This is correct - a nuclear missile submarine's whole purpose is to hide. According to this writeup, the Admiralty and the US Navy compare notes on the subs' planned courses to avoid such incidents; we can only assume that the French are not privy to these planning sessions.
Perhaps Sir Humphrey Appleby spoke the truth about the true purpose behind Britain's independent deterrent?...
Perhaps, but on/. the audience is quite Unix-heavy, and an abbreviation that collides with one of the standard utilities really ought to have been capitalised to avoid confusion. My mistake.
I'm not sure exactly what Google Sweden's policy is. I'd be surprised if it was the same as TPB's. Is there a list of mocking responses that Google has written in response to copyright infringement complaints?
I don't know about Google Sweden, but the US version will remove any entries that link to copyrighted material, on receipt of a proper DMCA notification, as required by US law. In their place, they'll put up a link to the request itself on chillingeffects.org, listing every URL that they weren't allowed to link to. As plain text, not as links, which I presume is legal. Here's an example of what Google will post when you ask them to take down links to your copyright material, plainly undermining the entire point of a takedown notice. Mocking? Quite possibly, although in a far more subtle way than TPB.
However, reading more closely, it looks like TPB haven't been charged with copyright infringement, or with linking to copyright material in any way. They've been charged with 'promoting other people's infringements'. Now I'm uncertain how to interpret that, since it'll be a translation from Swedish and probably loses some meaning, but to my mind, if one promotes an activity, one publicises and encourages it. It's more incitement to piracy than piracy itself. And I have no idea what the Swedish law is on that one. Maybe it's legal to link - but illegal to encourage people to click?
I think Google can reasonably argue that they try to link to legal content. The evidence for this is that the majority of the content appears to be legal, and if someone provides evidence that a link is illegal they will typically remove it.
Only if it's criminally illegal, like cp - you'll get linked to the chillingeffects record explaining what has been censored and why. Google is still a perfectly good search engine for pirate material on Rapidshare and such. Search on 'Fishman Affidavit' and you'll find Google linking direct to copyrighted material belonging to the most litigious organisation around - all the dirty Scientology secrets. And anyway I gather TPB will also remove cp.
I think the pirate bay cannot reasonably make this argument. The majority of the content appears illegal and if someone provides incontravertible proof that the link is illegal they'll send a smug insulting response.
That's why TPB don't make that argument. They argue that linking to material without the copyright holder's permission is not illegal in Sweden - only the act of copying it is illegal. So far, they've been right, hence their entertaining page of ineffectual legal threats. Hopefully this court will agree.
If it weren't for thieving cunting pirates in the first place, you'd not have to piss around with half the stuff you do for legitimate sources.
Actually, most of the DRM that got in my way there had nothing to do with piracy. It was about getting me locked into Microsoft's online store - for instance, after buying the three expansions I'd have 600 points left over at the start of April, which is _nearly_ enough for another download, so shall I buy another block of points, otherwise I'm just wasting these ones? No, of course not, they're a sunk cost, but most people would think otherwise. It was about getting people on Windows Live and not, say, Steam, and then it was about trying to sell them an Xbox.
And it was about enforcing region controls - I ran into problems because it had been decided that I was American, but people in other countries have had problems because they bought an English-language Fallout game but can only get their own localised version of the download. Handy for Microsoft, as they can tailor the rate of real money to MS Points to suit what the local market will bear; not so good for customers. You think that if there were no pirates in the world, then Microsoft would drop all this other crap?
If the purpose of DRM is to counter piracy, then it has failed in the most complete way possible. I wanted to pay for this expansion - Fallout 3 was that good. Apparently however since I cannot figure out how to jump through Microsoft's hoops, I cannot do so. Fine. Piracy it is, then.
The British have a parliamentary system and your parties actually stand for something. Since your parties are formed around issues, there needs to be a run off system so that the lesser issues also get their say. IIRC, your current government leaders must form a majority of total parties to maintain in power. Gross oversimlification I know.
And plain wrong, I'm afraid. We have no run-off, it's pure first past the post. The two main parties, the Conservative ('Tory') Party and the Labour Party, split the country pretty much between rural and urban. The third party, the Liberal Democrats, don't have any particular geographical base, but maintain a fairly solid level of support nationwide; they're fairly left-wing at the moment, but used to be a centre party back when Labour were socialists and the Tories were Thatcher. So in Dunny-on-the-Wold, it might go Tories 60% - Liberals 30% - Labour 10%. Whereas in Crackton, it might be Labour 60% - Liberals 30% - Tories 10%. The eventual winner of a British election will normally take more than half the seats with substantially less than half of the vote.
There are frequent calls for electoral reform to deal with the unfairness here - mostly, of course, from the Liberals. Ideally they'd like proportional representation, where the number of seats in the Commons directly reflects the share of the popular vote. They'd like that because then in every single election the Liberals could play the kingmaker, deciding which side to join to form a Government. A fairer model would be instant runoff, so that at least in those constituencies where Liberals + Other > Eventual Winner then second preferences might make a difference.
There are also an assortment of other parties in the Commons: nationalist parties pushing for further devolution and eventual independence for Scotland and Wales, parties representing the various factions of Northern Ireland, and the occasional independent who won his seat on purely local matters. They have no particular power, being few in number, but there's something to be said for being involved in the debate, and the occasional opportunity to question the Prime Minister on what the hell he thinks he's doing really shouldn't be turned down.
Many other European nations do have more sophisticated voting systems such as you describe, which has led to a variety of Red / Green coalitions between social democratic and environmentalist parties. One down side of them is that extremists get in; at least in a two-party hegemony, the bias is towards broad, mainstream parties. A Jorg Haider would find it difficult to get into the British parliament. But if we believe in democracy, and a vicious scumbag has enough votes to get him a seat in Parliament, should we deny him entry just because we despise his politics?
Extermination by Cro-Magnon invaders is an attractive idea; it certainly fits with what we see in about every other ecosystem when humans move into it. The problem with that is that in some areas, Neanderthals coexisted alongside modern man for about twenty thousand years. That's way too long; when modern man exterminates a species, he does it fast. If our ancestors considered Neanderthals monsters and slew them wherever they found them, then they should have vanished almost overnight.
The problem would be that, like monkeys, Neanderthals are primates and would probably be the focus of animal rights groups seeking ways to stall the progress of science. Should appearance endow rights? Just because they may look structurally similar to humans, they aren't human.
This is why it probably won't be done. Cloning a Neanderthal opens up an enormous can of worms. We're able to declare that it's wrong to do certain things to humans, but fine to do the same to animals, because there's a substantial gap between H. Sapiens and the nearest relatives, the chimpanzees. Even so there is serious disquiet over treating the great apes in such a manner, and even experimentation on more distant relatives attracts protest, especially if the animals in question happen to be cute.
That gap between us and the chimpanzee - and hence the rest of the animal kingdom - exists only because all the intermediates are dead and buried. We draw a line in a conveniently empty space. Now we propose to clone a Neanderthal, and ask on which side of the line he falls. If you say he is a man, then what if we now clone H. erectus? H. heidelbergensis? A. Afarensis? Suddenly we don't have a clear-cut boundary between human and nonhuman, but a continuum of clones. Where is the line drawn, and on what grounds? You might end up defining all the hominids as human, Homo, Pan, Gorilla and Pongo together, and rule out experimentation on them all. Then what of other human rights? Votes for Neanderthals - yes? Votes for Chimps - no? A sliding scale of rights based on intellectual capability? Who administers the test?
Our whole society is built on the unspoken, unexamined assumption that we know what is human and what is not. Cloning our ancestors in this way undermines that. Which is why I doubt it will be done any time soon.
There isn't piracy because there's DRM, there's DRM because there's piracy.
HOW TO GET FALLOUT 3: OPERATION ANCHORAGE LEGALLY
1: Go to a website called XBox Live to download software for your PC. Spend some time trying to find it in among all the information about how wonderful the XBox 360 is.
2: Install this software.
3: Install updates for Fallout 3.
4: Install updates for Windows XP.
5: Reboot.
6: Create Windows Live gamer ID.
7: Enter your card details to buy Microsoft points (the download costs 800 of these, so naturally they're sold in blocks of 1000).
8: Fill in most of your address and find that it thinks you're in the USA for no apparent reason and you can't change that. (Was it because my Hotmail account had 'USA' as my region because I've never bothered to fill that stuff in since I created it eleven years ago?)
9: Give the fuck up (presumably there would have been (9) Buy points, (10) Agree to bloodthirsty EULA, (11) Download expansion, (12) Play, to go after that, but I never got that far.)
HOW TO GET FALLOUT 3: OPERATION ANCHORAGE ILLEGALLY
1: Type 'operation anchorage megaupload' into Google and pick the first result
2: Download it
3: Copy files into Fallout/data/ directory
4: Play and realise that the expansion pack actually takes less time to finish than you've just spent fucking around with Microsoft's bullshit.
I guess it would be ok for me to take Open Source code and to close it to make it proprietary, release it on Bit-torrent with ads inserted in the program and not suffer an consequences.
No, it wouldn't. But it would be OK for TPB to link to it.
I would have been just as confused, but I fired up TPB on someone else's machine yesterday and was horrified. Apparently they do have adverts, and really quite a lot of them. Is that how 90% of users see the web?
they were running a site which made millions off porn advertising
It'd be interesting to see your working there. I can't imagine that the porn sites pay much for their advertising. After all, they're advertising to pirates; why pay for porn when you can just grab a torrent of the stuff? And that's before you ask whether the ads are seen at all. It's not as if a pirate is going to think 'Oh my - if I visit this ad-supported website with Adblock Plus switched on, that's like stealing' now, is it?
It's just hit here. I've had two copies of it in the last 24 hours, one of which was from someone who really should know better, and I'm expecting a swarm.
That's more of a chain letter, though; a meme that explicitly instructs that it be copied onward. That's nothing new, we've had chain letters for a hundred years or more, and religions for millennia. That's cheating. I'd be interested in seeing a study of the spread of a more passive meme, of which I'm sure there are over 9000 examples, at least in Soviet Russia. How do ideas spread among a population organically, without this lame 'now forward to all your friends' thing? Something along the lines of Dawkins' original study of citations of a scientific paper, and how they increase slowly as the meme spreads and then suddenly increase rapidly after some critical point. The same could be done with internet memes: perhaps an index of how many non-/b/tards are using a meme as an indicator of its popularity. Or indeed with fashion trends; I understand that some marketing firms have been known to identify the alpha child in a given playground and straight-out bribe him to wear their brands...
As I recall, that happened in a Stephen Baxter novel about ten years ago. It was set in an awful dystopian future in which the loss of the shuttle Columbia in a re-entry accident led to the neglect and eventual abandonment of the manned space programme, against the backdrop of a rise in superstition, fundamentalism and paranoia in America as the Chinese gradually surpass them as the leading world power.
Yeah. It's always embarrassing how badly wrong SF writers get the near future, isn't it?
Oh, and for the record, it was absolutely awful. The only worthwhile bit is the planning of a manned Titan mission on a shoestring, using every last bit of space hardware available just before NASA is shut down for good. The Shuttle-C, the Enterprise, Spacelab, NERVA, LEMs pulled out of a museum and hacked up into Titan landers, a decades-old Saturn V picked up off the lawn, dusted down and fuelled up... Ridiculous, but as space nerd fantasy goes it's hard to beat:-)
Re:Legal standards of search and seizure
on
You Are Not a Lawyer
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Holy crap.. you seriously walked around with a police scanner in your ear ALL the TIME... and you were still invited to parties?
Going by the line Friends learned that if I left a party or gathering, they need to as well - I'd say they were the sort of parties where knowing in advance that the police were on their way was a big advantage. In other words, really good parties.
It comes with a 7 inch screen, a VIA CPU, 256 MB of RAM - and running multiple apps the size of Firefox and OpenOffice,org is fantasyland and the geek knows it.
That so?
$ grep LVDS/var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep mode
(II) intel(0): Output LVDS using initial mode 1024x600
$ grep name/proc/cpuinfo
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz
$ grep MemTotal/proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 1026948 kB
$ uname -a
Linux eee901 2.6.24-21-eeepc #1 SMP Thu Aug 7 22:18:05 MDT 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
And for the record, the principal problem when I run multiple apps including Firefox and OpenOffice.org on this computer is that the frame rate on Compiz when I tab between them drops quite noticeably, making the fancy 3D effects rather less glorious. The specs of this machine are pretty typical for the current generation of netbooks; I went for the Eee 901 for the larger battery capacity, but if you don't mind that the Aspire One has the same screen size, CPU and RAM and is quite absurdly cheap.
The difference between someone captured on the battlefield and someone captured within the United States should be plain to everybody.
You actually think that everyone the US is imprisoning without charge was 'captured on the battlefield'? As I understand it, the majority were not captured on the battlefield, but bought for bounty payments from Afghan warlords. Perhaps they captured them on a battlefield somewhere; I imagine that they did indeed assure the CIA that these people were terrorists captured on the battlefield. And who would lie when all they had to gain was getting rid of their enemies and acquiring large sums of money?
And that's before we discuss the people who were seized in peaceful regions across the globe, like Sarajevo, or Islamabad, or Gambia. Not that it matters. It seems that the Americans define 'the battlefield' as the entire planet, and anybody, anywhere could be declared an enemy combatant thereon and disappeared to some godforsaken torture camp.
I think the/. i grew up with is dead. This is a huge political upheaval in a Virtual World. The old/. would lap up the meta-game consequences. The old/. would wax lyrical about the shifting social paradigms that would make this a headline.
Yes, but that was in 1998. Virtual worlds were new; anything more sophisticated than a MUD was pure Snow Crash stuff. Events like this were news because it was a virgin territory. Nobody knew what kind of culture would emerge, what kind of unwritten rules and social norms would become established in the new cyberspace communities.
Was Mr Bungle a rapist? Seems quite quaint now, doesn't it? It was a big deal at the time. Yet what he did was small beer compared to what anonymous trolls from ebaumsworld do every day. We know now what people will do in a virtual world given unlimited freedom to create as they see fit. They'll scrawl goatse on every available surface, and code up swarms of flying penises to molest furries. They'll swarm in a hundred Samuel L Jackson lookalikes and block off the exits from the swimming pool. It's just griefing, move on.
Events in-game like this one aren't interesting any more. Been there, done that, bored now. What gets/.'s interest nowadays is the interface between the game world and reality. The economics of gold farming, for instance. Or, player A buys a +5 Sword of Smiting with real money from player B. Player C kills player A in-game and takes the sword. Is player C a real-world thief? Having gained an item worth real-world money, is he liable for tax on it? That's where the unknown is now, where we don't really know the rules, so that's what's interesting.
As for the HURD - again, it's been too long, and we've mostly lost interest. We have a kernel of our own, thanks.
Im sorry, but arent you out there fighting for those people? so they dont have to worry about more than their online personas.
He said Iraq. I'm not sure exactly what the purpose of that was - something about weapons of mass destruction that we knew where they were and that could be launched against British bases in Cyprus within 45 minutes, wasn't it? - but I'm pretty sure that whatever Saddam Hussein's evil plans were, messing with EVE Online wasn't high on his list of priorities. The troops in Iraq could all sod off to Amsterdam and get high and shag hookers for all the difference it would make to events in MMORPGs.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps Sir Humphrey Appleby spoke the truth about the true purpose behind Britain's independent deterrent?...
Perhaps, but on /. the audience is quite Unix-heavy, and an abbreviation that collides with one of the standard utilities really ought to have been capitalised to avoid confusion. My mistake.
I don't know about Google Sweden, but the US version will remove any entries that link to copyrighted material, on receipt of a proper DMCA notification, as required by US law. In their place, they'll put up a link to the request itself on chillingeffects.org, listing every URL that they weren't allowed to link to. As plain text, not as links, which I presume is legal. Here's an example of what Google will post when you ask them to take down links to your copyright material, plainly undermining the entire point of a takedown notice. Mocking? Quite possibly, although in a far more subtle way than TPB.
However, reading more closely, it looks like TPB haven't been charged with copyright infringement, or with linking to copyright material in any way. They've been charged with 'promoting other people's infringements'. Now I'm uncertain how to interpret that, since it'll be a translation from Swedish and probably loses some meaning, but to my mind, if one promotes an activity, one publicises and encourages it. It's more incitement to piracy than piracy itself. And I have no idea what the Swedish law is on that one. Maybe it's legal to link - but illegal to encourage people to click?
That's a crime now? Did I miss a memo? I thought that was a civil matter for the copyright holder to enforce, not a criminal matter for the police.
Only if it's criminally illegal, like cp - you'll get linked to the chillingeffects record explaining what has been censored and why. Google is still a perfectly good search engine for pirate material on Rapidshare and such. Search on 'Fishman Affidavit' and you'll find Google linking direct to copyrighted material belonging to the most litigious organisation around - all the dirty Scientology secrets. And anyway I gather TPB will also remove cp.
I think the pirate bay cannot reasonably make this argument. The majority of the content appears illegal and if someone provides incontravertible proof that the link is illegal they'll send a smug insulting response.
That's why TPB don't make that argument. They argue that linking to material without the copyright holder's permission is not illegal in Sweden - only the act of copying it is illegal. So far, they've been right, hence their entertaining page of ineffectual legal threats. Hopefully this court will agree.
INTENT MATTERS!!!!!!
Does it? Show us the Swedish law that says so.
Actually, most of the DRM that got in my way there had nothing to do with piracy. It was about getting me locked into Microsoft's online store - for instance, after buying the three expansions I'd have 600 points left over at the start of April, which is _nearly_ enough for another download, so shall I buy another block of points, otherwise I'm just wasting these ones? No, of course not, they're a sunk cost, but most people would think otherwise. It was about getting people on Windows Live and not, say, Steam, and then it was about trying to sell them an Xbox.
And it was about enforcing region controls - I ran into problems because it had been decided that I was American, but people in other countries have had problems because they bought an English-language Fallout game but can only get their own localised version of the download. Handy for Microsoft, as they can tailor the rate of real money to MS Points to suit what the local market will bear; not so good for customers. You think that if there were no pirates in the world, then Microsoft would drop all this other crap?
If the purpose of DRM is to counter piracy, then it has failed in the most complete way possible. I wanted to pay for this expansion - Fallout 3 was that good. Apparently however since I cannot figure out how to jump through Microsoft's hoops, I cannot do so. Fine. Piracy it is, then.
And plain wrong, I'm afraid. We have no run-off, it's pure first past the post. The two main parties, the Conservative ('Tory') Party and the Labour Party, split the country pretty much between rural and urban. The third party, the Liberal Democrats, don't have any particular geographical base, but maintain a fairly solid level of support nationwide; they're fairly left-wing at the moment, but used to be a centre party back when Labour were socialists and the Tories were Thatcher. So in Dunny-on-the-Wold, it might go Tories 60% - Liberals 30% - Labour 10%. Whereas in Crackton, it might be Labour 60% - Liberals 30% - Tories 10%. The eventual winner of a British election will normally take more than half the seats with substantially less than half of the vote.
There are frequent calls for electoral reform to deal with the unfairness here - mostly, of course, from the Liberals. Ideally they'd like proportional representation, where the number of seats in the Commons directly reflects the share of the popular vote. They'd like that because then in every single election the Liberals could play the kingmaker, deciding which side to join to form a Government. A fairer model would be instant runoff, so that at least in those constituencies where Liberals + Other > Eventual Winner then second preferences might make a difference.
There are also an assortment of other parties in the Commons: nationalist parties pushing for further devolution and eventual independence for Scotland and Wales, parties representing the various factions of Northern Ireland, and the occasional independent who won his seat on purely local matters. They have no particular power, being few in number, but there's something to be said for being involved in the debate, and the occasional opportunity to question the Prime Minister on what the hell he thinks he's doing really shouldn't be turned down.
Many other European nations do have more sophisticated voting systems such as you describe, which has led to a variety of Red / Green coalitions between social democratic and environmentalist parties. One down side of them is that extremists get in; at least in a two-party hegemony, the bias is towards broad, mainstream parties. A Jorg Haider would find it difficult to get into the British parliament. But if we believe in democracy, and a vicious scumbag has enough votes to get him a seat in Parliament, should we deny him entry just because we despise his politics?
Extermination by Cro-Magnon invaders is an attractive idea; it certainly fits with what we see in about every other ecosystem when humans move into it. The problem with that is that in some areas, Neanderthals coexisted alongside modern man for about twenty thousand years. That's way too long; when modern man exterminates a species, he does it fast. If our ancestors considered Neanderthals monsters and slew them wherever they found them, then they should have vanished almost overnight.
All hominid fossils are either humans, or apes. Never anything intermediate between the two. Which is which, well... that depends who you ask.
This is why it probably won't be done. Cloning a Neanderthal opens up an enormous can of worms. We're able to declare that it's wrong to do certain things to humans, but fine to do the same to animals, because there's a substantial gap between H. Sapiens and the nearest relatives, the chimpanzees. Even so there is serious disquiet over treating the great apes in such a manner, and even experimentation on more distant relatives attracts protest, especially if the animals in question happen to be cute.
That gap between us and the chimpanzee - and hence the rest of the animal kingdom - exists only because all the intermediates are dead and buried. We draw a line in a conveniently empty space. Now we propose to clone a Neanderthal, and ask on which side of the line he falls. If you say he is a man, then what if we now clone H. erectus? H. heidelbergensis? A. Afarensis? Suddenly we don't have a clear-cut boundary between human and nonhuman, but a continuum of clones. Where is the line drawn, and on what grounds? You might end up defining all the hominids as human, Homo, Pan, Gorilla and Pongo together, and rule out experimentation on them all. Then what of other human rights? Votes for Neanderthals - yes? Votes for Chimps - no? A sliding scale of rights based on intellectual capability? Who administers the test?
Our whole society is built on the unspoken, unexamined assumption that we know what is human and what is not. Cloning our ancestors in this way undermines that. Which is why I doubt it will be done any time soon.
HOW TO GET FALLOUT 3: OPERATION ANCHORAGE LEGALLY
1: Go to a website called XBox Live to download software for your PC. Spend some time trying to find it in among all the information about how wonderful the XBox 360 is.
2: Install this software.
3: Install updates for Fallout 3.
4: Install updates for Windows XP.
5: Reboot.
6: Create Windows Live gamer ID.
7: Enter your card details to buy Microsoft points (the download costs 800 of these, so naturally they're sold in blocks of 1000).
8: Fill in most of your address and find that it thinks you're in the USA for no apparent reason and you can't change that. (Was it because my Hotmail account had 'USA' as my region because I've never bothered to fill that stuff in since I created it eleven years ago?)
9: Give the fuck up (presumably there would have been (9) Buy points, (10) Agree to bloodthirsty EULA, (11) Download expansion, (12) Play, to go after that, but I never got that far.)
HOW TO GET FALLOUT 3: OPERATION ANCHORAGE ILLEGALLY
1: Type 'operation anchorage megaupload' into Google and pick the first result /data/ directory
2: Download it
3: Copy files into Fallout
4: Play and realise that the expansion pack actually takes less time to finish than you've just spent fucking around with Microsoft's bullshit.
No, it wouldn't. But it would be OK for TPB to link to it.
Probably Internet Explorer.
I would have been just as confused, but I fired up TPB on someone else's machine yesterday and was horrified. Apparently they do have adverts, and really quite a lot of them. Is that how 90% of users see the web?
It'd be interesting to see your working there. I can't imagine that the porn sites pay much for their advertising. After all, they're advertising to pirates; why pay for porn when you can just grab a torrent of the stuff? And that's before you ask whether the ads are seen at all. It's not as if a pirate is going to think 'Oh my - if I visit this ad-supported website with Adblock Plus switched on, that's like stealing' now, is it?
Once upon a time this would have been obvious. Now, it would actually never have occurred to me, because, well, what ads?
Once again I'm grateful for the little red octagon in the corner of my screen. Thank you Wladimir Palant!
14 year olds on 4chan
14
underage b&
That's more of a chain letter, though; a meme that explicitly instructs that it be copied onward. That's nothing new, we've had chain letters for a hundred years or more, and religions for millennia. That's cheating. I'd be interested in seeing a study of the spread of a more passive meme, of which I'm sure there are over 9000 examples, at least in Soviet Russia. How do ideas spread among a population organically, without this lame 'now forward to all your friends' thing? Something along the lines of Dawkins' original study of citations of a scientific paper, and how they increase slowly as the meme spreads and then suddenly increase rapidly after some critical point. The same could be done with internet memes: perhaps an index of how many non-/b/tards are using a meme as an indicator of its popularity. Or indeed with fashion trends; I understand that some marketing firms have been known to identify the alpha child in a given playground and straight-out bribe him to wear their brands...
As I recall, that happened in a Stephen Baxter novel about ten years ago. It was set in an awful dystopian future in which the loss of the shuttle Columbia in a re-entry accident led to the neglect and eventual abandonment of the manned space programme, against the backdrop of a rise in superstition, fundamentalism and paranoia in America as the Chinese gradually surpass them as the leading world power.
Yeah. It's always embarrassing how badly wrong SF writers get the near future, isn't it?
Oh, and for the record, it was absolutely awful. The only worthwhile bit is the planning of a manned Titan mission on a shoestring, using every last bit of space hardware available just before NASA is shut down for good. The Shuttle-C, the Enterprise, Spacelab, NERVA, LEMs pulled out of a museum and hacked up into Titan landers, a decades-old Saturn V picked up off the lawn, dusted down and fuelled up... Ridiculous, but as space nerd fantasy goes it's hard to beat :-)
Going by the line Friends learned that if I left a party or gathering, they need to as well - I'd say they were the sort of parties where knowing in advance that the police were on their way was a big advantage. In other words, really good parties.
Yes, what a pity nobody thought of that.
That so?
$ grep LVDS /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep mode
(II) intel(0): Output LVDS using initial mode 1024x600
$ grep name /proc/cpuinfo
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz
$ grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 1026948 kB
$ uname -a
Linux eee901 2.6.24-21-eeepc #1 SMP Thu Aug 7 22:18:05 MDT 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
And for the record, the principal problem when I run multiple apps including Firefox and OpenOffice.org on this computer is that the frame rate on Compiz when I tab between them drops quite noticeably, making the fancy 3D effects rather less glorious. The specs of this machine are pretty typical for the current generation of netbooks; I went for the Eee 901 for the larger battery capacity, but if you don't mind that the Aspire One has the same screen size, CPU and RAM and is quite absurdly cheap.
You actually think that everyone the US is imprisoning without charge was 'captured on the battlefield'? As I understand it, the majority were not captured on the battlefield, but bought for bounty payments from Afghan warlords. Perhaps they captured them on a battlefield somewhere; I imagine that they did indeed assure the CIA that these people were terrorists captured on the battlefield. And who would lie when all they had to gain was getting rid of their enemies and acquiring large sums of money?
And that's before we discuss the people who were seized in peaceful regions across the globe, like Sarajevo, or Islamabad, or Gambia. Not that it matters. It seems that the Americans define 'the battlefield' as the entire planet, and anybody, anywhere could be declared an enemy combatant thereon and disappeared to some godforsaken torture camp.
I don't know about Big Brother, but if you're a Brazilian uninterested in football... well, that's deeply weird.
Yes, but that was in 1998. Virtual worlds were new; anything more sophisticated than a MUD was pure Snow Crash stuff. Events like this were news because it was a virgin territory. Nobody knew what kind of culture would emerge, what kind of unwritten rules and social norms would become established in the new cyberspace communities.
Was Mr Bungle a rapist? Seems quite quaint now, doesn't it? It was a big deal at the time. Yet what he did was small beer compared to what anonymous trolls from ebaumsworld do every day. We know now what people will do in a virtual world given unlimited freedom to create as they see fit. They'll scrawl goatse on every available surface, and code up swarms of flying penises to molest furries. They'll swarm in a hundred Samuel L Jackson lookalikes and block off the exits from the swimming pool. It's just griefing, move on.
Events in-game like this one aren't interesting any more. Been there, done that, bored now. What gets /.'s interest nowadays is the interface between the game world and reality. The economics of gold farming, for instance. Or, player A buys a +5 Sword of Smiting with real money from player B. Player C kills player A in-game and takes the sword. Is player C a real-world thief? Having gained an item worth real-world money, is he liable for tax on it? That's where the unknown is now, where we don't really know the rules, so that's what's interesting.
As for the HURD - again, it's been too long, and we've mostly lost interest. We have a kernel of our own, thanks.
He said Iraq. I'm not sure exactly what the purpose of that was - something about weapons of mass destruction that we knew where they were and that could be launched against British bases in Cyprus within 45 minutes, wasn't it? - but I'm pretty sure that whatever Saddam Hussein's evil plans were, messing with EVE Online wasn't high on his list of priorities. The troops in Iraq could all sod off to Amsterdam and get high and shag hookers for all the difference it would make to events in MMORPGs.