Actually, they partially are. Breeders can be reduced to dramatically reduce the amount of waste generated, thus eliminating one of the major issues with nuclear power. I've seen predictions from 95% to 98% less waste.
I think Skylab was a bit higher than 1 second above the Earth's surface.
It should have been, but NASA got the angle wrong and Skylab was released 9.8 meters above ground. It only stayed up for six years because of its, er, very high velocity that put it into an ultra-eccentrical orbit. Yes. My story is absolutely scientifically sound and it only doesn't appear in any publication because of the vast conspiracy to hide it. Everything I say is entirely trustworthy.
Mainly because the farmer couldn't prove that it was the hazardous chemicals from the wreckage that killed the cow. After Skylab impacted right on top of it at 9.8 meters per second.
I don't read tabloids (especially since the largest one in Germany has considerable influence and is not ashamed to use it), but it's hard not to be informed when the local newspaper and pretty much every TV news show feels obliged to mix the latest celebrity gossip with actual news - although I probably should abandon mainstream news altogether, given that 95% of their content can be summed up as "someone died".
Even worse, the only free TV station in Germany that actually caters to the SciFi crowd (RTL2) also happens to have a news show that's almost entirely tabloid-level. So it can happen that during Heroes a commercial break ends with a teaser for their news show, informing me that $CELEBRITY has done $SHOCKING_THING. I didn't want to know that, but it's in a place where it's hard to completely ignore. The paparazzi just manage to get their junk everywhere. Even if I actually did manage to avoid the stories and newsflashes, sooner or later some of the stuff becomes popular culture and then you have to actually look up the bullshit in order to understand the references in a discussion.
Ignoring a currently-big celebrity can turn out surprisingly difficult.
Yes, that's about it. I never said that the United Stated had to apologize for Britney Spears beign like she is; I sid that the States should apologize for Britney Spears - the media product that gets crammed down our throats all the time whether we want it or not. The people at fault are the people who make money off stories about a woman cutting off her hair.
To quote a certain YouTube celebrity: Leave Britney alone. I can't stand to hear things about her provate life I never wanted to hear.
Not alone. It's a combination of many factors: It's a fact that many celebrities have more or less severe mental disorders - that's what enables them to become celebrities in the first place. It's what makes them train, train and train again until they have the skill to play with the big ones. Bipolar disorder, for example, is rather commonly diagnosed. Unfortunately, while that makes them more likely to become big, it also makes their careers more likely to end in a bad way - I think recently someone linked celebrity deaths due to drug overdose to bipolar disorder and found a remarkable overlap.
So, the first factor is: Most celebrities don't tick quite like the rest of the world ticks. While that doen't necessarily make them dysfunctional, it does make some of them crave attention like nothing else. No fault on their part, it's just how they are.
Speaking of drugs; Speard did admit herself into rehab, indicating that she did take drugs. I'd be willing to bet that that was for stress mitigation. However, drugs don't exactly make it easier to live a normal life.
The second factor is that Spears was rather young when she became famous. She spent pretty much her entire early adulthood in the spotlight and she was on stage since she was ten, if the Wikipedia article is to be believed; another thing that makes letting go of the fame difficult.
Then there's the boulevard press. Whether or not Spears wants to, as long as she gives them anything they can use they will continue writing stories about her. The uside is that she stays in the spotlight, the downside it that said spotlight shows her in a rather unfavourable way. The only way to stop being the paparazzis' darling would be to become boring - and I think that's something Spears just can't do. She's not used to being boring and to avoiding attention.
Her management didn't help her either; the way her career was built around (rather blunt) provocation made people expect these kind of escapades from her. To quote a review of her fourth album: "Had Britney been in charge of her career direction instead of mercilessly prostituted by her management, she might have been able to produce something with some semblance of musical vision." Granted, the review talks about her music, but if one considers the image that was given to her, the term "prostituted" does seem somewhat appropriate. Her image was that of a tart and now it follows her.
All in all, she's just saddled with the side-effects of a career as a superstar (which, contrarily to what I said previously, isn't over yet; she just happened to completely drop from my radar). Being one is hard for various reasons and she shows it. Most of her problem don't come from things she could have avoided. Of course, that doesn't mean I want to hear about her latest escapades; that both insults me by implyig I care and her by taking away her dignity. But then, that' what the whole superstar circus is all about if one thinks about it.
As for my nickname: It doesn't have a meaning, actually. I got it as a throwaway nickname for some experimental trolling* (not on/. though) and stuck with it because it's way superior to the one I had before. I explicitly chose that nickname because it sounds controversial while having no meaning at all.
* I wanted to see how fast the ops on a certain IRC channel would react to a generic troll. It turns out they didn't react at all.
True. That part of her career easily managed to out-annoy the generic pop part.
I think it's a bit of a feedback loop: Some celebrities have a hard time staying relevant (for example, Spears hasn't released anything in quite a while), thus they try to stay up by keeping themselves in the news. Paparazzi who gladly make stories out of every single misdemeanor reinforce this - if you screw up you appear in the news and thus are relevant. Every story is a good story. Unfortunately, forcing yourself into the spotlight like that lessens your chance of getting your career back on track. So you have to force even harder in order to stay relevant...
Perhaps this is just what we need to make congress re-think our amazingly incompetent patent office.
1. Acquire a patent to a technique commonly found in websites. Get one that virtually all sites infringe upon.
2. Sue all major political parties, the White House and Congress at once.
3. Watch as politicians across the board ask themselves how someone could ever get awarded such an obvious patent.
4. Wait until the incident makes the news.
5. Send in the patent reform lobbyists.
It'd be absurdly expensive, but I think those steps could suffice to get a reform going.
How about this: If a lawsuit is found frivolous, the damages the plaintiff has sued for are taken from the plaintiff and given to the defendant, scaled for relative size. Non-monetary damages are either dropped (if they come together with monetary ones) or converted to monetary ones.
An example: (Note: IANAL and the example will probably be littered with procedural mistakes)
So let's say the giant hardware manufacturer Microtech sues the much smaller but still sizable BlueSuit corporation because BlueSuit has allegedly stolen internal Microtech documentation in order to facilitate electrical interoperability with Microtech's proprietary, trade-secret connectors. Everyone knows that any electrical engineer with a multimeter could figure out the connectors and that BlueSuit reverse-engineered them from scratch, but Microtech wants to get rid of BlueSuit competing with its core products.
Microtech demands that BlueSuit immediately pulls the compatible devices off the market and pays 100.000.000$ - half of BlueSuit's annual revenue. Both sides present their cases and the judge decides that Microtech is out of its <expletive deleted> mind. The case is squashed and BlueSuit files for frivolous lawsuit. The judge agrees and the damages are inverted: Microtech gets to pay 50% of their annual revenue to BlueSuit - and since Microtech makes a cool 10 billion Dollars a year that means that BlueSuit's shareholders are suddenly very busy deciding on what color their new Porsches should come in. The judge decides that ordering Microtech to stop distributing all hardware using their own connector wouldn't be sensible and that 50% revenue loss is tough enough anyway, so that part of the punishment is dropped.
Okay, that only works really well for corporations, but it would make people really consider suing someone without a solid case - any lawsuit that is found frivolous is seriously going to hurt you (except if the lawsuit was just a slap on the wrist, but that would defeat the purpose of suing in the first place).
I'm pretty sure someone is going to shoot holes into my little idea, but it would make lawsuits like this a whole lot less attractive. And **AA suits even more - if the AA lost, they could end up paying 500% their annual income, immediately bankrupting the association (and probably costing the labels quite a penny). That'd make them think twice, thrice and then again before they sue someone without having proper evidence.
Ignoring the filamentary nature of plasmas in space will always lead to garbage calculations. If it's not *our* theory, then it's not *our* responsibility to prove or disprove it!
It appears that not only conventional scientists can play at that game...
I don't think this is limited to him and I don't think it means the rest of the world hates the US. I do think it says the rest of the world no longer trusts the US. And in some ways that's worse than hatred. It's definitely sad testimony to what we've become in the eyes of the rest of the world. Instead of being trusted to work cooperatively with other sovereign nations we've pretty much declared, by our actions if not by words, that our pursuit of terrorism trumps every other concern, legitimate or not.
And it's not just government actions. AT&T threatening to charge at both ends of the pipe and cooperating in warrant-less monitoring of internet and phone traffic on a massive scale. Several of the core ISP's threatening to block certain kinds of traffic. It could easily be a combination of corporate dickishness and the privacy insults we've foisted on the rest of the world and they're just tired of it.
Quoted for truth. There is a whole lot of bullshit coming over from the States these days; political, legal and corporate.
And if the USA ever decides to use ths asset agains someone, they instantly lose it. Europe is already immune; we could just switch over to ORSN and decide to ignore US standards on IP address usage. Other regions/countries can set up alternative DNS roots as well.
ICANN is not much of an asset because the USA have to cooperate with everyone anyway, lest they want the internet to fragment.
One KDE terminal emulator that OS X doesn't have an equivalent for is Yakuake, a terminal emulator that works like Quake's ingame console. You hit the shortcut and down pops a terminal. You're done, you press the shortcut again and it's gone. Quite nice.
The proper OS X equivalent would be a Dashboard widget, but since Dashboard requires you to stick to HTML/JavaScript there are no decent terminals for Dashboard. If only Dashboard's developer mode would allow me to drag regular windows onto the Dashboard...
Which is why nobody wants to abandon copyright. What we want is more sane copyright terms. Just bcause you've written a greal book doesn't mean your family should live off that for the next 120 years. That doesn't entice people to create new work, thus failing to do what copyright was explicitly designed to do.
Fifteen to twenty years should be plenty of time to make money from your work. If you want more money after that, do what everyone does and keep working. Write another book.
Even lolcats can be funny and smart if pulled off right. The edits in this gallery are rather trivial, yes, but some of them do put the image in a different perspective - at least to me. Might be that some have always seen them like that.
Yes, it's not the most intellectual thing ever, but then again Star Wars isn't too smart, either. Both aim to entertain, just with different methods. Putting an original work into a different context is something I resonate very well with; apparently most people on/. less so.
Every half-decent PHP coder would tell you to stop using the shorthand tag because it tends to break on systems that don't allow it. So the shortest reliable way would be:
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is someone you never ever want to involve in a joke, for he has no humor.
Those images are strictly tongue-in-cheek. They were made by a geek for geeks and by no means do they intend to convey that all geeks are completely incompetent when it comes to understanding art. It's the same kind of joke that we make when we revoke someone's geek licence because he said he has a girlfriend.
Those images are just varyingly clever approaches at looking at art from a new angle. If you don't think that any kind of art that involves self-depreciating jokes is tolerable, then I suggest you simply avoid said art.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they partially are. Breeders can be reduced to dramatically reduce the amount of waste generated, thus eliminating one of the major issues with nuclear power. I've seen predictions from 95% to 98% less waste.
Dotsub is currently mirroring the incident in more ways than one - their server is on the verge of meltdown. Expect long loading times.
LOOK, BEHIND YOU! *runs away*
Mainly because the farmer couldn't prove that it was the hazardous chemicals from the wreckage that killed the cow. After Skylab impacted right on top of it at 9.8 meters per second.
I don't read tabloids (especially since the largest one in Germany has considerable influence and is not ashamed to use it), but it's hard not to be informed when the local newspaper and pretty much every TV news show feels obliged to mix the latest celebrity gossip with actual news - although I probably should abandon mainstream news altogether, given that 95% of their content can be summed up as "someone died".
Even worse, the only free TV station in Germany that actually caters to the SciFi crowd (RTL2) also happens to have a news show that's almost entirely tabloid-level. So it can happen that during Heroes a commercial break ends with a teaser for their news show, informing me that $CELEBRITY has done $SHOCKING_THING. I didn't want to know that, but it's in a place where it's hard to completely ignore. The paparazzi just manage to get their junk everywhere. Even if I actually did manage to avoid the stories and newsflashes, sooner or later some of the stuff becomes popular culture and then you have to actually look up the bullshit in order to understand the references in a discussion.
Ignoring a currently-big celebrity can turn out surprisingly difficult.
Yes, that's about it. I never said that the United Stated had to apologize for Britney Spears beign like she is; I sid that the States should apologize for Britney Spears - the media product that gets crammed down our throats all the time whether we want it or not. The people at fault are the people who make money off stories about a woman cutting off her hair.
To quote a certain YouTube celebrity: Leave Britney alone. I can't stand to hear things about her provate life I never wanted to hear.
Not alone. It's a combination of many factors: It's a fact that many celebrities have more or less severe mental disorders - that's what enables them to become celebrities in the first place. It's what makes them train, train and train again until they have the skill to play with the big ones. Bipolar disorder, for example, is rather commonly diagnosed. Unfortunately, while that makes them more likely to become big, it also makes their careers more likely to end in a bad way - I think recently someone linked celebrity deaths due to drug overdose to bipolar disorder and found a remarkable overlap.
/. though) and stuck with it because it's way superior to the one I had before. I explicitly chose that nickname because it sounds controversial while having no meaning at all.
So, the first factor is: Most celebrities don't tick quite like the rest of the world ticks. While that doen't necessarily make them dysfunctional, it does make some of them crave attention like nothing else. No fault on their part, it's just how they are.
Speaking of drugs; Speard did admit herself into rehab, indicating that she did take drugs. I'd be willing to bet that that was for stress mitigation. However, drugs don't exactly make it easier to live a normal life.
The second factor is that Spears was rather young when she became famous. She spent pretty much her entire early adulthood in the spotlight and she was on stage since she was ten, if the Wikipedia article is to be believed; another thing that makes letting go of the fame difficult.
Then there's the boulevard press. Whether or not Spears wants to, as long as she gives them anything they can use they will continue writing stories about her. The uside is that she stays in the spotlight, the downside it that said spotlight shows her in a rather unfavourable way. The only way to stop being the paparazzis' darling would be to become boring - and I think that's something Spears just can't do. She's not used to being boring and to avoiding attention.
Her management didn't help her either; the way her career was built around (rather blunt) provocation made people expect these kind of escapades from her. To quote a review of her fourth album: "Had Britney been in charge of her career direction instead of mercilessly prostituted by her management, she might have been able to produce something with some semblance of musical vision." Granted, the review talks about her music, but if one considers the image that was given to her, the term "prostituted" does seem somewhat appropriate. Her image was that of a tart and now it follows her.
All in all, she's just saddled with the side-effects of a career as a superstar (which, contrarily to what I said previously, isn't over yet; she just happened to completely drop from my radar). Being one is hard for various reasons and she shows it. Most of her problem don't come from things she could have avoided. Of course, that doesn't mean I want to hear about her latest escapades; that both insults me by implyig I care and her by taking away her dignity. But then, that' what the whole superstar circus is all about if one thinks about it.
As for my nickname: It doesn't have a meaning, actually. I got it as a throwaway nickname for some experimental trolling* (not on
* I wanted to see how fast the ops on a certain IRC channel would react to a generic troll. It turns out they didn't react at all.
True. That part of her career easily managed to out-annoy the generic pop part.
I think it's a bit of a feedback loop: Some celebrities have a hard time staying relevant (for example, Spears hasn't released anything in quite a while), thus they try to stay up by keeping themselves in the news. Paparazzi who gladly make stories out of every single misdemeanor reinforce this - if you screw up you appear in the news and thus are relevant. Every story is a good story. Unfortunately, forcing yourself into the spotlight like that lessens your chance of getting your career back on track. So you have to force even harder in order to stay relevant...
2. Sue all major political parties, the White House and Congress at once.
3. Watch as politicians across the board ask themselves how someone could ever get awarded such an obvious patent.
4. Wait until the incident makes the news.
5. Send in the patent reform lobbyists.
It'd be absurdly expensive, but I think those steps could suffice to get a reform going.
How about this: If a lawsuit is found frivolous, the damages the plaintiff has sued for are taken from the plaintiff and given to the defendant, scaled for relative size. Non-monetary damages are either dropped (if they come together with monetary ones) or converted to monetary ones.
An example: (Note: IANAL and the example will probably be littered with procedural mistakes)
So let's say the giant hardware manufacturer Microtech sues the much smaller but still sizable BlueSuit corporation because BlueSuit has allegedly stolen internal Microtech documentation in order to facilitate electrical interoperability with Microtech's proprietary, trade-secret connectors. Everyone knows that any electrical engineer with a multimeter could figure out the connectors and that BlueSuit reverse-engineered them from scratch, but Microtech wants to get rid of BlueSuit competing with its core products.
Microtech demands that BlueSuit immediately pulls the compatible devices off the market and pays 100.000.000$ - half of BlueSuit's annual revenue. Both sides present their cases and the judge decides that Microtech is out of its <expletive deleted> mind. The case is squashed and BlueSuit files for frivolous lawsuit. The judge agrees and the damages are inverted: Microtech gets to pay 50% of their annual revenue to BlueSuit - and since Microtech makes a cool 10 billion Dollars a year that means that BlueSuit's shareholders are suddenly very busy deciding on what color their new Porsches should come in. The judge decides that ordering Microtech to stop distributing all hardware using their own connector wouldn't be sensible and that 50% revenue loss is tough enough anyway, so that part of the punishment is dropped.
Okay, that only works really well for corporations, but it would make people really consider suing someone without a solid case - any lawsuit that is found frivolous is seriously going to hurt you (except if the lawsuit was just a slap on the wrist, but that would defeat the purpose of suing in the first place).
I'm pretty sure someone is going to shoot holes into my little idea, but it would make lawsuits like this a whole lot less attractive. And **AA suits even more - if the AA lost, they could end up paying 500% their annual income, immediately bankrupting the association (and probably costing the labels quite a penny). That'd make them think twice, thrice and then again before they sue someone without having proper evidence.
Wow, nice. Thanks.
Well, you should apologize for Britney Spears.
And if the USA ever decides to use ths asset agains someone, they instantly lose it. Europe is already immune; we could just switch over to ORSN and decide to ignore US standards on IP address usage. Other regions/countries can set up alternative DNS roots as well.
ICANN is not much of an asset because the USA have to cooperate with everyone anyway, lest they want the internet to fragment.
One KDE terminal emulator that OS X doesn't have an equivalent for is Yakuake, a terminal emulator that works like Quake's ingame console. You hit the shortcut and down pops a terminal. You're done, you press the shortcut again and it's gone. Quite nice.
The proper OS X equivalent would be a Dashboard widget, but since Dashboard requires you to stick to HTML/JavaScript there are no decent terminals for Dashboard. If only Dashboard's developer mode would allow me to drag regular windows onto the Dashboard...
You paid money for Windows software tht wasn't yet officially suported on Windows? It appears you were ripped off...
Which is why nobody wants to abandon copyright. What we want is more sane copyright terms. Just bcause you've written a greal book doesn't mean your family should live off that for the next 120 years. That doesn't entice people to create new work, thus failing to do what copyright was explicitly designed to do.
Fifteen to twenty years should be plenty of time to make money from your work. If you want more money after that, do what everyone does and keep working. Write another book.
Even lolcats can be funny and smart if pulled off right. The edits in this gallery are rather trivial, yes, but some of them do put the image in a different perspective - at least to me. Might be that some have always seen them like that.
/. less so.
Yes, it's not the most intellectual thing ever, but then again Star Wars isn't too smart, either. Both aim to entertain, just with different methods. Putting an original work into a different context is something I resonate very well with; apparently most people on
Of course there are some works where an explanation will give you an "aha" moment and you suddenly do get it. Not many, though.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is someone you never ever want to involve in a joke, for he has no humor.
Those images are strictly tongue-in-cheek. They were made by a geek for geeks and by no means do they intend to convey that all geeks are completely incompetent when it comes to understanding art. It's the same kind of joke that we make when we revoke someone's geek licence because he said he has a girlfriend.
Those images are just varyingly clever approaches at looking at art from a new angle. If you don't think that any kind of art that involves self-depreciating jokes is tolerable, then I suggest you simply avoid said art.