Comment Re:Will Invite (Score 1) 1223
I've got several invites now. Thanks everyone!
Comment Re:Will Invite (Score 1) 1223
I'm getting very curious about G+, so I'd love to get an invite. Thanks!
monstermanual at gmail dot com
Comment Re:Business not a zero sum game (Score 2) 249
War by definition is a zero sum game.
By what definition? I would consider war to be a negative-sum game.
Only if you don't consider the consequences of not going to war. For instance, I'm very glad that France and Britain declared war on the Axis. I have little doubt that the world would have been a worse place now if they hadn't.
Comment Not irony (Score 2) 123
Ironically Hotz wasn't the first school-aged hacker to be rewarded for his cyber-crime rather than a prison sentence.
Fail.
Comment That's nothing! (Score 1) 191
That's nothing! I have a tuna sandwich that will last up to 1 billion years! (Your pick of long or short scale.) I absolutely guarantee that it will last no longer than that!
...
When will we stop giving an upper bound on the time until something will break when we should be giving a (preferably maximal) lower bound?
(Still mighty cool work of the University of Oslo.)
Comment Re:Casio F-91W wristwatch (Score 3, Insightful) 426
The silliness enters the picture when you consider how many non-terrorists own such watches, not when you just look at all the suspected or actual terrorists who do.
How many people running around Afghanistan wear digital watches, much less this particular model? If it's very common in the region, I would agree. But I honestly don't know.
I remember seeing these in many stores in The Netherlands in the '90s. Owned one myself. In many ways it's a better watch than the fancy Swiss one I've got now. Very reliable, user-friendly, incredibly long battery life (people report 8+ years; I know I never had to change the battery in mine), and dirt cheap to boot ($8 on the web). I wouldn't be surprised at all if it's still popular in places like Afghanistan. If it wasn't so ugly I'd still be wearing mine.
Comment Thanks for posting (Score 1) 469
Thanks for posting this story. This issue doesn't affect me, as I don't use EA forums, but it is still something that I find completely unacceptable. I've bought (yes, with money) every RPG Bioware ever released for the PC (and I think I also have a copy of Shattered Steel), but combined with the emphasis on DLC (which requires logging in) in recent titles, this means I will not be buying (or pirating) DA2.
(Apologies for all the parentheses. I'm in the middle of On Lisp.)
Comment Mod parent up. (Score 1) 1277
The morphing occurred in the exact opposite direction. See wikipedia or (highly recommended if you have the time) these free lectures by Yale's prof. Donald Kagan.
Comment Re:Summary sucks. (Score 1) 663
Just NoScript.
So there's a 4th page if you have javascript enabled? My apologies to the submitter then.
Submission + - "Money for Nothing" not fit for Canadian radio (yahoo.com) 2
jenningsthecat writes: In a move that echoes the recent sanitization of Mark Twain's works, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has ruled that the Dire Straits song 'Money for Nothing' "contravenes the human rights clauses of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters' Code of Ethics and Equitable Portrayal Code". Twenty-five years after the song's release, it seems that a listener in St. John's, Newfoundland objected to the use of the word 'faggot' in the song's lyrics.
Comment Re:Summary sucks. (Score 2) 663
And inaccurate as well, at least insofar as the article having 3 rather than 4 pages.
Submission + - "Poo-Gloos" as Effective as Costly Sewage Plants (gizmag.com)
Zothecula writes: Poo isn't something generally talked about in polite company but like it or not, all of that human waste has to go somewhere. In smaller rural communities, it usually goes to wastewater lagoon systems; the alternative is mechanical treatment plants which process waste far more quickly but are expensive, labor intensive and often use chemicals. Enter the "Poo-Gloo," or Bio-Dome as it is officially known – an igloo-shaped device that can reportedly clean up sewage as effectively, but far more cheaply, than its mechanical counterparts. The Poo-Gloo, developed by Wastewater Compliance Systems, Inc., uses a combination of air, dark environment and large surface area to encourage the growth of a bacterial biofilm which consumes the wastewater pollutants. It is claimed that Poo-Gloos can treat pollutants just as quickly as mechanical plants while operating at a fraction of the cost – hundreds of dollars a month rather than thousands – and can be retrofitted to existing lagoon systems.
Comment Re:A shame I won't be playing it. (Score 1) 187
True, so it would be perfectly reasonable to take away all their achievements, and ban them from getting any new ones. But banning them from even playing the single player game is just being mean.
Comment Re:I didn't buy one for the payback (Score 1) 762
Hear ye, hear ye!
The thing that keeps me up at night is running out of affordable fuel. Without it, we can't run the tractors and combines to work the land, we can't run the trucks to transport the food to the cities, we can't maintain the electricity and gas grids, we can't maintain the flood control systems, we can't stock hospitals, etc., etc.
I don't have the brains or the means to develop an alternative to fossil fuels. But I can sure use the power of capitalism to encourage others to do so. And if that ends up being green as well as saving our civilization, that's a nice bonus.
Comment Re:This opens a lot of doors (Score 1) 266
IANAL, but I did have a law class at university where they stated that running software is in practice considered to fall under copyright, as code is copied to memory before execution.
Of course, this is a total perversion of all intentions behind copyright, but that isn't something that lawyers seem to care about...
