Nah, like I said, all areas of the drive start out as scrambled, so all 'previous' bits would read as one, pretending that actually worked.
It was a stupid idea to start with even when hard drives did store data in such a way it was possible to look at each bit, simply because there's no magical fairy running around making sure the drive is 100% magnetically inactive before you use it, which is the only way you could later see the 'spillover'.
The only justification for anything more than a zero-wipe is possibly remapped bad sectors.
I was just giving an example of the encoding. Yeah, that's like a decade-ago encoding, but the point stands.
Modern hard drives use even weirder encoding, almost at the level of byte-level encoding, where there are basically 256 different patterns that bear no relationship to the actual bit patterns. They have a pattern for 00000000, 00000001, etc. It is a complicated waveform, not a highs and lows. For all I know, they're even higher now, with a single wave that represents a 16 bit patterns.
And hence talking about the 'value' of the 'previous bit' is nonsense. There's not even such thing as a location on the drive a 'bit' is stored at, much less some sort of partial remain of a previous bit.
And I did say that they use an 'analog signal'. That was half the point of my post.
The 'recover bits' idea is based on essentially the same idea that all modems are 2400 bps, because that's the highest baud rate phone lines can support. That is, indeed, the highest baud rate, but that just means we started doing something besides toggling the phone line off and on, to transmit more than one bit at a time. Hard drives stopped doing that a long time ago.
Of course, even if they were doing that, you still couldn't recover the data of a zero'd drive by looking as 'residue' data. Even in an imaginary world where a previously-written-and-then-zero'd bit is 0.1, and a hypothetically-never-written bit is 0, that would not actually recover any data, because of the aforementioned fact that hard drives do not start out at 'zero'. They are formatted to zero, at the factory. (In fact, they don't even have 'tracks' on them before that.)
If there really was a 'residue' value left behind, every single bit would have it. Pretending hard drives actually worked that way.
For one thing, hard drives do not store data like that. They store a one when the data changes, and a zero when it's the same. So 11010011 would actually be written as written as 10111010.
A quick thought will demonstrate that not knowing the value of any bit will render the entire rest of the byte unknown.
More importantly, bytes start without a value. They are in indeterminate state, they are magnetized. They are essentially.5. They are then formatted, at the factory, by writing a 'zero' to them.
Pretending that your idea worked (Which it doesn't.) every bit would read as a one. (Or, rather, every bit as a change bit, resulting in the data being 10101010.)
However, your idea is dumb to start with, because, as the other reply points out, hard drives aren't storing 0 or 1. They're storing 0.0-0.3 and 0.7-1.0, because hard drive manufactures make them as dense as possible, to the point that when writing one bit, you can't help but slightly alter the bit ahead or behind it. The development of hard drives is a contest to produce less overlap when writing.
Which means if you were to actually read the value of a bit, there would be a good chance it was 0.2 not because it 'used' to be a 1, which incidentally doesn't work that way, but because it has a 1 after it.
This is actually somewhat of a simplification, because in actuality, at the base level, hard drives are 'analog'. The strength of write is not a square wave, or even a jigsaw wave. It is much smoother than that. It is like transmitting morse code using a slide whistle.
I know there are lots of stupid urban myths about how hard drives work, but if there was a way to recover data from an overwritten hard drive, it would immediately get used to store more data on the drive.
The only way to recover data from a zero'd hard drive is to look for remapped sectors.
Oh, and I should add, this only applies to people in climates where it doesn't get absurdly cold outside.
Although many people in such areas have an outbuilding they can use, like a well house. It's not really the 'outside' part that's relevant, it's the 'Not inside a building that's going to burn for four hours' part that's important.
At the very least, if you have to put it inside, put it against an outside wall. A connected garage would be ideal, unless you store flammable crap there.
Socks are destroyed in a quantum-mechanical manner. Socks don't specifically disappear, or slowly disappear, they just disappear in general, like 'an electron' jumps from one energy level to another, although we all know it's not possible to tell electrons apart.
It's a statistical disappearance, where 'each sock' (Although we know that socks are, while being washed, actually 'waves' that are indistinguishable from each other.) has something like a 5% chance of totally disappearing, but lint is produced continually from the probability that a sock vanished.
Sorta the opposite of the photovoltaic effect, where the gradual absorption of electrical energy results in the random emission of entire photons.
Sometimes, at the end of the wash, enough lint was emitted that the system finds itself minus a sock when you collapse the waveform by opening the door.
This is, incidentally, why you shouldn't look inside a washer while it's running...you'll lose a lot more socks, up to one every time you peak in.
I always thought people should install fire safes outside.
Seriously. It's a safe. As long as it is actually secured to the ground via some means, no one should be able to get in. At least not without explosives, and if they're willing to do that, duh, they'd be willing to break some windows to get in, or take a chainsaw to the front door.
Install it on, or under, your backporch. And you don't have to worry about 'how long' the fire will last. It might get somewhat hot, but obviously not as much as inside the house, and in a fire, the porch obviously goes out fairly quickly when firefighters show up.
And, as you pointed out, you can actually get to it after the fire.
Storage mechanisms for clothes are stupid, you can't ever find anything.
Just get a very big floor, and throw everything on it.
Plus, you can reuse clothes by putting them back, and, when you decide to wash, you can easily see which is dirty. (Or, alternately, if you wish to wash everything after wearing it once, just store it in the washing machine after wearing.)
Even if they can't do this, that just means you need a laptop and two cards. (Or three if one fails.)
This lets you swap out cards, stick the full one in your computer, and keep going while it copies. And it will obviously finish fast enough...it just has to copy one photo in the time it takes you to take one photo.
Anyone who thinks 'but he might not be able to afford a laptop' is ignoring the fact that a hundred SD cards would cost something like 800 dollars at minimum, and that's assuming they are the current smallest size. If they were moderately sized ones when purchased, that'd be something like $2500. You can buy one of those cheap flash Linux laptop for like $250, and they have SD slots, although it's possible they don't have enough 'disk space'. But a real laptop is like $500.
There are also devices explicitly designed to solve this problem, external hard drives that operate on their own to move files from SD cards to an internal hard drive. I don't know how much they are, but certainly less than laptops.
Does anyone feel like we're solving a problem that can't actually exist anyway?
As for the actual topic under discussion, I actually do have a need for SD storage, although not 'hundreds' of cards. I have a SD mp3 player in my car, and I have four or five cards with different music on them. I solve the labeling problem simply by labeling them A-E, and knowing roughly what I have on each one. I used to do essentially the same thing for VHS tapes, way back when. As long as I know I currently have Christmas music on D, and BNL on A, or whatever I'm good. And worse comes to worst, it's not that hard to check each one.
However, my actual problem is physically securing them. Right now, I have plastic cases for three of them, but that's a crazy hassle. Is there some sort of SD card holder that holds them in by friction but you can pull them straight out?
Something like any of the CD solutions, either sideways jewel-case holders, or the flat clear plastic books, but for SD cards? It would be amazingly nice if they were actually designed to be mounted, but I'd take anything. (I collect old 128 and 256 meg SD cards from friends and family, with the plan to put individual albums on them, but I can't actually manage them in my car right now.)
I can find 'SD holders', but they seem designed to hold, like, two SD cards. And they seem larger than just keeping them in the two fricking plastic cases the cards came in. And they're super expensive...I presume they're for 'I plan to take eight bajillion pictures on vacation, and I'm an ass', vs. 'There is nothing valuable on any of these cards, but I'd rather they stay where I can find them and not slide under the car seats.'
Sync tools are plentiful and easier to understand and deal with than 'backup' tools.
Incremental backup tools only make sense for personal users if they have big files that change often. Otherwise, they should get a NAS or a external USB drive and simply one-way sync files onto it.
Download is a verb. Downloading goes from one place to another place. You can add on, or leave off, either or both of those prepositions. (And put whatever other prepositions make sense on there, like the time.)
I downloaded the file.
I downloaded the file from X.
I downloaded the file to Y.
I downloaded the file from X to Y.
I downloaded the file to Y from X.
All perfectly valid grammatically and logically. It's exactly the same with uploaded.
The difference is the implied preposition. With downloaded, the implied preposition is 'to the subject of the sentence', whereas with uploaded it is 'from the subject of the sentence'.
Now, there is a difference between downloaded and uploaded, but it's not which has 'to' vs. 'from'. It's which end initiated it.
I uploaded a file from France to Russia.
I downloaded a file from France to Russia.
The first means I, from France, sent a file from there to Russia.
The second means I, from Russia, asked a computer in France for a file and got it.
With downloaded, you are speaking from the POV of the computer that asked for the file to be sent to it, whereas with uploaded, you are speaking from the POV of the computer that asked to send the file. And only one of those can exist (Only one person could start this whole thing!), so everything is either an upload or a download, not both. But that doesn't mean you can't clarify either verb with both a 'to' and a 'from' to explain what is meant.
One device will start the copy, and it is that device that is downloading, the other uploading. Regardless of where they are.
Ignoring quibbles about 'triggering the other end to do the copy', like FTP. You told your end to, in an automated way, tell the other end, so your end still did it.
When you do this manually, like if you were to SSH into a computer and FTP back to your own computer to get a file from it, it can get somewhat confusing. Arguably, you're downloading to the SSH'd computer, but that can go either way. Likewise, it is very confusing when you trigger a copy between two computers from a third computer, like in FXP.
So basically anything coming off an SD card is 'downloading', and anything being put on it is 'uploading'.
Although, in reality, people usually used those terms for 'connections' to existing services, not a storage medium that get inserted into computers. But if you're going to use those in that sense, you're always downloading from them when you copy off them. As storage devices cannot initiate copying themselves.
And suddenly I just remembered those 'backup' external hard drives where a button press can initiate a backup, which adds even more to the confusion.
NASA, of course, is completely broken in this regard, and using 'uploading' to actually mean 'up', regardless of who did it.
Okay, a lot of people are reading 'use classified military technology' as 'merging'. I'm simply not seeing that.
I do see how NASA's rocket research could be hampered by the fact it's using military tech, and thus can no longer be as open...but NASA isn't known for sharing tech in the first place.
Photograph when you are trespassing isn't a crime either. Obviously, the trespassing is a crime, but not photographing.
Various laws may be in place that keep you from making money of the pictures (Enacted to keep criminals from making money from their crimes.), and recording trade secrets while breaking the law is an additional violations of trade secret laws. And various peeping tom laws can apply if taking pictures of people.
But nothing stops you from taking photographs in general, even while somewhere totally illegally.
Yeah, computer people tend to assume trespass laws are magic, but, people aren't required to read and parse all signs.
Especially as the signs say 'No Gun', and not 'No Admittance if Carrying a Gun'. They're not even attempting to tell you not to enter. Even if they were, however, that probably would not work.
'Employee only' signs and 'No Admittance Without Authorization' can work, if clearly posted, though. They have to be posted on the door, though, not some random location on the wall once inside.
And, you'd think, 'Womens' and 'Mens' signs on restrooms, but it turns out that's not actually trespassing either, although there are other laws about that.
Trespassing, in general, requires someone to actually ask you to leave or very specific signs posted in a manner you cannot fail to miss.
Although be aware that some 'No Gun' signs are simply informing you of pre-existing laws about where you can have guns. Like those signs near schools declaring them to be Gun Free Zones...it's illegal to have a gun that close to the school, the signs are just a courtesy. (However, violating the sign would still not be trespassing, it would be a different crime.)
Blowing up a crowded security checkpoint at an airport would have a nice irony to it, in addition to the overreaction as all other airports shut down causing massive travel problems.
No shit. This is idiotic. The say to track mileage is with the fucking device built into the car to track mileage. Duh. This isn't rocket science. Oregon is, I believe, one of those states where all cars have to have inspections every few years, so it's not difficult to do. (In fact, it's probably already collected.)
Although I've always thought it should be the other way around...we should reward high mileage cars and good driving practices that get good mileage, so what we should actually do is issue rebates for total mileage driven, and then raise the gas tax to counteract those rebates.
For example, let's say right now, if you use 1000 gallons of gas, you pay 700 dollars in gas taxes. Let's add 300 and make it 1000 dollars in gas tax...but you get back a penny for every mile driven. So if you have a car/driving style that got you 30,000 miles on that 1000 gallons, you'd get back 300 dollars on your taxes. But if you only got 15,000 miles, you'd get back 150.
Note this 'rebate', while notionally of your gas taxes, is not actually related to to the gas tax you paid. You don't have to show any proof of that or anything.
These numbers are, of course, imaginary, but the point is to raise the taxes, and make the rebate, where people who get, say, 30 mpg pay exactly the same taxes, and people who get better mileage pay less. So we penalize gas usage, and reward mileage. (And people with electric cars get free money. Although we do tax electricity too.)
Of course, there's the problem of people who live near state lines buying gas in the other state, but that's always a problem with purchase taxes.
Anyone who uses Occam's Razor WRT the cause of a plane crash is a moron. 'Someone snipped a wire.' and 'A wire got cut by a mechanical problem.' are equally simple explanations.
Occam's Razor would just tell us that, if a wire was snapped, it probably was, you know, that wire, not some other freak accident that just happened to be going on that looked exactly like what would happen if that wire was broken, but not caused by it, and the wire magically broke after that.
Sometimes Occam's Razor can shoot down conspiracy theories just fine.
For example: The 9/11 morons claiming the government replaced various airplanes with missiles, and have never managed to explain to me what logical reason there would be for that. Sure, flying airplanes into things to start a war, fine, and let's pretend the WTC guy wanted his buildings demolished. But why missiles? Why not use the damn actual airplanes? And then they wouldn't have to additionally execute everyone on the plane, and dismantle it. (Of course, the loons claim they didn't and those people didn't exist, which raises the next question of why they didn't invent terrorists too?)
Answer: Because the bad science they've invented requires missiles, despite there being no logical reason for it. Whereas modern airplanes actually have automatic control built in and it would be a few hours work to make the non-responsive to manual control.
Likewise: Why one earth would the US government blame actual terrorists that were roaming free when they were supposed to be dead? Instead of just inventing new guys? And, hey, here's a thought, how about inventing Iraqis?
Answer: The 9/11 Truthers are morons who will seize on any piece of evidence without considering whether or not it actually makes sense for people to do.
But WRT this death: We already know he had enemies, they already exist. And thus it doesn't require any 'extra entities' to assert a conspiracy.
That's not to say I believe it, or even consider it. But it's not removable by Occam's Razor.
This is why all 'ticking time bomb' examples are nonsense. In the real world, if someone straight-out tortured someone and stopped a bomb from going off, they would 'get away' with it.
Whether it would be the DA refusing to bring charges, the jury failing to convict, or the executive pardoning them, it would be unlikely for them to spend any time in jail, or at most a nominal amount.
But the right wants to do this in secret, which rather implies, when it is looked at in the light of day, that it will not stand up to public opinion.
Yeah, regional networks are sorta stupid. I mean, I belong to the 'Atlanta' one, despite living over 100 miles away...but I've gone through and set almost all my information to just friends, with my high school and college allowed to 'friends of friends' just in case they think they know me but aren't sure. Networks get nothing.
It's incredibly dumb to use the default and let anyone who just asserts they live in the same region as you have access to your information. Any information.
As far as I know, people can join as many regional networks as they want, as often as they want, so with a few logical deductions about you they could figure out what networks you're in, join them, and see all that stuff.
All of this is stupid. It's impossible to prove they've actually read the summons without the cooperation of facebook. Sure, you can tell when someone has logged in, but not that they've read some message.
And if you have facebook's cooperation, obviously, you should just get their IP and email address and track them down in person.
The courts really shouldn't be letting papers be served in any way but in person.
You know, women who have the same first name as their husband really need to buck the tradition of taking their husband's last name, if only to avoid confusion that, if added up, could easily waste a year of their life.
Of course, having a married couple with the same first name and different last name would also result in confusion. Just not as much.
...that adventure game designers seem to be designing for the lowest common denominator.
Granted, there is some reason behind some of their choices...pixel-hunts suck, so indicating what objects can be used, and their name, is a good thing. But they could, for example, include a lot of extraneous hotspots, and even items. It's a lot harder to brute force when you've got 20 items in inventory and 15 on screen. Or, if when you look at a bookcase, you can grab every book instead of the one you need.
And, of course, 3D movement helps a lot. I remember in The Pandora Directive, you're trying to get past a security lock, and the solution is to make, of course, a fishing rod out of a hook or something and grab a clipboard with passcodes on it.
But the trick was that the clipboard was on the receptionist's desk, behind a window, and you actually had to walk up to the window and look to the right to see it even existed. You couldn't just run your mouse over the screen.
Same with stuff in trashcans. Walk up to them, look down, there it is, but you couldn't click on the trashcans from across the room.
At some level, of course, this just becomes annoying. But there's always been a trade-off there, and, too often, I think companies err on the side of 'simple'.
And, totally unrelated, I'd like a game that treated concepts as items. The Pandora Directive made me think about that, because you didn't just have conversational trees, you had a list of every person and company and noun you'd ever come across, and another list of every inventory item, and could ask anyone about any of them.
I think it would be interesting to expand that idea. For example, say you come across a car that needs to be hotwired. Well, in a normal adventure game that would be sole book on a bookshelf, or you'd have a question as a tree option in a conversation somewhere.
What if, instead, you had a 'concepts inventory' included the idea 'hotwire a car'. And you could drag it, like normal inventory, onto people, or onto a bookcase, or onto a computer, and get the answer. (Or not, depending on who you ask.) And now you have a new verb on the car.
And such a system would certainly solve the goofy 'You have a three hundred page book but can only read the four relevant pages' problem. Which is especially weird if you have the book before you know what's relevant. No, now pages show up when you 'combine' concepts with the book, presumably looking up that information in an index or something and marking the pages.
You could even combine concepts and make new ones. Drag 'Person X' onto 'Company ABC' and get 'Is person X working for company ABC?'.
Because survival horror is just a traditional adventure game with an action game bolted on. Or, more often, the other way around.
He didn't discuss it for the same reason he didn't discuss RPG/adventure games, or action/adventure games in general. Everyone can logically see how that works, he doesn't need to talk about every possible genre cross, although it would have been nice to mention that almost every video game ever made has some 'adventure' elements, even if it's just Doom's 'find the colored keys to open the doors'.
Incidentally, I will argue that it makes more sense to talk about action/adventure games because 'survival horror' excludes games with near identical gameplay, minus 'horror'. Like Half-Life, which would be the defining 'survival horror' game...if it was against zombies, in a darker and spookier environment.
I.e., horror survival is a thematic genre, whereas we're actually talking about gameplay genres right now.
I, however, was a little disappointed he seemed to think that 'recent computer games' had invented a fully 3D interface to wander around and find clues, when, of course, that was present as far back as Under a Killing Moon in frickin 1994. (And probably earlier.)
And continued to Dreamfall in 2006, and probably dozens of games in between. (And probably most action/adventure games although I don't play those.)
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Nah, like I said, all areas of the drive start out as scrambled, so all 'previous' bits would read as one, pretending that actually worked.
It was a stupid idea to start with even when hard drives did store data in such a way it was possible to look at each bit, simply because there's no magical fairy running around making sure the drive is 100% magnetically inactive before you use it, which is the only way you could later see the 'spillover'.
The only justification for anything more than a zero-wipe is possibly remapped bad sectors.
I was just giving an example of the encoding. Yeah, that's like a decade-ago encoding, but the point stands.
Modern hard drives use even weirder encoding, almost at the level of byte-level encoding, where there are basically 256 different patterns that bear no relationship to the actual bit patterns. They have a pattern for 00000000, 00000001, etc. It is a complicated waveform, not a highs and lows. For all I know, they're even higher now, with a single wave that represents a 16 bit patterns.
And hence talking about the 'value' of the 'previous bit' is nonsense. There's not even such thing as a location on the drive a 'bit' is stored at, much less some sort of partial remain of a previous bit.
And I did say that they use an 'analog signal'. That was half the point of my post.
The 'recover bits' idea is based on essentially the same idea that all modems are 2400 bps, because that's the highest baud rate phone lines can support. That is, indeed, the highest baud rate, but that just means we started doing something besides toggling the phone line off and on, to transmit more than one bit at a time. Hard drives stopped doing that a long time ago.
Of course, even if they were doing that, you still couldn't recover the data of a zero'd drive by looking as 'residue' data. Even in an imaginary world where a previously-written-and-then-zero'd bit is 0.1, and a hypothetically-never-written bit is 0, that would not actually recover any data, because of the aforementioned fact that hard drives do not start out at 'zero'. They are formatted to zero, at the factory. (In fact, they don't even have 'tracks' on them before that.)
If there really was a 'residue' value left behind, every single bit would have it. Pretending hard drives actually worked that way.
The 'previous value' of each bit is nonsense.
For one thing, hard drives do not store data like that. They store a one when the data changes, and a zero when it's the same. So 11010011 would actually be written as written as 10111010.
A quick thought will demonstrate that not knowing the value of any bit will render the entire rest of the byte unknown.
More importantly, bytes start without a value. They are in indeterminate state, they are magnetized. They are essentially .5. They are then formatted, at the factory, by writing a 'zero' to them.
Pretending that your idea worked (Which it doesn't.) every bit would read as a one. (Or, rather, every bit as a change bit, resulting in the data being 10101010.)
However, your idea is dumb to start with, because, as the other reply points out, hard drives aren't storing 0 or 1. They're storing 0.0-0.3 and 0.7-1.0, because hard drive manufactures make them as dense as possible, to the point that when writing one bit, you can't help but slightly alter the bit ahead or behind it. The development of hard drives is a contest to produce less overlap when writing.
Which means if you were to actually read the value of a bit, there would be a good chance it was 0.2 not because it 'used' to be a 1, which incidentally doesn't work that way, but because it has a 1 after it.
This is actually somewhat of a simplification, because in actuality, at the base level, hard drives are 'analog'. The strength of write is not a square wave, or even a jigsaw wave. It is much smoother than that. It is like transmitting morse code using a slide whistle.
I know there are lots of stupid urban myths about how hard drives work, but if there was a way to recover data from an overwritten hard drive, it would immediately get used to store more data on the drive.
The only way to recover data from a zero'd hard drive is to look for remapped sectors.
Oh, and I should add, this only applies to people in climates where it doesn't get absurdly cold outside.
Although many people in such areas have an outbuilding they can use, like a well house. It's not really the 'outside' part that's relevant, it's the 'Not inside a building that's going to burn for four hours' part that's important.
At the very least, if you have to put it inside, put it against an outside wall. A connected garage would be ideal, unless you store flammable crap there.
It doesn't pick one sock.
Socks are destroyed in a quantum-mechanical manner. Socks don't specifically disappear, or slowly disappear, they just disappear in general, like 'an electron' jumps from one energy level to another, although we all know it's not possible to tell electrons apart.
It's a statistical disappearance, where 'each sock' (Although we know that socks are, while being washed, actually 'waves' that are indistinguishable from each other.) has something like a 5% chance of totally disappearing, but lint is produced continually from the probability that a sock vanished.
Sorta the opposite of the photovoltaic effect, where the gradual absorption of electrical energy results in the random emission of entire photons.
Sometimes, at the end of the wash, enough lint was emitted that the system finds itself minus a sock when you collapse the waveform by opening the door.
This is, incidentally, why you shouldn't look inside a washer while it's running...you'll lose a lot more socks, up to one every time you peak in.
It's always amazed me that people think socks just magically disappear.
Obviously, the dryers are shredding the socks, probably one a load, and producing lint with them.
I mean, where do people think that 'lint' comes from? Thin air?
I always thought people should install fire safes outside.
Seriously. It's a safe. As long as it is actually secured to the ground via some means, no one should be able to get in. At least not without explosives, and if they're willing to do that, duh, they'd be willing to break some windows to get in, or take a chainsaw to the front door.
Install it on, or under, your backporch. And you don't have to worry about 'how long' the fire will last. It might get somewhat hot, but obviously not as much as inside the house, and in a fire, the porch obviously goes out fairly quickly when firefighters show up.
And, as you pointed out, you can actually get to it after the fire.
Storage mechanisms for clothes are stupid, you can't ever find anything.
Just get a very big floor, and throw everything on it.
Plus, you can reuse clothes by putting them back, and, when you decide to wash, you can easily see which is dirty. (Or, alternately, if you wish to wash everything after wearing it once, just store it in the washing machine after wearing.)
Even if they can't do this, that just means you need a laptop and two cards. (Or three if one fails.)
This lets you swap out cards, stick the full one in your computer, and keep going while it copies. And it will obviously finish fast enough...it just has to copy one photo in the time it takes you to take one photo.
Anyone who thinks 'but he might not be able to afford a laptop' is ignoring the fact that a hundred SD cards would cost something like 800 dollars at minimum, and that's assuming they are the current smallest size. If they were moderately sized ones when purchased, that'd be something like $2500. You can buy one of those cheap flash Linux laptop for like $250, and they have SD slots, although it's possible they don't have enough 'disk space'. But a real laptop is like $500.
There are also devices explicitly designed to solve this problem, external hard drives that operate on their own to move files from SD cards to an internal hard drive. I don't know how much they are, but certainly less than laptops.
Does anyone feel like we're solving a problem that can't actually exist anyway?
As for the actual topic under discussion, I actually do have a need for SD storage, although not 'hundreds' of cards. I have a SD mp3 player in my car, and I have four or five cards with different music on them. I solve the labeling problem simply by labeling them A-E, and knowing roughly what I have on each one. I used to do essentially the same thing for VHS tapes, way back when. As long as I know I currently have Christmas music on D, and BNL on A, or whatever I'm good. And worse comes to worst, it's not that hard to check each one.
However, my actual problem is physically securing them. Right now, I have plastic cases for three of them, but that's a crazy hassle. Is there some sort of SD card holder that holds them in by friction but you can pull them straight out?
Something like any of the CD solutions, either sideways jewel-case holders, or the flat clear plastic books, but for SD cards? It would be amazingly nice if they were actually designed to be mounted, but I'd take anything. (I collect old 128 and 256 meg SD cards from friends and family, with the plan to put individual albums on them, but I can't actually manage them in my car right now.)
I can find 'SD holders', but they seem designed to hold, like, two SD cards. And they seem larger than just keeping them in the two fricking plastic cases the cards came in. And they're super expensive...I presume they're for 'I plan to take eight bajillion pictures on vacation, and I'm an ass', vs. 'There is nothing valuable on any of these cards, but I'd rather they stay where I can find them and not slide under the car seats.'
Sync tools are plentiful and easier to understand and deal with than 'backup' tools.
Incremental backup tools only make sense for personal users if they have big files that change often. Otherwise, they should get a NAS or a external USB drive and simply one-way sync files onto it.
Um, no.
Download is a verb. Downloading goes from one place to another place. You can add on, or leave off, either or both of those prepositions. (And put whatever other prepositions make sense on there, like the time.)
I downloaded the file.
I downloaded the file from X.
I downloaded the file to Y.
I downloaded the file from X to Y.
I downloaded the file to Y from X.
All perfectly valid grammatically and logically. It's exactly the same with uploaded.
The difference is the implied preposition. With downloaded, the implied preposition is 'to the subject of the sentence', whereas with uploaded it is 'from the subject of the sentence'.
Now, there is a difference between downloaded and uploaded, but it's not which has 'to' vs. 'from'. It's which end initiated it.
I uploaded a file from France to Russia.
I downloaded a file from France to Russia.
The first means I, from France, sent a file from there to Russia.
The second means I, from Russia, asked a computer in France for a file and got it.
With downloaded, you are speaking from the POV of the computer that asked for the file to be sent to it, whereas with uploaded, you are speaking from the POV of the computer that asked to send the file. And only one of those can exist (Only one person could start this whole thing!), so everything is either an upload or a download, not both. But that doesn't mean you can't clarify either verb with both a 'to' and a 'from' to explain what is meant.
One device will start the copy, and it is that device that is downloading, the other uploading. Regardless of where they are.
Ignoring quibbles about 'triggering the other end to do the copy', like FTP. You told your end to, in an automated way, tell the other end, so your end still did it.
When you do this manually, like if you were to SSH into a computer and FTP back to your own computer to get a file from it, it can get somewhat confusing. Arguably, you're downloading to the SSH'd computer, but that can go either way. Likewise, it is very confusing when you trigger a copy between two computers from a third computer, like in FXP.
So basically anything coming off an SD card is 'downloading', and anything being put on it is 'uploading'.
Although, in reality, people usually used those terms for 'connections' to existing services, not a storage medium that get inserted into computers. But if you're going to use those in that sense, you're always downloading from them when you copy off them. As storage devices cannot initiate copying themselves.
And suddenly I just remembered those 'backup' external hard drives where a button press can initiate a backup, which adds even more to the confusion.
NASA, of course, is completely broken in this regard, and using 'uploading' to actually mean 'up', regardless of who did it.
Okay, a lot of people are reading 'use classified military technology' as 'merging'. I'm simply not seeing that.
I do see how NASA's rocket research could be hampered by the fact it's using military tech, and thus can no longer be as open...but NASA isn't known for sharing tech in the first place.
Photograph when you are trespassing isn't a crime either. Obviously, the trespassing is a crime, but not photographing.
Various laws may be in place that keep you from making money of the pictures (Enacted to keep criminals from making money from their crimes.), and recording trade secrets while breaking the law is an additional violations of trade secret laws. And various peeping tom laws can apply if taking pictures of people.
But nothing stops you from taking photographs in general, even while somewhere totally illegally.
Yeah, computer people tend to assume trespass laws are magic, but, people aren't required to read and parse all signs.
Especially as the signs say 'No Gun', and not 'No Admittance if Carrying a Gun'. They're not even attempting to tell you not to enter. Even if they were, however, that probably would not work.
'Employee only' signs and 'No Admittance Without Authorization' can work, if clearly posted, though. They have to be posted on the door, though, not some random location on the wall once inside.
And, you'd think, 'Womens' and 'Mens' signs on restrooms, but it turns out that's not actually trespassing either, although there are other laws about that.
Trespassing, in general, requires someone to actually ask you to leave or very specific signs posted in a manner you cannot fail to miss.
Although be aware that some 'No Gun' signs are simply informing you of pre-existing laws about where you can have guns. Like those signs near schools declaring them to be Gun Free Zones...it's illegal to have a gun that close to the school, the signs are just a courtesy. (However, violating the sign would still not be trespassing, it would be a different crime.)
Blowing up a crowded security checkpoint at an airport would have a nice irony to it, in addition to the overreaction as all other airports shut down causing massive travel problems.
No shit. This is idiotic. The say to track mileage is with the fucking device built into the car to track mileage. Duh. This isn't rocket science. Oregon is, I believe, one of those states where all cars have to have inspections every few years, so it's not difficult to do. (In fact, it's probably already collected.)
Although I've always thought it should be the other way around...we should reward high mileage cars and good driving practices that get good mileage, so what we should actually do is issue rebates for total mileage driven, and then raise the gas tax to counteract those rebates.
For example, let's say right now, if you use 1000 gallons of gas, you pay 700 dollars in gas taxes. Let's add 300 and make it 1000 dollars in gas tax...but you get back a penny for every mile driven. So if you have a car/driving style that got you 30,000 miles on that 1000 gallons, you'd get back 300 dollars on your taxes. But if you only got 15,000 miles, you'd get back 150.
Note this 'rebate', while notionally of your gas taxes, is not actually related to to the gas tax you paid. You don't have to show any proof of that or anything.
These numbers are, of course, imaginary, but the point is to raise the taxes, and make the rebate, where people who get, say, 30 mpg pay exactly the same taxes, and people who get better mileage pay less. So we penalize gas usage, and reward mileage. (And people with electric cars get free money. Although we do tax electricity too.)
Of course, there's the problem of people who live near state lines buying gas in the other state, but that's always a problem with purchase taxes.
Anyone who uses Occam's Razor WRT the cause of a plane crash is a moron. 'Someone snipped a wire.' and 'A wire got cut by a mechanical problem.' are equally simple explanations.
Occam's Razor would just tell us that, if a wire was snapped, it probably was, you know, that wire, not some other freak accident that just happened to be going on that looked exactly like what would happen if that wire was broken, but not caused by it, and the wire magically broke after that.
Sometimes Occam's Razor can shoot down conspiracy theories just fine.
For example: The 9/11 morons claiming the government replaced various airplanes with missiles, and have never managed to explain to me what logical reason there would be for that. Sure, flying airplanes into things to start a war, fine, and let's pretend the WTC guy wanted his buildings demolished. But why missiles? Why not use the damn actual airplanes? And then they wouldn't have to additionally execute everyone on the plane, and dismantle it. (Of course, the loons claim they didn't and those people didn't exist, which raises the next question of why they didn't invent terrorists too?)
Answer: Because the bad science they've invented requires missiles, despite there being no logical reason for it. Whereas modern airplanes actually have automatic control built in and it would be a few hours work to make the non-responsive to manual control.
Likewise: Why one earth would the US government blame actual terrorists that were roaming free when they were supposed to be dead? Instead of just inventing new guys? And, hey, here's a thought, how about inventing Iraqis?
Answer: The 9/11 Truthers are morons who will seize on any piece of evidence without considering whether or not it actually makes sense for people to do.
But WRT this death: We already know he had enemies, they already exist. And thus it doesn't require any 'extra entities' to assert a conspiracy.
That's not to say I believe it, or even consider it. But it's not removable by Occam's Razor.
Exactly.
This is why all 'ticking time bomb' examples are nonsense. In the real world, if someone straight-out tortured someone and stopped a bomb from going off, they would 'get away' with it.
Whether it would be the DA refusing to bring charges, the jury failing to convict, or the executive pardoning them, it would be unlikely for them to spend any time in jail, or at most a nominal amount.
But the right wants to do this in secret, which rather implies, when it is looked at in the light of day, that it will not stand up to public opinion.
Yeah, regional networks are sorta stupid. I mean, I belong to the 'Atlanta' one, despite living over 100 miles away...but I've gone through and set almost all my information to just friends, with my high school and college allowed to 'friends of friends' just in case they think they know me but aren't sure. Networks get nothing.
It's incredibly dumb to use the default and let anyone who just asserts they live in the same region as you have access to your information. Any information.
As far as I know, people can join as many regional networks as they want, as often as they want, so with a few logical deductions about you they could figure out what networks you're in, join them, and see all that stuff.
All of this is stupid. It's impossible to prove they've actually read the summons without the cooperation of facebook. Sure, you can tell when someone has logged in, but not that they've read some message.
And if you have facebook's cooperation, obviously, you should just get their IP and email address and track them down in person.
The courts really shouldn't be letting papers be served in any way but in person.
Oh, and this is ignoring the fact, obviously, they could have the same last name to start with.
What would be a real hassle is if husband and wife had a last name that's pronounced the same but spelt different.
You know, women who have the same first name as their husband really need to buck the tradition of taking their husband's last name, if only to avoid confusion that, if added up, could easily waste a year of their life.
Of course, having a married couple with the same first name and different last name would also result in confusion. Just not as much.
...that adventure game designers seem to be designing for the lowest common denominator.
Granted, there is some reason behind some of their choices...pixel-hunts suck, so indicating what objects can be used, and their name, is a good thing. But they could, for example, include a lot of extraneous hotspots, and even items. It's a lot harder to brute force when you've got 20 items in inventory and 15 on screen. Or, if when you look at a bookcase, you can grab every book instead of the one you need.
And, of course, 3D movement helps a lot. I remember in The Pandora Directive, you're trying to get past a security lock, and the solution is to make, of course, a fishing rod out of a hook or something and grab a clipboard with passcodes on it.
But the trick was that the clipboard was on the receptionist's desk, behind a window, and you actually had to walk up to the window and look to the right to see it even existed. You couldn't just run your mouse over the screen.
Same with stuff in trashcans. Walk up to them, look down, there it is, but you couldn't click on the trashcans from across the room.
At some level, of course, this just becomes annoying. But there's always been a trade-off there, and, too often, I think companies err on the side of 'simple'.
And, totally unrelated, I'd like a game that treated concepts as items. The Pandora Directive made me think about that, because you didn't just have conversational trees, you had a list of every person and company and noun you'd ever come across, and another list of every inventory item, and could ask anyone about any of them.
I think it would be interesting to expand that idea. For example, say you come across a car that needs to be hotwired. Well, in a normal adventure game that would be sole book on a bookshelf, or you'd have a question as a tree option in a conversation somewhere.
What if, instead, you had a 'concepts inventory' included the idea 'hotwire a car'. And you could drag it, like normal inventory, onto people, or onto a bookcase, or onto a computer, and get the answer. (Or not, depending on who you ask.) And now you have a new verb on the car.
And such a system would certainly solve the goofy 'You have a three hundred page book but can only read the four relevant pages' problem. Which is especially weird if you have the book before you know what's relevant. No, now pages show up when you 'combine' concepts with the book, presumably looking up that information in an index or something and marking the pages.
You could even combine concepts and make new ones. Drag 'Person X' onto 'Company ABC' and get 'Is person X working for company ABC?'.
Because survival horror is just a traditional adventure game with an action game bolted on. Or, more often, the other way around.
He didn't discuss it for the same reason he didn't discuss RPG/adventure games, or action/adventure games in general. Everyone can logically see how that works, he doesn't need to talk about every possible genre cross, although it would have been nice to mention that almost every video game ever made has some 'adventure' elements, even if it's just Doom's 'find the colored keys to open the doors'.
Incidentally, I will argue that it makes more sense to talk about action/adventure games because 'survival horror' excludes games with near identical gameplay, minus 'horror'. Like Half-Life, which would be the defining 'survival horror' game...if it was against zombies, in a darker and spookier environment.
I.e., horror survival is a thematic genre, whereas we're actually talking about gameplay genres right now.
I, however, was a little disappointed he seemed to think that 'recent computer games' had invented a fully 3D interface to wander around and find clues, when, of course, that was present as far back as Under a Killing Moon in frickin 1994. (And probably earlier.)
And continued to Dreamfall in 2006, and probably dozens of games in between. (And probably most action/adventure games although I don't play those.)