Thats a little harsh, don't you think. Personnally I fall into a few of the categories mentioned by the parent (I'll keep which ones to myself though) but I would like to point out that not all things deal in absolutes. There are a number of reasons someone would believe in many of the things you mentioned, many people I know believe in some form of a god and afterlife simply because that is how they were raised and it makes them feel better to belive in it. Are they wrong, who knows, does believing that way hurt anyone around them, no. The harm from beliefs come from the fanactical zealots in any side of a belief. What you or I believe is our choice, when someone starts to press their beliefs onto others is when we have a problem.
OK, I don't know what movie you saw, but the Episode III that I saw was IMHO rather well done. The purpose of the movie (being a prequel and all) was to explain how ANH came to be. This involves developing and progressing the universe and characters within it to a point that makes ANH the next step. This movie did just that. This is a rather difficult task in that it covers so many bases, first the characters have to be developed further than before, especially with these characters who have been so well developed in the original trilogy.
This movie showed the fall of the entire jedi order, and yes I am aware that a great many of the jedi were killed very rapidly, but that added to the development of the universe. If they had not been killed rapidly and simultaneously, a war would ensue that would delay if not prevent the success of the Empire. Someone please explain how that would have made sense in respect to the original trilogy?
Another commonly disliked point is how quickly Anakin fell to the dark side. This is just an outright lack of vision on YOUR part. Anakin's fall to the dark side was well developed, in fact, it started back in episode II. His fall began when he slaughtered the camp of sandpeople that killed his mother. His emotions of love for his family are what caused him to fall to the dark side. He started down that path on his own, Palpatine simply prodded him to continue in that direction. His fall did remain rather subtle throughout the beginning of ep III, but if you look he was falling the entire time. His loyalty wavered and he questioned the council's judgement. Not to mention the whole lying about the marriage thing. The moment he crossed blades with Windu was the proverbial straw on the camel's back, so his fall was complete at that point, why not swear loyalty to the sith master at that point?
One final thing I noticed during the movie that seems to have been overlooked by everyone that was looking for faults as opposed to just enjoying the movie was the CG issue so many of those same people complained about throughout the prequels. If you watch carefully, the CG starts out with the full effects from ep I and II, but at the end of ep III its almost back to the level of graphics of ANH. This was one of the things I thought Lucas did very well as I hardly noticed until right at the end, during the much hated "NOOOO" scene.
Oh and on a side note, I loved the droid remarks and the antics of R2D2 in ep III. One of the things I didn't like about ep I was that the majority of the fight scenes were with expressionless droids, it was a one-sided fight and not all that particularly entertaining. You can only see a droid get sliced in half so many times before you start to yawn. By adding the remarks of the droids, it added a tiny amount of depth to the driods and made it far more entertaining to me to see them in action.
To be honest the majority of you who didn't like the films probably knew you wouldn't before you ever went to the theater, and went to the movie looking for reasons to hate it. I loved it, and at least liked ep I and II.
I just wanted to point out two things, first the bows used back then are dramatically different than the bows of today. I'm guessing you used some kind of compound bow with sight pins, synthetic string, and carbon fibre (or some other lightweight, strong material). The old bows were made out of wood and leather string. Today's versions would give you substantially more power and control than the old bows would have, which directly translates to less training time.
The second thing that many people forget is that medieval archers, with their old wooden bows, could fire 3 arrows in approximately 10-15 seconds, counting loading and aiming time. It is difficult to load and fire 3 shots in 10 seconds much less aim and hit something.
I don't doubt your ability with your bow, but stating that bows are incredibly easy to use really only applies to today. You should also take into account that the old bows did not add much power to the arrow, and the people the archers were shooting at wore full body armor and carried reinforced shields. In order for a medieval archer to be truly effective, he had to be able to hit the narrow gaps in joints and the neck, from a distance, in the heat of battle .
Before I even start, I should make it clear, I am a capitalist and I am aware it is not a perfect system. I feel sorry for the projectionists in your story, I really do, but there are several things that seem to have been forgotten in this.
It is indeed a shame that a company fired these poor workers, however their jobs were no longer necessary. Its a sad truth but technology is a double-edged sword, always has been and always will be. On one hand, it makes our lives easier, enriched, and enjoyable, on the other hand technology can do things we as humans can not, and to make things worse they do the things we can do better and cheaper than we can. This has happened throughout human history, advancement in technology makes certain jobs obsolete. It's called progress, as horrible as it is that jow sixpack loses his job, it is inevitable.
As for your idea on raising the minimum wage to $15.00 an hour (which is almost a 200% raise were it done where I am) sounds like a great idea in theory. The only problem that arises is when you attempt to put in practice. Where would this money magically come from? The most common answer to this is from the super-greedy-rich-bastards-with-all-the-money-runn ing-all-the-sick-little-behind-the-scenes-money-ma king-corrupt-businesses. But who decides who is rich enough to give up their money in order to increase the minimum wage? The only real way to establish a fair payment scheme is to make everyone make the exact same amount of money, regardless of job. (BTW this has been tried in the past, it's called communism) The problem with it is that humans are greedy and lazy by nature, and if someone can make the same amount of money for flipping a burger as for performing heart surgery, most humans will choose to flip burgers because it is easier. This has the effect of reducing everyone's productivity and contribution to society to that of the lowest denominator(sp?) of society.
I am by no means saying that capitalism is the true right path, but it does remember that humans require competition and incentive to strive for improvement. Back when we were hunters and gatherers, the incentive was easy, survival. Now with modern technology, survival is easy, so progress is being made based on other incentives, namely money.
Is it the good, morally correct path, probably not. Do you or anyone else have a better idea on how to provide incentive for progress? I'd love to hear it if you do.
Hrrm... you might want to re-check that, unless by you, you are implying the GP. Nowhere in Einstein's theories (or anyone else's since Einstein, IIRC) does it state that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. The theory is that nothing can accelerate to the speed of light. To quote K-PAX: "He said nothing of things moving the speed of light or faster." While I personally can not say I remember anyone detecting any tachyon particles, in theory they can exist.
Last time I checked, there was ONE country in the US, being as it IS a country. The difference in the situation you used is that if a state tried to invade and hold another state, the US military would step in and that would end that... Wait, nevermind , that is what happens in Europe too. And yes, I am an American.
I am not sure if the two are entirely the same, with the Caeser cipher, a message was obviously being sent, you just couldn't read it. This is referred to as a symmetric encryption method, as it was usualy a simple substitution cipher. (offset of 3 IIRC) This is not quite the same thing as steganography, which is the art of hiding the fact that the message was sent at all. The two are very similar, but with the cipher you secure the data by assuring that others can not read it, while with steganography you secure it by making it difficult for someone to know there is something to read. In addition, steganography is used quite extensively today, though probably not in the way that many assume. (ie data transfer) A form of steganography is digital watermarking, where a digital signature is embedded within the actual digital media. This is very common with audio files as there is plenty of space for the watermark to be stored that will not noticably affect the audio quality.
Actually they are one in the same, it is possible to determine what something means using today's voice recog. (I've got a setup that controls my entertainment center and lights in my apartment through voice recog) However it is wildly inefficient and difficult to setup. The reason is the english language is just about the most illogical system on the planet, and computers only understand logic. Due to the limited scope of my setup, I only had to record about 20-40 words/phrases and reference them differently in a database. Then you speak, it gets each word and follows a tree like structure jumping from each word to the next until it gets to the end. Any word not understood is simply filtered out as useless. When it reachs the "leaf" in the tree it has a command which it sends out the preconfigured port. Not a beautiful system but it works fairly well. If they make the ability to recognize text much more efficient, that means all the processing power that was being used to simultaneously decode and translate speech can be used to understand the speech. This is an immediate boost in power and then it just takes some good algorithms to be made in order for these inventions to become a plausible reality. Also, the reference about using a high-end PC to do this is true if thats not all it is doing. If you use a mid-range PC solely for voice processing, it should work just as well. (mine is running using spare processing time on my Athlon 64 3400+ with 2GB RAM, but I would assume that you could use a slower system if you werent doing anything else on it.)
the atkins diet requires carb levels of fewer than 20 grams each day, and much of this "low carb" junk food exceeds that with only one or two servings.
Read the packages carefully, each one says not fit for the initial phase of the atkins diet which is the only phase that restrict carbs to less than 20 a day and lasts only 2-3 weeks. After that you can have as many carbs as you wish, though they suggest keeping it as low as possible. The reason for this is, if you take the first 2-3 weeks seriously, you break your bodies addiction to carbs and you simply don't care for them anymore. I did the atkins initial phase thing for 3 weeks and afterward I went to a friend of mine's barbeque. All he had to drink was coke and one sip almost caused me to gag due to its sugar amount. It really is sick how much we have become addicted to sugar. Oh and after about 1 week of the initial phase the mere idea of McDonalds is, shall we say, less than appetizing.
No matter what happens there will always be the "first to adopt" and those that hang on to their set ways forever.
While this may seem true, the evidence just isn't there to support your claim. If that statement were true, we'd have people using hand-crank powered cars right along side the new hybrid ones. Simple preferences can be and are replaced by innovation. Though it doesn't happen overnight. I still know of businesses that don't use computers. Eventually those who are set in their ways die (I'm simply stating fact, not trying to offend anyone) and are replaced by people that don't remember the things that are now outdated. If you don't believe me take a record into a elementary school classroom and I guarantee someone will ask you what the "big cd" is for. While I personally don't think all of the article's predictions will come true, I can't just say they won't because people are set in their ways.
End User: What the fsck is this Adware doing on my computer?!
Skype: We needed funding to add new features and/or improve the technical performance of the software. In order to get this funding, we included Adware into the software. Perfectly legit by the EULA's terms.
I personally own both a PS2, and an XBox. I bought the XBox solely for Halo, and eventually Halo 2. (I have since gotten a few other titles, but they were afterthoughts) The PS2 on the other hand in my main choice, even today. I am a huge fan of RPG games, I own virtually every game Squaresoft/Square-Enix has made since PS1. I can honestly say that while recently the majority of my playing time is spent playing the newer titles, I have put some serious time into my PS1 titles on the PS2. My library of games is about a 3:1 ratio of old games to new. In time, this will probably even out, but collecting a large library of good RPG titles takes a long period of time for any console.
Nope sorry, no extension would work. Not too long ago, the Supreme Court ruled that email, unlike regular mail, was public domain. This means that there is no law that states you can not read someone else's email. This important distinction clearly separates email from regular mail, so you can bet that any decent lawyer will throw that Supreme Court ruling in your face if you try and bridge the gap between email and regular mail. Note: IANAL so if a lawyer could back this up or refute it, that'd be great.
Perhaps restart was the wrong word. When a taser hits you, thereby administering a 50,000 volt shock, your heartbeat becomes erratic. This only lasts as long as the elctricity is flowing, which is about 5 seconds in a standard taser. Once the electricity stops, the heart normally resumes normal operation. However drugs like cocaine affect the natural beat of the heart. Because of this, it is sometimes [this is very rare (40 out of 30,000 rare)] the heart beat remains erratic. This can lead to heart complications. While I think that the use of electric shock weapons as crowd control is a good idea, I'd like to see a study done on people with high caffeine levels. caffeine affects the heart in a similar, although far less intense, way to drugs like cocaine. By the way, IANAD (I Am Not A Doctor) so this is all what I remember from high school and college biology and chemistry. If anyone can verify, that would be great.
all you will have to worry about is the 50,000 volt shock it is going to hit you with... you may be toast but your eyes will be ok to survey your charred corpse
Remember your physics, voltage doesn't kill, amps do. Besides I believe that standard police issue tasers already administer 50,000 volts over the wires for a period of 5 seconds. The only deaths that arise from this are because the heart fails to restart, usually because the victim was on some kind of drug that inhibited the process. (think cocaine not tylenol).
He (the judge) wouldn't have to. All you need to present in court is reasonable doubt. Because of this, the argument that someone else installed/set up whatever on your computer will be enough to doubt that you ever read the EULA, or that you even agreed to it. IANAL but my father works in the legal system, and being a software developer I have asked him about this in the past.
Isn't it a llittle soon to claim to put 4 processors in one chip by 2005, especially sinse last I had heard, one processor was causing a heat concern. Have they fixed this or is this Intel making predictions and setting dates that will only get pushed back anyway?
But wouldn't anything that can reproduce uncontrollably be just as affecte by the pressures of the environment as any other living organism?
That would hold true, but you seem to have forgotten that the reason for the concern with nanomachines is just that they are machines and, in fact, not living organisms. Living organisms succomb to age, disease, etc... Nanomachines do not, they instead only rely on two things: power and purpose. If there purpose is to self replicate and they can find sufficient power, no other influences will matter.
Just a quick comment, it may be a little offtopic but I think its relevant. For several years here in the US, a large percentage of cars have had a "black box" (just a term, I don't think they are actually black) embedded in your engine. Its purpose has been geared toward use by the insurance companies, it records your speed at the time of a crash. If they were pushing these RFID's to make it easier to give you speeding tickets, why didn't they just broadcast a unique identifier and the speed from each car. Then they wouldn't even have to be stationary to determine your speed. I'm not saying the idea of RFID tags in license plates is good or bad, but the argument that they are being pushed to make speeding tickets easier to give is kind of like saying te internet was created to make identity theft easier. Basically my point is that despite the overwhelming sense of paranoia that has come from this, maybe, just maybe, there are uses here other than tracking YOU all over the country.
Just thought I'd point out that the Discovery Channel has done a story on this in the past, specifically when referring to robot appearance. There is an actual graph of how realistic the face is vs the attitude people take towards it. Though I can't seem to find the link, if I remember correctly it rises steadily until a little bit past "75% realistic", at which point it drops to next to nothing until about "97% realistic" in which it rises back to the top. If someone could find a link to this, that would be great. It may also have appeared sometime on TechTV.
Well, it is IBM. In the past, their ability to think 'ahead' was rather well portrayed when they decided that there was no home market for computing. But at least they are catching up right?
I just wanted to tell you that those poor man's images of the transit impressed me far more than the professional ones I saw earlier. Keep up the great work and thanks for recording it all, as I missed it myself.
Number of Permutations:
For 5 letter passwords: 6590815232
For 8 letter passwords: 5132188731375616
Total number of new permutations: 5132182140560384
End Result: just as insecure as before, because everyone knew the password before, and now everyone knows again. The permutations could be infinite for all it matters, now that its been posted, its no more difficult.
By the way the above calculations were done assuming 92 different characters for each letter/number/symbol in the password. a-z, A-Z, 0-9, and 30 different junk characters that/. wont let me post.
I know/. is a very pro-Linux site, and I am an avid supporter and user of Linux myself. But surely some of you realize that Linux and Microsoft are mutually beneficial in some respects. While many of the features of Windows are horribly insecure and/or badly designed, many of the ideas for improvements to Linux comes from seeing somethng that can be improved on in something else... and Windows is a big something else. Linux is also helping Windows by finally giving free competition to the Windows environment. Yes I am aware that Windows and Macintosh have been competitors for some time, but they both cost roughly the same in the long run. By providing a good, actually great, operating system for nothing, the operating systems that cost money have to be much more convincing to continue sales. If they don't eventually someone is going to ask, "Whats the point?" I personally have two computers, one runs Linux while the other runs Windows. I hate crashes on Windows, just like all the rest of you, but it [Windows, not the crashes] does have a few good points, especially when you see the good ideas from microsoft find their way into the Open Source community.
As far as advertising goes, if Linux Today wants to get funding from Microsoft, and Microsoft is willing to grant it, great. But I don't think Microsoft has any right to limit what gets published on a website that they are merely buying ad-time on. But, if Linux Today is volunteering to start limiting whats being published in order to get more money, then they deserve to be boycotted. I don't know what everyone else thinks about this situation, but thats what I think, and since this is a somewhat pro-Microsoft post, I expect I'll soon find out what other people think.
Thats a little harsh, don't you think. Personnally I fall into a few of the categories mentioned by the parent (I'll keep which ones to myself though) but I would like to point out that not all things deal in absolutes. There are a number of reasons someone would believe in many of the things you mentioned, many people I know believe in some form of a god and afterlife simply because that is how they were raised and it makes them feel better to belive in it. Are they wrong, who knows, does believing that way hurt anyone around them, no. The harm from beliefs come from the fanactical zealots in any side of a belief. What you or I believe is our choice, when someone starts to press their beliefs onto others is when we have a problem.
OK, I don't know what movie you saw, but the Episode III that I saw was IMHO rather well done. The purpose of the movie (being a prequel and all) was to explain how ANH came to be. This involves developing and progressing the universe and characters within it to a point that makes ANH the next step. This movie did just that. This is a rather difficult task in that it covers so many bases, first the characters have to be developed further than before, especially with these characters who have been so well developed in the original trilogy.
This movie showed the fall of the entire jedi order, and yes I am aware that a great many of the jedi were killed very rapidly, but that added to the development of the universe. If they had not been killed rapidly and simultaneously, a war would ensue that would delay if not prevent the success of the Empire. Someone please explain how that would have made sense in respect to the original trilogy?
Another commonly disliked point is how quickly Anakin fell to the dark side. This is just an outright lack of vision on YOUR part. Anakin's fall to the dark side was well developed, in fact, it started back in episode II. His fall began when he slaughtered the camp of sandpeople that killed his mother. His emotions of love for his family are what caused him to fall to the dark side. He started down that path on his own, Palpatine simply prodded him to continue in that direction. His fall did remain rather subtle throughout the beginning of ep III, but if you look he was falling the entire time. His loyalty wavered and he questioned the council's judgement. Not to mention the whole lying about the marriage thing. The moment he crossed blades with Windu was the proverbial straw on the camel's back, so his fall was complete at that point, why not swear loyalty to the sith master at that point?
One final thing I noticed during the movie that seems to have been overlooked by everyone that was looking for faults as opposed to just enjoying the movie was the CG issue so many of those same people complained about throughout the prequels. If you watch carefully, the CG starts out with the full effects from ep I and II, but at the end of ep III its almost back to the level of graphics of ANH. This was one of the things I thought Lucas did very well as I hardly noticed until right at the end, during the much hated "NOOOO" scene.
Oh and on a side note, I loved the droid remarks and the antics of R2D2 in ep III. One of the things I didn't like about ep I was that the majority of the fight scenes were with expressionless droids, it was a one-sided fight and not all that particularly entertaining. You can only see a droid get sliced in half so many times before you start to yawn. By adding the remarks of the droids, it added a tiny amount of depth to the driods and made it far more entertaining to me to see them in action.
To be honest the majority of you who didn't like the films probably knew you wouldn't before you ever went to the theater, and went to the movie looking for reasons to hate it. I loved it, and at least liked ep I and II.
I just wanted to point out two things, first the bows used back then are dramatically different than the bows of today. I'm guessing you used some kind of compound bow with sight pins, synthetic string, and carbon fibre (or some other lightweight, strong material). The old bows were made out of wood and leather string. Today's versions would give you substantially more power and control than the old bows would have, which directly translates to less training time.
The second thing that many people forget is that medieval archers, with their old wooden bows, could fire 3 arrows in approximately 10-15 seconds, counting loading and aiming time. It is difficult to load and fire 3 shots in 10 seconds much less aim and hit something.
I don't doubt your ability with your bow, but stating that bows are incredibly easy to use really only applies to today. You should also take into account that the old bows did not add much power to the arrow, and the people the archers were shooting at wore full body armor and carried reinforced shields. In order for a medieval archer to be truly effective, he had to be able to hit the narrow gaps in joints and the neck, from a distance, in the heat of battle .
Before I even start, I should make it clear, I am a capitalist and I am aware it is not a perfect system. I feel sorry for the projectionists in your story, I really do, but there are several things that seem to have been forgotten in this.
n ing-all-the-sick-little-behind-the-scenes-money-ma king-corrupt-businesses. But who decides who is rich enough to give up their money in order to increase the minimum wage? The only real way to establish a fair payment scheme is to make everyone make the exact same amount of money, regardless of job. (BTW this has been tried in the past, it's called communism) The problem with it is that humans are greedy and lazy by nature, and if someone can make the same amount of money for flipping a burger as for performing heart surgery, most humans will choose to flip burgers because it is easier. This has the effect of reducing everyone's productivity and contribution to society to that of the lowest denominator(sp?) of society.
It is indeed a shame that a company fired these poor workers, however their jobs were no longer necessary. Its a sad truth but technology is a double-edged sword, always has been and always will be. On one hand, it makes our lives easier, enriched, and enjoyable, on the other hand technology can do things we as humans can not, and to make things worse they do the things we can do better and cheaper than we can. This has happened throughout human history, advancement in technology makes certain jobs obsolete. It's called progress, as horrible as it is that jow sixpack loses his job, it is inevitable.
As for your idea on raising the minimum wage to $15.00 an hour (which is almost a 200% raise were it done where I am) sounds like a great idea in theory. The only problem that arises is when you attempt to put in practice. Where would this money magically come from? The most common answer to this is from the super-greedy-rich-bastards-with-all-the-money-run
I am by no means saying that capitalism is the true right path, but it does remember that humans require competition and incentive to strive for improvement. Back when we were hunters and gatherers, the incentive was easy, survival. Now with modern technology, survival is easy, so progress is being made based on other incentives, namely money.
Is it the good, morally correct path, probably not. Do you or anyone else have a better idea on how to provide incentive for progress? I'd love to hear it if you do.
Hrrm... you might want to re-check that, unless by you, you are implying the GP. Nowhere in Einstein's theories (or anyone else's since Einstein, IIRC) does it state that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. The theory is that nothing can accelerate to the speed of light. To quote K-PAX: "He said nothing of things moving the speed of light or faster." While I personally can not say I remember anyone detecting any tachyon particles, in theory they can exist.
Last time I checked, there was ONE country in the US, being as it IS a country. The difference in the situation you used is that if a state tried to invade and hold another state, the US military would step in and that would end that... Wait, nevermind , that is what happens in Europe too. And yes, I am an American.
I am not sure if the two are entirely the same, with the Caeser cipher, a message was obviously being sent, you just couldn't read it. This is referred to as a symmetric encryption method, as it was usualy a simple substitution cipher. (offset of 3 IIRC) This is not quite the same thing as steganography, which is the art of hiding the fact that the message was sent at all. The two are very similar, but with the cipher you secure the data by assuring that others can not read it, while with steganography you secure it by making it difficult for someone to know there is something to read. In addition, steganography is used quite extensively today, though probably not in the way that many assume. (ie data transfer) A form of steganography is digital watermarking, where a digital signature is embedded within the actual digital media. This is very common with audio files as there is plenty of space for the watermark to be stored that will not noticably affect the audio quality.
Actually they are one in the same, it is possible to determine what something means using today's voice recog. (I've got a setup that controls my entertainment center and lights in my apartment through voice recog) However it is wildly inefficient and difficult to setup. The reason is the english language is just about the most illogical system on the planet, and computers only understand logic. Due to the limited scope of my setup, I only had to record about 20-40 words/phrases and reference them differently in a database. Then you speak, it gets each word and follows a tree like structure jumping from each word to the next until it gets to the end. Any word not understood is simply filtered out as useless. When it reachs the "leaf" in the tree it has a command which it sends out the preconfigured port. Not a beautiful system but it works fairly well. If they make the ability to recognize text much more efficient, that means all the processing power that was being used to simultaneously decode and translate speech can be used to understand the speech. This is an immediate boost in power and then it just takes some good algorithms to be made in order for these inventions to become a plausible reality. Also, the reference about using a high-end PC to do this is true if thats not all it is doing. If you use a mid-range PC solely for voice processing, it should work just as well. (mine is running using spare processing time on my Athlon 64 3400+ with 2GB RAM, but I would assume that you could use a slower system if you werent doing anything else on it.)
the atkins diet requires carb levels of fewer than 20 grams each day, and much of this "low carb" junk food exceeds that with only one or two servings.
Read the packages carefully, each one says not fit for the initial phase of the atkins diet which is the only phase that restrict carbs to less than 20 a day and lasts only 2-3 weeks. After that you can have as many carbs as you wish, though they suggest keeping it as low as possible. The reason for this is, if you take the first 2-3 weeks seriously, you break your bodies addiction to carbs and you simply don't care for them anymore. I did the atkins initial phase thing for 3 weeks and afterward I went to a friend of mine's barbeque. All he had to drink was coke and one sip almost caused me to gag due to its sugar amount. It really is sick how much we have become addicted to sugar. Oh and after about 1 week of the initial phase the mere idea of McDonalds is, shall we say, less than appetizing.
No matter what happens there will always be the "first to adopt" and those that hang on to their set ways forever.
While this may seem true, the evidence just isn't there to support your claim. If that statement were true, we'd have people using hand-crank powered cars right along side the new hybrid ones. Simple preferences can be and are replaced by innovation. Though it doesn't happen overnight. I still know of businesses that don't use computers. Eventually those who are set in their ways die (I'm simply stating fact, not trying to offend anyone) and are replaced by people that don't remember the things that are now outdated. If you don't believe me take a record into a elementary school classroom and I guarantee someone will ask you what the "big cd" is for. While I personally don't think all of the article's predictions will come true, I can't just say they won't because people are set in their ways.
I can see the argument now.
End User: What the fsck is this Adware doing on my computer?!
Skype: We needed funding to add new features and/or improve the technical performance of the software. In order to get this funding, we included Adware into the software. Perfectly legit by the EULA's terms.
I personally own both a PS2, and an XBox. I bought the XBox solely for Halo, and eventually Halo 2. (I have since gotten a few other titles, but they were afterthoughts) The PS2 on the other hand in my main choice, even today. I am a huge fan of RPG games, I own virtually every game Squaresoft/Square-Enix has made since PS1. I can honestly say that while recently the majority of my playing time is spent playing the newer titles, I have put some serious time into my PS1 titles on the PS2. My library of games is about a 3:1 ratio of old games to new. In time, this will probably even out, but collecting a large library of good RPG titles takes a long period of time for any console.
Nope sorry, no extension would work. Not too long ago, the Supreme Court ruled that email, unlike regular mail, was public domain. This means that there is no law that states you can not read someone else's email. This important distinction clearly separates email from regular mail, so you can bet that any decent lawyer will throw that Supreme Court ruling in your face if you try and bridge the gap between email and regular mail. Note: IANAL so if a lawyer could back this up or refute it, that'd be great.
Perhaps restart was the wrong word. When a taser hits you, thereby administering a 50,000 volt shock, your heartbeat becomes erratic. This only lasts as long as the elctricity is flowing, which is about 5 seconds in a standard taser. Once the electricity stops, the heart normally resumes normal operation. However drugs like cocaine affect the natural beat of the heart. Because of this, it is sometimes [this is very rare (40 out of 30,000 rare)] the heart beat remains erratic. This can lead to heart complications. While I think that the use of electric shock weapons as crowd control is a good idea, I'd like to see a study done on people with high caffeine levels. caffeine affects the heart in a similar, although far less intense, way to drugs like cocaine. By the way, IANAD (I Am Not A Doctor) so this is all what I remember from high school and college biology and chemistry. If anyone can verify, that would be great.
all you will have to worry about is the 50,000 volt shock it is going to hit you with... you may be toast but your eyes will be ok to survey your charred corpse
Remember your physics, voltage doesn't kill, amps do. Besides I believe that standard police issue tasers already administer 50,000 volts over the wires for a period of 5 seconds. The only deaths that arise from this are because the heart fails to restart, usually because the victim was on some kind of drug that inhibited the process. (think cocaine not tylenol).
He (the judge) wouldn't have to. All you need to present in court is reasonable doubt. Because of this, the argument that someone else installed/set up whatever on your computer will be enough to doubt that you ever read the EULA, or that you even agreed to it. IANAL but my father works in the legal system, and being a software developer I have asked him about this in the past.
Isn't it a llittle soon to claim to put 4 processors in one chip by 2005, especially sinse last I had heard, one processor was causing a heat concern. Have they fixed this or is this Intel making predictions and setting dates that will only get pushed back anyway?
But wouldn't anything that can reproduce uncontrollably be just as affecte by the pressures of the environment as any other living organism?
That would hold true, but you seem to have forgotten that the reason for the concern with nanomachines is just that they are machines and, in fact, not living organisms. Living organisms succomb to age, disease, etc... Nanomachines do not, they instead only rely on two things: power and purpose. If there purpose is to self replicate and they can find sufficient power, no other influences will matter.
Just a quick comment, it may be a little offtopic but I think its relevant. For several years here in the US, a large percentage of cars have had a "black box" (just a term, I don't think they are actually black) embedded in your engine. Its purpose has been geared toward use by the insurance companies, it records your speed at the time of a crash. If they were pushing these RFID's to make it easier to give you speeding tickets, why didn't they just broadcast a unique identifier and the speed from each car. Then they wouldn't even have to be stationary to determine your speed. I'm not saying the idea of RFID tags in license plates is good or bad, but the argument that they are being pushed to make speeding tickets easier to give is kind of like saying te internet was created to make identity theft easier. Basically my point is that despite the overwhelming sense of paranoia that has come from this, maybe, just maybe, there are uses here other than tracking YOU all over the country.
Just thought I'd point out that the Discovery Channel has done a story on this in the past, specifically when referring to robot appearance. There is an actual graph of how realistic the face is vs the attitude people take towards it. Though I can't seem to find the link, if I remember correctly it rises steadily until a little bit past "75% realistic", at which point it drops to next to nothing until about "97% realistic" in which it rises back to the top. If someone could find a link to this, that would be great. It may also have appeared sometime on TechTV.
Well, it is IBM. In the past, their ability to think 'ahead' was rather well portrayed when they decided that there was no home market for computing. But at least they are catching up right?
I just wanted to tell you that those poor man's images of the transit impressed me far more than the professional ones I saw earlier. Keep up the great work and thanks for recording it all, as I missed it myself.
My bet is on SupermanReturns, or SupermanStrikesBack, with a password of a different employee's phone number.
Number of Permutations:
/. wont let me post.
For 5 letter passwords: 6590815232
For 8 letter passwords: 5132188731375616
Total number of new permutations: 5132182140560384
End Result: just as insecure as before, because everyone knew the password before, and now everyone knows again. The permutations could be infinite for all it matters, now that its been posted, its no more difficult.
By the way the above calculations were done assuming 92 different characters for each letter/number/symbol in the password. a-z, A-Z, 0-9, and 30 different junk characters that
I know /. is a very pro-Linux site, and I am an avid supporter and user of Linux myself. But surely some of you realize that Linux and Microsoft are mutually beneficial in some respects. While many of the features of Windows are horribly insecure and/or badly designed, many of the ideas for improvements to Linux comes from seeing somethng that can be improved on in something else... and Windows is a big something else. Linux is also helping Windows by finally giving free competition to the Windows environment. Yes I am aware that Windows and Macintosh have been competitors for some time, but they both cost roughly the same in the long run. By providing a good, actually great, operating system for nothing, the operating systems that cost money have to be much more convincing to continue sales. If they don't eventually someone is going to ask, "Whats the point?" I personally have two computers, one runs Linux while the other runs Windows. I hate crashes on Windows, just like all the rest of you, but it [Windows, not the crashes] does have a few good points, especially when you see the good ideas from microsoft find their way into the Open Source community.
As far as advertising goes, if Linux Today wants to get funding from Microsoft, and Microsoft is willing to grant it, great. But I don't think Microsoft has any right to limit what gets published on a website that they are merely buying ad-time on. But, if Linux Today is volunteering to start limiting whats being published in order to get more money, then they deserve to be boycotted. I don't know what everyone else thinks about this situation, but thats what I think, and since this is a somewhat pro-Microsoft post, I expect I'll soon find out what other people think.