And this is where US law ought to step in and say "no, you can't do this."
There are dozens of reasons this ought to get laughed right out of court. Anti-SLAPP statutes, for one, or the judge could just issue a bench order declaring the case to be brought in bad faith and dismiss it with prejudice.
Unfortunately, US judges are brain-dead fools who follow the highest bidder and with one or two notable exceptions, have no education in modern technology. The end result has been a stream of rulings by idiots whose first interaction with technology was reading Jack Valenti's "VCR=Boston Strangler" comments in a newspaper.
Of course, the legal system doesn't help either in general. As you pointed out, the primary purpose of the legal system is no longer to decide issues fairly, but to burn up a shitload of time and money to enrich the lawyers and ensure that only gigantic megacorporations can "play" in the system and anyone else gets just squished under the weight of the paperwork. The bad judgements we've gotten because one side was a megacorporation with massive teams of lawyers and unlimited money to throw at it and the other person was a single human being trying to defend themselves while mortgaged to the hilt and relying on the scant hours of pro-bono counsel or volunteer lawyers for groups like the EFF (I like you, guys, but let's face it, volunteer time vs corporate resources!) are steadily eroding away consumer rights every day.
And don't forget that this even goes to the US Supreme Court, where legendarily crappy decisions (Eldred v Ashcroft, "even if congress set copyright at a million billion years that still constitutes a limit so it's constitutional and the no-ex-post-facto law restriction we just don't fucking care about because the MPAA/RIAA/MafiAA/Disney paid us off) fuck the consumer over too.
That doesn't change the fact that he governed while a majority voted against him.
Uhm... that's almost a given event in any plurality voting system.
If it's imperfect and you believe it should be changed, please feel free to argue for that. To claim it is "illegitimate", however, is simply wrong.
If that happens then the House reps each gets a vote, in several states they don't even have to vote for the candidate the people of the state they represent voted for
Yes. This is the fall-back position in the event of a candidate not getting a majority of electoral votes: the US House of Representatives holds a vote. Unfortunately, your understanding is faulty, and the vote goes to one vote per state with the individual state delegations deciding by whatever means they choose (vote, cards, dice, drunken brawl, what have you) how their state's ONE vote shall go.
Again, is it perfect? No. Could it be amended? Probably. Will it likely be anytime soon? Probably not.
Sigh. You never understood the point of Brave New World; that it DID NOT MATTER what was broadcast, because the population would be turned into an ADD-driven collection of sheeple who were distracted the moment after something important was said by something more trivial.
In Roman days it was called "bread and circuses."
We "hear" the important news today. But good luck filtering out what has meaning among the 1000 other "news stories" that are just meaningless distraction.
I'm not saying he's a nice guy or perfect - far from it.
I'm thinking "about 180 degrees from it" myself.
But the fact remains that he got a far larger share of the vote than most western leaders
Sure. What percentage did the current President of China win by again? What percentage did Saddam get in his final "election"? Rigged elections are meaningless.
and extremely popular with most of the population
Again, I'm reminded of all the "vocal supporters" of other dictatorial regimes who are only "vocal" because they're afraid of being "disappeared" if someone hears them talking bad about Mr. Dictator-For-Life.
has ploughed money into education and healthcare, and massively improved the lives of the poor
Again, the US is on dodgy ground to criticise, with elections of presidents on less than half the votes with results determined by dodgy courts
I take it you have never studied how the US constitution and election system, in particularly the Electoral College in which the vote is not a "national popular vote" but 50 separate elections apportioning the votes of 538 representatives to the national ballot.
detention without trial in Cuba
Sigh. And you seemed so rational prior to this.
the ever-widening poverty gap
No, most of us agree this is a problem.
denial of healthcare to the poor
All you have to do to have healthcare in the US is to show up to a hospital. The fact is, "health care access" is not an issue: "health insurance", which helps one pay for it, is what is being roundly discussed.
Neither system is perfect, but it seems that Chavez is at least helping the poor rather than the rich
With due respect, if you honestly think this, you need to get your head out of the sand and take a better look at conditions in Venezuela.
And he's not starting wars responsible for the deaths of thousands
No, he's just busy murdering thousands of the citizens in his own country. As for the rest of your assertions, they're offtopic and can be discussed at another time.
it's been proven that there is no charge of espionage, since he never obtained any information in the first place.
Then what did he have to post?
It was given to him.
Ahh. So your assertion is that if it is "given" to him, as opposed to his asking for it, that's not espionage? Likely as not, the charge is going to assert that Assange asked PFC Manning to give him the information, which would make them co-conspirators.
Whether that is TRUE, or not, I do not make judgement. But that is likely what the charge will be.
If that were true, that would mean they could charge the newspapers with treason.
Actually newspaper reporters and editors have been charged with treason in the past, and probably will be again in the future, in nations around the world. Newspaper reporters traveling with the military, for instance, are enjoined and warned about transmitting their locations over broadcast. Geraldo Rivera was kicked out of just such an assignment for drawing a map in the sand for the audience.
quit making shit up, you dumb fucking retard.
Are you expecting me to respond in kind? I know your type. You're posting "anonymously" so that you can log in and downmod me a few times.
Please get an education and grow up. The world does not work the way you think it does.
The actual charge is likely to be something along the lines of espionage.
That being said, the bigger problem I have is that Assange seems to be doing his level best to make as unsympathetic a defendant of himself as possible. If he had simply put things up with notes to the effect of "This was acquired and is now made public" or even "Look at this which shows what the US government/military does", he'd have an easier time claiming whatever immunities status as a journalist may offer.
Instead, he ruthlessly re-edited video and released only those things he felt like releasing, slanting the story as much as possible. His conduct and behavior - stating goals to "take down" various entities - don't make him sympathetic either.
Besides, when dictatorial, murdering thugs like Hugo Chavez are the primary people taking your side, that ought to be a not-so-subtle hint that you're not quite on the right side.
"Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
Terry Pratchett, Hogfather"
AI, in general, isn't what most people think it is. You can make a stupidly-hard-to-beat game where the opponent plays "perfectly" against you, with perfect timing and unencumbered by the physical constraints of a controller, and you get what happens in most of the Street Fighter series (or about any other fighting game), where the "hardest difficulty level" or end-boss is unbeatable, seems to always get off the perfect shot, block, tech hit, avoidance roll, etc, until you start abusing a game-breaking technique or bug yourself to beat the game. That's actually pretty easy.
What's harder is making a game AI that acts somewhat seemingly like real opponents, that makes real mistakes and leaves openings for the player to work with while not feeling like you're just handing them the game.
Of course, on most systems (Nintendo's underpowered consoles most of all), the designers don't even bother, they just code in whatever the AI they want and the altered difficulty levels give the enemy bigger guns, more health/armor, or just drop even more enemies in a level to chew through. Or else the difficulty levels leave the enemy alone, but screw with the player's health bar and damage output to much the same effect.
As we start dropping "AI" into other frontiers, it doesn't get much better. Translation AI is still relatively poor, able to handle some word-for-word translations passably but being lousy the moment you come across colloquialisms, figures of speech, neologisms, parallel synonyms, malapropisms, simply typos, failures of homonym (there/their/they're, our/hour, its/it's, principle/principal). There's a reason it's so easy to tell when you get a tech call response that's outsourced to somewhere in Asia - most of them know just enough Engrish to try to translate word-for-word what they want to say, and so they come up with constructions like "Tech support welcomes you, may I please know the problem you have today" that could just as easily come out of Babelfish or Google Translate.
For pure problem-solving and pattern-matching, AI's proceeding slowly. Maps and GPS routing have their benefits but are certainly not perfect yet. "Automatic response answers" chat stuff is best tossed in the garbage bin, usually right next to a company's crappily written FAQ page.
Spamming is profitable. That's why the spammers do it.
What we need is simple: we need to make Spamming unprofitable. (I almost said make Spam unprofitable, but I actually kinda like Hormel's product).
This wouldn't be that hard to do. Spammers hit government addresses like anything else. Hit the purveyors of the product, the people who hire the spammers, with a nasty "kill your business for good" level fine for every product that goes out in a spamming campaign - problem solved, none of these guys will ever be so stupid as to hire a spammer again.
That leaves the virus-purveyors and identity-theft types to deal with, true, but the bulk of the money spent on breaking CAPTCHA solutions and everything else comes from the spam-for-profit guys, so if we hit them first, the rest are more manageable.
It's awesome to see techies and everyone else working to do their part.
What I find actually uplifting is this part: On a sombre note, the floods have claimed 10 lives, including children, and 78 people are still missing after facing a torrent of water up to 8 metres (26 feet) high."
Think about that number and compare it with the number of dead and missing from many "classical" disasters - for floods, the usual death count is in the multiple thousands. Roughly 3000 in the monsoon floods for the past few incidents in Asia, for instance.
It's a tragedy when people die in a natural disaster, but if the death count is below 100, they did a great job preparing and minimizing casualties!
The problem for the Wiimote is that it's just plain underpowered. Test it out with any small motions and you'll understand what I mean; Wii Sports Golf putting, for instance, is an exercise in frustration trying to get it to register for a simple tap-in putt without having it fling your ball halfway across the green instead. The same problem is also responsible for the troubles the wiimote has in recognizing when people have moved the controller for a backhand rather than forehand stroke in Wii Sports Tennis.
The motion sensors are simply not sensitive enough to register correctly, so they put an abnormally large "dead zone" calibration in as a cheap hack. Even the add-on pack with the extra sensors doesn't improve it to that great of an extent, and requires constant calibration (the whole "set your wiimote down on a flat surface... quick... no really do it now, we know you're handcuffed to it but you better have it flat NOW or fuck it you can play the next round with a miscalibrated controller" deal).
When Chris Hecker said the Wii is nothing more than two gamecubes stuck together with duct tape, he wasn't that far off. Of course, the larger problem for the Wii going forward is the fact that game designers with little experience in interface design seem to feel obliged to put in some nasty-stupid "ooh it has motion sensing" control element even when unjustified. Classic case: Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions. On the 360 and PS3 you have jump, jab, punch, and grab buttons. On the Wii you have jump, jab, grab, and... for a punch I have to shake the damn remote? Really? It's not just annoying, it's actually LESS playable, because you never know quite when "enough" shaking will be enough to activate the function you're looking for.
That being said, IF Microsoft can improve the sensitivity of the Kinect bar enough to reliably discern fingers, it might actually be interesting to see what a motion-to-mouse interface would be like with it. Wave, poke to click, pinch to select, etc... it could be done.
What should have happened is, the MafiAA corps should have been forcibly disbanded, assets sold, and all singers and songwriters released from their slave-labor contracts.
The double upside there is that we could get rid of the MafiAA companies and destroy the Payola system that still strangleholds music radio today. Maybe we'd have some real radio stations that would do things like play local artists, new acts simply because they like the sound, or even spin entire albums now and again.
Of course, we should probably reinstitute the media ownership limits. In 1995 there were over 5000 independent radio station companies, by 1997 five companies controlled 95% of the radio market.
So long Wintel, Hello Winvidia! I think it's clear that AMD and Intel are crapping their pants and swiftly ousted AMD's CEO to prepare for the merger of AMD and Intel.
Merger of AMD and Intel? Not likely. The phrase "antitrust lawsuit" comes swiftly to mind.
More likely as well, what you'll get for ARM-based Windows is an attempt to compete in the tablet/smartphone market. Let's face it, Win7phone is a joke, Android OS was never designed for tablets and Google has admitted so, leaving the need for "something" to compete with iPads down the road.
Dell did a pretty good job with the Inspiron Duo, but Atom-based will only go so far.
Book "piracy" (e.g. rampant copying) has been going on for ages now. At the same time, I can't object to much of what happens with it.
I'm a collector of roleplaying system books. A large number of them are out of print. A sizable majority, not only are they out of print, the publisher itself is long gone. My options are to scour secondhand markets and convention auctions like nobody's business, but that can't find everything. Eventually, just to archive them and keep them around in case they get requested for reference, "piracy" is the last-and-only resort.
It's not half as good as having the physical book in my hand, but it's better than being unable to find the material. And when traveling to a distant convention, sometimes it's a "necessary evil" in order to transport the material in a 6-lb laptop rather than shipping an 80-lb suitcase back and forth.
Now, I'd be willing to pay $1-2 more to get a PDF copy of the book along with the print copy, but the same can't be said for Kindle/Nook/etc formats. Why? Because I have NO guarantee that there'll be a good reader for them 10 years from now. I'm hauling around (in some cases) 20 year old material here, I know I'll still be able to read a PDF a decade from now because it's non-DRM'ed, but the same can't be said for the DRM-laden formats.
Actually part of the problem is that a lot of medical devices NEED to be closed systems.
I've got a friend who works in medical IT and it's a nightmare keeping systems certified. Anytime there's anything approaching a major Windows patch or upgrade, the device has to be re-certified to be sure that the patch didn't affect something to give bad readouts. This isn't an idle threat, given the various system incompatibilities that popped up in various ways over the years - there were a few systems that "broke" when some well-meaning person upgraded from XP SP2 to SP3 for instance.
They have systems still running win95, 98se, 2000, etc. on them. There are a few that are DOS-based putting out info on monochrome screens. It is actually a little frightening to realize what would happen if the unit had to be replaced quickly... on the other hand, the DOS units are hardy little bastards from back in the day when everything ran nice and cool and quiet on passive heat sinks.
In other words, "damned if you do, damned if you don't."
We chose Mao - and the result is the shitty, slave-labor society called mainland China which boasts such illustrious achievements as the world's worst, most overpolluted city, most dismal human-rights record outside of african juntas, and companies so criminally assholish they cause mass suicides (looking at you, Foxconn).
On the other hand, who would have been leader had the Kuomintang won? Sun Yat-Sen, who was yet another Communist? The path of the nation wouldn't have changed significantly, we'd just have "Chairman Sun" hats instead of "Chairman Mao" hats.
The history of the US intervening in foreign conflicts is rife with this sort of thing. But that's because the history of wars and conflicts and revolutions is rife with this sort of thing anyways. I hate to use a wikipedia list, but it's a handy reference, so here, take your pick of revolutions and do some digging.
British revolutions kicked out corruption to replace it with more corruption - didn't matter whether they were revolting against parliament or following a pencil-dicked king who was angry that the pope wouldn't give him a fifth annulment. French Revolution? See also "bloody war followed by corrupt leaders followed by more revolution." Go back way back, look at Julius Caesar and the general "line of succession" of leaders of Rome. Wander over to earlier China and see what happened with the Han, Yellow Turbans, et al.
It's a sad statement on human nature, but very true: usually, the leaders of a revolution turn out to be just as corrupt as the assholes they overthrew. Why? "Power corrupts..."
Slashdot Mirror
And this is where US law ought to step in and say "no, you can't do this."
There are dozens of reasons this ought to get laughed right out of court. Anti-SLAPP statutes, for one, or the judge could just issue a bench order declaring the case to be brought in bad faith and dismiss it with prejudice.
Unfortunately, US judges are brain-dead fools who follow the highest bidder and with one or two notable exceptions, have no education in modern technology. The end result has been a stream of rulings by idiots whose first interaction with technology was reading Jack Valenti's "VCR=Boston Strangler" comments in a newspaper.
Of course, the legal system doesn't help either in general. As you pointed out, the primary purpose of the legal system is no longer to decide issues fairly, but to burn up a shitload of time and money to enrich the lawyers and ensure that only gigantic megacorporations can "play" in the system and anyone else gets just squished under the weight of the paperwork. The bad judgements we've gotten because one side was a megacorporation with massive teams of lawyers and unlimited money to throw at it and the other person was a single human being trying to defend themselves while mortgaged to the hilt and relying on the scant hours of pro-bono counsel or volunteer lawyers for groups like the EFF (I like you, guys, but let's face it, volunteer time vs corporate resources!) are steadily eroding away consumer rights every day.
And don't forget that this even goes to the US Supreme Court, where legendarily crappy decisions (Eldred v Ashcroft, "even if congress set copyright at a million billion years that still constitutes a limit so it's constitutional and the no-ex-post-facto law restriction we just don't fucking care about because the MPAA/RIAA/MafiAA/Disney paid us off) fuck the consumer over too.
That doesn't change the fact that he governed while a majority voted against him.
Uhm... that's almost a given event in any plurality voting system.
If it's imperfect and you believe it should be changed, please feel free to argue for that. To claim it is "illegitimate", however, is simply wrong.
If that happens then the House reps each gets a vote, in several states they don't even have to vote for the candidate the people of the state they represent voted for
Yes. This is the fall-back position in the event of a candidate not getting a majority of electoral votes: the US House of Representatives holds a vote. Unfortunately, your understanding is faulty, and the vote goes to one vote per state with the individual state delegations deciding by whatever means they choose (vote, cards, dice, drunken brawl, what have you) how their state's ONE vote shall go.
Again, is it perfect? No. Could it be amended? Probably. Will it likely be anytime soon? Probably not.
OMG! Comic book artists can get lazy and use the real world as a model for their art!
My common sense is tingling!
No, Manning was the man who gave the stuff out to Assange.
Manning also happens to have the misfortune of being in the military, where the rules are different from both the civil and criminal courts.
Sigh. You never understood the point of Brave New World; that it DID NOT MATTER what was broadcast, because the population would be turned into an ADD-driven collection of sheeple who were distracted the moment after something important was said by something more trivial.
In Roman days it was called "bread and circuses."
We "hear" the important news today. But good luck filtering out what has meaning among the 1000 other "news stories" that are just meaningless distraction.
Indeed. You offer insight into what you believe the charges are likely to be, and someone calls you names for it.
Slashdot's certainly been going downhill lately.
I'm not saying he's a nice guy or perfect - far from it.
I'm thinking "about 180 degrees from it" myself.
But the fact remains that he got a far larger share of the vote than most western leaders
Sure. What percentage did the current President of China win by again? What percentage did Saddam get in his final "election"? Rigged elections are meaningless.
and extremely popular with most of the population
Again, I'm reminded of all the "vocal supporters" of other dictatorial regimes who are only "vocal" because they're afraid of being "disappeared" if someone hears them talking bad about Mr. Dictator-For-Life.
has ploughed money into education and healthcare, and massively improved the lives of the poor
Say what again?
Again, the US is on dodgy ground to criticise, with elections of presidents on less than half the votes with results determined by dodgy courts
I take it you have never studied how the US constitution and election system, in particularly the Electoral College in which the vote is not a "national popular vote" but 50 separate elections apportioning the votes of 538 representatives to the national ballot.
detention without trial in Cuba
Sigh. And you seemed so rational prior to this.
the ever-widening poverty gap
No, most of us agree this is a problem.
denial of healthcare to the poor
All you have to do to have healthcare in the US is to show up to a hospital. The fact is, "health care access" is not an issue: "health insurance", which helps one pay for it, is what is being roundly discussed.
Neither system is perfect, but it seems that Chavez is at least helping the poor rather than the rich
With due respect, if you honestly think this, you need to get your head out of the sand and take a better look at conditions in Venezuela.
And he's not starting wars responsible for the deaths of thousands
No, he's just busy murdering thousands of the citizens in his own country. As for the rest of your assertions, they're offtopic and can be discussed at another time.
If you like someone who murders people, regularly steals from the government to enrich himself, sets up a paradise for criminals, maintains his rule through fear and oppression, and just made himself supreme dictator for life and you'll be shot if you say otherwise, be my guest.
Just don't be surprised if I tend to disagree with you.
it's been proven that there is no charge of espionage, since he never obtained any information in the first place.
Then what did he have to post?
It was given to him.
Ahh. So your assertion is that if it is "given" to him, as opposed to his asking for it, that's not espionage? Likely as not, the charge is going to assert that Assange asked PFC Manning to give him the information, which would make them co-conspirators.
Whether that is TRUE, or not, I do not make judgement. But that is likely what the charge will be.
If that were true, that would mean they could charge the newspapers with treason.
Actually newspaper reporters and editors have been charged with treason in the past, and probably will be again in the future, in nations around the world. Newspaper reporters traveling with the military, for instance, are enjoined and warned about transmitting their locations over broadcast. Geraldo Rivera was kicked out of just such an assignment for drawing a map in the sand for the audience.
quit making shit up, you dumb fucking retard.
Are you expecting me to respond in kind? I know your type. You're posting "anonymously" so that you can log in and downmod me a few times.
Please get an education and grow up. The world does not work the way you think it does.
Feels more like a brave new world to me.
Now what's the latest on this congresscritter shooting, Britney Spears, and Miley Cyrus's latest tattoo and boyfriend again?
The actual charge is likely to be something along the lines of espionage.
That being said, the bigger problem I have is that Assange seems to be doing his level best to make as unsympathetic a defendant of himself as possible. If he had simply put things up with notes to the effect of "This was acquired and is now made public" or even "Look at this which shows what the US government/military does", he'd have an easier time claiming whatever immunities status as a journalist may offer.
Instead, he ruthlessly re-edited video and released only those things he felt like releasing, slanting the story as much as possible. His conduct and behavior - stating goals to "take down" various entities - don't make him sympathetic either.
Besides, when dictatorial, murdering thugs like Hugo Chavez are the primary people taking your side, that ought to be a not-so-subtle hint that you're not quite on the right side.
Sigh.
So little time to point to other green blobs.
"Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
Terry Pratchett, Hogfather"
AI, in general, isn't what most people think it is. You can make a stupidly-hard-to-beat game where the opponent plays "perfectly" against you, with perfect timing and unencumbered by the physical constraints of a controller, and you get what happens in most of the Street Fighter series (or about any other fighting game), where the "hardest difficulty level" or end-boss is unbeatable, seems to always get off the perfect shot, block, tech hit, avoidance roll, etc, until you start abusing a game-breaking technique or bug yourself to beat the game. That's actually pretty easy.
What's harder is making a game AI that acts somewhat seemingly like real opponents, that makes real mistakes and leaves openings for the player to work with while not feeling like you're just handing them the game.
Of course, on most systems (Nintendo's underpowered consoles most of all), the designers don't even bother, they just code in whatever the AI they want and the altered difficulty levels give the enemy bigger guns, more health/armor, or just drop even more enemies in a level to chew through. Or else the difficulty levels leave the enemy alone, but screw with the player's health bar and damage output to much the same effect.
As we start dropping "AI" into other frontiers, it doesn't get much better. Translation AI is still relatively poor, able to handle some word-for-word translations passably but being lousy the moment you come across colloquialisms, figures of speech, neologisms, parallel synonyms, malapropisms, simply typos, failures of homonym (there/their/they're, our/hour, its/it's, principle/principal). There's a reason it's so easy to tell when you get a tech call response that's outsourced to somewhere in Asia - most of them know just enough Engrish to try to translate word-for-word what they want to say, and so they come up with constructions like "Tech support welcomes you, may I please know the problem you have today" that could just as easily come out of Babelfish or Google Translate.
For pure problem-solving and pattern-matching, AI's proceeding slowly. Maps and GPS routing have their benefits but are certainly not perfect yet. "Automatic response answers" chat stuff is best tossed in the garbage bin, usually right next to a company's crappily written FAQ page.
Once you haul the spammer in, it's easy enough to tell who paid him.
The problem is simple to solve though:
Spamming is profitable. That's why the spammers do it.
What we need is simple: we need to make Spamming unprofitable. (I almost said make Spam unprofitable, but I actually kinda like Hormel's product).
This wouldn't be that hard to do. Spammers hit government addresses like anything else. Hit the purveyors of the product, the people who hire the spammers, with a nasty "kill your business for good" level fine for every product that goes out in a spamming campaign - problem solved, none of these guys will ever be so stupid as to hire a spammer again.
That leaves the virus-purveyors and identity-theft types to deal with, true, but the bulk of the money spent on breaking CAPTCHA solutions and everything else comes from the spam-for-profit guys, so if we hit them first, the rest are more manageable.
Here's a few articles and interviews for you on the subject:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/music/perfect/radio.html
http://www.civilrights.org/publications/low-power/consolidation.html
http://futureofmusic.org/tags/radio-consolidation
http://futureofmusic.org/article/research/employment-and-wage-effects-radio-consolidation
http://www.daveyd.com/lettertofcc.html
http://www.radiosurvivor.com/2010/05/27/fcc-ponders-the-future-of-radio-consolidation/
http://www.allbusiness.com/retail-trade/miscellaneous-retail-retail-stores-not/4653720-1.html
http://iplj.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Note-NO-COMPETITION-HOW-RADIO-CONSOLIDATION-HAS-DIMINISHED-DIVERSITY-AND-SACRIFICED-LOCALISM.pdf
It's awesome to see techies and everyone else working to do their part.
What I find actually uplifting is this part: On a sombre note, the floods have claimed 10 lives, including children, and 78 people are still missing after facing a torrent of water up to 8 metres (26 feet) high."
Think about that number and compare it with the number of dead and missing from many "classical" disasters - for floods, the usual death count is in the multiple thousands. Roughly 3000 in the monsoon floods for the past few incidents in Asia, for instance.
It's a tragedy when people die in a natural disaster, but if the death count is below 100, they did a great job preparing and minimizing casualties!
The problem for the Wiimote is that it's just plain underpowered. Test it out with any small motions and you'll understand what I mean; Wii Sports Golf putting, for instance, is an exercise in frustration trying to get it to register for a simple tap-in putt without having it fling your ball halfway across the green instead. The same problem is also responsible for the troubles the wiimote has in recognizing when people have moved the controller for a backhand rather than forehand stroke in Wii Sports Tennis.
The motion sensors are simply not sensitive enough to register correctly, so they put an abnormally large "dead zone" calibration in as a cheap hack. Even the add-on pack with the extra sensors doesn't improve it to that great of an extent, and requires constant calibration (the whole "set your wiimote down on a flat surface... quick... no really do it now, we know you're handcuffed to it but you better have it flat NOW or fuck it you can play the next round with a miscalibrated controller" deal).
When Chris Hecker said the Wii is nothing more than two gamecubes stuck together with duct tape, he wasn't that far off. Of course, the larger problem for the Wii going forward is the fact that game designers with little experience in interface design seem to feel obliged to put in some nasty-stupid "ooh it has motion sensing" control element even when unjustified. Classic case: Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions. On the 360 and PS3 you have jump, jab, punch, and grab buttons. On the Wii you have jump, jab, grab, and... for a punch I have to shake the damn remote? Really? It's not just annoying, it's actually LESS playable, because you never know quite when "enough" shaking will be enough to activate the function you're looking for.
That being said, IF Microsoft can improve the sensitivity of the Kinect bar enough to reliably discern fingers, it might actually be interesting to see what a motion-to-mouse interface would be like with it. Wave, poke to click, pinch to select, etc... it could be done.
Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash
Screw that. Quick, someone get Bruce Banner up there in an airplane!
What should have happened is, the MafiAA corps should have been forcibly disbanded, assets sold, and all singers and songwriters released from their slave-labor contracts.
The double upside there is that we could get rid of the MafiAA companies and destroy the Payola system that still strangleholds music radio today. Maybe we'd have some real radio stations that would do things like play local artists, new acts simply because they like the sound, or even spin entire albums now and again.
Of course, we should probably reinstitute the media ownership limits. In 1995 there were over 5000 independent radio station companies, by 1997 five companies controlled 95% of the radio market.
So long Wintel, Hello Winvidia! I think it's clear that AMD and Intel are crapping their pants and swiftly ousted AMD's CEO to prepare for the merger of AMD and Intel.
Merger of AMD and Intel? Not likely. The phrase "antitrust lawsuit" comes swiftly to mind.
More likely as well, what you'll get for ARM-based Windows is an attempt to compete in the tablet/smartphone market. Let's face it, Win7phone is a joke, Android OS was never designed for tablets and Google has admitted so, leaving the need for "something" to compete with iPads down the road.
Dell did a pretty good job with the Inspiron Duo, but Atom-based will only go so far.
Book "piracy" (e.g. rampant copying) has been going on for ages now. At the same time, I can't object to much of what happens with it.
I'm a collector of roleplaying system books. A large number of them are out of print. A sizable majority, not only are they out of print, the publisher itself is long gone. My options are to scour secondhand markets and convention auctions like nobody's business, but that can't find everything. Eventually, just to archive them and keep them around in case they get requested for reference, "piracy" is the last-and-only resort.
It's not half as good as having the physical book in my hand, but it's better than being unable to find the material. And when traveling to a distant convention, sometimes it's a "necessary evil" in order to transport the material in a 6-lb laptop rather than shipping an 80-lb suitcase back and forth.
Now, I'd be willing to pay $1-2 more to get a PDF copy of the book along with the print copy, but the same can't be said for Kindle/Nook/etc formats. Why? Because I have NO guarantee that there'll be a good reader for them 10 years from now. I'm hauling around (in some cases) 20 year old material here, I know I'll still be able to read a PDF a decade from now because it's non-DRM'ed, but the same can't be said for the DRM-laden formats.
Actually part of the problem is that a lot of medical devices NEED to be closed systems.
I've got a friend who works in medical IT and it's a nightmare keeping systems certified. Anytime there's anything approaching a major Windows patch or upgrade, the device has to be re-certified to be sure that the patch didn't affect something to give bad readouts. This isn't an idle threat, given the various system incompatibilities that popped up in various ways over the years - there were a few systems that "broke" when some well-meaning person upgraded from XP SP2 to SP3 for instance.
They have systems still running win95, 98se, 2000, etc. on them. There are a few that are DOS-based putting out info on monochrome screens. It is actually a little frightening to realize what would happen if the unit had to be replaced quickly... on the other hand, the DOS units are hardy little bastards from back in the day when everything ran nice and cool and quiet on passive heat sinks.
You mean like when Jimbo Wales was busy "oversighting" things out of Rachel Marsden's wikipedia article because she was screwing him?
In other words, "damned if you do, damned if you don't."
We chose Mao - and the result is the shitty, slave-labor society called mainland China which boasts such illustrious achievements as the world's worst, most overpolluted city, most dismal human-rights record outside of african juntas, and companies so criminally assholish they cause mass suicides (looking at you, Foxconn).
On the other hand, who would have been leader had the Kuomintang won? Sun Yat-Sen, who was yet another Communist? The path of the nation wouldn't have changed significantly, we'd just have "Chairman Sun" hats instead of "Chairman Mao" hats.
The history of the US intervening in foreign conflicts is rife with this sort of thing. But that's because the history of wars and conflicts and revolutions is rife with this sort of thing anyways. I hate to use a wikipedia list, but it's a handy reference, so here, take your pick of revolutions and do some digging.
British revolutions kicked out corruption to replace it with more corruption - didn't matter whether they were revolting against parliament or following a pencil-dicked king who was angry that the pope wouldn't give him a fifth annulment. French Revolution? See also "bloody war followed by corrupt leaders followed by more revolution." Go back way back, look at Julius Caesar and the general "line of succession" of leaders of Rome. Wander over to earlier China and see what happened with the Han, Yellow Turbans, et al.
It's a sad statement on human nature, but very true: usually, the leaders of a revolution turn out to be just as corrupt as the assholes they overthrew. Why? "Power corrupts..."