, is one of the palestinians strongest western supporters.
Why does everyone talk about something being free as in beer? I've just come from the pub, and let me tell you this. Beer isn't free. It costs me over £2 a pint.
I agree, and more than that, if anyone is going to make money out of selling information about me it should be me. I don't see why anyone else has the right to make money out of my identity in that manner.
Matt Oppenheim, RIAA senior vice president of business and legal affairs.
"If I rob a bank, the fact that I haven't been arrested yet doesn't mean I haven't done something wrong," Oppenheim says. "Sharman Networks should take no comfort in the fact they haven't been sued yet."
Perhaps a better analogy would be...
Person A works in a bank. Person B is a friend of person A and says "Can you give me some of the money from your bank". Person A says "sure, come on over". So person B drives to the bank and person A gives him some cash from the vault. The FBI decides that a theft has taken place and imprisons the Ford motor company for making the vehicle used by person B to drive to the bank.
Even if this get's introduced I doubt anyone will take it seriously. Here in the UK video games have long come with the same content rating system used on films and video. That is the British Board of Film Classification. I'm looking at a copy of Max Payne which has a great big "15" symbol on it which means no-one under that age can buy it or rent it. I know some games come with an "18" certificate, but I can't think of any for certain. Anyway, I don't think the current law actually stops anyone playing these games, simply because people don't really take them seriously. On the other hand, it does at least let parents know what a game might contain so they don't buy it for Christmas or something.
I agree. These people aren't evil, they're just doing what comes naturally. That is, pushing the boundaries until someone pushes back. The people who've been sailing close to the wind know they have, and aren't likely to complain so long as you don't restrict their legitimate use of the network. Give 'em a big shove now, and then in future you'll only have to nudge them a bit to keep them in line.
This isn't going to be popular, but hell I'll say it anyway 'cos it's true.
I like windows.
I don't use linux 'cos because it doesn't have standard, coherent metaphor. ie. I see a button and I have no idea what it does.
My plea is this. Please don't kill Windows!! I know M$ abuse their position as market leaders, but this trial is all about computer vendors who want to remove IE and install something else.
Well quite apart from the fact that it is perfectly possible to install and run Mozilla on a Windows box and relegate IE to the background, IE is essentially the windows shell. Remove it totally and you loose a lot of the benefit of Windows. It can be done and a lot of people do replace explorer as the windows shell using third party apps. OK maybe M$ don't have the right to prevent OEMs doing that, but anyone who buys a PC with windows pre-installed deserves what they get.
On the other hand I can see why M$ doesn't want OEM's to play with Windows before the customer see's it. If the customer buys a PC and chooses to have windows installed, presumambly thats because they know how windows works and they'll be able to get going straight away. If they don't know windows, and they are told that the wierd montage OS they see when they turn on the PC IS Microsoft Windows, and they don't like it, it could prevent them buying M$ in the future.
Basically, IMHO, if the badge says Microsoft Windows, it should look, and feel like the Windows design team meant it to. Otherwise you're defacing their brand.
If adverts no longer work then stop using them. There is plenty of scope for product placement in TV and of course, they could just cut wages. Besides, big media makes too much money already, I fail to see how profits falling from astronomical to simply extravagent will stop people making TV.
Here in the UK actors are paid a fraction of what the major US stars earn. Often they earn in a year what a similar US star will take home every episode. At least then they can stay a bit truer to their roots.
Of course we also have 6 TV channels, and many radio stations with no adverts paid for by the TV licence fee, which is currently a little over £9 per household per month. Best thing is 24 currently being shown on BBC2. Each show is supposed to show the passing of one hour of the day yeah? But each show is only 45 minutes long because we have no adverts. Ha Ha! we get 33% more drama for our money.
I can just see this happening. TV's with built in DRM will not allow you to change channel, turn off or mute until the program you're watching finishes.
alternatively TV execs could stop paying actors $1M+ for each episode. If their business model changes then perhaps they should rethink how much stuff costs. No one can realistically demand that their right to print money be enshrined in law (unless you have a pet senator obviously).
Re:Global warming impact?
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 1
Well that really depends upon 2 things.
1) The efficiency of the storage and use of the electricy.
2) Whether we use more energy because more is available.
On the second pont we already burn vast amounts of fossil fuels which, by its nature pours huge amounts of waste heat into the atmosphere, not to mention all the CO2 and other toxic gasses churned out too. We could probably see a large increase in energy usage without exceeding todays heat wastege levels.
The danger of global warming is that sea levels will rise dramitically, and while some area may become tropical in climate, more areas currently used to grow crops will turn to desert and the global climate will probably become more unstable. For example, the UK is expecting global warming to reduce its land area, increase flooding at heavy rain during the winter, and more droughts in the summer. It is also expected that the melting of canadian permafrost will cause large amounts of cold water to be dumped into the gulf of mexico, turning off the north atlantic conveyor (AKA the gulf stream) potentially causeing the ice sheets to extend towards Iceland and Scotland. Such a change in the past triggered an ice age in Europe. Already this has been seen to some extent as the strength of the north atlantic conveyor has reduced significantly over the last decade.
The part that wories me is pointing a giant microwave at the earth and cooking the atmosphere.
Bush's Kyoto escape clause
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 1
As we all know "dubya" pulled out of the kyoto agreement stating it was bad for the US and the world. This pissed everyone off a bit but dubya didn't care. He said that the way to beat global warming was through technology and investment.
Well, here's your chance mr president. Dig deep in your pocket and spend that 135 billion dollars for this project. Either that or we see for certain that the only reason you wanted out of Kyoto was because the oil companies wanted to maintain the status quo and keep pumping more and more toxic fumes into our delicate home.
Slashdot Mirror
--Did the first European settlers in the US forget where they came from? I just don't think so.
maybe the first settlers didn't forget, but how much does the average american of today feel they owe to europe? no much I'd guess and thats only a few hundred years AND it doesn't take the best part of a millenium to get back to the old country. Rememeber the original purpose of colonisation of the new world was for the glory of the Spanish,Portugese, British crown etc. Is that why the US has propelled itself to being the only remaining superpower? For the glory of the Queen? I think not.
Imagine, thousands of years to reach you new home, thousands more years to turn it into a place capable of, and willing to, spend a fortune building new ships and providing huge numbers of settlers to go on a colonise new planets. All this assumes no internal politics gets in the way, which is surprising given that in order to coordinate enough to launch a single mission to the stars, a species would have to be pretty martial in order to provide enough will to actually do it, and how much more martial than us could you get without actually blowing up your own planet?
--We have a space faring life form that has the tech to go everywhere...and then you believe they would have sudden amnesia on planetfall???
Thats not what I'm saying exactly. Some kind of neglecting of advanced tech is almost inevitable given the relative importance of rapid development of production capability and life support. What I'm saying is that the tech required for space exploration can only be explored when a society has reached a critical mass whereby it can both afford the time and resources required for further exploration and sees the necessity for it. It's rather like asking whether you would support a 5% rise in tax to support the building of a giant model elephant. It might be a really cool thing but wouldn't money be better spent on better healthcare? Or perhaps growing enough food to live. These are the kinds of realities which would face a newly colonised planet without further support from the home planet.Going back to your comparison to the US settlers, what were they doing while Europe was fighting wars and expanding every way they could? They were trying to grow crops and grind out a living, AND they could export stuff back to Europe to buy livestock, weapons food, etc which would arrive some months later. How would they have survived had it taken a few hundred years for the essential supplies to arrive?
All in all I dont think it would be possible to build a collection of planets with similar cultures, who all knew of the existnce of the other and were able to act as a single block without FTL transport, and given current human nature I'm not sure we could realistically do it even with FTL tech.
Of course, Fermi's Paradox assumes that intersteller flight is possible. It also fails to take into account that without FTL flight empire building would be impossible. What you would end up with would be a collection of diverse planets with similar species on who would have little idea of where they came from. Without a link back to a home planet each spaceship seeking to colonise a planet would have a few tens of thousands of people at a maximum, who would have to build a new society from scratch. These new societies would then have to develop a spacefaring culture before moving on. Chances are there would be no desire to do this until the new planet was fully colonised and so the progress would be painfully slow, with no central control, and potentially without any knowledge of any other planets colonised by the parent species.
Many generations would grow up and the story of where they came from could simply be lost in the past. For example, how much do we really know about human society from when there were only a few tens of thousands of us living in central Africa? OK, its not quite the same, but it would only take one major disaster early on to send the colonists back into the dark ages.
A virus like culture like this (virus like because they just spread without central control) would have little need for broadcasting info across the galaxy and the only time you would see any sign of them would be when they turned up on your doorstep wanting your planet. Even then, if they turned up here they'd probably take one look at this place, decide it was too dirty and polluted and turn around to go onto the next planet.
I'm a BIG fan of scan. I do all my PC bit shopping online and have bought stuff in the past from Scan, CCL and overclockers-UK. I have to say that my best experience has always been with Scan, delivery next day by a friendly courier (for which the price has just fallen from £10 to £7) and a no quible returns policy. I have to admit, one of the major factors in my online purchasing decisions is the simplicity and speed of the website. Scan's is quick, clean and simple, with easy navigation and a logical layout, whereas Dabs, Jungle etc leave a LOT to be desired. Jungle in particular has a hideous website which is very slow to load and slow to use. My employer uses Jungle as their prefered supplier for some unknown reason, and they always seem to take ages to deliver an order and frequently seem to have to wait 7 days for the parts to be in stock.
I think I was being slightly ironic. My current job will not actually use a QA dept at all because nearly all of the bugs are ironed out at integration (Also because the deadline is so tight). No one likes to give buggy objects to their colleagues but it happens, usually because you can't see the wood for the trees and miss something stupid.
Everything we write is a separate COM object. This means every software engineer is capable of, and responsible for finding and fixing bugs using either the current integrated software or individual test apps in VB or similar. We also run a bugzilla bug base so each programmer can report an error directly to the author of the bug. I can't imagine a bug in the architecture reaching a tester when a modular structure lends itself so well to modelling in UML, and any flaw in that would raise it's head during implementation and integration.
Never the less, my point still holds true I think. If your testing regime comes up with no bugs, no small coding errors and no intermittent glitches then the testing is inadequate and you should look harder. After all, we are only human.
The point of testing is to find bugs. If you're not finding bugs then you're not testing hard enough because ALL software contains bugs.
I once heard of a place where the testing people were actually paid a small bonus for each bug they found, and the programmers bonus was based on the number of bugs found in their code, and the time it took them to write it in the first place.
The job of a programmer is to write code, not to find bugs, so you write code that seems to work and send it off for testing. It then comes back with a list of bugs as long as your arm, mostly to do with integration testing, and you fix'em. You send it back for more testing and it comes back with a short list of bugs caused by your previous fixes and you fix 'em. Eventually someone decides that bugs are sufficiently rare, or unimportant (ie minor glitches which could be difficult to fix quickly) that it is time to release the software. Then you get a long list of bug reports from your customers when they blatently and wantonly start using your software in a totally different way to which you had thought they would use it thus breaking things you thought worked.
Every time I meant Gigabytes I wrote Gb. OK I should have said GB. As I understand it the accepted version for bits is Gbits however in fact Giga is the wrong prefix. Giga means 10^9 so in fact we should be talking about mebibytes and gibibytes (2^20 and 2^30) with symbols MiB and GiB. Actually hard drive tend to use the power of ten prefixes when talking about drive capacity, whereas OS's tend to use powers of 2 which is why your formatted size is so much less once you boot up.
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
It all depends about how pedantic you want to be.
As for speed, don't forget that if the data density is 33 times greater than a GXP 120, so will be the maximum data transfer rate. Imagine being able to get a sustained data transfer rate of 1.65 GiB per second. It'd be my boot drive.
Just one more quick thing. One was 116 GigaBYTES in^-2 and the other was 29.7 Giga BITS in^-2 which is 3.45 GigaBYTES in^-2 so the ratio of 116/3.45 GigaBytes is the same as (1 Trillion bits ^-2)/ (29.7 Billion bits in^-2)
Yeah I know that. The reason I spelt it out was to show the original poster how dumb he was.
Interestingly a drive with this tech with the same number of platters as the GXP 120 would have a capacity of nearly 4 Tb. Fill that.
umm thats 116Gb per square inch
for comparison the GXP 120 has a maximum density of 29.7 Gigabits per square inch
29,700,000,000 bits
~3,712,500,000 bytes
~3,625,488 Kb
~3,540 Mb
~3.45 Gb per square inch
116/3.45 is 33 times greater than the density of a GXP 120.
I saw it for sale in HMV in Brisol, UK on Sunday.
Quantum tunneling has little to do with a charge difference between two plates and everything to do with an individual electron having enough kinetic energy that it's Schrodinger wave function has a significant value on the far side of a barrier.
What they are doing is rather like bouncing a tennis ball against a wall and all of a sudden the ball just appears on the other side of the wall. This isn't the same as throwing it hard enough that it goes through making a hole in the wall, it just has a finite possibility that it could exist on the far side, and then it is.
The technological problem is that the barrier has to be small enough that the wave function can have a high enough value on the far side that tunneling can occur in large numbers, then the kinetic energy of the electron has to be reduced rapidly so it can't tunnel back, or the electron must be drawn away from the boundary by a potential difference.
I too heard this some time ago, but I believe it was dropped because the harmless gas in question was a either a strong greenhouse gas or a destroyer of ozone.
btw. it's Corus steel (I know, it's a very silly name)
You missed out the most important one.
The label duplicates millions of CDs and gets them into shops.
With digital tech the cost of recording can come right down. The major blocker which forces artist into an unholy alliance with the recording industry is that they control all the TV and radio airplay and all the distribution networks (ie record shops).
Using P2P and internet distribution could remove the need for music publishing companies especially if you decide you don't need to disribute music on CDs. Promotion might come from a larger number of niche internet sites, and the old favorite, word of mouth (or keyboard).
RIAA is in a panic because it can see a future where it is no longer relevant. It is desperately trying to create a new role for itself as a cop by getting laws passed to keep it alive.
The important thing to recognise is that P2P networks needent harm artists if a scheme like the one KaZaa and verizon are proposing comes off. Thus the hollings bill and similar can be seen not to be protecting copyright, but protecting the business model of a monopoly. It becomes clear that the RIAA is using copyright to allow them to keep screwing over both the public and the artists. I fail to see how the state can support such blackmail in law.
Oh no!! You don't believe all this crap your US media is feeding you about the rise of anti-semetism and the far right in Europe do you?
OK, the UK does have a problem in some of its northern cities with tensions between asian and white area, but this is all really about economics really. The anti-immigrant sentiment as you call it, is aimed at illegal immigrants who stow away on train and lorries to get to the UK. 80-90% of whom are economic migrants anyway. as fo those who really are political refugees, many of them are breaking the EU rules on seeking refugee status by not applying for asylum in the first EU country they enter.
The anti-semetism angle is a red herring. There is total apathy towards the Jewish people. It's just not an issue in this country. Just because we don't pussy foot around them, and actually have the courage of our convictions to say that Israel is behaving in a barbaric, arrogant and short sighted manner, it doesn't mean we're all about to start marching around waving swastikas.
Only a country that elected someone like dubya could be right wing enough to actually support the heavy handed use of tanks, F-16's and Apache gunships against civilians. It's hardly any wonder that Palestinians and other Islamic people are lining up to join Al-Qaeda and kill Americans.
France has always been a hotbed of fascism for years and this years vote was only a slight shift towards La Pen. Don't forget that 80% of france voted against him in the final round of voting. However isn't it slighly ironic that the nation most associated with rising fascism, is one of the palestinians strongest western supporters.
Why does everyone talk about something being free as in beer? I've just come from the pub, and let me tell you this. Beer isn't free. It costs me over £2 a pint.
IMHO one of the best war films of recent years has to be Blackhawk Down. If anything could be said to show the horror of war, that film does.
I agree, and more than that, if anyone is going to make money out of selling information about me it should be me. I don't see why anyone else has the right to make money out of my identity in that manner.
Matt Oppenheim, RIAA senior vice president of business and legal affairs.
"If I rob a bank, the fact that I haven't been arrested yet doesn't mean I haven't done something wrong," Oppenheim says. "Sharman Networks should take no comfort in the fact they haven't been sued yet."
Perhaps a better analogy would be...
Person A works in a bank. Person B is a friend of person A and says "Can you give me some of the money from your bank". Person A says "sure, come on over". So person B drives to the bank and person A gives him some cash from the vault.
The FBI decides that a theft has taken place and imprisons the Ford motor company for making the vehicle used by person B to drive to the bank.
Even if this get's introduced I doubt anyone will take it seriously. Here in the UK video games have long come with the same content rating system used on films and video. That is the British Board of Film Classification. I'm looking at a copy of Max Payne which has a great big "15" symbol on it which means no-one under that age can buy it or rent it. I know some games come with an "18" certificate, but I can't think of any for certain. Anyway, I don't think the current law actually stops anyone playing these games, simply because people don't really take them seriously. On the other hand, it does at least let parents know what a game might contain so they don't buy it for Christmas or something.
I agree. These people aren't evil, they're just doing what comes naturally. That is, pushing the boundaries until someone pushes back. The people who've been sailing close to the wind know they have, and aren't likely to complain so long as you don't restrict their legitimate use of the network. Give 'em a big shove now, and then in future you'll only have to nudge them a bit to keep them in line.
This isn't going to be popular, but hell I'll say it anyway 'cos it's true.
I like windows.
I don't use linux 'cos because it doesn't have standard, coherent metaphor. ie. I see a button and I have no idea what it does.
My plea is this. Please don't kill Windows!! I know M$ abuse their position as market leaders, but this trial is all about computer vendors who want to remove IE and install something else.
Well quite apart from the fact that it is perfectly possible to install and run Mozilla on a Windows box and relegate IE to the background, IE is essentially the windows shell. Remove it totally and you loose a lot of the benefit of Windows. It can be done and a lot of people do replace explorer as the windows shell using third party apps. OK maybe M$ don't have the right to prevent OEMs doing that, but anyone who buys a PC with windows pre-installed deserves what they get.
On the other hand I can see why M$ doesn't want OEM's to play with Windows before the customer see's it. If the customer buys a PC and chooses to have windows installed, presumambly thats because they know how windows works and they'll be able to get going straight away. If they don't know windows, and they are told that the wierd montage OS they see when they turn on the PC IS Microsoft Windows, and they don't like it, it could prevent them buying M$ in the future.
Basically, IMHO, if the badge says Microsoft Windows, it should look, and feel like the Windows design team meant it to. Otherwise you're defacing their brand.
Well, boo hoo!!!
If adverts no longer work then stop using them. There is plenty of scope for product placement in TV and of course, they could just cut wages. Besides, big media makes too much money already, I fail to see how profits falling from astronomical to simply extravagent will stop people making TV.
Here in the UK actors are paid a fraction of what the major US stars earn. Often they earn in a year what a similar US star will take home every episode. At least then they can stay a bit truer to their roots.
Of course we also have 6 TV channels, and many radio stations with no adverts paid for by the TV licence fee, which is currently a little over £9 per household per month.
Best thing is 24 currently being shown on BBC2. Each show is supposed to show the passing of one hour of the day yeah? But each show is only 45 minutes long because we have no adverts. Ha Ha! we get 33% more drama for our money.
I can just see this happening. TV's with built in DRM will not allow you to change channel, turn off or mute until the program you're watching finishes.
alternatively TV execs could stop paying actors $1M+ for each episode. If their business model changes then perhaps they should rethink how much stuff costs. No one can realistically demand that their right to print money be enshrined in law (unless you have a pet senator obviously).
Well that really depends upon 2 things.
1) The efficiency of the storage and use of the electricy.
2) Whether we use more energy because more is available.
On the second pont we already burn vast amounts of fossil fuels which, by its nature pours huge amounts of waste heat into the atmosphere, not to mention all the CO2 and other toxic gasses churned out too. We could probably see a large increase in energy usage without exceeding todays heat wastege levels.
The danger of global warming is that sea levels will rise dramitically, and while some area may become tropical in climate, more areas currently used to grow crops will turn to desert and the global climate will probably become more unstable. For example, the UK is expecting global warming to reduce its land area, increase flooding at heavy rain during the winter, and more droughts in the summer. It is also expected that the melting of canadian permafrost will cause large amounts of cold water to be dumped into the gulf of mexico, turning off the north atlantic conveyor (AKA the gulf stream) potentially causeing the ice sheets to extend towards Iceland and Scotland. Such a change in the past triggered an ice age in Europe. Already this has been seen to some extent as the strength of the north atlantic conveyor has reduced significantly over the last decade.
The part that wories me is pointing a giant microwave at the earth and cooking the atmosphere.
As we all know "dubya" pulled out of the kyoto agreement stating it was bad for the US and the world. This pissed everyone off a bit but dubya didn't care. He said that the way to beat global warming was through technology and investment.
Well, here's your chance mr president. Dig deep in your pocket and spend that 135 billion dollars for this project. Either that or we see for certain that the only reason you wanted out of Kyoto was because the oil companies wanted to maintain the status quo and keep pumping more and more toxic fumes into our delicate home.