Technological advancement is peaking. The 20th century, the era-when-everything-happened is over. It was an aberation caused by huge amounts of cheap petroleum energy. With cheap oil depleting, the huge technology positive-feedback loop slows and stops.

Really now? What about nations which are not dependent on oil such as France, Germany, and Japan. Yes peak oil would most likley be a pain for international shipping, but nations who had the forethought to actually build nuclear power plants and decent mass transit systems will shrug and keep on going.

Plus there isn't any money. The banking system is fundamentally broken, nobody trusts that due-process rule-of-law applies to the financial sector anymore. And one-by-one all the industries in the USA are going down like the housing industry in a chain reaction. Government will frozen and powerless to do anything to stop it from happening.

Government? Whose government? Are we talking about? You talk as if the past 200 years of advances were primarily made by people who lived on Washington, DC's payroll.

The world will advance. It will adapt and it will progress... The statement you should be saying that the world will not progress should say "The United States will not progress, while China, Japan, and Europe keep going."

Its not like China is short on cash.

So soldiers are trained to be like teenagers? That is creepy.

Most soldiers are teenagers.

(At least the recruits)

Get a formal education and you get a much broader foundation.

That said, a car mechanic, a plumber, and house maid have better job security than college grad these days.

Give this book some serious thought:

http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/

If I had a chance to talk with myself 20 years ago and tell them how to live their life I would say the following:

Join the military for a few years. You'll have health insurance for life.
Don't take on debt for college.
Buy a house early and pay it off.
Get a job that you cannot be outsourced from.

Yeah college is nice, but in 20 years from the point you have graduated, you might think different if you found yourself laid off from a job once though un-outsource..

Anyways... Not to ramble, but most knowledge jobs will be outsourced or contracted in 20 years and it won't matter if you have that piece of paper or not. Some guy in India or China will have your job because it was cheaper.

lets say all of my views and information is made up. i still have much more spine than you, since i have the guts to actually voice it myself, instead of posting anonymous like spineless cowards.

Maybe he was too lazy to log on or trust the terminal he was on?

Also, its not that hard to just make up throw away account. So simply posting as anon doesn't invalidate the poster.

Of course he didn't have a valid point but it had nothing to whether or not he logged on.

No, this is completely wrong. If you copy the characters- i.e. Pacman, then it IS copyright infringement, that is Namco's IP.

No. Characters are not covered by copyright, but the media about them.

In theory, you could write your own fanfiction of "Harry Potter" and publish it as long as you don't use any source material of the original books and not violate copyright.

You can be sure as heck to be violating a trademark though.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Can_you_get_a_copyright_on_a_character

Why isn't it a copyright violation. He used their characters, their name (SuperPacman came out in 1982), and mechanic. This about as much of a derivative work as you get.

IANAL but there has been quite a bit of hoo doo about this in the 1970s over board games. From my recollection, the courts determined that you can copyright the art and words, but you can't copyright the rules or the design of the game itself.

Recently Hasbro filed suit against Scrabulous over the copyright infringment of Scrabble. (source)

The courts said that Scrabble was a trademark but the game itself was not in which the company in question simply changed their name of the copycat game.

In that regard, anyone could take say super mario brothers or pac man, and as long as they use their own grpahics, game code, and art, can basically create a copy cat of sorts.

Same thing applies to this issue the article brings forth. He probably shouldn't have used the word "Pac" tho as it might be trademarked.

Color me stumped.

No. The answer is obvious.

This shuttle vehicle is designed to retrieve satellites deemed too risky to fall back to earth in any shape or form.

Also... It has the ability to retrieve foreign satellites. This is more of a chilling effect as they seem to want everyone to know they have this ability so before Russia or China decided to send up anything of note in the spy department that they will have to be aware that the Americans can pull it down to find out what makes it tick.

It makes sense this thing is unmanned as such satellites have been known to be able to self destruct if it is believed to be falling back to earth anyways.

Someone once used a car to kill someone.

I don't think anyone has used a car to kill just about everything that moves in a city.

A rich lawyer or CEO is NOT the equal of a McDonalds burger flipper that studied liberal arts in college. The rich lawyer has a job, the CEO has a job, and they are both rich; the burger flipper cannot argue a court case reliably or run a company (or gracefully drop it if it's destined to fail-- some CEOs are repeatedly hired by companies that are winding down to make this process graceful; others just suck at their jobs). Likewise the lawyer probably would need some training to flip burgers; though this is a lot less training and a LOT less upkeep than entering and staying in the legal profession.

The key point people should remember is that the CEOs and lawyers are able to make their income off the collective wellbeing of society.

As in... If the CEO and laywer lived in Somalia, then they would not really have much to do in the way of income. So arguably, they should pay their fair share of their income to support such a way of life to the rest of society so that they themselves don't have to worry about the collapse of said society (yes I'm being over dramatic, but if there were no laws or a functioning government and society than CEO's and laywers would just be as bad off)

Food Stamps: Are they for food or cigarettes, booze, and lottery tickets? Are the recipients actually deserving of them.

Farm Subsidies: Are they for keeping wealthy mega-farms profitable?

Corporate welfare: Is it to keep the lobbyists appeased?

Serioiusly... The USPS, public education system, and food stamps are a drop in the bucket compared to the corporate pork barrel that goes to companies like Haliburton etc.

Second, why in the hell would you tell ANYONE to type out a registry key anyway?

Norton Symantec Endpoint Protection has hosed the TCP/IP stack on your VP's laptop while he's in his hotel room on the other side of the country.

He needs to pull his PowerPoint presentation off the server that his office assistant worked on last night.

You're unable to remote in or email him the registry fix due to the glaring obvious problem that he has no TCP/IP connection and his local tech turned off Window's Restore on his image for some unknown reason.

Obviously the only thing you can do for him is to read out the entry over the phone... Just saying because its happened.

The registry is a database file, why can't be backed up?

Thats easy...

Lets say (and this has happened more than once to offices that I have had the pleasure of working in):

Program A is installed and messes with the registry.
Program B is installed and messes with the registry.
Program A runs an update and messes with the registry.

Something happens (malware, hotfix, windows update) and Program A has to be fixed with a registry backup restore at the time of its installation.

Now Program B is screwed up because its missing its entries. Oh lets put the registry restore back after its installed, but now we're missing the registry entries for the update.

Actually, I've never worked in an office where restoring the registry was considered to be a reasonable option and usually considered a last resort because so many things can go wrong.

Not in an aircraft = doesn't make flying scary. Crowd bomb theater is short (BOOM!) and cleaned up quickly.

I'm too tired to find the article, but its what the Hamas suicide bombers did to Israeli soldiers after they setup security checkpoints.

As they couldn't sneak bombs into Israel anymore (that easy), they decided to just target the soldiers directly at the gates.

Of course the jokes on them as many checkpoints involve soldiers sitting in a blast proof bunker who do the checkpoint screenings via CCTV and a loudspeaker.

I take a dice and throw it in the air. Even if I give you the starting terms and the exact forces used to throw the cube, you still cannot, with 100% absolute certainty, tell me what number it will land on. Even with everything known, there are things we cannot calculate.

I'm pretty sure if we had a marker on the cube and a hi-speed camera plus a rather fast image processing computer, we could give you an answer before the dice had landed. Also it wouldn't be too hard to create a robot arm to throw the dice with exactly the same force and position each time.

Dice have to adhere to the laws of physics just like everything else. Its just when humans throw them, there are so many variables that it seems random.

Now, when we start talking about particle decay or trying to determine the position of an electron.

Then yeah... We can start talking about random.

Norway and Sweden are not police state hell holes...

And secondly, the dems aren't even remotely socialist.

Then again, neither is the Communist Chinese government.