But prophesy is one of the major functions of an oracle!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_tensile_strength#Typical_tensile_strengths

Note on spider silk strength: The strength of spider silk is highly variable. It depends on many factors including type of silk (every spider can produce several different types for different purposes), the particular species, the age of the silk, the temperature, the humidity, the rate at which stress is applied during testing, the length of time the stress is applied and the way the silk is collected (forced silking or natural spinning). The value shown in the table, 1000 MPa, is roughly representative of the results from a few studies involving several different species of spider however specific results varied greatly.

Of course, the Darwin's Bark Spider has silk with an ultimate tensile strength of 27,600 MPa, contested only by Carbon Nanotubes...

Also, respect to Alpha Centauri. I love that game and all its beautiful little quotes. I especially like the already-posted "Nonlinear Genetics" one.

Outta mod points - this should be marked Informative, I was also unaware of the difference between the two, and hence confused by why it would be considered expensive in solar cells.

Actually, that term is often used for games with 3D graphics but 2D gameplay (Smash Bros., Kirby, New Super Mario Bros., LittleBigPlanet) OR for games that have 2D graphics and 3D gameplay (Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, Toejam & Earl).

In short, "2D" and "3D" aren't great terms alone to describe videogames - there's many ways they can be applied. As it stands, we could end up with a 3D game played in 2D in 3D vision. (Smash Bros. 3D, anyone?)

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/892-2-5D-Hoedown

Yahtzee has a bit of commentary on the stupidity of these changing terms at the start of that video.

As far as games go, the Mac was an... unsuitable platform? Extremely limited? Sure, there have been games for macs of all generations, but none truly rose to critical acclaim against their non-Mac peers. It was a niche platform for gaming at best, and Bungie's Marathon is an excellent game that stands out. So, not "the best game on an awful system", but "the best game on a niche system", perhaps.

Don't tell that to the tinfoil hatters - HAARP is one of their favourite conspiracy theory targets.

I usually hear them described as "eye donors". Helmets are great at protecting the head, especially the eyes, but the rest of the body usually ends up somewhat less usable... ew.

what started off as brief discussions in June 2009

Oddworld Inhabitants: "Hello"
Just Add Water: "Hello"
Oddworld Inhabitants: "Follow me"
Just Add Water: "Okay"
Oddworld Inhabitants: "Work!"
Just Add Water: *works*

I preferred Rogue Leader on the Gamecube. Just outright had better controls and a wide array of interesting missions. I mean, it opens with blowing up the Death Star and gets better from there.

We've entered an endless recursion of Nazi.

True, but even in London you occasionally get the poor fat bastard who manages to take up both. They're usually friendly enough though, and if you're barrelling up the left-hand side they'll slowly rotate to let you past while mumbling apologies. All very British.

Blue-eyed, eager and athletic with a milky complexion...

Has Yahoo stumbled upon the Holy Grail of dupes? Have they unwittingly produced the mother of all duping systems? We must know, is there anything slashdot can learn from this to ensure more efficiently duped articles? Why stop at duped stories when we can have duped comments?! This would save so much time.

What about the architects that designed those buildings? They made creative choices that went into the structure, both before the formation was down, how it was constructed, and in maintenance.

Not to mention that an architect spent their resources in obtaining the equipment to design and construct the building, and also the resources to purchase the design tools, and possibly understanding the site and surroundings for the perfect alignment.

Resources, effort, and creative decisions went into the design of the building, shapes and forms that otherwise would never have been seen or used, instead replaced by bland and meaningless geometry.

If anyone's going to have a claim to control, its the architect.

--

Just to be blunt, I'm disagreeing that a photographer has an absolute right of claim over any photo they take, regardless of creativity. Yes, many photographs are claimable as creative works; many more are little more than duplicates and reproduction of existing works. Nature photography is one thing; a clear and sustainable effort must be made to take a perfectly zoomed-in and focused image of a rare insect. Photography of buildings, though, is mere facsimile. Photography of persons, too, although the line blurs - holiday snaps are personal and private, yet little to no effort goes into the majority of them, and belong not only to the photographer but to the subjects depicted. It gets worse - take a photo of a crowd and have an absolutely characteristic, identifiable individual - or individuals - standing out? That person surely has some legal claim over this reproduction of their image too.

Image data and intellectual property is a very complex field; far more complex than the IP-abolitionists seem to think, and far more complex than amateur photographers and artists seem to think. This is an age of data glut, where anything recorded can be easily and instantly reproduced by almost anyone with a simple computing device. What value does your intellectual property have in such a world? And what value would a person captured a million times by random tourists and security cameras the world over place on their image? This field is far too complex and messy to be resolved through simple argument here.

I'm not arguing against IP. I'm not arguing for it. Just saying that the concept of ownership and ownership of depictions is really, really complex, and both extremes have a point. I opened this post by mimicking you; that argument can be used almost endlessly, for any reproduction of reality, whether by dedicated time, effort and skill on the photographer/artist, or by simple happenstance snapshot. Determining the threshold of when something ceases to be a depiction of an existing work and becomes the depicter's intellectual property, and just how wide or narrow that threshold is, is so thorny as to be intolerable to discuss outside of legal practice with any due reason. Sure, we can attempt it, but we're not going to get anywhere.

Briefly on-topic with the main story; a simple, naive attempt at gathering and sorting data, without respect for existing IP law. The internet is still a wild, crazy frontier where old laws make no sense, but lawmen will ever try their hardest to civilise it. We'll see if they turn into a new Google,indexing and sorting the world's information for our benefit, or fold under the flood of imagedata and DMCA takedown requests.

Fun times.

T-Mobile is pretty damn big across Europe. Perhaps they're willing to risk a "2nd class carrier" in the US in exchange for one of the biggest carriers in Europe?