Did you hang out on another early internet than I did (I'm being a bit liberal with "early" meaning the first half of the 90's but this is still ancient pre-internet times to the average internet user)? I got my first taste of the internet prior to the september that never ended and even following that it always felt a lot more left-leaning or non-partisan meritocratic than the US (and europe) IRL. If anything the crazy right-wing hate-brigades/circle-jerks didn't really seem to pop up en masse until the early 2000's (there have always been some of course).
That said, there definitely used to be a lot more talk of freedom, cooperation and similar "crazy" ideas in the past, these days we seem have a lot more people online screaming about how teh intartoobz needs to be regulated for various vaguely defined reasons.
Well, I'm in my mid-late twenties and all my grandparents are/were old enough to remember the war years but the most I've ever heard about it from any of them was my paternal grandfather mentioning how everything was rationed. Of course, he was only in his teens at the time, wasn't like he was a soldier or anything...
(Please note: I'm european so my perspective might be a bit different, I've been a student at a university where to this day there are visible signs of the fighting (bullet and shrapnel damage on the walls) that I would walk by practically every day and my history lessons in grade school were with a german woman who told us stories of how terrified she was when the apartment building she lived in got hit by allied bombs while she was hiding in the basement and how the civilian population in Germany experienced the war)
I was actually thinking pretty much the same as you, I would have loved to see this properly masked with the grayscale soldiers and cannon in an otherwise modern scene.
Another example would be the first image which should be pretty easy to blend so that the officers walking down the stairs appear like ghosts walking down the modern-day scene.
But the purpose of a car is a lot simpler than that of a computer (when looking at the entire computer system).
A better way to look at it is to see the computer as a collection of tools (spreadsheet software being one tool, email client another and so on). But it still boggles the mind that some people can use the same software day after day, week after week, month after month and still have weekly calls to helpdesk because they forgot where the Print button is in the application they use for several hours per day (and which they print things from at least a couple of times per week)...
Adding insult to injury, the industry big bosses, TV pundits and politicians are always screaming bloody murder about our labour laws, claiming they're the most restrictive in Europe (which is a lie).
Interestingly the same lies can be heard here in Sweden as well as in Denmark, Norway and France (don't know about other countries but I suspect the same is true there). It's always the same crap as well "our restrictive socialist labour laws are the worst in Europe and are making us fall behind by punishing business owners" and "Our companies being taxed much worse than businesses in any other European country"...
I imagine a good RTS like Company of Heroes has a similar number of single players as Demigod did (only 23% even attempted it).
I don't think I even considered that CoH even had a multiplayer mode, I played it for the single player mode and I liked it. Now where did I put that disc? And I know I had a Windows XP license around here somewhere...
Well, there are still xpilot servers around. True, the quality of the players tends to become a bit more erratic as the years go by (die-hard fanatics mixed with guys who haven't played the game for years) but there are still servers out there. This is true of a lot of games.
Oh, it's the difference between the Mac-owning Apple customers and the iPhone/iPad/iPod-owning Apple customers. Obviously some own products from both categories (and can thus fall in either category or both) but lots of Mac users like Macs (artsy types for the industrial design, workflow and such and the UNIX geeks for the UNIX underpinnings and no-fuss setup which reminds us of the old-school UNIX workstations that actually sort of worked out of the box) without liking iPhones, iPads and iPods (although as a Mac user I actually also own an iPhone 3G, it's served me quite well but I can see how it may feel limited or overpriced to many others).
Because everyone makes mistakes from time to time, especially those of us who are multilingual. What I'd like to know is why you can't capitalize the first word in sentences.
They're trying to change the profecy but it will fail, somehow some bored lab tech will manage to start the accelerator and cause the end of the universe anyway.
Well, 480p isn't high enough to match the resolution of the iPhone 4 and it would have to be upscaled which looks significantly worse than native resolution (it does, really, there are plenty of users who dislike this even if you happen to be one of the loudmouths who claim it looks "just fine").
Obviously higher res video needs higher bitrates to look good.
And finally you don't have to waste bandwidth by streaming the same 960x640 high bitrate video to every user just to make sure that the iPhone 4 users don't get a video that looks like crap on their device. You also lower the risk of having lower end devices choke on videos with a bitrate that's too high for them to handle.
While it does mean you'll use up a little extra storage it is probably best to encode one version for each resolution, h.264 tends to be the standard in video these days (especially for mobile devices since they tend to have h.264 decoding hardware).
By using one resolution per device (or at least for the more common devices and then a couple of fallback resolutions) you ensure the best possible quality for the largest number of users while also avoiding wasting a lot of bandwidth streaming high-res iPhone 4-res video to some other phone just because you didn't want your video to look like crap on the iPhone.
Sorry, but I really must disagree. I'm 28 years old and graduated with a dual major in Computer Science and International Affairs. One's very math-centric (obviously), and the other's very liberal-artsy (political science, economics, languages, and history). Being able to "cross-pollinate" like this is a huge advantage that the American system has over the European system, and its one that I really learned to appreciate after backpacking across Europe. Time and time again, I met Europeans who were shocked that I was allowed to study multiple subjects and not forced to pick a single emphasis. They were also very jealous that in university I had easy access to different areas of schooling -- they almost universally agreed that it was a major failing of European education.
What part of Europe was this exactly? Because here in Sweden you can generally pick and choose as you see fit (not to mention that university-level education is free). If you choose a "program" you get the advantage of them putting together the required courses for your degree but you also have a fairly large part of your credits electable, and of course you can switch to another program. If a program isn't your thing you can just pick random courses as you see fit but if you want a degree then it's up to you to pick enough courses in that subject/field to meet the requirements.
I'm not talking about missing the target by a few inches or even a meter, I'm talking about pointing the weapon at an enemy and having the bullets hit somewhere 3-4 meters to the side, and without moving the mouse at all and firing again the bullet will miss the enemy by a meter to the other side. And like I stated, I don't mind a bit of randomness thrown in for realism (and to mess with the "headshot!" crowd who try to learn all the little quirks of the game engine just so they can pull off stunts you could never pull off in real life) but when the bullet hits somewhere that indicates it decided to fly out the side of the rifle that just annoys me...
Oh, I have no problem with a little randomness thrown in to increase realism, it's when the weapon is clearly aimed straight at someone not 5 meters away and the bullet hits somewhere that indicates that it's either magic or that my in-game character is suffering from some kind of spontaneous intermittent muscle spasm that bothers me.
It is amusing that legalization is an issue that both the far left, and far right could stand behind though, you just run into problems towards the middle.
Yes, for some reason the more fringe elements in politics tend to respond easier to obviously good ideas, and the even the idiots out on the edges realize that them supporting a Good Thing will most likely lead to greater public support...
The problem is mostly getting them to join forces over issues like this.
Actually, you want red lights as well. It depends on if the plant is in its vegetative or flowering stage. At least if you want to maximize the yield, in practice a lot of people who grow for both personal and commercial use just stick to either high pressure sodium lights (red) or metal halide lights (blue) since they work well enough for both stages.
Operation Flashpoint 2 got it right for the most part, firing a sniper rifle mid-air while running and jumping in CounterStrike is nonsense.
Well, at least it's better than some games that deliberately gimp sniper weapons when not using the scope to avoid players using them for their single-shot firepower.
The average anti-personnel sniper rifle isn't really more powerful than a regular army rifle at the ranges typically seen in games (anti-materiel rifles OTOH) so the extra power makes little sense (especially not in games that practically let you kill enemies with a single shot with most weapons anyway) other than to make sure they can punch through thin walls. This seems especially common with games that are essentially mods of other games, I suspect it's because when they added the sniper weapons they couldn't be bothered rewriting the engine so that they punch through walls, instead they just up the power of the weapon if the engine already allowed weapons powerful enough to shoot through walls.
Then there's the precision issue. While it's true you won't get much precision holding a rifle half-raised or at your hip that doesn't mean you're suddenly unable to hit the broad side of barn either, unfortunately there's more than one game out there that adds randomness to the aim of sniper rifles when not in "aim mode" so when someone bursts into the room you're sniping from, you turn around and fire straight at him only to hit the wall just at the edge of your FOV. If I could hit coke cans with a real rifle at my hip from 20m as a kid I should be able to hit a stationary person at 3m in-game if my virtual rifle is pointing straight at him...
Lol you ever eaten to much? If not you'll find out tommorow when you can't move.
What are you talking about? Are you saying the effects of eating cannabis stay with you for 24+ hours? or that it causes paralysis?
Neither of those are true btw, the effects do stay with you longer than when smoking though, if you eat too much there's a good chance you'll end up falling asleep/passing out (depending on how you look at it) and waking up five hours later still somewhat high.
I stopped reading after "Marijuana use prior to injury was determined prospectively in 1023 patients injured as the result of vehicular (67.6%) and nonvehicular (32.4%) trauma.". Do you know why? Because those aren't "marijuana deaths" any more than me smoking a cigarette and jumping of a building is a "tobacco death". When people talk about "marijuana deaths" in this context they mean overdoses or causes of deaths otherwise directly attributable to marijuana use, not "he was an idiot, got high, drove off and died". All that tells us is that driving while drunk or high is a bad idea and should be avoided, doesn't tell us that being high in itself is a bad idea (but it is common knowledge through many many years of research and practical experience that alcohol really can kill you simply because you drank too much of it).
I don't remember who said it but IIRC some US general said something along the lines of "Smart bombs are fine and all but after a week of real fighting you're back to basics again", implying that if a real large war broke out again both sides would eventually just be chucking big dumb bomb loads at each other since it's cheaper to throw a few tons of explosives at the other guy than it is to use "smart" bombs.
It's not really the small growers that want it illegal but unenforced, it's the dealers, more specifically it's the shadier of the dealers who know they wouldn't be able to compete with legal marijuana.
And of course the bigger companies are going to end up dominating the market if it's legalized (unless local regulations make it impossible for larger companies to operate marijuana sales and production businesses), but don't count out the little guys yet. It'll probably end up a lot like with wine and beer, if all Joe Sixpack wants to do is get high he'll just buy a little marijuana from some large company, sold at a gas station, coffee shop or whatever. But if he's got a romantic night with his girlfriend planned he might decide to spring for something which isn't the marijuana equivalent of a case of Budweiser or a large jug of cheap white wine. There are still some amazing wines and beers on the market, despite it mainly being dominated by a small number of giants. And honestly, it's a lot easier growing good cannabis at home than it is to brew good beer or wine at home.
Hmm, but I smell the high smell of marijuana growing being handed over to licensed only agro-corporations and individuals will be fined for attempting to grow it themselves under penalties of tax evasion. Only four licensed operation, hmm, corporate drug cartels with government lobbied grossly inflated profit margins.
Well, if proposition 19 passes in California this november private citizens will be allowed to grow their own cannabis as long as it's in a space no larger than 25 square feet. It also allows local governments to regulate commercial production and sale themselves which makes it very doubtful that the grow-ops of Humboldt county and surrounding areas are going to go away anytime soon...
The info I got about the EXIF was the following line from one of the Americablog articles: "The photo contains data suggesting it was taken in 2001, not July of 2010 as claimed on BP's Web site.". The article has since been updated with more info, that was the only mention of the EXIF data that I saw and made no mention of the camera model.
Also, this does not invalidate my other point, which was that both images were very poorly photoshopped.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you hang out on another early internet than I did (I'm being a bit liberal with "early" meaning the first half of the 90's but this is still ancient pre-internet times to the average internet user)? I got my first taste of the internet prior to the september that never ended and even following that it always felt a lot more left-leaning or non-partisan meritocratic than the US (and europe) IRL. If anything the crazy right-wing hate-brigades/circle-jerks didn't really seem to pop up en masse until the early 2000's (there have always been some of course).
That said, there definitely used to be a lot more talk of freedom, cooperation and similar "crazy" ideas in the past, these days we seem have a lot more people online screaming about how teh intartoobz needs to be regulated for various vaguely defined reasons.
Well, I'm in my mid-late twenties and all my grandparents are/were old enough to remember the war years but the most I've ever heard about it from any of them was my paternal grandfather mentioning how everything was rationed. Of course, he was only in his teens at the time, wasn't like he was a soldier or anything...
(Please note: I'm european so my perspective might be a bit different, I've been a student at a university where to this day there are visible signs of the fighting (bullet and shrapnel damage on the walls) that I would walk by practically every day and my history lessons in grade school were with a german woman who told us stories of how terrified she was when the apartment building she lived in got hit by allied bombs while she was hiding in the basement and how the civilian population in Germany experienced the war)
I was actually thinking pretty much the same as you, I would have loved to see this properly masked with the grayscale soldiers and cannon in an otherwise modern scene.
Another example would be the first image which should be pretty easy to blend so that the officers walking down the stairs appear like ghosts walking down the modern-day scene.
But the purpose of a car is a lot simpler than that of a computer (when looking at the entire computer system).
A better way to look at it is to see the computer as a collection of tools (spreadsheet software being one tool, email client another and so on). But it still boggles the mind that some people can use the same software day after day, week after week, month after month and still have weekly calls to helpdesk because they forgot where the Print button is in the application they use for several hours per day (and which they print things from at least a couple of times per week)...
Adding insult to injury, the industry big bosses, TV pundits and politicians are always screaming bloody murder about our labour laws, claiming they're the most restrictive in Europe (which is a lie).
Interestingly the same lies can be heard here in Sweden as well as in Denmark, Norway and France (don't know about other countries but I suspect the same is true there). It's always the same crap as well "our restrictive socialist labour laws are the worst in Europe and are making us fall behind by punishing business owners" and "Our companies being taxed much worse than businesses in any other European country"...
I imagine a good RTS like Company of Heroes has a similar number of single players as Demigod did (only 23% even attempted it).
I don't think I even considered that CoH even had a multiplayer mode, I played it for the single player mode and I liked it. Now where did I put that disc? And I know I had a Windows XP license around here somewhere...
Well, there are still xpilot servers around. True, the quality of the players tends to become a bit more erratic as the years go by (die-hard fanatics mixed with guys who haven't played the game for years) but there are still servers out there. This is true of a lot of games.
Oh, it's the difference between the Mac-owning Apple customers and the iPhone/iPad/iPod-owning Apple customers. Obviously some own products from both categories (and can thus fall in either category or both) but lots of Mac users like Macs (artsy types for the industrial design, workflow and such and the UNIX geeks for the UNIX underpinnings and no-fuss setup which reminds us of the old-school UNIX workstations that actually sort of worked out of the box) without liking iPhones, iPads and iPods (although as a Mac user I actually also own an iPhone 3G, it's served me quite well but I can see how it may feel limited or overpriced to many others).
Because everyone makes mistakes from time to time, especially those of us who are multilingual. What I'd like to know is why you can't capitalize the first word in sentences.
They're trying to change the profecy but it will fail, somehow some bored lab tech will manage to start the accelerator and cause the end of the universe anyway.
Well, 480p isn't high enough to match the resolution of the iPhone 4 and it would have to be upscaled which looks significantly worse than native resolution (it does, really, there are plenty of users who dislike this even if you happen to be one of the loudmouths who claim it looks "just fine").
Obviously higher res video needs higher bitrates to look good.
And finally you don't have to waste bandwidth by streaming the same 960x640 high bitrate video to every user just to make sure that the iPhone 4 users don't get a video that looks like crap on their device. You also lower the risk of having lower end devices choke on videos with a bitrate that's too high for them to handle.
While it does mean you'll use up a little extra storage it is probably best to encode one version for each resolution, h.264 tends to be the standard in video these days (especially for mobile devices since they tend to have h.264 decoding hardware).
By using one resolution per device (or at least for the more common devices and then a couple of fallback resolutions) you ensure the best possible quality for the largest number of users while also avoiding wasting a lot of bandwidth streaming high-res iPhone 4-res video to some other phone just because you didn't want your video to look like crap on the iPhone.
Sorry, but I really must disagree. I'm 28 years old and graduated with a dual major in Computer Science and International Affairs. One's very math-centric (obviously), and the other's very liberal-artsy (political science, economics, languages, and history). Being able to "cross-pollinate" like this is a huge advantage that the American system has over the European system, and its one that I really learned to appreciate after backpacking across Europe. Time and time again, I met Europeans who were shocked that I was allowed to study multiple subjects and not forced to pick a single emphasis. They were also very jealous that in university I had easy access to different areas of schooling -- they almost universally agreed that it was a major failing of European education.
What part of Europe was this exactly? Because here in Sweden you can generally pick and choose as you see fit (not to mention that university-level education is free). If you choose a "program" you get the advantage of them putting together the required courses for your degree but you also have a fairly large part of your credits electable, and of course you can switch to another program. If a program isn't your thing you can just pick random courses as you see fit but if you want a degree then it's up to you to pick enough courses in that subject/field to meet the requirements.
I'm not talking about missing the target by a few inches or even a meter, I'm talking about pointing the weapon at an enemy and having the bullets hit somewhere 3-4 meters to the side, and without moving the mouse at all and firing again the bullet will miss the enemy by a meter to the other side. And like I stated, I don't mind a bit of randomness thrown in for realism (and to mess with the "headshot!" crowd who try to learn all the little quirks of the game engine just so they can pull off stunts you could never pull off in real life) but when the bullet hits somewhere that indicates it decided to fly out the side of the rifle that just annoys me...
Oh, I have no problem with a little randomness thrown in to increase realism, it's when the weapon is clearly aimed straight at someone not 5 meters away and the bullet hits somewhere that indicates that it's either magic or that my in-game character is suffering from some kind of spontaneous intermittent muscle spasm that bothers me.
It is amusing that legalization is an issue that both the far left, and far right could stand behind though, you just run into problems towards the middle.
Yes, for some reason the more fringe elements in politics tend to respond easier to obviously good ideas, and the even the idiots out on the edges realize that them supporting a Good Thing will most likely lead to greater public support...
The problem is mostly getting them to join forces over issues like this.
Actually, you want red lights as well. It depends on if the plant is in its vegetative or flowering stage. At least if you want to maximize the yield, in practice a lot of people who grow for both personal and commercial use just stick to either high pressure sodium lights (red) or metal halide lights (blue) since they work well enough for both stages.
Operation Flashpoint 2 got it right for the most part, firing a sniper rifle mid-air while running and jumping in CounterStrike is nonsense.
Well, at least it's better than some games that deliberately gimp sniper weapons when not using the scope to avoid players using them for their single-shot firepower.
The average anti-personnel sniper rifle isn't really more powerful than a regular army rifle at the ranges typically seen in games (anti-materiel rifles OTOH) so the extra power makes little sense (especially not in games that practically let you kill enemies with a single shot with most weapons anyway) other than to make sure they can punch through thin walls. This seems especially common with games that are essentially mods of other games, I suspect it's because when they added the sniper weapons they couldn't be bothered rewriting the engine so that they punch through walls, instead they just up the power of the weapon if the engine already allowed weapons powerful enough to shoot through walls.
Then there's the precision issue. While it's true you won't get much precision holding a rifle half-raised or at your hip that doesn't mean you're suddenly unable to hit the broad side of barn either, unfortunately there's more than one game out there that adds randomness to the aim of sniper rifles when not in "aim mode" so when someone bursts into the room you're sniping from, you turn around and fire straight at him only to hit the wall just at the edge of your FOV. If I could hit coke cans with a real rifle at my hip from 20m as a kid I should be able to hit a stationary person at 3m in-game if my virtual rifle is pointing straight at him...
Lol you ever eaten to much? If not you'll find out tommorow when you can't move.
What are you talking about? Are you saying the effects of eating cannabis stay with you for 24+ hours? or that it causes paralysis?
Neither of those are true btw, the effects do stay with you longer than when smoking though, if you eat too much there's a good chance you'll end up falling asleep/passing out (depending on how you look at it) and waking up five hours later still somewhat high.
Yep. [ama-assn.org]
I stopped reading after "Marijuana use prior to injury was determined prospectively in 1023 patients injured as the result of vehicular (67.6%) and nonvehicular (32.4%) trauma.". Do you know why? Because those aren't "marijuana deaths" any more than me smoking a cigarette and jumping of a building is a "tobacco death". When people talk about "marijuana deaths" in this context they mean overdoses or causes of deaths otherwise directly attributable to marijuana use, not "he was an idiot, got high, drove off and died". All that tells us is that driving while drunk or high is a bad idea and should be avoided, doesn't tell us that being high in itself is a bad idea (but it is common knowledge through many many years of research and practical experience that alcohol really can kill you simply because you drank too much of it).
Nah, it'll probably start with them.
I don't remember who said it but IIRC some US general said something along the lines of "Smart bombs are fine and all but after a week of real fighting you're back to basics again", implying that if a real large war broke out again both sides would eventually just be chucking big dumb bomb loads at each other since it's cheaper to throw a few tons of explosives at the other guy than it is to use "smart" bombs.
It's not really the small growers that want it illegal but unenforced, it's the dealers, more specifically it's the shadier of the dealers who know they wouldn't be able to compete with legal marijuana.
And of course the bigger companies are going to end up dominating the market if it's legalized (unless local regulations make it impossible for larger companies to operate marijuana sales and production businesses), but don't count out the little guys yet. It'll probably end up a lot like with wine and beer, if all Joe Sixpack wants to do is get high he'll just buy a little marijuana from some large company, sold at a gas station, coffee shop or whatever. But if he's got a romantic night with his girlfriend planned he might decide to spring for something which isn't the marijuana equivalent of a case of Budweiser or a large jug of cheap white wine. There are still some amazing wines and beers on the market, despite it mainly being dominated by a small number of giants. And honestly, it's a lot easier growing good cannabis at home than it is to brew good beer or wine at home.
Hmm, but I smell the high smell of marijuana growing being handed over to licensed only agro-corporations and individuals will be fined for attempting to grow it themselves under penalties of tax evasion. Only four licensed operation, hmm, corporate drug cartels with government lobbied grossly inflated profit margins.
Well, if proposition 19 passes in California this november private citizens will be allowed to grow their own cannabis as long as it's in a space no larger than 25 square feet. It also allows local governments to regulate commercial production and sale themselves which makes it very doubtful that the grow-ops of Humboldt county and surrounding areas are going to go away anytime soon...
Nice attitude you've got there.
The info I got about the EXIF was the following line from one of the Americablog articles: "The photo contains data suggesting it was taken in 2001, not July of 2010 as claimed on BP's Web site.". The article has since been updated with more info, that was the only mention of the EXIF data that I saw and made no mention of the camera model.
Also, this does not invalidate my other point, which was that both images were very poorly photoshopped.
Yeah, noticed that later, apparently they used a camera that wasn't released until 2007. The images are still clearly doctored though.