Humodour

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."

Isn't BP in gigantic trouble right now because of this whole thing? Like, major financial losses kind of trouble? I thought I remember Exxon also nearly going belly up after the Valdez incident as well and had to change a bunch of their environmental stuff in order to recover. What I'm saying is I think it is in their best interests, but unfortunately it takes a big disaster to remind them of that. And, it seems, each company can only to learn the lesson itself rather than observing others in the past. This does not give me any confidence since in 20 years time some new oil company, or BP itself when most of the old faces are gone, will likely make the mistake all over again.

It's not irrelevant at all - it's a very important property. It is the basis of lasers (basically putting multiple photons in the same spot), and it is also what allows us to form a BEC from photons. A photon is a boson and a Bose-Einstein condensate can only occur with particles which adhere to Bose statistics (that is: bosons). That is: ONLY particles which don't obey Pauli's Exclusion Principle can form BECs. What you're going to ask me next is: how on earth can atoms form a BEC then, since they're not like light, they're not bosons? Weeeeell... some atoms are fermions (Helium-3) and some ARE like light in a way - they are bosons (Helium-4). It depends entirely on their spin, which is the sum of the spin of the constituent particles (electrons, protons, neutrons etc all have half-spin). So bosonic atoms can form a BEC easily. But fermions can even form a BEC because they become coupled in pairs and thus become bosons as their spin becomes an integer when added together! The trick with atoms is you need temperatures as close to absolute zero as possible or the particles are too energetic and thus move too much and cannot occupy the same wavelength (I believe - I'm a bit rusty on waves). This is a related and interesting technology - the atom laser: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_laser

BP ignored Halliburton's safety monitoring to save time. http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/11/27/12...re-To-Save-Time Honestly, how could a state without a government, or with a minimal government, prevent big companies from committing various atrocities if it made them more profit? That one is for taks and Guard Dog and co. Wals, this one is for you: do you still have faith that multinationals like BP would act to prevent environmental disasters and safety issues because it would be in their best interest to do so? And generally, I think BP's ****up is a strong case to dump fossil fuels. Like we didn't already have reason to do so. But we're at a stage where it is now economically feasible to do so - alternative energy costs have fallen, technology has gotten way more efficient and reliable, fossil fuel costs are rising rapidly, and the economic costs of fossil fuels on our health and productivity (through climate change and general air pollution) are starker than they ever have been. In the early 2000's here, the right-wing Howard government met with oil and coal executives to discuss what to do about wind power - it was too successful. So they did what such governments do and listened to the lobbyists. Wind power funding was cut, government investment severely curtailed. In NSW state (home of Sydney), the state government recently toned down the solar rebate scheme because it too was too successful. Too many people were adopting solar panels and the government wanted to waste their money on other things (which incidentally did not include public transport, health, education, or electricity infrastructure - I'm still not sure what NSW Labour has spent the past few years wasting our money on). But Australia is still in a position where wind and solar are extremely viable alternatives to Australia's coal use. We could essentially make the switch now if our government had balls, and what I hear about America paints a similar picture. For instance: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local...ld/2009820.aspx http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/82641/2010...law-pv-mlpm.htm And Australia is at fault in another way, too - we supply China's coal needs. China then pollutes at record levels - they will be driving climate change in the next couple of decades. They're investing in alternative energy sources out of necessity for more energy, but they're also investing in more and more coal each day as well. So on average they're making the situation a lot worse. Australia should be shipping uranium to China, not coal - we own 1/4 of the world's uranium, as does Canada. At least nuclear is a bunch cleaner. A few things to think about. Discuss.