That's pretty useless if you don't have your phone on your body 24/7. Unless of course you know a phone with a vibration mode that can be felt from several meters away.
Even with the knowledge that EST, AST and PST are referring to "Standard Time" in America, I'd resolve them to "Eastern Standard Time", "Atlantic Standard Time" and "Pacific Standard Time" with EST and AST being synonyms. EST would be... UTC +9 and PST UTC +11, I guess. CST (Central Standard Time, obviously) would be UTC +10.
Yeah, but most nternat-using people on the planet understand by how much their local time zone deviates from UTC as opposed to from some random time zone where they have to ask Wikipedia before they even know which continent it's on. Then again, Mozilla didn't tell anyone beforehand when their "day" started, so it would've been useless anyway.
I work on project A, that's ten tabs of various information sources. Now I have assignment B coming up, which adds another ten tabs until I get it done. Then I'm currently playing game TWEWY and trying to make sense of it means having another ten tabs open.
I could page out stuff to bookmarks, but that's extremely cumbersome. So the number of open tabs fluctuates somewhere between 1 and forty. For the last few months it has never gone below 20.
I wanted to. Then first mozilla.com was down. After it came back up it was adamant in the belief that the latest stable version of Firefox is 2.0.0.14 and Firefox 3 hasn't passed RC3 yet. Turns out Mozilla apparently didn't propagate the latest changes through their entire server farm.
If Mozilla can't be arsed to properly coordinate a product launch they sure as hell can't expect me to help them with their marketing.
Actually, the article you linked to uses the word "fuel cell" multiple times, compares the engine to methanol fuel cells and mentions the company used "a well-known process to produce hydrogen from water".
It's a fuel cell car. Neither magic nor claims of magic going on.
Actually, Bioware is the developer of NWN 1 and 2. KOTOR (both parts) and Jade Empire, too. The job they did with KOTOR prompted a lot of people to wish that BioWare had written the Star Wars prequels instead of George Lucas.
Besides, if we're comparing a not-yet-ready future version of USB to FireWire we might as well compare it to FireWire S3200. Unless the USB controller gets decoupled from the CPU, USB 3.0 might end up losing the direct speed comparison yet again.
SCSI still lives. I can still buy SCSI drives at every online retailer; also there's SAS. However, most people don't use SCSI; it has mainly survived because a few people do know why they buy it and they do pay more for it.
I expect FireWire to continue in a similar state: Most computers will ship with a single FW400 port at best when USB 3.0 has already become standard on all mainboards; meanwhile Apple and other high-end manufacturers will continue putting high-speed FW ports (perhaps up to FW3200) into their machines because their customers know why they don't use USB instead.
Design-wise USB is much simpler than FireWire. The ISB controller doesn't do all the work - in fact your CPU does quite a bt of it. That's why USB 2.0 has 480 Mb/s and 6-pin FireWire has 400 Mb/s and FireWire is still quite a bit faster than USB: USB has to shovel all the data through your CPU while the more expensive FireWire controller does that work itself.
Then there's the issue of FireWire controllers being smarter than USB controllers. With USB, most devices are simple peripherals than cn be connected to a computer. You can't plug your USB stick into your iPod and have the two of them talk. They released a spec called "USB On-the-go" that allows USB devices to directly talk to each other, but I have no ides where that went.
On the other hand, FireWire works more like Ethernet: Devices can talk to each other, they can initiate transfers etc. In fact, you can even use FireWire to set up networks.
Also, FireWire devices usually have two ports and allow daisy-chaining - meaning that you stick one device behind another and you can talk to both of them. One thing me and a fried of mine like to do when we need to share data is to hook up both of our notebooks to my external hard drive (FW800) and network across it. Then we ask people with USB hard drives how fast their hard drive-based network is. Yeah, we're Mac users; being snobs about our hardware's capabilities is a contractual obligation.;)
In my opinion, FireWire is much superior to USB for anything involving large amounts of data. USB is nice for input devices, but FireWire has the better design for bulk transfers. Also, FireWire plugs aren't pseudo-symmetrical like USB plugs. Not having to try several times untl you figure out which side is up is a big plus.
However, I digress. FireWire costs more because the FireWire controller does quite a bit more than a USB controller. Also, I think the licensing costs are still higher; not sure about that one though.
I maintain that DoomRL is much superior to Doom 4.
I normally don't like roguelikes too much because they tend to be cruelly hard in the beginning, but DoomRL is relatively fast and easy to get into. If you're a rouelike fanatic who is put off by the game sounding too easy: Play one of the harder challenge modes like Angel of Berserk (melee only) on Nightmare! and we'll talk again...
Another love-or-hate thing. Even though Mass Effect isn't too big on the action (but to really bad either) and the (IMO mostly interesting) conversations can draw out forever, especially if you just want to wrap up a sidequest and ten NPCs pop up to talk you into doing their sidequest right now, it's still a solid game. Much of what makes Mass Effect good is the solidity of the world and the writing. Bioware just knows how to create huge, immersive worlds where every insignificant locaton has its own backstory - and they are extremely good dialog writers. Even the myriads of elevator rides are lightened up by your team's banter.
Of course you might feel that a detailed universe and witty dialogs can't make up for the fact that the combat isn't executed as well as it could have been. I think Mass Effect is on par with Advent Rising, but I'm a sucker for good writing and immersive universes.
Are you crazy? Catching bullets is how you end up burning karma. You gain karma by completing runs. In my opinion, the Slashdot editors should get in contact with a Johnson and set a couple discreet missions into motion. I'm pretty sure that you could get a lot of interesting data if you'd get a decker into the MediaSentry HQ. Or maybe "acquire" one of the RIAA's top lawyers so that/. can "convince" them to work against the RIAA. You know, stuff like that. Good karma to be made, too.
Now we only need to find a team that doesn't entirely consist of stay-at-home deckers...
Latin languages doesn't have this problem, and there's no "free vs. free" ambiguity. Thus nobody speaking those languages has the impression that FSF is playing with words.
It's not something that plague all germanic languages either. In German "frei" usually means freedom; while in some cases it can mean "without cost", those are few and static. More commonly used words for "without cost" would be "gratis" or "umsonst".
No laguage is safe from misleading homonyms, however.
Of course someone is going to eavesdrop on the communication. You don't really think you can send anything over the internet without someone being able to listen, do you? All communications with the server would be heavily encrypted.
That's an issue I didn't consider as I live in Germany and we aren't as sparsely populated as the USA. Over here "rural" means "twenty kilometers from the next biggish town".
I'd recommend public transportation. Buses probably don't work due to the sparse population, but if quick travel to a big city is important you could settle in/ride to a village with a train station and use that. Over here there are various ways for train commuters to get lower prices; maybe there is something similar in the States. I commute by train (admittedly for free; as a university student I can get a semester ticket) and it's quite doable. If the target city doesn't have a tram or bus network you can take the bike with you and ride it from the station to your office.
Of course, given what I usually hear about the States, public transportation seems to be very rudimentary and might not be an option. In that case I'd recommend lobbying whoever is responsible to develop an infrastructure and using your car until it is in place.
They're getting more expensive everywhere. In Germany we had cases of people stealing scrap wires or even trying to remove the thick power wires from railroad installations(!) because copper is expensive enough for cable theft to be lucrative.
Soldiers do a lot of things. They don't like it and it's not good for their mental health and you run into problems, but hey, with enough spin you can still pretend you're the good guy.
The problem with guerilla warfare is that it's extremely messy. It means by definition that you're dragging innocents into the fight. You chip away at the enemy's nerves and public standing by attacking them from nowhere until they freak out and start killing civilians without good cause. While that's certainly effective if you want to drive occupants out of your country, I don't think it's going to help you much in a civil war; people are going to notice why death squadrons are burning down small towns and those who are unaffected aren't going to like either side of the war.
Add to that the fact that the USA have all of their high-tech hardware readily at hand, so communicating without the communication being intercepted and decrypted/pinpointed might prove difficult. Also, weapons can be easily deployed without having to be shipped thousands of miles.
I think "we'll just use guerilla tactics" is a recipe for a long, very ugly conflict that might not end well for either side. With the kind of suveillance the USA have going on it's also hard to pull off without being caught.
I still think that if you want any respect from the international community afterwards, getting a bunch of states to secede, taking a part of the military with them, is the way to go. You still run into the problem of the other guys being bigger than you are, but if you can hold out for long enough you can disable their surveillance capacities in your area and you can get the citizens behind you, creating a widespread feeling of "us vs. them". If the USA still overrun your new nation you can switch to guerilla warfare, capitalizing on that feeling.
By the way, hi to the various agencies whose keyword sensors I've probably set off. Aren't gedanken experiments interesting?
The problem is that even if you can trivially prove that you're innocent it can still take weeks before you get your equipment back. At least if these IP cops are anything like real police, which I don't doubt. The VPN approach has one distinct advantage: Even if your equipment is seized you can still use another PC if you can recreate your key (of course the connection is encrypted); you will probably have to use physical storage instead of a ramdisk, but you can still work. And there are ways of making physical storage somewhat volatile (encrypted volumes that are nulled/recreated on shutdown/boot).
You don't really think I'd set up any kind of VPN or similar connection without it being encrypted? Preferably, the key is transmitted separately - either through various channels so as to make it very difficult to intercept (for example split into several fragments which are then steganographically embedded in images, sound etc.) or entirely inside my head.
Slashdot Mirror
That's pretty useless if you don't have your phone on your body 24/7. Unless of course you know a phone with a vibration mode that can be felt from several meters away.
Even with the knowledge that EST, AST and PST are referring to "Standard Time" in America, I'd resolve them to "Eastern Standard Time", "Atlantic Standard Time" and "Pacific Standard Time" with EST and AST being synonyms. EST would be... UTC +9 and PST UTC +11, I guess. CST (Central Standard Time, obviously) would be UTC +10.
Yeah, but most nternat-using people on the planet understand by how much their local time zone deviates from UTC as opposed to from some random time zone where they have to ask Wikipedia before they even know which continent it's on. Then again, Mozilla didn't tell anyone beforehand when their "day" started, so it would've been useless anyway.
I work on project A, that's ten tabs of various information sources. Now I have assignment B coming up, which adds another ten tabs until I get it done. Then I'm currently playing game TWEWY and trying to make sense of it means having another ten tabs open.
I could page out stuff to bookmarks, but that's extremely cumbersome. So the number of open tabs fluctuates somewhere between 1 and forty. For the last few months it has never gone below 20.
I wanted to. Then first mozilla.com was down. After it came back up it was adamant in the belief that the latest stable version of Firefox is 2.0.0.14 and Firefox 3 hasn't passed RC3 yet. Turns out Mozilla apparently didn't propagate the latest changes through their entire server farm.
If Mozilla can't be arsed to properly coordinate a product launch they sure as hell can't expect me to help them with their marketing.
Actually, the article you linked to uses the word "fuel cell" multiple times, compares the engine to methanol fuel cells and mentions the company used "a well-known process to produce hydrogen from water".
It's a fuel cell car. Neither magic nor claims of magic going on.
Actually, Bioware is the developer of NWN 1 and 2. KOTOR (both parts) and Jade Empire, too. The job they did with KOTOR prompted a lot of people to wish that BioWare had written the Star Wars prequels instead of George Lucas.
We already have. USB UHCI and OHCI are two different USB 1.x standards that do the same thing.
Besides, if we're comparing a not-yet-ready future version of USB to FireWire we might as well compare it to FireWire S3200. Unless the USB controller gets decoupled from the CPU, USB 3.0 might end up losing the direct speed comparison yet again.
SCSI still lives. I can still buy SCSI drives at every online retailer; also there's SAS. However, most people don't use SCSI; it has mainly survived because a few people do know why they buy it and they do pay more for it.
I expect FireWire to continue in a similar state: Most computers will ship with a single FW400 port at best when USB 3.0 has already become standard on all mainboards; meanwhile Apple and other high-end manufacturers will continue putting high-speed FW ports (perhaps up to FW3200) into their machines because their customers know why they don't use USB instead.
Design-wise USB is much simpler than FireWire. The ISB controller doesn't do all the work - in fact your CPU does quite a bt of it. That's why USB 2.0 has 480 Mb/s and 6-pin FireWire has 400 Mb/s and FireWire is still quite a bit faster than USB: USB has to shovel all the data through your CPU while the more expensive FireWire controller does that work itself.
;)
Then there's the issue of FireWire controllers being smarter than USB controllers. With USB, most devices are simple peripherals than cn be connected to a computer. You can't plug your USB stick into your iPod and have the two of them talk. They released a spec called "USB On-the-go" that allows USB devices to directly talk to each other, but I have no ides where that went.
On the other hand, FireWire works more like Ethernet: Devices can talk to each other, they can initiate transfers etc. In fact, you can even use FireWire to set up networks.
Also, FireWire devices usually have two ports and allow daisy-chaining - meaning that you stick one device behind another and you can talk to both of them. One thing me and a fried of mine like to do when we need to share data is to hook up both of our notebooks to my external hard drive (FW800) and network across it. Then we ask people with USB hard drives how fast their hard drive-based network is. Yeah, we're Mac users; being snobs about our hardware's capabilities is a contractual obligation.
In my opinion, FireWire is much superior to USB for anything involving large amounts of data. USB is nice for input devices, but FireWire has the better design for bulk transfers. Also, FireWire plugs aren't pseudo-symmetrical like USB plugs. Not having to try several times untl you figure out which side is up is a big plus.
However, I digress. FireWire costs more because the FireWire controller does quite a bit more than a USB controller. Also, I think the licensing costs are still higher; not sure about that one though.
I maintain that DoomRL is much superior to Doom 4.
I normally don't like roguelikes too much because they tend to be cruelly hard in the beginning, but DoomRL is relatively fast and easy to get into. If you're a rouelike fanatic who is put off by the game sounding too easy: Play one of the harder challenge modes like Angel of Berserk (melee only) on Nightmare! and we'll talk again...
Another love-or-hate thing. Even though Mass Effect isn't too big on the action (but to really bad either) and the (IMO mostly interesting) conversations can draw out forever, especially if you just want to wrap up a sidequest and ten NPCs pop up to talk you into doing their sidequest right now, it's still a solid game. Much of what makes Mass Effect good is the solidity of the world and the writing. Bioware just knows how to create huge, immersive worlds where every insignificant locaton has its own backstory - and they are extremely good dialog writers. Even the myriads of elevator rides are lightened up by your team's banter.
Of course you might feel that a detailed universe and witty dialogs can't make up for the fact that the combat isn't executed as well as it could have been. I think Mass Effect is on par with Advent Rising, but I'm a sucker for good writing and immersive universes.
I say we just block ports 1 - 65535 in both directions; most child porn comes over those ports.
Are you crazy? Catching bullets is how you end up burning karma. You gain karma by completing runs. In my opinion, the Slashdot editors should get in contact with a Johnson and set a couple discreet missions into motion. I'm pretty sure that you could get a lot of interesting data if you'd get a decker into the MediaSentry HQ. Or maybe "acquire" one of the RIAA's top lawyers so that /. can "convince" them to work against the RIAA. You know, stuff like that. Good karma to be made, too.
Now we only need to find a team that doesn't entirely consist of stay-at-home deckers...
No laguage is safe from misleading homonyms, however.
Of course someone is going to eavesdrop on the communication. You don't really think you can send anything over the internet without someone being able to listen, do you? All communications with the server would be heavily encrypted.
I think Slashdoe does qualify as a newsblog. We just don't jerk ourselves off over how 2.0 we are.
That's an issue I didn't consider as I live in Germany and we aren't as sparsely populated as the USA. Over here "rural" means "twenty kilometers from the next biggish town".
I'd recommend public transportation. Buses probably don't work due to the sparse population, but if quick travel to a big city is important you could settle in/ride to a village with a train station and use that. Over here there are various ways for train commuters to get lower prices; maybe there is something similar in the States. I commute by train (admittedly for free; as a university student I can get a semester ticket) and it's quite doable. If the target city doesn't have a tram or bus network you can take the bike with you and ride it from the station to your office.
Of course, given what I usually hear about the States, public transportation seems to be very rudimentary and might not be an option. In that case I'd recommend lobbying whoever is responsible to develop an infrastructure and using your car until it is in place.
For the common man outside the USA: It's one of the small intervals on your ruler.
Ride carefully? If you live an area that doesn't regularly see frozen ground or meters of snow a carefully ridden bike can be as useful as a car.
They're getting more expensive everywhere. In Germany we had cases of people stealing scrap wires or even trying to remove the thick power wires from railroad installations(!) because copper is expensive enough for cable theft to be lucrative.
Soldiers do a lot of things. They don't like it and it's not good for their mental health and you run into problems, but hey, with enough spin you can still pretend you're the good guy.
The problem with guerilla warfare is that it's extremely messy. It means by definition that you're dragging innocents into the fight. You chip away at the enemy's nerves and public standing by attacking them from nowhere until they freak out and start killing civilians without good cause. While that's certainly effective if you want to drive occupants out of your country, I don't think it's going to help you much in a civil war; people are going to notice why death squadrons are burning down small towns and those who are unaffected aren't going to like either side of the war.
Add to that the fact that the USA have all of their high-tech hardware readily at hand, so communicating without the communication being intercepted and decrypted/pinpointed might prove difficult. Also, weapons can be easily deployed without having to be shipped thousands of miles.
I think "we'll just use guerilla tactics" is a recipe for a long, very ugly conflict that might not end well for either side. With the kind of suveillance the USA have going on it's also hard to pull off without being caught.
I still think that if you want any respect from the international community afterwards, getting a bunch of states to secede, taking a part of the military with them, is the way to go. You still run into the problem of the other guys being bigger than you are, but if you can hold out for long enough you can disable their surveillance capacities in your area and you can get the citizens behind you, creating a widespread feeling of "us vs. them". If the USA still overrun your new nation you can switch to guerilla warfare, capitalizing on that feeling.
By the way, hi to the various agencies whose keyword sensors I've probably set off. Aren't gedanken experiments interesting?
The problem is that even if you can trivially prove that you're innocent it can still take weeks before you get your equipment back. At least if these IP cops are anything like real police, which I don't doubt. The VPN approach has one distinct advantage: Even if your equipment is seized you can still use another PC if you can recreate your key (of course the connection is encrypted); you will probably have to use physical storage instead of a ramdisk, but you can still work. And there are ways of making physical storage somewhat volatile (encrypted volumes that are nulled/recreated on shutdown/boot).
You don't really think I'd set up any kind of VPN or similar connection without it being encrypted? Preferably, the key is transmitted separately - either through various channels so as to make it very difficult to intercept (for example split into several fragments which are then steganographically embedded in images, sound etc.) or entirely inside my head.