"Another test involves placing the animals in water and seeing if they swim or simply give up and float. Hamsters don't sink apparently, but float in water."
That's not the test to see if a hamster is depressed, it's the test to see if the hamster is a witch.
By "confident enough not to feel threatened" I'm sure they mean ""intelligent enough not to feel threatened".
Just how retarded do you have to be to feel threatened by the shape of a video game character?
Yes, current video game imagery - like 90% of the rest of 'entertainment' is pretty damn sexist in its representation of the genders. However like anything else money goes where the suits think the biggest profit will return from. If they don't believe there's profit to be made from a more balanced view, well that's just part of the trade-off of living in a society where people are allowed to make the games they want to, play and watch what they want to, and think what they want to.
I'd rather live in a society where female video game characters are portrayed the way horny teen males wold have them rather than a society where character designs are dictated to you in the name of equality.
Did anyone really think that Sony were going to stop doing evil things? They don't see themselves as having any financial benefit from truly removing the damage they do to their consumers' computers. They have their reasons for wanting this crap of there in the first place, and a bit of bad publicity they think will blow over soon enough just isn't going to make those reasons go away.
There will be an updated patch eventually that actually does a half decent job of removing the worst of the security holes - they'll have to if they don't want a blanket removal of all their spyware from AV companies as a security measure. Not even a giant of Sony's stature can last too long being seen actively attacking and damaging all of their customers.
Then, after the news outlets have had their fill of the story, 6 months or so down the line they won't be wanting to run the same thing over again. Sony will then be free to come out with the next wave of evil but slightly less dangerous malware. That's how it goes. The next round will be a bit less dangerous, a LOT more secretive, but with the same anti-consumer schemes.
Gamma rays are photons? So nuclear reactors just emit sunlight and happiness? How about you go test - go walk around inside Chernobyl and tell me if it's bright in there.
WTF does that have to do with anything? Extreme amounts of UV is 'just light' too, but you wouldn't want to go walking around it it. Please learn even just the basics of phyics before making such comments - it'll stop you from looking stupid. Yes, gamma rays are just high frequency light, just as are X-rays.
Besides, the point was that being light the barriers stopping most of it in the atmosphere is not the magnetic field. When was the last time you saw light bending/reflected from what is effectively a very weak magnet?
It's true, there's not going to be some mass bird extinction. Their navigation can't help but be affected - they do rely on it in part - but for the majority of species I don't think we'll be taking catastrophe. After all, I don't think many species if any navigate by that method alone, and the fact that it happens (in geological time) so reguarly implicitly implies that it's not an end of the world scenario at all.
I'm sure that if this does go on further to be a full on change over a hundred years or so, there'll be large numbers of animals (singular and large groups) turning up in unexpected places, that sort of thing.
The rarity of MAJOR changes in the magnetic field wouldn't, I imagine, have any real effect. Moreso, if using the poles for navigation was so unreliable over the course of a single lifetime, such an ability wouldn't have been positively selected for in the first place.
There are many much more significant changes that happen far more frequently (day/night, summer/winter) that have been easily adapted to that I doubt your suggestion is valid.
Gamma rays are photons - i.e. light. They are not affected by the weak magnetif field surrounding the earth. Loss of the magnetic field would be devestating long term because it would make it easier for solar winds to slowly strip away the upper atmosphere.
But... a weakened field for a few decades will not send us all to early graves. The biggest impact of a changing magnetic field would be to: - Navigation. I guess we all have to adjust to GPS and similar. - Animal navigation. Sadly birds, fish, etc. haven't yet implemented and learned how to use GPS. They'll have loads of trouble.
In terms of dangers it poses to us in the next hundred or so years, should this be a continuation of the existing decrease/beginning of reversal in field strength, it's importance is way below things like climate change, oil reserves running out, etc.
Nuisance for us, a bitch for animals that rely on it to migrate, but as a race, the danger from it is effectively zero.
Really cool info on the virus. I've always thought that they're a significantly underinvestigated and underestimated part of biology. Taking over, changing, and otherwise messing with cells in ways that we just can't otherwise do - and there are untold trillions of trillions of trillions of them at it every minute of the day. There's so much potential there for both beneficial and evil purposes, and such flexibility.
But hey, real and significant news about a possible cure for many cancers gets relegated to last mention in a list containing: a really long cat's tail! OMG! The US getting involved in the internal affairs of another country (as much as I agree with what they're saying, it's not their business) Yet another boring international outsourcing press release More ICANN soap drama.
I guess others have different ideas of what's important in the world.:)
It's disgusting that people are even allowed to patent naturally occuring biological phenomenon. Patenting medicinal properties of plants/animals, DNA sequences, and suchlike is just plain bad. Taking credit for your own creations is fine, but not nature's.
For anyone wanting to wave the "if you don't let them patent it and rape the world for money for a simple discovery, nothing will get discovered - ever!" flag, I'd rather have a wordwide tax that funds such research.
If you're religious or not (and I'm not), I'm sure most people will get just a little uneasy at the idea of patenting aspects of life itself. A world where you can infringe on a patent merely by being born? Screw that.
Does anyone think though that India is having too much change too soon? It's not exactly the most stable part of the world as it is. Fast progress is great - too fast though and you're setting yourself up for serious problems down the road.
The stupid government decision makers want to be careful how they phrase the judgement here. If I were Microsoft, purely out of spite for such stupid 'punishments' I'd be looking at a way to get away with doing the following:
5 levels deep in the control panel have a "alternate applications list" menu item. This then opens a page with the following:
Well it does what it says - lets them download competing products from the opposition, and if MS did this they'd have my support. Punish an alleged abuse of the open market by further distorting the open market by forcing a company to actively promote their competitiors. Morons.
it's a big messy tree that wasn't designed for the convenience of classification
In fact, it wasn't designed at all! I'm sure you didn't really mean that, but let's not go giving the nutjobs ammo, eh.
That asside, it's incidents like this that just help show how little we still understand about our own world, yet we're still merrily destroying enormous parts of it. How many wonders will now never be known because of our actions this past century? How many will cease to exist in the coming one?
Various polls report 10-25% of them crash? Wow, maybe the vast majority of people who don't have crashing 360s are busy playing games instead of filling out polls.
Also check out the post above about iPod failure rates - 20-30% depending on the exact model. From this we can obviously conclude that Microsoft are 1x to 3x better than Apple.
1) Generic terms to block will make it difficult to search for other items. My favourite artist, "Kylie Kylie" distributes only through Kazaa. Now I can't find her stuff.
2) Not everything related to those the scum are allegedly protecting is copyrighted. I'm sure there used to be several free public domain photos of Eminem that you could find on Kazaa. No longer possible.
3) They just plain suck, don't they?
Idiots. Instead of researching the reason why people are willing to download music from P2P (such as CDs no longer being a trustable source, and legally downloadable music has impractical DRM and low quality sound, prices too high across the board) they sue people and make stupid keyword blocks on software.
I always used to do the best job I could to ensure artists are compensated, by buying music I listen to (ok, the suits and lawers got the money not the artists, but that's not the point). Nowadays they're making it increasingly hard for people to actually do the right thing. Sorry, I don't want a virus ridden PC thanks to your infected CDs - I feel much safer downloading my music. And since your stupid DRM sites don't work with my music player, I have no choice but to P2P. It's your own fault, guys. Give me no valid source, and I have no choice but to make my own.
I agree. We need to add a "Module -1 (Notepad)" to ease people into things.
As long as MS office software is the market leader in numbers, why the heck would you want to use anything else to prepare people for working with computers? Keep your GPL religious bigotry out of it, and realise that it's a way of preparing people for a real job in a real company using computers - and for 90% of people that will mean MS office.
Train them up on Abiword, lynx, Linux xyz, and whatever 'pure' FOOS software and all you're doing is shafting them out of what they thought they were paying for - knowledge that will help them get on in the current office environment.
The last thing I am is a slashdot fanboy - I find the general slashmentality crazy at best.
Regarding livejournal, 99% of it is dumb emo kids moaning about how unfair life/parents/school is, and how the blood from their wristslashing clashes with their hair. Hence I made a joke. Take something like that seriously and you need your blood pressure checked, cos you're seriously wacko.
I don't care if it's the fatcat executives, the performers, or my neighbour's cat collecting the money, that's not the issue.
All i care is that it's a tax/levy that both assumes guilt of the customer and unfairly taxes the supplier for something a customer may or may not do.
Give people an opt-in levy that allows them to freely listen to and copy music from any source legally, or go back to that arcane concept of innocent until proven guilty, and don't tax people for something they may or may not do.
Except you're wrong. The levy is supposedly for allowing people to make a copy for their own private use, from the original media, even if they don't OWN the media.
Well considering that making a copy from your own media for your own personal use is legal in any decent society, I'm still right - it's a levy for copying someone else's stuff, which not everyone will do.
Do they have an account that people can take their money back from if they only listen to their own stuff? If not, it sounds JUST like charging the 'guilty' and 'innocent' alike.
Slashdot Mirror
It's no wonder so many open source projects never make it as far as a v1 release - emacs is stealing all of the version numbers!
22!!
"Another test involves placing the animals in water and seeing if they swim or simply give up and float. Hamsters don't sink apparently, but float in water."
That's not the test to see if a hamster is depressed, it's the test to see if the hamster is a witch.
By "confident enough not to feel threatened" I'm sure they mean ""intelligent enough not to feel threatened".
Just how retarded do you have to be to feel threatened by the shape of a video game character?
Yes, current video game imagery - like 90% of the rest of 'entertainment' is pretty damn sexist in its representation of the genders. However like anything else money goes where the suits think the biggest profit will return from. If they don't believe there's profit to be made from a more balanced view, well that's just part of the trade-off of living in a society where people are allowed to make the games they want to, play and watch what they want to, and think what they want to.
I'd rather live in a society where female video game characters are portrayed the way horny teen males wold have them rather than a society where character designs are dictated to you in the name of equality.
Did anyone really think that Sony were going to stop doing evil things? They don't see themselves as having any financial benefit from truly removing the damage they do to their consumers' computers. They have their reasons for wanting this crap of there in the first place, and a bit of bad publicity they think will blow over soon enough just isn't going to make those reasons go away.
There will be an updated patch eventually that actually does a half decent job of removing the worst of the security holes - they'll have to if they don't want a blanket removal of all their spyware from AV companies as a security measure. Not even a giant of Sony's stature can last too long being seen actively attacking and damaging all of their customers.
Then, after the news outlets have had their fill of the story, 6 months or so down the line they won't be wanting to run the same thing over again. Sony will then be free to come out with the next wave of evil but slightly less dangerous malware. That's how it goes. The next round will be a bit less dangerous, a LOT more secretive, but with the same anti-consumer schemes.
That's my opinion, anyway.
Gamma rays are photons? So nuclear reactors just emit sunlight and happiness? How about you go test - go walk around inside Chernobyl and tell me if it's bright in there.
WTF does that have to do with anything? Extreme amounts of UV is 'just light' too, but you wouldn't want to go walking around it it. Please learn even just the basics of phyics before making such comments - it'll stop you from looking stupid. Yes, gamma rays are just high frequency light, just as are X-rays.
Besides, the point was that being light the barriers stopping most of it in the atmosphere is not the magnetic field. When was the last time you saw light bending/reflected from what is effectively a very weak magnet?
It's true, there's not going to be some mass bird extinction. Their navigation can't help but be affected - they do rely on it in part - but for the majority of species I don't think we'll be taking catastrophe. After all, I don't think many species if any navigate by that method alone, and the fact that it happens (in geological time) so reguarly implicitly implies that it's not an end of the world scenario at all.
I'm sure that if this does go on further to be a full on change over a hundred years or so, there'll be large numbers of animals (singular and large groups) turning up in unexpected places, that sort of thing.
Interesting theory, but I think you're wrong.
The rarity of MAJOR changes in the magnetic field wouldn't, I imagine, have any real effect. Moreso, if using the poles for navigation was so unreliable over the course of a single lifetime, such an ability wouldn't have been positively selected for in the first place.
There are many much more significant changes that happen far more frequently (day/night, summer/winter) that have been easily adapted to that I doubt your suggestion is valid.
Damn, they even have a 'Flight Sim' department.
Really though, what the hell has the internet got to do with the wingflapping guys?
Gamma rays are photons - i.e. light. They are not affected by the weak magnetif field surrounding the earth. Loss of the magnetic field would be devestating long term because it would make it easier for solar winds to slowly strip away the upper atmosphere.
But... a weakened field for a few decades will not send us all to early graves. The biggest impact of a changing magnetic field would be to:
- Navigation. I guess we all have to adjust to GPS and similar.
- Animal navigation. Sadly birds, fish, etc. haven't yet implemented and learned how to use GPS. They'll have loads of trouble.
In terms of dangers it poses to us in the next hundred or so years, should this be a continuation of the existing decrease/beginning of reversal in field strength, it's importance is way below things like climate change, oil reserves running out, etc.
Nuisance for us, a bitch for animals that rely on it to migrate, but as a race, the danger from it is effectively zero.
Really cool info on the virus. I've always thought that they're a significantly underinvestigated and underestimated part of biology. Taking over, changing, and otherwise messing with cells in ways that we just can't otherwise do - and there are untold trillions of trillions of trillions of them at it every minute of the day. There's so much potential there for both beneficial and evil purposes, and such flexibility.
:)
But hey, real and significant news about a possible cure for many cancers gets relegated to last mention in a list containing:
a really long cat's tail! OMG!
The US getting involved in the internal affairs of another country (as much as I agree with what they're saying, it's not their business)
Yet another boring international outsourcing press release
More ICANN soap drama.
I guess others have different ideas of what's important in the world.
It's disgusting that people are even allowed to patent naturally occuring biological phenomenon. Patenting medicinal properties of plants/animals, DNA sequences, and suchlike is just plain bad. Taking credit for your own creations is fine, but not nature's.
For anyone wanting to wave the "if you don't let them patent it and rape the world for money for a simple discovery, nothing will get discovered - ever!" flag, I'd rather have a wordwide tax that funds such research.
If you're religious or not (and I'm not), I'm sure most people will get just a little uneasy at the idea of patenting aspects of life itself. A world where you can infringe on a patent merely by being born? Screw that.
Microsoft Curry XP coming soon.
Does anyone think though that India is having too much change too soon? It's not exactly the most stable part of the world as it is. Fast progress is great - too fast though and you're setting yourself up for serious problems down the road.
The stupid government decision makers want to be careful how they phrase the judgement here. If I were Microsoft, purely out of spite for such stupid 'punishments' I'd be looking at a way to get away with doing the following:
p layer-v0.5alpha_downloado omessenger-v0.1beta_download
5 levels deep in the control panel have a "alternate applications list" menu item. This then opens a page with the following:
Download rubbish software made by people who have relations with goats here!!!
http://www.microsoft.com/thecompetition/real/real
http://www.microsoft.com/thecompetition/yahoo/yah
etc....
Well it does what it says - lets them download competing products from the opposition, and if MS did this they'd have my support. Punish an alleged abuse of the open market by further distorting the open market by forcing a company to actively promote their competitiors. Morons.
DaVinci and MontaVista (Mona Lisa)? More than a coincidence in the naming there?
I think we need to get Dan Brown to write a book about this obvious conspiracy - "The DaVinci Source Code".
it's a big messy tree that wasn't designed for the convenience of classification
In fact, it wasn't designed at all! I'm sure you didn't really mean that, but let's not go giving the nutjobs ammo, eh.
That asside, it's incidents like this that just help show how little we still understand about our own world, yet we're still merrily destroying enormous parts of it. How many wonders will now never be known because of our actions this past century? How many will cease to exist in the coming one?
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil... ..and their long lost brother "can't be bothered to do any evil"
Various polls report 10-25% of them crash? Wow, maybe the vast majority of people who don't have crashing 360s are busy playing games instead of filling out polls.
Also check out the post above about iPod failure rates - 20-30% depending on the exact model. From this we can obviously conclude that Microsoft are 1x to 3x better than Apple.
Or maybe I'm just talking rubbhish, like you.
...this is a breach of eggthics, not ethics?
1) Generic terms to block will make it difficult to search for other items. My favourite artist, "Kylie Kylie" distributes only through Kazaa. Now I can't find her stuff.
2) Not everything related to those the scum are allegedly protecting is copyrighted. I'm sure there used to be several free public domain photos of Eminem that you could find on Kazaa. No longer possible.
3) They just plain suck, don't they?
Idiots. Instead of researching the reason why people are willing to download music from P2P (such as CDs no longer being a trustable source, and legally downloadable music has impractical DRM and low quality sound, prices too high across the board) they sue people and make stupid keyword blocks on software.
I always used to do the best job I could to ensure artists are compensated, by buying music I listen to (ok, the suits and lawers got the money not the artists, but that's not the point). Nowadays they're making it increasingly hard for people to actually do the right thing. Sorry, I don't want a virus ridden PC thanks to your infected CDs - I feel much safer downloading my music. And since your stupid DRM sites don't work with my music player, I have no choice but to P2P. It's your own fault, guys. Give me no valid source, and I have no choice but to make my own.
I agree. We need to add a "Module -1 (Notepad)" to ease people into things.
As long as MS office software is the market leader in numbers, why the heck would you want to use anything else to prepare people for working with computers? Keep your GPL religious bigotry out of it, and realise that it's a way of preparing people for a real job in a real company using computers - and for 90% of people that will mean MS office.
Train them up on Abiword, lynx, Linux xyz, and whatever 'pure' FOOS software and all you're doing is shafting them out of what they thought they were paying for - knowledge that will help them get on in the current office environment.
...science useful for the slashdot masses.
What? You know you guys are ugly as sin, admit it!
(hey it's a joke!)
The last thing I am is a slashdot fanboy - I find the general slashmentality crazy at best.
Regarding livejournal, 99% of it is dumb emo kids moaning about how unfair life/parents/school is, and how the blood from their wristslashing clashes with their hair. Hence I made a joke. Take something like that seriously and you need your blood pressure checked, cos you're seriously wacko.
I don't care if it's the fatcat executives, the performers, or my neighbour's cat collecting the money, that's not the issue.
All i care is that it's a tax/levy that both assumes guilt of the customer and unfairly taxes the supplier for something a customer may or may not do.
Give people an opt-in levy that allows them to freely listen to and copy music from any source legally, or go back to that arcane concept of innocent until proven guilty, and don't tax people for something they may or may not do.
In a recent post at his livejournal... It's an interesting piece; the reason are thought-out well
I'm sorry, but isn't this the ultimate in oxymorons?
Except you're wrong. The levy is supposedly for allowing people to make a copy for their own private use, from the original media, even if they don't OWN the media.
Well considering that making a copy from your own media for your own personal use is legal in any decent society, I'm still right - it's a levy for copying someone else's stuff, which not everyone will do.
Do they have an account that people can take their money back from if they only listen to their own stuff? If not, it sounds JUST like charging the 'guilty' and 'innocent' alike.