Glorifying deadly combat is more than a little twisted.
You could certainly call it "wrong;" I don't see how you can call it "twisted", however, as far from being deviant, the glorification of deadly combat has been a historical norm.
Even today, King Arthur and the Knights of Round Table, or The Three Musketeers, are still instilled as childhood heroes. And gaining glory and honor through deadly combat is pretty much their entire theme.
Senseless violence is against the basic principal of civilization.
I think the violence in "Smash Bros." is rather more senseless than the violence in "America's Army."
One of the first things they did was show us a movie, to spark our interest, I suppose. But all it was were kids driving around in tanks, climbing stuff and being out in nature. Not a single image of what war actually is. Not even a drop of blood.
In Norway we have semi-obligatory military service for males (basically a 1 year training program to be prepared in the event of an invasion
So how often is Norway invaded that that video is not a fully accurate depiction of what they should expect?
Of course messing with them/stealing from them would be a felony.
Not under existing law.
You'd own the mailbox, and the contents; stealing is already a crime.
Unless your mail includes diamond rolexes, the crime is only petty theft at worst. How much are letters and envelopes worth in cost of raw material? Taking the mail is practically zero-risk: it's not until the guy is long gone that the real crimes such as identity theft and credit card fraud occur.
There is a reason it is a big nasty federal crime to tamper with official U.S. mail. It should be the same for other couriers if we are going to give them a fair chance to compete in that market.
There is nothing which prevents any person from installing a secondary mailbox similar to those used by us in more rural areas for newspapers.
The first problem is that this requires an action on behalf of the recipient who usually incurs no visible cost, while the (visible) benefit is to the sender.
The only reason for newspaper stations in rural areas is because in that scenario the recipients actually make things more convenient for themselves and protect their paper from wildlife, etc.
The second problem is that these "fake" mailboxes would not have the same legal protection. It would not be a felony to mess with them, or to steal the contents. Mail frequently contains confidential and financial items, and there is no way for corporations to punish their employees or individuals to seek restitution to a degree that would have the same level of deterrence.
Without the pressure of the USPS being able to provide affordable prices for shipping to more poorly covered or less easily accessed areas (such as Alaska and Hawaii) only the people in major metropolitan areas would receive reasonable parcel and letter services. As much as that may not affect you there are still many millions of other people who are equally as valuable and important to you who would be royally bunged if things happened the way you obviously wish.
Hawaii is already "bunged" by having to import everything. I would think the most important commodity price on the mind of the poor would be food, which isn't usually sent by USPS. Should we be subsidizing all of their clothing etc. too to make sure it doesn't cost any more to live in Hawaii than it does to live in Texas? They are kind of compensated by living in an island paradise. Why should we foot the cost for that?
It seems to me this is the sort of social service that would be best provided by the states: Hawaii from taxes on their high class resorts and tourism and Alaska from its profitable petroleum exports.
(Although I am still not convinced that the prices would substantially increase if the USPS was fundamentally replaced or fairly competed with.)
You'll note that the Santa Ana winds are also devastating to vegetation. They are the reason that much of southern California is a desert.
You are a little confused. The deserts of that region are rainshadow deserts. They are not caused by the Santa Ana wind (which is not even a permanent feature). In fact, the Santa Ana wind is caused (partly) by the high deserts.
If we made the (incorrect) assumption that Antarctica is guaranteed a similar desert region, it would also be guaranteed a region of high precipitation. The water moisture doesn't just evacuate into space.
I would also point out that climate change is unlikely to mitigate the antarctic katabatic winds -- it's more likely to amplify them, because there will be more energy in the system.
This fits well with 'Day After Tomorrow' logic, but is ignorant of how the winds themselves originate:
"Katabatic winds are created by the cooling of air close to the surface of the ice sheet on the higher parts of the continent. As this cold heavy air sinks, it presses down hard, pushing away all the air that was underneath. This process creates a downhill wind which, by the time it reaches the coast, is blowing at great force."
The unusual energy of the Antarctic katabatics comes directly from the existence of high elevation ice sheets. Global warming voodoo will not make the winds more powerful when the continent thaws.
As it happens, I was just reading an article about how global warming is possibly diminishing the force of the Santa Ana winds.
There is a reason that large plants do not grow past the Arctic tree line. Permafrost, wind, and cold inhibit vegetation, and they will cause severe problems for agriculture.
Yes, you have accurately stated the status quo. That is not relevant to our debate of what happens when these regions are warmed. The problems of cold and permafrost no longer exist in this scenario.
The angle of incidence of sunlight, in addition to the amount of sunlight per year, causes these effects.
Yes, because as I previously observed, the same quantity of sunlight is spread over a larger area. But also as I observed, plants can theoretically absorb much the same amount of sunlight being at a proper angle. (they would however have to spaced out father) Not that it isn't possible to use low-sunlight plants.
But you are pairing an unrealistic conception of how much sunlight is diminished with an oversight of geographical warming effects. I'll bet when the sunsets, you don't freeze to death. The reason for this is the earth's ability to retain heat. You should be acquainted with this since as far as I know this is the most fundamental tenet of man made global warming--that the suns energy remains constant but our activity causes more heat to be retained. In fact, there is a fairly intricate 'heat cycle' for which the initial bombardment by the sun is merely the first step. But it is a widely held theory that Antarctica did not ice over until warm ocean currents were deflected from the continent, which is the opposite of your theory that ice and cold temperatures must necessarily exist in the low sunlight conditions.
Antarctica will never get warm enough for agriculture to take hold -- if it does, the tropics and likely the temperate zones will be uninhabitable.
So why are we fearmongering over the possibility of ocean levels rising, when it seems to me that frying to death at the equator would be a much worse effect of the ice caps getting warm enough to melt?
It is because, for reasons mentioned on the last point, temperature does not distribute the way you think it does. The arctic can get 30 degrees warmer without the equator bursting into flames.
First of all, saying there is a 'general lack of sunlight' over the pole is misleading. Apart from some additional atmospheric filtering, it is not as if the sun shines less brightly there. A smaller angle of incidence means that the roughly parallel rays of the sun are spread over a larger area of absorption on a plane approximating the local surface, but something at the correct angle to that plane would still get the 1 kW/m^2 of radiant energy you expect. Also, there is some compensation to be had from the increased number of hours of sunlight. Doubtless, even when warmed, the polar regions will not be as prime for agriculture as the equatorial regions, but the difference is hardly enough to discount them.
Antarctica is not the only place you find a katabatic wind. There is, for example, the Santa Ana wind of Southern California, which frequently becomes warm by the time of its descent. I don't think you or I or probably anyone else can say off hand what the exact nature of the Antarctic winds would be in a significantly warmer climate, but it stands to reason that their overall effect would be significantly mitigated.
I would further point out that additional land of *any form* provides us additional farmland even if the new land is as barren as the moon and is guaranteed to stay that way. The reason is that in the modern technological era there is no need for people to live proximate to their food supply, and so we can reclaim arable land currently hosting human settlements by simple migration. Of course, as we are nowhere near exhausting our present capacity to farm, we have no existing plans to do something like this. But it is well within the domain of possibilities should the need arise, and a warmer earth would generate a great deal more land than it would lose.
It absolutely does not take "thousands of years" to reclaim a desert. Seriously, it takes less time for freshly cooled volcanic islands to develop vegetative cover. Maybe you could point out historical instances of deserts which have naturally receded over the course of thousands of years, but that is not the same thing as stipulating the amount of time fundamentally required, particularly with human intervention. Human beings don't have to wait for the natural incidence of topsoil to encroach on the desert periphery, they can haul in topsoil by the truckload, build wind and sand barriers, etc. Provided you have sufficient water, taking over a desert from its edges is well within the capabilities of contemporary human achievement, and in the sort of time frame in which we are liable to even considerate it, technology can only make the prospect that much more realistic.
If there is one unalterable truth here, it is that, given resources, humans can make use of them. If we wouldn't benefit from a warmer planet, then do you argue we would benefit from a colder planet? It seems highly improbable that in the range of temperatures the earth (and even humanity!) has existed, we just so happened to have stumbled upon the perfect temperature.
If you only want to be anonymous if its convenient and without negative side effects then you are probably not one of the ones who need to be anonymous.
Having more anonymous people increases the anonymity of everyone. The reason being that if you can identify non-anonymous people, you who is a member of the "anonymous" sub-demographic by the simple principle of exclusion. Details about timing of certain data requests may even narrow it down to a specific individual. The more anonymous data that traffics the internet, the more difficult it is to isolate any of it in particular.
It is also important to have widespread anonymity because this is the only way for anonymity to be socially excepted. If the only people who use anonymity are those who "need" it, it's going to be dominated by people doing illegal things, and the chance of anonymity itself remaining legal diminishes significantly.
We also weren't trying to feed six billion humans last time it was seriously warm.
I would like to point out that if it gets warm enough we will have an entire extra continent to farm and live in, not to mention all the other land that is currently locked away under ice sheets.
And as has been pointed out extensively in the 'arctic snowfall' discussion here, atmospheric water content is related to temperature. Generally speaking, higher temperature == more rain.
I think increases in technology are more than capable of handling our food supply problem for the foreseeable feature, but in a desperate situation, perhaps increased global warming would be our best investment.
The value of a signature is its difficulty to replicate. The historical cut off for this has been the talent and prevalence of expert forgers. Having automated forgers is quite irrelevant if they require more investment of time and effort to perform the same replication. (which would clearly be the case for this implementation, at least)
If anything, I would say the problem is that these machines are being underapplied. What they should *really* be used for is to create extremely complicated signatures a human being would not be able to accurately reproduce. Then for the first time in hundreds of years written signatures would become more secure.
(Granted, only until someone develops a machine that can reverse-engineer them, but at that point human-written signatures would have been even less helpful.)
Takes effort to startup the programs that I keep running all the time on it.
Takes more effort to script them so I don't have to spend effort starting them up on every reboot.
How did you ever get Linux on your system in the first place?
My present hypothesis is that your system crashed and the Ubuntu CD was marginally closer to your workstation than the Windows reinstall disk.
A few the nice features of the airy beam: the plasma conduit keeps the beam in focus; it tends to be self-healing, which means that small objects such as raindrops will not interfere with the overall path; the light from the plasma pulse does not propagate in the same direction as the beam, so it won't burn out your laser detector at the other end.
These features could make it very useful for communications purposes.
Another use which was mentioned was high-altitude spectroscopy. Instead of needing a sample of the upper atmosphere to put in your spectroscopy device, you could use an airy beam to get the atoms excited and analyze the output from down on the ground.
There is also the bessel beam which has some similar properties to the airy beam, and has been around a while longer.
I thought that was how many of the MMORPGS work nowadays. The game client is free, but you enter into a monthly contract to access the resources on the servers.
For another example, chess is about as copyright and license free as a game can be, but the Internet Chess Club charges $60 for a 1-year membership and purports "over 200,000 memberships sold." They don't have exclusive rights over anything inherent to the game of chess, or even internet chess. I don't know if their clients are proprietary, but I know they are free and there are open source versions. What they make money off of is support they provide in form of connecting people, hosting games, information, etc.
and they'll go nuts if you try to cram advertising down their throats.
What's up with all those internet flash games?
I wouldn't say the closed source model doesn't have its own merits, but if the argument is really that it is best (for gaming or otherwise) I hope that means the government doesn't need to sweep in and save it with price floors or whatever the article is suggesting we do to fix these "non-flaws".
From the first link "The 31-year-old blogger's crime: falsely reporting that South Korea had barred banks from purchasing U.S. currency" which doesn't seem to describe the claim of "blogging about declining companies" the summary purports.
This also apparently had a real impact on the value of South Korean currency.
I would hope the SK courts don't punish him for making an honest mistake, if that's what this was, but either way it is not about "free speech." They are not punishing him for expressing a view or opinion. They are punishing him for telling a very expensive lie.
While I doubt it was the authors' intent, this could actually be useful for creating 'plausible deniability', e.g., you want to provide resources to host legally questionable content, but do not want to open yourself up to any liabilities.
The fact that the content is split between many sites in unrecognizable pieces would also provide legal cover to those wishing to plead ignorant victim rather than willful enabler.
dd unfortunately does not support error correction. (Have you examined all of those backups for sound and video glitches?:p)
And, anyway, it is usually the transcoding part that has issues, mostly because there are so many different transcoding options to choose from and test against. But I can't remember the last program I used that couldn't at least get a proper.iso copied to the drive.
dvd::rip always gets the language mixed up (for example, when ripping 'Howl's Moving Castle,' one of the files it ripped to was in Japanese instead of English),
What makes you think it is dvd::rip that has the language mixed up? It is a Japanese movie and it is not surprising that the first audio track is Japanese. Fortunately you can select to rip a different audio track.
Acidrip just plain isn't working for me (not recognizing a disc with spaces in its name, refusing to encode, etc.)
I am betting you set it up wrong, since the disc name really shouldn't effect anything. It could be your ripper program should point at/dev/dvd (or equivalent), not "/mnt/Mounted File System"
very little downside except short term funding issues.
Which puts it among a vast, vast quantity of things for which the only downside is that... they must be paid for.
If you think that short term funding issues should take precedence over long term societal growth, then by all means reject this proposal.
Please qualify "societal growth." What aspect of society is growing? And are we going to need to hand out free computers as well to realize the benefits?
If you can show me some major life-altering benefits, I may be convinced. But I must admit I am having some difficulty thinking what is so important about broadband that trumps $5 a month dialup which is available to anyone with a phone line. Surely streaming HD video and playing First Person Shooters isn't what counts for 'societal growth'? Connecting people to news and other information works plenty well at 56k.
We must also consider that the remaining places that lack high-bandwidth availability are also generally those that would gain the least by having it.
I do certainly agree that laying fiber all across America would be pretty cool, but I'm just not convinced that the benefits over what we have now are going to match the massive cost of doing so.
I should also point out that there is a certain boon for waiting to overhaul your infrastructure, in that, while you wait, technology advances. It gets both cheaper and more awesome. Yeah, Korea may be already mapped out with fiber, but how often are they planning to replace that entire infrastructure? If that's going to be their internet backbone for the next 30 years, well, it would suck if in the next 5 years there is some major advancement, and they have to spend the next 25 lagging behind everyone else. If we wait until such an overhaul is makes economic sense to us, we not only save over the short term, but we get all that extra technological advance thrown in for later.
Reflecting more sun from the top of the atmosphere while increasing greenhouse gasses will place us in yet another unknown region of the earths dynamics.
We have only ever been in an unknown region of earth dynamics. Sitting quietly in a corner does not guarantee us earth's favor.
In fact, left to its own devices earth has been dealt numerous ice ages and mass extinctions. For all we know the next great ice age is pending and warming up the planet as much as possible is the only hope human civilization has of weathering it comfortably. It could even be that in a few decades warming will neutralize itself. Heat and C02 are two factors which increase the growth of carbon sinking organisms. If those define the limiting factors on biotic potential then earth's ecosystem will expand until it consumes the extra C02 in the atmosphere. (melting ice caps could contribute to that as well)
If you do want to deal with the environment on any certain terms, the way to do that is precisely to experiment on it. Pump up C02, see what happens. Pump up particulates, see what happens. Adjust and readjust and eventually learn how to tweak things properly. Despite what the clamoring of alarmists, we probably have quite a bit leeway with which to work--after all, the earth has been both much more and much less glaciated than it is at the present time.
It sounds like EA's fifty-percent stake entitles them to share in profits and IP, but Will Wright is still totally in charge of his company (which makes EA more of an investor-with-benefits).
And just because EA is a bigger entity does not make co-owner Will Wright an "employee" of EA. They can't fire him, for example. So it is correct to say that Will Wright has left his employment at EA.
The fact that one man (the judge) can overturn the jury of his peers on the basis that the lawyers who got him convicted did it wrong is proof that it takes only 2 corrupt men in a room full of people to get away with anything
*Betting on being able to do that is a fairly absurd idea seeing as how you don't know beforehand who will comprise the judge and prosecution. If your assumption is just that everyone everywhere is bribable, well, in that case we're already screwed, and I think bribing six jurors would be easier and cheaper anyway.
*Unless the system is already rife with corruption, I don't think you're quite considering how dangerous it is to approach said persons with the prospect of a bribe. Most likely, you would just wind up sealing your fate.
*You forget that any decision a judge makes can be reviewed by other judges.
*You forget that a corrupt senator may also be impeached by congress. (and if you think parties will stick up for their friends when they're tainted by public ire, see how many friends Gov. Blagojevich has)
*You'll note that despite being reprieved, Ted Stevens was cost the election. In a democracy, gaming the system may keep you out of the pen, but merely being brought into court can see to the end of your political significance.
I am all for punishing the guilty, but I don't think the expressed paranoia quite justifies abridging our present safeguards against malicious court proceedings. And it isn't as if having courts rigged more toward the prosecution couldn't also be used as a means of protecting (or exerting) high-level corruption.
The outcome of the test says a lot more about that than anything we would discover by forensic analysis (which is of course precisely why they were performing the test).
I'm sure you could put Kim Jong Il in a hissy-fit by saying you found it and were reverse engineering secret NK technology, however.;)
First person shooters have never been and will probably never be a competitive aspect of opensource. The major reason is because they are extremely content-intensive, and the collaboration advantages open source has in creating code just don't apply to things that require sound and art studios.
That out of the way, your complaint is totally invalid. While Nexuiz might not be an innovation to the genre, and might not smitten you with the highest res graphics, it still proves the concept of open source by taking something that already existed (the original Quake 1 source code) and continually improving it with user contributions. Hardcore gamers will definitely appreciate the never ending flow of UI and gameplay improvements. And if someone ever has a better idea, they can take Nexuiz and expand on it, whereas without that open source foundation, not only would they be delayed by years of extra work, they might not even start.
And I'm sure if you go to the trouble of reading the changelogs, you will have a much greater appreciation for all the work that has gone into it than you do just as some guy who plays the latest console releases.
Meanwhile, checkout TA: Spring for a RTS, and Wesnoth or Freeciv for turnbased strategy. If you aren't impressed, I suppose you aren't in to strategy games.
Slashdot Mirror
Glorifying deadly combat is more than a little twisted.
You could certainly call it "wrong;" I don't see how you can call it "twisted", however, as far from being deviant, the glorification of deadly combat has been a historical norm.
Even today, King Arthur and the Knights of Round Table, or The Three Musketeers, are still instilled as childhood heroes. And gaining glory and honor through deadly combat is pretty much their entire theme.
Senseless violence is against the basic principal of civilization.
I think the violence in "Smash Bros." is rather more senseless than the violence in "America's Army."
One of the first things they did was show us a movie, to spark our interest, I suppose. But all it was were kids driving around in tanks, climbing stuff and being out in nature. Not a single image of what war actually is. Not even a drop of blood.
In Norway we have semi-obligatory military service for males (basically a 1 year training program to be prepared in the event of an invasion
So how often is Norway invaded that that video is not a fully accurate depiction of what they should expect?
Of course messing with them/stealing from them would be a felony.
Not under existing law.
You'd own the mailbox, and the contents; stealing is already a crime.
Unless your mail includes diamond rolexes, the crime is only petty theft at worst. How much are letters and envelopes worth in cost of raw material? Taking the mail is practically zero-risk: it's not until the guy is long gone that the real crimes such as identity theft and credit card fraud occur.
There is a reason it is a big nasty federal crime to tamper with official U.S. mail. It should be the same for other couriers if we are going to give them a fair chance to compete in that market.
There is nothing which prevents any person from installing a secondary mailbox similar to those used by us in more rural areas for newspapers.
The first problem is that this requires an action on behalf of the recipient who usually incurs no visible cost, while the (visible) benefit is to the sender.
The only reason for newspaper stations in rural areas is because in that scenario the recipients actually make things more convenient for themselves and protect their paper from wildlife, etc.
The second problem is that these "fake" mailboxes would not have the same legal protection. It would not be a felony to mess with them, or to steal the contents. Mail frequently contains confidential and financial items, and there is no way for corporations to punish their employees or individuals to seek restitution to a degree that would have the same level of deterrence.
Without the pressure of the USPS being able to provide affordable prices for shipping to more poorly covered or less easily accessed areas (such as Alaska and Hawaii) only the people in major metropolitan areas would receive reasonable parcel and letter services. As much as that may not affect you there are still many millions of other people who are equally as valuable and important to you who would be royally bunged if things happened the way you obviously wish.
Hawaii is already "bunged" by having to import everything. I would think the most important commodity price on the mind of the poor would be food, which isn't usually sent by USPS. Should we be subsidizing all of their clothing etc. too to make sure it doesn't cost any more to live in Hawaii than it does to live in Texas? They are kind of compensated by living in an island paradise. Why should we foot the cost for that?
It seems to me this is the sort of social service that would be best provided by the states: Hawaii from taxes on their high class resorts and tourism and Alaska from its profitable petroleum exports.
(Although I am still not convinced that the prices would substantially increase if the USPS was fundamentally replaced or fairly competed with.)
You'll note that the Santa Ana winds are also devastating to vegetation. They are the reason that much of southern California is a desert.
You are a little confused. The deserts of that region are rainshadow deserts. They are not caused by the Santa Ana wind (which is not even a permanent feature). In fact, the Santa Ana wind is caused (partly) by the high deserts.
If we made the (incorrect) assumption that Antarctica is guaranteed a similar desert region, it would also be guaranteed a region of high precipitation. The water moisture doesn't just evacuate into space.
I would also point out that climate change is unlikely to mitigate the antarctic katabatic winds -- it's more likely to amplify them, because there will be more energy in the system.
This fits well with 'Day After Tomorrow' logic, but is ignorant of how the winds themselves originate:
"Katabatic winds are created by the cooling of air close to the surface of the ice sheet on the higher parts of the continent. As this cold heavy air sinks, it presses down hard, pushing away all the air that was underneath. This process creates a downhill wind which, by the time it reaches the coast, is blowing at great force."
The unusual energy of the Antarctic katabatics comes directly from the existence of high elevation ice sheets. Global warming voodoo will not make the winds more powerful when the continent thaws.
As it happens, I was just reading an article about how global warming is possibly diminishing the force of the Santa Ana winds.
There is a reason that large plants do not grow past the Arctic tree line. Permafrost, wind, and cold inhibit vegetation, and they will cause severe problems for agriculture.
Yes, you have accurately stated the status quo. That is not relevant to our debate of what happens when these regions are warmed. The problems of cold and permafrost no longer exist in this scenario.
The angle of incidence of sunlight, in addition to the amount of sunlight per year, causes these effects.
Yes, because as I previously observed, the same quantity of sunlight is spread over a larger area. But also as I observed, plants can theoretically absorb much the same amount of sunlight being at a proper angle. (they would however have to spaced out father) Not that it isn't possible to use low-sunlight plants.
But you are pairing an unrealistic conception of how much sunlight is diminished with an oversight of geographical warming effects. I'll bet when the sunsets, you don't freeze to death. The reason for this is the earth's ability to retain heat. You should be acquainted with this since as far as I know this is the most fundamental tenet of man made global warming--that the suns energy remains constant but our activity causes more heat to be retained. In fact, there is a fairly intricate 'heat cycle' for which the initial bombardment by the sun is merely the first step. But it is a widely held theory that Antarctica did not ice over until warm ocean currents were deflected from the continent, which is the opposite of your theory that ice and cold temperatures must necessarily exist in the low sunlight conditions.
Antarctica will never get warm enough for agriculture to take hold -- if it does, the tropics and likely the temperate zones will be uninhabitable.
So why are we fearmongering over the possibility of ocean levels rising, when it seems to me that frying to death at the equator would be a much worse effect of the ice caps getting warm enough to melt?
It is because, for reasons mentioned on the last point, temperature does not distribute the way you think it does. The arctic can get 30 degrees warmer without the equator bursting into flames.
First of all, saying there is a 'general lack of sunlight' over the pole is misleading. Apart from some additional atmospheric filtering, it is not as if the sun shines less brightly there. A smaller angle of incidence means that the roughly parallel rays of the sun are spread over a larger area of absorption on a plane approximating the local surface, but something at the correct angle to that plane would still get the 1 kW/m^2 of radiant energy you expect. Also, there is some compensation to be had from the increased number of hours of sunlight. Doubtless, even when warmed, the polar regions will not be as prime for agriculture as the equatorial regions, but the difference is hardly enough to discount them.
Antarctica is not the only place you find a katabatic wind. There is, for example, the Santa Ana wind of Southern California, which frequently becomes warm by the time of its descent. I don't think you or I or probably anyone else can say off hand what the exact nature of the Antarctic winds would be in a significantly warmer climate, but it stands to reason that their overall effect would be significantly mitigated.
I would further point out that additional land of *any form* provides us additional farmland even if the new land is as barren as the moon and is guaranteed to stay that way. The reason is that in the modern technological era there is no need for people to live proximate to their food supply, and so we can reclaim arable land currently hosting human settlements by simple migration. Of course, as we are nowhere near exhausting our present capacity to farm, we have no existing plans to do something like this. But it is well within the domain of possibilities should the need arise, and a warmer earth would generate a great deal more land than it would lose.
It absolutely does not take "thousands of years" to reclaim a desert. Seriously, it takes less time for freshly cooled volcanic islands to develop vegetative cover. Maybe you could point out historical instances of deserts which have naturally receded over the course of thousands of years, but that is not the same thing as stipulating the amount of time fundamentally required, particularly with human intervention. Human beings don't have to wait for the natural incidence of topsoil to encroach on the desert periphery, they can haul in topsoil by the truckload, build wind and sand barriers, etc. Provided you have sufficient water, taking over a desert from its edges is well within the capabilities of contemporary human achievement, and in the sort of time frame in which we are liable to even considerate it, technology can only make the prospect that much more realistic.
If there is one unalterable truth here, it is that, given resources, humans can make use of them. If we wouldn't benefit from a warmer planet, then do you argue we would benefit from a colder planet? It seems highly improbable that in the range of temperatures the earth (and even humanity!) has existed, we just so happened to have stumbled upon the perfect temperature.
If you only want to be anonymous if its convenient and without negative side effects then you are probably not one of the ones who need to be anonymous.
Having more anonymous people increases the anonymity of everyone. The reason being that if you can identify non-anonymous people, you who is a member of the "anonymous" sub-demographic by the simple principle of exclusion. Details about timing of certain data requests may even narrow it down to a specific individual. The more anonymous data that traffics the internet, the more difficult it is to isolate any of it in particular.
It is also important to have widespread anonymity because this is the only way for anonymity to be socially excepted. If the only people who use anonymity are those who "need" it, it's going to be dominated by people doing illegal things, and the chance of anonymity itself remaining legal diminishes significantly.
We also weren't trying to feed six billion humans last time it was seriously warm.
I would like to point out that if it gets warm enough we will have an entire extra continent to farm and live in, not to mention all the other land that is currently locked away under ice sheets.
And as has been pointed out extensively in the 'arctic snowfall' discussion here, atmospheric water content is related to temperature. Generally speaking, higher temperature == more rain.
I think increases in technology are more than capable of handling our food supply problem for the foreseeable feature, but in a desperate situation, perhaps increased global warming would be our best investment.
The value of a signature is its difficulty to replicate. The historical cut off for this has been the talent and prevalence of expert forgers. Having automated forgers is quite irrelevant if they require more investment of time and effort to perform the same replication. (which would clearly be the case for this implementation, at least)
If anything, I would say the problem is that these machines are being underapplied. What they should *really* be used for is to create extremely complicated signatures a human being would not be able to accurately reproduce. Then for the first time in hundreds of years written signatures would become more secure.
(Granted, only until someone develops a machine that can reverse-engineer them, but at that point human-written signatures would have been even less helpful.)
Takes effort to startup the programs that I keep running all the time on it. Takes more effort to script them so I don't have to spend effort starting them up on every reboot.
How did you ever get Linux on your system in the first place?
My present hypothesis is that your system crashed and the Ubuntu CD was marginally closer to your workstation than the Windows reinstall disk.
A few the nice features of the airy beam: the plasma conduit keeps the beam in focus; it tends to be self-healing, which means that small objects such as raindrops will not interfere with the overall path; the light from the plasma pulse does not propagate in the same direction as the beam, so it won't burn out your laser detector at the other end.
These features could make it very useful for communications purposes.
Another use which was mentioned was high-altitude spectroscopy. Instead of needing a sample of the upper atmosphere to put in your spectroscopy device, you could use an airy beam to get the atoms excited and analyze the output from down on the ground.
There is also the bessel beam which has some similar properties to the airy beam, and has been around a while longer.
Gamers don't need support contracts,
I thought that was how many of the MMORPGS work nowadays. The game client is free, but you enter into a monthly contract to access the resources on the servers.
For another example, chess is about as copyright and license free as a game can be, but the Internet Chess Club charges $60 for a 1-year membership and purports "over 200,000 memberships sold." They don't have exclusive rights over anything inherent to the game of chess, or even internet chess. I don't know if their clients are proprietary, but I know they are free and there are open source versions. What they make money off of is support they provide in form of connecting people, hosting games, information, etc.
and they'll go nuts if you try to cram advertising down their throats.
What's up with all those internet flash games?
I wouldn't say the closed source model doesn't have its own merits, but if the argument is really that it is best (for gaming or otherwise) I hope that means the government doesn't need to sweep in and save it with price floors or whatever the article is suggesting we do to fix these "non-flaws".
From the first link "The 31-year-old blogger's crime: falsely reporting that South Korea had barred banks from purchasing U.S. currency" which doesn't seem to describe the claim of "blogging about declining companies" the summary purports.
This also apparently had a real impact on the value of South Korean currency.
I would hope the SK courts don't punish him for making an honest mistake, if that's what this was, but either way it is not about "free speech." They are not punishing him for expressing a view or opinion. They are punishing him for telling a very expensive lie.
While I doubt it was the authors' intent, this could actually be useful for creating 'plausible deniability', e.g., you want to provide resources to host legally questionable content, but do not want to open yourself up to any liabilities.
The fact that the content is split between many sites in unrecognizable pieces would also provide legal cover to those wishing to plead ignorant victim rather than willful enabler.
It's sort of like steganography for bandwidth.
It's not a high-volume site, but it sure as hell isn't abandoned.
I see you are still in denial about how much time you spend posting at Slashdot.
You just have to click on it.
(Note you will have to click on it again when it comes back.)
dd unfortunately does not support error correction. (Have you examined all of those backups for sound and video glitches? :p)
And, anyway, it is usually the transcoding part that has issues, mostly because there are so many different transcoding options to choose from and test against. But I can't remember the last program I used that couldn't at least get a proper .iso copied to the drive.
dvd::rip always gets the language mixed up (for example, when ripping 'Howl's Moving Castle,' one of the files it ripped to was in Japanese instead of English),
What makes you think it is dvd::rip that has the language mixed up? It is a Japanese movie and it is not surprising that the first audio track is Japanese. Fortunately you can select to rip a different audio track.
Acidrip just plain isn't working for me (not recognizing a disc with spaces in its name, refusing to encode, etc.)
I am betting you set it up wrong, since the disc name really shouldn't effect anything. It could be your ripper program should point at /dev/dvd (or equivalent), not "/mnt/Mounted File System"
very little downside except short term funding issues.
Which puts it among a vast, vast quantity of things for which the only downside is that... they must be paid for.
If you think that short term funding issues should take precedence over long term societal growth, then by all means reject this proposal.
Please qualify "societal growth." What aspect of society is growing? And are we going to need to hand out free computers as well to realize the benefits?
If you can show me some major life-altering benefits, I may be convinced. But I must admit I am having some difficulty thinking what is so important about broadband that trumps $5 a month dialup which is available to anyone with a phone line. Surely streaming HD video and playing First Person Shooters isn't what counts for 'societal growth'? Connecting people to news and other information works plenty well at 56k.
We must also consider that the remaining places that lack high-bandwidth availability are also generally those that would gain the least by having it.
I do certainly agree that laying fiber all across America would be pretty cool, but I'm just not convinced that the benefits over what we have now are going to match the massive cost of doing so.
I should also point out that there is a certain boon for waiting to overhaul your infrastructure, in that, while you wait, technology advances. It gets both cheaper and more awesome. Yeah, Korea may be already mapped out with fiber, but how often are they planning to replace that entire infrastructure? If that's going to be their internet backbone for the next 30 years, well, it would suck if in the next 5 years there is some major advancement, and they have to spend the next 25 lagging behind everyone else. If we wait until such an overhaul is makes economic sense to us, we not only save over the short term, but we get all that extra technological advance thrown in for later.
Reflecting more sun from the top of the atmosphere while increasing greenhouse gasses will place us in yet another unknown region of the earths dynamics.
We have only ever been in an unknown region of earth dynamics. Sitting quietly in a corner does not guarantee us earth's favor.
In fact, left to its own devices earth has been dealt numerous ice ages and mass extinctions. For all we know the next great ice age is pending and warming up the planet as much as possible is the only hope human civilization has of weathering it comfortably. It could even be that in a few decades warming will neutralize itself. Heat and C02 are two factors which increase the growth of carbon sinking organisms. If those define the limiting factors on biotic potential then earth's ecosystem will expand until it consumes the extra C02 in the atmosphere. (melting ice caps could contribute to that as well)
If you do want to deal with the environment on any certain terms, the way to do that is precisely to experiment on it. Pump up C02, see what happens. Pump up particulates, see what happens. Adjust and readjust and eventually learn how to tweak things properly. Despite what the clamoring of alarmists, we probably have quite a bit leeway with which to work--after all, the earth has been both much more and much less glaciated than it is at the present time.
It sounds like EA's fifty-percent stake entitles them to share in profits and IP, but Will Wright is still totally in charge of his company (which makes EA more of an investor-with-benefits). And just because EA is a bigger entity does not make co-owner Will Wright an "employee" of EA. They can't fire him, for example. So it is correct to say that Will Wright has left his employment at EA.
I put down CowboyNeal. I hope if he gets a call he'll confirm that I don't work for him.
The fact that one man (the judge) can overturn the jury of his peers on the basis that the lawyers who got him convicted did it wrong is proof that it takes only 2 corrupt men in a room full of people to get away with anything
*Betting on being able to do that is a fairly absurd idea seeing as how you don't know beforehand who will comprise the judge and prosecution. If your assumption is just that everyone everywhere is bribable, well, in that case we're already screwed, and I think bribing six jurors would be easier and cheaper anyway.
*Unless the system is already rife with corruption, I don't think you're quite considering how dangerous it is to approach said persons with the prospect of a bribe. Most likely, you would just wind up sealing your fate.
*You forget that any decision a judge makes can be reviewed by other judges.
*You forget that a corrupt senator may also be impeached by congress. (and if you think parties will stick up for their friends when they're tainted by public ire, see how many friends Gov. Blagojevich has)
*You'll note that despite being reprieved, Ted Stevens was cost the election. In a democracy, gaming the system may keep you out of the pen, but merely being brought into court can see to the end of your political significance.
I am all for punishing the guilty, but I don't think the expressed paranoia quite justifies abridging our present safeguards against malicious court proceedings. And it isn't as if having courts rigged more toward the prosecution couldn't also be used as a means of protecting (or exerting) high-level corruption.
The outcome of the test says a lot more about that than anything we would discover by forensic analysis (which is of course precisely why they were performing the test).
I'm sure you could put Kim Jong Il in a hissy-fit by saying you found it and were reverse engineering secret NK technology, however. ;)
First person shooters have never been and will probably never be a competitive aspect of opensource. The major reason is because they are extremely content-intensive, and the collaboration advantages open source has in creating code just don't apply to things that require sound and art studios.
That out of the way, your complaint is totally invalid. While Nexuiz might not be an innovation to the genre, and might not smitten you with the highest res graphics, it still proves the concept of open source by taking something that already existed (the original Quake 1 source code) and continually improving it with user contributions. Hardcore gamers will definitely appreciate the never ending flow of UI and gameplay improvements. And if someone ever has a better idea, they can take Nexuiz and expand on it, whereas without that open source foundation, not only would they be delayed by years of extra work, they might not even start.
And I'm sure if you go to the trouble of reading the changelogs, you will have a much greater appreciation for all the work that has gone into it than you do just as some guy who plays the latest console releases.
Meanwhile, checkout TA: Spring for a RTS, and Wesnoth or Freeciv for turnbased strategy. If you aren't impressed, I suppose you aren't in to strategy games.