Sad children
Fight scene
Particle effects
Explosions
Fight scene
Big monsters
Fight scene
Lots of special moves etc
Motorcycle
Fight Scene
Seriously. I'm a big fan of the FF series (got all of them except the GB ones... but including FF2/NES), but I was extremely disappointed with FF-AC. Plot-wise, I think that even "Spirits Within" was a little better. How about a real non-mangled movie-adaptation of one of the original RPG's... without plot-mangling or fanboy-precedence to large anime boobies and fight-scenes? FFVI had a wonderful plot. I'm replaying FFX with a friend and frankly the voice-acting (for most characters) and the believability of the characters is definitely movie-worthy (the whole "who's undead" thing was a fun twist). Yes, you could definately cut out some of the extraneous crap and the extra Seymour battles, but a lot of the rest would be good cinema material.
Much better than a cellphone with final-fantasy ringtones, and a few cheap summon effects that were really no better than in the games themselves...
I think that the wording on the story is a bit confusing. While it seems they are talking about previews (short snippets of the movie release to entice watchers, aka "trailers"), they are more likely referring to pre-releases (full releases to certain entities to generate hype - although often with identifying marks or distortions - before the official movies hit the theatres etc).
This works fine if you're getting faxes to your voice-line, but if you're getting junk-faxes to your business-fax line, then it's going to disconnect legit callers as well as fax-spammers
What if somebody managed to mail a bomb from AU to USA, without it getting caught at customs. Now let's say the bomb worked properly, and blew up a citizen in the US.
In which country would the bomber most likely be tried?
As has been mentioned earlier in various comments, the action at hand is illegal in both countries... I'm not sure why it warrants extradition to the USA when a trial in Australia would be perfectly valid. Is there a precedent for this under other crimes committed from one country to another?
A little of both might be nice. People are literally dying in waits for surgeries etc in Canada, with those that can afford it going to the US for expensive but potentially life-saving operations.
The big problem up here would be allowing for a two-tiered system without all the doctors etc jumping ship to the more lucrative private-funded clinics etc
I don't hear quite so many people around here bitching about the "copyright" system as I do about the broken "patent" system. While in some ways the two are similar, they are different systems.
Yup, Canadian. I've been trying to find the exact definition of "rape" under Canadian law (as to whether penetration must be involved), but no luck as of yet. I wonder if one could argue that it is still rape because penetration occurred against the will of the male.
This is one of the reasons I'm careful about the company I keep, where I sleep, and what I consume in mixed company. Women today seem much more aggressive than days past.
As a man, I have found that at my current age (26) I am constantly running into women who are more sexually aggressive than I am comfortable with. These women, within days or even hours of knowing me, have gone quickly from a friendly (non-sexual) conversation to jumping on my laptop and grinding, or attempting to undress me. In some cases I have pretty much had to push/throw these women off of me. If I were ever to be inebriated to the state of unconsciousness (never happened, never plan to have it happen, but possible under unexpected circumstances), or slipped a drug, I know I would feel emotionally damaged if a woman were to perform sexual acts upon me without my permission.
Part of this is just the issue of violation. It doesn't matter if the woman is attractive physically, as I do not find being sexual forced attractive. There is also the issue of disease and/or other related issues. You can get herpes or other nasties from oral sexual. You can get worse things from standard sex. That means half a year or more of wondering/worrying whether you have been infected, as a woman who is willing to act in such a way is likely also reckless in her exposure to such nasties. On top of this are many other issues, reputation (I'm assuming it wasn't exactly the man's relationship-proper), feeling of personal-control, and for a man... the sense of being "manly" could be very damage by this, compounded on the damage to one's personal security.
So yes, the physical damage is less than if one is penetrated. However, penetration does not always necessitate a painful experience so much as an emotionally damaging one.
Is it rape? Damn straight it is. While the letter of the law comes from a book, this is why we have a court system to deal with cases and interpret intent of laws in addition to "the letter."
I think that these sort of cases border very strongly on entrapment. By bordering, I mean that if the person has already gone to the trouble of cybering a (to them) 12-year-old, often replete with webcam pictures and/or nasty photos, it might not quite cross that very thin line. This would mean that the officer misrepresented his/her identity, however if they have not acted lasciviously or asked for nude photos, then the actual point at which the perp arrives is just the pick-up and crime(s) have already been committed. However, I believe that the chances are in favour that somewhere in there the officer crossed the line into enticement/entrapment.
As far as the underage person not actually existing, well it's still a crime to fully plan out a murder, it doesn't depend on successful execution, and you don't have to actually get to the point of killing somebody before they can stop and arrest you. Sometimes these cases too get muddled, but it's the same concept.Many people might lead this into thought-crime, but as soon as you start putting the idea "out there" it's no longer a thought but a plan. The real hard part comes on discrimination between an off-remark like "somebody should toss him off the bridge in concrete boots" VS actually planning to pick somebody up and attach them weighted on the bottom of a lake
To throw a similar-context analogy, if somebody plants a bomb that doesn't work (or the parts turn out to be fake), then that person is still guilty of having tried to commit the act as to his knowledge he was going to blow something up, knowingly committing an illegal act. By the same count, the people in question are in their own minds are in fact committing an illegal act, it's only circumstances beyond their knowledge that prevented it... not much different from pulling the trigger on somebody without realizing the gun was out-of-ammo.
Again, the big line is what crosses into entrapment, and whether authorities have in their own actions encourage the illegal act. Entrapment at times often seems to be a case of "were the authorities aiding and abetting"... and would the crime or a similar crime ever have occurred without their involvement.
Now in this case, it's not an issue of entrapment but rather more one of intent and damage done. Would a reasonable person have suffered harm in this event, and does it equate to a similar crime in the physical world. In this case, no, as virtual rape is in no way a comparable violation to real rape. Depending on how often it happens, the real-world equivalent law might fall more under harassment or stalking (if the player persisted in attempting to engage the "victim" despite obvious unwillingness).
While the parent indicates that you can download an exact copy of the song/movie, in many/most cases this is not quite true. What you do get is an exact copy of the re-encoded form of the media, which is usually at least to some extent a "lossy" re-encoding. This means that for music - unless you're able to download a full CD ISO image (or a flac, etc)- you are getting an mp3 that isn't quite the quality of the original song-on-disc, but the difference isn't noticeable to everyone. Audiophiles are still likely to buy CD's, but many others settle for the lower-quality mp3's. I am one of those people that does notice a quality improvement when listening to an original disc, but at the same time I often prefer the convenience of having a DVD of mp3's in my car (in my case, legally ripped from originals) rather than a whackload of CD's waiting to be stolen.
The same thing applies to movies. For DVD's, the encoding actually has some loss as it is (MPEG-2), and re-encoding doesn't really help things. If you're willing to download an 8GB image and burn to a dual-layer disc you can reproduce the original, but given the cost of dual-layer media it's not really worth it. Again though, the purists - if they want to best copy available - will buy a disc.
For theatre cams, there is a more noticeable loss of audio/video quality, but this is going down as the quality of cameras improve and the number of rips-from-masters goes up as well.
It is only the initial rip that does lose quality though, unless you are re-encoding or re-mastering for some reason (maybe to convert to a format that's friendly on your local NTSC/PAL DVD player). So that means that the parent is still correct in that "copies of the copy" remain digitally identical.
I think that if the MPAA/RIAA *really* wanted to make an impact, the best way for them to go would be to embrace the digital media, and offer cheap but low quality copies. For a small price, you can get a lo-fi Mp3 that lets you know what a song sounds like, or a low-resolution lesser-framerate version of a movie. Of course, this means they will also have to try harder to not market worthless crap, but for good movies the el-cheapo versions would probably do quite well in sales while at the same time pushing people towards buying the higher quality CD/DVD/etc version.
Only the makers of large-sized spoons should be held accountable for epidemic of obesity. After all, if fat people had really teeny spoons, not only would be be only able to eat very small quantities of food at a time (thus requiring much more 'scooping,' which is exercise), but extremely obese people will be unable to properly hold the teeny spoons, resulting in them being completely unable to use the spoon for gluttonous consumption of fattening foods.
Not at all, I'm saying that they receive just as much bullying - albeit for different reasons - as many other groups. There is no reason to narrow the focus on orientation-specific bullying when bullying at large still represents a major problem.
Interesting idea. I wonder how much leakage would occur with a transatlantic power line though. Not to mention what happens if you have several GV travelling through a line that breaks.
Still, greater minds than mine might figure out a solution.
Even if we come up with some super-efficient way to transfer solar energy into useful electricity, there is one barrier that will remain:
How do we store it?
It seems to me that we will need both a new source of energy and a way to harvest/store it. Current oil/gasoline, as a liquid or vapor, is both. That means that it works fairly independent of outside factors with the exemption of operating-temperature limitations.
With solar energy, we need it to be available not just on the nice sunny days, but the nights, and the cloudy not-so-sunny days too. In countries like Canada or other places that see a fair bit of snow, we'll need ways to properly keep the collectors unobscured (such as heated solar panels) in order to keep the snow off, and ways to clean them when they get dirty.
We're making lots of interesting progress, but there's a whole, huge industry out there if the big push away from fossil-fuels ends up with solar as a primary replacement. Some people have mentioned the oil companies being involved, but my thoughts are that they can find plenty of ways to make money in the new industry. In fact, many of the oil-producing nations would also be prime areas for solar-collection, so they might do just fine in such a new market.
Not likely. At the very least with consoles you end up with - in a given period of time - 2 or 3 unique combinations of hardware/software to base games on.
With a PC, you have:
Variable hardware: Everything from CPU to RAM to graphics card... and trust me there's a lot of difference between an Intel i810 onboard and a newer Nvidia/ATI card
Variable operating system: Windows tends to be predominant, but at the moment even that is fractured (XP or Vista), with other possibilities including MacOS or Linux
Variable interface: DirectX or OpenGL? This can tie into what hardware you use as well
A PC is built to be multi-functional. While it may follow "standards" it's about as far from a standard - particularly for gaming - as anything can be.
It seems that while ATI is improving in the driver-arena, NVidia is falling into the hole that previously had a lot of people switching over to them.
It used to be that ATI made powerful cards, but the drivers were crap so you couldn't fully utilize them, or at least not reliably. Nowadays it seems ATI is putting forth a decent effort to getting their cards working with Vista, and decent XP drivers as well. Heck, even the ATI linux driver works quite nicely on my laptop after I tweaked with it a bit.
Nvidia is going to fall victim to the situation which contributed to their rise, and people *will* be switching over to ATI unless they get things straightened out, and soon!
I think it's also a matter of degree. People who constantly use mooshy pet-names, whether gay or straight, can be annoying. People heavily sucking face in public, annoying. A couple holding hands together never really bothered me, regardless of their orientation.
What really bugs me goes beyond PDA though, it's when you get to have a parade, with people wearing nothing but chains, with a giant phallic balloon that squirts. I'm fairly sure it wouldn't be acceptable for straight people, so why is it for straight people.
Around here, the local Gay & Lesbian society of the city of Kelowna petitioned to have funding for a parade. The answer they got back was fairly reasonable and straightforward: such an event would only promote the interests of a minority, and thus should be privately funded and not use taxpayer dollars. They weren't denied the right to the parade, just to fund it from public purse-strings. However, it went to litigation, and from my understanding the city was basically forced to fund the event.
This happens a lot with minority groups or events, because many of these groups have a vocal element which tends to have a persecution complex. I've seen it on slashdot, for example here where a slashdotter indicates that victims of orientation-based bullying should get a special precedence.
Again, this is just the current example, there are plenty of other situations. One of my best friends has a cousin who complained loudly of discrimination. He claimed that he had problems finding work and was looked down on because he was Native (which, locally, is somewhat the equivalent at times to being a person of colour in the US). As my friend pointed out to him: "dude, you look as white as me, and the only reason anyone knows you're native is because you bring it up all the time. And people don't like you because you start fights and steal cars"
The point is that the grandparent it right, to an extent. Many people don't have a problem with group X. They do end up having a problem when group X pushes their own agenda into everyone else's face, or when it colours your point of view on every issue. I have friends who are native. Some aspects of their lives are coloured by their culture, and I can respect that. I have friends/relatives that are gay, and again I have respect for how it affects their lifestyles in both positive and negative ways. I don't mind at all being involved the activities of said groups, but I would if they started pushing it upon me. The problem is when the person becomes the category, and assume they must live their lives thus.
I think it's much better to - if you have the opportunity - live life in a sane and normal manner. This means that you don't need to shout from the rooftops, unless a major issue is at hand. It also means that you can reasonably advocate your position. Some people have to spend every minute shoving their lifestyle in everyone else's face, when we are just trying to live our own, which in the end lessens your cause rather than furthers it. So by keeping things down at the level of "advocate" or "spokesperson" rather than "zealot", perhaps everyone can show a bit more tolerance.
Oh, and for the record, there are cases when an uprising is warranted. Rodney King, being fired based on orientation, and many others, but these are specific times and events.
Credit is a tool. Unfortunately it tends to in most cases carry a form of debt, but the big trick is managing it.
My car is paid off. My credit cards I use purely because I can accumulate travel points (paid off in full bi-weekly). My house has a mortgage, because - given both the current and rising market costs - there is no way I could possibly afford to save up money for a house in the next 5-10 years while also paying the (rising) cost of rent.
I'm paying slightly more for the mortgage, but the fact is that in owning a house, if I really wanted to I could sell after my 5-year term and have cash coming back. With rent it's simply gone with no returns. The mortgage is within my realm of affordability, and on accelerated payment. I will of course end up paying back more than I borrowed, but things aren't too bad.
Given that I have a roomate, I'm paying about $6900/year into a mortgage, vs $5400 rent on my previous place (which judging from the rates nowadays, would definitely be more now). In the initial years I'll hardly be denting the mortgage, I figured about five years before things start rolling. After that point I'm chipping at a bit more mortgage and a little less interest, and in the end I have a house instead of... rent.
Nowadays, unless you have an alternate source of money, singular individuals will find it hard to avoid some form of rent. Yes, the banks will get richer, but in some cases it's better to accept some debt for an appreciable asset over time.
What pisses me off is that I make maybe 10-20% more than my old man did at my age, but the cost of real-estate is up by something like 300% or more locally (and more in most appreciable-sized cities)
I was thinking that instead of a card, it would be neat to have a little USB device that could receive an encoded package from the payment website, decrypt it, and then display said code on a small LCD. The user enters the code, and proceeds with the transaction.
That way you have a code unique to the user (or at least the USB device) and verification in return that the owner has access to the device.
It actually has quite nice quality/features for a cheap camera: metal body, LED's that turn on in low-light, and the picture quality is actually quite nice. I recently started using it again and just went through the process of digging up drivers that would compile against my newer kernel.
One point of confusion is between the article's GSPCA/spca50x drivers, and the SPCA50X drivers on SF.net
The latter I had run into first, but it won't compile against my newer 2.6 kernel. Luckily, I was able to find the mxhaard drivers, which worked nicely, and get the thing going after a little while.
All said, big Kudos to Michel for gifting us all with well-working cheap webcams!
Well, some major factors are temperature and sunlight (which can often be related). See temperature for Western Canada, Eastern Canada, and England
For the lazy, your average yearly temperatures, shown against January (winter lows) and August (summer highs) are:
W-Canada:3.6 c (-10.0/16.4)
E-Canada:7.3 c (-6.4/20.7)
England: 9.6 c (3.8/16.5)
Canada has a higher temperature spread, and definitely gets colder in the winter. This means more air-conditioning in the summer, and more heating in winter (which may be gas or electric, but I know that my power bills go up just due to running the fans on the heaters in winter).
You can also throw that together with population density. Driving in Canada Vs most other countries quickly shows in many cases that there is a lot of distance between urban centres. This means more consumption of gas, and more consumption of all sorts of other things in terms of maintaining the road, lighting distant stretches of highway, and getting power/gas/etc to remote areas (remember, power lines do suffer loss over distance).
I'm not at all surprised that Canada would use more power than the UK. There's a much lower temperature in winter, higher temperature-spread overall (between summer and winter) and a huge amount of distance to travel. Do those power calculations factor in line-loss? That could be a big factor in itself. Whatever you might say population-wise, Canada is a big country, and to make our resources travel the distance costs resources to do so...
Ten of these solar plants would cost $3Billion dollars, which, depending upon which figures you use, would result in 1-3GW of new nuclear plant capacity
Slashdot Mirror
Sad children
Fight scene
Particle effects
Explosions
Fight scene
Big monsters
Fight scene
Lots of special moves etc
Motorcycle
Fight Scene
Seriously. I'm a big fan of the FF series (got all of them except the GB ones... but including FF2/NES), but I was extremely disappointed with FF-AC. Plot-wise, I think that even "Spirits Within" was a little better. How about a real non-mangled movie-adaptation of one of the original RPG's... without plot-mangling or fanboy-precedence to large anime boobies and fight-scenes? FFVI had a wonderful plot. I'm replaying FFX with a friend and frankly the voice-acting (for most characters) and the believability of the characters is definitely movie-worthy (the whole "who's undead" thing was a fun twist). Yes, you could definately cut out some of the extraneous crap and the extra Seymour battles, but a lot of the rest would be good cinema material.
Much better than a cellphone with final-fantasy ringtones, and a few cheap summon effects that were really no better than in the games themselves...
Doesn't the DMCA deal with circumvention of digital protections though? What's protected about a fake ID here?
I think that the wording on the story is a bit confusing. While it seems they are talking about previews (short snippets of the movie release to entice watchers, aka "trailers"), they are more likely referring to pre-releases (full releases to certain entities to generate hype - although often with identifying marks or distortions - before the official movies hit the theatres etc).
This works fine if you're getting faxes to your voice-line, but if you're getting junk-faxes to your business-fax line, then it's going to disconnect legit callers as well as fax-spammers
What if somebody managed to mail a bomb from AU to USA, without it getting caught at customs. Now let's say the bomb worked properly, and blew up a citizen in the US.
In which country would the bomber most likely be tried?
As has been mentioned earlier in various comments, the action at hand is illegal in both countries... I'm not sure why it warrants extradition to the USA when a trial in Australia would be perfectly valid. Is there a precedent for this under other crimes committed from one country to another?
A little of both might be nice. People are literally dying in waits for surgeries etc in Canada, with those that can afford it going to the US for expensive but potentially life-saving operations.
The big problem up here would be allowing for a two-tiered system without all the doctors etc jumping ship to the more lucrative private-funded clinics etc
I don't hear quite so many people around here bitching about the "copyright" system as I do about the broken "patent" system. While in some ways the two are similar, they are different systems.
Yup, Canadian. I've been trying to find the exact definition of "rape" under Canadian law (as to whether penetration must be involved), but no luck as of yet. I wonder if one could argue that it is still rape because penetration occurred against the will of the male.
This is one of the reasons I'm careful about the company I keep, where I sleep, and what I consume in mixed company. Women today seem much more aggressive than days past.
As a man, I have found that at my current age (26) I am constantly running into women who are more sexually aggressive than I am comfortable with. These women, within days or even hours of knowing me, have gone quickly from a friendly (non-sexual) conversation to jumping on my laptop and grinding, or attempting to undress me. In some cases I have pretty much had to push/throw these women off of me. If I were ever to be inebriated to the state of unconsciousness (never happened, never plan to have it happen, but possible under unexpected circumstances), or slipped a drug, I know I would feel emotionally damaged if a woman were to perform sexual acts upon me without my permission.
Part of this is just the issue of violation. It doesn't matter if the woman is attractive physically, as I do not find being sexual forced attractive. There is also the issue of disease and/or other related issues. You can get herpes or other nasties from oral sexual. You can get worse things from standard sex. That means half a year or more of wondering/worrying whether you have been infected, as a woman who is willing to act in such a way is likely also reckless in her exposure to such nasties. On top of this are many other issues, reputation (I'm assuming it wasn't exactly the man's relationship-proper), feeling of personal-control, and for a man... the sense of being "manly" could be very damage by this, compounded on the damage to one's personal security.
So yes, the physical damage is less than if one is penetrated. However, penetration does not always necessitate a painful experience so much as an emotionally damaging one.
Is it rape? Damn straight it is. While the letter of the law comes from a book, this is why we have a court system to deal with cases and interpret intent of laws in addition to "the letter."
I think that these sort of cases border very strongly on entrapment. By bordering, I mean that if the person has already gone to the trouble of cybering a (to them) 12-year-old, often replete with webcam pictures and/or nasty photos, it might not quite cross that very thin line. This would mean that the officer misrepresented his/her identity, however if they have not acted lasciviously or asked for nude photos, then the actual point at which the perp arrives is just the pick-up and crime(s) have already been committed. However, I believe that the chances are in favour that somewhere in there the officer crossed the line into enticement/entrapment.
As far as the underage person not actually existing, well it's still a crime to fully plan out a murder, it doesn't depend on successful execution, and you don't have to actually get to the point of killing somebody before they can stop and arrest you. Sometimes these cases too get muddled, but it's the same concept.Many people might lead this into thought-crime, but as soon as you start putting the idea "out there" it's no longer a thought but a plan. The real hard part comes on discrimination between an off-remark like "somebody should toss him off the bridge in concrete boots" VS actually planning to pick somebody up and attach them weighted on the bottom of a lake
To throw a similar-context analogy, if somebody plants a bomb that doesn't work (or the parts turn out to be fake), then that person is still guilty of having tried to commit the act as to his knowledge he was going to blow something up, knowingly committing an illegal act. By the same count, the people in question are in their own minds are in fact committing an illegal act, it's only circumstances beyond their knowledge that prevented it... not much different from pulling the trigger on somebody without realizing the gun was out-of-ammo.
Again, the big line is what crosses into entrapment, and whether authorities have in their own actions encourage the illegal act. Entrapment at times often seems to be a case of "were the authorities aiding and abetting"... and would the crime or a similar crime ever have occurred without their involvement.
Now in this case, it's not an issue of entrapment but rather more one of intent and damage done. Would a reasonable person have suffered harm in this event, and does it equate to a similar crime in the physical world. In this case, no, as virtual rape is in no way a comparable violation to real rape. Depending on how often it happens, the real-world equivalent law might fall more under harassment or stalking (if the player persisted in attempting to engage the "victim" despite obvious unwillingness).
While the parent indicates that you can download an exact copy of the song/movie, in many/most cases this is not quite true. What you do get is an exact copy of the re-encoded form of the media, which is usually at least to some extent a "lossy" re-encoding. This means that for music - unless you're able to download a full CD ISO image (or a flac, etc)- you are getting an mp3 that isn't quite the quality of the original song-on-disc, but the difference isn't noticeable to everyone. Audiophiles are still likely to buy CD's, but many others settle for the lower-quality mp3's. I am one of those people that does notice a quality improvement when listening to an original disc, but at the same time I often prefer the convenience of having a DVD of mp3's in my car (in my case, legally ripped from originals) rather than a whackload of CD's waiting to be stolen.
The same thing applies to movies. For DVD's, the encoding actually has some loss as it is (MPEG-2), and re-encoding doesn't really help things. If you're willing to download an 8GB image and burn to a dual-layer disc you can reproduce the original, but given the cost of dual-layer media it's not really worth it. Again though, the purists - if they want to best copy available - will buy a disc.
For theatre cams, there is a more noticeable loss of audio/video quality, but this is going down as the quality of cameras improve and the number of rips-from-masters goes up as well.
It is only the initial rip that does lose quality though, unless you are re-encoding or re-mastering for some reason (maybe to convert to a format that's friendly on your local NTSC/PAL DVD player). So that means that the parent is still correct in that "copies of the copy" remain digitally identical.
I think that if the MPAA/RIAA *really* wanted to make an impact, the best way for them to go would be to embrace the digital media, and offer cheap but low quality copies. For a small price, you can get a lo-fi Mp3 that lets you know what a song sounds like, or a low-resolution lesser-framerate version of a movie. Of course, this means they will also have to try harder to not market worthless crap, but for good movies the el-cheapo versions would probably do quite well in sales while at the same time pushing people towards buying the higher quality CD/DVD/etc version.
Only the makers of large-sized spoons should be held accountable for epidemic of obesity. After all, if fat people had really teeny spoons, not only would be be only able to eat very small quantities of food at a time (thus requiring much more 'scooping,' which is exercise), but extremely obese people will be unable to properly hold the teeny spoons, resulting in them being completely unable to use the spoon for gluttonous consumption of fattening foods.
Not at all, I'm saying that they receive just as much bullying - albeit for different reasons - as many other groups. There is no reason to narrow the focus on orientation-specific bullying when bullying at large still represents a major problem.
Interesting idea. I wonder how much leakage would occur with a transatlantic power line though. Not to mention what happens if you have several GV travelling through a line that breaks.
Still, greater minds than mine might figure out a solution.
Even if we come up with some super-efficient way to transfer solar energy into useful electricity, there is one barrier that will remain:
How do we store it?
It seems to me that we will need both a new source of energy and a way to harvest/store it. Current oil/gasoline, as a liquid or vapor, is both. That means that it works fairly independent of outside factors with the exemption of operating-temperature limitations.
With solar energy, we need it to be available not just on the nice sunny days, but the nights, and the cloudy not-so-sunny days too. In countries like Canada or other places that see a fair bit of snow, we'll need ways to properly keep the collectors unobscured (such as heated solar panels) in order to keep the snow off, and ways to clean them when they get dirty.
We're making lots of interesting progress, but there's a whole, huge industry out there if the big push away from fossil-fuels ends up with solar as a primary replacement. Some people have mentioned the oil companies being involved, but my thoughts are that they can find plenty of ways to make money in the new industry. In fact, many of the oil-producing nations would also be prime areas for solar-collection, so they might do just fine in such a new market.
I guess it depends on the card. On mine is has issues running GL screensavers in windows, but the acceleration works better in linux :-)
Not likely. At the very least with consoles you end up with - in a given period of time - 2 or 3 unique combinations of hardware/software to base games on.
With a PC, you have:
Variable hardware: Everything from CPU to RAM to graphics card... and trust me there's a lot of difference between an Intel i810 onboard and a newer Nvidia/ATI card
Variable operating system: Windows tends to be predominant, but at the moment even that is fractured (XP or Vista), with other possibilities including MacOS or Linux
Variable interface: DirectX or OpenGL? This can tie into what hardware you use as well
A PC is built to be multi-functional. While it may follow "standards" it's about as far from a standard - particularly for gaming - as anything can be.
It seems that while ATI is improving in the driver-arena, NVidia is falling into the hole that previously had a lot of people switching over to them.
It used to be that ATI made powerful cards, but the drivers were crap so you couldn't fully utilize them, or at least not reliably. Nowadays it seems ATI is putting forth a decent effort to getting their cards working with Vista, and decent XP drivers as well. Heck, even the ATI linux driver works quite nicely on my laptop after I tweaked with it a bit.
Nvidia is going to fall victim to the situation which contributed to their rise, and people *will* be switching over to ATI unless they get things straightened out, and soon!
I think it's also a matter of degree. People who constantly use mooshy pet-names, whether gay or straight, can be annoying. People heavily sucking face in public, annoying. A couple holding hands together never really bothered me, regardless of their orientation.
What really bugs me goes beyond PDA though, it's when you get to have a parade, with people wearing nothing but chains, with a giant phallic balloon that squirts. I'm fairly sure it wouldn't be acceptable for straight people, so why is it for straight people.
Around here, the local Gay & Lesbian society of the city of Kelowna petitioned to have funding for a parade. The answer they got back was fairly reasonable and straightforward: such an event would only promote the interests of a minority, and thus should be privately funded and not use taxpayer dollars. They weren't denied the right to the parade, just to fund it from public purse-strings. However, it went to litigation, and from my understanding the city was basically forced to fund the event.
This happens a lot with minority groups or events, because many of these groups have a vocal element which tends to have a persecution complex. I've seen it on slashdot, for example here where a slashdotter indicates that victims of orientation-based bullying should get a special precedence.
Again, this is just the current example, there are plenty of other situations. One of my best friends has a cousin who complained loudly of discrimination. He claimed that he had problems finding work and was looked down on because he was Native (which, locally, is somewhat the equivalent at times to being a person of colour in the US). As my friend pointed out to him: "dude, you look as white as me, and the only reason anyone knows you're native is because you bring it up all the time. And people don't like you because you start fights and steal cars"
The point is that the grandparent it right, to an extent. Many people don't have a problem with group X. They do end up having a problem when group X pushes their own agenda into everyone else's face, or when it colours your point of view on every issue. I have friends who are native. Some aspects of their lives are coloured by their culture, and I can respect that. I have friends/relatives that are gay, and again I have respect for how it affects their lifestyles in both positive and negative ways. I don't mind at all being involved the activities of said groups, but I would if they started pushing it upon me. The problem is when the person becomes the category, and assume they must live their lives thus.
I think it's much better to - if you have the opportunity - live life in a sane and normal manner. This means that you don't need to shout from the rooftops, unless a major issue is at hand. It also means that you can reasonably advocate your position. Some people have to spend every minute shoving their lifestyle in everyone else's face, when we are just trying to live our own, which in the end lessens your cause rather than furthers it. So by keeping things down at the level of "advocate" or "spokesperson" rather than "zealot", perhaps everyone can show a bit more tolerance.
Oh, and for the record, there are cases when an uprising is warranted. Rodney King, being fired based on orientation, and many others, but these are specific times and events.
I dunno, sometimes it takes a bigger man to finally throw in an say "I screwed up and people are pissed", then set things rights.
If only the government would take this attitude more often.
Credit is a tool. Unfortunately it tends to in most cases carry a form of debt, but the big trick is managing it.
My car is paid off. My credit cards I use purely because I can accumulate travel points (paid off in full bi-weekly). My house has a mortgage, because - given both the current and rising market costs - there is no way I could possibly afford to save up money for a house in the next 5-10 years while also paying the (rising) cost of rent.
I'm paying slightly more for the mortgage, but the fact is that in owning a house, if I really wanted to I could sell after my 5-year term and have cash coming back. With rent it's simply gone with no returns. The mortgage is within my realm of affordability, and on accelerated payment. I will of course end up paying back more than I borrowed, but things aren't too bad.
Given that I have a roomate, I'm paying about $6900/year into a mortgage, vs $5400 rent on my previous place (which judging from the rates nowadays, would definitely be more now). In the initial years I'll hardly be denting the mortgage, I figured about five years before things start rolling. After that point I'm chipping at a bit more mortgage and a little less interest, and in the end I have a house instead of... rent.
Nowadays, unless you have an alternate source of money, singular individuals will find it hard to avoid some form of rent. Yes, the banks will get richer, but in some cases it's better to accept some debt for an appreciable asset over time.
What pisses me off is that I make maybe 10-20% more than my old man did at my age, but the cost of real-estate is up by something like 300% or more locally (and more in most appreciable-sized cities)
I was thinking that instead of a card, it would be neat to have a little USB device that could receive an encoded package from the payment website, decrypt it, and then display said code on a small LCD. The user enters the code, and proceeds with the transaction.
That way you have a code unique to the user (or at least the USB device) and verification in return that the owner has access to the device.
It actually has quite nice quality/features for a cheap camera: metal body, LED's that turn on in low-light, and the picture quality is actually quite nice. I recently started using it again and just went through the process of digging up drivers that would compile against my newer kernel.
One point of confusion is between the article's GSPCA/spca50x drivers, and the SPCA50X drivers on SF.net
The latter I had run into first, but it won't compile against my newer 2.6 kernel. Luckily, I was able to find the mxhaard drivers, which worked nicely, and get the thing going after a little while.
All said, big Kudos to Michel for gifting us all with well-working cheap webcams!
Well, some major factors are temperature and sunlight (which can often be related). See temperature for Western Canada, Eastern Canada, and England
For the lazy, your average yearly temperatures, shown against January (winter lows) and August (summer highs) are:
W-Canada:3.6 c (-10.0/16.4)
E-Canada:7.3 c (-6.4/20.7)
England: 9.6 c (3.8/16.5)
Canada has a higher temperature spread, and definitely gets colder in the winter. This means more air-conditioning in the summer, and more heating in winter (which may be gas or electric, but I know that my power bills go up just due to running the fans on the heaters in winter).
You can also throw that together with population density. Driving in Canada Vs most other countries quickly shows in many cases that there is a lot of distance between urban centres. This means more consumption of gas, and more consumption of all sorts of other things in terms of maintaining the road, lighting distant stretches of highway, and getting power/gas/etc to remote areas (remember, power lines do suffer loss over distance).
I'm not at all surprised that Canada would use more power than the UK. There's a much lower temperature in winter, higher temperature-spread overall (between summer and winter) and a huge amount of distance to travel. Do those power calculations factor in line-loss? That could be a big factor in itself. Whatever you might say population-wise, Canada is a big country, and to make our resources travel the distance costs resources to do so...
Ten of these solar plants would cost $3Billion dollars, which, depending upon which figures you use, would result in 1-3GW of new nuclear plant capacity
This seems off to me. Doesn't 1G=1000M?
So 40MW * 10=400MW
400MW / (1GW/1000MW) = 0.4GW, not even a gigawatt