Most email is accepted or bounced before the message body is available to the receiving ISP. By that point it's too late - the ISP has accepted the email, and the spammer will assume that it's a correct address.
Aside from which, bouncing email on that basis is against the relevant standards; and many users want to be able to receive such email - many messages are sent solely with a Subject: line and no message text.
MMORPGs are boring as sin. That's because most make the basic gameplay automatic and scriptable so you can chat while you're doing it.
This is certainly true of some content, but not all by any means. It's very easy to tell the difference between somebody who is paying attention vs. concentrating mainly on chatting, and it's possible to pay attention and still get a certain amount of chatting done.
For some levels, particularly lower levels, there is a certain amount of "just hit attack then go do something interesting". At higher levels additional skills are added to the game, and it gets riskier. This also depends on the class you're playing.
My guild was in a raid yesterday which failed twice in rapid succession, in both cases because somebody (in a group of 72) made a fairly small mistake. Later in the day I joined a group in a new zone (there's another reason for playing: to see new content) where the monsters can kill me in about fifteen seconds if I'm so silly as to try to take one on, and can kill even the "tank" players in a minute or so. For some monsters ten seconds is enough for *any* player to die.
Under such circumstances a team has to get everything right, and be prepared for emergencies - split-second decisions that can save or wipe a group. Do this for four hours straight, with a brief break every hour or so while somebody goes to grab a drink or whatever.
But even while doing this there's time to chat - in group and outside of it. You do this by using the time when your spell is being cast, by using the time between pulls when there's no monster in camp... multitasking is basically a buzzword, but it really does matter.
In any case it certainly *can* be boring, and if you try hard you can keep doing boring things and still progress in the game, finding all your excitement in the social side of things. But there's another option to take real risks and confront real challenges in the game... and still have the social side of it for depth and different kinds of fun.
"On the other hand, some open source licenses may include specific constraints or restrictions that might preclude development under the Office 2003 XML Reference Schema licenses. You should check with your legal counsel if you have questions about a particular open source software license."
The BSD licence is an open source licence. The GPL is also an open source licence. I would bet that the GPL is excluded from the "allowed" licences by its provisions concerning patents and patent transfers. It's not the first time that Microsoft have done this. You may recall there was a similar path followed with their recent forays into Sender-ID for email.
Greg Egan's books are pretty loopy at times. He takes all those weird physics (and sometimes philosophical) ideas and turns them into fiction.
(Spoilers from here...)
Aliens put a huge shield around the solar system. It later turns out that this is to prevent us from observing the univrse and therefore causing quantum collapse (the collapse of quantum superpositions to a single observed state) in the rest of the universe, since all other life is quite happy being in a "smeared" quantum state and is getting tied of human beings messing up their lives.
As I recall the Pioneer probes are mentioned briefly - when they hit the shell they stop transmitting, and nobody is sure if they've been destroyed or just hidden. (But I may not be remembering that part correctly.)
Can't speak for EF. Armada was a fairly generic RTS, with many superior titles on the market.
Star Trek: TNG - A Final Unity was supposed to be quite good. The 25th Anniversary adventure game I've heard was above-average as a graphic adventures go.
The first two Starfleet Command games were interesting (if too blinkin' hard). What I played of Bridge Commander was very good (but I was distracted by some other game - story of my life).
Klingon Academy (or whatever they called it, the Klingon version of Starfleet Academy) was also said to be OK. What I played of it was pretty good, if a little too heavy on the cut scenes.
Then there are a very large number of Star Trek games which varied from atrocious (ST: Klingon) to merely mediocre (into which category I would place Armada). However, there is a small set of Star Trek games that are actually worth playing.
As Bladesjester has said, this is almost certainly Pitfall 2.
You can get this as part of the Activision Anthology compilation for the PS2. I actually played it for the first time on the PS2 version... the compilation also includes a bunch of other old Activision games (many quite good) as well as scans of game manuals, publicity materials and assorted other weird features (try playing Pitfall when the screen is represented on the faces of a spinning cube...)
You won't find it on the Atari lists because it was released by Activision rather than Atari.
The GPL is a licence. A licence is a permission to do something that you would otherwise not be allowed to do - in this case, the right to redistribute copyrighted software, but only if certain conditions are adhered to.
Calling the GPL an exception would be far more misleading IMHO. The GPL does not void copyright or exempt you from it. You are still subject to copyright law, but you are given permission to exceed what copyright law would normally allow; it's the GNU Copyright Extension, perhaps, rather than Exception, as it adds to your rights rather than taking away from them.
Your agreement with PJ consists of PJ allowing you to do something (copy one of her posts) that ou would not otherwise be allowed to do - in other words, she's giving you licence (or permission) to do so.
SCO's error has been that they *did* treat the GPL as an exception, thinking that it acted to erase copyrights somehow while adding a couple of conditions - and that voiding the GPL eliminated the conditions and left the code copyright-free. IBM is now demonstrating to them the errors in this interpretation.:-)
Still, it's definitely a puzzler why SCO continued to distribute Linux while claiming that the GPL was invalid.
(Incidentally, I notice Forbes now has an article giving SCO's "reply", which essentially pushes SCO's own dubious views concerning what a "derived work" comprises. Basically it looks like a SCO press release... not unusual for Forbes when it comes to the SCO/IBM case.)
Communicating with a database via "TCP/IP or another protocol," such as ODBC, is not in any way a circumvention of the GPL.
If it *were* a circumvention of the GPL (which it isn't)... my goodness, SCO's drunken ramblings about the GPL being viral would barely begin to cover it. Anything that talks to a GPL program having to be GPL? Within seconds half of the Internet would be GPLed. A web server talks to MySQL, so it's GPLed. My browser talks to the web server, so it's GPLed. The next site I visit is also forced into the GPL.
The GPL is a copyright licence. Internet protocols are a matter of formatting and implementation - they could be patented, but can't affect the copyright of the software holding up either end of the connection.
I can understand that as a commercial developer they need to get their revenue from somewhere, but "re-interpreting" the GPL is not the way to do it. If they're going to dump the GPL, they should do it. They may not be "licence police", but reputable companies will try to stick to the licence anyway - or dump MySQL.
Solar sails can be used to move towards or away from a star. The trick is that the sail is not generally perpendicular to the star but at a 45 degree angle, so that light is reflected behind the vehicle (to accelerate), in front of it (to slow down) or at some sideways angle (for a sideways vector).
If you accelerate, you move into a higher orbit (and move away from the star). If you decelerate you move into a lower orbit (towards the star). Sideways vectors are used to change the plane of your orbit.
All this acceleration lasts as long as you have light. So even if the sail only gives you 0.001g of acceleration, after three hours that's as much acceleration as a one second, one gee burn... but you have not used any fuel. This can carry on for many months, and at the end of that time you have as much "fuel" as you started with.
I actually agree that, barring powerful lasers to "push" the sail, solar sails are not an interstellar technology; they don't build up enough speed quickly enough. However it's not true that interstellar debris will slow the sail down substantially. The amount of interstellar material is just not enough to affect it. The density of the local interstallar medium is actually around 10^5 atoms per cubic metre. That is an *incredibly* hard vacuum. One hydrogen atom is about 1.67x10^-27 kg; a 1km square sail will hit 10^14 of these for each kilometre of travel. The sail will have to travel roughly 6x10^12km to encounter one kilo of hydrogen. Alpha Centauri is about 4x10^13km away; in getting there you'll encounter about six kilograms of material.
That's simplifying a bit, as matter is much denser than that before you hit the heliopause. On the other hand, once radiation pressure becomes negligible, turn your sail sideways to the interstellar medium and it won't hit *anything*.
Within a solar system, they are an incredibly efficient means of transportation, because they give constant acceleration with no fuel cost. Outside of the solar system, they are much less useful without the aid of lasers boosting your radiation pressure.
Robert Forward's "Rocheworld" (AKA Flight of the Dragonfly) is SF but covers interstellar use of solar sails fairly well. The SF short "The Wind from the Sun" by Arthur C Clarke (I think I have that title right) gives a good overview of use within a solar system.
thats EXACTLY how things are done at a university. there is no good reason everyone else shouldn't be treated the same way....college costs me a lot more than my internet at home does.
...which is why it's NOT done that way. Antivirus scanning using commercial products costs money. (MessageLabs charge A$4/mailbox per month for example. The cheapest commercial solutions come out at around $1/mailbox per month.) I haven't yet seen a freeware solution with a *good* virus database and timely (daily or better) updates *for commercial use*. The mail server also needs to be beefed up to handle the additional CPU load of the virus scan.
If you know of a good solution usable in a commercial environment please let me know. The company I work for scans for viruses - the ISP I *used* to work for did not, mostly due to cost considerations.
These costs have to be recovered somehow; Internet access is a commodity in most respects,
with paper-thin profit margins. Add AV protection, increase prices, lose customers. And of course you're endangering your common-carrier status...
Port-scanning is frequently illegal, and for customers charged by the megabyte (they do still exist) it increases their bills which is not widely appreciated. The port scans themselves can be problematical in a commercial environment as they cannot be distinguished from scans run by somebody who really *is* scanning for vulnerabilities for black hat purposes.
Net result - virus scanning is frequently not done for fairly solid (if weaselly) commercial reasons, particularly on bargain-basement plans. Port scanning is just not going to happen for legal reasons; it's far too risky.
If the items sold are regarded as assets, the company has an obligation to maintain the value of those assets. Otherwise it can get sued.
For example, I sell you a virtual sword for $1. I've made $1 for that, but if I then shut down the game where the virtual sword exists, you no longer have access to that $1 "asset" and you can sue me for (effectively) stealing it from you.
One possible way around this is to code depreciation into the game engine - assets depreciate by 50% per annum and lose all value after 5 years. Until the 5 year mark the company will buy your virtual sword for its full depreciated value. If the depreciation is described up-front, before the purchase, there's no contractual basis to sue; the company has used assets in "maintaining" the virtual object and the depreciation simply reflects that. Such virtual property will have to appear on the company balance sheet as a liability until fully depreciated.
There are other reasons for these restrictions - once an item becomes your property rather than theirs, they can't freely change the object (whether it be the graphic model, or some other characteristics for balance purposes), restricting how the company can adjust the game they've written. The quality of the game may suffer as a result - if a munchkin item is released it can't be rendered harmless, and those who possess such items become disproportionately powerful. "Stealing" within the game starts to matter more, and the company may be forced to take on some law enforcement functions that they could really live without.
However, I suspect the main reason is just so the MMOG companies retain their freedom to pull the plug when they want to do so.
Nobody owns Groklaw but me. Keep your FUD or antiFUD or whatever you think it is straight, please.
PJ
One of the few times I *really* wish I had modpoints...
I don't know if the above AC really *is* PJ (or just somebody speaking in her name), but it's quite true that Groklaw is owned by PJ, *not* by OSRM. PJ is employed by OSRM, but Groklaw is not affiliated with OSRM at all. When PJ was employed by OSRM, PJ made it quite clear that Groklaw would remain independent.
Guilt by association is not regarded as valid in most democracies.
I notice that this article is not referenced by Groklaw at the moment. If OSRM really did own Groklaw (they don't) and this really was intended as an exercise in FUD (insufficient evidence IMO) then we would be seeing this headlined in Groklaw, which it so far is not.
It probably *should* be, but it looks like PJ has chosen to ignore this in order to maintain independence in appearance as well as in fact.
My interpretation of this Dune character has always been the classic "good guy trapped by circumstances beyond his control".
Dune: Paul Atriedes is the Messiah!
Dune Messiah: But *really* being the Messiah is hard. Unfortunately it's necessary.
Children of Dune: Leto Paul's son, chooses to *really* be the Messiah after Dad chickens out.
God Emperor of Dune: This is why Dad chickened out.
Heretics and Chapter House I don't remember well enough for pithy summaries. I tend to ignore the Herbert/Anderson books here. They've struck me as even more overblown than Christopher Tolkien's followups.
The first was an old 386 with an AT case; I had no instructions for the motherboard and when putting it together once I cross-wired the power connectors and turbo switch. Turned it on, let the smoke out, turned it back on and rewired it correctly. It booted up correctly, although it always seemed a little slower after that.
The second was a fairly high-end DEC server-grade PC, about eight years ago. It had a dedicated port for a power management, with a connector *exactly* the same as a SCSI cable we were trying to hook up. We didn't know anything about the motherboard (didn't know about the power management, and didn't know whether it had onboard SCSI) so we hooked up a SCSI ribbon cable and turned it on.
We turned it off when we smelled smoke but the only damage was that one line on the SCSI cable melted its plastic covering.
"When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of being childish,
and the desire to be very grown up." --CS Lewis, 1947
None of the "adult" activities mentioned strike me as particularly interesting. And I have no kids, with no near-term plans of having any.
Personally I spent ten hours a day at work then go home and after dinner go in front of my computer, usually to play games. On weekends, it's not uncommon for me to game from 10am to 10pm.
There is an unsubtle qualitative difference between staring at a screen for work (usually reading and writing text) and playing games.
Some days I blow off the gaming and watch anime (AKA cartoons, another "childish thing") or read a book. (If you think anime are not cartoons, please look up the word "cartoon" in a good dictionary before protesting.)
In some ways this makes me the antithesis of the wage slave in the article - but on weekdays evening play times tend to be short. One hour between save points when I have an hour and a half to play means I either have to cut play short or stay up an extra half hour.
I mean, this way the university could save a truck load of money and give out a handheld that is way more capable than the iPod in running real applications, plus having the ability to play mp3s!
Getting enough memory expansion on a Zire to hold a decent amount of audio would be painfully expensive. The default 16MB will hold between 15 minutes and a couple of hours of audio depending on the audio quality; it's nowhere near the bottomless pit the iPod gives you.
The iPod is not successful only because of its looks or interface. It is successful because it's very good at what it does. I read a review of a bunch of MP3 players recently. The ones that held a decent amount of audio were very bulky; the ones that were compact held a pitiful amount of audio.
The iPod is compact, holds more audio than I will ever need, has a decent (and rechargeable) batttery life and a straightforward interface. The fact that it's "cool" is a stigma I'll live with (as a person who goes out of their way to avoid "cool" things).
The fact that it can be convinced to do other stuff is an added bonus; I bought mine so I could stop burning AA batteries on the portable CD player I was formerly carting around. For PDA stuff I have a PDA.
But it's another thing entirely for an employer to provide those devices with the expectation that you'll be reachable, then to say "you're now responsible for paying for this stuff. And, oh, by the way, you still need to be reachable 24x7."
A company I used to work for decided at one point that all mobiles had to be "private", i.e. the company wouldn't pay for mobile phones any more.
One tech had handed in his phone and the rest of us were getting ready to do so when I made the mistake of querying the policy through our group manager. Basically "you do realise that we're all contemplating this policy joyfully because it means we won't be interrupted after hours, and if there's an outage you won't be able to reach us... right?"
The policy was quickly reversed - for on-call technical staff at least.
The lipolitics tic-tac-toe can be beaten quite easily; it looks like it's been programmed deterministically - so move center, bottom right, bottom left, then bottom center to win. Top right and bottom left can also be used as the beginning moves to win.
The only way to win is not to play the game, or to play against someone stupid.
A lot of people either traded in or sold their PS1 console to buy a shiny new PS2 console.
I gave mine to my younger sister, and lent her a few games as well. Now Sony are selling games to two people rather than one.
Typically it's not the consoles that make a profit, but the games. By including backwards compatibility, Sony increase market share and retain a market for the older games. My N64 is retired and I would not buy a new game for it. My PS1 is at my sister's house... but I still buy PS1 games occasionally, because I can still play them on my PS2.
The final irony is whales and the rainforest, which people feel are somehow 'good'. People think the rainforest generates most of the oxygen in the air, but rainforests only produce something like 5% of it; most oxygen comes from algae in the sea. Who's eating the algae? That's right, the whales.
Whales do *not* eat algae.
Whales eat krill - small, shrimplike creatures. Krill eat algae. Less whales = more krill. More krill = *less* algae.
In tropical waters it's actually slightly more complicated; some tropical krill eat zooplankton as well as phytoplankton, which muddies the situation.
It's pretty much true about the paper. One thing that recycled paper does have going for it is that it's usually not bleached; production and use of chlorine is really nasty, environmentally speaking. But paper made from fast-growing plantation forests is very "good" for carbon levels. These forests do tend to leave behind rather acidic soils, which many plants don't like, and the forests themselves have terrible biodiversity ("green deserts")... but they do chew up that CO2.
1.) When characters cry, a giant stream of tears fly out.
Actually there are a few ways tears are shown in anime. The gushing geysers is one. When somebody is genuinely sad, rather than comically so, you'll usually see a much more subtle use of tears; water pooling, shimmering, at the bottom of the eyes... leaving a trace down the cheek. A person running past with a glittering of sunlight to show their scattered tears as they flee.
There are a few conventions used to show expression in anime, many of them borrowed from manga, others borrowed from early American animation. Knowing these conventions gives you a better idea of what's going on.
2.) Ridiculous facial expression change when they blush or say wow or say yay.
Following a tradition in Western animation here, actually. Flat cel tones can't carry expresions all that well (although I have seen some stunningly subtle expressions in anime).
Blushes (and so forth) are not always as obvious as you suggest either...
3.) Animes that are part comics, action, drama, tragedy is too common.
Difference in taste. I like the mix personally.
4.) Episodes are a waste of time. Half the animes can be compressed into outstanding 2 hr movies, look at Battle Angel & Ninja Scroll.
You've been watching the wrong anime. While most series have *some* filler, anime makes much more use of proper story arcs and character development than most U.S. series.
A series like Fruits Basket could not possibly be compressed into a two hour movie. They tried to compress Evangelion down for the first half of "Death and Rebirth" and the result was (IMO) a dismal, confusing mess if you hadn't seen the series beforehand.
Even the action series usually have a decent story arc that would render an attempt at compression useless.
5.) Random peace signs MUST go. Anime characters absolutely abuse it.
As others have said, that's "V" for Victory, not a peace sign. Sometimes they even *say* "Victory!". Think of it as a Japanese equivalent to a "thumbs up" sign - it's used about as often.
6.) Still frames. Artist gets lazy and you hear conversations, but you are staring at still frames.
It is annoying, and is basically a cost-cutting measure, but it's not really much less interesting than talking heads. I would prefer that they spend their animation budget where it matters.
7.) Overuse of robotics and cards.
I just don't see it with the cards. I can only think of two anime I've seen offhand that use cards extensively, and one of them is a marketing machine for selling the cards.
I sorta agree about the robots, but *real* robots, i.e. autonomous rather than piloted, are frequently used very sensitively.
8.) Ridiculous physics.
As distinct from Star Trek? Or pretty much any popular medium? Hard science is vanishingly rare in the media. If a movie gets half its physics right these days I count it as a decent attempt.
Slashdot Mirror
Aside from which, bouncing email on that basis is against the relevant standards; and many users want to be able to receive such email - many messages are sent solely with a Subject: line and no message text.
This is certainly true of some content, but not all by any means. It's very easy to tell the difference between somebody who is paying attention vs. concentrating mainly on chatting, and it's possible to pay attention and still get a certain amount of chatting done.
For some levels, particularly lower levels, there is a certain amount of "just hit attack then go do something interesting". At higher levels additional skills are added to the game, and it gets riskier. This also depends on the class you're playing.
My guild was in a raid yesterday which failed twice in rapid succession, in both cases because somebody (in a group of 72) made a fairly small mistake. Later in the day I joined a group in a new zone (there's another reason for playing: to see new content) where the monsters can kill me in about fifteen seconds if I'm so silly as to try to take one on, and can kill even the "tank" players in a minute or so. For some monsters ten seconds is enough for *any* player to die.
Under such circumstances a team has to get everything right, and be prepared for emergencies - split-second decisions that can save or wipe a group. Do this for four hours straight, with a brief break every hour or so while somebody goes to grab a drink or whatever.
But even while doing this there's time to chat - in group and outside of it. You do this by using the time when your spell is being cast, by using the time between pulls when there's no monster in camp... multitasking is basically a buzzword, but it really does matter.
In any case it certainly *can* be boring, and if you try hard you can keep doing boring things and still progress in the game, finding all your excitement in the social side of things. But there's another option to take real risks and confront real challenges in the game... and still have the social side of it for depth and different kinds of fun.
The BSD licence is an open source licence. The GPL is also an open source licence. I would bet that the GPL is excluded from the "allowed" licences by its provisions concerning patents and patent transfers. It's not the first time that Microsoft have done this. You may recall there was a similar path followed with their recent forays into Sender-ID for email.
Greg Egan's books are pretty loopy at times. He takes all those weird physics (and sometimes philosophical) ideas and turns them into fiction.
(Spoilers from here...)
Aliens put a huge shield around the solar system. It later turns out that this is to prevent us from observing the univrse and therefore causing quantum collapse (the collapse of quantum superpositions to a single observed state) in the rest of the universe, since all other life is quite happy being in a "smeared" quantum state and is getting tied of human beings messing up their lives.
As I recall the Pioneer probes are mentioned briefly - when they hit the shell they stop transmitting, and nobody is sure if they've been destroyed or just hidden. (But I may not be remembering that part correctly.)
Star Trek: TNG - A Final Unity was supposed to be quite good. The 25th Anniversary adventure game I've heard was above-average as a graphic adventures go.
The first two Starfleet Command games were interesting (if too blinkin' hard). What I played of Bridge Commander was very good (but I was distracted by some other game - story of my life).
Klingon Academy (or whatever they called it, the Klingon version of Starfleet Academy) was also said to be OK. What I played of it was pretty good, if a little too heavy on the cut scenes.
Then there are a very large number of Star Trek games which varied from atrocious (ST: Klingon) to merely mediocre (into which category I would place Armada). However, there is a small set of Star Trek games that are actually worth playing.
You can get this as part of the Activision Anthology compilation for the PS2. I actually played it for the first time on the PS2 version... the compilation also includes a bunch of other old Activision games (many quite good) as well as scans of game manuals, publicity materials and assorted other weird features (try playing Pitfall when the screen is represented on the faces of a spinning cube...)
You won't find it on the Atari lists because it was released by Activision rather than Atari.
Calling the GPL an exception would be far more misleading IMHO. The GPL does not void copyright or exempt you from it. You are still subject to copyright law, but you are given permission to exceed what copyright law would normally allow; it's the GNU Copyright Extension, perhaps, rather than Exception, as it adds to your rights rather than taking away from them.
Your agreement with PJ consists of PJ allowing you to do something (copy one of her posts) that ou would not otherwise be allowed to do - in other words, she's giving you licence (or permission) to do so.
SCO's error has been that they *did* treat the GPL as an exception, thinking that it acted to erase copyrights somehow while adding a couple of conditions - and that voiding the GPL eliminated the conditions and left the code copyright-free. IBM is now demonstrating to them the errors in this interpretation. :-)
Still, it's definitely a puzzler why SCO continued to distribute Linux while claiming that the GPL was invalid.
(Incidentally, I notice Forbes now has an article giving SCO's "reply", which essentially pushes SCO's own dubious views concerning what a "derived work" comprises. Basically it looks like a SCO press release... not unusual for Forbes when it comes to the SCO/IBM case.)
If it *were* a circumvention of the GPL (which it isn't)... my goodness, SCO's drunken ramblings about the GPL being viral would barely begin to cover it. Anything that talks to a GPL program having to be GPL? Within seconds half of the Internet would be GPLed. A web server talks to MySQL, so it's GPLed. My browser talks to the web server, so it's GPLed. The next site I visit is also forced into the GPL.
The GPL is a copyright licence. Internet protocols are a matter of formatting and implementation - they could be patented, but can't affect the copyright of the software holding up either end of the connection.
I can understand that as a commercial developer they need to get their revenue from somewhere, but "re-interpreting" the GPL is not the way to do it. If they're going to dump the GPL, they should do it. They may not be "licence police", but reputable companies will try to stick to the licence anyway - or dump MySQL.
If you accelerate, you move into a higher orbit (and move away from the star). If you decelerate you move into a lower orbit (towards the star). Sideways vectors are used to change the plane of your orbit.
All this acceleration lasts as long as you have light. So even if the sail only gives you 0.001g of acceleration, after three hours that's as much acceleration as a one second, one gee burn... but you have not used any fuel. This can carry on for many months, and at the end of that time you have as much "fuel" as you started with.
I actually agree that, barring powerful lasers to "push" the sail, solar sails are not an interstellar technology; they don't build up enough speed quickly enough. However it's not true that interstellar debris will slow the sail down substantially. The amount of interstellar material is just not enough to affect it. The density of the local interstallar medium is actually around 10^5 atoms per cubic metre. That is an *incredibly* hard vacuum. One hydrogen atom is about 1.67x10^-27 kg; a 1km square sail will hit 10^14 of these for each kilometre of travel. The sail will have to travel roughly 6x10^12km to encounter one kilo of hydrogen. Alpha Centauri is about 4x10^13km away; in getting there you'll encounter about six kilograms of material.
That's simplifying a bit, as matter is much denser than that before you hit the heliopause. On the other hand, once radiation pressure becomes negligible, turn your sail sideways to the interstellar medium and it won't hit *anything*.
Within a solar system, they are an incredibly efficient means of transportation, because they give constant acceleration with no fuel cost. Outside of the solar system, they are much less useful without the aid of lasers boosting your radiation pressure.
Robert Forward's "Rocheworld" (AKA Flight of the Dragonfly) is SF but covers interstellar use of solar sails fairly well. The SF short "The Wind from the Sun" by Arthur C Clarke (I think I have that title right) gives a good overview of use within a solar system.
The Cute Girl With Glasses is a well-known anime stereotype with an enthusiastic following. Unfortunately they seem to be getting less common...
If you know of a good solution usable in a commercial environment please let me know. The company I work for scans for viruses - the ISP I *used* to work for did not, mostly due to cost considerations.
These costs have to be recovered somehow; Internet access is a commodity in most respects, with paper-thin profit margins. Add AV protection, increase prices, lose customers. And of course you're endangering your common-carrier status...
Port-scanning is frequently illegal, and for customers charged by the megabyte (they do still exist) it increases their bills which is not widely appreciated. The port scans themselves can be problematical in a commercial environment as they cannot be distinguished from scans run by somebody who really *is* scanning for vulnerabilities for black hat purposes.
Net result - virus scanning is frequently not done for fairly solid (if weaselly) commercial reasons, particularly on bargain-basement plans. Port scanning is just not going to happen for legal reasons; it's far too risky.
For example, I sell you a virtual sword for $1. I've made $1 for that, but if I then shut down the game where the virtual sword exists, you no longer have access to that $1 "asset" and you can sue me for (effectively) stealing it from you.
One possible way around this is to code depreciation into the game engine - assets depreciate by 50% per annum and lose all value after 5 years. Until the 5 year mark the company will buy your virtual sword for its full depreciated value. If the depreciation is described up-front, before the purchase, there's no contractual basis to sue; the company has used assets in "maintaining" the virtual object and the depreciation simply reflects that. Such virtual property will have to appear on the company balance sheet as a liability until fully depreciated.
There are other reasons for these restrictions - once an item becomes your property rather than theirs, they can't freely change the object (whether it be the graphic model, or some other characteristics for balance purposes), restricting how the company can adjust the game they've written. The quality of the game may suffer as a result - if a munchkin item is released it can't be rendered harmless, and those who possess such items become disproportionately powerful. "Stealing" within the game starts to matter more, and the company may be forced to take on some law enforcement functions that they could really live without.
However, I suspect the main reason is just so the MMOG companies retain their freedom to pull the plug when they want to do so.
PJ
One of the few times I *really* wish I had modpoints...
I don't know if the above AC really *is* PJ (or just somebody speaking in her name), but it's quite true that Groklaw is owned by PJ, *not* by OSRM. PJ is employed by OSRM, but Groklaw is not affiliated with OSRM at all. When PJ was employed by OSRM, PJ made it quite clear that Groklaw would remain independent.
Guilt by association is not regarded as valid in most democracies.
I notice that this article is not referenced by Groklaw at the moment. If OSRM really did own Groklaw (they don't) and this really was intended as an exercise in FUD (insufficient evidence IMO) then we would be seeing this headlined in Groklaw, which it so far is not.
It probably *should* be, but it looks like PJ has chosen to ignore this in order to maintain independence in appearance as well as in fact.
Dune: Paul Atriedes is the Messiah!
Dune Messiah: But *really* being the Messiah is hard. Unfortunately it's necessary.
Children of Dune: Leto Paul's son, chooses to *really* be the Messiah after Dad chickens out.
God Emperor of Dune: This is why Dad chickened out.
Heretics and Chapter House I don't remember well enough for pithy summaries. I tend to ignore the Herbert/Anderson books here. They've struck me as even more overblown than Christopher Tolkien's followups.
The first was an old 386 with an AT case; I had no instructions for the motherboard and when putting it together once I cross-wired the power connectors and turbo switch. Turned it on, let the smoke out, turned it back on and rewired it correctly. It booted up correctly, although it always seemed a little slower after that.
The second was a fairly high-end DEC server-grade PC, about eight years ago. It had a dedicated port for a power management, with a connector *exactly* the same as a SCSI cable we were trying to hook up. We didn't know anything about the motherboard (didn't know about the power management, and didn't know whether it had onboard SCSI) so we hooked up a SCSI ribbon cable and turned it on.
We turned it off when we smelled smoke but the only damage was that one line on the SCSI cable melted its plastic covering.
None of the "adult" activities mentioned strike me as particularly interesting. And I have no kids, with no near-term plans of having any.
Personally I spent ten hours a day at work then go home and after dinner go in front of my computer, usually to play games. On weekends, it's not uncommon for me to game from 10am to 10pm.
There is an unsubtle qualitative difference between staring at a screen for work (usually reading and writing text) and playing games.
Some days I blow off the gaming and watch anime (AKA cartoons, another "childish thing") or read a book. (If you think anime are not cartoons, please look up the word "cartoon" in a good dictionary before protesting.)
In some ways this makes me the antithesis of the wage slave in the article - but on weekdays evening play times tend to be short. One hour between save points when I have an hour and a half to play means I either have to cut play short or stay up an extra half hour.
Actually my site isn't in a lot of danger. It's fairly dull. CmdrTaco will either laugh at you, or post it twice.
Getting enough memory expansion on a Zire to hold a decent amount of audio would be painfully expensive. The default 16MB will hold between 15 minutes and a couple of hours of audio depending on the audio quality; it's nowhere near the bottomless pit the iPod gives you.
The iPod is not successful only because of its looks or interface. It is successful because it's very good at what it does. I read a review of a bunch of MP3 players recently. The ones that held a decent amount of audio were very bulky; the ones that were compact held a pitiful amount of audio.
The iPod is compact, holds more audio than I will ever need, has a decent (and rechargeable) batttery life and a straightforward interface. The fact that it's "cool" is a stigma I'll live with (as a person who goes out of their way to avoid "cool" things).
The fact that it can be convinced to do other stuff is an added bonus; I bought mine so I could stop burning AA batteries on the portable CD player I was formerly carting around. For PDA stuff I have a PDA.
A company I used to work for decided at one point that all mobiles had to be "private", i.e. the company wouldn't pay for mobile phones any more.
One tech had handed in his phone and the rest of us were getting ready to do so when I made the mistake of querying the policy through our group manager. Basically "you do realise that we're all contemplating this policy joyfully because it means we won't be interrupted after hours, and if there's an outage you won't be able to reach us... right?"
The policy was quickly reversed - for on-call technical staff at least.
Nerds of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your girlfr... you have nothing to lose!
I usually use .??* for this. That doesn't match . or .. and it's very rare to have a file name of the form .x where x!=".".
It's also pretty easy to type, and works under pretty much every UNIX shell.
The lipolitics tic-tac-toe can be beaten quite easily; it looks like it's been programmed deterministically - so move center, bottom right, bottom left, then bottom center to win. Top right and bottom left can also be used as the beginning moves to win.
The only way to win is not to play the game, or to play against someone stupid.
I gave mine to my younger sister, and lent her a few games as well. Now Sony are selling games to two people rather than one.
Typically it's not the consoles that make a profit, but the games. By including backwards compatibility, Sony increase market share and retain a market for the older games. My N64 is retired and I would not buy a new game for it. My PS1 is at my sister's house... but I still buy PS1 games occasionally, because I can still play them on my PS2.
Whales do *not* eat algae.
Whales eat krill - small, shrimplike creatures. Krill eat algae. Less whales = more krill. More krill = *less* algae.
In tropical waters it's actually slightly more complicated; some tropical krill eat zooplankton as well as phytoplankton, which muddies the situation.
It's pretty much true about the paper. One thing that recycled paper does have going for it is that it's usually not bleached; production and use of chlorine is really nasty, environmentally speaking. But paper made from fast-growing plantation forests is very "good" for carbon levels. These forests do tend to leave behind rather acidic soils, which many plants don't like, and the forests themselves have terrible biodiversity ("green deserts")... but they do chew up that CO2.
1.) When characters cry, a giant stream of tears fly out.
Actually there are a few ways tears are shown in anime. The gushing geysers is one. When somebody is genuinely sad, rather than comically so, you'll usually see a much more subtle use of tears; water pooling, shimmering, at the bottom of the eyes... leaving a trace down the cheek. A person running past with a glittering of sunlight to show their scattered tears as they flee.
There are a few conventions used to show expression in anime, many of them borrowed from manga, others borrowed from early American animation. Knowing these conventions gives you a better idea of what's going on.
2.) Ridiculous facial expression change when they blush or say wow or say yay.
Following a tradition in Western animation here, actually. Flat cel tones can't carry expresions all that well (although I have seen some stunningly subtle expressions in anime).
Blushes (and so forth) are not always as obvious as you suggest either...
3.) Animes that are part comics, action, drama, tragedy is too common.
Difference in taste. I like the mix personally.
4.) Episodes are a waste of time. Half the animes can be compressed into outstanding 2 hr movies, look at Battle Angel & Ninja Scroll.
You've been watching the wrong anime. While most series have *some* filler, anime makes much more use of proper story arcs and character development than most U.S. series.
A series like Fruits Basket could not possibly be compressed into a two hour movie. They tried to compress Evangelion down for the first half of "Death and Rebirth" and the result was (IMO) a dismal, confusing mess if you hadn't seen the series beforehand.
Even the action series usually have a decent story arc that would render an attempt at compression useless.
5.) Random peace signs MUST go. Anime characters absolutely abuse it.
As others have said, that's "V" for Victory, not a peace sign. Sometimes they even *say* "Victory!". Think of it as a Japanese equivalent to a "thumbs up" sign - it's used about as often.
6.) Still frames. Artist gets lazy and you hear conversations, but you are staring at still frames.
It is annoying, and is basically a cost-cutting measure, but it's not really much less interesting than talking heads. I would prefer that they spend their animation budget where it matters.
7.) Overuse of robotics and cards.
I just don't see it with the cards. I can only think of two anime I've seen offhand that use cards extensively, and one of them is a marketing machine for selling the cards.
I sorta agree about the robots, but *real* robots, i.e. autonomous rather than piloted, are frequently used very sensitively.
8.) Ridiculous physics.
As distinct from Star Trek? Or pretty much any popular medium? Hard science is vanishingly rare in the media. If a movie gets half its physics right these days I count it as a decent attempt.