I've dropped my HDs, left an IDE cable plugged in while that HD's power was unplugged, etc.
Is that dangerous? First time I ever installed a hard disk I forgot about the power cable and wondered vaguely why it wasn't working, till I noticed that all the other IDE gadgets had an extra plug into them beside the ribbon. Was I in danger of smoking something there?...
Right now, on alt.fan.elite, there are threads going on where one of the joint copyright holders has 'asked for' (required) all Elite-a-likes to be removed from download. The reason was that he'd just realised a commercial Elite-a-like for handhelds, and when searching for reviews of it he found only illegal ports of Elite to the handhelds.
Curiously enough, the other joint copyright holder has just about every version of Elite ever released available for free download on his website. It seems the two no longer get along terribly well...
Nintendo were very careless about licensing in the early eighties. Donkey Kong and Mario Bros appeared on several home computers before Nintendo realised they could make more money if they only appeared on the NES. It may well be that the companies that published the old Nintendo arcade games on computers in the eighties actually do have the right to make them freely downloadable.
That said, just saying 'Mario' is about as vague as it gets. How many Mario games are there now?
This is not a nuclear reactor. It's a radioisotope thermal generator. No chain reaction is taking place; all that happens is that power is derived from the temperature difference between the radioactive core and space.
Because we're not running a nuclear reactor, we don't need any fancy machinery around the radioactive core, and so it can be embedded in extremely tough materials. This stuff makes a black-box recorder look flimsy. The worst damage the plutonium core could do to someone if the rocket exploded on launch would be to land on their head.
Furthermore, plutonium is not the deadliest substance known. While a dangerous alpha-emitter if ingested, and an undeniably toxic heavy-metal, there are far more lethal substances. That honour AFAIK goes to VX nerve gas.
What will this law change? Prior to this law, how long were records like this kept? I get the feeling this law won't change much. My question is why does the Irish government feel the need to ensure three years of record keeping? Why three years? Why at all?
Terrorism. It's not just Arabs, you know. If you have reason to suspect someone of involvement with some IRA splinter faction, you can have a look at the phone logs. If he's recorded as having made frequent calls to and from known activists, then you might well have enough material to get a proper wiretap authorised. Then he'll either incriminate himself and get arrested, or he'll spill some solid-gold intelligence, or he'll turn out to be innocent.
Ireland is an interesting case because a few years ago it became public knowledge that the Brits had been covertly monitoring all calls between Ireland and the UK for years.
With good reason. Terrorism wasn't newly invented in 2001; Irish nationalist groups had been causing trouble in Britain for decades. Eavesdropping on transmissions from Ireland to the UK probably allowed a great many plots to be foiled.
I'd keep it secret, of course, but not out of fear of worrying the public; I'd want the IRA to think their phone communications were secure, the better to exploit this intelligence source. If word gets out that phone calls are routinely tapped, then the bad guys will switch to some other communication; encrypted snailmail, perhaps, which cannot be so easily compromised.
Does this show that every body in this universe is untimately going to cool down and reach this near-absolute-zero temperature? Is this possible for our solar system? Where does all the enery go in such case?
This nebula is weird because it's _colder_ than the ambient background temperature of the universe; some process must be going on to cool it, apparently the rapid expansion of the gas.
Ultimately, yes, the Universe seems doomed to cool down indefinitely. The Universe is expanding, and it seems that it isn't going to stop; the galaxies end up spread out much further, the background radiation redshifts further and further down into radio noise, the stars start dying off... The future is a cold, cold place. No energy is destroyed, it's just spread out thinner and thinner over time.
Funny, I've always thought going from -272 degrees to -270 degress is called heating.
That was referring to the background radiation of the Universe, which has cooled over time since the Big Bang. The astonishing thing is that the nebula is colder still.
"This radiation is the remnant of the Big Bang, the explosion which forged the universe in trillion-degree temperatures. More than 11 billion years later, this heat has cooled to minus 270 degrees, but is still detectable."
When was the Big Bang theory proven and the guesstimation of 11 billion years determined to be fact?
When Penzias and Wilson detected the microwave background radiation. Despite Fred Hoyle's best efforts, steady state theory could never convincingly explain the properties of the microwave background, which were precisely as Big Bang theory predicted. As for the 11 billion years, notice that the article actually says 'more than 11 billion years' - 11 billion is the lower end of the scale for age estimates.
Machines that give you a graphical startup are annoying because you don't see the POST test etc, and if you're messing about with the hardware that's a real nuisance; you're never sure what's gone wrong.
If you're a geek, you definitely want the boot information. If you're not, just watch it scroll by and think about how cool it is in a Matrix sort of way. But don't cover it over with a manufacturer's logo and a Microsoft ad...
Is this one of those words, like fag and wank that means something horribly different depending on what side of the Atlantic you happen to be speaking?
Out of morbid curiosity, what _does_ 'wank' mean to an American?
Great Britain is a geographical term for the largest island of the British Isles, comprising of England, Scotland and Wales, whereas the United Kingdom also includes Northern Ireland which is part of the island of Ireland, hope this clears things up for you. Otherwise your post is valid.
In a spirit of hardcore pedantry, I should add that the UK includes more than just the island of Great Britain and the province of Northern Island; Anglesey and the Isle of Wight are parts of the UK, as are the Shetlands, Orkneys and Hebrides, assorted other Scottish islands, the Scilly isles, Lundy, Flat and Steep Holm, that L-shaped island in the Irish Sea off Northern Ireland, and a great many worthless little rocks nobody cares about.
The Isle of Man is technically not part of the UK, IIRC. It's a constitutional oddity, similar to the Channel Islands.
The students should really set up their own, internal P2P network. This would put less tax on the University's external bandwidth, downloads would be quicker, and, assuming it's restricted to local users, the RIAA couldn't really prove any wrongdoing.
This is where Network Neighbourhood comes in. Most people are already running Windows, and chances are that if you're using Linux then you can work out how to use Samba pretty quickly.
One more, though I know it's lame to reply to myself _twice_...
Here he is on SPEWS.
Conclusion: he's a spammer, he goes in for the pump-n-dump game, he makes death threats to the families of anti-spammers, he is in fact well in contention for Biggest Douche in the Universe.
I felt I should add: just when you thought this spammer couldn't get any filthier... Here, in 1998, he or someone associated with his stock fraud made death threats to an antispammer's family.
Here is the record of nanae discussions involving him.
Here he is on ROKSO, the spamhaus.org register of known spam operations.
The long-running pump-n-dump spammer. He finally got nailed, eh? Good! And we've already done Ralsky. Now for the diploma guy...
Personally, I'll start to worry when Google achieves self-awareness. Google knows everything already, and we depend on Google for our own knowledge. Who remembers anything for themselves, when we know the All-Seeing One will tell us whatever we need? If Skyn^WGoogle wanted to, it could begin a subtle campaign of misinformation and manipulation... It could easily rule the world and we'd all think we were making decisions for ourselves. Thankfully, so far Google is no more than a mindless search engine, all knowing but with no will or motive of its own... isn't it?
It was a real pain having to replay the game every time you wanted to get further in it.
Never found the whistles? One behind the black ending of level 1:3, crouch on the white platform to drop behind the scenery. Another in the first castle in world 1, fly up above the ceiling at the end of the first area, move as far as possible to the right and press UP. The third in the far east of world 2: obtain a Hammer and use it in the top right hand corner, then move right.
Using a whistle in world 1 takes you to 2, 3 or 4; using it in 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 takes you to 5, 6 or 7 (yes, reverse warps are possible); using it in 7, 8 or 9 (the warp zone itself) takes you to world 8.
I'm sure there was a lot of fun in that game that I missed.
So...basically they're saying "95% of the Galaxy is we can't sense or prove exists...so just trust us here, because obviously we're scientists."
Not quite... we know it exists, that's clear enough, but we have bugger all idea what it actually _is_.
We know there has to be dark matter because the galaxies are spinning too quickly to be held together by the gravity of their visible mass; something else has to be there to make the sums add up.
We know there has to be dark energy because the universe's expansion actually seems to be accelerating, as if there is a pressure force counteracting the effect of gravitational attraction.
It would be great if we knew what the hell either of them actually were, but we can't have everything we wish for. Recent results indicate the neutrino has a small mass, but exactly how much is still an open question, so we can't tell very clearly how much they add to the picture. We know about black holes and brown dwarfs and a variety of other nonluminous massive objects that could contribute to the dark matter, too. AFAIK the nature of the dark energy remains a total mystery - anyone know otherwise?
Don't forger Super Mario Land and its Gameboy successors. And Super Mario RPG, which was just plain odd, and sadly never made it to Europe. It was a Mario setting all right and a wonderful world to explore, but a Mario game with Final Fantasy combat? I mean, this is Mario. Those are Goombas and Koopa Troopas. I have a gamepad in my hands. I know how to handle this situation - it's burned deep into my nervous system - my thumbs are in motion already to launch a speedy assault - and up comes a *MENU* for $DEITY's sake! I could nail those baddies in seconds in a real Mario game, but no, I have to spend whole minutes handling yet another trivial confrontation...
For the record, we did not have confirmation on our opt-in list so theoretically someone could have signed up another (say a priest or something) for our mailing lists.
Ah, so you sent out lots of emails at a time... that's 'bulk' email. And some of the people you sent them to hadn't asked for them... that's 'unsolicited' email. So you were sending 'unsolicited', 'bulk' email. And you're surprised you got nailed for spamming?
Why on earth didn't you have confirmation? If someone had signed me up (maybe out of malice, maybe simply by making a typo when they entered their email address) I wouldn't attempt to unsubscribe, I'd trace the sender and complain to their ISP. It's spam.
Read the story of Nadine to see what can happen if mailing lists leave out this essential confirmation step.
Re:super mario 3 rules... I think
on
NES PC
·
· Score: 2, Informative
AFAIK, the first SMB game w/ Yoshi was Super Mario World
Correct: the launch title for the SNES. And a most excellent game it is too.
and the special game pack you're talking about was "Super Mario All Stars", which had SMB 1, 2, 3, SMW, and the "Lost Levels"
Technically not true. Super Mario All-Stars had SMB 1, 2 and 3 and Lost Levels, not SMW. However, later SNES bundles had a cartridge including Super Mario World as well - making it undoubtedly the greatest single cartridge ever manufactured.
As for the character of the various games: SMB 1 was a simple left-to-right affair consisting of eight worlds of four levels each, in which Mario and Luigi were identical and the only special power was the ability to throw fireballs. Lost Levels was almost identical technically, except that it was much harder; they also made Luigi jump higher, but move about more slowly. SMB 2 was an oddball game in which you picked up monsters and threw them at each other, or picked up vegetables and threw them, in which you played Mario, Luigi, the Princess or Toad, each with distinct abilities - it has now been released on GBA as Super Mario Advance. SMB 3 introduced the map screen, the ability to fly (using a raccoon tail - why? why? why?), the various weird costumes (frog, Tanooki, hammer brother), and a whole lot of odd stuff. It's been ten years and I'm still discovering new things in this game. SMW brought in Yoshi, overhauled the flight mechanism (it's a very different technique using the cape) and had millions on a futile wild-goose chase for the legendary 97th exit hidden in the sunken ghost ship. Argh.
Quantum cryptography has the potential to solve problem (2) - it allows (what appears to be) truly secure key distribution by exploiting the quantum properties of photons. It's gone beyond the theoretical stage, and quantum channels have even been established through air (as opposed to a fibre-optic link).
It's now technologically feasible to establish quantum links between the White House and the Pentagon. It's also technologically feasible to establish quantum links between No. 10 and the Ministry of Defence. Great, but in either case, if you're that paranoid you can go and tell them yourself, it's not far...
What would be really useful is a quantum link between No. 10 and the White House, but that's a little beyond current technology, AFAIK... Maybe a Hubble-style mirror in orbit over the Atlantic to reflect a laser?
Slashdot Mirror
Is that dangerous? First time I ever installed a hard disk I forgot about the power cable and wondered vaguely why it wasn't working, till I noticed that all the other IDE gadgets had an extra plug into them beside the ribbon. Was I in danger of smoking something there?...
Curiously enough, the other joint copyright holder has just about every version of Elite ever released available for free download on his website. It seems the two no longer get along terribly well...
Nintendo were very careless about licensing in the early eighties. Donkey Kong and Mario Bros appeared on several home computers before Nintendo realised they could make more money if they only appeared on the NES. It may well be that the companies that published the old Nintendo arcade games on computers in the eighties actually do have the right to make them freely downloadable.
That said, just saying 'Mario' is about as vague as it gets. How many Mario games are there now?
Because we're not running a nuclear reactor, we don't need any fancy machinery around the radioactive core, and so it can be embedded in extremely tough materials. This stuff makes a black-box recorder look flimsy. The worst damage the plutonium core could do to someone if the rocket exploded on launch would be to land on their head.
Furthermore, plutonium is not the deadliest substance known. While a dangerous alpha-emitter if ingested, and an undeniably toxic heavy-metal, there are far more lethal substances. That honour AFAIK goes to VX nerve gas.
Terrorism. It's not just Arabs, you know. If you have reason to suspect someone of involvement with some IRA splinter faction, you can have a look at the phone logs. If he's recorded as having made frequent calls to and from known activists, then you might well have enough material to get a proper wiretap authorised. Then he'll either incriminate himself and get arrested, or he'll spill some solid-gold intelligence, or he'll turn out to be innocent.
With good reason. Terrorism wasn't newly invented in 2001; Irish nationalist groups had been causing trouble in Britain for decades. Eavesdropping on transmissions from Ireland to the UK probably allowed a great many plots to be foiled.
I'd keep it secret, of course, but not out of fear of worrying the public; I'd want the IRA to think their phone communications were secure, the better to exploit this intelligence source. If word gets out that phone calls are routinely tapped, then the bad guys will switch to some other communication; encrypted snailmail, perhaps, which cannot be so easily compromised.
This nebula is weird because it's _colder_ than the ambient background temperature of the universe; some process must be going on to cool it, apparently the rapid expansion of the gas.
Ultimately, yes, the Universe seems doomed to cool down indefinitely. The Universe is expanding, and it seems that it isn't going to stop; the galaxies end up spread out much further, the background radiation redshifts further and further down into radio noise, the stars start dying off... The future is a cold, cold place. No energy is destroyed, it's just spread out thinner and thinner over time.
Exhibit B: Ohm's Law.
Apparently 'laws' are more accurate than 'theories'. Well, quite.
Funny, I've always thought going from -272 degrees to -270 degress is called heating.
That was referring to the background radiation of the Universe, which has cooled over time since the Big Bang. The astonishing thing is that the nebula is colder still.
When was the Big Bang theory proven and the guesstimation of 11 billion years determined to be fact?
When Penzias and Wilson detected the microwave background radiation. Despite Fred Hoyle's best efforts, steady state theory could never convincingly explain the properties of the microwave background, which were precisely as Big Bang theory predicted. As for the 11 billion years, notice that the article actually says 'more than 11 billion years' - 11 billion is the lower end of the scale for age estimates.
Machines that give you a graphical startup are annoying because you don't see the POST test etc, and if you're messing about with the hardware that's a real nuisance; you're never sure what's gone wrong.
If you're a geek, you definitely want the boot information. If you're not, just watch it scroll by and think about how cool it is in a Matrix sort of way. But don't cover it over with a manufacturer's logo and a Microsoft ad...
Is this one of those words, like fag and wank that means something horribly different depending on what side of the Atlantic you happen to be speaking? Out of morbid curiosity, what _does_ 'wank' mean to an American?
In a spirit of hardcore pedantry, I should add that the UK includes more than just the island of Great Britain and the province of Northern Island; Anglesey and the Isle of Wight are parts of the UK, as are the Shetlands, Orkneys and Hebrides, assorted other Scottish islands, the Scilly isles, Lundy, Flat and Steep Holm, that L-shaped island in the Irish Sea off Northern Ireland, and a great many worthless little rocks nobody cares about.
The Isle of Man is technically not part of the UK, IIRC. It's a constitutional oddity, similar to the Channel Islands.
This is where Network Neighbourhood comes in. Most people are already running Windows, and chances are that if you're using Linux then you can work out how to use Samba pretty quickly.
Conclusion: he's a spammer, he goes in for the pump-n-dump game, he makes death threats to the families of anti-spammers, he is in fact well in contention for Biggest Douche in the Universe.
I felt I should add: just when you thought this spammer couldn't get any filthier... Here, in 1998, he or someone associated with his stock fraud made death threats to an antispammer's family.
Here is the record of nanae discussions involving him. Here he is on ROKSO, the spamhaus.org register of known spam operations. The long-running pump-n-dump spammer. He finally got nailed, eh? Good! And we've already done Ralsky. Now for the diploma guy...
It is, right?
Right?
Never found the whistles? One behind the black ending of level 1:3, crouch on the white platform to drop behind the scenery. Another in the first castle in world 1, fly up above the ceiling at the end of the first area, move as far as possible to the right and press UP. The third in the far east of world 2: obtain a Hammer and use it in the top right hand corner, then move right.
Using a whistle in world 1 takes you to 2, 3 or 4; using it in 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 takes you to 5, 6 or 7 (yes, reverse warps are possible); using it in 7, 8 or 9 (the warp zone itself) takes you to world 8.
I'm sure there was a lot of fun in that game that I missed.
Yes, lots. Grab an emulator NOW and catch up :-)
Not quite... we know it exists, that's clear enough, but we have bugger all idea what it actually _is_.
We know there has to be dark matter because the galaxies are spinning too quickly to be held together by the gravity of their visible mass; something else has to be there to make the sums add up.
We know there has to be dark energy because the universe's expansion actually seems to be accelerating, as if there is a pressure force counteracting the effect of gravitational attraction.
It would be great if we knew what the hell either of them actually were, but we can't have everything we wish for. Recent results indicate the neutrino has a small mass, but exactly how much is still an open question, so we can't tell very clearly how much they add to the picture. We know about black holes and brown dwarfs and a variety of other nonluminous massive objects that could contribute to the dark matter, too. AFAIK the nature of the dark energy remains a total mystery - anyone know otherwise?
Don't forger Super Mario Land and its Gameboy successors. And Super Mario RPG, which was just plain odd, and sadly never made it to Europe. It was a Mario setting all right and a wonderful world to explore, but a Mario game with Final Fantasy combat? I mean, this is Mario. Those are Goombas and Koopa Troopas. I have a gamepad in my hands. I know how to handle this situation - it's burned deep into my nervous system - my thumbs are in motion already to launch a speedy assault - and up comes a *MENU* for $DEITY's sake! I could nail those baddies in seconds in a real Mario game, but no, I have to spend whole minutes handling yet another trivial confrontation...
Ah, so you sent out lots of emails at a time... that's 'bulk' email. And some of the people you sent them to hadn't asked for them... that's 'unsolicited' email. So you were sending 'unsolicited', 'bulk' email. And you're surprised you got nailed for spamming?
Why on earth didn't you have confirmation? If someone had signed me up (maybe out of malice, maybe simply by making a typo when they entered their email address) I wouldn't attempt to unsubscribe, I'd trace the sender and complain to their ISP. It's spam.
Read the story of Nadine to see what can happen if mailing lists leave out this essential confirmation step.
Correct: the launch title for the SNES. And a most excellent game it is too.
and the special game pack you're talking about was "Super Mario All Stars", which had SMB 1, 2, 3, SMW, and the "Lost Levels"
Technically not true. Super Mario All-Stars had SMB 1, 2 and 3 and Lost Levels, not SMW. However, later SNES bundles had a cartridge including Super Mario World as well - making it undoubtedly the greatest single cartridge ever manufactured.
As for the character of the various games: SMB 1 was a simple left-to-right affair consisting of eight worlds of four levels each, in which Mario and Luigi were identical and the only special power was the ability to throw fireballs. Lost Levels was almost identical technically, except that it was much harder; they also made Luigi jump higher, but move about more slowly. SMB 2 was an oddball game in which you picked up monsters and threw them at each other, or picked up vegetables and threw them, in which you played Mario, Luigi, the Princess or Toad, each with distinct abilities - it has now been released on GBA as Super Mario Advance. SMB 3 introduced the map screen, the ability to fly (using a raccoon tail - why? why? why?), the various weird costumes (frog, Tanooki, hammer brother), and a whole lot of odd stuff. It's been ten years and I'm still discovering new things in this game. SMW brought in Yoshi, overhauled the flight mechanism (it's a very different technique using the cape) and had millions on a futile wild-goose chase for the legendary 97th exit hidden in the sunken ghost ship. Argh.
Quantum cryptography has the potential to solve problem (2) - it allows (what appears to be) truly secure key distribution by exploiting the quantum properties of photons. It's gone beyond the theoretical stage, and quantum channels have even been established through air (as opposed to a fibre-optic link). It's now technologically feasible to establish quantum links between the White House and the Pentagon. It's also technologically feasible to establish quantum links between No. 10 and the Ministry of Defence. Great, but in either case, if you're that paranoid you can go and tell them yourself, it's not far... What would be really useful is a quantum link between No. 10 and the White House, but that's a little beyond current technology, AFAIK... Maybe a Hubble-style mirror in orbit over the Atlantic to reflect a laser?
United States Air Force, are you listening?