Perhaps it won't need batteries, because it will only be on when you are actually driving, and it is in the fob. Unless the guys over at MINI didn't think to power it that way.
Both BluRay and HD-DVD shall die pretty quick deaths, at least in the first world. I mean, in Japan and South Korea for example, with a 50Mbps internet connection being normal, you can download an entire DVD in about 752 seconds. In some parts they have gigabit connections. The only physical medium that shall matter is your hard drive. I already see a future in which your cable provider gives you a proper home entertainment server system, with terabytes of hard drive space, and movies are delivered to your server and you watch them from there.
As for pr0n, well, people get it online anyway. What is more discreet than that?
People tolerate it because they don't have to pay for it. Seriously, I have always been sceptical about the numbers I hear being peddled. I mean, I do not know anyone who has ever bought a porn movie. Maybe rented one, but not actually bought. Even back in the day when my mind was first corrupted by that stuff, people would have tapes that were probably copied from someone who copied someone who copied from someone else ad infinitum. Nowadays there is bittorrent. The biggest issue with such copying was the obvious degradation in quality, but with digital copies, that is not an issue. Coupled with the fact that most people do not really want to spend money on it. I mean, I watched the _non porn_ movie "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" in the cinema, and I watched it on someone else's computer, and then I bought the DVD. Repeat sales right there. People just don't do that sort of stuff with porn.
You bet if the industry was as big as claimed at times, as someone else put it, Disney would have a porn division, and so would Sony, Paramount, and all those big movie makers.
I think it was a coincidence that the pr0n guys chose VHS. I mean, back in the 80s, it was probablt kosher just to have pr0n, but now, that stuff is available everywhere. I think many people probably prefer to get their fix online, and regardless what you hear, pr0n is definitely not biggest shipping genre of DVD nowadays. A single film like Finding Nemo or Shrek of the Incredibles probably shipped more DVDs that the entire pr0n industry does in a whole year.
Forget those billions you hear the adult industry to be said to be making, it is not that huge, and will probably not be much of a deciding factor.
I for one think it is a good idea to perhaps force all porn domains into the xxx TLD. I think this should have been done long before. Not because I want them censored, but to make it easy for people who want to limit what can be viewed on certain computers to do so. When it comes to porn, the cat is out of the bag. No one is deluded enough to think that the government could wake up one morning and order people to stop making it. They would have a right riot on their hands. Government do not want to create a situation where their power would be shown to be limited. Why do you think they give in to protests. Because if people make themselves ungovernable, then government is toothless.
Any measure they take to be able to force porn sites to identify themselves as such is tantamount to censorship if you believe what you here on the dot. The domain registrar is probably not going to make much money off this. They will be closely watched to ensure that no underhand dealings go on. If anything, opportunistic slashdotters will rush out to buy domains and sell them on ebay long before the registrars milk their supposed client. And if $30 (an exaggerated example) is too much for a budding business, then you probably have no business trying to buy one of such domain.
There is not that much money in porn to sink billions in domain name registrations. Simple economics will keep the prices down.
No, it makes Fedora better than Debian. Paid developers steering the project and (hopefully) steering clear of making decisions by committee (see camel story).
Volunteers getting all the fancy packages they want, as they proved they could do, and did with the Extras project. So a real community distribution.
It's no Ubuntu, but they do still remain true to their Free/Open Source roots, so that makes them especially more appealing to the hardcore types too. Unlike Ubuntu. And its Redhat, the most consistent of the Linux companies. In terms of their Open Source/Free Software credentials, they have an unmatched record in the community.
Well, it is quite unfortunate, but unless you are a plant, you feed on other life. Lions feeds on deer, buffalo, snakes feeds on mice, and humans feed on just about anything. If another species were to become dominant on earth, rest assured they would have no problem cutting off your backsides to make burgers.
If wild boy had died, and some scientists had happened upon his remains, and tested them, would they have found him to be human or otherwise?
Your programming does not make you human. You are human from the moment of your conception because you will not turn out in any other way. Your destiny is set. You will have two legs, and two hands (asides some possible deformities).
I mean, if you are arguing that the programming is what makes one human, then you might as well argue that all those bones we dig up were not human, or we can't prove they were, because we do not know what their programming was like.
Your argument is pretty much circular in that you are defining a human to be someone programmed in a certain way, and therefore your conclusions follow. But your premise is very flawed. I mean, from your arguments it would follow that there are various degrees of being human, because there rudimentary your personality, the less human you are. How do you then define what a rudimentary personality is?
The line between humans and none humans is not fuzzy at all. It is very clear, but perhaps some people like to make it less clear because it serves their arguments better to make it seem so. If an embryo is not human, then you have to come up with a point at which it becomes human. For many of us, it is when the sperm and the egg fuse. It may not be much to behold then, but since when has size been the be all and end all of anything.
A lot of poor people are poor not because they were lazy, but because they were born poor, and opportunities were hard to come by. Whilst I think taxes need to be simplified, I think this can be done rather easily by just increasing the tax threshold. A rich person earning billions is not going to be advantaged much by a tax free income portion of say 10,000. So in a way it is very prgressive, whilst being non discriminatory.
It does really help the poor, and does not appreciably impact the rich. And above the tax free threshold, you can have a single tax rate anyway. And no special tax concession on income. At all.
You reciprocate questions and answers with the bank. Ask for the first and last digit of the password. Next time ask for the third and fifth from last. It will help to have a long password. Change your password when you have nearly exhausted all the letter combinations. It doesn't have to be a word that can be guessed, so knowing half the letters should not enable the MITM to guess the rest and call 'on your behalf'. If banks can ask you security questions, perhaps we should also be asking them too. Just to be sure.
People like Saddam did spread fear through their population, but he did not kill hundreds of thousands of his own people. That 'honour' belongs to the USA.
Saddam didn't need to kill that many. The downfall of a leaders is applying excessive force. You apply enough force to instill fear, but not too much so that people believe that they can avoid your attentions. If you kill wantonly, they will revolt, because they will not have much to lose. In terms of civil liberties, and modernisation Iraq was actually ahead of all its counterparts in the region. They just had a megalomaniac for a president who erred in judgement and attacked Kuwait.
Too true. If one million British people would have had to die to bring down Saddam, rest assured Bush would probably arrange a meeting with the fellow. But if it's Iraqis who are dying, who the hell cares.
I hate how people go on about how some people go on about how taking Saddam down made the world a better place. In terms of human casualty, probably more Americans and British and magnitudes more of Iraqis have died. But as you put it, rather unfortunately, they are poor third world people, so no one cares. (Except me of course).
So you are agreed that it is not a commom misconception. Theoretically, a round manhole cover only need a lip of less than 1mm, (depending on tolerances), whilst you need a ridiculously large lip to prevent square manhole covers falling into the holes. It's much harder to explain to someone who does not usually have an inclination to that sort of thing. And it usually suffices.
No Chavez is just a loud mouth. Putin is the real deal. He has real leverage over here in Europe. Europe has this thing with gas, and Putin has almost all of it.
So even if they found evidence that he did personally authorise the murder of Mr Litvinenko, they will probably rebuke him publicly, ( after giving a call telling him that they are going to di it of course, to keep their voters happy), but they know their voters do not like their winters messed with, so they will not do much else.
I mean, he may not have power over the US, but in Europe he is pretty much top dog. You think US has a dependence on middle east oil, nothing like Europe's dependence of Russian gas. He is actually playing the EU presidents against each other because of that.
You got nothing on Russia, and yes, Soviet Russia does check mate you.
The actual real solution is to rebase the currency. But that is a huge exercise, and not politically advantageous to say the least. It is actually now quite cheap to do so, given that most money is bits in some computer. If you rebase a currency, then those pennies are now actually worth something.
Here's an idea.
A court fines you so much money, and if you don't have a job, they give you one at around minimum wage (diggin up roads), and they deduct the fine from your wages until you have repaid every penny. So you actually do something productive whilst 'learning your lesson' If you have a job, they just instruct your employer to deduct a certian amount from your salary every month until you repay your debt.
There is this fallacy that a fine that doesn't run into 5 figures isn't effective. Please. anyone who says that has obviously not ever had to earn their money.
Actually, most marine life lives close to land and in the shallower water. So you just do it in the middle of the Atlantic, away from all manner of sea dwellers, and you mostly avoid the problem.
And oh, there is no way we are going to keep up our current confortable existence (heating for the home) and all without some environmental impact. We are part of the damn environment.
Get nuclear fusion right, and just 'mine' the ocean for tritium and deuterium. Possibly very little environmental impact, unless we are thinking of the white dolphins again.
And the waste, shoot it up to the moon I say. Preferably to the "Dark Side of the Moon", to make those radiation freaks feel better.
Just about the only way I can see humans finishing themselves off is through a nuclear war, where just about every nuclear device is detonated, or through a super virus that is airborne. We are way too geographically dispersed to vanish that easily without some keystone predator.
It may be that those weirdo people who do not have social lives choosing to program from their nuclear bunkers (the uber geeks) who survive, but trust me, it will survive just about anything. Heck, humans can and do survive in the jungle with the lions and all.
We can't starve ourselves to death. Some people may die, but in Darwinian terms, that is just another form of natural selection. The human population may drop drastically, but for the greater part of history, it has not been above 1 billion, or even 500 million. As long as human are alive and have unsurpassed intellect and moderate strength, they will remain.
(Famous last words?)
I am not arguing that there is no God. Hell no. I am just starting with a premise.
I did not mean you are dense. I meant that in "survival of the fittest" terms, if one cannot monetize your brilliant idea, then one is not very clever. So Bill Gates would be cleverer than the guy he bought DOS from. which is probably true.
However, if you agree that the issue of ownership is a practical issue, then it stands to reason that there are limits to it. I mean, we are taxed (at least I am). But I earned it. The government obviously thinks they can do better with the money I earn.
I tend to lean to that analysis. That 'economic' ownership is useful as a motivator for humans to improve their lives directly, and the lives of others indirectly. As soon as ownership begins to impede progress, it has gone too far.
Which is why, incidentally, I support higher estate taxes. You don't really need those things in death, and your kids should be able to have some of your stuff, but so should society, because, well, we can.
Slashdot Mirror
Say, what do they prefer to measure, umm, size in, centimetres or inches?
The big issue is getting the distribution system.
Perhaps it won't need batteries, because it will only be on when you are actually driving, and it is in the fob. Unless the guys over at MINI didn't think to power it that way.
Ughh, I said it.
Both BluRay and HD-DVD shall die pretty quick deaths, at least in the first world. I mean, in Japan and South Korea for example, with a 50Mbps internet connection being normal, you can download an entire DVD in about 752 seconds. In some parts they have gigabit connections. The only physical medium that shall matter is your hard drive. I already see a future in which your cable provider gives you a proper home entertainment server system, with terabytes of hard drive space, and movies are delivered to your server and you watch them from there.
As for pr0n, well, people get it online anyway. What is more discreet than that?
People tolerate it because they don't have to pay for it. Seriously, I have always been sceptical about the numbers I hear being peddled. I mean, I do not know anyone who has ever bought a porn movie. Maybe rented one, but not actually bought. Even back in the day when my mind was first corrupted by that stuff, people would have tapes that were probably copied from someone who copied someone who copied from someone else ad infinitum. Nowadays there is bittorrent. The biggest issue with such copying was the obvious degradation in quality, but with digital copies, that is not an issue. Coupled with the fact that most people do not really want to spend money on it. I mean, I watched the _non porn_ movie "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" in the cinema, and I watched it on someone else's computer, and then I bought the DVD. Repeat sales right there. People just don't do that sort of stuff with porn.
You bet if the industry was as big as claimed at times, as someone else put it, Disney would have a porn division, and so would Sony, Paramount, and all those big movie makers.
I think it was a coincidence that the pr0n guys chose VHS. I mean, back in the 80s, it was probablt kosher just to have pr0n, but now, that stuff is available everywhere. I think many people probably prefer to get their fix online, and regardless what you hear, pr0n is definitely not biggest shipping genre of DVD nowadays. A single film like Finding Nemo or Shrek of the Incredibles probably shipped more DVDs that the entire pr0n industry does in a whole year.
Forget those billions you hear the adult industry to be said to be making, it is not that huge, and will probably not be much of a deciding factor.
Gasp!!! All adult German men!!!
I for one think it is a good idea to perhaps force all porn domains into the xxx TLD. I think this should have been done long before. Not because I want them censored, but to make it easy for people who want to limit what can be viewed on certain computers to do so. When it comes to porn, the cat is out of the bag. No one is deluded enough to think that the government could wake up one morning and order people to stop making it. They would have a right riot on their hands. Government do not want to create a situation where their power would be shown to be limited. Why do you think they give in to protests. Because if people make themselves ungovernable, then government is toothless.
Any measure they take to be able to force porn sites to identify themselves as such is tantamount to censorship if you believe what you here on the dot. The domain registrar is probably not going to make much money off this. They will be closely watched to ensure that no underhand dealings go on. If anything, opportunistic slashdotters will rush out to buy domains and sell them on ebay long before the registrars milk their supposed client. And if $30 (an exaggerated example) is too much for a budding business, then you probably have no business trying to buy one of such domain.
There is not that much money in porn to sink billions in domain name registrations. Simple economics will keep the prices down.
No, it makes Fedora better than Debian. Paid developers steering the project and (hopefully) steering clear of making decisions by committee (see camel story).
Volunteers getting all the fancy packages they want, as they proved they could do, and did with the Extras project. So a real community distribution.
It's no Ubuntu, but they do still remain true to their Free/Open Source roots, so that makes them especially more appealing to the hardcore types too. Unlike Ubuntu. And its Redhat, the most consistent of the Linux companies. In terms of their Open Source/Free Software credentials, they have an unmatched record in the community.
Well, it is quite unfortunate, but unless you are a plant, you feed on other life. Lions feeds on deer, buffalo, snakes feeds on mice, and humans feed on just about anything. If another species were to become dominant on earth, rest assured they would have no problem cutting off your backsides to make burgers.
But to each his own.
If wild boy had died, and some scientists had happened upon his remains, and tested them, would they have found him to be human or otherwise?
Your programming does not make you human. You are human from the moment of your conception because you will not turn out in any other way. Your destiny is set. You will have two legs, and two hands (asides some possible deformities).
I mean, if you are arguing that the programming is what makes one human, then you might as well argue that all those bones we dig up were not human, or we can't prove they were, because we do not know what their programming was like.
Your argument is pretty much circular in that you are defining a human to be someone programmed in a certain way, and therefore your conclusions follow. But your premise is very flawed. I mean, from your arguments it would follow that there are various degrees of being human, because there rudimentary your personality, the less human you are. How do you then define what a rudimentary personality is?
The line between humans and none humans is not fuzzy at all. It is very clear, but perhaps some people like to make it less clear because it serves their arguments better to make it seem so. If an embryo is not human, then you have to come up with a point at which it becomes human. For many of us, it is when the sperm and the egg fuse. It may not be much to behold then, but since when has size been the be all and end all of anything.
I think progressive taxes are a good idea.
A lot of poor people are poor not because they were lazy, but because they were born poor, and opportunities were hard to come by. Whilst I think taxes need to be simplified, I think this can be done rather easily by just increasing the tax threshold. A rich person earning billions is not going to be advantaged much by a tax free income portion of say 10,000. So in a way it is very prgressive, whilst being non discriminatory.
It does really help the poor, and does not appreciably impact the rich. And above the tax free threshold, you can have a single tax rate anyway. And no special tax concession on income. At all.
You reciprocate questions and answers with the bank. Ask for the first and last digit of the password. Next time ask for the third and fifth from last. It will help to have a long password. Change your password when you have nearly exhausted all the letter combinations. It doesn't have to be a word that can be guessed, so knowing half the letters should not enable the MITM to guess the rest and call 'on your behalf'. If banks can ask you security questions, perhaps we should also be asking them too. Just to be sure.
People like Saddam did spread fear through their population, but he did not kill hundreds of thousands of his own people. That 'honour' belongs to the USA.
Saddam didn't need to kill that many. The downfall of a leaders is applying excessive force. You apply enough force to instill fear, but not too much so that people believe that they can avoid your attentions. If you kill wantonly, they will revolt, because they will not have much to lose. In terms of civil liberties, and modernisation Iraq was actually ahead of all its counterparts in the region. They just had a megalomaniac for a president who erred in judgement and attacked Kuwait.
Too true. If one million British people would have had to die to bring down Saddam, rest assured Bush would probably arrange a meeting with the fellow. But if it's Iraqis who are dying, who the hell cares.
I hate how people go on about how some people go on about how taking Saddam down made the world a better place. In terms of human casualty, probably more Americans and British and magnitudes more of Iraqis have died. But as you put it, rather unfortunately, they are poor third world people, so no one cares. (Except me of course).
So you are agreed that it is not a commom misconception. Theoretically, a round manhole cover only need a lip of less than 1mm, (depending on tolerances), whilst you need a ridiculously large lip to prevent square manhole covers falling into the holes. It's much harder to explain to someone who does not usually have an inclination to that sort of thing. And it usually suffices.
Actually, there are more males than females in the world. According to https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos /xx.html#People
total population: 1.01 male(s)/female (2006 est.)
No Chavez is just a loud mouth. Putin is the real deal. He has real leverage over here in Europe. Europe has this thing with gas, and Putin has almost all of it.
So even if they found evidence that he did personally authorise the murder of Mr Litvinenko, they will probably rebuke him publicly, ( after giving a call telling him that they are going to di it of course, to keep their voters happy), but they know their voters do not like their winters messed with, so they will not do much else.
I mean, he may not have power over the US, but in Europe he is pretty much top dog. You think US has a dependence on middle east oil, nothing like Europe's dependence of Russian gas. He is actually playing the EU presidents against each other because of that.
You got nothing on Russia, and yes, Soviet Russia does check mate you.
The actual real solution is to rebase the currency. But that is a huge exercise, and not politically advantageous to say the least. It is actually now quite cheap to do so, given that most money is bits in some computer. If you rebase a currency, then those pennies are now actually worth something.
Here's an idea. A court fines you so much money, and if you don't have a job, they give you one at around minimum wage (diggin up roads), and they deduct the fine from your wages until you have repaid every penny. So you actually do something productive whilst 'learning your lesson' If you have a job, they just instruct your employer to deduct a certian amount from your salary every month until you repay your debt. There is this fallacy that a fine that doesn't run into 5 figures isn't effective. Please. anyone who says that has obviously not ever had to earn their money.
Then Linux would be like OpenBSD. You wouldn't be reading about it at all.
Actually, most marine life lives close to land and in the shallower water. So you just do it in the middle of the Atlantic, away from all manner of sea dwellers, and you mostly avoid the problem.
And oh, there is no way we are going to keep up our current confortable existence (heating for the home) and all without some environmental impact. We are part of the damn environment.
Get nuclear fusion right, and just 'mine' the ocean for tritium and deuterium. Possibly very little environmental impact, unless we are thinking of the white dolphins again.
And the waste, shoot it up to the moon I say. Preferably to the "Dark Side of the Moon", to make those radiation freaks feel better.
Just about the only way I can see humans finishing themselves off is through a nuclear war, where just about every nuclear device is detonated, or through a super virus that is airborne. We are way too geographically dispersed to vanish that easily without some keystone predator. It may be that those weirdo people who do not have social lives choosing to program from their nuclear bunkers (the uber geeks) who survive, but trust me, it will survive just about anything. Heck, humans can and do survive in the jungle with the lions and all. We can't starve ourselves to death. Some people may die, but in Darwinian terms, that is just another form of natural selection. The human population may drop drastically, but for the greater part of history, it has not been above 1 billion, or even 500 million. As long as human are alive and have unsurpassed intellect and moderate strength, they will remain. (Famous last words?)
I am not arguing that there is no God. Hell no. I am just starting with a premise.
I did not mean you are dense. I meant that in "survival of the fittest" terms, if one cannot monetize your brilliant idea, then one is not very clever. So Bill Gates would be cleverer than the guy he bought DOS from. which is probably true.
However, if you agree that the issue of ownership is a practical issue, then it stands to reason that there are limits to it. I mean, we are taxed (at least I am). But I earned it. The government obviously thinks they can do better with the money I earn.
I tend to lean to that analysis. That 'economic' ownership is useful as a motivator for humans to improve their lives directly, and the lives of others indirectly. As soon as ownership begins to impede progress, it has gone too far.
Which is why, incidentally, I support higher estate taxes. You don't really need those things in death, and your kids should be able to have some of your stuff, but so should society, because, well, we can.