Actors get a certain amount of money from DVD sales, rebroadcast rights, etc, dictated on a sliding scale by the Screen Actors Guild. Eventually if an actor gets enough work, the residuals alone can (almost) pay the bills - assuming of course that you get enough roles to start getting a decent amount of income.
I can't speak for Wil, but I'd imagine having a reoccurring role on one of the most popular TV series ever probably generates a decent amount of income from residuals. Certainly for someone like Bruce Campbell, who's done tons of work over the years, he's probably decently well off.
I bought the 12.1" iBook, and run Photoshop CS on it. The biggest drawback isn't the horsepower of the machine, it's the size of the screen. You have to hide most of your palettes to get a decent-sized work area, and it still requires some squinting. Other than that both Dreamweaver and Photoshop run just fine on an iBook. I do highly recommend upgrading the RAM to 512MB, either through Apple or through a third-party dealer. 256MB isn't quite enough.
As for movie watching, you should have no problem getting at least 3 solid hours of battery life with the DVD player running. I routinely get 5 hours of battery life without using the CD drive, even when using wireless networks.
I'd used Macs for web development in a previous job, and had always liked OS X. I was ecstatic when iTunes was released for the PC, as it was the singularly best program for managing large music collections I'd ever seen.
When I got my new job, one of the first things I did is shell out for an iPod to replace my crappy car CD changer. The Apple design philosophy appealed to me, and the incredible ease-of-use of both iTunes and the iPod were a big factor.
Last month I bought an iBook - the fact that they dropped the price, bumped up the CPU speed, and added AirPort Express for free was enough to get me off the fence. I wanted a laptop that was lighter than my old Compaq which weighs more than Kirstie Allie after camping out at a Royal Fork for a week. The iBook was light, priced competitively, and had all the features I want.
I had been trying to get my WinXP Home laptop to connect to the shared files on my XP Pro desktop for days, and finally just gave up. The iBook not only saw the network, but just asked for the password to connect. That was it. No hastle, no fiddling with network setup, no hunting through poorly documented and frequently useless configuration pages. AirPort has no trouble connecting to any wireless network I can throw at it.
My next machine may well be a Mac. It runs the software I need to be productive, the UNIX underpinnings mean that I have not only all the UNIX tools I'm used to from vim to Apache, but I also have a beautiful and usable GUI to go with it.
I hated Macs before. The "classic" Mac OS never appealed to me in the slightest. But Mac OS X is a dream to use, from running Photoshop to using it as a test server with the built-in copy of Apache.
OS X just "gets it". It is by far the best OS I've used, and iTunes gives Windows users a preview of how well Mac software works. The iPod and iTunes are the perfect "gateway drug" into full-fledged Mac addiction. Macs have always been a niche product, and Apple has always been a niche retailer. But if the iPod helps drive even a small number of PC users towards the Apple platform, it's a net gain to Apple on top of the incredibly strong sales of the iPod line.
I'd imagine that whatever wreckage remains is in very small chunks in very deep water. Even if we could find and recover it, there'd be almost nothing left. Reentry tends to do a very good job of scattering debris for miles - imagine if Columbia had broken up over the Pacific rather than over Texas.
Even with Challenger recovery took a long time, and that was a craft that hadn't come down from orbit and many of the pieces landed in relatively shallow water. Trying to pull the pieces of a Russian submarine from the deep ocean after it had gone through reentry probably wouldn't have provided enough information to justify the costs.
Your best options are at the University of Minnesota, which is about a 4 hour drive, or the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, about a 5 hour drive. Either one will have doctors who are trained in the treatment of infectious diseases. I would first visit the hospital in Fargo and make sure you fill out a HIPAA release so that they can forward your records onto the appropriate hospitals.
It's clear you have an advanced infection that is not responding well to various treatments. The risks of developing an antibiotic resistant infection is very high with prolonged use of drugs like ciprofloxin.
If you need help, my cousin is a doctor at the U of M (in oncology/hemotology) who would be able to at least get you in touch with the right people there.
Don't be so sure, Wikipedia has been cited in a few court cases already, and I'm sure a blogger like Eugene Volokh (who already has an established legal career) would carry some weight.
It's not like all blogs are LiveJournals written by angst-ridden teenage goths...
The problem is that the mainstream media tries to paint itself as some kind of oracle of information. The "blogosphere" is an organic system in that there is no official channel for information. So for instance, when Dan Rather stated to the world that the Bush National Guard documents were proof that Bush was AWOL, where were the dissenting voices? Where was the actual analysis?
Instead what we got was CBS news using blatant forgeries, selectively shopping them around to "experts" and pushing a story that doesn't even pass the smell test. The Bush docs story stunk to high heaven, and it took bloggers a matter of hours to determine that CBS lied through their teeth. Bloggers like those at Powerline devastated CBS' story because the media was not willing to do the ground work they should have. Whether that was through sheer laziness or bias I will leave as an exercise to the reader.
The mainstream media doesn't do reporting anymore. The blogosphere allows for a lot of crap, but through that crap comes a lot of valuable research. How many Iraqis are allowed to give their opinions on the nightly newscasts? Yet I can chose any number of Iraqi blogs and get a point of view that I would never see on the evening newscast - and because of it I've learned things about Iraqi culture and the situation there that the media would never have time to delve into.
It would be much better if those crying about the lack of journalistic standards with bloggers were any better - but the only thing that seems to separate journalists from bloggers these days is that bloggers have a greater tendency to check their sources when called and don't carry around the façade of officious objectivity like a shield.
Quite frankly, I give more credence to Glenn Reynolds than I do to Jayson Blair, Howell Raines, Andrew Gilligan, or Dan Rather - all of whom have shown that the combination of arrogance and groupthink in the mainstream media is far more pernicious than the open biases of bloggers.
Even though I'm a Bush-voting Republican (and proud of it!) and think the French are mainly cheese-eating surrender monkeys, I'll give France one thing: they have the best nuclear power program in the world.
Unlike the US which went with several designs for nuclear reactors, none of which was quite like the other, the French bought the design for Pressurized Water Reactors from Westinghouse in the US and built 56 reactors, all of the same design and all using interchangable parts and systems. That way problems in one reactor can be fixed systemwide using the same techniques.
France gets over 75% of their power from cheap nuclear energy. Electric power in France from nuclear sources is about 3 Euro cents/kWh, which is very competitive and less than half of the US average cost for electricity.
I don't give France credit for much, but the way in which the French have run their nuclear program is a model for the rest of the world. France is far less dependent on foreign energy for power than most countries, and their costs are lower - and there has not been a major nuclear accident in France since the program began.
If we did something similar with more efficient breeder reactors, we could reduce pollution, reduce energy costs, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
McCain was the rep. frontrunner, until a whisper campaign about his "mentally disabled black daughter" killed his hopes. The whispers of course didn't mention that she was adopted from Somalia or some country, the implied message was McCain knocked boots with a crack whore.
First of all, I was a McCain supporter in 2000 (and really, really, really want him to run in 2008).
Secondly, McCain's campaign cratered because he had some logistical problems, he insulted members of the Republican base (which is not a smart thing to do in a primary even if I agreed with some of it), and he had a tough time fundraising which limited his ability to compete. The attacks against him didn't do much, his campaign was already troubled long before then.
Yes, the American people really haven't gotten enough Bush bashing. I mean, c'mon, we haven't even seen Al Franken's Bush Is The Love Child Of Hitler and Tokyo Rose or Jim Hightower's Bush Kidnapped The Linbergh Baby or MoveOn.org's Bush Enjoys Raping Kittens, Small Children ad yet.
Here's what's interesting - note how the successful political campaigns usually say something about their candidate rather than just smear the other guy. Like what has John Kerry been doing for the last 20 years. Where are his major legislative accomplishments. He's had two decades in the Senate, let's see what he's done? As long as we're on it, let's see what his position is on Iraq. What would he do now to end the violence there? How would he fight terrorism? What would he do in Darfur? How will he stop the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons? How will he contain North Korea?
Hell, the Democrats should be doing that sort of thing regardless. I know it's a shock to some, but not everyone in America hates Bush. Some of us (gasp!) actually think he's done rather well given the situation he's had to work with. And some of us do so because we've actually taken the time to do our homework.
Nope, instead just bash Bush. There's a real winning strategy.
Hint, when the server recovers from being Slashdotted, take a look at McGovern's "Morning in America" ads and compare them to the ads Kerry is running. Note McGovern's electoral successes. Look at Mondale's ads against Reagan. Note how well he did.
Then note why campaigns that are just referendums against a relatively popular incumbant but offer no information on the challenger end up failing miserably.
I know this is off topic, but I cannot stand when people make such arguments as the one you just made.
The war in Iraq was not a dichotomy in which we got to war and Iraqi civilians die or we don't and Iraqi civilians live. It was a choice between going to war and risking the lives of thousands of Iraqis or not and leaving 25 million to the whims of Saddam. Even the most conservative estimates had Saddam killing tens of thousands of Iraqis every year. Amnesty International estimated 24,000 dead Iraqis every year from a combination of Saddam Hussein and crippling sanctions.
So, we could go to Mars and leave 25 million people in abject tyranny at the hands of a crazed madman with ambitions to become the next Saladin, or we could remove that dictator and give the Iraqi people a chance at freedom and save far more lives than were lost.
This sort of simplistic dichotomy on the war is exceptionally disgusting, akin to Holocaust denial. I've met Iraqis who have suffered under Saddam Hussein, and they will all tell you that as bad as Iraq is now, the horror of living under Saddam's totalitarianism was far worse.
Besides, who knows - in 30 years we could be launching Mars missions from the Baghdad Cosmodrome thanks to an Iraqi scientist who beforehand would have been working on designs for dirty bombs or chemical munitions.
It is possible to create a remastered Windows XP installation CD containing custom drivers for SATA cards - I used one to install XP on one of my nForce2 boxen.
You can also slipstream in other drivers/updates as well.
You'd have to snort a shell in order to inhale enough depleted uranium to cause significant kidney damage. 96% of DU is passed through the body within 24 hours. In order to cause any significant health risks you'd have to inhale literally grams of the substance, and there are plenty of other heavy metals on the battlefield that would kill you before the DU would.
There is no evidence of permanent kidney or lung damage to individuals exposed to aerosolized DU, including those with retained shrapnel.
For instance, Soviet tanks have significant amount of radium, asbestos, and dioxins in their construction. In fact, I'd wager that most of the toxicity and radioactivity comes from the Soviet-era military hardware that was blown up rather than the weapons used in their destruction.
There is absolutely no credible epidemological evidence which supports the contention of significant health risks from DU exposure. Even if one accepts that there have been increases in birth defects near sites where DU has been used correlation does not equal causation. Until someone can show that the symptoms being reported are A:) not skewed and B:) directly related to DU rather than other environmental factors, there is no credible scientific evidence that indicates such a connection.
The arguments about how DU has supposedly caused Gulf War Syndrome, etc, are not borne out by any legitimate medical studies. In fact, those studies that have been done have concluded that the use of DU ammunition does not pose a health risk.
"The fact that there is no evidence of an association between exposures sometimes high and lasting since the beginning of the uranium industry and health damages such as bone cancer, lymphatic or other forms of leukemia shows that these diseases as a consequence of an uranium exposure are either not present or very exceptional."
"...because DU is only weakly radioactive, very large amounts of dust (on the order of grams) would have to be inhaled for the additional risk of lung cancer to be detectable in an exposed group. Risks for other radiation-induced cancers, including leukaemia, are considered to be very much lower than for lung cancer."
"The radiological hazard is likely to be very small. No increase of leukemia or other cancers has been established following exposure to uranium or DU."
Studies of DU exposuring during the NATO action in Kosovo found that DU does not remain in the bloodstream long enough to cause any significant health risks.
DU does emit alpha radiation, which decreases in power exponentially with distance. There is absolutely no credible scientific evidence that connects depleted uranium to "Gulf War syndrome" or any other health problems. The World Health Organization and the European Union are far more credible sources than an organization that is clearly biased in favor of the contention that DU poses a health risk in spite of the clear evidence against such a contention.
Apparently the definition of "censored" for this site are "stories that match our left-leaning biases".
Now, I personally think the media is liberal, and I've done the studies to prove it (a few nights with Lexis-Nexis is enough), but this kind of thing represents a fringe view of the world. Did the authors of this list ever consider that maybe the reasons these "stories" didn't get reported are because they have no basis in fact?
Look, this kind of stuff irks the hell out of me. Telling us that a story that doesn't even pass the smell test has somehow been "censored" is an insult to our critical thinking skills. It's the same old crap as they people who say that the government is keeping aliens on ice at Area 51 right next to the engine that runs on water and the Ark of the Covenant.
Given that Slashdot's audience is supposed to be people with critical thinking skills, I would hope that tripe like this would be seen for what it is. "Censored" my ass!
Chances are you were running your X server with unaccelerated drivers - which offloads all the hard work to the CPU. In Panther, Quartz Extreme allows the transform and lighting engine of your GPU do all the hard work, leaving the CPU for things that a CPU should be doing it.
Properly implemented and accelerated, eye candy does not have the take away from CPU power and can greatly enhance usability - as it does with OSX.
Previously, transparency was implemented by essential taking a bitmap of what should show through underneath - try turning on transparency on a terminal window and you'd see only the desktop background rather than a live representation of what was underneath.
True transparency means that if you were to have a terminal window running above an animation or another terminal you will get a live representation of whatever's going on underneath.
Not only that, but Florida is close to the Equator, so that a spacecraft can use some of the natural momentum of the Earth to help get it in orbit. Launching westward would mean you'd have to burn off your inherited rotation from the planet along with obtaining orbital velocity.
There isn't a spot on Earth that doesn't have some kind of natural disaster that could threaten a program this large over a long enough timescale.
I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but it's worth it.
I'm sick of all the outright lies about the war in Iraq coming from the anti-war left. It's disgusting. Saddam Hussein was not a nice guy. Iraq was not Disneyland before the war. It was a totalitarian hellhole in which people were getting killed by the thousands. Talk to an Iraqi sometime. They will tell you stories about how on their sister's wedding night a drunk Uday Hussein showed up and decided to rape her death and slit the throat of the groom. These weren't isolated incidents, they happened every day.
What the hell, right? So what if ~1000 American kids are dead and 10,000+ are mangled. So what if tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead and many more are mangled. So what if we jail Iraqi resistance fighters by the thousands and torture people routinely? What's the big deal? They're only people, right?!:-(
Only 6,000 have been "wounded" and only a fraction of those are serious wounds. Saying that 10,000+ were "mangled" is an outright lie.
Let's take the highest number of wartime civilian casualties in Iraq: right around 12,000.
Let's take the lowest figure for the number of Iraqis killed each year by Saddam Hussein: 24,000.
That's at least 12,000 lives saved in Iraq, and that figure is likely too low by at least half.
If you're going to talk about the morality of war, don't gloss over the costs of inaction.
I'd say Britain doesn't count; Blair is Bush's poodle and he was willing to do or say anything to curry favor with his masters.
Nice ad hominem attack, but have you ever considered that maybe MI6 has better intelligence than we do and believed that Hussein was a threat. Have you ever tried reading the Butler Report that said that there was no evidence of politicization of British Intelligence?
I'd guess no, because that would challenge your worldview.
This kind of leftist cant is both prima facie ridiculous, but it crowds out legitimate criticism of the war by those who don't get their rocks off by reading Chomsky. If you're going to increase intelligent public discourse, calling someone a "poodle" for having an informed opinion that you don't like is not the way to go about it.
Apparently the left out the part about "must have absolutely no soul or common decency".
Wait, it says "at least 6 years of relevant litigation experience in a nationally recognized law firm and/or an in-house legal department" - I suppose that's essentially saying the same thing.
I know this has been said a thousand times before, but network apps are going to be the wave of the future. Look at GMail... that's better than a lot of mail clients out there, and thanks to its minimalist interface it's not all that slow on a decent connection. Already your mail application is portable to any machine with a browser.
With XUL and XAML fighting for market dominance, it's clear that the future of computing lies with small, portable, web-based applications for particular purposes. GMail is just one example of this trend.
The first wave of network apps were horrendous, but they were ahead of their time. Now that bandwidth, memory, and CPU power has gone up, the idea of composing your emails online or even creating documents online is less farfetched than it was a few years ago. Granted, there won't be a web-based 3D modelling application coming around any time soon, and there will always be a place for desktop applications, but even those will be increasingly dependent on networked tools. Imagine OpenOffice with Google search built in to the application - you could pull an RSS feed of Google results on any topic right from the UI. Even in those spaces where web apps aren't yet ready for primetime they'll still be an increasingly important suppliment to traditional applications.
What's interesting is that these apps are better suited to the UNIX philosophy - small and easy to interconnect apps rather than the monolithic feature bloat of traditional Windows programming. Even Microsoft is starting to realize that network apps are going to be a more important part of 21st Century computing, which is why they're trying to embrace and extend this sphere by trying to compete with services like Google and trying to get XAML as the standard for web app development.
The advantage of this over ISR is that ISR requires a lot of new technologies, while web-apps require a browser and standards like CSS, XML, XHTML, and JavaScript. With even Apple's Dashboard embracing this concept, my money is on the tools we have now for creating web apps rather than another technology that reinvents the wheel.
Slashdot Mirror
Actors get a certain amount of money from DVD sales, rebroadcast rights, etc, dictated on a sliding scale by the Screen Actors Guild. Eventually if an actor gets enough work, the residuals alone can (almost) pay the bills - assuming of course that you get enough roles to start getting a decent amount of income.
I can't speak for Wil, but I'd imagine having a reoccurring role on one of the most popular TV series ever probably generates a decent amount of income from residuals. Certainly for someone like Bruce Campbell, who's done tons of work over the years, he's probably decently well off.
I bought the 12.1" iBook, and run Photoshop CS on it. The biggest drawback isn't the horsepower of the machine, it's the size of the screen. You have to hide most of your palettes to get a decent-sized work area, and it still requires some squinting. Other than that both Dreamweaver and Photoshop run just fine on an iBook. I do highly recommend upgrading the RAM to 512MB, either through Apple or through a third-party dealer. 256MB isn't quite enough.
As for movie watching, you should have no problem getting at least 3 solid hours of battery life with the DVD player running. I routinely get 5 hours of battery life without using the CD drive, even when using wireless networks.
I'd used Macs for web development in a previous job, and had always liked OS X. I was ecstatic when iTunes was released for the PC, as it was the singularly best program for managing large music collections I'd ever seen.
When I got my new job, one of the first things I did is shell out for an iPod to replace my crappy car CD changer. The Apple design philosophy appealed to me, and the incredible ease-of-use of both iTunes and the iPod were a big factor.
Last month I bought an iBook - the fact that they dropped the price, bumped up the CPU speed, and added AirPort Express for free was enough to get me off the fence. I wanted a laptop that was lighter than my old Compaq which weighs more than Kirstie Allie after camping out at a Royal Fork for a week. The iBook was light, priced competitively, and had all the features I want.
I had been trying to get my WinXP Home laptop to connect to the shared files on my XP Pro desktop for days, and finally just gave up. The iBook not only saw the network, but just asked for the password to connect. That was it. No hastle, no fiddling with network setup, no hunting through poorly documented and frequently useless configuration pages. AirPort has no trouble connecting to any wireless network I can throw at it.
My next machine may well be a Mac. It runs the software I need to be productive, the UNIX underpinnings mean that I have not only all the UNIX tools I'm used to from vim to Apache, but I also have a beautiful and usable GUI to go with it.
I hated Macs before. The "classic" Mac OS never appealed to me in the slightest. But Mac OS X is a dream to use, from running Photoshop to using it as a test server with the built-in copy of Apache.
OS X just "gets it". It is by far the best OS I've used, and iTunes gives Windows users a preview of how well Mac software works. The iPod and iTunes are the perfect "gateway drug" into full-fledged Mac addiction. Macs have always been a niche product, and Apple has always been a niche retailer. But if the iPod helps drive even a small number of PC users towards the Apple platform, it's a net gain to Apple on top of the incredibly strong sales of the iPod line.
I'd imagine that whatever wreckage remains is in very small chunks in very deep water. Even if we could find and recover it, there'd be almost nothing left. Reentry tends to do a very good job of scattering debris for miles - imagine if Columbia had broken up over the Pacific rather than over Texas.
Even with Challenger recovery took a long time, and that was a craft that hadn't come down from orbit and many of the pieces landed in relatively shallow water. Trying to pull the pieces of a Russian submarine from the deep ocean after it had gone through reentry probably wouldn't have provided enough information to justify the costs.
You need to seek qualified medical treatment.
Your best options are at the University of Minnesota, which is about a 4 hour drive, or the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, about a 5 hour drive. Either one will have doctors who are trained in the treatment of infectious diseases. I would first visit the hospital in Fargo and make sure you fill out a HIPAA release so that they can forward your records onto the appropriate hospitals.
It's clear you have an advanced infection that is not responding well to various treatments. The risks of developing an antibiotic resistant infection is very high with prolonged use of drugs like ciprofloxin.
If you need help, my cousin is a doctor at the U of M (in oncology/hemotology) who would be able to at least get you in touch with the right people there.
Don't be so sure, Wikipedia has been cited in a few court cases already, and I'm sure a blogger like Eugene Volokh (who already has an established legal career) would carry some weight.
It's not like all blogs are LiveJournals written by angst-ridden teenage goths...
The problem is that the mainstream media tries to paint itself as some kind of oracle of information. The "blogosphere" is an organic system in that there is no official channel for information. So for instance, when Dan Rather stated to the world that the Bush National Guard documents were proof that Bush was AWOL, where were the dissenting voices? Where was the actual analysis?
Instead what we got was CBS news using blatant forgeries, selectively shopping them around to "experts" and pushing a story that doesn't even pass the smell test. The Bush docs story stunk to high heaven, and it took bloggers a matter of hours to determine that CBS lied through their teeth. Bloggers like those at Powerline devastated CBS' story because the media was not willing to do the ground work they should have. Whether that was through sheer laziness or bias I will leave as an exercise to the reader.
The mainstream media doesn't do reporting anymore. The blogosphere allows for a lot of crap, but through that crap comes a lot of valuable research. How many Iraqis are allowed to give their opinions on the nightly newscasts? Yet I can chose any number of Iraqi blogs and get a point of view that I would never see on the evening newscast - and because of it I've learned things about Iraqi culture and the situation there that the media would never have time to delve into.
It would be much better if those crying about the lack of journalistic standards with bloggers were any better - but the only thing that seems to separate journalists from bloggers these days is that bloggers have a greater tendency to check their sources when called and don't carry around the façade of officious objectivity like a shield.
Quite frankly, I give more credence to Glenn Reynolds than I do to Jayson Blair, Howell Raines, Andrew Gilligan, or Dan Rather - all of whom have shown that the combination of arrogance and groupthink in the mainstream media is far more pernicious than the open biases of bloggers.
Even though I'm a Bush-voting Republican (and proud of it!) and think the French are mainly cheese-eating surrender monkeys, I'll give France one thing: they have the best nuclear power program in the world.
Unlike the US which went with several designs for nuclear reactors, none of which was quite like the other, the French bought the design for Pressurized Water Reactors from Westinghouse in the US and built 56 reactors, all of the same design and all using interchangable parts and systems. That way problems in one reactor can be fixed systemwide using the same techniques.
France gets over 75% of their power from cheap nuclear energy. Electric power in France from nuclear sources is about 3 Euro cents/kWh, which is very competitive and less than half of the US average cost for electricity.
France reprocesses used nuclear fuel to create new fuel and maximize efficiency. That produces less waste and increases overall efficiency. The French also found that it's psychologically better to say that waste is being "stocked" rather than disposed of.
I don't give France credit for much, but the way in which the French have run their nuclear program is a model for the rest of the world. France is far less dependent on foreign energy for power than most countries, and their costs are lower - and there has not been a major nuclear accident in France since the program began.
If we did something similar with more efficient breeder reactors, we could reduce pollution, reduce energy costs, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
Besides, we can't let the French beat us, can we?
Are you sure it's wise to point people to a browser that's A:) radically out of date B:) slow and C:) no longer supported in any way?
If you're looking for an alternate browser besides Mozilla, Opera, and Safari, there are plenty of better choices such as Konqueror or Omniweb.
First of all, I was a McCain supporter in 2000 (and really, really, really want him to run in 2008).
Secondly, McCain's campaign cratered because he had some logistical problems, he insulted members of the Republican base (which is not a smart thing to do in a primary even if I agreed with some of it), and he had a tough time fundraising which limited his ability to compete. The attacks against him didn't do much, his campaign was already troubled long before then.
Yes, the American people really haven't gotten enough Bush bashing. I mean, c'mon, we haven't even seen Al Franken's Bush Is The Love Child Of Hitler and Tokyo Rose or Jim Hightower's Bush Kidnapped The Linbergh Baby or MoveOn.org's Bush Enjoys Raping Kittens, Small Children ad yet.
Here's what's interesting - note how the successful political campaigns usually say something about their candidate rather than just smear the other guy. Like what has John Kerry been doing for the last 20 years. Where are his major legislative accomplishments. He's had two decades in the Senate, let's see what he's done? As long as we're on it, let's see what his position is on Iraq. What would he do now to end the violence there? How would he fight terrorism? What would he do in Darfur? How will he stop the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons? How will he contain North Korea?
Hell, the Democrats should be doing that sort of thing regardless. I know it's a shock to some, but not everyone in America hates Bush. Some of us (gasp!) actually think he's done rather well given the situation he's had to work with. And some of us do so because we've actually taken the time to do our homework.
Nope, instead just bash Bush. There's a real winning strategy.
Hint, when the server recovers from being Slashdotted, take a look at McGovern's "Morning in America" ads and compare them to the ads Kerry is running. Note McGovern's electoral successes. Look at Mondale's ads against Reagan. Note how well he did.
Then note why campaigns that are just referendums against a relatively popular incumbant but offer no information on the challenger end up failing miserably.
I know this is off topic, but I cannot stand when people make such arguments as the one you just made.
The war in Iraq was not a dichotomy in which we got to war and Iraqi civilians die or we don't and Iraqi civilians live. It was a choice between going to war and risking the lives of thousands of Iraqis or not and leaving 25 million to the whims of Saddam. Even the most conservative estimates had Saddam killing tens of thousands of Iraqis every year. Amnesty International estimated 24,000 dead Iraqis every year from a combination of Saddam Hussein and crippling sanctions.
So, we could go to Mars and leave 25 million people in abject tyranny at the hands of a crazed madman with ambitions to become the next Saladin, or we could remove that dictator and give the Iraqi people a chance at freedom and save far more lives than were lost.
This sort of simplistic dichotomy on the war is exceptionally disgusting, akin to Holocaust denial. I've met Iraqis who have suffered under Saddam Hussein, and they will all tell you that as bad as Iraq is now, the horror of living under Saddam's totalitarianism was far worse.
Besides, who knows - in 30 years we could be launching Mars missions from the Baghdad Cosmodrome thanks to an Iraqi scientist who beforehand would have been working on designs for dirty bombs or chemical munitions.
It is possible to create a remastered Windows XP installation CD containing custom drivers for SATA cards - I used one to install XP on one of my nForce2 boxen.
You can also slipstream in other drivers/updates as well.
You'd have to snort a shell in order to inhale enough depleted uranium to cause significant kidney damage. 96% of DU is passed through the body within 24 hours. In order to cause any significant health risks you'd have to inhale literally grams of the substance, and there are plenty of other heavy metals on the battlefield that would kill you before the DU would.
As The American College of Emergency Physicians says this about DU exposure:
For instance, Soviet tanks have significant amount of radium, asbestos, and dioxins in their construction. In fact, I'd wager that most of the toxicity and radioactivity comes from the Soviet-era military hardware that was blown up rather than the weapons used in their destruction.
There is absolutely no credible epidemological evidence which supports the contention of significant health risks from DU exposure. Even if one accepts that there have been increases in birth defects near sites where DU has been used correlation does not equal causation. Until someone can show that the symptoms being reported are A:) not skewed and B:) directly related to DU rather than other environmental factors, there is no credible scientific evidence that indicates such a connection.
The arguments about how DU has supposedly caused Gulf War Syndrome, etc, are not borne out by any legitimate medical studies. In fact, those studies that have been done have concluded that the use of DU ammunition does not pose a health risk.
For example, the European Union found this: (PDF link)
The World Health Organization had this to say:
They also report this in their findings on DU exposure: (PDF link)
Studies of DU exposuring during the NATO action in Kosovo found that DU does not remain in the bloodstream long enough to cause any significant health risks.
DU does emit alpha radiation, which decreases in power exponentially with distance. There is absolutely no credible scientific evidence that connects depleted uranium to "Gulf War syndrome" or any other health problems. The World Health Organization and the European Union are far more credible sources than an organization that is clearly biased in favor of the contention that DU poses a health risk in spite of the clear evidence against such a contention.
Apparently the definition of "censored" for this site are "stories that match our left-leaning biases".
Now, I personally think the media is liberal, and I've done the studies to prove it (a few nights with Lexis-Nexis is enough), but this kind of thing represents a fringe view of the world. Did the authors of this list ever consider that maybe the reasons these "stories" didn't get reported are because they have no basis in fact?
Take reinstating the draft for example. Did the authors of that list ever consider the facts that the Army has met and exceeding its recruiting goals, that the Secretary of Defense has said he doesn't want a draft and the Joint Chiefs of Staff have said the same thing repeatedly? Did they ever consider that the bill to reintroduce the draft came from a group of anti-war congressman as a way of scaring people and was swiftly killed in committee and had no chance of ever passing?
Look, this kind of stuff irks the hell out of me. Telling us that a story that doesn't even pass the smell test has somehow been "censored" is an insult to our critical thinking skills. It's the same old crap as they people who say that the government is keeping aliens on ice at Area 51 right next to the engine that runs on water and the Ark of the Covenant.
Given that Slashdot's audience is supposed to be people with critical thinking skills, I would hope that tripe like this would be seen for what it is. "Censored" my ass!
Chances are you were running your X server with unaccelerated drivers - which offloads all the hard work to the CPU. In Panther, Quartz Extreme allows the transform and lighting engine of your GPU do all the hard work, leaving the CPU for things that a CPU should be doing it.
Properly implemented and accelerated, eye candy does not have the take away from CPU power and can greatly enhance usability - as it does with OSX.
Previously, transparency was implemented by essential taking a bitmap of what should show through underneath - try turning on transparency on a terminal window and you'd see only the desktop background rather than a live representation of what was underneath.
True transparency means that if you were to have a terminal window running above an animation or another terminal you will get a live representation of whatever's going on underneath.
Not only that, but Florida is close to the Equator, so that a spacecraft can use some of the natural momentum of the Earth to help get it in orbit. Launching westward would mean you'd have to burn off your inherited rotation from the planet along with obtaining orbital velocity.
There isn't a spot on Earth that doesn't have some kind of natural disaster that could threaten a program this large over a long enough timescale.
I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but it's worth it.
I'm sick of all the outright lies about the war in Iraq coming from the anti-war left. It's disgusting. Saddam Hussein was not a nice guy. Iraq was not Disneyland before the war. It was a totalitarian hellhole in which people were getting killed by the thousands. Talk to an Iraqi sometime. They will tell you stories about how on their sister's wedding night a drunk Uday Hussein showed up and decided to rape her death and slit the throat of the groom. These weren't isolated incidents, they happened every day.
Only 6,000 have been "wounded" and only a fraction of those are serious wounds. Saying that 10,000+ were "mangled" is an outright lie. Let's take the highest number of wartime civilian casualties in Iraq: right around 12,000. Let's take the lowest figure for the number of Iraqis killed each year by Saddam Hussein: 24,000. That's at least 12,000 lives saved in Iraq, and that figure is likely too low by at least half. If you're going to talk about the morality of war, don't gloss over the costs of inaction. Nice ad hominem attack, but have you ever considered that maybe MI6 has better intelligence than we do and believed that Hussein was a threat. Have you ever tried reading the Butler Report that said that there was no evidence of politicization of British Intelligence? I'd guess no, because that would challenge your worldview. This kind of leftist cant is both prima facie ridiculous, but it crowds out legitimate criticism of the war by those who don't get their rocks off by reading Chomsky. If you're going to increase intelligent public discourse, calling someone a "poodle" for having an informed opinion that you don't like is not the way to go about it.Apparently the left out the part about "must have absolutely no soul or common decency".
Wait, it says "at least 6 years of relevant litigation experience in a nationally recognized law firm and/or an in-house legal department" - I suppose that's essentially saying the same thing.
ComputerWorld confirms: VAX is dying
In all seriousness, the fact that VAX is still around is a testament to how damn well engineered those machines are.
I know this has been said a thousand times before, but network apps are going to be the wave of the future. Look at GMail... that's better than a lot of mail clients out there, and thanks to its minimalist interface it's not all that slow on a decent connection. Already your mail application is portable to any machine with a browser.
With XUL and XAML fighting for market dominance, it's clear that the future of computing lies with small, portable, web-based applications for particular purposes. GMail is just one example of this trend.
The first wave of network apps were horrendous, but they were ahead of their time. Now that bandwidth, memory, and CPU power has gone up, the idea of composing your emails online or even creating documents online is less farfetched than it was a few years ago. Granted, there won't be a web-based 3D modelling application coming around any time soon, and there will always be a place for desktop applications, but even those will be increasingly dependent on networked tools. Imagine OpenOffice with Google search built in to the application - you could pull an RSS feed of Google results on any topic right from the UI. Even in those spaces where web apps aren't yet ready for primetime they'll still be an increasingly important suppliment to traditional applications.
What's interesting is that these apps are better suited to the UNIX philosophy - small and easy to interconnect apps rather than the monolithic feature bloat of traditional Windows programming. Even Microsoft is starting to realize that network apps are going to be a more important part of 21st Century computing, which is why they're trying to embrace and extend this sphere by trying to compete with services like Google and trying to get XAML as the standard for web app development.
The advantage of this over ISR is that ISR requires a lot of new technologies, while web-apps require a browser and standards like CSS, XML, XHTML, and JavaScript. With even Apple's Dashboard embracing this concept, my money is on the tools we have now for creating web apps rather than another technology that reinvents the wheel.
Only 10 disks? What, you think all that can fit in only 47GB?
Now, if they had the 1000 disk Blu-Ray set and some really nice compression you may be onto something...
Especially if you're doing something with high-resolution photogrammatry, you can easily burn up a couple gigs in textures for one scene alone...