Like someone once said: If a person wishes to rule, that person should in no way be given any power.

Yeah, the problem is that we seem to adapt only marginally to the alternatives, which are:

1) Randomly select (and periodically change) leadership
2) Distribute leadership over as much of the group as possible.

I suppose there's another model, which is to entirely eschew systemic power, but that runs on the assumption that if you don't architect a system there won't be one.

You are not quite getting it. But that is understandable, as this is quite a commonly misunderstood part of information theory.

No; rather, it is a way in which information theory has different definitions than normal use. The poster is using the English definition of compression, and you are using a more technical definition that is part of a specific field's jargon. Since this is an English discussion, I think the above poster can be reasonably viewed as correct.

It's weird I love a sleazy action film but I when they had the mother getting high (L O L) and the knee high camera shots of girls' arses, all I could think was "this is a film being at least partly marketed at 10 year olds?". It's not something I would have taken kids to.

Really? Which standard does HTML5 correspond to? There is no HTML5 standard. Right now, it's just browser makers doing their own proprietary things hoping to make it standard when things are finalized.

I'm sick of people claiming Video tags, or various other HTML5 things are standard. They're not. Not until the standard is ratified, everything is subject to change.

The Moon can serve as good practice for setting up a permanent installation, and we can use that experience in the future to set one up on Mars or wherever else. But the proximity of the Moon lets us focus on things other than how to get people there, since we've already been to the Moon.

Cut and paste? It's been out for months now, never used it. MMS? Never used it. MP3/AAC ringtones? Always supported, (you have to change the file extension is all), but actually never used them. Video recording? Never used it (and yes I have a 3gs.)

Good for you. You bought an expensive phone and don't use all the features. I've used MMS, cut and paste, an MP3 ringtone and video recording on my Nokia N82 since I bought it in 2007, for about the same price as a first gen iPhone. Newsflash: Some customers actually use the features of their phones, and some customers they don't. Plenty of people expect these sorts of features to be standard at the iPhone's price point, though.

With iPhone I use everything that comes with it and then some because the iPhone makes it easy.

Except apparently video recording, MMS, cut and paste...

I never really understood this business model. Say you have 10,000 players all paying $15 a month. Now you make it free, and you've got 20,000 players, but only about 10,000 pay any money and of those only 5,000 have a second or third transaction. It doesn't seem to add up. Granted, DDO wasn't going anywhere and was in the doldrums and this keeps it alive. There are significant support costs involved, it's not like it's just a web site that pays its hosting fees through a little bit of ad revenue.

Similarly, Guild Wars is the same. Free to play (though you have to buy the game). Very popular still, lots of activity. I know some players do pay for extra character slots, or pay to buy up their skills to max. But there aren't that many things you can really buy if you look into it, I can't imagine they get even $5/month per player. But they probably also have lower server costs because of the way the game works (mostly instanced).

That said, the free-to-play model is nice. I'm not big on the DDO play style, so I can't see myself playing for a full month. But I could see doing it for a week every couple of months or so. Also a lot of players like me can't see themselves paying two or more full time subscriptions (some people do :-), so it's nice to have a side game like DDO or Guild Wars at times. Wish Champions Online had this sort of model, that's the sort of game where you can log in for an hour a week and still have fun.

As the AC already pointed out, Sony isn't a US corporation. Also, Canon does the same thing. In the US, the 5D Mark II lists for $2699USD, and in the UK it lists for £2690GBP.

If we're going to be jumping to random conclusions based on little to no data (after all, this is /.), these two data points should be enough to conclude that Japanese corporations have trouble doing currency conversions. Actually, to be more precise, customers of Japanese corporations have trouble doing currency conversions, otherwise they would know they are being ripped off.

But in reality, these are just two data points and the more likely scenario is that these two companies (among others, I'm sure) have just found another way to screw over some of their customers.

computing friggen large numbers isn't as easy as it appears. Consider the fact that your computer contains a discrete(limited) number of bits, and the processor can operate on about 64 bits at a time (depending on architecture). Try putting 2^100 into a scientific calculator, it will probably overflow (can't represent a number that large). 2^43,112,609 is a huge, huge, number.

Is it just me, or is the headline for this article in Yoda instead of English?

It seems like "Sky Watcher Ask for New Cloud Description" would have read more smoothly and been shorter.

A friend of mine works in the ER of a large NYC hospital. Contrary to the flu trends chart saying this region has "high" flu activity, she says the ER is seeing just a trickle. She also says nearly half the staff she's spoken to -- doctors, nurses -- say they won't be getting the H1N1 shot before the deadline. "They can't fire us all."

if you tell a lie often enough....

... then some nutjob, who thinks he's the last sane person on the earth, will fill in the details of how the lie is true, and then believe it absolutely and unconditionally?

The slashdot crowd is supposed to be very US centric though...we would never "whinge" about anything.

IMO there are 3 significant facts:

1) We cannot prove/disprove Global Warming in a satisfactory way, if we wait for proof then the time to react in either direction will have passed.

2) CO2 either DOES or DOES NOT affect the environment as a whole, ultimately it has become a political football.

3) We ARE treating the earth like a whore.

There is nothing we can do about the first 2 facts.

I don't know if you ever applied for a scholarship or a school that wanted an essay, but let me tell you how it works:

Every one who's writing KNOWS exactly what the person reading it is looking for, and embellishes their life experience to fit that, thus making themselves look as good as possible. So you end up with the best bullshitters winning.