It was actually from a later book, in response to a question from the recently deceased King Verence of Lancre...."Where's the justice in that?". Only the very best humourists, the very best, are quite that insightfully philosophical. I've long suspected Terry Pratchett of being secretly in the pay of the Philosopher's Union.
The fact that the "underlying P2P" technology was not property of Skype made me wonder about the possibility of the technology owners enabling eavesdropping mechanisms behind closed doors..
Sometimes it takes a very long time for the penny to drop. Ah, I'm getting old.
Could it possibly be that a *much* larger organisation than the Hollywood studios is actually behind the drive to quash P2P technology universally?
Follow the money, they say. Now... it's not a question of who would benefit most, but who would lose the most if P2P was allowed to roam free?
Next question - Who is shaping down P2P network traffic without telling us? The ISP's? And they're owned by...
The Telcos. Yep, all of them. Chargeable point to point telecommunications are under threat, copper and cell both - people are still charged by the call, not by the TCP/IP connection. It's bread and butter.
Telcos have the most to fear by the proliferation of Skype, Ventrilo, TeamSpeak et.al...
I know correlation isn't causation, but it sure as hell draws your eye. Big question here: are the Telcos, behind the odd blind financing dodges, actually bankrolling the fight against P2P technologies?
Think... SCO epic to kill Linux; beyond the obvious threat to Microsoft, the comms are a bit too "open" to make the telcos really comfortable. The RIAA - yes, we know the record companies are bringing suit, and we know what they're like, but isn't P2P technology an enabler of free phone calls?
I know this is tinfoil hat stuff, but I also consider that people who make it to the strategy-deciding levels at communications firms do know a bit about communications strategies. P2P is aimed squarely at their wallets. If I were a bastard in their position it's what I'd do. And in the aggregate, I think they outweigh Microsoft and all the record companies too, no?
Found the reference. It was Operation Crossroads and apparently quite a number of ships did not sink. Animals on one ship were certainly all killed, even one goat that was considered well shielded. They were coffins, all, but some were floating ones.
Just out of curiosity (totally medically ignorant here) would such things trigger a bee-sting allergy? Someone close to me is extremely sensitive to bee products (milligram of honey is worth a long distance migrane). The delivery mechanism is interesting, but the toxin is scary to me.
Friend of mine served in the USN for about 14 years as a sparks. Much of that on the Onslo, not that that matters. But he said they tried to sink an aircraft carrier back when they were doing atmospheric nuclear tests, and they couldn't sink the bastard. Nowdays I hear nuclear carriers have an extremely high rate water flow across the deck they can start up that can minimise the damage by radiation of anything short of a direct hit by a large yield weapon, at least to the point where the carrier can remain operational to some extent. Yes, a thermonuclear weapon could probably kill it but I'd suggest that before that happened their weapons would be away and their ordinance spent. Bad dust up scenario, but I bet it will be a long time before carriers are actually irrelevant. This is very second-hand, but I'd be interested in hearing any counter or corroborative stories.
There may be more or better or less expensive graphics/rendering libraries and other software available for Linux as opposed to Windows. It may be that the software for turning a pile of Linux boxes into a rendering farm is free or less expensive or more efficient than the equivalent for Windows.
I remember the keynote to the Queensland TechEd 2007 where they showed the some 600,000 rendered penguins (no, not Tux) in one scene for the animated film Happy Feet. Then I remembered the producer saying the render farm was several thousand Windows boxes running NT4. This in 2007, mind you.
Then I thought -- there's no way Microsoft would have known about the licenses for those thousands of servers, they were so old, and that many would have crippled their budget...
So there you have it. The state of the art is undoubtedly Massively OverAge - Parallel Environments of Windows - Piratically Esourced Windows Servers (MOA-PEW-PEWS).
I suddenly have this ghastly urge to go roll a Horde character and chat in the Barrens. Soz, cya, bbl...
Ahh, the fabled Lockheed P-3 O'Brian Subroutine Chasers like those out of FASOTRAGRABRUPAC. You can run, but you can't hide. Many is the touch and go I never successfully filtered out of my hearing from their flight path over the Oakwood in Mountain View. Years of it. And when the wife and I ran away to Australia together, there was one (just one, from a visit) buzzing the Wrest Point when we arrived in Tasmania.
Sometimes life imitates bad software. Truly you can run from a P-3, but you can't hide.
... But, speaking of acceleration, how does the Pinto do going from 60mph to 0?
Doesn't that depend on how solid the wall that it hits is?
I think it also has to do with the minimum amount of remaining car that you time to get that 0-60 speed. For example, if you rear-ended a 1978 Pinto and only the car from the front seats forward accelerated away, does that count toward the record?
"This is the greatest assembly of minds this house has ever seen, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." - John F. Kennedy, presiding over a dinner of Nobel laureates at the White House.
Unlike parliamentary governments, where "government is dissolved" on a regular basis, the US system has had a continuous seated government since the Constitution was ratified. It's based on that Constitution, which is fundamental to the operation of the US as a country and it's democratic mind set. It's perceived as a critical, unbreakable contract. Well, not unbreakable, as it contains within itself the means whereby it can be set aside. This would be painful, though, requiring a consensus among states (three-fifths isn't it?) that would be all but impossible to achieve today. I'm sure some science-fiction scenarios could challenge this, but the fact is The Constitution = American System of Government and even today, it's one hell of a well-structured document.
And I'm speaking as an Australian, so don't accuse me of patriotism. This is simple admiration for a well constructed successful bid for power.
Otherwise, according to your rather tortured and fuzzy "logic", we'd have to locate airports at the precise border of the US and disallow any international flights except for those which land there.
Which gives rise to the question my old high school math teacher asked us once. If an aircraft crashes in the middle of the Rio Grande, and half the passengers were Mexican and half were American, and the aircraft was registered in Liberia, where would the survivors be buried?
Even after reading the article, it doesnt specify if that is per unit or the total cost of all the systems, including r&d. It says they are less expensive to buy and operate than comparable fixed-wing aircraft so I am hoping that is the total.
Yes. $1.4Big is a lot of balloon, especially when you can inflate it directly from Washington and get the hot air free (grin).
It's most likely the cost of the entire programme, and simply administering the deployment will cost big bucks. Figure you'll have quite a few of these things, even if it's as few as (say) 10,000 units, you have to tie in with logistics to package and deliver them, train people on their use, worry about spares and repair and system upgrades, and of course -- the "hot air". Which can actually be hot air if they want, although I'd think it unlikely given the IR signatures & suchlike. Although a radar signature of a quickly-deployed hot air balloon may not be such a problem if your theatre is 340 miles away.
More likely hydrogen (hey if it gets hit, it blows up. Pretty!) and I hope certainly not helium, which is a bit more difficult to source. The US has a lot of it, but once it escapes it's gone. Hydrogen availability we know about. Hot air would be way easy to deploy - easy to get fuel and you have grunts to clean the burners. Possibly a bit simple, however, to get past the procurement process. YMMV.
You make a good point. I'd be willing to bet that support for the orderly transfer of power is fundamental to the difference between rule by law and less-ordered tyranny. It tends to last longer than rule by personality, too.
But all attempts at world unification have failed to date, and I suspect it was because of a fundamental difference in goals between the Unifier and the Unifiee's. It doesn't take a great philosopher to try, just someone who is driven, stubborn, ruthless, eloquent and insensitive to the needs of others. Intelligent is a nice option, but not a necessity.
Besides, how are you going to get dictatorships and corrupt governments to willingly surrender their power? Or do you intend to impose your world government at gunpoint and invade them if necessary?
Ah, astute comment there. This has been tried. Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Attila, Napoleon... throughout history the great unifiers failed, and were vilified. Those who successfully resisted are revered as heroes; George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro*, Ray Beckerman... the list goes on. Global unification only ever worked in the Lensman series. In the world of nonfiction, the concept kind of sucks.
*Being a non-American reader, I'm free to include him in that list. Are you? One man's freedoms can be another man's tyranny.
I suspect that the rocket's first stage will have a Radium - Aluminum - Phosphorus based fuel (RAALPh) and will propel the ALICE stage to the moon. Straight to the moon. One of these days.
Nothing a few hundred find and replace's wouldn't solve, for sure. But the platform was General Automation GA16/440 Fortran II and we didn't have Perl back then (or any decent command language, for that matter). Editing itself was rather painful.
Why not. Competition is a good thing. Frankly I find it a bit scary that such an enormous amount of work by so many people is apparently at the mercy of so few. So a "trusted editor" or two with a political agenda can control the major source of information on a particular subject which is apparently referenced by journalists and academics (although of course it shouldn't be), probably comes up as the first result on google etc. If anything, this makes me less inclined to trust the information in wikipedia than when it was free for all and errors could be easily added and just as easily removed. I hope this is just an experiment rather than the first step to implementing this process on the whole thing but I doubt it.
Agree in whole.
To put it into perspective, though, this limitation pretty much defines the editorial constraints of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, which survived for years as a printed work before the advent of Wikipedia.
I would be slightly less worried (the difference in sheer scope between the two encyclopedias is a stunner) if the "trusted editors" weren't quite so agressive in their reversions. I find this aromatically equivalent to "untrustworthy".
Inability to handle the volume of submissions shouldn't be the reason for reversions.
I want to see Wikipedia grow and flourish. Rules like this will only help, as long as there are enough "trusted" editors to handle putting the edits into place.
Yes, but that's one heck of a qualification.
o Who is a "trusted" editor? o What is the qualification process for earning "trust"? o And the Big Question(tm) - Will the qualification process work quickly enough to match the growth in new biographic articles?
If the last one turns out to be "no" there will be a fairly sharp drop off in new articles. This strikes me as quickly becoming one of those "seemed like a good idea at the time" moments.
Slashdot Mirror
It was actually from a later book, in response to a question from the recently deceased King Verence of Lancre. ..."Where's the justice in that?". Only the very best humourists, the very best, are quite that insightfully philosophical. I've long suspected Terry Pratchett of being secretly in the pay of the Philosopher's Union.
The fact that the "underlying P2P" technology was not property of Skype made me wonder about the possibility of the technology owners enabling eavesdropping mechanisms behind closed doors..
Sometimes it takes a very long time for the penny to drop. Ah, I'm getting old.
Could it possibly be that a *much* larger organisation than the Hollywood studios is actually behind the drive to quash P2P technology universally?
Follow the money, they say. Now... it's not a question of who would benefit most, but who would lose the most if P2P was allowed to roam free?
Next question - Who is shaping down P2P network traffic without telling us? The ISP's? And they're owned by...
The Telcos. Yep, all of them. Chargeable point to point telecommunications are under threat, copper and cell both - people are still charged by the call, not by the TCP/IP connection. It's bread and butter.
Telcos have the most to fear by the proliferation of Skype, Ventrilo, TeamSpeak et.al...
I know correlation isn't causation, but it sure as hell draws your eye. Big question here: are the Telcos, behind the odd blind financing dodges, actually bankrolling the fight against P2P technologies?
Think ... SCO epic to kill Linux; beyond the obvious threat to Microsoft, the comms are a bit too "open" to make the telcos really comfortable. The RIAA - yes, we know the record companies are bringing suit, and we know what they're like, but isn't P2P technology an enabler of free phone calls?
I know this is tinfoil hat stuff, but I also consider that people who make it to the strategy-deciding levels at communications firms do know a bit about communications strategies. P2P is aimed squarely at their wallets. If I were a bastard in their position it's what I'd do. And in the aggregate, I think they outweigh Microsoft and all the record companies too, no?
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE," said Death, "THERE IS ONLY ME." -- Terry Pratchett
Found the reference. It was Operation Crossroads and apparently quite a number of ships did not sink. Animals on one ship were certainly all killed, even one goat that was considered well shielded. They were coffins, all, but some were floating ones.
Just out of curiosity (totally medically ignorant here) would such things trigger a bee-sting allergy? Someone close to me is extremely sensitive to bee products (milligram of honey is worth a long distance migrane). The delivery mechanism is interesting, but the toxin is scary to me.
As a result technology no longer constitutes an overwhelming advantage.
It depends on whether you include "necessary technical and manufacturing infrastructure" in the definition of technology.
Forget India, it's China, with their massive manufacturing capability that you have to worry about.
Friend of mine served in the USN for about 14 years as a sparks. Much of that on the Onslo, not that that matters. But he said they tried to sink an aircraft carrier back when they were doing atmospheric nuclear tests, and they couldn't sink the bastard. Nowdays I hear nuclear carriers have an extremely high rate water flow across the deck they can start up that can minimise the damage by radiation of anything short of a direct hit by a large yield weapon, at least to the point where the carrier can remain operational to some extent. Yes, a thermonuclear weapon could probably kill it but I'd suggest that before that happened their weapons would be away and their ordinance spent. Bad dust up scenario, but I bet it will be a long time before carriers are actually irrelevant. This is very second-hand, but I'd be interested in hearing any counter or corroborative stories.
There may be more or better or less expensive graphics/rendering libraries and other software available for Linux as opposed to Windows. It may be that the software for turning a pile of Linux boxes into a rendering farm is free or less expensive or more efficient than the equivalent for Windows.
I remember the keynote to the Queensland TechEd 2007 where they showed the some 600,000 rendered penguins (no, not Tux) in one scene for the animated film Happy Feet. Then I remembered the producer saying the render farm was several thousand Windows boxes running NT4. This in 2007, mind you.
Then I thought -- there's no way Microsoft would have known about the licenses for those thousands of servers, they were so old, and that many would have crippled their budget ...
So there you have it. The state of the art is undoubtedly Massively OverAge - Parallel Environments of Windows - Piratically Esourced Windows Servers (MOA-PEW-PEWS).
I suddenly have this ghastly urge to go roll a Horde character and chat in the Barrens. Soz, cya, bbl...
Sometimes life imitates bad software. Truly you can run from a P-3, but you can't hide.
And whoever modded me flamebait, it's a logic joke, not a racist one. The answer was "You don't bury survivors". (/whoosh).
I think it also has to do with the minimum amount of remaining car that you time to get that 0-60 speed. For example, if you rear-ended a 1978 Pinto and only the car from the front seats forward accelerated away, does that count toward the record?
Next up...ridiculously large front-wheeled bicycle speed record.
You may have a challenge ahead of you.
Unlike parliamentary governments, where "government is dissolved" on a regular basis, the US system has had a continuous seated government since the Constitution was ratified. It's based on that Constitution, which is fundamental to the operation of the US as a country and it's democratic mind set. It's perceived as a critical, unbreakable contract. Well, not unbreakable, as it contains within itself the means whereby it can be set aside. This would be painful, though, requiring a consensus among states (three-fifths isn't it?) that would be all but impossible to achieve today. I'm sure some science-fiction scenarios could challenge this, but the fact is The Constitution = American System of Government and even today, it's one hell of a well-structured document.
And I'm speaking as an Australian, so don't accuse me of patriotism. This is simple admiration for a well constructed successful bid for power.
Otherwise, according to your rather tortured and fuzzy "logic", we'd have to locate airports at the precise border of the US and disallow any international flights except for those which land there.
Which gives rise to the question my old high school math teacher asked us once. If an aircraft crashes in the middle of the Rio Grande, and half the passengers were Mexican and half were American, and the aircraft was registered in Liberia, where would the survivors be buried?
No, don't answer that. Really. Don't.
Even after reading the article, it doesnt specify if that is per unit or the total cost of all the systems, including r&d. It says they are less expensive to buy and operate than comparable fixed-wing aircraft so I am hoping that is the total.
Yes. $1.4Big is a lot of balloon, especially when you can inflate it directly from Washington and get the hot air free (grin).
It's most likely the cost of the entire programme, and simply administering the deployment will cost big bucks. Figure you'll have quite a few of these things, even if it's as few as (say) 10,000 units, you have to tie in with logistics to package and deliver them, train people on their use, worry about spares and repair and system upgrades, and of course -- the "hot air". Which can actually be hot air if they want, although I'd think it unlikely given the IR signatures & suchlike. Although a radar signature of a quickly-deployed hot air balloon may not be such a problem if your theatre is 340 miles away.
More likely hydrogen (hey if it gets hit, it blows up. Pretty!) and I hope certainly not helium, which is a bit more difficult to source. The US has a lot of it, but once it escapes it's gone. Hydrogen availability we know about. Hot air would be way easy to deploy - easy to get fuel and you have grunts to clean the burners. Possibly a bit simple, however, to get past the procurement process. YMMV.
But all attempts at world unification have failed to date, and I suspect it was because of a fundamental difference in goals between the Unifier and the Unifiee's. It doesn't take a great philosopher to try, just someone who is driven, stubborn, ruthless, eloquent and insensitive to the needs of others. Intelligent is a nice option, but not a necessity.
Hell, come to think of it I may just put a sticker like that on my car window - let the thieves wonder what the hell it means
A more effective one might be "Planning on breaking into this car? You will have 4 seconds to find the hidden grenade."
Besides, how are you going to get dictatorships and corrupt governments to willingly surrender their power? Or do you intend to impose your world government at gunpoint and invade them if necessary?
Ah, astute comment there. This has been tried. Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Attila, Napoleon... throughout history the great unifiers failed, and were vilified. Those who successfully resisted are revered as heroes; George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro*, Ray Beckerman... the list goes on. Global unification only ever worked in the Lensman series. In the world of nonfiction, the concept kind of sucks.
*Being a non-American reader, I'm free to include him in that list. Are you? One man's freedoms can be another man's tyranny.
Wikipedia is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) in which...
Nice idea, but -- dude, decaf!!
The chemistry entries are really nice.
Unlikely to find potassium nitrate on the moon I think, at least until after we've been there for a while, and aren't forced to sell our solids back.
I suspect that the rocket's first stage will have a Radium - Aluminum - Phosphorus based fuel (RAALPh) and will propel the ALICE stage to the moon. Straight to the moon. One of these days.
Oh. Mod points gone. Oh my ribs...
...Nothing a find and replace wouldn't solve.
Nothing a few hundred find and replace's wouldn't solve, for sure. But the platform was General Automation GA16/440 Fortran II and we didn't have Perl back then (or any decent command language, for that matter). Editing itself was rather painful.
Don't make any mistakes...
Why not. Competition is a good thing. Frankly I find it a bit scary that such an enormous amount of work by so many people is apparently at the mercy of so few. So a "trusted editor" or two with a political agenda can control the major source of information on a particular subject which is apparently referenced by journalists and academics (although of course it shouldn't be), probably comes up as the first result on google etc. If anything, this makes me less inclined to trust the information in wikipedia than when it was free for all and errors could be easily added and just as easily removed. I hope this is just an experiment rather than the first step to implementing this process on the whole thing but I doubt it.
Agree in whole.
To put it into perspective, though, this limitation pretty much defines the editorial constraints of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, which survived for years as a printed work before the advent of Wikipedia.
I would be slightly less worried (the difference in sheer scope between the two encyclopedias is a stunner) if the "trusted editors" weren't quite so agressive in their reversions. I find this aromatically equivalent to "untrustworthy".
Inability to handle the volume of submissions shouldn't be the reason for reversions.
I want to see Wikipedia grow and flourish. Rules like this will only help, as long as there are enough "trusted" editors to handle putting the edits into place.
Yes, but that's one heck of a qualification.
o Who is a "trusted" editor?
o What is the qualification process for earning "trust"?
o And the Big Question(tm) - Will the qualification process work quickly enough to match the growth in new biographic articles?
If the last one turns out to be "no" there will be a fairly sharp drop off in new articles. This strikes me as quickly becoming one of those "seemed like a good idea at the time" moments.
RSA was good while it lasted. It's still better than nothing. Looks like we may need to invest in biometric laptops for the crew. What a pain.