I think blaming the online test for the polarisation in Dutch politics is a bit short-sighted.
As some commentators remarked (for our Dutch readers, Rob Oudkerk among them), and consistent with what I hear around me, it is the waffling and trying to be everyone's friend of the centrist parties that drove voters to vote for politician that were actually willing to stand up for their beliefs.
A nice example is the centre-left PvdA (Labour party) waffling on the Armenian genocide. At first they were willing to go along with a hard line pushed by the (centre-)right that requiring a positive affirmation of the genocide by Turkish-descended politicians was a good idea, and when Turkish organisations made it abundantly clear that that would cost votes, the head honcho suddenly started waffling about whether or not the genocide would qualify as a genocide per se.
Disclosure: I voted for the definitely left-wing Socialist Party, so my view of Labour's waffling may be a bit biased.
Well, it was a balmy -25F here in Fairbanks, Alaska. GameStop had sold out preorders, and I have no idea what was going on down at WalMart, but my choice (and the choice of most Fairbanks residence) was the Northwestern based, Kroger owned chain, Fred Meyers, of which there are two Super-center sized box stores in town. The one I went to reported having 100 Wiis and the other reported having 90. Just for your info, they reported having 8 PS3s at launch.
They close at 11pm, but for the Wii openned at 12:01am for an hour. Since it's so cold, lauches up here aren't exactly the same kind of thing they are down in the states, noone camping for hours on end, partially because everyone knew that NOONE else was going to be crazy enough to do that. I got there at about 10:40pm, and stood in line with some guys. It was a really nice, relaxed atmosphere, some people brought chairs, but most stood around and gabbed, trying to keep themselves warm and taking turns going back and forth to warm up in near-by idling cars (noone was going to be an ass about it... it's called "survival"). Nintendo DSs were out of the question, since it's kinda hard to push buttons with thick, canvas and wool gloves.
At just after 11pm, "Freddy's" shoed out it's remaining customers and did something wonderful we didn't expect, they openned their doors, gave people numbered tickets, and let people line up inside. There were many people there (a number of my buds) who weren't even buying that night, but just wanted to join in the festivities. After going inside, some Nintendo DSs broke out, but we were having a good enough time just hanging out that I didn't really have much interest in playing mine.
At midnight, there was a joyous cheer as the line started moving a bit. The staff (all of which were wearing "Wii Play" shirts), had set up a few islands in the middle of the front isle, which had games and accessories. The Wiis were handed out in order of ticket number (I was #44 out of 100), at a window, and everyone (surprisingly calmy) went for games and accessories. When I got there, there were a number of copies of Zelda left (one of which I nabbed), something like 3 VC Controllers left (also one of which I nabbed), but unfortunately they had long since run out of extra Wiimotes and Nunchucks, but that'll be okay for the moment, especially since one of my other friends bought a system, so we'll have two controllers for the moment. Copies of Red Steel were long since bought out, but I hadn't planned on getting one, since Zelda will keep me well enough occupied for a while, and FF12 and Okami are still running strong on my PS2. Overall, a very pleasant and successfull launch experience.
VHS won't die until the HTPC appliance fully matures, and a DRM-free medium is adapted en masse, and can record both NTSC and ATSC. DVD recordable is almost there, but is less flexible than an HTPC and won't record high-def, so why bother upgrading? Tivo almost has it, except tivo decides how long you can keep recordings (in some cases at least), NOT you, PLUS it requires a monthly subscription and either a land line or ethernet connection to phone home. Also, Tivo makes it FAR to difficult to record say, Smallville or Desperate Housewives or whatever it is you and your friends all want to watch, then take that recording over to a friend's house or simply lend it out. It's FAR to difficult for the average joe to record a show for you while you're on vacation and then give you the timeshifted content.
I think that VHS will be around until the HTPC is easy to use, DRM-free, HDTV capable, AND the public is made aware of it. Myth is so close, and yet so far, because it is a royal pain in the ass to set up, and the easy-to-configure distribution (Knoppmyth) is fully two generations behind when it comes to chipset and video card support.
Here's how to let them know how you feel!
on
Utube Sues YouTube
·
· Score: -1
They have a convenient form on their site. It could help to demoralize them on this issue if a lot of Slashdotters got on there and sent Utube their thoughts. Personally, I think that the whole thing is absurd. Good luck!
For Universal, don't mess with the kind of people who have a lotttt more spare time than you do. The group is the kind of group that *will* get into a good television show (especially as good as Firefly was). These fans were and still are super-dedicated to the show and have and will have a lot of energy to spare for the show that is practically their religion.
However, that being said, Universal will disregard everything that they (and anyone else) do. It's going to take a hot poker to get Universal to do anything pro-consumer. Remember, all of the decisions are made by a group of women and men sitting at a table trying to figure out how to maximize profit. And that they are going to try to do, even if they are shortsighted about it.
Let's use some crazy gorilla math. Alive in Joburg is about 6 minutes long. Make it 90 or 120 minutes long, and you've got twenty times the budget. (Mind you, I'm using crazy gorilla math). I don't think that short film cost $10 million. Hell, I doubt it even cost $200,000. I think if they worked on a budget first (say, $75 million), and then worked backwards from there, they can still have a great product.
Now, a budget of $200 million is a lot for any movie. Jackson's King Kong barely broke even, so he doesn't exactly have a perfect track record.
Was I the only one who was thoroughly impressed with Mr. Blomkamp's short film Alive in Joburg? I thought it was a nice mix of sci-fi and realism and would love to see more movies blending that style.
Please don't make the movie three hours long. I wouldn't be able to take it all in, HEH!
Wasn't there also talk about ice in deep craters situated where the sun can never shine on it?
The theory was (and I hope I have this right) that cometary ice must impact the moon from time to time - so there is water there from time to time - but whenever the sun shines, in the absence of an atmosphere, the water will evaporate (sublimate?) away quite quickly during the lunar day - then freeze out of the atmosphere during the night.
This mechanism would generally keep whatever water molecules there is up there moving around...*UNTIL* (by chance) it lands somewhere where there is never any sunlight - inside a cave or a deep crater. At that point it must settle - and there is no longer a mechanism to move it around again. With no atmosphere to scatter sunlight, permenantly dark places will be profoundly cold.
It follows then that whatever water there is will always end up in these relatively rare places EVENTUALLY - so given enough time, all of the moon's water would end up stashed away in just a few easy-to-predict places.
Furthermore, we'd never be able to see those places from earth-bound or low orbit telescopes because any place we can see must also collect sunlight at some point in the lunar orbit....at least that's what I recall. It sounds kinda plausible.
Would Flash animations (and animated GIFs, for that matter) be regulated too? I don't see any reason why they wouldn't be (cartoon boobies -- won't someone please think of the children!), but it seems like that type of regulation would be even more upsetting to the general population than one on live action video. "What, you mean I can't watch H*R when I'm supposed to be working anymore?!"
This scheme demonstrates just why it's NOT worth $599. The pricing is all wrong. The online service is just one more gimmick that will fail...and because of its cost.
Think about it. Would Google, which already has Google Video, go and spend 1.6 billion on a virtually equivalent service, only to end up "vulnerable" and sued?
Somehow I feel this was discussed behind closed doors, risks assessed and measured, strategy outlined. The deal proceeded despite all this.
There's simply a lot we just don't know to start discussing if YouTube leaves "Google vulnerable." And when you don't know something, it's best to wait and see, versus flap your mouth, outputting unmitigated BullSnot in your articles.
This is an interlocutory order. TakeTwo can't appeal this order forcing them to turn over the game. If TakeTwo loses the full trial, then they can appeal and claim that the order should have never been issued. It's a civil proceudure rule.
That aside, I'm not surprised. Most state judges have little concept of the first amendment. Even if they lose at the trial level, they will almost certainly prevail on appeal. Video games are protected as expression just like speech, books, and flag burning. All this will do is stir up a media shitstorm, you'll see a bunch of Tipper Gore wannabes out whining about "saving the children," from violence, and then we'll go back to executing criminals, engaging in war, and watching Sunday afternoon football. God Bless America.
I just had a little talk about this merger with my boss (I.T. director) and the CFO of my company. I work at a ~1200-employee company, so these guys have to know what is going on. We pretty much agreed that Google was looking for what was making YouTube successful but didn't have the concept nailed down yet. It would be better to hit them now in their current market positron.
We concluded the following. Google needed these:
1. The users, and more importantly,
2. the usage pattern of these users.
While google has been picking up little things here and there, essentially this is google's first real "social networking" site that they have purchased. I say it in quotes because youtube isn't really a social networking site, but there are certainly aspects of it that cannot be denied.
I say youtube lucked out and google really made a stupid purchase, it appears to me like it was an attrition attempt against the competition in internet space (yahoo? microsoft? myspace? - whoever they think their competition is atm, because I can't tell). I don't know.. I'm curious to see where this goes. Google definately wants to go into the multimedia distribution area, that's for sure. How they go about doing it, we'll have to see..
The Russian defence ministry has confirmed it as a nuclear detonation:
"Russia's defence ministry said it was "100% certain" that an underground nuclear explosion had taken place, ITAR-Tass news agency reported"
Until other nuclear experts tell me otherwise, I'll believe their conclusion rather than your explanation. As a complete layman it is not impossible for me to think that the time scale can depend on lots of things, including type of rock surrounding the underground explosion, how far underground it was, etc.
In my opinion it must be one of the most balanced games ever made. I always found it much more playable than Warcraft or Ages of Empires... Perhaps becuase of the simple graphics or lack of 'hero' characters, which always seem to just make battles harder to orchestrate.
Can't believe I didn't see this one listed for anyone! Was always one of my favorites, every 6 or 8 months I end up digging up a copy of StarCraft (and some of the addons) and get stuck playing for hours.
It's one thing to talk about increased H2S production, but that totally fails to address the question, "Where did the O2 go?" The article describes the displacement of dissolved O2 by dissolved H2S in anoxic oceans, which is fine as far as it goes. However, unless large reservoirs of elemental carbon (or CO or CH4) are being oxidized to produce CO2 in large quantities, the result should be an increased atmospheric O2 concentration. Perhaps volcanic activity resulted in such an outpouring of CO2 that it dwarfed the O2 forced into the atmosphere by the anoxic oceans, resulting in the increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations inferred by the rock record. Or perhaps the inferred cause and effect relationship is not nearly as simple as the article makes it out to be.
Google is strong when you want 'something that contains text X' but not strong for 'a page that describes 'X''. And Google's attempts to preserve quality can actually become a nightmare -- that's how Search Engine Optimization got to be a big business.
To me, more and more Google is a tiresome chore -- you have to make stuff work with it, but searches are hugely hampered by blogs, aggregators, search engine traps, link farms and so on to the point where:
If I want to find out about some general topic, I use wikipedia.
If I want to find out about a specific thing, I use a site such as riskglossary or MSDN.
If I want detailed facts, I use a bookshop, still as true today as it was before teh n3t started.
If I'm looking for a line from a half-remembered song, I use google.
I like google and I use google, but to me, the days when it was my one-stop shop for absolutely every visit to the web are long gone.
I was watching television the other day and had a pretty big revelation. Have you noticed, at least lately, that television shows are a lot better than the movies that have come out recently? Let's think about it for a minute here. Last year, ABC's Lost and Desperate Housewives had 140.3 million viewers. This year, I've been really impressed by NBC's Heroes and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. The writing has been quite good, although some may argue that it does degrade over time. Not to mention lots of the great shows on HBO, Showtime, and some of the excellent comedies that have come and gone (Arrested Development comes to mind). And keep in mind that most of these are original shows. TV is in a far better situation than it used to be just a few years ago, when everything had to be a "reality TV show".
This is in comparison to movies, where it seems like everything is a sequel nowadays, or some book->movie or TV->movie or game->movie port.
There's a few factors which have made myspace a cesspool spawning marketing and advertising demons left and right.
The first is that the system is centralized. Therefore, any spammers, spimmers, or whatever they're called on social networking sites, who decide to set up shop have only to contend with a sign up process, and maybe a captcha. Other than that, the burden is put on myspace.com itself. The spammers get a free ride.
The answer to this is to create a more decentralized social networking system. Like I've said before, I'm working on an open source project like that called Appleseed, but some of the ways I can foresee stopping spammers from setting up fake profiles and all that is to a) use a sender-stores system for messaging, so that the burden of storing and maintaining messages is put on the spammer. Want to send out a million messages? Sure. But be sure to be willing to host those messages indefinitely until their recipients decide to pick them up. Oh, and as far as accountability goes, it'll be a lot easier to find you. Also, b) By distributing social networking into specialized nodes, you now have a lot large pool of people willing to get rid of spammers. Each node will have a dedicated admin, so knocking off one or two fake profiles every so often isn't so hard. But MySpace has 50,000,000 people on one site. Sometimes it seems like they don't care about spammers, but honestly, it's probably just that they're incapable of removing all of them as fast as they're created. "Never attribute to malice" and all that...
The other important factor? Men are idiots. I see these fake profiles that scream "no fucking way I'm real", and it'll have hundreds of knucklehead friends. It seems creating a profile that says,
"Hi, I'm Emily! I'm 19 years old, bisexual, and I just moved to Detroit from Cali! I like to party, have fun, dance, and have naughty sex! Come over and see me on my webcam over here..."
is all you need to do to create the requisite blood flow displacement which makes most dudes take a few steps back on the evolutionary ladder. Just like spam, you can take a technical approach, and that can go a far way to defeating it, but as long as there are dudes out there with barbed wire bicep tattoos, backwards hats, throwing up fake gang signs in their bedroom in front of a Sublime poster willing to be duped by the simplest of scams, there's not much we can do. Possibly a well educated, self-confident, and sexually liberation female population who absolutely refused to have sex with these cro-magnons until they opened a book might help. But like a sender-stores system, some of them might get through anyways.
Gerald Bull had a vision and an obsession, a vision that led to estrangement from his native Canada, prison in America, and ultimately assassination by Israel. His vision was of an entirely new way to get into space: small rockets boosted by giant guns. To achieve it he worked for some of the worst regimes on earth: South Africa, China, and ultimately Iraq. His work affected the course of two modern wars and revived the ancient field of artillery.
How I'd like to put it...people are becoming increasingly sick of having to upgrade a large proportion of their hardware for a minimal increase in performance.
I have a AMD X2 4800 Socket 939 with 2GB of RAM. It does what I want. For me to upgrade to the next level, it's not only a new CPU but new motherboard and new RAM too and that DDR2 stuff ain't cheap if you go for the higher speed stuff to try and futureproof.
Many, including myself, are starting to see the introduction of a new CPU socket type as nothing more than a vain attempt to try and keep revenue flowing by trying to persuade us of all the benefits that these new sockets can offer which apparently the old ones can't. Two downsides to this. The first is ASROCK who have proven that the chipsets are more than up to running new sockets with the help of a low cost adapter to allow you to use the different RAM and CPU. The second is Intel who have come along with the undeniably impressive Core 2 processors that not only run on the existing 775 socket but also the i965 chipset with many boards requiring nothing more than a BIOS update to recognise the new range of processors.
So my message to you, AMD, is simple. We're sick of CPU sockets changing every 18 months. For christ sake, Socket 754 had about 6 months before it was superceeded. Slot A, Socket A, Socket 754, Socket 939, AM2 in less than 6 years with the last three having no real benefit over each other..I've certainly had enough.
Its not short-sighted. They just know there is only so much room on that teet, and they are already there.
Do you remember that Ken Lay was on the VP's energy task force? Do you remember right after that how CA had rolling blackouts due to the 'speculation' in the free market trading of electricity? Do you remember that Enron supplied the energy market that CA was using?
Open your eyes my friend. They arent being short-sighted. They are pissed because THEY might be pulled off the teet you so eloquently speak of.
Companies do not pay taxes, only consumers do. In the company ledgers, taxes are a cost of doing business which are calculated into the price of the products they sell. So while it might sound all high and mighty that you are "sticking it to the man!" by imposing high taxes on companies, what you are really doing is telling voters to take in the rear.
If you want to make alternative energy technologies more attractive to consumers, you have to price them competitively with fossil based fuels. Taxing fossil fuels to the same cost level of alternative energy fuels is nothing more than an attack on the pocketbooks of the poor.
Slashdot Mirror
I think blaming the online test for the polarisation in Dutch politics is a bit short-sighted.
As some commentators remarked (for our Dutch readers, Rob Oudkerk among them), and consistent with what I hear around me, it is the waffling and trying to be everyone's friend of the centrist parties that drove voters to vote for politician that were actually willing to stand up for their beliefs.
A nice example is the centre-left PvdA (Labour party) waffling on the Armenian genocide. At first they were willing to go along with a hard line pushed by the (centre-)right that requiring a positive affirmation of the genocide by Turkish-descended politicians was a good idea, and when Turkish organisations made it abundantly clear that that would cost votes, the head honcho suddenly started waffling about whether or not the genocide would qualify as a genocide per se.
Disclosure: I voted for the definitely left-wing Socialist Party, so my view of Labour's waffling may be a bit biased.
TSP
Well, it was a balmy -25F here in Fairbanks, Alaska. GameStop had sold out preorders, and I have no idea what was going on down at WalMart, but my choice (and the choice of most Fairbanks residence) was the Northwestern based, Kroger owned chain, Fred Meyers, of which there are two Super-center sized box stores in town. The one I went to reported having 100 Wiis and the other reported having 90. Just for your info, they reported having 8 PS3s at launch.
They close at 11pm, but for the Wii openned at 12:01am for an hour. Since it's so cold, lauches up here aren't exactly the same kind of thing they are down in the states, noone camping for hours on end, partially because everyone knew that NOONE else was going to be crazy enough to do that. I got there at about 10:40pm, and stood in line with some guys. It was a really nice, relaxed atmosphere, some people brought chairs, but most stood around and gabbed, trying to keep themselves warm and taking turns going back and forth to warm up in near-by idling cars (noone was going to be an ass about it... it's called "survival"). Nintendo DSs were out of the question, since it's kinda hard to push buttons with thick, canvas and wool gloves.
At just after 11pm, "Freddy's" shoed out it's remaining customers and did something wonderful we didn't expect, they openned their doors, gave people numbered tickets, and let people line up inside. There were many people there (a number of my buds) who weren't even buying that night, but just wanted to join in the festivities. After going inside, some Nintendo DSs broke out, but we were having a good enough time just hanging out that I didn't really have much interest in playing mine.
At midnight, there was a joyous cheer as the line started moving a bit. The staff (all of which were wearing "Wii Play" shirts), had set up a few islands in the middle of the front isle, which had games and accessories. The Wiis were handed out in order of ticket number (I was #44 out of 100), at a window, and everyone (surprisingly calmy) went for games and accessories. When I got there, there were a number of copies of Zelda left (one of which I nabbed), something like 3 VC Controllers left (also one of which I nabbed), but unfortunately they had long since run out of extra Wiimotes and Nunchucks, but that'll be okay for the moment, especially since one of my other friends bought a system, so we'll have two controllers for the moment. Copies of Red Steel were long since bought out, but I hadn't planned on getting one, since Zelda will keep me well enough occupied for a while, and FF12 and Okami are still running strong on my PS2. Overall, a very pleasant and successfull launch experience.
VHS won't die until the HTPC appliance fully matures, and a DRM-free medium is adapted en masse, and can record both NTSC and ATSC. DVD recordable is almost there, but is less flexible than an HTPC and won't record high-def, so why bother upgrading? Tivo almost has it, except tivo decides how long you can keep recordings (in some cases at least), NOT you, PLUS it requires a monthly subscription and either a land line or ethernet connection to phone home. Also, Tivo makes it FAR to difficult to record say, Smallville or Desperate Housewives or whatever it is you and your friends all want to watch, then take that recording over to a friend's house or simply lend it out. It's FAR to difficult for the average joe to record a show for you while you're on vacation and then give you the timeshifted content.
I think that VHS will be around until the HTPC is easy to use, DRM-free, HDTV capable, AND the public is made aware of it. Myth is so close, and yet so far, because it is a royal pain in the ass to set up, and the easy-to-configure distribution (Knoppmyth) is fully two generations behind when it comes to chipset and video card support.
Show support for your führer! Mod up ze Hitroll!
They have a convenient form on their site. It could help to demoralize them on this issue if a lot of Slashdotters got on there and sent Utube their thoughts. Personally, I think that the whole thing is absurd. Good luck!
For Universal, don't mess with the kind of people who have a lotttt more spare time than you do. The group is the kind of group that *will* get into a good television show (especially as good as Firefly was). These fans were and still are super-dedicated to the show and have and will have a lot of energy to spare for the show that is practically their religion.
However, that being said, Universal will disregard everything that they (and anyone else) do. It's going to take a hot poker to get Universal to do anything pro-consumer. Remember, all of the decisions are made by a group of women and men sitting at a table trying to figure out how to maximize profit. And that they are going to try to do, even if they are shortsighted about it.
Let's use some crazy gorilla math. Alive in Joburg is about 6 minutes long. Make it 90 or 120 minutes long, and you've got twenty times the budget. (Mind you, I'm using crazy gorilla math). I don't think that short film cost $10 million. Hell, I doubt it even cost $200,000. I think if they worked on a budget first (say, $75 million), and then worked backwards from there, they can still have a great product.
Now, a budget of $200 million is a lot for any movie. Jackson's King Kong barely broke even, so he doesn't exactly have a perfect track record.
Was I the only one who was thoroughly impressed with Mr. Blomkamp's short film Alive in Joburg ? I thought it was a nice mix of sci-fi and realism and would love to see more movies blending that style.
Please don't make the movie three hours long. I wouldn't be able to take it all in, HEH!
Wasn't there also talk about ice in deep craters situated where the sun can never shine on it?
...at least that's what I recall. It sounds kinda plausible.
The theory was (and I hope I have this right) that cometary ice must impact the moon from time to time - so there is water there from time to time - but whenever the sun shines, in the absence of an atmosphere, the water will evaporate (sublimate?) away quite quickly during the lunar day - then freeze out of the atmosphere during the night.
This mechanism would generally keep whatever water molecules there is up there moving around...*UNTIL* (by chance) it lands somewhere where there is never any sunlight - inside a cave or a deep crater. At that point it must settle - and there is no longer a mechanism to move it around again. With no atmosphere to scatter sunlight, permenantly dark places will be profoundly cold.
It follows then that whatever water there is will always end up in these relatively rare places EVENTUALLY - so given enough time, all of the moon's water would end up stashed away in just a few easy-to-predict places.
Furthermore, we'd never be able to see those places from earth-bound or low orbit telescopes because any place we can see must also collect sunlight at some point in the lunar orbit.
Let's look in the dictionary...
Main Entry: 2content
Function: transitive verb
- 1 : to appease the desires of
- 2 : to limit (oneself) in requirements, desires, or actions
They're content, so they're not pushing themselves.The ones that are unhappy about their math skills are still striving to improve them.
Would Flash animations (and animated GIFs, for that matter) be regulated too? I don't see any reason why they wouldn't be (cartoon boobies -- won't someone please think of the children!), but it seems like that type of regulation would be even more upsetting to the general population than one on live action video. "What, you mean I can't watch H*R when I'm supposed to be working anymore?!"
This scheme demonstrates just why it's NOT worth $599. The pricing is all wrong. The online service is just one more gimmick that will fail...and because of its cost.
Think about it. Would Google, which already has Google Video, go and spend 1.6 billion on a virtually equivalent service, only to end up "vulnerable" and sued?
Somehow I feel this was discussed behind closed doors, risks assessed and measured, strategy outlined. The deal proceeded despite all this.
There's simply a lot we just don't know to start discussing if YouTube leaves "Google vulnerable." And when you don't know something, it's best to wait and see, versus flap your mouth, outputting unmitigated BullSnot in your articles.
Double the size makes quadruple the cost when it comes to LCD's.
This is an interlocutory order. TakeTwo can't appeal this order forcing them to turn over the game. If TakeTwo loses the full trial, then they can appeal and claim that the order should have never been issued. It's a civil proceudure rule.
That aside, I'm not surprised. Most state judges have little concept of the first amendment. Even if they lose at the trial level, they will almost certainly prevail on appeal. Video games are protected as expression just like speech, books, and flag burning. All this will do is stir up a media shitstorm, you'll see a bunch of Tipper Gore wannabes out whining about "saving the children," from violence, and then we'll go back to executing criminals, engaging in war, and watching Sunday afternoon football. God Bless America.
While google has been picking up little things here and there, essentially this is google's first real "social networking" site that they have purchased. I say it in quotes because youtube isn't really a social networking site, but there are certainly aspects of it that cannot be denied.
I say youtube lucked out and google really made a stupid purchase, it appears to me like it was an attrition attempt against the competition in internet space (yahoo? microsoft? myspace? - whoever they think their competition is atm, because I can't tell). I don't know.. I'm curious to see where this goes. Google definately wants to go into the multimedia distribution area, that's for sure. How they go about doing it, we'll have to see..
The Russian defence ministry has confirmed it as a nuclear detonation:
"Russia's defence ministry said it was "100% certain" that an underground nuclear explosion had taken place, ITAR-Tass news agency reported"
Until other nuclear experts tell me otherwise, I'll believe their conclusion rather than your explanation. As a complete layman it is not impossible for me to think that the time scale can depend on lots of things, including type of rock surrounding the underground explosion, how far underground it was, etc.
In my opinion it must be one of the most balanced games ever made. I always found it much more playable than Warcraft or Ages of Empires... Perhaps becuase of the simple graphics or lack of 'hero' characters, which always seem to just make battles harder to orchestrate.
Can't believe I didn't see this one listed for anyone! Was always one of my favorites, every 6 or 8 months I end up digging up a copy of StarCraft (and some of the addons) and get stuck playing for hours.
It's one thing to talk about increased H2S production, but that totally fails to address the question, "Where did the O2 go?" The article describes the displacement of dissolved O2 by dissolved H2S in anoxic oceans, which is fine as far as it goes. However, unless large reservoirs of elemental carbon (or CO or CH4) are being oxidized to produce CO2 in large quantities, the result should be an increased atmospheric O2 concentration. Perhaps volcanic activity resulted in such an outpouring of CO2 that it dwarfed the O2 forced into the atmosphere by the anoxic oceans, resulting in the increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations inferred by the rock record. Or perhaps the inferred cause and effect relationship is not nearly as simple as the article makes it out to be.
Unless the data itself has dramatically changed, I really can't see any functional difference. How is the following any better?
In the old system, the US pulled 34 items of data about each passenger.
In the new system, the EU pushes 34 items of data about each passenger.
Strange coincidence?
To me, more and more Google is a tiresome chore -- you have to make stuff work with it, but searches are hugely hampered by blogs, aggregators, search engine traps, link farms and so on to the point where:
I like google and I use google, but to me, the days when it was my one-stop shop for absolutely every visit to the web are long gone.
I was watching television the other day and had a pretty big revelation. Have you noticed, at least lately, that television shows are a lot better than the movies that have come out recently? Let's think about it for a minute here. Last year, ABC's Lost and Desperate Housewives had 140.3 million viewers. This year, I've been really impressed by NBC's Heroes and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. The writing has been quite good, although some may argue that it does degrade over time. Not to mention lots of the great shows on HBO, Showtime, and some of the excellent comedies that have come and gone (Arrested Development comes to mind). And keep in mind that most of these are original shows. TV is in a far better situation than it used to be just a few years ago, when everything had to be a "reality TV show".
This is in comparison to movies, where it seems like everything is a sequel nowadays, or some book->movie or TV->movie or game->movie port.
Ya get where I'm going?
There's a few factors which have made myspace a cesspool spawning marketing and advertising demons left and right.
The first is that the system is centralized. Therefore, any spammers, spimmers, or whatever they're called on social networking sites, who decide to set up shop have only to contend with a sign up process, and maybe a captcha. Other than that, the burden is put on myspace.com itself. The spammers get a free ride.
The answer to this is to create a more decentralized social networking system. Like I've said before, I'm working on an open source project like that called Appleseed, but some of the ways I can foresee stopping spammers from setting up fake profiles and all that is to a) use a sender-stores system for messaging, so that the burden of storing and maintaining messages is put on the spammer. Want to send out a million messages? Sure. But be sure to be willing to host those messages indefinitely until their recipients decide to pick them up. Oh, and as far as accountability goes, it'll be a lot easier to find you. Also, b) By distributing social networking into specialized nodes, you now have a lot large pool of people willing to get rid of spammers. Each node will have a dedicated admin, so knocking off one or two fake profiles every so often isn't so hard. But MySpace has 50,000,000 people on one site. Sometimes it seems like they don't care about spammers, but honestly, it's probably just that they're incapable of removing all of them as fast as they're created. "Never attribute to malice" and all that...
The other important factor? Men are idiots. I see these fake profiles that scream "no fucking way I'm real", and it'll have hundreds of knucklehead friends. It seems creating a profile that says,
"Hi, I'm Emily! I'm 19 years old, bisexual, and I just moved to Detroit from Cali! I like to party, have fun, dance, and have naughty sex! Come over and see me on my webcam over here..."
is all you need to do to create the requisite blood flow displacement which makes most dudes take a few steps back on the evolutionary ladder. Just like spam, you can take a technical approach, and that can go a far way to defeating it, but as long as there are dudes out there with barbed wire bicep tattoos, backwards hats, throwing up fake gang signs in their bedroom in front of a Sublime poster willing to be duped by the simplest of scams, there's not much we can do. Possibly a well educated, self-confident, and sexually liberation female population who absolutely refused to have sex with these cro-magnons until they opened a book might help. But like a sender-stores system, some of them might get through anyways.
How I'd like to put it...people are becoming increasingly sick of having to upgrade a large proportion of their hardware for a minimal increase in performance.
I have a AMD X2 4800 Socket 939 with 2GB of RAM. It does what I want. For me to upgrade to the next level, it's not only a new CPU but new motherboard and new RAM too and that DDR2 stuff ain't cheap if you go for the higher speed stuff to try and futureproof.
Many, including myself, are starting to see the introduction of a new CPU socket type as nothing more than a vain attempt to try and keep revenue flowing by trying to persuade us of all the benefits that these new sockets can offer which apparently the old ones can't. Two downsides to this. The first is ASROCK who have proven that the chipsets are more than up to running new sockets with the help of a low cost adapter to allow you to use the different RAM and CPU. The second is Intel who have come along with the undeniably impressive Core 2 processors that not only run on the existing 775 socket but also the i965 chipset with many boards requiring nothing more than a BIOS update to recognise the new range of processors.
So my message to you, AMD, is simple. We're sick of CPU sockets changing every 18 months. For christ sake, Socket 754 had about 6 months before it was superceeded. Slot A, Socket A, Socket 754, Socket 939, AM2 in less than 6 years with the last three having no real benefit over each other..I've certainly had enough.
If you want to make alternative energy technologies more attractive to consumers, you have to price them competitively with fossil based fuels. Taxing fossil fuels to the same cost level of alternative energy fuels is nothing more than an attack on the pocketbooks of the poor.