Comment Re:TOR (Score 1) 102
that the Republicans forced Obama to sign
LOLOLOLOLOLOL
that the Republicans forced Obama to sign
LOLOLOLOLOLOL
Yeah, I guess. Keeping people in line using military hardware seems to be a growth industry all over the world. I'm not sure I believe our overlords even see borders any more.
Yeah, I thought that too for a minute. But this part of the summary seems to suggest otherwise:
"Over at the Communications of the ACM, a new article — Computing's Narrow Focus May Hinder Women's Participation — suggests that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs should shoulder some of the blame for the dearth of women at Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter and other tech companies.
Clearly, they're including platforms other than the Microsoft DOS/Windows hegemony. There are lots of ways to compute today that don't involve those platforms.
I suppose maybe it has to do with the platforms these women grew up with, but assuming they're in their 20s, they would have had lots of other choices even then.
Who knows? My wife got a Masters in Computer Science before her PhD in Math, and she doesn't seem to like computers very much. From what I've seen over the past 20+ years, she prefers pencil and paper. She tells me that it's possible to do real Computer Science with paper and pencil, but I never fully understood how that works. She's the smart one in the family.
Is it just me, or is everyone against the War on Drugs at the same time opposed to the tobacco industry?
No. The New York Times editorial staff maintains a stance in favor of legalizing marijuana, but opposed to tobacco, including e-cigarettes.
Think about all the second/third worlders supporting piracy on Slashdot. The hungarians/romanians/russians saying they pirated everything and then complaining about how no one wants to pay for their own software they make so they're thinking about emigrating...but that everyone should pirate Game of Thrones because media companies who want to make a profit are evil.
Forget about their reasons. Is it a problem that would make Sony unprofitable?
We've had the music industry give up on DRM over a decade ago, and they're still in business, doing better than ever. In fact, the Super Bowl is now making half-time acts PAY for the privilege of playing at the half-time of the Superbowl. All that piracy of music and there is still a huge music industry, still musicians making livings all over the world. Maybe some of the power shifted, but do you doubt that there are just as many musicians making livings today as there were in 1980?
The industry wants to say it's a SERIOUS problem, but all we have to go on is their outrageous estimates of lost revenues, and dire warnings. We had the same dire warnings about the music industry and they turned out to be completely false. I don't need a Playstation 4 if I want to play the latest music from my favorite musician. In fact, there are more ways for me to get that music and get it for free than ever before. Movies are pirated left and right and there's still a movie industry, in fact, it's bigger than ever. More independent movies than ever. More people making a living in the movie industry than ever, in more places than ever. The music industry and the movie industry have surrendered to piracy and lived to tell the tale. Yet, you tell me that somehow the game industry is different.
I call BS.
People can go on how Sony or Microsoft and other companies are evil and information wants to be free and all that.....but really it's just a bunch of people who don't want to pay.
And yet, somebody is paying. Here, look for yourself:
Billboard:
Global digital revenues were up 8% to $5.8 billion, climbing from $5.4 billion the previous year. Performance rights revenue was the fastest growing sector in the music industry, rising 9.4% to $943 million, up from $862 million in 2011. Synchronization grew 2.1% and totaled $337 million, up from $330 million. Global revenues from physical was $9.4 billion, a 5% decrease on 2011’s total of $9.9 billion.
And,
Statista:
Filmed entertainment revenue in 2013 was $88billion
That's billion with a "b". And the projections through 2018 are all up up up.
http://www.statista.com/statis...
All in all, the entertainment industry in the US made $632billion in 2013. So somebody is paying. Piracy my ass.
Does it have something to do with this, perhaps?
She doesn't need to. The dike has now extended out beyond the glacier and is 60% of the way to Askja.
The real problem isn't the subglacial volcanoes, though. It's Hekla. They've been talking about this in the Icelandic press a bit, basically she usually gives an average of a couple dozen minutes advance warning, and then the ash plume reaches flight level in 5-20 minutes. Yet a dozen or so commercial passenger jets fly over her every day. There's one volcanologist recommending a permanent air traffic closure over her. The current situation really looks to be just asking or a serious tragedy at some point in the coming decades.
Foreigners? It's our volcano. You're the foreigners.
FYI, it was our volcanologists who called the Met Office on their bad claim. Of course, they had every reason to think that there was an eruption, the earthquake and tremor activity has gotten so crazy it's higher than that seen during all but the most powerful eruptions in the area, and it's not even broken out of the ground yet. The amount of magma in motion there is just bonkers.
The best scenario at this point is a Krafla-style eruption - lava fountains slowly releasing the pressure over a decade, a nice "tourist eruption". The worst realistic scenario is a long-lasting, multiple vent fissure eruption stretching between Bárðarbunga and Askja, which would likely be one of our "Oh My God, Oh My God, We're All Going To Die!" eruptions that happen every 100-200 years on average.
- 20 cans of spam [survival rate: one can/day]
Bonus: After day 20, you won't want to survive anymore.
Yeah, it's morbidly fascinating to keep up with what's going on underground there. Whenever you run out of superlatives for how extreme the situation underground is, whatever crazy thing you were looking at before increases by half an order of magnitude
Iceland's volcanoes have indeed done that quite a few times. Eruptions connected with Laki in particular have been nasty, the 970 eruption was reported to have frozen the Tigris and Euphrates in central Iraq, and the 1783-1784 eruption froze the Mississippi at New Orleans and there was ice seen floating in the Gulf of Mexico. Which is even more impressive when you realize that the closer a volcano is to the poles, the harder it is to alter climate suchly; Iceland's volcanoes give off abnormally high levels of SO2 (also, really unfortunately from a local perspective, HF). Laki's 1783-1784 eruption, for example, gave off a whopping 120 million tonnes of SO2 and 6 million of HF, 6 times more SO2 and orders of magnitude more HF than Pinatubo, the largest eruption of the 20th century.
The problem with that, however, is that these effects are only short term. Meanwhile, volcanoes also give off CO2, which contributes to warming and last much longer. So they provide short-term cooling but long-term warming.
Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine. -- Andy Warhol