They might as well be walking on the sun. This mission is not going to go down the sunny side of the road if you catch my drift. No matter how often NASA says "let the sun shine", the house of the rising sun is no place for a probe. Walking on sunshine is just a bad idea; not to mention that the people of the sun might be annoyed if we drop probes on their head. Even if we wait until the midnight sun, a sleeping sun is still very hot and this probe is likely to spend entire seasons in the sun. I mean, everybody's free (to wear sunscreen), but it's jut too sunny out there. I think we should focus our attention away from the sun before we screw something up and kill the sun - I certainly don't want a black hole sun in my solar system. Let's look for a star that has already died - dead stars still burn, after all.
Huh? When did I mention how we lost WW2? That has nothing at all to do with the whole issue. Well, except for the fact that we were occupied afterwards. The allied forces made sure that we wouldn't become trigger-happy again and they did a good job at that. The time after WW2 is the interesting part. All love we had for ourself was removed during that time and that's a Good Thing(TM).
By the way, where am I whining? Yeah, it can be a bit annoying how we hate ourselves, but I think it's MUCH BETTER than the kind of we-are-so-awesome mentality I see in other countries. For one, Germany has become very critical of any kind of war, unlike some other countries. If anything I decry that we are losing our self-loathing.
Read my post again. The only part where I say that us becoming a bit more confident in our humanity is that it "might be considered healthy". Apart from that it's all downsides.
Unfortunately the very country that has enshrined the right of every citizen to own a gun and form a militia (so the rulers don't get any funny ideas) has ensured that the citizens don't have access to weaponry nearly as powerful as that of the armed forces. Should there be a large uprising even the most well-armed militia can't stand up to a similarly-sized troop of marines, even if armed vehicles aren't involved. Armed resistance isn't much of an option anymore unless you get a whole bunch of states to secede.
Hmm. If I lived in the States I'd think about going "thin" client. Have all data on a remote server somewhere in Sweden; the local machine is a client with nothing but a barebones OS and an obscene amount of RAM/volatile storage (something on the order of 16-32 GiB). The local machine connects to the server, downloads everything you currently want to work with onto a ramdisk and then does everything from there. Should the police seize the machine they won't find anything but the OS. Use an OS that supports encrypted RAM for additional ease of mind.
Yes, it's ridiculous, but I wouldn't put meningful data on a machine that sits in the USA. The country simply isn't trustworthy enough.
You don't need to consider others unworthy to succumb to appeals to patriotism. Read the Goebbels quote: You just need to say that the country is under attack and everyone who says otherwise is unpatriotic. The appeal is not "the others are unworty, so we must crush them" but rather "everyone who is against the war doesn't love his country because he doesn't want us to actively defend ourselves".
This works in every country where being unpatriotic is considered bad. If, however, being unpatriotic is not only tolerated but even encouraged you're not going to win over anyone. That's the advantage of self-loathing: You can't con the entire nation into doing something stupid by appealing to their patriotism.
Sometimes I am happy that in today's Germany being a patriot is considered as being somewhere between having sex with dogs in public and beating up little children for a living. Although we are slowly recovering from the inferiority complex we were given after the war - it's not anymore politically incorrect for a German to say that he likes his country.
One the one hand, not hating oneself is probably considered healthy, on the other hand it opens one up to this kind of manipulation. Ten years ago anyone using the kind of argumentation you quoted to start a war would have been met with a response like "If we're under attack we'll ask NATO for advice. Now go away, Nazi scumbag". In ten years that will probably not be the case anymore.
If the car industry suddenly switched to making weapons the American manufacturers would upsell all customers who just want a.38 pistol to defend themselves with to a "Defense Utility Weapon" chambered for.585 Nyati cartridges.
European manufacturers would release big lumps of electronics that can burn DVDs, act as a camcorder and tell you your current position in ten different languages. Oh, and they can also fire bullets. Despite being weapons manufacturers, all of them would base their advertisements almost exclusively on how many stars their guns got in the latest satey test. Except for VW, of course, who would insist that they manufacture The Gun.
Japanese guns would be small and exceptionally well-built but some damn kids would still insist that putting Type-R stickers on their Honda Civic Carbine somehow makes the bullets faster, making every other user of Japanese armaments look like yet another ricegunner.
As the sibling correctly pointed out I referred to the Gor books - sometimes called the Counter-Earth series. It was a deliberate misunderstanding in order to make a joke.
I do like how you turned my noise around and put some signal into the channel, though.
You can use it to describe [...] even the counter-Earth ideas from waay back
I didn't know you could describe third-rate SciFi-as-an-excuse-for-BDSM hrough mathematics. Were Norman's publisations peer-reviewed? (Given their literary qualities I doubt it.)
Actualy, it is used a bit like that in German. We do use "52 degree" (although I think that "degree", when used for temperature, simply has no separate plural form); "6.2 kilometer" and "1.6 liter" are used since in German "kilometer" and "liter" have no separate plural forms. So, in essence, it's an artifact of having plural = singular. However, we do always use the singular form for currencies - 3 Dollar are about 2 Euro, equivalent to 4 Mark - which would suggest that not having a plural form comes from the fact that we never use one.
This does not apply to time, however. We would never say we sleep for "nine hour". Languages are irrational, which is why I abandoned the thought of focusing my studies on computational linguistics as soon as I saw what you have to deal with.
In an anime, that's not exactly the most unusual revelation...
Re:Toyota knew the high price of oil was coming...
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
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· Score: 1
Remember that Toyota has a habit of being in one of the leading positions (and often the leading position) in customer satisfaction surveys, at least over here in Germany. If there's one company in the autmobile market that knows how to do things right it's them.
Actually, comparing the cars that are advertised as crossovers and regular station wagons, one sees a distinctive difference. Crossovers are much bulkier; where a station wagon is just a sedan with a D-pillar and more space at the rear end a crossover tries to be an SUV as much as possible. In other words: A station wagon is for when you need to move stuff (like a family) around but don't need a van; a crossover is for when your penis is too small.
It can't be too hard to add a small writable sector to a CD/DVD blank that I can individualize.
The problem is: How do you do this? Regular CDs/DVDs are pressed - the gold master is created and used as a template for all further discs. In order to accomodate disc-specific content you'd need to create a new template for every disc which is orders of magnitude more expensive.
The CD-R(W)/DVD-R(W) approach also doesn't work because user-writable discs are based on completely different materials than pressed ones, making mixed-mode discs very difficult (and expensive) to produce. Of course one could press the disc and then use a really powerful laser to burn holes into the reflective layer but that might not produce desirable results at all - and, again, it would be much more expensive than just pressing the disc.
Reasonable copy protection is fine, too. Ambrosia Software games require a license key to be unlocked. License keys are validated online and time-limited so they invalidate quickly in case they are leaked - but if your key expires you can simply enter your data in their registration program and they give you a new one. As long as you have purchased the game from them you can always request a new key.
The result is that I feel good about buying from them. Their copy protection scheme is reasonable, it's not much of a hassle (once games are registered they get a machine-specific file saying that they are - no further online checks neccessary) and if I should lose all my data I can just download the game again and request a new license key. That last part makes the scheme almost look like a service.
Very acceptable, very reasonable and not insulting like StarForce et al. Of course it might not work for high-profile companies as people would release cracks, but for small-to-medium sized companies I think this scheme is much superior compared to the nonsense other companies come up with.
Very true! I associate the color magenta, the upper case T and small squares with incomprehensible documentation and poor customer service... err... Deutsche Telekom.
Yes, that's the other cornerstone of DTAG's corporate identity.;)
In that light, such a trademark might make sense (again, not saying it does in T-Mobile's case, as I don't know anything about it).
In Germany, magenta is the Deutsche Telekom (which T-Mobile is a part of) color. Most of DTAG's* corporate identity is built around the color magenta, the upper-case T and small squares. Combine two of the three (or have a product strting with "T-") and most people in Germany will assume it's a DTAG product.
But really your statements support the idea that requires labor and expertise (that is, expense) to provide this service and have it not suck.
Show me one place where someone who has no idea what he's doing can provide you with good service. Of course offering Wi-Fi to your customers means that you somehow need to have access to someone who knows his networking. You need reasonably well-trained people for every kind of service.
Both. Windows sends out funky data; that's not optimal and should be fixed (unless it turns out that Microsoft uses an obscure but valid part of some standard). The router can be crashed by sending it funky data; that's a major screwup and shouldn't have happened at all.
Microsoft (maybe) gets a slap on the wrist for not paying attention; the router manufacturers get a kick in the balls for producing junk.
You just use another browser to access the server to run your browser to access the server to run a web application. That othat browser could be a web application, as well.
Slashdot Mirror
They might as well be walking on the sun. This mission is not going to go down the sunny side of the road if you catch my drift. No matter how often NASA says "let the sun shine", the house of the rising sun is no place for a probe. Walking on sunshine is just a bad idea; not to mention that the people of the sun might be annoyed if we drop probes on their head. Even if we wait until the midnight sun, a sleeping sun is still very hot and this probe is likely to spend entire seasons in the sun. I mean, everybody's free (to wear sunscreen), but it's jut too sunny out there. I think we should focus our attention away from the sun before we screw something up and kill the sun - I certainly don't want a black hole sun in my solar system. Let's look for a star that has already died - dead stars still burn, after all.
Huh? When did I mention how we lost WW2? That has nothing at all to do with the whole issue. Well, except for the fact that we were occupied afterwards. The allied forces made sure that we wouldn't become trigger-happy again and they did a good job at that. The time after WW2 is the interesting part. All love we had for ourself was removed during that time and that's a Good Thing(TM).
By the way, where am I whining? Yeah, it can be a bit annoying how we hate ourselves, but I think it's MUCH BETTER than the kind of we-are-so-awesome mentality I see in other countries. For one, Germany has become very critical of any kind of war, unlike some other countries. If anything I decry that we are losing our self-loathing.
Read my post again. The only part where I say that us becoming a bit more confident in our humanity is that it "might be considered healthy". Apart from that it's all downsides.
Unfortunately the very country that has enshrined the right of every citizen to own a gun and form a militia (so the rulers don't get any funny ideas) has ensured that the citizens don't have access to weaponry nearly as powerful as that of the armed forces. Should there be a large uprising even the most well-armed militia can't stand up to a similarly-sized troop of marines, even if armed vehicles aren't involved. Armed resistance isn't much of an option anymore unless you get a whole bunch of states to secede.
I think that wars on abstract concepts are very much a problem...
Hmm. If I lived in the States I'd think about going "thin" client. Have all data on a remote server somewhere in Sweden; the local machine is a client with nothing but a barebones OS and an obscene amount of RAM/volatile storage (something on the order of 16-32 GiB). The local machine connects to the server, downloads everything you currently want to work with onto a ramdisk and then does everything from there. Should the police seize the machine they won't find anything but the OS. Use an OS that supports encrypted RAM for additional ease of mind.
Yes, it's ridiculous, but I wouldn't put meningful data on a machine that sits in the USA. The country simply isn't trustworthy enough.
You don't need to consider others unworthy to succumb to appeals to patriotism. Read the Goebbels quote: You just need to say that the country is under attack and everyone who says otherwise is unpatriotic. The appeal is not "the others are unworty, so we must crush them" but rather "everyone who is against the war doesn't love his country because he doesn't want us to actively defend ourselves".
This works in every country where being unpatriotic is considered bad. If, however, being unpatriotic is not only tolerated but even encouraged you're not going to win over anyone. That's the advantage of self-loathing: You can't con the entire nation into doing something stupid by appealing to their patriotism.
Sometimes I am happy that in today's Germany being a patriot is considered as being somewhere between having sex with dogs in public and beating up little children for a living. Although we are slowly recovering from the inferiority complex we were given after the war - it's not anymore politically incorrect for a German to say that he likes his country.
One the one hand, not hating oneself is probably considered healthy, on the other hand it opens one up to this kind of manipulation. Ten years ago anyone using the kind of argumentation you quoted to start a war would have been met with a response like "If we're under attack we'll ask NATO for advice. Now go away, Nazi scumbag". In ten years that will probably not be the case anymore.
But if the Sun doesn't, what about the BILD or maybe the Gazetta dello Sport?
Time travel. William Shatner did it; Jesus can do it, too.
If the car industry suddenly switched to making weapons the American manufacturers would upsell all customers who just want a .38 pistol to defend themselves with to a "Defense Utility Weapon" chambered for .585 Nyati cartridges.
European manufacturers would release big lumps of electronics that can burn DVDs, act as a camcorder and tell you your current position in ten different languages. Oh, and they can also fire bullets. Despite being weapons manufacturers, all of them would base their advertisements almost exclusively on how many stars their guns got in the latest satey test. Except for VW, of course, who would insist that they manufacture The Gun.
Japanese guns would be small and exceptionally well-built but some damn kids would still insist that putting Type-R stickers on their Honda Civic Carbine somehow makes the bullets faster, making every other user of Japanese armaments look like yet another ricegunner.
As the sibling correctly pointed out I referred to the Gor books - sometimes called the Counter-Earth series. It was a deliberate misunderstanding in order to make a joke.
I do like how you turned my noise around and put some signal into the channel, though.
Actualy, it is used a bit like that in German. We do use "52 degree" (although I think that "degree", when used for temperature, simply has no separate plural form); "6.2 kilometer" and "1.6 liter" are used since in German "kilometer" and "liter" have no separate plural forms. So, in essence, it's an artifact of having plural = singular. However, we do always use the singular form for currencies - 3 Dollar are about 2 Euro, equivalent to 4 Mark - which would suggest that not having a plural form comes from the fact that we never use one.
This does not apply to time, however. We would never say we sleep for "nine hour". Languages are irrational, which is why I abandoned the thought of focusing my studies on computational linguistics as soon as I saw what you have to deal with.
In an anime, that's not exactly the most unusual revelation...
Remember that Toyota has a habit of being in one of the leading positions (and often the leading position) in customer satisfaction surveys, at least over here in Germany. If there's one company in the autmobile market that knows how to do things right it's them.
Actually, comparing the cars that are advertised as crossovers and regular station wagons, one sees a distinctive difference. Crossovers are much bulkier; where a station wagon is just a sedan with a D-pillar and more space at the rear end a crossover tries to be an SUV as much as possible. In other words: A station wagon is for when you need to move stuff (like a family) around but don't need a van; a crossover is for when your penis is too small.
The CD-R(W)/DVD-R(W) approach also doesn't work because user-writable discs are based on completely different materials than pressed ones, making mixed-mode discs very difficult (and expensive) to produce. Of course one could press the disc and then use a really powerful laser to burn holes into the reflective layer but that might not produce desirable results at all - and, again, it would be much more expensive than just pressing the disc.
Reasonable copy protection is fine, too. Ambrosia Software games require a license key to be unlocked. License keys are validated online and time-limited so they invalidate quickly in case they are leaked - but if your key expires you can simply enter your data in their registration program and they give you a new one. As long as you have purchased the game from them you can always request a new key.
The result is that I feel good about buying from them. Their copy protection scheme is reasonable, it's not much of a hassle (once games are registered they get a machine-specific file saying that they are - no further online checks neccessary) and if I should lose all my data I can just download the game again and request a new license key. That last part makes the scheme almost look like a service.
Very acceptable, very reasonable and not insulting like StarForce et al. Of course it might not work for high-profile companies as people would release cracks, but for small-to-medium sized companies I think this scheme is much superior compared to the nonsense other companies come up with.
Both. Windows sends out funky data; that's not optimal and should be fixed (unless it turns out that Microsoft uses an obscure but valid part of some standard). The router can be crashed by sending it funky data; that's a major screwup and shouldn't have happened at all.
Microsoft (maybe) gets a slap on the wrist for not paying attention; the router manufacturers get a kick in the balls for producing junk.
You just use another browser to access the server to run your browser to access the server to run a web application. That othat browser could be a web application, as well.