Since I have read this far down and nobody has posted a decent explanation on the difference between a Debeers mined diamond and a made one I thought I would post some five year old info about where they used to be up to. The most advanced people at making artificial diamonds was a lab in Russia.
As far as I can remember the main problem they were encountering was Nitrogen. In a natural diamond which forms over a long period of time the nitrogen atoms would drift together over time and end up clumped together and form a seperate molecule (N4) of pure nitrogen embeded in the carbon lattice. This nitrogen molecule absorbed some light from the carbon but was otherwise undetectable.
In the early attempts at making artificial diamonds they left the nitrogen in but it did not migrate together so ended up actually part of the carbon lattice. This gave the artificial diamonds a slight yellow tint as the nitrogen also emitted light back into the diamond crystal lattice. The Russian solution was to remove all the nitrogen at the start of the process.
This produced perfect, pure carbon diamonds with a perfect crystal lattice. These diamonds however had a the property of trapping light so that when the light falling on them ceased (you switched the light off) they fluoresced, giving off the light they had been trapping with in the crystal lattice due to total internal reflection. Now this may have made them really cool but it did make them different to naturally occuring diamond.
What the Russian team really needed was a way to leave in the Nitrogen impurity but so that it did not ever interupt the carbon crystal lattice.
At this point De Beers was already shitting themselves and started looking at ways of marking there diamonds to prove they were mined diamonds not some knocked up in a lab. They semed to have a number of ideas such as laser etching the DeBeers trademark on each stone and similar but I dont know what the ultimately chose.
If someone has some more info, please post it but don't start it with your dad, grandad, etc used to be jeweler as this just makes it hopelessly outdated. These new lab made diamonds are not like anything De Beers have had to deal with before (Cubic Zirconia, etc) as they are actually made of carbon which is formed into a diamond lattice using super high pressures but in a lab rather than underground.
This information came from some sort of TV documentary I saw a number of years ago.
I did however just throw some stuff at google and this is what came back -
Because your average technical journo who writes the articles in question is too hooked on the freebies MS provide him with in the way of free booze to risk fucking that up.
Everyone knows there have been better OSes out there than windows since OS2 warp but the competion has never bribed these people with enough free stuff for them to write about it. To get a glowing review of an OS you have to install it on a brand new laptop and then give said laptop away for free to enough journos so that some actually use it.
A lot of this comes down to "what's in a name"? Personally, I see Debian's position as more proper within the realm of the F/OSS community. If you toute your program as open source, yet say that if anyone makes any changes to the program that you do not approve of, that they cannot use your trademark, then that certainly doesn't sound "open" and "free" to me.
So by virtue of this I should be able to release my own version of Debian, still containing all the debian logos and branding. But I presinstall my version with shit loads of adverts which pop up every 15 seconds and tracks all your net activity for my own ends. Then I post my version of debian to a few sites I maintain and release it as Debian with only the smallest indication that I made it unusable, not Debian themselves.
Of course I can't do this or I would be able to seriously tarnish Debians reputation.
Good on Debian for sticking to their guns, let's hope enough distributions have the balls to stick by their guns and start refusing to use the FireFox logo or icons in protest.
Not sure why you say this. It seemed to me that the problem was that debian wanted to use firefox with all the firefox logos and artwork, but make some changes behind the scenes to the code. No I can understand firefox objecting to this, as if debian muck up their modifications it will reflect badly on the firefox brand, not debian.
If you want to release firefox as part of your product (with modifications) then that is your right under the GPL providiing you also release it under the GPL. But you may not use the Logo's and artwork that come with firefox as you are no longer releasing firefox, you are releasing your bastardised version of firefox so need to label it as such. That way if you release complete crap it reflects badly on you, not the Mozilla corp.
I love your comment about the capitalistic stuff, once upon a time I agreed with this. Then I got a job and joined the real world. What Mozilla are actually trying to do is protect their own public image, it has nothing to do with monopolies or market abuse of any kind.
Thanks for the reply, but I was hoping for an answer from someone who at least lived in Britain as it was a question about a fairly specific point of British Law.
I am however aware that someone who is not entitled to any assistance does not count towards the low unemployment figures. This means that the unemployment figures are not worth a damn. I believe the expression used is "under emnployed". This is a great way of keeping the figures low but not actually having enough jobs for all members of society who wish to work.
We in Britain use the same system but most of Europe calculates unemployment figures by deducting the number of working tax payers from number of people between 16 and 60 (ages actually vary by country) from the national census info. This gives a much higher value for unemployment figures.
In respect of not getting the full picture, does anyone? Lets face it unless you actually research these issues for yourself what can you hope to learn. The media (especially that which is privately owned like CBS, CNN, Fox, Sky News, etc) never gives an impartial view with regards to these issues as they have their own agenda to push. This agenda is usually set by the owners of said media.
It is worth reminding you that George Bush senior pulled strings to stop his son George Bush junior (current president) from going to Vietnam. Otherwise, like Kerry, he would have had to go there and serve his country. He did not.
Also, your point is about kids willingly joining the army would be valid if they did it willingly. But in America you put a limit on the amount of social security anyone can claim. So it is highly likely that if you run out of social security you would be very desperate for anywork you could get as starvation is fairly unpleasant. And watching your family starve is probably about the only thing less than pleasant than starving to death yourself. This will give people a great incentive to join the army even without the fact that it is the only way a lot of poor kids can afford to go to college.
And before anyone claims that they paid there own way through college with no financial help from their parents please include a free place to live while saving for college as financial help. Alot of people I know had to start paying rent to their parents as soon as they left school at 16. When you are 16-21 having to pay any rent / keep is very expensive for most people due to the low prospective earnings for the sort of work available to most kids that age.
Since the above is a worthless answer that does not go into any detail of explaing whiy you are wrong I thought I would try and elaborate.
The first point is relavant regarding google not distributing modifications to the kernel as this is what prohibited.
For example, if I rewrite large chunks of anything under the GPL then only use that code in house without ever releasing a product based on my alterations that is legal. This is effectively what the GPL was there to allow, you can modify the kernel source for your own ends providing you do not distribute the result as your own work. If you distribute the result at all then it must be done with source included.
Although as far as I am aware the GPL may not be legally binding in all countries. I am fairly sure it has never been challenged in any English court and I do not know how well it would hold up here due to our laws of contract but as I am not a lawyer I an not qualified to discuss that point.
If there are any lawyers out there could they explain to me why the GPL still forms a binding contract even though the end user who supposedly agrees to the contract does not provide any 'consideration' to the developers?
(Note - 'consideration' is used in this instance as a legal term so if you dont understand the question, dont bother trying to answer it)
The website you list as your home page is based in Holland, now last time I checked that was never part of the Soviet Union. So unless you regularly went for jaunts behind the Iron curtain you know just as much about what it was like to live under Communism as I do.
I also notice from browsing your site that you are a decadent westerner who is involved in the Oil industry, and by the looks of it does very well for your troubles (You drive a Porsche 968). Now personally I am a decadent westerner who makes his money from software we sell to whoever will buy it so I cannot be too critical but dont pretend you know anything about living under communism.
Hell, hire me and I'll make all that lost productivity go away.
Some hope!
You obviously don't have to deal with higly technical staff. Where I work any attempt to stop us browsing what we please would be doomed to failure. We are a development house so its a pretty safe bet any one of the staff here could bypass any filter you care to apply.
Not that we could spend all day browsing what we please as it is an open plan office so everyone can see everyone elses PC screen without too much effort.
Any attempt to restrict what you staff do with their work PC's by force is only effective against non-techies. Any member of techy staff worth his or here salt should be able to bypass any sort of filtering. Personally I would connect to my home network via VPN and then go back out from there.
Any attempt to block access to my home PC from here would cause problems when I want to connect to the office from home.
A much better idea is to encourage your staff to work their asses of with profit sharing schemes and such.
Every Democratically elected government uses this trick. They bullshit the electorate before the electorate (usually trying to bribe them with less taxes) then do whatever they want when the get into power, safe in the knowledge that it is usually 4 years before anyone can do anything about it. Closer to the election the government will start being nice, but right after they election they never give a shit.
You want previous examples, go look at every British conservative election victory in the 1980's. In most cases the British people would do the same thing, vote for the opposition in the local elections as a protest then go back to the tories when the prime ministers election came round becuase they were promised the moon on a stick (lower taxes, better public services through less waste).
Sooner or later all of eastern europe will have to realise that Democracy is no better than Communism was. All it provides is the illusion of having a say in who runs your country so nobody starts a revolution. The people who run every country are the people with the the money. They support politicians with huge donations of cash in return for getting their way when those politicians get elected. Without that cash the politician is unable to pay for all the advertising required in order to get elected.
This will only change when the people of every nation actually take interest in running their own country, but at the moment most people want someone else to take charge so they don't have to make any tough decisions.
Iraq is the best example of this in the western world at present. We need their oil so we can use motor vehicles. Yet nobody wants the guilt of invading another country just to steal their natural resources. So the politicians make up some excuse and we all go along with it, not because we believe it, but because we dont want to face the truth. The alternative was that we kept paying Saudi Arabia for oil and they kept spending some of it on flying planes into our buildings (WTC - 9/11). Osama Bin Laden is Saudi Arabian. He is rich because we had to buy oil from his country. The Saudi Government (Not Democratic, it is ruled by a KING) tacitly support this and will quite happily turn a blind eye to their people funding and supporting terrorism abroad because it keeps the problem abroad, not at home).
The truth is that if everyone in the world had the same standard of living we do in the west, the world would be fucked. Imagine 6 Billion people all driving their own car whenever they pleased, using Gas that costed the same amount it does in the US. The remainder of the worlds oil would be gone inside a decade. So we trust our governments in the west to make sure this doesn't happen. That is why China and India are such a problem. They have too many people who all want the same standard of living we currently have so even they may break the bank, yet alone if Africa got on its feet as well.
So instead we all whine and carp on about how you can't trust politicians. But who wants to. We don't want to know the truth, we want someone to hold our hands and tell us that everything will be ok. That way, if the shit hits the fan we can honestly say it isnt our fault. In the mean time however we can get on with enjoying our lives free from worry.
Remember - It doesnt matter who you vote for, the Government always get in!
As someone who actually played UT2005 (or whatever, the latest one anyway) under both Windows and Linux I would suggest that most developement companies dont bother with linux for another reason. The games look crap compared with when they run under direct X.
If you compare UT2005 under windows to UT2005 under linux, there is a very noticable drop in quality (or there was on the 6800GT I had to play it on). An awful lot of the really pretty visual lighting effects were just not supported under Linux. The net result was that I would happily reboot my PC into windows just to play a game that was installed under linux as well. Eventually I removed the Linux version as it was never used.
Now if I were a game developer I would not want people looking at the Linux version because it would give them a bad impression of how the game could really look.
This will only change when all the nice effects currently available under the DirectX 10 SDK are matched by OpenGL.
As much as it pains me to admit it, DirectX is so far ahead of OpenGL in terms of the ease with which you can create decent 3D worlds that Linux games are still along way off.
If anyone out there disagrees and knows enough about DirectX SDK and OpenGL to explain why this is untrue please post a nice long reply for me to read. Many Thanks in advance if you do.
I have used it for years and everytime I try another distribution they all just annoy me too much.
The only time I ever considered Slackware I took one look at the docs, read the bit about 2.4 kernel and threw the disk in the bin. I think that was Slackware 9.?? but everyone else was just releasing the first 2.6 kernels even then. Why do they still go 2.4 by default now?
How does Slackware work with modern hardware? (Wifi, SATA, etc)
I am never likely to use Slackware and answer these questions myself as I am a sucker for running the most recent stable versions of stuff.
Actually no, if the launch fails very late on after the container has left the atmosphere but before it escapes earths magnetic field then the container would have to withstand re-entry.
Anyone who has studied re-entry will tell you this is bad. The container could quite easily (no atmosphere to slow it down in space) attain speeds of the order of 1000+mph (http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae15 8.cfm). Something travveling at this speed hitting the atmosphere will get hot, very hot. I am sorry I cant be bothered to go into all the details now as I am on my lunch break at work at have no access to my old Physics with Space Technology Uni notes.
Basically, you would be hard pressed to design a container that can with stand anything more than a 5 degree angle re-entry. Something tumbling out of control will almost certainly come in much steeper, and it will burn up. This will disperse its contents over a wide area (half the globe).
Nuclear fissile material will not become magically inert in this process though. This is because even if it gets hot enough become a gas it is still too heavy to be captured by the earths magnetic field (normal radiation from the sun is trapped by earths field and enters at the poles producing the funny lights in the sky). Think Chernobyl, this caused radioactive material to rain (litterally in rain) down over a wide swaith of Europe and this was a near meltdown at ground level.
A nuclear meltdown in low earth orbit would be very bad. Not planet destroying, but still bad.
That said, I am still in favour of using nuclear power, it just has to be done very carefully in all circumstances.
Sorry this article is light on technical details, but I could write 30 page essays on this and still leave bits out. If anyone is that interesting try this wikipedia link for a start:
It was a Space 1999 reference, that crappy SciFi show from the 70s where Moonbase Alpha (and the entire moon) was sent drifting off through the universe by load of nuclear waste we stored there going critical and forcing it out of orbit.
The thing everyone always forgets about the farmer who shot an unarmed boy in the back while he was leaving his premises is that the shotgun he did it with was an unregistered sawn off which he obtained specifically for killing the next person to trespass on his farm.
Unsurprisingly the police take a very dim view of people who use illegal firearms, even if it is in self defence (which this most definately was not).
You missed the Macarthy era? Lucky you. But I seem to recall some people were sent to prison during it.
But seriously join the American Communist Party and see what happens. You will find it alot harder to get highly paid work and a lot of doors that were previously open will close for no apparrent reason.
Communist Russia never conquered africa, most of Africa's problems have been the fall out of British colonialism. Communism has never really gained much of a foothold.
Same for Linux. Nero has a version for Linux, its what I use for burning DVD's.
What? You say your hardware didnt come with a disk for Linux? Did it come with a disk for OSX as well as the windows one?
And talking about bundled software with hardware did you know that usually the software vendor pays for this so they can fob substandard software off on to users who don't know any better and will buy the full version anyway (Global DVD / WinDVD anyone?) This business model will only work when you have a large number of uneducated users who buy software without reading anything about it first (Or without checking that they need it)
Or the data would sit at the ISP until the RIAA filed a subpoena to access it to find prove who ownded that ADSL line which was providing Britney Spears MP3's via bit torrent.
Child porn is disgusting. This is the main reason why goverments use it to cry out for less anonymity online, most people find it disgusting and so will go along with this. If Gonzales had come out and made this announcement saying they wanted to force ISPs to retain this information so that the RIAA / MPAA could hassle more parents over their kids ileagally downloading music / films then the public would laugh him off stage.
Your average parent will certainly react very differently to a potential peadophile threat than to the threat of some huge corporation kicking your door in one morning over something your kids have been doing while you are at work.
Slashdot Mirror
Since I have read this far down and nobody has posted a decent explanation on the difference between a Debeers mined diamond and a made one I thought I would post some five year old info about where they used to be up to. The most advanced people at making artificial diamonds was a lab in Russia.
l abstrans.shtml - The program I watched on BBC and have summarised (badly) above.
l 1 7092046.htmh tml
As far as I can remember the main problem they were encountering was Nitrogen. In a natural diamond which forms over a long period of time the nitrogen atoms would drift together over time and end up clumped together and form a seperate molecule (N4) of pure nitrogen embeded in the carbon lattice. This nitrogen molecule absorbed some light from the carbon but was otherwise undetectable.
In the early attempts at making artificial diamonds they left the nitrogen in but it did not migrate together so ended up actually part of the carbon lattice. This gave the artificial diamonds a slight yellow tint as the nitrogen also emitted light back into the diamond crystal lattice. The Russian solution was to remove all the nitrogen at the start of the process.
This produced perfect, pure carbon diamonds with a perfect crystal lattice. These diamonds however had a the property of trapping light so that when the light falling on them ceased (you switched the light off) they fluoresced, giving off the light they had been trapping with in the crystal lattice due to total internal reflection. Now this may have made them really cool but it did make them different to naturally occuring diamond.
What the Russian team really needed was a way to leave in the Nitrogen impurity but so that it did not ever interupt the carbon crystal lattice.
At this point De Beers was already shitting themselves and started looking at ways of marking there diamonds to prove they were mined diamonds not some knocked up in a lab. They semed to have a number of ideas such as laser etching the DeBeers trademark on each stone and similar but I dont know what the ultimately chose.
If someone has some more info, please post it but don't start it with your dad, grandad, etc used to be jeweler as this just makes it hopelessly outdated. These new lab made diamonds are not like anything De Beers have had to deal with before (Cubic Zirconia, etc) as they are actually made of carbon which is formed into a diamond lattice using super high pressures but in a lab rather than underground.
This information came from some sort of TV documentary I saw a number of years ago.
I did however just throw some stuff at google and this is what came back -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2004/diamond
(Please note - my summary is from memory so the info on the above link will be better.)
http://www.russianbrilliants.net/introduction.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/08/9908
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.
Because your average technical journo who writes the articles in question is too hooked on the freebies MS provide him with in the way of free booze to risk fucking that up.
Everyone knows there have been better OSes out there than windows since OS2 warp but the competion has never bribed these people with enough free stuff for them to write about it. To get a glowing review of an OS you have to install it on a brand new laptop and then give said laptop away for free to enough journos so that some actually use it.
A lot of this comes down to "what's in a name"? Personally, I see Debian's position as more proper within the realm of the F/OSS community. If you toute your program as open source, yet say that if anyone makes any changes to the program that you do not approve of, that they cannot use your trademark, then that certainly doesn't sound "open" and "free" to me.
So by virtue of this I should be able to release my own version of Debian, still containing all the debian logos and branding. But I presinstall my version with shit loads of adverts which pop up every 15 seconds and tracks all your net activity for my own ends. Then I post my version of debian to a few sites I maintain and release it as Debian with only the smallest indication that I made it unusable, not Debian themselves.
Of course I can't do this or I would be able to seriously tarnish Debians reputation.
Good on Debian for sticking to their guns, let's hope enough distributions have the balls to stick by their guns and start refusing to use the FireFox logo or icons in protest.
Not sure why you say this. It seemed to me that the problem was that debian wanted to use firefox with all the firefox logos and artwork, but make some changes behind the scenes to the code. No I can understand firefox objecting to this, as if debian muck up their modifications it will reflect badly on the firefox brand, not debian.
If you want to release firefox as part of your product (with modifications) then that is your right under the GPL providiing you also release it under the GPL. But you may not use the Logo's and artwork that come with firefox as you are no longer releasing firefox, you are releasing your bastardised version of firefox so need to label it as such. That way if you release complete crap it reflects badly on you, not the Mozilla corp.
I love your comment about the capitalistic stuff, once upon a time I agreed with this. Then I got a job and joined the real world.
What Mozilla are actually trying to do is protect their own public image, it has nothing to do with monopolies or market abuse of any kind.
Thanks for the reply, but I was hoping for an answer from someone who at least lived in Britain as it was a question about a fairly specific point of British Law.
Did all the rich kids getting spoonfed the whole way through college annoy the piss out of you?
Theres nothing like missing out on all the social occasions your friends get to go to because you work all weekend and most nights.
No, you are correct I am from the UK not the US.
I am however aware that someone who is not entitled to any assistance does not count towards the low unemployment figures. This means that the unemployment figures are not worth a damn. I believe the expression used is "under emnployed". This is a great way of keeping the figures low but not actually having enough jobs for all members of society who wish to work.
We in Britain use the same system but most of Europe calculates unemployment figures by deducting the number of working tax payers from number of people between 16 and 60 (ages actually vary by country) from the national census info. This gives a much higher value for unemployment figures.
In respect of not getting the full picture, does anyone? Lets face it unless you actually research these issues for yourself what can you hope to learn. The media (especially that which is privately owned like CBS, CNN, Fox, Sky News, etc) never gives an impartial view with regards to these issues as they have their own agenda to push. This agenda is usually set by the owners of said media.
It is worth reminding you that George Bush senior pulled strings to stop his son George Bush junior (current president) from going to Vietnam. Otherwise, like Kerry, he would have had to go there and serve his country. He did not.
Also, your point is about kids willingly joining the army would be valid if they did it willingly. But in America you put a limit on the amount of social security anyone can claim. So it is highly likely that if you run out of social security you would be very desperate for anywork you could get as starvation is fairly unpleasant. And watching your family starve is probably about the only thing less than pleasant than starving to death yourself. This will give people a great incentive to join the army even without the fact that it is the only way a lot of poor kids can afford to go to college.
And before anyone claims that they paid there own way through college with no financial help from their parents please include a free place to live while saving for college as financial help. Alot of people I know had to start paying rent to their parents as soon as they left school at 16. When you are 16-21 having to pay any rent / keep is very expensive for most people due to the low prospective earnings for the sort of work available to most kids that age.
Since the above is a worthless answer that does not go into any detail of explaing whiy you are wrong I thought I would try and elaborate.
The first point is relavant regarding google not distributing modifications to the kernel as this is what prohibited.
For example, if I rewrite large chunks of anything under the GPL then only use that code in house without ever releasing a product based on my alterations that is legal. This is effectively what the GPL was there to allow, you can modify the kernel source for your own ends providing you do not distribute the result as your own work. If you distribute the result at all then it must be done with source included.
Although as far as I am aware the GPL may not be legally binding in all countries. I am fairly sure it has never been challenged in any English court and I do not know how well it would hold up here due to our laws of contract but as I am not a lawyer I an not qualified to discuss that point.
If there are any lawyers out there could they explain to me why the GPL still forms a binding contract even though the end user who supposedly agrees to the contract does not provide any 'consideration' to the developers?
(Note - 'consideration' is used in this instance as a legal term so if you dont understand the question, dont bother trying to answer it)
Oh crap, I'm screwed then.
:)
I live in the UK,and I am a troll who doesn't RTFA.
It was fun while it lasted slashdot, I don't think they'll allow me a PC in prison
Were you?
The website you list as your home page is based in Holland, now last time I checked that was never part of the Soviet Union.
So unless you regularly went for jaunts behind the Iron curtain you know just as much about what it was like to live under Communism as I do.
I also notice from browsing your site that you are a decadent westerner who is involved in the Oil industry, and by the looks of it does very well for your troubles (You drive a Porsche 968). Now personally I am a decadent westerner who makes his money from software we sell to whoever will buy it so I cannot be too critical but dont pretend you know anything about living under communism.
Hell, hire me and I'll make all that lost productivity go away.
Some hope!
You obviously don't have to deal with higly technical staff. Where I work any attempt to stop us browsing what we please would be doomed to failure. We are a development house so its a pretty safe bet any one of the staff here could bypass any filter you care to apply.
Not that we could spend all day browsing what we please as it is an open plan office so everyone can see everyone elses PC screen without too much effort.
Any attempt to restrict what you staff do with their work PC's by force is only effective against non-techies. Any member of techy staff worth his or here salt should be able to bypass any sort of filtering. Personally I would connect to my home network via VPN and then go back out from there.
Any attempt to block access to my home PC from here would cause problems when I want to connect to the office from home.
A much better idea is to encourage your staff to work their asses of with profit sharing schemes and such.
Welcome to democracy. Get used to it.
Every Democratically elected government uses this trick. They bullshit the electorate before the electorate (usually trying to bribe them with less taxes) then do whatever they want when the get into power, safe in the knowledge that it is usually 4 years before anyone can do anything about it. Closer to the election the government will start being nice, but right after they election they never give a shit.
You want previous examples, go look at every British conservative election victory in the 1980's. In most cases the British people would do the same thing, vote for the opposition in the local elections as a protest then go back to the tories when the prime ministers election came round becuase they were promised the moon on a stick (lower taxes, better public services through less waste).
Sooner or later all of eastern europe will have to realise that Democracy is no better than Communism was. All it provides is the illusion of having a say in who runs your country so nobody starts a revolution. The people who run every country are the people with the the money. They support politicians with huge donations of cash in return for getting their way when those politicians get elected. Without that cash the politician is unable to pay for all the advertising required in order to get elected.
This will only change when the people of every nation actually take interest in running their own country, but at the moment most people want someone else to take charge so they don't have to make any tough decisions.
Iraq is the best example of this in the western world at present. We need their oil so we can use motor vehicles. Yet nobody wants the guilt of invading another country just to steal their natural resources. So the politicians make up some excuse and we all go along with it, not because we believe it, but because we dont want to face the truth. The alternative was that we kept paying Saudi Arabia for oil and they kept spending some of it on flying planes into our buildings (WTC - 9/11). Osama Bin Laden is Saudi Arabian. He is rich because we had to buy oil from his country. The Saudi Government (Not Democratic, it is ruled by a KING) tacitly support this and will quite happily turn a blind eye to their people funding and supporting terrorism abroad because it keeps the problem abroad, not at home).
The truth is that if everyone in the world had the same standard of living we do in the west, the world would be fucked. Imagine 6 Billion people all driving their own car whenever they pleased, using Gas that costed the same amount it does in the US. The remainder of the worlds oil would be gone inside a decade. So we trust our governments in the west to make sure this doesn't happen. That is why China and India are such a problem. They have too many people who all want the same standard of living we currently have so even they may break the bank, yet alone if Africa got on its feet as well.
So instead we all whine and carp on about how you can't trust politicians. But who wants to. We don't want to know the truth, we want someone to hold our hands and tell us that everything will be ok. That way, if the shit hits the fan we can honestly say it isnt our fault. In the mean time however we can get on with enjoying our lives free from worry.
Remember - It doesnt matter who you vote for, the Government always get in!
America still has all their natural resources left.
Us in Europe used all of ours rather heavily in the last centuary.
Whereas at the time the Indians in Amnerica at the time were managing a country that would last them an enternity.
Unfortunately for them us Europeans used our natural resources to steal it from them and create the United States as it is today.
As someone who actually played UT2005 (or whatever, the latest one anyway) under both Windows and Linux I would suggest that most developement companies dont bother with linux for another reason. The games look crap compared with when they run under direct X.
If you compare UT2005 under windows to UT2005 under linux, there is a very noticable drop in quality (or there was on the 6800GT I had to play it on). An awful lot of the really pretty visual lighting effects were just not supported under Linux. The net result was that I would happily reboot my PC into windows just to play a game that was installed under linux as well. Eventually I removed the Linux version as it was never used.
Now if I were a game developer I would not want people looking at the Linux version because it would give them a bad impression of how the game could really look.
This will only change when all the nice effects currently available under the DirectX 10 SDK are matched by OpenGL.
As much as it pains me to admit it, DirectX is so far ahead of OpenGL in terms of the ease with which you can create decent 3D worlds that Linux games are still along way off.
If anyone out there disagrees and knows enough about DirectX SDK and OpenGL to explain why this is untrue please post a nice long reply for me to read. Many Thanks in advance if you do.
I'm just curious, but what made you leave Gentoo?
I have used it for years and everytime I try another distribution they all just annoy me too much.
The only time I ever considered Slackware I took one look at the docs, read the bit about 2.4 kernel and threw the disk in the bin. I think that was Slackware 9.?? but everyone else was just releasing the first 2.6 kernels even then.
Why do they still go 2.4 by default now?
How does Slackware work with modern hardware? (Wifi, SATA, etc)
I am never likely to use Slackware and answer these questions myself as I am a sucker for running the most recent stable versions of stuff.
Actually no, if the launch fails very late on after the container has left the atmosphere but before it escapes earths magnetic field then the container would have to withstand re-entry.
5 8.cfm). Something travveling at this speed hitting the atmosphere will get hot, very hot. I am sorry I cant be bothered to go into all the details now as I am on my lunch break at work at have no access to my old Physics with Space Technology Uni notes.
Anyone who has studied re-entry will tell you this is bad. The container could quite easily (no atmosphere to slow it down in space) attain speeds of the order of 1000+mph (http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae1
Basically, you would be hard pressed to design a container that can with stand anything more than a 5 degree angle re-entry. Something tumbling out of control will almost certainly come in much steeper, and it will burn up. This will disperse its contents over a wide area (half the globe).
Nuclear fissile material will not become magically inert in this process though. This is because even if it gets hot enough become a gas it is still too heavy to be captured by the earths magnetic field (normal radiation from the sun is trapped by earths field and enters at the poles producing the funny lights in the sky). Think Chernobyl, this caused radioactive material to rain (litterally in rain) down over a wide swaith of Europe and this was a near meltdown at ground level.
A nuclear meltdown in low earth orbit would be very bad. Not planet destroying, but still bad.
That said, I am still in favour of using nuclear power, it just has to be done very carefully in all circumstances.
Sorry this article is light on technical details, but I could write 30 page essays on this and still leave bits out. If anyone is that interesting try this wikipedia link for a start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_reentry
It was a Space 1999 reference, that crappy SciFi show from the 70s where Moonbase Alpha (and the entire moon) was sent drifting off through the universe by load of nuclear waste we stored there going critical and forcing it out of orbit.
The thing everyone always forgets about the farmer who shot an unarmed boy in the back while he was leaving his premises is that the shotgun he did it with was an unregistered sawn off which he obtained specifically for killing the next person to trespass on his farm.
Unsurprisingly the police take a very dim view of people who use illegal firearms, even if it is in self defence (which this most definately was not).
You missed the Macarthy era? Lucky you. But I seem to recall some people were sent to prison during it.
But seriously join the American Communist Party and see what happens. You will find it alot harder to get highly paid work and a lot of doors that were previously open will close for no apparrent reason.
Aftermath of communism in africa?
Communist Russia never conquered africa, most of Africa's problems have been the fall out of British colonialism. Communism has never really gained much of a foothold.
Same for Linux. Nero has a version for Linux, its what I use for burning DVD's.
What? You say your hardware didnt come with a disk for Linux? Did it come with a disk for OSX as well as the windows one?
And talking about bundled software with hardware did you know that usually the software vendor pays for this so they can fob substandard software off on to users who don't know any better and will buy the full version anyway (Global DVD / WinDVD anyone?)
This business model will only work when you have a large number of uneducated users who buy software without reading anything about it first (Or without checking that they need it)
Please don't tell me you remembered that little combo from memory.
I thought I played that game too much but even I couldnt have rolled that off the top of my head.
That's what you get from letting a incompetent cunt run a project.
"a incompetent"?
I think you mean an incompetent cunt you illiterate bag of bile.
Or the data would sit at the ISP until the RIAA filed a subpoena to access it to find prove who ownded that ADSL line which was providing Britney Spears MP3's via bit torrent.
Child porn is disgusting. This is the main reason why goverments use it to cry out for less anonymity online, most people find it disgusting and so will go along with this. If Gonzales had come out and made this announcement saying they wanted to force ISPs to retain this information so that the RIAA / MPAA could hassle more parents over their kids ileagally downloading music / films then the public would laugh him off stage.
Your average parent will certainly react very differently to a potential peadophile threat than to the threat of some huge corporation kicking your door in one morning over something your kids have been doing while you are at work.