Hate to disappoint you, but Antarctica has been cooling for years: it's only the Arctic which has been warming (and much of that is because many parts of the Arctic were unusually cold a couple of decades ago and is returning to more normal temperatures).
"previous versions of mozzila (whitch I use) have bugs too, and security flaws. report them too!"
But, unlike IE, upgrading Mozzilla to fix the bugs doesn't require you to _UPGRADE YOUR ENTIRE OPERATING SYSTEM_. You see, Mozilla is written by sane people, who don't think it's a sensible idea to wire a web browser deep into the operating system.
"Actually, I have to say that installing SP2 was not a good idea, atleast in my experience. I installed it on one of my computer systems, and it didn't boot."
Yeah, same here. I installed SP2 on two computers at work last week: one works fine, the other wouldn't even boot after installing. The only choice was to uninstall SP2 and stick with SP1.
It's absolutely retarded for a company to release security fixes for a bloody _WEB BROWSER_ that require you to upgrade the entire operating system.
There are two ways to change a law: either buy the people who make the laws, or break the laws until they're impossible to enforce. The former is not an option, since the RIAA and MPAA have far more money than the average college student, so mass civil disobedience is the only other option.
If Americans had listened to people like you in the 30s, they would still be unable to legally drink beer: Prohibition wasn't ended because the law-makers had a change of heart, but because it was so widely broken that it became impossible to enforce. Similarly, racist laws in the 60s weren't repealed because the law-makers decided they were a bad idea, but because black people and the anti-racist groups led campaigns that made the laws impossible to support.
Finally, current copyright law is blatantly unconstitutional, and therefore there is no reason for any American not to break it. While the laws may be within the letter of the Constitution, they're clearly not within the spirit, and if the courts hadn't gone out of their way to prevent jury nullification after it proved such a success in ending Prohibition, no jury would punish anyone for file sharing today.
"Most speech is protected by the First Amendment. Some speech is not."
Let's see now: 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.'
Do you want to explain where in there, exactly, the government has any right to ban any kind of speech? What part of 'Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech' is so hard to understand?
"If you "probably never" wanted to see the movie again, why would you keep a copy?"
Why not? I know several people who have stacks of VHS tapes of shows they've recorded off-air and never watched again... equally, it's not hard to imagine that a show which isn't worth paying to watch again may be worth watching again if it's free.
But, as has been pointed out elsewhere, I already have a 'copy' of that movie in my brain. Are you going to tell me that if I 'watch' that copy of the movie in the privacy of my own brain, then I should have to pay the TV company to do so? Are you going to claim that you not only own a number (i.e. the MPEG representation of a movie), but you own my memories as well?
Where will this nonsense end? Will we be forced to don earplugs and facemasks when we watch TV just in case we retain any memory of the show being broadcast?
"Oh thats right, because the arguement 'I wouldnt have bought it anyway, so it isnt hurting anyone' comes into play as it normally does on slashdot."
Because it's a perfectly good and valid argument: if someone looks at my house, considers buying it, but then decides to build a copy instead, I have no right to demand they pay me money.
Or, heck, if you bought software that competes with the software that my company produces, you've deprived me of income. I demand that you send me money right now for your choice to _not_ buy my software!
The simple fact is that 'intellectual property' is an attempt to artificially create scarcity in an environment where there is none: at best it's a moronic abuse of government power, at worst it will prevent a truly information-based economy from arising. It's nothing more than the modern equivalent of buggy-whip manufacturers conspiring with the government to keep those new-fangled automobiles off the road.
"If you werent going to buy it anyway, what entitles you to a free copy?"
It's not a free copy: someone has spent the money to buy a blank DVD and the time required to copy it.
"This is the heart of fair-use, you paid for it to be displayed on your television, whether you record that with your brain or on some other media (dvd, vhs, hard disk) it should not matter."
Fortunately the 'Happy Fluffy Kittens and Copyright Protection Act 2006' is going to introduce a clause forcing viewers to delete all copies of PPV movies from their brain after watching...
Of course, as usual, you completely ignore the difference between renting a DVD and not returning it -- i.e. depriving the owner of their property -- and copying a PPV movie and keeping it, which only deprives the distributor of potential future income that you were probably never going to give them anyway.
So quite why your post is rated 'Insightful' is beyond me.
"Part of what doomed NERVA was possibility of burning up the reactor in the atmosphere."
Something which is perfectly avoidable by launching the fuel in similar containment to the RTGs which have already survived launch explosions and re-entry.
"would produce about 1000 kg of depeleted Uranium."
That is, a whole ton of uranium that is _less_ radioactive than naturally occuring uranium. Wow, I'm scared!
"Part of the explanation for the increased cost was the additional nuclear safety requirements"
Due to anti-nuclear whackos.
"this article is salesman-speak that politely avoids the issues that doomed NERVA"
No, it just assumes that the anti-nuclear whackos can be kept under control this time. Naive and optimistic, I'm sure, but there are no real technical problems, only problems with loons who think the sky is falling any time someone says the world 'nuke-lear'.
"F1 race cars, Racing Sailboats, Nuclear Reactors - NO design is failsafe, and NO design is foolproof."
Not true: there are failsafe nuclear reactor designs that even a genius couldn't manage to melt down, let alone a fool... you just have to design them with safety guaranteed by the laws of physics, not the control systems. General Atomics built a lot of them decades ago, and the Chinese are developing modern versions today.
Good design prevents a heck of a lot of problems. If nothing else, you'd have thought that by now engineers would realise that if you design something so it can be fitted backwards, sooner or later it will be.
Re:interesting but it's not really true
on
Murphy's Law Rules NASA
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"The vehicles and satellites it carried had problems but the rocket itself never failed."
No, but it came damn close. The 'pogo' problem on one of the launches, for example, almost lead to the loss of the Saturn V: if I remember correctly it would have broken up in a few seconds, but one of the engines shut down due to excessive forces and that saved the rocket.
The sad thing is that by the time we launched the last Saturn the worst of the bugs had been resolved, just in time to stop flying them...
"Well... technically by adding one additional measure of protection they do become harder to forge."
Why? The whole point of RFID is that you don't need to do anything other than pass the passport near a reader: the RFID data will probably be trusted even if you have a photo of Mickey Mouse in the passport itself.
"I'm fed up with having to produce many bits of paper just to prove who I am"
They you should be opposing the 'identity' culture, not supporting it.
These chips will do nothing to make people safer (they'll be no harder to forge than current passports), but will certainly make some people less safe by broadcasting their information to anyone with an RFID reader.
"So your point is that because the reason that people had problems with the butterfly ballots was their own stupidity that it wasn't a big deal?"
Yes. Stupid people shouldn't be voting, so if they don't understand the ballots, that's a bonus.
Of course had I been Gore, I'd have been embarassed to claim that people who voted for me were too stupid to understand the ballot...
"Perhaps we should add a mini IQ test to the ballot, that would really screen out the stupid people."
Indeed we should: until and unless the vote is limited to smart people, the stupid people will keep electing losers like Bush and Kerry who promise to steal their neighbour's money and give it to them. The only way for democracy to be viable is for the vote to be limited.
"You know why? BECAUSE NONE OF OUR END-USERS LOG ON AS ADMINISTRATORS!!!"
That may be fine if you're running one specific program that's designed to run as a non-administrator user, but, thanks to bad security design in Microsoft Windows, half the programs I run on my home PC simply won't work properly unless they have administrator priviledges. I did try to set up a non-admin user, but after a few hours of faffing around trying to make these programs work, I just gave up.
"yet no politician wants to force the issue on ethanol-burning transportation"
That's because ethanol takes a significant amount of energy to produce, often more than you get out when you burn it. Now, it may be possible, in areas where there's consistent sunshine, to use solar heating in ethanol production, but it will require a lot of non-ethanol energy from some souce to produce that ethanol.
It also introduces new safety problems of its own. AFAIR ethanol burns invisibly, so it's not exactly an ideal fuel to have in a crash.
Slashdot Mirror
"I guess I'll be buying property in Antartica."
Hate to disappoint you, but Antarctica has been cooling for years: it's only the Arctic which has been warming (and much of that is because many parts of the Arctic were unusually cold a couple of decades ago and is returning to more normal temperatures).
"previous versions of mozzila (whitch I use) have bugs too, and security flaws. report them too!"
But, unlike IE, upgrading Mozzilla to fix the bugs doesn't require you to _UPGRADE YOUR ENTIRE OPERATING SYSTEM_. You see, Mozilla is written by sane people, who don't think it's a sensible idea to wire a web browser deep into the operating system.
"Actually, I have to say that installing SP2 was not a good idea, atleast in my experience. I installed it on one of my computer systems, and it didn't boot."
Yeah, same here. I installed SP2 on two computers at work last week: one works fine, the other wouldn't even boot after installing. The only choice was to uninstall SP2 and stick with SP1.
It's absolutely retarded for a company to release security fixes for a bloody _WEB BROWSER_ that require you to upgrade the entire operating system.
"Don't like it? Work to change it"
There are two ways to change a law: either buy the people who make the laws, or break the laws until they're impossible to enforce. The former is not an option, since the RIAA and MPAA have far more money than the average college student, so mass civil disobedience is the only other option.
If Americans had listened to people like you in the 30s, they would still be unable to legally drink beer: Prohibition wasn't ended because the law-makers had a change of heart, but because it was so widely broken that it became impossible to enforce. Similarly, racist laws in the 60s weren't repealed because the law-makers decided they were a bad idea, but because black people and the anti-racist groups led campaigns that made the laws impossible to support.
Finally, current copyright law is blatantly unconstitutional, and therefore there is no reason for any American not to break it. While the laws may be within the letter of the Constitution, they're clearly not within the spirit, and if the courts hadn't gone out of their way to prevent jury nullification after it proved such a success in ending Prohibition, no jury would punish anyone for file sharing today.
"I remember the old days with my Atari 2600. That thing took a beating and never stopped working."
:).
I remember we used to pull the cartridges out and quickly push them back in to 'hack' the games by causing it to randomly trash memory locations
"Uh, no, it doesn't, and it breaks about every interface design rule there is."
:).
Around here, you probably don't want to admit that you work for Microsoft
"Most speech is protected by the First Amendment. Some speech is not."
Let's see now: 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.'
Do you want to explain where in there, exactly, the government has any right to ban any kind of speech? What part of 'Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech' is so hard to understand?
"If you "probably never" wanted to see the movie again, why would you keep a copy?"
Why not? I know several people who have stacks of VHS tapes of shows they've recorded off-air and never watched again... equally, it's not hard to imagine that a show which isn't worth paying to watch again may be worth watching again if it's free.
But, as has been pointed out elsewhere, I already have a 'copy' of that movie in my brain. Are you going to tell me that if I 'watch' that copy of the movie in the privacy of my own brain, then I should have to pay the TV company to do so? Are you going to claim that you not only own a number (i.e. the MPEG representation of a movie), but you own my memories as well?
Where will this nonsense end? Will we be forced to don earplugs and facemasks when we watch TV just in case we retain any memory of the show being broadcast?
"Oh thats right, because the arguement 'I wouldnt have bought it anyway, so it isnt hurting anyone' comes into play as it normally does on slashdot."
Because it's a perfectly good and valid argument: if someone looks at my house, considers buying it, but then decides to build a copy instead, I have no right to demand they pay me money.
Or, heck, if you bought software that competes with the software that my company produces, you've deprived me of income. I demand that you send me money right now for your choice to _not_ buy my software!
The simple fact is that 'intellectual property' is an attempt to artificially create scarcity in an environment where there is none: at best it's a moronic abuse of government power, at worst it will prevent a truly information-based economy from arising. It's nothing more than the modern equivalent of buggy-whip manufacturers conspiring with the government to keep those new-fangled automobiles off the road.
"If you werent going to buy it anyway, what entitles you to a free copy?"
It's not a free copy: someone has spent the money to buy a blank DVD and the time required to copy it.
"This is the heart of fair-use, you paid for it to be displayed on your television, whether you record that with your brain or on some other media (dvd, vhs, hard disk) it should not matter."
Fortunately the 'Happy Fluffy Kittens and Copyright Protection Act 2006' is going to introduce a clause forcing viewers to delete all copies of PPV movies from their brain after watching...
Of course, as usual, you completely ignore the difference between renting a DVD and not returning it -- i.e. depriving the owner of their property -- and copying a PPV movie and keeping it, which only deprives the distributor of potential future income that you were probably never going to give them anyway.
So quite why your post is rated 'Insightful' is beyond me.
Been there, done that, realised it wasn't the smartest idea ever.
"Part of what doomed NERVA was possibility of burning up the reactor in the atmosphere."
Something which is perfectly avoidable by launching the fuel in similar containment to the RTGs which have already survived launch explosions and re-entry.
"would produce about 1000 kg of depeleted Uranium."
That is, a whole ton of uranium that is _less_ radioactive than naturally occuring uranium. Wow, I'm scared!
"Part of the explanation for the increased cost was the additional nuclear safety requirements"
Due to anti-nuclear whackos.
"this article is salesman-speak that politely avoids the issues that doomed NERVA"
No, it just assumes that the anti-nuclear whackos can be kept under control this time. Naive and optimistic, I'm sure, but there are no real technical problems, only problems with loons who think the sky is falling any time someone says the world 'nuke-lear'.
"F1 race cars, Racing Sailboats, Nuclear Reactors - NO design is failsafe, and NO design is foolproof."
Not true: there are failsafe nuclear reactor designs that even a genius couldn't manage to melt down, let alone a fool... you just have to design them with safety guaranteed by the laws of physics, not the control systems. General Atomics built a lot of them decades ago, and the Chinese are developing modern versions today.
Good design prevents a heck of a lot of problems. If nothing else, you'd have thought that by now engineers would realise that if you design something so it can be fitted backwards, sooner or later it will be.
"The vehicles and satellites it carried had problems but the rocket itself never failed."
No, but it came damn close. The 'pogo' problem on one of the launches, for example, almost lead to the loss of the Saturn V: if I remember correctly it would have broken up in a few seconds, but one of the engines shut down due to excessive forces and that saved the rocket.
The sad thing is that by the time we launched the last Saturn the worst of the bugs had been resolved, just in time to stop flying them...
"Well... technically by adding one additional measure of protection they do become harder to forge."
Why? The whole point of RFID is that you don't need to do anything other than pass the passport near a reader: the RFID data will probably be trusted even if you have a photo of Mickey Mouse in the passport itself.
"I'm fed up with having to produce many bits of paper just to prove who I am"
They you should be opposing the 'identity' culture, not supporting it.
These chips will do nothing to make people safer (they'll be no harder to forge than current passports), but will certainly make some people less safe by broadcasting their information to anyone with an RFID reader.
"6800 > X800 *PERIOD*"
6800GT > X800 Pro
X800 XT PE > 6800 Ultra (and both seem to be about equally rare when you want to buy them)
However, really, there's not enough performance difference either way, except in a few special cases, for either to be a bad choice.
"So your point is that because the reason that people had problems with the butterfly ballots was their own stupidity that it wasn't a big deal?"
Yes. Stupid people shouldn't be voting, so if they don't understand the ballots, that's a bonus.
Of course had I been Gore, I'd have been embarassed to claim that people who voted for me were too stupid to understand the ballot...
"Perhaps we should add a mini IQ test to the ballot, that would really screen out the stupid people."
Indeed we should: until and unless the vote is limited to smart people, the stupid people will keep electing losers like Bush and Kerry who promise to steal their neighbour's money and give it to them. The only way for democracy to be viable is for the vote to be limited.
"I wouldn't want to see people dying due to, e.g., interference with medical equipment caused by somebody's grey MP3 player."
I wouldn't want to see hospitals using vital medical equipment that could be made to malfunction by an MP3 player nearby...
"You know why? BECAUSE NONE OF OUR END-USERS LOG ON AS ADMINISTRATORS!!!"
That may be fine if you're running one specific program that's designed to run as a non-administrator user, but, thanks to bad security design in Microsoft Windows, half the programs I run on my home PC simply won't work properly unless they have administrator priviledges. I did try to set up a non-admin user, but after a few hours of faffing around trying to make these programs work, I just gave up.
"Jar-Jar was so bad that it made the Ewoks look like fucking Shaft"
:).
I hope you're happy. I'll never be able to watch Shaft again without imagining an Ewok playing the role
"Hence the reason we have a Republic, not a pure Democracy."
_Had_ a republic. It's been dead for a century now, since mass democracy was introduced, the inevitable end result being the tyranny of the majority.
"How is this different from all the oil stored underground that we're pumping up and burning?"
Oil won't escape from containment and (supposedly) cause catastrophic global warming...
"yet no politician wants to force the issue on ethanol-burning transportation"
That's because ethanol takes a significant amount of energy to produce, often more than you get out when you burn it. Now, it may be possible, in areas where there's consistent sunshine, to use solar heating in ethanol production, but it will require a lot of non-ethanol energy from some souce to produce that ethanol.
It also introduces new safety problems of its own. AFAIR ethanol burns invisibly, so it's not exactly an ideal fuel to have in a crash.