Hmm. Perhaps if Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbour, we would all know how to speak German. As it is, you give a fine example of how some of us don't actually know how to speak English.
Just what was that stream of gibberish supposed to convey, anyway?
It's a heckuva read...they advocate building a real frontier which ultimately generates tax revenues.
We tried that when we settled North America. Building a real frontier, OK, but you run into serious difficulties when you try to get it to generate tax revenues...
Especially if the country's being run by a lunatic called George at the time.
I don't really see why a spaceplane design is out of the question. The shuttle was hugely complex compared to SpaceShipOne. Couldn't a more modern design of the shuttle still be useful?
The trouble with a spaceplane is its inefficiency. Too much of the energy expended in a Shuttle launch goes to carry the orbiter's main engines, wings and other structure into orbit. If you could leave those off, with a capsule design, you could either save a whole lot of fuel and get a cheaper launch, or use the same amount of fuel and carry a much larger payload.
The idea behind the Shuttle was that the engines were worth keeping, and reusing them could save money. Apollo used to drop its main engines into the sea... But it turns out that there are plenty of factories on Earth capable of producing rocket engines very cheaply, so that economy didn't really work out.
Or you could take her outside so she can be fit and strong and teach her to save herself instead of watching lots of tv.
Farm work builds strength and stamina, and once she's strong enough then there's good money to be made killing kidnappers down at the lake. With that you can fund plenty of schooling in magic, fencing, fighting and dance (yes, dance - good for her coordination, not to mention social attributes). Careful about the Sin rating, unless you want her to go on to become queen of the underworld. Don't bother trying to put her on diets, it only hurts her attitude and hitpoints, and you don't get that much bonus from the kinky outfits anyway.
(I know this is a pretty geeky sort of place, but will anyone get this?)
Not trying to tell you how to raise your kid, but there's one common theme running through all of those - fighting.
Um... yeah. I must have missed that bit where Kiki smacked down the forest girl with her broomstick before gorging herself on the entrails of the unfriendly crows. And how she used dark magic to dismember the policeman who tried to bring her to book for obstructing traffic.
Hell, if you can travel faster than light, your 'immediately' can be my 'some time after you left' and somebody else's 'hang on, you haven't left Earth yet!'
Causality gets a bit buggered up under these circumstances, as you might imagine.
We are not poor due to our stupidity. We are poor by design. Just a 100 years ago, we were the richest nation on earth.
No you weren't.
The point is exaggerated, but the importance of India around 1905 was certainly tremendous. Africa, the Americas, these were sidelines; the British Empire, when you get right down to it, was India. Indian natural resources, Indian agriculture, Indian manpower, Indian soldiers - we forget it, but the Empire depended on India as much as it did on the mother country.
Perhaps two to three hundred years ago, before colonialism got going, India might well have been the richest country in the world. The civilisation the built the Taj Mahal was hardly backward and poor.
And all these advantages that made old India so rich and powerful and such a valuable prize for the British are still there. India isn't a big player now, but if they play their cards right they definitely will be before long.
things have been sour between India and the European Union (specifically, UK)
Not for a long time... India and the UK had a bit of a rocky divorce, true, especially with the whole partition thing, but they've got on very well since then. Have you seen how many fighter jets the Indians buy from the UK? And how many vindaloos the English devour?
ESA is separate from Arianespace, so European missions fly on rockets of all nations. Mars Express was launched on a Russian rocket, Huygens piggybacked on an American probe... A lot of European satellites do fly on Ariane rockets, Ariane being a very cost-effective option, but there's no exclusive contract going on.
You're probably right that the EU and India might be interested in closer cooperation, though... India wants to become rich, and an increase of trade with the EU would certainly help; meanwhile, the EU is already enormously rich, but doesn't have the global influence to go with it in the way the USA does. Alliance between Europe and India would certainly help both.
However, there have been cease-and-desist orders filed against some fansub groups. This is bloody annoying. As far as I know there still isn't a boxset of Lain, I had to order Cowboy Bebop from Denmark, and my Evangelion and Nadesico boxes are the Aussie version.
Getting anime in the UK is a right bugger, I have to say.
Making it should probably be illegal in most cases(depending on lots of factors), but watching it should not be. And the same should hold true for snuff films. The murder is the illegal part not recording the murder. The whole idea of the watching a videotape of a crime being illegal just seems wrong to me.
If we were talking about an ordinary murder, I'd agree. If a killing is, by chance, caught on CCTV, and the tape ends up getting circulated among those who enjoy such material, then viewing it, while weird and unpleasant, shouldn't be a crime in itself. If it was, we'd have to shut down rotten.com...
But if we're talking about illegal porn, the reason the murder or the child abuse or whatever was committed in the first place is to sell videos. Hence the customer who buys these things is, in effect, sponsoring the killing or the rape. If I hire a hitman to rub out an enemy, I'm a criminal. If I pay for a snuff movie... I think I share the guilt there too.
I've said 'lol' occasionally. Not so often, though, since most of the time I'll just laugh; 'lol' is redundant in meatspace. Much more often, however, I'll say 'brb'...
but i do not keep any on my local harddrive, i have other family members to think about, women & children that would not appreciate looking at pr0n
Then keep it in your home directory. File permissions will do the rest. Personally I keep all mine in ~/.pr0n, which means that even if I accidentally leave myself logged in the directory's hidden and so is relatively unlikely to be accidentally discovered.
Does this apply to kiddie porn as well? Dogs and horses?
It would do, if it wasn't for the small detail that it's rather hard to make kiddie porn without actually abusing children at some point.
If your kiddie porn happens to feature animated Japanese schoolgirls being buggered by tentacle demons, then I don't see the problem. If your kiddie porn features real children being buggered by actual people, then there's a problem.
In the UK, it is a government agency that sets the movie ratings, and some of the game ratings. The BBFC's classifications are legally enforced, and it is a crime to sell (for instance) an 18-rated film to a minor, or to let one in to see such a film at the cinema. I don't think there's anything against, say, watching your big brother's splatter movie tapes, though.
The BBFC generally aren't too bad. They cut Ninja Scroll to ribbons, and have outright banned a lot of hentai classics, and in the eighties they banned a fair few cult horror films (e.g. Driller Killer, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and I think The Exorcist) but otherwise they don't intrude too much. You have to be pretty extreme not to get the 18 rating these days, and most porn gets 18-R, which means only sex shops can sell it.
It is if it causes you to be incapable of preventing yourself from taking an action that harms others.
One might argue that this is also the case with obscene literature. Pornography turns ordinary pious citizens into perverted rapists, after all, just like marijuana turns well-behaved youngsters into Satan-worshipping anti-war deviants.
they can't stop everyone, but they can stop the non-geeks...
It only takes one geek, though. One geek with the know-how to strip out the protection, and then it's easy for the mundanes to copy it on themselves. Stick it on P2P, or pass it on by DVD-burner samizdat.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that just because all the previous DRM schemes were broken, that any new scheme will suffer the same fate. The crypto necessary to build good DRM exists.
Actually, I think that DRM will always be crackable.
The problem is not really one of encryption; you can use as strong a cipher as you like. The problem is that the user has to be able to decrypt your message. So, somewhere encoded into the software, or on a chip on a circuit board, is the key. Get that key and the scheme is compromised.
If the system is being implemented as an industry standard, then it'll be done a thousand times by a thousand different manufacturers. Sooner or later someone'll pull a Xing and give us an easy way in. Even if They are careful, and enforce strict standards on how their secret keys are implemented, well... Sony put an awful lot of work into making the PS2 refuse to play pirate games, but how long did it take before there were modchips?
I'm pretty optimistic about this. A cryptosystem in which the recipient himself is the enemy is a system which is doomed to be cracked.
Excellent except that one poor genius 15 year old kid from Ukraine is going to crack the code and spend 25 years in prison for the rest of us to escape corporate consumer mandates.
If he's got any sense, he'll get a friend in a better legal climate to announce it for him.
IIRC, DVD Jon didn't do all the work on DeCSS and on the Apple crack himself, but worked on the projects with a variety of hackers around the world. He gets the credit because he's the one living in a country where it's safe to do it.
They standardise, and so we only have to crack one DRM system.
And the more different devices it's embedded into, the harder it is for them to introduce a fixed, more secure version. I think this should be encouraged!
Why, back in the day you never had stars spew their guts all over space and call it a "supernova." If they did they had the courtesy to clean up after themselves.
Life was much better in the quark-gluon era. It was warm back then, with none of these howling great voids of nothing. I'm just hanging around watching Eta Carinae in the hope that it'll explode and I can catch some nice warm neutrinos to keep out the bitter cold...
Whoever decided to press the button on the Inflation Device really needs kicking. Worst idea in the history of the universe, I swear!
Re:Are we asking questions just to sound smart?
on
Escape from the Universe
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Anything that is reacheable from our universe is, by definition, part of the universe. The concept of "escape" has no meaning in this context.
OK, then redefine 'universe'. After all, an atom can't be split; that's what the word 'atom' means... Just come up with a new word for the larger structure, and don't worry too much about Greek derivations.
Slashdot Mirror
The very last thing we want is Internet Explorer and Outlook Express running on Linux!
Just what was that stream of gibberish supposed to convey, anyway?
You, too, could be a big hero, once you've learned to count backwards to zero...
We tried that when we settled North America. Building a real frontier, OK, but you run into serious difficulties when you try to get it to generate tax revenues...
Especially if the country's being run by a lunatic called George at the time.
Actually, please come back, Hicks of middle America. Bill, that is. Your country needs you...
The trouble with a spaceplane is its inefficiency. Too much of the energy expended in a Shuttle launch goes to carry the orbiter's main engines, wings and other structure into orbit. If you could leave those off, with a capsule design, you could either save a whole lot of fuel and get a cheaper launch, or use the same amount of fuel and carry a much larger payload.
The idea behind the Shuttle was that the engines were worth keeping, and reusing them could save money. Apollo used to drop its main engines into the sea... But it turns out that there are plenty of factories on Earth capable of producing rocket engines very cheaply, so that economy didn't really work out.
Farm work builds strength and stamina, and once she's strong enough then there's good money to be made killing kidnappers down at the lake. With that you can fund plenty of schooling in magic, fencing, fighting and dance (yes, dance - good for her coordination, not to mention social attributes). Careful about the Sin rating, unless you want her to go on to become queen of the underworld. Don't bother trying to put her on diets, it only hurts her attitude and hitpoints, and you don't get that much bonus from the kinky outfits anyway.
(I know this is a pretty geeky sort of place, but will anyone get this?)
Um... yeah. I must have missed that bit where Kiki smacked down the forest girl with her broomstick before gorging herself on the entrails of the unfriendly crows. And how she used dark magic to dismember the policeman who tried to bring her to book for obstructing traffic.
Causality gets a bit buggered up under these circumstances, as you might imagine.
No you weren't.
The point is exaggerated, but the importance of India around 1905 was certainly tremendous. Africa, the Americas, these were sidelines; the British Empire, when you get right down to it, was India. Indian natural resources, Indian agriculture, Indian manpower, Indian soldiers - we forget it, but the Empire depended on India as much as it did on the mother country.
Perhaps two to three hundred years ago, before colonialism got going, India might well have been the richest country in the world. The civilisation the built the Taj Mahal was hardly backward and poor.
And all these advantages that made old India so rich and powerful and such a valuable prize for the British are still there. India isn't a big player now, but if they play their cards right they definitely will be before long.
Not for a long time... India and the UK had a bit of a rocky divorce, true, especially with the whole partition thing, but they've got on very well since then. Have you seen how many fighter jets the Indians buy from the UK? And how many vindaloos the English devour?
ESA is separate from Arianespace, so European missions fly on rockets of all nations. Mars Express was launched on a Russian rocket, Huygens piggybacked on an American probe... A lot of European satellites do fly on Ariane rockets, Ariane being a very cost-effective option, but there's no exclusive contract going on.
You're probably right that the EU and India might be interested in closer cooperation, though... India wants to become rich, and an increase of trade with the EU would certainly help; meanwhile, the EU is already enormously rich, but doesn't have the global influence to go with it in the way the USA does. Alliance between Europe and India would certainly help both.
Getting anime in the UK is a right bugger, I have to say.
Preordained? That's a strong word to use in a universe with an Uncertainty Principle.
If we were talking about an ordinary murder, I'd agree. If a killing is, by chance, caught on CCTV, and the tape ends up getting circulated among those who enjoy such material, then viewing it, while weird and unpleasant, shouldn't be a crime in itself. If it was, we'd have to shut down rotten.com...
But if we're talking about illegal porn, the reason the murder or the child abuse or whatever was committed in the first place is to sell videos. Hence the customer who buys these things is, in effect, sponsoring the killing or the rape. If I hire a hitman to rub out an enemy, I'm a criminal. If I pay for a snuff movie... I think I share the guilt there too.
I've said 'lol' occasionally. Not so often, though, since most of the time I'll just laugh; 'lol' is redundant in meatspace. Much more often, however, I'll say 'brb'...
Then keep it in your home directory. File permissions will do the rest. Personally I keep all mine in ~/.pr0n, which means that even if I accidentally leave myself logged in the directory's hidden and so is relatively unlikely to be accidentally discovered.
It would do, if it wasn't for the small detail that it's rather hard to make kiddie porn without actually abusing children at some point.
If your kiddie porn happens to feature animated Japanese schoolgirls being buggered by tentacle demons, then I don't see the problem. If your kiddie porn features real children being buggered by actual people, then there's a problem.
The BBFC generally aren't too bad. They cut Ninja Scroll to ribbons, and have outright banned a lot of hentai classics, and in the eighties they banned a fair few cult horror films (e.g. Driller Killer, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and I think The Exorcist) but otherwise they don't intrude too much. You have to be pretty extreme not to get the 18 rating these days, and most porn gets 18-R, which means only sex shops can sell it.
One might argue that this is also the case with obscene literature. Pornography turns ordinary pious citizens into perverted rapists, after all, just like marijuana turns well-behaved youngsters into Satan-worshipping anti-war deviants.
It only takes one geek, though. One geek with the know-how to strip out the protection, and then it's easy for the mundanes to copy it on themselves. Stick it on P2P, or pass it on by DVD-burner samizdat.
Actually, I think that DRM will always be crackable.
The problem is not really one of encryption; you can use as strong a cipher as you like. The problem is that the user has to be able to decrypt your message. So, somewhere encoded into the software, or on a chip on a circuit board, is the key. Get that key and the scheme is compromised.
If the system is being implemented as an industry standard, then it'll be done a thousand times by a thousand different manufacturers. Sooner or later someone'll pull a Xing and give us an easy way in. Even if They are careful, and enforce strict standards on how their secret keys are implemented, well... Sony put an awful lot of work into making the PS2 refuse to play pirate games, but how long did it take before there were modchips?
I'm pretty optimistic about this. A cryptosystem in which the recipient himself is the enemy is a system which is doomed to be cracked.
If he's got any sense, he'll get a friend in a better legal climate to announce it for him.
IIRC, DVD Jon didn't do all the work on DeCSS and on the Apple crack himself, but worked on the projects with a variety of hackers around the world. He gets the credit because he's the one living in a country where it's safe to do it.
And the more different devices it's embedded into, the harder it is for them to introduce a fixed, more secure version. I think this should be encouraged!
Life was much better in the quark-gluon era. It was warm back then, with none of these howling great voids of nothing. I'm just hanging around watching Eta Carinae in the hope that it'll explode and I can catch some nice warm neutrinos to keep out the bitter cold...
Whoever decided to press the button on the Inflation Device really needs kicking. Worst idea in the history of the universe, I swear!
OK, then redefine 'universe'. After all, an atom can't be split; that's what the word 'atom' means... Just come up with a new word for the larger structure, and don't worry too much about Greek derivations.