Why artificial? In a few years I expect full limb replacements grown either from stemming and letting them grow from the missing location or from vats and having them sewn on.
Bionic arms and legs may be more cool, but I imagine you'd need to plug them in to do anything super-powered.
Neither of which had neural interfaces (except maybe the zoom lens and nightvision eye), but I suppose Johnny Mnemonic would be too obvious. And yes, I mean the book version - I have never seen the film version sober enough to remember it and don't intend on changing that anytime soon.
Still, I think they're right - if you can find a control node of some kind, you should be able to shut down any botnet. Botnets are (nearly?) always set up to execute arbitrary code (I don't know of any that aren't) - in fact, most inject more malware while they operate, so injecting a self destruct that plugs whatever security hole(s) the botnet was exploiting should theoretically shut down the net, but it won't remove the malware, which may reinstall a botnet - it may need to be a 2-tier injection - one that targets both the security holes and injects antivirus/antirootkit software to clean up the mess.
I think MS learned its lesson - when I was in gradeschool, Microsoft claimed their re-release of (subLOGIC's) flight simulator was uncrackable. 3 hours after they started selling it retail, cracked copies were circulating on pirate BBS's (a group on the west coast won that race, as I recall - there actually was a competition between several pirate guilds in the US to see who would be first). My point is never underestimate a determined group of people with a cause, as they will probably surprise you with how quickly they prove you wrong.
Yes - DX6 texture compression is S3, as is GL_ARB_texture_compression for OpenGL 1.3 (prior to that it was EXT and ARB, which are essentially optional). In fact, this has been one of the major impediments for creating open source OpenGL drivers, because it is core now (and therefore required).
I personally find it highly derivative on prior art, but I found the same thing about most GPU implementations of Navier-Stokes (fluid dynamics) equations and have yet to hear of any of those being overturned. I guess what is obvious to me isn't obvious to the USPTO (and other patent authorities).
You're referring to Generation II (like Fukishima) and III (essentially more efficient designs than gen II) or the in-development III+(+). Bill Gates suggested Gen IV reactor from last year's TED conference suggests burning the 99% U235 that is currently considered waste (currently only U238 is burned), which would run on nuclear waste, and waste from that reactor could be combined with waste from other reactors and burned again. Another alternative, Thorium Molten Salt Reactors also burn nearly 100% of their fuel, but because they use raw fuel and not vastly profitable processed fuel and also don't generate vast amounts of enriched uranium used in nuclear weapons, they have largely been ignored (the capitalist mentality - who cares how much energy it can provide or how efficient it is when you can make more money burning 1% and throwing the rest out). Waste from Thorium decays in hundreds of years and Thorium is vastly more abundant. Even better, TMSRs have passive shutdown built in, so have a much smaller risk factor than Uranium reactors.
Solutions that are only practical in 20% of the US doesn't help the other 80% of the country. Solar concentrators may be great for Nevada, but they don't really help Seattle. Pumped water may be great for Florida, but it doesn't help anyplace where the water freezes for almost 1/2 the year. And before you suggest just building 800 plants in Nevada to supply the US, remember that current transmission loss would make that impractical. We would need superconducting power trunk to make that practical.
Virtualization itself isn't software emulation in any way - what you seem to be referring to is Intel consumer chips use software register shifting and such for virtualization context switches rather than hardware (so-called VT-x - AMD's equivalent, on all of their modern CPUs, is called AMD-V) - in a more layman's term, when the control software switches between, say core OS and VM #1, certain information that is important to the OS being switched out needs to be stored and the one coming in need to be grabbed from a saved cache (for instance, register values and probably high speed caches). The OS instructions themselves still are direct instructions to the CPU and so are still full virtualization - just not hardware assisted because software does the context swap rather than hardware - and no emulation is involved (emulation means converting non-native instructions to native instructions - it is possible to have virtualization running on emulation - an example of this is running iOS on a mac, or android dev environment on a PC, since the underlying chips in both cases are ARM, not x86). This performance hit is relatively slight in the whole scheme of things, but can be noticeable, particularly if running several VMs at once. For a single VM on a single host OS, it is fairly negligible (maybe 5% additional cost at most, with virtualization itself being about 10% for a net of about 15% vs 10%, but if you are running multiple VMs it can get worse).
My Quad core Intel desktop CPU without vT-x smokes my Dual core laptop CPU with VT-x (and yes, I had to turn it on in BIOS), even when all are forced to use a single core - the main performance boost seems to be getting 3x the RAM (I usually assign 6GB on the desktop and 2GB on the laptop for VMs). The desktop also has a generation+ newer GPU, which helps graphics apps (and yes, I turn on hardware graphics acceleration).
Peppermint is very multimedia/cloud centric from what I recall. Great for kids, but moms? Then again, Ubuntu seems to be going that direction, too.
For a more traditional desktop I'd probably lean to other distributions, but I guess it depends on goals. If the goal is first one to rip a CD, I'd probably go with Ubuntu, Peppermint, or similar. For development work I usually use OpenSuSE or Debian, because it is far easier to set up a dev env on them than on Ubuntu (I don't want to spend 20 hours finding all the packages I need for general dev work - I need a dev-all package, and if that exists in Ubuntu, it wasn't obvious and I was unable to find it with search tools).
I've tried a lot of distributions - I usually pop them in a Sun^H^H^HOracle VirtualBox on a chunk of terra-byte drive, but I can't say I've found any I've particularly favored. I used to love Mandrake, but that was long ago (before the forking and infighting left that distribution dead, but they were first with SATA support and I really needed that at the time, and the rest of the distribution was nice, as well).
I personally have never been a fan of traditional nuclear reactors, which seem far too delicate and risky, mainly because they use a 50 year old design that has never been updated. OK, yes, there are newer designs, but nobody has implemented them (I believe Europe has a test reactor being built, but that's about it). Also nobody in the US wants to lead the way in the vastly safer Thorium Molten Salt Reactors because there isn't massive profits to be made in fuel fabrication or breeding, despite its huge advantage as a power generation source. It's really sad that a fission reactor design that is massively safer, is vastly more efficient than traditional nuclear reactors (burning 99% of fuel vs 3%), uses a less dangerous fuel and produces a less dangerous waste that decays much faster is shoved to the side because it is a poor breeder for nuclear weapons and uses raw fuel rather than vastly profitable processed fuel. Despite the US developing the technology, Japan and China will probably be the ones to use it first in production (though why Japan is using it for a breeder is beyond me).
Fusion would be nice, but anything we get out of ITER is probably 50+ years away from practical use.
And municipal funds are collected by state aid to cities and property taxes, so when Republicans say "no new taxes" and instead cut state aid to cities, they force the cities to raise property taxes to fix the streets (which is basically a tax on the poor and middle class, since those groups pay the majority of that type of property tax, as residential taxes far eclipse business taxes). This is an indirect form of trickle down economics, which gives tax breaks to the rich and they are supposed to invest that money in giving to the middle class and poor, which is idiocy (for instance, one extreme rich couple I know use their extra money on stuff like hummers and fancy boats - they sold their 40 foot cruising yacht and replaced it with a bigger one because someone else added one that was bigger to their pier and they had too much penis envy to allow that).
I'm no fan of taxes, but at some point you either need to raise them or cut funding for non-essential programs and ignore those groups whining about, say, not getting state medical care. Eventually their whining will probably cost the candidate an election, but in the meantime, you can enjoy lower taxes. I'm also not a huge fan of tax the rich (are we now socialists and punishing success?) - we should all pay a fair share, whatever that is.
I'm just glad I'm currently residing in a state that allows voting in both primaries, since I don't like socialist Democrats or conservative Christian Republicans. I also don't support parties that are platformed around drug legalization (which I don't necessarily believe in - I think drugs should be federally decriminalized, but not necessarily legalized - if States do legalize, they should not get federal money for treatment - that should be built into the taxation of such products). Unfortunately, the last election I had didn't have a moderate third party candidate and the split vote was for conservative candidates and the liberal Democrat won probably because of it (the rest were all basically hippie parties that got less than 1% of the vote total, as I recall).
Yep - bikes can use car lanes on most city streets, but are supposed to stay to the right. Sidewalk usage is allowed or disallowed by city ordinances.
In fact, I know of an area near a university that bans biking, rollerblading, and skateboarding on the sidewalk, and forces all three onto a narrow, poorly maintained, pothole ridden "bike" lane (or in some areas where there is no bike lane, into the heavily trafficked streets themselves). I nearly got sideswiped by cars and trucks dozens of times when going to school there (trucks almost always drive in the bike lane because the street is fairly narrow to begin with - they took a standard 12' lane and made it 11' with a 1' bike path on the right on both sides, so both sides are squished), and rollerbladers were almost always out of the lane and in the street, which I thought was very dangerous. I had heard there were accidents there including at least one fatality, but I don't know much about the details because I don't get any local news for that area (I don't live in that area - I hear it from others that went there and are still around).
That is a generalization and not necessarily true. If the extra taxation is used for social programs like welfare, public health care, etc., then yes, it is socialist. If the extra income is used to offset the burdens of maintaining multiple mobilizations (wars), a slow economy (tax income not high enough to meet budget burden due to too many unemployed workers), higher health care costs for government workers, higher pay for government workers (e.g. raises), then I don't see it as liberal or socialist.
It drives me nuts when Democrats say "tax only the richest 2%" (as Obama and Minnesota Gov Dayton say) as much as it does Republicans "no new taxes." I don't think either is a good solution - taxation should be fair no matter what your income level (punishing success is an anti-capitalist, socialist ideal - move to France or Canada if you want that - note that I'm not huge on Capitalism, but I understand it and live under it), and "no new taxes" tends to just be an excuse to push taxes into other areas - for instance, if federal government cuts state aid, states cut city aid, and cities are forced to raise taxes to maintain their roads. Where do these taxes come from? Property taxes - essentially a tax on the middle class and poor (because they disproportionately pay the majority of property taxes).
I don't live in California or care about this, but I do know people that do, and I can fully understand from a retailer's point of view why it is impossible to collect sales tax correctly for all 50 states.
1) exemptions - some states give an exemption up to $XXX/year tax free - how does Amazon know if/when such an exemption is hit and when to start collecting tax? Collecting tax before the exemption is hit gives the government a free loan using your money and probably isn't legal. 2) already taxed - nearly all states have a tax on online purchases already, called Use Tax. California already has this (in fact, they already have mandatory use tax registration to provide tax info to the state for in-state sellers earning over $100000/yr) Start enforcing your existing laws already. 3) 50 states, 50 different tax codes, and then subdivide that for special taxes by county (for instance, I pay something like 1.15% extra tax for stadiums in my county). It boils down to a ridiculous amount of data you need to keep on each person and each area. If I had to collect that much info about a person, I'd sell it to marketers to compensate for the amount of work and expense involved, and I'm generally not a dick like that. 4) Use tax schedules (and is for out-of-state sales, it would probably apply to sales tax schedules) vary by state - some require collecting monthly, others quarterly, and others yearly (often due on April 15). This is a tremendous amount of bookkeeping, as I mentioned in point 3.
In Sony's defense, licensing fees for the PS3, like all other consoles, is the primary revenue stream, so bypassing the security and license requirement means Sony doesn't earn money on their console games, which breaks the Gillette razor model - sell the razor at a loss and jack up the price of blades to make up for the loss.
For you and me that is an unpopular stance, but honestly, they have to protect their revenue stream - Microsoft and Nintendo would do the same thing in a heartbeat. If you don't like the Gillette razor model, buy a PC instead.
You miss the double standard - retailers don't face any punishment if they sell an NR or R rated movie to a minor, so why should they face punishment for selling an M rated video game to a minor? An NR (or uncut) movie probably would get an AO rating by the MPAA (effectively either pornographic or have graphic violence that is beyond what even the MPAA allows), but they still sell them in retail stores.
Also, as I've pointed out all along - buying a video game and going to see a movie is not an apples-to-apples comparison, since theater would be analogous to arcade and arcades are pretty much dead. Buying a video game vs buying a movie at the same retail store is a much better comparison. In this case, kids were able to buy NR and R rated movies more than twice as often as M rated video games (13% bought a video game, 33% got into a movie, 47% bought an unrated movie).
I don't have a problem with regulating violent and pornographic media to children, but California's over-broad, ambiguous, biased toward video game law deserved to be smacked to the curb as just that, especially when retailers have shown that enforcement of ESRB ratings has improved drastically over the past decade - in fact, it is even better than theater's enforcement of MPAA ratings according to studies I've seen (showing once again how out of touch the people that create this type of legislation are with reality).
Punishing the retailer isn't the answer, either - the 16 year old kid working the register doesn't give a rats ass if their boss gets fined, and if they get fired over it, there's always another entry job somewhere. I guarantee the 16 year old kid won't be paying the fine, even though the best punishment would be to fine the actual person that sold the game (another reason I have a problem with the now failed California law) - if I was 16 and told I'd be paying fines out of my pocket, I'd be damn sure that law was enforced.
Actually, aerodynamics technology can make a supersonic airplane signature (aka "boom") almost silent - the military and NASA has been investing in that for years.
Ltpinter: Hi Ed. I hope NASA is keeping you busy on really cool stuff. I would like to know if sonic booms can be reduced to a low rumble?
Ed.: Yes, we can make sonic booms that are very quiet, and can't be heard over normal conversation. It sometimes sounds like distant thunder. And referring to my last comment sometimes you can make the boom totally quiet if the aircraft is slow enough or high enough in altitude.
I know Eurocopter is working on a quiet helicopter, but I couldn't find the one I know about (nor can I talk about it, because they are a customer I'm working with). It may be the same technology as I was able to find, but I'm not sure.
This technology has a different application - it bends sound around the object it surrounds, so sonically it appears to not be there. Being able to bend waves of different kinds around objects has fundamental uses - for instance, if you can bend radiation around a spaceship, you eliminate one of the problems with the theoretical Alcubierre drive (though I would say the theory existed before he wrote about it, as people in my physics class discussed it amongst other "further than light" ideas before 1994 - the two that we couldn't debunk were time bubbles and one that is difficult to describe, but I'd call it uncertainty tunneling).
My time sheet people actually care about having it work in Firefox (and Opera, and Chrome), mainly because the time sheet developer is a huge fan of Chrome.
My HR people are stuck in the stone ages, browser wise, though - they require a 32 bit IE browser running in compatibility mode (officially the software only supports IE6, but our ops people no longer support IE6). I've been told this will be true for many years to come, mainly because of a license squabble for upgrades (apparently the company that created the software we use wants millions of dollars for upgrades, and I've heard that the amount is roughly $1000/person, so I can see why that won't fly - yay, vendor and browser lock-in ftl).
I'll never accuse HR people for making poor decisions - I'll just congratulate them when they make a good one (and if you're wondering, no I wasn't hired by HR - I was hired when there was no dedicated HR and became part of a large company through acquisition).
Actually, they probably already did back then, for instance, in an ID3 metadata container. The problem is that metadata probably contains info about the program that created it (e.g. WinAmp) and song information, but nothing personal. I don't think MP3 encoders today even write anything personal that could identify owner.
On my Android DroidX Open phone Go to My Verizon Mobile app Look at... Phone Usage, Text Message Usage, Data Usage
If green, you are under the limit If yellow, you are at the limit If red, you are past the limit If red/green colorblind (as one of my friends is), you have to read the numbers
My grudge is I'd prefer not to have to ever have to look at it for anything. Wireless in particular I feel gouges customers whenever and wherever they can. $30 a month for unlimited, restrictive (i.e. tethering costs another $20/month and as I recall is per device) wireless broadband is silly. If texting was $5 per month I'd consider it, but at $30/month (family plan) I think it's absurd. I actually request people set up their SMS/MMS to send to my email and I send messages back using my data package. The rest is identical to texting - it pings me when I get an email. Texting is a ridiculous overpriced easily replaced feature.
A family data plan would be great for me - we're lucky if we use 100k a month between us except when we're out of town (that's when I've racked up 1GB+ before). I've watched Dish and Netflix on my phone, but it seems when I do I am almost always near WiFi, so that doesn't chew up bandwidth. Only 24k so far this month with 10 days to go. I guess I'm in the same boat as the article writer - I rarely use my bandwidth as it is, but have some spike bandwidth on vacation.
Also the rumor is existing customers can keep their unlimited plan (also mentioned in TFA). The article makes it sound like potentially forever, but the rumors I've heard from other sources were more grim (like a possible phase-out by the end of the year).
Not sure of the state of this technology for humans because I'm sure it's stifled by religious politics (I do know it is used for certain species of endangered shark), but why adopt or take the risk of a donor womb when an artificial uterus would solve the problem? 9 months of extra freedom, no risk to the mom's life, and no hormonal baby blues (unless she takes hormones to lactate) - it seems like the way to go.
My wife and I decided not to have kids, partially because we both have bad genetic issues, so I personally don't really have any issues with genetic engineering that is used to fix genetic problems. Playing God is the last thing I worry about - God (belief issues aside) failed to create a perfect human or else allowed others (e.g. Satan) to create flaws in us and therefore is fallible (why would he allow that?), and therefore I think we should be able to fix the flaws.
Yeah, but what you're missing is that Steam is a commercial product, so to add "free to play" games they likely are taking a cut of micropayments or charging yearly fees in exchange for broader visibility of these games (via Steam). Someone is paying for the bandwidth to download, and I guarantee it isn't Valve.
I see max level limits as OK - it is kind of like shareware - if you like the game after you get to a certain point, buy the rest of it and get more content. It is a good way to avoid games you really dislike. For instance, I considered buying Dungeon Runners before it went FTP, and after trying it, I found I really didn't care for it. I gave D&D Online two shots - once with a free trial and once after it went FTP - neither time impressed me enough in the first 20 hours to keep playing beyond that. Never managed to get past the free trial for WoW, either (which I did 3 times under different names/emails, none of which was faked - just variants - for instance, not my real name, but Charles can be Chuck or Charlie).
I'm fairly certain the patch thing is because you have the game set to "Always keep this game up to date" instead of "Do not automatically update this game" - if you have the latter set, you have to manually update it.
The bandwidth thing is annoying - I'd like to be able to play Steam games while downloading, as well - a game like Empire: Total War in singleplayer mode should not stop downloads and it does. Just to clarify this, it only affects Steam associated games, not all bandwidth - I can launch other games that are not associated with Steam, including networked ones (I've run Battlefield 2, Guild Wars, and several other non-Steam associated games on my system) and downloads continue, so this is just a bad feature in Steam.
Another peeve for Steam is not allowing pre-downloading for some titles, even though they already have a process in place to lock the game until release - I bought the Witcher 2 retail because of this. The choice was wait 8 hours for Steam to download (at 7Mbps down, probably slower on average), or have it in the 20 minutes it takes to get to the store and back... hmm - I'll take store. Fallout 3: New Vegas took about 8 hours to download but was a pre-download, and I bought it through Steam (and I'm a sucker for Fallout games, even though they have always been buggy as hell - even the Black Isle ones had dozens of [mostly user made] patches... I have yet to finish any of the Bethesda ones, though - get too bored with the "MOTS" play and cardboard characters about 3/4 through to finish - if I don't care about anyone in the game, which is usually the case, that is bad storytelling).
As for Offline mode, I've never had a problem - I played Empire: Total War for a week while staying at a house in bumf*ck nowhere with no internet access. I also like that I can have a copy of multiple games on my desktop and laptop and switch between the machines (just can't be logged in as the same Steam user twice, but that is fine IMO), and also that by just logging in with a different Steam user that also owned a game (Borderlands to be specific) a friend of mine and I could play multiplayer with my copies of the game (I think we started a new game, so not sure about character access - it would probably be my laptop and desktop characters).
Most PCs do as well, but it isn't always turned on (you usually need to boot into BIOS and set it). I have had that set up on one of my web servers since I ran a K6 AMD chip (with Linux, of course). Another of my web servers is a mac with MacOS X (both are old machines that got re-purposed - in fact, Apple is phasing out support for my mac if they haven't already, so I plan to switch it to Linux).
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Why artificial? In a few years I expect full limb replacements grown either from stemming and letting them grow from the missing location or from vats and having them sewn on.
Bionic arms and legs may be more cool, but I imagine you'd need to plug them in to do anything super-powered.
Neither of which had neural interfaces (except maybe the zoom lens and nightvision eye), but I suppose Johnny Mnemonic would be too obvious. And yes, I mean the book version - I have never seen the film version sober enough to remember it and don't intend on changing that anytime soon.
Still, I think they're right - if you can find a control node of some kind, you should be able to shut down any botnet. Botnets are (nearly?) always set up to execute arbitrary code (I don't know of any that aren't) - in fact, most inject more malware while they operate, so injecting a self destruct that plugs whatever security hole(s) the botnet was exploiting should theoretically shut down the net, but it won't remove the malware, which may reinstall a botnet - it may need to be a 2-tier injection - one that targets both the security holes and injects antivirus/antirootkit software to clean up the mess.
I think MS learned its lesson - when I was in gradeschool, Microsoft claimed their re-release of (subLOGIC's) flight simulator was uncrackable. 3 hours after they started selling it retail, cracked copies were circulating on pirate BBS's (a group on the west coast won that race, as I recall - there actually was a competition between several pirate guilds in the US to see who would be first). My point is never underestimate a determined group of people with a cause, as they will probably surprise you with how quickly they prove you wrong.
Yes - DX6 texture compression is S3, as is GL_ARB_texture_compression for OpenGL 1.3 (prior to that it was EXT and ARB, which are essentially optional). In fact, this has been one of the major impediments for creating open source OpenGL drivers, because it is core now (and therefore required).
I personally find it highly derivative on prior art, but I found the same thing about most GPU implementations of Navier-Stokes (fluid dynamics) equations and have yet to hear of any of those being overturned. I guess what is obvious to me isn't obvious to the USPTO (and other patent authorities).
You're referring to Generation II (like Fukishima) and III (essentially more efficient designs than gen II) or the in-development III+(+). Bill Gates suggested Gen IV reactor from last year's TED conference suggests burning the 99% U235 that is currently considered waste (currently only U238 is burned), which would run on nuclear waste, and waste from that reactor could be combined with waste from other reactors and burned again. Another alternative, Thorium Molten Salt Reactors also burn nearly 100% of their fuel, but because they use raw fuel and not vastly profitable processed fuel and also don't generate vast amounts of enriched uranium used in nuclear weapons, they have largely been ignored (the capitalist mentality - who cares how much energy it can provide or how efficient it is when you can make more money burning 1% and throwing the rest out). Waste from Thorium decays in hundreds of years and Thorium is vastly more abundant. Even better, TMSRs have passive shutdown built in, so have a much smaller risk factor than Uranium reactors.
Solutions that are only practical in 20% of the US doesn't help the other 80% of the country. Solar concentrators may be great for Nevada, but they don't really help Seattle. Pumped water may be great for Florida, but it doesn't help anyplace where the water freezes for almost 1/2 the year. And before you suggest just building 800 plants in Nevada to supply the US, remember that current transmission loss would make that impractical. We would need superconducting power trunk to make that practical.
Virtualization itself isn't software emulation in any way - what you seem to be referring to is Intel consumer chips use software register shifting and such for virtualization context switches rather than hardware (so-called VT-x - AMD's equivalent, on all of their modern CPUs, is called AMD-V) - in a more layman's term, when the control software switches between, say core OS and VM #1, certain information that is important to the OS being switched out needs to be stored and the one coming in need to be grabbed from a saved cache (for instance, register values and probably high speed caches). The OS instructions themselves still are direct instructions to the CPU and so are still full virtualization - just not hardware assisted because software does the context swap rather than hardware - and no emulation is involved (emulation means converting non-native instructions to native instructions - it is possible to have virtualization running on emulation - an example of this is running iOS on a mac, or android dev environment on a PC, since the underlying chips in both cases are ARM, not x86). This performance hit is relatively slight in the whole scheme of things, but can be noticeable, particularly if running several VMs at once. For a single VM on a single host OS, it is fairly negligible (maybe 5% additional cost at most, with virtualization itself being about 10% for a net of about 15% vs 10%, but if you are running multiple VMs it can get worse).
My Quad core Intel desktop CPU without vT-x smokes my Dual core laptop CPU with VT-x (and yes, I had to turn it on in BIOS), even when all are forced to use a single core - the main performance boost seems to be getting 3x the RAM (I usually assign 6GB on the desktop and 2GB on the laptop for VMs). The desktop also has a generation+ newer GPU, which helps graphics apps (and yes, I turn on hardware graphics acceleration).
Peppermint is very multimedia/cloud centric from what I recall. Great for kids, but moms? Then again, Ubuntu seems to be going that direction, too.
For a more traditional desktop I'd probably lean to other distributions, but I guess it depends on goals. If the goal is first one to rip a CD, I'd probably go with Ubuntu, Peppermint, or similar. For development work I usually use OpenSuSE or Debian, because it is far easier to set up a dev env on them than on Ubuntu (I don't want to spend 20 hours finding all the packages I need for general dev work - I need a dev-all package, and if that exists in Ubuntu, it wasn't obvious and I was unable to find it with search tools).
I've tried a lot of distributions - I usually pop them in a Sun^H^H^HOracle VirtualBox on a chunk of terra-byte drive, but I can't say I've found any I've particularly favored. I used to love Mandrake, but that was long ago (before the forking and infighting left that distribution dead, but they were first with SATA support and I really needed that at the time, and the rest of the distribution was nice, as well).
I personally have never been a fan of traditional nuclear reactors, which seem far too delicate and risky, mainly because they use a 50 year old design that has never been updated. OK, yes, there are newer designs, but nobody has implemented them (I believe Europe has a test reactor being built, but that's about it). Also nobody in the US wants to lead the way in the vastly safer Thorium Molten Salt Reactors because there isn't massive profits to be made in fuel fabrication or breeding, despite its huge advantage as a power generation source. It's really sad that a fission reactor design that is massively safer, is vastly more efficient than traditional nuclear reactors (burning 99% of fuel vs 3%), uses a less dangerous fuel and produces a less dangerous waste that decays much faster is shoved to the side because it is a poor breeder for nuclear weapons and uses raw fuel rather than vastly profitable processed fuel. Despite the US developing the technology, Japan and China will probably be the ones to use it first in production (though why Japan is using it for a breeder is beyond me).
Fusion would be nice, but anything we get out of ITER is probably 50+ years away from practical use.
And municipal funds are collected by state aid to cities and property taxes, so when Republicans say "no new taxes" and instead cut state aid to cities, they force the cities to raise property taxes to fix the streets (which is basically a tax on the poor and middle class, since those groups pay the majority of that type of property tax, as residential taxes far eclipse business taxes). This is an indirect form of trickle down economics, which gives tax breaks to the rich and they are supposed to invest that money in giving to the middle class and poor, which is idiocy (for instance, one extreme rich couple I know use their extra money on stuff like hummers and fancy boats - they sold their 40 foot cruising yacht and replaced it with a bigger one because someone else added one that was bigger to their pier and they had too much penis envy to allow that).
I'm no fan of taxes, but at some point you either need to raise them or cut funding for non-essential programs and ignore those groups whining about, say, not getting state medical care. Eventually their whining will probably cost the candidate an election, but in the meantime, you can enjoy lower taxes. I'm also not a huge fan of tax the rich (are we now socialists and punishing success?) - we should all pay a fair share, whatever that is.
I'm just glad I'm currently residing in a state that allows voting in both primaries, since I don't like socialist Democrats or conservative Christian Republicans. I also don't support parties that are platformed around drug legalization (which I don't necessarily believe in - I think drugs should be federally decriminalized, but not necessarily legalized - if States do legalize, they should not get federal money for treatment - that should be built into the taxation of such products). Unfortunately, the last election I had didn't have a moderate third party candidate and the split vote was for conservative candidates and the liberal Democrat won probably because of it (the rest were all basically hippie parties that got less than 1% of the vote total, as I recall).
Yep - bikes can use car lanes on most city streets, but are supposed to stay to the right. Sidewalk usage is allowed or disallowed by city ordinances.
In fact, I know of an area near a university that bans biking, rollerblading, and skateboarding on the sidewalk, and forces all three onto a narrow, poorly maintained, pothole ridden "bike" lane (or in some areas where there is no bike lane, into the heavily trafficked streets themselves). I nearly got sideswiped by cars and trucks dozens of times when going to school there (trucks almost always drive in the bike lane because the street is fairly narrow to begin with - they took a standard 12' lane and made it 11' with a 1' bike path on the right on both sides, so both sides are squished), and rollerbladers were almost always out of the lane and in the street, which I thought was very dangerous. I had heard there were accidents there including at least one fatality, but I don't know much about the details because I don't get any local news for that area (I don't live in that area - I hear it from others that went there and are still around).
As a cellist, I have to point out that this is all a refinement of the Original 1 hit wonder.
Some of the same songs even ;)
Technically this is 5 chords, but the 6th is often "skipped" by using a turn.
That is a generalization and not necessarily true. If the extra taxation is used for social programs like welfare, public health care, etc., then yes, it is socialist. If the extra income is used to offset the burdens of maintaining multiple mobilizations (wars), a slow economy (tax income not high enough to meet budget burden due to too many unemployed workers), higher health care costs for government workers, higher pay for government workers (e.g. raises), then I don't see it as liberal or socialist.
It drives me nuts when Democrats say "tax only the richest 2%" (as Obama and Minnesota Gov Dayton say) as much as it does Republicans "no new taxes." I don't think either is a good solution - taxation should be fair no matter what your income level (punishing success is an anti-capitalist, socialist ideal - move to France or Canada if you want that - note that I'm not huge on Capitalism, but I understand it and live under it), and "no new taxes" tends to just be an excuse to push taxes into other areas - for instance, if federal government cuts state aid, states cut city aid, and cities are forced to raise taxes to maintain their roads. Where do these taxes come from? Property taxes - essentially a tax on the middle class and poor (because they disproportionately pay the majority of property taxes).
I don't live in California or care about this, but I do know people that do, and I can fully understand from a retailer's point of view why it is impossible to collect sales tax correctly for all 50 states.
1) exemptions - some states give an exemption up to $XXX/year tax free - how does Amazon know if/when such an exemption is hit and when to start collecting tax? Collecting tax before the exemption is hit gives the government a free loan using your money and probably isn't legal.
2) already taxed - nearly all states have a tax on online purchases already, called Use Tax. California already has this (in fact, they already have mandatory use tax registration to provide tax info to the state for in-state sellers earning over $100000/yr) Start enforcing your existing laws already.
3) 50 states, 50 different tax codes, and then subdivide that for special taxes by county (for instance, I pay something like 1.15% extra tax for stadiums in my county). It boils down to a ridiculous amount of data you need to keep on each person and each area. If I had to collect that much info about a person, I'd sell it to marketers to compensate for the amount of work and expense involved, and I'm generally not a dick like that.
4) Use tax schedules (and is for out-of-state sales, it would probably apply to sales tax schedules) vary by state - some require collecting monthly, others quarterly, and others yearly (often due on April 15). This is a tremendous amount of bookkeeping, as I mentioned in point 3.
In Sony's defense, licensing fees for the PS3, like all other consoles, is the primary revenue stream, so bypassing the security and license requirement means Sony doesn't earn money on their console games, which breaks the Gillette razor model - sell the razor at a loss and jack up the price of blades to make up for the loss.
For you and me that is an unpopular stance, but honestly, they have to protect their revenue stream - Microsoft and Nintendo would do the same thing in a heartbeat. If you don't like the Gillette razor model, buy a PC instead.
You miss the double standard - retailers don't face any punishment if they sell an NR or R rated movie to a minor, so why should they face punishment for selling an M rated video game to a minor? An NR (or uncut) movie probably would get an AO rating by the MPAA (effectively either pornographic or have graphic violence that is beyond what even the MPAA allows), but they still sell them in retail stores.
Also, as I've pointed out all along - buying a video game and going to see a movie is not an apples-to-apples comparison, since theater would be analogous to arcade and arcades are pretty much dead. Buying a video game vs buying a movie at the same retail store is a much better comparison. In this case, kids were able to buy NR and R rated movies more than twice as often as M rated video games (13% bought a video game, 33% got into a movie, 47% bought an unrated movie).
I don't have a problem with regulating violent and pornographic media to children, but California's over-broad, ambiguous, biased toward video game law deserved to be smacked to the curb as just that, especially when retailers have shown that enforcement of ESRB ratings has improved drastically over the past decade - in fact, it is even better than theater's enforcement of MPAA ratings according to studies I've seen (showing once again how out of touch the people that create this type of legislation are with reality).
Punishing the retailer isn't the answer, either - the 16 year old kid working the register doesn't give a rats ass if their boss gets fined, and if they get fired over it, there's always another entry job somewhere. I guarantee the 16 year old kid won't be paying the fine, even though the best punishment would be to fine the actual person that sold the game (another reason I have a problem with the now failed California law) - if I was 16 and told I'd be paying fines out of my pocket, I'd be damn sure that law was enforced.
Actually, aerodynamics technology can make a supersonic airplane signature (aka "boom") almost silent - the military and NASA has been investing in that for years.
For instance, from NASA's website:
I know Eurocopter is working on a quiet helicopter, but I couldn't find the one I know about (nor can I talk about it, because they are a customer I'm working with). It may be the same technology as I was able to find, but I'm not sure.
This technology has a different application - it bends sound around the object it surrounds, so sonically it appears to not be there. Being able to bend waves of different kinds around objects has fundamental uses - for instance, if you can bend radiation around a spaceship, you eliminate one of the problems with the theoretical Alcubierre drive (though I would say the theory existed before he wrote about it, as people in my physics class discussed it amongst other "further than light" ideas before 1994 - the two that we couldn't debunk were time bubbles and one that is difficult to describe, but I'd call it uncertainty tunneling).
My time sheet people actually care about having it work in Firefox (and Opera, and Chrome), mainly because the time sheet developer is a huge fan of Chrome.
My HR people are stuck in the stone ages, browser wise, though - they require a 32 bit IE browser running in compatibility mode (officially the software only supports IE6, but our ops people no longer support IE6). I've been told this will be true for many years to come, mainly because of a license squabble for upgrades (apparently the company that created the software we use wants millions of dollars for upgrades, and I've heard that the amount is roughly $1000/person, so I can see why that won't fly - yay, vendor and browser lock-in ftl).
I'll never accuse HR people for making poor decisions - I'll just congratulate them when they make a good one (and if you're wondering, no I wasn't hired by HR - I was hired when there was no dedicated HR and became part of a large company through acquisition).
Actually, they probably already did back then, for instance, in an ID3 metadata container. The problem is that metadata probably contains info about the program that created it (e.g. WinAmp) and song information, but nothing personal. I don't think MP3 encoders today even write anything personal that could identify owner.
Seems easy enough for me...
On my Android DroidX
Open phone
Go to My Verizon Mobile app
Look at...
Phone Usage, Text Message Usage, Data Usage
If green, you are under the limit
If yellow, you are at the limit
If red, you are past the limit
If red/green colorblind (as one of my friends is), you have to read the numbers
My grudge is I'd prefer not to have to ever have to look at it for anything. Wireless in particular I feel gouges customers whenever and wherever they can. $30 a month for unlimited, restrictive (i.e. tethering costs another $20/month and as I recall is per device) wireless broadband is silly. If texting was $5 per month I'd consider it, but at $30/month (family plan) I think it's absurd. I actually request people set up their SMS/MMS to send to my email and I send messages back using my data package. The rest is identical to texting - it pings me when I get an email. Texting is a ridiculous overpriced easily replaced feature.
A family data plan would be great for me - we're lucky if we use 100k a month between us except when we're out of town (that's when I've racked up 1GB+ before). I've watched Dish and Netflix on my phone, but it seems when I do I am almost always near WiFi, so that doesn't chew up bandwidth. Only 24k so far this month with 10 days to go. I guess I'm in the same boat as the article writer - I rarely use my bandwidth as it is, but have some spike bandwidth on vacation.
Also the rumor is existing customers can keep their unlimited plan (also mentioned in TFA). The article makes it sound like potentially forever, but the rumors I've heard from other sources were more grim (like a possible phase-out by the end of the year).
Not sure of the state of this technology for humans because I'm sure it's stifled by religious politics (I do know it is used for certain species of endangered shark), but why adopt or take the risk of a donor womb when an artificial uterus would solve the problem? 9 months of extra freedom, no risk to the mom's life, and no hormonal baby blues (unless she takes hormones to lactate) - it seems like the way to go.
My wife and I decided not to have kids, partially because we both have bad genetic issues, so I personally don't really have any issues with genetic engineering that is used to fix genetic problems. Playing God is the last thing I worry about - God (belief issues aside) failed to create a perfect human or else allowed others (e.g. Satan) to create flaws in us and therefore is fallible (why would he allow that?), and therefore I think we should be able to fix the flaws.
Yeah, but what you're missing is that Steam is a commercial product, so to add "free to play" games they likely are taking a cut of micropayments or charging yearly fees in exchange for broader visibility of these games (via Steam). Someone is paying for the bandwidth to download, and I guarantee it isn't Valve.
I see max level limits as OK - it is kind of like shareware - if you like the game after you get to a certain point, buy the rest of it and get more content. It is a good way to avoid games you really dislike. For instance, I considered buying Dungeon Runners before it went FTP, and after trying it, I found I really didn't care for it. I gave D&D Online two shots - once with a free trial and once after it went FTP - neither time impressed me enough in the first 20 hours to keep playing beyond that. Never managed to get past the free trial for WoW, either (which I did 3 times under different names/emails, none of which was faked - just variants - for instance, not my real name, but Charles can be Chuck or Charlie).
I'm fairly certain the patch thing is because you have the game set to "Always keep this game up to date" instead of "Do not automatically update this game" - if you have the latter set, you have to manually update it.
The bandwidth thing is annoying - I'd like to be able to play Steam games while downloading, as well - a game like Empire: Total War in singleplayer mode should not stop downloads and it does. Just to clarify this, it only affects Steam associated games, not all bandwidth - I can launch other games that are not associated with Steam, including networked ones (I've run Battlefield 2, Guild Wars, and several other non-Steam associated games on my system) and downloads continue, so this is just a bad feature in Steam.
Another peeve for Steam is not allowing pre-downloading for some titles, even though they already have a process in place to lock the game until release - I bought the Witcher 2 retail because of this. The choice was wait 8 hours for Steam to download (at 7Mbps down, probably slower on average), or have it in the 20 minutes it takes to get to the store and back... hmm - I'll take store. Fallout 3: New Vegas took about 8 hours to download but was a pre-download, and I bought it through Steam (and I'm a sucker for Fallout games, even though they have always been buggy as hell - even the Black Isle ones had dozens of [mostly user made] patches... I have yet to finish any of the Bethesda ones, though - get too bored with the "MOTS" play and cardboard characters about 3/4 through to finish - if I don't care about anyone in the game, which is usually the case, that is bad storytelling).
As for Offline mode, I've never had a problem - I played Empire: Total War for a week while staying at a house in bumf*ck nowhere with no internet access. I also like that I can have a copy of multiple games on my desktop and laptop and switch between the machines (just can't be logged in as the same Steam user twice, but that is fine IMO), and also that by just logging in with a different Steam user that also owned a game (Borderlands to be specific) a friend of mine and I could play multiplayer with my copies of the game (I think we started a new game, so not sure about character access - it would probably be my laptop and desktop characters).
Most PCs do as well, but it isn't always turned on (you usually need to boot into BIOS and set it). I have had that set up on one of my web servers since I ran a K6 AMD chip (with Linux, of course). Another of my web servers is a mac with MacOS X (both are old machines that got re-purposed - in fact, Apple is phasing out support for my mac if they haven't already, so I plan to switch it to Linux).