The point of this effort, as I see it, is directly aimed at the very large market of corporate IT infrastructure provision. At present microsoft owns this market but if a company had the option this would mean geeks and users alike could start to influence the hardware purchasing decisions and get linux and mac boxes starting to appear. If this leads to lower technical support hours the corporations are going to throw more weight behind it.
I'm sure that a lot of companies would love to have their receptionists using the very pretty mac hardware, and I can assure you your average receptionist does not give a damn about the operating system but will go gaga over the pretty machinery, and the leet factor will come up in corporate image too. I'm no apple fanboy but I think that front-counter macs would make the operation seem more 'slick' and this could become a factor in marketing decision making and could lead to front-desk being equipped with macs because they just look so nice, and the marketing people, who design the customer contact environments will be in favour if it, I guarantee it, especially in organisations that pride themselves on being innovators.
On the backend, the reduced costs of running highly standardised linux machines would be something the IT support department would favour, one thing linux does well is stay when you set it. Windows has this bitrot factor that every geek knows about. When a linux machine is working perfectly you could probably leave it as is until the function becomes upgraded or expanded, internally facing network nodes don't need to be kept bleeding edge, only servers on the outer edge. And then the server rooms might consider moving to linux as well because, presently, and probably forever, it will remain a very elusive target for those wishing to violate servers of businesses due to the implicit heteregenous nature of linux servers - windows servers are very uniform, all to varying degrees exactly the same attack vectors globally, however, linux distributions are not in agreement about 'stable' versions of nearly everything which makes the homogenity factor irrelevant for attacking these servers.
Alyx Vance, the heroine from Half Life 2 is so gawdamn hawt! She looks exotic and sure enough her father is african-descended and her mother - well I'm not sure - the photograph in Eli's lab sorta looks like she might be plain euro, possibly italian or french, or possibly even south american indian. Alyx Vance probably is not so appealing to girls but I wouldn't really know for certain about that - the Amazon factor probably would count for a lot given female gamers are often not exactly fond of the overtly feminine anyway.
Her racial ambiguity and as you learn as you play, mixing, is very appealing and I'd say adds to her allure. I dunno about anyone else but I want Alyx by my side when I need to wipe out the combine... or even just to enjoy a nice dinner and fine wine with:)
imho the laws of thermodynamics are perfectly functional but the third one - no addition or subtraction (oh wait is that the first, conservation? damn i don't even know, maybe i should read wikipedia so i can say something useful) - what about division. i know, in transistor logic subtraction is implemented as multiple subtractions (or have i got that wrong, i know multiplication is implemented that way) but in mathematical terms making more by cutting everything into smaller pieces means you respect conservation of energy. in that idea i am suggesting that relativity is a loophole in thermodynamics. i don't understand why this has not been noticed before, maybe it has but i have yet to hear of anyone else suggesting this. there's some other aspects like finite but unbounded space and the puzzing mechanism that might be behind any such division process (second harmonics, but also more harmonics, if one assumes a wave mechanics model).
in any case this sounds like a fancy form of polarisation being it filters particles by velocity (in the physics sense of direction and speed) and if it works on photons why not atoms too?
i fail to see the point of vista. it's just a 'me too' counter to the actually useful upgrades that have been done to macos X, and addressing a singular lack of capabilities which apple perfected long ago and very soon will be stable and usable on linux/bsd - eye candy.
i can't see any feature that actually makes vista distinguish from xp. i would be willing to bet that apart from bundled consumer/game related purchases nobody is going to clamour to get their hands on vista. xp already ladens my machine with stupid loads from buggy and bloated system software i don't see any point in bloating it any more.
at my work they still run win2k. in 2001 i was using nt3.5 in a government department and at that time the military was still running win3.1. i really don't see major take-up of corporate use with vista, the only market they may get something out of is the computer game market and microsoft fans. everyone else is not gonna go shell out some several hundred dollars for a trivial amount of improvement and if history is any indication, 2 years of nasty internet worms exploiting its weaknesses. the market is already wary of microsoft's 'new improved' label for it's new releases. it boggles my mind that in 5 years microsoft has achieved exactly zero. id software could have done all of the 'improvements' in vista in about 3 months.
it sorta reminds me of the recent 'upgrade' of the dbms in the place i work at. so far no benefits, and insoluble bugs that 6 weeks of live operation has failed to address. no improvements in usability and the most incredible array of mindbogglingly stupid bugs and, in actual fact, losses of features.
what the hell is going on with software development these days? have all the good programmers sworn off working for large corporations and do custom programming for small companies which sell hardware that utilises good software? i am very puzzled. i have not yet seen a machine running vista but frankly, i only started using xp a year after it's initial release and it was painful for 2 years before it became something i wanted to use. i switched back to win2k for about half of that period of time, but by the end of the 3rd year of release xp became good. imho microsoft should have just thought 'extend xp' rather than 'reinvent the wheel' xp is the best windows ever, after 5-something years.
excuse my long post but it boggles my mind that vista isn't in any way compelling. why did we not get winfs? what about improving security? how much of xp did they rewrite during this, it's pretty obvious to me that they must have rewritten half the OS when it was already working.
i assert that the actions of the tax offices of every country of the world are covered by the following dictionary definition:
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) - Cite This Source extortion/kstrn/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[ik-stawr-shuhn] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation -noun 1. an act or instance of extorting. 2. Law. the crime of obtaining money or some other thing of value by the abuse of one's office or authority. 3. oppressive or illegal exaction, as of excessive price or interest: the extortions of usurers. 4. anything extorted. [Origin: 1250-1300; ME extorcion LL extortin- (s. of extorti). See extort, -ion]
everyone has been browbeaten into accepting they have to pay tax but if you navigate the byzantine conduits of tax law you will find that if you follow some complicated voodoo procedure you can legally not pay any of it. it is only because they have the upper hand of lots of lawyer type nerds who enjoy sifting through mountains of information to find an excuse to... now what does it say back up there? oppressive or illegal exaction, as of excessive price or interest: the extortions of usurers - yeah that one. there's quite an interesting array of methods by which one can bypass their system using their rules but there is more to this than the rules of the tax offices.
i posted about this further back but for anyone who is interested in the true status of income tax in US constitutional law i highly recommend checking out 'america: from freedom to fascism' which you'll find on google video. income tax is not constitutional. taxation is technically not permitted, according to the 16th amendment on the labour of a person. where you draw the line depends on your position, but sole operators and small businesses mostly all the profit goes to paying people which means that the law permits they not actually pay tax.
taxation is extortion. i find it amusing that the dictionary quotes 'the extortions of usurers' because taxation is actually the mechanism used by money lenders via their proxy, the tax office, to ensure they can set any given interest rate and have the debtors (that's you, the people) pay it at pretty much gunpoint.
the similarity of taxation to a protection racket is hard to miss if you ask me.
perhaps if the lists had a decay time so any given ip address is not on the list in 24 hours unless it is found to be a source of zombie activity. if this was integrated into a security defense system on webservers or whatever, when a listed ip attempts to send packets instead of passing it on, the data is dumped, sends back to the sender a message saying 'your computer is infected by a spam trojan, and will be blocked for another 10 hours if it continues to relay spam' and then dumbass user with zombie box scratches his head and gets annoyed and summons his/her nearest nerd and gets them to explain why they can't go to their favourite site anymore, and maybe even gets the nasty trojan removed. if they do it immediately, the net outcome is the next day they are cleared from the blacklist.
spam is such a major problem now that an aggressive security stance is the only way it is going to be remedied. everyone knows about it, just not everyone knows how it happens. scary looking web pages telling users their computer appears to be a spambot would make people start to learn that all that lovely viagra advertising is coming from THEIR OWN COMPUTERS ultimately.
it will take a massive and cohesive action by operators of major websites (especially ones which have discussions and email addresses - in other words virtually all websites nowadays apart from web stores) but if it were done spam would be virtually stamped out.
chaos theory is the only theory that will never be busted, it is going to eventually take over from quantum theory imho. chaos works on every level it has been looked for and explains all systems with a mixture of entropy and order. everything else other than chaos theory is just trend finding. special relativity works for some things, but not others. the laws of thermodynamics have exceptions too. so does quantum theory, and string theory would probably do well to mix with wave mechanics and chaos theory being that so far it models nothing. well that's the mix of directions i see physics going anyway.
tax is the tool of tyrants in debt to money grubbing bankers who have already got most of the money in the world. try and find me the us law (not irs tax code) that says you have to pay it, as an american. a recent documentary i have seen makes it pretty clear that income tax is illegal at least in the usa.
makes sense, if you ask me, if anyone remembers their american history they'd recall that a major cause of the american revolution and war with britain was taxation. it was nearly a hundred years before the banking scum got their fingers back into the usa and until the 20th century it was fought vigourously even, in many cases, by presidents.
not sure what can be done about it but raising awareness helps a lot. everyone wishes that their gross income was their net income. what, if you had a choice would you pay tax? please. and don't trot out the old bs argument that someone needs to fund the government. not only do they get their fancy cars and massive numbers of staff but that's not even the greater part of the money they steal, the rest goes to the imf and other large international banks paying 'national debt'.
So simply searching for 'tianenmen square' gives no hint but add 1989 to it and google.cn magically shows you information. I have no idea how biased it is but the snippets are pretty revealing I think
yeah i don't get what the problem is. dc->ac converter, then transform 12V down to 3 and 5. put a voltage regulator/surge protector between the power conversion circuit and the motherboard and voila, solar powered (or car powered) computing. perhaps there is a paucity of people who know how simple power regulation circuitry works. it's really not that big and if fans are an issue immerse it in oil and put some nice fins near a good airflow area.
size issues are more to do with wattage than voltage. if the wattage on a pico atx board is the same as a standard atx or micro-atx then perhaps there is a point here but i'm pretty sure these boxes are designed to run via C3 which copes with passive cooling and no-fan heatsinks. they only run 1.something ghz but who needs more than a gigahertz to play a dvd or decode mp3 and run a gps mapping program anyway. being that integrating gpus and video decoders and physics coprocessors is becoming a new norm for cpu manufacturers in a year's time via will have a box that can play doom 3 without a fan. ok, two years. still, considering you could run that in your car...
atx power supply usually means a minimum of 250W. does this board need 250W (including hdd and dvd drive?)
oopsie. brisbane to sydney is 1010km. for you americans, that is 631 miles, roughly (at a conversion rate of 1.6km to 1mi). perhaps it would be appropriate to add that the highway i am describing is 2 lanes for about 95% of its length and in some places winds back and forth over several mountains and if you were watching recent news got completely stopped by bushfires in the mountains north of sydney.
well, you americans are all a bit pampered. it's 1010km according to http://www.sydney.com.au/distance-between-australi a-cities.htm now unless i am mistaken this takes you 3-4 sometimes 5 states across. this is from one capital city to another capital city. i should also add it cost about 130 to go brisbane to adelaide by plane. australian dollars.
maybe this is a good time to repopularise the clandestine road journey across borders:)
the whole point is not about the money, that is nominal money anyway, the point is that it becomes a race that people will put way more energy into than just 10x the money.
what would be even better would be if governments and their research budgets would cut their advanced research funding and just fund basic research like genome mapping and drug studies and that sort of thing, simple stuff that nobody thinks will lead to a breakthrough, and putting the rest of the research budget into a number of prizes.
a bounty is always better than a pre-payment in the world of crime, why would it be any different in science. it doesn't even exclude competitors teaming up in an agreement to split the prize if they win it.
that makes me think about something - perhaps intelligence is not the measure that they should be claiming to make, but instead, geekiness. being that geekiness is now being widely regarded as some kind of measure of superiority by the tech-disinterested social robots in what they term 'cool' perhaps this just means that the cold lands select for geekiness somehow, maybe that ingenuity of surviving 9 months winters has something to do with it.
i'd like to see a global study rating countries for their geek friendliness so i know where i should be trying to move to so we can start up Zero One and turn into cyborgs and take over the world.
Re:To the Retard who Posted this Story
on
New Ice Age Theory
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i can't cite my source because i forget it but mercury has a very thin atmosphere that hangs around the dark side. where else is any gases that happen to be around it going to hang anyway, obviously if the sun blasts them off with heat and solar wind they won't magically travel to venus and they certainly aren't going to congregate in some random spot in space away from a large body of matter.
not only is this a slashvertisement, it is playing on the new media fear campaign that the copyright defenders and violent game horror criers are using.
it's amazing how history repeats itself. television used to be something that 'made people spend less time with their significant others', so was radio, so was the printing press. in parallel to this the other issues came up, the monk-scribes were out of work for copying latin bibles, latin was under attack, people were persecuted by the inquisition for owning writings of the new protestant movement. controversial movies being banned, book burnings, etc etc.
Actually, that could be very interesting. Perhaps someone could propose a standard prefix or something along those lines which can't happen easily without being intentional, and flags the link as 'this is a crap link' so that there is a counterbalance to inbound link ranking? This should work in plaintext as well, in fact be part of the contents of the ie: thisbit.
It certainly would change the shape of the spamdexing scenario because people could then counter-attack by deranking their enemies, and I for one like the idea of being able to post a link that is detected as being a link to a site I don't like, since at present even mentioning a link no matter what your opinion about it is, adds something to pagerank, even if it's trivial, that still amounts to a contribution to their place on google that they don't deserve. Admittedly one has to note that bad linked sites will get a lot of other nasty terms linked to them but not only, and at present google has no way of determining what the reputation value of a link is with a simple textual statistical breakdown. Users should be able to add a robot-readable significator of despising.
There was this thing some chap invented quite some time ago, I think his name must have been Bell, called the 'Bell Curve', representing the statistical patterns that appear in nearly any collection of data one cares to poke a stick at.
Being that 98% of the majority (51% as it is considered in politics generally) are halfwits, it is no wonder we are in the mess we are in. This segment of the population is the most pliable to political trickery and least likely to notice they are being lied to.
The Republic is a tyranny of the majority of idiots who have no business determining the process of social change, and the God-King Emperor/President is just the face selected from the two options which is the least ugly. Democracy is a way to make everyone think that they are participating when in actual fact the outcomes are determined by those with the most money to brainwash the most people, and up the chain to the ones lending out imaginary money who decide who gets to play with the next wave of funny money and thereby giving them control over politics by selecting which groups they are the most generous with.
I don't know if there is anything that can be done to change the shape of it. For example, if we selectively culled those below 100 IQ (assuming one can settle on a test which gives a useful answer) then the whole curve just shifts into the right hand side from before and assumes the same structure. Is intelligence at issue, or is it emotional lability? I have met plenty of clever people who are brainwashed or believe the most inordinate nonsense. Lao Tzu would say that increasing the cleverness of the people would just lead to more sophisticated forms of trickery and crime. Making people dumber will not help either.
I gave up some years ago when I realised that the only thing one can do is find a way to advance towards one's goals, and use other people to define the faults we wish to eradicate in ourselves.
Anyway, back to the topic - synthetic spider silk sure would improve safety for mountain climbers, especially if combined with that gecko sticky stuff one of the first comments referenced, and probably would be very useful for special ops sneaking into enemy installations and planting charges. The idea of a device one can fire a very long and thin but extremely strong rope that ends in a sticky surface that will literally stick to anything strongly enough to hold the weight of a fully laden soldier is a very interesting piece of technology.
Imagine the wonderful pranks such technology would enable. Now that is what I am most interested in.
I think, actually, that the late William S. Burroughs originated the mashup. I think he called it 'Cutup'. I can't think of an earlier reference to taking a piece of work apart and re-arranging it and merging multiple parts. Surrealism probably was the first art movement based on this concept.
absolutely, it might be highly toxic to humans. The fact that most likely generations of localised fauna which are known to have close genetics to humans that have made this fish and the cast-offs of humans does not mean the enzyme in question is safe. it just means it could be. the sooner there is a way to shut the stupid media up about bird flu the better imo. i hope this is a road to the cure. trans-species viral disease, to me, is the fantasy of those who want a mass disease. maybe. maybe not.
i'm pretty sure the birds don't die of the bird flu, at least not often.
i personally put a lot of faith in my immune system. i reckon i've already encountered this alleged terrifying flu, and many of its relatives. i don't like hanging out with birds tho, personally. nice to hear their tittering but i'd rather have them outside pollinating trees than inside or anywhere near my space. domestic ground birds such as chickens and geese are highly entertaining and useful to me (i love eggs but i do wish they didn't put so much sulphur into their eggs) but anyone who wants to or submits to living so close to birds that they get f1 hybrids of bird virii that their body can't cope with should be ruled out as legitimate sufferers of a trans-species virus because it's pretty obvious they would not get it without living with their goose. who's gonna tell those people not to live with their geese.
i mean, everyone knows that living with cats who wander about the neighbourhood are likely to expose themselves to toxoplasma. where's the media terror about toxoplasma. conclusive data has arrived that toxoplasma distorts human social interaction.
is someone trying to subvert the definition of the scientific method?
oh wait, your average joe doesn't understand the principles of science.
the question is: 50+% of the population does not believe in science. Never mind that 95% of the population's daily work depends on it. Should we be surprised that some so-called 'scientist' is acting politically?
i say, rip the computers out of the majority non-scientific workplaces. i for one am sick of people who are in this attitude of compters are some alien foreign thing that they can't possibly understand headspace. GO WORK SOMEWHERE THEY DON'T FSCKING USE COMPUTERS OK?
of course the dilemma is that politically savvy folks don't grok tech (aka science) and technically savvy people (some of which are scientists) do not grok politics.
yeah, this is wrong. 'offer' means to have a standing statement of and facilitating the prompt provision of, given item. damn, i hate fscking lawyer language. only because i have add, not because i'm incapable of understanding it. most users of gpl software who want to be honest just host the relevant files on a ftp/http server. otherwise, i think that cisco is soon to be assaulted with a copyright lawsuit, AND a DDoS of requests for source code from gpl people. if such an effort is already being established i'd love to know about it, cos i want a copy of the source code too just to make them do the proper thing and offer it in a way that doesn't cost them a great deal of money, and makes it readily available. even if it's a torrent. i will download it just to prove that the free software movement has people willing to be part of a DDoS request to comply with gpl.
it is entirely irrelevant that (making guesses here) the code is in binary form and in ROM in the hardware. gpl matters, and i'm willing to join any effort to enforce the legal binding status of the license.
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The point of this effort, as I see it, is directly aimed at the very large market of corporate IT infrastructure provision. At present microsoft owns this market but if a company had the option this would mean geeks and users alike could start to influence the hardware purchasing decisions and get linux and mac boxes starting to appear. If this leads to lower technical support hours the corporations are going to throw more weight behind it.
I'm sure that a lot of companies would love to have their receptionists using the very pretty mac hardware, and I can assure you your average receptionist does not give a damn about the operating system but will go gaga over the pretty machinery, and the leet factor will come up in corporate image too. I'm no apple fanboy but I think that front-counter macs would make the operation seem more 'slick' and this could become a factor in marketing decision making and could lead to front-desk being equipped with macs because they just look so nice, and the marketing people, who design the customer contact environments will be in favour if it, I guarantee it, especially in organisations that pride themselves on being innovators.
On the backend, the reduced costs of running highly standardised linux machines would be something the IT support department would favour, one thing linux does well is stay when you set it. Windows has this bitrot factor that every geek knows about. When a linux machine is working perfectly you could probably leave it as is until the function becomes upgraded or expanded, internally facing network nodes don't need to be kept bleeding edge, only servers on the outer edge. And then the server rooms might consider moving to linux as well because, presently, and probably forever, it will remain a very elusive target for those wishing to violate servers of businesses due to the implicit heteregenous nature of linux servers - windows servers are very uniform, all to varying degrees exactly the same attack vectors globally, however, linux distributions are not in agreement about 'stable' versions of nearly everything which makes the homogenity factor irrelevant for attacking these servers.
Alyx Vance, the heroine from Half Life 2 is so gawdamn hawt! She looks exotic and sure enough her father is african-descended and her mother - well I'm not sure - the photograph in Eli's lab sorta looks like she might be plain euro, possibly italian or french, or possibly even south american indian. Alyx Vance probably is not so appealing to girls but I wouldn't really know for certain about that - the Amazon factor probably would count for a lot given female gamers are often not exactly fond of the overtly feminine anyway.
:)
Her racial ambiguity and as you learn as you play, mixing, is very appealing and I'd say adds to her allure. I dunno about anyone else but I want Alyx by my side when I need to wipe out the combine... or even just to enjoy a nice dinner and fine wine with
unless you want to play deathmatch...
why on dialup still? do you live in the country or something?
imho the laws of thermodynamics are perfectly functional but the third one - no addition or subtraction (oh wait is that the first, conservation? damn i don't even know, maybe i should read wikipedia so i can say something useful) - what about division. i know, in transistor logic subtraction is implemented as multiple subtractions (or have i got that wrong, i know multiplication is implemented that way) but in mathematical terms making more by cutting everything into smaller pieces means you respect conservation of energy. in that idea i am suggesting that relativity is a loophole in thermodynamics. i don't understand why this has not been noticed before, maybe it has but i have yet to hear of anyone else suggesting this. there's some other aspects like finite but unbounded space and the puzzing mechanism that might be behind any such division process (second harmonics, but also more harmonics, if one assumes a wave mechanics model).
in any case this sounds like a fancy form of polarisation being it filters particles by velocity (in the physics sense of direction and speed) and if it works on photons why not atoms too?
i fail to see the point of vista. it's just a 'me too' counter to the actually useful upgrades that have been done to macos X, and addressing a singular lack of capabilities which apple perfected long ago and very soon will be stable and usable on linux/bsd - eye candy.
i can't see any feature that actually makes vista distinguish from xp. i would be willing to bet that apart from bundled consumer/game related purchases nobody is going to clamour to get their hands on vista. xp already ladens my machine with stupid loads from buggy and bloated system software i don't see any point in bloating it any more.
at my work they still run win2k. in 2001 i was using nt3.5 in a government department and at that time the military was still running win3.1. i really don't see major take-up of corporate use with vista, the only market they may get something out of is the computer game market and microsoft fans. everyone else is not gonna go shell out some several hundred dollars for a trivial amount of improvement and if history is any indication, 2 years of nasty internet worms exploiting its weaknesses. the market is already wary of microsoft's 'new improved' label for it's new releases. it boggles my mind that in 5 years microsoft has achieved exactly zero. id software could have done all of the 'improvements' in vista in about 3 months.
it sorta reminds me of the recent 'upgrade' of the dbms in the place i work at. so far no benefits, and insoluble bugs that 6 weeks of live operation has failed to address. no improvements in usability and the most incredible array of mindbogglingly stupid bugs and, in actual fact, losses of features.
what the hell is going on with software development these days? have all the good programmers sworn off working for large corporations and do custom programming for small companies which sell hardware that utilises good software? i am very puzzled. i have not yet seen a machine running vista but frankly, i only started using xp a year after it's initial release and it was painful for 2 years before it became something i wanted to use. i switched back to win2k for about half of that period of time, but by the end of the 3rd year of release xp became good. imho microsoft should have just thought 'extend xp' rather than 'reinvent the wheel' xp is the best windows ever, after 5-something years.
excuse my long post but it boggles my mind that vista isn't in any way compelling. why did we not get winfs? what about improving security? how much of xp did they rewrite during this, it's pretty obvious to me that they must have rewritten half the OS when it was already working.
i assert that the actions of the tax offices of every country of the world are covered by the following dictionary definition:
/kstrn/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[ik-stawr-shuhn] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
... now what does it say back up there? oppressive or illegal exaction, as of excessive price or interest: the extortions of usurers - yeah that one. there's quite an interesting array of methods by which one can bypass their system using their rules but there is more to this than the rules of the tax offices.
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) - Cite This Source
extortion
-noun
1. an act or instance of extorting.
2. Law. the crime of obtaining money or some other thing of value by the abuse of one's office or authority.
3. oppressive or illegal exaction, as of excessive price or interest: the extortions of usurers.
4. anything extorted.
[Origin: 1250-1300; ME extorcion LL extortin- (s. of extorti). See extort, -ion]
--Synonyms 1, 4. blackmail.
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.
everyone has been browbeaten into accepting they have to pay tax but if you navigate the byzantine conduits of tax law you will find that if you follow some complicated voodoo procedure you can legally not pay any of it. it is only because they have the upper hand of lots of lawyer type nerds who enjoy sifting through mountains of information to find an excuse to
i posted about this further back but for anyone who is interested in the true status of income tax in US constitutional law i highly recommend checking out 'america: from freedom to fascism' which you'll find on google video. income tax is not constitutional. taxation is technically not permitted, according to the 16th amendment on the labour of a person. where you draw the line depends on your position, but sole operators and small businesses mostly all the profit goes to paying people which means that the law permits they not actually pay tax.
taxation is extortion. i find it amusing that the dictionary quotes 'the extortions of usurers' because taxation is actually the mechanism used by money lenders via their proxy, the tax office, to ensure they can set any given interest rate and have the debtors (that's you, the people) pay it at pretty much gunpoint.
the similarity of taxation to a protection racket is hard to miss if you ask me.
perhaps if the lists had a decay time so any given ip address is not on the list in 24 hours unless it is found to be a source of zombie activity. if this was integrated into a security defense system on webservers or whatever, when a listed ip attempts to send packets instead of passing it on, the data is dumped, sends back to the sender a message saying 'your computer is infected by a spam trojan, and will be blocked for another 10 hours if it continues to relay spam' and then dumbass user with zombie box scratches his head and gets annoyed and summons his/her nearest nerd and gets them to explain why they can't go to their favourite site anymore, and maybe even gets the nasty trojan removed. if they do it immediately, the net outcome is the next day they are cleared from the blacklist.
spam is such a major problem now that an aggressive security stance is the only way it is going to be remedied. everyone knows about it, just not everyone knows how it happens. scary looking web pages telling users their computer appears to be a spambot would make people start to learn that all that lovely viagra advertising is coming from THEIR OWN COMPUTERS ultimately.
it will take a massive and cohesive action by operators of major websites (especially ones which have discussions and email addresses - in other words virtually all websites nowadays apart from web stores) but if it were done spam would be virtually stamped out.
chaos theory is the only theory that will never be busted, it is going to eventually take over from quantum theory imho. chaos works on every level it has been looked for and explains all systems with a mixture of entropy and order. everything else other than chaos theory is just trend finding. special relativity works for some things, but not others. the laws of thermodynamics have exceptions too. so does quantum theory, and string theory would probably do well to mix with wave mechanics and chaos theory being that so far it models nothing. well that's the mix of directions i see physics going anyway.
tax is the tool of tyrants in debt to money grubbing bankers who have already got most of the money in the world. try and find me the us law (not irs tax code) that says you have to pay it, as an american. a recent documentary i have seen makes it pretty clear that income tax is illegal at least in the usa.
makes sense, if you ask me, if anyone remembers their american history they'd recall that a major cause of the american revolution and war with britain was taxation. it was nearly a hundred years before the banking scum got their fingers back into the usa and until the 20th century it was fought vigourously even, in many cases, by presidents.
not sure what can be done about it but raising awareness helps a lot. everyone wishes that their gross income was their net income. what, if you had a choice would you pay tax? please. and don't trot out the old bs argument that someone needs to fund the government. not only do they get their fancy cars and massive numbers of staff but that's not even the greater part of the money they steal, the rest goes to the imf and other large international banks paying 'national debt'.
extortion by any other name is still extortion.
So simply searching for 'tianenmen square' gives no hint but add 1989 to it and google.cn magically shows you information. I have no idea how biased it is but the snippets are pretty revealing I think
F %2Fwww.google.cn%2Fsearch%3Fhl%3Dzh-CN%26q%3Dtiana nmen%2Bsquare%2B1989&langpair=zh-CN%7Cen&hl=en&ie= UTF8
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2
'Blame Canada!'
- Mother's Against Canada
Sheila Brovlovsky would be proud.
Now satan will rise from hell and take over the world!
well, one would have to conclude that norway is run by linus torvalds. we already knew this.
yeah i don't get what the problem is. dc->ac converter, then transform 12V down to 3 and 5. put a voltage regulator/surge protector between the power conversion circuit and the motherboard and voila, solar powered (or car powered) computing. perhaps there is a paucity of people who know how simple power regulation circuitry works. it's really not that big and if fans are an issue immerse it in oil and put some nice fins near a good airflow area.
size issues are more to do with wattage than voltage. if the wattage on a pico atx board is the same as a standard atx or micro-atx then perhaps there is a point here but i'm pretty sure these boxes are designed to run via C3 which copes with passive cooling and no-fan heatsinks. they only run 1.something ghz but who needs more than a gigahertz to play a dvd or decode mp3 and run a gps mapping program anyway. being that integrating gpus and video decoders and physics coprocessors is becoming a new norm for cpu manufacturers in a year's time via will have a box that can play doom 3 without a fan. ok, two years. still, considering you could run that in your car...
atx power supply usually means a minimum of 250W. does this board need 250W (including hdd and dvd drive?)
oopsie. brisbane to sydney is 1010km. for you americans, that is 631 miles, roughly (at a conversion rate of 1.6km to 1mi). perhaps it would be appropriate to add that the highway i am describing is 2 lanes for about 95% of its length and in some places winds back and forth over several mountains and if you were watching recent news got completely stopped by bushfires in the mountains north of sydney.
well, you americans are all a bit pampered. it's 1010km according to http://www.sydney.com.au/distance-between-australi a-cities.htm now unless i am mistaken this takes you 3-4 sometimes 5 states across. this is from one capital city to another capital city. i should also add it cost about 130 to go brisbane to adelaide by plane. australian dollars.
:)
maybe this is a good time to repopularise the clandestine road journey across borders
the whole point is not about the money, that is nominal money anyway, the point is that it becomes a race that people will put way more energy into than just 10x the money.
what would be even better would be if governments and their research budgets would cut their advanced research funding and just fund basic research like genome mapping and drug studies and that sort of thing, simple stuff that nobody thinks will lead to a breakthrough, and putting the rest of the research budget into a number of prizes.
a bounty is always better than a pre-payment in the world of crime, why would it be any different in science. it doesn't even exclude competitors teaming up in an agreement to split the prize if they win it.
that makes me think about something - perhaps intelligence is not the measure that they should be claiming to make, but instead, geekiness. being that geekiness is now being widely regarded as some kind of measure of superiority by the tech-disinterested social robots in what they term 'cool' perhaps this just means that the cold lands select for geekiness somehow, maybe that ingenuity of surviving 9 months winters has something to do with it.
i'd like to see a global study rating countries for their geek friendliness so i know where i should be trying to move to so we can start up Zero One and turn into cyborgs and take over the world.
i can't cite my source because i forget it but mercury has a very thin atmosphere that hangs around the dark side. where else is any gases that happen to be around it going to hang anyway, obviously if the sun blasts them off with heat and solar wind they won't magically travel to venus and they certainly aren't going to congregate in some random spot in space away from a large body of matter.
not only is this a slashvertisement, it is playing on the new media fear campaign that the copyright defenders and violent game horror criers are using.
it's amazing how history repeats itself. television used to be something that 'made people spend less time with their significant others', so was radio, so was the printing press. in parallel to this the other issues came up, the monk-scribes were out of work for copying latin bibles, latin was under attack, people were persecuted by the inquisition for owning writings of the new protestant movement. controversial movies being banned, book burnings, etc etc.
times are changing. nothing's changed.
Actually, that could be very interesting. Perhaps someone could propose a standard prefix or something along those lines which can't happen easily without being intentional, and flags the link as 'this is a crap link' so that there is a counterbalance to inbound link ranking? This should work in plaintext as well, in fact be part of the contents of the ie: thisbit.
It certainly would change the shape of the spamdexing scenario because people could then counter-attack by deranking their enemies, and I for one like the idea of being able to post a link that is detected as being a link to a site I don't like, since at present even mentioning a link no matter what your opinion about it is, adds something to pagerank, even if it's trivial, that still amounts to a contribution to their place on google that they don't deserve. Admittedly one has to note that bad linked sites will get a lot of other nasty terms linked to them but not only, and at present google has no way of determining what the reputation value of a link is with a simple textual statistical breakdown. Users should be able to add a robot-readable significator of despising.
There was this thing some chap invented quite some time ago, I think his name must have been Bell, called the 'Bell Curve', representing the statistical patterns that appear in nearly any collection of data one cares to poke a stick at.
Being that 98% of the majority (51% as it is considered in politics generally) are halfwits, it is no wonder we are in the mess we are in. This segment of the population is the most pliable to political trickery and least likely to notice they are being lied to.
The Republic is a tyranny of the majority of idiots who have no business determining the process of social change, and the God-King Emperor/President is just the face selected from the two options which is the least ugly. Democracy is a way to make everyone think that they are participating when in actual fact the outcomes are determined by those with the most money to brainwash the most people, and up the chain to the ones lending out imaginary money who decide who gets to play with the next wave of funny money and thereby giving them control over politics by selecting which groups they are the most generous with.
I don't know if there is anything that can be done to change the shape of it. For example, if we selectively culled those below 100 IQ (assuming one can settle on a test which gives a useful answer) then the whole curve just shifts into the right hand side from before and assumes the same structure. Is intelligence at issue, or is it emotional lability? I have met plenty of clever people who are brainwashed or believe the most inordinate nonsense. Lao Tzu would say that increasing the cleverness of the people would just lead to more sophisticated forms of trickery and crime. Making people dumber will not help either.
I gave up some years ago when I realised that the only thing one can do is find a way to advance towards one's goals, and use other people to define the faults we wish to eradicate in ourselves.
Anyway, back to the topic - synthetic spider silk sure would improve safety for mountain climbers, especially if combined with that gecko sticky stuff one of the first comments referenced, and probably would be very useful for special ops sneaking into enemy installations and planting charges. The idea of a device one can fire a very long and thin but extremely strong rope that ends in a sticky surface that will literally stick to anything strongly enough to hold the weight of a fully laden soldier is a very interesting piece of technology.
Imagine the wonderful pranks such technology would enable. Now that is what I am most interested in.
I think, actually, that the late William S. Burroughs originated the mashup. I think he called it 'Cutup'. I can't think of an earlier reference to taking a piece of work apart and re-arranging it and merging multiple parts. Surrealism probably was the first art movement based on this concept.
absolutely, it might be highly toxic to humans. The fact that most likely generations of localised fauna which are known to have close genetics to humans that have made this fish and the cast-offs of humans does not mean the enzyme in question is safe. it just means it could be. the sooner there is a way to shut the stupid media up about bird flu the better imo. i hope this is a road to the cure. trans-species viral disease, to me, is the fantasy of those who want a mass disease. maybe. maybe not.
i'm pretty sure the birds don't die of the bird flu, at least not often.
i personally put a lot of faith in my immune system. i reckon i've already encountered this alleged terrifying flu, and many of its relatives. i don't like hanging out with birds tho, personally. nice to hear their tittering but i'd rather have them outside pollinating trees than inside or anywhere near my space. domestic ground birds such as chickens and geese are highly entertaining and useful to me (i love eggs but i do wish they didn't put so much sulphur into their eggs) but anyone who wants to or submits to living so close to birds that they get f1 hybrids of bird virii that their body can't cope with should be ruled out as legitimate sufferers of a trans-species virus because it's pretty obvious they would not get it without living with their goose. who's gonna tell those people not to live with their geese.
i mean, everyone knows that living with cats who wander about the neighbourhood are likely to expose themselves to toxoplasma. where's the media terror about toxoplasma. conclusive data has arrived that toxoplasma distorts human social interaction.
scientist? wants to silence disagreement?
is someone trying to subvert the definition of the scientific method?
oh wait, your average joe doesn't understand the principles of science.
the question is: 50+% of the population does not believe in science. Never mind that 95% of the population's daily work depends on it. Should we be surprised that some so-called 'scientist' is acting politically?
i say, rip the computers out of the majority non-scientific workplaces. i for one am sick of people who are in this attitude of compters are some alien foreign thing that they can't possibly understand headspace. GO WORK SOMEWHERE THEY DON'T FSCKING USE COMPUTERS OK?
of course the dilemma is that politically savvy folks don't grok tech (aka science) and technically savvy people (some of which are scientists) do not grok politics.
i smell speciation.
yeah, this is wrong. 'offer' means to have a standing statement of and facilitating the prompt provision of, given item. damn, i hate fscking lawyer language. only because i have add, not because i'm incapable of understanding it. most users of gpl software who want to be honest just host the relevant files on a ftp/http server. otherwise, i think that cisco is soon to be assaulted with a copyright lawsuit, AND a DDoS of requests for source code from gpl people. if such an effort is already being established i'd love to know about it, cos i want a copy of the source code too just to make them do the proper thing and offer it in a way that doesn't cost them a great deal of money, and makes it readily available. even if it's a torrent. i will download it just to prove that the free software movement has people willing to be part of a DDoS request to comply with gpl.
it is entirely irrelevant that (making guesses here) the code is in binary form and in ROM in the hardware. gpl matters, and i'm willing to join any effort to enforce the legal binding status of the license.