I thought that patents were supposed to be accompanied by diagrams and schematics, full explanations of how the thing worked. That way, if somebody came up with a different way -- their own way -- to accomplish the same thing, they wouldn't have to pay on your patent and society could continue to improve technology.
If things are enforced that way, there's really nothing wrong with patenting and it really doesn't stifle progress.
But the way things have been the last twenty years is just stupid as hell. You can just patent concepts, now? Without any physical approximation of how they'll ever come about? You can just say "oh yeah well I patent flying carpets" and throw in some jargon "well of course they will utilize levitational leverage and will maneuver by means of hover redirection S.M.A.R.T. controls" and get it patented?
Well I call bullshit. In fact, I call Magic Bullshit(tm)!
That's fucking right. You can't have AAAANYY of this. Once real actual Magic Bullshit comes around to this universe you're all going to be had because *I'M* going to collect all the money from its usage and you'll ALL have to use it or you'll be left behiiiiind.
Maybe we need to hold a hunger games for the brass. Shake em up a little, get them back to reality.
Of course for a lot of brass reality starts at academy and they're coddled and protected all the way to the top. Just like the 1%.
This should be a huge wake-up call for Americans. Now, I'm not on the whole OWS bandwagon thing. I think it's bonkers, but I don't disagree there's a 1% and that they do us major damage as if they're an invasive enemy combatant on our soil getting the upper hand.
Only here we see them militarized. SO stupid, SO profit-driven, SO heads-up-their-asses, that they WOULD COMMISSION WAR MATERIALS FROM THE COUNTRY THAT THREATENED TO NUKE THEM OVER TAIWAN'S UNTAPPED NATURAL RESOURCES.
Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!!?!!!
I think we have a pretty good case, here, IF any war materials were acquired in good faith FROM China, to take any number of generals and majors and wring their fucking necks for treason!
It's not arrogance, it's face. Under really bad and embarrassing situations it probably looks the same from the outside but it's not.
In America we're totally fucked, too, just look at the facts. There was a news item recently that the heads of American nuclear plants never saved enough money for their decommission. That means we face that potentially weird but real science fictile future where the countryside is dotted with highly radioactive no-go zones. Or there'll be a Nuclear Bailout and those idiots will go home hands clean while the government picks up the tab for twenty years of free dismantling.
But what is ANY American saying about that right now?
And you want to shift bullshit over to the Japanese side of the table.
No, instead, everybody with a fishing boat will continue to blame the NOAA for every single last thing that happens to the fishing industry, including the results of overfishing.
If NOAA enforces fishing less, they're purposefully trying to ruin the industry in some kind of unfathomable conspiracy with the government and the oil companies and blah blah blah.
If NOAA allows for fishing, they're not protecting the ocean's wildlife enough and the smaller boats don't stand a chance to haul anything in when the bigger purse-sein boats are stealing it all, blah blah blah.
In all the time I've spent debating with fishermen, usually at Jane Lubchenco's Facebook, since the Deepwater spill, I've never seen one fisherman write that perhaps it's a good idea to try to preserve the industry by fishing less.
I think for most fishermen it's either
a) a foregone conclusion that all the fish will be fished to extinction so why dare to hold them back from making their livelihood b) a foregone conclusion that it's impossible to seriously deplete fish stock from the world's "fisheries" so holding fishing back is conspiracy
blah blah blah blah
The thing is they talk about it like they have some kind of thriving business going when I'm sure if I had been there in the various meeting places where they go to argue with, heckle, and defame NOAA authorities over the years, I would probably have heard fishermen blaming every one but themselves for their decreasing livelihood.
I'm working on my Master Gardener certification. And I can tell you that EVERY element trees absorb or expel is ionized. Trees don't interact with anything but anions and cations. So there's that! Nothing a $250 course in plants wouldn't have taught you!
The ISP model is based on net scarcity, isn't it? We're talking about the internet, something which many people today might just take for granted in that it has not always existed.
The relative scarcity of ways to get online was, at one point in time, a profitable market. You could take advantage of that scarcity and charge people to get online.
But it's a corrupted and oppressed market, much like the diamond trade. Consider the whole DSL thing. The phone companies didn't win the war against 14.4 (when they wanted subscribers to start paying more for 'data usage') and things kept going until 56kbps and the next iteration up in baud (I seriously can't remember.) Suddenly any modem that came next was part of their DSL wrapper / profit scheme.
So what we end up seeing are projects to create free wifi for the entire city get tagged by ISPs, phone companies, and cable companies (there's actually a lot of money and political power concentrated in those three) as "the enemy" and the funding or the public interest never shows up.
I think it all generates the wrong attitude about the internet. There's no reason to require that a wireless network is secure. The only people it hurts are those who have to ultimately share the bandwidth.
Cops could argue all day long about, people using it as a gateway to hacking and so on, and frankly, cops and their legislator lapdogs don't know anything about the internet. Just as there is no real security on the internet, and no real identity, the inescapable future for these various net-related laws is that they are all going to be broken increasingly until they are broken constantly, and enforcing them will become increasingly expensive until it becomes an unacceptable expense to the public.
Currently I work in a warehouse where, all day long, I am doing one of four things with stuff that's dropped off for refurbish and resale:
1. See whether it works and if necessary learn how 2. Determine if it's salable or if it's not, if not, scrap 3. If it's salable but broke, fix it 4. Clean it up until it looks like it's almost brand-new
Step 1 isn't too time-consuming because I don't mess with the mountain of gaming consoles. I wait until some new person wants to take a load off and build morale, and let them think they're having fun weeding through all the not-quite-complete systems in hopes of being able to shuck off some free time in lieu of "testing these games to make sure they work". Everything else besides gaming consoles is pretty straightforward: lamps, educational toys, power chairs, more toys, boutique appliances, home fixtures, weird shit like FM boosters that plug into your wall outlets, storm radios, more toys and things that look like toys but they aren't, power tools, everything else besides gaming consoles is easy to figure out.
2. If it's easy to figure out it's pretty easy to repair. Sometimes I run into something really stupid, like having a little plastic shield hiding a screwhole. It's so seamlessly made that it looks like somebody heat-stamped a plastic cover over the screwhole. So you go prying to the interior to see which kind of clever way they tried to make this rotating fan or radio control truck unserviceable, and you break a plastic molding before you realize the little 'stamped' part comes off with a screwdriver. You end up adding some materials not cleared by the manufacturer like superglue and spray-on elmer's to the casing to make it operate normally again, but it does. Or a shredder that was designed to ONLY work if you happen to set it down on the lips of a proprietary wastepaper basket with a special plastic dick poking out of its maw. So you remove the safety device and bridge the connection and the entire reason why it was donated free in the first place is gone. This warehouse I work at, which is a charity drop-off place, gets so much stuff that's "broken" but really needed to be cleaned or to have a wire snipped, that it's fabulous.
3. The rest is god-damn scrap. Iron or steel of various grades, aluminum, and copper. It all gets torn apart and sorted.
4. Who cares
(3) is what I'm bothering to write all this about.
When you're in the business of tearing shit apart for the little bits of valuable metal, you run into a realization pretty quick: as the years go by, companies get better at protecting those metals, and they started way, way, way the fuck back like the early 1900s. "Shielding", my ass, if it was "shielding" it wouldn't be held down by four screws and also wrapped the fuck around the other side of the board. The more you get into stuff and see where screws are located, how accessible things are, and so on, you realize there's this real fine line between "we did this for your safety" and "we did this because we don't want ye te be haven any o' our lucky copper and gold!"
And don't get me started on how you'd recycle all of these Chinese products from a place where they gave up using solder ten years ago and since then it's all hot-glue, all the time, like a porno.
And then there's user serviceability. Most things that are easy to take apart are easy to put back together. You need to be able to complete both of those processes in order to successfully service something. Service can be something as simple as cleaning the guts out of something. You wouldn't believe how many appliances and gizmos are out there that clearly accumulate dirt and detritus on their insides as a fast pace and yet are apparently designed with no mind for getting into them without destroying them. And that usually means having to exert significant force in two opposite directions, at potential danger to yourself. Rather than just remove a couple screws, it's plastic grenade time, because they glued or hot molded the thermoplastic sh
In my case, I'm only one little capitulation away from dropping my fuck-apple-guard:
If Apple were to admit Adobe/Macromedia Flash onto their iOS (palmtop) components, and I could browse and watch and play things like a normal person, then I would have no problem with using their devices into the foreseeable future.
As it is, I probably won't buy an Apple anything if they want to actively shut me out of useful information.
I'm sorry that every girl you know, you met because they want you to repair small proprietary devices for free or in exchange for feeling a boob rest on your shoulder a couple of times.
I am 33. My first computer at 8 was a Sinclair ZX-81. Then an Atari model (800XL, the silvery one, which BTW survived being run over by the back tire of a Pontiac 2000STE) then the better model (130XE, the ventilated off-white plastic one, which came along with pen printers, multiple 5.25 floppy drives, tape drive [I couldn't get Zaxxon in any other format], and 600 'baud' [remember 'baud'] modem), then some kind of 6mhz super-proprietary system where the power came through the monitor into the desk unit and had an OS called Gem or something, then a roaring fast 80286 that was my first real "hot-rod". The last two were used, all of those earlier ones were bought brand-new, and there are of course many days when I'd happily go back to Atari if they made laptops or were still in the business of amazing.
Unlike all the other machines mentioned, the 286 (besides running at my choice of ultra-fast 10mhz or 12mhz, in 1991) was the first machine I had that you could open up and really customize. Granted, you could pick open the Atari and from what I hear you could cram some more RAM into it but it was never necessary because it's not like LOGO is going to give you 8 turtles instead of 4, or Escape from Epsilon is going to turn into Jumpman or Gauntletak is going to go 3D or something. When you're mostly playing shareware it's not a huge deal to operate with 64k, in fact, 64K SHOULD BE ABOUT ALL YOU EVER NEED. WHAT. [Okay, so some programs used the full 128k but to do that those budding 'programmers' needed to utilize the other memory bank, you know! Tricky tricky stuff! Atari BASIC!]
Anyways, so the 286 was like heaven. I outfitted it with a 20 mb expansion-slot hard drive so I could keep running my 2400 Baud BBS (in 1991) which up until then was operating primarily off of a floppy and was serving files and message boards from a 12 mb IDE. I was really upset when I found that the expansion slot drives I had access to didn't like to be in the same computer with one another, and soon after I got Taipei virus which basically ruined a lot of crap including the floppy. I had an ATI all-in-wonder EGA/VGA card. The EGA was, like, above and beyond normal EGA in some way I can't even remember. I remember when I finally afforded a VGA monitor and swept into the world of VGA.
All of this love life was the result of being able to open up and modify my computer. So of course I snickered and guffawed at the Dell, Compaq, Gateway, and other computers of the world that were insisting that their users had to use their hardware. I thought it was especially crude that some of these companies had worked out ways to ensure that you not only used their parts but also made sure you had software on hand to re-acquaint the hardware with the motherboard or else you were screwed. At the time, these companies were selling their computers as the cheapest on the market, so there was this illusion of "you don't want to spend money on a computer you can work with? You're not going to be able to work with your computer." Which I admit lulled all us geeks into complacency.
It was easy to say that it's alright to manufacture and mass market these devices that can't be worked on, because they were going cheap. We noticed that most of the users of these devices weren't very computer-literate so much as they were glad they had their internet poker, their mahjongg, their Sierra and their Myst (though Sierra games were on their way out by the time Compaq started to corner the market).
Eventually, though, these losers won out. People in the Compaq demographic didn't learn-up and throw their useless piles of steaming turd to the corner and go to the OEM store and hand-pick their hot-rods for just $50-100 more. They kept using them, and upgrading, and Compaq became this giant. Dell managed to beat them but they were both playing the same game: proprietary hardware, and I as well as many others never, ever thought that this was going to be the business model that would dominate the PC market and survive through the ages.
Disposable, miniature satellites that provide communications relay and/or photographic coverage can be manufactured for closer to $5,000 a piece. What is DARPA thinking?
So, the LED converts free heat along with the electrical energy into light. So I suppose, yes, if you had a closed, dark room, and you made an array of these lights, and you plugged them into a power source, and you spotted them on a PVC with over 50% efficiency, and you routed that PVC's output back into the LEDs, you would have yourself an ongoing power source that would actually increase in power until you tapped some of it out for safety. Which you could then use! Furthermore, the meanwhile, the LEDs thermocoupling the heat energy along with the joules of electrical energy and transforming it all into light are steadily making the entire environment cooler.
#1:) higher efficiency #2:) cooler house
That means you are also cooling your house while you are generating perpetual motion! This is good because you will have to keep your house heated in order to continue to supply energy to the system you have created. The sun is the most obvious source! If you switch from tinfoil to copper foil and cook the outside of it twice before wearing it, your foil hat can act as a sun magnet!
At any rate, this all seems like an argument for further complicating a field of study I have luckily not yet spent college money on. They will end up having to either re-do their study with a mind toward clarifying where energies are coming from and how they're measurable, or physics is going to have to come up with a yet even more complex unit of measurement (oh, great) in order to avoid further claims such as these.
Hmm, you might be interested to learn that most real-real women, i.e. the kind that walk around, breath, and aren't impressions on glossy paper, typically aren't photoshopped, either!
Listen to YOU. "Good enough", you say. Do you think that's how the video game console designers, from days and years and years and months ago thought and talked and acted?
Good enough? It's "good enough", that's why the Nintendo Entertainment System dominated the gaming market and we're not all just trading old Atari 5200 cartridges?
"Good enough", that's why there are fifty games starting with the word "Super" for the Super Nintendo?
"Good enough", that's why the Jaguar has two processors with two separate bus widths, and featured Quarantine AND Cybermorph?
"Good enough", that's why the 3D0 had like three first-person AD&D games, Braindead 13, AND all those interactive sex videos?
"Good enough", that's why the Playstation 2 features roughly three or four MORE clones per cloud of exact clones closing in directly on your fighter's position at any given wave along the rails?
"Good enough", that's why the Playstation 3 didn't come with back-compatibility for the PSX?
"GOOD ENOUGH", is that WHY, the Wii makes old people relevant to the video game scene?
GOOD ENOUGH!? IT'S NEVER GOOD ENOUGH! IT ALWAYS SUCKS! ARE YOU WITH ME! LET'S MAKE ANOTHER SHITTY CONSOLE HURRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHH1!!!!!!!!!
I haven't used Chrome for months. It was behaving errratically and made me nervous during a yime I was looking for a secure browser out of immediate necessity. I eventually managed to use an old version of firefox portable that settled things. I forgot pwn2own was even happening by the time I noticed Chrome zipped in my archives folder and deleted it as useless just two days ago.
But this stuff has me wondering: suppose this goes on and Chrome eventually has all of the exploits worked out of it. A theoretical possibility. Suppose, then, that some new features are requested. Now it seems to me that if I recall correctly, every time revisions are made to software, new exploits appear. This leads me to my first question: what is getting screwed up, learned, forgotten then screwed up again in the coding process that this always seems to be the case?
My second question is, by extension of the first, what are the major weaknesses of browsers? Their implementation of a half-finished "standard" like dHTML? The coders borrowing classes or libraries that would introduce flaw.X to any programmers including them or using them with the program? Programmers being clumsy and trying to force data types to do things they aren't meant to like fit four bytes through an argument that's two bytes wide, and instead of backtracking both directions and setting them both to te same width in planning, just over-riding some compiler warning and supressing runtime halts and sending it to market?
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the really irresponsible use of the term "Neanderthal".
How come I can't just patent magical bullshit?
I thought that patents were supposed to be accompanied by diagrams and schematics, full explanations of how the thing worked. That way, if somebody came up with a different way -- their own way -- to accomplish the same thing, they wouldn't have to pay on your patent and society could continue to improve technology.
If things are enforced that way, there's really nothing wrong with patenting and it really doesn't stifle progress.
But the way things have been the last twenty years is just stupid as hell. You can just patent concepts, now? Without any physical approximation of how they'll ever come about? You can just say "oh yeah well I patent flying carpets" and throw in some jargon "well of course they will utilize levitational leverage and will maneuver by means of hover redirection S.M.A.R.T. controls" and get it patented?
Well I call bullshit. In fact, I call Magic Bullshit(tm)!
That's fucking right. You can't have AAAANYY of this. Once real actual Magic Bullshit comes around to this universe you're all going to be had because *I'M* going to collect all the money from its usage and you'll ALL have to use it or you'll be left behiiiiind.
They never tell you THAT is going to happen.
Yeah, so, now you know why you're never going to see me in a census download.
if (!deadPeopleOnBoard) ship.ghost = false;
And I say that in the entire spirit of "YOU'RE FIRING A GUN AT YOUR IMAGINARY FRIEND NEAR 400 GALLONS OF NITROGLYCERINE!!!"
Maybe we need to hold a hunger games for the brass. Shake em up a little, get them back to reality.
Of course for a lot of brass reality starts at academy and they're coddled and protected all the way to the top. Just like the 1%.
This should be a huge wake-up call for Americans. Now, I'm not on the whole OWS bandwagon thing. I think it's bonkers, but I don't disagree there's a 1% and that they do us major damage as if they're an invasive enemy combatant on our soil getting the upper hand.
Only here we see them militarized. SO stupid, SO profit-driven, SO heads-up-their-asses, that they WOULD COMMISSION WAR MATERIALS FROM THE COUNTRY THAT THREATENED TO NUKE THEM OVER TAIWAN'S UNTAPPED NATURAL RESOURCES.
Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!!?!!!
I think we have a pretty good case, here, IF any war materials were acquired in good faith FROM China, to take any number of generals and majors and wring their fucking necks for treason!
It's not arrogance, it's face. Under really bad and embarrassing situations it probably looks the same from the outside but it's not.
In America we're totally fucked, too, just look at the facts. There was a news item recently that the heads of American nuclear plants never saved enough money for their decommission. That means we face that potentially weird but real science fictile future where the countryside is dotted with highly radioactive no-go zones. Or there'll be a Nuclear Bailout and those idiots will go home hands clean while the government picks up the tab for twenty years of free dismantling.
But what is ANY American saying about that right now?
And you want to shift bullshit over to the Japanese side of the table.
THEY'RE saving face.
WE'RE arrogant.
This isn't an actual commercial solicitation leading up to any kind of authorship. Unless you count authoring a comment (below).
Q: What in your estimation is the worst-case scenario involving critical mass left uncooled and resting on a surface attached to the ground?
Allow me to instigate some imaginings:
* Melting through to the center of the earth, causing a singularity
* Turning into a carrot
Please respond, I'm really concerned about what this lump of actively fissile material is apt to accomplish.
No, instead, everybody with a fishing boat will continue to blame the NOAA for every single last thing that happens to the fishing industry, including the results of overfishing.
If NOAA enforces fishing less, they're purposefully trying to ruin the industry in some kind of unfathomable conspiracy with the government and the oil companies and blah blah blah.
If NOAA allows for fishing, they're not protecting the ocean's wildlife enough and the smaller boats don't stand a chance to haul anything in when the bigger purse-sein boats are stealing it all, blah blah blah.
In all the time I've spent debating with fishermen, usually at Jane Lubchenco's Facebook, since the Deepwater spill, I've never seen one fisherman write that perhaps it's a good idea to try to preserve the industry by fishing less.
I think for most fishermen it's either
a) a foregone conclusion that all the fish will be fished to extinction so why dare to hold them back from making their livelihood
b) a foregone conclusion that it's impossible to seriously deplete fish stock from the world's "fisheries" so holding fishing back is conspiracy
blah blah blah blah
The thing is they talk about it like they have some kind of thriving business going when I'm sure if I had been there in the various meeting places where they go to argue with, heckle, and defame NOAA authorities over the years, I would probably have heard fishermen blaming every one but themselves for their decreasing livelihood.
I think there's a difference between Tron and Suicidal Etch-A-Sketch
I'm working on my Master Gardener certification. And I can tell you that EVERY element trees absorb or expel is ionized. Trees don't interact with anything but anions and cations. So there's that! Nothing a $250 course in plants wouldn't have taught you!
I think you're right.
The ISP model is based on net scarcity, isn't it? We're talking about the internet, something which many people today might just take for granted in that it has not always existed.
The relative scarcity of ways to get online was, at one point in time, a profitable market. You could take advantage of that scarcity and charge people to get online.
But it's a corrupted and oppressed market, much like the diamond trade. Consider the whole DSL thing. The phone companies didn't win the war against 14.4 (when they wanted subscribers to start paying more for 'data usage') and things kept going until 56kbps and the next iteration up in baud (I seriously can't remember.) Suddenly any modem that came next was part of their DSL wrapper / profit scheme.
So what we end up seeing are projects to create free wifi for the entire city get tagged by ISPs, phone companies, and cable companies (there's actually a lot of money and political power concentrated in those three) as "the enemy" and the funding or the public interest never shows up.
I think it all generates the wrong attitude about the internet. There's no reason to require that a wireless network is secure. The only people it hurts are those who have to ultimately share the bandwidth.
Cops could argue all day long about, people using it as a gateway to hacking and so on, and frankly, cops and their legislator lapdogs don't know anything about the internet. Just as there is no real security on the internet, and no real identity, the inescapable future for these various net-related laws is that they are all going to be broken increasingly until they are broken constantly, and enforcing them will become increasingly expensive until it becomes an unacceptable expense to the public.
Currently I work in a warehouse where, all day long, I am doing one of four things with stuff that's dropped off for refurbish and resale:
1. See whether it works and if necessary learn how
2. Determine if it's salable or if it's not, if not, scrap
3. If it's salable but broke, fix it
4. Clean it up until it looks like it's almost brand-new
Step 1 isn't too time-consuming because I don't mess with the mountain of gaming consoles. I wait until some new person wants to take a load off and build morale, and let them think they're having fun weeding through all the not-quite-complete systems in hopes of being able to shuck off some free time in lieu of "testing these games to make sure they work". Everything else besides gaming consoles is pretty straightforward: lamps, educational toys, power chairs, more toys, boutique appliances, home fixtures, weird shit like FM boosters that plug into your wall outlets, storm radios, more toys and things that look like toys but they aren't, power tools, everything else besides gaming consoles is easy to figure out.
2. If it's easy to figure out it's pretty easy to repair. Sometimes I run into something really stupid, like having a little plastic shield hiding a screwhole. It's so seamlessly made that it looks like somebody heat-stamped a plastic cover over the screwhole. So you go prying to the interior to see which kind of clever way they tried to make this rotating fan or radio control truck unserviceable, and you break a plastic molding before you realize the little 'stamped' part comes off with a screwdriver. You end up adding some materials not cleared by the manufacturer like superglue and spray-on elmer's to the casing to make it operate normally again, but it does. Or a shredder that was designed to ONLY work if you happen to set it down on the lips of a proprietary wastepaper basket with a special plastic dick poking out of its maw. So you remove the safety device and bridge the connection and the entire reason why it was donated free in the first place is gone. This warehouse I work at, which is a charity drop-off place, gets so much stuff that's "broken" but really needed to be cleaned or to have a wire snipped, that it's fabulous.
3. The rest is god-damn scrap. Iron or steel of various grades, aluminum, and copper. It all gets torn apart and sorted.
4. Who cares
(3) is what I'm bothering to write all this about.
When you're in the business of tearing shit apart for the little bits of valuable metal, you run into a realization pretty quick: as the years go by, companies get better at protecting those metals, and they started way, way, way the fuck back like the early 1900s. "Shielding", my ass, if it was "shielding" it wouldn't be held down by four screws and also wrapped the fuck around the other side of the board. The more you get into stuff and see where screws are located, how accessible things are, and so on, you realize there's this real fine line between "we did this for your safety" and "we did this because we don't want ye te be haven any o' our lucky copper and gold!"
And don't get me started on how you'd recycle all of these Chinese products from a place where they gave up using solder ten years ago and since then it's all hot-glue, all the time, like a porno.
And then there's user serviceability. Most things that are easy to take apart are easy to put back together. You need to be able to complete both of those processes in order to successfully service something. Service can be something as simple as cleaning the guts out of something. You wouldn't believe how many appliances and gizmos are out there that clearly accumulate dirt and detritus on their insides as a fast pace and yet are apparently designed with no mind for getting into them without destroying them. And that usually means having to exert significant force in two opposite directions, at potential danger to yourself. Rather than just remove a couple screws, it's plastic grenade time, because they glued or hot molded the thermoplastic sh
Screws beat glues hands-down. And hey: get your god-damn glue off my soldering bench.
In my case, I'm only one little capitulation away from dropping my fuck-apple-guard:
If Apple were to admit Adobe/Macromedia Flash onto their iOS (palmtop) components, and I could browse and watch and play things like a normal person, then I would have no problem with using their devices into the foreseeable future.
As it is, I probably won't buy an Apple anything if they want to actively shut me out of useful information.
I'm sorry that every girl you know, you met because they want you to repair small proprietary devices for free or in exchange for feeling a boob rest on your shoulder a couple of times.
I am 33. My first computer at 8 was a Sinclair ZX-81. Then an Atari model (800XL, the silvery one, which BTW survived being run over by the back tire of a Pontiac 2000STE) then the better model (130XE, the ventilated off-white plastic one, which came along with pen printers, multiple 5.25 floppy drives, tape drive [I couldn't get Zaxxon in any other format], and 600 'baud' [remember 'baud'] modem), then some kind of 6mhz super-proprietary system where the power came through the monitor into the desk unit and had an OS called Gem or something, then a roaring fast 80286 that was my first real "hot-rod". The last two were used, all of those earlier ones were bought brand-new, and there are of course many days when I'd happily go back to Atari if they made laptops or were still in the business of amazing.
Unlike all the other machines mentioned, the 286 (besides running at my choice of ultra-fast 10mhz or 12mhz, in 1991) was the first machine I had that you could open up and really customize. Granted, you could pick open the Atari and from what I hear you could cram some more RAM into it but it was never necessary because it's not like LOGO is going to give you 8 turtles instead of 4, or Escape from Epsilon is going to turn into Jumpman or Gauntletak is going to go 3D or something. When you're mostly playing shareware it's not a huge deal to operate with 64k, in fact, 64K SHOULD BE ABOUT ALL YOU EVER NEED. WHAT. [Okay, so some programs used the full 128k but to do that those budding 'programmers' needed to utilize the other memory bank, you know! Tricky tricky stuff! Atari BASIC!]
Anyways, so the 286 was like heaven. I outfitted it with a 20 mb expansion-slot hard drive so I could keep running my 2400 Baud BBS (in 1991) which up until then was operating primarily off of a floppy and was serving files and message boards from a 12 mb IDE. I was really upset when I found that the expansion slot drives I had access to didn't like to be in the same computer with one another, and soon after I got Taipei virus which basically ruined a lot of crap including the floppy. I had an ATI all-in-wonder EGA/VGA card. The EGA was, like, above and beyond normal EGA in some way I can't even remember. I remember when I finally afforded a VGA monitor and swept into the world of VGA.
All of this love life was the result of being able to open up and modify my computer. So of course I snickered and guffawed at the Dell, Compaq, Gateway, and other computers of the world that were insisting that their users had to use their hardware. I thought it was especially crude that some of these companies had worked out ways to ensure that you not only used their parts but also made sure you had software on hand to re-acquaint the hardware with the motherboard or else you were screwed. At the time, these companies were selling their computers as the cheapest on the market, so there was this illusion of "you don't want to spend money on a computer you can work with? You're not going to be able to work with your computer." Which I admit lulled all us geeks into complacency.
It was easy to say that it's alright to manufacture and mass market these devices that can't be worked on, because they were going cheap. We noticed that most of the users of these devices weren't very computer-literate so much as they were glad they had their internet poker, their mahjongg, their Sierra and their Myst (though Sierra games were on their way out by the time Compaq started to corner the market).
Eventually, though, these losers won out. People in the Compaq demographic didn't learn-up and throw their useless piles of steaming turd to the corner and go to the OEM store and hand-pick their hot-rods for just $50-100 more. They kept using them, and upgrading, and Compaq became this giant. Dell managed to beat them but they were both playing the same game: proprietary hardware, and I as well as many others never, ever thought that this was going to be the business model that would dominate the PC market and survive through the ages.
So of cour
Disposable, miniature satellites that provide communications relay and/or photographic coverage can be manufactured for closer to $5,000 a piece. What is DARPA thinking?
Great, let's convert off the grid into DC and rely on a single, bottle-necked power supply, then.
Probably something in the equation of energy to information and the relation of information to entropy that you missed.
So, the LED converts free heat along with the electrical energy into light. So I suppose, yes, if you had a closed, dark room, and you made an array of these lights, and you plugged them into a power source, and you spotted them on a PVC with over 50% efficiency, and you routed that PVC's output back into the LEDs, you would have yourself an ongoing power source that would actually increase in power until you tapped some of it out for safety. Which you could then use! Furthermore, the meanwhile, the LEDs thermocoupling the heat energy along with the joules of electrical energy and transforming it all into light are steadily making the entire environment cooler.
#1:) higher efficiency
#2:) cooler house
That means you are also cooling your house while you are generating perpetual motion! This is good because you will have to keep your house heated in order to continue to supply energy to the system you have created. The sun is the most obvious source! If you switch from tinfoil to copper foil and cook the outside of it twice before wearing it, your foil hat can act as a sun magnet!
At any rate, this all seems like an argument for further complicating a field of study I have luckily not yet spent college money on. They will end up having to either re-do their study with a mind toward clarifying where energies are coming from and how they're measurable, or physics is going to have to come up with a yet even more complex unit of measurement (oh, great) in order to avoid further claims such as these.
I said it once before, I'll say it again: pixel boobs should pixel bounce.
Hmm, you might be interested to learn that most real-real women, i.e. the kind that walk around, breath, and aren't impressions on glossy paper, typically aren't photoshopped, either!
Listen to YOU. "Good enough", you say. Do you think that's how the video game console designers, from days and years and years and months ago thought and talked and acted?
Good enough? It's "good enough", that's why the Nintendo Entertainment System dominated the gaming market and we're not all just trading old Atari 5200 cartridges?
"Good enough", that's why there are fifty games starting with the word "Super" for the Super Nintendo?
"Good enough", that's why the Jaguar has two processors with two separate bus widths, and featured Quarantine AND Cybermorph?
"Good enough", that's why the 3D0 had like three first-person AD&D games, Braindead 13, AND all those interactive sex videos?
"Good enough", that's why the Playstation 2 features roughly three or four MORE clones per cloud of exact clones closing in directly on your fighter's position at any given wave along the rails?
"Good enough", that's why the Playstation 3 didn't come with back-compatibility for the PSX?
"GOOD ENOUGH", is that WHY, the Wii makes old people relevant to the video game scene?
GOOD ENOUGH!? IT'S NEVER GOOD ENOUGH! IT ALWAYS SUCKS! ARE YOU WITH ME! LET'S MAKE ANOTHER SHITTY CONSOLE HURRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHH1!!!!!!!!!
*CROWDS ROARING, MASTURBATING*
I haven't used Chrome for months. It was behaving errratically and made me nervous during a yime I was looking for a secure browser out of immediate necessity. I eventually managed to use an old version of firefox portable that settled things. I forgot pwn2own was even happening by the time I noticed Chrome zipped in my archives folder and deleted it as useless just two days ago.
But this stuff has me wondering: suppose this goes on and Chrome eventually has all of the exploits worked out of it. A theoretical possibility. Suppose, then, that some new features are requested. Now it seems to me that if I recall correctly, every time revisions are made to software, new exploits appear. This leads me to my first question: what is getting screwed up, learned, forgotten then screwed up again in the coding process that this always seems to be the case?
My second question is, by extension of the first, what are the major weaknesses of browsers? Their implementation of a half-finished "standard" like dHTML? The coders borrowing classes or libraries that would introduce flaw.X to any programmers including them or using them with the program? Programmers being clumsy and trying to force data types to do things they aren't meant to like fit four bytes through an argument that's two bytes wide, and instead of backtracking both directions and setting them both to te same width in planning, just over-riding some compiler warning and supressing runtime halts and sending it to market?