Posts by Grikath 1528 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Feb 2012
You mean it's too hard to label adult content as such (either voluntary or automated, preferably both), and introduce a clean and unmistakeable "no I don't want to see adult content" option, set to Default On..?
It's just a US company, (ab)using US puranitanical morals, being afraid of litigation fever. Isn't the first, won't be the last.
The bit about modern PC's being Good Enough for whatever the average user wants to do, so they will not be replaced until the physical machine dies, or browser requirements become such that you need a teraflop machine to view a webpage has, of course nothing to do with it. At all.
[/sarcasm]
That has been the cycle of US american politics for the past decades, hasn't it? With a generally republican majority in the Houses over the past decades, the republican presidents get away with whatever they want to do, and basically make a right royal mess of things, while any democratic president is actively cock-blocked "just because". And shouted down for Not Accomplishing Anything by the very people that actively sabotage any attempt at efficiency and, you know, sensible government.
The few voices of reason are drowned out by the puppets from the "interest groups" aka. large sponsors, and the net effect is that the US is rapidly going bankrupt morally and financially.
Ah well... Within the next decade or two that perticular card-house will come down, and then the US will be left nothing but banging its' wardum in senile reminiscene and impotency.
It's all good and well to poke fun of US american commercialised versions of oldfashioned school exercise, but seriously... Cricket?
You mean the mandatory ambulatory exercise between extended lunches for the participants the old british empyrian elite seems so desperate to maintain is a "sport"?
My personal knowledge of sysadminny stuff is not nearly enough to make these guys break a sweat ( unless Luser --> [facepalm] entries count ;) ), but to save you some effort and allow some of the more knowledgeable Dutch in next time ( or retroactively):
Dutch law regarding foreign prize contests is (surprisingly) pretty straightforward: If it's not held in dutch territory, it assumes it is held according to local regulations, and the only thing that interests the State, in this case the Revenue Office, is that proper gambling/game tax (29% of cash/equivalent value) will be/has been paid over the prize. Prizes are exempt from this tax if the equivalent value is less than €454 (calculated from foreign currency at the moment of collection.)
For foreign contests this is the sole responsibility of the recipient of the prize, not of the organiser. The recipient can avoid this tax if the country of origin has a comparable gambling/prize contest tax scheme, and if proof is provided this tax has been paid by the organisor as part of local regulations. But proof of this is again the sole responsibility of the recipient.
So as far as the Netherlands is concerned, nothing stops anyone from here from legally participating or winning a prize.
You forget Germany. And the Dutch.. (although those intelligence agencies are running under rather strict mandates, nothing like the free-for-all of the NSA, and possibly the UK.)
The Luxembourg spook squad has been proven to be well out of control, and "inquiries are ongoing".
One can only speculate what Italy under Berlusconi has gotten up to, and as far as the former eastern european bloc countries are concerned .... *ahem*
" a really small price to pay for the freedom of living in a terror free world ;) "
Which doesn't happen, and will not happen by slurping data from your average punter, and people are well aware of that. Real terrorists will start out by staying under the radar to begin with, and will assume Big Brother is watching.
And it still doesn't stop local yokels from emptying a couple of clips into innocent bystanders in the US, unless my memory has failed me entirely.
It shouldn't make a difference at all.. When setting up a budget/cost of operating quote you are always working against the Unknown and Murphy ( and the inbred anal retentiveness of beancounters in general) , so you need to build in margins and hedges anyway. If cost-stability becomes a big enough issue, a cloud-centered mode of operation may well not be the correct solution to $scenario to begin with.
If there's an actual threat, the dodgy side of territorial protection has effectivly carte blanche at trying to prevent The Other Side from getting the upper hand, financially and "legally". That's what their funding *is* for...
It's only when politicians feel the need to up the Official Budget, you know there's some people getting paid for twiddling their thumbs and Looking Important. That's the time to say "no"and wait until a real threat comes along.
Given the tendency of the US government to claim anything they have any remote connection to as "theirs" since WWII, I'm not surprised.
What I really wonder is why the real astronauts who risked life and limb (et.al. it took a huge team to pull it off...) to get there aren't revolting against the Kindergarden Puppies who try and play with their achievements and score some pinkie points nowadays.
The ancient rule is "you have what you can keep". The US is rapidly losing just about everything outside their own territory, and they claim bits of the MOON?!! Talk about conceited ostrichism...
Something like that...
There's plenty of peeps who would just do it for the creds. If only to enhance their l33t status.
Bughunting is an art in and of itself, but you got to think about wanting to actually opening up your code to that kind of scrutiny. it may *sound* nice and cheap, but there's a number of rather unpleasant risks taking this route.
Not just France. The Netherlands has a nice little tax % on all devices that can carry "media" and the devices that use "media". And several other texes of similar intent. Which are, of course, applied before VAT is calculated. The Government Will Have Its' Share Of The Pie.
Ummm... Call me stoopid, but when attempting something shady you will of course use an IP that can be directly connected to you, your activities, and preferrably your (approximate) physical location... The "101 Rules for the Successful Evil Overlord" handbook says so, so it must be true. [/sarc]
All cynicism aside, this is an interesting proof of concept, with a relatively cheap ( there's still nanotubes in there...) solution to a serious technical hurdle. There's preciously little you can do to the mass of a sodium ion, after all. Something to do with laws of physics.
Battery R&D is one of the areas of boffinry that has an ever increasing impact on our lives, as more and more devices and gadgets we use including the IT related stuff become battery-powered. I can see why the Reg pays attention to it, but obviously some people seem to keep missing the point.
When there is a clear profit to be made, technology has a tendency to move really, really fast. ( or have people (already) forgotten how fast the industry most readers here work in developed..) And battery tech is a hot item. It is moving at a steady pace, and articles like this show that there's actual progress being made.
The article places the remarks at a time when the whole "political correctness" movement was still soiling its' nappies, and women in general were not Fragile Flowers in need of outraged abhorrence by some metrosexual wusses, let alone those who worked in any techie job at that time..
I do believe most members of the female species of our race are quite capable of defending themselves from any perceived slight, by ripping your (virtual) tonkers off if necessary, and quite often do so in rather eloquent and amusing ways (innuendo optional). Funnily enough most of these outburst of female self-reliance and independence are aimed at those males who are condescending enough to assume the poor lady needs to be spoken "on behalf of" in the first place.
I doubt that any amount of small investors could muster any more than a minority block, which then has to convince the lawyers/analists of the Big Players that Ballmer ( et. al.) should be handed his shoebox and shown the exit. The chances of that happening are ..not encouraging.. to put it mildly.
I do agree with you that the whole system is rotten to the core, but it has been for decades, and the real money is (sometimes literally) made by those Big Players and their datacenters snuggling up to the stock exchanges. They are not likely to be willing to change the status quo, to put it mildly.
I'm afraid that the *real* bubble hasn't burst yet, and that things are going to be way worse than they are now before the whole cardhouse comes down in a giant *pop* across the globe.
Because most of those shareholders are corporate entities in and of themselves, with their own golden parachutes for their higher echelons.
The majority of "shareholders" wouldn't give a rats' arse about Microsofts' survival, they'll simply offload their shares when they hit their bottom line, or use them as a loss leader for tax reasons. It's a Big Money game, you see?
Bullying from MS may have had something to do with it with the big OEMs, but I've been working for a smaller OEM in the late 90's-00's in the Netherlands, and we *desperately* wanted to offer Linux configurations alongside our usual MS line of installs. (Some of which was caused by the absolute horror that was the original Vista release, so at that point in time the linux versions had a fighting chance..)
Guess what: It was next to impossible to set up a commercial-viable system. You'd either run into driver issues, hardware incompatibility issues, stability issues, crashed desktops, and other minor unconveniences, which would have taken up most of the time of our tech dept in finding hardware that *was* supported/stable, or would have swamped our customer support. So we ended up needing to build machines with either legacy parts, or more expensive bits and bobs, or simply accept that roughly half of the boxes would be returned because they would fail customer expectation (you plug it in, boot it up, and get to work..). Finding productivity/entertainment programs to go with the box proved to be an equal pain in the arse, since there was nothing open source out there that was remotely comparable to the quality and stability that MS customers were used to.
And really, we've tried, but the reaction from the Linux "society" at that time ranged from lukewarm to outright hostile, and the one thing that struck me at the time was that the "scene" overall had its' head up its' arse because they simply refused to acknowledge that they would need to match actual production criteria to make a Linux/open source ecosystem viable for anything other than bespoke limited production runs.
We ended up solving the problem by buying up a wad of WinXP licenses and ignoring Vista altogether for the consumer boxes. By the time Red Hat came out, the issue was moot again, because most consumers and companies looking to upgrade had already bought their boxes and "back in the saddle" on the windows platform, and the Linux "movement had lost another round, simply by missing an opportunity to pounce when the crack in the armour was there.
MS may "bully", but there's an inbuilt elitism in the Linux community that is just as bad, and has caused quite a few "Ballmeresque" episodes over the years.
You're right in the fact that no version of windows ( or linux for that matter) could have revitalised the consumer PC market. The shift towards phones/tablets is as clear and logical as the shift from PC poxes to laptops in the household. It's simply a matter of technology progressing, decent wireless access at home, and no real need to be tethered to one place to check your emails/get your daily dose of T&A/play $game.
There's no doubt MS knows this, and it's one of the reasons they pushed out win8. They *need* an OS that can cope with the new technology, and getting it to work over a wide range of devices must have been a serious headache. So win8 was a given, not as win7.1, but as a full version change.
They dropped the ball(mer) however with Metro. Full well knowing there would be an upgrade cycle in the corporate sector they could have gone:
"Look guys, we know you've been eyeing Win7 for your upgrade, but look at this Win8. Supports all the new stuff you like while more or less staying the same, so things will be where people expect it to be. But wait for it!! It also supports the new mobile touch devices through a dedicated UI that kicks in as soon as it's installed on [devicex]! Isn't that neat?!"
Which is basically what man and dog has been telling them, and which they chose to ignore. For reasons which have preciously little to do with actual technology, but with "aesthetics" and Opinions. Which obviously from Win8.1 still has not been resolved.
Dunno about that Ford quote being genuine, but I remember the tale of Ford stating: "They can order any colour of car, as long as it's black."
Which in a sense represents Microsofts' attitude to all things Win8 better IMO. From what I've read and experienced the OS has been seriously improved under the hood. It's just that the internal Fashionistas insisted that the touch interface was also implemented for the desktop, which was a patently stupid idea then, and still hasn't been fixed in this sort-of-backpedalling-by-reintroducing-the "Start"-button.
It's a bit rich to blame the current US president of all this when it is a given that surveillance like this, within the maximum of technological capacity, has been going on since well before WW II, with such little gems as the mcCarthy era as shining example.
Not unlike the UK, and basically any other stable nation you can think of, the real cause, and power, behind this program is hidden in the layers of bureaucracy and career civil "servants" who outlast politicos and go on with whatever they were doing. Find the people who stay *just* out of the spotlights but in positions of authority since roughly the Clinton era, and you'll find the ones really responsible for this mess.
Don't forget you're talking Ebooks here...No physical object that needs production/shipping/storage, just a file suited for a (locked in/DRM-ed to hell and back or not....) display apparatus of your choice.
I'm a huge fan of the dead-tree format, and prefer my copies of my fav authors to be first-edition hardbacks, and am willing to pay for that. Ebooks? Not so much. The publishers themselves have been pulling the mickey when it comes to "costs" to begin with. Amazon just placed it's pricing point where they thought people would actually buy Ebooks.
The way the flame is dependent on diffusion of oxygen through the depletion zone, each and every point of the sphere can be seen as "one-dimensional" with regards to the reaction system itself.
Mind.. I really don't get how a reaction that not only extracts half of the potential energy of a reaction, but produces poisons to boot can lead to "more efficient combustion engines" through this mechanism. The whole point of a clean burn is to optimise the fuel/oxygen ratio and mixing to produce maximum efficiency (and energy extraction), producing as little as possible in undesireable by-products. Which is what engineers have been cranking their brains on for the past decades.
it's a bit complicated, but a planet is assumed to come into existence after the star has already formed, simply because a planet orbits its' star. You need the gravity well caused by the (proto) star to create a solar system.
This doesn't mean some pretty big lumps of matter cannot accrete randomly, as indeed they do, and they do float ( well, until they too enter our suns'gravity well..) around in interstellar space. The vast majority of them, however, do not enter the gravity well in the plane of accretion, so their possible orbits ( if the speed is right, etc.) would be well out of that plane, and would not disturb an accretion disc overly much, especially since even the accretion disc around a proto-star is still mostly "empty vacuum".
The thing with this star is that we're looking flat on at the accretion disc, and we're looking at something that has hoovered up a fair amount of stuff within it, so its' orbit must be within that disc with not too much exxentricity. Given the distance and the mass of the sun itself, it must also be a long orbit, so in 8 million years it cannot have made a huge number of orbits. Yet there is a clear ring there, so there's some efficient hoovering going on.
Like Ghost, I'm more of a well-informed amateur than an expert, but my bet is that that object there did indeed arise from the accretion disc, so should be termed a "planet" in that sense. Although given the scale, and the seriously tiny size of the star it may well be that what is hoovering stuff up there is more a "failed sister star' in a double system than a true planet. Scale down ordinary star formation theory far enough into pigmy territory and you get some odd things. Could be that this is proof that some of these solutions actually happen in reality.
Given the attitude of the manufacturer towards "wasting time", I suspect that his attitude will extend to proper bowel movements, and that to reduce that the amount of dietary fibre will be minimal.
So I expect this stuff to give you serious constipation if used for extended periods, and a major bollocking of your intestinal flora, with all unpleasantness (short and long term) attached to that. Unless the manufacturer has miraculously evaded all the associated complications that come with medically indicated and applied liquid nutrition, you can expect *at least* the same long and intermediate term problems.
I've spent a bit of time in Oz, and the raw "Charge what you can, whenever you can get away with it" runs the range from luxuries to necessities.
Funny how petrol prices (and just about everything else connected to them) rise significantly around the holidays when everyone is gallivanting about on family visits and the like. Rent? You'd think you'd get solid gold taps for what is charged down under. Etc.
And funnily enough the few politicos who do try to impose limits on this behaviour get shouted down by the people who complain the hardest about the cost of living in Oz. Funny old country....
The combined internet has progressed to a "real" landscape, where just about everything and anyone in the physical world has a "presence". With the added advantage that you do not have to travel at all to "reach" a particular place or person. Where there are checkpoints, walls or doors in place, their actual quality in keeping unwanted eyes out varies, and there have always been people who have made it a career to sneak by such obstacles, for several sets of reasons.
Unless you've been living under a rock, it's really hard to not realise that the more the internet resembles the physical world, the more it will be subject to actions equivalent to the real world, including crime, (counter)intelligence, and indeed warfare. No nation state can afford to not engage in activities in these areas, as it would not only leave a nation extremely vulnerable, but it would also mean that if they ignore this arena they are essentially failing in the duty of protecting their citizens.
So the US has proper protocols in place to conduct "cyberwarfare". Whoop-te-doo! Amazing, Mike! The US intelligence agency has ways of getting their data from the Source, and actually shares the relevant bits with it's allies. Oh shocker! It's not as if the US has not had a fat finger in world politics and (counter)intelligence since the post WW II pen-and-paper era. I would be really, really, shocked if the US had not been engaging in the same activities in the "cyber" landscape. After all, no-one else would be so dastardly to try this.. [/sarcasm]
They simply went the one step further than the big conglomerates. And got burned.
( US American) Legal issues aside, tonight it took me about 5 minutes on a lappie using Google to prove rule #34 to a rather rapt ( not legal everywhere ) audience in the pub. Yes, I believe in true education by example. My biggest question is: why the hell did the people burned by this bothered to torrent that stuff anyways. There's your Five Minutes of Fap everywhere, for "free".
As opposed to random banner ads on any other webpage?
Clickthrough is piss poor on any web-based campaign. You aim for Big Numbers, unless you're very careful with your placement. Which Facebook is not for, as advertising there is simply a spam-stream on a sidebar.
Which the average hardened internet consumer simply ignores anyway.
except that at the time you're referring to there were no "scientists", only a "philosophy of the natural world" of which most practitioners were clergy or associated with clergymen.
No-one in their right mind, or any occupation remotely dealing with travelling the globe in general, actually thought that the earth was flat at the time you're referring to. This is a nice myth that started roughly in the Victorian age, which is based on the simple fact that the old maps are indeed flat, simply because the projections used to create accurate-ish maps simply hadn't been invented yet, and generally used jerusalem as the "centre of the world".
Then again, the Victorians/Romantics are to blame for a hell of a lot of misconceptions people now regard as "historic truth".
People at the time did believe the sun revolved around the earth, as did every other civilisation before that. Which explains why this is explicitly stated in the bible, at the time the Authorative Book on Everything, since religion at the time was entirely Literalist, even for the newfangled "protestant movement".
Not that the bible was the only source, since quite a few of the extant Greek and Roman sources assume the same thing.
Guys like Copernicus ran into trouble not because they claimed the universe was arranged a bit differently than everyone though until then ( quite a few peeps were perfectly happy to accept that the sun was the centre of the universe, after all God created light first, right?) , but because their theories refuted passages of the bible, a book that was declared the True and immutable word of God Ex Officio. Which caused some major headaches since accepting Copernicus' theory would open up the floodgates of Doubt about the veracity of the bible, the infallibility of the pope as Gods' Voice on Earth, and several other political and social issues playing across Europe at the time.
quite a bit like being a climate-sceptic nowadays...
If you take the high count, we actually share something like 99% of our DNA with our expired cousins, which follows from their proper name: Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis. ( the fact that there is genetic evidence of successful interbreeding makes the case for Neanderthals being a subspecies instead of a separate species.)
Part of the 1% difference still lives on in our genome in certain genetic lines to the point of 1-4% of those specific traits still surviving, although there's precious little to be found on those genes actually being expressed at one stage or another, and what those genes actually do.
What dr. Potatohead said...
Physics does not equate to biochemistry does not equate to "neuroscience".
The LHC cost a fair bundle, but it got the scientists working with it millions upon millions of collisions observed by multiple experiments. That's a fair bang for your buck. Now imagine stripping and replacing the LHC after every single shot, for each and every experiment, then you'd find a way to do with smaller samples rather quickly..
the 2-sigma criterion in biology is , if correctly applied, sufficient to get valid results. The statistical techniques assume, and require, a stable equilibrium state, which in itself is representative for the biological process studied in an organism, and in which only one variable is changed. Even then you're running into the usual random mutations, unexpected interference from other processes, and a host of other things that make biological experiments both complex and frustrating, so getting 2-sigma is about as good as you can get given the level of control you have over the experiment.
There is a helluva lot of difference between the space debris in earth orbit, and the exhaust products of a rocket engine, including this one.
- If they manage to get this thing going the exhaust product is the result of nuclear fusion , which tends to be rather ...hot. The pellets leave the exhaust as a plasma, so any "debris" would be near indistinguishable from the local micro-stuff naturally present.
- Simple ballistics shows that any exhaust product for a trajectory away from earth will not have the correct vector for an earth orbit. Even more so, as the vessel picks up speed eventually the net vector of the exhaust products will be *away* from earth.
At 0.028g surface gravity, and considering the energy/equipment requirement for even a modest "settlement" on Ceres, why on earth would you even consider a space elevator?
You can damn well literally toss a rock off the asteroid, and risk launching yourself into space as well if you're not careful.
The only reason why you *maybe* might construct one is to show why the things do not work as imagined, and are a lot more troublesome than most people realise, because you can scale down enough to use conventional materials to actually construct one.
let's see....
A DDOS attack this size takes time, effort and $$.
Spamhaus provides a service which hurts a rather infamous sector of the intarwebs, and seriously helps quite a number of operators to keep the headache down to a minimum.
This sector, by all accounts over the last two decades, has proven to be very profitable for people with the proper mercenary attitude.
Even the Big Ten of monopolists bad guys nowadays have not garnered enough ärger to get the fanatics up upon the Barricades for something this size. If Anonymous, or any other activist society could ever agree on [something] they might take a shot, but at the moment it simply isn't there.
If it isn't the "Good Guys" , then it's the Opposition. Occam's Razor, a close shave every time.
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