For many, dialup does what they want. email, low bandwidth browsing etc. Low-tech folk.
Actually, email was the killer argument I used to persuade an uncle of mine into looking into broadband.
It went like this:
1) You get emails all the time from friends and relatives around the world
2) These emails contain photographs
3) Every year cameras come with more and more megapixels
4) So every year the photos they take use up more and more space
5) And take longer and longer to download when you read your emails
6) And it's running at nearly an hour sometimes already
7) Imagine what they'll be sending in 2010
8) Probably entire home videos
9) At a guess? Forever.
10) Eight megabit is about seven-fifty a month
11) About a hundred and fifty times faster
Or, worse, they actually need a newer version to cope with the files that those with newer versions are churning out. Yes you can save to older formats, but most people will just regard that as a PITA
Actually, with the new Office apps it's not. We're almost entirely WinXP but a few Vista machines have crept in lately - mine is one of them. By default of course Office saves to the new format - but I've only had to tell Excel once, and now every new workbook is created in 'Compatibility Mode', and saved as such when I hit Ctrl-S. It won't even let me go beyond the 65,535 row limit. It's not like in the past when you had to remember to do 'Save As' and pick the right version every time, which really was a pain.
As a matter of fact I really like the new Office. I'm not usually an MS apologist, but here they've done a good job. Redesigning the interface on Word might have made many people scream, but seriously: it's made my mother start using layout properly. It's exactly what all us LaTeX geeks have been complaining about for decades, and it's fixed. That deserves applause.
And for any of the websites I run I do not remember giving them permission to access those sites...
You need explicit permission to access a public website now? Shit! I'd better get offline and write an apology to CmdrTaco - I've been using/. without permission for the best part of a decade!
Time to post a specific statement on all websites stating that AVG does NOT have consent to access or "visit" these websites.
That's a bit like putting up a 'No Trespassing' sign inside your cellar, and expecting it to prevent people coming over your fence.
Who's up to volunteer to have it removed to see if they turn into a philosophical zombie?
As I understand the concept, you wouldn't be able to tell. The philosophical zombie is a creature which acts just as if it were conscious - it even holds sensible conversations - but which is in fact not conscious.
So, you walk up to a zombie and ask 'Are you a zombie?' It answers, 'No, of course not: I'm a conscious human being.' And however cleverly you interrogate it, you cannot distinguish it from a human being.
This is why for practical purposes we can't really do much better than the Turing test.
If they had actually finished the damn game (which honestly wouldn't have taken THAT much more work) it probably would have been even better than KotOR 1.
If they had actually finished the game, we might JUST be expecting a release about, oh... now.
NWN's story sucked but some of the mutliplayer was great; it's a shame NWN2 didn't follow through.
Download some of the user-made modules: in particular the Shadowlords and Dreamcatcher campaigns. The third part of the saga, Demon, was great fun and technically amazing but for me didn't really seem fit with the others.
The moon has uranium. That provides us CHEAP power. In particular, it provides us power to go places, send big sats, go fast to mars, live on mars, etc.
At a guess, that's probably an irrelevance except in the very long term. Fissionables contain a fantastic amount of potential energy in a relatively low weight and an extremely small volume. However, they require a huge and elaborate refining process in order to be useful. It will be cheaper to refine and reprocess radioactives on Earth and then ship them to space. The expense of establishing and maintaining so large and complex an industrial base will outweigh the benefits of avoiding the occasional launch.
This fruitloop thinks he discovered 189 secret, artificial satellites in orbit? How does NASA plan its launches around them? How are commercial and GPS satellites launched without hitting them? How does Russia work on the ISS without noticing them? How is Europe going to get those Galileo sats up there with these "secret" ones flying around?
The USAF has its own launch capability; they buy the same rockets from the same contractors NASA does. Sometimes NASA launches these things themselves; the Shuttle has carried secret satellites from time to time. It's hard to hide a launch, but you can keep the nature of its payload a secret. So, you can identify Mystery Satellite #121 by radar and by telescope, but determining whose it is (the Russians certainly have their own and I'd be surprised if the French don't) and what it is capable of is another matter. And if you're not watching it 24 hours a day, it can manoeuvre onto a different orbit when you're not looking.
So revealing that he's found 189 satellites and publishing his photographs doesn't reveal much the government wants kept secret. Every serious rival nation already knows where these things are. If however someone published that 'Satellite #117 is a Model X SuperScryer made by Lockheed in 2002, operating in infrared frequency x with maximum angular resolution y, resolving objects on the ground to z centimetres, using the following highly classified technologies...' - now that would upset people.
And 189 isn't so large a number. It's not like Star Wars out there, with crowds of vehicles zipping past each other. Space is big, and empty, and spysats are not such big things. They orbit very low, the better to get a close look at the Earth's surface, while communications and GPS satellites are far above, to have line of sight to much wider areas. Collisions are very unlikely, and all concerned maintain an extremely careful radar watch on all orbits intersecting any manned vehicle.
"I really love Legos, they're my favorite toy, I like building castles and spaceships!"
Is this an American thing? Here in.uk I've never heard them referred to as 'Legos', only ever as 'Lego'. As if it's a continuum, like water, or cheese, rather than a set of discrete objects.
So how big a black hole will they create there? Say, about the weight of two neutrons? _Three_ neutrons? Heck, let's be generous and smash a whole five neutrons together.
Rather more than that, actually. It'll crash together two hadrons, you're right so far - but you're neglecting the fact that it will do so at nine point quite a few nines of lightspeed. Collisions will occur at some 14TeV, which Google calculator indicates is equivalent to a mass of something like 15,000 neutrons.
The rest of the reasoning holds pretty well: the hole's Schwarzschild radius will be tiny, and its gravitational interaction cross-section negligible. Bear in mind also that, having resulted from a proton-proton collision, the hole is likely to carry a +2e charge. It will probably interact electromagnetically, and bind a couple of electrons into orbit about itself; these would shield other particles from ever approaching the central black hole. I wonder if it would look just like a badly overweight helium atom?
Even if they did manage to destroy the world, we'd all die so quickly there wouldn't be time to dish out any blame.
Actually, it will take a while. The event horizon of the hole will be small; the interaction cross-section with ordinary matter in the Earth is tiny. So it will orbit the centre of the Earth, absorbing a few atoms on each pass, gradually increasing in mass.
We'll notice by the time it reaches the mass of, say, a decent-sized mountain. It will cause local tides. Volcanism. Earthquakes. We won't die of spaghettification; we'll die because something awful inside the earth is whipping up the mantle like a blancmange and shredding the whole crust.
Wise population centers do not locate themselves near large volcanoes.
Let's be fair to Pompeii here: they didn't know Vesuvius was a volcano, they didn't know what a volcano was. I hear (admittedly from a popular kids' pulp SF show) that the word volcano was only coined afterwards. By the Romans. To explain what the hell just happened, and blame it on the god Vulcan.
'zeitgeist': German, translates as 'spirit of the times'. Roughly refers to cultural and intellectual trends and fashions.
'petard': a bomb. Used in mediaeval siege warfare to blow up walls. Petards were unstable and unsafe weapons, and the petardier's life expectancy was not long; it was common for a man to be 'hoist by his own petard' - said bomb having exploded rather earlier than it should have. Now refers to any cunning plan which backfires spectacularly.
Now, what should I do about countries where the REAL rules are "Normally, we'll be enforce the published laws, but if you get too profitable, well do whatever the hell we want, and rationalize it in the most plausible way" ?
That would be 'all of them'. And if that's a problem, it's one that most people would dearly love to have.
Isn't it global anti-trust to sell a product for less in one country than you do another?
Ordinarily, no, I don't think so. There's a natural limiting factor to this kind of thing, because if you sell your product much more cheaply in a poor market than in a rich one, then people will make good money buying up stock in the poor countries, shipping it to the rich countries, and selling it on at a profit while still undercutting your official price there.
The problem comes when the product has a near-zero marginal cost to produce, and near-zero weight. It costs Microsoft almost nothing to stamp out ten thousand Windows disks and sell them in east Asia for a dollar each; if that's what it takes to compete in that market, a dollar per copy is better than nothing. But similarly, it costs me almost nothing to buy up ten thousand Windows disks and ship them to England, there to be sold in a street market; I can undercut their official price by a huge margin, and still turn a healthy profit.
Thus Microsoft play silly buggers with the EULA, claiming that their product is licensed not sold, and that it's illegal to use in England the copy they sold in China. And Hollywood play silly buggers with region coding as well, to make sure Europeans don't buy DVDs from America of films that aren't yet in our cinemas, and to make sure neither of us buys DVDs from China priced super-cheap to compete with the pirate market. Is that legal? Don't know, but it's sure as hell not right. If globalisation and free trade benefit the corporations, who'll outsource your job at the drop of a hat, it should work for us too: I want to outsource my DVD buying, thank you very much.
One thing I'm pretty sure of is that this is not legal within the EU. You can't sell a product cheaply in Slovenia and dearly in Germany, and then complain when the Germans buy in Slovenia. Apple ran afoul of that a little while ago with their iTunes pricing structure, though I'm not sure how that turned out.
What use would Communist China have for anti-Trust laws
China is being heavily leant upon by the US and its stooges to do something about their prevailing culture of piracy - you know, the great DVD markets of Hong Kong and Shanghai where every film is available a month before it reaches the cinema, all that stuff. It's all to do with international trade agreements; China gets to make more money selling abroad if they stop ripping off Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
Hitherto China has been happily ignoring Microsoft's monopoly by simply pirating everything. If they're going to go legit then they're going to make damn sure they don't end up paying through the nose for it, so they're raising the same monopoly issue that the US and the EU have done. After all, if China is going to play fair, then so must Microsoft.
surprisingly to me, Germany is in 2nd place at nearly 475,000
Who would you expect to be ahead of Germany? There are countries with larger populations, but they're substantially poorer per capita; fewer of their people will be downloading Firefox today. Germany is the most populous country in the EU, it is very rich, and very technologically advanced.
To my mind, the only country that might have a chance of outFirefoxing Germany and taking second place would be Japan. And they're not so far behind (at time of writing, Germany is on 499,014 and Japan is on 369,364).
The big surprise here for me is Iran. 207,816 downloads, comparable to Britain, France or Spain. I suppose their wartime baby boom is now a generation of internet-savvy students. Can't imagine hardline fundamentalism keeping hold on that demographic for too long.
Uh, the French and Polish resistance both worked with the liberating army, and had the support of the local populace.
I'm sure that if some great army came along to liberate Iraq from the Anglo-American axis, then the Iraqi resistance would work with them, with the support of the local populace.
Slashdot Mirror
'Long enough' means exactly that: as the length of the game approaches infinity, the computer's expected losses approach zero.
Actually, email was the killer argument I used to persuade an uncle of mine into looking into broadband.
It went like this:
1) You get emails all the time from friends and relatives around the world
2) These emails contain photographs
3) Every year cameras come with more and more megapixels
4) So every year the photos they take use up more and more space
5) And take longer and longer to download when you read your emails
6) And it's running at nearly an hour sometimes already
7) Imagine what they'll be sending in 2010
8) Probably entire home videos
9) At a guess? Forever.
10) Eight megabit is about seven-fifty a month
11) About a hundred and fifty times faster
Actually, with the new Office apps it's not. We're almost entirely WinXP but a few Vista machines have crept in lately - mine is one of them. By default of course Office saves to the new format - but I've only had to tell Excel once, and now every new workbook is created in 'Compatibility Mode', and saved as such when I hit Ctrl-S. It won't even let me go beyond the 65,535 row limit. It's not like in the past when you had to remember to do 'Save As' and pick the right version every time, which really was a pain.
As a matter of fact I really like the new Office. I'm not usually an MS apologist, but here they've done a good job. Redesigning the interface on Word might have made many people scream, but seriously: it's made my mother start using layout properly. It's exactly what all us LaTeX geeks have been complaining about for decades, and it's fixed. That deserves applause.
You need explicit permission to access a public website now? Shit! I'd better get offline and write an apology to CmdrTaco - I've been using /. without permission for the best part of a decade!
Time to post a specific statement on all websites stating that AVG does NOT have consent to access or "visit" these websites.
That's a bit like putting up a 'No Trespassing' sign inside your cellar, and expecting it to prevent people coming over your fence.
As I understand the concept, you wouldn't be able to tell. The philosophical zombie is a creature which acts just as if it were conscious - it even holds sensible conversations - but which is in fact not conscious.
So, you walk up to a zombie and ask 'Are you a zombie?' It answers, 'No, of course not: I'm a conscious human being.' And however cleverly you interrogate it, you cannot distinguish it from a human being.
This is why for practical purposes we can't really do much better than the Turing test.
'Support the troops...'
'Think of the children...'
'Pater noster...'
'Microsoft Sucks...'
120 millibits per second? That's... 8.3 seconds to transmit a single on/off state. You're probably not getting the best possible experience there.
If they had actually finished the game, we might JUST be expecting a release about, oh... now.
Oh, wait: we are.
Download some of the user-made modules: in particular the Shadowlords and Dreamcatcher campaigns. The third part of the saga, Demon, was great fun and technically amazing but for me didn't really seem fit with the others.
What, really? If you guys hadn't bothered to do a damn thing, The Scary Terrorist Menace would already have killed everybody?
Now go and listen closely to 'Don't Stand So Close To Me' ;-)
At a guess, that's probably an irrelevance except in the very long term. Fissionables contain a fantastic amount of potential energy in a relatively low weight and an extremely small volume. However, they require a huge and elaborate refining process in order to be useful. It will be cheaper to refine and reprocess radioactives on Earth and then ship them to space. The expense of establishing and maintaining so large and complex an industrial base will outweigh the benefits of avoiding the occasional launch.
The USAF has its own launch capability; they buy the same rockets from the same contractors NASA does. Sometimes NASA launches these things themselves; the Shuttle has carried secret satellites from time to time. It's hard to hide a launch, but you can keep the nature of its payload a secret. So, you can identify Mystery Satellite #121 by radar and by telescope, but determining whose it is (the Russians certainly have their own and I'd be surprised if the French don't) and what it is capable of is another matter. And if you're not watching it 24 hours a day, it can manoeuvre onto a different orbit when you're not looking.
So revealing that he's found 189 satellites and publishing his photographs doesn't reveal much the government wants kept secret. Every serious rival nation already knows where these things are. If however someone published that 'Satellite #117 is a Model X SuperScryer made by Lockheed in 2002, operating in infrared frequency x with maximum angular resolution y, resolving objects on the ground to z centimetres, using the following highly classified technologies...' - now that would upset people.
And 189 isn't so large a number. It's not like Star Wars out there, with crowds of vehicles zipping past each other. Space is big, and empty, and spysats are not such big things. They orbit very low, the better to get a close look at the Earth's surface, while communications and GPS satellites are far above, to have line of sight to much wider areas. Collisions are very unlikely, and all concerned maintain an extremely careful radar watch on all orbits intersecting any manned vehicle.
Is this an American thing? Here in .uk I've never heard them referred to as 'Legos', only ever as 'Lego'. As if it's a continuum, like water, or cheese, rather than a set of discrete objects.
Rather more than that, actually. It'll crash together two hadrons, you're right so far - but you're neglecting the fact that it will do so at nine point quite a few nines of lightspeed. Collisions will occur at some 14TeV, which Google calculator indicates is equivalent to a mass of something like 15,000 neutrons.
The rest of the reasoning holds pretty well: the hole's Schwarzschild radius will be tiny, and its gravitational interaction cross-section negligible. Bear in mind also that, having resulted from a proton-proton collision, the hole is likely to carry a +2e charge. It will probably interact electromagnetically, and bind a couple of electrons into orbit about itself; these would shield other particles from ever approaching the central black hole. I wonder if it would look just like a badly overweight helium atom?
Actually, it will take a while. The event horizon of the hole will be small; the interaction cross-section with ordinary matter in the Earth is tiny. So it will orbit the centre of the Earth, absorbing a few atoms on each pass, gradually increasing in mass.
We'll notice by the time it reaches the mass of, say, a decent-sized mountain. It will cause local tides. Volcanism. Earthquakes. We won't die of spaghettification; we'll die because something awful inside the earth is whipping up the mantle like a blancmange and shredding the whole crust.
Let's be fair to Pompeii here: they didn't know Vesuvius was a volcano, they didn't know what a volcano was. I hear (admittedly from a popular kids' pulp SF show) that the word volcano was only coined afterwards. By the Romans. To explain what the hell just happened, and blame it on the god Vulcan.
'zeitgeist': German, translates as 'spirit of the times'. Roughly refers to cultural and intellectual trends and fashions.
'petard': a bomb. Used in mediaeval siege warfare to blow up walls. Petards were unstable and unsafe weapons, and the petardier's life expectancy was not long; it was common for a man to be 'hoist by his own petard' - said bomb having exploded rather earlier than it should have. Now refers to any cunning plan which backfires spectacularly.
That would be 'all of them'. And if that's a problem, it's one that most people would dearly love to have.
Ordinarily, no, I don't think so. There's a natural limiting factor to this kind of thing, because if you sell your product much more cheaply in a poor market than in a rich one, then people will make good money buying up stock in the poor countries, shipping it to the rich countries, and selling it on at a profit while still undercutting your official price there.
The problem comes when the product has a near-zero marginal cost to produce, and near-zero weight. It costs Microsoft almost nothing to stamp out ten thousand Windows disks and sell them in east Asia for a dollar each; if that's what it takes to compete in that market, a dollar per copy is better than nothing. But similarly, it costs me almost nothing to buy up ten thousand Windows disks and ship them to England, there to be sold in a street market; I can undercut their official price by a huge margin, and still turn a healthy profit.
Thus Microsoft play silly buggers with the EULA, claiming that their product is licensed not sold, and that it's illegal to use in England the copy they sold in China. And Hollywood play silly buggers with region coding as well, to make sure Europeans don't buy DVDs from America of films that aren't yet in our cinemas, and to make sure neither of us buys DVDs from China priced super-cheap to compete with the pirate market. Is that legal? Don't know, but it's sure as hell not right. If globalisation and free trade benefit the corporations, who'll outsource your job at the drop of a hat, it should work for us too: I want to outsource my DVD buying, thank you very much.
One thing I'm pretty sure of is that this is not legal within the EU. You can't sell a product cheaply in Slovenia and dearly in Germany, and then complain when the Germans buy in Slovenia. Apple ran afoul of that a little while ago with their iTunes pricing structure, though I'm not sure how that turned out.
That killed some 2,500 of 250,000,000 Americans. You have a strange definition of 'all'.
China is being heavily leant upon by the US and its stooges to do something about their prevailing culture of piracy - you know, the great DVD markets of Hong Kong and Shanghai where every film is available a month before it reaches the cinema, all that stuff. It's all to do with international trade agreements; China gets to make more money selling abroad if they stop ripping off Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
Hitherto China has been happily ignoring Microsoft's monopoly by simply pirating everything. If they're going to go legit then they're going to make damn sure they don't end up paying through the nose for it, so they're raising the same monopoly issue that the US and the EU have done. After all, if China is going to play fair, then so must Microsoft.
Who would you expect to be ahead of Germany? There are countries with larger populations, but they're substantially poorer per capita; fewer of their people will be downloading Firefox today. Germany is the most populous country in the EU, it is very rich, and very technologically advanced.
To my mind, the only country that might have a chance of outFirefoxing Germany and taking second place would be Japan. And they're not so far behind (at time of writing, Germany is on 499,014 and Japan is on 369,364).
The big surprise here for me is Iran. 207,816 downloads, comparable to Britain, France or Spain. I suppose their wartime baby boom is now a generation of internet-savvy students. Can't imagine hardline fundamentalism keeping hold on that demographic for too long.
I'm sure that if some great army came along to liberate Iraq from the Anglo-American axis, then the Iraqi resistance would work with them, with the support of the local populace.
That doesn't matter at all, unless they are also able to kill all Americans. Just wanting something doesn't make it so.