One day was pestering to be let out of a room and I managed to whack him right in the face with the door. His response was to walk slowly over to the sofa look right at me and then scratch it really slowly while holding my gaze.

Mine did even worse once. She normally sleeps on the end of my bed. One night however I had a girlfriend stay over the night and the cat got a bit upset when she threw the cat off the bed. So she went out into the hallway, pulled all my girlfriends clothes out of her bag and strew them up and down the hallway. Then *pissed on them*. First time she's peed inside since she was a kitten.

That was a pretty strong message I suspect.,

Global warming is a money/power grab, the ultimate in "Do as I say, not as I do" diplomacy.

Only Alex Jones can save us from the reptile menace now!

Since when have protective tariffs been "efficient"?

Freemarket capitalists should be supporting freetrade no matter what reason the politicians give for getting rid of tariffs. Or are you one of those freemaket people who only think there should be freetrade if the USA benefits?

"grrr scientists are engaged in a vast left wing conspiracy organized by the lizard people to lie about physics for some reason" is why.

Some peoples brains just sieze up when the scientific community points out some aspects of our current way of life might be harmful to our long term viability as a society.

Yeah your right. The australian one was AARNet (Australian academic research network)

Part of the reason I used Minix was I had an old second hand 286. because I couldn't afford one of the new-fangled 386s. Computers where bloody expensive back then! At the time I had started using a local BBS called "Omen" which had just gotten a brand spanking new ISDN connection to this new thing called "ARPAnet" (aka "Australian research something something net") , aka the australian wing of the internet, and it had two amazing features 1) IRC, 2) Usenet (There was also Gopher but eh..... Usenet was better indexed and also had hilarious flame wars). Anyway it struck me that if I had a unix I could get a SLIP connection to the internet and run IRC *and* Usenet simultaneously using the magical wonder of multitasking. Omen was using Linux (very very brand new) but since I didnt have a 386 I couldnt use it. So I grabbed Minix, since I couldnt afford Xenix or SCO Unix (Pre SCO getting brought out by Caldera and then turning cthulhu it was a great company).

Problem is Minix didnt have a network stack :(

A lot of people have the wrong impression about the good professor after the infamous exchange, but they miss that this is what academics do, and despite the flameyness of the exchange, Linus and Tanenbaum had a great deal of respect for each other. After all Linus was, for all purposes, Tanenbaums greatest student. I remember borrowing his book from UWA and getting the disks from the UWA computer club, following the instructions to get a functional minix up, then following his book to write a driver for my highly bugshit WANG (yes that was the brand name lol) hard drive controller. I learned more from that about how computers *really* work, than almost any thing I've ever learned. The difficulty of his book was notorious, probably the only books I found harder was Walter Pistons music theory book "Harmony", and Deleuzes philosophy text "Capitalism and Schizophrenia". And like those books, in its field Tanenbaums work shook the foundations of academia.

Enjoy your retirement old man, you deserved it.

How does lunar recession affect things here?

Space-ron-paul was right! Convert your lunar-coins to bitcoins before the collapse!

Good thing zits generally disappear once you leave your teenage years...you only get them later if you are really unlucky.

Of course on geological/cosmic type time scales, by the time she leaves puberty, the main species on this earth will be homo-greyalien or something. We're not a species that seems like it wants to hang around too long, what with our whole "Lets invent nuclear weapons, venus out the atmosphere and then feed dolphins plastic bags" tendencies.

When was the last time the average person created something original?

Probably every day, BUT it does go to the point with this one. We're still trying to recreate an idealized human rather than actually focusing on what intelligence is.

My cat is undeniably intelligent, almost certainly sentient although probably not particularly sapient. She works out things for herself and regularly astonishes me with the stuff she works out, and her absolute cunning when when she's hunting mice. In fact having recently worked out I get unhappy when she brings mice from outside the house and into my room, she now brings them into the back-room and leaves them in her food bowl, despite me never having told her that that would be an accepatble place for her to place her snacks.

But has she created an original work? Well no, other than perhaps artfully diabolical new ways to smash mice. But thats something she's programmed to do. She is, after all, a cat.

She'd fail the test, but she's probably vastly more intelligent in the properly philosophical meaning of the term, than any machine devised to date.

Except they are not targeting devs. They are just selling a limited number of devices too cheaply. That neither targets devs nor provides development funds for themselves. There's nothing about selling-low that prevents "rich folks" buying a toy. Essentially whether a dev, a rich toy buyer or a tech collector gets a unit is a matter of first-come-first-served.

I dunno man. It seems pretty clear they are trying to target developers. Its in big text on the site, and much of the content provided (Such as the unity trial license and the like) would be meaningless to non devs. For everyone else , its pretty much just a tech demo at this stage.

But whilst the cheaper price wont stop the richer non-devs from buying in, at least keeping it cheap somewhat levels the playijng field allowing a wider scope of devs.

More to the point, now that Occulus is highly capitalized via its facebook deal, its quite capable of ramping up production to meet demand at its price, BUT, it seems to me occulus dont seem to want its products in wide use yet , probably to protect their reputation whilst its still in development. If they just wanted cash, they could simply produce more.

Shutting off china probably is in the scheme of things shooting themselves in the foot (China , after all is a huge market), I'm not sure how occulus can protect its target group here. It needs developers to ensure a broad range of launch products or its product will fail, but if third parties force the prices out of garage developer reach, then its all in vain.

[Sounds like your Eve team suffered the tragedy of the commons. Your manufacturers wanted to be part of a team for their benefit, preferentially profited from that membership compared to other members, but didn't want to pay proportionally more to defend the team. This is why real world "teams" end up with governments and taxes.]

Right. It did eventually become difficult to stop relisters because of the way eve works, so eventually a system dubbed "space communism" came into play where the team nationalized moons and asteroid belts and leased them out to miners for a fee, and then took a 20% tax on production. With the somewhat extensive income, the team then started supplying free ships to new players to bootstrap them to a point they could get financially independent, and ship reimbursments for the troops (ie, if you die in battle, and it wasn't stupidity induced, your ship is replaced). In the cases of the all important capitals and supercapitals the team moved to a policy of centrally managed fleet (manufacturers could only sell to the team leadership which in turn would loan them to its capital fleet). All of which led to hilarious drama when one of the directors decided to one day run off with the titan and the entire capital fleet reserve. Its a pretty goddamn interesting game if your interested in a simulation of an idealized wartime economy.

If you are selling a dev version, then you are retailing a product to the public. Again, if there is more demand at a higher price than you are supplying either quantity/price, the error is the vendor's, not the "scalper's".

That would be fine if Occulus was simply trying to profit maximise here, but that is not even remotely Occulus' intention here. They have a limited supply but want to keep the price low to stimulate development. If they raise the price it goes out of the hands of developers into the hands of rich folks as a space age toy, which is harmful to their business which will rely on having a strong release catalogue at launch.

Back when I used to play Eve Online , debates within the team (A rather large 5000 member alliance, back before the era of 30,000 member coalitions) would occur about whether to ban reselling of our producers to keep the price of combat craft cheap for combat pilots who tended to be poorer than the manufacturers/miners. Ultimately the wealthier producers won out (who where usually happy to have 're-listers' on the market as they could just sell batches of ships to them bulk) but it came at the cost of a lot of combat pilots simply not being able to afford the battleships which in our space had become more expensive than what our enemies where paying. And when the enemy finally came to our gates, we got steamrolled. We never made that mistake again.

It all strikes down to why law can be so complicated. When done right, laws are subtle things.

Ideally we'd like a "right to be forgotten" that means when I ask Facebook to delete my account, then by delete I mean "not a single bit of my accounts data remains". What we DONT want however is if I go raping or beating people I can get news articles about me supressed. Distilling those distinctions into laws however can end up quite tricky because of all the edge cases.

That requires legal expertise, and unfortunatlely whatever law results is going to be complicated and full of edge cases.

Which, of course means nobody is going to understand the bloody thing.

Not sure which you are talking about. The ones denying the scam or the ones denying the truth.

The crazy god damn loons who think there is a vast left wing conspiracy of hundreds of thousands of scientists lying about physics FOR SOME REASON.

I'm sorry, but in 2014 there is no functional difference between being a creationist and a global warming denier. It just requires too much belief in weird lizardoid conspiracy theories involving a conspiracy to lie about science going back to the 1870s for reason nobody can seem to explain.

Personally I'd go for Occams law and suggest the reason 97% of atmospheric physicists say AGM is beyond all reasonable doubt is because thats what the god damn evidence says, and its said that since scientists started talking about the spectral banding in CO2 over 100 god damn years ago.

Not one iota of fact presented. Just a stream of attacks. Pathetic.

Listen cletus, I dont know how its done in alibama, but over here in the north we have this thing called "science" and its done by men called "scientists", not bloggers, preachers, marketing people, or conservative politicians. Now in science we do this thing called "literature review" and it turns out I don't need to present evidence, because other folks have done it for me. Simply go to google, type in IPCC , go to their website and download the reports and theres all the evidence, from tens of thousands of physicts you'll ever need.

And if that doesn't satisfy you, sorry dude, but your too far gone to be helped, and perhaps a better google search is "banjo tabelature"

Evidently climate scientists can ignore the data and falsify what they need to buttress the alarm.

The ends justify the means. The tired 97% of climate scientists agree...has been thoroughly debunked. People are seeing this for the scam that it really is.

WHEN WILL THE SHEEPLE FINALLY REALISE THE LIZARDS ARE THE REAL MASTERS.

Man the crackpot denialist invasion of slashdot is getting tiring. What happened to the website that actually shouted down cranky god damn denialists, creationists and other conspiratorial loons.