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I agree with you (from your first post) that the sale of "smart" weapons isn't a bad thing.

If somebody wants one, I believe they should be allowed to buy it. I'm free market like that.

As for finger/palm reading, what if I'm wearing gloves? I'm not police, I'm military, but I can say that I'm wearing gloves at least half the time I'm handling a firearm, whether for duty or practicing at a range or during an exercise. They're not thick gloves, but a palm print won't even penetrate thin latex gloves.

On the other hand, a watch type RFID system would require me to use both hands or the hand with the watch - and I'm used to wearing a watch on my left hand. What if I have to shoot off-handed?

Hell, the weapon would still fire if the user's arm is within 10" of it, such as if the criminal and user are wrestling for control of the weapon. So the user might STILL get shot.

it might save some lives.

I've found that "It might save some lives" to nearly always be a suprisingly poor reason to do something.

Again, good information. Thanks! I'm not police, [para]military or a gun enthusiast and didn't consider the use of gloves. That's an excellent point.

I do see your point about "saving lives," however I think that your economic valuation of human life would come up rather short for the person(s) killed and their loved ones.

That said, I'm not advocating for the mandatory use of "smart" weapons. As someone who finds technology fascinating, to me the concept of a "smart" weapon is an excellent one.

Perhaps I should look into designing something like this. ;)

The difference between theory and practice being...

Cookies, a 5th of scotch, an angry monkey

How many cookies? It takes 900 quintillion cookies to win over the kitten managers.

I'm pretty sure a Shadow Hawk weighs 55 tons

http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/...

Considering China's on/off relationship with North Korea I wonder if this is a response to the episode about Leonard dating the North Korean spy - http://bigbangtheory.wikia.com...

been done.

They had these in SimCity 2000. You built Microwave power collectors that collected energy from orbital space stations.

Why I'm bringing it up on Slashdot (aside from the hoped-for karma boost from invoking PC game nostalgia) is that occasional disasters happened if the orbital satellites were ever off by a fraction of a percent and they beamed the energy into the nearby residential population instead.

I'd be very interested to know more details of how they plan to transport the energy to the surface.

I did the same and got something that looks like a cross between a fish and a lightbulb. Coincidence?

I'd like to see a few animatronic dinosaurs instead of cars. http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Lucky_the_Dinosaur

Looks kind of similar to Aurebesh..

Thanks for the link, but...did you have a point?

There was the second season Babylon 5 episode, "The Long Dark" in which a Sleeper ship carrying some early human colonists drifts into B5 space. Frankly, I think if your species develops FTL capabilities, the first order of business should really be to "warp" to all those generational/sleeper ships and pick 'em up.

Howto: Stand perfectly still (Uncyclopedia)

I keep forgetting how old I am. Master Blaster run barter town

all hail inanimate carbon rod^W tube!
Truly the chronicles of Homer are the fount of all wisdom.

Oh I don't have a problem with Nuclear energy but most nations don't have the political will to push forward with it. With the cost of each plant possibly in the Billions you also have to wonder if the investment community will back it as well because the money has to come somewhere. I'm also in favor of pushing for more local Solar along the lines of household domestic use considering we're burning through a lot of natural gas just dealing with peak load demands. Then again, I'm not in DC so all I can do is invest in areas where I think it'll help... You know, think globally, act locally but that still means dealing with retarded Gladys Kravitz types who will fight you putting up solar panels on your roof or planting a few more trees in your yard.

I was thinking Emory and Oglethorpe from ATHF, not Wormfaces...

Like this guy.

...This could all be a game of World of Warcraft for higher dimensional beings.

I think you mean Eternal Sphere (the spoilerific plot of Star Ocean 3 - their reality is an MMO for higher-dimensional beings, and they're shutting down the server and deleting everything)

The more you click, the more cookies you bake during a click frenzy. (Not that Cookie Clicker uses this exploit, mind you.)

...what are the ten radical isotopes?

Do we really want to send reality TV loving cretins to colonize other planets?

Three words:

Golgafrincham "B" Ark.

Its unlikely that they would send people like that, or that they would survive on a planet after adapting to 120,000 years worth of space travel.

You mean something like this?

Prior art: http://brutallegend.wikia.com/...

I remember day-dreaming about an MMO like this ages ago when they were just coming into the mainstream. I was thinking one based on Feist's "Hall of Worlds" concept. Each player would start on a pre-fabbed world, and after levelling a bit, make their way into the Hall, where they could connect to player-generated worlds which served as dungeons against which to test their skill. After progressing sufficiently, they could gain control of their own world, and create another dungeon to add to the Hall of Worlds.

Still think it'd be a good game; I'd like to play it.

Damn those Centauri!

To hell with clamato, I want Tomacco!

Why would Klingons "fru-fru" up their coffee, not very warrior like IMO.

Have you seen their embassy?

They all look like Sontarans. So the next generation of space explorers need no necks?

It's called the Crusader. I was going to link directly to the Bliz gameplay guide but was still getting the press release in my hasty search string.

There are two elephants in the room when it comes to vim that really need to be addressed:

1. Its pattern or "regular expression" support. I'm talking about things like :%s/// for matching/replacing but it can be used in other places. I'll refer folks to the docs, which they should read (or if you just want to skim, go to the vim wiki link):

http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pattern.html
http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/usr_27.html
http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Search_patterns

Take a very, very close look at how parenthesis work under the section called Magic. It's completely inverted compared to every other expression/RE, even base system regex.

Any vim user who has been using this functionality knows how painful it is; it can literally take you 20 full minutes to come up with a vim :%s line that does what you need, and most of the time the user ends up just shelling out to the CLI and using sed or perl or whatever else to do the replacement because of vim's awful pattern syntax.

"21st century" (I hate this term) vim should just use PCRE and be done with it. I'm a KISS principle minimalist and don't like the idea of tying vim to another 3rd-party library, but I think this would be acceptable given PCRE's prevalence.

2. Bram's absolutely horrible laziness when it comes to making actual releases. For those who don't follow vim regularly, you probably don't know of this problem, but its existed for years. Basically someone submits a patch to Bram, he approves it, and the patch gets made and dumped as a single patch/diff file in the patches directory:

ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/patches/

Take 2-3 minutes of your time and go to that directory and look around. For starters, look at the 7.3 directory and how many patches there were between 7.3 and 7.4. The answer? 1314 patches. Yes, over THIRTEEN HUNDRED patches before 7.4 was made. Now look at the 7.4 directory (7.4 is the current release of vim); there are already 211 patches.

The problem is that Bram lets things sit in this condition for ages -- often YEARS -- before making a release. He needs to make releases more often. And in case you think I'm whining, I'm not: even Bram himself has admitted that "there's too many patches between releases":

http://www.vim.org/news/news.php

Quote:

Work on Vim 7.4 has started

[2013-05-17] 7.3 has more than 950 patches, that's too many!

There's hilarity in the fact that he admitted this in May 2013, but didn't do anything about it for another 3 months (vim 7.4 came out August 2013), during which time nearly 400 patches were submit/accepted.

Yet this problem continues on and on (cue Journey's Don't Stop Believing). The only person to blame for it is Bram. He should make an effort to actually roll a new release when he reaches an arbitrary number of patches -- say, 100 or 150. 1300+ is literally insane, because by the time someone upgrades from 7.3 to 7.4, and finds something broken, there are _1300+ patches_ to go through to figure out the regression. It's not manageable, and I'm sure he knows it. So he should step up to the plate and stop playing with drills.

Seriously, with all the self absorbed drivers on the road these days all trying to get to the same place at the same time, I want the Sweet Tooth options on my next car. Cut me off?!?! It's the flaming ice cream buddy!

With fewer officers on the highways and all the dumb ass maneuvers that people pull, it still seems incomprehensible that people don't get why "road rage" exists. I'm all for free choice but acting like an asshole on the roads means you'll probably get an asshole response. It's just human nature. Oh and Fred Rogers is still dead.

This means that you should be asking the people who will buy your product

They're the last people you should ask. http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki...

The tau that are eaten become the true Tau.

Why is his name special?

Because it's just like Elbereth except of scaring monsters away, it attracts nerds instead.

The only problem here is finding a tablet that you can stand on without destroying it in the process. Maybe one per foot? (Or do I just need to lose weight?)

Fallout New Vegas has a man-portable 25mm automatic grenade launcher. It has an on-screen display scrolling what looks like code while the weapon is firing.

The code? It's a piece of BASH scripting. With a crippling syntax error ("if" without closing "fi").

If this was the height of alternate-history pre-war embedded software technology, I can understand why derelict car engines can explode in a nuclear explosion.

So if their are 250,000 patentable inventions in a phone, and that phone retails for $600, by my math each of those inventions are worth about a quarter of a cent per device. So it looks like Apple has a justifiable claim to 1.25 cents per phone.

It depends a bit on how much each individual patent contributes to the overall device/standard/etc.

In the standards context, courts lately have been making an effort (it's never going to be perfect, but at least making an effort) to assign some level of proportional value the patents in question vs. the rest of the patents covering the standard, and use those numbers to calculate a reasonable royalty for the patents in question. In theory (and if all courts eventually start using a similar methodology) that will largely address the royalty stacking problem.

Don't they know wikipedia exists?

Do you know that conservapedia exists?

http://www.conservapedia.com/

Which one is correct? Teach the controversy!

Do you know uncyclopedia exists? http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/...

You are talking about The Elder Bugs, right?

You mean the wrinklers keeping my cookies nice and clean?

http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doo...

Purity.. but not to be confused with POE
http://x-files.wikia.com/wiki/...

...ice

I guess they'll have to, otherwise everything in the Squishee machine will melt long before the arrive.

I found it here. I assume the cheese heads maintaining that wiki have reasonably up to date figures.

I asked for a link because you can say anything you want, but just saying it doesn't make it true. You have to provide evidence of why you're right.

But the article you provide doesn't provide the evidence you thought it would. From your Wikipedia article (emphasis mine):

Censorship ( Latin censura) is a restrictive procedure of usually government agencies in order to mass media to control or in the personal transport mediated.

Usually does not mean always, which is what you're trying to say.

So the Catholic Church established its ban heretical writings

The Catholic Church is a religious organization, not a government.

Just take a look at the Motion Picture Association of America. When it was first started, it was led by Will H Hays, and he was not in the government at that time. He was censoring based on the perceived offensiveness of content.

Either one. Censor is both a noun and a verb.

The pressure to censor media comes from many different places. Government is one. Religious organizations are definitely another, as well as independent organizations (such as the MPAA).

If you're editing to remove "offensive" content, then you are censoring (you can be both an editor and a censor, they're not exclusive). If you're editing to correct grammar, spelling, sentence flow, etc., then you're just editing. Schizophrenia has nothing to do with it.

Here's an example of censorship not done by a government body. You ever play The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time? In the Fire Temple, Nintendo had originally put in some background chanting. However, the chanting was apparently sampled from an Islamic prayer. In the fear that it would offend Islamic people, Nintendo removed the chanting (see http://zelda.wikia.com/wiki/Controversy.

Or how about Dragon Ball? In Japan, where casual nudity and sex isn't quite the big deal it is in the US, several images and scenes from censored. A list of examples are found at http://dragonball.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Censorship_in_the_Dragon_Ball_series.

I asked for a link because you can say anything you want, but just saying it doesn't make it true. You have to provide evidence of why you're right.

But the article you provide doesn't provide the evidence you thought it would. From your Wikipedia article (emphasis mine):

Censorship ( Latin censura) is a restrictive procedure of usually government agencies in order to mass media to control or in the personal transport mediated.

Usually does not mean always, which is what you're trying to say.

So the Catholic Church established its ban heretical writings

The Catholic Church is a religious organization, not a government.

Just take a look at the Motion Picture Association of America. When it was first started, it was led by Will H Hays, and he was not in the government at that time. He was censoring based on the perceived offensiveness of content.

Either one. Censor is both a noun and a verb.

The pressure to censor media comes from many different places. Government is one. Religious organizations are definitely another, as well as independent organizations (such as the MPAA).

If you're editing to remove "offensive" content, then you are censoring (you can be both an editor and a censor, they're not exclusive). If you're editing to correct grammar, spelling, sentence flow, etc., then you're just editing. Schizophrenia has nothing to do with it.

Here's an example of censorship not done by a government body. You ever play The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time? In the Fire Temple, Nintendo had originally put in some background chanting. However, the chanting was apparently sampled from an Islamic prayer. In the fear that it would offend Islamic people, Nintendo removed the chanting (see http://zelda.wikia.com/wiki/Controversy.

Or how about Dragon Ball? In Japan, where casual nudity and sex isn't quite the big deal it is in the US, several images and scenes from censored. A list of examples are found at http://dragonball.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Censorship_in_the_Dragon_Ball_series.

Oh ya, the other things I thought was GREAT in Thief were the maps. No auto-map of the locations you've been that eventually turns into a relatively detailed map of the locale as if you had a blueprint. Instead you get some scribbles on a piece of paper. Exactly what you expect to get if a fence hands you a tip. You couldn't just look at the automap to see what you haven't explored yet or the corridor you overlooked.

Ie, http://thief.wikia.com/wiki/Fi...

I find it funny and a bit sad when other players complained bitterly that the maps were useless (they really weren't). Sometimes getting lost was part of the fun.

"One of the great things about ghostbusters was that it came out at a time when accepted humor wasn't limited by this kind of PC garbage."

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/...

Start reading. Accusing people of being "politically correct" is a standard white, male, racist, asshole tactic for dismissing.

The problem isn't necessarily that Winston Zedmore's character sucked and was just a wall to bounce jokes off of. The problem is that is how this was the standard way virtually any black character was constructed by Hollywood. Winston's character got the least character development, his main screentime was him being all "WHOA", and most of his speaking lines were side jokes and comic relief.

Are you sure you watched the same Ghostbusters that most of us watched? Winston was the everyman outsider that grounded the otherwise "out there" other characters - Ray was the heart, Peter the conman, and Egon the brain. He was the bridge for the average man just looking to make a living and as such he was able to ground those characters to the general public. As a child, I identified with aspects found in all of the characters. Finally, Winston was the character that established just how real the danger was that none of the scientists had even considered. In the second movie, he saved Ray's life. You may need to rewatch the movies.

It is like The Office -- without Jim or Pam there (average people) the rest of the characters would appear to be a collection of "out there" personalities.

Funny how you prove his point by all but demanding a story be told by bolting PC narratives on the side and derailing the entire flow by screaming "I CARE MORE ABOUT NONWHITES, WOMEN, AND GAYS THAN YOU!" at each other and their audience. http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/... Start reading, asshole. I never did anything you claim I did.

"One of the great things about ghostbusters was that it came out at a time when accepted humor wasn't limited by this kind of PC garbage."

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/...

Start reading. Accusing people of being "politically correct" is a standard white, male, racist, asshole tactic for dismissing.

The problem isn't necessarily that Winston Zedmore's character sucked and was just a wall to bounce jokes off of. The problem is that is how this was the standard way virtually any black character was constructed by Hollywood. Winston's character got the least character development, his main screentime was him being all "WHOA", and most of his speaking lines were side jokes and comic relief.

I remember reading an article long ago that said that the Voynich manuscript was made by a con man that wanted to make some quick cash by writing down some gibberish in a book, claiming that it had mystical origins, and selling it off to someone with more money than common sense. (In this case, that person would be Emperor Rudolf II.) Some linguists have said that the statistical patterns of the text match what would be expected of a natural language, but the article that I read suggested that it is possible to create a random text that looks like a natural language by randomly choosing syllables with a special table. This table of syllables is constructed in such a way that the probability of a certain syllable occurring depends on the syllable that precedes it.

His name was John Dee, or maybe his buddy Edward Kelley, both pretty interesting characters.

I also believe that you are referring to the hoax theory of Gordon Rugg, but I found that unconvincing (such ciphers were popular 100 to 150 years after the creation of Voynich, and even if someone independently invented it earlier, manually it is a lot of work for a 240 page hoax).

Now if only we could harness this to make an infinite improbability drive!

From HHGTTG, quoting from here: Infinite Improbability Drive:

The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were of course well understood

If ... such a [infinite improbability] machine is a virtual impossibility, it must have finite improbability. So all [one has] to do in order to make one is to work out how exactly improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea... and turn it on!