Humodour

If you're playing on a console it probably will be everything you expected. If you're expecting ****. Honestly, console?

The lesson here is: you're a fool for buying the console version. Everyone knows consoles suck. Disclaimer: not an Obsidian employee.

The current Western conception of intellectual property is a farce and makes a mockery of itself by encompassing too much and for too long a time period - the notion that copyrights or patents can extend for a period longer than 10 years is infuriating.

That's a lame attempt to stop people from making illegal copies. The better argument is that it often hurts the people who are genuinely innocent: the artists. The publishers are far from innocent, but let's leave that for another thread. The best way to prevent illegal copying is to change business models (and that doesn't mean suing your way to success). Steam and GOG and similar have done this for games, iTunes and Amazon and similar for music although for music artists don't usually rely on album profits but merchandising and concert sales, and I hear Hulu and Netflix are decent for movies. Somebody can rant about people downloading illegally all day, and call them 'stupid' or 'evil' or you want, but it's a silly thing to do and a waste of time and anger. If you want to change it - stop it - you need to look to new business models that make it less desirable to copy things. Or you'll spend your days ranting while nothing changes. Steam is the most potent force I can think of for preventing game copying. And they've achieved this not through abusing or criminalising customers and potential customers, but by tapping into that market of people who previously were too lazy or poor to purchases your products (whether they are downloaders or not) - and THAT is a question of marketing.

3 million Americans had access to this information. They found the guy who leaked most (all?) of it because he was bragging about it, but he didn't have to try particularly hard to do it, and it's not secret enough to hide from these 3 million people who have access to it. His reasons for leaking the info seem to be basic transparency issues and some genuine concerns with US foreign policy. For now I remain neutral on whether this is a good or bad thing, but I relish the opportunity to get some insights into how brutal regimes operate, as well as how our own Western governments operate behind our backs.

The intention isn't to smear the US; it's just that the US is the country they find it easiest to get leaks from. The US isn't the only country they leak about, and government politics itself isn't the only thing that gets leaked by WikiLeaks. Moving on from that point, I'm personally finding the leaks to be far more damaging to the idiots running China, Russia, Italy, North Korea, Iran, etc rather than to the US. Ironically, it's looking like the US itself is the only thing standing between Iran and a crater - because that's what Iran would be if Israel, Saudi Arabia, and heck most of Europe and the Mid-East had their way.

http://forums.obsidian.net/index.php?showtopic=56630

First time I've actually felt genuine loss that an actor has died.

With Wikileaks comes a new dimension to North Korea's threat: it supplies Iran with nuclear fuel, technology, and missiles designed to have enough range to hit Europe. cronicler: Interesting read. Might respond if I have time when I get home.

Considering gravity is the single biggest unknown in physics, this is certainly worthwhile.

This newspaper, at the bottom, lists coverage from all the newspapers these leaks were released to, if you don't like reading the Guardian: http://www.news.com.au/world/wikileaks-set...i-1225962494119 One of the more disturbing revelations is the shocking but obvious (and reasonably widely known) case of the Chinese government's highest echelons being intimately involved with and ordering cyber attacks and infiltration on Western companies and governments from at least 2002 through to the present day.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/2...iplomacy-crisis Just click the link. It doesn't matter who you are, it will be worth reading. E.g.:

Yeah the thing is you've got artists like Di who see it as stealing, then you've got other artists like Cory Doctorow, Trent Reznor, etc who send the opposite message and encourage the free proliferation of their works and often pose economic or social reasons as their rational. Interestingly, it is those people who are probably onto something according to a study by the Dutch government: http://www.marketingvox.com/study-file-sha...ng-term-042837/ http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/01/du...is-positive.ars "Curiously, freeloaders consume paid content in the same amounts as nondownloaders—for games, freeloaders even buy more than non-downloaders." So the artistic community is certainly not united on the matter.

LoF probably has posted, just not under his LoF account.

Unfortunately because of the board's silly edit timeout limit I have to make a new post. Basically I wanted to add NASA's great article on fermionic condensates (BECs were created in 1995, and fermionic condensates are even newer): http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/technolog...2feb_fermi.html

And maybe America doesn't need conventional troops that much any more anyway.... http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/11/27...ne-To-Land-Soon This spy plane, which nobody outside the American government knows what it does, has been in the air for 7 straight months. It has repeatedly changed trajectory through a powerful engine. This is one amazing piece of technology.

I... I... my vision is augmented.

Damn.

Heh heh. It's actually a widely popular electronics franchise in Australia. **** Smith himself is a renowned and well-respected business leader. I don't know how he managed to rise above his name, but he did.

Ok what are they hoping to learn? As mentioned in my first post, this is an experiment to detect gravity waves and in doing so learn more about black holes, pulsars, anything that produces gravity waves. It's quite similar really to things like Hubble, the SKA, LOFAR. You can read about the earth-based prototype (LIGO) for this larger space-based experiment (LISA) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO

Not to be facetious but I would suggest the same thing right back at you. This is NOT an American thing. This is a Western thing. This is not Iraq or Afghanistan, this is South Korea. This would not be a peacekeeping mission, it would be a full-on war, albeit likely brief. South Korea is a very vital trade partner to Australia alone so you can bet we'd be sending in vastly more troops than we ever did to Afghanistan or Iraq. Same goes for Japan, the EU, NATO, UN, etc. Secondly, the South Korean army is about the same size as the North Korean army and far more advanced. The West would be supplying the backup here more than anything - not the core force. No I did not miss this point, in fact I mentioned it in this thread and previous threads. I don't want a war with North Korea, for the record. I want every single country in the world to stop all - every last bit - of trade and aid to them. China shooting refugees is your fantasy, however. Their government is not that evil, at least not while the West is watching.

“North Korean soldiers have full stomachs from our support, and now they repay us by firing at us. Next time, we should repay them by shooting them back.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/world/as...sland.html?_r=1

Dicksmith. **** Smith. O.o

Good choices! No.

To clarify, LISA (this) is in fact 3 probes, unmanned. In terms of funding, LISA is a joint project between NASA (the USA's space agency) and ESA (the EU's space agency). Further to that, Wikipedia notes this: "LISA was recommended in the 2010 U.S. National Research Council decadal report on astronomy and astrophysics as one of two large space missions to be implemented by NASA in the upcoming decade."