From here: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/11/10710862 02326.html
"Sanson said he understood Johanson struck very high head winds soon after leaving Invercargill, on the southern tip of the south island.
"We believe it would have been wiser to turn around when he got into difficulties," he said.
Sanson said Antarctica New Zealand, the national scientific research program, could not provide the 47-year-old with fuel anyway because it did not have aviation gas, and the petrol it had was not of aviation quality.
"It's very unclear that at McMurdo or Scott base we have the fuel he needs," he said.
"We've done all we possibly can in terms of the resources we have."
Sanson said Johanson's expedition seemed "very ill planned", adding the adventurer had no search and rescue back up or contingency plans and only had a two-hour fuel margin for a 33-hour flight in his flight plan."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1008265.ht m
New Zealand's side of the story:
"Antarctica New Zealand spokeswoman Shelly Peebles said American and New Zealand authorities were being painted in a bad light but Mr Johanson had taken a very irresponsible approach.
She said he filed a flight plan just before he left but kept his South Pole flight plan a secret because he knew both American and New Zealand authorities would have stopped it.
"All our research points to the fact that this guy had one mission in mind and that was to fly over the South Pole," she said.
"He abdicated complete personal responsibility for any kind of contingency plan or consideration of how he was going to get back with limited fuel.""
The other side of the story:
Mr Johanson says he spent months studying weather patterns in the Antarctic before he left, including "a lot of time talking with Australia's top Antarctic weather forecaster".
"Any suggestion that this was a flight on a whim is far from accurate," he said. "Weather is only one very small segment of the whole flight, but it can happen to any flight anywhere in the world that things just don't work out as forecast.
"Weather can't be an exacting science. You can't blame the weathermen. I guess, technically, we should have made the decision earlier, and that was where the mistake was made."
It seems like he is insisting on the fuel rather than the flight out because it will be waaaaaay more expensive to take the flight out and have the plane shipped to him.
Tragedies become the legitimate subject of humour (ie. you don't get attacked by those in hearing) if:
1. Said tragedy/issue didn't really affect your audience. You know the saying, tragedy is when I break a fingernail, comedy is when you fall down an open sewer-hole and die.
2. Life is so bad eg. under an oppression dictatorship that you find a macabre black humour in your situation. I know people who have survived who are like this. This is a case of life is so crap if you don't laugh you're going to break-down crying and maybe committ suicide.
I've noticed this about mozilla as well. Not so much the rendering speed as the speed of the interface eg. the "feel" of clicking a button. After having used it under Linux I just passed it off as Mozilla being slow but when I started using it under Windows (same versions) it seemed to be much less sluggish. This is with no themes applied as well.
China is effectively a capitalist country now. Granted a very very very corrupt capitalist country but the Communist (as in party) in China has always been extremely corrupt from its earliest days (as my grandmother likes to put it, it was basically "Pay us, or we'll beat you to death."). Copyright and IP and capitalism are not necessarily tied together you know. Neither is democracy and capitalism.
The reason why China doesn't really recognise copyright and IP laws right now is because it doesn't suit their developing economy. Just like why they don't float their currency. If you look at the past history of Europe and America, when those economies were developing, they had very loose IP laws (or loose enforcement). For example British authors used to be totally pissed off with the very widespread and blatant piracy of their books in America. It was only when their economies were developed enough to actually make them think they have something worth protecting from new upstarts that they started getting concerned with copyright. Stealing IP from smuggling plants out of a country to pirating entertainment seems to be the common way for developing nations to get a step forwards...
Actually in regards to drugs I think it is only the US where the prices are that high. In other developed nations eg. Europe, Australia, Canada, the governments impose some sort of control over the prices to bring down prices to more affordable levels and they tend to subsidise a lot of drugs. Also in other developed nations, healthcare is much less privatised, with the governments taking a much more active role in subsidising medical care and drugs. For example, the wholesale prices of the ten most prescribed drugs in Australia are 79-306% more expensive in the US.
To tell the truth, the American medical system isn't much admired. The usual horror words for an opposition to utter about a government's policies is "They're bringing us to an American-style health system." That always seems to bring shivers down voter's spines...
Basically you can look at in two ways. Either the US is subsidising the rest of the world including all other developed nations like Australia, Britain, Canada etc. Or (what I think is more likely), US people are getting ripped off in a major way because the US Federal government refuses to crack down on the drug companies.
The stupid thing about it is that whilst the button order Apple uses *may* be better in their usability tests, this is in the Mac environment where Apple can enforce consistency.
In a typical Linux desktop however, all of the non-GTK2 apps have the Windows button order. This includes things like all KDE programs, all GTK1 programs, Mozilla, OpenOffice, closed-source programs for Linux etc.
What is more confusing, a slightly less intuitive button order which is consistent across all apps (and incidentally the one that most new converts are probably used to already from their Windows days), or one where the button order changes all the time no matter how "intuitive" one of those button orders is? I find it difficult to believe any usability tests will find the 2nd option easier for Mr and Mrs Average to use.
I do admire Gnome's attempts to have HIG guidelines and I think it is a good thing, but sometimes I have to wonder if they really understand usability or if they are just blindly following Apple's guidelines without thought of how it works in the real world of the Linux desktop.
Mandarin can distinguish between L and R. Cantonese is similar to Japanese in that it doesn't distinguish between the two - actually it's more like it just doesn't have 'r' - go to a Cantonese-English dictionary, you'll see that when they list the words romanised in alphabetical order, there are no words listed as starting with 'r'. Go look in a Mandarin-English dictionary and you'll see plenty of words starting with 'r' and 'l'. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that Cantonese is the Chinese language that most closely resembles late Tang dynasty Chinese, which is also when some of the heaviest language importation from China to Japan occurred. Mandarin developed later, I think around the time the Mongolians ruled China. Southern Chinese languages tend to be older in general than Northern Chinese languages. Everytime there's a barbarian invasion, everyone flees south:)
Wait until MS wins the media player war, and then you'll see about as much further development and innovation and basic caring about WMP as you currently see in Internet Explorer. Not to mention that is when MS will start locking it down with compulsory DRM.
Even if you use WMP and think it's great it's in your best interests for there to be large vibrant healthy competition.
I wonder if the EU has thought of just including MS products in the 100% tariffs category (along with things like sunglasses and motorbikes) that they are allowed (by the WTO) to impose on imports from the US as a retalitory measure to the illegal US steel tariffs. Come to think of it, weren't countries like Japan, China, Korea, Australia as well as a host of others also part of the WTO judgement (on the side of the EU) as well?
So Dubya, keep those illegal steel tariffs! Remember you need to win votes in steel producing states in the next election!
In all these things an obvious way to get girls interested in games is dismissed - cute male characters. This isn't politically correct but I don't care. Yes I am a young woman in her early twenties and I keep in touch with a wide range of other females on the internet and one thing that always attracts the attention of girls to a game or an anime or any other show or movie for that matter is cute guys. For example Final Fantasy 7 and up are popular amongst girls. Partly because they are good games but also because they are populated with cute guys. Another game that is popular is Devil May Cry. Also notice that these are Japanese, probably because the Japanese deliberately put in these "bishounen" characters to attract female fans (and it works). This is how it works. Girl finds game with cute guys. Girl goes on mailing list/forum:
"Hey guys. Heh, heh, I've been playing "Game X" a lot. I mean have you seen "character Y". I mean man he's such a bishie! Looks like Sephiroth except he's hair is shorter. But his outfit is sooooo cool. Black leather and his weapon is a whip."
"Really?!!! *Squeal* I love Sephie. *Hugs chibi Sephie doll.* Me waaaaants. Where can I get it??!!! A whip? Heh, heh, I got such a hentai mind."
Or you go to a popular webpage which has the picture of a guy from a game and the intro goes:
"Heh, I've changed my website today. The character is X from game Y. Man I've been playing it soooo much. This game is just full of bishounen. Hot, hot, hot. X looks just like Sephiroth doesn't he? Except with a whip! Heh heh, all the hentai thoughts that go through my mind..."
But by far the most popular game has to be The Sims...
I noticed that KDE has more than twice the number of votes that GNOME does (in fact KDE came 2nd whilst GNOME came 6th). Either this means KDE has a lot more users than GNOME or it means that KDE users are much more enthusiastic about their desktop than GNOME users (and hence more likely to vote for said desktop). Actually I must admit, I wonder if there are any statistics on the popularity of GNOME vs the popularity of KDE. As far as I can tell all of the major distros except Red Hat come with KDE as the default desktop, but then again Red Hat is by far the most popular distribution in the mainstream...
Does anyone know if Fedora includes things like mp3 playback by default with xmms? Or DVD (w/o deCSS obviously) and divX playback by default via xine or mplayer? Since this is no longer a commercial distribution and is more open wrt contributions, I thought that maybe there aren't any more legal problems. This is one of the key things stopping me from using RedHat in the past. I simply don't want to have download and compile xine or mplayer by myself (this has something to do with the fact that I usually suck at compiling and have never even managed to get KDE themes to compile properly. If it's just./configure, make, make install I can do it, but something *always* goes wrong).
Given that the Sorbig virus has been linked to spammers, finding the person who wrote the virus might be a blow against spammers as well. Any trial will be well publicised and having the public connection of spammers==virus writers==evil hackers (yes I know the proper term is crackers, but this is public opinion I'm talking about here)==terrorists could be a big blow against the reputation of spamming so that it is no longer seen as just an annoyance but something potentially dangerous. This probably won't bother the spammers so much but it might help get legitimate companies who hire them give the whole email marketing process a second thought, especially if any connections come up during a trial. "Trial: Virus used to advertise for Company X." "Virus writers hack computers to advertise for X" does not sound good for Company X on the front page. At the very least it might make them more careful about who they hire and who the people they hire outsource to (as I'm sure there will be so much outsourcing something known as "plausible deniablity" will be used).
And a connection in the public consciousness between spammers and hackers who write viruses might give a bit of impetus to the government for harsher anti-spam laws. I mean look at anti-hacking laws vs anti-spam laws. Which one has more teeth and are tougher?
As I've said before, the agencies responsible for buying this equipment and software should bear a good deal of the blame for anything that goes wrong. It seems to me that some gross negligance or incompetence is going on here. If the government was hiring a private company to do security related work, you bet that they would have standard procedures set out, vetting, interviews, background checks etc. by people who are actually familiar with the security area. Yes I know it doesn't always work, but they give it a decent shot and show a degree of competence. If a problem with security clearances of this magnitude came to public light, you'd bet that they would be announcements of an "inquiry".
However as soon as it comes to "computer stuff" it seems like government agencies suddenly try to express how incompetent they really are. A lot of the weaknesses in this software should be blatently obvious by an audit by a computer security professional. As it is the articles I've read suggest that they only audited the source code the companies themselves wrote rather than the whole program ('hey wait a minute what's all this MS stuff? We need to audit this whole thing you know'), only audited for reliability rather than security and didn't even take the audits seriously anyway. It increasingly seems like they made a token gesture at an audit and them simply trusted the companies' word on the matter. And now that things like this are coming to light they are burying their heads in the sand. Sure they are unlikely to be tech experts but can't they just apply the basic principles of security clearances and audits to this software? And surely being 'experts' on managing elections they should realise the importance of a paper trail, since they must be familiar with all the stuff that goes wrong in elections that most of us never hear about?
I mean what is about "computers" that suddenly make government employees act like incompetent idiots? They seem to be able to act at least somewhat competent in non-computer areas, but suddenly stick some technology in and it's like they suddenly don't know what to do and any previous expertise they had in the field eg. managing elections suddenly disappears into thin air.
There is a lot of talk about Diebold - but what about the people who bought the machines off them? They were all I believe state governments and agencies. I'd say that they have been guilty of gross negligence in the buying process. And even now when the truth is coming out they are still not even holding an inquiry or even publicly demanding answers from Diebold. Surely there must be some laws that can be used to hold the state agencies responsible.
I wonder if they could end up being sued by a losing candidate if he could prove that their negligence led to him losing? Generally I'm against law-suits but sometimes its the only thing that get institutions or companies to sit up and take notice.
The general opinion seems to be that Office 2003 doesn't offer all that much new for the average user. It's main benefits are to do with workgroup integration and IRM. Target users for IRM would be big businesses. However one possible problem is that laws in the US require all email records for X number of years to be kept stored (and accessible) in case of say an Enron style investigation. This could greatly inhibit the takeup of IRM in big business, esp. for things like emails that self-destruct after T period of time or have restrictions on who can read them. One thing I read in a newspaper today (The Australian) is that a MS spokesperson (in response to the audit trail concerns) claims that these self-destructing emails are still there on the HD but are simply not readable, but an IT professional should be able to easily recover them in readable format. If this is true it means that the security provisions of IRM are useless as it means there is an easy way for people to break the security coded in by MS themselves (which will soon probably exist as a downloadable tool on the internet if it doesn't already).
I am not a lawyer so maybe some people with more experience can tell me - is it usually obvious to a judge (it may be obvious to us in the case of SCO, but that's an entirely different matter) if someone is trying to stall for time, how do judges usually look upon this sort of behaviour (do they shrug their shoulders or get pissed off?) and if they do get annoyed what can they do to the stalling party?
What happens to a massive population where there is bad electricity supply for a period of time? No need to ask - just look at Iraq (a lot of people were gloating in Iraq when the blackouts in America hit). Everywhere in Iraq has very irregular electricity supplies.
Oh and don't worry about the food. One thing Iraq has taught is, no electricity for extended periods of time means no clean water because the machinery needed to purify water requires electricity to run. Disease time.
If the same thing happened in America the results will likely to be both worse and better. Worse because the Iraqis have been enduring this for years and are quite good at coping now. This means that America is much more dependent on having regular electricity supply than Iraq is. Better because the recent breakdowns in electricity co-incided with war and the total breakdown of government authority (initially the US army wasn't much help, they just sat there and let criminals run riot partly because they didn't take what was happening seriously until it was too late and partly because they didn't have the resources or the planning to assert authority anyway), so their situation is equivalent to not only turning off all the lights but getting all the police to disappear as well. That's not likely to happen in America in a massive breakdown (unless you have incompetent local authorities).
Phillip Ruddock is the new Attorney-General. As recent news articles state, the reason is to "strengthen the security aspects" of the job. Phillip Ruddock is firstly a favourite of Howard, and once is given a task he will pursue it to the letter no matter who gets hurt in the way, even if they are innocent kids (look at his actions as immigration minister). To say he is dedicated is an understatement. And to wrap up the package he truely absolutely believes that what he is doing is the "good" thing eg. he refuses to take off his Amnesty International Badge even though Amnesty has asked him to. With him as Attorney-General, any innocents who get harmed will be like the kids in detention, collateral damage in an ideological crusade in which to bend or to show any sort of sympathy or humanity is a sign of weakness and a failure. He has the fervour of a Crusader riding into Jerusalem. And the worse thing is, he is actually a very talented adminstrator. Once he sets out to do something, it'd probably get done and he has the favour of Howard to push through th e laws he wants.
Basically think of how he runs immigration in Australia. Think of him running national security in the same way. If he can treat little kids the wa he does because he believes it is the right thing to do and he can't show any weakness, imagine how he's going to treat a "terrorist suspect". I'm sure we're going to end up safer from terrorists. But the collateral damage is likely to be huge.
Personally I'm not so much worried about them being knocked offline for a few hours as I am about what this incident says about security at the place. If security is bad enough for this to occur, it is probably bad enough for an intruder to *alter* some of the files.
Personally a lot of the Chinese I know think of the Taiwanese as people who can't speak proper Mandarin...They also believe that Taiwan should be part of China again. I'm not sure how much this can really be blamed on government brainwashing though. Chinese (well Han Chinese anyway) have always believed very strongly in the concept of China as one people and one culture. Periods of time when there have been two or more "Chinas" have always resulted in much effort expended in reuniting the country. There is no celebration of disunity or having independent Chinese "countries". One wonders how the Taiwanese actually reconcile this cultural history with their desire to remain separate from China. In the Chinese mode of thinking, the desire to NOT be Chinese, is very strange.
In Chinese folklore, literature and popular history all divisions in China (a very popular topic), whether through civil war or barbarian invasion always end up with the country reunited by some glorious hero (or occassionally talented despot who is then deposed by a glorious hero). Having Chinese accept two Chinas is like asking Westerners to accept that yes, the villain really should win the war and beat the good guys. In the books, China always gets reunited by the good guys and everyone rejoices and lives happily ever after.
I really don't follow this. There was no such thing as a cohesive entity called "Europe" in the 18th century. In fact the very idea of a unified Europe is new and came out of the utter devastation of two world wars. For hundreds of years, the countries of Europe have been competing very fiercely against each *other*. Especially in the colonial age. In fact if one looks at the EU *today* many of the countries still don't really see eye to eye on many things.
China may have the US, Europe and Russia as rival military powers. But in the 18th century *all* of the major European countries were rival military and economic powers. There would be Britain, France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussia, Spain, Italy, Poland, Portugal etc. etc. Then of course there was China and India. In 1700 China at that time had 23% of the World's GDP and India had 23% (Europe was 23%, Japan 5% and the US 0%). And of course they were no small military powers either. This leads some historians to describe the "real" Asian crisis to be from 1820 to 1950 when Asia dropped from 58% of the world's GDP to 17% in 1952. I believe the Ottoman Empire was still going strong in the 18th century and that dominated the Middle East.
The figures are from a British historian called Angus Maddison in 1998. Calculations are based on purchasing power parity.
What would be really great is if the Indian government decided to allow one of the first Indians to go on the Moon to be one of the Untouchables. Despite government rhetoric, prejudice and violence against Untouchables is still very prevalent esp. in rural areas. It is only really in the teeming populations of the big cities that they can really escape what one calls suffering simply because they were born. Having an Untouchable in such a nationalistic important venture would be a big symbolic step in helping to increase their standing. Of course, that's also probably the reason why it would probably never happen...
Slashdot Mirror
From here: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/11/10710862 02326.html
t m
"Sanson said he understood Johanson struck very high head winds soon after leaving Invercargill, on the southern tip of the south island.
"We believe it would have been wiser to turn around when he got into difficulties," he said.
Sanson said Antarctica New Zealand, the national scientific research program, could not provide the 47-year-old with fuel anyway because it did not have aviation gas, and the petrol it had was not of aviation quality.
"It's very unclear that at McMurdo or Scott base we have the fuel he needs," he said.
"We've done all we possibly can in terms of the resources we have."
Sanson said Johanson's expedition seemed "very ill planned", adding the adventurer had no search and rescue back up or contingency plans and only had a two-hour fuel margin for a 33-hour flight in his flight plan."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1008265.h
New Zealand's side of the story:
"Antarctica New Zealand spokeswoman Shelly Peebles said American and New Zealand authorities were being painted in a bad light but Mr Johanson had taken a very irresponsible approach.
She said he filed a flight plan just before he left but kept his South Pole flight plan a secret because he knew both American and New Zealand authorities would have stopped it.
"All our research points to the fact that this guy had one mission in mind and that was to fly over the South Pole," she said.
"He abdicated complete personal responsibility for any kind of contingency plan or consideration of how he was going to get back with limited fuel.""
The other side of the story:
Mr Johanson says he spent months studying weather patterns in the Antarctic before he left, including "a lot of time talking with Australia's top Antarctic weather forecaster".
"Any suggestion that this was a flight on a whim is far from accurate," he said. "Weather is only one very small segment of the whole flight, but it can happen to any flight anywhere in the world that things just don't work out as forecast.
"Weather can't be an exacting science. You can't blame the weathermen. I guess, technically, we should have made the decision earlier, and that was where the mistake was made."
It seems like he is insisting on the fuel rather than the flight out because it will be waaaaaay more expensive to take the flight out and have the plane shipped to him.
Tragedies become the legitimate subject of humour (ie. you don't get attacked by those in hearing) if:
1. Said tragedy/issue didn't really affect your audience. You know the saying, tragedy is when I break a fingernail, comedy is when you fall down an open sewer-hole and die.
2. Life is so bad eg. under an oppression dictatorship that you find a macabre black humour in your situation. I know people who have survived who are like this. This is a case of life is so crap if you don't laugh you're going to break-down crying and maybe committ suicide.
I've noticed this about mozilla as well. Not so much the rendering speed as the speed of the interface eg. the "feel" of clicking a button. After having used it under Linux I just passed it off as Mozilla being slow but when I started using it under Windows (same versions) it seemed to be much less sluggish. This is with no themes applied as well.
Anyone know why?
China is effectively a capitalist country now. Granted a very very very corrupt capitalist country but the Communist (as in party) in China has always been extremely corrupt from its earliest days (as my grandmother likes to put it, it was basically "Pay us, or we'll beat you to death."). Copyright and IP and capitalism are not necessarily tied together you know. Neither is democracy and capitalism.
The reason why China doesn't really recognise copyright and IP laws right now is because it doesn't suit their developing economy. Just like why they don't float their currency. If you look at the past history of Europe and America, when those economies were developing, they had very loose IP laws (or loose enforcement). For example British authors used to be totally pissed off with the very widespread and blatant piracy of their books in America. It was only when their economies were developed enough to actually make them think they have something worth protecting from new upstarts that they started getting concerned with copyright. Stealing IP from smuggling plants out of a country to pirating entertainment seems to be the common way for developing nations to get a step forwards...
Actually in regards to drugs I think it is only the US where the prices are that high. In other developed nations eg. Europe, Australia, Canada, the governments impose some sort of control over the prices to bring down prices to more affordable levels and they tend to subsidise a lot of drugs. Also in other developed nations, healthcare is much less privatised, with the governments taking a much more active role in subsidising medical care and drugs. For example, the wholesale prices of the ten most prescribed drugs in Australia are 79-306% more expensive in the US.
To tell the truth, the American medical system isn't much admired. The usual horror words for an opposition to utter about a government's policies is "They're bringing us to an American-style health system." That always seems to bring shivers down voter's spines...
Basically you can look at in two ways. Either the US is subsidising the rest of the world including all other developed nations like Australia, Britain, Canada etc. Or (what I think is more likely), US people are getting ripped off in a major way because the US Federal government refuses to crack down on the drug companies.
The stupid thing about it is that whilst the button order Apple uses *may* be better in their usability tests, this is in the Mac environment where Apple can enforce consistency.
In a typical Linux desktop however, all of the non-GTK2 apps have the Windows button order. This includes things like all KDE programs, all GTK1 programs, Mozilla, OpenOffice, closed-source programs for Linux etc.
What is more confusing, a slightly less intuitive button order which is consistent across all apps (and incidentally the one that most new converts are probably used to already from their Windows days), or one where the button order changes all the time no matter how "intuitive" one of those button orders is? I find it difficult to believe any usability tests will find the 2nd option easier for Mr and Mrs Average to use.
I do admire Gnome's attempts to have HIG guidelines and I think it is a good thing, but sometimes I have to wonder if they really understand usability or if they are just blindly following Apple's guidelines without thought of how it works in the real world of the Linux desktop.
Mandarin can distinguish between L and R. Cantonese is similar to Japanese in that it doesn't distinguish between the two - actually it's more like it just doesn't have 'r' - go to a Cantonese-English dictionary, you'll see that when they list the words romanised in alphabetical order, there are no words listed as starting with 'r'. Go look in a Mandarin-English dictionary and you'll see plenty of words starting with 'r' and 'l'. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that Cantonese is the Chinese language that most closely resembles late Tang dynasty Chinese, which is also when some of the heaviest language importation from China to Japan occurred. Mandarin developed later, I think around the time the Mongolians ruled China. Southern Chinese languages tend to be older in general than Northern Chinese languages. Everytime there's a barbarian invasion, everyone flees south :)
Wait until MS wins the media player war, and then you'll see about as much further development and innovation and basic caring about WMP as you currently see in Internet Explorer. Not to mention that is when MS will start locking it down with compulsory DRM.
Even if you use WMP and think it's great it's in your best interests for there to be large vibrant healthy competition.
I wonder if the EU has thought of just including MS products in the 100% tariffs category (along with things like sunglasses and motorbikes) that they are allowed (by the WTO) to impose on imports from the US as a retalitory measure to the illegal US steel tariffs. Come to think of it, weren't countries like Japan, China, Korea, Australia as well as a host of others also part of the WTO judgement (on the side of the EU) as well?
So Dubya, keep those illegal steel tariffs! Remember you need to win votes in steel producing states in the next election!
That's known as a plutocracy.
In all these things an obvious way to get girls interested in games is dismissed - cute male characters. This isn't politically correct but I don't care. Yes I am a young woman in her early twenties and I keep in touch with a wide range of other females on the internet and one thing that always attracts the attention of girls to a game or an anime or any other show or movie for that matter is cute guys. For example Final Fantasy 7 and up are popular amongst girls. Partly because they are good games but also because they are populated with cute guys. Another game that is popular is Devil May Cry. Also notice that these are Japanese, probably because the Japanese deliberately put in these "bishounen" characters to attract female fans (and it works). This is how it works. Girl finds game with cute guys. Girl goes on mailing list/forum: "Hey guys. Heh, heh, I've been playing "Game X" a lot. I mean have you seen "character Y". I mean man he's such a bishie! Looks like Sephiroth except he's hair is shorter. But his outfit is sooooo cool. Black leather and his weapon is a whip." "Really?!!! *Squeal* I love Sephie. *Hugs chibi Sephie doll.* Me waaaaants. Where can I get it??!!! A whip? Heh, heh, I got such a hentai mind." Or you go to a popular webpage which has the picture of a guy from a game and the intro goes: "Heh, I've changed my website today. The character is X from game Y. Man I've been playing it soooo much. This game is just full of bishounen. Hot, hot, hot. X looks just like Sephiroth doesn't he? Except with a whip! Heh heh, all the hentai thoughts that go through my mind..." But by far the most popular game has to be The Sims...
I noticed that KDE has more than twice the number of votes that GNOME does (in fact KDE came 2nd whilst GNOME came 6th). Either this means KDE has a lot more users than GNOME or it means that KDE users are much more enthusiastic about their desktop than GNOME users (and hence more likely to vote for said desktop). Actually I must admit, I wonder if there are any statistics on the popularity of GNOME vs the popularity of KDE. As far as I can tell all of the major distros except Red Hat come with KDE as the default desktop, but then again Red Hat is by far the most popular distribution in the mainstream...
Does anyone know if Fedora includes things like mp3 playback by default with xmms? Or DVD (w/o deCSS obviously) and divX playback by default via xine or mplayer? Since this is no longer a commercial distribution and is more open wrt contributions, I thought that maybe there aren't any more legal problems. This is one of the key things stopping me from using RedHat in the past. I simply don't want to have download and compile xine or mplayer by myself (this has something to do with the fact that I usually suck at compiling and have never even managed to get KDE themes to compile properly. If it's just ./configure, make, make install I can do it, but something *always* goes wrong).
Given that the Sorbig virus has been linked to spammers, finding the person who wrote the virus might be a blow against spammers as well. Any trial will be well publicised and having the public connection of spammers==virus writers==evil hackers (yes I know the proper term is crackers, but this is public opinion I'm talking about here)==terrorists could be a big blow against the reputation of spamming so that it is no longer seen as just an annoyance but something potentially dangerous. This probably won't bother the spammers so much but it might help get legitimate companies who hire them give the whole email marketing process a second thought, especially if any connections come up during a trial. "Trial: Virus used to advertise for Company X." "Virus writers hack computers to advertise for X" does not sound good for Company X on the front page. At the very least it might make them more careful about who they hire and who the people they hire outsource to (as I'm sure there will be so much outsourcing something known as "plausible deniablity" will be used).
And a connection in the public consciousness between spammers and hackers who write viruses might give a bit of impetus to the government for harsher anti-spam laws. I mean look at anti-hacking laws vs anti-spam laws. Which one has more teeth and are tougher?
As I've said before, the agencies responsible for buying this equipment and software should bear a good deal of the blame for anything that goes wrong. It seems to me that some gross negligance or incompetence is going on here. If the government was hiring a private company to do security related work, you bet that they would have standard procedures set out, vetting, interviews, background checks etc. by people who are actually familiar with the security area. Yes I know it doesn't always work, but they give it a decent shot and show a degree of competence. If a problem with security clearances of this magnitude came to public light, you'd bet that they would be announcements of an "inquiry". However as soon as it comes to "computer stuff" it seems like government agencies suddenly try to express how incompetent they really are. A lot of the weaknesses in this software should be blatently obvious by an audit by a computer security professional. As it is the articles I've read suggest that they only audited the source code the companies themselves wrote rather than the whole program ('hey wait a minute what's all this MS stuff? We need to audit this whole thing you know'), only audited for reliability rather than security and didn't even take the audits seriously anyway. It increasingly seems like they made a token gesture at an audit and them simply trusted the companies' word on the matter. And now that things like this are coming to light they are burying their heads in the sand. Sure they are unlikely to be tech experts but can't they just apply the basic principles of security clearances and audits to this software? And surely being 'experts' on managing elections they should realise the importance of a paper trail, since they must be familiar with all the stuff that goes wrong in elections that most of us never hear about? I mean what is about "computers" that suddenly make government employees act like incompetent idiots? They seem to be able to act at least somewhat competent in non-computer areas, but suddenly stick some technology in and it's like they suddenly don't know what to do and any previous expertise they had in the field eg. managing elections suddenly disappears into thin air.
There is a lot of talk about Diebold - but what about the people who bought the machines off them? They were all I believe state governments and agencies. I'd say that they have been guilty of gross negligence in the buying process. And even now when the truth is coming out they are still not even holding an inquiry or even publicly demanding answers from Diebold. Surely there must be some laws that can be used to hold the state agencies responsible. I wonder if they could end up being sued by a losing candidate if he could prove that their negligence led to him losing? Generally I'm against law-suits but sometimes its the only thing that get institutions or companies to sit up and take notice.
The general opinion seems to be that Office 2003 doesn't offer all that much new for the average user. It's main benefits are to do with workgroup integration and IRM. Target users for IRM would be big businesses. However one possible problem is that laws in the US require all email records for X number of years to be kept stored (and accessible) in case of say an Enron style investigation. This could greatly inhibit the takeup of IRM in big business, esp. for things like emails that self-destruct after T period of time or have restrictions on who can read them. One thing I read in a newspaper today (The Australian) is that a MS spokesperson (in response to the audit trail concerns) claims that these self-destructing emails are still there on the HD but are simply not readable, but an IT professional should be able to easily recover them in readable format. If this is true it means that the security provisions of IRM are useless as it means there is an easy way for people to break the security coded in by MS themselves (which will soon probably exist as a downloadable tool on the internet if it doesn't already).
I am not a lawyer so maybe some people with more experience can tell me - is it usually obvious to a judge (it may be obvious to us in the case of SCO, but that's an entirely different matter) if someone is trying to stall for time, how do judges usually look upon this sort of behaviour (do they shrug their shoulders or get pissed off?) and if they do get annoyed what can they do to the stalling party?
What happens to a massive population where there is bad electricity supply for a period of time? No need to ask - just look at Iraq (a lot of people were gloating in Iraq when the blackouts in America hit). Everywhere in Iraq has very irregular electricity supplies.
Oh and don't worry about the food. One thing Iraq has taught is, no electricity for extended periods of time means no clean water because the machinery needed to purify water requires electricity to run. Disease time.
If the same thing happened in America the results will likely to be both worse and better. Worse because the Iraqis have been enduring this for years and are quite good at coping now. This means that America is much more dependent on having regular electricity supply than Iraq is. Better because the recent breakdowns in electricity co-incided with war and the total breakdown of government authority (initially the US army wasn't much help, they just sat there and let criminals run riot partly because they didn't take what was happening seriously until it was too late and partly because they didn't have the resources or the planning to assert authority anyway), so their situation is equivalent to not only turning off all the lights but getting all the police to disappear as well. That's not likely to happen in America in a massive breakdown (unless you have incompetent local authorities).
Phillip Ruddock is the new Attorney-General. As recent news articles state, the reason is to "strengthen the security aspects" of the job. Phillip Ruddock is firstly a favourite of Howard, and once is given a task he will pursue it to the letter no matter who gets hurt in the way, even if they are innocent kids (look at his actions as immigration minister). To say he is dedicated is an understatement. And to wrap up the package he truely absolutely believes that what he is doing is the "good" thing eg. he refuses to take off his Amnesty International Badge even though Amnesty has asked him to. With him as Attorney-General, any innocents who get harmed will be like the kids in detention, collateral damage in an ideological crusade in which to bend or to show any sort of sympathy or humanity is a sign of weakness and a failure. He has the fervour of a Crusader riding into Jerusalem. And the worse thing is, he is actually a very talented adminstrator. Once he sets out to do something, it'd probably get done and he has the favour of Howard to push through th e laws he wants. Basically think of how he runs immigration in Australia. Think of him running national security in the same way. If he can treat little kids the wa he does because he believes it is the right thing to do and he can't show any weakness, imagine how he's going to treat a "terrorist suspect". I'm sure we're going to end up safer from terrorists. But the collateral damage is likely to be huge.
Personally I'm not so much worried about them being knocked offline for a few hours as I am about what this incident says about security at the place. If security is bad enough for this to occur, it is probably bad enough for an intruder to *alter* some of the files.
Personally a lot of the Chinese I know think of the Taiwanese as people who can't speak proper Mandarin...They also believe that Taiwan should be part of China again. I'm not sure how much this can really be blamed on government brainwashing though. Chinese (well Han Chinese anyway) have always believed very strongly in the concept of China as one people and one culture. Periods of time when there have been two or more "Chinas" have always resulted in much effort expended in reuniting the country. There is no celebration of disunity or having independent Chinese "countries". One wonders how the Taiwanese actually reconcile this cultural history with their desire to remain separate from China. In the Chinese mode of thinking, the desire to NOT be Chinese, is very strange.
In Chinese folklore, literature and popular history all divisions in China (a very popular topic), whether through civil war or barbarian invasion always end up with the country reunited by some glorious hero (or occassionally talented despot who is then deposed by a glorious hero). Having Chinese accept two Chinas is like asking Westerners to accept that yes, the villain really should win the war and beat the good guys. In the books, China always gets reunited by the good guys and everyone rejoices and lives happily ever after.
I really don't follow this. There was no such thing as a cohesive entity called "Europe" in the 18th century. In fact the very idea of a unified Europe is new and came out of the utter devastation of two world wars. For hundreds of years, the countries of Europe have been competing very fiercely against each *other*. Especially in the colonial age. In fact if one looks at the EU *today* many of the countries still don't really see eye to eye on many things.
China may have the US, Europe and Russia as rival military powers. But in the 18th century *all* of the major European countries were rival military and economic powers. There would be Britain, France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussia, Spain, Italy, Poland, Portugal etc. etc. Then of course there was China and India. In 1700 China at that time had 23% of the World's GDP and India had 23% (Europe was 23%, Japan 5% and the US 0%). And of course they were no small military powers either. This leads some historians to describe the "real" Asian crisis to be from 1820 to 1950 when Asia dropped from 58% of the world's GDP to 17% in 1952. I believe the Ottoman Empire was still going strong in the 18th century and that dominated the Middle East.
The figures are from a British historian called Angus Maddison in 1998. Calculations are based on purchasing power parity.
What would be really great is if the Indian government decided to allow one of the first Indians to go on the Moon to be one of the Untouchables. Despite government rhetoric, prejudice and violence against Untouchables is still very prevalent esp. in rural areas. It is only really in the teeming populations of the big cities that they can really escape what one calls suffering simply because they were born. Having an Untouchable in such a nationalistic important venture would be a big symbolic step in helping to increase their standing. Of course, that's also probably the reason why it would probably never happen...
Unlikely, since Chinese dragons are associated with rain and water not fire.
However, this brings up the problem of mixing water with electronics...