Its head is shaped like a vacuum cleaners nozzle, but the article also states that it grazed like a cow. Cows don't vacuum (more the other way around) and nowhere in the article is there any suggestion that it vacuums except in sentences that seem to be written by a journalist, not a scientist.
If the animal did hover up its food it would need some way to create a large enough vacuum. Some fish do it, by suddenly expanding their mouth so that water, and hopefully ffood is sucked in to the "new" space. But that is a lot easier then to do the same thing with air. Just check the amount of power needed to vacuum up even an ant.
Unless the animal has some radicial new systems the only way for it to create a vacuum would be to expand its body to take in air. Doable,and if you are a large animal the amount of suction would be impressive but, well why?
If it grazed it meant it ate plants, you can't vacuum up plants because they are attached to their roots. Once you cut of the grass with your mouth, you no longer need to suck it up.
About the only thing I could see it being used for is to suck up small animals, like say sucking up ants. Still, I think that animal would also be sucking up a lot of dirt.
Frankly I think this is just bad journalism, the scientist said its mouth looks like a vacuum cleaner nozzle and the journalist turned that into the critter vacuums up its food.
First off, some people need to RTFA, he is NOT talking about himself, but about new bands who dream of success who he claims will not be able to do it (or at least not the way he defines success, getting really rich of your image).
So?
Times change. Once you had far more theathers and far more places where plays could be held. Then the movie theather arrived and put countless performers out of business. Were once a musician was playing in bar now there is a sound installation. Where once there was an entertainer, now there is a big screen TV.
Movie theathers too took a hit with the arrival of television. Live tv broadcasts took a hit when VCR's arrived and even more with DVR.
Coal mines are gone in holland, because we discovered a gas field and bam, lots of people unemployed. Daf cars (trucks still exists) is gone and again, people out of a job because less and less people are needed to make cars and there are countries that can do it cheaper.
IT is being outsourced as are call center jobs.
The next generations job prospects are going to be different then today's.
In a way, he says that himself, no band has managed to overtake KISS in merchandising. HE himself killed the dream off new bands in becoming the next kiss because he refuses to step aside. Shame on him.
Lets say that not a single musician can make money anymore. Unlikely but lets assume it for a second, not a single person can make a single penny creating music. So?
Where is it written that you should be able too? I am by training a baker, I am fairly good at it, (but not exceptionally so) and I left the business because it is a dead end. People buy their bakery goods from the factory and opening a new bakery shop is far to expensive and legally impossible. Zoning restrictions, a bakery works at night and produces noise and smells while by its nature it has to be in a residential area. That don't mix no more. The hygience laws have become so strict that it costs a fortune to fit out a new building and the costs (and shortage) of skilled labourers, plus the restrictions of what they are allowed to do means you need a massive amount of very expensive equipment, which because the demand for small scale equipment has plummeted is increasingly expensive.
In short, society has killed the small baker shop. Of the people in my entire school only a handfull are still in the trade, a most of them because they inheritied the business from their parents.
Do I see Gene Simmons give a shit about that? No. Why then should I give a shit if some other person has to give up his dream of being a paid artist and find another way of making a living.
Lots of people try to make an argument that music sharing doesn't hurt the industry or that artist can compensate or that there are different methods of selling music.
I like to take it one step further, why should society give a shit wether music creators can make money? Do we really want to make rigid laws for all people just so a few can make a living the job they want? I want to bake bread. Should YOU be forced to go to a seperate store in your area for your bread rather then go to the supermarket? Should for instance the dutch be forced to serve pie again on their birthday from the local bakery rather then "vlaai" (a kind of pie coming originally from a dutch province that comes from a chain of stores that get supplied by a factory).
If you say no to that, then you should say no to everything the RIAA wants as well. Society should not have to bend over backwards just some people can make music for a living. Get a job.
We know nothing about this game except that it will be a sequel to a movie and you claim it was meant for the Wii? What on earth are you smoking and how deep is that Wiimote up your ass anyway?
It could be an adventure, it could be a sim, it could be a management game, it could be a shooter, it could be a stategy game.
What makes this game a Wii game? Take one look at the released screenshot, does that look like something the Wii can pull off?
About the only Wii connection I can think of is using the remote to control the beams, possibly a fun way of doing it, but nothing you couldn't do as easily with a mouse.
Anyway the story so far is that it is going to be on all the platforms. This usually means the game is going to suck some major donkeyballs as it will have to fit to the restrictions of ALL the platforms.
If anything, I hope that this game will have some bloody humor in it for once. The hotel shootup in game form, oh yeah, I pay for that.
Slashdot, like most media, has to attract eyeballs. If they printed on the frontpage "no news today" they wouldn't be making any money. So the slashdot editors have the task of keeping a steady stream of stories on the frontpage. So that when you visit it, you get some new story to read.
But not yet any story will do, it needs to be a story that people will react to. So that they post comments, so that it looks like an active site.
A slashdot story where ALL you needed to know was in the headline and had no room for discussion, well, you could just get that from the RSS feed, no page load, no ad load, no eyeballs.
You posted a comment to this story, I posted a comment to you. Mission accomplished. All you have shown is that the story attracted eyeballs.
In Terry Pratchets discworld book "The Truth" the patrician (local ruler) makes an observation about a newspaper. "Ain't it nice how there is always just enough news to fit the page, no spaces left open or anything".
The newspaper needs to be full, it needs to get read. That is a newspapers mission.
If you really want to tell the editors to stop doing this. STOP REPLYING.
Oh, and there is another thing to consider, slashdot is NOT a news site. It is an intresting things site. Nobody ever claimed that intresting things have to be new.
I think that is the key difference. I can write a book ABOUT Harry Potter and Rowling would have no case. This site is based ON her work, not ABOUT her work.
A book that shows you a made up layout of Q's lab (sorry not a James Bond fan so don't hang me if I get it wrong)n is different then a book that tells you about when the movies were made or talks about the people involved.
Lots of people have written a shit load of articles ABOUT Trek. Discussions of the women in spocks live, who would have been a good wife for him. Less has been written about WW2 then Roddenberry's creation, BUT it is ABOUT Star Trek. Not based on Star Trek like a blueprint of the Enterprise.
One book listed the planets and its inhabitants as seen in the series. IF it had been a simple list that used pictures and just quoted the original work THEN it would have been ABOUT the series. But that book was styled as an official Federation reference, and had taken the original info and presented it in a new format clearly designed to look like it was from a real manaul. This made that book based ON the series.
If I publish a detailed biography of all the characters in James Bond then that probably would be okay, IF I wrote it as if I was the Human Resource Director responsible for hiring these people, it would not. I think. Maybe, that was really my question. When does fair use end?
The grind happens when you already levelled, but still have to do the same thing an INSANE number of times to advance tiny amounts.
For WoW and LOTRO this is the reputation grind. For Eve it might be mining.
Let me explain how the rep grind works in lotro.
Say you want the gain reputation with the hobbits. You can't do this until you are 39. To gain rep, you need to get special loot items that drop from human enemies past level 35 BUT with a max level. They drop rarely. 10 mathoms (the item) is 300 points, once you gained enough reputatin 10.000 points you can also turn in well preserved mathoms 500 points (for one item), but these drop even more rarely.
Each level of repuation is a shitload of points that if you calculate the drop rate for you need to kill a fucking large amount of things.
Now here is the most obvious grind element. There is NO WAY IN HELL, to collect these items WITHOUT levelling up to the point that the enemies that drop the items become to low for you.
So you are just slaughtering mobs that provide not the slightest bit of challenge in the hope of getting enough items to get a tiny bit more reputation.
THAT IS GRINDING.
It is NOT about levelling up, or questing or doing quests that ask you to kill ten X, go back, kill ten more X, etc etc.
It is when all pretense of questing and story telling is gone and the game just tells you, go and kill a million of this critter that is challenge and I give you a shiny.
In counterstrike you got to earn money to buy better weapons. That is fine. Now imagine counterstrike and to get money you had to shoot a whale in a ditch with a shotgun for money. 100.000 times. For a slightly better pistol. A machine gun? 10.000.000 times. Oh and you can try hitting the broad side of that barn over there, with a nuke. Come back when you pressed the attack button a gazillion times.
This OBVIOUSLY does not happen in most games.
Again, I am NOT talking about people who call levelling up grinding. I am talking about past that. For instance in Eve where you might realise that to buy anything you first need to mine asteroids for an unholy amount of time.
Perhaps you are right and it is part of the nature of MMORPG's but I think there are better ways.
Other popular universes might be Star Wars, Star Trek, the Discworld etc etc. How many of these have books published that are NOT sanctioned by the original copyright holder?
All those Star Trek tech manuals, or star wars art books, or the discworld science books are ALL published with the blessing of Paramount, Lucasfilm and Terry Pratchet. (The ones I got at least)
So are there any books out there that do something similar that were NOT officially sanctioned. I am not talking about parodies like Star Wrecked, these fall under different laws.
Movies spawn novells, these also seem to be often written with the blessing of the studio.
So where is the evidence that this kinda of thing is common practice?
This site is NOT a synopsis or a review or even a discussion site. It is clearly a product designed to work of the original content by extending it. Selling it for money makes it clear they are profitting of someone elses work.
While some one slashdot favor a more lenient copyright system, I think even the most rabid filesharer usually is against people who pirate for profit.
There is a real issue here, who owns the rights to for instance a 3D model of an x-wing. Worse, who owns the rights to a picture of a light-saber. Does it become a Star Wars image because someone hold a sword of light OR does it have to have Jedi written all over it before it becomes a Star Wars image.
But as intresting a discussion as that is, it doesn't apply here. If you browse the site you can clearly see that this is a 100% ripoff of the original work that would have no value on its own. It doesn't fall under the rules for a biography, it is not parody. Fair use is about using a limited amount of someone elses work in your own work.
So how much of this site is their own work and how much that of the original author? I don't think it is a simple measurement, if I produce a detailed layout of the Enterprise, then the resulting blueprint may well be 99% my own work, but that 1% that makes it the enterprise also puts it firmly in the hands of Paramount. Without that 1% it wouldjust be a blueprint, it is their original work that makes it 'worth' something.
Look at it that way, would this site be worth anything without the original work. No, I don't think so.
So I think in this case the copyright/trademark? holder is correct. They tolerated the site because it wasn't commericial, but printing it is clearly designed to earn money. Sorry, but if you want to profit of someone elses original work to such a degree, you got to get their permission first.
What are you doing on slashdot spouting facts and reason? This is a write-up by slashdot, bastion of editorial excellence, from a story by theregister.co.uk a source of journalism the guardian could take lessons from, based on commonts by an Anonymous poster (who claims to be the women in question) about an unproven incident.
Unless I missed something, there is no actuall link anywhere in that story that confirms that this woman even exists and that she has been arrested. If she has been arrested and does exist we only got the word of the anonymous poster that the poster is the woman and that the events happened as claimed.
I have had several experiences in the past with learning things from rumor that I obviously had missed with my own eyes. People who call the other side 'thugs' are automatically to be distrusted, objective reporting should be objective. At a minimum you should provide ample evidence if you are slinging accusations. What was so thuggish about the police behaviour?
We got a lot of claims, a security expert who politly tells us that it is likely untrue (the police in question can't serve such an order) and slashdot all hot and botherd.
Tell me something, do you think the directors of Enron should be made to hand over the numbers of their private swiss bank accounts to pay for the damages they done? Should banksaves be opened on police request? Why, yes, they should. That is the law.
There is a feeling that somehow we have a right to privacy. WRONG we don't. Not once there is a warrant for that information. The encrypted file is not that information, the contents are, just like a safe does not satisfy a warrant, the contents of the safe do.
It is how our legal system works. Change this and you change the way the law can do what we expect it to do. It would be trivial for everyone to encode their data. Do we really want a world in which the likes of Enron can just encrypt everything and go unpunished because the police can't get at the evidence?
With encryption we have created a problem for ourselves because previously if you refused to open your house for a search warrant the police could just break the door down. This is not possible with encryption, should a person escape the law just because they made an unbreakable door?
Fine, by all means, form a party and try to get elected on that. Don't fancy your chances much. Because you would be running on an agenda for anarchy.
Ah, but this is used as a means of a going after an animal rights activist, an assault of free speech. Yes, but that is an unrelated matter.First off, we don't know what kind of activist she is, some make terrorists look harmless, second, if you think her actions should not be prosecuted, change the laws regarding that.
I have a theory for why MMORPG's are the way they are. The companies behind aren't run by gamers who enjoy gaming as a hobby.
I will tell you a couple of game elements. SWG's jedi XP grind where as a fully experienced character you had to trade regular XP from killing into jedi XP at a 10:1 or worse ratio. Endless amounts of killing for a slow level up of your jedi skill, so that you could kill things a tiny bit faster.
SWG collectible items, a dozen incomplete sets clogging up your inventory. Lotro's reputation system, that involves farming items for measly rewards. Lotro's deed rewards that involves killing hundreds of critters so you character can go from 10% fire resistance to 11% (which means you still are 89% vulnerable).
WoW's repuation grind for.... eh what was it for again? Special mounts or something?
Eve's online levelling system where you have to keep logging in to select new skills to level up while you are logged off.
Vendor trash, an area populated with half a dozen different critters all who drop 4 different kinds of vendor trash (looted items that have no value except to sold to NonPlayerCharacters, cash but cash you have to have inventory space for) so that you need 24 empty spots in your inventory just for one area, trash like teeth that stack only to ten, while you can carry life sized statues with no problem and go swimming to them.
They are ALL delay tactics. Stuffing your inventory with junk forces you to travel back and forth. Rep grinding is just a way to keep you busy.
The odd thing is WHY? Well, because they want us to pay the monthly fee right? Well, no. Think of it, see gaming as a hobby. Is 14.95 that much? I have a friend with a hobby of scuba diving, he pays he would LOVE to be able to do his hobby for my complete costs of PC, internet and monthyly fee.
Even in gaming, plenty of other games have long lasting appeal without forcing the player to grind. Imagine if MS Flight Simulator only allowed you to fly a 747 AFTER you grinded 1200 Cessna landings. Imagine if Half-Life only allowed to to play multiplayer AFTER grinding the tutorial 100 times.
Imagine if before you could connect to a multiplayer map, you first had to spend several minutes running around a single player map to set up the story.
Plenty of single AND multiplayer games have long lasting appeal without introducing a grind, so why do ALL MMMORPG designers have this desperate urge to inject it into their games?
Would you keep playing a MMO (and more importantly paying the fee) if the pure grind like the reputation grind was removed and the only lasting appeal was the gameplay itself.
Would you raid the same instance if you didnt need to in order to get all the items?
Other games can pull that off, are MMORPG's as games that bad that they got to hook us with something else then the fun of gaming?
No, I don't think so, but it seems MMORPG designers think so.
Oh well, no time, got head into misty mountains and collect rings, almost at exhalted status, so I can get a new skin for my horse.
Falcon 3.0 (please don't hang me on the number at my age the mind is becoming more and more like a) required me to upgrade to a new Dos. (5?)I did. (legally too)
That was the last time a game pushed me on a new MS release.
Back then 99% of games were DOS, only a handfull of games required Windows (3.X) and most DOS games ran a lot faster without windows loaded.
This didn't change for a long time even with the release of Windows 95. Quake was an important game back then,and running it under 95 just meant you sacrificed a lot memory the game could have been using. There was no benefit I can remember, and so I stuck with DOS for a long time. I have no recollection how long it took between 95's release and me finally getting and seeing games that were WIN95 only AND worth it. But it was at least a year.
Remember that dos to WIN95 was a HUGE change.
DirectX must have been introduced at some time, but I don't recall it being widely used until it was a couple of major releases old. Even MS own games didn't use it for a long time. MS Flightsimulator and Close Combat come to mind. In fact, MS games were notorious for being rather primitive, Close Combat was one of those games were you had to manuall set the desktop to reduced colors, this was AFTER DirectX had gotten some traction.
But we moved away from DOS, we now have DirectX games mostly and one day Vista will be the norm and so will DirectX 10, because just as games once become Windows9X only and games became DirectX only, so will they become Vista only and DirectX10 only.
The article notes that Vista has only 18% users. This is very noteworthy, but check the chart, how many Windows 9X users? For that many 2000 users? 9X ain't even listed, 2000 doesn't even get a full percentage.
Remember all the people who said they would stick with 9X or 2K? Where are they now? Not on steam at least.
We move on. I won't be getting Vista for a while, I like my linux desktop and for games I don't need it. Yet.
I think the biggest thing hurting MS at the moment is NOT Vista's tech woes, but something far more deadly. It is piracy. It ain't there. I am a freak for trying the latest software, but I also hate cripple ware and store bought machines, so I either look at spending a couple of hundred euro's on Vista because all the pirated versions seem to have problems.
How much of MS old early adoptor market consisted of pirates? I got 95Se 98 98SE 2K etc ALL from that subscription thing an old employer had. Illegal, sure. But those machines showed up in surveys like this. How any Steam players would run Vista if they could?
More and more games will be directx 10, or will look at their best in directx10. Support for XP will dry up, new computers will come with Vista pre-installed and people will move on.
Just as we did before.
The only difference as I have said is that this time it will be a lot harder to do it without paying MS, and for some of us, that is a big hurdle. I wouldn't mind trying Vista, it is not like I use my gaming machine for anything critical, but not for the current price tag.
But some day? Sure, if I can find an unused key somewhere for a non-crippled version. Because lets admit it, I want to see how shiny it is. Precious...
First, you claim that the british methods did NOT work. We don't know that, unless you got a parallel universe handy to prove it, we only got the fact that the british and IRA employed the tactics they did, and now there is 'peace'. It is impossible to say that things would have turned out as they have if you had changed something. We just don't know, if the IRA had not committed bombings against civilians, perhaps the peace process might have happened quicker? If britain had been less vigilant, perhaps the IRA might have thought it could dictate a withdrawal?
But there are other differences as well, the IRA never wished for britain to be wiped of the map. The enemy is not an animal who doesn't deserve to live. The IRA tried, to a certain degree, limit the amount of civilian casualties. It could have caused many more deaths if it had gone purely after a huge death toll, it didn't and that made it easier for the enemy/victims to 'forgive'. For instance many IRA bombings were WARNED about by the IRA itself with enough time to evacuate, terror but without casualties. A HUGE difference from the bombings by Islamic terrorists or the Japanese Nerve gas attack or the Oklohoma bombing. All these groups want to do is kill lots of people who in their eyes are undeserving of living.
The link to other treaths is often made, but doesn't really matter, we all die, but terror attacks disrupt our lives. Many people die in road 'accidents' and that is why we have camera's everywhere and most of the police constantly patrolling the roads.
The problem ain't the number of deaths, it is that it is allowed to happen. Not all that many people are killed by murderes either, should we just let them go as well? Get rid of the entire justice system? No, if someone commits a crime, they must answer for that crime. You mention train crashes, holland hasn't had a person die in a train cash in decades, we have had two terrorists attacks, both murders of people who dared to speak their mind. A direct attack on freedom of speech. Surely freedom of speech is worth defending?
But there are problems, like international crime, terrorism seems almost impossible to erradicate because the police has to respect the law, and criminals by their nature don't.
The recent lebanon conflict showed this once again. Hezbollah broke every convention of war, yet it was Israel that was restricted in its actions. If you use a human shield, then those humans become active participants in that war and therefore legal targets. Yet Israel could not simply bomb them because the world was breathing down their neck.
This jail was one attempt by the americans to level the playing field, faced with an enemy that didn't play by the rules, they tried to do the same. It backfired. Not just because people expect/want the US to play by the rules, but because they did not go far enough. If you fight dirty, you really have to get dirty. If you are going to fight a war, you need to commit to it fully, send in all the troops you need and then double them and send them in with more firepower then they can handle. Any war that starts with an exit plan is doomed. No plan survives contact with the enemy.
I think the IRA and britain made peace because the war had taken its toll, both sides decided that enough was enough and peace HAD to be the solution rather then continued fighting. BOTH sides. As in BOTH, two of them. It takes one person to make a war, but it requires two to make peace.
One of the silliest things I hear people say about the current problems is,"I am not war with islam" or more personal,"I am not war with that cashier at my supermarket who wears a headscarf".
A noble sentiment, and pointless. The question is,"is islam at war with ME". Is that girl behind the cash register at war with YOU.
If someone wants a war, the other side rarely has the luxury to ignore it. Exactly who desired the current conflict is why beyond even my lengthy ranting, sad fact is that we got a conflict, it has been brewing for a long
I followed the links you supplied and didn't have to look far at all before I ran into pages that were IE/Windows only. You want to take a guess at how many Flickr customers use an Apple?
Yes MS has a huge share of the desktop, in business it is near absolute, but that means all those millions of machines Apple keeps churning out HAVE TO END UP SOMEWHERE. In fact, I have strong personal evidence that Apples last longer, so that means there are a shitload of people out there on macs. This doesn't even count freaks like me on linux.
Does that matter? Yes, a sharing site, a social site, should just work. In Firefox, in Safari, in opera, on OSX on OS9 on Linux on BSD and yes even windows ALL all the way back to 98.
MS can't do this. Not because of a lack of skill, it just wouldn't occur to them. It simply ain't the way MS operates. They always will introduce some element that excludes large numbers of their own customers, let alone those on other OS'es or who don't use IE.
And that matters, because these sites are about sharing, not about worrying wether your viewer has the right browser/OS or indeed software installed.
Why do you think so many sites now use flash for their video player? Because it is the most reliable way of doing that, why do you think a lot of sites EVEN so still add a hard download link? Because the captures the last percentage of users.
The techies at MS may be capable, but somewhere in the Redmond beast there is someone with veto powers who ALWAYS injects something that kills it. Look at all their attemps with a universal login, they renamed it, redesigned it and it is still a dismall failure, because at no point did MS put the enduser first and not their own corporate interests.
The moment MS becomes capable (not in tech but in business decisions) to support other OS'es then its own, then MS will be succesfull on the web. Perhaps it is changing, silverlight might be a change and I did see a link to a.mov on photosynth. But the apps themselves are windows XP SP2 and Vista only (in fact one says XP only).
Check flickr, you won't be able to move for the mac lovers.
Not that you are capable of understanding this, but copyright is NOT an absolute. The copyright as we know it now is a recent 'invention' and was introduced in response to technological changes (music recordings). Is it that strange to rethink copyright again now technologie has once again changed the world?
To give an example, before the printing press was invented, the only way to spread written texts was by copying them. Someone, monks in the west, sat down, and simply copied an existing work word for word. That was the only way to make more then one copy, unless the original author fancied writing all the copies himself.
There was no such thing as copyright, you had the original author and book, and people copied that work for distribution.
This changed with the inventing of the press, all of a sudden an original work could be turned out in any number desired (more or less). This changed the name of the game, as all of a sudden you had a new industry, that of the printing press (publishers if you like) who could take works and reprint them and sell them at volumes large enough to make a business. Before that books were simply to rare and expensive for all but the most powerfull to posses.
With music this mattered, before a composer who wrote a piece of music had one copy of it. If someone wanted another copy of it, they had to deal with the composer, distribution was limited. When printing of sheet music became possible all of sudden a piece of music was worth more then just the money you could get from performing it, you could write music and sell it without ever touching an instrument. The music industry had been born.
It is hard for us to imagine, but once people traded music sheets as eagerly as we trade MP3's.
Times changed again when music itself could be recorded, first by automatic instruments, later the music performance itself.
Over this time, the music industry (the people selling others people work) and the artists and the composers have been in a constant struggle as to who should receive what amount of money. The original sheet publishers offcourse preffered to simply take the music, or pay a mininal one time fee, and collect all the profits they could. The performers want to just pay a minimal fee at most and be damned how many times they perform it or how much they get paid for it, the composer wants to see money for each copy sold and each performance.
All this eventually, over many changes led to copyright as we know it now. The best you can say for it, is that it kept everyone quiet. Not exactly content, but quiet.
But things changed, tech moved on once again and deeply cut for the first time into the publishers, all of sudden you didn't need a huge press anymore, (either to print books OR press vinyl/CD's etc) but end customers could reproduce music easily on their own. In a way going back to the original situation where if you wanted a copy of something, you made it.
The industry seems to have responded by making copyright even stricter, seemingly wanting to expand the lifespan to infinite, this despite the fact that for instance Disney is famous for NOT paying for the copyrighted works of others who just happen to fall outside that new protection, Pinocio was famously released JUST after the copyright expired.
But the main question is this, why should we keep a law that has been recently introduced to deal with changing tech, now that tech has changed again? Copyright is NOT a natural thing, it is something invented by lawyers to product an industry, why should we as a society keep it if we no longer need it, want it.
Once there was a law that required a man with a red flag to walk in front of a motorised vehicle, that was introcued to protect the horse carriage industry. We changed it when it became clear that new tech of the automobile had made the horse obsolete. That industry was simply forced to adopt or die. Why should the music industry not do the same.
It is a lot of pages but so far this text seems to be pretty standard procedure for dealing with what the US claims are highly dangerous people. If the guidelines in this document are followed it is hard to see evidence of torture. Then again I thought abu ghraib was pathetic. If muslims talk just because a dog is barking at them, well, it is just pathetic. Read up on some real torture sessions, done against women and childeren and then come back. Being put into humiliating postions? Flushing a book? Oh yeah, that compares to electro shock, being beaten to death and seeing your fellows executed.
Is the US right in doing this? Hard to say, they face an enemy that on the one hand seems almost eager to die for the cause but can't be counted on to make a stand so they can be wiped out. How do you deal with an enemy that behaves like a civilian right upto the point they detonate a bomb, then blend back in again.
Germany had over 97% casualty from mistreatment of its russian prisoners, that is clear, you can't argue that this was barbaric. But where do you draw the line? I seen stories about criminals in the west who are let go because putting them in jail would place to heavy a burden on them. Eh yeah, we should only jail people who can handle it. Why not give speeding tickets only to those who can afford them?
The world, it is not just the US that is faced with radicals, is in a war that cannot be won by conventional means. So what do you do with your prisoners, there is no real war, so they ain't real prisoners, and the enemy cannot be defeated so you cannot return them afterwards.
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.
The US method? Well, that doesn't exactly seem to work either.
Perhaps the world is just at a loss, what do you do against fringe groups who are on the one hand fanatical enough to do anything, but smart enough to not wipe themselves out? It ain't just muslims, Japan had that nerve gas attack, America had Oklohoma, Holland had themurder of Pim Fortuyn. How do you deal with those who want to overthrow society but at once are such a part of that society you can't seperate them.
I think this whole jail is just a big mistake, they thought they could use it for intel, and all they ended up with was a public relation disaster because the public doesn't want to hear about how the world works. If you think the stuff here is really disturbing read up on innocent mental patients strapped to their beds for days because you don't want to pay for medical care. No red cross who inspects mental wards.
The US would have much better off had it shot these people instead of capturing them. Offcourse, that has other issues, tell the enemy surrender is not an option, and you just make him more fanatical (russian soldiers scared the germans, because the russians just didn't quit)
Lots of people will disagree with me, but frankly if you want to cry about abuse of power there are far worse places in the world. This seems to be just a rather harsh prisoner of war camp. Compared to the real horrors that go on around the world, I can't loose any sleep over it, especially if you realize that the people improsened here support goverments and organisations that have absolutely no rules about the treathment of prisoners.
Watch the movie The life and death of Colonel Blimp, a story about a man who has to realize that in a dirty war, you got to fight dirty.
Oh and please don't think me a Bush supporter, I am not, but the world has this war now, and we need to deal with it. Whining about how things should be different don't help. We need to clean up this fucking mess and pulling out ain't the fucking answer. If bush can't take responsiblity someone else will have too.
Laptops are the way they are, BIG, because they keyboard needs to be big. If you ever have been forced to use a small keyboard, or even one of those horrible flat ones without physical keys you will know why. Our fingers just ain't that accurate while typing. I can blind type fairly but my fingers still depend heavily on the shape of the keys to press the right one.
That is the reason keys on your keybaord are tapered like / \ that so that two keys next to each other/i\/o\ have a large space between them so that if you slightly miss one you don't hit another.
Keys are also slightly curved inwards for even better guidance of your fingers. Work with a keyboard that doesn't have this and watch your accuracy drop.
This has always been a weakness with touchscreens. For display stands the keyboard is a necesarry evil, while you could do LOTS of intresting things with a touch screen as the input method, the simple fact is that if you want people to start typing, they want/need/expect a traditional keyboard with properly shaped and spaced keys. If people only have to make the most basic inputs, a touch screen will do, and can in many ways help avoid wrong inputs. (Experiment, Prompt the user to enter Y/N, and record what keys they actually press. WARNING: you will loose all fate in humanity when you see the results. Intresting side note, once had a display that at one point asked the user to touch the screen to continue. Should have known better then to use this for a display at a household show. The women touched the screen alright, the sides, the top, the bottom, everything BUT the screen. Granted this was some time ago)
The iPhones touch screen is in many ways totally crap, no tactile feedback on where your fingers are (no homekeys), no tactile feedback on a keypress/release. Way too closely spaced. The "advantage" it has is that physical keyboards at that size are little better, and very prone to breaking.
Why do you think over all these years we still have keyboards with physical keys that are still the same shape as they were on typewriters from before the war? They work.
A webserver needs at most three ports open, 80, for obvious reasons, 443 for https and 22 for ssh. That is it.
If you need to connect remotely to another service you do it via SSH.
Mysql is a database. Let it do databases. Let SSH do its job.
When I see people use your logic you make my jaw drop. SSH for live. EVERYTHING over ssh. ALWAYS. Full stop, end of story. No argument.
Exposing your database like this is insanity and you are asking for trouble. Mysql authentication is a joke and considering you are doing it this way, you probably have it setup wrong. Because what you are doing is wrong.
Tunnel over SSH. It is a most basic tool. Read up on it, NOW! Google: mysql tunnel ssh
Offcourse, next thing he will say is that he uses telnet for remote access, some admins would make ghandi loose his temper
What you are talking about is brandname awareness. Shout your brand loudly and hope it sticks so that when people go shopping they remember your brand and buy it.
Google is closer to advertising as it is done in stores. Google "knows" that you are in a hardware site, so they put up a display of something you might want to buy related to that. If you don't remember it or don't even look at it, though, you probably weren't intrested. Supermarkets don't really care if you look at their displays or not. They are there to convince people who were already looking, those people are intrested. When you are shopping for soda drinks a display for a new brand or a special offer will intrest you, that is all after all why you are there.
But as much as you might be intrested, you wouldn't want a show that stops you in your tracks for 30 seconds while shopping to tell you of this great new brand. Google COULD put up huge flashing ads, but it would also interfer with is main business.
You might notice that most personal ads in the newspaper, do not use color, full page, or nude women (well apart from certain sections) that is because a person reading the second hand computer section doesn't need to be attracted anymore, just sold. It is the reason that while shampoo is advertised with gorgeous naked women, it is sold by people fully dressed.
There are already automatic sentry guns, robots in essence, but these don't guard against missles on open sea, they guard a border in what is still a war zone.
I think that is a very good time to start thinking about the ethics around robots. Not just how we treat robots, but how we allow them to treat us. What exactly should a robot confirm too before it can be allowed to harm a human being?
This doesn't require ethics. Currently we have dumb machines, if a car runs you over it is either because it has gone out of control and you are a victim of the laws of nature OR it is the fault of the human driver.
But what of a robot who can make decisions, how should it govern itself. Current robots are always setup as much as possible to avoid doing any harm whatsover. They are either behind safety gates, that cannot be opened while the robot is working and shut down the moment they detect an obstruction. This is an ethical choice in itself, we decided as human beings that it better to outfit robots in this way, rather then just put a sign "watch out". Current ethic is roughly "never knowingly risk causing harm, even at risk to oneself or ones task".
The gun sentry offcourse has a totally different task, how far should it go from being just a dumb automatic gun that fires at everything to a machine that makes choices. If it chooses when to fire, how certain should it be. When can it fire and when can't it fire.
There are other aspects as well, as medical technology becomes more advanced we get machines that will decide our treatment for us, I think it is equally important that we think of just what these machines can decide and when they should stop and call a human being.
Say that machine has been charged with deliving drugs to a person to keep that person alive, there is usually a fine line between the dose that benefits you, and the dose that kills you. How far should the machine be allowed to go? If a possible lethal dose MIGHT be what is necesarry to keep a person alive, would we allow that decision to be made by a robot OR should a human doctor make that decision.
In a way robot ethics has nothing to do with robot sentience, it is far closer to where do we put the decision making, in the hands of humans onthe spot, or a programmer who coded the decision making sometime during manufacturing.
Say you have a robot truck, it is driving on the highway, suddenly an obstacle appears, possible human. What should it do? We are thinking of automating driving, but why has no one thought of this ethical choice where a piece of software will have to choose between running someone over OR performing a dangerous manouver that might cause even more lives. Current machines have no choice, but if we add choice to themachine we need to think what we want it to decide.
As westerners our ideas of what happens to make a face look young (I can't speak for other cultures) just happens to be abundant in asian faces. A western female face, perhaps because we are more familiar with it, will develop quickly from that of a young a girl, to that of a mature woman, install a program like poser and see for yourselve how a subtle shifting of the facial lines can make a character leap through the years.
An adult face, even in a female is more lined, more pronounced, asian faces, by their nature are smoother. This doesn't apply to ALL japanese faces, but I myself have seen plenty of asian females well into their 20's who at first glance you mistake for someone ten years younger.
Faces of indian (as in india) women tend to me look far more mature on the other hand. Because they have in a way a more extreme version of the western face combined with the darkness of the skin, they seem older then they really are. To a westerner, grown up with western faces.
Saying that different facial structures throw you assement of their age off balance is racist is taking PC too far.
All people have difficulty reading faces of races they aren't exposed too. I noticed myself that since I started working in a more international area where I am constantly exposed to clients from all over the world, I have become far better at it.
Not all bugs are equal. Some you will be able to fix in minutes as they are little more then simple errors in your code. Others will be more complex because you designed something wrong and changing it impacts more then just the part that is bugged. And finally there will be errors that not just affect your program but the data the customer has created with your program.
You can't say a bug == 4 weeks. That is like saying, repairing a car takes 4 weeks. Is it a loose cable or have the wheels taken a detour?
To asses how long it will take to fix you have to know what the bug is. Is it an error in a line of code? Is it a function that does not quite what is expected? Is there a design flaw/oversight? Is data involved? And finally, have people come to depend on that bug as a feature? This ranges from a hotpatch in a couple of hours to something you may just have to learn to live with including having to code that 'bug' into future releases.
Now stop reading slashdot and start fixing that damned code. Geez, you would think Microsoft would have better control over its people. Oh wait, a patch in a month? Nah, too fast for an MS coder.
Symbian was developed on hardware, on the lowest hardware then available so that it would be sure to run on everything. This made the design obsolete at launch and now it is so archaic(?) that people really resent that original decesion.
Perhaps Google wants to avoid this. Wants apps that push the hardware requirements so that the Android phones will HAVE to be powerhouses, and it doesn't get trapped in the symbian or even MS trap of having to work on the cheapest shit some company can throw together.
Apparently (I only have this from hearsay) symbian phones often miss basic hardware capabilties that drive a pc programmer up the wall because he suddenly has to code for features that have been present in PC's from the dawn of computing.
All google now has to do, is convince mobile phone makers that it is in their best interest to make their phones capable of actually running the software currently being developed.
Don't forget mobile tech moves fast but is expensive. If the companies could get away with yesterdays tech they would. That ain't good for us consumers, we want them to be pushed so we finally get some fully capable smart phones and not the same crippled yunk they have pushing on us.
That conflict showed the failure of an army fighting by the rules, against an enemy that did not, and never has.
If Israel could have used the full force of its military without the world breathing down its neck, hezbollah would have been so much smoking corpses.
What this shows you is that most advanced tank cannot deal with a meat shield if there is a camera crew near. Hezbollah has become very good at using this kind of war, they had to, the more recent lebanese actions have shown they suck at military conflict. Note that lebanon could just blow the hell out of hezbollah bases and civilian casualties be damned. Suddenly the world realises that just because a shot up corpse is dressed in civil garb, does not make it a civilian.
In fact the military conflics around Israel have shown just how bloody effective modern equipment is, outnumbered in every way, Israel nonetheless manages to hold out, because they use tech to the max.
You are also wrong about the soviets, the russians were actually the one with the better gear against the germans. It just took a while for it all to come together, but it was the germans that copied soviet tech, not the other way around. The turn around came when russia learned to use the tech advantage it had and properly equip its soldiers with it. Early in the war, it had excellent tanks, but often without radios, or it had motivated troops, who lacked guns. Once that was sorted out, the germans never won a single battle against the russians. Superior tech.
Offcourse, you got to use it properly.
Iraq again shows you just how lethal tech is over numbers. The iraq army was many times greater and was wiped out.
The current conflict has nothing to do with the lack of manpower or reliance on tech. You cannot occupy a country that doesn't want to be occupied unless you are capable of dealing out massive amounts of punishment Roman style. Storm the city, kill everyone inside, tear down the buildings, plow up the ground and sow it with salt, so that you can then point to the desolate area and say, "this is what we do with those who oppose us, any questions?"
In a way, Hezbollah uses very modern weapons, western media, to fight the war. No use of radio? How do you think the images of bloodshed, real and staged made its way to the west? Pigeons?
One final note. You state that Israel only managed to advance X miles. How many miles did Hezbollah advance? Okay, yards then. Feet? Inches? So much for low tech then. Hezbollah has never once manage to threaten Israels survival. It is one of the reasons Lebanon is so fed up with them and finally took action against them and this time, the world media didn't care.
Although lots of people seem to think him a traitor, he really wasn't (although it depends heavily on how your read the history). His father at one point emigrated to the US, then moved back to russia, taking his american born son with him. So while the guy was american born, when he became an agent he was a soviet citizen.
Using people as agents who have lived in the country they are supposed to work in is nothing new. But he worked as an agent for the country of which he was a citizen. He entered the US as a spy and as such did NOT commit treason.
That is an important difference to make.
Odd by the way that a lot of americans seem to condemn hailing this guy as a hero, when their own space program was built upon a nazi war criminal. Russian spy vs nazi, oh yeah the ruskies are the baddies alright. Working people to their death vs taking a dangerous mission to protect your home country.
For those of us with a mind (american, Idol is on) this guy and others helped created the policy of mutually assured destruction. While nukes are scary, they ain't half as scary as they would have been if only one side had them. Would you have trusted the US as the only country with nuclear weapons?
Millions of japanese? 140.000 at Horishima 80.000 at Nagasaki, several thousand afterwards. That is a quarter million from the results of the way. The cities in question would have had to been wiped out from fallout and after effects SEVERAL times to even reach one million.
So where do you get your millions from? The total death toll of WW2 is estimated around 50 million, the americans accounted for a small fraction of that. Major culprits where the germans, the russians and the japanese. It is often forgotten but they had a regime as brutal as the holocaust.
The A-bombs are noteworthy because they killed a lot of people with just one device. Before that you needed large bomber formations or massive organisation to achieve the same amount of killing, but compare it to the slaughter on the eastern front, the japanese death camps, the german concentration camps or even carpet bombing, and they were just a small note on that huge ledger of lost lives that we call WW2.
Millions of japanese lives, geez. Grow up and read a book.
China doesn't want war, not right now at least. It also really doesn't want taiwan. What on earth would it do with it. It just doesn't want to be seen backing down on it either. The current situation suits them and for that matter suits the US and most of the world.
But China is also in danger of being seen as weak, or thinks itself being seen that way at least, so it must show it got a bark. Taking out an american spy plane, destroying a satelite, supporting north-korea (that is mess china would dearly love to get rid off, if only it wouldn't loose face over it) and now, showing that that might US fleet ain't all that mighty after all.
If it did want war, the sub would not have surfaced, it would have quietly slipped away and once out of range send a signal, 'test succesfull' and chinese military planners would have made another mark on their checklist for conditions for a succesfull invasion of taiwan "reduce US capability to interfere".
Upsetting the economy is NOT in Chinese interest, it benefits them far too much. In case of war the world economy would be gone anyway, the US is under no obligation to honor its debts to a country it is at war with. China can't exactly set the bailifs on washintong. Impound Fort Knox?
The US projects its military power by sailing its carriers around the world, and the chinse projects its by popping up in torpedo range and saying "Boom you are dead". It is a game, a lethal game played for high stakes, but the chinese have shown it is still just horsing around. If they were serious, we wouldn't have had this story.
Slashdot Mirror
Its head is shaped like a vacuum cleaners nozzle, but the article also states that it grazed like a cow. Cows don't vacuum (more the other way around) and nowhere in the article is there any suggestion that it vacuums except in sentences that seem to be written by a journalist, not a scientist.
If the animal did hover up its food it would need some way to create a large enough vacuum. Some fish do it, by suddenly expanding their mouth so that water, and hopefully ffood is sucked in to the "new" space. But that is a lot easier then to do the same thing with air. Just check the amount of power needed to vacuum up even an ant.
Unless the animal has some radicial new systems the only way for it to create a vacuum would be to expand its body to take in air. Doable,and if you are a large animal the amount of suction would be impressive but, well why?
If it grazed it meant it ate plants, you can't vacuum up plants because they are attached to their roots. Once you cut of the grass with your mouth, you no longer need to suck it up.
About the only thing I could see it being used for is to suck up small animals, like say sucking up ants. Still, I think that animal would also be sucking up a lot of dirt.
Frankly I think this is just bad journalism, the scientist said its mouth looks like a vacuum cleaner nozzle and the journalist turned that into the critter vacuums up its food.
Anyone found ANY link suggesting otherwise?
First off, some people need to RTFA, he is NOT talking about himself, but about new bands who dream of success who he claims will not be able to do it (or at least not the way he defines success, getting really rich of your image).
So?
Times change. Once you had far more theathers and far more places where plays could be held. Then the movie theather arrived and put countless performers out of business. Were once a musician was playing in bar now there is a sound installation. Where once there was an entertainer, now there is a big screen TV.
Movie theathers too took a hit with the arrival of television. Live tv broadcasts took a hit when VCR's arrived and even more with DVR.
Coal mines are gone in holland, because we discovered a gas field and bam, lots of people unemployed. Daf cars (trucks still exists) is gone and again, people out of a job because less and less people are needed to make cars and there are countries that can do it cheaper.
IT is being outsourced as are call center jobs.
The next generations job prospects are going to be different then today's.
In a way, he says that himself, no band has managed to overtake KISS in merchandising. HE himself killed the dream off new bands in becoming the next kiss because he refuses to step aside. Shame on him.
Lets say that not a single musician can make money anymore. Unlikely but lets assume it for a second, not a single person can make a single penny creating music. So?
Where is it written that you should be able too? I am by training a baker, I am fairly good at it, (but not exceptionally so) and I left the business because it is a dead end. People buy their bakery goods from the factory and opening a new bakery shop is far to expensive and legally impossible. Zoning restrictions, a bakery works at night and produces noise and smells while by its nature it has to be in a residential area. That don't mix no more. The hygience laws have become so strict that it costs a fortune to fit out a new building and the costs (and shortage) of skilled labourers, plus the restrictions of what they are allowed to do means you need a massive amount of very expensive equipment, which because the demand for small scale equipment has plummeted is increasingly expensive.
In short, society has killed the small baker shop. Of the people in my entire school only a handfull are still in the trade, a most of them because they inheritied the business from their parents.
Do I see Gene Simmons give a shit about that? No. Why then should I give a shit if some other person has to give up his dream of being a paid artist and find another way of making a living.
Lots of people try to make an argument that music sharing doesn't hurt the industry or that artist can compensate or that there are different methods of selling music.
I like to take it one step further, why should society give a shit wether music creators can make money? Do we really want to make rigid laws for all people just so a few can make a living the job they want? I want to bake bread. Should YOU be forced to go to a seperate store in your area for your bread rather then go to the supermarket? Should for instance the dutch be forced to serve pie again on their birthday from the local bakery rather then "vlaai" (a kind of pie coming originally from a dutch province that comes from a chain of stores that get supplied by a factory).
If you say no to that, then you should say no to everything the RIAA wants as well. Society should not have to bend over backwards just some people can make music for a living. Get a job.
We know nothing about this game except that it will be a sequel to a movie and you claim it was meant for the Wii? What on earth are you smoking and how deep is that Wiimote up your ass anyway?
It could be an adventure, it could be a sim, it could be a management game, it could be a shooter, it could be a stategy game.
What makes this game a Wii game? Take one look at the released screenshot, does that look like something the Wii can pull off?
About the only Wii connection I can think of is using the remote to control the beams, possibly a fun way of doing it, but nothing you couldn't do as easily with a mouse.
Anyway the story so far is that it is going to be on all the platforms. This usually means the game is going to suck some major donkeyballs as it will have to fit to the restrictions of ALL the platforms.
If anything, I hope that this game will have some bloody humor in it for once. The hotel shootup in game form, oh yeah, I pay for that.
Slashdot, like most media, has to attract eyeballs. If they printed on the frontpage "no news today" they wouldn't be making any money. So the slashdot editors have the task of keeping a steady stream of stories on the frontpage. So that when you visit it, you get some new story to read.
But not yet any story will do, it needs to be a story that people will react to. So that they post comments, so that it looks like an active site.
A slashdot story where ALL you needed to know was in the headline and had no room for discussion, well, you could just get that from the RSS feed, no page load, no ad load, no eyeballs.
You posted a comment to this story, I posted a comment to you. Mission accomplished. All you have shown is that the story attracted eyeballs.
In Terry Pratchets discworld book "The Truth" the patrician (local ruler) makes an observation about a newspaper. "Ain't it nice how there is always just enough news to fit the page, no spaces left open or anything".
The newspaper needs to be full, it needs to get read. That is a newspapers mission.
If you really want to tell the editors to stop doing this. STOP REPLYING.
Oh, and there is another thing to consider, slashdot is NOT a news site. It is an intresting things site. Nobody ever claimed that intresting things have to be new.
I think that is the key difference. I can write a book ABOUT Harry Potter and Rowling would have no case. This site is based ON her work, not ABOUT her work.
A book that shows you a made up layout of Q's lab (sorry not a James Bond fan so don't hang me if I get it wrong)n is different then a book that tells you about when the movies were made or talks about the people involved.
Lots of people have written a shit load of articles ABOUT Trek. Discussions of the women in spocks live, who would have been a good wife for him. Less has been written about WW2 then Roddenberry's creation, BUT it is ABOUT Star Trek. Not based on Star Trek like a blueprint of the Enterprise.
One book listed the planets and its inhabitants as seen in the series. IF it had been a simple list that used pictures and just quoted the original work THEN it would have been ABOUT the series. But that book was styled as an official Federation reference, and had taken the original info and presented it in a new format clearly designed to look like it was from a real manaul. This made that book based ON the series.
If I publish a detailed biography of all the characters in James Bond then that probably would be okay, IF I wrote it as if I was the Human Resource Director responsible for hiring these people, it would not. I think. Maybe, that was really my question. When does fair use end?
The grind happens when you already levelled, but still have to do the same thing an INSANE number of times to advance tiny amounts.
For WoW and LOTRO this is the reputation grind. For Eve it might be mining.
Let me explain how the rep grind works in lotro.
Say you want the gain reputation with the hobbits. You can't do this until you are 39. To gain rep, you need to get special loot items that drop from human enemies past level 35 BUT with a max level. They drop rarely. 10 mathoms (the item) is 300 points, once you gained enough reputatin 10.000 points you can also turn in well preserved mathoms 500 points (for one item), but these drop even more rarely.
Each level of repuation is a shitload of points that if you calculate the drop rate for you need to kill a fucking large amount of things.
Now here is the most obvious grind element. There is NO WAY IN HELL, to collect these items WITHOUT levelling up to the point that the enemies that drop the items become to low for you.
So you are just slaughtering mobs that provide not the slightest bit of challenge in the hope of getting enough items to get a tiny bit more reputation.
THAT IS GRINDING.
It is NOT about levelling up, or questing or doing quests that ask you to kill ten X, go back, kill ten more X, etc etc.
It is when all pretense of questing and story telling is gone and the game just tells you, go and kill a million of this critter that is challenge and I give you a shiny.
In counterstrike you got to earn money to buy better weapons. That is fine. Now imagine counterstrike and to get money you had to shoot a whale in a ditch with a shotgun for money. 100.000 times. For a slightly better pistol. A machine gun? 10.000.000 times. Oh and you can try hitting the broad side of that barn over there, with a nuke. Come back when you pressed the attack button a gazillion times.
This OBVIOUSLY does not happen in most games.
Again, I am NOT talking about people who call levelling up grinding. I am talking about past that. For instance in Eve where you might realise that to buy anything you first need to mine asteroids for an unholy amount of time.
Perhaps you are right and it is part of the nature of MMORPG's but I think there are better ways.
Other popular universes might be Star Wars, Star Trek, the Discworld etc etc. How many of these have books published that are NOT sanctioned by the original copyright holder?
All those Star Trek tech manuals, or star wars art books, or the discworld science books are ALL published with the blessing of Paramount, Lucasfilm and Terry Pratchet. (The ones I got at least)
So are there any books out there that do something similar that were NOT officially sanctioned. I am not talking about parodies like Star Wrecked, these fall under different laws.
Movies spawn novells, these also seem to be often written with the blessing of the studio.
So where is the evidence that this kinda of thing is common practice?
This site is NOT a synopsis or a review or even a discussion site. It is clearly a product designed to work of the original content by extending it. Selling it for money makes it clear they are profitting of someone elses work.
While some one slashdot favor a more lenient copyright system, I think even the most rabid filesharer usually is against people who pirate for profit.
There is a real issue here, who owns the rights to for instance a 3D model of an x-wing. Worse, who owns the rights to a picture of a light-saber. Does it become a Star Wars image because someone hold a sword of light OR does it have to have Jedi written all over it before it becomes a Star Wars image.
But as intresting a discussion as that is, it doesn't apply here. If you browse the site you can clearly see that this is a 100% ripoff of the original work that would have no value on its own. It doesn't fall under the rules for a biography, it is not parody. Fair use is about using a limited amount of someone elses work in your own work.
So how much of this site is their own work and how much that of the original author? I don't think it is a simple measurement, if I produce a detailed layout of the Enterprise, then the resulting blueprint may well be 99% my own work, but that 1% that makes it the enterprise also puts it firmly in the hands of Paramount. Without that 1% it wouldjust be a blueprint, it is their original work that makes it 'worth' something.
Look at it that way, would this site be worth anything without the original work. No, I don't think so.
So I think in this case the copyright/trademark? holder is correct. They tolerated the site because it wasn't commericial, but printing it is clearly designed to earn money. Sorry, but if you want to profit of someone elses original work to such a degree, you got to get their permission first.
What are you doing on slashdot spouting facts and reason? This is a write-up by slashdot, bastion of editorial excellence, from a story by theregister.co.uk a source of journalism the guardian could take lessons from, based on commonts by an Anonymous poster (who claims to be the women in question) about an unproven incident.
Unless I missed something, there is no actuall link anywhere in that story that confirms that this woman even exists and that she has been arrested. If she has been arrested and does exist we only got the word of the anonymous poster that the poster is the woman and that the events happened as claimed.
I have had several experiences in the past with learning things from rumor that I obviously had missed with my own eyes. People who call the other side 'thugs' are automatically to be distrusted, objective reporting should be objective. At a minimum you should provide ample evidence if you are slinging accusations. What was so thuggish about the police behaviour?
We got a lot of claims, a security expert who politly tells us that it is likely untrue (the police in question can't serve such an order) and slashdot all hot and botherd.
Tell me something, do you think the directors of Enron should be made to hand over the numbers of their private swiss bank accounts to pay for the damages they done? Should banksaves be opened on police request? Why, yes, they should. That is the law.
There is a feeling that somehow we have a right to privacy. WRONG we don't. Not once there is a warrant for that information. The encrypted file is not that information, the contents are, just like a safe does not satisfy a warrant, the contents of the safe do.
It is how our legal system works. Change this and you change the way the law can do what we expect it to do. It would be trivial for everyone to encode their data. Do we really want a world in which the likes of Enron can just encrypt everything and go unpunished because the police can't get at the evidence?
With encryption we have created a problem for ourselves because previously if you refused to open your house for a search warrant the police could just break the door down. This is not possible with encryption, should a person escape the law just because they made an unbreakable door?
Fine, by all means, form a party and try to get elected on that. Don't fancy your chances much. Because you would be running on an agenda for anarchy.
Ah, but this is used as a means of a going after an animal rights activist, an assault of free speech. Yes, but that is an unrelated matter.First off, we don't know what kind of activist she is, some make terrorists look harmless, second, if you think her actions should not be prosecuted, change the laws regarding that.
SOE boggles the mind, there fixed it for you.
I have a theory for why MMORPG's are the way they are. The companies behind aren't run by gamers who enjoy gaming as a hobby.
I will tell you a couple of game elements. SWG's jedi XP grind where as a fully experienced character you had to trade regular XP from killing into jedi XP at a 10:1 or worse ratio. Endless amounts of killing for a slow level up of your jedi skill, so that you could kill things a tiny bit faster.
SWG collectible items, a dozen incomplete sets clogging up your inventory. Lotro's reputation system, that involves farming items for measly rewards. Lotro's deed rewards that involves killing hundreds of critters so you character can go from 10% fire resistance to 11% (which means you still are 89% vulnerable).
WoW's repuation grind for.... eh what was it for again? Special mounts or something?
Eve's online levelling system where you have to keep logging in to select new skills to level up while you are logged off.
Vendor trash, an area populated with half a dozen different critters all who drop 4 different kinds of vendor trash (looted items that have no value except to sold to NonPlayerCharacters, cash but cash you have to have inventory space for) so that you need 24 empty spots in your inventory just for one area, trash like teeth that stack only to ten, while you can carry life sized statues with no problem and go swimming to them.
They are ALL delay tactics. Stuffing your inventory with junk forces you to travel back and forth. Rep grinding is just a way to keep you busy.
The odd thing is WHY? Well, because they want us to pay the monthly fee right? Well, no. Think of it, see gaming as a hobby. Is 14.95 that much? I have a friend with a hobby of scuba diving, he pays he would LOVE to be able to do his hobby for my complete costs of PC, internet and monthyly fee.
Even in gaming, plenty of other games have long lasting appeal without forcing the player to grind. Imagine if MS Flight Simulator only allowed you to fly a 747 AFTER you grinded 1200 Cessna landings. Imagine if Half-Life only allowed to to play multiplayer AFTER grinding the tutorial 100 times.
Imagine if before you could connect to a multiplayer map, you first had to spend several minutes running around a single player map to set up the story.
Plenty of single AND multiplayer games have long lasting appeal without introducing a grind, so why do ALL MMMORPG designers have this desperate urge to inject it into their games?
Would you keep playing a MMO (and more importantly paying the fee) if the pure grind like the reputation grind was removed and the only lasting appeal was the gameplay itself.
Would you raid the same instance if you didnt need to in order to get all the items?
Other games can pull that off, are MMORPG's as games that bad that they got to hook us with something else then the fun of gaming?
No, I don't think so, but it seems MMORPG designers think so.
Oh well, no time, got head into misty mountains and collect rings, almost at exhalted status, so I can get a new skin for my horse.
Falcon 3.0 (please don't hang me on the number at my age the mind is becoming more and more like a) required me to upgrade to a new Dos. (5?)I did. (legally too)
That was the last time a game pushed me on a new MS release.
Back then 99% of games were DOS, only a handfull of games required Windows (3.X) and most DOS games ran a lot faster without windows loaded.
This didn't change for a long time even with the release of Windows 95. Quake was an important game back then,and running it under 95 just meant you sacrificed a lot memory the game could have been using. There was no benefit I can remember, and so I stuck with DOS for a long time. I have no recollection how long it took between 95's release and me finally getting and seeing games that were WIN95 only AND worth it. But it was at least a year.
Remember that dos to WIN95 was a HUGE change.
DirectX must have been introduced at some time, but I don't recall it being widely used until it was a couple of major releases old. Even MS own games didn't use it for a long time. MS Flightsimulator and Close Combat come to mind. In fact, MS games were notorious for being rather primitive, Close Combat was one of those games were you had to manuall set the desktop to reduced colors, this was AFTER DirectX had gotten some traction.
But we moved away from DOS, we now have DirectX games mostly and one day Vista will be the norm and so will DirectX 10, because just as games once become Windows9X only and games became DirectX only, so will they become Vista only and DirectX10 only.
The article notes that Vista has only 18% users. This is very noteworthy, but check the chart, how many Windows 9X users? For that many 2000 users? 9X ain't even listed, 2000 doesn't even get a full percentage.
Remember all the people who said they would stick with 9X or 2K? Where are they now? Not on steam at least.
We move on. I won't be getting Vista for a while, I like my linux desktop and for games I don't need it. Yet.
I think the biggest thing hurting MS at the moment is NOT Vista's tech woes, but something far more deadly. It is piracy. It ain't there. I am a freak for trying the latest software, but I also hate cripple ware and store bought machines, so I either look at spending a couple of hundred euro's on Vista because all the pirated versions seem to have problems.
How much of MS old early adoptor market consisted of pirates? I got 95Se 98 98SE 2K etc ALL from that subscription thing an old employer had. Illegal, sure. But those machines showed up in surveys like this. How any Steam players would run Vista if they could?
More and more games will be directx 10, or will look at their best in directx10. Support for XP will dry up, new computers will come with Vista pre-installed and people will move on.
Just as we did before.
The only difference as I have said is that this time it will be a lot harder to do it without paying MS, and for some of us, that is a big hurdle. I wouldn't mind trying Vista, it is not like I use my gaming machine for anything critical, but not for the current price tag.
But some day? Sure, if I can find an unused key somewhere for a non-crippled version. Because lets admit it, I want to see how shiny it is. Precious...
First, you claim that the british methods did NOT work. We don't know that, unless you got a parallel universe handy to prove it, we only got the fact that the british and IRA employed the tactics they did, and now there is 'peace'. It is impossible to say that things would have turned out as they have if you had changed something. We just don't know, if the IRA had not committed bombings against civilians, perhaps the peace process might have happened quicker? If britain had been less vigilant, perhaps the IRA might have thought it could dictate a withdrawal?
But there are other differences as well, the IRA never wished for britain to be wiped of the map. The enemy is not an animal who doesn't deserve to live. The IRA tried, to a certain degree, limit the amount of civilian casualties. It could have caused many more deaths if it had gone purely after a huge death toll, it didn't and that made it easier for the enemy/victims to 'forgive'. For instance many IRA bombings were WARNED about by the IRA itself with enough time to evacuate, terror but without casualties. A HUGE difference from the bombings by Islamic terrorists or the Japanese Nerve gas attack or the Oklohoma bombing. All these groups want to do is kill lots of people who in their eyes are undeserving of living.
The link to other treaths is often made, but doesn't really matter, we all die, but terror attacks disrupt our lives. Many people die in road 'accidents' and that is why we have camera's everywhere and most of the police constantly patrolling the roads.
The problem ain't the number of deaths, it is that it is allowed to happen. Not all that many people are killed by murderes either, should we just let them go as well? Get rid of the entire justice system? No, if someone commits a crime, they must answer for that crime. You mention train crashes, holland hasn't had a person die in a train cash in decades, we have had two terrorists attacks, both murders of people who dared to speak their mind. A direct attack on freedom of speech. Surely freedom of speech is worth defending?
But there are problems, like international crime, terrorism seems almost impossible to erradicate because the police has to respect the law, and criminals by their nature don't.
The recent lebanon conflict showed this once again. Hezbollah broke every convention of war, yet it was Israel that was restricted in its actions. If you use a human shield, then those humans become active participants in that war and therefore legal targets. Yet Israel could not simply bomb them because the world was breathing down their neck.
This jail was one attempt by the americans to level the playing field, faced with an enemy that didn't play by the rules, they tried to do the same. It backfired. Not just because people expect/want the US to play by the rules, but because they did not go far enough. If you fight dirty, you really have to get dirty. If you are going to fight a war, you need to commit to it fully, send in all the troops you need and then double them and send them in with more firepower then they can handle. Any war that starts with an exit plan is doomed. No plan survives contact with the enemy.
I think the IRA and britain made peace because the war had taken its toll, both sides decided that enough was enough and peace HAD to be the solution rather then continued fighting. BOTH sides. As in BOTH, two of them. It takes one person to make a war, but it requires two to make peace.
One of the silliest things I hear people say about the current problems is,"I am not war with islam" or more personal,"I am not war with that cashier at my supermarket who wears a headscarf".
A noble sentiment, and pointless. The question is,"is islam at war with ME". Is that girl behind the cash register at war with YOU.
If someone wants a war, the other side rarely has the luxury to ignore it. Exactly who desired the current conflict is why beyond even my lengthy ranting, sad fact is that we got a conflict, it has been brewing for a long
I followed the links you supplied and didn't have to look far at all before I ran into pages that were IE/Windows only. You want to take a guess at how many Flickr customers use an Apple?
Yes MS has a huge share of the desktop, in business it is near absolute, but that means all those millions of machines Apple keeps churning out HAVE TO END UP SOMEWHERE. In fact, I have strong personal evidence that Apples last longer, so that means there are a shitload of people out there on macs. This doesn't even count freaks like me on linux.
Does that matter? Yes, a sharing site, a social site, should just work. In Firefox, in Safari, in opera, on OSX on OS9 on Linux on BSD and yes even windows ALL all the way back to 98.
MS can't do this. Not because of a lack of skill, it just wouldn't occur to them. It simply ain't the way MS operates. They always will introduce some element that excludes large numbers of their own customers, let alone those on other OS'es or who don't use IE.
And that matters, because these sites are about sharing, not about worrying wether your viewer has the right browser/OS or indeed software installed.
Why do you think so many sites now use flash for their video player? Because it is the most reliable way of doing that, why do you think a lot of sites EVEN so still add a hard download link? Because the captures the last percentage of users.
The techies at MS may be capable, but somewhere in the Redmond beast there is someone with veto powers who ALWAYS injects something that kills it. Look at all their attemps with a universal login, they renamed it, redesigned it and it is still a dismall failure, because at no point did MS put the enduser first and not their own corporate interests.
The moment MS becomes capable (not in tech but in business decisions) to support other OS'es then its own, then MS will be succesfull on the web. Perhaps it is changing, silverlight might be a change and I did see a link to a .mov on photosynth. But the apps themselves are windows XP SP2 and Vista only (in fact one says XP only).
Check flickr, you won't be able to move for the mac lovers.
Not that you are capable of understanding this, but copyright is NOT an absolute. The copyright as we know it now is a recent 'invention' and was introduced in response to technological changes (music recordings). Is it that strange to rethink copyright again now technologie has once again changed the world?
To give an example, before the printing press was invented, the only way to spread written texts was by copying them. Someone, monks in the west, sat down, and simply copied an existing work word for word. That was the only way to make more then one copy, unless the original author fancied writing all the copies himself.
There was no such thing as copyright, you had the original author and book, and people copied that work for distribution.
This changed with the inventing of the press, all of a sudden an original work could be turned out in any number desired (more or less). This changed the name of the game, as all of a sudden you had a new industry, that of the printing press (publishers if you like) who could take works and reprint them and sell them at volumes large enough to make a business. Before that books were simply to rare and expensive for all but the most powerfull to posses.
With music this mattered, before a composer who wrote a piece of music had one copy of it. If someone wanted another copy of it, they had to deal with the composer, distribution was limited. When printing of sheet music became possible all of sudden a piece of music was worth more then just the money you could get from performing it, you could write music and sell it without ever touching an instrument. The music industry had been born.
It is hard for us to imagine, but once people traded music sheets as eagerly as we trade MP3's.
Times changed again when music itself could be recorded, first by automatic instruments, later the music performance itself.
Over this time, the music industry (the people selling others people work) and the artists and the composers have been in a constant struggle as to who should receive what amount of money. The original sheet publishers offcourse preffered to simply take the music, or pay a mininal one time fee, and collect all the profits they could. The performers want to just pay a minimal fee at most and be damned how many times they perform it or how much they get paid for it, the composer wants to see money for each copy sold and each performance.
All this eventually, over many changes led to copyright as we know it now. The best you can say for it, is that it kept everyone quiet. Not exactly content, but quiet.
But things changed, tech moved on once again and deeply cut for the first time into the publishers, all of sudden you didn't need a huge press anymore, (either to print books OR press vinyl/CD's etc) but end customers could reproduce music easily on their own. In a way going back to the original situation where if you wanted a copy of something, you made it.
The industry seems to have responded by making copyright even stricter, seemingly wanting to expand the lifespan to infinite, this despite the fact that for instance Disney is famous for NOT paying for the copyrighted works of others who just happen to fall outside that new protection, Pinocio was famously released JUST after the copyright expired.
But the main question is this, why should we keep a law that has been recently introduced to deal with changing tech, now that tech has changed again? Copyright is NOT a natural thing, it is something invented by lawyers to product an industry, why should we as a society keep it if we no longer need it, want it.
Once there was a law that required a man with a red flag to walk in front of a motorised vehicle, that was introcued to protect the horse carriage industry. We changed it when it became clear that new tech of the automobile had made the horse obsolete. That industry was simply forced to adopt or die. Why should the music industry not do the same.
and if you cry out, but that would mean, no
It is a lot of pages but so far this text seems to be pretty standard procedure for dealing with what the US claims are highly dangerous people. If the guidelines in this document are followed it is hard to see evidence of torture. Then again I thought abu ghraib was pathetic. If muslims talk just because a dog is barking at them, well, it is just pathetic. Read up on some real torture sessions, done against women and childeren and then come back. Being put into humiliating postions? Flushing a book? Oh yeah, that compares to electro shock, being beaten to death and seeing your fellows executed.
Is the US right in doing this? Hard to say, they face an enemy that on the one hand seems almost eager to die for the cause but can't be counted on to make a stand so they can be wiped out. How do you deal with an enemy that behaves like a civilian right upto the point they detonate a bomb, then blend back in again.
Germany had over 97% casualty from mistreatment of its russian prisoners, that is clear, you can't argue that this was barbaric. But where do you draw the line? I seen stories about criminals in the west who are let go because putting them in jail would place to heavy a burden on them. Eh yeah, we should only jail people who can handle it. Why not give speeding tickets only to those who can afford them?
The world, it is not just the US that is faced with radicals, is in a war that cannot be won by conventional means. So what do you do with your prisoners, there is no real war, so they ain't real prisoners, and the enemy cannot be defeated so you cannot return them afterwards.
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.
The US method? Well, that doesn't exactly seem to work either.
Perhaps the world is just at a loss, what do you do against fringe groups who are on the one hand fanatical enough to do anything, but smart enough to not wipe themselves out? It ain't just muslims, Japan had that nerve gas attack, America had Oklohoma, Holland had themurder of Pim Fortuyn. How do you deal with those who want to overthrow society but at once are such a part of that society you can't seperate them.
I think this whole jail is just a big mistake, they thought they could use it for intel, and all they ended up with was a public relation disaster because the public doesn't want to hear about how the world works. If you think the stuff here is really disturbing read up on innocent mental patients strapped to their beds for days because you don't want to pay for medical care. No red cross who inspects mental wards.
The US would have much better off had it shot these people instead of capturing them. Offcourse, that has other issues, tell the enemy surrender is not an option, and you just make him more fanatical (russian soldiers scared the germans, because the russians just didn't quit)
Lots of people will disagree with me, but frankly if you want to cry about abuse of power there are far worse places in the world. This seems to be just a rather harsh prisoner of war camp. Compared to the real horrors that go on around the world, I can't loose any sleep over it, especially if you realize that the people improsened here support goverments and organisations that have absolutely no rules about the treathment of prisoners.
Watch the movie The life and death of Colonel Blimp, a story about a man who has to realize that in a dirty war, you got to fight dirty.
Oh and please don't think me a Bush supporter, I am not, but the world has this war now, and we need to deal with it. Whining about how things should be different don't help. We need to clean up this fucking mess and pulling out ain't the fucking answer. If bush can't take responsiblity someone else will have too.
Laptops are the way they are, BIG, because they keyboard needs to be big. If you ever have been forced to use a small keyboard, or even one of those horrible flat ones without physical keys you will know why. Our fingers just ain't that accurate while typing. I can blind type fairly but my fingers still depend heavily on the shape of the keys to press the right one.
That is the reason keys on your keybaord are tapered like / \ that so that two keys next to each other /i\ /o\ have a large space between them so that if you slightly miss one you don't hit another.
Keys are also slightly curved inwards for even better guidance of your fingers. Work with a keyboard that doesn't have this and watch your accuracy drop.
This has always been a weakness with touchscreens. For display stands the keyboard is a necesarry evil, while you could do LOTS of intresting things with a touch screen as the input method, the simple fact is that if you want people to start typing, they want/need/expect a traditional keyboard with properly shaped and spaced keys. If people only have to make the most basic inputs, a touch screen will do, and can in many ways help avoid wrong inputs. (Experiment, Prompt the user to enter Y/N, and record what keys they actually press. WARNING: you will loose all fate in humanity when you see the results. Intresting side note, once had a display that at one point asked the user to touch the screen to continue. Should have known better then to use this for a display at a household show. The women touched the screen alright, the sides, the top, the bottom, everything BUT the screen. Granted this was some time ago)
The iPhones touch screen is in many ways totally crap, no tactile feedback on where your fingers are (no homekeys), no tactile feedback on a keypress/release. Way too closely spaced. The "advantage" it has is that physical keyboards at that size are little better, and very prone to breaking.
Why do you think over all these years we still have keyboards with physical keys that are still the same shape as they were on typewriters from before the war? They work.
A webserver needs at most three ports open, 80, for obvious reasons, 443 for https and 22 for ssh. That is it.
If you need to connect remotely to another service you do it via SSH.
Mysql is a database. Let it do databases. Let SSH do its job.
When I see people use your logic you make my jaw drop. SSH for live. EVERYTHING over ssh. ALWAYS. Full stop, end of story. No argument.
Exposing your database like this is insanity and you are asking for trouble. Mysql authentication is a joke and considering you are doing it this way, you probably have it setup wrong. Because what you are doing is wrong.
Tunnel over SSH. It is a most basic tool. Read up on it, NOW! Google: mysql tunnel ssh
Offcourse, next thing he will say is that he uses telnet for remote access, some admins would make ghandi loose his temper
What you are talking about is brandname awareness. Shout your brand loudly and hope it sticks so that when people go shopping they remember your brand and buy it.
Google is closer to advertising as it is done in stores. Google "knows" that you are in a hardware site, so they put up a display of something you might want to buy related to that. If you don't remember it or don't even look at it, though, you probably weren't intrested. Supermarkets don't really care if you look at their displays or not. They are there to convince people who were already looking, those people are intrested. When you are shopping for soda drinks a display for a new brand or a special offer will intrest you, that is all after all why you are there.
But as much as you might be intrested, you wouldn't want a show that stops you in your tracks for 30 seconds while shopping to tell you of this great new brand. Google COULD put up huge flashing ads, but it would also interfer with is main business.
You might notice that most personal ads in the newspaper, do not use color, full page, or nude women (well apart from certain sections) that is because a person reading the second hand computer section doesn't need to be attracted anymore, just sold. It is the reason that while shampoo is advertised with gorgeous naked women, it is sold by people fully dressed.
There are already automatic sentry guns, robots in essence, but these don't guard against missles on open sea, they guard a border in what is still a war zone.
I think that is a very good time to start thinking about the ethics around robots. Not just how we treat robots, but how we allow them to treat us. What exactly should a robot confirm too before it can be allowed to harm a human being?
This doesn't require ethics. Currently we have dumb machines, if a car runs you over it is either because it has gone out of control and you are a victim of the laws of nature OR it is the fault of the human driver.
But what of a robot who can make decisions, how should it govern itself. Current robots are always setup as much as possible to avoid doing any harm whatsover. They are either behind safety gates, that cannot be opened while the robot is working and shut down the moment they detect an obstruction. This is an ethical choice in itself, we decided as human beings that it better to outfit robots in this way, rather then just put a sign "watch out". Current ethic is roughly "never knowingly risk causing harm, even at risk to oneself or ones task".
The gun sentry offcourse has a totally different task, how far should it go from being just a dumb automatic gun that fires at everything to a machine that makes choices. If it chooses when to fire, how certain should it be. When can it fire and when can't it fire.
There are other aspects as well, as medical technology becomes more advanced we get machines that will decide our treatment for us, I think it is equally important that we think of just what these machines can decide and when they should stop and call a human being.
Say that machine has been charged with deliving drugs to a person to keep that person alive, there is usually a fine line between the dose that benefits you, and the dose that kills you. How far should the machine be allowed to go? If a possible lethal dose MIGHT be what is necesarry to keep a person alive, would we allow that decision to be made by a robot OR should a human doctor make that decision.
In a way robot ethics has nothing to do with robot sentience, it is far closer to where do we put the decision making, in the hands of humans onthe spot, or a programmer who coded the decision making sometime during manufacturing.
Say you have a robot truck, it is driving on the highway, suddenly an obstacle appears, possible human. What should it do? We are thinking of automating driving, but why has no one thought of this ethical choice where a piece of software will have to choose between running someone over OR performing a dangerous manouver that might cause even more lives. Current machines have no choice, but if we add choice to themachine we need to think what we want it to decide.
As westerners our ideas of what happens to make a face look young (I can't speak for other cultures) just happens to be abundant in asian faces. A western female face, perhaps because we are more familiar with it, will develop quickly from that of a young a girl, to that of a mature woman, install a program like poser and see for yourselve how a subtle shifting of the facial lines can make a character leap through the years.
An adult face, even in a female is more lined, more pronounced, asian faces, by their nature are smoother. This doesn't apply to ALL japanese faces, but I myself have seen plenty of asian females well into their 20's who at first glance you mistake for someone ten years younger.
Faces of indian (as in india) women tend to me look far more mature on the other hand. Because they have in a way a more extreme version of the western face combined with the darkness of the skin, they seem older then they really are. To a westerner, grown up with western faces.
Saying that different facial structures throw you assement of their age off balance is racist is taking PC too far.
All people have difficulty reading faces of races they aren't exposed too. I noticed myself that since I started working in a more international area where I am constantly exposed to clients from all over the world, I have become far better at it.
Not all bugs are equal. Some you will be able to fix in minutes as they are little more then simple errors in your code. Others will be more complex because you designed something wrong and changing it impacts more then just the part that is bugged. And finally there will be errors that not just affect your program but the data the customer has created with your program.
You can't say a bug == 4 weeks. That is like saying, repairing a car takes 4 weeks. Is it a loose cable or have the wheels taken a detour?
To asses how long it will take to fix you have to know what the bug is. Is it an error in a line of code? Is it a function that does not quite what is expected? Is there a design flaw/oversight? Is data involved? And finally, have people come to depend on that bug as a feature? This ranges from a hotpatch in a couple of hours to something you may just have to learn to live with including having to code that 'bug' into future releases.
Now stop reading slashdot and start fixing that damned code. Geez, you would think Microsoft would have better control over its people. Oh wait, a patch in a month? Nah, too fast for an MS coder.
Symbian was developed on hardware, on the lowest hardware then available so that it would be sure to run on everything. This made the design obsolete at launch and now it is so archaic(?) that people really resent that original decesion.
Perhaps Google wants to avoid this. Wants apps that push the hardware requirements so that the Android phones will HAVE to be powerhouses, and it doesn't get trapped in the symbian or even MS trap of having to work on the cheapest shit some company can throw together.
Apparently (I only have this from hearsay) symbian phones often miss basic hardware capabilties that drive a pc programmer up the wall because he suddenly has to code for features that have been present in PC's from the dawn of computing.
All google now has to do, is convince mobile phone makers that it is in their best interest to make their phones capable of actually running the software currently being developed.
Don't forget mobile tech moves fast but is expensive. If the companies could get away with yesterdays tech they would. That ain't good for us consumers, we want them to be pushed so we finally get some fully capable smart phones and not the same crippled yunk they have pushing on us.
That conflict showed the failure of an army fighting by the rules, against an enemy that did not, and never has.
If Israel could have used the full force of its military without the world breathing down its neck, hezbollah would have been so much smoking corpses.
What this shows you is that most advanced tank cannot deal with a meat shield if there is a camera crew near. Hezbollah has become very good at using this kind of war, they had to, the more recent lebanese actions have shown they suck at military conflict. Note that lebanon could just blow the hell out of hezbollah bases and civilian casualties be damned. Suddenly the world realises that just because a shot up corpse is dressed in civil garb, does not make it a civilian.
In fact the military conflics around Israel have shown just how bloody effective modern equipment is, outnumbered in every way, Israel nonetheless manages to hold out, because they use tech to the max.
You are also wrong about the soviets, the russians were actually the one with the better gear against the germans. It just took a while for it all to come together, but it was the germans that copied soviet tech, not the other way around. The turn around came when russia learned to use the tech advantage it had and properly equip its soldiers with it. Early in the war, it had excellent tanks, but often without radios, or it had motivated troops, who lacked guns. Once that was sorted out, the germans never won a single battle against the russians. Superior tech.
Offcourse, you got to use it properly.
Iraq again shows you just how lethal tech is over numbers. The iraq army was many times greater and was wiped out.
The current conflict has nothing to do with the lack of manpower or reliance on tech. You cannot occupy a country that doesn't want to be occupied unless you are capable of dealing out massive amounts of punishment Roman style. Storm the city, kill everyone inside, tear down the buildings, plow up the ground and sow it with salt, so that you can then point to the desolate area and say, "this is what we do with those who oppose us, any questions?"
In a way, Hezbollah uses very modern weapons, western media, to fight the war. No use of radio? How do you think the images of bloodshed, real and staged made its way to the west? Pigeons?
One final note. You state that Israel only managed to advance X miles. How many miles did Hezbollah advance? Okay, yards then. Feet? Inches? So much for low tech then. Hezbollah has never once manage to threaten Israels survival. It is one of the reasons Lebanon is so fed up with them and finally took action against them and this time, the world media didn't care.
Although lots of people seem to think him a traitor, he really wasn't (although it depends heavily on how your read the history). His father at one point emigrated to the US, then moved back to russia, taking his american born son with him. So while the guy was american born, when he became an agent he was a soviet citizen.
Using people as agents who have lived in the country they are supposed to work in is nothing new. But he worked as an agent for the country of which he was a citizen. He entered the US as a spy and as such did NOT commit treason.
That is an important difference to make.
Odd by the way that a lot of americans seem to condemn hailing this guy as a hero, when their own space program was built upon a nazi war criminal. Russian spy vs nazi, oh yeah the ruskies are the baddies alright. Working people to their death vs taking a dangerous mission to protect your home country.
For those of us with a mind (american, Idol is on) this guy and others helped created the policy of mutually assured destruction. While nukes are scary, they ain't half as scary as they would have been if only one side had them. Would you have trusted the US as the only country with nuclear weapons?
Millions of japanese? 140.000 at Horishima 80.000 at Nagasaki, several thousand afterwards. That is a quarter million from the results of the way. The cities in question would have had to been wiped out from fallout and after effects SEVERAL times to even reach one million.
So where do you get your millions from? The total death toll of WW2 is estimated around 50 million, the americans accounted for a small fraction of that. Major culprits where the germans, the russians and the japanese. It is often forgotten but they had a regime as brutal as the holocaust.
The A-bombs are noteworthy because they killed a lot of people with just one device. Before that you needed large bomber formations or massive organisation to achieve the same amount of killing, but compare it to the slaughter on the eastern front, the japanese death camps, the german concentration camps or even carpet bombing, and they were just a small note on that huge ledger of lost lives that we call WW2.
Millions of japanese lives, geez. Grow up and read a book.
China doesn't want war, not right now at least. It also really doesn't want taiwan. What on earth would it do with it. It just doesn't want to be seen backing down on it either. The current situation suits them and for that matter suits the US and most of the world.
But China is also in danger of being seen as weak, or thinks itself being seen that way at least, so it must show it got a bark. Taking out an american spy plane, destroying a satelite, supporting north-korea (that is mess china would dearly love to get rid off, if only it wouldn't loose face over it) and now, showing that that might US fleet ain't all that mighty after all.
If it did want war, the sub would not have surfaced, it would have quietly slipped away and once out of range send a signal, 'test succesfull' and chinese military planners would have made another mark on their checklist for conditions for a succesfull invasion of taiwan "reduce US capability to interfere".
Upsetting the economy is NOT in Chinese interest, it benefits them far too much. In case of war the world economy would be gone anyway, the US is under no obligation to honor its debts to a country it is at war with. China can't exactly set the bailifs on washintong. Impound Fort Knox?
The US projects its military power by sailing its carriers around the world, and the chinse projects its by popping up in torpedo range and saying "Boom you are dead". It is a game, a lethal game played for high stakes, but the chinese have shown it is still just horsing around. If they were serious, we wouldn't have had this story.