Was that the case where the cops were told they were apprehending a suicide bomber? You have to take into account what they knew (or thought they knew) at the time.
Even that's odd; they thought he was a suicide bomber, so they waited until he was on the train before they grabbed him, pinned him to his seat and then shot him in the head seven times with hollowpoints. You'd think you'd want to kill your suicide bomber before he gets that far.
... ask yourself 'What will Anonymous do with this?' They love nothing better than screwing with Google.
There's an image tagger, for instance. It's a kind of game: Google presents you and a random other person with the same images in sequence. You type in a series of tags, until both of you type the same thing; Google then has two people independently entering the same term, so it knows that tag is valid, and both of you are awarded points towards a high score. Good idea, right?
Well, no. Anonymous put up a list of stock phrases from popular memes on/b/ and exhorted everybody to go and type them into Google in that exact order - and to immediately refresh the page and be re-matched if they didn't get a hit on the first word, in hopes of eventually being matched with another Anonymous. Result: a whole lot of images got tagged 'mudkips' and the top score for the day belonged to someone called 'longcat'.
The folks who are fringe would be buried into oblivion. Not so bad? What about atheists? 90%+ of the human population believes in a God. 5.6+ billion votes for God, 400 million against.
Ah, but we are protected by the fact that no two theists believe in the same god.
1 billion votes for Allah (divided more or less equally between Sunni and Shia, with trace elements of Sufism).
1 billion votes for Jesus (block vote delivered by benedict@vatican.va)
1 billion more votes for Jesus (assorted factions of oddball Protestants)
1 billion votes for Brahman (and the primary Hindu trinity, and the endless other deities available)
1 billion votes for gods which may or may not exist but don't really matter in the long run because karma is only portioned out by the cosmos
... etc.
So it's not five billion votes for God. It's five billion competing votes for entirely different conceptions of what God ought to be. And the more these people fight over it, the greater the disrepute into which they bring the whole thing.
Yes, that's right. Ireland. GP didn't say 'The Republic of Ireland', just 'Ireland'. What island is Belfast on? Great Britain? Iceland? Honshu? Perhaps Madagascar? No. It's in Ireland. If it wasn't in the north of Ireland, it wouldn't be called 'Northern Ireland', now, would it?
I expect there will be remakes of Deus Ex, Sands of Time, and System Shock 2 at some point, and people will still enjoy playing them.
Deus Ex doesn't need a remake, you're living in it. Look at the copyright date on the game, look at the skyline in the New York levels, look at what's not there, and get paranoid:-)
System Shock 2... well, there's Bioshock. But that was too easy and nowhere near as frightening. There was nothing in that game to compare to the madly shrieking psi monkeys. Or the spiders. Oh God, the spiders...
Or how Link's shield in the original Zelda only works against projectiles, and it's fickle at that?
The shield you have at the start of the game is rubbish; it'll usually stop rocks and arrows but not blades or fireballs or magic. Buy the upgraded one - prices vary from 80 to 160 rupees depending on which store you visit. Beware of Like Like.
Shakespeare's and Marlowe's plays took well-known stories and reinvented them for the "modern" (Victorian) audience.
Wrong queen. Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901 - Shakespeare was long dead by then. Shakespeare is most identified with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, though his career lasted well into the reign of King James I.
your whole post reeks of formalities, shape over substance, presentation over content.
Computer programming requires great precision and clarity of thought. It requires the programmer to express himself exactly and unambiguously, within the confines of an extremely restrictive grammar and syntax, and then put his work through a compiler which is pedantic beyond the dreams of Private Eye correspondents; it will reject the code entirely if it finds the smallest of syntax errors anywhere within it. And should the code be syntactically correct but contain ambiguities or carelessly expressed logic, then the program will not run correctly.
Yet it seems that some people who are capable of doing all this, and doing it well, complain when asked to apply the same precision and clarity to the writing of their own native language. I've never understood this. Surely a person who writes clear, exact, unambiguous and correct English, is also likely to write clear, exact, unambiguous and correct code?
My daughter and I did this too with her college recruitment interviews. It's silly not to. Why not mention her years of jujitsu training if it turns out the interviewer is a martial arts freak?
That is going to backfire. Unless she genuinely has substantial knowledge of jujutsu, an expert interviewer will expose her as a liar very quickly, and at that point the day is lost. You only want to lie about sporting activities if you know full well that the interviewer is ignorant of those sports! If on the other hand she really is an experienced jujutsuka, she'd be a fool not to mention it - it's exactly the sort of extracurricular activity that university interviewers love.
All that, simply to keep you from copying files you supposedly don't have the right to copy.
It might not be that. Encrypting the connection protects the files in transit, but who the hell ever sniffed the USB connection to break Apple DRM? There are far easier ways to free up your music in order to exercise your legitimate fair use rights.
I suspect the encryption is there to make sure that only iTunes can talk to an iPod. That's Apple's profit right there: you're forced to manage your music collection using their application, with its inbuilt link up to their music store. And you get used to doing things the Apple way - hell, some day you might even buy a Mac. You're not supposed to use Amarok - God forbid! That way you don't join up with the Cult Of Steve!
The part that pisses me off is they've done a pretty good job of encrypting the firmware updates too. Absolutely no way in for the Rockbox hackers. Pity, because I was thinking of buying a 160GB iPod Classic now that my old iRiver iHP-140 is full. That's a sale lost, then...
For those outside the European Union, many member states give a yearly funding to CERN. I hate the EU, and when I see all those scientists dancing around like asses because of money that someone has forced me to pay them, I lose the motivation to work.
CERN has nothing to do with the EU, except insofar as it is partially in it, and shares some of the same member states.
For example, if you give subjects a placebo pill for their back pain, and tell them it's a pain reliever, there's a measurable reduction in reported pain. However, if you give a placebo to people with an objectively measurable problem X, and tell them it's a cure for X, then there's a much smaller effect, or no effect at all.
A horrible thought just occurred to me. Are the placebo patients just being polite? You know, the doctor's going to all this trouble, providing them with fancy pills and all with a complicated label and they've been taking them as prescribed... well, you don't feel much better, but when you sit down with the doctor are you going to tell him that his pills have done nothing at all? I'd suspect that a lot of patients would say that they felt at least a little better, just so as not to offend the nice doctor who's worked so hard for them...
Re:research to application life cycle
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 1
50 and 25 years sound suspiciously like two and one human generations respectively. And 50 years is roughly an academic career from start of university education through to retirement. Maybe we only get the new stuff as the old guard are replaced?
Step 1: mathematician invents new kind of mathematics
Step 2: mathematician's colleagues all get involved in it
Step 3: they all teach it to their students
Step 4: those students go on to become mathematicians
Step 5: physicists working on difficult theoretical problem ring the mathematics department and have good odds of having one of the mathematicians from step 4 on the line because there are enough of them around by now
Step 6: physicists incorporate new kind of mathematics into physics - this takes less time because it's already a known good idea, having had mathematicians playing with it for the last generation or so
Step 7: physicists teach new mathematics to their students
Step 8: engineers get to hear about it
Step 9: ???
Step 10: Profit
Ahh, a definitive open source physics textbook so comic book writers can stop having Superman lift a mountain which under the small surface area he can cover, regardless of how strong, would simply crumble around him or the pressure at his hands would be so great the rock would go molten and he would effectively melt through the mountain he was trying to hold up.
Have you been reading The Boys in recent months? It's a terrific series so far. Follows a rather unofficial CIA team whose job it is to keep an eye on superheroes, in particular The Seven, who are a collective Captain Ersatz for the Justice League. There was a flashback sequence to an event about seven years ago, in which The Homelander tried to divert a plane from crashing into a major national landmark by flying straight into its tail, intent on changing its course by sheer super power.
Of course he just blasted straight through the thing, it broke into two parts, and both went down pretty fast, making an awful mess when they hit.
The old Superman movie actually got this right, too. A plane lost an engine and was in deep trouble... until Superman saves the day, by flying into position right where the engine should have been and doing exactly as much work as the engine would have. Superman's understanding of aviation and basic physics clearly far exceed The Homelander's.
Re:you can't stop the doomsayers
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 1
Although Jupiter would need to be about 75 times as massive to fuse hydrogen and become a star, the smallest red dwarf is only about 30 percent larger in radius than Jupiter.
IIRC, Jupiter is about as large as planets can get. Add mass slowly to Jupiter and it won't expand - it will just condense under the added gravity. You'd only get significant increase in diameter if you heated Jupiter up - say, by accretion of an absolutely enormous amount of mass, and then switching on a nuclear reaction in the core.
Re:you can't stop the doomsayers
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 1
How much more does Jupiter need to 'suck in' to have enough mass to ignite and be our second star?
Depends what you call a star. To ignite hydrogen fusion in the core, Jupiter would need a mass of about 7.5% of a Sun - it currently has about 0.1% of the mass of the Sun, so it would need to be 75 times more massive than it is. To ignite deuterium fusion and become a brown dwarf, Jupiter would need to be about 13 times more massive than it is.
The ignition in 2010 was done by converting a large part of Jupiter's mass to neutronium by means of Sufficiently Advanced Technology. This enormously condensed the planet and increased the pressures at the core dramatically, allowing fusion to begin without needing any extra mass. However, in the absence of omnipotent alien Monoliths, that's not considered likely to happen.
You might want to re-read that article. The events described took place over a 300 million year period, from 2.7 billion years ago to 2.4 billion years ago, when life on earth consisted exclusively of single-celled organisms. 300 million years ago, the amphibians were well along in the job of colonising the land.
To be fair to you, it's an easy mistake to make. 300 million years, 2.4 billion years... the difference is only about 300 times more than the time between modern man and our common ancestor with the chimpanzees. Not much at all.
But when I see Ubuntu and it boots slower than XP and... Well, feels slower than XP, I have to facepalm. Linux is supposed to be the faster one, it's supposed to be the one where you can say "Man, you use XP? It's so slow! Use Linux!", but with Ubuntu you can't really say that.
Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.
XP is seven years old. It came out a few days after Red Hat 7.2. It's entitled to boot faster than an OS from 2008.
Which it doesn't by the way, not on my machine anyway. I get to a desktop faster on XP, but it's a long while before it's finished housekeeping and deigns to let me actually do anything. Ubuntu takes longer to give me a desktop, but once it does so I'm free to use it; Linux would never lie to me, and in fact cannot talk.
I suspect it's something that they've quietly de-emphasised over the years since Hubbard died. It's completely absurd and embarrassing, and they don't like to talk about it - a bit like how most Christians gloss over some of the more barbaric parts of the Old Testament.
That it is in fact authentic Scientology scripture is proved by how the cult reacted when OT-3 first leaked. They didn't sue for libel, for publishing malicious lies to the effect that Scientologists believed nonsense; instead, they sued for copyright infringement and trade secret breach.
The fact that it was necessary to display "This is what scientologists actually believe" on the screen while parodying the cult of scientology on Southpark speaks volumes. This is the show that puts a nuke up Hillary Clinton's snatch and a hamster up Mr Slaves ass in front of a class of school kids.
But that's exactly why they did need to put that message up. There isn't really a Great Spider Queen in the Vatican running the entire Church, but South Park depicted one. Their Scientology episode was equally ridiculous - but in this case it happened to be true. So they needed to put the message on screen to say that this time they weren't kidding, it wasn't the usual South Park surrealism, it was in fact 100% authentic OT-3 gives-you-pneumonia secret space opera for Super Saiyan scientologists only.
It either is acceptable, or it isn't. Maybe you think that 73MB per 1GB is a lot, but I bet that 10 years ago you would've felt the same way about "losing" 5MB per every 100MB.
Not really. The difference goes up by 2.4% every iteration. It becomes relatively greater, not just absolutely greater. Terabyte disks are now available: a tebibyte is 10% more than a terabyte, and that's almost 100GB - quite a substantial difference.
But who's 'losing' bytes? I bought four gigabytes of RAM when I built my new PC, and it seems that the manufacturer has thrown in just under 295 extra megabytes for free! I'm quite delighted. Everyone else in this thread is just wilfully taking the 'half empty' viewpoint:-)
It's not RAM manufacturers, it's the whole computer industry...
It's clearly not the whole computer industry, though, is it? Otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion in the first place. Some parts of the computer industry call a gigabyte 1,000,000,000 bytes, other parts call a gigabyte 1,073,741,824 bytes. One of these standards is consistent with the usage of 'giga' in all other scientific and technical fields, while the other is unique to computer science. To my mind, calling 1,024 bytes a 'kilobyte' was just about acceptable, since the difference wasn't so great and 'kilo' was a convenient shorthand. But calling 1,073,741,824 bytes a 'gigabyte' is really pushing it, and now we're starting to build terabyte drives and it's getting ridiculous. If you want to use substantially different multipliers from the standard, don't use SI prefixes for them. Make up your own unit names.
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Even that's odd; they thought he was a suicide bomber, so they waited until he was on the train before they grabbed him, pinned him to his seat and then shot him in the head seven times with hollowpoints. You'd think you'd want to kill your suicide bomber before he gets that far.
You haven't been listening then. Eragon is so close to Star Wars it's comical.
There's an image tagger, for instance. It's a kind of game: Google presents you and a random other person with the same images in sequence. You type in a series of tags, until both of you type the same thing; Google then has two people independently entering the same term, so it knows that tag is valid, and both of you are awarded points towards a high score. Good idea, right?
Well, no. Anonymous put up a list of stock phrases from popular memes on /b/ and exhorted everybody to go and type them into Google in that exact order - and to immediately refresh the page and be re-matched if they didn't get a hit on the first word, in hopes of eventually being matched with another Anonymous. Result: a whole lot of images got tagged 'mudkips' and the top score for the day belonged to someone called 'longcat'.
Ah, but we are protected by the fact that no two theists believe in the same god.
1 billion votes for Allah (divided more or less equally between Sunni and Shia, with trace elements of Sufism).
1 billion votes for Jesus (block vote delivered by benedict@vatican.va)
1 billion more votes for Jesus (assorted factions of oddball Protestants)
1 billion votes for Brahman (and the primary Hindu trinity, and the endless other deities available)
1 billion votes for gods which may or may not exist but don't really matter in the long run because karma is only portioned out by the cosmos
... etc.
So it's not five billion votes for God. It's five billion competing votes for entirely different conceptions of what God ought to be. And the more these people fight over it, the greater the disrepute into which they bring the whole thing.
Yes, that's right. Ireland. GP didn't say 'The Republic of Ireland', just 'Ireland'. What island is Belfast on? Great Britain? Iceland? Honshu? Perhaps Madagascar? No. It's in Ireland. If it wasn't in the north of Ireland, it wouldn't be called 'Northern Ireland', now, would it?
Deus Ex doesn't need a remake, you're living in it. Look at the copyright date on the game, look at the skyline in the New York levels, look at what's not there, and get paranoid :-)
System Shock 2... well, there's Bioshock. But that was too easy and nowhere near as frightening. There was nothing in that game to compare to the madly shrieking psi monkeys. Or the spiders. Oh God, the spiders...
The shield you have at the start of the game is rubbish; it'll usually stop rocks and arrows but not blades or fireballs or magic. Buy the upgraded one - prices vary from 80 to 160 rupees depending on which store you visit. Beware of Like Like.
Wrong queen. Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901 - Shakespeare was long dead by then. Shakespeare is most identified with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, though his career lasted well into the reign of King James I.
That everybody turn-based player in the world bought Civ 2 and then never needed to buy another game?
Computer programming requires great precision and clarity of thought. It requires the programmer to express himself exactly and unambiguously, within the confines of an extremely restrictive grammar and syntax, and then put his work through a compiler which is pedantic beyond the dreams of Private Eye correspondents; it will reject the code entirely if it finds the smallest of syntax errors anywhere within it. And should the code be syntactically correct but contain ambiguities or carelessly expressed logic, then the program will not run correctly.
Yet it seems that some people who are capable of doing all this, and doing it well, complain when asked to apply the same precision and clarity to the writing of their own native language. I've never understood this. Surely a person who writes clear, exact, unambiguous and correct English, is also likely to write clear, exact, unambiguous and correct code?
That is going to backfire. Unless she genuinely has substantial knowledge of jujutsu, an expert interviewer will expose her as a liar very quickly, and at that point the day is lost. You only want to lie about sporting activities if you know full well that the interviewer is ignorant of those sports! If on the other hand she really is an experienced jujutsuka, she'd be a fool not to mention it - it's exactly the sort of extracurricular activity that university interviewers love.
It might not be that. Encrypting the connection protects the files in transit, but who the hell ever sniffed the USB connection to break Apple DRM? There are far easier ways to free up your music in order to exercise your legitimate fair use rights.
I suspect the encryption is there to make sure that only iTunes can talk to an iPod. That's Apple's profit right there: you're forced to manage your music collection using their application, with its inbuilt link up to their music store. And you get used to doing things the Apple way - hell, some day you might even buy a Mac. You're not supposed to use Amarok - God forbid! That way you don't join up with the Cult Of Steve!
The part that pisses me off is they've done a pretty good job of encrypting the firmware updates too. Absolutely no way in for the Rockbox hackers. Pity, because I was thinking of buying a 160GB iPod Classic now that my old iRiver iHP-140 is full. That's a sale lost, then...
CERN has nothing to do with the EU, except insofar as it is partially in it, and shares some of the same member states.
A horrible thought just occurred to me. Are the placebo patients just being polite? You know, the doctor's going to all this trouble, providing them with fancy pills and all with a complicated label and they've been taking them as prescribed... well, you don't feel much better, but when you sit down with the doctor are you going to tell him that his pills have done nothing at all? I'd suspect that a lot of patients would say that they felt at least a little better, just so as not to offend the nice doctor who's worked so hard for them...
Step 1: mathematician invents new kind of mathematics
Step 2: mathematician's colleagues all get involved in it
Step 3: they all teach it to their students
Step 4: those students go on to become mathematicians
Step 5: physicists working on difficult theoretical problem ring the mathematics department and have good odds of having one of the mathematicians from step 4 on the line because there are enough of them around by now
Step 6: physicists incorporate new kind of mathematics into physics - this takes less time because it's already a known good idea, having had mathematicians playing with it for the last generation or so
Step 7: physicists teach new mathematics to their students
Step 8: engineers get to hear about it
Step 9: ???
Step 10: Profit
Have you been reading The Boys in recent months? It's a terrific series so far. Follows a rather unofficial CIA team whose job it is to keep an eye on superheroes, in particular The Seven, who are a collective Captain Ersatz for the Justice League. There was a flashback sequence to an event about seven years ago, in which The Homelander tried to divert a plane from crashing into a major national landmark by flying straight into its tail, intent on changing its course by sheer super power.
Of course he just blasted straight through the thing, it broke into two parts, and both went down pretty fast, making an awful mess when they hit.
The old Superman movie actually got this right, too. A plane lost an engine and was in deep trouble... until Superman saves the day, by flying into position right where the engine should have been and doing exactly as much work as the engine would have. Superman's understanding of aviation and basic physics clearly far exceed The Homelander's.
IIRC, Jupiter is about as large as planets can get. Add mass slowly to Jupiter and it won't expand - it will just condense under the added gravity. You'd only get significant increase in diameter if you heated Jupiter up - say, by accretion of an absolutely enormous amount of mass, and then switching on a nuclear reaction in the core.
Depends what you call a star. To ignite hydrogen fusion in the core, Jupiter would need a mass of about 7.5% of a Sun - it currently has about 0.1% of the mass of the Sun, so it would need to be 75 times more massive than it is. To ignite deuterium fusion and become a brown dwarf, Jupiter would need to be about 13 times more massive than it is.
The ignition in 2010 was done by converting a large part of Jupiter's mass to neutronium by means of Sufficiently Advanced Technology. This enormously condensed the planet and increased the pressures at the core dramatically, allowing fusion to begin without needing any extra mass. However, in the absence of omnipotent alien Monoliths, that's not considered likely to happen.
You might want to re-read that article. The events described took place over a 300 million year period, from 2.7 billion years ago to 2.4 billion years ago, when life on earth consisted exclusively of single-celled organisms. 300 million years ago, the amphibians were well along in the job of colonising the land.
To be fair to you, it's an easy mistake to make. 300 million years, 2.4 billion years... the difference is only about 300 times more than the time between modern man and our common ancestor with the chimpanzees. Not much at all.
Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.
XP is seven years old. It came out a few days after Red Hat 7.2. It's entitled to boot faster than an OS from 2008.
Which it doesn't by the way, not on my machine anyway. I get to a desktop faster on XP, but it's a long while before it's finished housekeeping and deigns to let me actually do anything. Ubuntu takes longer to give me a desktop, but once it does so I'm free to use it; Linux would never lie to me, and in fact cannot talk.
[citation needed]
And if it's going to be from a certain popular book by Professor Dawkins, may I suggest you actually read the thing first?
That it is in fact authentic Scientology scripture is proved by how the cult reacted when OT-3 first leaked. They didn't sue for libel, for publishing malicious lies to the effect that Scientologists believed nonsense; instead, they sued for copyright infringement and trade secret breach.
But that's exactly why they did need to put that message up. There isn't really a Great Spider Queen in the Vatican running the entire Church, but South Park depicted one. Their Scientology episode was equally ridiculous - but in this case it happened to be true. So they needed to put the message on screen to say that this time they weren't kidding, it wasn't the usual South Park surrealism, it was in fact 100% authentic OT-3 gives-you-pneumonia secret space opera for Super Saiyan scientologists only.
Not really. The difference goes up by 2.4% every iteration. It becomes relatively greater, not just absolutely greater. Terabyte disks are now available: a tebibyte is 10% more than a terabyte, and that's almost 100GB - quite a substantial difference.
But who's 'losing' bytes? I bought four gigabytes of RAM when I built my new PC, and it seems that the manufacturer has thrown in just under 295 extra megabytes for free! I'm quite delighted. Everyone else in this thread is just wilfully taking the 'half empty' viewpoint :-)
It's clearly not the whole computer industry, though, is it? Otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion in the first place. Some parts of the computer industry call a gigabyte 1,000,000,000 bytes, other parts call a gigabyte 1,073,741,824 bytes. One of these standards is consistent with the usage of 'giga' in all other scientific and technical fields, while the other is unique to computer science. To my mind, calling 1,024 bytes a 'kilobyte' was just about acceptable, since the difference wasn't so great and 'kilo' was a convenient shorthand. But calling 1,073,741,824 bytes a 'gigabyte' is really pushing it, and now we're starting to build terabyte drives and it's getting ridiculous. If you want to use substantially different multipliers from the standard, don't use SI prefixes for them. Make up your own unit names.