As a Christian, I don't like seeing people criticize my religion, but I certainly don't want them arrested for it! WTF makes scientology so damn important? The same could be said for Islam. Why is throwing a koran in the toilet a hate crime, but dumping a cross in a jar of urine not?
I don't want to see people arrested for criticizing Christianity and I sure as hell don't want to see people jailed for criticizing other religions either! Why is the free speech of non-Christians important than that of Christians??
Are any of them forcing their citizens to carry a nationalised ID card with biometric data on them? No. Yes. They all have a picture on them as well as eye color, height, weight and so on. And if they had more, like, say a finger print, so what?
Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Bosnia, nearly Haiti, and, of course, Afghanistan. Of course, this list only goes back to the late 80's, but you did say, "lately".
Crap! Scratch Kuwait. They have oil. Although, we didn't steal it all like the protesters said we would and the protesters say we are now.
Why would you assume that when the invasion has absolutely nothing to do with freedom? Tell that to those who voted in the first time of their lives where the ballot had more than one option.
How many countries has the US "liberated" that didn't have oil lately?? Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Bosnia, nearly Haiti, and, of course, Afghanistan. Of course, this list only goes back to the late 80's, but you did say, "lately".
I care because freedom is everyone's concern. Your loss of freedom is a negative influence on my freedom. I care because totalitarianism is insidious. Then I assume you supported the US/British/Spanish/Australian invasion Iraq. I presume you are currently pressing your government to liberate Saudi Arabia, Syria, Russia, and Iran, all in the name of freedom of course.
"It's only an ID card" becomes "you have to carry the ID card at all times" becomes "the RFID chip (or whatever) allows us to track you, wherever you are" becomes.... I know not what. And I don't want to know. Let's stop before we start on that road. I care because the state is our servant, not our master. And I do not have to tell you good folks that it will be expensive, and it will be insecure, and it will not prevent crime or terror or social disintegration. I care, becase it won't work - and it is dangerous. I see. You are saying that a nationalized ID will lead to tyranny. Are Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Sweden, and Switzerland run by tyrannical regimes? They all have nationalized ID card standards. Spain, Greece and about 98 other countries require you to carry a nationalized ID card. (Source)
For a list of ountries with compulsory identity cards, go HERE I think you find that none of them are run by Bush.
For all the horrific breaches of privacy and freedom that the Patriot Act etc have brought you over there
Seriously, I haven't noticed any. I know that facts really don't matter, but nothing in my life has changed since the PATRIOT Act was passed.
If you can regain your freedom...
Again, I haven't lost any freedoms. As for Britain, it sounds like you haven't lost any freedoms either. Privacy while you are in public maybe, but not any freedoms. (Although, as I have never been there, I'm really just speaking out my arse)
And the price for the domain wouldn't be just a few dollars: it could be something like $50,000 -- making it prohibitively expensive to most copycats. Banks would love this.
Not every bank is Bank of America. Most banks are actually small, local banks. I support these banks and trust me, some of these guys are the biggest tight-asses I've met! Besides, just because you have a bank, doesn't mean you are rolling in cash... well, OK, it does, but the money isn't yours to piss away.
So, rather than making it out of reach for smaller banks and credit unions, how about set it up so that only the FDIC can register your domain name. That way, when you get your FDIC Insurance certification, you get your domain name as well.
Let's see, my first Blizzard game was Warcraft, Orcs vs Humans (AKA Warcraft 1). It was DOS. I mean pre-Windows95 pure DOS. Next Came Warcraft II. It was also a DOS based game. It was the first game I played online. I had to use Kali under Win95 over dialup to connect. It was still awesome Next, they released a version of WCII that ran under DirectX, WC2BNE (WarCraft II BattleNet Edition). Coupled with a high speed connection and BattleNet.. it kicked ass! I lost a college semester and a summer to BNE! Then came Diablo. That rocked. The sounds were creepy enough to scare me late at night after a few bong hits... Diablo2 came out. It was a lot like Diablo1, much bigger... but not exactly revolutionary. Next was Starcraft. This was Blizzard's best game yet. BattleNet, futuristic setting, that chick from Diablo doing the voice for Kerra (sp?). Much better resource management, three races to play and more units each. It was WC2 on steroids and in the future! WarCraftIII was next. I thought it was better than Stacraft, if for no other reason than it took away much of the micromanagement. It also required more strategy with the addition of the heroes. No agreed with me, however, as most people still thing Starcraft is a better game. Finally, World of Warcraft was release. WOW is the biggest game Blizzard has ever released and its biggest cash cow. All else fell to the wayside when WOW came out. Shame, really.
Well, that's the history of Blizzard. I didn't include expansions like Frozen Throne or BroodWar. To me, those are just part of the game. It's like they were supposed to be in the original, but ran out of time and then finished it up and sold it as an expansion.
Of course, all this is from memory and it would kill some of the nostalgia if I looked it up. Some of it may be a bit out of order, but it looks right to me and everything is there as far as I can tell.
Seven games. Seven games in over 12 years. Not exactly what I could call a LOT of games, but not too shabby either if you really only have one product manager.
Rather, the sophomore says he was examining vulnerabilities so that they could be fixed. "I was planning on going to Cisco with the vulnerability this summer," Maass says.
While I'm all for white-hat hacking, it's unfortunate that every time someone is busted, they suddenly put the white hat on. In this case, I have to ask: Why didn't he go to Cisco with the vulnerability YESTERDAY?
my guess is no. over 100,000 votes is a lot to fuck up.
I believe you are talking about 2004 election. This deals with the 2006 election where, for example, the Senate race was decided by less than 50,000 votes. It would take a 25,000 (7%) change of votes to change the outcome.
However, your point is still valid as 25,000 is still a lot to fuck up. But one county mentioned in the article as being totally fucked up is Cuyahoga, which has a difference of about 186,000 votes between the two candidates, and that's just one county.
Of course, the example I provide is just for the Senate race. I don't know about the House elections. I'm sure the "local dog-catcher" elections would be closer still.
If the government is not allowed to secretly spy on you (before the PATRIOT Act anyway... IANAL), why should the RIAA?
Possibility for abuse aside, at least the government claims to do it save lives, whereas the RIAA is doing it to make (more) money.
Note: This is not a comment on the PATRIOT Act. It is a comment on how the RIAA now has more power than the FBI, CIA, NSA, and local police combined. The only difference being that they can not shoot you.
That's funny, even with comment filtering set to level 5, this one still gets through...and +5 informative, no less. Informative how? Maybe it's a glitch in the/. mod system...
Careful! My karma was "excellent" two days ago. Then I commented on an Anonymous Coward post stating little more than "Bush. Worst. President. Ever." on a story that wasn't even about Bush getting modded "+5 Insightful." By the end of the day, my Karma was "Terrible". Read my sig for opinion of opinionated Mods. Read my Journal for SlashDot rules. Look at my Karma to see how well they are followed.
Just my experience. May the mods have mercy on me.
why storing all your data on some company's servers is a good idea?
While I agree that keeping local backups will prevent the frustration felt when remote servers lose your data, there is a convenience factor of being able to access your data from anywhere. Two examples:
GMail: I like the idea of being able to access my email everywhere I have an Internet connection. It's also a nice file transfer mechanism. If I need a file at work, I email it to my gmail account and then download it at work.
QuickBooks: My stepfather has his own business. He used quickbooks and found that it met his needs, was easy enough for him to use and, most importantly, he was familiar with it. When he hired on a few managers to help out with his growing business, he realized that giving them each their own copy was not only expensive, but they would would constantly be trying to reconcile and replicate all the data entered by each of them to each of their own systems. This could become a huge hassle for the three employees he had and would only get worse as more are hired on. With QuickBooks online, everyone has access the same data at the same time from different locations and since there is only one database, no replication is required. Of course, he keeps local hard copies of everything in the event of an Intuit disaster.
Is it just me, or are all these options that are added with every new release going to result in a bloated kernel? It seems like every release adds new stuff, but I never see anything outdated taken away.
Yes, I know that you can recompile and remove what you don't need, but most "non-uber-geek" users are not going to be able to handle that, and most distros are going to include a kernel with the kitchen sink compiled in.
The Cell is no more a console chip than the x86 (used in XBox) or the PowerPC (used in the 360). Yes, it is used in a console, but I hate to see such a powerful chip "type-cast" to the console. I'm glad IBM is cutting the Cell loose by actually using it for something other than console gaming. However, I wish they would have used a better example than "Virtual Worlds" for its uses. Something like Medical Imaging, 3D Rendering or even Weather Forecasting would have been so much better towards breaking the Cell from its gaming niche.
If so, wouldn't that be a violation of the Logan Act that all the conservatives claim (incorrectly) that Pelosi violated?
In fact, it's rather hard to imagine a scenario where the hostages get released minutes after Reagan takes office that doesn't entail a violation of the Logan Act.
The President Elect "making policy" is a bit different than the Speaker of the House.
If ANWR is so valuable as a strategic reserve, why would we ever take the oil out of it if we weren't using it as such?
It will take more than a year to see any oil actually flow from ANWR. Our strategic reserves will last us about 60 days. I would suggest that even if we don't drill in ANWR because we need to oil for our SUV's, we should at least drill there and be ready to pump, in case of emergency.
Unfortunately, the Sierra Club thinks that this 5% of ANWR is more valuable as a wildlife reserve than a strategic one.
The entire known reserves in ANWR would provide six months' worth of oil. It won't bring prices down, and it won't significantly reduce the amount of money sent to people who want to kill us. It will bring money to the people who want to drill there, but that's about it. I'm unconvinced that the nation has a meaningful policy on reducing the use of foreign oil, given that any move toward reducing consumption has been blocked over the last six years.
I disagree with your numbers, but we'll use them for now. Rather than providing us with 100% of our oil needs for 6 months, it could provide us with 10% of our needs for 60 months (5 years). The idea, of course, being that if the profit received from ANWR was put into renewable energy research, we could be providing more than 10% more of our oil needs through renewable or "other than fossil" fuels.
Back to the numbers: How much oil is in ANWR? Take this:
The estimates of the technically-recoverable oil (i.e. ignoring the market price) in the 1002 area are as follows: There is a 95% probability of being able to technically recover 4.254 billion barrels of oil, and a 5% probability of recovering 11.8 billion barrels of oil. The mean expected estimate is of being able to technically recover 7.7 billion barrels of oil. Using the graph on the right we see that at an oil price of below $13/barrel no oil is commercially recoverable, while at an oil price of $30/barrel the 95% probability estimate is 3.2 billion barrels of oil, the 5% probability is 10.4 billion barrels of oil, and the mean expected estimate is 6.4 billion barrels of oil. At an oil price of $24/barrel the mean expected estimate comes in at 5.2 billion barrels of oil.
One thing that's been in the news lately is the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It currently stores about 570 million barrels of oil in underground salt caverns along the Gulf of Mexico. Given that the U.S. imports about half of its oil, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve holds about a 60 day supply of oil if all imports were suddenly cut off.
In other words, even if we don't drill in ANWR to sell the oil outright, it would increase our strategic reserves by at least 700%!
Apparently you haven't purchased gasoline in the past, oh, 5 years. That's cool. It's good to find a GOP member who actually walks or bikes to work instead of riding in the biggest SUV they can get 60 month leasing on.
And for the record, I remember gas lines from more than 5 years ago. Also, I drive a 1995 Toyota Avalon (it's paid for). When I filled it up today and calculated my mileage, I found that it got about 28 mpg since the last fill up.
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As a Christian, I don't like seeing people criticize my religion, but I certainly don't want them arrested for it! WTF makes scientology so damn important? The same could be said for Islam. Why is throwing a koran in the toilet a hate crime, but dumping a cross in a jar of urine not?
I don't want to see people arrested for criticizing Christianity and I sure as hell don't want to see people jailed for criticizing other religions either! Why is the free speech of non-Christians important than that of Christians??
As long as I can still back up my DVD's to my HDD and then view them off my own burned DVD's, I don't care what they do!
You try keeping your daughter from destroying those Disney DVD's that are only released once a few decades!
Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Bosnia, nearly Haiti, and, of course, Afghanistan. Of course, this list only goes back to the late 80's, but you did say, "lately".
Crap! Scratch Kuwait. They have oil. Although, we didn't steal it all like the protesters said we would and the protesters say we are now.
I care because totalitarianism is insidious. Then I assume you supported the US/British/Spanish/Australian invasion Iraq. I presume you are currently pressing your government to liberate Saudi Arabia, Syria, Russia, and Iran, all in the name of freedom of course. "It's only an ID card" becomes "you have to carry the ID card at all times" becomes "the RFID chip (or whatever) allows us to track you, wherever you are" becomes
I care because the state is our servant, not our master.
And I do not have to tell you good folks that it will be expensive, and it will be insecure, and it will not prevent crime or terror or social disintegration.
I care, becase it won't work - and it is dangerous. I see. You are saying that a nationalized ID will lead to tyranny. Are Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Sweden, and Switzerland run by tyrannical regimes? They all have nationalized ID card standards. Spain, Greece and about 98 other countries require you to carry a nationalized ID card. (Source)
For a list of ountries with compulsory identity cards, go HERE I think you find that none of them are run by Bush.
For all the horrific breaches of privacy and freedom that the Patriot Act etc have brought you over there
Seriously, I haven't noticed any. I know that facts really don't matter, but nothing in my life has changed since the PATRIOT Act was passed.
If you can regain your freedom...
Again, I haven't lost any freedoms. As for Britain, it sounds like you haven't lost any freedoms either. Privacy while you are in public maybe, but not any freedoms. (Although, as I have never been there, I'm really just speaking out my arse)
Is it helpful for non USA citizens to also voice their disquiet?
As a US citizen, I appreciate your concern, but I have to ask:
Why do you care?
And the price for the domain wouldn't be just a few dollars: it could be something like $50,000 -- making it prohibitively expensive to most copycats. Banks would love this.
Not every bank is Bank of America. Most banks are actually small, local banks. I support these banks and trust me, some of these guys are the biggest tight-asses I've met! Besides, just because you have a bank, doesn't mean you are rolling in cash... well, OK, it does, but the money isn't yours to piss away.
So, rather than making it out of reach for smaller banks and credit unions, how about set it up so that only the FDIC can register your domain name. That way, when you get your FDIC Insurance certification, you get your domain name as well.
Especially since Blizzard makes a lot of games.
Let's see, my first Blizzard game was Warcraft, Orcs vs Humans (AKA Warcraft 1). It was DOS. I mean pre-Windows95 pure DOS.
Next Came Warcraft II. It was also a DOS based game. It was the first game I played online. I had to use Kali under Win95 over dialup to connect. It was still awesome
Next, they released a version of WCII that ran under DirectX, WC2BNE (WarCraft II BattleNet Edition). Coupled with a high speed connection and BattleNet.. it kicked ass! I lost a college semester and a summer to BNE!
Then came Diablo. That rocked. The sounds were creepy enough to scare me late at night after a few bong hits...
Diablo2 came out. It was a lot like Diablo1, much bigger... but not exactly revolutionary.
Next was Starcraft. This was Blizzard's best game yet. BattleNet, futuristic setting, that chick from Diablo doing the voice for Kerra (sp?). Much better resource management, three races to play and more units each. It was WC2 on steroids and in the future!
WarCraftIII was next. I thought it was better than Stacraft, if for no other reason than it took away much of the micromanagement. It also required more strategy with the addition of the heroes. No agreed with me, however, as most people still thing Starcraft is a better game.
Finally, World of Warcraft was release. WOW is the biggest game Blizzard has ever released and its biggest cash cow. All else fell to the wayside when WOW came out. Shame, really.
Well, that's the history of Blizzard. I didn't include expansions like Frozen Throne or BroodWar. To me, those are just part of the game. It's like they were supposed to be in the original, but ran out of time and then finished it up and sold it as an expansion.
Of course, all this is from memory and it would kill some of the nostalgia if I looked it up. Some of it may be a bit out of order, but it looks right to me and everything is there as far as I can tell.
Seven games. Seven games in over 12 years. Not exactly what I could call a LOT of games, but not too shabby either if you really only have one product manager.
Rather, the sophomore says he was examining vulnerabilities so that they could be fixed. "I was planning on going to Cisco with the vulnerability this summer," Maass says.
While I'm all for white-hat hacking, it's unfortunate that every time someone is busted, they suddenly put the white hat on. In this case, I have to ask:
Why didn't he go to Cisco with the vulnerability YESTERDAY?
my guess is no. over 100,000 votes is a lot to fuck up.
I believe you are talking about 2004 election. This deals with the 2006 election where, for example, the Senate race was decided by less than 50,000 votes. It would take a 25,000 (7%) change of votes to change the outcome.
However, your point is still valid as 25,000 is still a lot to fuck up. But one county mentioned in the article as being totally fucked up is Cuyahoga, which has a difference of about 186,000 votes between the two candidates, and that's just one county.
Of course, the example I provide is just for the Senate race. I don't know about the House elections. I'm sure the "local dog-catcher" elections would be closer still.
TFA didn't say, but does anyone know if it is possible to get an accurate, tally? Would it make a difference?
If the government is not allowed to secretly spy on you (before the PATRIOT Act anyway... IANAL), why should the RIAA?
Possibility for abuse aside, at least the government claims to do it save lives, whereas the RIAA is doing it to make (more) money.
Note: This is not a comment on the PATRIOT Act. It is a comment on how the RIAA now has more power than the FBI, CIA, NSA, and local police combined. The only difference being that they can not shoot you.
That's funny, even with comment filtering set to level 5, this one still gets through...and +5 informative, no less. Informative how? Maybe it's a glitch in the /. mod system...
Careful! My karma was "excellent" two days ago. Then I commented on an Anonymous Coward post stating little more than "Bush. Worst. President. Ever." on a story that wasn't even about Bush getting modded "+5 Insightful." By the end of the day, my Karma was "Terrible". Read my sig for opinion of opinionated Mods. Read my Journal for SlashDot rules. Look at my Karma to see how well they are followed.
Just my experience. May the mods have mercy on me.
why storing all your data on some company's servers is a good idea?
While I agree that keeping local backups will prevent the frustration felt when remote servers lose your data, there is a convenience factor of being able to access your data from anywhere. Two examples:
GMail: I like the idea of being able to access my email everywhere I have an Internet connection. It's also a nice file transfer mechanism. If I need a file at work, I email it to my gmail account and then download it at work.
QuickBooks: My stepfather has his own business. He used quickbooks and found that it met his needs, was easy enough for him to use and, most importantly, he was familiar with it. When he hired on a few managers to help out with his growing business, he realized that giving them each their own copy was not only expensive, but they would would constantly be trying to reconcile and replicate all the data entered by each of them to each of their own systems. This could become a huge hassle for the three employees he had and would only get worse as more are hired on. With QuickBooks online, everyone has access the same data at the same time from different locations and since there is only one database, no replication is required. Of course, he keeps local hard copies of everything in the event of an Intuit disaster.
Is it just me, or are all these options that are added with every new release going to result in a bloated kernel? It seems like every release adds new stuff, but I never see anything outdated taken away.
Yes, I know that you can recompile and remove what you don't need, but most "non-uber-geek" users are not going to be able to handle that, and most distros are going to include a kernel with the kitchen sink compiled in.
IBM Adds Videogame Console Chips to Mainframes
The Cell is no more a console chip than the x86 (used in XBox) or the PowerPC (used in the 360). Yes, it is used in a console, but I hate to see such a powerful chip "type-cast" to the console. I'm glad IBM is cutting the Cell loose by actually using it for something other than console gaming. However, I wish they would have used a better example than "Virtual Worlds" for its uses. Something like Medical Imaging, 3D Rendering or even Weather Forecasting would have been so much better towards breaking the Cell from its gaming niche.
What is going to be the name of the first model?
The smart money is on Bob.
How do they ID hate speech? Is a cartoon Mohamed hate speech? How about a cartoon Jesus (South Park anyone?)
If so, wouldn't that be a violation of the Logan Act that all the conservatives claim (incorrectly) that Pelosi violated?
In fact, it's rather hard to imagine a scenario where the hostages get released minutes after Reagan takes office that doesn't entail a violation of the Logan Act.
The President Elect "making policy" is a bit different than the Speaker of the House.
If ANWR is so valuable as a strategic reserve, why would we ever take the oil out of it if we weren't using it as such?
It will take more than a year to see any oil actually flow from ANWR. Our strategic reserves will last us about 60 days. I would suggest that even if we don't drill in ANWR because we need to oil for our SUV's, we should at least drill there and be ready to pump, in case of emergency.
Unfortunately, the Sierra Club thinks that this 5% of ANWR is more valuable as a wildlife reserve than a strategic one.
I disagree with your numbers, but we'll use them for now. Rather than providing us with 100% of our oil needs for 6 months, it could provide us with 10% of our needs for 60 months (5 years). The idea, of course, being that if the profit received from ANWR was put into renewable energy research, we could be providing more than 10% more of our oil needs through renewable or "other than fossil" fuels.
Back to the numbers:
How much oil is in ANWR? Take this:
Compared to this:
In other words, even if we don't drill in ANWR to sell the oil outright, it would increase our strategic reserves by at least 700%!
What was the topic again?
Crap... here's the link here
Apparently you haven't purchased gasoline in the past, oh, 5 years. That's cool. It's good to find a GOP member who actually walks or bikes to work instead of riding in the biggest SUV they can get 60 month leasing on.
t ml">here and look at the "adjusted for inflation" part.
Maybe you should check http://www.randomuseless.info/gasprice/gasprice.h
And for the record, I remember gas lines from more than 5 years ago. Also, I drive a 1995 Toyota Avalon (it's paid for). When I filled it up today and calculated my mileage, I found that it got about 28 mpg since the last fill up.