I would assume that they strip 'em down for raw materials. There is a company where I live who buy electronic scrap, pick it apart and make a handsome profit by selling the gutted remains (glass, aluminium, gold and so on).
While I'm not an economist, you may be paying Dell to earn more money...
Sounds fair to me, but knowing the type of people who do this, their first reaction is going to be one of "What a second! We weren't told about this!! We were busy reaching around your jacket to get your wallet, we didn't know that you were grabbing ours in the process!"
Honestly, people dumb enought to getting ripped off while they are trying to rip off someone else deserves what they get.. people beliving spam even more so. After all, a fool and his money is easily parted.
I am however puzzled over one simple fact; can it really be legal in the USofA (where I presume this is happening) to sell such a device? Over here (Norway for those who don't get the clue from my nick) it would be quite illegal to sell something which is intended to allow the (l)user to break the law.
...as my palm130 (http://www.palm.com/products/palmm130/ )do all that I want, I won't switch; Linux or no Linux.
After all, as far as I can see, the only benefit this device offers is Linux; everything else has been done before either by Palm or bysome PocketPC (allthought I would never get one of those myself, for the same reason).
...if they make some sort of interface between e-books and text-to-speech. Instant 'sound-book' *smiles*. No longer do the visualy impared have to wait for someone to make the soundbook for them, no longer do I need to actually read the long, booring documents people send me at work.
With the right technical document, this could cure insomnia as well...
While recovering DNA may be hard / impossible (I'm fixing military aircraft for a living, not extracting organinc matter from rocks), we still can learn a lot of interesting things. After all, we can't extract DNA from a fossil, yet it teaches us (or rather, the guys who do that sort of thing for a living or as a hobby) a lot about the creature in question.
I am, however, reminded by a television programe I saw on Discovery Europe a while back... where they 'proved' - by setting up a simulated Mars-base in Antartica or somewhere - that human explorers might see signs of life that a robotic explorer would miss. And I'm sure they could set up a (simplified?) DNA-extraction lab in a potential Mars-base too, thus preventing any organic remains from beeing erradicated by the radiation in outer space.
...if they may be willing to copy this out on a real floppy (5¾", SS SD) for me. I mean, the postage shouldn't be frightfully huge. Maybe they can patch together an ethernet adaptor and sell me too?
1. create a niche product aimed at nerds who still owns an outdated computer.
2. sell modded hardware to increase percived usefullness of said product.
3. PROFIT!
Hooking this up to my network at home should be a breeze... and I just have to restart the C64 to play some kickass games too.
Failing that, could someone post a simple, easy to understand, step-by-step guide on how to get this onto a floppy that my C64 can read?
In transport terms though we really only want them to fly in straight lines from A to B so agility is not an overwhelming consideration in their construction.
Isn't that like saying that we shouldn't spend so much money trying to figure out the age of the universe, or how dung beetles reproduce, because there are no immediate, practical applications?
No, that is like saying that you don't need to design your latest mega-jet destined to load aboard half a thousand units of self-loading cargo (aka passangers) to be as agile as a hummingbird. After all, they go up, fly more or less straight ahead for anything from an hour to half a day, then go down again.
The point, as I see it, is that big, boring Boings (or Airbuses for that matter) are designed down to a price, not up to a agilitylevel. Quite the oposite of most military aircraft, but...
Boats, ships and submarines are another matter. As they are relatively slow modes of transportation, and anything that increase speed / reduce the energy needed to keep a certain speed is probaly a good thing - at least from an economic viewpoint.
It's a baaare faced challenge to the quality of M$'s products.
Or it could be a barefaced challenge of the prices that M$ asks. I mean, if the Oregonans (?) could point to a different CD and say something like 'Sure, you make nice programs, but that one is free', you can bet your ass that M$ would cought up some discounts...
My guess is that these dollar figure likely assume that every copy of a song downloaded results in a lost record sale so the record labels can cry "boo-hoo" all the way to the bank.
I download music too.. not from Kazaa but from the less know WinMX. I download - usually the 128kbs or less copy if I can find it - anything that I'm either recomended or has picked up on the radio as sounding interesting. Then I listen, decide weither or not it's worth my money. If it is, I make a note and keep an eye out for the CD... if it isn't, I delete the file
So yes, every downloaded song that I delete cost them a recordsale - but I don't buy records which I havn't checked out yet.
It may be me, but I would rather have a cheaper, lighter notebook with a long (8 hours or there abouts) batterylife than a HDTV+DVD-player combo with a computer attaced. But hey, each to his or her own.
Belgium officially capitulated on may 28. The king "stayed in captivity with his soldiers" (he was the chief of the army). The government did flee to London, but was militarily powerless.
I stand corrected... but then I'm not afraid to admidt that. Thank you for teaching me something new today.
But remember before them the Poles, the Checks (however you write that), the Danes, the Norwegians, the Dutch, the Luxemburgers, the Belgians had surrendered -Yet you never mock them. (my emphasis)
Just to make one little thing clear... Norway did not surrender; we were occupied. Our armed forces - ie what little remained after a two month long campaing of what little wh had to start with - was transfered to the UK to keep on the fight shoulder to shoulder with our allies. Trainingcamps for our Army and Navy airforces were set up in Canada. The Norwegian goverment paid in full for two complete fightersquadrons, one ASW-skvadron and a fightewrbomber squadron, all of who fought along the british forces. Norwegian naval forces opereated alongside british naval forces. A major part of the supplies brought to britan during the war was floated on norwegian keels.
The dutch, belgian and polish goverment did the same btw, so I'm not bragging here. The fact remains however, that the french did not... and that the leader of the Free French - de Gaulle - was sentenced to death in absintio in Vichy France.
Hmm.. I'm actually going to talk about something I don't know a horrible lot about now, but I'll make a stab at it anyway.
Firstly, the chinese got a fairly good looking spaceprograme, which you can learn more about here, and their lunar dream in patucular here. So yes, they have probaly the capability to go to the moon with this decade - if their progame recives enought money (as for the poster who wondered if they wasn't 'still blowing up unmanned rockets on the pad'... isn't NASA the guys who fries seven astronauts at a time? Accident do happen - to all)
Secondly, there is the question of the economic side. Is there things worth mining on the moon? If it is, is it worth sending them back here? I guess, considering that you need a system of capsules, heatprotection, a system to collect all those capsules and so on ad nasaum, that the answer is a loud no. Is it worth sending it somewhere else, like into earth orbit? Ah.. now where talking. They could set up a few mines on the moon, along with a 'factory' to make additional modules for their planned spacestation, satelites and so on. While they still need to lob them into space from the surface of the moon, it takes 1/36 of the power it takes from earth (since the gravity of the moon is 1/6 of earths).
Thirdly, there is the question of wether they should mine the moon or head out in the astroidfield. Off course, this is a simple one to answer; We (they) have the capacity to go to that huge rock that very conviently hangs just above us all the time. We (they) don't have - as of today the capacity to do the same to any of those little rocks that tumble about in the solar system... we don't even know the precise orbital data for most of them. So the moon is the obvious place to go, because it is easy.
Lastly, there is the question about the legal aspect... I was under the impression that the moon - and the other planets - were a no mans land; ie that no nation could or can claim sovreinity. This means, presumably, that they can, unless there is some hidden catch like there is in antartica (where all can go, but no one is allowed to mine, drill for oil or do anything that can disturb the enviroment.
So... whats wrong with game development? Or rather, why does the games of today seem to suck compared to the ones I played when I was young?
I think there are many reasons, some off which has ben adressed by other posters. Still, beeing me, I'm gonna list up the ones I think are among the most important.
- Lack of any attemt of original gameplay. Most, or all, of todays games are simply 'more of the same'.
- Too much focus on 'eyecandy'. Modern games look the part, but often I find that too much development has gone into good looks, and too little into things like plot, levels and gameplay.
-Rehashing of old ideas. What is 'Medal of Honor'? Simply a better version of the original 'Doom'. And what was 'Doom' in the first place, but a souped up version of the original 'Castle Wolfenstain'?
Don't misunderstand me. I still buy and enjoy games... but I'm not sucked in as I was before.
The downfall of the gaming industry, I feel, began when the graphicsadaptors started becomming good enought to allow for 'nearly real' gameplay. That shifted the focus away from good games and towards games that looked good. Maybe because it was easy to describe a scene where you had to feed a 10' carrot to a mutant spacebunny as long as you had to rely on text, but impossible to do it visually. That, and while a textphraser could actually make sence out of what you wrote, a visualy based game was dumbed down to walk about and clicking on stuff.
Maybe a game like Valhalla could solve that last problem - eyecandy and a reasonable smart textphraser.
Just about any way you cut it, the US legal system is older than Norway's. Denmark more or less gave Norway to Sweden in 1814, and only really became an independent country in 1905. The US federal legal system has been in continuous operation since at least 1789.
It it sad to see how some people will talk very loudly about stuff they clearly know nothing about.
Yes, Norway was under the jurisdiction of the danish-norwegian king from the early 1400's (the Kalmar-union) to 1814. No, we were not a part of Denmark - we had (from 1644) our own armed forced and (from about the same time) our own laws. And since they were based on the old norse laws (from about 1000, allthought they in turn are based on older, non-written laws), they differed from the laws of Denmark in several important ways.
Yes, due to the fact that Great Britan more or less forced Denmark-Norway into the war on Napolion's side (read up on the 'fleet robbery' in 1807), the winning parties decided that since Sweden (who were on Britans side) had lost Finnland to Russia, they were to get Norway as a compensation. No, we didn't tag along. Instead we declared ourself independent on May 17th 1814, and mobilized for war. And as always when we fight the swedes, we kicked ass... so much ass in fact that when the smoke had cleared, we were still an independent country, with our own armed forces, our own currency, our own laws (based on the older norwegian laws) and juridical system. The only thing we had in common with the swedes were the king and the forgein policy.
So, as you see, the norwegian juridical system is based in part on laws that go back until the time vikings discovered North America, and it is an unbroken tradition too.
Hint of the day; know what you're talking about before you open your mouth.
The Soviet Union lost about 11 million soldiers fighting the invading germans - fighting them all the way into Berlin in fact. The US lost how many? I seem to recall hearing 0,3 million US lives lost in Europe in both WWI and WWII...
Yes, we europeans did a lot of stupid stuff during the first half of the last century. But that means we have seen the folly of war far better than those safely behind two oceans.
...well written, quick to load, and it gave me several ideas (that I probaly won't act out on).
However, it seems like the gear he used should be lightweight and robust enought to pack into a rocket - espesially if you take off the strobe and beeper. Maybe upgrade the radiotransmitter (and check the reciver before launch), and send it into orbit?
Just an idea... but what you think? That would make an interesting article on/. - "privatly launched satelite runs Linux"
...authorities contact the Web-hosting companies and order them -- under threat of legal action -- to pinpoint and shut down the illegal pornographic sites.
Okay... english isn't my native lingo, but the way I read this the web-hosting companies will be asked to find (pinpoint) the illegal porn. To me, this seems to mean that someone working for the ISP will have to search through all the 'net for illegal porn...
Somehow, I don't think thats the best way to make illegal porn go away...
IT professor Ron Rivest has come up with a new way to throw away money on the Internet. With luck, it'll make him a fortune. Rivest is one of the three people who devised the encryption system that allows us to transmit our credit-card information safely over the Internet. The company that grew out of this work, Bedford-based RSA Security Inc., is one of the leaders in the field. He's a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Association of Computing Machinery. Put it this way: Rivest knows what he's doing. So what's all this about throwing away money?
Actually, it's a fascinating proposal for solving one of the toughest -- and smallest -- problems of Internet commerce. It's easy to buy a $20 CD online, or a $100 hard drive or a $20,000 car. But how do you buy something online when it only costs a buck or two?
This is what's called a micropayment, and it turns out to be remarkably difficult to do. Entrepreneurs have been banging their heads against this problem for the past half-decade or more, and with good reason. There are lots of desirable digital products that might sell like popcorn if there were a practical way to pay for them. Music, for instance. Some subscription services will let you download tunes at 50 cents apiece, but you have to pay a subscription fee as well. We're still waiting for a service that lets anybody drop by at any time, and purchase a single song.
This is because it costs so much to process a single financial transaction. Most Internet shopping happens with a credit card. The merchant selling the goods must pay a transaction fee to the credit card issuer. This usually amounts to a few percent of the sale price, plus a flat fee of 25 cents or so.
But this flat fee is the same no matter the size of the purchase. When the merchant is selling Tom Clancy novels at $30 apiece, the fee doesn't matter. If it's an MP3 of the latest single from Sheryl Crow, that fee will eat up all the seller's profits, maybe even put him in the red.
''You can't do small payments with credit cards,'' said Rivest. ''From the merchant's point of view, you probably can't do under $5 and make a profit.''
What's needed is a method that slashes the cost of the transaction. Enter Rivest, his colleague and fellow computer scientist Silvio Micali, and their new company, Peppercoin Inc., which plans to solve the problem with doses of encryption and statistics.
The service will be free to consumers, who sign up with Peppercoin and provide a credit card number. Now the user can go to any Peppercoin retailer and purchase a single, very cheap item -- an MP3 song priced at 50 cents, for instance. By clicking on a link, the music gets downloaded to the customer's computer. The merchant gets a Peppercoin -- a sort of electronic token that's got the customer's digital signature embedded in it.
What's the token worth to the merchant? It depends. Peppercoin uses an algorithm that assigns a value to the token. Actually it assigns one of two values. Either the token is worth some preset amount -- say, $10 -- or it's worth nothing at all. When the token is worthless, the merchant throws it away. When it's not, the merchant collects $10 from Peppercoin, even if the customer only spent 50 cents.
It seems utterly nutty until you apply this method to millions of 50-cent transactions every month. Maybe 5 percent of these transactions will be sent to Peppercoin, which processes them through the credit card system. The rest are thrown away. This keeps transaction costs way low. And the transactions that are processed have a value of $10 apiece, which brings in cash to make up for the 95 percent that were thrown away. Spread over millions of purchases, it all averages out.
But even if Rivest's math is correct, the success of Peppercoin is far from assured. The dot-com graveyard has a special section for companies like Digicash and Cybercent that failed to solve the micropayment puzzle.
''A payment system is a real chicken-and-egg problem,'' said Rivest. Consumers won't embrace the system unless lots of merchants accept it; merchants won't sign onto the system unless the customers are there. Peppercoin hopes to break the cycle by signing up some major media companies in time for its debut later this year.
Letting consumers buy hit music recordings for a buck or less, without charging $10 a month in subscription fees, could be just the thing to ignite the micropayment market. And if more consumers sign up for Peppercoin, more vendors will start offering products -- magazine articles, digital games, even those annoying cellphone ringtones. Many of these goodies will be items that are presently given away, because there's no efficient way to charge for them.
With Peppercoin, companies will be able to make us pay. And at the microprices made possible by his software, Rivest figures millions of us will be happy to let him throw our money away.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
This story ran on page C4 of the Boston Globe on 2/17/2003.
Just a few links on the subject;
http://www.pafko.com/trips/norway/n10/ - about the sabotage
http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/heavy.htm - about heavy water and it's use
http://www.lawzone.com/half-nor/haukelid.htm - about Knut Haukelid; another of the heroes from Telemark
http://www.390th.org/warstories/Rjukan.htm - about how the USAF tried and failed to knock out the heavy water plant
Slashdot Mirror
I would assume that they strip 'em down for raw materials. There is a company where I live who buy electronic scrap, pick it apart and make a handsome profit by selling the gutted remains (glass, aluminium, gold and so on).
While I'm not an economist, you may be paying Dell to earn more money...
Sounds fair to me, but knowing the type of people who do this, their first reaction is going to be one of "What a second! We weren't told about this!! We were busy reaching around your jacket to get your wallet, we didn't know that you were grabbing ours in the process!"
Honestly, people dumb enought to getting ripped off while they are trying to rip off someone else deserves what they get.. people beliving spam even more so. After all, a fool and his money is easily parted.
I am however puzzled over one simple fact; can it really be legal in the USofA (where I presume this is happening) to sell such a device? Over here (Norway for those who don't get the clue from my nick) it would be quite illegal to sell something which is intended to allow the (l)user to break the law.
...as my palm130 (http://www.palm.com/products/palmm130/ )do all that I want, I won't switch; Linux or no Linux.
After all, as far as I can see, the only benefit this device offers is Linux; everything else has been done before either by Palm or bysome PocketPC (allthought I would never get one of those myself, for the same reason).
...if they make some sort of interface between e-books and text-to-speech. Instant 'sound-book' *smiles*. No longer do the visualy impared have to wait for someone to make the soundbook for them, no longer do I need to actually read the long, booring documents people send me at work.
With the right technical document, this could cure insomnia as well...
...would a 1/3rd scale model be large enought for a grown man? Or should I try for a 1/2 scale?
I mean, this would be one hell of a toy to scare the neightbours with... *smiles*
While recovering DNA may be hard / impossible (I'm fixing military aircraft for a living, not extracting organinc matter from rocks), we still can learn a lot of interesting things. After all, we can't extract DNA from a fossil, yet it teaches us (or rather, the guys who do that sort of thing for a living or as a hobby) a lot about the creature in question.
I am, however, reminded by a television programe I saw on Discovery Europe a while back... where they 'proved' - by setting up a simulated Mars-base in Antartica or somewhere - that human explorers might see signs of life that a robotic explorer would miss. And I'm sure they could set up a (simplified?) DNA-extraction lab in a potential Mars-base too, thus preventing any organic remains from beeing erradicated by the radiation in outer space.
...if they may be willing to copy this out on a real floppy (5¾", SS SD) for me. I mean, the postage shouldn't be frightfully huge. Maybe they can patch together an ethernet adaptor and sell me too?
1. create a niche product aimed at nerds who still owns an outdated computer.
2. sell modded hardware to increase percived usefullness of said product.
3. PROFIT!
Hooking this up to my network at home should be a breeze... and I just have to restart the C64 to play some kickass games too.
Failing that, could someone post a simple, easy to understand, step-by-step guide on how to get this onto a floppy that my C64 can read?
In transport terms though we really only want them to fly in straight lines from A to B so agility is not an overwhelming consideration in their construction.
Isn't that like saying that we shouldn't spend so much money trying to figure out the age of the universe, or how dung beetles reproduce, because there are no immediate, practical applications?
No, that is like saying that you don't need to design your latest mega-jet destined to load aboard half a thousand units of self-loading cargo (aka passangers) to be as agile as a hummingbird. After all, they go up, fly more or less straight ahead for anything from an hour to half a day, then go down again.
The point, as I see it, is that big, boring Boings (or Airbuses for that matter) are designed down to a price, not up to a agilitylevel. Quite the oposite of most military aircraft, but...
Boats, ships and submarines are another matter. As they are relatively slow modes of transportation, and anything that increase speed / reduce the energy needed to keep a certain speed is probaly a good thing - at least from an economic viewpoint.
It's a baaare faced challenge to the quality of M$'s products.
Or it could be a barefaced challenge of the prices that M$ asks. I mean, if the Oregonans (?) could point to a different CD and say something like 'Sure, you make nice programs, but that one is free', you can bet your ass that M$ would cought up some discounts...
My guess is that these dollar figure likely assume that every copy of a song downloaded results in a lost record sale so the record labels can cry "boo-hoo" all the way to the bank.
I download music too.. not from Kazaa but from the less know WinMX. I download - usually the 128kbs or less copy if I can find it - anything that I'm either recomended or has picked up on the radio as sounding interesting. Then I listen, decide weither or not it's worth my money. If it is, I make a note and keep an eye out for the CD... if it isn't, I delete the file
So yes, every downloaded song that I delete cost them a recordsale - but I don't buy records which I havn't checked out yet....for one hell of a price; From $2,299
It may be me, but I would rather have a cheaper, lighter notebook with a long (8 hours or there abouts) batterylife than a HDTV+DVD-player combo with a computer attaced. But hey, each to his or her own.
Sounds kinda like our Quisling... difference was, we shoot him once the war was over, along with the rest of his 'goverment'...
Belgium officially capitulated on may 28. The king "stayed in captivity with his soldiers" (he was the chief of the army). The government did flee to London, but was militarily powerless.
I stand corrected... but then I'm not afraid to admidt that. Thank you for teaching me something new today.
But remember before them the Poles, the Checks (however you write that), the Danes, the Norwegians, the Dutch, the Luxemburgers, the Belgians had surrendered -Yet you never mock them. (my emphasis)
Just to make one little thing clear... Norway did not surrender; we were occupied. Our armed forces - ie what little remained after a two month long campaing of what little wh had to start with - was transfered to the UK to keep on the fight shoulder to shoulder with our allies. Trainingcamps for our Army and Navy airforces were set up in Canada. The Norwegian goverment paid in full for two complete fightersquadrons, one ASW-skvadron and a fightewrbomber squadron, all of who fought along the british forces. Norwegian naval forces opereated alongside british naval forces. A major part of the supplies brought to britan during the war was floated on norwegian keels.
The dutch, belgian and polish goverment did the same btw, so I'm not bragging here. The fact remains however, that the french did not... and that the leader of the Free French - de Gaulle - was sentenced to death in absintio in Vichy France.soooo... the proof that there is no moon is that everyone with their heads screwed on right think there is a moon?
The day that makes sence to me, I'll put on my tinfoilhat, leave a message for Chutulu and head over to the universe next door...
I can see the moon. If I can't believe my own eyes, whose eyes should I believe? -Me
Hmm.. I'm actually going to talk about something I don't know a horrible lot about now, but I'll make a stab at it anyway.
Firstly, the chinese got a fairly good looking spaceprograme, which you can learn more about here, and their lunar dream in patucular here. So yes, they have probaly the capability to go to the moon with this decade - if their progame recives enought money (as for the poster who wondered if they wasn't 'still blowing up unmanned rockets on the pad'... isn't NASA the guys who fries seven astronauts at a time? Accident do happen - to all)
Secondly, there is the question of the economic side. Is there things worth mining on the moon? If it is, is it worth sending them back here? I guess, considering that you need a system of capsules, heatprotection, a system to collect all those capsules and so on ad nasaum, that the answer is a loud no. Is it worth sending it somewhere else, like into earth orbit? Ah.. now where talking. They could set up a few mines on the moon, along with a 'factory' to make additional modules for their planned spacestation, satelites and so on. While they still need to lob them into space from the surface of the moon, it takes 1/36 of the power it takes from earth (since the gravity of the moon is 1/6 of earths).
Thirdly, there is the question of wether they should mine the moon or head out in the astroidfield. Off course, this is a simple one to answer; We (they) have the capacity to go to that huge rock that very conviently hangs just above us all the time. We (they) don't have - as of today the capacity to do the same to any of those little rocks that tumble about in the solar system... we don't even know the precise orbital data for most of them. So the moon is the obvious place to go, because it is easy.
Lastly, there is the question about the legal aspect... I was under the impression that the moon - and the other planets - were a no mans land; ie that no nation could or can claim sovreinity. This means, presumably, that they can, unless there is some hidden catch like there is in antartica (where all can go, but no one is allowed to mine, drill for oil or do anything that can disturb the enviroment.
Thoughts on this, anyone?
Computers are way to fragile - I just broke my third mice in two years...
So... whats wrong with game development? Or rather, why does the games of today seem to suck compared to the ones I played when I was young?
I think there are many reasons, some off which has ben adressed by other posters. Still, beeing me, I'm gonna list up the ones I think are among the most important.
- Lack of any attemt of original gameplay. Most, or all, of todays games are simply 'more of the same'.
- Too much focus on 'eyecandy'. Modern games look the part, but often I find that too much development has gone into good looks, and too little into things like plot, levels and gameplay.
-Rehashing of old ideas. What is 'Medal of Honor'? Simply a better version of the original 'Doom'. And what was 'Doom' in the first place, but a souped up version of the original 'Castle Wolfenstain'?
Don't misunderstand me. I still buy and enjoy games... but I'm not sucked in as I was before.
The downfall of the gaming industry, I feel, began when the graphicsadaptors started becomming good enought to allow for 'nearly real' gameplay. That shifted the focus away from good games and towards games that looked good. Maybe because it was easy to describe a scene where you had to feed a 10' carrot to a mutant spacebunny as long as you had to rely on text, but impossible to do it visually. That, and while a textphraser could actually make sence out of what you wrote, a visualy based game was dumbed down to walk about and clicking on stuff.
Maybe a game like Valhalla could solve that last problem - eyecandy and a reasonable smart textphraser.
Just about any way you cut it, the US legal system is older than Norway's. Denmark more or less gave Norway to Sweden in 1814, and only really became an independent country in 1905. The US federal legal system has been in continuous operation since at least 1789.
It it sad to see how some people will talk very loudly about stuff they clearly know nothing about.
Yes, Norway was under the jurisdiction of the danish-norwegian king from the early 1400's (the Kalmar-union) to 1814. No, we were not a part of Denmark - we had (from 1644) our own armed forced and (from about the same time) our own laws. And since they were based on the old norse laws (from about 1000, allthought they in turn are based on older, non-written laws), they differed from the laws of Denmark in several important ways.
Yes, due to the fact that Great Britan more or less forced Denmark-Norway into the war on Napolion's side (read up on the 'fleet robbery' in 1807), the winning parties decided that since Sweden (who were on Britans side) had lost Finnland to Russia, they were to get Norway as a compensation. No, we didn't tag along. Instead we declared ourself independent on May 17th 1814, and mobilized for war. And as always when we fight the swedes, we kicked ass... so much ass in fact that when the smoke had cleared, we were still an independent country, with our own armed forces, our own currency, our own laws (based on the older norwegian laws) and juridical system. The only thing we had in common with the swedes were the king and the forgein policy.
So, as you see, the norwegian juridical system is based in part on laws that go back until the time vikings discovered North America, and it is an unbroken tradition too.
Hint of the day; know what you're talking about before you open your mouth.
Amen!
The Soviet Union lost about 11 million soldiers fighting the invading germans - fighting them all the way into Berlin in fact. The US lost how many? I seem to recall hearing 0,3 million US lives lost in Europe in both WWI and WWII...
Yes, we europeans did a lot of stupid stuff during the first half of the last century. But that means we have seen the folly of war far better than those safely behind two oceans.
...well written, quick to load, and it gave me several ideas (that I probaly won't act out on).
/. - "privatly launched satelite runs Linux"
However, it seems like the gear he used should be lightweight and robust enought to pack into a rocket - espesially if you take off the strobe and beeper. Maybe upgrade the radiotransmitter (and check the reciver before launch), and send it into orbit?
Just an idea... but what you think? That would make an interesting article on
...authorities contact the Web-hosting companies and order them -- under threat of legal action -- to pinpoint and shut down the illegal pornographic sites.
Okay... english isn't my native lingo, but the way I read this the web-hosting companies will be asked to find (pinpoint) the illegal porn. To me, this seems to mean that someone working for the ISP will have to search through all the 'net for illegal porn...
Somehow, I don't think thats the best way to make illegal porn go away...
[irony] I always trust my money to the advice of people whos names are made by a few seconds hammering on a keyboard... [/irony]
In cause we manage to /. the server
Solving the problem of micropayments
By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, 2/17/2003
IT professor Ron Rivest has come up with a new way to throw away money on the Internet. With luck, it'll make him a fortune. Rivest is one of the three people who devised the encryption system that allows us to transmit our credit-card information safely over the Internet. The company that grew out of this work, Bedford-based RSA Security Inc., is one of the leaders in the field. He's a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Association of Computing Machinery. Put it this way: Rivest knows what he's doing. So what's all this about throwing away money?
Actually, it's a fascinating proposal for solving one of the toughest -- and smallest -- problems of Internet commerce. It's easy to buy a $20 CD online, or a $100 hard drive or a $20,000 car. But how do you buy something online when it only costs a buck or two?
This is what's called a micropayment, and it turns out to be remarkably difficult to do. Entrepreneurs have been banging their heads against this problem for the past half-decade or more, and with good reason. There are lots of desirable digital products that might sell like popcorn if there were a practical way to pay for them. Music, for instance. Some subscription services will let you download tunes at 50 cents apiece, but you have to pay a subscription fee as well. We're still waiting for a service that lets anybody drop by at any time, and purchase a single song.
This is because it costs so much to process a single financial transaction. Most Internet shopping happens with a credit card. The merchant selling the goods must pay a transaction fee to the credit card issuer. This usually amounts to a few percent of the sale price, plus a flat fee of 25 cents or so.
But this flat fee is the same no matter the size of the purchase. When the merchant is selling Tom Clancy novels at $30 apiece, the fee doesn't matter. If it's an MP3 of the latest single from Sheryl Crow, that fee will eat up all the seller's profits, maybe even put him in the red.
''You can't do small payments with credit cards,'' said Rivest. ''From the merchant's point of view, you probably can't do under $5 and make a profit.''
What's needed is a method that slashes the cost of the transaction. Enter Rivest, his colleague and fellow computer scientist Silvio Micali, and their new company, Peppercoin Inc., which plans to solve the problem with doses of encryption and statistics.
The service will be free to consumers, who sign up with Peppercoin and provide a credit card number. Now the user can go to any Peppercoin retailer and purchase a single, very cheap item -- an MP3 song priced at 50 cents, for instance. By clicking on a link, the music gets downloaded to the customer's computer. The merchant gets a Peppercoin -- a sort of electronic token that's got the customer's digital signature embedded in it.
What's the token worth to the merchant? It depends. Peppercoin uses an algorithm that assigns a value to the token. Actually it assigns one of two values. Either the token is worth some preset amount -- say, $10 -- or it's worth nothing at all. When the token is worthless, the merchant throws it away. When it's not, the merchant collects $10 from Peppercoin, even if the customer only spent 50 cents.
It seems utterly nutty until you apply this method to millions of 50-cent transactions every month. Maybe 5 percent of these transactions will be sent to Peppercoin, which processes them through the credit card system. The rest are thrown away. This keeps transaction costs way low. And the transactions that are processed have a value of $10 apiece, which brings in cash to make up for the 95 percent that were thrown away. Spread over millions of purchases, it all averages out.
But even if Rivest's math is correct, the success of Peppercoin is far from assured. The dot-com graveyard has a special section for companies like Digicash and Cybercent that failed to solve the micropayment puzzle.
''A payment system is a real chicken-and-egg problem,'' said Rivest. Consumers won't embrace the system unless lots of merchants accept it; merchants won't sign onto the system unless the customers are there. Peppercoin hopes to break the cycle by signing up some major media companies in time for its debut later this year.
Letting consumers buy hit music recordings for a buck or less, without charging $10 a month in subscription fees, could be just the thing to ignite the micropayment market. And if more consumers sign up for Peppercoin, more vendors will start offering products -- magazine articles, digital games, even those annoying cellphone ringtones. Many of these goodies will be items that are presently given away, because there's no efficient way to charge for them.
With Peppercoin, companies will be able to make us pay. And at the microprices made possible by his software, Rivest figures millions of us will be happy to let him throw our money away.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
This story ran on page C4 of the Boston Globe on 2/17/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company
http://www.pafko.com/trips/norway/n10/ - about the sabotage
http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/heavy.htm - about heavy water and it's use
http://www.lawzone.com/half-nor/haukelid.htm - about Knut Haukelid; another of the heroes from Telemark
http://www.390th.org/warstories/Rjukan.htm - about how the USAF tried and failed to knock out the heavy water plant
I know, I gotta learn proper html