On the other we have a bunch of folk who want to have everything for free and construct elaborate explanations as to how this is great for the artists.
It's not great for the artists. It's just too bad for the artists. It's pretty damn good for everybody else.
I supposed the EU's say the same thing about American football...
We do indeed:-)
I saw some American football game on TV in the pub a while back. Watched it a bit. Infuriating game to watch, though. They get going, throw the ball about, charge down the pitch, someone from the other team goes in for a tackle - at this point I'm getting interested. Don't really know the rules, but by analogy to rugby I get the overall objective here. They want to get to the end of the pitch and score a try. The other guys want to stop them doing so. Fine.
Then for no apparent reason everyone stops dead and they all get together for what appears to be a committee meeting. WTF? Get the fuck on with it, guys! This was just getting good!
And before long what looks like the entire bloody team gets substituted, and I give up in exasperation and go and buy another pint.
If you get hung up on 'proof', then you miss out on a whole realm of awareness. Proof is all about convincing others that an experience was real. Unfortunately, some experiences cannot be so easily shared.
Fine if you're talking about the Holy Spirit, but the topic here is dowsing. It's supposed to accurately locate physical objects. That's something that can be tested objectively.
I tried to explain to him that he was simply remembering where he had buried the pipes, and that it was his subconscious mind that was causing the wires to cross, but he really didn't want to hear that. He'd rather believe in dowsing.
I used to do some of that stuff. Someone's mum at school showed a bunch of us how to do it back when we were 11-ish. I was very good at it. Even blindfold.
Of course the scientific mindset kicks in before too long, and I thought about how it could possibly work, and came to the same conclusion. That it was in fact me unconsciously moving the rods - that while I didn't know where whatever it might have been was, subconsciously I did. And my subconscious is apparently very, very good at correlating things I haven't consciously noticed and putting up an estimate of where the target is. And I must have a decent inner ear, for the blindfold bit.
The annoying thing is that once I reached this conclusion, the whole thing totally stopped working. You can't second-guess your subconscious. You end up watching out for the little twitches that move the rods, and so of course they don't happen.
So, don't try too hard to convince the old man. If you succeed, he'll lose all his powers:-)
I never have quite got this. What on earth is America's big problem with Venezuela? Are they threatening to charge for their oil in euros or something?
Hmm, remind me how long can the police hold someone in UK? If memory serves, it was something like two weeks if they suspect you of terrorism, two weeks is a very long time, I wouldn't be surprised that in two weeks the police can make you sign whatever they like...
It used to be that in England they'd keep you for seven long days; God help you if ever you're caught on these shores, though, because it's been extended to 28 days. Apparently they can't always extract a confession in this time, though, because they want to extend the period of internment to three months.
Another fun, more recent example was some video I saw of a bunch of Boston police officers. It was night, and there was a large line of police officers in riot gear. Some were on horses. I was trying to figure out what was happening in Boston that would justify such a police response. The answer? The local baseball team had won the baseball championship. The police response was against fans, celebrating the victory in the streets. The Boston response to people celebrating a sporting victory is to call out the riot police.
I don't know what American baseball fans are like, but in the UK, well... go to any Premiership football match and there are mounted police everywhere. Riot gear is unusual; they're mostly there for crowd control. Mostly. Go to a major game - let's say, oh... Liverpool vs Manchester United - and there'll be a serious police presence. Wherever you have tens of thousands of people in one place where emotions run high and a great deal of beer has been drunk, there's a danger of violence. And that's today; back in the eighties, football violence was almost expected.
MINURCAT: all European, half of them French.
MONUC: a wide variety of nationalities, none American; largest contingent is from Pakistan.
UNOCI: troops principally from Bangladesh, Bénin, France, Ghana, Jordan, Morocco, Niger, Pakistan, Sénégal and Togo.
UNMEE: 1,500 of 3,300 troops are from India.
UNMIL: various nationalities, none American.
UNMIS: again many nations, none American.
UNAMID: not in Darfur yet, but among the nations stating that they are likely to participate you will not find the USA.
MINURSO: many nations, none American.
MINUSTAH: principally Brazilian, with other South American nations providing the rest.
UNMOGIP: no Americans.
UNMIT: no Americans though Wikipedia does list the US; maybe there was one guy who's since gone home.
UNFICYP: no Americans, troops from many nations led by Argentina.
UNOMIG: this is the first one I've found where there ARE Americans, though the bulk of the force seems to be Russian.
UNMIK: substantial American presence, 3,000 of the 16,000 troops in Kosovo. At the height of the operation the US provided 7,000 of 50,000, just ahead of Germany on 6,000 and equal to France, but well behind Britain's 19,000.
UNDOF: Austria, Canada, India, Japan, Nepal, Poland, and Slovakia.
UNIFIL: no Americans, largest contingents from France, Germany and Italy. UNTSO: has some Americans, can't find a breakdown by nationality, but the total strength of the force is 150.
So, er, yes. Thank you, America, for your great contribution to UN peacekeeping operations worldwide. Now we see why that colossal defence budget of yours is good and necessary.
A trailer where you seemed to be selling coffee or ice cream wouldn't attract the attention of the police unless they wanted to check your permits but they wouldn't do that until you opened for business. Hiding a bomb in a display that is designed to draw attention does make sense. If they ignored them and they did blow up then people would be screaming.
So, if I were to go into business with a fleet of ice cream vans, and one fine summer's day my vans are driving around Boston giving away promotional ice cream and drawing quite a crowd, you would say the police ought to close down the roads, bring the whole city to a standstill, and arrest me on charges of perpetrating a bomb hoax, because my vans might be bombs?
Does this 4.06% (~530 billion dollars) of GDP (2006 est.) correspond to 21% of the federal budget? If this is true, the federal budget represents ~2.524 trillion dollars, or ~19.3% of GDP... It seems a lot.
Seems pretty low, actually. The British government typically spends something like 40% of GDP. The US tends to be a lot further right, and so generally has lower taxes, but I don't think it's that much less. Possibly the individual state budgets are not counted in that figure?
To date, U.S. nuclear power plants have produced 40,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel. The spent fuel consists of 95.6 percent uranium
Doesn't that number just scream 'REPROCESS ME!'?
95.6% of nuclear waste is uranium. Nineteen parts in every twenty are perfectly good fuel. You're not going to have to store that stuff for ten thousand years. You're only going to have to store it until the uranium mines are worked out and you need something to put into the reactors.
It never ceases to amaze me how popular it is to hate the United States, yet how popular our culture remains in spite of this.
You have excellent marketing. And much of your most popular culture is actually in open opposition to your foreign policy. Of course all the taxes go towards exporting oppression of the working masses, but nobody ever really thinks it through that far.
Assuming that somebody reading Slashdot is familiar with a well known Slashdot pun does not imply a lack of communication skills on my part.
People often mention 'federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison' on Slashdot. People very rarely link to the IMDB quotes page for 'Office Space' while doing so. So it's quite possible to recognise it as a piece of/. culture while not realising that it's a totally offtopic reference to a movie that has nothing whatever to do with leaked military documents.
It was years before I happened to watch that movie and found out where the line came from; up to that point, I'd thought it just a nasty little meme in extremely poor taste, circulated by juvenile geeks who liked to gloat over the idea of someone else getting forcibly sodomised in prison. Certainly I can imagine how seeing frequent nasty little references to prison rape throughout Slashdot would anger anyone with a sense of justice and a less than encyclopaedic knowledge of geek movie culture.
If you look at the aftermath of the various EU terrorists attacks, then the response has been basically,"oh you naughty kids, don't do this again or I will have to scold you a second time". That doesn't exactly seem to work.
How are you measuring that? What would it mean for a response to 'work'?
But there have been no more terrorist attacks on the US during that time. I know it's hard to prove that it's because we went to war, but it's just as hard to prove that it is not.
Yep, not a terrorist in sight. The Terrorist Patrol must be working a charm!
The market has determined that fair payment is between $0.00 and $1.99 per song.
Was the price truly determined by the market, or by the musicians' guild? Apart from a small number of non-guild musicians, is there meaningful price competition for legitimate downloads?
You did state a lower limit, though, which is more reasonable. Allowing for the costs of internet time used up by having BitTorrent on, the market rate is probably more like $1.00 per entire back catalogue of a major rock band.
Because 79 million of them are/b/tards who turned up one day dressed as Samuel L Jackson, announced that the pool was closed, stood around for some time doing very little, and eventually left.
People are still waiting on wii's? I bought one about 2 months ago by taking one from the shelf at Meijer and paying for it.
I bought mine on launch night, with a whole bunch of other Zelda fanboys, and we bought up the entire supply then and there, along with heaps of other games and accessories. We all then went home over Christmas and played Wii Tennis with family and friends, who then went out and bought up the entire supply through to about May. I'm not sure any of them ever bought any other game.
Wiis were in stock most places throughout the summer, but now Christmas is coming up, and enough little kids now know what a Wii is and why it's cool. The Nintendogs crowd wants in now. So it's out of stock again.
The premise is that a large solid core in a gas giant like Jupiter is unstable, and every once in awhile it kicks out a terrestrial-sized planet. A hot one. I'm not sure if it's actually better than Jeebusistic creationism or not, but it's interesting.
It's marginally more scientific than creationism, because it's more amenable to rational analysis and doesn't have the built-in 'God just did it that way' excuse.
As an exercise, why not work out the energy required to lift the mass of Venus from Jupiter to a large distance? Compare that to, say, the annual energy output of the Sun. Then work out if that kind of power is plausible.
Not by itelsef, but if you could create some sort of reservoir of coolness, perhaps with a refrigerator or heat pump, you could run a sterling engine with the temperature difference.
Seems kind of pointless... energy source X powers a heat pump to maintain a cool region, against which you run a Stirling engine to produce energy output Y. I bet you anything you like that Y X.
Or, you could try and find a Vesta sized chunk of hydrogen, and via some chemical wizardry, that will get rid of the carbon dioxide as well and leave water.
This, at least, can be had. Saturn would probably be the best place to get it, although lifting it all out of that gravity well would be energetically expensive. You'd probably need fusion power to do it - fuel the reactors from a small amount of the atmospheric hydrogen, and start pumping the rest of it into space.
(a) A satellite on the dark side of Venus beamed a light towards Venus and measured how much of that light returned, or
(b) A satellite on the light side of Venus simply turned the instrument towards the Sun and then towards Venus, and computed a ratio of the light intensities.
Or (c): the apparent brightness of the Sun is measured from Earth, the apparent brightness of Venus is measured from Earth, and a simple inverse square law calculation is done.
All too often on Slashdot people actually believe that "Smart==Thinks like me" and "Stupid==Doesn't think like me"
But isn't that true of pretty much everybody? I mean, are there people out there who believe that "Smart==Doesn't think like me" and "Stupid==Thinks like me"? And if so, wouldn't they be so stupid that they wouldn't realise their own stupidity, and so think they're smart after all, and so... [out of stack space]
Slashdot Mirror
It's not great for the artists. It's just too bad for the artists. It's pretty damn good for everybody else.
Not a solution to the problem, of course - only a solution to the blame.
We do indeed :-)
I saw some American football game on TV in the pub a while back. Watched it a bit. Infuriating game to watch, though. They get going, throw the ball about, charge down the pitch, someone from the other team goes in for a tackle - at this point I'm getting interested. Don't really know the rules, but by analogy to rugby I get the overall objective here. They want to get to the end of the pitch and score a try. The other guys want to stop them doing so. Fine.
Then for no apparent reason everyone stops dead and they all get together for what appears to be a committee meeting. WTF? Get the fuck on with it, guys! This was just getting good!
And before long what looks like the entire bloody team gets substituted, and I give up in exasperation and go and buy another pint.
Fine if you're talking about the Holy Spirit, but the topic here is dowsing. It's supposed to accurately locate physical objects. That's something that can be tested objectively.
I used to do some of that stuff. Someone's mum at school showed a bunch of us how to do it back when we were 11-ish. I was very good at it. Even blindfold.
Of course the scientific mindset kicks in before too long, and I thought about how it could possibly work, and came to the same conclusion. That it was in fact me unconsciously moving the rods - that while I didn't know where whatever it might have been was, subconsciously I did. And my subconscious is apparently very, very good at correlating things I haven't consciously noticed and putting up an estimate of where the target is. And I must have a decent inner ear, for the blindfold bit.
The annoying thing is that once I reached this conclusion, the whole thing totally stopped working. You can't second-guess your subconscious. You end up watching out for the little twitches that move the rods, and so of course they don't happen.
So, don't try too hard to convince the old man. If you succeed, he'll lose all his powers :-)
I never have quite got this. What on earth is America's big problem with Venezuela? Are they threatening to charge for their oil in euros or something?
It used to be that in England they'd keep you for seven long days; God help you if ever you're caught on these shores, though, because it's been extended to 28 days. Apparently they can't always extract a confession in this time, though, because they want to extend the period of internment to three months.
I don't know what American baseball fans are like, but in the UK, well... go to any Premiership football match and there are mounted police everywhere. Riot gear is unusual; they're mostly there for crowd control. Mostly. Go to a major game - let's say, oh... Liverpool vs Manchester United - and there'll be a serious police presence. Wherever you have tens of thousands of people in one place where emotions run high and a great deal of beer has been drunk, there's a danger of violence. And that's today; back in the eighties, football violence was almost expected.
Why must you turn Slashdot into a house of lies?
Current UN peacekeeping operations.
MINURCAT: all European, half of them French.
MONUC: a wide variety of nationalities, none American; largest contingent is from Pakistan.
UNOCI: troops principally from Bangladesh, Bénin, France, Ghana, Jordan, Morocco, Niger, Pakistan, Sénégal and Togo.
UNMEE: 1,500 of 3,300 troops are from India.
UNMIL: various nationalities, none American.
UNMIS: again many nations, none American.
UNAMID: not in Darfur yet, but among the nations stating that they are likely to participate you will not find the USA.
MINURSO: many nations, none American.
MINUSTAH: principally Brazilian, with other South American nations providing the rest.
UNMOGIP: no Americans.
UNMIT: no Americans though Wikipedia does list the US; maybe there was one guy who's since gone home.
UNFICYP: no Americans, troops from many nations led by Argentina.
UNOMIG: this is the first one I've found where there ARE Americans, though the bulk of the force seems to be Russian.
UNMIK: substantial American presence, 3,000 of the 16,000 troops in Kosovo. At the height of the operation the US provided 7,000 of 50,000, just ahead of Germany on 6,000 and equal to France, but well behind Britain's 19,000.
UNDOF: Austria, Canada, India, Japan, Nepal, Poland, and Slovakia.
UNIFIL: no Americans, largest contingents from France, Germany and Italy. UNTSO: has some Americans, can't find a breakdown by nationality, but the total strength of the force is 150.
So, er, yes. Thank you, America, for your great contribution to UN peacekeeping operations worldwide. Now we see why that colossal defence budget of yours is good and necessary.
So, if I were to go into business with a fleet of ice cream vans, and one fine summer's day my vans are driving around Boston giving away promotional ice cream and drawing quite a crowd, you would say the police ought to close down the roads, bring the whole city to a standstill, and arrest me on charges of perpetrating a bomb hoax, because my vans might be bombs?
Seems pretty low, actually. The British government typically spends something like 40% of GDP. The US tends to be a lot further right, and so generally has lower taxes, but I don't think it's that much less. Possibly the individual state budgets are not counted in that figure?
Doesn't that number just scream 'REPROCESS ME!'?
95.6% of nuclear waste is uranium. Nineteen parts in every twenty are perfectly good fuel. You're not going to have to store that stuff for ten thousand years. You're only going to have to store it until the uranium mines are worked out and you need something to put into the reactors.
You have excellent marketing. And much of your most popular culture is actually in open opposition to your foreign policy. Of course all the taxes go towards exporting oppression of the working masses, but nobody ever really thinks it through that far.
People often mention 'federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison' on Slashdot. People very rarely link to the IMDB quotes page for 'Office Space' while doing so. So it's quite possible to recognise it as a piece of /. culture while not realising that it's a totally offtopic reference to a movie that has nothing whatever to do with leaked military documents.
It was years before I happened to watch that movie and found out where the line came from; up to that point, I'd thought it just a nasty little meme in extremely poor taste, circulated by juvenile geeks who liked to gloat over the idea of someone else getting forcibly sodomised in prison. Certainly I can imagine how seeing frequent nasty little references to prison rape throughout Slashdot would anger anyone with a sense of justice and a less than encyclopaedic knowledge of geek movie culture.
Not if what they're saying is true.
How are you measuring that? What would it mean for a response to 'work'?
Yep, not a terrorist in sight. The Terrorist Patrol must be working a charm!
Was the price truly determined by the market, or by the musicians' guild? Apart from a small number of non-guild musicians, is there meaningful price competition for legitimate downloads?
You did state a lower limit, though, which is more reasonable. Allowing for the costs of internet time used up by having BitTorrent on, the market rate is probably more like $1.00 per entire back catalogue of a major rock band.
Because 79 million of them are /b/tards who turned up one day dressed as Samuel L Jackson, announced that the pool was closed, stood around for some time doing very little, and eventually left.
I bought mine on launch night, with a whole bunch of other Zelda fanboys, and we bought up the entire supply then and there, along with heaps of other games and accessories. We all then went home over Christmas and played Wii Tennis with family and friends, who then went out and bought up the entire supply through to about May. I'm not sure any of them ever bought any other game.
Wiis were in stock most places throughout the summer, but now Christmas is coming up, and enough little kids now know what a Wii is and why it's cool. The Nintendogs crowd wants in now. So it's out of stock again.
It's marginally more scientific than creationism, because it's more amenable to rational analysis and doesn't have the built-in 'God just did it that way' excuse.
As an exercise, why not work out the energy required to lift the mass of Venus from Jupiter to a large distance? Compare that to, say, the annual energy output of the Sun. Then work out if that kind of power is plausible.
Seems kind of pointless... energy source X powers a heat pump to maintain a cool region, against which you run a Stirling engine to produce energy output Y. I bet you anything you like that Y X.
This, at least, can be had. Saturn would probably be the best place to get it, although lifting it all out of that gravity well would be energetically expensive. You'd probably need fusion power to do it - fuel the reactors from a small amount of the atmospheric hydrogen, and start pumping the rest of it into space.
Or (c): the apparent brightness of the Sun is measured from Earth, the apparent brightness of Venus is measured from Earth, and a simple inverse square law calculation is done.
But isn't that true of pretty much everybody? I mean, are there people out there who believe that "Smart==Doesn't think like me" and "Stupid==Thinks like me"? And if so, wouldn't they be so stupid that they wouldn't realise their own stupidity, and so think they're smart after all, and so... [out of stack space]