I saw the E3 demo and it puts the entire silent hill series to shame.
Except that in Doom 3 you'll be a serious, gun-slinging badass.
In Silent Hill 2 on the other hand you start out unarmed, unskilled, and when you get your first weapon it's not a gun, not even a knife. ...it's a friggin' piece of wood. When you _finally_ get a gun you find out you shoot like a little girl. Oh yeah, and there's almost no bullets.
That game is some of the scariest shit I ever played, and I rue the day I bought it. I still haven't gotten very far, mostly due to the fact that I can't play alone at night (seriously). It's scary almost to the point of unplayable.
The worst part is I can't even sell it and get my money back because...it's too good. So the box just sits there on it's shelf and sort of stares at me. Actually even that is kind of creepy.
How do they figure melting ice won't raise sea levels? even if the glacier is 20 feet above water, won't the excess buoyant pieces of ice melt down into the ocean?
Actually no. Water is more dense than ice (this is why it floats above the water in the first place). So so far this theory seems ok.
What they don't account for, and what makes this bunk is that it doesn't account for the huge amount of landlocked glaciers (The south pole, Greenland, etc.).
Someone kindly explain how you propose to melt just the floating ice and not the rest of it?
This crap is posted just to further the official slashdot agenda of: "I'll do whatever the hell I want to and I'm sure it'll have no consequences whatsoever on the environment. And if it has, it's my lazy worthless childrens problem! You'll pry the steering wheel of my SUV from my cold dead fingers, commie-boy!"
Now go ahead and label me a crazy environazi, if you like. It doesn't make my point any less valid.
And the EU is up to the same game. One day the EU is going to be the US's biggest challenger in the global stakes and we'll have GIVEN THEM the means to do it!!!
Not really. Last time i checked Finland was a member of the EU.
So, if you are talking about Linux, you are wrong, but on the other hand the GPL is "Made In The USA"... And without it Linux wouldn't be Linux, so I guess you can claim partial credit for that. (And the countless manhours poured into OSS by US coders.)
What use would the original developers be to a mod maker?
I bet Microsoft doesn't give them the ability to sign random code without Microsofts approval. Thus, you would ultimately be dealing with Microsoft anyways, only through a third party.
Sure, the global picture locks pretty bleak. US, Europe and parts of Asia is having problems right now. But, the fact is there is one player that is not following the trend. Thats, right, China. Despite SARS, despite Hong Kongs diffculties, China is still in a economic boom!
They may actually change the balance in the world economy considerably, if this continues for a few years. And a space program is proven to give a lot of nice spinoff effects, and technological progress. I think I can see why this would be a good time for China to start one.
And I'll say this in closing; this gung-ho millionaire represents humanity much better that you ever will.
I'm sure he is a swell guy.
But he is probably has nowhere near the kind of money space exploration would take.
for that, we are talking, Bill Gates, or Saudi Royal Family rich.
If you ever become that wealthy, my money is on that the only thing you represent is yourself.
Btw. the majority of the (addmittedly small sample) of "self-made rich men" I've met has been complete assholes, dedicated to winning any way they can, morals be damned! I'm not saying there are no exceptions (a few has been pretty decent) but if you are motivated by accumulating vast amounts money above all else, chances are it won't make you a very nice person.
I strongly dissagree. Not for a beginner.
I was allowed to use a pretty nifty calculator, for the time(it had graphs and all), in school.
One of the first things I realised when I started my university education was that using the calculator was the worst thing I could have done to my math skills.
I was crippled without it, and learning to think again without the support of a machine made my first semester a lot harder than it had to be.
Learn to understand math first, then use a computer! I cannot stress this enough. If you do it the other way around you only cripple your skills. You are nothing without the computer, and even with it you are nowhere near as good as someone who know math and only use the computer to enhance his skills.
...sure XP can be great for some but it is just a learning OS.
Except that Windows is a terrible learning OS.
It's all about hiding the computer from the user.
Granted, a modern Linux distro also do this to some degree, but at least you have the possibility to get in as deep as you want to, if you are so inclined. Just keep digging, and if you dig deep enough you'll be swimming in the actual source.
This is not really possible in a proprietary and closed OS, Windows or otherwise.
I see what you're getting at, the whole RFID-tag is basically a antenna, but I doubt it would be practical to knock them out with a EM-pulse.
As I understand it they are actually designed to convert EM pulses to power since they have no internal power source, so far so well, but if you look at a RFID-tag you'll see that at least the visible conductors are really fat. From this we can conclude that they would be hard to burninate with an EMP. My (pretty uneuducated) guess is that they are much tougher than other electronics due to them not being very miniaturized. In short, you would probably knock out every integrated circuit in a wide radius before you managed to toast the RFID-tag.
I agree.
I live in Sweden, and lately I have noticed that RFID tags have quietly been introduced in some stores.
The uses I've seen so far has been pretty responsible. The RFID-tag is usually stickered on like a price tag and easily removed and discarded (I always tear it up). The only problem I've encountered so far was when someone in a book store had slipped a RFID-tag between the pages of a computer book I bought.
For some reason it proceeded to set of the alarm in a different store when I continued my shopping.
I haven't seen any outhright abuses of the tags tough, at least not yet.
Mixing a toxin with bleach might destroy 99.999% of the agent. What is left might not hurt you (though you'd have to pay me a LOT to work at that kind of a job!). But modern analytical techniques have no trouble finding the 0.001% that is left. Plus, the stuff that degrades probably doesn't degrade to CO2+H20+NO2 and dissapate. The degradation products are probably complex molecules which could be easily spotted.
A decade is a long time. Oxidizing the stuff would neutralize it, and if you are smart enough to cook up the stuff in the first place you could probably find a way to anonymize the remains.
You are completely correct in that we may never know if Iraq still had any.
What irks me is that the world was told, repeatedly, and in no uncertain terms that there was irrefutable proof of enormous amounts of usable chemical weapons. That was the entire justification for going to war in the first place.
That they still haven't produced any proof means that something as serious as a war was likely started on either disasterously bad intelligence, or false premises and lies. Either one is a Bad Thing.
I would certainly not like someone from/. to get infected with Anthrax because they read your post and assumed after they washed their clothes and took a shower that they were A-OK.
Anthrax is not a chemical weapon, it's biological. Entirely different thing, the only thing they have in common is that both will kill you...
That doesn't say it destroys it. It says it washes the chemical weapons away. Where? Into the ocean? I doubt that's good for the environment.
Correct, water doesn't destroy, for example a nerve-agent, but the detergent you use in your washing machine would. (However if you are already exposed it doesn't really help you any.) Also, I doubt the nerve agent if washed away would reach the ocean. It will be neutralized long before it ever gets there. Search for self-decontamination in the article.
I think you see my point. Let me ask you a question. If chemical weapons were so easy to get rid of, why didn't Saddam get rid of them over the last 12 years? Or, even better, why's everyone (including you) so scared of them? If all you have to do is take a hot shower a few hours after inhaling Sarin, VX, Mustard, etc., why all the fear? Could it be because it's NOT that simple? I don't particularly care who you are or what you did 10-50 years ago in the military... this isn't about politics, it's about people's lives. Don't try to give people a false impression that chemical weapons aren't that bad and they're easy to get rid of.
I don't think you got a point. Chemical weapons are extremely dangerous, but don't give people the false impression that they are hard to get rid of. That's just not the case.
I am afraid of chemical weapons because they are insanely toxic and hard to protect against. A tiny droplet or some contaminated air on your skin will kill you horribly, possibly within as little as 2 minutes from exposure. Your average Joe won't have time to shower, not that it would do him any good once his skin or lungs has absorbed the agent.
I find their very existance an atrocity.
I just pointed out that they are mostly rather unstable. All the difficulties you point out is with decontaminating stuff after an attack without getting exposed, or minimizing the damage after exposure. If you just want to destroy your own weapons, it's easy, they are well contained in, say a barrel. Just add a strong oxidizer. Mix, stir, done. It's not hard nor complicated or visible on sattelite, as the post I originaly replied to claimed. Besides, if you are say, Saddam Hussein, not give a rats ass about the wellbeing of others, and have a batch of nasty stuff you want to get rid of with plausable deniability. Well, then just pour it out in the desert and let it decay in the sun! (You'll note that my link had a table with decay times of various agents after an attack, even VX, a very persistant for a nerve agent, should be gone in a couple of weeks.)
If there are indeed chemical weapons in iraq, I'm sure they will turn up shortly. In fact, I thought they would find at least something somewhere. But it is quite possible that Iraq didn't have them any more, either because they destroyed them quitely to avoid public embarrasment, or just because they didn't have the means to maintain their arsenal during the sanctions.
And, hey, 10-50 years ago? How old do you think I am? Let's just say it's less.
I'd be interested in reading any articles or reference material you have on that. I'll delay any judgments I have until after I verify what you say. I don't think that's unreasonable...
You could find this stuff on google yourself if you bothered, but here you go... If not me, then how about The Organization For The Prohibition Of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) A few choice quotes from the link: "Water, with or without additives of detergents, soda, soap, etc., can be used, as well as organic solvents such as fuel, paraffin and carburettor spirit." "Detergents containing perborates are particularly effective in destroying nerve agents." As I said, you shower, clean your house, fuel your car and wash your clothes with stuff capable of destroying chemical weapons.
They are insanely toxic but not at all as hard to destroy as some people would have you believe.
Did you sniff them to make sure they were OK?
Don't be stupid. We used indicating paper.
The drill was design to build confidence in that countermeasures do work as adverticed. (Yes, I had some doubt about the household cleaning products myself)
At the time I was wearing a gas mask and a full chemical suit. I had just passed to a cloud of tear-gas to insure things were air-tight. Afterwards we were throughoutly decontaminated. I had absolutely no intention in getting in contact with even the dilluted bad stuff we practiced on. Chemical weapons scared me then, and still do.
Actually this proposal still sucks.
Just not as bad as the rabid, foaming at the mouth, slashdot editors think. But that doesn't make it a good idea. I wish we had treated the EUCD the way Finland did, sending it back to the drawingboard in Brussels is the only sensible thing to do.
I can't see how incorporating it, in it's current form, in national law can be a good thing, even if they have tried somewhat to mitigate its repressive effects.
I hereby copyright this post. I expressly forbid these words from being read anywhere inside of Sweden.
Man I can't wait to see how many people end up in jail now.
Damn you NanoGator, you've made me a criminal! Mozilla just evilly pirated your post to my browser cache.
there is no possible way for them to enforce this.Even if they did I could imagine the headline... 1/3 of population rounded up in latest crackdown on downloading.... story at 11
In fact, the swedish minister of justice said something to the effect of: "This is not a law we will try to enforce."
Great! Why don't we just make some new laws for a few special interests, lets make 'em so broad that they criminalize a large part of the population... and then we pick and choose where to enforce it.
I don't feel very good about beeing swedish today. We just got our own DMCA+.
If you google around a bit, you'll find that chemical weapons are pretty hard to destroy and require very large incinerators that would easily be spotted by satelliete.
This is totally and utterly wrong. Don't believe everything you read on the internet, son...
When I did my military service we were trained in destroying chemical weapons.
They are pretty reactive (otherwise they would be lousy weapons), and can easily be neutralized by ordinary household cleaning products, or gasoline (Iraq certainly had no shortage of that one...).
I have personally tried this with both sarin (a nerve-agent) and mustard-gas, and were told it would work on other substances, like Fosgen or VX too.
Most chemical weapons also decay with time (very reactive, remember) and thus proving that Iraq had working nerv-agents a decade ago doesn't prove they had it now since their proven 1993 weapons would be unsable by now.
Chemical weapons are horrible, but you don't have to believe all the FUD and propaganda surrounding them.
Slashdot Mirror
I want to hide my PS2 and go find a Barbie. :/
Nah, just ignore them and load up your favorite game instead.
You are allowed to enjoy your own interrests, and if anyone thinks otherwise it's their friggin' problem.
Go be as weird as you like!
...nobody could possibly make any sense out of what he wrote in the sand.
Not unlike the rest of his "journalism" then, eh?
I saw the E3 demo and it puts the entire silent hill series to shame.
...it's too good.
Except that in Doom 3 you'll be a serious, gun-slinging badass.
In Silent Hill 2 on the other hand you start out unarmed, unskilled, and when you get your first weapon it's not a gun, not even a knife.
...it's a friggin' piece of wood.
When you _finally_ get a gun you find out you shoot like a little girl.
Oh yeah, and there's almost no bullets.
That game is some of the scariest shit I ever played, and I rue the day I bought it.
I still haven't gotten very far, mostly due to the fact that I can't play alone at night (seriously).
It's scary almost to the point of unplayable.
The worst part is I can't even sell it and get my money back because
So the box just sits there on it's shelf and sort of stares at me.
Actually even that is kind of creepy.
How do they figure melting ice won't raise sea levels? even if the glacier is 20 feet above water, won't the excess buoyant pieces of ice melt down into the ocean?
Actually no. Water is more dense than ice (this is why it floats above the water in the first place). So so far this theory seems ok.
What they don't account for, and what makes this bunk is that it doesn't account for the huge amount of landlocked glaciers (The south pole, Greenland, etc.).
Someone kindly explain how you propose to melt just the floating ice and not the rest of it?
This crap is posted just to further the official slashdot agenda of:
"I'll do whatever the hell I want to and I'm sure it'll have no consequences whatsoever on the environment. And if it has, it's my lazy worthless childrens problem!
You'll pry the steering wheel of my SUV from my cold dead fingers, commie-boy!"
Now go ahead and label me a crazy environazi, if you like.
It doesn't make my point any less valid.
Regardless of what theory you subscribe to, Otzi seems to have lead an interesting life.
...and had an interesting end.
I think I'll actually RTFA this time.
And the EU is up to the same game. One day the EU is going to be the US's biggest challenger in the global stakes and we'll have GIVEN THEM the means to do it!!!
Not really.
Last time i checked Finland was a member of the EU.
So, if you are talking about Linux, you are wrong, but on the other hand the GPL is "Made In The USA"...
And without it Linux wouldn't be Linux, so I guess you can claim partial credit for that.
(And the countless manhours poured into OSS by US coders.)
Yeah, I use SCO as my server platform, and WinXP for my desktop. I'm a /. rebel, baby!
If you were a true rebel, you'd be using WinXP as a server and UnixWare (or some other SCO-crap) as a desktop.
Imagine the pain.
What use would the original developers be to a mod maker?
I bet Microsoft doesn't give them the ability to sign random code without Microsofts approval.
Thus, you would ultimately be dealing with Microsoft anyways, only through a third party.
Sure, the global picture locks pretty bleak. US, Europe and parts of Asia is having problems right now.
But, the fact is there is one player that is not following the trend.
Thats, right, China.
Despite SARS, despite Hong Kongs diffculties, China is still in a economic boom!
They may actually change the balance in the world economy considerably, if this continues for a few years. And a space program is proven to give a lot of nice spinoff effects, and technological progress.
I think I can see why this would be a good time for China to start one.
And I'll say this in closing; this gung-ho millionaire represents humanity much better that you ever will.
I'm sure he is a swell guy.
But he is probably has nowhere near the kind of money space exploration would take.
for that, we are talking, Bill Gates, or Saudi Royal Family rich.
If you ever become that wealthy, my money is on that the only thing you represent is yourself.
Btw. the majority of the (addmittedly small sample) of "self-made rich men" I've met has been complete assholes, dedicated to winning any way they can, morals be damned!
I'm not saying there are no exceptions (a few has been pretty decent) but if you are motivated by accumulating vast amounts money above all else, chances are it won't make you a very nice person.
...and computers can help with Math.
I strongly dissagree. Not for a beginner.
I was allowed to use a pretty nifty calculator, for the time(it had graphs and all), in school.
One of the first things I realised when I started my university education was that using the calculator was the worst thing I could have done to my math skills.
I was crippled without it, and learning to think again without the support of a machine made my first semester a lot harder than it had to be.
Learn to understand math first, then use a computer!
I cannot stress this enough.
If you do it the other way around you only cripple your skills. You are nothing without the computer, and even with it you are nowhere near as good as someone who know math and only use the computer to enhance his skills.
...sure XP can be great for some but it is just a learning OS.
Except that Windows is a terrible learning OS.
It's all about hiding the computer from the user. Granted, a modern Linux distro also do this to some degree, but at least you have the possibility to get in as deep as you want to, if you are so inclined.
Just keep digging, and if you dig deep enough you'll be swimming in the actual source.
This is not really possible in a proprietary and closed OS, Windows or otherwise.
The HURD isn't _all_ waporware. Not in the same league as Duke Nuke'em Forever.
;-)
I mean, HURD publicly available, and somewhat functional.
For all we know Duke Nuke'em Forever still only exists as a design document and a Power Point presentation
[nt]
I see what you're getting at, the whole RFID-tag is basically a antenna, but I doubt it would be practical to knock them out with a EM-pulse.
As I understand it they are actually designed to convert EM pulses to power since they have no internal power source, so far so well, but if you look at a RFID-tag you'll see that at least the visible conductors are really fat.
From this we can conclude that they would be hard to burninate with an EMP.
My (pretty uneuducated) guess is that they are much tougher than other electronics due to them not being very miniaturized.
In short, you would probably knock out every integrated circuit in a wide radius before you managed to toast the RFID-tag.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I agree.
I live in Sweden, and lately I have noticed that RFID tags have quietly been introduced in some stores.
The uses I've seen so far has been pretty responsible. The RFID-tag is usually stickered on like a price tag and easily removed and discarded (I always tear it up).
The only problem I've encountered so far was when someone in a book store had slipped a RFID-tag between the pages of a computer book I bought.
For some reason it proceeded to set of the alarm in a different store when I continued my shopping.
I haven't seen any outhright abuses of the tags tough, at least not yet.
Oxidizing the stuff would neutralize it, and if you are smart enough to cook up the stuff in the first place you could probably find a way to anonymize the remains.
You are completely correct in that we may never know if Iraq still had any.
What irks me is that the world was told, repeatedly, and in no uncertain terms that there was irrefutable proof of enormous amounts of usable chemical weapons.
That was the entire justification for going to war in the first place.
That they still haven't produced any proof means that something as serious as a war was likely started on either disasterously bad intelligence, or false premises and lies.
Either one is a Bad Thing.
Entirely different thing, the only thing they have in common is that both will kill you...
Correct, water doesn't destroy, for example a nerve-agent, but the detergent you use in your washing machine would. (However if you are already exposed it doesn't really help you any.)
Also, I doubt the nerve agent if washed away would reach the ocean. It will be neutralized long before it ever gets there.
Search for self-decontamination in the article.
I think you see my point. Let me ask you a question. If chemical weapons were so easy to get rid of, why didn't Saddam get rid of them over the last 12 years? Or, even better, why's everyone (including you) so scared of them? If all you have to do is take a hot shower a few hours after inhaling Sarin, VX, Mustard, etc., why all the fear? Could it be because it's NOT that simple? I don't particularly care who you are or what you did 10-50 years ago in the military... this isn't about politics, it's about people's lives. Don't try to give people a false impression that chemical weapons aren't that bad and they're easy to get rid of.
I don't think you got a point.
Chemical weapons are extremely dangerous, but don't give people the false impression that they are hard to get rid of.
That's just not the case.
I am afraid of chemical weapons because they are insanely toxic and hard to protect against. A tiny droplet or some contaminated air on your skin will kill you horribly, possibly within as little as 2 minutes from exposure.
Your average Joe won't have time to shower, not that it would do him any good once his skin or lungs has absorbed the agent.
I find their very existance an atrocity.
I just pointed out that they are mostly rather unstable.
All the difficulties you point out is with decontaminating stuff after an attack without getting exposed, or minimizing the damage after exposure. If you just want to destroy your own weapons, it's easy, they are well contained in, say a barrel. Just add a strong oxidizer. Mix, stir, done. It's not hard nor complicated or visible on sattelite, as the post I originaly replied to claimed.
Besides, if you are say, Saddam Hussein, not give a rats ass about the wellbeing of others, and have a batch of nasty stuff you want to get rid of with plausable deniability. Well, then just pour it out in the desert and let it decay in the sun! (You'll note that my link had a table with decay times of various agents after an attack, even VX, a very persistant for a nerve agent, should be gone in a couple of weeks.)
If there are indeed chemical weapons in iraq, I'm sure they will turn up shortly.
In fact, I thought they would find at least something somewhere. But it is quite possible that Iraq didn't have them any more, either because they destroyed them quitely to avoid public embarrasment, or just because they didn't have the means to maintain their arsenal during the sanctions.
And, hey, 10-50 years ago? How old do you think I am?
Let's just say it's less.
If not me, then how about The Organization For The Prohibition Of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)
A few choice quotes from the link:
"Water, with or without additives of detergents, soda, soap, etc., can be used, as well as organic solvents such as fuel, paraffin and carburettor spirit."
"Detergents containing perborates are particularly effective in destroying nerve agents."
As I said, you shower, clean your house, fuel your car and wash your clothes with stuff capable of destroying chemical weapons. They are insanely toxic but not at all as hard to destroy as some people would have you believe. Don't be stupid.
We used indicating paper.
The drill was design to build confidence in that countermeasures do work as adverticed. (Yes, I had some doubt about the household cleaning products myself)
At the time I was wearing a gas mask and a full chemical suit. I had just passed to a cloud of tear-gas to insure things were air-tight. Afterwards we were throughoutly decontaminated. I had absolutely no intention in getting in contact with even the dilluted bad stuff we practiced on.
Chemical weapons scared me then, and still do.
Does this answer your questions?
Actually this proposal still sucks.
Just not as bad as the rabid, foaming at the mouth, slashdot editors think. But that doesn't make it a good idea. I wish we had treated the EUCD the way Finland did, sending it back to the drawingboard in Brussels is the only sensible thing to do.
I can't see how incorporating it, in it's current form, in national law can be a good thing, even if they have tried somewhat to mitigate its repressive effects.
I'm swedish by the way.
I hereby copyright this post. I expressly forbid these words from being read anywhere inside of Sweden.
Man I can't wait to see how many people end up in jail now.
Damn you NanoGator, you've made me a criminal!
Mozilla just evilly pirated your post to my browser cache.
there is no possible way for them to enforce this.Even if they did I could imagine the headline... 1/3 of population rounded up in latest crackdown on downloading.... story at 11
In fact, the swedish minister of justice said something to the effect of: "This is not a law we will try to enforce."
Great! Why don't we just make some new laws for a few special interests, lets make 'em so broad that they criminalize a large part of the population... and then we pick and choose where to enforce it.
I don't feel very good about beeing swedish today.
We just got our own DMCA+.
If you google around a bit, you'll find that chemical weapons are pretty hard to destroy and require very large incinerators that would easily be spotted by satelliete.
This is totally and utterly wrong. Don't believe everything you read on the internet, son...
When I did my military service we were trained in destroying chemical weapons.
They are pretty reactive (otherwise they would be lousy weapons), and can easily be neutralized by ordinary household cleaning products, or gasoline (Iraq certainly had no shortage of that one...).
I have personally tried this with both sarin (a nerve-agent) and mustard-gas, and were told it would work on other substances, like Fosgen or VX too.
Most chemical weapons also decay with time (very reactive, remember) and thus proving that Iraq had working nerv-agents a decade ago doesn't prove they had it now since their proven 1993 weapons would be unsable by now.
Chemical weapons are horrible, but you don't have to believe all the FUD and propaganda surrounding them.
The price level is the same in Sweden.
Is this the general rule or an exception? What do console games cost in the rest of Europe?
Why are we getting shafted worse than the US and asian markets?