Well, of course it it a viral marketing campaign, but a grassroots one and relatively benign. A well-run company would always appreciate the opportunity to get free publicity, that's what they pay their PR guys for. As long as 3M doesn't start sponsoring pranks in order to get/. frontpage story, I am fine with the mention.
Brilliant! Why not end the sunctions then? It was just pointless murder of children by some Western states. As you illustrate it was well known for a long time that sanctions harmed Iraqis. We also know that they didn't have much effect on Saddam and even if they had, it was decided not to use that effect and attack the country instead...
Sanctions were wrong in the first place, that's all. All the deaths could be avoided if the US (and some other countries too) cared a tiniest bit about Iraqi people and not only about their own interests. As it is, the US cared mostly about oil and Bush's personal vendetta with Saddam. People of Iraq are only used as PR fodder when appropriate.
The rest of the time I've been able to trace the crashes back to drivers.
And the articles discusses what? I fail to see how your Windoze system crashing because of bad drivers proves that Windoze driver support is better than Linux...
Win2k crashes a lot on me. Sometimes it happens because of bad Creative Sound Blaster Live! drivers (fucking fuck, that's as mainstream as it gets and Windows doesn't properly support that sound card?), sometimes because of nVidia crappy drivers (same shit, but now I have better luck with ATi). Sometimes it crashes because some other crap, sometimes a program manages to hang the box so badly there is no real difference from a crash.
Please don't tell me the hardware is at fault, because as far as I am concerned, the hardware doesn't crash (there is no smoke coming from the case and I don't need to reset the hardware), Windoze does.
It seems everybody misses the point. For several years I had 64kbit broadband. Why would I call something only marginally faster than 56K "broadband"? Because of entirely different mode of access - the "always-on" connection. It changes the way you think about Internet, it is no longer something you do once a day to read e-mail and chat on AIM - it is now something you do when you need something from Internet. You no longer need to connect to the Net, you are connected all the time. This is also useful for family access, when there is more than one Internet user.
Right now I have 256kbit connection which is also much cheaper (60$/mon and unlimited traffic, unlike the old one). I like the ability to play UT2004, use P2P and download videos, demos, flash, etc., but this isn't the best part of broadband. The best part is being able to instantly look up everything you need on a miriad of sites as much in-depth as you need.
Called protest voting, it is quite popular (by necessity) in many places in the world. In Russia we vote for "Protiv Vseh" candidate ('against all') and in many elections this fella collects 10% of the votes and more. Often there are people campaigning for him (her?). During the 1996 presidential elections Protiv Vseh got as much as 8% in several regions. According to the law, if the Protiv Vseh candidate wins the election, they are declared void. This has never happened yet in federal elections (state parliament or president), but it did happen in small regional elections several times.
It is believed that this candidate was originally added to the ballots during Soviet time, to help maintain the illusion of competitive elections.:) It is said that you should expect bad things happening to your career if you lose an election to Protiv Vseh. Kinda like losing to dead guy...
I wonder how soon will companies realise (they will eventually) that they can easily combine the benefits of open source with proprietary profitability. If nVidia realises Gelato under a GPL-like license with one addition - to use the code you need to pay $$$ to nVidia. Everything else would be the same as in GPL, all changes must be shared and made available (to those in the club). This would allow nVidia to create a small open-source community among CGI programmers, while ensuring they continuously get paid to pay for their own R&D.
BTW, the same approach can be used in game programming. Games would benefit enormously from open source collaboration and if the licence included a payment scheme, the model might be feasible.
Blah. MPAA. Blah-blah-blah. Seriously, I am not saying it's not news, but there is nothing interesting here. Nothing Stallman hasn't predicted in 1997. It all goes according to his plan^H^H^Hrediction.
People, unless you all do something, it will continue. I don't want the fucking Tycho Uprising, I want this all settled today, while it can be done peacefully. Personally I hope to make sure that two universities I have some influence in will be as open (source, access, etc.) as possible. Once this is built in into the system, adding limitations later should be much more difficult...
It seems that the discussion degenerated to bashing Java for being slow, arguing that it isn't and speculating about doing the same in some other bizarre programming language. But I would like to ask a very simply, yet, profound question. Why? What exactly the point of this project? It's not that I am against distributed computing, Java or rendering of strange bubbles. I just honestly don't understand (from reading the writeup and meditating over the 11-year old gif) what rkeene517 is trying to achieve.
The picture he rendered 11 years ago could now be rendered in about a millisecond on top of the line Radeon. Does he want to up the resulution? Does he want to better simulate the physics of light? Does he want to simply increase the number of photons a thousandfold and see what comes out of it? Does he want to test the limits of Java programming or distributed computing? The inquiring minds want to know.
Spam is also free. The fact that something is free doesn't mean noone has the right to express valid concerns about it.
I'm sure they're not performing a secure wipe of every sector containing portions of an email once it's deleted. Do you work at Google? Have you read something from them we haven't? I see absolutely no reason to think that they will delete personal e-mail. In fact they practically promise that they won't.
If you started looking, most of the privacy "concerns" with Google's service apply to almost any email service. Bullshit. Simply reading the e-mail is not a privacy concern. Mail servers do it when they transmit it. The privacy concern is when there is any output that a human reads. When a program reads my personal e-mail it either filters it or allows it to get to my inbox. At no point does a human read it, unless I mark a message as spam to forward it to the e-mail provider.
When Google scans messages to index them and to show ads, they create all sorts of data about my personal communications that may be accessible (initially only in aggregated form) to their employees and third-parties. They also change the behaviour of their program in accordance with my behaviour but without me asking.
Consider the Opera browser. The free version comes with a banner, but you can select which ads you want to see - generic ads, ads related to your selected interests or relevant text ads. Where is an option in GMail to turn all personalisation off and just show what everyone gets?
I don't think most online banking systems consider themselves fucked. Sure, they offer phone services, so it isn't a direct comparison. Most decent online banking systems have PDA versions, which happen to work wonderfully in Lynx. Of all websites, banking systems need flashy design the least and accessible simple pages the most.
Yandex is the leading Russian search engine, a technological, social and commercial innovator on par with Google. Yandex had a webmail service for years now. And in regards to usability, unobtrusiveness and usefullness their webmail is lightyears ahead of GMail.
In the settings you can turn off all advertisments on webmail pages and turn off the obligatory text signature promoting the mail service (like all other webmailers have). Why did they do that? The user survey showed that users don't want ads while they are reading their e-mail and find it annoying and obtrusive.
Personally, I don't use their service, purely because I want a good e-mail address and nothing beats name.surname@mail.ru, which I luckily have.
Yes, this will happen soon, you don't have to worry, unless you already are on your deathbed. The only reason this didn't happen earlier is that there was need for it. In the past computers didn't move, they stood on our desks, notbooks and PDAs were rather rare and didn't move from the power grid anyway (and where you can find the power, you can find a phone line). Only recently we god capable devices with long power life and quickly Wi-Fi (Bluetooth, 3G) has emerged. Everyone is talking about dynamic network artitecture, because it only became relevant now. But it's not terribly difficult to implement. It will take some time to phase out the legacy systems, but ultimately the problem is purely technical, no breakthrough is needed.
Good point. But given that there are migration costs, in the long-term it is probably safer to bet on the innovator. For example, Windows WE (whatever) may surpass Mac OS at some point, but we can be relatively sure its advantage will only be temporary.
Still, in other cases the rule doesn't work, such as with 3D videocards. I rooted for 3Dfx when I bought my first 3D accelerator. Then I hailed nVidia as the 3d-king when I bought two Ti4200s. Now I honestly believe that ATi rules forever.:) Not much of a loyal customer...
Use evolutionary programming. There should be mutating virtual tax-payers and thousands of simple rules, checking compliance - you don't have to code all rules to fit together. When a virtual tax-payer pays the taxes, the rule checkers should make sure their rule is abided by. If not, they kill the tax-payer. Eventually programs will evolve capable of calculating their taxes with full compliance with the laws. As a side benefit, in such a system it would be easy to fight tax-evaders, just more rules to catch those paying the least amount of taxes per 1$ of gross income.
If you want a rule of thumb, here is one: always choose the simpliest and most elegant solution. It doesn't matter what is your favourite design methodology, just remember to regularly stop and make sure that what you just wrote is simple and elegant. If not, make it so through redisign (you only have to do it for the last step, everything before that is supposed to be simple and elegant already).
It should be obvious to everyone, but that Valery is obviously a hoax.
P.S. The parent might be modded funny, I don't know, because I browse with scores disabled - don't like my perception of the comment to be influenced by the moderation.
BTW, would that IE option work for Flash audio? For MIDI?
As a better browsing alternative I would recommend Opera. To turn off the sound I just need to press F12 and disable "Enable sounds" and "Enable plug-ins". It can be turned back on just as easily.
If the existence of a green cow is a 100% certainty the probability of your viewing one is still going to be infinitely close or equal to zero. What you are saying here is that not only are there no tests of gods' existence, there is also infinitely small amount of evidence for that even if they do in fact exist. I'd like to know what do you base this on. If we are to believe the bible, then god interefered with the world quite often. Sometimes directly, by appearing to humans, sending angels or causing clearly supernatural events, and sometimes through prayers (which were answered in the bible pretty much with 100% reliability). It seems reasonable to extrapolate that to this day and assume that if god existed, he would be showing himself here pretty often.
A sidenote: you can use probability theory even with non random possibilities that aren't tests - what is necessary is for the outcomes to comply with Kholmogorov axioms (or something like that).
Any conclusions you make based on that belief are no more or less valid then the conclusions made by an individual who believes the opposite. You keep stating that god/no god hypothesises are equal, as if you can somehow prove it. But the assumption you make about 50/50 probabilities is dubious. Think of it, what if we state a thousand hypothesises - one for each religion and one for atheism. Will all of them have 0.1% chance of being true, even the christian one (which christian, by the way?)?
I think that such a simple approach is unlikely to wield useful results. In the beginning we need to utilize some heuristics, even "higher being is needed to create order" is better than just assigning 1/n to each of n possibilities. The Occam Razor is one such heuristic. Sure, it doesn't (and can't) prove that there is no god, but it is useful to assign a priori probabilities. And with recent mathematical research (such as ANKOS by Wolfram and a theory by a group of Russian mathematicians from Novosibirsk) we know that there is a possibility that the basic rules of our world are determined by mathematics, thus there is no need for any external force to create the Universe, it emerges from the basic principles (that's only a possibility though, and not developed enough yet).
Someone being forced into a particular religion is outside the scope of this debate because that person does not truly believe, he is forced to live his life as if he believes. That's clearly not true. People believe what they are told - that's natural. This is not the same as forcing, it's persuading. And most people are lacking in rationality and intelligence, that's a fact. If they were to become victims of religious brainwashing, their chances of escaping unscathed would be very low. Most believers (and may be most atheists, but I suspect the percentage would be higher among believers) are even incapable of understanding (often reading) the bible (other holy books) itself, they rely on what the clergy tells them. You can make those suckers believe pretty much everything - witness the popularity of paranormal and any political campaign.
I have no respect for beliefs of such people. If you were a christian, I would respect your beliefs, because you clearly put at least a tiny bit of thought into that. But when some illiterate, irrational, stupid moronic idiot says "there is god", I want to punch him in the face, cut his balls off and finally shoot him with a machinegun, because even my tolerance has its limits.
A fitting quote: "It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them." (Pierre Beaumarchais)
300-350 tonns (1 mln lbs) is a figure from the official press release (and the conference). They say it is planned to use rockets with 20 tons payload and possibly also Proton and Arian. The final ship will be assembled in orbit.
The director of the leading design bureau said a launch in 2013-2014 is realistic. And judging from the list of participating companies and organisation (many large Russian aerospace industry players), this is not entirely vaporware.
BTW, the alternative Russian "Energia" project costs 15-20 billion $.
Those of you interested in the reality TV from space might want to check out Spacestation, an IMAX 3D film about the ISS. It was made two years ago, but is premiered in Russia today, on April 12.
BTW, April 12 is the Cosmonautics Day. 43 years ago YuryGagarin became a first human ever to fly to space. BTW, during the 43 years that followed, 431 humans have been up there. Think of it, only 10 people per year on average...
Nobody in the US (or in the world for that matter) expected the Soviet space triumth of the 1961. Nobody expects these Russians to pull off their Mars trip. But one thing is for certain - the only way to find the limits of possible is to venture beyond them, into the impossible. Good luck to those trying!
If they found even one block of the movie on her disk, they could tell the court there was only a 1 in 1.318x10^1204 chance she didn't do it.
Or it just so happened that some guy pirated the movie, watched it, opened MS Word or another poorly written software, Word didn't clear the memory after allocating, didn't use it, but wrote it as a part of the file. This word document was then sent to this girl, who ended up with a block of a pirated movie on her HDD. This is far-fetched, sure, but it was demonstrated that data from other programs may be acquired by Word in this manner and written in a file.
Even when data is overwritten by normal use of the disk, it is possible to extract. (It's recoverable until about 7 overwrites.
You know, I just happened to read a FAQ written by techs from the data recovery company (in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia) and they say it's bullshit. They quote Gordon Hughes, the director of Magnetic Recording Research at the University of California:
"Beyond these data recovery techniques which use drive hardware, other exotic techniques can be proposed such as putting recorded discs into scanning magnetic force microscopes. It is easy to obtain pictures that appear to show unerased track edge data. But no one has shown complete recovery of a data sector, including the data synchronization preamble, bit de-randomizer, partial response and modulation codes, and error correction code."
So until I see some better evidence, I am tempted to believe that even wiping the file contents with zeros once should be enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, of course it it a viral marketing campaign, but a grassroots one and relatively benign. A well-run company would always appreciate the opportunity to get free publicity, that's what they pay their PR guys for. As long as 3M doesn't start sponsoring pranks in order to get /. frontpage story, I am fine with the mention.
Brilliant! Why not end the sunctions then? It was just pointless murder of children by some Western states. As you illustrate it was well known for a long time that sanctions harmed Iraqis. We also know that they didn't have much effect on Saddam and even if they had, it was decided not to use that effect and attack the country instead...
Sanctions were wrong in the first place, that's all. All the deaths could be avoided if the US (and some other countries too) cared a tiniest bit about Iraqi people and not only about their own interests. As it is, the US cared mostly about oil and Bush's personal vendetta with Saddam. People of Iraq are only used as PR fodder when appropriate.
The rest of the time I've been able to trace the crashes back to drivers.
And the articles discusses what? I fail to see how your Windoze system crashing because of bad drivers proves that Windoze driver support is better than Linux...
Win2k crashes a lot on me. Sometimes it happens because of bad Creative Sound Blaster Live! drivers (fucking fuck, that's as mainstream as it gets and Windows doesn't properly support that sound card?), sometimes because of nVidia crappy drivers (same shit, but now I have better luck with ATi). Sometimes it crashes because some other crap, sometimes a program manages to hang the box so badly there is no real difference from a crash.
Please don't tell me the hardware is at fault, because as far as I am concerned, the hardware doesn't crash (there is no smoke coming from the case and I don't need to reset the hardware), Windoze does.
It seems everybody misses the point. For several years I had 64kbit broadband. Why would I call something only marginally faster than 56K "broadband"? Because of entirely different mode of access - the "always-on" connection. It changes the way you think about Internet, it is no longer something you do once a day to read e-mail and chat on AIM - it is now something you do when you need something from Internet. You no longer need to connect to the Net, you are connected all the time. This is also useful for family access, when there is more than one Internet user.
Right now I have 256kbit connection which is also much cheaper (60$/mon and unlimited traffic, unlike the old one). I like the ability to play UT2004, use P2P and download videos, demos, flash, etc., but this isn't the best part of broadband. The best part is being able to instantly look up everything you need on a miriad of sites as much in-depth as you need.
Called protest voting, it is quite popular (by necessity) in many places in the world. In Russia we vote for "Protiv Vseh" candidate ('against all') and in many elections this fella collects 10% of the votes and more. Often there are people campaigning for him (her?). During the 1996 presidential elections Protiv Vseh got as much as 8% in several regions. According to the law, if the Protiv Vseh candidate wins the election, they are declared void. This has never happened yet in federal elections (state parliament or president), but it did happen in small regional elections several times.
:) It is said that you should expect bad things happening to your career if you lose an election to Protiv Vseh. Kinda like losing to dead guy...
It is believed that this candidate was originally added to the ballots during Soviet time, to help maintain the illusion of competitive elections.
I wonder how soon will companies realise (they will eventually) that they can easily combine the benefits of open source with proprietary profitability. If nVidia realises Gelato under a GPL-like license with one addition - to use the code you need to pay $$$ to nVidia. Everything else would be the same as in GPL, all changes must be shared and made available (to those in the club). This would allow nVidia to create a small open-source community among CGI programmers, while ensuring they continuously get paid to pay for their own R&D.
BTW, the same approach can be used in game programming. Games would benefit enormously from open source collaboration and if the licence included a payment scheme, the model might be feasible.
Blah. MPAA. Blah-blah-blah. Seriously, I am not saying it's not news, but there is nothing interesting here. Nothing Stallman hasn't predicted in 1997. It all goes according to his plan^H^H^Hrediction.
People, unless you all do something, it will continue. I don't want the fucking Tycho Uprising, I want this all settled today, while it can be done peacefully. Personally I hope to make sure that two universities I have some influence in will be as open (source, access, etc.) as possible. Once this is built in into the system, adding limitations later should be much more difficult...
It's funny that Google doesn't have the cache of a9, but does have the cache of itself, while a9 has the cache for both a9 and Google.
It seems that the discussion degenerated to bashing Java for being slow, arguing that it isn't and speculating about doing the same in some other bizarre programming language. But I would like to ask a very simply, yet, profound question. Why? What exactly the point of this project? It's not that I am against distributed computing, Java or rendering of strange bubbles. I just honestly don't understand (from reading the writeup and meditating over the 11-year old gif) what rkeene517 is trying to achieve.
The picture he rendered 11 years ago could now be rendered in about a millisecond on top of the line Radeon. Does he want to up the resulution? Does he want to better simulate the physics of light? Does he want to simply increase the number of photons a thousandfold and see what comes out of it? Does he want to test the limits of Java programming or distributed computing? The inquiring minds want to know.
Spam is also free. The fact that something is free doesn't mean noone has the right to express valid concerns about it.
I'm sure they're not performing a secure wipe of every sector containing portions of an email once it's deleted.
Do you work at Google? Have you read something from them we haven't? I see absolutely no reason to think that they will delete personal e-mail. In fact they practically promise that they won't.
If you started looking, most of the privacy "concerns" with Google's service apply to almost any email service.
Bullshit. Simply reading the e-mail is not a privacy concern. Mail servers do it when they transmit it. The privacy concern is when there is any output that a human reads. When a program reads my personal e-mail it either filters it or allows it to get to my inbox. At no point does a human read it, unless I mark a message as spam to forward it to the e-mail provider.
When Google scans messages to index them and to show ads, they create all sorts of data about my personal communications that may be accessible (initially only in aggregated form) to their employees and third-parties. They also change the behaviour of their program in accordance with my behaviour but without me asking.
Consider the Opera browser. The free version comes with a banner, but you can select which ads you want to see - generic ads, ads related to your selected interests or relevant text ads. Where is an option in GMail to turn all personalisation off and just show what everyone gets?
I don't think most online banking systems consider themselves fucked. Sure, they offer phone services, so it isn't a direct comparison.
Most decent online banking systems have PDA versions, which happen to work wonderfully in Lynx. Of all websites, banking systems need flashy design the least and accessible simple pages the most.
Yandex is the leading Russian search engine, a technological, social and commercial innovator on par with Google. Yandex had a webmail service for years now. And in regards to usability, unobtrusiveness and usefullness their webmail is lightyears ahead of GMail.
In the settings you can turn off all advertisments on webmail pages and turn off the obligatory text signature promoting the mail service (like all other webmailers have). Why did they do that? The user survey showed that users don't want ads while they are reading their e-mail and find it annoying and obtrusive.
Personally, I don't use their service, purely because I want a good e-mail address and nothing beats name.surname@mail.ru, which I luckily have.
Yes, this will happen soon, you don't have to worry, unless you already are on your deathbed. The only reason this didn't happen earlier is that there was need for it. In the past computers didn't move, they stood on our desks, notbooks and PDAs were rather rare and didn't move from the power grid anyway (and where you can find the power, you can find a phone line). Only recently we god capable devices with long power life and quickly Wi-Fi (Bluetooth, 3G) has emerged. Everyone is talking about dynamic network artitecture, because it only became relevant now. But it's not terribly difficult to implement. It will take some time to phase out the legacy systems, but ultimately the problem is purely technical, no breakthrough is needed.
Good point. But given that there are migration costs, in the long-term it is probably safer to bet on the innovator. For example, Windows WE (whatever) may surpass Mac OS at some point, but we can be relatively sure its advantage will only be temporary.
:) Not much of a loyal customer...
Still, in other cases the rule doesn't work, such as with 3D videocards. I rooted for 3Dfx when I bought my first 3D accelerator. Then I hailed nVidia as the 3d-king when I bought two Ti4200s. Now I honestly believe that ATi rules forever.
Use evolutionary programming. There should be mutating virtual tax-payers and thousands of simple rules, checking compliance - you don't have to code all rules to fit together. When a virtual tax-payer pays the taxes, the rule checkers should make sure their rule is abided by. If not, they kill the tax-payer. Eventually programs will evolve capable of calculating their taxes with full compliance with the laws. As a side benefit, in such a system it would be easy to fight tax-evaders, just more rules to catch those paying the least amount of taxes per 1$ of gross income.
RTFA. They say it's 45 cents/100$. That's not terrible really, although it is too bad they didn't reduce the cost in the past 50 years...
If you want a rule of thumb, here is one: always choose the simpliest and most elegant solution. It doesn't matter what is your favourite design methodology, just remember to regularly stop and make sure that what you just wrote is simple and elegant. If not, make it so through redisign (you only have to do it for the last step, everything before that is supposed to be simple and elegant already).
It should be obvious to everyone, but that Valery is obviously a hoax.
P.S. The parent might be modded funny, I don't know, because I browse with scores disabled - don't like my perception of the comment to be influenced by the moderation.
BTW, would that IE option work for Flash audio? For MIDI?
As a better browsing alternative I would recommend Opera. To turn off the sound I just need to press F12 and disable "Enable sounds" and "Enable plug-ins". It can be turned back on just as easily.
If the existence of a green cow is a 100% certainty the probability of your viewing one is still going to be infinitely close or equal to zero.
What you are saying here is that not only are there no tests of gods' existence, there is also infinitely small amount of evidence for that even if they do in fact exist. I'd like to know what do you base this on. If we are to believe the bible, then god interefered with the world quite often. Sometimes directly, by appearing to humans, sending angels or causing clearly supernatural events, and sometimes through prayers (which were answered in the bible pretty much with 100% reliability). It seems reasonable to extrapolate that to this day and assume that if god existed, he would be showing himself here pretty often.
A sidenote: you can use probability theory even with non random possibilities that aren't tests - what is necessary is for the outcomes to comply with Kholmogorov axioms (or something like that).
Any conclusions you make based on that belief are no more or less valid then the conclusions made by an individual who believes the opposite.
You keep stating that god/no god hypothesises are equal, as if you can somehow prove it. But the assumption you make about 50/50 probabilities is dubious. Think of it, what if we state a thousand hypothesises - one for each religion and one for atheism. Will all of them have 0.1% chance of being true, even the christian one (which christian, by the way?)?
I think that such a simple approach is unlikely to wield useful results. In the beginning we need to utilize some heuristics, even "higher being is needed to create order" is better than just assigning 1/n to each of n possibilities. The Occam Razor is one such heuristic. Sure, it doesn't (and can't) prove that there is no god, but it is useful to assign a priori probabilities. And with recent mathematical research (such as ANKOS by Wolfram and a theory by a group of Russian mathematicians from Novosibirsk) we know that there is a possibility that the basic rules of our world are determined by mathematics, thus there is no need for any external force to create the Universe, it emerges from the basic principles (that's only a possibility though, and not developed enough yet).
Someone being forced into a particular religion is outside the scope of this debate because that person does not truly believe, he is forced to live his life as if he believes.
That's clearly not true. People believe what they are told - that's natural. This is not the same as forcing, it's persuading. And most people are lacking in rationality and intelligence, that's a fact. If they were to become victims of religious brainwashing, their chances of escaping unscathed would be very low. Most believers (and may be most atheists, but I suspect the percentage would be higher among believers) are even incapable of understanding (often reading) the bible (other holy books) itself, they rely on what the clergy tells them. You can make those suckers believe pretty much everything - witness the popularity of paranormal and any political campaign.
I have no respect for beliefs of such people. If you were a christian, I would respect your beliefs, because you clearly put at least a tiny bit of thought into that. But when some illiterate, irrational, stupid moronic idiot says "there is god", I want to punch him in the face, cut his balls off and finally shoot him with a machinegun, because even my tolerance has its limits.
A fitting quote: "It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them." (Pierre Beaumarchais)
300-350 tonns (1 mln lbs) is a figure from the official press release (and the conference). They say it is planned to use rockets with 20 tons payload and possibly also Proton and Arian. The final ship will be assembled in orbit.
The director of the leading design bureau said a launch in 2013-2014 is realistic. And judging from the list of participating companies and organisation (many large Russian aerospace industry players), this is not entirely vaporware.
BTW, the alternative Russian "Energia" project costs 15-20 billion $.
In Soviet Russia profit is illegal, you capitalist clod!
Those of you interested in the reality TV from space might want to check out Spacestation, an IMAX 3D film about the ISS. It was made two years ago, but is premiered in Russia today, on April 12.
BTW, April 12 is the Cosmonautics Day. 43 years ago Yury Gagarin became a first human ever to fly to space. BTW, during the 43 years that followed, 431 humans have been up there. Think of it, only 10 people per year on average...
Nobody in the US (or in the world for that matter) expected the Soviet space triumth of the 1961. Nobody expects these Russians to pull off their Mars trip. But one thing is for certain - the only way to find the limits of possible is to venture beyond them, into the impossible. Good luck to those trying!
If they found even one block of the movie on her disk, they could tell the court there was only a 1 in 1.318x10^1204 chance she didn't do it.
Or it just so happened that some guy pirated the movie, watched it, opened MS Word or another poorly written software, Word didn't clear the memory after allocating, didn't use it, but wrote it as a part of the file. This word document was then sent to this girl, who ended up with a block of a pirated movie on her HDD. This is far-fetched, sure, but it was demonstrated that data from other programs may be acquired by Word in this manner and written in a file.
You know, I just happened to read a FAQ written by techs from the data recovery company (in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia) and they say it's bullshit. They quote Gordon Hughes, the director of Magnetic Recording Research at the University of California:
So until I see some better evidence, I am tempted to believe that even wiping the file contents with zeros once should be enough.