With everybody's computer taken and sold, there is now going to be a booming market in new computers, all preloaded with Vista. What a windfall this shall be for the computer manufacturers and Microsoft.
If Vista is the bright side, even Palpatine would be afraid of the dark.
If the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 and Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 primarily benefited an anti-Republican entertainment industry, why did the majority of Republicans vote for them?
In all likelihood it was because the entertainment industry paid sufficient bribes that the politicians ignored their stated ideology and obeyed their corporate masters. The same as with every other stupidly evil bill.
And GOTO statements? You're programming in BASIC? Now if you'ld said "JMP" statemnents your humorous comment would have been funnier, because uncomment assembly is a real bitch to follow, especially badly written assembly.
Of course you could get the best of both worlds by having your BASIC program modify the BASIC interpreter on the fly with the poke command. Gentlemen, I give you... ASSYMBLIC !
Microsoft isn't going to self destruct so let's hope they stop giving botnets & trojans a home in this world. Better security is better for the community and the users.
Oh, I don't know. I, for one, take great comfort in the thought of Microsoft delivering the DRM products of tomorrow. It's like being locked in the Alcatraz for life and realizing that the walls are made of wet cardboard.
Electricity might be at a premium rate during the evening - when your car might provide it. Also, assuming that you are in a state that won't let you build coal plants and that the incoming power lines are already over nominal, the electricity company simply has no other way to get energy. Building a gas-fired generator is costly, takes a bit of time, and the electricity it generates is expensive (fuel costs).
In order to get anything out of this arrangement, the fuel cost per kilowatt produced must be less than the what the power company is paying you. That means they would be better off buying the hydrogen fuel themselves and turning it into energy in the cheap fuel cells which must be available because otherwise the cars using them would be so costly they would be rare, which in turn would make the combined power from all of them insignificant, not to make the infrastructure to get fuel be sparse, making the annoyance value of having to refuel more often more than whatever pennies you might profit by supplying energy.
In other words, there is simply no set of circumstances where this arrangement could be profitable for both you and the power company and where it would not be even more profitable for the power company to just cut you out and just use hydrogen to generate power directly.
We have no right to take power from the oceans. Have we any idea what that'll do to the ocean currents? To breeding cycles? To weather? To plankton upon which many other things (directly or indirectly) feed?
I think this nicely summarizes and demonstrates the main problem with today's enviromental movement: since everything you do affects something, you can't do anything. As a result the enviromentalists are considered nuts and ignored, even when they actually have a valid point (which you don't, especially since hydroelectric takes energy from the rivers, not the oceans).
Next up, plug your hydrogen car into the grid as a generator. Don't bother pointing out that all this conversion will lose some efficiency; of course it will. But think about the brownouts California was suffering a few summers ago. People will pay good money to escape no air conditioning, and some transmission loss doesn't change that.
But why would you provide energy for the grid ? Disconnect the house and use the electricity yourself. The power company can't sell electricity for more than it costs to produce it yourself that way, because then no one would buy it, and they can't pay you as much or more than they get when selling it, because then they'll go banckrupt. Consequently, your best bet is to disconnect from the grid in the case of brownout, and simply power your own house with your car.
Apart from it not supporting DRM, ogg has only advantages - it's equal or superior to most other codecs (the widely used mp3 and wma are inferior) and it's open-source w/o patents restrictions...
Those are advantages for the end user, not the content provider, who'll have a hard time selling the end user ringtunes if the user can simply upload an mp3 or ogg of their choice to the phone.
Things which are good for the consumer are usually bad for the producer, and vice versus.
The whole world is screwed up, and we cannot fix it by further centralizing this mess. DECENTRALIZING might work, especially returning the authority to each individual unto himself insofar as he doesn't trespass upon others via force or fraud.
Acquiring a centimeter-thick strip of land which completely encircles your home and then setting your eternal servitude as the price for right of passage requires neither force nor fraud. Take the deal or rot in your home; literally once food and water run out. That's what you libertarians refuse to understand: your rules don't prevent the haves from issuing orders ending with "or die" to have-less.
As simple as that sounds, I can guarantee a hundred authoritarians (authority worshippers) will tell me how more laws than just that are required.
More laws are required because the set of "do not defraud" and "do not initiate force" is insufficient to guarantee freedom. All it does is transfer power from the official government, the one with at least nominal checks on its usage of that power, into the plutocracy, removing even the nominal checks and leaving everyone else worse off than they were before.
Of course they are, these "useful idiots" require that every possible use of fraud and force be spelled out, not because they plan to obey the laws, but because they really need them enumerated so they can know how to defraud others or what methods of force may be employed in oppressing others.
If you don't specify exactly what counts as either fraud or force, then court gets to decide it on whatever basis it pleases. Better make sure the judge likes you, then, by worshipping in his church and mowing his lawn and being his servant in every other way imaginable too. Again, you haven't freed people from power, but rather moved the power outside of supervision.
Laws need to enumare the offenses and be specific, because otherwise the courts get to judge based on the whims of their members, giving those members undeserved power over other members of the society. There is nothing authoritarian in this enumeration; if anything, it limits the power of government.
I would go also but most people I just don't think would want a 3 hour roller coaster ride.
Roller coaster ? Being in a ballistic arc means you're in freefall most of the trip. Being in freefall means it is impossible to tell the whole thing is moving without looking outside. You aren't subject to any forces - not even Earth's gravity - during the ballistic part of the trip, so you'll simply float, weightless like a feather.
Every fact on Wikipedia has a link back to the primary source. All you have to do is tell kids to look up the fact from the primary source and cite that, and obviously not to cite it if there is no link back or they can't find the material. Any teacher who is too intellectually lazy to take the time to understand this is by definition a bad teacher.
As has been recently brought up, Wikipedia is not above corruption. It can be used to push an agenda, simply by leaving out sources which contradict your agenda and linking to those which agree with it. If you aren't already familiar with the subject (which would make Wikipedia unneccessary), how are you going to notice ?
No, a teacher who tells his students to not trust Wikipedia is right. It can't be trusted, at least not for anything the people in charge of it are likely to care about. Of course the exact same is true of Encyclopedia Britannica and any imaginable source.
So... what does that leave us with ? A healthy amount of suspicion for any information source, I'd hope. And I truly hope that students learn mistrust and suspicion, rather than blindly believing anyone who can get at least one other creep to agree with them.
My vote goes for the C64 Last Ninja soundtrack. Absolutely awesome.
Star Control 2 / Ur-Quan Masters. Actraiser and Seiken Densetsu 3 for Super Nintendo are also pretty good, and Zelda 3 has some memorable stuff as well, as does Castlevania 4. And Chrono Cross and FF7 for Playstation.
Sigh. I just realized that I do most of my playing with ZSNes Super Nintendo emulator nowadays. Hell, I prefer 2D games to the 3D ones, since i have a tendency to get lost in the latter. I'm getting old:(.
Every time I see some petty bureaucrat acting out, or some idiot with some kind of a uniform busting out the authority moves, I see the truth in that demonstrated.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Petty power corrupts beyond all out of proportion to the actual power. No power leaves you posting to Slashdot on Friday night.
The energy budget to go from Low-Earth Orbit to the moon is half of the one to go from earth to LEO. So I would say that the reward is surprisingly on-spot.
It gets even better when you consider the issue of thrust. To lift from the Earth you need a lot of thrust simply to raise from the ground. This translates directly into consuming a lot of energy and reaction mass, which rules out things like solar panels and forcing the spacecraft to carry all its energy within. This makes the spacecraft heavier, increasing the needed thrust and thus fuel usage even higher and leading to a vicious circle.
On the other hand, once you're in LEO, you're in freefall. There is no more any minimum thrust treshold to change your velocity. You can use solar sails, ion engine powered by solar panels, or whatever to speed you on your way. It will take weeks, if not months, to get to the Moon this way, but you will get there eventually.
The hard part is getting into an orbit, any orbit as long as it's outside of atmosphere. Once you're there, the rest is (relatively) easy, at least as long as you're not in a hurry.
While there are many reasons to go from London to New York, there are few reasons to go from some pacific island to the moon, other than research or publicity.
Actually, the fastest way from London to New York (or any other point on Earth) is a ballistic arc. And the ballistic arcs for any significant distances - meaning you'd consider using an airplane - go through space.
A ballistic arc from London to New York isn't far from LEO as far as speed and altitude goes. From New York to Tokyo would be even closer. And the hard, dangerous and expensive parts of space travel are precisely entering orbit and entering atmosphere.
I've never seen so many confusing drug related delusions put into comments! Luckily the comments made for a great book and that was how I, L. Ron Hubbard began Scientology!
That is hardly fair. Scientology is a carefully designed and executed fraud. Give credit where credit is due.
Yet another fine example of the kind of far-reaching, ridiculously broad pieces of legislation that we get thanks to election year pandering.
You seem to be implying that this is a law to make the politician seem good for the think of the children -group. I don't think that's the case here.
Politicians are politicians because they want power. They want to control other people and tell them how to live their lives. Now, there's an old saying that knowledge is power, and it is absolutely true. In order to control your life, a politician needs to have a way of watching you. How else is he going to enforce all those laws and orders he gave ?
Now, if we have lots of open access points to the Internet, then the actions of people online are pretty much impossible to trace. After all, with them it is impossible to know if it was Joe Sixpack or some passing stranger who accessed Pooh Porn in flat ignorance of Protect Innocent Bears Act, or posted an insightful defense of free public medicare on Slashdot and therefore threatened the profits of the insurance corporation the politician owns stocks in, not to mention broke the Protect Freedom From Communist Horders Act. Open access points make it possible for people to defy stupid laws without consequences.
Now, simply forbidding open access points outright might - propably wouldn't, but might - rise resistance. However, surely anyone wouldn't dare oppose a law which merely makes people responsible for the actions of strangers ? That's the real idea behind this law: preventing anonymous Internet usage and the freedom from surveillance it threatens to give people.
In other words: Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice.
Funny, I was hit with shrapnel while wearing Kevlar and am still breathing.
My grandfather got hit with shrapnel to the kidney without wearing any kind of armor whatsoever, and he's still breathing. In fact he's been hit with pretty much everything imaginable, even a wrecking ball - yes, the kind used to know down buildings - to the head, and is still breathing. Lucky me, I inherited tought genes;).
The secret to armor is layers, it may get through the first few layers but it isn't going to slice through the whole suit.
While this is true, it is also irrelevant. The summary talks about car bomb blasts, which in turn (at least to me) imply civilians. Car bomb goes off right under you, at which point you'd need so many layers of armor that it would restrict your movement a lot, and there's no way people are wearing that in their everyday lifes. And of course a soldier needs freedom of movement too, on top of which I'd imagine that wearing lots of layers of armor and performing constant physical action would lead to overheating pretty soon.
It's like a back-up of your thesis project just before you attempt to rewrite the kernel after 8 beers.
Strangely enough, I've noticed that suffering from severe sleep deprivation really helps me get into the zone. It keeps me from being distracted by external factors, and makes coding like a dream; the logic of the code becomes the dream logic.
I dunno if beer would have a similar effect, thought. And even if it did, you'd propably need rum for the kernel.
By that measure, a red-light runner is worse than a spammer...
He is. He is deliberately endangering other people's lives to save a few seconds of his time. Children are especially likely to simply cross on green, making them especially vulnerable for these kinds of assholes.
A red light runner should lose his driving license for good. If he can't be trusted to obey such a simple rule with such a high chance of someone getting hurt as a result, he can't be trusted with a car, period.
and let's not forget that more people die in those types of accidents than from armed robbery, let alone spamming.
If you run the red light and kill someone it is not an accident, any more than a doctor who decides to skip the examination and just write a random prescription which ends up killing the patient is killing that patient by accident. If you choose to deliberately endanger others for your gain, and they end up dying, you should be tried for murder; after all, you knowingly and deliberately engaged in the course of action which you knew would kill them with reasonable likelyhood.
As well, often I've noticed that it will freeze the rendering of a page for no apparent reason, or blur the page, so that you can't actually see anything at all... for a time.
Clearly this means that they have stolen some Firefox code !
Which reminds me: in Firefox, is it possible to keep the stupid popup box from coming up at startup ? The one which asks if I want to resume my previous "session" ? If yes, then how ?
Slashdot Mirror
If Vista is the bright side, even Palpatine would be afraid of the dark.
In all likelihood it was because the entertainment industry paid sufficient bribes that the politicians ignored their stated ideology and obeyed their corporate masters. The same as with every other stupidly evil bill.
Of course you could get the best of both worlds by having your BASIC program modify the BASIC interpreter on the fly with the poke command. Gentlemen, I give you... ASSYMBLIC !
Oh, I don't know. I, for one, take great comfort in the thought of Microsoft delivering the DRM products of tomorrow. It's like being locked in the Alcatraz for life and realizing that the walls are made of wet cardboard.
In order to get anything out of this arrangement, the fuel cost per kilowatt produced must be less than the what the power company is paying you. That means they would be better off buying the hydrogen fuel themselves and turning it into energy in the cheap fuel cells which must be available because otherwise the cars using them would be so costly they would be rare, which in turn would make the combined power from all of them insignificant, not to make the infrastructure to get fuel be sparse, making the annoyance value of having to refuel more often more than whatever pennies you might profit by supplying energy.
In other words, there is simply no set of circumstances where this arrangement could be profitable for both you and the power company and where it would not be even more profitable for the power company to just cut you out and just use hydrogen to generate power directly.
I think this nicely summarizes and demonstrates the main problem with today's enviromental movement: since everything you do affects something, you can't do anything. As a result the enviromentalists are considered nuts and ignored, even when they actually have a valid point (which you don't, especially since hydroelectric takes energy from the rivers, not the oceans).
But why would you provide energy for the grid ? Disconnect the house and use the electricity yourself. The power company can't sell electricity for more than it costs to produce it yourself that way, because then no one would buy it, and they can't pay you as much or more than they get when selling it, because then they'll go banckrupt. Consequently, your best bet is to disconnect from the grid in the case of brownout, and simply power your own house with your car.
Those are advantages for the end user, not the content provider, who'll have a hard time selling the end user ringtunes if the user can simply upload an mp3 or ogg of their choice to the phone.
Things which are good for the consumer are usually bad for the producer, and vice versus.
Acquiring a centimeter-thick strip of land which completely encircles your home and then setting your eternal servitude as the price for right of passage requires neither force nor fraud. Take the deal or rot in your home; literally once food and water run out. That's what you libertarians refuse to understand: your rules don't prevent the haves from issuing orders ending with "or die" to have-less.
More laws are required because the set of "do not defraud" and "do not initiate force" is insufficient to guarantee freedom. All it does is transfer power from the official government, the one with at least nominal checks on its usage of that power, into the plutocracy, removing even the nominal checks and leaving everyone else worse off than they were before.
If you don't specify exactly what counts as either fraud or force, then court gets to decide it on whatever basis it pleases. Better make sure the judge likes you, then, by worshipping in his church and mowing his lawn and being his servant in every other way imaginable too. Again, you haven't freed people from power, but rather moved the power outside of supervision.
Laws need to enumare the offenses and be specific, because otherwise the courts get to judge based on the whims of their members, giving those members undeserved power over other members of the society. There is nothing authoritarian in this enumeration; if anything, it limits the power of government.
Roller coaster ? Being in a ballistic arc means you're in freefall most of the trip. Being in freefall means it is impossible to tell the whole thing is moving without looking outside. You aren't subject to any forces - not even Earth's gravity - during the ballistic part of the trip, so you'll simply float, weightless like a feather.
As has been recently brought up, Wikipedia is not above corruption. It can be used to push an agenda, simply by leaving out sources which contradict your agenda and linking to those which agree with it. If you aren't already familiar with the subject (which would make Wikipedia unneccessary), how are you going to notice ?
No, a teacher who tells his students to not trust Wikipedia is right. It can't be trusted, at least not for anything the people in charge of it are likely to care about. Of course the exact same is true of Encyclopedia Britannica and any imaginable source.
So... what does that leave us with ? A healthy amount of suspicion for any information source, I'd hope. And I truly hope that students learn mistrust and suspicion, rather than blindly believing anyone who can get at least one other creep to agree with them.
Star Control 2 / Ur-Quan Masters. Actraiser and Seiken Densetsu 3 for Super Nintendo are also pretty good, and Zelda 3 has some memorable stuff as well, as does Castlevania 4. And Chrono Cross and FF7 for Playstation.
Sigh. I just realized that I do most of my playing with ZSNes Super Nintendo emulator nowadays. Hell, I prefer 2D games to the 3D ones, since i have a tendency to get lost in the latter. I'm getting old :(.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Petty power corrupts beyond all out of proportion to the actual power. No power leaves you posting to Slashdot on Friday night.
It gets even better when you consider the issue of thrust. To lift from the Earth you need a lot of thrust simply to raise from the ground. This translates directly into consuming a lot of energy and reaction mass, which rules out things like solar panels and forcing the spacecraft to carry all its energy within. This makes the spacecraft heavier, increasing the needed thrust and thus fuel usage even higher and leading to a vicious circle.
On the other hand, once you're in LEO, you're in freefall. There is no more any minimum thrust treshold to change your velocity. You can use solar sails, ion engine powered by solar panels, or whatever to speed you on your way. It will take weeks, if not months, to get to the Moon this way, but you will get there eventually.
The hard part is getting into an orbit, any orbit as long as it's outside of atmosphere. Once you're there, the rest is (relatively) easy, at least as long as you're not in a hurry.
Actually, the fastest way from London to New York (or any other point on Earth) is a ballistic arc. And the ballistic arcs for any significant distances - meaning you'd consider using an airplane - go through space.
A ballistic arc from London to New York isn't far from LEO as far as speed and altitude goes. From New York to Tokyo would be even closer. And the hard, dangerous and expensive parts of space travel are precisely entering orbit and entering atmosphere.
That is hardly fair. Scientology is a carefully designed and executed fraud. Give credit where credit is due.
You seem to be implying that this is a law to make the politician seem good for the think of the children -group. I don't think that's the case here.
Politicians are politicians because they want power. They want to control other people and tell them how to live their lives. Now, there's an old saying that knowledge is power, and it is absolutely true. In order to control your life, a politician needs to have a way of watching you. How else is he going to enforce all those laws and orders he gave ?
Now, if we have lots of open access points to the Internet, then the actions of people online are pretty much impossible to trace. After all, with them it is impossible to know if it was Joe Sixpack or some passing stranger who accessed Pooh Porn in flat ignorance of Protect Innocent Bears Act, or posted an insightful defense of free public medicare on Slashdot and therefore threatened the profits of the insurance corporation the politician owns stocks in, not to mention broke the Protect Freedom From Communist Horders Act. Open access points make it possible for people to defy stupid laws without consequences.
Now, simply forbidding open access points outright might - propably wouldn't, but might - rise resistance. However, surely anyone wouldn't dare oppose a law which merely makes people responsible for the actions of strangers ? That's the real idea behind this law: preventing anonymous Internet usage and the freedom from surveillance it threatens to give people.
In other words: Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice.
No, I fixed bugs in the newest HAL daemon to get it to work on my system. I wonder if I should post the fixes upstream...
My grandfather got hit with shrapnel to the kidney without wearing any kind of armor whatsoever, and he's still breathing. In fact he's been hit with pretty much everything imaginable, even a wrecking ball - yes, the kind used to know down buildings - to the head, and is still breathing. Lucky me, I inherited tought genes ;).
While this is true, it is also irrelevant. The summary talks about car bomb blasts, which in turn (at least to me) imply civilians. Car bomb goes off right under you, at which point you'd need so many layers of armor that it would restrict your movement a lot, and there's no way people are wearing that in their everyday lifes. And of course a soldier needs freedom of movement too, on top of which I'd imagine that wearing lots of layers of armor and performing constant physical action would lead to overheating pretty soon.
Strangely enough, I've noticed that suffering from severe sleep deprivation really helps me get into the zone. It keeps me from being distracted by external factors, and makes coding like a dream; the logic of the code becomes the dream logic.
I dunno if beer would have a similar effect, thought. And even if it did, you'd propably need rum for the kernel.
He is. He is deliberately endangering other people's lives to save a few seconds of his time. Children are especially likely to simply cross on green, making them especially vulnerable for these kinds of assholes.
A red light runner should lose his driving license for good. If he can't be trusted to obey such a simple rule with such a high chance of someone getting hurt as a result, he can't be trusted with a car, period.
If you run the red light and kill someone it is not an accident, any more than a doctor who decides to skip the examination and just write a random prescription which ends up killing the patient is killing that patient by accident. If you choose to deliberately endanger others for your gain, and they end up dying, you should be tried for murder; after all, you knowingly and deliberately engaged in the course of action which you knew would kill them with reasonable likelyhood.
I prefer Firefox to IE, but to each his own.
Clearly this means that they have stolen some Firefox code !
Which reminds me: in Firefox, is it possible to keep the stupid popup box from coming up at startup ? The one which asks if I want to resume my previous "session" ? If yes, then how ?
Those aren't parentheses, those are lightsaber slashes !
Of course it is. The surface of a cube, for example, can be projected to a plane without distortion.