More CO2 => increased temperatures => more greenery => more CO2 absorption => decreased temperatures?
Yes. It's one of many self-regulating systems you'll find in nature. It's negative feedbacks like this that keep the climate stable-ish. If a volcano belches out a vast cloud of carbon, the trees will devour it, and not much will change overall. Read up Lovelock's 'Gaia' theory: modelling the Earth's whole biosphere as a distributed organism, and its interconnected feedbacks as homeostatic mechanisms that stabilise internal conditions.
Trouble is that we're putting out far more carbon than any volcano ever dreamed of. And, er... we're cutting down the trees at the same time. That's really not a good idea.
We'll find a way to subvert it into doing what we need it to do, or we'll tell them to go fuck themselves and go back to SneakerNet
The word for this, when trying to avoid the attentions of an uncontrollable authoritarian government bent on total control of information, is samizdat. In Soviet Russia, they did this a lot.
As to the weight of the light saber -- have we established it would have no weight?
A laser sword has to be a magnetically contained tube of plasma; anything else is clearly ludicrous. It cannot have a very high rest mass, and a high enough thermal energy density for it to have a significant weight from the energy... well, that would cook the planet.
However, interesting side-effects might arise from moving such an intense magnetic field at such speed. There should be a current flow. Lightsabers ought to crackle and discharge to nearby objects; they'd be EVEN COOLER that way.
The whole purpose of the 2nd amendment is to ensure military-grade weapons (flint-lock muskets at the time) remain in the hands of ordinary citizens. Today, that would include a lot more than just hunting rifles. It may seem scary to have such powerful weapons in the hands of ordinary citizens, but to me the opposite is much scarier
Military-grade weapons, the kind you'd need to take on the armed forces of the USA, in the hands of ordinary citizens.
That means the hydrogen bomb.
So really, I'm struggling to think of any conceivable scenario that is more frightening than American civilians having the same right to possess thermonuclear devices that they currently enjoy to own handguns.
And modern socialism works a lot better than you might think. Just look at Europe.
There hasn't been a real Socialist state in Europe in years. Well, apart from Belarus, where they're just waiting for Russia to sort themselves out and reform the Soviet Union. I don't think any government or credible party of opposition has any serious policy of nationalisation of industries. And if you're not committed to public control of the means of production... well, what the hell sort of a Socialist are you? At best you're a welfare-state liberal.
Who will they turn to when they need inaccurate video game 'murder simulation' fear mongering news pieces? Who will yell, "Think of the children!" (when the obvious answer should be "Their parents, not your goddamn nanny-state...."
Don't get me wrong here, I'm delighted by the news. Couldn't have happened to a more deserving censorious asshat. But there's a danger here, and the danger is that he may be replaced by someone not stupid. Imagine someone with the same media contacts and crusading think-of-the-children mentality, without the paranoia, hubris, overweening pride, latent psychopathy, egomania, idiocy and general fruitbattiness that Thompson exhibits...
the same sort of people are saying that 5 GB per month is more than enough for anybody,
Nowhere near enough
and that there is no need for average people to use p2p,
because I do, and how!
and that no-one really needs speeds of 50 Mbs
Actually, I don't need that. Speed's not as important as unlimited traffic. If I can download stuff faster than I can watch it I'm content. Come back and offer me the 50Mb connection once I've installed that monster home cinema system and need HD rips:-)
Interesting question, but probably not for the reasons you think.
Linus began his little hobby project in part because all the Unix distributions in 1991 were prohibitively expensive; the nearest thing at the time that an impoverished student could get his hands on was minix, a very minimal cut-down Unix used mostly in comp. sci academia. The GNU project existed to try to implement a free Unix-like OS, but at the time their Hurd kernel was not yet practically usable; the free versions of BSD were still a couple of years off. Linux filled a gap in the market.
Now, if Windows had never existed? Windows wasn't that much use until 3.0, which came out in 1990. It wasn't the monopoly at the time that it is today. We were all using Acorn machines at school here, with RISC OS; I remember being greatly disappointed in the first Windows PCs I met. Apple machines were terrifically impressive at the time, and Amigas were enjoying their heyday too. But before Windows was MS-DOS. If not for MS-DOS, would there be Linux?
Well, once upon a time there was an x86 Unix distribution called Xenix. Microsoft Xenix, from 1979 on. What if a version of Xenix had been the OS of the IBM PC, instead of MS-DOS? Would there have been a Linux, if Linus had had access to a cheap Microsoft Unix on his 386 in 1991?
As it was, Microsoft lost interest in Xenix and sold it off in 1987, to SCO... and we know how that story ends.
Why does absolutely no developer actually use the damn wii-control in the way people want/expect. Take Zelda - you expect Link to mimic your slashes in how you move the wiimote, instead you just shake it to get it to attack. It just serves as a funky way to push a button - shake = B.
That would be a bad thing. The problem of parrying has been gone into by a previous reply, but let's suppose that's been solved. We now run into a deeper problem: gamers suck at fencing. Perfect 1:1 mapping between the Wiimote and the sword might be implemented, but the player had better stop waving it about like a feather duster if he hopes to make a shish kebab of the monster. Throw the average gamer, however hardcore, into Hyrule expecting him to use a sword that way, and he'll die over and over again, then piss off and play TF2. That or you'll spend half the game teaching the player remedial swordplay.
Shake = button press is lazy and less than the Wiimote is capable of, but it's a step in the right direction at least. I'd be delighted simply if the game was able to distinguish between a slash from the left, from the right, a straight stab and an overhead chop; here's hoping some future built-from-the-ground-up Wii Zelda manages that.
Myself I'm amazed that The Godfather never got more love. That game had perfect motion control. Gunplay - well, you could free-aim with the pointer if you wanted, though it was better for fine-tuning the automatic aim for a kneecapping when you locked on. But that wasn't the big attraction. Melee combat - God, the violence. Fisticuffs with a motion sensor in each hand. Plus choking, throws (often through windows) and slams, and a couple of hundred execution styles. Every single act of brutal intimidation and mayhem flowed naturally, and the figure on screen followed the motion of the controls, not 1:1 but near enough for the illusion to hold. THAT is what the Wii needs to see more of. Bully tried, but didn't quite have the same natural feel to it.
The only games we can say successfully used wii-mote it were RE4 and Metroid Prime as they actually used the aiming ability for it.
I'm surprised at that myself. When I first heard of the controller, the motion-sensing games I thought would be fun all right, but I expected the pointer ability to be the main thing. I've never liked console FPS - not Goldeneye, not Halo. It's never as good as a mouse. But a Wiimote? That's a pointer I can work with all right. OK, so the Wii isn't the powerhouse the other two are... but there's a decade and more of FPS history in the world. How hard could it be to get something like Half-Life on here, dammit? Let's see... steer with analogue stick, aim and shoot with wiimote, and... oh yes. Make Gordon left handed... Then smash with nunchuck to swing crowbar!
I was never sure if WinME was a SP for the 9x line or a beta for XP
It was the last of the 9x series. Windows XP was delayed again and again, as you'll recall. '98 was pretty much '95 with FAT32, and even with the SE update it was showing its age. ME was a stopgap to fill the space between Win98 and WinXP.
Of course all the talent at the time was working on Windows 2000 and on XP - the NT lineage which Windows follows today. So ME was a half-arsed mess of an OS, and it's only a mercy its lifespan was so short.
This isn't the desktop. It's the micro-laptop. But it's a beginning.
We had one of the women from upstairs come down to the IT dungeon a couple of weeks ago. Wanted to get her (personal) laptop set up so she could read email while on the road, which meant configuring it to connect through a 3G USB stick, then bookmarking the company's webmail in the browser.
She'd bought it, having done without laptops in the past, because it was small and cute and pink and cheap and fit in her handbag. Yep, it's an Eee.
In case anyone's wondering, yes, they work perfectly, at least with the Vodafone sticks; there's a free download of the necessary software, with a version especially for the Eee that adds an icon in the Internet pane, and Vodafone even run an apt repository for it. I was expecting to get to play the Unix guru, but this was simpler than it is on the bloody Windows boxes!
So: someone wholly clueless bought this machine because of its size and price and cute factor. She wouldn't know what Linux was if you beat her about the head with a plump contented well-fed penguin. Wouldn't know an operating system from a hole in the ground. But she'd been playing happily with it for days and loving the damn thing. Best of all, the usual question of 'what happens when they try to install [INSERT DUMB USER PROGRAM HERE]' doesn't arise: Eee's got no disk drives:-)
These machines are going to produce an army of users who are used to Firefox and OpenOffice.org and all the rest of our beloved open-source applications. Once they've found that they can do everything they expect of a computer with these systems... well, Joe Public isn't tech-savvy, but he'll notice the price premium for Windows, remember how their geeky nephew Timmy said it was because those ones go to pay Bill Gates The Richest Man In The World even more money but these don't, and make the obvious decision.
I'm afraid too many users (and stores) over here are too lazy to try something new. It makes sense that supermarkets (the ad was from one) might try to sell XP rather than linux, so they can sell some other software that's needed.
The market must be different over there. I keep an eye out for Eees wnenever I'm out shopping for kit, and I've only ever seen the Linux ones. I reasoned that it was (a) people familiar with XP on a bigger screen will think the Eee's screen small and cramped, while the custom Linux interface fits just fine, and (b) these are cheaper, and this end of the laptop market is all about price. I don't really get the point of Windows on these machines; they're not your primary workstation, nor are they in any way a gamer's box; they're portable net terminals and maybe media players.
Never bought one, because I'd heard about the bigger screen of the 900 series; the wasted space at the sides of the 700s is ugly. But then the 900s got too expensive for a cute-little-laptop impulse buy. Now I'm hanging on a little longer for the Acer Aspire One, which is about my perfect spec. Linux box, 1024x600, eight gig storage, one kilo mass, two hundred quid. Sold.
Yes, it did not matter so much in england that Tony blair waited until AFTER leaving office before converting from Church of England to Roman Catholic. That is, he waited until he was done politically.
Few enough in England cared one way or another about whether Blair converted to Catholicism or not, save as a matter of society gossip to be filed along with royal weddings and separations, and the latest doings of the Beckhams. Some of the dustier constitutional scholars wondered if it might cause bother - the Prime Minister picks Anglican bishops, that sort of thing - but there's no real bar to a Catholic Prime Minister, and certainly nothing that couldn't be quietly fudged away if the issue ever arose.
My reading of it is that Blair's delay in formalising his conversion to Rome was a wise political move because of opinions in Ulster, not England. Over there, it's important whether you're a Catholic or a Protestant - it can be, and far too frequently actually is, a matter of life or death. Building on secret negotiations with the IRA carried out under the Tories, Blair presided over the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, the establishment of the Stormont assembly and devolution of power to Belfast, and the whole decade-long saga of horse trading that followed which finally led to the North being run by First Minister Ian Paisley (in the old days, a thoroughly monstrous Protestant hate preacher) and Deputy Martin McGuinness (who was a terrorist - sometime IRA quartermaster, I think). Just getting these people in the same room without a murder being done is impressive. Getting them to work together in comparative harmony to run the Six Counties day to day... that's amazing. For all his faults in following Bush on his damn-fool crusade, this achievement will rightly put Blair's name in the history books.
Part of the reason this was possible is that Blair wasn't clearly associated with either faction. He was a High Church Anglican married to a Catholic, and there were persistent rumours all along that he was considering conversion. So he's a Protestant... but not so much that the Catholics would mind. If he had actually come out with it and formally converted to Catholicism, with the peace process in Ireland lurching from crisis to crisis as it so frequently did, he risked alienating the Protestant Loyalists. He'd have been perceived as firmly on one side, and that could have been the death of the whole project.
Previous PMs could have converted to Catholicism and it would have made no difference; there was no diplomacy being done in Ulster, they'd just keep killing each other regardless. And I think future PMs could be Catholics without any trouble either; the deal in Ireland is done, the Assembly in operation, and being run by a coalition of both sides. But during the negotiations, and the early years of the peace deal, it was just too risky for Blair to make such a religious statement.
a Christian who commits minor adultery (say, fooling around on his wife?)
How is that 'minor' adultery? Sounds to me like, well... adultery. Unqualified and plain adultery with no excuses.
In fact I'm not clear that there is such a thing as minor adultery. Jesus - whose teachings most Christians seem to hold in some regard - certainly felt quite strongly about it:
5:27 Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:
5:28 But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
Even the thought of it is enough. You didn't actually do anything with her... but you wanted to, right? And you would have, given the chance? Guilty as charged.
Maybe they estimated that a field of that strength will separate H20 or some other molecule that life finds necessary? Just a random guess.
Not too far off. In the thread earlier today about the magnetar, in which this same topic came up, it was said that the fatal effect would be because of the diamagnetism of water. Given that we're all mostly water, then once that stuff becomes magnetised in bulk a 100,000T field would shred any living thing on earth instantly.
Slashdot Mirror
He works for the Linux Foundation, not Aperture Science!
Are you kidding? This is England you're talking about. You think we'll miss the chance to bring more drink into the world?
Yes. It's one of many self-regulating systems you'll find in nature. It's negative feedbacks like this that keep the climate stable-ish. If a volcano belches out a vast cloud of carbon, the trees will devour it, and not much will change overall. Read up Lovelock's 'Gaia' theory: modelling the Earth's whole biosphere as a distributed organism, and its interconnected feedbacks as homeostatic mechanisms that stabilise internal conditions.
Trouble is that we're putting out far more carbon than any volcano ever dreamed of. And, er... we're cutting down the trees at the same time. That's really not a good idea.
The original post correctly said far side, not dark side.
There is no dark side of the moon really; as a matter of fact it's all dark.
The word for this, when trying to avoid the attentions of an uncontrollable authoritarian government bent on total control of information, is samizdat. In Soviet Russia, they did this a lot.
A laser sword has to be a magnetically contained tube of plasma; anything else is clearly ludicrous. It cannot have a very high rest mass, and a high enough thermal energy density for it to have a significant weight from the energy... well, that would cook the planet.
However, interesting side-effects might arise from moving such an intense magnetic field at such speed. There should be a current flow. Lightsabers ought to crackle and discharge to nearby objects; they'd be EVEN COOLER that way.
Military-grade weapons, the kind you'd need to take on the armed forces of the USA, in the hands of ordinary citizens.
That means the hydrogen bomb.
So really, I'm struggling to think of any conceivable scenario that is more frightening than American civilians having the same right to possess thermonuclear devices that they currently enjoy to own handguns.
There hasn't been a real Socialist state in Europe in years. Well, apart from Belarus, where they're just waiting for Russia to sort themselves out and reform the Soviet Union. I don't think any government or credible party of opposition has any serious policy of nationalisation of industries. And if you're not committed to public control of the means of production... well, what the hell sort of a Socialist are you? At best you're a welfare-state liberal.
The Aspire One is similar in spec to the Eee 900, and costs less than the Eee 701. SOLD.
According to El Reg, Acer reckon three hours on the standard battery, seven on the optional bigger one (which presumably adds weight and bulk).
Really? Because 10 in decimal is 10. 2 in binary is 10. 16 in hex is 10. Does the rule change for transcendental bases?
Don't get me wrong here, I'm delighted by the news. Couldn't have happened to a more deserving censorious asshat. But there's a danger here, and the danger is that he may be replaced by someone not stupid. Imagine someone with the same media contacts and crusading think-of-the-children mentality, without the paranoia, hubris, overweening pride, latent psychopathy, egomania, idiocy and general fruitbattiness that Thompson exhibits...
Nowhere near enough
and that there is no need for average people to use p2p,
because I do, and how!
and that no-one really needs speeds of 50 Mbs
Actually, I don't need that. Speed's not as important as unlimited traffic. If I can download stuff faster than I can watch it I'm content. Come back and offer me the 50Mb connection once I've installed that monster home cinema system and need HD rips :-)
Three And A Bit
or work out the sine of 0.1 radians
Not Much
So, how'd I do?
That's easy. It's exactly 10.
In base pi.
Now, your turn: convert 10 (base pi) into decimal.
Interesting question, but probably not for the reasons you think.
Linus began his little hobby project in part because all the Unix distributions in 1991 were prohibitively expensive; the nearest thing at the time that an impoverished student could get his hands on was minix, a very minimal cut-down Unix used mostly in comp. sci academia. The GNU project existed to try to implement a free Unix-like OS, but at the time their Hurd kernel was not yet practically usable; the free versions of BSD were still a couple of years off. Linux filled a gap in the market.
Now, if Windows had never existed? Windows wasn't that much use until 3.0, which came out in 1990. It wasn't the monopoly at the time that it is today. We were all using Acorn machines at school here, with RISC OS; I remember being greatly disappointed in the first Windows PCs I met. Apple machines were terrifically impressive at the time, and Amigas were enjoying their heyday too. But before Windows was MS-DOS. If not for MS-DOS, would there be Linux?
Well, once upon a time there was an x86 Unix distribution called Xenix. Microsoft Xenix, from 1979 on. What if a version of Xenix had been the OS of the IBM PC, instead of MS-DOS? Would there have been a Linux, if Linus had had access to a cheap Microsoft Unix on his 386 in 1991?
As it was, Microsoft lost interest in Xenix and sold it off in 1987, to SCO... and we know how that story ends.
Really? I only knew him as the guy who hogged all the credits on xscreensaver...
That would be a bad thing. The problem of parrying has been gone into by a previous reply, but let's suppose that's been solved. We now run into a deeper problem: gamers suck at fencing. Perfect 1:1 mapping between the Wiimote and the sword might be implemented, but the player had better stop waving it about like a feather duster if he hopes to make a shish kebab of the monster. Throw the average gamer, however hardcore, into Hyrule expecting him to use a sword that way, and he'll die over and over again, then piss off and play TF2. That or you'll spend half the game teaching the player remedial swordplay.
Shake = button press is lazy and less than the Wiimote is capable of, but it's a step in the right direction at least. I'd be delighted simply if the game was able to distinguish between a slash from the left, from the right, a straight stab and an overhead chop; here's hoping some future built-from-the-ground-up Wii Zelda manages that.
Myself I'm amazed that The Godfather never got more love. That game had perfect motion control. Gunplay - well, you could free-aim with the pointer if you wanted, though it was better for fine-tuning the automatic aim for a kneecapping when you locked on. But that wasn't the big attraction. Melee combat - God, the violence. Fisticuffs with a motion sensor in each hand. Plus choking, throws (often through windows) and slams, and a couple of hundred execution styles. Every single act of brutal intimidation and mayhem flowed naturally, and the figure on screen followed the motion of the controls, not 1:1 but near enough for the illusion to hold. THAT is what the Wii needs to see more of. Bully tried, but didn't quite have the same natural feel to it.
The only games we can say successfully used wii-mote it were RE4 and Metroid Prime as they actually used the aiming ability for it.
I'm surprised at that myself. When I first heard of the controller, the motion-sensing games I thought would be fun all right, but I expected the pointer ability to be the main thing. I've never liked console FPS - not Goldeneye, not Halo. It's never as good as a mouse. But a Wiimote? That's a pointer I can work with all right. OK, so the Wii isn't the powerhouse the other two are... but there's a decade and more of FPS history in the world. How hard could it be to get something like Half-Life on here, dammit? Let's see... steer with analogue stick, aim and shoot with wiimote, and... oh yes. Make Gordon left handed... Then smash with nunchuck to swing crowbar!
It was the last of the 9x series. Windows XP was delayed again and again, as you'll recall. '98 was pretty much '95 with FAT32, and even with the SE update it was showing its age. ME was a stopgap to fill the space between Win98 and WinXP.
Of course all the talent at the time was working on Windows 2000 and on XP - the NT lineage which Windows follows today. So ME was a half-arsed mess of an OS, and it's only a mercy its lifespan was so short.
This isn't the desktop. It's the micro-laptop. But it's a beginning.
We had one of the women from upstairs come down to the IT dungeon a couple of weeks ago. Wanted to get her (personal) laptop set up so she could read email while on the road, which meant configuring it to connect through a 3G USB stick, then bookmarking the company's webmail in the browser.
She'd bought it, having done without laptops in the past, because it was small and cute and pink and cheap and fit in her handbag. Yep, it's an Eee.
In case anyone's wondering, yes, they work perfectly, at least with the Vodafone sticks; there's a free download of the necessary software, with a version especially for the Eee that adds an icon in the Internet pane, and Vodafone even run an apt repository for it. I was expecting to get to play the Unix guru, but this was simpler than it is on the bloody Windows boxes!
So: someone wholly clueless bought this machine because of its size and price and cute factor. She wouldn't know what Linux was if you beat her about the head with a plump contented well-fed penguin. Wouldn't know an operating system from a hole in the ground. But she'd been playing happily with it for days and loving the damn thing. Best of all, the usual question of 'what happens when they try to install [INSERT DUMB USER PROGRAM HERE]' doesn't arise: Eee's got no disk drives :-)
These machines are going to produce an army of users who are used to Firefox and OpenOffice.org and all the rest of our beloved open-source applications. Once they've found that they can do everything they expect of a computer with these systems... well, Joe Public isn't tech-savvy, but he'll notice the price premium for Windows, remember how their geeky nephew Timmy said it was because those ones go to pay Bill Gates The Richest Man In The World even more money but these don't, and make the obvious decision.
The market must be different over there. I keep an eye out for Eees wnenever I'm out shopping for kit, and I've only ever seen the Linux ones. I reasoned that it was (a) people familiar with XP on a bigger screen will think the Eee's screen small and cramped, while the custom Linux interface fits just fine, and (b) these are cheaper, and this end of the laptop market is all about price. I don't really get the point of Windows on these machines; they're not your primary workstation, nor are they in any way a gamer's box; they're portable net terminals and maybe media players.
Never bought one, because I'd heard about the bigger screen of the 900 series; the wasted space at the sides of the 700s is ugly. But then the 900s got too expensive for a cute-little-laptop impulse buy. Now I'm hanging on a little longer for the Acer Aspire One, which is about my perfect spec. Linux box, 1024x600, eight gig storage, one kilo mass, two hundred quid. Sold.
Few enough in England cared one way or another about whether Blair converted to Catholicism or not, save as a matter of society gossip to be filed along with royal weddings and separations, and the latest doings of the Beckhams. Some of the dustier constitutional scholars wondered if it might cause bother - the Prime Minister picks Anglican bishops, that sort of thing - but there's no real bar to a Catholic Prime Minister, and certainly nothing that couldn't be quietly fudged away if the issue ever arose.
My reading of it is that Blair's delay in formalising his conversion to Rome was a wise political move because of opinions in Ulster, not England. Over there, it's important whether you're a Catholic or a Protestant - it can be, and far too frequently actually is, a matter of life or death. Building on secret negotiations with the IRA carried out under the Tories, Blair presided over the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, the establishment of the Stormont assembly and devolution of power to Belfast, and the whole decade-long saga of horse trading that followed which finally led to the North being run by First Minister Ian Paisley (in the old days, a thoroughly monstrous Protestant hate preacher) and Deputy Martin McGuinness (who was a terrorist - sometime IRA quartermaster, I think). Just getting these people in the same room without a murder being done is impressive. Getting them to work together in comparative harmony to run the Six Counties day to day... that's amazing. For all his faults in following Bush on his damn-fool crusade, this achievement will rightly put Blair's name in the history books.
Part of the reason this was possible is that Blair wasn't clearly associated with either faction. He was a High Church Anglican married to a Catholic, and there were persistent rumours all along that he was considering conversion. So he's a Protestant... but not so much that the Catholics would mind. If he had actually come out with it and formally converted to Catholicism, with the peace process in Ireland lurching from crisis to crisis as it so frequently did, he risked alienating the Protestant Loyalists. He'd have been perceived as firmly on one side, and that could have been the death of the whole project.
Previous PMs could have converted to Catholicism and it would have made no difference; there was no diplomacy being done in Ulster, they'd just keep killing each other regardless. And I think future PMs could be Catholics without any trouble either; the deal in Ireland is done, the Assembly in operation, and being run by a coalition of both sides. But during the negotiations, and the early years of the peace deal, it was just too risky for Blair to make such a religious statement.
Antimatter falls strange.
How is that 'minor' adultery? Sounds to me like, well... adultery. Unqualified and plain adultery with no excuses.
In fact I'm not clear that there is such a thing as minor adultery. Jesus - whose teachings most Christians seem to hold in some regard - certainly felt quite strongly about it:
Even the thought of it is enough. You didn't actually do anything with her... but you wanted to, right? And you would have, given the chance? Guilty as charged.
Not too far off. In the thread earlier today about the magnetar, in which this same topic came up, it was said that the fatal effect would be because of the diamagnetism of water. Given that we're all mostly water, then once that stuff becomes magnetised in bulk a 100,000T field would shred any living thing on earth instantly.