Re:Too early for amature guesses.
on
Fossett's Plane Found
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· Score: 4, Informative
I don't know what it is but the end result looks like controlled flight into the ground.
Yeah, I don't get the "statistically, dollars to donuts it was engine/fuel-related", because statistically, CFIT is a much more common cause of air accidents than engine or fuel problems. Fuel problems are actually one of the *least* likely causes, be it contamination, starvation or exhaustion.
There were reportedly clouds at around the altitude he'd have been flying at that day obscuring mountain peaks like this one. I think the most likely cause at this point is he was flying in a cloud and ran into the mountain. It happens, even to airliner pilots with sophisticated ground proximity warning systems. General aviation pilots usually have either no such equipment, or rudimentary ground avoidance equipment. I'm not sure what, if anything, his plane would have been equipped with, but even if it had such equipment, it wouldn't necessarily have been enough to prevent a CFIT accident.
Oh I see. Yet another reason why CRT are better than LCDs.
Er, no. CRT's have a native resolution as well; later models were just made to multi-scan. But they always looked best at their native res, just like LCD's do. (LCD's can "multi-scan" too, although on an LCD it's just called scaling.) Back before LCD monitors really existed, gamers and other high-end users used to talk about CRT's in terms of resolution just like we do now with LCD's. My old 17" NEC CRT was a 1280x1024 monitor, one of the first of its kind. (It could display other resolutions, including higher ones, but it didn't look all that great doing it.)
Sometimes it was hard to notice the quality difference between resolutions on a CRT because they're inherently blurrier than LCD's anyway. There's no such thing as 1:1 pixel mapping on a CRT. But that doesn't mean there's not a native resolution.
CRT HDTV's are still talked about in terms of native resolution. Most are 1080i and 480p native. A few HDTV CRT's were built 720p native, and these are somewhat sought-after now because while the difference in resolution between 1080i and 720p is hard to see, the difference between progressive and interlaced is easier. (I think the downside is that most of these sets did not have scalers built in, so they could *only* display 720p content, meaning you needed an external box to do the scaling of other resolutions.)
What Gore has done in the past eight years scares me even more than what Bush has done.
(spit-take)
What planet are you living on? Do you actually read newspapers or anything? If an unnecessary war wasn't enough, then Gitmo, the Patriot Act, suspension of Habeas Corpus, rampant cronyism and corruption, then a $700 billion bailout for an economy that's been run into the ground doesn't phase you?
Yeah, what Gore has done over the past eight years is MUCH worse. We can't have people actually be aware of global warming!
The last sentence of the summary - and the article it links to - are incorrect. Sam and Dan Houser did not create GTA, Dave Jones did. DMA Design was not affiliated with Rockstar in any way when that game was created.
I'm pursuaded that, on the balance of probabilities, Bin Laden really was surprised by the attack.
This is kind of like saying that, on the balance of probabilities, George Bush was surprised by the capture of Saddam Hussein.
Yes, he probably was. That doesn't mean he didn't order, authorize and finance it. I'm not sure where this idea that leaders of organizations have a direct hand in all of its operations comes from. Does the CEO of a corporation write every little piece of text in all of the company's press releases? Does he program all of the Flash in the company's web site? No, of course not.
But bin Laden clearly knew about the plan, clearly approved it (admitting as much in the video we all saw), and it was his money that financed it. Did he know that it would happen on September 11, 2001? Probably not. Was he surprised by the amount of destruction? Could have been. He wasn't the guy on the ground coordinating the attack, just like Bush isn't the guy on the ground directing our forces around in Iraq.
The only time he acknowledged being responsible, was in some supposed sham video that was "found" in Afghanistan, and claimed by the CIA as some sort of smoking gun proving he did it.
So the video was authenticated by the CIA, and you don't believe it. But these documents! These documents were... authenticated by the CIA. Totally different!
Wouldn't he take credit for it if he organized the attacks?
Al Qaeda rarely (if ever) takes credit for attacks externally.
What some people are forgetting, though, is that we have a video tape of bin Laden with his lieutenants discussing the plan after it happened, and talking about how it went better than any of them expected. (He said he didn't expect the towers to fall, only the top floors). It was widely disseminated shortly after it was found during our invasion of Afghanistan. I'm not sure how you refute that. This video was also authenticated by the CIA, so if someone's using them as proof that these documents are real, then they should believe that video tape as well.
1) In general, the Japanese mobile market has a wider availability of much more bleeding edge technology than just about anywhere else in the world. This is because the Japanese, in general, are gadget freaks. Imagine if Joe Sixpack in America were as much of a gadget freak as your typical Slashdot crowd, and now you will instantly understand why Japanese tech is light years ahead of anything available in the West, including iPhone.
This is true, but 99% of their phones are *not* touch screen phones. They're not even QWERTY phones. They're standard alpha-numeric layout phones, albeit extremely advanced ones (with such features as 800x480 resolution screens, 1 seg TV tuners, and 5-8 megapixel cameras).
In fact, one of the failings of this article is that the author lumps every country into some mythical "Asian" market. What is this "Asian" market? China, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea all have different providers and different phones. They speak different languages and input them differently. There is no "Asian" cell phone market. I realize Asia is a continent, but this would be akin to saying the iPhone is popular in the "western" cell phone market. Where exactly would you mean by that?
I think there would be a natural tendency to assume Japan must be one of the top countries included in this touch-screen survey, but I would guess that is almost surely *not* the case. For one thing, Motorola is virtually unknown there. Samsung is not popular. Touch screen phones are uncommon, as you can see by browsing NTT Docomo's lineup here: http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/product/foma/index.html
The way the Japanese are used to inputting their language using latin letters on QWERTY keyboards (which is the standard way of doing it) combined with the construction of the Japanese phonetic alphabet actually means it's very easy for them to type quickly on a cell phone with a standard alphanumeric layout. So they're not going to be embracing touch screens - at least not for this reason - any time soon.
I would have liked to have seen a breakdown by country of where touch screens were popular. Korea is probably the leader. Japan is probably not on the list.
Disclaimer: I have yet to watch any episode of Seinfeld. I wasn't impressed with him before Gates conned him into this.
In other words, you're not the target demo. You're obviously not a fan of Bill Gates, or of Jerry Seinfeld. Yeah, what's *not* to like for you in this commercial?
I think it's kind of amusing how much coverage and talk I'm seeing today all around the net about how "ineffective" these ads are. Think about that for a second.
Everyone always says well you vote for this with your wallet but give me an example of how we can buy toothpaste that doesn't come from a polluting factory in china? All the brands are made their now.
Toothpaste? Maybe not.
Electronics? Yes. Just ask for "made in Japan" or "made in Mexico" or "made in Malaysia" or really anywhere other than China if you care so much about the environment. Plenty of places make that stuff. (Sony home theater equipment is made in Malaysia or Mexico; Canon SLR cameras are made in Japan, etc.)
Cars? Yes, when it comes to that - and it will. Chinese manufacturers are gearing up for a push into the west with cheap, high quality cars. Don't buy them if you don't want to support China.
Hell, I just bought a guitar made in China. I surely didn't need *that*. I could have bought a Mexican guitar instead if I wanted something cheap. But the Mexican equivalent to my Chinese guitar cost twice as much and had obviously poorer manufacturing tolerances (in my first-hand experience).
There are plenty of ways to screw China economically if you want to; you don't need to do a complete boycott. If everybody in this country cut their buying of Chinese products by 50%, and swore off all Chinese luxury products when alternatives do exist, they'd practically be out of business.
Of course, I don't advocate this nor do I intend to practice it. My only point is it's not true that there is no way to stop buying Chinese products. That's a cop-out. There are many ways to stop buying Chinese products if you want to. If you don't, it means you don't really want to.
If people want to stand by their principles, there are ways to do it. If you choose not to anyway, then you may as well get off your high horse because your principles obviously don't mean as much as you say they do.
When the Olympics were in Atlanta did they have to shut down every factory for dozens of miles just go go from 100, to 10 times acceptable particulate levels?
Atlanta population: 470,688
Beijing population: 15.7 million
Maybe when Atlanta adds another 15.3 million people and doesn't have the same pollution problems as Beijing, then they can claim some level of superiority on this issue.
Ethnocentric? The fact that pollution from europe can reach the US in 3 weeks is just illustrating that pollution travels. Presumably, thats just based on a study that found that. No one is saying pollution from the US never goes to china, it's just likely that hasn't been specifically tested and would therefore be illogical to use to support the argument.
Why is it you're so anxious to see ethnocentrism?
Ok, how about this?
Black people like fried chicken and are really good dancers.
That's not racist! Nobody ever said whites don't like fried chicken and aren't good dancers, it just hasn't been tested and therefore it's an illogical argument.
Why are you so anxious to see racism?
Nobody ever wants to admit to being ethnocentric, xenophobic or racist. That doesn't mean they aren't any or all of those three.
Why isn't there a study showing how much US pollution affects China? Don't tell me it's because you need Chinese scientists to study that. If anything, it's the country of the pollution's origin who should have the most interest in where that pollution goes, and I have no doubt the Chinese government would love to see a study show how much of their pollution comes from outside of their borders. So they're not the problem either.
If there is such a study, why hasn't it made the front page of Slashdot as this one did? Seriously, these things are not down to chance.
And you, my friend, are not only a hypocrite but an irrational one. We aren't discussing atomic weapons, warfare, or our form of government.
Yeah, because we all know bombing all those factories just makes the world greener!
News flash: wars pollute. All those warplanes flying around pollute. Atomic detonations pollute, a lot. All those radioactive bullets we've left all over the Iraqi battlefield pollute. All those emissions from tanks and armored vehicles that get 2mpg with a tailwind pollute.
What about this point did you not understand?
You can say pollution doesn't matter in the face of national security, but then the Chinese will turn around and say pollution doesn't matter in the face of economic growth. What's the difference? The rationalizations may be different, but the end result is the same.
As for this:
So far as the U.S. being the greatest polluter... we'll, we're still the greatest manufacturer.
Probably not. China has been predicted to eclipse us in gross output this year. So what's our excuse when that happens?
I think the opposite... If IE8 had some really good anti-advertising stuff then I would be REALLY happy.
Woosh!
The point is, without the tracking images being tracked, a lot of businesses will suddenly see IE usage stats drop. True, most advertisers do it with a cookie as well these days. But when you get conflicting usage info, most companies will take the more conservative data for internal usage. And that's going to show IE use dropping.
But is this really enough to convince them? I'm convinced
And I'm not. I don't really see proof of anything here. I see a bunch of names and dates on a document linked to from a blog that has exactly one post from a self-described "hacker". Seems to me that pretty much any hacker could come up with such a list, post it on a government site and then link to the cache (or fake the cache).
Not to mention that these appear to be from the same document on the same date. So one document contradicts a person's passport and that automatically invalidates their passport info? I don't see the logic in that. Imagine if you went to a US court challenging a person's passport and your entire body of evidence was a random document from a 2006 sporting event that showed a different birth year. You'd be laughed out of the courtroom. And that's what would happen here, let alone in China or any other country.
Bottom line is even if this is real, mistakes happen. Nobody would have been pouring over this document at the time, so it probably would have gone unnoticed in this sea of hundreds of names and dates. Given the choice between believing a passport or this, I think a passport is a lot likelier to be correct.
I guess the real question I'm asking is, why are you so quick to trust some random blogspot blogger over the Chinese government? If trust needs to be earned, what has this blogger done to earn it? And why do you think this document is true and the passport is false? Because it confirms some bias that you already had?
I have no idea of He Kexin is really 16 or not. All I know is the only real evidence anyone has put forth so far that she isn't is that she supposedly looks too young to be 16 (apparently nobody's ever seen Japan's Koko Tsurumi, who's shorter and looks even younger), and now this random list of names allegedly from a cached government site and "discovered" by a self-confessed "hacker" and posted in his first and only blog post on Blogger.
People are too quick to believe what they want to believe. A little critical thinking is in order.
People around here (and this is somewhat unique to this site) can be both absolutist and incredibly defeatist when it comes to issues like this.
But this logic can be used to justify anything. "People murder other people anyway, why not just let them do it?" Well, for one thing, such an argument displays a complete lack of morality and ethics. Ethics is not about the results of an action, it's about the reasoning behind an action. So by taking such a stand, you are throwing out any sense of ethical rule-making - and you are telling everybody else that ethics and morality don't matter. What, then, are you left with? Why not throw out every rule, regulation and law?
This is important because not only do you legalize what was previously illegal, you also legitimize it. You're saying one of two things: a) this was a bad rule/law, and what it forbade should not have been forbade, or b) ethical conduct doesn't matter, so do what you want.
You're essentially actively encouraging what you were previously forbidding. It's not a neutral act, repealing a rule or law.
Second, while it's true that *some* "people murder other people anyway", it's certainly *not* true that *most* people do or that laws against it have no effect. There most certainly is both a factor of deterrence and a natural lowering of the incidence of crime due to incarceration of the offenders who are caught.
The same is true of doping. It is simply untrue to say doping tests are "ineffective". The only way you could say that is if nobody had been caught. Well, plenty of people have been caught - not just athletes, but suppliers as well. Investigators don't only go after the athletes anymore, they go to the source, and it's very hard to even get banned substances anymore. And they don't rely only on tests - they follow the paper trail, like any other investigative body.
They also store blood and urine for 8 years. So if you think that just because there's no test for a particular substance today, there probably will be before those samples expire. Athletes know this too - it's a cat and mouse game, but the athletes are forever on the wrong end of it.
Several US athletes including Michael Phelps have volunteered this time around to be "super-tested" - from what I remember, they get blood and urine tests every single day, and they get followed around all over the place by USOC officials. These are gold medal athletes who have volunteered for this.
*All* of the other athletes are tested regularly. And anyone suspected of doping literally has their trash gone through, their phone records checked, their bank accounts examined. It's just not worth it for most athletes.
Does that mean there's no doping? No. But it's like any other rule - the fact that a few people break it doesn't mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater. The rules work, for the most part.
What you actually see probably is mist. I've been seeing a lot of western commentators looking at Beijing cityscapes and saying "look at that smog!"
Anyone who's been to any part of Asia in summer will tell you about the humidity. It's nothing that anyone in most western countries can understand. You can see the air, even in completely rural areas. (Walking through it is like walking through pea soup.) My wife's family lives on a rice paddy in rural Japan and the air looks exactly the same as it does in Beijing all summer long.
That doesn't mean Beijing isn't polluted, but I don't know what the Chinese official was actually responding to when he said "that's just mist." It's possible some dumb reporter asked him to look at the sky and see how polluted it was. The point is when the humidity level is that high, you can't tell visually how polluted a city is.
Here at Brazil there are dozens of local bands that I never heard about, but are able to market themselves and earn money. These bands basically perform at regional shows, sell their albuns themselves and basically are ignored by the mainstream music industry. The music is basically "pirated" by the artists themselves, because it's sold on a such informal way directly by the band or by street vendors that copy and resell the albums as much as they want to.
Yes, and this is the way it's been done in the United States and England and Japan and everywhere else for decades too. Nothing new there...
Eventually some of this bands get attention from the general public and become know nationwide...
And here you've left out about a million steps, most of which involve a record label or at least some form of professional PR. (I'll get to your specific example in a minute.)
How do you suppose a band that's playing around locally and selling tapes or whatever to local people becomes "eventually" known nationwide? Every local area has dozens or hundreds of bands all trying to do the same thing, so why would somebody pay attention to a local band from 500 miles away?
The answer is they get mentioned in newspapers, they get played on radio stations, they make it into video games, etc. etc. Hopefully at some point before that they get a more professional recording made, which costs a lot of money that most local bands don't have.
None of this happens without a record label.
As for this:
And some even internationally, see the Calypso band for an example...
I've never heard of them. A quick Google search turns up nothing either. Searching for Calypso brings up results for calypso music, some technology company calling itself Calypso, a Calypso catamaran... but no band. Searching for "Calypso band" is similarly barren - lots of results for calypso bands, but no band specific named Calypso in the first few dozen results. So they can't really be all that popular internationally - not many people are mentioning them online or linking to pages that do.
Now, if they'd had a record label, maybe a different story. Record labels have SEO specialists that would ensure they'd be high up in search results. They'd have a nice SEO-friendly official web site with a blog or two. They'd be setting up tours. They'd get them on appropriate radio stations and TV shows. An associated PR agency would be sending out press releases and samplers to various publications.
Like the parent, I can't believe I'm here defending record labels, but the fact is they do serve a purpose. That doesn't mean I support everything they do or that I think their current form is right for the way music is distributed today - their business model is still very 1950's, and they need to get smaller and streamline. They also need to acknowledge that the internet is not going away. A lot of bands might not need a "full service" record label, but then they shouldn't expect as much help either (be it financial or practical).
Has anyone given any thought to the fact that it really isn't easy to do this?
Lots of us. The comment section on Slashdot is not entirely representative of the world at large.
In almost every story about the privatization of space flight here, I find myself defending NASA despite their (few) accidents and supposed lax culture when it comes to safety. The fact remains, their success rate is extremely high. When they've been forced to cut costs and/or rush launches is when they've had problems. And that's exactly what the private industry is attempting to do now.
I think the lesson here is that space flight is difficult, it is dangerous and it is expensive. There are no shortcuts - not if you want a success rate anywhere close to 100%, anyway. And with the amount it costs to build and insure the average payload, anything less than near 100% is not going to be acceptable to most potential customers.
Part of it is probably google's good name that is attractive to malware hosts.
It's a lot more likely that it's just really easy to automate setting up a blog on Blogger and then customizing the template to host malware. It's not like setting up a blog using Wordpress or Movable Type or even Livejournal. I don't think it's got anything to do with "Google's good name" - you don't see the name "Google" anywhere in a blogger url.
Not sure what Google can do about it, though - set up captchas for editing templates? Who knows. They can't take away the ability to edit templates or nobody's going to use them anymore. I have definitely noticed that a lot of the blogger blogs I click on during blog searches try to get me to install various bits of crapware, though. Yesterday, I hit one that almost forced me to reboot my machine before I could get rid of it (only furiously hitting the "x" button over and over faster than the popups could refresh cleared it - and yes, I'm using Firefox).
How long until Google just decides this service is more trouble than it's worth? It's already way behind the other blog systems out there in terms of features.
oh, btw, Google does *not* spider blogger blogs any faster than any other blogs or site. I've got a Wordpress blog and two Blogger blogs, and they're spidered at the exact same rate and usually on the exact same days (I also use Google webmastertools). So maybe that's a misconception that the malware authors have, or maybe it's just an assumption by the article submitter. But it isn't true in any case.
Also, the Linksys WRT54G up to version 4 was a fine router, plenty of memory, ran Linux, was very stable.
Yeah, I have a 1.1, which I didn't even know until right now (checked the sticker), and I don't think I've rebooted that thing once in the entire time I've owned it. It's been running continuously right now for at least six months 24/7, and before that had a stint of probably 2 years uninterrupted. (I was forced to use Verizon's POS FiOS router for a little while.)
I was about to leave a comment wondering what the hell the submitter was talking about, because to me the WRT54G is probably the most stable router that exists. It really couldn't *be* anymore stable. But I didn't realize there were such problems with version 4 and above.
Right, but Belvin's right on the money about E3 should be more fun and entertaining since it is about videogames.
Two things:
a) Why? Video games are a multi-billion dollar business. Do you think that developers, publishers and retailers all sit around all day drinking and smoking pot as hired strippers perform in front of them? Because that's what E3 used to be. That's *not* representative of the game industry. It's also not a very good way to get business done.
It's no different than saying "movies are entertainment, so nobody involved in producing them should have to do any work!" Don't confuse the product with the process.
b) It should tell you something that Belvin's quote is from a guy who works in the gaming media. It's obviously in his best interests that his web site has something interesting to focus on for a month, because it gets him viewers which in turn gets him ad dollars.
The problem is the gaming media is not part of the industry. At least it's not supposed to be. The fact that they consider themselves part of the industry is a big problem with "gaming journalism" these days. Imagine if CNN or the New York Times or whatever considered themselves part of the military armaments industry. Would you trust them to report on issues relating to war or the military any longer?
The media is a wholly separate industry that is independent of any of the events, people or entities that it reports on. So to say "the gaming industry needs this or that" and then use a bunch of media people to bolster the argument is wrong. The media's interests in this case are pretty much diametrically opposed to the gaming industry's interests.
The media can whine all it wants about this. Publishers themselves are giddy that they don't need to spend a million dollars on a booth and have fifty games ready to be seen the same week anymore, only to see about ten of those games get any actual coverage while the rest just get lost in the shuffle. They may complain about one or two little logistical things about the new E3 - having to walk more between buildings, for example - and the media will always focus on those little complaints because it makes their own complaints sound more legitimate. But don't make any mistake here - the industry loves the smaller E3. It's the media that doesn't.
You can try to define "Fair Use" all you want to. But any definition is utterly meaningless in the real world because your rights are entirely and completely dependent on a number of factors that have nothing to do with any attempt to define the term
Exactly - and the article summary is wrong about the law "moving increasingly in the opposite direction". The law hasn't moved at all. Copyright law is what it is and the last real update to it was the DMCA what, ten or more years ago now? There are several bills making their way through congress right now that would strengthen copyright laws, not weaken them. The law has not budged since the awful DMCA, but if it's *going* to move in any particular direction, it's going to get worse.
What's changed is the public's perception about copyright. But that's got nothing to do with the law. You're perfectly free to believe murder is right and moral too, but that doesn't mean you won't go to jail if you kill somebody. The law is the law.
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I don't know what it is but the end result looks like controlled flight into the ground.
Yeah, I don't get the "statistically, dollars to donuts it was engine/fuel-related", because statistically, CFIT is a much more common cause of air accidents than engine or fuel problems. Fuel problems are actually one of the *least* likely causes, be it contamination, starvation or exhaustion.
There were reportedly clouds at around the altitude he'd have been flying at that day obscuring mountain peaks like this one. I think the most likely cause at this point is he was flying in a cloud and ran into the mountain. It happens, even to airliner pilots with sophisticated ground proximity warning systems. General aviation pilots usually have either no such equipment, or rudimentary ground avoidance equipment. I'm not sure what, if anything, his plane would have been equipped with, but even if it had such equipment, it wouldn't necessarily have been enough to prevent a CFIT accident.
Oh I see. Yet another reason why CRT are better than LCDs.
Er, no. CRT's have a native resolution as well; later models were just made to multi-scan. But they always looked best at their native res, just like LCD's do. (LCD's can "multi-scan" too, although on an LCD it's just called scaling.) Back before LCD monitors really existed, gamers and other high-end users used to talk about CRT's in terms of resolution just like we do now with LCD's. My old 17" NEC CRT was a 1280x1024 monitor, one of the first of its kind. (It could display other resolutions, including higher ones, but it didn't look all that great doing it.)
Sometimes it was hard to notice the quality difference between resolutions on a CRT because they're inherently blurrier than LCD's anyway. There's no such thing as 1:1 pixel mapping on a CRT. But that doesn't mean there's not a native resolution.
CRT HDTV's are still talked about in terms of native resolution. Most are 1080i and 480p native. A few HDTV CRT's were built 720p native, and these are somewhat sought-after now because while the difference in resolution between 1080i and 720p is hard to see, the difference between progressive and interlaced is easier. (I think the downside is that most of these sets did not have scalers built in, so they could *only* display 720p content, meaning you needed an external box to do the scaling of other resolutions.)
What Gore has done in the past eight years scares me even more than what Bush has done.
(spit-take)
What planet are you living on? Do you actually read newspapers or anything? If an unnecessary war wasn't enough, then Gitmo, the Patriot Act, suspension of Habeas Corpus, rampant cronyism and corruption, then a $700 billion bailout for an economy that's been run into the ground doesn't phase you?
Yeah, what Gore has done over the past eight years is MUCH worse. We can't have people actually be aware of global warming!
The last sentence of the summary - and the article it links to - are incorrect. Sam and Dan Houser did not create GTA, Dave Jones did. DMA Design was not affiliated with Rockstar in any way when that game was created.
I'm pursuaded that, on the balance of probabilities, Bin Laden really was surprised by the attack.
This is kind of like saying that, on the balance of probabilities, George Bush was surprised by the capture of Saddam Hussein.
Yes, he probably was. That doesn't mean he didn't order, authorize and finance it. I'm not sure where this idea that leaders of organizations have a direct hand in all of its operations comes from. Does the CEO of a corporation write every little piece of text in all of the company's press releases? Does he program all of the Flash in the company's web site? No, of course not.
But bin Laden clearly knew about the plan, clearly approved it (admitting as much in the video we all saw), and it was his money that financed it. Did he know that it would happen on September 11, 2001? Probably not. Was he surprised by the amount of destruction? Could have been. He wasn't the guy on the ground coordinating the attack, just like Bush isn't the guy on the ground directing our forces around in Iraq.
But that in no way diminishes his culpability.
The only time he acknowledged being responsible, was in some supposed sham video that was "found" in Afghanistan, and claimed by the CIA as some sort of smoking gun proving he did it.
So the video was authenticated by the CIA, and you don't believe it. But these documents! These documents were... authenticated by the CIA. Totally different!
Wouldn't he take credit for it if he organized the attacks?
Al Qaeda rarely (if ever) takes credit for attacks externally.
What some people are forgetting, though, is that we have a video tape of bin Laden with his lieutenants discussing the plan after it happened, and talking about how it went better than any of them expected. (He said he didn't expect the towers to fall, only the top floors). It was widely disseminated shortly after it was found during our invasion of Afghanistan. I'm not sure how you refute that. This video was also authenticated by the CIA, so if someone's using them as proof that these documents are real, then they should believe that video tape as well.
1) In general, the Japanese mobile market has a wider availability of much more bleeding edge technology than just about anywhere else in the world. This is because the Japanese, in general, are gadget freaks. Imagine if Joe Sixpack in America were as much of a gadget freak as your typical Slashdot crowd, and now you will instantly understand why Japanese tech is light years ahead of anything available in the West, including iPhone.
This is true, but 99% of their phones are *not* touch screen phones. They're not even QWERTY phones. They're standard alpha-numeric layout phones, albeit extremely advanced ones (with such features as 800x480 resolution screens, 1 seg TV tuners, and 5-8 megapixel cameras).
In fact, one of the failings of this article is that the author lumps every country into some mythical "Asian" market. What is this "Asian" market? China, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea all have different providers and different phones. They speak different languages and input them differently. There is no "Asian" cell phone market. I realize Asia is a continent, but this would be akin to saying the iPhone is popular in the "western" cell phone market. Where exactly would you mean by that?
I think there would be a natural tendency to assume Japan must be one of the top countries included in this touch-screen survey, but I would guess that is almost surely *not* the case. For one thing, Motorola is virtually unknown there. Samsung is not popular. Touch screen phones are uncommon, as you can see by browsing NTT Docomo's lineup here: http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/product/foma/index.html
The way the Japanese are used to inputting their language using latin letters on QWERTY keyboards (which is the standard way of doing it) combined with the construction of the Japanese phonetic alphabet actually means it's very easy for them to type quickly on a cell phone with a standard alphanumeric layout. So they're not going to be embracing touch screens - at least not for this reason - any time soon.
I would have liked to have seen a breakdown by country of where touch screens were popular. Korea is probably the leader. Japan is probably not on the list.
Disclaimer: I have yet to watch any episode of Seinfeld. I wasn't impressed with him before Gates conned him into this.
In other words, you're not the target demo. You're obviously not a fan of Bill Gates, or of Jerry Seinfeld. Yeah, what's *not* to like for you in this commercial?
I think it's kind of amusing how much coverage and talk I'm seeing today all around the net about how "ineffective" these ads are. Think about that for a second.
Everyone always says well you vote for this with your wallet but give me an example of how we can buy toothpaste that doesn't come from a polluting factory in china? All the brands are made their now.
Toothpaste? Maybe not.
Electronics? Yes. Just ask for "made in Japan" or "made in Mexico" or "made in Malaysia" or really anywhere other than China if you care so much about the environment. Plenty of places make that stuff. (Sony home theater equipment is made in Malaysia or Mexico; Canon SLR cameras are made in Japan, etc.)
Cars? Yes, when it comes to that - and it will. Chinese manufacturers are gearing up for a push into the west with cheap, high quality cars. Don't buy them if you don't want to support China.
Hell, I just bought a guitar made in China. I surely didn't need *that*. I could have bought a Mexican guitar instead if I wanted something cheap. But the Mexican equivalent to my Chinese guitar cost twice as much and had obviously poorer manufacturing tolerances (in my first-hand experience).
There are plenty of ways to screw China economically if you want to; you don't need to do a complete boycott. If everybody in this country cut their buying of Chinese products by 50%, and swore off all Chinese luxury products when alternatives do exist, they'd practically be out of business.
Of course, I don't advocate this nor do I intend to practice it. My only point is it's not true that there is no way to stop buying Chinese products. That's a cop-out. There are many ways to stop buying Chinese products if you want to. If you don't, it means you don't really want to.
If people want to stand by their principles, there are ways to do it. If you choose not to anyway, then you may as well get off your high horse because your principles obviously don't mean as much as you say they do.
When the Olympics were in Atlanta did they have to shut down every factory for dozens of miles just go go from 100, to 10 times acceptable particulate levels?
Atlanta population: 470,688
Beijing population: 15.7 million
Maybe when Atlanta adds another 15.3 million people and doesn't have the same pollution problems as Beijing, then they can claim some level of superiority on this issue.
Ethnocentric? The fact that pollution from europe can reach the US in 3 weeks is just illustrating that pollution travels. Presumably, thats just based on a study that found that. No one is saying pollution from the US never goes to china, it's just likely that hasn't been specifically tested and would therefore be illogical to use to support the argument.
Why is it you're so anxious to see ethnocentrism?
Ok, how about this?
Black people like fried chicken and are really good dancers.
That's not racist! Nobody ever said whites don't like fried chicken and aren't good dancers, it just hasn't been tested and therefore it's an illogical argument.
Why are you so anxious to see racism?
Nobody ever wants to admit to being ethnocentric, xenophobic or racist. That doesn't mean they aren't any or all of those three.
Why isn't there a study showing how much US pollution affects China? Don't tell me it's because you need Chinese scientists to study that. If anything, it's the country of the pollution's origin who should have the most interest in where that pollution goes, and I have no doubt the Chinese government would love to see a study show how much of their pollution comes from outside of their borders. So they're not the problem either.
If there is such a study, why hasn't it made the front page of Slashdot as this one did? Seriously, these things are not down to chance.
First off, the US is the greatest polluter in the world
And lastly, they are not.
By far they are not.
Support your points, troll.
"By far"? We were only overtaken in Co2 emissions this year. Before that, we were "by far" the leader.
In other areas (there's more to pollution than Co2), we are still the leader.
Be my guest and look it up.
Hell, why not listen to George Bush? He seems pretty proud of us being the world's biggest polluter: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/2277298/President-George-Bush-'Goodbye-from-the-world's-biggest-polluter'.html
And you, my friend, are not only a hypocrite but an irrational one. We aren't discussing atomic weapons, warfare, or our form of government.
Yeah, because we all know bombing all those factories just makes the world greener!
News flash: wars pollute. All those warplanes flying around pollute. Atomic detonations pollute, a lot. All those radioactive bullets we've left all over the Iraqi battlefield pollute. All those emissions from tanks and armored vehicles that get 2mpg with a tailwind pollute.
What about this point did you not understand?
You can say pollution doesn't matter in the face of national security, but then the Chinese will turn around and say pollution doesn't matter in the face of economic growth. What's the difference? The rationalizations may be different, but the end result is the same.
As for this:
So far as the U.S. being the greatest polluter ... we'll, we're still the greatest manufacturer.
Probably not. China has been predicted to eclipse us in gross output this year. So what's our excuse when that happens?
It doesn't matter how they feel. New York State can't tax a purchase made in Texas
They can and they do. Moreover, this is not new. Nor is it unique to New York.
I think the opposite... If IE8 had some really good anti-advertising stuff then I would be REALLY happy.
Woosh!
The point is, without the tracking images being tracked, a lot of businesses will suddenly see IE usage stats drop. True, most advertisers do it with a cookie as well these days. But when you get conflicting usage info, most companies will take the more conservative data for internal usage. And that's going to show IE use dropping.
But is this really enough to convince them? I'm convinced
And I'm not. I don't really see proof of anything here. I see a bunch of names and dates on a document linked to from a blog that has exactly one post from a self-described "hacker". Seems to me that pretty much any hacker could come up with such a list, post it on a government site and then link to the cache (or fake the cache).
Not to mention that these appear to be from the same document on the same date. So one document contradicts a person's passport and that automatically invalidates their passport info? I don't see the logic in that. Imagine if you went to a US court challenging a person's passport and your entire body of evidence was a random document from a 2006 sporting event that showed a different birth year. You'd be laughed out of the courtroom. And that's what would happen here, let alone in China or any other country.
Bottom line is even if this is real, mistakes happen. Nobody would have been pouring over this document at the time, so it probably would have gone unnoticed in this sea of hundreds of names and dates. Given the choice between believing a passport or this, I think a passport is a lot likelier to be correct.
I guess the real question I'm asking is, why are you so quick to trust some random blogspot blogger over the Chinese government? If trust needs to be earned, what has this blogger done to earn it? And why do you think this document is true and the passport is false? Because it confirms some bias that you already had?
I have no idea of He Kexin is really 16 or not. All I know is the only real evidence anyone has put forth so far that she isn't is that she supposedly looks too young to be 16 (apparently nobody's ever seen Japan's Koko Tsurumi, who's shorter and looks even younger), and now this random list of names allegedly from a cached government site and "discovered" by a self-confessed "hacker" and posted in his first and only blog post on Blogger.
People are too quick to believe what they want to believe. A little critical thinking is in order.
Yet you feel that this isn't the case already?
No, frankly it is not the case already.
People around here (and this is somewhat unique to this site) can be both absolutist and incredibly defeatist when it comes to issues like this.
But this logic can be used to justify anything. "People murder other people anyway, why not just let them do it?" Well, for one thing, such an argument displays a complete lack of morality and ethics. Ethics is not about the results of an action, it's about the reasoning behind an action. So by taking such a stand, you are throwing out any sense of ethical rule-making - and you are telling everybody else that ethics and morality don't matter. What, then, are you left with? Why not throw out every rule, regulation and law?
This is important because not only do you legalize what was previously illegal, you also legitimize it. You're saying one of two things: a) this was a bad rule/law, and what it forbade should not have been forbade, or b) ethical conduct doesn't matter, so do what you want.
You're essentially actively encouraging what you were previously forbidding. It's not a neutral act, repealing a rule or law.
Second, while it's true that *some* "people murder other people anyway", it's certainly *not* true that *most* people do or that laws against it have no effect. There most certainly is both a factor of deterrence and a natural lowering of the incidence of crime due to incarceration of the offenders who are caught.
The same is true of doping. It is simply untrue to say doping tests are "ineffective". The only way you could say that is if nobody had been caught. Well, plenty of people have been caught - not just athletes, but suppliers as well. Investigators don't only go after the athletes anymore, they go to the source, and it's very hard to even get banned substances anymore. And they don't rely only on tests - they follow the paper trail, like any other investigative body.
They also store blood and urine for 8 years. So if you think that just because there's no test for a particular substance today, there probably will be before those samples expire. Athletes know this too - it's a cat and mouse game, but the athletes are forever on the wrong end of it.
Several US athletes including Michael Phelps have volunteered this time around to be "super-tested" - from what I remember, they get blood and urine tests every single day, and they get followed around all over the place by USOC officials. These are gold medal athletes who have volunteered for this.
*All* of the other athletes are tested regularly. And anyone suspected of doping literally has their trash gone through, their phone records checked, their bank accounts examined. It's just not worth it for most athletes.
Does that mean there's no doping? No. But it's like any other rule - the fact that a few people break it doesn't mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater. The rules work, for the most part.
It is all just 'mist.'
What you actually see probably is mist. I've been seeing a lot of western commentators looking at Beijing cityscapes and saying "look at that smog!"
Anyone who's been to any part of Asia in summer will tell you about the humidity. It's nothing that anyone in most western countries can understand. You can see the air, even in completely rural areas. (Walking through it is like walking through pea soup.) My wife's family lives on a rice paddy in rural Japan and the air looks exactly the same as it does in Beijing all summer long.
That doesn't mean Beijing isn't polluted, but I don't know what the Chinese official was actually responding to when he said "that's just mist." It's possible some dumb reporter asked him to look at the sky and see how polluted it was. The point is when the humidity level is that high, you can't tell visually how polluted a city is.
Here at Brazil there are dozens of local bands that I never heard about, but are able to market themselves and earn money. These bands basically perform at regional shows, sell their albuns themselves and basically are ignored by the mainstream music industry. The music is basically "pirated" by the artists themselves, because it's sold on a such informal way directly by the band or by street vendors that copy and resell the albums as much as they want to.
Yes, and this is the way it's been done in the United States and England and Japan and everywhere else for decades too. Nothing new there...
Eventually some of this bands get attention from the general public and become know nationwide...
And here you've left out about a million steps, most of which involve a record label or at least some form of professional PR. (I'll get to your specific example in a minute.)
How do you suppose a band that's playing around locally and selling tapes or whatever to local people becomes "eventually" known nationwide? Every local area has dozens or hundreds of bands all trying to do the same thing, so why would somebody pay attention to a local band from 500 miles away?
The answer is they get mentioned in newspapers, they get played on radio stations, they make it into video games, etc. etc. Hopefully at some point before that they get a more professional recording made, which costs a lot of money that most local bands don't have.
None of this happens without a record label.
As for this:
And some even internationally, see the Calypso band for an example...
I've never heard of them. A quick Google search turns up nothing either. Searching for Calypso brings up results for calypso music, some technology company calling itself Calypso, a Calypso catamaran... but no band. Searching for "Calypso band" is similarly barren - lots of results for calypso bands, but no band specific named Calypso in the first few dozen results. So they can't really be all that popular internationally - not many people are mentioning them online or linking to pages that do.
Now, if they'd had a record label, maybe a different story. Record labels have SEO specialists that would ensure they'd be high up in search results. They'd have a nice SEO-friendly official web site with a blog or two. They'd be setting up tours. They'd get them on appropriate radio stations and TV shows. An associated PR agency would be sending out press releases and samplers to various publications.
Like the parent, I can't believe I'm here defending record labels, but the fact is they do serve a purpose. That doesn't mean I support everything they do or that I think their current form is right for the way music is distributed today - their business model is still very 1950's, and they need to get smaller and streamline. They also need to acknowledge that the internet is not going away. A lot of bands might not need a "full service" record label, but then they shouldn't expect as much help either (be it financial or practical).
Has anyone given any thought to the fact that it really isn't easy to do this?
Lots of us. The comment section on Slashdot is not entirely representative of the world at large.
In almost every story about the privatization of space flight here, I find myself defending NASA despite their (few) accidents and supposed lax culture when it comes to safety. The fact remains, their success rate is extremely high. When they've been forced to cut costs and/or rush launches is when they've had problems. And that's exactly what the private industry is attempting to do now.
I think the lesson here is that space flight is difficult, it is dangerous and it is expensive. There are no shortcuts - not if you want a success rate anywhere close to 100%, anyway. And with the amount it costs to build and insure the average payload, anything less than near 100% is not going to be acceptable to most potential customers.
Part of it is probably google's good name that is attractive to malware hosts.
It's a lot more likely that it's just really easy to automate setting up a blog on Blogger and then customizing the template to host malware. It's not like setting up a blog using Wordpress or Movable Type or even Livejournal. I don't think it's got anything to do with "Google's good name" - you don't see the name "Google" anywhere in a blogger url.
Not sure what Google can do about it, though - set up captchas for editing templates? Who knows. They can't take away the ability to edit templates or nobody's going to use them anymore. I have definitely noticed that a lot of the blogger blogs I click on during blog searches try to get me to install various bits of crapware, though. Yesterday, I hit one that almost forced me to reboot my machine before I could get rid of it (only furiously hitting the "x" button over and over faster than the popups could refresh cleared it - and yes, I'm using Firefox).
How long until Google just decides this service is more trouble than it's worth? It's already way behind the other blog systems out there in terms of features.
oh, btw, Google does *not* spider blogger blogs any faster than any other blogs or site. I've got a Wordpress blog and two Blogger blogs, and they're spidered at the exact same rate and usually on the exact same days (I also use Google webmastertools). So maybe that's a misconception that the malware authors have, or maybe it's just an assumption by the article submitter. But it isn't true in any case.
Also, the Linksys WRT54G up to version 4 was a fine router, plenty of memory, ran Linux, was very stable.
Yeah, I have a 1.1, which I didn't even know until right now (checked the sticker), and I don't think I've rebooted that thing once in the entire time I've owned it. It's been running continuously right now for at least six months 24/7, and before that had a stint of probably 2 years uninterrupted. (I was forced to use Verizon's POS FiOS router for a little while.)
I was about to leave a comment wondering what the hell the submitter was talking about, because to me the WRT54G is probably the most stable router that exists. It really couldn't *be* anymore stable. But I didn't realize there were such problems with version 4 and above.
Right, but Belvin's right on the money about E3 should be more fun and entertaining since it is about videogames.
Two things:
a) Why? Video games are a multi-billion dollar business. Do you think that developers, publishers and retailers all sit around all day drinking and smoking pot as hired strippers perform in front of them? Because that's what E3 used to be. That's *not* representative of the game industry. It's also not a very good way to get business done.
It's no different than saying "movies are entertainment, so nobody involved in producing them should have to do any work!" Don't confuse the product with the process.
b) It should tell you something that Belvin's quote is from a guy who works in the gaming media. It's obviously in his best interests that his web site has something interesting to focus on for a month, because it gets him viewers which in turn gets him ad dollars.
The problem is the gaming media is not part of the industry. At least it's not supposed to be. The fact that they consider themselves part of the industry is a big problem with "gaming journalism" these days. Imagine if CNN or the New York Times or whatever considered themselves part of the military armaments industry. Would you trust them to report on issues relating to war or the military any longer?
The media is a wholly separate industry that is independent of any of the events, people or entities that it reports on. So to say "the gaming industry needs this or that" and then use a bunch of media people to bolster the argument is wrong. The media's interests in this case are pretty much diametrically opposed to the gaming industry's interests.
The media can whine all it wants about this. Publishers themselves are giddy that they don't need to spend a million dollars on a booth and have fifty games ready to be seen the same week anymore, only to see about ten of those games get any actual coverage while the rest just get lost in the shuffle. They may complain about one or two little logistical things about the new E3 - having to walk more between buildings, for example - and the media will always focus on those little complaints because it makes their own complaints sound more legitimate. But don't make any mistake here - the industry loves the smaller E3. It's the media that doesn't.
You can try to define "Fair Use" all you want to. But any definition is utterly meaningless in the real world because your rights are entirely and completely dependent on a number of factors that have nothing to do with any attempt to define the term
Exactly - and the article summary is wrong about the law "moving increasingly in the opposite direction". The law hasn't moved at all. Copyright law is what it is and the last real update to it was the DMCA what, ten or more years ago now? There are several bills making their way through congress right now that would strengthen copyright laws, not weaken them. The law has not budged since the awful DMCA, but if it's *going* to move in any particular direction, it's going to get worse.
What's changed is the public's perception about copyright. But that's got nothing to do with the law. You're perfectly free to believe murder is right and moral too, but that doesn't mean you won't go to jail if you kill somebody. The law is the law.