I'm not a lawyer but I thought precedence was set for this in US Vs Forrester where a $10 million drug operation had their e-mail, phone and IP address records obtained from their ISP without a warrant. They were guilty but not until the court case.
This happened just last year. How are they going to reconcile these two rulings?
All I have to say is that it's a good thing Microsoft isn't running the 2008 Presidential Election! Diebold voting machines run Windows CE. Please press any key to start voting!
>> [Enter]
Are you sure you want to vote today?
(Allow/Deny)
>> Allow
*An anthropomorphic paper clip appears*
"Hi! I'm Clippy, I see you're trying to vote!"
"Let me help you with that! Which of these do you enjoy the most:"
A) Fear Mongering
B) Economy Stunting Taxation...
If you can change a vote of "no with comments" to "yes" I don't see why you couldn't change "fails with 122,000 errors" to "passes." I mean, when your standard passes through sheer lobbying and politics with little technical analysis, it's going to take a lot to surprise me with how epically it fails.
I happen to have very rare output from the upcoming game that I've personally been working on for Nasa. Let's just say we found a way to keep this MMORPG low budget and, in fact, make money off of it without costing NASA or you, the consumer, anything!
Multi-User Dungeon - MUD1 Version 1E
* NASA's Super Happy MUD *
* It's Edutainment! *
Origin of version: Sat Sep 15 10:00:50 2007
Welcome! By what name shall I call you?
>> Buzz
Hello, Buzz!
Cape Canaveral Launch Pad.
You stand in your Converse (tm) Brand space suit on the Launch Pad, before you is a towering shuttle with the huge Coca-Cola (tm) logo on the side of it. A crowd watches in anticipation and enjoys the T-Mobile (tm) cameras broadcasting the cabin and crew live to their cell phones.
[Exits: shuttle, bathroom]
>> bathroom
Bathroom Adjacent to Launch Pad.
You rush into the bathroom and rip off your helmet to deposit your stomach contents in the toilet. Luckily you have Rolaids (tm) antacid in your Converse (tm) Brand space suit. You pop a few pills into your mouth... ahh much better, Rolaids spells relief.
[Exits: door]
>> door
Cape Canaveral Launch Pad.
You stumble out of the restroom and back on to the launch pad. Oh no, a congressman spots you! "Hey, why if it isn't Buzz!" he says as he moves in for a photo op!
[A Congressman] is at [quite a few]
Your pierce *** MASSACRES *** A Congressman!
A Congressman's pound scratches you.
Your pierce *** MASSACRES *** A Congressman!
Your pierce DISEMBOWELS A Congressman!
[A Congressman] is at [big nasty]
You stop using A diamond-tipped dagger.
You wield a legendary greatsword.
A Congressman sees your attempt to trip him in time to avoid your foot.
[A Congressman] is at [big nasty]
Your fiery slash *** DEMOLISHES *** A Congressman!
[A Congressman] is at [pretty hurt]
A Congressman sees your attempt to trip him in time to avoid your foot.
Your flaming slash *** DEVASTATES *** A Congressman!
[A Congressman] is at [pretty hurt]
Your burning slash *** OBLITERATES *** A Congressman!
You trip A Congressman, sending him sprawling to the ground!
Your flaming slash *** OBLITERATES *** A Congressman!
A Congressman is mortally wounded, and will die soon if not aided.
[A Congressman] is at [dying]
You trip A Congressman, knocking him unconscious.
A Congressman is mortally wounded, and will die soon if not aided.
[A Congressman] is at [dying]
You trip A Congressman, knocking him unconscious.
A Comgressman is mortally wounded, and will die soon if not aided.
Your burning slash *** DEMOLISHES *** A Congressman!
The Congressman's body becomes limp and the politician drops to the ground DEAD!!
You receive 212000 experience out of 280012 total.
[neutral]
[Exits: shuttle, bathroom]
>> shuttle
You stagger into the elevator paid for by Playboy Magazine and begin your assent to the cabin. The slow motion walking thingy starts to happen as you cross the bridge... Before you enter the cabin, you hug the Doritos (tm) "Who Wants to Meet an Astronaut" Sweepstakes winner and step inside. You turn on your Sony Brand headset that sounds like a dream and prepare for blastoff...
That's all we have so far. I think you can see just how exciting this game is goi
from the dudas-just-wants-his-rug-back dept. He doesn't want it back, he wants it replaced. He still has the original but it has Asian-American urine all over it which is too bad because that rug really tied the room together.
More importantly, you should pay attention to the several insightful and interesting comments that followed which point out French Economist Bastiat's Parable of the Broken Window.
Whether you hate it or not, it does no good to ignore this contempt that so much of corporate America holds for open source! Take the time to inform your boss or coworker who claims losses directly to open source efforts.
I thought I would add in a few more points that might influence your stance on this. While standardizing on one is great, I think that we should stick to letting the consumer have the option.
At the company I work at, there is extreme contempt for hooking widescreen laptops up to projectors and smartboards as the user on the laptop cannot view what they are doing on the laptop's screen (if they do it is super distorted to fit on the other viewing device). While this may sound trivial, imagine sitting at a desk facing a class of 100+ people who are looking at huge screens behind you. Not only end consumers but also the enterprise prefers the choice. Although this is kind of a non-issue if only Lenovo is doing that because my employer won't buy from China... what with the phone home possibilities of hardware and all. Oddly enough, half the laptops here are IBM's Thinkpads and the other newer half are Dell XPS's (which ironically spurred the widescreen incidents). Leave it to a Fortune 500 company to waste cash on desktop-replacement-laptops.
And--I'm sure this will come up several times--there is my DVD collection which is mostly widescreen as I have a widescreen TV at home. For this reason, I personally may prefer a widescreen. However, most DVDs are non-widescreen and laptop screens are small enough as it is without having the lost real-estate. Again, probably a trivial aspect unless you travel and watch DVDs a lot.
I do enjoy Warcraft on wide screens though... something about horizontal viewing that makes me happy. Although I don't do that on laptops or play Warcraft anymore, it may be something to consider.
I agree with the submitter that it is important indeed to leave this decision up to the consumer. Actually, since this is just Lenovo, I wonder if this will hurt their sales? If the consumers want it, the companies will notice...
The question I always had about this- if they can take one sample from one animal and clone it in a vat and feed this world, will the vegans be ok with that? Are they cloning the sample or the animal? If it's just a sample piece of tissue, I would imagine most would be fine with it. If they are cloning the entire animal, it's still a physically separate organism with a central nervous system that is attached to a cerebrum. It's still feeling pain so I would think all Vegans would be opposed to it.
Don't click on links ending with notlong.com!
http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt... More importantly it's that beginning 'rds' that is a dead giveaway. That's Yahoo hosting a Re-Direct Script (RDS). If you see [yahoo.com] after a link, fair warning that you should check the very beginning, they could be hosting a redirect to something very very harmful. Honestly, I'm shocked that Yahoo would do that but I guess what ever brings in the ad/referral cash, huh?
Isn't one of the points of the movie that while scientists espouse neutrality, lack of bias, objectivity, etc. that they are not actually following it? As one of the submitters (and evidently one of the few people who watched the extended trailer), you're pretty accurate there.
During the whole montage he's writing something over and over on the blackboard and it comes out to be something like "I will NOT question Darwinian Evolution." He interviews scientists and editors who have lost their jobs for printing/writing papers that claim our DNA has a 'code' with information that could not have happened in nature.
Disclaimer, I read a lot of Darwin/Dawkins/Gould so I'm pretty biased here... but I fear that the ostracized members of the scientific community will make the evolutionists look just as much like religious zealots trying to purge their ranks of people with open minds. Which is why I likened his trailer to the Spanish Inquisition.
I think that even though it's 'a waste of time,' it's bad to write these people off or fire them. I'm sure there's sound criticism against these papers and authors but Ben Stein isn't showing that in his movie if there is.
If you have friends who believe in Creationism, respect them and provide for them sound arguments against it. It may be a waste of time to you but it's complete snobbery to write them off. Ben Stein is correct that you may lose friends if you watch that movie and become polarized by it--don't let that happen!
Like a Michael Moore movie, objectivity is raped, killed, gutted and donned over a rich man's face who then can safely tell you what to think.
I haven't had a chance to read the entire essay, just the article and I must agree that there's so many caveats to 'giving.' There's no way in hell you're going to please everyone.
Open source shows that philanthropy and business can cohabit and mutually thrive...
I'm not certain that everyone shares this view. The article seems to posit that open source is a 'perfect' donation vehicle with no down sides but I know several people who directly disagree. Why just this week, The Standish Group released a report (that you can have for a mere 1000 USD) and this is the summary:
Boston, April 16, 2008 -- "Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market," said Jim Johnson, Chairman, The Standish Group (www.standishgroup.com).
"It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies," said Jim Johnson, Chairman, The Standish Group International, Boston, MA.
Five years of research has gone into this new report titled "Trends in Open Source". The Open Source report discusses The Standish group's research study of the top 10 drivers that are influencing decisions on how IT is adopting open source technology.
"The Standish Group's new study clearly shows how pervasive Open Source Software is used in industry today. It is a shocking examination of Open Source usage by commercial and government organizations," said Timothy Chou, Ph.D. former President of Oracle OnDemand and author of "The End of Software: Transforming Your Business for the On Demand Future," "The Standish Group has successfully quantified both user and market behavior so that we may more fully understand what is driving this IT trend."
"The Standish Open Source Report is a thoughtful, objective and extremely useful tool for understanding the impact free software is having on the entire IT industry. Every CIO, CFO, and CEO of any corporation with large IT expenditures should read this report," said Wayne Sadin, CIO, Loomis USA, Houston, TX "The impact of Open Source on IT will be profound and The Standish Group research helps business as well as IT management make vitally important investment decisions."
The Standish Group's "Trends in Open Source" report is available free of charge to Standish Group subscribers. Non-subscribers may obtain copies directly from The Standish Group at: http://www.standishgroup.com/market_research/index.php for $1,000 per copy.
Emphasis mine. So you can see that there is definitely a mentality of open source "costing" industries. I'm sure the people at Brittanica and other encyclopedia publishers claim millions in losses to Wikipedia.
Allow me to point out something I think the article missed which is that when you donate to open source, you're avoiding a huge loss of donations through third parties and local governments. Example, say I donate a 100 dollars every month to an African village through Africa Needs Help International (made up, it applies to almost every organization though). Well, I'll bet that ANHI takes a cut of that to run staff and transportation and such so let's say we're down to 75 USD. That 75 USD is probably used to buy from a predetermined company (usually not in Africa) and not at the best possible rate so we could probably estimate that 5 USD is trimmed off in pre-arranged agreements so we're down to 70 USD. Then whether or not that 70 USD of goods actually makes it to the village is another story. It could very well be intercepted by local guerillas, Janjaweed or the Mujahideen (often the very reasons the local villages are in need) which would actually be directly contradicting what you are trying to do.
Let me tell you, they couldn't have made this move any sooner. Some of the law students were having 'independent' thoughts about how the United States legal system should be corrected and it was just causing mass chaos in the classrooms. One student kept reading things online like People Before Lawyers and began voicing concerns about the plaintiffs and defendants (you know, the actual humans involved) in certain cases. Let's just say that individual had to stay back a few years after having to repeat the class Soul Removal 101 and begin the process over. It was very ugly I think they were only eligible to be a para-legal after that incident.
The "internet" (or "anarchist-net" as we've dubbed it here) is nothing more than a distraction for students and could never ever possibly be used for learning. I suppose next citizens will want every single state and federal law posted on there so they can try to interpret it themselves! Not on my watch, we here at U of Chicago produce no fewer than 50,000 lawyers a year and we will see you in court if you try to circumvent the United State's legal system's need for them (Sprint, we're watching you!).
I submitted this in story form yesterday but also in recent news, Glasgow scientists have made a tiny switch that would make huge leaps in memory storage:
Scientists at the University of Galsgow have claimed a breakthrough that enables them to store 500,000 gigabytes squeezed onto one square inch making way for some hilarious storage for things like cell phones and iPods. The scientists working on it divulged, "We have been able to assemble a functional nanocluster that incorporates two electron donating groups, and position them precisely 0.32 nm apart so that they can form a totally new type of molecular switching device. This is unprecedented and provides a route to produce new a molecule-based switch that can be easily manipulated using an electric field. By taking these nano-scale clusters, just a nanometer in size, and placing them onto a gold or carbon, we can control the switching ability. Not only is this a new type of switchable molecule, but by grafting the molecule on to metal (gold) or carbon means that we can potentially bridge the gap between traditional semiconductor devices and components for nanoscale plastic electronics. The key advantage of the molecule sized switch is information / transistor density in traditional semi-conductors. Molecule sized switches would lead to increasing data storage to say 4 Petabits per square inch. This breakthrough shows conceptually that this is possible (showing the bulk effect) but we are yet to solve the fabrication and addressing problems. The fact these switches work on carbon means that they could be embedded in plastic chips so silicon is not needed and the system becomes much more flexible both physically and technologically. Since these switches are little balls of metal oxide they are made of similar stuff to normal semi-conductors but are much easier to manipulate as discrete molecular units." You can read more about it in Nature's Nanotechnology publication. In related news, researchers have claimed to harness terahertz radiation using circuits.
Another advancement in nanotechnology, thought I would post it here since it's probably not going to be used.
Free means that you're free to look out for yourself.
As long as they don't inhibit other people from making desktop distros, I see nothing wrong with this. I certainly didn't intend this submission to sound like I was blaming Red Hat for abandoning Linux on the desktop for the single user. I was, instead, hoping this would generate interesting conversation about whether or not desktop Linux is supposed to be delivered by a company. Perhaps it has to come from single developers working together? Red Hat contributes big time (over 10% of all contributions I think) to kernel development so they're already a god to me.
Will Canonical's Ubuntu distribution be short lived if they fail to target the enterprise? I don't mean to spread FUD, just wondering. I think Canonical is Europe or South Africa based, perhaps America's economic woes are driving Red Hat away from funding things that, frankly, have no return on investment? Is desktop Linux for the end user merely an economic drain on a company? I certainly hope not but that's kind of how I interpreted Red Hat's blog...
First, we developed the weapons and these kept USSR and America from going to war. The simple fact is, that both side were terrified of using these. We all knew what would happen. So, it really did accomplish what we wanted. You're not really trying to argue that both sides understood we would never ever use the nuclear weapons we had worked so hard to build, are you? Both sides of the coin are madness, as you'd never spend so much money creating these weapons never to use them. I once read a book by Robert Strange McNamara (see also Fog of War) that talked numbers. The numbers he talked about were how many nuclear weapons we built during the cold war and also how much each of these weapons cost. MIRV technology, kill areas, megatonnage, etc. That's what we bought at any cost on taxpayer money. Meanwhile people in the United States still starved. Children around the world over died.
All these countries that you speak of would put their entire population (and some have) into disgusting poverty in order to get their hands on nuclear weapons.
The real problem is the recent round of nuclear build-out. I don't get it, how do other countries getting the bomb change your logic any further? I mean, the U.S. was religious enough an the U.S.S.R. was so anti-religion it was worse than being religious. You say these countries could really start a war because they lack maturity... could you please explain how the U.S. or Russia are any more mature than they are? Are you talking technologically mature because that has little to do with how you use nuclear weapons. Or is maturity just the safe way to say we hate them? I'm surprised you weren't calling China immature.
In the end, I suspect that it will not matter. There are so many other easy ways to attack other ppl. Groups like Al Qaeda could easily mutate the avian flu... If that's so easy, why don't you tell me how that's done (and why haven't they done it in the past five years). Not even Al Qaeda is as immature as you think they are. Bin Laden has talked number counts of how many Americans he wants dead... they are not out to create a mass epidemic that would almost certainly spread the world over like Stephen King's The Stand.
Biological warfare would just be the new horror, we'd get strains of all our favorite diseases and so would Russia, China, all the countries you listed. There'd still be conventional war, we'd still dump half our resources into developing these strains and everyone everywhere would still be thinking that it's a good thing we'll never use them. Until the day we do.
This is an endless cycle, we're doomed to repeat this forever. If you want to get a Large Hadron Collider operating in the United States, convince congress it can create black holes that would easily be used as weapons against anyone.
And if could stop a world war, yeah, I would allow the feds to move me to another place, pay for a new home, and provide me with a nice new job, schooling for my children, etc, which IIRC, is what we did. Money solves everything, does it? I would wager some of these people (as the same special interviewed the older ones) didn't really care about that.
For those of you who are anthropologists as well as zoologists, it should be mentioned that there were native inhabitants of these islands that were forced to move before the tests.
We did it to Native Americans on the continental United States as well but it really bears mentioning that there was a pretty gross injustice paid to these peaceful peoples in the name of atomic testing. I remember watching this footage on an ABC special as a kid and I luckily recorded it so I could watch it over and over again. When watching project Baker, I kept thinking "Wow, that's impressive, that was somebody's home."
I suppose I'll be called a self-hating liberal but I believe we should never forget the price we pay for the weapons we hold. These weapons that were supposed to be the end of war aren't and any future horror developed to stop war won't be the end to war either.
Just imagine what the look on your face would be if someone showed up and told you to evacuate your state because it was now going to be used for nuclear testing. You probably wouldn't be very happy to leave your home in the name of warfare.
Several years ago, I tried a demo of Bright Planet's Deep Query Manager that would essentially do these searches through a client on your machine in batch-like jobs. Oh, the bandwidth and resources you'll hog!
Their stats on how much of the web they hit that Google missed was always impressive (true or not) but perhaps their days are numbered with this new venture by Google.
Quite an interesting concept if you think about it. I always presupposed that companies would hate it but never got 'blocked' from doing it to sites.
Here, suck up my bandwidth without generating ad revenue! Sounds like a lose situation for the data provider in my mind...
"...If you want to develop Free Software, Linux.com (Shares corp overlord w/ Slsahdot)..."
Wow,/. editors can't even spell their own name? Somebody should give them a pointy hat and make them go sit in the corner for a bit;) Leave Salsadot alone!
Mmmmm, "Dancing for Nerds. Spicy food you pay for twice."
Does anyone else get a sort of Outer Limits/Twilight Zone feel when they watch Ghost in the Shell? I've only been exposed to what's on Adult Swim but for some reason I liken each episode to those shows. Something odd or peculiar is happening and there is a startling revelation at the end of the episode. I know on the surface it's just a police thriller with sci-fi themes of artificial intelligence and robotics but I still get this feel. I also get the same feel when reading a Philip K. Dick or some of Ray Bradbury's short stories.
Then again, when watch Cowboy Bebop I feel like it's modern day Clint Eastwood western with the shiny veneer of space. And I just read The Watchmen for the first time last week and it felt more like a philosophical analysis of power than a simple graphic novel.
Despite what many times goes wrong with movie adaptations, I welcome this as it will expose the Ghost in the Shell themes to younger people without the insane licensing fees I've come across when trying to acquire this anime.
They all seem to have pretty close pricing, for example the HP's 2133:
... anywhere from a $499 system running Linux to a $749 model using Microsoft's Windows Vista Business operating system. The low-end Linux version, which sports a 1GHz CPU and 512MB of RAM--is probably the closest matchup for the Eee. The Vista machine we review here today sits at the top-end with a 1.6GHz CPU and 2GB of RAM. I'm glad to see healthy competition in this market. I know some people are going to hate the non-standard stuff going on with these laptops and there's going to be some dirty tactics to 'lock-in' countries to purchase only a certain brand for schools (*cough* Intel/Microsoft *cough*) but these prices are going to continue to be driven down. Which from $400-$500 is a great price!
While it may not be the year of Linux on the desktop, it's certainly the year of Linux on the super freaking tiny notebook that is difficult to type on (yes, I know what a USB keyboard is).
One is a highly regarded tech school, and the other is a highly regarded liberal arts institution. A highly regarded school is a highly regarded school. On top of that, I interview people to work for my tech company and I don't care if you're from MIT or middle of nowhere college, it all depends on what comes out of your mouth during the interview. And I haven't met a company that's any different.
I think you need to ask yourself if you want to go to a school where they force you into requirements like taking one anthropology course or two upper division reading courses. You're other choice (the tech school) is having all your courses picked for you but never accidentally stumbling onto something you love or have never experienced.
Me, I opted for the liberal arts college and will never regret it. Sure, my coworkers who went to a tech school get to brag about how intensive their CS coursework was but I've learned what they know (if not more) a couple years into my job.
Do what you want to do, what you think will be fun and exciting. The place ain't gonna matter, what you put into it will and will be evident to anybody that talks to you.
What might follow is arguments of who is more important, the man who discovers this science or the man who makes it easily accessible and digestible by a vast majority of the five billion simpletons living on the earth?
You know you're on Slashdot when someone speaks so condescendingly of most of humanity for their lack of PhD-level expertise in a specific field and gets modded interesting. I challenge you to take a few good cultural anthropology classes. Just a few. The human experience does not begin or end in a physics lab. You misunderstand me. By stating that I read these pop physicist books, I was implying that I'm one of those five billion simpletons. I am simple, especially compared to any physicist or my college professor even. I was not great at physics which is why I code computers for a living now.
I've taken cultural anthropology classes--even while in college! I still read many books about Native American/First Nation, Inuit, Inca, Pima, Hopi, Aztec and League of Five Nations peoples. I love their culture! I find more reward from reading their religious ceremonies and beliefs than I ever did find in the bible!
Here a great man has passed in a great field, and we mar that with misanthropy. "Misanthropy?" Ha! By acknowledging that there are people smarter than other people, you assume I meant misanthropy? At least I started my post with condolences to Wheeler's colleagues, his family and thanking him for everything he did for us. How do you feel about "the death of a great man?" I wouldn't know, you spent your time attacking me for calling most of the populace of the world simple.
I'm not a physicist, I was merely hoping to relay what my physics professor had told me about being a real physicist. I never even sad I believe it, I admire all these men mentioned and feel a simpleton myself compared to them.
What in the hell is wrong with being simple anyway?
I don't think anything major as this has happened before... Really? It was only the client code, they don't know how the server works (although they could reverse engineer the messaging potentially and mock a server after a lot of work and assumptions).
Something that the summary missed but was reiterated twice in the actual article is that CCP is accused of seeding most of the torrents and then monitoring all IP addresses acquiring the source and then banning accounts associated with those IPs. So if you're going to get the code just to look at it, I suggest using your mom's house or an internet cafe!
I wonder if any large MMO company will ever be brave enough to calmly address an issue rather than wielding the ban-hammer. This particular user used this code to point out a few things regarding security:
From all security i saw - were ROLE permissions for logins with priviliges higher than usual player, and some minor things in relation to prevent some remote service calls (some with potentially bad payload) I'm not entirely sure if he's implying there's some exploitable permissions bug or if there are some user roles that are jacked up (you know, like a coder at CCP giving himself the keys to the game and claiming it was for debug when it was for his own account's gain). But whatever it is, CCP should fix that.
Frankly, downloading this would be a stupid thing to get banned over. This is CCP's bread and butter, I don't blame them for taking this action. In their eyes, they are trying to eliminate exploiting players in hopes of making the game better for non-exploiting players. This 'policing' action is usually desired by the community. Yeah, it's unfortunate that they're not taking advantage of the security and stability of an open source coding community... but you have to admit it would be easy for someone to fork and go off and make their own client with. Maybe there's deep dark secrets they don't want out and since it's only a game and I don't really care for it I'm not too concerned.
Let's see if Linden Labs can make this OSS client thing work to their advantage. I sure hope so because it will give everyone else a reason to make the switch.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a lawyer but I thought precedence was set for this in US Vs Forrester where a $10 million drug operation had their e-mail, phone and IP address records obtained from their ISP without a warrant. They were guilty but not until the court case.
This happened just last year. How are they going to reconcile these two rulings?
>> [Enter]
Are you sure you want to vote today?
(Allow/Deny)
>> Allow
*An anthropomorphic paper clip appears*
"Hi! I'm Clippy, I see you're trying to vote!"
"Let me help you with that! Which of these do you enjoy the most:"
A) Fear Mongering
B) Economy Stunting Taxation
Yeah, I can't wait to vote this year
If you can change a vote of "no with comments" to "yes" I don't see why you couldn't change "fails with 122,000 errors" to "passes." I mean, when your standard passes through sheer lobbying and politics with little technical analysis, it's going to take a lot to surprise me with how epically it fails.
Multi-User Dungeon - MUD1 Version 1E
... ahh much better, Rolaids spells relief.
... Before you enter the cabin, you hug the Doritos (tm) "Who Wants to Meet an Astronaut" Sweepstakes winner and step inside. You turn on your Sony Brand headset that sounds like a dream and prepare for blastoff ...
* NASA's Super Happy MUD *
* It's Edutainment! *
Origin of version: Sat Sep 15 10:00:50 2007
Welcome! By what name shall I call you?
>> Buzz
Hello, Buzz!
Cape Canaveral Launch Pad.
You stand in your Converse (tm) Brand space suit on the Launch Pad, before you is a towering shuttle with the huge Coca-Cola (tm) logo on the side of it. A crowd watches in anticipation and enjoys the T-Mobile (tm) cameras broadcasting the cabin and crew live to their cell phones.
[Exits: shuttle, bathroom]
>> bathroom
Bathroom Adjacent to Launch Pad.
You rush into the bathroom and rip off your helmet to deposit your stomach contents in the toilet. Luckily you have Rolaids (tm) antacid in your Converse (tm) Brand space suit. You pop a few pills into your mouth
[Exits: door]
>> door
Cape Canaveral Launch Pad.
You stumble out of the restroom and back on to the launch pad. Oh no, a congressman spots you! "Hey, why if it isn't Buzz!" he says as he moves in for a photo op!
[A Congressman] is at [quite a few]
Your pierce *** MASSACRES *** A Congressman!
A Congressman's pound scratches you.
Your pierce *** MASSACRES *** A Congressman!
Your pierce DISEMBOWELS A Congressman!
[A Congressman] is at [big nasty]
You stop using A diamond-tipped dagger.
You wield a legendary greatsword.
A Congressman sees your attempt to trip him in time to avoid your foot.
[A Congressman] is at [big nasty]
Your fiery slash *** DEMOLISHES *** A Congressman!
[A Congressman] is at [pretty hurt]
A Congressman sees your attempt to trip him in time to avoid your foot.
Your flaming slash *** DEVASTATES *** A Congressman!
[A Congressman] is at [pretty hurt]
Your burning slash *** OBLITERATES *** A Congressman!
You trip A Congressman, sending him sprawling to the ground!
Your flaming slash *** OBLITERATES *** A Congressman!
A Congressman is mortally wounded, and will die soon if not aided.
[A Congressman] is at [dying]
You trip A Congressman, knocking him unconscious. A Congressman is mortally wounded, and will die soon if not aided.
[A Congressman] is at [dying]
You trip A Congressman, knocking him unconscious.
A Comgressman is mortally wounded, and will die soon if not aided.
Your burning slash *** DEMOLISHES *** A Congressman!
The Congressman's body becomes limp and the politician drops to the ground DEAD!!
You receive 212000 experience out of 280012 total. [neutral]
[Exits: shuttle, bathroom]
>> shuttle
You stagger into the elevator paid for by Playboy Magazine and begin your assent to the cabin. The slow motion walking thingy starts to happen as you cross the bridge
That's all we have so far. I think you can see just how exciting this game is goi
I pointed this study out yesterday during the "Is Open Source the Answer To Giving?" discussion and was promptly modded up, down, up, down, ad infinitum (probably because I was trying to merely provide the unpopular side/view of the issue but I digress).
More importantly, you should pay attention to the several insightful and interesting comments that followed which point out French Economist Bastiat's Parable of the Broken Window.
Whether you hate it or not, it does no good to ignore this contempt that so much of corporate America holds for open source! Take the time to inform your boss or coworker who claims losses directly to open source efforts.
I thought I would add in a few more points that might influence your stance on this. While standardizing on one is great, I think that we should stick to letting the consumer have the option.
... what with the phone home possibilities of hardware and all. Oddly enough, half the laptops here are IBM's Thinkpads and the other newer half are Dell XPS's (which ironically spurred the widescreen incidents). Leave it to a Fortune 500 company to waste cash on desktop-replacement-laptops.
... something about horizontal viewing that makes me happy. Although I don't do that on laptops or play Warcraft anymore, it may be something to consider.
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At the company I work at, there is extreme contempt for hooking widescreen laptops up to projectors and smartboards as the user on the laptop cannot view what they are doing on the laptop's screen (if they do it is super distorted to fit on the other viewing device). While this may sound trivial, imagine sitting at a desk facing a class of 100+ people who are looking at huge screens behind you. Not only end consumers but also the enterprise prefers the choice. Although this is kind of a non-issue if only Lenovo is doing that because my employer won't buy from China
And--I'm sure this will come up several times--there is my DVD collection which is mostly widescreen as I have a widescreen TV at home. For this reason, I personally may prefer a widescreen. However, most DVDs are non-widescreen and laptop screens are small enough as it is without having the lost real-estate. Again, probably a trivial aspect unless you travel and watch DVDs a lot.
I do enjoy Warcraft on wide screens though
I agree with the submitter that it is important indeed to leave this decision up to the consumer. Actually, since this is just Lenovo, I wonder if this will hurt their sales? If the consumers want it, the companies will notice
During the whole montage he's writing something over and over on the blackboard and it comes out to be something like "I will NOT question Darwinian Evolution." He interviews scientists and editors who have lost their jobs for printing/writing papers that claim our DNA has a 'code' with information that could not have happened in nature.
Disclaimer, I read a lot of Darwin/Dawkins/Gould so I'm pretty biased here
I think that even though it's 'a waste of time,' it's bad to write these people off or fire them. I'm sure there's sound criticism against these papers and authors but Ben Stein isn't showing that in his movie if there is.
If you have friends who believe in Creationism, respect them and provide for them sound arguments against it. It may be a waste of time to you but it's complete snobbery to write them off. Ben Stein is correct that you may lose friends if you watch that movie and become polarized by it--don't let that happen!
Like a Michael Moore movie, objectivity is raped, killed, gutted and donned over a rich man's face who then can safely tell you what to think.
Open source shows that philanthropy and business can cohabit and mutually thrive ...
I'm not certain that everyone shares this view. The article seems to posit that open source is a 'perfect' donation vehicle with no down sides but I know several people who directly disagree. Why just this week, The Standish Group released a report (that you can have for a mere 1000 USD) and this is the summary:
Boston, April 16, 2008 -- "Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market," said Jim Johnson, Chairman, The Standish Group (www.standishgroup.com).
"It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies," said Jim Johnson, Chairman, The Standish Group International, Boston, MA.
Five years of research has gone into this new report titled "Trends in Open Source". The Open Source report discusses The Standish group's research study of the top 10 drivers that are influencing decisions on how IT is adopting open source technology.
"The Standish Group's new study clearly shows how pervasive Open Source Software is used in industry today. It is a shocking examination of Open Source usage by commercial and government organizations," said Timothy Chou, Ph.D. former President of Oracle OnDemand and author of "The End of Software: Transforming Your Business for the On Demand Future," "The Standish Group has successfully quantified both user and market behavior so that we may more fully understand what is driving this IT trend."
"The Standish Open Source Report is a thoughtful, objective and extremely useful tool for understanding the impact free software is having on the entire IT industry. Every CIO, CFO, and CEO of any corporation with large IT expenditures should read this report," said Wayne Sadin, CIO, Loomis USA, Houston, TX "The impact of Open Source on IT will be profound and The Standish Group research helps business as well as IT management make vitally important investment decisions."
The Standish Group's "Trends in Open Source" report is available free of charge to Standish Group subscribers. Non-subscribers may obtain copies directly from The Standish Group at: http://www.standishgroup.com/market_research/index.php for $1,000 per copy.
Emphasis mine. So you can see that there is definitely a mentality of open source "costing" industries. I'm sure the people at Brittanica and other encyclopedia publishers claim millions in losses to Wikipedia.
Allow me to point out something I think the article missed which is that when you donate to open source, you're avoiding a huge loss of donations through third parties and local governments. Example, say I donate a 100 dollars every month to an African village through Africa Needs Help International (made up, it applies to almost every organization though). Well, I'll bet that ANHI takes a cut of that to run staff and transportation and such so let's say we're down to 75 USD. That 75 USD is probably used to buy from a predetermined company (usually not in Africa) and not at the best possible rate so we could probably estimate that 5 USD is trimmed off in pre-arranged agreements so we're down to 70 USD. Then whether or not that 70 USD of goods actually makes it to the village is another story. It could very well be intercepted by local guerillas, Janjaweed or the Mujahideen (often the very reasons the local villages are in need) which would actually be directly contradicting what you are trying to do.
When you donate to Open Source proj
Make TV shows from ads?! That's so easy a caveman could do it!
Let me tell you, they couldn't have made this move any sooner. Some of the law students were having 'independent' thoughts about how the United States legal system should be corrected and it was just causing mass chaos in the classrooms. One student kept reading things online like People Before Lawyers and began voicing concerns about the plaintiffs and defendants (you know, the actual humans involved) in certain cases. Let's just say that individual had to stay back a few years after having to repeat the class Soul Removal 101 and begin the process over. It was very ugly I think they were only eligible to be a para-legal after that incident.
The "internet" (or "anarchist-net" as we've dubbed it here) is nothing more than a distraction for students and could never ever possibly be used for learning. I suppose next citizens will want every single state and federal law posted on there so they can try to interpret it themselves! Not on my watch, we here at U of Chicago produce no fewer than 50,000 lawyers a year and we will see you in court if you try to circumvent the United State's legal system's need for them (Sprint, we're watching you!).
I submitted this in story form yesterday but also in recent news, Glasgow scientists have made a tiny switch that would make huge leaps in memory storage:
Scientists at the University of Galsgow have claimed a breakthrough that enables them to store 500,000 gigabytes squeezed onto one square inch making way for some hilarious storage for things like cell phones and iPods. The scientists working on it divulged, "We have been able to assemble a functional nanocluster that incorporates two electron donating groups, and position them precisely 0.32 nm apart so that they can form a totally new type of molecular switching device. This is unprecedented and provides a route to produce new a molecule-based switch that can be easily manipulated using an electric field. By taking these nano-scale clusters, just a nanometer in size, and placing them onto a gold or carbon, we can control the switching ability. Not only is this a new type of switchable molecule, but by grafting the molecule on to metal (gold) or carbon means that we can potentially bridge the gap between traditional semiconductor devices and components for nanoscale plastic electronics. The key advantage of the molecule sized switch is information / transistor density in traditional semi-conductors. Molecule sized switches would lead to increasing data storage to say 4 Petabits per square inch. This breakthrough shows conceptually that this is possible (showing the bulk effect) but we are yet to solve the fabrication and addressing problems. The fact these switches work on carbon means that they could be embedded in plastic chips so silicon is not needed and the system becomes much more flexible both physically and technologically. Since these switches are little balls of metal oxide they are made of similar stuff to normal semi-conductors but are much easier to manipulate as discrete molecular units." You can read more about it in Nature's Nanotechnology publication. In related news, researchers have claimed to harness terahertz radiation using circuits.
Another advancement in nanotechnology, thought I would post it here since it's probably not going to be used.
Will Canonical's Ubuntu distribution be short lived if they fail to target the enterprise? I don't mean to spread FUD, just wondering. I think Canonical is Europe or South Africa based, perhaps America's economic woes are driving Red Hat away from funding things that, frankly, have no return on investment? Is desktop Linux for the end user merely an economic drain on a company? I certainly hope not but that's kind of how I interpreted Red Hat's blog
All these countries that you speak of would put their entire population (and some have) into disgusting poverty in order to get their hands on nuclear weapons. The real problem is the recent round of nuclear build-out. I don't get it, how do other countries getting the bomb change your logic any further? I mean, the U.S. was religious enough an the U.S.S.R. was so anti-religion it was worse than being religious. You say these countries could really start a war because they lack maturity
Biological warfare would just be the new horror, we'd get strains of all our favorite diseases and so would Russia, China, all the countries you listed. There'd still be conventional war, we'd still dump half our resources into developing these strains and everyone everywhere would still be thinking that it's a good thing we'll never use them. Until the day we do.
This is an endless cycle, we're doomed to repeat this forever. If you want to get a Large Hadron Collider operating in the United States, convince congress it can create black holes that would easily be used as weapons against anyone. And if could stop a world war, yeah, I would allow the feds to move me to another place, pay for a new home, and provide me with a nice new job, schooling for my children, etc, which IIRC, is what we did. Money solves everything, does it? I would wager some of these people (as the same special interviewed the older ones) didn't really care about that.
For those of you who are anthropologists as well as zoologists, it should be mentioned that there were native inhabitants of these islands that were forced to move before the tests.
We did it to Native Americans on the continental United States as well but it really bears mentioning that there was a pretty gross injustice paid to these peaceful peoples in the name of atomic testing. I remember watching this footage on an ABC special as a kid and I luckily recorded it so I could watch it over and over again. When watching project Baker, I kept thinking "Wow, that's impressive, that was somebody's home."
I suppose I'll be called a self-hating liberal but I believe we should never forget the price we pay for the weapons we hold. These weapons that were supposed to be the end of war aren't and any future horror developed to stop war won't be the end to war either.
Just imagine what the look on your face would be if someone showed up and told you to evacuate your state because it was now going to be used for nuclear testing. You probably wouldn't be very happy to leave your home in the name of warfare.
Several years ago, I tried a demo of Bright Planet's Deep Query Manager that would essentially do these searches through a client on your machine in batch-like jobs. Oh, the bandwidth and resources you'll hog!
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Their stats on how much of the web they hit that Google missed was always impressive (true or not) but perhaps their days are numbered with this new venture by Google.
Quite an interesting concept if you think about it. I always presupposed that companies would hate it but never got 'blocked' from doing it to sites.
Here, suck up my bandwidth without generating ad revenue! Sounds like a lose situation for the data provider in my mind
Mmmmm, "Dancing for Nerds. Spicy food you pay for twice."
Does anyone else get a sort of Outer Limits/Twilight Zone feel when they watch Ghost in the Shell? I've only been exposed to what's on Adult Swim but for some reason I liken each episode to those shows. Something odd or peculiar is happening and there is a startling revelation at the end of the episode. I know on the surface it's just a police thriller with sci-fi themes of artificial intelligence and robotics but I still get this feel. I also get the same feel when reading a Philip K. Dick or some of Ray Bradbury's short stories.
Then again, when watch Cowboy Bebop I feel like it's modern day Clint Eastwood western with the shiny veneer of space. And I just read The Watchmen for the first time last week and it felt more like a philosophical analysis of power than a simple graphic novel.
Despite what many times goes wrong with movie adaptations, I welcome this as it will expose the Ghost in the Shell themes to younger people without the insane licensing fees I've come across when trying to acquire this anime.
They all seem to have pretty close pricing, for example the HP's 2133:
... anywhere from a $499 system running Linux to a $749 model using Microsoft's Windows Vista Business operating system. The low-end Linux version, which sports a 1GHz CPU and 512MB of RAM--is probably the closest matchup for the Eee. The Vista machine we review here today sits at the top-end with a 1.6GHz CPU and 2GB of RAM. I'm glad to see healthy competition in this market. I know some people are going to hate the non-standard stuff going on with these laptops and there's going to be some dirty tactics to 'lock-in' countries to purchase only a certain brand for schools (*cough* Intel/Microsoft *cough*) but these prices are going to continue to be driven down. Which from $400-$500 is a great price!While it may not be the year of Linux on the desktop, it's certainly the year of Linux on the super freaking tiny notebook that is difficult to type on (yes, I know what a USB keyboard is).
I think you need to ask yourself if you want to go to a school where they force you into requirements like taking one anthropology course or two upper division reading courses. You're other choice (the tech school) is having all your courses picked for you but never accidentally stumbling onto something you love or have never experienced.
Me, I opted for the liberal arts college and will never regret it. Sure, my coworkers who went to a tech school get to brag about how intensive their CS coursework was but I've learned what they know (if not more) a couple years into my job.
Do what you want to do, what you think will be fun and exciting. The place ain't gonna matter, what you put into it will and will be evident to anybody that talks to you.
I've taken cultural anthropology classes--even while in college! I still read many books about Native American/First Nation, Inuit, Inca, Pima, Hopi, Aztec and League of Five Nations peoples. I love their culture! I find more reward from reading their religious ceremonies and beliefs than I ever did find in the bible! Here a great man has passed in a great field, and we mar that with misanthropy. "Misanthropy?" Ha! By acknowledging that there are people smarter than other people, you assume I meant misanthropy? At least I started my post with condolences to Wheeler's colleagues, his family and thanking him for everything he did for us. How do you feel about "the death of a great man?" I wouldn't know, you spent your time attacking me for calling most of the populace of the world simple.
I'm not a physicist, I was merely hoping to relay what my physics professor had told me about being a real physicist. I never even sad I believe it, I admire all these men mentioned and feel a simpleton myself compared to them.
What in the hell is wrong with being simple anyway?
On a side note, I think this has happened before on a much more serious scale.
Frankly, downloading this would be a stupid thing to get banned over. This is CCP's bread and butter, I don't blame them for taking this action. In their eyes, they are trying to eliminate exploiting players in hopes of making the game better for non-exploiting players. This 'policing' action is usually desired by the community. Yeah, it's unfortunate that they're not taking advantage of the security and stability of an open source coding community
Let's see if Linden Labs can make this OSS client thing work to their advantage. I sure hope so because it will give everyone else a reason to make the switch.