I really hate to break the news to you, martijn, but you're blind in one eye. Sorry you had to find out this way.

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The Andromeda Strain is the only movie I can think of which depicts actual bona-fide scientists performing something close to actual bona-fide science - there are a number of experiments (including some not overly humane animal experiments) performed by the main cast in order to ascertain the nature of some deadly space plague. What's more, you can actually tell, more or less, how the experiments work and what they're intended to achieve, unlike most science in 'science fiction' films, which generally involve some mad scientist pulling inscrutable levers or pouring green foaming liquid from one test tube into the purple bubbling liquid in the beaker.

Not that I think it would be an easy movie to use to sell science to today's sugar-addicted attention-impaired youth. The film is fairly slow and talky by today's standards, the main characters are mostly rather dowdy and middle-aged, there's more or less no sex or violence, and it's from 1971 and most definitely looks it. The only thing that would make you think otherwise is that, refreshingly, it's not about some lone individual rebel fighting back against/escaping from an oppressive totalitarian government like almost every single mindfucking sci-fi flick made in the English-speaking world between 1965 and 1975. Count the other exceptions, if you like, I'll be surprised if you can think of more than 4 without referring to Halliwell's or the imdb.

Anyways, if you want to see science done almost right in a movie, you can do far worse than the Andromeda Strain.

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Candid assessments about Karzai's leadership : DO NOT RELEASE
Name calling of the Prince of England : DO NOT RELEASE

The thing is, if Wikileaks redacted cables based on the nature of the content, rather than a few names that might be considered 'at risk', then they would be accused of bias or editorialising or censorship - attacks on Wikileaks' integrity. Far better to release the whole thing and be accused of distributing trivia.

As for the cases you're talking about, Prince Andrew stands a very good chance of becoming King (it just depends on the order in which his mother and brother die in) and the monarch does have a lot of formal powers which can get abused to the detriment of democracy (These powers were used to forcibly deport the islanders of Diego Garcia and to unilaterally depose the Australian Government in 1975). The fact that Prince Andrew is a moronic jingoistic fucknut when there are no TV cameras in the room is actually of some serious public interest.

If that were so, then where are the leaks from China, from Germany, from Russia, etc?

Howabout here, here, here and here, for starters.

I don't see any Russian documents on a brief scan, but that might be a linguistic thing, or just that they've not had any Russian leakers yet.

I spilled a small amount of coffee on my new(ish) Unicomp Model M clone keyboard a couple of days back and now some of the keys just fail to work. Hopefully it's some gunk on the membranes causing a short that can be cleaned off, but if it's not fixable then I'll not be happy. Best keyboard I ever had, and it was Not Cheap.

Sigh.

Thing is, there's a bnetd-derived server running now, called iCCup which is the server of choice for almost anyone playing Starcraft (BroodWar, not 2) these days. Not only does it ignore CD checks but iCCup will offer you a chopped-down copy of Starcraft to play on, if you look hard enough. There doesn't seem to be any great rush from Blizzard to stomp it off the net, either.

Blizzard seems to be ambivalent about iCCup. It has called it a "pirate server", but it has also linked to ongoing iCCup tournaments from the battlenet homepage, which is probably because it has realised that the vast majority of people still playing BroodWar (legitimately as well as otherwise) much prefer iCCup to battlenet, to the extent that if you don't know your iCCup ranking, you really can't call yourself a Starcraft player.

Likely, that's because iCCup has a functioning ladder system, and the admins do keep iCCup relatively free of cheats, and the worst of the foulmouthed little brats you get playing online games, unlike battlenet, which is a cesspool in comparison. The "pirate server" offers, for free, a better service than the one that Starcraft players generally paid for, and Blizzard has realised that allowing overt (if discreet) piracy is a small price to pay for keeping a functioning community centred around some of their products.

Think about it. The RIAA's usual claim is that every downloaded file is a lost sale. and damages should be calculated based on that. Now by asking for this ludicrious figure, they've just put the lie to that previous assertion, since there is absolutely no way in hell that the general public could, or would have paid for $1 trillion worth of their products.

On the other hand, they've just claimed that Limewire has increased the net digital wealth of the world by something of the order of well over $1 trillion, something the RIAA could never have done by themselves. Way to go, Limewire!

The GP didn't say paying taxes was quaint. He said filling in a tax form was quaint. Over in this part of the world, income tax is automatically deducted from an employee's paycheque by the employer and sent off to the Inland Revenue (paye, or Pay-As-You-Earn), so that the vast bulk of the population (self-employed people excepted of course) don't have to waste hours of their lives with all that dismal rotten paperwork that you USians inflict upon yourselves every April 15th.

Either that, or you're the most prominent news outlet to mispell the subject's name, as happened here. Ma Jae Yoon is Savior. 'Ja Mae Yoon' isn't.

Sir, I beg you to try clicking the mouse 3 times a second for half an hour. I assure you it is quite physical.

He's on Slashdot. He probably clicks that fast normally.

Actually, in all seriousness, 3 times a second, or 180 actions per minute) is fast for a starcraft player, but it is too slow for a Korean pro - only the slowest of them, such as Savior, average 200 over a game, while most average an APM Of 300-450 over the course of a 5-60 minute game, and peak at maybe 600 or so.

I can maybe hit 300-400 if I mindlessly spam keypresses and mouseclicks while doing nothing at the start of the game. I can't evisage how anyone actually can click that fast that AND keep track of the units and the tech tree and the base layout and the production buildings and the workers and the scouting and the upgrades and the 2 dozen things you have to worry about in a normal Starcraft game AND try to outwit some other devious bastard at the other end of the internet trying to kill you off all at the same time.

Anyone who says playing Starcraft doesn't involve a physical skill is probably assuming that it's like some other game they happened to play once.

Mod you down of course!

Oh crap...

BadAnalogyGuy (945258) writes:

"Having been shot several times, ..."

I know Slashdotters are a pedantic bunch, and prone to nerdrage, but shooting someone for bad analogies is a bit extreme, even for them...

Strangely enough, UKIP is against ACTA, and presumably they're dead against the EU having any secrets whatsoever (given they want it abolished), yet the majority of their MPs voted against this motion. Are they too lazy to bother to read whatever it is they vote on? Did the party functionary who tells them what way to vote make a mistake? Or is UKIP just so instinctively contrarian in Europe that they oppose any EU consensus at all, even when it is in favour of their stated principles?