Singapore has just as much drug use as most other nations. People just learn to hide it better in fear of beatings, and the government pretends that their harsh penalties work.
How many families and lives are ruined by alcoholism? Millions. Should that that take away my right to enjoy a glass of wine with dinner?
Prohibition DOES NOT WORK. If we want to end drug abuse, we need to do it by giving people better things to do. We need to give people better educations, and better jobs, so that they are less likely to be seduced into the shady world of cheap street drugs. We need to break down this culture of media and money addicts, seeking out designer drugs and cocaine as new forms of instant gratification.
The drug war has been going on for decades. Drugs have come and gone, popularity rises and wanes, but prohibition does not, and has never worked. It did not work for alcohol, or pot, or crack. The only way to keep people off of drugs is to show them that there is a wonderful, caring society out there willing to help and embrace them, to employ them and enjoy them. Not to simply exploit them as resources in for our great corporations, bastions of capitalism, and then throw them away into prisons that make no attempt at rehabilitation.
"they may not go through with producing the Gamecube"
Hiroshi Yamauchi never said that. He simply stated that they may stop marketing the game cube. Not producing it is simply an extrapolation by Daily Radar, a website known for having little- if any - journalistic integrity.
The point of the drug war is not to do anything with drugs. It is the largest bit of pork spending, ever. It is, at best, white trash wellfare, dumping jobs into the laps of american's under-educated white population, at the expense of a huge percentage (Nearly 50%.) of our black males.
Here is a short list of companies/people profiting from the drug war:
-All of the cops out there who are just worthless scum that like having a badge and a gun. Review the LAPD Rampart scandal for a good look. Also review the last 40 years of the Philadelphia police.
- Gun manufacturers.
- Ammunition manufacturers.
- American car companies, who provide the police with vehicles.
- Uniform companies (Police and prisoner.) and the textile/dye manufacturers that make the fabric for the uniforms.
- Construction firms. Someone builds prisons.
- Prison management firms. Very few prisons are run by the states anymore.
- Prison guards, and the firms that contract them to the prisons.
- Defense contractors, who sell items to the US armed forces to use attacking drug manufacturers in other nations.
- Lawyers, mostly defense, as prosecution offices in the US are mostly so understaffed that even without drug cases they would still have more cases than they could handle.
- The people who came up with DARE.
The list goes on and on. Name an industry, they have a hand in the drug war. And like all companies, they have a list of politicians they have bought off. No politician would take much serious action against the drug war at a federal level, because he would likely not recieve further campaign funds from many of the companies that put him in office.
If you really want to fight against the drug war, call your legislators and have them support campaign finance reform. Get the money out of the game, and there is no longer a need for the drug war.
Today I read a bit by a developer on the Star Wars MMORPG. He mentioned that most of the people of the planet Coruscant never left their home building.
How many of the people born in this building would never need to leave? This building will be done in around 20 years, so by then work on buildings for several times as many people will be in the works. Will Earth soon be home to giant city sized buildings, all just connections of sub-buildings? Couldn't we just hollow out mountains or something?
Regardless of how it works out, this whole thing scares me. I think I just found the premise for my first sci-fi novel.
"the same explosive fuel that downed the hindenburg"
The Hindenburg was not downed by the Hydrogen. The Hindenburg went down because the the fabric "skin" over the metal frame had been painted with a mixture containing powerdered aluminum. It was the first time a blimp had been painted with the substance, and before that the extreme flammability of the stuff was unknown. When the ship dropped its mooring lines, a sparc from the static it picked up from storm clouds arced somewhere on blimp, and the aluminum in the paint caught fire. It burned at several thousand degrees, and the entire skin of the blimp went with it. The heat collapsed the frame, and blew up the hydrogen tanks inside.
The whole thing was discovered by the Germans soon after the explosion, who covered it up fearing that shifting blame from helium to the aluminum paint would make Nazi scientists look bad. It was later discovered by a NASA hydrogen expert who saw that the giant flames and burning skin were inconsistent with hydrogen explosions. He found remnants of the blimp's skin and tests confirmed his theory.
Now I can go to an installfest run by a lug, get all my Linux stuff set up with working sound and 3D, and then get the games cheap! Sweeeet.
Now if I could only find a Linux distro with 3D that works well enough to play games on Nvidia cards, right out of the box. Anyone know if Mandrake 8 is capable?
"I wonder if it'll be cheap enough for home use.:-)" "
Fiber is cheap now. The high cost of fiber is not the fiber cable, it is the installation and maintenance. Add on the cost of all the routing equipment and you see where the real costs lay.
This crap is all legal stuff. No intelligent person in Apple outside of legal would really believe that this is good for the company. Any idiot can look at the situation and see that this is done for one reason - allowing the lawyers to rack up more billable hours.
Eventually Apple will get with it an throw the bastards out. It might take a while, but eventually they will realize the same thing that AOL/Time-Warner did during the Harry Potter legal mess: YOU DO NOT MAKE, NOR SAVE MONEY, BY ATTACKING PAYING CUSTOMERS.
While this is good for the blind, it still isn't enough. Until every image is sufficiently tagged (Requiring an average of a few seconds work per image.) the blind will still have a rough time surfing the web. It is a shame that so many companies cut the blind out like this.
There is absolutely no reason to assume that the Xbox will be delayed. Unstable OSs are pretty much a thing of the past with Windows on the PC. On the Xbox, there is only one hardware set to support and no need for all of the extra crap that might cause any problems.
Aside from the fact that the video processor is arriving a little late (Which it does in most video console development, like the Dreamcast, PS2, N64, and GameCube.) there has been no evidence that this will hold back release of the machine. If anything, having a video processor from Nvidia makes it more likely that the machine will release on time, because of existing relationships with chip fabs that allow for higher volumes of chip production early on as compared to the problems making the custom chips for the PS2.
If you want to insult Microsoft, go after their shady, anticompetitive business practices. Stability is no longer an issue, and given all of their careful work and partners on the Xbox, assuming it will be unstable and/or late is just idiotic.
Console game companies have made it very clear that the reason they are so slow to get into online gaming is the pitiful state of slow, high-latency modem based services. High speed wirless changes that. Sony is already building a wireless online network for Playstation 2 games in Japan. This sort of thing could also be easily adopted in most of Europe, Asia, and North America's metropoli and their outlying suburbs, just all cell phones were.
The devices can also be used to stream out live feeds of video (In a few years, all wireless phones will likely be video phones, British firm Pedagogue will lead they way.) to wireless devices, as well as live music. Imagine setting up your own streaming audio server at home, and listening to all of your MP3s from anywhere in the world, with a device half the size of current MP3 players.
Optical media is not really such a bad option. A useful, self contained system for playback of optical media could be easily built. If nothing else, carefully preserved schematics for future readers of media could be store with it to make sure that if the machine is ruined and media survives, it might still be read.
The real reason that old magnetic tape is hard to read now is that it was never a great format in the first place. The stuff falls apart. My last employer had an old HP reel-to-reel machine for reading data on tapes from a company we had purchased, but the tapes were so old that the chemicals on the tape itself turned to dust and fell off. This is not a problem with optical storage. Optical storage also has the option of being dedicated in very small spaces, unlike the van sized tape players of old.
Life is also not a big issue with optical media, because just as the books of the Medici's were recopied over and over into new languages and on better bindings, so can data be quickly copied from old optical media onto newer formats.
Katz presents a vision of the standoff that is far too simple. Given, the standoff is not the only point of the article, but there is enough involved for it to be a pain in the ass.
The Chinese want more than a simple apology from the US in order to free the crew of the American plane. They also want the US to end all flights off the coast of China, specifically in the South China sea, beyond that, all flights around Taiwan.
Demands like this are presented on behalf of the Chinese military, which has been growing in power as the Chinese grow dissatisfied with their opressive, corrupt, and generally worlthless unelected leaders. China's military also wants to "take back" Taiwan. If they can get the US to apoligize for activities relating to US espionage off the China coast, they get a great power boost. If they can use it to forward their machinations against Taiwan, all the better. While military subversion of the Chinese government might be good at breaking down their terribly mismanaged communist system, a military government in China might be even worse.
Jiang Zemin and his corhorts, of course, see this and must stand up and make simlar demands, so that they are not seen as an enemy of the military, and so that the military can not say that he is backing down to the US like he was percieved to have done when the US accidentally bombed a Chinese embassy in the balkan conflicts.
Last of all, comes the US. Our leaders muyst show a strong front against the Chinese, so that we can continue to support the Taiwanese. Taiwan is an invaluable trade partner, and if China were to conquer Taiwan, it would drastically raise prices on many goods, especailly compter parts, that come into the US. Such things would have a disasterous affect on the US economy given its present shaken state. It would also lead to a terrible loss of life for the Taiwanese, many of whom would resist a Chinese takeoever to their deaths.
So what it all comes down to is far more than a simple apology for a midair accident. In the greater scheme of things, the lives of the airmen involved mean nothing. What matters here is the freedom, wealth, and lives of billions of people, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Americans.
"The US plane was in international airspace on autopilot"
Perhaps from an American point of view. As far as the Chinese are concerned, that is their airspace, and the Americans are only allowed to fly there until the Chinese finally take back Taiwan and all the ocean inbetween. Things are not as black and white as your silly little mind would like them to be.
Why does it matter? The kids will eventually see the stuff, one way or the other. It does not hurt them, much less matter.
Hearing the word "fuck" does nothing to harm a child. Neither does seeing naked men having gay orgies.
The real problem here is that people refuse to give up on the worthless moral standards imposed by their religions. This leads to shame when discussing such topics, especially when discussing them with children. When the FCC censors television, it is only because Americans are too stupid to think for themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Singapore has just as much drug use as most other nations. People just learn to hide it better in fear of beatings, and the government pretends that their harsh penalties work.
How many families and lives are ruined by alcoholism? Millions. Should that that take away my right to enjoy a glass of wine with dinner?
Prohibition DOES NOT WORK. If we want to end drug abuse, we need to do it by giving people better things to do. We need to give people better educations, and better jobs, so that they are less likely to be seduced into the shady world of cheap street drugs. We need to break down this culture of media and money addicts, seeking out designer drugs and cocaine as new forms of instant gratification.
The drug war has been going on for decades. Drugs have come and gone, popularity rises and wanes, but prohibition does not, and has never worked. It did not work for alcohol, or pot, or crack. The only way to keep people off of drugs is to show them that there is a wonderful, caring society out there willing to help and embrace them, to employ them and enjoy them. Not to simply exploit them as resources in for our great corporations, bastions of capitalism, and then throw them away into prisons that make no attempt at rehabilitation.
The drug war is a sick joke. It will never work.
"they may not go through with producing the Gamecube"
Hiroshi Yamauchi never said that. He simply stated that they may stop marketing the game cube. Not producing it is simply an extrapolation by Daily Radar, a website known for having little- if any - journalistic integrity.
The point of the drug war is not to do anything with drugs. It is the largest bit of pork spending, ever. It is, at best, white trash wellfare, dumping jobs into the laps of american's under-educated white population, at the expense of a huge percentage (Nearly 50%.) of our black males.
Here is a short list of companies/people profiting from the drug war:
-All of the cops out there who are just worthless scum that like having a badge and a gun. Review the LAPD Rampart scandal for a good look. Also review the last 40 years of the Philadelphia police.
- Gun manufacturers.
- Ammunition manufacturers.
- American car companies, who provide the police with vehicles.
- Uniform companies (Police and prisoner.) and the textile/dye manufacturers that make the fabric for the uniforms.
- Construction firms. Someone builds prisons.
- Prison management firms. Very few prisons are run by the states anymore.
- Prison guards, and the firms that contract them to the prisons.
- Defense contractors, who sell items to the US armed forces to use attacking drug manufacturers in other nations.
- Lawyers, mostly defense, as prosecution offices in the US are mostly so understaffed that even without drug cases they would still have more cases than they could handle.
- The people who came up with DARE.
The list goes on and on. Name an industry, they have a hand in the drug war. And like all companies, they have a list of politicians they have bought off. No politician would take much serious action against the drug war at a federal level, because he would likely not recieve further campaign funds from many of the companies that put him in office.
If you really want to fight against the drug war, call your legislators and have them support campaign finance reform. Get the money out of the game, and there is no longer a need for the drug war.
Today I read a bit by a developer on the Star Wars MMORPG. He mentioned that most of the people of the planet Coruscant never left their home building.
How many of the people born in this building would never need to leave? This building will be done in around 20 years, so by then work on buildings for several times as many people will be in the works. Will Earth soon be home to giant city sized buildings, all just connections of sub-buildings? Couldn't we just hollow out mountains or something?
Regardless of how it works out, this whole thing scares me. I think I just found the premise for my first sci-fi novel.
"the same explosive fuel that downed the hindenburg"
The Hindenburg was not downed by the Hydrogen. The Hindenburg went down because the the fabric "skin" over the metal frame had been painted with a mixture containing powerdered aluminum. It was the first time a blimp had been painted with the substance, and before that the extreme flammability of the stuff was unknown. When the ship dropped its mooring lines, a sparc from the static it picked up from storm clouds arced somewhere on blimp, and the aluminum in the paint caught fire. It burned at several thousand degrees, and the entire skin of the blimp went with it. The heat collapsed the frame, and blew up the hydrogen tanks inside.
The whole thing was discovered by the Germans soon after the explosion, who covered it up fearing that shifting blame from helium to the aluminum paint would make Nazi scientists look bad. It was later discovered by a NASA hydrogen expert who saw that the giant flames and burning skin were inconsistent with hydrogen explosions. He found remnants of the blimp's skin and tests confirmed his theory.
Just a little eye opener...
They could put Walt Disney on display, giving a whole new meaning to a "Disney theme park."
Now I can go to an installfest run by a lug, get all my Linux stuff set up with working sound and 3D, and then get the games cheap! Sweeeet.
Now if I could only find a Linux distro with 3D that works well enough to play games on Nvidia cards, right out of the box. Anyone know if Mandrake 8 is capable?
"I wonder if it'll be cheap enough for home use. :-)" "
Fiber is cheap now. The high cost of fiber is not the fiber cable, it is the installation and maintenance. Add on the cost of all the routing equipment and you see where the real costs lay.
Leave it to Mandrake to mess up my day! I was going to stay home, now I have to go to work so I can download my fave distro on the T1 and burn it off!
I am SO switching to Debian! Those guys never update.
This crap is all legal stuff. No intelligent person in Apple outside of legal would really believe that this is good for the company. Any idiot can look at the situation and see that this is done for one reason - allowing the lawyers to rack up more billable hours.
Eventually Apple will get with it an throw the bastards out. It might take a while, but eventually they will realize the same thing that AOL/Time-Warner did during the Harry Potter legal mess: YOU DO NOT MAKE, NOR SAVE MONEY, BY ATTACKING PAYING CUSTOMERS.
While this is good for the blind, it still isn't enough. Until every image is sufficiently tagged (Requiring an average of a few seconds work per image.) the blind will still have a rough time surfing the web. It is a shame that so many companies cut the blind out like this.
I meant acutal production parts in the development cycle. Most console video parts are the last thing to arrive, as was the emotion engine.
", an Open Source victory in this sector could deal a major blow to Microsoft"
Deal a major blow? Given that Microsoft has almost no share of this market to begin with, this is not dealing a blow.
There is absolutely no reason to assume that the Xbox will be delayed. Unstable OSs are pretty much a thing of the past with Windows on the PC. On the Xbox, there is only one hardware set to support and no need for all of the extra crap that might cause any problems.
Aside from the fact that the video processor is arriving a little late (Which it does in most video console development, like the Dreamcast, PS2, N64, and GameCube.) there has been no evidence that this will hold back release of the machine. If anything, having a video processor from Nvidia makes it more likely that the machine will release on time, because of existing relationships with chip fabs that allow for higher volumes of chip production early on as compared to the problems making the custom chips for the PS2.
If you want to insult Microsoft, go after their shady, anticompetitive business practices. Stability is no longer an issue, and given all of their careful work and partners on the Xbox, assuming it will be unstable and/or late is just idiotic.
Console game companies have made it very clear that the reason they are so slow to get into online gaming is the pitiful state of slow, high-latency modem based services. High speed wirless changes that. Sony is already building a wireless online network for Playstation 2 games in Japan. This sort of thing could also be easily adopted in most of Europe, Asia, and North America's metropoli and their outlying suburbs, just all cell phones were.
The devices can also be used to stream out live feeds of video (In a few years, all wireless phones will likely be video phones, British firm Pedagogue will lead they way.) to wireless devices, as well as live music. Imagine setting up your own streaming audio server at home, and listening to all of your MP3s from anywhere in the world, with a device half the size of current MP3 players.
I always hated that goddamned paperclip.
Then again, I use StarOffice for everything except email, so I guess I don't matter.
"I'm curious about now is what happens to the games in development"
Nobody was developing any games for Indrema. Why do you think that they could not get funding?
764 mph is listed by Brittanica as a common speed of sound at altitudes supersonic planes fly, so it seemed like an obvious one to use.
The speed of sound is 764 miles per hour. That makes mach five 3820 miles per hour.
Optical media is not really such a bad option. A useful, self contained system for playback of optical media could be easily built. If nothing else, carefully preserved schematics for future readers of media could be store with it to make sure that if the machine is ruined and media survives, it might still be read.
The real reason that old magnetic tape is hard to read now is that it was never a great format in the first place. The stuff falls apart. My last employer had an old HP reel-to-reel machine for reading data on tapes from a company we had purchased, but the tapes were so old that the chemicals on the tape itself turned to dust and fell off. This is not a problem with optical storage. Optical storage also has the option of being dedicated in very small spaces, unlike the van sized tape players of old.
Life is also not a big issue with optical media, because just as the books of the Medici's were recopied over and over into new languages and on better bindings, so can data be quickly copied from old optical media onto newer formats.
Katz presents a vision of the standoff that is far too simple. Given, the standoff is not the only point of the article, but there is enough involved for it to be a pain in the ass.
The Chinese want more than a simple apology from the US in order to free the crew of the American plane. They also want the US to end all flights off the coast of China, specifically in the South China sea, beyond that, all flights around Taiwan.
Demands like this are presented on behalf of the Chinese military, which has been growing in power as the Chinese grow dissatisfied with their opressive, corrupt, and generally worlthless unelected leaders. China's military also wants to "take back" Taiwan. If they can get the US to apoligize for activities relating to US espionage off the China coast, they get a great power boost. If they can use it to forward their machinations against Taiwan, all the better. While military subversion of the Chinese government might be good at breaking down their terribly mismanaged communist system, a military government in China might be even worse.
Jiang Zemin and his corhorts, of course, see this and must stand up and make simlar demands, so that they are not seen as an enemy of the military, and so that the military can not say that he is backing down to the US like he was percieved to have done when the US accidentally bombed a Chinese embassy in the balkan conflicts.
Last of all, comes the US. Our leaders muyst show a strong front against the Chinese, so that we can continue to support the Taiwanese. Taiwan is an invaluable trade partner, and if China were to conquer Taiwan, it would drastically raise prices on many goods, especailly compter parts, that come into the US. Such things would have a disasterous affect on the US economy given its present shaken state. It would also lead to a terrible loss of life for the Taiwanese, many of whom would resist a Chinese takeoever to their deaths.
So what it all comes down to is far more than a simple apology for a midair accident. In the greater scheme of things, the lives of the airmen involved mean nothing. What matters here is the freedom, wealth, and lives of billions of people, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Americans.
"The US plane was in international airspace on autopilot"
Perhaps from an American point of view. As far as the Chinese are concerned, that is their airspace, and the Americans are only allowed to fly there until the Chinese finally take back Taiwan and all the ocean inbetween. Things are not as black and white as your silly little mind would like them to be.
At least this will make it harder for the Micro$oft marketers to ramble on about how Linux is insecure :)
Why does it matter? The kids will eventually see the stuff, one way or the other. It does not hurt them, much less matter.
Hearing the word "fuck" does nothing to harm a child. Neither does seeing naked men having gay orgies.
The real problem here is that people refuse to give up on the worthless moral standards imposed by their religions. This leads to shame when discussing such topics, especially when discussing them with children. When the FCC censors television, it is only because Americans are too stupid to think for themselves.