It wasn't a volcano, it was possibly several volcanos. Or, more likely a super volcano.
The already sited Yellowstone Caldera, if it were to blow again, would be just as bad or worse than a large asteroid impact.
I'm sure you've seen photos of St. Helens eruption? Multiply that by many thousands of times. Such an event would cause global devastation and do a fairly efficient job of destroying most of the life on Earth.
This is not crap. It's happened before. Many times. Life on this planet is a lot more delicate than some think, and it doesn't take much to screw it up.
"Plenty, if you market a program for a particular use, or are in a position to control how a program is used, or have reason to know it will be abused."
Tobacco, guns, and numerous other implements in our society fit this description. Even fast-food.
P2P is a file transfer protocal. Let's be clear on this. P2P IS A FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL. Just like ftp, smtp, http, etc., these are all just ways to facilitate transferring data from point a to point b.
P2P has nothing to do with "piracy". Nor was it's original intent "piracy". No more than http (warez sites, anyone?).
Just because P2P is the flavor of the month when it comes to ALLEGED copyright infringement activity does not mean the entire protocal and any software that uses it should be illegal.
By that reasoning, guns should be made illegal. Guns are used in a large amount of the murders in this country.
Fast-food, indeed all junk-food, should be illegal because there is a high correlation between consuming such foods and heart disease, the number one killer in America.
"Courts as a rule don't think in terms of abstractions, but of actions and consequences in the real world."
For our sake I certainly hope not. Technology is often about the abstract. There are also plenty of abstract laws out there. Freedom itself is an abstract concept, with diferent people having different ideas about what it means.
If that were true then we better get the hell out of here now before this place becomes a fear-based right-wing corporate dictatorship!
Oh...yeah.:(
~X~ I heard tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
No, if this decision goes badly the US will become a technological backwater. Why, because the decision will give acts like the Induce Act, DMCA, and the new SR96 (not sure if I have that one right) legs to stand on. Technological innovations regarding communications in all forms would come to a screeching halt as ridiculous measure are built into these devices.
But, most of these devices are not built in the US. They are built overseas. So these acts will have a direct influence on these foriegn economies. Either their infrastructures would have to adapt to pass US laws for importing, or they just stop selling to the US.
More than likely, I think they eventually might stop selling to the US, as China and India are advancing at record speeds and have 4 to 5 billion people between them. They also don't have draconian tech laws.
A win for the Media Corps in this case would be a major loss to the US in general.
The images of the landing site were not repeated. They are different images.
Put them in a movie and you'll see what I'm talking about. There's also some sort of 'fat snowflakes" that are falling at the landing site. One of them even hits the camera and then blows off.
I don't really know what they are, but "fat snowflakes" is what they look like.
This person also has never taken a few hard knocks that life can deal such as:
Trying to support a family when you lose your job in a terrible job market and then being diagnosed with cancer which requires expensive treatments and causes a lack of functionality to prevent you from getting a new job even if one was available.
Or getting into a car accident that leaves you paralyzed from the neck down preventing you from attaining a job.
Or having a stroke, or any number of other calamities that may befall someone in this lovely little tradgedy we call life.
It's easy to say "you're all a bunch of lazy fucking leeches" when things in your life are rosy.
Pray that reality never visits with a big smile and heaping pile of "you're fucked".
Prime example, the Digital Rebel. Cannon deliberately disabled some features that this camera could handle so that it wouldn't compete with the 10D. If you wanted those features, they wanted you to pay $500 more.
Unfortunately for them, they underestimated the desire of the consumers for pushing the limits. A guy in Russia realized that they were using a pc-dos based OS, hacked around a bit, and discovered all the little goodies packed away in the camera.
I've been attempting to discover the intricacies of the D70. Though I've managed to figure out a lot of info so far about the camera, deciphering the firmware is more of a challenge (uses two different processors).
I believe that alot of features can be added to comera's if the firware was open. But it's not likely to happen. After all, why would a company want to give up making $500 for a couple lines of assembler code?
There are some strange things that appear at the landing site.
If you take the better quality images and sticth them to gether into a animation, you'll notice that for the most part there are just some slight changes in jpeg artifacts.
But if you watch, you will see some things flit down and then back up again. They're not artifacts of compression. It almost looks like some fat snow flakes (other than they fact they go up again.
Not really going to know what they are until we get some better images.
But the one really really strange one is from the side camera at the landing site (the one with the light illuminating the ground). There are three frames where something lands on the lower left of the camera, and then takes off. Possibly one of the "fat snowflakes".
I'm not saying these things are life forms, but I would be really curious to find out what they are. Maybe methane or ethane snowflakes? Cooler, real snowflakes?:)
Incorrect, the US produces more than it needs to feed,clothe, and house people.
But our system is capitalistic, which means if you don't have the cash, they'll sell to someone who does.
Communism is a great theory if humans weren't inherintly greedy self-involved animals. But we are. And it's a good thing too because we probably wouldn't have gotten very far along in the evolutionary chain if we weren't.
QUote from TFA:
"Usually you would want to sue your enemies and not your friends," said Gary Fine, a Northwestern professor of sociology and expert on rumors. "I can't think of an instance in which a corporation would sue its own fans. I haven't heard anything like this."
*COUGH* RIAA *COUGH* MPAA *COUGH* ALL OVER THE FRIGGIN' NEWS *COUGH*
Uh...if this guy is a professor at NorthWestern, then I don't want to go there.
This brings up a good point, and one that seems to be overlooked alot.
When you download a song from the internet, unless it's in WAV format or something similar, then it is not an exact copy of the song.
At the standard 128 Kbits, ALOT of sound information has been removed. This is unrecoverable data loss. Most of the time the songs sound decent compare to a CD but.....
THIS IS NOT AN EXACT COPY.
This would be akin to me going to a museum and taking a digital picture of some modern day masterpiece painting. It isn't an exact copy, but I could certainly have the picture printed up to the same size and hung on my wall. With a high enough resolution and the right skill, you could even make the picture look so real that the only way to tell it isn't would be to walk up to it and touch it. I could put this in my house and enjoy it every day without paying the artist a damn thing.
BUT IT IS NOT AN EXACT COPY.
This is a very important fact. Mp3's are not exact digital copies of songs. They are good enough approximations to songs. Just like digital images of paintings are good enough approximations to paintings.
Then the argument "But it's close enough!" crops up. Then what is the definition of "close-enough"? Who decides when something "is to close"? The industry? The courts?
Is taking a picture of a painting illegal? If so, I, along with millions of people have been breaking copyright laws like no tommorow by merely photographing art exhibits.
Should it be illegal?
Should the brain be illegal then? Pen and paper? Where do we draw the line?
The whole system needs an overhaul, and it needs to be done without the media conglomerates.
That's funny, I have assholes high-beam me with their uber-bright krypton bulbs everyday on the drive home and I've neither swerved nor come to a complete stop.
It's a magic trick. It's called focusing on the part of the road that doesn't have the obnoxiously bright lights on it.
The keyword here is "sustained". This means you need to keep staring into the laser light. And considering a human's FOV is quite a bit wider than a pencil-thin low wattage laser, I find it highly improbable that any respectable terrorist would even consider this ludicrous idea.
Come on people, use your thinking skills and counter-act the gross pseudo-science of the media.
You can't be serious.
Your comparing apples to minuteman missle. A SAM WILL take the aircraft down. A SAM WILL detonate on impact. A SAM WILL cause damage.
A laser will...maybe possibly affect a pilot?
What are going to say next? Driving with highbeams on a night is like firing a tank shell at an oncoming car?
I believe it is a human instinct to avert your vision when you see something bright. I do it every night on the drive home from work.
Welcome to age of paranoia. I find it an extremely dubious claim that any consumer level laser could cause any possible damage. I would be far more concerned with someone parking near a runway with a compressed air canon launching rocks as a plane taking off.
Blind the pilots? For fucks sake. They have a higher risk from going blind from looking at the sun while they're flying. Only if they were staring directly into the pencil-thin beam for a significant amount of time could it cause blidness .
OVERREACTIVE MEDIA HYPE, UNSCIENTIFIC NONSENSE.
Terrorist = Communists 1952.
~X~
Anyway, how about a bounty system backed by incredibly strong "police" NPCs.
Players could have a karma modifier or something. The bounty on their heads doesn't kick in until the karma gets bad enough. The police start eyeing you when your karma dips negative, will arrest if it is too negative, and will kill you on sight if you're extra naughty.
Jail time would be real, i.e if you get arrested for robbing another player and the jail time is 30 days, that means 30 days of real time of not being able to use that character. You will also need to pay a fine which will be taken out of your possesions (gold, armor, etc.).
Bounty's get paid out upon capture or kill, depending on whether the player is wanted dead, alive, or doesn't matter.
If you are a habitual player killer and you are caught or killed in the game, your death is permanent. As in you will not be able to use that character ever again.
If you keep creating characters that do lots of naughty things, then you get permanently spanked from the game.
Having a list of links to pirated files is no different than having a list of links to creditcard numbers.
Unfortunately, many Higher Powers(tm) think this is true (or a paid enough to think it's true).
That being said, I'm not sure they take into account the full ramifications of that statement. If providing a list of (insert something illegal here) is inherently illegal, then what of the search engines like google? Should it be the information provider's fault, or should it be the user who is seeking such information that should be held accountable? Should they both be held accountable? Should neither?
These are questions which are being blindly pushed aside presently for the cause of the greater profit. If P2P programs and bittorrent link sites are illegal, how long will it take the Big Corporations to throw their weight around on the search engines? How long before the entire internet in the U.S. (at least) becomes one giant PolitiCorporate lock-box?
Information wants to be free. Well...so did the slaves. Same concept, Big Corporations fearing the worst if their business model changed. Except they underestimated when they imagined "the worst".
~X~
Interesting Sidenote Regarding Slavery:
Slavery almost died out in the early 1800's because it was becoming economically unfeasible for a large number of cotton plantations in the south. Cotton was just too difficult a crop. It was Eli Whitney's cotton gin that suddenly made the whole thing work again.
For that, I'm glad he died miserable and penniless.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh...that's JPEG artifacting.
~X~
And what kinda crack are you smoking if you think any content will ever reach public domain again? :P
Worship the capitalistic theocracy, heathen!
~X~
It wasn't a volcano, it was possibly several volcanos. Or, more likely a super volcano.
The already sited Yellowstone Caldera, if it were to blow again, would be just as bad or worse than a large asteroid impact.
I'm sure you've seen photos of St. Helens eruption? Multiply that by many thousands of times. Such an event would cause global devastation and do a fairly efficient job of destroying most of the life on Earth.
This is not crap. It's happened before. Many times. Life on this planet is a lot more delicate than some think, and it doesn't take much to screw it up.
Though we seem to try really hard it sometimes.
~X~
"Plenty, if you market a program for a particular use, or are in a position to control how a program is used, or have reason to know it will be abused."
:(
Tobacco, guns, and numerous other implements in our society fit this description. Even fast-food.
P2P is a file transfer protocal. Let's be clear on this. P2P IS A FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL. Just like ftp, smtp, http, etc., these are all just ways to facilitate transferring data from point a to point b.
P2P has nothing to do with "piracy". Nor was it's original intent "piracy". No more than http (warez sites, anyone?).
Just because P2P is the flavor of the month when it comes to ALLEGED copyright infringement activity does not mean the entire protocal and any software that uses it should be illegal.
By that reasoning, guns should be made illegal. Guns are used in a large amount of the murders in this country.
Fast-food, indeed all junk-food, should be illegal because there is a high correlation between consuming such foods and heart disease, the number one killer in America.
"Courts as a rule don't think in terms of abstractions, but of actions and consequences in the real world."
For our sake I certainly hope not. Technology is often about the abstract. There are also plenty of abstract laws out there. Freedom itself is an abstract concept, with diferent people having different ideas about what it means.
If that were true then we better get the hell out of here now before this place becomes a fear-based right-wing corporate dictatorship!
Oh...yeah.
~X~
I heard tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
Quoth the RIAA,"PAY US MORE!".
The US != The TechWorld is 100% true.
No, if this decision goes badly the US will become a technological backwater. Why, because the decision will give acts like the Induce Act, DMCA, and the new SR96 (not sure if I have that one right) legs to stand on. Technological innovations regarding communications in all forms would come to a screeching halt as ridiculous measure are built into these devices.
But, most of these devices are not built in the US. They are built overseas. So these acts will have a direct influence on these foriegn economies. Either their infrastructures would have to adapt to pass US laws for importing, or they just stop selling to the US.
More than likely, I think they eventually might stop selling to the US, as China and India are advancing at record speeds and have 4 to 5 billion people between them. They also don't have draconian tech laws.
A win for the Media Corps in this case would be a major loss to the US in general.
~X~
Sort of like the Amiga you mean?
They said the PS2 was going to be powerful and simple to program as well...
Let's just say I think this is more hype than fact.
~X~
The images of the landing site were not repeated. They are different images.
Put them in a movie and you'll see what I'm talking about. There's also some sort of 'fat snowflakes" that are falling at the landing site. One of them even hits the camera and then blows off.
I don't really know what they are, but "fat snowflakes" is what they look like.
~X~
This person also has never taken a few hard knocks that life can deal such as:
Trying to support a family when you lose your job in a terrible job market and then being diagnosed with cancer which requires expensive treatments and causes a lack of functionality to prevent you from getting a new job even if one was available.
Or getting into a car accident that leaves you paralyzed from the neck down preventing you from attaining a job.
Or having a stroke, or any number of other calamities that may befall someone in this lovely little tradgedy we call life.
It's easy to say "you're all a bunch of lazy fucking leeches" when things in your life are rosy.
Pray that reality never visits with a big smile and heaping pile of "you're fucked".
~X~
PROFIT.
Prime example, the Digital Rebel. Cannon deliberately disabled some features that this camera could handle so that it wouldn't compete with the 10D. If you wanted those features, they wanted you to pay $500 more.
Unfortunately for them, they underestimated the desire of the consumers for pushing the limits. A guy in Russia realized that they were using a pc-dos based OS, hacked around a bit, and discovered all the little goodies packed away in the camera.
I've been attempting to discover the intricacies of the D70. Though I've managed to figure out a lot of info so far about the camera, deciphering the firmware is more of a challenge (uses two different processors).
I believe that alot of features can be added to comera's if the firware was open. But it's not likely to happen. After all, why would a company want to give up making $500 for a couple lines of assembler code?
~X~
There are some strange things that appear at the landing site.
:)
If you take the better quality images and sticth them to gether into a animation, you'll notice that for the most part there are just some slight changes in jpeg artifacts.
But if you watch, you will see some things flit down and then back up again. They're not artifacts of compression. It almost looks like some fat snow flakes (other than they fact they go up again.
Not really going to know what they are until we get some better images.
But the one really really strange one is from the side camera at the landing site (the one with the light illuminating the ground). There are three frames where something lands on the lower left of the camera, and then takes off. Possibly one of the "fat snowflakes".
I'm not saying these things are life forms, but I would be really curious to find out what they are. Maybe methane or ethane snowflakes? Cooler, real snowflakes?
~X~
Incorrect, the US produces more than it needs to feed,clothe, and house people.
But our system is capitalistic, which means if you don't have the cash, they'll sell to someone who does.
Communism is a great theory if humans weren't inherintly greedy self-involved animals. But we are. And it's a good thing too because we probably wouldn't have gotten very far along in the evolutionary chain if we weren't.
~X~
What is it exactly that corporations fear and hate so much about a group of individuals working together for the greater good of humanity?
Oh yeah, the lack of dollar signs.
~X~
*COUGH* RIAA *COUGH* MPAA *COUGH* ALL OVER THE FRIGGIN' NEWS *COUGH* Uh...if this guy is a professor at NorthWestern, then I don't want to go there.
~X~That wasn't my understanding of the jpg algorithm. I remember that it uses huffman compression in the last step.
If it was using rle, I'm sure someone would have gone this route a long time ago.
~X~
It's patented, non-open, and the inventors want lotsa dough for it.
Plus even with today's machines, it is still slow compared to jpeg and other compressed formats.
~X~
All you balls are belong to us!
~X~
GOLF!
#1 urfkd
#2 cuncrt
~X~
This brings up a good point, and one that seems to be overlooked alot.
When you download a song from the internet, unless it's in WAV format or something similar, then it is not an exact copy of the song.
At the standard 128 Kbits, ALOT of sound information has been removed. This is unrecoverable data loss. Most of the time the songs sound decent compare to a CD but.....
THIS IS NOT AN EXACT COPY.
This would be akin to me going to a museum and taking a digital picture of some modern day masterpiece painting. It isn't an exact copy, but I could certainly have the picture printed up to the same size and hung on my wall. With a high enough resolution and the right skill, you could even make the picture look so real that the only way to tell it isn't would be to walk up to it and touch it. I could put this in my house and enjoy it every day without paying the artist a damn thing.
BUT IT IS NOT AN EXACT COPY.
This is a very important fact. Mp3's are not exact digital copies of songs. They are good enough approximations to songs. Just like digital images of paintings are good enough approximations to paintings.
Then the argument "But it's close enough!" crops up. Then what is the definition of "close-enough"? Who decides when something "is to close"? The industry? The courts?
Is taking a picture of a painting illegal? If so, I, along with millions of people have been breaking copyright laws like no tommorow by merely photographing art exhibits.
Should it be illegal?
Should the brain be illegal then? Pen and paper? Where do we draw the line?
The whole system needs an overhaul, and it needs to be done without the media conglomerates.
~X~
I exist because God cannot prove that I don't. :)
~X~
That's funny, I have assholes high-beam me with their uber-bright krypton bulbs everyday on the drive home and I've neither swerved nor come to a complete stop.
It's a magic trick. It's called focusing on the part of the road that doesn't have the obnoxiously bright lights on it.
The keyword here is "sustained". This means you need to keep staring into the laser light. And considering a human's FOV is quite a bit wider than a pencil-thin low wattage laser, I find it highly improbable that any respectable terrorist would even consider this ludicrous idea.
Come on people, use your thinking skills and counter-act the gross pseudo-science of the media.
~X~
You can't be serious. Your comparing apples to minuteman missle. A SAM WILL take the aircraft down. A SAM WILL detonate on impact. A SAM WILL cause damage. A laser will...maybe possibly affect a pilot? What are going to say next? Driving with highbeams on a night is like firing a tank shell at an oncoming car? I believe it is a human instinct to avert your vision when you see something bright. I do it every night on the drive home from work. Welcome to age of paranoia. I find it an extremely dubious claim that any consumer level laser could cause any possible damage. I would be far more concerned with someone parking near a runway with a compressed air canon launching rocks as a plane taking off. Blind the pilots? For fucks sake. They have a higher risk from going blind from looking at the sun while they're flying. Only if they were staring directly into the pencil-thin beam for a significant amount of time could it cause blidness . OVERREACTIVE MEDIA HYPE, UNSCIENTIFIC NONSENSE. Terrorist = Communists 1952. ~X~
Multi-Undergraduate-Destroyer....memories. :)
Anyway, how about a bounty system backed by incredibly strong "police" NPCs.
Players could have a karma modifier or something. The bounty on their heads doesn't kick in until the karma gets bad enough. The police start eyeing you when your karma dips negative, will arrest if it is too negative, and will kill you on sight if you're extra naughty.
Jail time would be real, i.e if you get arrested for robbing another player and the jail time is 30 days, that means 30 days of real time of not being able to use that character. You will also need to pay a fine which will be taken out of your possesions (gold, armor, etc.).
Bounty's get paid out upon capture or kill, depending on whether the player is wanted dead, alive, or doesn't matter.
If you are a habitual player killer and you are caught or killed in the game, your death is permanent. As in you will not be able to use that character ever again.
If you keep creating characters that do lots of naughty things, then you get permanently spanked from the game.
This would encourage people to play nice.
~X~
I think this is thier perspective on it:
Having a list of links to pirated files is no different than having a list of links to creditcard numbers.
Unfortunately, many Higher Powers(tm) think this is true (or a paid enough to think it's true).
That being said, I'm not sure they take into account the full ramifications of that statement. If providing a list of (insert something illegal here) is inherently illegal, then what of the search engines like google? Should it be the information provider's fault, or should it be the user who is seeking such information that should be held accountable? Should they both be held accountable? Should neither?
These are questions which are being blindly pushed aside presently for the cause of the greater profit. If P2P programs and bittorrent link sites are illegal, how long will it take the Big Corporations to throw their weight around on the search engines? How long before the entire internet in the U.S. (at least) becomes one giant PolitiCorporate lock-box?
Information wants to be free. Well...so did the slaves. Same concept, Big Corporations fearing the worst if their business model changed. Except they underestimated when they imagined "the worst".
~X~
Interesting Sidenote Regarding Slavery:
Slavery almost died out in the early 1800's because it was becoming economically unfeasible for a large number of cotton plantations in the south. Cotton was just too difficult a crop. It was Eli Whitney's cotton gin that suddenly made the whole thing work again.
For that, I'm glad he died miserable and penniless.
Agreed. Nuclear fusion would probably be one of the safest ways to get energy.
It takes precise conditions just to get fusion to occur. The minute those conditions fail, the reaction stops.
The plasma densities aren't high enough to cause any damage.
~X~
It squares just fine.
Yes it theoretically could produce 5 time the energy going in, but your forgetting the fuel source.
A fusion reactor is no different than any other reactor. It takes some energy + fuel and generates more energy.
~X~