Surely they would just repurpose their last-mine distriubtion networks to transport petrol from the fuel farms to gas stations? They'd shrink as companies, but still have a place - unless they're smart and buy these guys out ASAP.
This happened to me with an EA game I bought cheap in a discount bin. Fortunately, EA was actually cool about it and after a few emails explaining the problem they gave me a replacement CD key. This surprised me a great deal because I have a low opinion of EA in general. Sometimes they will surprise you.
Two things here. Firstly, you're making the assumption that you will have contemporary platforms and games in abundance in the year 3000. That's not for certain at all - much in the same way that there is no preponderance of pottery from 0 AD. Time and attrition reduce the supply of artifacts, and that reduced supply makes them more valuable due to their scarcity. It is worth proactively preserving the substance of computer game lore precisely because it is mundane now, and hence easily protected. If you wait until the last copies of a program or the last hardware to run it on has decayed, then it is too late.
Secondly, you're imply that a clone is inherently inferior to the original and not worth preserving if copies of the original are intact. Unfortunately, history has proven that to be a false assertion. There are many, many tracts and works from history that are known through their copies alone (I could list a fistful of classical greek poets, sculptors and paintings here). In the case of renaissance masters, the copies were often technically superior to the originals, even if they were not as well known in their time.
Let future generations be the judge of our creative products, but preserve them now for those generations to enjoy. Much in the same way that even down-right mundane things go into time capsules, so too do we store artifacts of historical and cultural interest. And remember, we're talking about software and data here (and small pieces of hardware). It's not a lot of floor space, and easy to distribute across different institutions.
You are quite correct. I expect that most of those kids who go missing wandered off at the mall, and a simple PA announcement was all that was needed to reunite parent with child. Sure, they were 'missing' but they weren't in danger. An AMBER alert is specifically for when there is an expectation of abduction. The two numbers pertain to quite different things, and mentioning the two together was comparing apples with oranges.
Thing is, Australia also has the highest urbanisation rate, with 90% of our population in cities. Floods rarely kill people in the country, but would be a colossal disaster in the city. Fortunately, almost all of our cities are on the coast and flood waters simply run off into the sea.
Now, when the sea levels rise, that's another story altogether...
I think this is what people mean when they talk about gun 'education'. Familiarity with guns reveals them to be tools, not fetishied symbols. People who go to the gun range regularly probably just like shooting and hitting targets for the sport of it. As you say, nice people. The sort of person you'd worry about has probably never set foot in a firing range, but he might have a stack of gun magazines under his bed and fantasise about them. When the time comes that suddenly have one in their hands, they haven't been demystified - that makes them dangerous.
I'm not arguing for or against guns or bans. I'm simply pointing out that guns are 'special' as a class of tools in that they carry symbolic weight. There are lots of ways to kill people, culture has made this way the way of choice for many people.
By "crazy people", the GP doesn't mean tyrants - he means deranged people bent on massacre. You can't stop a lone lunatic from killing people with cars, scissors or cricket bats - it's just not possible to always catch them before the act. That's quite distinct from the crazy person you voted in who is now suddenly a despot. Two different problems entirely.
I don't know about that. Simply putting a gun in someone's hand changes a person because of the culture weight of the thing. Guns have a social symbolism of power and prowess that is different from vehicles or even cars (also a potent symbol, but one of freedom). When one weilds a gun, it makes the user feel elevated and virile in a way which entices the user to employ that power. Pulling a gun carries the implication that you will use it, and stepping back requires giving up that mantle.
Cars, cricket bats and other mundane, but lethal, items are all capable of killing if killing is the plan, but ne'er-do-wells inevitably flock to a means that make them feel empowered. Invariably it seems that massacres are the work of disenfranchised individuals who feel powerless and frustrated. It's no wonder they choose a means that they feel puts control back in their hands.
It's not something intrinsic to guns that makes them a lunatic magnet, it's the culture around them that's the problem. It's partly the allure of martial prowess and the intrinsic respect granted by carrying a weapon (eg. police authority) that means that any device made to kill will attract them, but it's also the fault hollywood that imbues guns with mystique.
The problem with mimicking P&P RPGs (and why I only play them, and not CRPGS) is that they have a genuine human being behind them dynamically telling a story, varying the difficulty, assigning rewards and generally making the game fun. Until computer game companies produce an AI as good as a human being at social interaction and storytelling (don't hold your breath), a pen-and-paper RPG will always be a 'better balanced' experience.
Have you been to India recently? Pretty much everybody there speaks English - it's one of their two national languages (along with Hindi) and it's taught in schools. As they have so many local languages, English is often used between two Indians if one of them doesn't speak Hindi.
How much does a simple solid state camera weigh these days?
Why, hardly anything at all!
Oh, wait - you mean you want one rated for vacuum, extremes of hot and cold, radiation outside of an atmosphere and G-loading/vibration tolerance to launch conditions? Hmm... let me ask Raytheon and get back to you...
you cannot use them to go towards the sun, unfortunatly
Not true at all! Due to the way that orbital mechanics works, you can use a solar sail to travel anywhere in orbit. If you tilt your solar sail so that the deflection of light occurs at an angle to the oncoming photons, you can produce a net force on the spacecraft retrograde to your orbital path. This slows your orbital velocity, causing you to spiral inward towards the star. To stabilise your orbit or to head outwards in a transfer orbit, you can tilt back the other way to apply prograde force.
It's a simple and elegant means of getting around space. The only real problem is that it's a tremendously slow way of traveling across orbital distances.
I agree this is the most likely threat to aircraft today. There are many places, including residential houses, under the flight-path of major airports but far outside the security zones, where Bad People could set up improvised or even smuggled military-grade rocket systems. If you have the technology to build a bomb and an RC plane, you have the technology to do this.
What the hell kind of toaster runs Linux? There's hardly any justification for a mass-produced toaster to have any logic more complex than a relay. If there's an actual consumer toaster out there on the market that has linux controlling it, I'd like to see it (and buy it)!
You know - I'd go for that... the differing levels of screening, I mean. I would gladly accept the apparent increased risk for a "non-extensively passenger screened" flight if given the option. I'll happily sign a waiver to do it.
The very term Microsoft used, "product tampering", sent chills down my spine. They weren't even talking about replacing aspirin with cyanide, but words like 'tampering' (and implications about getting law enforcement involved) certainly make it sound like that. We're talking about the stuff people themselves actually own. It's astonishing to think that their rhetoric extends so far.
How dare you talk sense about people violating the GPL? Especially Telstra! Don't you know we're supposed to froth angrilly and uselessly about being oppressed by The Man to feel better about ourselves!? All this logical and rational analysis is completely uncalled for!
Slashdot Mirror
Surely they would just repurpose their last-mine distriubtion networks to transport petrol from the fuel farms to gas stations? They'd shrink as companies, but still have a place - unless they're smart and buy these guys out ASAP.
This happened to me with an EA game I bought cheap in a discount bin. Fortunately, EA was actually cool about it and after a few emails explaining the problem they gave me a replacement CD key. This surprised me a great deal because I have a low opinion of EA in general. Sometimes they will surprise you.
pulls out BFG and mows down audience
Uhhh... you know the BFG is from DOOM, right?
Surely you mean a shrink ray! That was the most fun from Duke 3D. *squish!*
+1 damn straight.
You make an excellent, reasoned rebuttal. Thank you, sir.
Two things here. Firstly, you're making the assumption that you will have contemporary platforms and games in abundance in the year 3000. That's not for certain at all - much in the same way that there is no preponderance of pottery from 0 AD. Time and attrition reduce the supply of artifacts, and that reduced supply makes them more valuable due to their scarcity. It is worth proactively preserving the substance of computer game lore precisely because it is mundane now, and hence easily protected. If you wait until the last copies of a program or the last hardware to run it on has decayed, then it is too late.
Secondly, you're imply that a clone is inherently inferior to the original and not worth preserving if copies of the original are intact. Unfortunately, history has proven that to be a false assertion. There are many, many tracts and works from history that are known through their copies alone (I could list a fistful of classical greek poets, sculptors and paintings here). In the case of renaissance masters, the copies were often technically superior to the originals, even if they were not as well known in their time.
Let future generations be the judge of our creative products, but preserve them now for those generations to enjoy. Much in the same way that even down-right mundane things go into time capsules, so too do we store artifacts of historical and cultural interest. And remember, we're talking about software and data here (and small pieces of hardware). It's not a lot of floor space, and easy to distribute across different institutions.
You are quite correct. I expect that most of those kids who go missing wandered off at the mall, and a simple PA announcement was all that was needed to reunite parent with child. Sure, they were 'missing' but they weren't in danger. An AMBER alert is specifically for when there is an expectation of abduction. The two numbers pertain to quite different things, and mentioning the two together was comparing apples with oranges.
Darwin is much further north of where the flooding is, but transporting them to the Northern Territory sounds like an eminently serviceable idea!
Thing is, Australia also has the highest urbanisation rate, with 90% of our population in cities. Floods rarely kill people in the country, but would be a colossal disaster in the city. Fortunately, almost all of our cities are on the coast and flood waters simply run off into the sea.
Now, when the sea levels rise, that's another story altogether...
I think this is what people mean when they talk about gun 'education'. Familiarity with guns reveals them to be tools, not fetishied symbols. People who go to the gun range regularly probably just like shooting and hitting targets for the sport of it. As you say, nice people. The sort of person you'd worry about has probably never set foot in a firing range, but he might have a stack of gun magazines under his bed and fantasise about them. When the time comes that suddenly have one in their hands, they haven't been demystified - that makes them dangerous.
I'm not arguing for or against guns or bans. I'm simply pointing out that guns are 'special' as a class of tools in that they carry symbolic weight. There are lots of ways to kill people, culture has made this way the way of choice for many people.
By "crazy people", the GP doesn't mean tyrants - he means deranged people bent on massacre. You can't stop a lone lunatic from killing people with cars, scissors or cricket bats - it's just not possible to always catch them before the act. That's quite distinct from the crazy person you voted in who is now suddenly a despot. Two different problems entirely.
Or, as the sibling post points out, with cameraphones.
I don't know about that. Simply putting a gun in someone's hand changes a person because of the culture weight of the thing. Guns have a social symbolism of power and prowess that is different from vehicles or even cars (also a potent symbol, but one of freedom). When one weilds a gun, it makes the user feel elevated and virile in a way which entices the user to employ that power. Pulling a gun carries the implication that you will use it, and stepping back requires giving up that mantle.
Cars, cricket bats and other mundane, but lethal, items are all capable of killing if killing is the plan, but ne'er-do-wells inevitably flock to a means that make them feel empowered. Invariably it seems that massacres are the work of disenfranchised individuals who feel powerless and frustrated. It's no wonder they choose a means that they feel puts control back in their hands.
It's not something intrinsic to guns that makes them a lunatic magnet, it's the culture around them that's the problem. It's partly the allure of martial prowess and the intrinsic respect granted by carrying a weapon (eg. police authority) that means that any device made to kill will attract them, but it's also the fault hollywood that imbues guns with mystique.
A good screen resolution.
Pedants assemble!
The problem with mimicking P&P RPGs (and why I only play them, and not CRPGS) is that they have a genuine human being behind them dynamically telling a story, varying the difficulty, assigning rewards and generally making the game fun. Until computer game companies produce an AI as good as a human being at social interaction and storytelling (don't hold your breath), a pen-and-paper RPG will always be a 'better balanced' experience.
Have you been to India recently? Pretty much everybody there speaks English - it's one of their two national languages (along with Hindi) and it's taught in schools. As they have so many local languages, English is often used between two Indians if one of them doesn't speak Hindi.
How much does a simple solid state camera weigh these days?
Why, hardly anything at all!
Oh, wait - you mean you want one rated for vacuum, extremes of hot and cold, radiation outside of an atmosphere and G-loading/vibration tolerance to launch conditions? Hmm... let me ask Raytheon and get back to you...
you cannot use them to go towards the sun, unfortunatly
Not true at all! Due to the way that orbital mechanics works, you can use a solar sail to travel anywhere in orbit. If you tilt your solar sail so that the deflection of light occurs at an angle to the oncoming photons, you can produce a net force on the spacecraft retrograde to your orbital path. This slows your orbital velocity, causing you to spiral inward towards the star. To stabilise your orbit or to head outwards in a transfer orbit, you can tilt back the other way to apply prograde force.
It's a simple and elegant means of getting around space. The only real problem is that it's a tremendously slow way of traveling across orbital distances.
I agree this is the most likely threat to aircraft today. There are many places, including residential houses, under the flight-path of major airports but far outside the security zones, where Bad People could set up improvised or even smuggled military-grade rocket systems. If you have the technology to build a bomb and an RC plane, you have the technology to do this.
What the hell kind of toaster runs Linux? There's hardly any justification for a mass-produced toaster to have any logic more complex than a relay. If there's an actual consumer toaster out there on the market that has linux controlling it, I'd like to see it (and buy it)!
(Disclaimer: IANAL).
So I take it you'd be in the 'intensive screening' line?
You know - I'd go for that... the differing levels of screening, I mean. I would gladly accept the apparent increased risk for a "non-extensively passenger screened" flight if given the option. I'll happily sign a waiver to do it.
The very term Microsoft used, "product tampering", sent chills down my spine. They weren't even talking about replacing aspirin with cyanide, but words like 'tampering' (and implications about getting law enforcement involved) certainly make it sound like that. We're talking about the stuff people themselves actually own. It's astonishing to think that their rhetoric extends so far.
How dare you talk sense about people violating the GPL? Especially Telstra! Don't you know we're supposed to froth angrilly and uselessly about being oppressed by The Man to feel better about ourselves!? All this logical and rational analysis is completely uncalled for!
So... you're telling me that a successful, smart, athletic, geeky female isn't attractive?
WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?