... past which power will inexorably slide away from the people towards the corporations? Has it already been passed?
Possibly, but things have been worse than this before. The monopolists of the early 20th century USA were far worse than today's breed, and you're probably aware of the bloody awful lot the workers had in 19th century Britain.
The great problem right now is that the corporations are beginning to surpass the governments in power. There are only a few countries in the world that are much wealthier than the largest corporations, and since they're mostly democracies that means that their leaders can be easily bought. If you have a single socialist bone in your body then this is a nightmare - the government, representative of the workers, should protect our rights from the capitalist barons, but they're selling us out. It's beginning to look almost like feudalism.
But as I said, we've seen worse before and come back from it. We probably need the left to get over the fall of the USSR and develop a post-Marxist philosophy; perhaps left-wing libertarianism along the Dutch model. Unfortunately, for socialism of any kind to have a fighting chance would probably need a really serious recession to damage the credibility of the ultra-capitalist model; this would be No Fun At All.
I would like a pivot table SQL aggregation function.
Unsurprisingly, they've got it in Access. There's a 'crosstab query', which is basically a regular SELECT query with pivot table processing done to it. In SQL this appears as a 'PIVOT ON' clause, but I never did quite work out how to use it...
Re:Even hard-line Islamist news portals like Firef
on
Firefox News Roundup
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I think al-Jazeera are quite right to play the messages in full. Should the media censor what the villains have to say? These people are threatening our lives, it seems: personally, I would think that if someone wants to kill me then I'd like to know everything I can about who they are and what they're about, the better to protect myself.
When bin Laden put out his video during the US election, I had a devil of a time finding out what he had to say. There was plenty of coverage of the fact that he'd released a film, and lots of discussion of how it would or wouldn't affect the outcome of the election, but scarcely anything about the content of the damn thing. Surely if the Big Bad has something to say, it's in the public interest to hear him? I mean, if he really is as important and terrible a threat as we're told.
Censoring the news on political grounds - 'these are the enemy, so we won't give them the publicity' - is deeply dodgy. So we need al-Jazeera, because maybe if we average it out with Fox and dissolve the precipitate in a solution of BBC, we'll maybe have a good idea of what's actually happening in the world.
... they have never made a bad film. Their creativity is mindboggling: easily the best Western animation around [1].
Disney, though... I don't know. Their homegrown films haven't been so great lately. They can reissue DVDs of their back catalogue, they can keep milking the Mouse [2], but with Pixar and Dreamworks producing material as good as they have been, Disney have got to raise the bar. Toy Story 3 is a risky move. Obviously, Marketing will insist on it, but if Toy Story 3 sucks, Disney have a big problem. Toy Story 3 has to be better than either of the first two if Disney want to stay in this game.
[1]: in case you're wondering: IMHO the best in the world is still Miyazaki. I haven't yet seen The Incredibles or Hauru no Ugoku Shiro, thougo.
[2]: did anyone ever actually find Mickey Mouse funny? I always preferred Bugs and Daffy. It's a bit like Charlie Chaplin vs Laurel and Hardy, I suppose.
Re:Even hard-line Islamist news portals like Firef
on
Firefox News Roundup
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Coverage on al-Jazeera? Hmm, maybe something along the lines of...
'Windows humanitarian aid worker Minesweeper has been taken hostage by the Firefox resistance organisation. They have issued a videotape in which Minesweeper pleads with President Gates to withdraw Internet Explorer from the occupied desktops. Firefox representatives say that unless Gates complies, Minesweeper will be executed.'
Yep, my mistake. I think I was confusing MoO with Stars!, where IIRC there was an ion cannon that did knock down shields.
I always liked to build ships with a bank of mass drivers to take down the shields, followed by a battery of ion cannons to wreck the ship's systems. Easy kill. But that was a middle-game strategy; by the time I was building doom stars, I preferred phasors with all the modifications. You can put shield-piercing and auto-fire on a phasor; in conjunction with the Achilles targeting unit, which bypasses armour, that's about as lethal as it ever gets. Never played the original, though; things might differ in MoO2.
... JPL's Deep Space 1 demonstrated the potential of such an engine back in the 20th century. Now we're seeing the first missions to rely on ion propulsion.
It'll be interesting to see, if the Pluto probe ever flies, whether that uses ion propulsion. An ion drive could really make a difference on such a long-haul flight.
Hmm. Maybe it's a localised thing, but certainly people I know generally refer to the device I own as an iPod, even though it wasn't made by Apple.
You're certainly quite right about mp3, though: that has certainly become a generic term for any digital compressed music. Perhaps it's the Fraunhofer Institute that should be worrying about its trademarks...
People soon start using proper nouns as nouns, as is the case with Hoover, Biro.
It happened to the Walkman too - hardly anyone says 'personal stereo' - and it's happening to the iPod. In common usage, 'iPod' is beginning to refer to any hard-disk mp3 player. I've got an iHP-140, another guy I know has a Karma, and a lot of people have actual Apple machines, but 'iPod' is becoming a generic term for any of them.
Well, I suppose one of these is obligatory in any LucasArts discussion...
To play Monkey Island - or Day of the Tentacle, or Sam & Max, or Fate of Atlantis, or whatever - on a modern OS, download and install ScummVM. It's a replacement for the old.exe, and uses the original data, so you'll need to own the game. Enjoy the goodness.
Note I say 'a modern OS' and not just 'XP'. OSX, Linux, it's been ported to just about everything there is.
Now, if you'll excuse me I have to settle a matter of honour with this dairy farmer.
Recent speculation is that the very center has a high ratio of Uranium, enough so that the pressure actually creates a self-sustaining natural nuclear reactor.
I find this implausible. Surely SNO and Kamiokande should detect a massive neutrino flux from such a large reaction? Kamiokande can pick up neutrino fluxes from the nuclear reactors across east Asia, so the flux from a monster reaction in the Earth's core should also be detectable.
A flux from the Earth's core would be easy to distinguish from others. Solar neutrinos change direction over a 24-hour period, cosmic neutrinos are evenly spread across the sky, but hypothetical Earth-core neutrinos would always come from directly below.
Please, this is an insult to Star Trek fans everywhere. The Star Trek vision, if anything, was about using science and technology to enhance people's lives. It was and is in no way about this pseudo-scientific nonsense.
Which is why about half the aliens they encounter are telepathic, psychic, equipped with ESP, able to transition into pure energy, or have telekinetic powers. And that was before the bloody Pah-wraiths which turned the end of Deep Space Nine into something resembling Buffy the Vampire Slayer...
... because the more money the US military wastes on this kind of mumbo-jumbo, the safer the rest of the world will be. I'd far rather they have remote viewing specialists, psychic teleporters and experts in yogic flying than even more guns and bombs.
And sunsets going red due to the change in position causing a different wavelength of light through...
Not quite. The blue wavelengths are scattered, and that's why the sky is blue; that much is true. The reason the sun looks red at sunset is because its light has had the blue wavelengths scattered out before it reaches you.
The curious thing about these muons is this. Muons have a very, very short half-life; they decay extremely rapidly. Even moving near lightspeed, they should decay significantly between (say) a mountaintop lab and a sea-level lab, because of the travel time on the way down, but they don't.
It's almost as if time was slowed down for these high-velocity particles... and indeed this is the case. It's a classic demonstration of relativity in action.
Unfortunately, I've had to have a scrith-reinforced prosthetic spine installed, and I have to stand on a floor plate made of Xeelee construction material... Exotic matter comes with its own set of health hazards.
Mars Express, the mothership, was built by ESA. It's a success, it's cheap, and we're planning to build a Venus probe based around the same design - a bit like the way the US reused the Mariner spaceprobe design for many missions in the seventies.
Beagle 2 was a longshot from the word go. It was proposed as one of the scientific packages Express would carry to Mars; nobody was expecting anyone to propose a lander, ESA had in mind spectrometers and sensors and things. So it had to be the smallest lander possible. It also needed funding. Britain has fuck-all space programme, and the Open University, while renowned for its distance-learning courses, isn't exactly loaded, so the cash had to be scraped together from corporate sponsors, whip-rounds, Blur, and what little they could get out of the government on the promise of good publicity.
Personally I'm amazed it ever got off the ground. Had it landed successfully, it would have been even better; the next Mars probe might easily have carried dozens of the things for not much cost, and scattered them all over the planet. But it seems there's a limit to how small and cheap you can make a device to land on another planet.
Now... speaking of European piggyback landers, I wish Huygens the very best of luck!
... How much music can you fit in that kind of space? At one meg a minute, typical for MP3, that's... about one and a half seconds. Surely you expect a little more for twelve hundred dollars these days?
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly, but things have been worse than this before. The monopolists of the early 20th century USA were far worse than today's breed, and you're probably aware of the bloody awful lot the workers had in 19th century Britain.
The great problem right now is that the corporations are beginning to surpass the governments in power. There are only a few countries in the world that are much wealthier than the largest corporations, and since they're mostly democracies that means that their leaders can be easily bought. If you have a single socialist bone in your body then this is a nightmare - the government, representative of the workers, should protect our rights from the capitalist barons, but they're selling us out. It's beginning to look almost like feudalism.
But as I said, we've seen worse before and come back from it. We probably need the left to get over the fall of the USSR and develop a post-Marxist philosophy; perhaps left-wing libertarianism along the Dutch model. Unfortunately, for socialism of any kind to have a fighting chance would probably need a really serious recession to damage the credibility of the ultra-capitalist model; this would be No Fun At All.
It's open source. Just go through and comment out all the places where it uses the HCF instruction.
Really? Here are some instructions to your Perl interpreter. They teach it how to commit the terrible crime of decoding encrypted DVD video.
s''$/=\2048;while(){G=29;R=142;if((@a=unqT="C*", _)[20]&48){D=89;_=unqb24,qT,@
b=map{ord qB8,unqb8,qT,_^$a[--D]}@INC;s/...$/1$&/;Q=unqV,qb2 5,_;H=73;O=$b[4]>8^(P=(E=255)&(Q>>12^Q>>4^Q/8^Q))> 8^(E&(F=(S=O>>14&7^O)
^S*8^S>=8
)+=P+(~F&E))for@a[128..$#a]}print+qT,@a}';s/[D-HO- U_]/\$$&/g;s/q/pack+/g;eval
Was that a crime?
Unsurprisingly, they've got it in Access. There's a 'crosstab query', which is basically a regular SELECT query with pivot table processing done to it. In SQL this appears as a 'PIVOT ON' clause, but I never did quite work out how to use it...
When bin Laden put out his video during the US election, I had a devil of a time finding out what he had to say. There was plenty of coverage of the fact that he'd released a film, and lots of discussion of how it would or wouldn't affect the outcome of the election, but scarcely anything about the content of the damn thing. Surely if the Big Bad has something to say, it's in the public interest to hear him? I mean, if he really is as important and terrible a threat as we're told.
Censoring the news on political grounds - 'these are the enemy, so we won't give them the publicity' - is deeply dodgy. So we need al-Jazeera, because maybe if we average it out with Fox and dissolve the precipitate in a solution of BBC, we'll maybe have a good idea of what's actually happening in the world.
Disney, though... I don't know. Their homegrown films haven't been so great lately. They can reissue DVDs of their back catalogue, they can keep milking the Mouse [2], but with Pixar and Dreamworks producing material as good as they have been, Disney have got to raise the bar. Toy Story 3 is a risky move. Obviously, Marketing will insist on it, but if Toy Story 3 sucks, Disney have a big problem. Toy Story 3 has to be better than either of the first two if Disney want to stay in this game.
[1]: in case you're wondering: IMHO the best in the world is still Miyazaki. I haven't yet seen The Incredibles or Hauru no Ugoku Shiro, thougo.
[2]: did anyone ever actually find Mickey Mouse funny? I always preferred Bugs and Daffy. It's a bit like Charlie Chaplin vs Laurel and Hardy, I suppose.
'Windows humanitarian aid worker Minesweeper has been taken hostage by the Firefox resistance organisation. They have issued a videotape in which Minesweeper pleads with President Gates to withdraw Internet Explorer from the occupied desktops. Firefox representatives say that unless Gates complies, Minesweeper will be executed.'
Now how in the hell am I supposed to trust this definition of Asymptote?
See Recursion.
I always liked to build ships with a bank of mass drivers to take down the shields, followed by a battery of ion cannons to wreck the ship's systems. Easy kill. But that was a middle-game strategy; by the time I was building doom stars, I preferred phasors with all the modifications. You can put shield-piercing and auto-fire on a phasor; in conjunction with the Achilles targeting unit, which bypasses armour, that's about as lethal as it ever gets. Never played the original, though; things might differ in MoO2.
No it doesn't. The ion pulse cannon demolishes shields. The neutron cannon kills marines.
It'll be interesting to see, if the Pluto probe ever flies, whether that uses ion propulsion. An ion drive could really make a difference on such a long-haul flight.
You're certainly quite right about mp3, though: that has certainly become a generic term for any digital compressed music. Perhaps it's the Fraunhofer Institute that should be worrying about its trademarks...
It happened to the Walkman too - hardly anyone says 'personal stereo' - and it's happening to the iPod. In common usage, 'iPod' is beginning to refer to any hard-disk mp3 player. I've got an iHP-140, another guy I know has a Karma, and a lot of people have actual Apple machines, but 'iPod' is becoming a generic term for any of them.
The great Ilparazo will be unhappy! Excel is a secret agent! Not toilet paper!
To play Monkey Island - or Day of the Tentacle, or Sam & Max, or Fate of Atlantis, or whatever - on a modern OS, download and install ScummVM. It's a replacement for the old .exe, and uses the original data, so you'll need to own the game. Enjoy the goodness.
Note I say 'a modern OS' and not just 'XP'. OSX, Linux, it's been ported to just about everything there is.
Now, if you'll excuse me I have to settle a matter of honour with this dairy farmer.
I find this implausible. Surely SNO and Kamiokande should detect a massive neutrino flux from such a large reaction? Kamiokande can pick up neutrino fluxes from the nuclear reactors across east Asia, so the flux from a monster reaction in the Earth's core should also be detectable.
A flux from the Earth's core would be easy to distinguish from others. Solar neutrinos change direction over a 24-hour period, cosmic neutrinos are evenly spread across the sky, but hypothetical Earth-core neutrinos would always come from directly below.
Hey, that's a great idea... I'm amazed nobody's ever done it before!
Which is why about half the aliens they encounter are telepathic, psychic, equipped with ESP, able to transition into pure energy, or have telekinetic powers. And that was before the bloody Pah-wraiths which turned the end of Deep Space Nine into something resembling Buffy the Vampire Slayer...
... because the more money the US military wastes on this kind of mumbo-jumbo, the safer the rest of the world will be. I'd far rather they have remote viewing specialists, psychic teleporters and experts in yogic flying than even more guns and bombs.
Literally, in this case. Very, very cool indeed.
Not quite. The blue wavelengths are scattered, and that's why the sky is blue; that much is true. The reason the sun looks red at sunset is because its light has had the blue wavelengths scattered out before it reaches you.
It's almost as if time was slowed down for these high-velocity particles... and indeed this is the case. It's a classic demonstration of relativity in action.
Unfortunately, I've had to have a scrith-reinforced prosthetic spine installed, and I have to stand on a floor plate made of Xeelee construction material... Exotic matter comes with its own set of health hazards.
Beagle 2 was a longshot from the word go. It was proposed as one of the scientific packages Express would carry to Mars; nobody was expecting anyone to propose a lander, ESA had in mind spectrometers and sensors and things. So it had to be the smallest lander possible. It also needed funding. Britain has fuck-all space programme, and the Open University, while renowned for its distance-learning courses, isn't exactly loaded, so the cash had to be scraped together from corporate sponsors, whip-rounds, Blur, and what little they could get out of the government on the promise of good publicity.
Personally I'm amazed it ever got off the ground. Had it landed successfully, it would have been even better; the next Mars probe might easily have carried dozens of the things for not much cost, and scattered them all over the planet. But it seems there's a limit to how small and cheap you can make a device to land on another planet.
Now... speaking of European piggyback landers, I wish Huygens the very best of luck!
... How much music can you fit in that kind of space? At one meg a minute, typical for MP3, that's... about one and a half seconds. Surely you expect a little more for twelve hundred dollars these days?