Well the danger here isn't exactly that a tunnel would collapse per se. The threat is an inundation as a result of the blast. The blast on the Picadilly line in London wasn't located under the Thames and of course the Moscow explosion didn't offer a threat of flooding either.
It doesn't seem to be a matter of obtaining enough explosives to make such a blast that would be problematic, McVeigh demonstrated what home chemistry is capable of and terrorists have demonstrated proficiency with other various explosives that are numerous in their examples. It would seem difficult to pack that much explosive power in to a subway inconspicuously. Although, as demonstrated in Spain these cells have the capability to engage in sophisticated implementations such as simultaneous remote detonations etc...
Sly Stallone is way too old now to rescue any trapped commuters in this tunnel anymore. For that and other reasons I congratulate our government on a job well done.
You do not need the paid gold account to download new content like Arcade games. Gold membership gets you in the door for on-line play with the games you have. Less than $5 per month is a small price to pay to be on Microsoft servers with players that are held responsible for their behavior be it cheating, abuse etc...
Now from what I understand Sony will use basically the PC structure of on-line play via a ad-hoc type of network. This absolves Sony of significant infrastructure management but invites all kinds of problems in terms of quality control. Game developers are always touting about the fixed hardware set for consoles and how that helps them on maximizing performance and hitting deadlines because they can avoid the moving goal posts of PC gaming. I'm not sure how Sony will structure this network (no one does apparently) but you would think developers will be less than thrilled with implementing their own on-line connectivity solutions, ala Gamespy interfaces and the like.
As to your side note, yes there are decent games on the 360. Oblivion is quite good. You have a very narrow definition of what you care for apparently. You don't like sports games, racing games nor "console speed FPSes"[sic]. I'm not quite sure what you mean by FPS in that statement but then again, I'm not sure what genre you do like. It would be easier if you stated what games you do like instead of those you don't and I'm sure you could receive some more meaningful feedback (if that's what you're interested in).
I'm not sure what this fear is you describe with Microsoft killing innovation. Are you suggesting that Microsoft suppresses quality games by developers out of some desire to only release popular titles? If anything I think Microsoft has taken very large steps towards helping Indy developers and smaller publishers with their digital distribution over Xbox Live and their willingness to deliver bandwidth for free trial downloads of this content. Try a friend's 360 and test drive "Wik" from the Arcade. This is no main stream blockbuster title but it's innovative and fun. Big brother really isn't out to get you. Microsoft wants to make money and they do that by delivering products that the public wants to purchase. You want to blame them for delivering popular content, I applaud them. I also give them credit for establishing a medium and pricing venue that allows the smaller segment of the market to get a shot.
I think you're way off base to say "Children do stupid things like this all the time". Kids cuss, they sneak liquor out of their parents stash, they try their first smokes, they might even experiment with sex or practice vandalism. ALL of these things have consequences, some directly by the various things they experiment with.
If my son ever did anything like this he'd lose his recreational computer privledges for a very long time, he'd personally and publically apologize to the teacher. In the end, his hate and frustration for that teacher would be nothing compared to the contempt he'd have for me when I'm done with him.
The planet Mars is undergoing significant global warming, new data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) show, lending support to many climatologists' claims that the Earth's modest warming during the past century is due primarily to a recent upsurge in solar energy.
Ok, so the National Academy has reported on the "hockey stick". In thier report they confirm some items from Mann's study and DISPROVE others. The panel confirmed that there has been noticable recent warming. They also note evidence of the mini ice age as well as good evidence of the Medieval warm period. These were not evidenced in the "hockey stick" and Mann went futher by claiming this data was significantly accurate for the past 1000 years. That significance in data is not 400 years, not 1000. The other previous years were said in the report to be (and read this carefully) plausible.
So pray tell, what media distortion am I talking about? Well, the first media reports that the hockey stick was "confirmed" which is only partially correct. The media says it's likely that there was significant warming prior to the last 400 years. The words "likely" and "plausible" have completely different meanings. But the AP takes the cake. The AP doesn't hedge it's bet at all and go for the full panic attack headline of, "Earth hottest it's been in 2000 years". What?! The study does none of these things. Drudge takes that to the Nth degree and claims, "Earth at it's hottest point since Jesus walked the Earth". Passion is a poison to science and it's no wonder the public is totally confused about the facts of climate change. It's clear that we are in a current warming trend and we need public policy based on accurate scienfic data. Those making political hay on either side of the equation need to be tossed to the curb. It makes me sick that a carefully worded study that's been worked on so hard gets mutated in to such garbage that it means nothing more than Drudge headline to public perception.
You're mostly correct. Craigslist is a corporation but it's not been listed on public exchanges. Essentially it's privately held via shares. Because it is structured as a corporation then those shares are freely transferrable which is why one of the former employees sold 25% of the company to Ebay. That was nearly two years ago and Craigslist hasn't suffered for it.
This kind of company can only exist when it's not publically owned. The pressures of revenue growth on public companies would never allow this kind of company to exist.
Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University
University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball
Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson
Dr. Boris Winterhalter, former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland and professor in marine geology, University of Helsinki
Dr. Wibjörn Karlén, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University
Dr. Dick Morgan, former advisor to the World Meteorological Organization and climatology researcher at University of Exeter, U.K.
You (and most slashdotters from my mod point suicide here) may not agree with their conclusions but why not rebut their findings instead of attacking their credibility? It's the very definition of Ad Hominem.
With all due respect, that's simply an ad hominem attack. What are the criticisms of the content of his findings? It seems to me he clearly cites named sources, instead of "climate experts". I don't know where the truth lies with global warming. I suspect it lies somewhere in the middle of the crusaders on both sides.
It seems to me this criticism of funding is a common theme with scientists that offer rebuttals on climate change. I guess my question in response to that is don't the proponents of existing global warming have funding as well? Would it surprise anyone to find donations from pro-environment groups? I'm not sure there is anything wrong with getting funding from whoever you can to continue your research. Unless, of course you're suggesting that the source of funding insinuates that their scientific results are compromised. In that case I believe you can disprove the science behind their conclusions rather than ad hominem accusations that suggest a compromise of their believability.
In quick succession we have stories from MIT and other Labs have discovered new and exiting uses for nanotechnology. They all seem to "discover" a scientific breakthrough. I'm just as excited about this as the next guy but from what I've read none of these discoveries have working prototypes of the technologies they espouse as the next great thing. Seems to me these are all working theories at best.
I really am looking forward to batteries lasting 100x longer, nanopaper and this latest discovery. I just have absolutely no read on how far we are out on practical implementations of this technology.
I'm not too proud to admit I wasn't sure exactly what Cirrhosis of the liver was despite hearing the jargon several times in the past. Here's some reference.
To be perfectly honest, the blame isn't with the spreadsheet in those cases. There are (or should be) a million and one checks and balances for this data. From the data entry to the manager to the controller to the CFO. Beyond that any organization that's dealing with those kinds of numbers are large enough (or should be) for a solid internal audit team. If they are a public company they will of course be subject to a public auditing firm in addition to their own interal controls. I've yet to meet a controller that didn't corraborate every major number in their various spreadsheet "books". Almost every important number is cross-referenced from other areas in other "books". It's the basic principles of balancing, something that's done for every major fortune 500 company down to the family owned bank my mother works for. These all sound like human errors, not spreadsheet errors.
There are several issues with this. You spike bandwidth while users are trying to utilize it for other needs such as a lot of morning email activity. We have offices all over the country and we push our updates (daily, not every few weeks). Some of our offices have wireless LANs and we push to NAS servers in some but overall we can get a cleaner update inventory/reports when machines are always on. Major updates that require reboots can be done when users aren't there. You could argue, what's the greater waste? Bandwidth that sits unutilized all night or moderate power consumption from computers that are on all night.
In a business environment like the one I work in a good sleep mode would be helpfull. We require our user's machines to stay on overnight so we can push security updates and other information to the machines. Turning them off isn't an option. There are options for booting via the LAN but they are cumbersome and time consuming if you're going to push and update to several hundred computers and have to wait for them to boot up.
Here's a senario.
Osama emails an intermediary to correspond information that's of interest to US national security. That intermidiary forwards it to a sleeper in the US. That now puts this correpsondance under the jurisdiction of required warrants under the FISA court right? The argument of rapid response is covered by the fact that such spying can occur post-occurance when deemed appropriate.
That all sounds quite reasonable and puts to question why the administration felt it necesary to circumvent such proceedures.
However, here's another senario.
Osama emails his buddies about the kick ass humus in the old neighborhood. He CC's 1000 random spam US email addresses. One of the go betweens of the email forwards it yet again with another 1000 random US email addresses and so on and so forth. Is this outrage over warrantless spying circumventing the logic of current technology? When FISA was established to spy on possible Soviet interests within the US in 1978 we were in a totally different technological environment. It was an era of land line based communication. Call the Bush presidency what you will but I think it's a large mistake to cripple the speed of intelligence agencies in the name of a Bush witch hunt. Should some other president in the future expect the NSA to submit 10000 warrants due to one email string, even after the fact? If congress authorizes war (and make no mistake that there is no difference according to the courts between declaring war and authorizing use of force), should intelligence agencies be able to monitor anything and everything coming out of that country regardless of where the destination may be?
Yes, you should ignore it.
Just as you should ignore the climatologist that finds evidence of global warming but recieves copius grants from environmental protection groups. You can presume the causation as a conflict of interest but it's easily refutable in the science of the persons arguement. Disprove their facts and leave the ad hominem attacks out of it.
This is EXACTLY the type of ad hominem attacks that hurt scientific debate rather than help it.
Instead of rebutting the facts of their science, climatogogists that don't hold global warming alarmist views are critisized for their funding. Where else is a climatologist supposed to get funding if they don't stand with the majority on this?
Real believers in global warming should welcome contrary views and science as an opportunity to refute those views and strengthen their own. Instead it's an attack against how they are funded.
All of this research is heavily funded by grants. The very definition of being a climatologist is to prove global warming it seems. Headlines and funding come from alarmist proclamations that make Drudge. When evidence to the contrary or less dramatic are discovered there's no headlines and probably more importantly, no money. For example:
Of the 15 different findings that were released and covered by the press on December 7, 2005 about global warming, 14 of them were reporting that things were "worse than we thought" and only one of them concluded that things weren't going to be as bad as originally forecast. Given an unbiased prediction, there should be a 50-50 chance that things turned out either worse or better than expected. Under such a scenario, there is only a 1-in-2,000 chance that 14 things out of 15 would be worse. But that's what happened. So, either the original forecasts were not unbiased, a rare event did indeed occur, or, more likely, the interpretation and reporting went a bit over the top--that is, the press (and to some degree the researchers themselves) only like to hype the more extreme results.
You get headlines and grants by claiming San Diego will be underwater by the year 2100. You get ignored and better be paid by NASA or a tenured by a college if you mention increased snow accumulations in the Antarctic.
Is there not a market for essentially the exact same games with updated graphics and subtle tweaks?
Isn't that what's driven the success of World of Warcraft? They didn't do anything new. They just polished it to the point of doing it better than anyone before them.
Anyway, I have got to get me some of that turn-based goodness again. Wasn't there some effort to ressurect the X-com world?
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't seem to be a matter of obtaining enough explosives to make such a blast that would be problematic, McVeigh demonstrated what home chemistry is capable of and terrorists have demonstrated proficiency with other various explosives that are numerous in their examples. It would seem difficult to pack that much explosive power in to a subway inconspicuously. Although, as demonstrated in Spain these cells have the capability to engage in sophisticated implementations such as simultaneous remote detonations etc...
Sly Stallone is way too old now to rescue any trapped commuters in this tunnel anymore. For that and other reasons I congratulate our government on a job well done.
Now from what I understand Sony will use basically the PC structure of on-line play via a ad-hoc type of network. This absolves Sony of significant infrastructure management but invites all kinds of problems in terms of quality control. Game developers are always touting about the fixed hardware set for consoles and how that helps them on maximizing performance and hitting deadlines because they can avoid the moving goal posts of PC gaming. I'm not sure how Sony will structure this network (no one does apparently) but you would think developers will be less than thrilled with implementing their own on-line connectivity solutions, ala Gamespy interfaces and the like.
As to your side note, yes there are decent games on the 360. Oblivion is quite good. You have a very narrow definition of what you care for apparently. You don't like sports games, racing games nor "console speed FPSes"[sic]. I'm not quite sure what you mean by FPS in that statement but then again, I'm not sure what genre you do like. It would be easier if you stated what games you do like instead of those you don't and I'm sure you could receive some more meaningful feedback (if that's what you're interested in).
I'm not sure what this fear is you describe with Microsoft killing innovation. Are you suggesting that Microsoft suppresses quality games by developers out of some desire to only release popular titles? If anything I think Microsoft has taken very large steps towards helping Indy developers and smaller publishers with their digital distribution over Xbox Live and their willingness to deliver bandwidth for free trial downloads of this content. Try a friend's 360 and test drive "Wik" from the Arcade. This is no main stream blockbuster title but it's innovative and fun. Big brother really isn't out to get you. Microsoft wants to make money and they do that by delivering products that the public wants to purchase. You want to blame them for delivering popular content, I applaud them. I also give them credit for establishing a medium and pricing venue that allows the smaller segment of the market to get a shot.
For example, I don't believe you're actually embarassed about not using punctuation.
If my son ever did anything like this he'd lose his recreational computer privledges for a very long time, he'd personally and publically apologize to the teacher. In the end, his hate and frustration for that teacher would be nothing compared to the contempt he'd have for me when I'm done with him.
So pray tell, what media distortion am I talking about? Well, the first media reports that the hockey stick was "confirmed" which is only partially correct. The media says it's likely that there was significant warming prior to the last 400 years. The words "likely" and "plausible" have completely different meanings. But the AP takes the cake. The AP doesn't hedge it's bet at all and go for the full panic attack headline of, "Earth hottest it's been in 2000 years". What?! The study does none of these things. Drudge takes that to the Nth degree and claims, "Earth at it's hottest point since Jesus walked the Earth". Passion is a poison to science and it's no wonder the public is totally confused about the facts of climate change. It's clear that we are in a current warming trend and we need public policy based on accurate scienfic data. Those making political hay on either side of the equation need to be tossed to the curb. It makes me sick that a carefully worded study that's been worked on so hard gets mutated in to such garbage that it means nothing more than Drudge headline to public perception.
This kind of company can only exist when it's not publically owned. The pressures of revenue growth on public companies would never allow this kind of company to exist.
Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University
University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball
Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson
Dr. Boris Winterhalter, former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland and professor in marine geology, University of Helsinki
Dr. Wibjörn Karlén, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University
Dr. Dick Morgan, former advisor to the World Meteorological Organization and climatology researcher at University of Exeter, U.K.
You (and most slashdotters from my mod point suicide here) may not agree with their conclusions but why not rebut their findings instead of attacking their credibility? It's the very definition of Ad Hominem.
I counted six sources he referenced in his article. You mean just the first in Bob Carter then.
It seems to me this criticism of funding is a common theme with scientists that offer rebuttals on climate change. I guess my question in response to that is don't the proponents of existing global warming have funding as well? Would it surprise anyone to find donations from pro-environment groups? I'm not sure there is anything wrong with getting funding from whoever you can to continue your research. Unless, of course you're suggesting that the source of funding insinuates that their scientific results are compromised. In that case I believe you can disprove the science behind their conclusions rather than ad hominem accusations that suggest a compromise of their believability.
I really am looking forward to batteries lasting 100x longer, nanopaper and this latest discovery. I just have absolutely no read on how far we are out on practical implementations of this technology.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cirrhosis/DS00373 h osis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_liver_cirr
No one prevents you from speaking in code to your Mom on the phone (land line / mobile) either, yet those can also be tapped.
Since the update is loaded to the Bios for lack of a better term. It's available for core systems with no hard drives. http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid= 17508
To be perfectly honest, the blame isn't with the spreadsheet in those cases. There are (or should be) a million and one checks and balances for this data. From the data entry to the manager to the controller to the CFO. Beyond that any organization that's dealing with those kinds of numbers are large enough (or should be) for a solid internal audit team. If they are a public company they will of course be subject to a public auditing firm in addition to their own interal controls. I've yet to meet a controller that didn't corraborate every major number in their various spreadsheet "books". Almost every important number is cross-referenced from other areas in other "books". It's the basic principles of balancing, something that's done for every major fortune 500 company down to the family owned bank my mother works for. These all sound like human errors, not spreadsheet errors.
There are several issues with this. You spike bandwidth while users are trying to utilize it for other needs such as a lot of morning email activity. We have offices all over the country and we push our updates (daily, not every few weeks). Some of our offices have wireless LANs and we push to NAS servers in some but overall we can get a cleaner update inventory/reports when machines are always on. Major updates that require reboots can be done when users aren't there. You could argue, what's the greater waste? Bandwidth that sits unutilized all night or moderate power consumption from computers that are on all night.
In a business environment like the one I work in a good sleep mode would be helpfull. We require our user's machines to stay on overnight so we can push security updates and other information to the machines. Turning them off isn't an option. There are options for booting via the LAN but they are cumbersome and time consuming if you're going to push and update to several hundred computers and have to wait for them to boot up.
The great thing about this discussion is that there's no stereotyping nor unsubstantiated claims of fact going on here.
Overhead. Lots and lots of overhead.
Here's a senario.
Osama emails an intermediary to correspond information that's of interest to US national security. That intermidiary forwards it to a sleeper in the US. That now puts this correpsondance under the jurisdiction of required warrants under the FISA court right? The argument of rapid response is covered by the fact that such spying can occur post-occurance when deemed appropriate.
That all sounds quite reasonable and puts to question why the administration felt it necesary to circumvent such proceedures.
However, here's another senario.
Osama emails his buddies about the kick ass humus in the old neighborhood. He CC's 1000 random spam US email addresses. One of the go betweens of the email forwards it yet again with another 1000 random US email addresses and so on and so forth. Is this outrage over warrantless spying circumventing the logic of current technology? When FISA was established to spy on possible Soviet interests within the US in 1978 we were in a totally different technological environment. It was an era of land line based communication. Call the Bush presidency what you will but I think it's a large mistake to cripple the speed of intelligence agencies in the name of a Bush witch hunt. Should some other president in the future expect the NSA to submit 10000 warrants due to one email string, even after the fact? If congress authorizes war (and make no mistake that there is no difference according to the courts between declaring war and authorizing use of force), should intelligence agencies be able to monitor anything and everything coming out of that country regardless of where the destination may be?
Yes, you should ignore it. Just as you should ignore the climatologist that finds evidence of global warming but recieves copius grants from environmental protection groups. You can presume the causation as a conflict of interest but it's easily refutable in the science of the persons arguement. Disprove their facts and leave the ad hominem attacks out of it.
Instead of rebutting the facts of their science, climatogogists that don't hold global warming alarmist views are critisized for their funding. Where else is a climatologist supposed to get funding if they don't stand with the majority on this?
Real believers in global warming should welcome contrary views and science as an opportunity to refute those views and strengthen their own. Instead it's an attack against how they are funded.
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=021706G0 1/18/not-as-bad-as-we-thought/#more-134
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2006/
Of the 15 different findings that were released and covered by the press on December 7, 2005 about global warming, 14 of them were reporting that things were "worse than we thought" and only one of them concluded that things weren't going to be as bad as originally forecast. Given an unbiased prediction, there should be a 50-50 chance that things turned out either worse or better than expected. Under such a scenario, there is only a 1-in-2,000 chance that 14 things out of 15 would be worse. But that's what happened. So, either the original forecasts were not unbiased, a rare event did indeed occur, or, more likely, the interpretation and reporting went a bit over the top--that is, the press (and to some degree the researchers themselves) only like to hype the more extreme results.
You get headlines and grants by claiming San Diego will be underwater by the year 2100. You get ignored and better be paid by NASA or a tenured by a college if you mention increased snow accumulations in the Antarctic.
World of Warcraft wasn't designed to teach you anything. It was designed to entertain you.
Is there not a market for essentially the exact same games with updated graphics and subtle tweaks?
Isn't that what's driven the success of World of Warcraft? They didn't do anything new. They just polished it to the point of doing it better than anyone before them.
Anyway, I have got to get me some of that turn-based goodness again. Wasn't there some effort to ressurect the X-com world?