The most embarrasing part is that the ignorant, obstinate, prejudiced gullible people who re-elected our president only represent about 18% of the population.
It's up to the other 72% to remember that, because the 18% will now regard themselves as a majority.
Which only proves it's a difference of degree, not kind.
And that's assuming your evaluations of the comparisons are valid. (I take issue with the DMCA being less heinous than the PATRIOT Act.)
It's perfectly legal to track dirt onto my sidewalk too, because I can just wash it off.
Yeah, but the difference between dirt on your sidewalk and Kinberg's chalk on Manhattan streets is that the latter is arranged in symbols that can be easily parsed into information contrary to the propaganda endorsed by the GOP.
Now if his bike had been plastering "NYC [heart] Bush" all over Manhattan, do you think he would have been arrested?
Did you see the program/read the website -- the part about Nic Harcourt's Public Radio program, Morning Becomes Eclectic on LA's KCRW? You can listen to it online here.
KCRW is the only station in LA that I listen to and find new music that I actually go buy. They introduced me (and probably the rest of the nation, indirectly) to Zero 7, Groove Armada, Macy Gray (over a year before she was nominated for an Emmy) and others...
Yea... LA radio sucks... in the commercial part of the FM band. But on Public Radio, it rules.
I had a 1991 Escort LX with a 1.9 liter engine, and regularly got 27-28 miles per gallon commuting, and on the highway, usually 33 miles per gallon... 35 if I was forced to stay to the speed limit. There's a reason why you still see quite a few of that model year on the roads.
Now I just bought a Focus ZTW and miss the fuel efficiency... but nothing else - everything except the engine, suspension and transmission on that Escort fell apart completely, including the cooling system, the electrical system, the timing belt, and the dash instrumentation.
And don't get me started about the frikkin' auto-strangulation shoulder belts, and the goddamn dummy alarm that constantly went off after the belt stretched.
Each song is assigned a number from 1-100 indicating the relative frequency of which you want the weighed song to appear in the rotation? 10's get played 10 times more often than 1's... etc. So, the more often you want to hear the song, the higher the number you assign.
Then you can weight the weighting, indicating to the player how strongly it lets the weighting influence the statistics. High positive integers and you get more songs you like... near zero and you get more or less equally random ordering... high negative integers and you get more stuff you don't like...
Actually, the Rolemaster combat and skill/maneuver systems were ported to MMORPG long ago.
The game was called Gemstone III. You wouldn't know it from their blubs, though, because they sort of didn't ask permission or give credit... they just used the Rolemaster rules and milieu (Shadow World). When the game started getting attention and players on CIS, ICE came down on them for copyright infringement.
I don't know the details of the settlement, since it happened before the AOL gateway opened, but they changed the names of everything in the milieu, keeping the underlying mechanics... there was just no way to reprogram the entire game. (Technically, Dragonrealms, or GSIV is the result of that effort.) But GSIII was already making money and had hordes of devotees, so it only recently was updated to GSIV.
The timeline of the parent company, Simutronics, is here.
Gemstone III was a Rolemaster player's wet dream. Rolemaster was ideal for porting to a game system, since the biggest complaint was the number of tables that needed referencing, and the tracking of all the bonuses and penalties. Automate that, and the freedom that the system allows really shines through. Of course, the automation processes adds additional limitations, but none that aren't there regardless of what system you use.
Microprocessor lab in 1985 at CU-Boulder. My sophomore year as an EECS student.
My assignment:
Develop a BIOS for an 8086 SBC, using an HP64000 develpoment system.
Use Pascal.
Ignore the lovely and idle Motorola 68000 SBCs and development systems occupying the lab. Those were off-limits. HP had just donated their development systems, Intel the SBCs and 8086's, and the free databooks for all students. We had to use those. Oh, and remember that they had a bug that miscompiled indirect relative addresses, in other words, linked list buffers were unallowed. Use arrays.
It didn't matter if you could patch the buggy assembly output yourself. It didn't matter if you could fix the damn broken development system. Use arrays.
Oh, and you're stuck with the lab partner assigned, by adjacency on the student roll. My partner did zero work. I worked 50 hours a week for a 1 semester credit hour lab. I wrote the linked list buffers, patched the assembly code, and found the error in the compiler.
And failed the assignment. So I redid the buffer routines (in Pascal, remember) using arrays, and got full credit.
For the class, I scored 92.5% out of a possible 100%. Unfortunately, the final grade was assigned on a strict curve, with the mean at 95%. Therefore, for all my work, I got a C-, and so did my partner, who did nothing...
I switched to straight EE the next semester. I decided I'd rather design microprocessors than program them. Even thermodynamics was easier than that lab. (And we used Kittel and Kroemer's wacked-out thermo text.)
The top-level comment was an attempt at humor by misinterpretation of the reference to 'Falcon,' in this case, the F-16 Falcon and its [unintentional?] inherent longitudinal aerodynamic instability in flight. More information can be found here.
Unfortnately, such attempts at misinterpreted humor often fail because of the obscurity of the alternate interpretation, as in this case.
Overall funny rating: 2.5 out of a possible 5.0 (Weak). [Not to be confused with slashdot moderation scores, of course. Everyone knows those are a joke.]
The "they" you refer to is Hamilton Sundstrand Human Space Flight.
Here is a quote from their GM on the subject:
"Fortunately, the speed brakes have always operated properly," said Larry McNamara, general manager, HS Human Space Flight. "We have revised our assembly procedures to mistake-proof the installation process, and we are implementing plans to provide new speed brakes to NASA for the shuttle fleet in time to allow NASA to meet its stated return-to-flight goal of March 2005. Kudos to Rudy Valdez and his team in Rockford for their hard work to meet this critical NASA activity."
They found the problem before anything went wrong while checking for defects.
Uhh... they were checking for defects because they just lost another seven astronauts only 13 months ago. I daresay if the last orbiter flight hadn't come back down as a fireball they wouldn't have been scrutinizing gearboxes so closely this time.
So maybe a large array of MEMS mirrors could be used to replace the spinning vorpal-sheets-o-death... if you touched the MEMS array while it was operating it would just feel... tickly.
Actually, that graph is from a study of STD transmission among high school students, so no, I don't feel so bad for them after all, presuming that, to be on that graph, you had to be getting some to begin with.
Very large reddish brown spots that flash in the middle of the picture, usually placed in a light area. They flash in various patterns throughout a given reel while other reels of the same film may have none at all.
If they were handling these reels appropriately, according to their cinematic quality, then they would be wadded up and covered in brown streaks.
Well, I've had one for about two weeks, and now have 262 searches.
Whether or not it's a status symbol, I can't comment. There was no indication that I was part of any test market. I was given a choice to opt out after it showed up. But since it's just a simple bar graph of a number stored in a cookie on my hard drive, I decided to embrace it, since it's trivially interesting to track my search count.
But nonetheless, I have one and you don't, nyah!:p
The only reason this ruling was issued was because a telemarketer had enough money to work the system.
You and I and the other 49,999,998 people on the list technically have the same rights, but the telemarketers' money makes them "more equal" than the rest of us.
The only persons who would consider the above comment offtopic or inappropriate are those who would rather keep the system as is - 0wn3d and c0rrupt3d...
Slashdot Mirror
It's up to the other 72% to remember that, because the 18% will now regard themselves as a majority.
Or something like that.
(Never mind... it's getting late.)
Getting them back will take another 20 or 30 years.
Which only proves it's a difference of degree, not kind. And that's assuming your evaluations of the comparisons are valid. (I take issue with the DMCA being less heinous than the PATRIOT Act.)
That's pretty damn funny... when taken into the context of Gloria Steinem's quote "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle."
Yeah, but the difference between dirt on your sidewalk and Kinberg's chalk on Manhattan streets is that the latter is arranged in symbols that can be easily parsed into information contrary to the propaganda endorsed by the GOP.
Now if his bike had been plastering "NYC [heart] Bush" all over Manhattan, do you think he would have been arrested?
(He might have gotten lynched, but not arrested.)
And don't forget the bastards' 25% restocking fee... OUCH!
KCRW is the only station in LA that I listen to and find new music that I actually go buy. They introduced me (and probably the rest of the nation, indirectly) to Zero 7, Groove Armada, Macy Gray (over a year before she was nominated for an Emmy) and others...
Yea... LA radio sucks... in the commercial part of the FM band. But on Public Radio, it rules.
Now I just bought a Focus ZTW and miss the fuel efficiency... but nothing else - everything except the engine, suspension and transmission on that Escort fell apart completely, including the cooling system, the electrical system, the timing belt, and the dash instrumentation.
And don't get me started about the frikkin' auto-strangulation shoulder belts, and the goddamn dummy alarm that constantly went off after the belt stretched.
Sure, if I'm listening to The White Album, then I want to hear the songs in order, from Back in the USSR to Revolution No. 9.
But if I'm listening to Fush You Mang then all I want to hear is Walking on the Sun and the rest can be shitcanned. Please.
Each song is assigned a number from 1-100 indicating the relative frequency of which you want the weighed song to appear in the rotation? 10's get played 10 times more often than 1's... etc. So, the more often you want to hear the song, the higher the number you assign.
Then you can weight the weighting, indicating to the player how strongly it lets the weighting influence the statistics. High positive integers and you get more songs you like... near zero and you get more or less equally random ordering... high negative integers and you get more stuff you don't like...
The game was called Gemstone III. You wouldn't know it from their blubs, though, because they sort of didn't ask permission or give credit... they just used the Rolemaster rules and milieu (Shadow World). When the game started getting attention and players on CIS, ICE came down on them for copyright infringement.
I don't know the details of the settlement, since it happened before the AOL gateway opened, but they changed the names of everything in the milieu, keeping the underlying mechanics... there was just no way to reprogram the entire game. (Technically, Dragonrealms, or GSIV is the result of that effort.) But GSIII was already making money and had hordes of devotees, so it only recently was updated to GSIV.
The timeline of the parent company, Simutronics, is here.
Gemstone III was a Rolemaster player's wet dream. Rolemaster was ideal for porting to a game system, since the biggest complaint was the number of tables that needed referencing, and the tracking of all the bonuses and penalties. Automate that, and the freedom that the system allows really shines through. Of course, the automation processes adds additional limitations, but none that aren't there regardless of what system you use.
It was just a matter of time before someone used it maliciously to confuse the line between instructions and data.
The 'HC11s we used at AMROC had built-in FORTH interpreters.
Yes. Coding FORTH was easier than writing PASCAL for the M68000 dev system.
My assignment:
Develop a BIOS for an 8086 SBC, using an HP64000 develpoment system.
Use Pascal.
Ignore the lovely and idle Motorola 68000 SBCs and development systems occupying the lab. Those were off-limits. HP had just donated their development systems, Intel the SBCs and 8086's, and the free databooks for all students. We had to use those. Oh, and remember that they had a bug that miscompiled indirect relative addresses, in other words, linked list buffers were unallowed. Use arrays.
It didn't matter if you could patch the buggy assembly output yourself. It didn't matter if you could fix the damn broken development system. Use arrays.
Oh, and you're stuck with the lab partner assigned, by adjacency on the student roll. My partner did zero work. I worked 50 hours a week for a 1 semester credit hour lab. I wrote the linked list buffers, patched the assembly code, and found the error in the compiler.
And failed the assignment. So I redid the buffer routines (in Pascal, remember) using arrays, and got full credit.
For the class, I scored 92.5% out of a possible 100%. Unfortunately, the final grade was assigned on a strict curve, with the mean at 95%. Therefore, for all my work, I got a C-, and so did my partner, who did nothing...
I switched to straight EE the next semester. I decided I'd rather design microprocessors than program them. Even thermodynamics was easier than that lab. (And we used Kittel and Kroemer's wacked-out thermo text.)
Unfortnately, such attempts at misinterpreted humor often fail because of the obscurity of the alternate interpretation, as in this case.
Overall funny rating: 2.5 out of a possible 5.0 (Weak). [Not to be confused with slashdot moderation scores, of course. Everyone knows those are a joke.]
Here is a quote from their GM on the subject:
Uhh... they were checking for defects because they just lost another seven astronauts only 13 months ago. I daresay if the last orbiter flight hadn't come back down as a fireball they wouldn't have been scrutinizing gearboxes so closely this time.
So maybe a large array of MEMS mirrors could be used to replace the spinning vorpal-sheets-o-death... if you touched the MEMS array while it was operating it would just feel... tickly.
Actually, that graph is from a study of STD transmission among high school students, so no, I don't feel so bad for them after all, presuming that, to be on that graph, you had to be getting some to begin with.
Thus, cosmologists and economists have much in common.
If they were handling these reels appropriately, according to their cinematic quality, then they would be wadded up and covered in brown streaks.
Whether or not it's a status symbol, I can't comment. There was no indication that I was part of any test market. I was given a choice to opt out after it showed up. But since it's just a simple bar graph of a number stored in a cookie on my hard drive, I decided to embrace it, since it's trivially interesting to track my search count.
But nonetheless, I have one and you don't, nyah! :p
The only reason this ruling was issued was because a telemarketer had enough money to work the system.
You and I and the other 49,999,998 people on the list technically have the same rights, but the telemarketers' money makes them "more equal" than the rest of us.
The only persons who would consider the above comment offtopic or inappropriate are those who would rather keep the system as is - 0wn3d and c0rrupt3d...