I bought the game when it came out because I'm unemployed, living in my mother's basement, have nothing else to do, and haven't bought a game in a year or so (besides Civ 5 but that's different).
I love the fact that you can customize your logo. Other than unlocking better weapons, it would be difficult for me to care less about customizing the appearance of the weapons (which you can do) or your character model (which you can do to a limited extent). But somehow, designing your own little logo really appeals to me.
I'm obviously not the only one who feels that way, because there are a lot of really intricately designed logos that people have made. I am always sure to look at everyone's logo when we're sitting in the lobby between rounds to look for interesting ones. You see them each time you kill someone or they kill you, too, so you can keep track of players you're playing with by their logo. Of course, there are a lot of typical design styles that you might expect, like skulls and penises and what not. Even with those, though, it's often amazing the creativity that went into them (using the set of graphics available, it's amazing the different ways people have come up with to illustrate ejaculating penises).
However, for the first several days, there was almost always at least one person with a swastika. Not a hindu or buddhist one - a red, white, and black, rotated 45 degrees, unmistakeably Nazi one. I was in one lobby where no less than three people had them. It's kind of funny actually because, since there's no pre-set swastika symbol, they had to be just as creative when designing their swastika as other people are designing other things.
Now personally, I believe fully in the freedom of expression, and all that. I am not offended by swastikas, even Nazi ones, by themselves. It depends entirely on the context. Here, it's mostly teenage boys donning them. They're ignorant of history and what the Nazi swastika represents, and the crap that spews out of their mouths if they have a microphone only confirms their ignorance. It really does become offensive. And, I don't need my parents (or anyone else) seeing me interacting with a bunch of idiots with swastika logos - the type of person you'd avoid at all costs in any other context, but who are difficult to avoid on xbox live (or playstation online in my case).
I believe they must be doing something about it on the PS3 too, because for the past few days I can't recall seeing any swastikas, and I've been playing quite a bit. From a purely business standpoint, it definitely makes sense to ban things like swastikas. To their credit, that's probably the only thing they're going to care about. There certainly hasn't been a decline in the number of ejaculating penis logos.
I just wanted to say, I really appreciated the artistic quality of the Khan CGI. I'm young (24) but a huge film geek and I'm quite jaded about modern CGI:)
Also, Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, the two biggest names in dance-heavy musicals, are both well-known for their long takes. Most of their sequences are done with as few takes as is possible. Both also employed beautiful editing in their dance sequences where appropriate, but recognized the impact of a continuous performance (like you'd see if you went to a live show), and it certainly makes their films stand out since few can match their abilities.
There's another great Gene Kelly long-take sequence where he tap dances on roller skates from another film. The film is just OK but that scene in particular is breathtaking.
As the other repliers said, "modern" cinemas run the films off of a single platter. The film is shipped on separate reels, and the projection tech splices them together.
However, there are still places that run dual-projector setups, and most film prints are still made with the "cigarette burn" marks that indicate the reel changes (be warned that once you notice them, you'll never be able to not notice them!)
I was on the exec board for the student group at the University of Rochester that showed second-run movies on campus. We had (they still have) two 50's or 60's era 35mm projectors (the story goes that they were purchased "off the back of a truck" sometime in the 80's) in a projection booth in a moderate-sized lecture hall. They're neat machines - they even had a space for an arc lamp to burn, though they had been converted to use modern bulbs at some point. The lazy projectionists fairly often missed the reel changes, or timed them poorly.
Besides that though, any place that shows prints of older films will typically have a two-projector setup, and professional projectionists that know how to handle the film without damaging it. The Dryden Theater at the George Eastman House, also in Rochester, is such a place.
It amazed me at first too, but there are actually a lot of places that don't have many 24/7 stores. Growing up and through university, I was used to being able to go to full-size grocery stores or Wal-Mart at any hour with no problem if I wanted or needed to. This in Western New York (Buffalo and Rochester).
I went to grad school in Southern California. Grocery stores close at 11 PM, most Wal Marts close at 10 and the 24 hour ones are spread very thin. This in an incredibly populous area - the most populous region in the entire country in fact. Incredibly, it's a similar situation in big cities like New York.
Yes, you can find convenience stores and gas stations open 24 hours, but... they don't carry The Beatles. The reason I mention Wal Mart above (a store I normally avoid) is because that's really the only store that has 24/7 locations that also sells music.
All that said, it's kind of silly to mention 24/7 availability as a huge factor when determining how convenient it is to acquire music. It's not like you wake up at 3AM sweating because you need your fix of $150 box sets and the store's closed.
There's a firefox plugin that ups the text magnification - but only for Thai script, leaving everything else the same. Same story, it's just harder to discern at smaller sizes. I think Japanese is worse since not only are there thousands of kanji, but they're more complicated than Thai script.
However, native speakers (native readers) I don't think have too much trouble with small sizes. You couldn't get it as small as this example of English, but I have seen Thai script well below the limit of me being able to tell the characters apart that native Thais I was with could read with no issue.
Hey, I've got a BS and (almost) an MS in Geology. I researched geomorphology for my thesis (though not exactly this kind of geomorphology).
Do the geomorphology research someone earlier up suggested. It sounds like the last time they did anything like that was fifteen years ago, though - all the data they refer to is available digitally, if you know where to look.
Don't email university professors until you have something substantial. They get requests like that very frequently, and usually it turns out to be nothing. They've got a lot of other stuff to do.
What you want to do is find a grad student. They should be fairly easy to find on the department's website. Not only will they have the resources to help, but they will also be looking for any excuse to do something else for a few minutes besides working on whatever they're supposed to be doing. Plus, they're not yet cynical about helping people like you. You may even find someone looking for a thesis project, in which case they would get a professor to actually look at it and determine if it's worth studying.
They should be able to get you the geologic and topographic map data you need, and may be able to help you interpret stuff. They will certainly be interested in helping you identify the rock, and may be able to do it in a lab (or know someone who can).
Personally, depending on the location (it would help if you gave a hint) I think it could very well be a quarry that's partially filled in - it looks like there is a small quarry right next to it filled with water, though you being familiar with the area may know that to be something else. Note that it's slightly square shaped, and the northeast corner is carved out as if it were an access road (and appears to connect to paths that are still there).
I'd be willing to help you a little bit. If you email me the location I will see if I can come up with some good maps for you. You'll need help from students at a local university for anything advanced (and for identifying the rock) but maps and some basic interpretation will be a good start.
Regarding the rocks - you say they outgassed. If you wash them again now that they're dry, do they react again? You may have gotten a reaction from the soil, as someone else mentioned I think. The first piece looks like limestone, and the second piece does look like iron but it could be slag from an old machine that was used in a quarry. I have pieces of slag I found next to a late 1800's abandoned rail line that looks similar.
As I said, feel free to reply here or email me. I've got little to do while looking for a job so this will be something interesting to occupy me and so my knowledge doesn't go to waste:)
First, it does seem a little ridiculous that not only are we using statistics from the US to determine what the suicide rate at Foxconn in China should be, but now you're bringing Australia into it as well! I'm sure the differences aren't too enormous, but it's a faulty assumption that they'll all be similar.
Second, Foxconn employs a lot of young people. I don't know off-hand but I wouldn't be surprised if it's mostly college-aged kids. Certainly all of the workers you see in the photos that are available of their facilities are college-age or younger (and yes I know Asians, especially women, can look younger than they really are). So to compare it to suicide rates among healthy working adults in first-world Australia is kind of ridiculous.
I don't dispute that the working conditions are poor, but from all indications they're better than most in China. It's all back-of-the-envelope, but I can certainly believe the statistics that (you claim) fanboys are trotting out - within a group of 500,000 people, you are going to get the whole range of possibilities which includes plenty of suicides.
... who can't claim to have heard this phrase before? Am I really the only person on Slashdot who is out of touch with "pop culture" insofar as Nintendo games are part of pop culture?
I'm 24, it's not like I'm either too old to be in touch with pop culture, or too young to have played any Donkey Kong games when they were big.
Sort of a fair point, but MS Office on OS X works fine for almost everybody, especially the new version which fixes some of the problems with the last one, and you never have to worry about compatibility. It boggles the mind, but most of the world runs on.doc files apparently, and while you can get by with using OpenOffice with word files much of the time, you *will* run into situations where 100% compatibility on a complex document is necessary and using MS Office is the only solution.
As for other major software packages - they either run great on OS X (e.g. Photoshop and other Creative Suite stuff), or OS X is not an option if you need something Windows-only. So yeah, what you're saying sarcastically is actually true - for a lot of people who need to run certain software, OS X is not an option. For professional settings with complex software that only runs on Windows, there's really no choice - no one runs Linux or OS X.
For most people though, especially average computer users at home, Windows and OS X are interchangeable in terms of compatible software they might want to use (other than games, but average users play consoles instead anyway). And if you need to work on that.doc file from work on your home computer, you don't have to worry either way because MS Office is available.
It's completely different with Linux. I use Linux myself, but got a macbook pro last year because I needed true MS Office compatibility for grad school (among other things relating to my photography hobby, which work very well with OS X of course). For personal stuff (besides photography) Linux had always been great, but through six years of university (BS and MS) I had been fighting compatibility problems, and enough was enough. Not enough to use Windows (though I did need to run Windows-only software for my MS thesis research - used Parallels), but OS X is more than good enough for compatibility, and now I find myself greatly preferring it over Linux in terms of day-to-day usability. My previous laptop still runs Linux, but it's basically just a server now.
It's in a completely different realm from Linux (in a figurative sense - I know they're rather similar underneath). Linux is great for many things, but the OP's point stands - it will never be widely adopted unless major Windows and OS X software is compatible, or something better that has guaranteed 100% compatibility that will never break - basically an impossibility - is available.
Of course, I'm in the camp that says "so what?" to that - I don't think Linux really needs to take over the desktop. It's already taking over everywhere else and OS X is a great alternative to Windows for novices and advanced users alike (arguments about proprietary vs. open and cost aside).
Everyone knows no one reads the articles, but knowing that, it shouldn't be much of a stretch to realize that not everyone reads the whole summary either! I usually read the whole summary, but not always - it's like reading newspaper articles, you can get the important part of the story by reading the first bit and you can safely skip the rest. Which is not to say that Slashdot summaries are well-written - not that newspaper articles are either, but they are organized deliberately at least.
True, but when I heard the same story, it was about the mirrors in the elevator itself - the mirrors supposedly take away some of the awkwardness of standing in the elevator with strangers for the same reason the OP mentioned - you can occupy yourself by checking yourself out (in reality of course, you use them to check out everyone else). I'm sure the internet has the "real" story, but it's the same idea either way. There isn't a separate reason for mirrors in the elevator itself, and mirrors in the lobby.
In fact I bet people were putting mirrors in places like lobbies long before elevators were even invented for the same reasons. A natural extension then to put them in elevators, and the hotel story is clearly repeated constantly in various versions - I don't doubt that it did take a while before someone realized putting mirrors in the elevator was a good idea, even if mirrors were in the lobby already.
I did see a couple of the films (not sure which ones - there are a lot!) and there's some stuff that's obvious for 3D - such as the Quidditch (sp?) games. That's the problem, though - Quidditch seems made for 3D, but that makes it into a pure gimmick once it's in 3D!
Reminds me of the Muppets 3D (Disneyland) joke - Kermit says they aren't going to pull any cheap 3D tricks, and then something pops out right in your face. That's what the whole 3D thing has felt like so far - they say it's not a gimmick, but then it turns out it is.
To be fair I haven't seen Avatar (3D in movies usually doesn't work for me so why waste the price of an overpriced ticket for a movie I know I'll dislike), where apparently the 3D was used effectively and not as a gimmick.
The rules in Little League and similar tend to be enforced much differently than in the professional leagues - tends to take a lot of the fun out of things. Part of the fun is stretching the rules!
As others have noted several times it's not actually against the MLB rules to run a line like this, unless you're doing it to avoid someone who will tag you out if you run straight for the base. In Little League, though, this often gets interpreted as meaning you need to run within a couple of feet of the painted line .
Meanwhile, the kids who don't have Little League and who play on their own (down to stickball level) have a lot more fun because they get to bend the rules as much as they want. I was in the position of supervising kids playing baseball at a summer camp on a few occasions, and I made sure that we bent the rules as much as possible (while remaining fair to both sides of course).
The phrase came into popular modern usage after the film Tombstone, with Val Kilmer playing a great Doc Holliday. I don't think it was meant in exactly the way the wikipedia article says he meant it - perhaps in reality he used it differently than in the film. Tombstone is worth seeing though for some great dialogue (and lots of old west action, and some ridiculous but entertaining melodrama;)
In California you get a huge discount on tuition at state schools if you're a resident. I bet a lot of students vote who might not normally because they had to register to vote as part of becoming a resident of the state!
I moved to California and became a resident to go to grad school. I voted in national, state, and local elections. Then I left... but that was in Orange County, an overwhelmingly conservative county, so my vote had little to no effect;)
Marble is a type of stone, and in Civilization if you have access to marble you can construct quarries. It can be assumed then that your civilization can quarry other types of stone as well. Stonehenge is indeed not made out of marble, though, so having a marble resource shouldn't speed production of stonehenge (not that Civ is realistic about these kinds of things). But, I am curious about what your comment meant - what did you think Marble was, exactly?;)
Depends on your point of view I think - I'm from Western New York, which is known for cold winters and lots of snow. You get a full four seasons there, for sure.
I then lived in Orange County for the past two years. Yes, there is variation - it's not the same all the time, as you say. But for all practical purposes, it is. You don't need to have three wardrobes (summer, fall/spring, winter) - you might not wear the same thing on the hottest day of September as you do in January when it rains (the two or three times it rains the whole year), but if you're not over-sensitive to temperature you easily could. That's what I did, anyway, because it takes a lot of cold to bother me.
Once you leave Orange and LA counties, of course it's different. But think of the kind of people who tell you it's the same year-round - these are the people that never leave those counties unless it's on an airplane.
Malibu is, of course, in a mountain/hilly area, but you have to go a little further north (or east) to get into the hills with significant climate variation.
I was going to make the same snarky comments others had made because I didn't notice that they were already there. Instead I'll just say that I assume you're talking about the "super-zoom" style point-and-shoot cameras. I've never owned one myself (been using DSLRs for years) but have used those belonging to others, and your complaints are similar to my experience there, also just based off of what I've heard about them.
Anyway, while the manuals are usually obtainable as others noted, the best thing to do is to look at review sites. There are tons of them for cameras, and they'll all mention usability factors such as how well the manual controls work. For actual DSLRs this may not be as big of a focus (heh), since these kinds of things are standard and are presumed to exist as usual, so unless there's something spectacularly good or bad it may go unmentioned. For superzooms and other non-DSLRs, they'll generally always mention controls like that. If you look at reviews of lenses, they'll mention how well it auto-focuses, how the manual focus feels, etc.
I'm sure you didn't need another reply, so sorry - I rarely look at replies to my posts myself though, maybe you won't even read this;)
People on/. love to bash the quality of the Mythbusters' science (and rightfully so to some extent), but I think it's because of how definitively they treat their results. You can't just say "Myth Busted" after you couldn't get it to work one time. I think they've started to change their attitude regarding this in recent years, doing more tests when possible and not busting things just because they couldn't get it to work.
So in that context, this starts to make more sense. Yeah, they've done it at least twice before, and neither time got it to work. Meanwhile others have gotten it to work to a limited extent. Now, they're going back and presumably are going to go *huge* to try to get it to work this time while Obama is watching.
This is starting to sound an awful lot like "real" science, where someone tries something and publishes their results, then others build on the results, then the original person works on it some more, and so on.
Just curious, how does someone rack up a grand worth of *local calls* in just one billing cycle? It not only would require the rate to be outrageous (wouldn't necessarily be surprising, but not in line with my experience) and for him to make a ridiculous amount of long phone calls. I just can't fathom it.
My own phone use is admittedly exceedingly below average, so maybe I'm just out of touch with how some people use their phones?
I was eating at an In & Out burger in Fullerton CA and a wedding couple came in, with full-on dress and everything, and a photographer with a couple of assistants. They took a lot of pictures. Pretty silly but I suppose it means something to the couple - maybe that's where they proposed.
That said McDonald's in Asia is weird. In Thailand I've only seen them from the outside (I don't eat there in the US either) but it was mostly tourists, as one might expect. They put them in the places where tourists congregate (often next to a Starbucks, also no surprise). But the thing is that there are only two types of tourists who seem to go in - western tourists with young kids, where the kids presumably forced the parents to go there, and Asian tourists not from Thailand. For some reason, middle and upper-middle class Asians seem to really like it. You do also see school kids who are interested because it's foreign (or whatever reason) - fast food places like this are actually cool among high school and middle school kids. I don't think this is anywhere near true anymore in the US.
Anyway, I can sort of understand McDonald's in the US - the food isn't very good but it's pretty cheap and you always know what to expect. in Asia, though, I can't comment on the quality but the prices are no longer cheap. It's one of the most expensive options! I suppose it is faster than most places, which counts for something I guess. But there are generally a lot of other options, all kinds of different foods, and most of which are cheaper. Doesn't make sense to me, but I suppose it'll wear off there eventually, like it did to some extent in the US.
It's really not that difficult, like you say, but it *is* annoying. I stopped using noscript because every page has so much stuff, running off of so many different servers, that I spent more time figuring out which scripts to allow than actually browsing. No "regular" user would put up with it for even the time it takes to get one site set up smoothly with it. I think you give Joe User *way* too much credit:)
Adblock with aggressive settings and updated subscriptions is fine for most sites, and is hassle-free. I leave noscript running in case I want to specifically block something, but rarely feel the need.
I have, on several occasions, walked into an Apple store solely to use the internet. Especially useful if you're out of the country and don't have a local sim card with data (assuming you're in a country and city with an Apple store and happen to be nearby it...) They don't seem to mind and the wi-fi is free and open, so if you have a smartphone you don't have to take up one of their computers (I have an N1 and an Apple Store worker in London gave me a dirty look for loitering in the store using that on their network - I guess he'd have been ok if it was an iPhone?)
I don't really see how any system like this will stop dedicated scalpers... I am not sure why they don't just limit them to one per customer (one iPhone policy... ahem).
Slashdot Mirror
I bought the game when it came out because I'm unemployed, living in my mother's basement, have nothing else to do, and haven't bought a game in a year or so (besides Civ 5 but that's different).
I love the fact that you can customize your logo. Other than unlocking better weapons, it would be difficult for me to care less about customizing the appearance of the weapons (which you can do) or your character model (which you can do to a limited extent). But somehow, designing your own little logo really appeals to me.
I'm obviously not the only one who feels that way, because there are a lot of really intricately designed logos that people have made. I am always sure to look at everyone's logo when we're sitting in the lobby between rounds to look for interesting ones. You see them each time you kill someone or they kill you, too, so you can keep track of players you're playing with by their logo. Of course, there are a lot of typical design styles that you might expect, like skulls and penises and what not. Even with those, though, it's often amazing the creativity that went into them (using the set of graphics available, it's amazing the different ways people have come up with to illustrate ejaculating penises).
However, for the first several days, there was almost always at least one person with a swastika. Not a hindu or buddhist one - a red, white, and black, rotated 45 degrees, unmistakeably Nazi one. I was in one lobby where no less than three people had them. It's kind of funny actually because, since there's no pre-set swastika symbol, they had to be just as creative when designing their swastika as other people are designing other things.
Now personally, I believe fully in the freedom of expression, and all that. I am not offended by swastikas, even Nazi ones, by themselves. It depends entirely on the context. Here, it's mostly teenage boys donning them. They're ignorant of history and what the Nazi swastika represents, and the crap that spews out of their mouths if they have a microphone only confirms their ignorance. It really does become offensive. And, I don't need my parents (or anyone else) seeing me interacting with a bunch of idiots with swastika logos - the type of person you'd avoid at all costs in any other context, but who are difficult to avoid on xbox live (or playstation online in my case).
I believe they must be doing something about it on the PS3 too, because for the past few days I can't recall seeing any swastikas, and I've been playing quite a bit. From a purely business standpoint, it definitely makes sense to ban things like swastikas. To their credit, that's probably the only thing they're going to care about. There certainly hasn't been a decline in the number of ejaculating penis logos.
I just wanted to say, I really appreciated the artistic quality of the Khan CGI. I'm young (24) but a huge film geek and I'm quite jaded about modern CGI :)
Also, Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, the two biggest names in dance-heavy musicals, are both well-known for their long takes. Most of their sequences are done with as few takes as is possible. Both also employed beautiful editing in their dance sequences where appropriate, but recognized the impact of a continuous performance (like you'd see if you went to a live show), and it certainly makes their films stand out since few can match their abilities.
There's another great Gene Kelly long-take sequence where he tap dances on roller skates from another film. The film is just OK but that scene in particular is breathtaking.
As the other repliers said, "modern" cinemas run the films off of a single platter. The film is shipped on separate reels, and the projection tech splices them together.
However, there are still places that run dual-projector setups, and most film prints are still made with the "cigarette burn" marks that indicate the reel changes (be warned that once you notice them, you'll never be able to not notice them!)
I was on the exec board for the student group at the University of Rochester that showed second-run movies on campus. We had (they still have) two 50's or 60's era 35mm projectors (the story goes that they were purchased "off the back of a truck" sometime in the 80's) in a projection booth in a moderate-sized lecture hall. They're neat machines - they even had a space for an arc lamp to burn, though they had been converted to use modern bulbs at some point. The lazy projectionists fairly often missed the reel changes, or timed them poorly.
Besides that though, any place that shows prints of older films will typically have a two-projector setup, and professional projectionists that know how to handle the film without damaging it. The Dryden Theater at the George Eastman House, also in Rochester, is such a place.
It amazed me at first too, but there are actually a lot of places that don't have many 24/7 stores. Growing up and through university, I was used to being able to go to full-size grocery stores or Wal-Mart at any hour with no problem if I wanted or needed to. This in Western New York (Buffalo and Rochester).
I went to grad school in Southern California. Grocery stores close at 11 PM, most Wal Marts close at 10 and the 24 hour ones are spread very thin. This in an incredibly populous area - the most populous region in the entire country in fact. Incredibly, it's a similar situation in big cities like New York.
Yes, you can find convenience stores and gas stations open 24 hours, but... they don't carry The Beatles. The reason I mention Wal Mart above (a store I normally avoid) is because that's really the only store that has 24/7 locations that also sells music.
All that said, it's kind of silly to mention 24/7 availability as a huge factor when determining how convenient it is to acquire music. It's not like you wake up at 3AM sweating because you need your fix of $150 box sets and the store's closed.
There's a firefox plugin that ups the text magnification - but only for Thai script, leaving everything else the same. Same story, it's just harder to discern at smaller sizes. I think Japanese is worse since not only are there thousands of kanji, but they're more complicated than Thai script.
However, native speakers (native readers) I don't think have too much trouble with small sizes. You couldn't get it as small as this example of English, but I have seen Thai script well below the limit of me being able to tell the characters apart that native Thais I was with could read with no issue.
Hey, I've got a BS and (almost) an MS in Geology. I researched geomorphology for my thesis (though not exactly this kind of geomorphology).
Do the geomorphology research someone earlier up suggested. It sounds like the last time they did anything like that was fifteen years ago, though - all the data they refer to is available digitally, if you know where to look.
Don't email university professors until you have something substantial. They get requests like that very frequently, and usually it turns out to be nothing. They've got a lot of other stuff to do.
What you want to do is find a grad student. They should be fairly easy to find on the department's website. Not only will they have the resources to help, but they will also be looking for any excuse to do something else for a few minutes besides working on whatever they're supposed to be doing. Plus, they're not yet cynical about helping people like you. You may even find someone looking for a thesis project, in which case they would get a professor to actually look at it and determine if it's worth studying.
They should be able to get you the geologic and topographic map data you need, and may be able to help you interpret stuff. They will certainly be interested in helping you identify the rock, and may be able to do it in a lab (or know someone who can).
Personally, depending on the location (it would help if you gave a hint) I think it could very well be a quarry that's partially filled in - it looks like there is a small quarry right next to it filled with water, though you being familiar with the area may know that to be something else. Note that it's slightly square shaped, and the northeast corner is carved out as if it were an access road (and appears to connect to paths that are still there).
I'd be willing to help you a little bit. If you email me the location I will see if I can come up with some good maps for you. You'll need help from students at a local university for anything advanced (and for identifying the rock) but maps and some basic interpretation will be a good start.
Regarding the rocks - you say they outgassed. If you wash them again now that they're dry, do they react again? You may have gotten a reaction from the soil, as someone else mentioned I think. The first piece looks like limestone, and the second piece does look like iron but it could be slag from an old machine that was used in a quarry. I have pieces of slag I found next to a late 1800's abandoned rail line that looks similar.
As I said, feel free to reply here or email me. I've got little to do while looking for a job so this will be something interesting to occupy me and so my knowledge doesn't go to waste :)
I read this thread with an incredulous look on my face - did the summary change, or did *all these people* really not even read the summary? :)
First, it does seem a little ridiculous that not only are we using statistics from the US to determine what the suicide rate at Foxconn in China should be, but now you're bringing Australia into it as well! I'm sure the differences aren't too enormous, but it's a faulty assumption that they'll all be similar.
Second, Foxconn employs a lot of young people. I don't know off-hand but I wouldn't be surprised if it's mostly college-aged kids. Certainly all of the workers you see in the photos that are available of their facilities are college-age or younger (and yes I know Asians, especially women, can look younger than they really are). So to compare it to suicide rates among healthy working adults in first-world Australia is kind of ridiculous.
I don't dispute that the working conditions are poor, but from all indications they're better than most in China. It's all back-of-the-envelope, but I can certainly believe the statistics that (you claim) fanboys are trotting out - within a group of 500,000 people, you are going to get the whole range of possibilities which includes plenty of suicides.
... who can't claim to have heard this phrase before? Am I really the only person on Slashdot who is out of touch with "pop culture" insofar as Nintendo games are part of pop culture?
I'm 24, it's not like I'm either too old to be in touch with pop culture, or too young to have played any Donkey Kong games when they were big.
Sort of a fair point, but MS Office on OS X works fine for almost everybody, especially the new version which fixes some of the problems with the last one, and you never have to worry about compatibility. It boggles the mind, but most of the world runs on .doc files apparently, and while you can get by with using OpenOffice with word files much of the time, you *will* run into situations where 100% compatibility on a complex document is necessary and using MS Office is the only solution.
As for other major software packages - they either run great on OS X (e.g. Photoshop and other Creative Suite stuff), or OS X is not an option if you need something Windows-only. So yeah, what you're saying sarcastically is actually true - for a lot of people who need to run certain software, OS X is not an option. For professional settings with complex software that only runs on Windows, there's really no choice - no one runs Linux or OS X.
For most people though, especially average computer users at home, Windows and OS X are interchangeable in terms of compatible software they might want to use (other than games, but average users play consoles instead anyway). And if you need to work on that .doc file from work on your home computer, you don't have to worry either way because MS Office is available.
It's completely different with Linux. I use Linux myself, but got a macbook pro last year because I needed true MS Office compatibility for grad school (among other things relating to my photography hobby, which work very well with OS X of course). For personal stuff (besides photography) Linux had always been great, but through six years of university (BS and MS) I had been fighting compatibility problems, and enough was enough. Not enough to use Windows (though I did need to run Windows-only software for my MS thesis research - used Parallels), but OS X is more than good enough for compatibility, and now I find myself greatly preferring it over Linux in terms of day-to-day usability. My previous laptop still runs Linux, but it's basically just a server now.
It's in a completely different realm from Linux (in a figurative sense - I know they're rather similar underneath). Linux is great for many things, but the OP's point stands - it will never be widely adopted unless major Windows and OS X software is compatible, or something better that has guaranteed 100% compatibility that will never break - basically an impossibility - is available.
Of course, I'm in the camp that says "so what?" to that - I don't think Linux really needs to take over the desktop. It's already taking over everywhere else and OS X is a great alternative to Windows for novices and advanced users alike (arguments about proprietary vs. open and cost aside).
Everyone knows no one reads the articles, but knowing that, it shouldn't be much of a stretch to realize that not everyone reads the whole summary either! I usually read the whole summary, but not always - it's like reading newspaper articles, you can get the important part of the story by reading the first bit and you can safely skip the rest. Which is not to say that Slashdot summaries are well-written - not that newspaper articles are either, but they are organized deliberately at least.
True, but when I heard the same story, it was about the mirrors in the elevator itself - the mirrors supposedly take away some of the awkwardness of standing in the elevator with strangers for the same reason the OP mentioned - you can occupy yourself by checking yourself out (in reality of course, you use them to check out everyone else). I'm sure the internet has the "real" story, but it's the same idea either way. There isn't a separate reason for mirrors in the elevator itself, and mirrors in the lobby.
In fact I bet people were putting mirrors in places like lobbies long before elevators were even invented for the same reasons. A natural extension then to put them in elevators, and the hotel story is clearly repeated constantly in various versions - I don't doubt that it did take a while before someone realized putting mirrors in the elevator was a good idea, even if mirrors were in the lobby already.
I did see a couple of the films (not sure which ones - there are a lot!) and there's some stuff that's obvious for 3D - such as the Quidditch (sp?) games. That's the problem, though - Quidditch seems made for 3D, but that makes it into a pure gimmick once it's in 3D!
Reminds me of the Muppets 3D (Disneyland) joke - Kermit says they aren't going to pull any cheap 3D tricks, and then something pops out right in your face. That's what the whole 3D thing has felt like so far - they say it's not a gimmick, but then it turns out it is.
To be fair I haven't seen Avatar (3D in movies usually doesn't work for me so why waste the price of an overpriced ticket for a movie I know I'll dislike), where apparently the 3D was used effectively and not as a gimmick.
The rules in Little League and similar tend to be enforced much differently than in the professional leagues - tends to take a lot of the fun out of things. Part of the fun is stretching the rules!
As others have noted several times it's not actually against the MLB rules to run a line like this, unless you're doing it to avoid someone who will tag you out if you run straight for the base. In Little League, though, this often gets interpreted as meaning you need to run within a couple of feet of the painted line .
Meanwhile, the kids who don't have Little League and who play on their own (down to stickball level) have a lot more fun because they get to bend the rules as much as they want. I was in the position of supervising kids playing baseball at a summer camp on a few occasions, and I made sure that we bent the rules as much as possible (while remaining fair to both sides of course).
The phrase came into popular modern usage after the film Tombstone, with Val Kilmer playing a great Doc Holliday. I don't think it was meant in exactly the way the wikipedia article says he meant it - perhaps in reality he used it differently than in the film. Tombstone is worth seeing though for some great dialogue (and lots of old west action, and some ridiculous but entertaining melodrama ;)
In California you get a huge discount on tuition at state schools if you're a resident. I bet a lot of students vote who might not normally because they had to register to vote as part of becoming a resident of the state!
I moved to California and became a resident to go to grad school. I voted in national, state, and local elections. Then I left... but that was in Orange County, an overwhelmingly conservative county, so my vote had little to no effect ;)
Marble is a type of stone, and in Civilization if you have access to marble you can construct quarries. It can be assumed then that your civilization can quarry other types of stone as well. Stonehenge is indeed not made out of marble, though, so having a marble resource shouldn't speed production of stonehenge (not that Civ is realistic about these kinds of things). But, I am curious about what your comment meant - what did you think Marble was, exactly? ;)
That's pretty neat, it even looks like there's a landing strip carved out of the trees in front of it ;)
Depends on your point of view I think - I'm from Western New York, which is known for cold winters and lots of snow. You get a full four seasons there, for sure.
I then lived in Orange County for the past two years. Yes, there is variation - it's not the same all the time, as you say. But for all practical purposes, it is. You don't need to have three wardrobes (summer, fall/spring, winter) - you might not wear the same thing on the hottest day of September as you do in January when it rains (the two or three times it rains the whole year), but if you're not over-sensitive to temperature you easily could. That's what I did, anyway, because it takes a lot of cold to bother me.
Once you leave Orange and LA counties, of course it's different. But think of the kind of people who tell you it's the same year-round - these are the people that never leave those counties unless it's on an airplane.
Malibu is, of course, in a mountain/hilly area, but you have to go a little further north (or east) to get into the hills with significant climate variation.
I was going to make the same snarky comments others had made because I didn't notice that they were already there. Instead I'll just say that I assume you're talking about the "super-zoom" style point-and-shoot cameras. I've never owned one myself (been using DSLRs for years) but have used those belonging to others, and your complaints are similar to my experience there, also just based off of what I've heard about them.
Anyway, while the manuals are usually obtainable as others noted, the best thing to do is to look at review sites. There are tons of them for cameras, and they'll all mention usability factors such as how well the manual controls work. For actual DSLRs this may not be as big of a focus (heh), since these kinds of things are standard and are presumed to exist as usual, so unless there's something spectacularly good or bad it may go unmentioned. For superzooms and other non-DSLRs, they'll generally always mention controls like that. If you look at reviews of lenses, they'll mention how well it auto-focuses, how the manual focus feels, etc.
I'm sure you didn't need another reply, so sorry - I rarely look at replies to my posts myself though, maybe you won't even read this ;)
People on /. love to bash the quality of the Mythbusters' science (and rightfully so to some extent), but I think it's because of how definitively they treat their results. You can't just say "Myth Busted" after you couldn't get it to work one time. I think they've started to change their attitude regarding this in recent years, doing more tests when possible and not busting things just because they couldn't get it to work.
So in that context, this starts to make more sense. Yeah, they've done it at least twice before, and neither time got it to work. Meanwhile others have gotten it to work to a limited extent. Now, they're going back and presumably are going to go *huge* to try to get it to work this time while Obama is watching.
This is starting to sound an awful lot like "real" science, where someone tries something and publishes their results, then others build on the results, then the original person works on it some more, and so on.
Just curious, how does someone rack up a grand worth of *local calls* in just one billing cycle? It not only would require the rate to be outrageous (wouldn't necessarily be surprising, but not in line with my experience) and for him to make a ridiculous amount of long phone calls. I just can't fathom it.
My own phone use is admittedly exceedingly below average, so maybe I'm just out of touch with how some people use their phones?
I was eating at an In & Out burger in Fullerton CA and a wedding couple came in, with full-on dress and everything, and a photographer with a couple of assistants. They took a lot of pictures. Pretty silly but I suppose it means something to the couple - maybe that's where they proposed.
That said McDonald's in Asia is weird. In Thailand I've only seen them from the outside (I don't eat there in the US either) but it was mostly tourists, as one might expect. They put them in the places where tourists congregate (often next to a Starbucks, also no surprise). But the thing is that there are only two types of tourists who seem to go in - western tourists with young kids, where the kids presumably forced the parents to go there, and Asian tourists not from Thailand. For some reason, middle and upper-middle class Asians seem to really like it. You do also see school kids who are interested because it's foreign (or whatever reason) - fast food places like this are actually cool among high school and middle school kids. I don't think this is anywhere near true anymore in the US.
Anyway, I can sort of understand McDonald's in the US - the food isn't very good but it's pretty cheap and you always know what to expect. in Asia, though, I can't comment on the quality but the prices are no longer cheap. It's one of the most expensive options! I suppose it is faster than most places, which counts for something I guess. But there are generally a lot of other options, all kinds of different foods, and most of which are cheaper. Doesn't make sense to me, but I suppose it'll wear off there eventually, like it did to some extent in the US.
It's really not that difficult, like you say, but it *is* annoying. I stopped using noscript because every page has so much stuff, running off of so many different servers, that I spent more time figuring out which scripts to allow than actually browsing. No "regular" user would put up with it for even the time it takes to get one site set up smoothly with it. I think you give Joe User *way* too much credit :)
Adblock with aggressive settings and updated subscriptions is fine for most sites, and is hassle-free. I leave noscript running in case I want to specifically block something, but rarely feel the need.
I have, on several occasions, walked into an Apple store solely to use the internet. Especially useful if you're out of the country and don't have a local sim card with data (assuming you're in a country and city with an Apple store and happen to be nearby it...) They don't seem to mind and the wi-fi is free and open, so if you have a smartphone you don't have to take up one of their computers (I have an N1 and an Apple Store worker in London gave me a dirty look for loitering in the store using that on their network - I guess he'd have been ok if it was an iPhone?)
I don't really see how any system like this will stop dedicated scalpers... I am not sure why they don't just limit them to one per customer (one iPhone policy... ahem).