Let us discuss the details of Megaupload's take down - Full indictment found inside

selfprodigy · 5 months

...what do you do?

deemahh · 5 months

FYI, she was found (link in OP's self post).

JesterTLS · 5 months

Not a bad watch at all. You fell in to a couple of traps (try not to cut audio and video at the same time between each shot, it kills the flow) but I know how tricky film-making can be, and I was impressed with how well executed certain parts were. You guys definitely have potential, so don't be afraid to try new things and make mistakes, it's how you grow!

Most of all, it looks like you guys had a blast. I envy you. Good friends are hard to come by, so don't let the small things come between you guys.

ltx · 5 months

I went in to Arkham City without having heard anything about it, so I had no expectations but I still wasn't overly impressed. I was surprised when I later found out how well received it was.

Pretty decent, but not worth all the hype in my (unpopular) opinion. I lost interest after about 8-10 hours of gameplay and stopped playing, so it's possible that I've missed out on the best parts of the game, but that was my experience.

W357Y · 5 months

That's not necessarily true. Some submissions just lend themselves to discussion more than others. Case in point, I upvoted this submission and then moved on without even reading the text or comments. That's unusual behaviour for me. The reason for it being that I have very little interest in the submission (I'm never going to play this game), but I figure others would and it's time-sensitive, so I did my part for the community and upvoted it for the sake of bringing it to the attention of others.

I'm only here now a while after voting because I was bored and figured I'd check out where my vote went, but I'm sure if I acted this way then many others did too.

Remmib · 5 months

I think I must be missing something. Are you saying the servers are free, or that I can get the game for free? If you mean the game then how is this legal?

TheCrippledPizza · 5 months

Thanks. It doesn't sound like something that deserves to be a the top of a thread concerning circumventing web censorship, so I was wondering if I was missing something. Apparently not, but it's pretty cool nonetheless.

TheCrippledPizza · 5 months

What does the Deadrop project actually achieve? Sure, it's novel, but I'm struggling to figure out what useful purpose it might actually serve.

RedMushtoom · 5 months

What do you mean?

DingDongerer · 5 months

close hangers

I see this a lot and now I just have to ask. Is this a thing, or do you mean "clothes hanger"?

TLinchen · 5 months

In case anyone else is wondering why China might protect North Korea in this way, I did some quick searching and managed to find this useful Wikipedia article, which states:

The Council on Foreign Relations suggests that China's main priority in its bilateral relations with the DPRK is to prevent the collapse of Kim Jong-il's government, concerned that such an event would provoke a surge of North Korean refugees into China.

brendanfromboston · 5 months

If you have an Android phone, root it and check out the Barnacle Wifi Tether app!

gorillahorse · 5 months

Haha, this picture's pretty cool. You should x-post it over to /r/pics!

rawbamatic · 5 months

First of all, I'd just like to thank you for your well thought out responses! I apologize if I come off as abrupt in any way, it's not my intent but I recognize that I sometimes do.

All populations are changing at all times.

I agree with this entire paragraph. What you describe is the continuum that I previously referred to.

Species are real things in the world, not just our arbitrary names.

Let's be more specific here. Organisms are real things. Variation is a real thing. I still maintain that 'species' are labels that we invent and pin to organisms of particular varieties, and that nature does not recognize or respect these labels.

If we (crudely) depict the biological characteristics of a population of organisms changing over time using a colour scale we can pretend that we might find a situation such as this arising:

http://i.imgur.com/7O1eo.png

A gradual change, ultimately from one variation to another variation with a complete set of intermediary forms in between, all unique and complete in their own right.

Now perhaps our only clue as to the history of this population's lineage is a sparse fossil set, maybe after digging around and piecing everything together we can only know this much:

http://i.imgur.com/cCyoF.png

Of course, with a situation like this it's easy to break it all down, label the different fossils that we've found - maybe Persian Indigosis here and Carmen Redus there. This is made easy because these things are now static and, most importantly, discrete.

What if we had a lot more specimens, though? What if we don't have just one fossil to represent the population as it stood at every million year interval or so - what if we had a complete set, a complete skeleton for every member of the population to have ever existed over the span of many millions of years?

How would we declare the start and end points of a 'species' on such a continuum?

rawbamatic · 5 months

At what point does a population undergoing gradual change turn from one species in to another species?

NotaX · 5 months

Too true, man. I've got fond memories of this game. Infiltrating and sniping in CTF:X with a partner, death squads, when multiple teams would rally together in a final effort to break through the defences of a turtling base before the round ended.

I just can't find anything that comes close to replicating the experience, which is a huge shame.

rawbamatic · 5 months

I contend that the classification is artificial, but I do not mean to suggest that distinctions between species do not exist or that there is no real physical basis for drawing lines between groups of organisms.

All I'm saying is that nature is blind to the lines we draw in the sand, which despite being derived from observation are largely very arbitrary and solely for our own convenience.

Whether that makes it entirely artificial or just slightly artificial is up to you, but the point is that we will forever be limited in our labelling of the kingdom of life because nature operates on a vast continuum and not in the nice kind solid breaks that humans like; that's something we should be aware of.

NotaX · 5 months

This game came out in 1999 but had a great shelf life. I played it on and off for over 10 years - with lots of different game types and huge skirmishes of 100+ people it was always an awesome experience.

Others might remember its spiritual predecessor Subspace Continuum.

I'm trying to find a more modern game that offers a similar experience, but there doesn't seem to be too much out there. Hopefully someone can point me in the direction of something, I've been pining for a game like this for a long time.

lights0ut · 5 months

Why is this being downvoted?

115lbs at 5ft 6in gives a BMI of 18.6 which falls within the 'Normal weight' range.

rawbamatic · 5 months

You have to remember that nature doesn't draw any lines between species, the entire concept of a 'species' is an artificial construct made up by humans for the sake of convenience.

The lines we draw are often hazy, but there are a number of criteria to go by. When you look at a population of organisms you have to ask yourself if they can be grouped (or rather, differentiated) by any particular characteristics or behaviours, are members kept from interbreeding due to any genetic, environmental or behavioural factors?

arloun · 5 months

Sure! Here's the explanation given by this Yahoo article (which was posted further up the thread by ZugZug_II):

To make the relatively faint glow of a coronal mass ejection stand out against the bright glare of space—caused by interplanetary dust and the stellar/galactic background—the NRL scientists must remove as much background light as possible. They explained that they determine what light is background light, and thus can be subtracted out, by calculating the average amount of light that entered each camera pixel on the day of the CME event and on the previous day. Light appearing in the pixels on both days is considered to be background light and is removed from the footage of the CME. The remaining light is then enhanced.

...

"When [this averaging process] is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark (negative) artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, which then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image,"

Differently · 6 months

This is another false dichotomy.

Yes, this applies to everything; no, that doesn't mean we can never know anything.

Take note that I'm making impersonal declarations here. This isn't about how I apply this particular way of thinking, or what it's possible for me to know. This isn't my prerogative. It's about rationality, what I'm describing right now is at the very heart of the scientific method.

You want me to believe your claim? Bring your evidence to me.

You don't have evidence for your claim? Then I reject it. The discussion ends there and I move on with my life. I'll reconsider your claim when you bring worthwhile evidence to the table. Until that time I treat it as bogus.

I can know of anything for which a satisfactory level of evidence has been provided. I know nothing else, and nor do you.

To categorically state "there is no god" is an (as yet) unsupported claim. To say "there is no evidence of a god and so I choose to dismiss the claim and live my life under the assumption that there is no god until further evidence is brought to the table" is rational, albeit slightly harder to roll of the tongue.

However if you want to take a particular illustration of a particular god, i.e. a character as described by the bible, and scrutinize the logical possibility of an entity with such properties, then go right ahead. That's a fruitful line of inquiry that can provide meaningful insight - but a far cry from the irrational statements often cast around here.

Differently · 6 months

You're presenting a false dichotomy bolstered by an invalid assumption. We don't have to choose between categorically asserting that such a thing as a god is either 'real' or 'not real'.

A third option exists - unknowing, or temporal dismissal. In the absence of any conclusive proof in the matter, this is the only intellectually honest answer that we have to give.

"I don't know if such a thing as god exists", or "I see no evidence for such a thing as god so I reject the notion".

A statement such as "gods are not true" is a positive assertion of knowledge (just as the statement "gods are true" is), and one that's not reasonably supported even in the absence of any evidence for gods being presented in the first place.

I don't see any proof or even any evidence of seven headed, one eyed aliens on a planet orbiting a nearby star, but it'd be silly for me to categorically state that such a thing is not true. I merely say that such a thing is not currently evidenced, dismiss the notion and go about my life, until such a point in time that evidence may be presented to cause me to reconsider the claim.

This is the scientific way.

NotaX

TROPHY CASE

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