for the sake of statistics, its the third largest arms exporter after the US of A and the former Soviet states.
That surprises me. I remember reading a few years ago that the second largest armsdealer in the world wasn't Russia and wasn't China, but was actually the UK. Not sure if that still holds - I imagine the market for Harriers isn't what it was, with next-generation planes coming quite soon - but the defence industry is still huge here. Taken together with the rest of the EU (some members of which ARE former Soviet states, btw), that should be an easy second place.
Possibly Russia ships more arms by volume, though. Every freedom fighter and soldier of fortune on the planet has a Kalashnikov, available cheaply and in vast numbers. The UK sells expensive top-end stuff, planes and monster tanks and those nifty rocket artillery things... smaller quantities, bigger money.
Does anyone think that US will start banning flights or threaten to remove financial aid if the data isn't shared? Would a European country give in to the US or obey the court ruling?
Hopefully, the US will back down. If not... this could turn out to be nasty. There've been a couple of trade wars with the US in recent years - recall the dispute over bananas, and then over steel - but this one would be a whole lot bigger. Banning flights? Brussels would retaliate hard.
Realistically, though, the US customs will just start demanding the information directly from the passenger on arrival, rather than getting it from the airline. It would be a big hassle, and would leave Europeans with an even worse impression of Americans than they already have, but at least it wouldn't spark off another trade war costing billions.
Sad really... if someone was to come up with an original (or even, not flogged to death in the past 5 years), entertaining gameplay idea, they'd do well...
Yeah. Wii all wish that someone would come up with some completely new style of gaming that wii could try. But wii all know that if anyone did, wii would just take the piss out of the name. A pity, because wii would all have a great time otherwise.
Me? I'm waiting for a decent new 2d platformer to come out:D
Same here. Something like the old Super Mario Bros. games. But new. A new Super Mario Bros, if you will. Amazing how nobody's thought of that.
The only way the UK gov and the AGING PIRA got to where it is now in the "process" with an "ammical withdrawal" is to play DIRTY.
Um. You expected a government - a British government - to play fair? At war?
Excuse me... I have to go and laugh mockingly for a while.
In addition, it's really come to something when someone sympathising with a terrorist organisation complains that the enemy is playing dirty. That's just pure comedy.
You mistakenly cite GTA as the "start" of this. "This" has been going on since Doom. GTA3, and Hot Coffee, weren't out when Colubine happened, if you remember.
Since even earlier. Remember the panic about Mortal Kombat? Or the epilepsy scare? Hell, the whole thing can probably be traced at least to the Dungeons & Dragons panic in the seventies and eighties.
One thing people never mention is when God ordered the death of someone for working on a sunday, now I know I don't have a right to challenge Him
Who told you that? If God is wrong, if God orders something you know to be evil, then you not only have the right but also the duty to challenge him. More to the point, if God's officially appointed spokesman on Earth is wrong - because for some reason he doesn't generally do public appearances, but issues statements via intermediaries - then you ought to challenge him.
To keep silence while a wrong is done because you feel you don't have the right to criticise the perpetrator... well, that just makes you complicit. It goes whether the perpetrator is a class bully, a judge, a president, or a priest. Or even a god.
Actually they just scanned the book in and put it in a pdf onto DVD.
Nah. They scanned Preacher and put _that_ onto DVD. Apparently focus groups said that mad monks from Opus Dei were all very well, but that the Saint of Killers just plain rocked.
Not that you really need them, but it's nice to see they incorporated the unlimited 1up turtle shell trick mainly seen in SMB's World 3-1.
That was an absolute bugger to pull off, though. An easier example is SMB3, world 3-9. Hit the Koopa at the beginning of the level, then carry it _fast_ to the place about halfway through where there are two cannons on the ground level and a platform above and between them. Throw the shell so that it bounces between the two cannons, and stand on the platform above so that both cannons fire inwards.
Consumating a marriage with a 9 year old is pedophilia by today's standards, but back then, it would have been perfectly normal.
Nine years old would still have been excessive even then. That's pre-pubescent.
And even so, your argument seems to be that we shouldn't judge Mohammed's actions by modern standards. Fair enough. But it's a poor counterargument when the world contains a billion or so people who seem quite insistent on judging the modern world by Mohammed's standards. Well, if Mohammed's standards are supposed to apply to us today, then I think the 'paedophile' charge stands and needs a better answer.
I still have boxes of "pirated" movies in my basement (actually, mostly time-shifted or otherwise under fair use, but I'm using the Jack Valenti term).
Time-shifted a hell of a long way, then... you're supposed to tape it, watch it at a later date and then tape over it with something else. Archiving it in your basement isn't really time-shifting. Unless you genuinely haven't quite got around to watching that stuff.
As for the sneakernet... yeah. I gave up on P2Ps a while back, too many broken files left by seven years of dropped connections. I carry around a 40G mp3 player (the good old iHP-140) and whenever I'm around a computer with a decent media collection I hook in and start trading. A USB2 connection beats hell out of any broadband;-)
When you press buttons on your computer keyboard, those inputs are read by programming - and something happens. It's not just magic. Too many people, having absolutely no clue how anything works, just think everything runs on magic.
What is magic? Words and symbols of power that shape the world according to the will of the magician. The magician speaks the right magic words, and draws the right sigils, and obtains the desired effect.
Meanwhile, the INT 8 half-orc barbarian doesn't have the faintest idea what all the runes carved on his battleaxe actually do. He doesn't care. He knows the end result is a +1 to hit and that suits him just fine. Neither is the ranger concerned about exactly how these enchanted bracers improve his aim with a longbow; they just do. Only the wizard needs to worry about the details.
And what is programming? Words and symbols of power that shape the computer according to the will of the programmer. Type the right instructions, give the right command arguments, and obtain the desired effect.
Ever created an infinite loop? Had a recursive process go berserk on you? Made a small mistake while invoking rm -rf? Yeah. Pure 'Sorcerer's Apprentice'.
We are the nearest thing to magicians that has ever existed in reality. Our spells work and are truly powerful, our mistakes cause incomprehensible chaos, and when one of us turns bad then sometimes the whole world can suffer the consequences. No wonder the muggles treat our creations like they're the mysterious products of a magical power beyond their understanding: that's what they are.
SS2 is the only game that has made me shoot randomly out of sheer terror.
The worst thing is that you really, really don't want to do that. Shooting randomly means you run out of ammo and your gun breaks down. There never was quite enough ammo in SS2 - how sadly different to the good old days on Citadel Station...
But yeah, I still do that. Stalking about the place, trying to conserve ammo as best I can... FUCK FUCK FUCK! PSI MONKEY! * blam blam blam blam blam blam blam KLIK *
Mutations are random which means evolution is random which means it isn't predictable
The roll of a d20 is random, which means that combat is random, which means we can't predict who'll win a fight between a first-level bard and Asmodeus.
I'd much prefer to go to a festival and see a huge range of bands rather than be scammed for the one band who may not perform so well on the night.
Spot on there. I go to gigs all right, but not huge ones. The superstar acts I see at festivals. Brian Wilson at Glastonbury last year, Green Day at Reading the year before just after we'd bottled 50 Cent off stage, Blur the year before that... It's the only way to do it.
Now, if you'll excuse me I'm beginning to suffer severe Glastonbury withdrawal symptoms. Only cure, to sit in a green space smoking something of questionable legality and drinking strawberry cider...
if you want to stop the government listening in to
your conversations then you're out of luck anyway , since they'll
just bug you some other way.
It's far, far easier for the government to bug all the phone lines (as they're currently doing, I might add) at a central point, and then plug in to someone's conversations at will. If you're using an encrypted phone, then Echelon / Carnivore / AT&T / Dubya's Latest Secret Illegal Wiretap can't listen in. The government have to break in to your house, take a screwdriver to your phone and physically bug the thing.
Can the government spy on everybody by bugging the telephone exchange? Yes, easily, and they're doing just that. Can the government spy on everybody by secretly bugging every last individual phone? No, it would be prohibitively expensive. Have the NSA burgle every single house individually and fiddle every single phone? Impossible.
Encrypting phone calls makes it enormously more expensive and difficult for the government to spy on you. That's got to be a good thing.
And for commercial encryption software that you actually pay for (not this free public beta), there are now requirements to check customers against government watch lists as well, which is something that companies such as PGP comply with these days.
How do you go about that? Suppose I were to set up a small business reselling GPG or something similar. Does the government simply hand me a copy of the watch list and let me do the checking myself? Or must I pass along the names of all my customers to them for authorisation to sell it on?
And I find it laughable that someone (the grandparent) is worried about getting modded down by conservatives. Conservatives? Slashdot?
You're kidding, right? Slashdot is pretty far right. Look at the discussion any time the question of trade unionism comes up. One can hardly call this a left-wing consensus. The number of Thatcherites and Ayn Rand fetishists here is amazing. You'd struggle to find someone on/. seriously favouring the nationalisation of all industry, mass organised labour and a really high (like say 90%) top rate of income tax. THAT would be left-wing.
If there's a political consensus on/., it's a very individualist one. We're hackers, solitary creatures uncomfortable with being interfered with by either governments or corporations. It's right-wing, but also anarchistic, what you might call libertarian.
Actually, in theory you could, but it would be rather slow. Just encode your text into, say... puffs and not-puffs using ASCII, or into little-puffs and big-puffs using Morse.
Christopher Ecclestone left after only one year; apparently this was planned from the beginning, although when word got out to the media they made a great fuss about it and gave the impression that there'd been some great row.
David Tennant (cf: Blackpool, Casanova) is the new Doctor, and he's already signed up for another year. Shows no signs of leaving, and is apparently a fan of the show from way back... I imagine we'll get a fair bit of mileage out of the Tenth Doctor.
The Hobbits were the British, "A nation of shopkeepers" as Churchill put it.
Actually, I believe that was Napoleon...
I think all the protagonist races of Tolkien's world were actually aspects of British society. So Hobbits are obvious: the idealised green-and-pleasant notion of England, a rose-tinted version of the Warwickshire in which Tolkien grew up. The Dúnedain are the imperial British: ancient and still immensely powerful but aware of their decline from past glory. Dwarves? Industrial society, all about mines and metals, the urban hobbits. Elves? Intellectuals. Academics like those Tolkien knew at Oxford, buried in lore of the vanishingly ancient past and completely detached from the troubles of the present.
And Orcs? One scarcely has to look far for those. The hooligan tendency is also nothing new.
I've also heard it said that Mordor was based on Birmingham. I think that's rather unfair, but I can see the ending in the Shire as an example of the thoughtless destruction that modernisation can wreak on a rural area. Such scenes were widespread across England in the early twentieth century.
For that matter could you imagine a troll with the bearing of a british gentleman?
Ever met a public-school rugby player?
Re:Horde IS supposed to be evil ?!?!?!
on
Stereotyping the Horde
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Ah the elves, who are the mentors and protectors of humans in celtic legends have been made into some 'snob' race.
Are we thinking about the same elves here? In Tolkien, sure. The Eldar were really good to the human tribes who first came to Beleriand in the First Age, taught them everything they could, gave them lands, the works.
But in Celtic mythology? I wouldn't go within ten miles of a real old-school Celtic elf even if I was wearing cold iron chainmail and carrying a rowan-wood quarterstaff. No bloody way.
Slashdot Mirror
Only on January 5th. Happy birthday Joshi.
Hey! Who are you, and how do you know what's on my hard drive?
That surprises me. I remember reading a few years ago that the second largest armsdealer in the world wasn't Russia and wasn't China, but was actually the UK. Not sure if that still holds - I imagine the market for Harriers isn't what it was, with next-generation planes coming quite soon - but the defence industry is still huge here. Taken together with the rest of the EU (some members of which ARE former Soviet states, btw), that should be an easy second place.
Possibly Russia ships more arms by volume, though. Every freedom fighter and soldier of fortune on the planet has a Kalashnikov, available cheaply and in vast numbers. The UK sells expensive top-end stuff, planes and monster tanks and those nifty rocket artillery things... smaller quantities, bigger money.
Hopefully, the US will back down. If not... this could turn out to be nasty. There've been a couple of trade wars with the US in recent years - recall the dispute over bananas, and then over steel - but this one would be a whole lot bigger. Banning flights? Brussels would retaliate hard.
Realistically, though, the US customs will just start demanding the information directly from the passenger on arrival, rather than getting it from the airline. It would be a big hassle, and would leave Europeans with an even worse impression of Americans than they already have, but at least it wouldn't spark off another trade war costing billions.
I'd already hit REPLY and begun mentally composing a piece of helpful advice regarding alternative firmware, when I noticed
(go rockbox!)
Yes. Yes indeed.
Yeah. Wii all wish that someone would come up with some completely new style of gaming that wii could try. But wii all know that if anyone did, wii would just take the piss out of the name. A pity, because wii would all have a great time otherwise.
Me? I'm waiting for a decent new 2d platformer to come out :D
Same here. Something like the old Super Mario Bros. games. But new. A new Super Mario Bros, if you will. Amazing how nobody's thought of that.
Um. You expected a government - a British government - to play fair? At war?
Excuse me... I have to go and laugh mockingly for a while.
In addition, it's really come to something when someone sympathising with a terrorist organisation complains that the enemy is playing dirty. That's just pure comedy.
Since even earlier. Remember the panic about Mortal Kombat? Or the epilepsy scare? Hell, the whole thing can probably be traced at least to the Dungeons & Dragons panic in the seventies and eighties.
Who told you that? If God is wrong, if God orders something you know to be evil, then you not only have the right but also the duty to challenge him. More to the point, if God's officially appointed spokesman on Earth is wrong - because for some reason he doesn't generally do public appearances, but issues statements via intermediaries - then you ought to challenge him.
To keep silence while a wrong is done because you feel you don't have the right to criticise the perpetrator... well, that just makes you complicit. It goes whether the perpetrator is a class bully, a judge, a president, or a priest. Or even a god.
Nah. They scanned Preacher and put _that_ onto DVD. Apparently focus groups said that mad monks from Opus Dei were all very well, but that the Saint of Killers just plain rocked.
That was an absolute bugger to pull off, though. An easier example is SMB3, world 3-9. Hit the Koopa at the beginning of the level, then carry it _fast_ to the place about halfway through where there are two cannons on the ground level and a platform above and between them. Throw the shell so that it bounces between the two cannons, and stand on the platform above so that both cannons fire inwards.
100. 200. 400. 800. 1000. 2000. 4000. 8000. 1UP. 1UP. 1UP. 1UP. 1UP...
Nine years old would still have been excessive even then. That's pre-pubescent.
And even so, your argument seems to be that we shouldn't judge Mohammed's actions by modern standards. Fair enough. But it's a poor counterargument when the world contains a billion or so people who seem quite insistent on judging the modern world by Mohammed's standards. Well, if Mohammed's standards are supposed to apply to us today, then I think the 'paedophile' charge stands and needs a better answer.
Time-shifted a hell of a long way, then... you're supposed to tape it, watch it at a later date and then tape over it with something else. Archiving it in your basement isn't really time-shifting. Unless you genuinely haven't quite got around to watching that stuff.
As for the sneakernet... yeah. I gave up on P2Ps a while back, too many broken files left by seven years of dropped connections. I carry around a 40G mp3 player (the good old iHP-140) and whenever I'm around a computer with a decent media collection I hook in and start trading. A USB2 connection beats hell out of any broadband ;-)
What is magic? Words and symbols of power that shape the world according to the will of the magician. The magician speaks the right magic words, and draws the right sigils, and obtains the desired effect.
Meanwhile, the INT 8 half-orc barbarian doesn't have the faintest idea what all the runes carved on his battleaxe actually do. He doesn't care. He knows the end result is a +1 to hit and that suits him just fine. Neither is the ranger concerned about exactly how these enchanted bracers improve his aim with a longbow; they just do. Only the wizard needs to worry about the details.
And what is programming? Words and symbols of power that shape the computer according to the will of the programmer. Type the right instructions, give the right command arguments, and obtain the desired effect.
Ever created an infinite loop? Had a recursive process go berserk on you? Made a small mistake while invoking rm -rf? Yeah. Pure 'Sorcerer's Apprentice'.
We are the nearest thing to magicians that has ever existed in reality. Our spells work and are truly powerful, our mistakes cause incomprehensible chaos, and when one of us turns bad then sometimes the whole world can suffer the consequences. No wonder the muggles treat our creations like they're the mysterious products of a magical power beyond their understanding: that's what they are.
The worst thing is that you really, really don't want to do that. Shooting randomly means you run out of ammo and your gun breaks down. There never was quite enough ammo in SS2 - how sadly different to the good old days on Citadel Station...
But yeah, I still do that. Stalking about the place, trying to conserve ammo as best I can... FUCK FUCK FUCK! PSI MONKEY! * blam blam blam blam blam blam blam KLIK *
The roll of a d20 is random, which means that combat is random, which means we can't predict who'll win a fight between a first-level bard and Asmodeus.
Spot on there. I go to gigs all right, but not huge ones. The superstar acts I see at festivals. Brian Wilson at Glastonbury last year, Green Day at Reading the year before just after we'd bottled 50 Cent off stage, Blur the year before that... It's the only way to do it.
Now, if you'll excuse me I'm beginning to suffer severe Glastonbury withdrawal symptoms. Only cure, to sit in a green space smoking something of questionable legality and drinking strawberry cider...
It's far, far easier for the government to bug all the phone lines (as they're currently doing, I might add) at a central point, and then plug in to someone's conversations at will. If you're using an encrypted phone, then Echelon / Carnivore / AT&T / Dubya's Latest Secret Illegal Wiretap can't listen in. The government have to break in to your house, take a screwdriver to your phone and physically bug the thing.
Can the government spy on everybody by bugging the telephone exchange? Yes, easily, and they're doing just that. Can the government spy on everybody by secretly bugging every last individual phone? No, it would be prohibitively expensive. Have the NSA burgle every single house individually and fiddle every single phone? Impossible.
Encrypting phone calls makes it enormously more expensive and difficult for the government to spy on you. That's got to be a good thing.
How do you go about that? Suppose I were to set up a small business reselling GPG or something similar. Does the government simply hand me a copy of the watch list and let me do the checking myself? Or must I pass along the names of all my customers to them for authorisation to sell it on?
You're kidding, right? Slashdot is pretty far right. Look at the discussion any time the question of trade unionism comes up. One can hardly call this a left-wing consensus. The number of Thatcherites and Ayn Rand fetishists here is amazing. You'd struggle to find someone on /. seriously favouring the nationalisation of all industry, mass organised labour and a really high (like say 90%) top rate of income tax. THAT would be left-wing.
If there's a political consensus on /., it's a very individualist one. We're hackers, solitary creatures uncomfortable with being interfered with by either governments or corporations. It's right-wing, but also anarchistic, what you might call libertarian.
Actually, in theory you could, but it would be rather slow. Just encode your text into, say... puffs and not-puffs using ASCII, or into little-puffs and big-puffs using Morse.
David Tennant (cf: Blackpool, Casanova) is the new Doctor, and he's already signed up for another year. Shows no signs of leaving, and is apparently a fan of the show from way back... I imagine we'll get a fair bit of mileage out of the Tenth Doctor.
Actually, I believe that was Napoleon...
I think all the protagonist races of Tolkien's world were actually aspects of British society. So Hobbits are obvious: the idealised green-and-pleasant notion of England, a rose-tinted version of the Warwickshire in which Tolkien grew up. The Dúnedain are the imperial British: ancient and still immensely powerful but aware of their decline from past glory. Dwarves? Industrial society, all about mines and metals, the urban hobbits. Elves? Intellectuals. Academics like those Tolkien knew at Oxford, buried in lore of the vanishingly ancient past and completely detached from the troubles of the present.
And Orcs? One scarcely has to look far for those. The hooligan tendency is also nothing new.
I've also heard it said that Mordor was based on Birmingham. I think that's rather unfair, but I can see the ending in the Shire as an example of the thoughtless destruction that modernisation can wreak on a rural area. Such scenes were widespread across England in the early twentieth century.
Ever met a public-school rugby player?
Are we thinking about the same elves here? In Tolkien, sure. The Eldar were really good to the human tribes who first came to Beleriand in the First Age, taught them everything they could, gave them lands, the works.
But in Celtic mythology? I wouldn't go within ten miles of a real old-school Celtic elf even if I was wearing cold iron chainmail and carrying a rowan-wood quarterstaff. No bloody way.