Interesting - that appears to be closer to modern German (my native language) than modern English.
It's cause we stole it from you long ago. Most of English's "base" is German derived. It's just we're also very loose about adding words stolen from other languages. Making a faux pas at a rodeo is strictly verboten - you say this to an English speaker, and most of us will know what you're talking about, even though "faux pas", "rodeo", and "verboten" have all entered the English lexicon in the past 150 years or less. German, plus this stuff, plus 1300 years, equals modern English.
This is, consequently, why I think English has ended up being a global language - because it's so absurdly flexible. When's the last time French decided it was ok to add a word? I hear all the time about cultural purists in France being against adding simple words that the rest of us have been using for years, just because "that's English, so we don't want it" or whatever.
You drank the kool-aid, too, huh? (Monsanto's kool-aid, for starters.)
Genetically modified crops are the poorest crops there are in the kinds of nutrition that count for long-term health. And the production rates are temporary. Do some research, man.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug says you're wrong, and he's won a Nobel Peace prize for increasing the food supply and saving a BILLION human beings from starvation, not to mention a Ph.D and 60 years experience with food science; so I'll take his word over some random fuck on the internet's word, thank you.
And you're going to tell me that moving all that fuel and equipment is efficient?
Yes, several orders of magnitude more efficient than doing it on small scale. Why do you think big mega farms exist? If everyone had to be a jack of all trades to grow their own feed for their own cattle, no one would be very good for it, and there would be a lot of duplicated work on the small scale. God, you're not very smart. Idealism isn't reality there, hippie.
I have friends and relatives involved in re-educating people in third world countries because the people who sell BIG have convinced them that the can't win small so they might as well get on the dole and do nothing. Awful lot of people doing close to nothing all day. Any wonder they start wanting to have wars when they think we are having all the fun?
I have a tertiary, several people removed, connection with people who are actually in poverty, and this gives my argument a human connection, making it more relevant.
I will admit. There are some aspects to going back to small that won't be pleasant for some people. It's a lot easier to think you can behave like a fool on the weekends and get away with it when you live in a big city and work for a big company.
yes, we can all go back to working 2 hour a day telecommute jobs, then work 8 hours a day as a farmer, and still have a great quality of life. Oh wait. The efficiency of modern life and modern manufacturing/industrial process *IS* what allows us to have fun on a weekend. If you think we should all become our own subsistence farmers, you're a douchebag who's advocating a resurgent dark ages. Go die in your own cave, fool.
I think this is right on. I'm in favor of letting jobs move around the world, but in order for this to work and be fair, the countries around the world need to operate at a common level of protection for workers, environment, etc. I think in equilibrium, this means that the US and Europe need to back off some, and Asia/Mexico/etc need to step up.
I'm even more pragmatic than that. What I want to know is, if the labor is so cheap overseas, why is the product before outsourcing just as expensive as the product after outsourcing? Oh, right, because they lay off all the American workers and laugh all the way to their banks with their executive bonuses.
Reducing costs should reduce end price. The fact that it doesn't is IMO what's wrong with outsourcing. This is even more basic than workers' rights in 3rd world countries - yes, ideally everyone should have the same protections that are coded into law here. But, the most basic of questions is, lacking these protections, the labor is hella cheap - why are the executives getting all the money and the end product is still the same price?
There is plenty of room on the earth for everyone to have enough land and access to water to live the way this guy suggests. There always has been.
No.
NO, NO, NO, there isn't.
There's almost 7 Billion people living on planet earth, and without things like genetically modified crops and modern production equipment, we only would produce enough food to feed 4 Billion of them. You volunteering for suicide squad?
Sorry, man, but the hard work of lots of other people, putting in long hard hours and working for a decent wage is what makes that guy's lifestyle possible.
He buys feed from a feedlot - where do you think that comes from? Someone owns a multi-million dollar farm, with millions of dollars worth of silos, grain elevators, combines, tractors, trucks, milling machines, pipelines, augers, and packaging facilities to make that happen. Then, someone drives the feed in a diesel truck from the farm to the warehouse, where a multi-million dollar computer system tracks orders, shipping info, inventory, etc. Then, yet another truck takes it to the feedlot, where the feedlot employees work to stock it, manage the store, sell it to him, etc.
Just inside that transaction, you have a farm with probably 20-30 employees and $20,000,000 worth of equipment, a trucking company with millions of dollars worth of trucks, and then you have to find the fuel for the trucks, which probably comes from Venezuela or Saudi Arabia, in a tanker, halfway across the globe, to be refined in a multi-trillion dollar facility into diesel fuel, which is then pumped or driven to gas stations for the truck to fuel up to carry the feed. The trucks need mechanics who have to go to school or have on-the-job training to know how to keep them operating. The oil companies hire Ph.D. Geologists and mechanical engineers to find oil and design oil rigs; their educations each cost $300,000 and can't be repaid on a $9000/yr salary.
The warehouse needs electricity that comes from a coal plant that uses coal mined in south africa and shipped across the globe to the plant, which has 100 employees who work round the clock, not to mention full time environmental techs to deal with government regulations. The warehouse also hires software companies or buys commercial software to manage orders and inventory, plus guys who drive forklifts and guys who repair the forklifts. The feedstore has 5 full time employees that handle inventory, stocking, sales, future capacity planning. The feedstore also needs electricity, this time it comes from a hydro-plant which employs 300 full time employees and an army of scientists and engineers and environmental impact researchers; the electrical company has a fleet of trucks that manage all the power poles and transformers that get the electricity to the feed store. Oh, and this year, the feedstore had to repave their parking lot, which involves getting asphalt, which is recycled concrete from other building projects mixed with tar mined out of the same places that the diesel fuel came from that's needed to bring the asphalt to the parking lot.
There's probably a MILLION people, and a HUNDRED TRILLION dollars worth of industry, who all get a slice of the $40 this guy pays for a bag of feed corn. But, it's all worth it, because it allows him to claim that if we all just lived off the grid, the planet would be in better shape.
Not to mention, doom2 had vertical height, which wolfenstein didn't have either. Now, granted, you could only ever be at one point on the z axis (you couldn't simultaneously walk under a staircase that allowed you to walk up it, too), but still.
Add to that, for the mechanical engineering mindset, or those that love math, Knuth's Concrete Mathematics is the definitive book for "hard math". Or, so I've heard from people who understand it.
Can you "run" a document you've opened recently on XP? Not that I know of. You can open it on Vista easily (like Quicksilver allows).
Uhh, i dunno about you, but this functionality has been there since I think windows 95 or 98. Under the (classic) start menu, there's a pop-out option called "documents" that's automatically populated in XP at least with the most recent office / notepad / wmv / picture files that have been open.
Also, honestly, does it really matter if you can do random_task_X faster in Vista? If nothing else, it's a resource hog. I mean, it does things that are nice, but that I don't ask my OS to do for me - i just want it to interface between applications and hardware, basically, in a relatively efficient way.
That's truth right there. After being burned a few times and wasting a lot of money, I decided a while back never to buy music or movies on a medium that I can't transfer. I've lost too many CDs, scratched up too many DVDs, had too many things go mysteriously bad to continue wasting money on such an archaic concept as DRM.
I agree with you on all the ethical arguments here, but blu-ray discs are made of some sort of really hard polycarbonate, and as far as I can tell, don't scratch under normal use. Like PSX disks? I dunno how they're doing it, but I've bought several used PS3 games now, and they all look like they've never been used. Same for the blu-ray movies I own (all like 3 of them).
Now, just because someone heard people saying "We want to be able to format shift our content, reason #2894 - because original media gets scratched", and decided that the next format should be unscratchable - doesn't mean that the reasons to want to shift media have been answered. But, I will give them credit for the better discs.
If that's what you're looking for, sign up for eve, spend 3 months skilling up and learning the basics (go for Amarr), and then leave the sections of space controlled by NPC's. Go get involved in alliance politics. It's not "only you" doing missions, but if you join up with one of the player controlled alliances in 0.0 space, it's your alliance deciding their destiny - taking over other people's space, staging raids on their resource-gathering operations, defending your corner of the universe. It's really dynamic. This (http://www.eve-iss.com/external/maps/territoryanimated.gif) is the map (player made map) of alliance territorial control from 2003 to mid 2005, and here's a shot of it today: http://dl.eve-files.com/media/corp/Verite/influence.png. The center bit of eve is what you're talking about - the same 20 quests over and over. The rest of it is player controlled.
My wife is in the same boat - $14,000 / semester tuition.
Except she's in Vet school.
And when she gets out of vet school, in the area we live in now, she can't reasonably expect to make more than about $50,000/yr, and that's if the economy recovers in the next 2.5 years enough that there are vet jobs available. Who knew? When the economy is down, people spend less money on their pets.
Really, there's a systematic problem with Vet schools, in that the cost of tuition has kept pace with the increased cost of all other post-graduate education, however unlike people-doctors, lawyers, etc, the ROI for a vet school diploma has nearly stagnated.
We're in an odd situation right now - we are almost done with all of our extemporaneous debt - a year or two on a car, a thousand bucks of credit card debt, and that's over and done with. But we want to buy a house somewhere along the way. The problem is... in 2011, we're going to be hit with a $140,000 bill for her brain - how does the house payment factor in with that? When can we be debt free? A combined income of $100,000/yr a couple of years ago sounded like a dream, but the reality of the $140k education loan and a $200k house loan really make $100k not that much money.
yeah, actually, I'm thinking about this, and I'm pretty sure you could get a 1-U box that fits 4 HDDs. Call it $300 for the case/power supply, get a cheap quad-core core2 from intel, 2GB of ram, and a motherboard with 2x gig-e nics, and then get an LSI SATA 150-6D or similar raid card + cache battery for about, say, $1200? Then stick 4x 1TB hard disks in a raid 1+0. I'm confident that you can get all the parts for less than $2000. Stick CentOS on it, bond the nics together, and run ISCSI or NFS or whatever. Bam, $2K for 2TB hotswap high performance RAID on a 2Gb/s interface in 1U.
It won't be SAS, which might be where the SUN price tag is coming from. But, meh, to me the cost doesn't justify the increased MTBF and read speed for most applications.
"Because you need a militia to ensure the security of the government, the people have the right to have guns".
I don't own a gun, and I can't really see many scenarios where I would ever own a handgun (maybe a shotgun or rifle if I moved further out into the country). But, I'm glad I have the option. Guns, in my reading of the amendment, aren't there to protect Citizens from Citizens.
They're there to protect the Citizens from the Government.
The framers of the constitution, recently having overthrown a tyrannical government, knew that the time may come when the United States government may have to be overthrown, and they wanted to protect the right to do so. Think about that: the founders of this country KNEW that by enumerating the 2nd amendment, that they were supporting the idea of the violent overthrow of the US government. How cool is that?
I dunno, I think as more people get high def TV's, there's going to be less demand for the Wii.
Case in point: A year ago, I *really* wanted a wii. Like, had to have. Couldn't find one.
Now, I have a high def TV, and find myself much more interested in something that doesn't just push 480p.
There's a lot good to say about the wii, but it's 2 years old now, and people are starting to see some issues with it, like: * the lack of high-def output 2 years ago was not really that big a deal, and I'm the first to say that graphics aren't everything, but in 2008, and edging into 2009, a console that can't even output 720p or use HDMI just looks lazy. * the fact that it's grossly underpowered for some games. Don't believe me? Play mario kart with 4 people, and watch the massive decrease in visual quality and frame rate. Look at Zelda for the wii, and realize that the exact same game came out simultaneously for the gamecube. Then you really start to get the idea that the Wii is just a Gamecube with a neat trick. Which makes it an 8 year old console, really. * the fact that there have been essentially no killer titles out in months for the thing. While xbox360 and PS3 continue to have blockbuster games come out, the last "must have" for the Wii was either Mario Kart or Smash Bros. Brawl, and those were over the summer. Before that, it was Metroid, what was way earlier. All in all there's a lot of "fun games" for the wii, but killer titles? Not many.
I'm kinda Meh on the wii right now. A playstation3 looks awfully good, especially with blu-ray movie releases ramping up, and little big planet coming out soon...
Not to mention, aren't mutations that happen during one's lifetime not technically genetic, and thus won't be carried to the next generation? I thought evolution was all about random mutations mostly at conception? I.e. you're BORN WITH a taller neck, therefore you can reach better food on the trees. Not your neck stretches out during your lifetime, that wouldn't breed.
Our most recent evolutionary characteristics, though, seem to be the loss of the appendix, and more recently, the ability to digest milk after infancy. Not everyone has that last one.
If there's a point to be made, however, it's that we're no longer breeding via natural selection criteria, it's more artificial. Since incompetent humans now survive past childhood into breeding age, we are selecting based on some random set of social criteria to breed (mostly).
I'd rather have a "real" ds version of the only GBA game I ever purchased, which is Final Fantasy IIIUS. In the GBA version, because of the screen size, certain things are scrolled or removed off of the screen, which is annoying. But the MOST annoying thing is that FFIII was created to work on the SNES, with A/B/X/Y/L/R/St/Sl buttons, but the GBA only has A/B/L/R/St/Sl (no X/Y). So, on the GBA, FFIIIUS used start and select to emulate the functionality of X and Y.
Well, on the DS, you can't remap the buttons, so even though you have a perfectly working X and Y sitting right there, you end up using the tiny, difficult to press start and select buttons.
Right, and while it might seem repulsive to some to have them proxy your web connections, I honestly find it more repulsive to hijack failed DNS queries, because this affects spam. Maybe it's just because I work for a professional email hosting company, but come on now. Failed dns lookup = drop mail as spam. Maybe not as critical because it's an ISP with mostly end users, but what if they're doing this to their small business customers, too?
Yeah, I don't understand how fundamentally having data on a cloud computing system is any different from having data on a shared computer, a. la. any webhost that sells shared hosting, etc.
I mean, plan for that. Manage permissions. If you don't like it, build your own cloud.
Right, and (directed to the GP) the practical upshot of this is: A.) Everyone can get involved in T2 production for not too much investment. B.) There is now a ceiling on T2 prices, i.e. there's no price fixing like there used to be on Cap Rechargers and Cov Ops cloaks (take 1M and 5M mil respectively to build, used to sell for 20M and 80M). Someone will sell the T2 parts for cost+5% always. C.) Because of B, T2 parts are far more accessible. D.) The invention-produced blueprint copies are not very efficient (Material efficiency of -4, and there's the cost of doing the invention), allowing the old timers who have T2 BPOs from the lottery to produce at a decent (but not obscene) profit with their researched BPO's.
Right; the player levels in eve are handled in such a way that being a vet does give you an advantage, but it's greatly diminishing returns.
(In eve, skills are learned in real time, not by play time or experience points gained by in game actions)
For example, for a given skill X that has a rank of "1", the first level of the skill will take several minutes, the 2nd level perhaps an hour, the 3rd level maybe 6-8 hours, the 4th level 1.5 days, and the 5th (and final) level, 5 days. For each level, this skill X may grant you a 5% bonus to some stat or item or whatever. A common example is a 5% damage bonus to $weapon, for instance.
The difference between the new players and the old farts is that the old farts all have it trained up to level V. But most of the new players will have it trained to III - IV anyway. So, old players get the bonuses associated with that extra few percent, but at the expense of much more time.
The other main advantages of "older" characters is that as your skills increase, you can use additional ships / modules. This allows older players to have a greater variety of the ships they can pilot, though you can only pilot one at a time - so this is mainly for variety to the older player. It also allows for players who are vets to use "better" equipment, i.e. so-called "tech-2" modules. To be honest, though, most of the fitting skill requirements for T2 mods (other than guns) are "Skill X, level IV", so even that's not out of a new players' reach.
The only major advantage of being an older player is access to cash; a lot of older players (much older than me, I'm thinking 2003 - early 2004 character creation dates) have access to things that don't exist anymore, like Tech 2 blueprints that can build infinite numbers of their corresponding modules. These essentially are a license to print money, which is why their random lottery-system giveaway was removed from the game. Honestly, though, it's not that big a deal. So you'll never be able to afford 140 billion for a Titan + fittings - meh. Fly cruisers and be happy.
i've heard that in Eve one spends most of their time gathering and flying through empty space with bugger all to do.
In a way, that's true; in a way it's not. Usually you end up calling a certain part of eve "home". I.e. a few systems, or part of a region. It does take a good bit of time in eve to move assets, but this is one of the realism aspects of the game. Unlike other games where you can check something into a "Vault" or "bank", and pull it out halfway across the world, in eve, assets are *some place*, and to get them from A to B, they have to be moved. So, then it becomes "Do I want to spend more money and buy X item here, or do I want to fly 10 solar systems over and buy it for X-30%?". Lots of people make money buying things low, moving them to the fringes, and selling them high.
When you've built your bad ass ship that took you weeks, someone can destroy it in a matter of minutes. Is that the case?
Yes. Death in eve has meaning. Don't fly it unless you can afford to lose it. There's a trade off between expensive items and their added benefit, and the cost of replacing them if they are lost.
Case in point: Estamel's Modified Invulnerability Field - most expensive and rarest module in the game. Adds a 50% resistance bonus to all damage types for shields. The last one that sold I think sold for 11 billion isk. You can almost buy a Mothership for that. So the question is how much will this increase your survivability versus the 6 million isk Tech 2 invulnerability field, or even the 300,000 isk tech 1 invulnerability field (30% and 25% resistance, respectively). Cost vs. Benefit.
i've mostly heard about it from people who disliked it. Can't recall talking to anyone who did like it.
I can't speak for everyone, but I like it. I've been playing for 2.5 years now, and have 2 characters. It's not for everyone, but it's really got some heart-pounding PVP if you go look for it. There's anywhere from 20,000 to 40,000 people logged in (to the same world, eve is not sharded) at any given time.
You can get a relatively accurate look at what's happened in player controlled territory since 2003 in New Eden.
For the un-initiated, eve has it's NPC-controlled sandbox, it's all the space in the middle of these maps. In this space, you can do your mining, crafting, running NPC missions / quests, invention, market trading, etc etc. Space in EvE is given a security rating 0.0 ~ 1.0, with 1.0 being tightly controlled by NPCs and 0.0 being lawless. For the adventurous, 0.0 space has different rules. There's no penalty for shooting someone else's ship, there are stations that can be captured, sovereignty to be gained, bountiful assets to take advantage of, and all the PVP you can shake a stick at - from the small 5 man roaming gangs to the laggy 300v300 fleet battles (these are usually over territorial control).
Anyway, in a nutshell, there's the history of eve. At odds with each other for years in EvE are the Band of Brothers alliance (mostly UK, Euro, and US), and the Red Alliance (Russian speaking players, mostly).
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting - that appears to be closer to modern German (my native language) than modern English.
It's cause we stole it from you long ago. Most of English's "base" is German derived. It's just we're also very loose about adding words stolen from other languages. Making a faux pas at a rodeo is strictly verboten - you say this to an English speaker, and most of us will know what you're talking about, even though "faux pas", "rodeo", and "verboten" have all entered the English lexicon in the past 150 years or less. German, plus this stuff, plus 1300 years, equals modern English.
This is, consequently, why I think English has ended up being a global language - because it's so absurdly flexible. When's the last time French decided it was ok to add a word? I hear all the time about cultural purists in France being against adding simple words that the rest of us have been using for years, just because "that's English, so we don't want it" or whatever.
~X
You drank the kool-aid, too, huh? (Monsanto's kool-aid, for starters.)
Genetically modified crops are the poorest crops there are in the kinds of nutrition that count for long-term health. And the production rates are temporary. Do some research, man.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug says you're wrong, and he's won a Nobel Peace prize for increasing the food supply and saving a BILLION human beings from starvation, not to mention a Ph.D and 60 years experience with food science; so I'll take his word over some random fuck on the internet's word, thank you.
And you're going to tell me that moving all that fuel and equipment is efficient?
Yes, several orders of magnitude more efficient than doing it on small scale. Why do you think big mega farms exist? If everyone had to be a jack of all trades to grow their own feed for their own cattle, no one would be very good for it, and there would be a lot of duplicated work on the small scale. God, you're not very smart. Idealism isn't reality there, hippie.
I have friends and relatives involved in re-educating people in third world countries because the people who sell BIG have convinced them that the can't win small so they might as well get on the dole and do nothing. Awful lot of people doing close to nothing all day. Any wonder they start wanting to have wars when they think we are having all the fun?
I have a tertiary, several people removed, connection with people who are actually in poverty, and this gives my argument a human connection, making it more relevant.
I will admit. There are some aspects to going back to small that won't be pleasant for some people. It's a lot easier to think you can behave like a fool on the weekends and get away with it when you live in a big city and work for a big company.
yes, we can all go back to working 2 hour a day telecommute jobs, then work 8 hours a day as a farmer, and still have a great quality of life. Oh wait. The efficiency of modern life and modern manufacturing/industrial process *IS* what allows us to have fun on a weekend. If you think we should all become our own subsistence farmers, you're a douchebag who's advocating a resurgent dark ages. Go die in your own cave, fool.
I think this is right on. I'm in favor of letting jobs move around the world, but in order for this to work and be fair, the countries around the world need to operate at a common level of protection for workers, environment, etc. I think in equilibrium, this means that the US and Europe need to back off some, and Asia/Mexico/etc need to step up.
I'm even more pragmatic than that. What I want to know is, if the labor is so cheap overseas, why is the product before outsourcing just as expensive as the product after outsourcing? Oh, right, because they lay off all the American workers and laugh all the way to their banks with their executive bonuses.
Reducing costs should reduce end price. The fact that it doesn't is IMO what's wrong with outsourcing. This is even more basic than workers' rights in 3rd world countries - yes, ideally everyone should have the same protections that are coded into law here. But, the most basic of questions is, lacking these protections, the labor is hella cheap - why are the executives getting all the money and the end product is still the same price?
There is plenty of room on the earth for everyone to have enough land and access to water to live the way this guy suggests. There always has been.
No.
NO, NO, NO, there isn't.
There's almost 7 Billion people living on planet earth, and without things like genetically modified crops and modern production equipment, we only would produce enough food to feed 4 Billion of them. You volunteering for suicide squad?
Sorry, man, but the hard work of lots of other people, putting in long hard hours and working for a decent wage is what makes that guy's lifestyle possible.
He buys feed from a feedlot - where do you think that comes from? Someone owns a multi-million dollar farm, with millions of dollars worth of silos, grain elevators, combines, tractors, trucks, milling machines, pipelines, augers, and packaging facilities to make that happen. Then, someone drives the feed in a diesel truck from the farm to the warehouse, where a multi-million dollar computer system tracks orders, shipping info, inventory, etc. Then, yet another truck takes it to the feedlot, where the feedlot employees work to stock it, manage the store, sell it to him, etc.
Just inside that transaction, you have a farm with probably 20-30 employees and $20,000,000 worth of equipment, a trucking company with millions of dollars worth of trucks, and then you have to find the fuel for the trucks, which probably comes from Venezuela or Saudi Arabia, in a tanker, halfway across the globe, to be refined in a multi-trillion dollar facility into diesel fuel, which is then pumped or driven to gas stations for the truck to fuel up to carry the feed. The trucks need mechanics who have to go to school or have on-the-job training to know how to keep them operating. The oil companies hire Ph.D. Geologists and mechanical engineers to find oil and design oil rigs; their educations each cost $300,000 and can't be repaid on a $9000/yr salary.
The warehouse needs electricity that comes from a coal plant that uses coal mined in south africa and shipped across the globe to the plant, which has 100 employees who work round the clock, not to mention full time environmental techs to deal with government regulations. The warehouse also hires software companies or buys commercial software to manage orders and inventory, plus guys who drive forklifts and guys who repair the forklifts. The feedstore has 5 full time employees that handle inventory, stocking, sales, future capacity planning. The feedstore also needs electricity, this time it comes from a hydro-plant which employs 300 full time employees and an army of scientists and engineers and environmental impact researchers; the electrical company has a fleet of trucks that manage all the power poles and transformers that get the electricity to the feed store. Oh, and this year, the feedstore had to repave their parking lot, which involves getting asphalt, which is recycled concrete from other building projects mixed with tar mined out of the same places that the diesel fuel came from that's needed to bring the asphalt to the parking lot.
There's probably a MILLION people, and a HUNDRED TRILLION dollars worth of industry, who all get a slice of the $40 this guy pays for a bag of feed corn. But, it's all worth it, because it allows him to claim that if we all just lived off the grid, the planet would be in better shape.
Not to mention, doom2 had vertical height, which wolfenstein didn't have either. Now, granted, you could only ever be at one point on the z axis (you couldn't simultaneously walk under a staircase that allowed you to walk up it, too), but still.
~X
Add to that, for the mechanical engineering mindset, or those that love math, Knuth's Concrete Mathematics is the definitive book for "hard math". Or, so I've heard from people who understand it.
~W
Can you "run" a document you've opened recently on XP? Not that I know of. You can open it on Vista easily (like Quicksilver allows).
Uhh, i dunno about you, but this functionality has been there since I think windows 95 or 98. Under the (classic) start menu, there's a pop-out option called "documents" that's automatically populated in XP at least with the most recent office / notepad / wmv / picture files that have been open.
Also, honestly, does it really matter if you can do random_task_X faster in Vista? If nothing else, it's a resource hog. I mean, it does things that are nice, but that I don't ask my OS to do for me - i just want it to interface between applications and hardware, basically, in a relatively efficient way.
That's truth right there. After being burned a few times and wasting a lot of money, I decided a while back never to buy music or movies on a medium that I can't transfer. I've lost too many CDs, scratched up too many DVDs, had too many things go mysteriously bad to continue wasting money on such an archaic concept as DRM.
I agree with you on all the ethical arguments here, but blu-ray discs are made of some sort of really hard polycarbonate, and as far as I can tell, don't scratch under normal use. Like PSX disks? I dunno how they're doing it, but I've bought several used PS3 games now, and they all look like they've never been used. Same for the blu-ray movies I own (all like 3 of them).
Now, just because someone heard people saying "We want to be able to format shift our content, reason #2894 - because original media gets scratched", and decided that the next format should be unscratchable - doesn't mean that the reasons to want to shift media have been answered. But, I will give them credit for the better discs.
If that's what you're looking for, sign up for eve, spend 3 months skilling up and learning the basics (go for Amarr), and then leave the sections of space controlled by NPC's. Go get involved in alliance politics. It's not "only you" doing missions, but if you join up with one of the player controlled alliances in 0.0 space, it's your alliance deciding their destiny - taking over other people's space, staging raids on their resource-gathering operations, defending your corner of the universe. It's really dynamic. This (http://www.eve-iss.com/external/maps/territoryanimated.gif) is the map (player made map) of alliance territorial control from 2003 to mid 2005, and here's a shot of it today: http://dl.eve-files.com/media/corp/Verite/influence.png. The center bit of eve is what you're talking about - the same 20 quests over and over. The rest of it is player controlled.
Go make history.
My wife is in the same boat - $14,000 / semester tuition.
Except she's in Vet school.
And when she gets out of vet school, in the area we live in now, she can't reasonably expect to make more than about $50,000/yr, and that's if the economy recovers in the next 2.5 years enough that there are vet jobs available. Who knew? When the economy is down, people spend less money on their pets.
Really, there's a systematic problem with Vet schools, in that the cost of tuition has kept pace with the increased cost of all other post-graduate education, however unlike people-doctors, lawyers, etc, the ROI for a vet school diploma has nearly stagnated.
We're in an odd situation right now - we are almost done with all of our extemporaneous debt - a year or two on a car, a thousand bucks of credit card debt, and that's over and done with. But we want to buy a house somewhere along the way. The problem is... in 2011, we're going to be hit with a $140,000 bill for her brain - how does the house payment factor in with that? When can we be debt free? A combined income of $100,000/yr a couple of years ago sounded like a dream, but the reality of the $140k education loan and a $200k house loan really make $100k not that much money.
~X
yeah, actually, I'm thinking about this, and I'm pretty sure you could get a 1-U box that fits 4 HDDs. Call it $300 for the case/power supply, get a cheap quad-core core2 from intel, 2GB of ram, and a motherboard with 2x gig-e nics, and then get an LSI SATA 150-6D or similar raid card + cache battery for about, say, $1200? Then stick 4x 1TB hard disks in a raid 1+0. I'm confident that you can get all the parts for less than $2000. Stick CentOS on it, bond the nics together, and run ISCSI or NFS or whatever. Bam, $2K for 2TB hotswap high performance RAID on a 2Gb/s interface in 1U.
It won't be SAS, which might be where the SUN price tag is coming from. But, meh, to me the cost doesn't justify the increased MTBF and read speed for most applications.
~X
Yeah, I always read that amendment as:
"Because you need a militia to ensure the security of the government, the people have the right to have guns".
I don't own a gun, and I can't really see many scenarios where I would ever own a handgun (maybe a shotgun or rifle if I moved further out into the country). But, I'm glad I have the option. Guns, in my reading of the amendment, aren't there to protect Citizens from Citizens.
They're there to protect the Citizens from the Government.
The framers of the constitution, recently having overthrown a tyrannical government, knew that the time may come when the United States government may have to be overthrown, and they wanted to protect the right to do so. Think about that: the founders of this country KNEW that by enumerating the 2nd amendment, that they were supporting the idea of the violent overthrow of the US government. How cool is that?
~X
I dunno, I think as more people get high def TV's, there's going to be less demand for the Wii.
Case in point:
A year ago, I *really* wanted a wii. Like, had to have. Couldn't find one.
Now, I have a high def TV, and find myself much more interested in something that doesn't just push 480p.
There's a lot good to say about the wii, but it's 2 years old now, and people are starting to see some issues with it, like:
* the lack of high-def output 2 years ago was not really that big a deal, and I'm the first to say that graphics aren't everything, but in 2008, and edging into 2009, a console that can't even output 720p or use HDMI just looks lazy.
* the fact that it's grossly underpowered for some games. Don't believe me? Play mario kart with 4 people, and watch the massive decrease in visual quality and frame rate. Look at Zelda for the wii, and realize that the exact same game came out simultaneously for the gamecube. Then you really start to get the idea that the Wii is just a Gamecube with a neat trick. Which makes it an 8 year old console, really.
* the fact that there have been essentially no killer titles out in months for the thing. While xbox360 and PS3 continue to have blockbuster games come out, the last "must have" for the Wii was either Mario Kart or Smash Bros. Brawl, and those were over the summer. Before that, it was Metroid, what was way earlier. All in all there's a lot of "fun games" for the wii, but killer titles? Not many.
I'm kinda Meh on the wii right now. A playstation3 looks awfully good, especially with blu-ray movie releases ramping up, and little big planet coming out soon...
~X
Not to mention, aren't mutations that happen during one's lifetime not technically genetic, and thus won't be carried to the next generation? I thought evolution was all about random mutations mostly at conception? I.e. you're BORN WITH a taller neck, therefore you can reach better food on the trees. Not your neck stretches out during your lifetime, that wouldn't breed.
Our most recent evolutionary characteristics, though, seem to be the loss of the appendix, and more recently, the ability to digest milk after infancy. Not everyone has that last one.
If there's a point to be made, however, it's that we're no longer breeding via natural selection criteria, it's more artificial. Since incompetent humans now survive past childhood into breeding age, we are selecting based on some random set of social criteria to breed (mostly).
~X
I'd rather have a "real" ds version of the only GBA game I ever purchased, which is Final Fantasy IIIUS. In the GBA version, because of the screen size, certain things are scrolled or removed off of the screen, which is annoying. But the MOST annoying thing is that FFIII was created to work on the SNES, with A/B/X/Y/L/R/St/Sl buttons, but the GBA only has A/B/L/R/St/Sl (no X/Y). So, on the GBA, FFIIIUS used start and select to emulate the functionality of X and Y.
Well, on the DS, you can't remap the buttons, so even though you have a perfectly working X and Y sitting right there, you end up using the tiny, difficult to press start and select buttons.
Meh.
~Wx
Right, and while it might seem repulsive to some to have them proxy your web connections, I honestly find it more repulsive to hijack failed DNS queries, because this affects spam. Maybe it's just because I work for a professional email hosting company, but come on now. Failed dns lookup = drop mail as spam. Maybe not as critical because it's an ISP with mostly end users, but what if they're doing this to their small business customers, too?
~Wx
I hear it'll play Crysis on Medium.
Shenanigans; there's no reason that they would charge you $20, seeing as you can get HL1 on steam for $10.
And if you buy that + orange box, you'll have HL1, HL2, HL2ep1, HL2ep2, portal, and TF2 - for $60.
~X
Yeah, I don't understand how fundamentally having data on a cloud computing system is any different from having data on a shared computer, a. la. any webhost that sells shared hosting, etc.
I mean, plan for that. Manage permissions. If you don't like it, build your own cloud.
I would have sexual intercourse in my imagination with the person on the other end of the phone conversation, if you know what I mean.
Video of the Large Hairball Collider in beta testing available here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHnuo17dsBQ
Right, and (directed to the GP) the practical upshot of this is:
A.) Everyone can get involved in T2 production for not too much investment.
B.) There is now a ceiling on T2 prices, i.e. there's no price fixing like there used to be on Cap Rechargers and Cov Ops cloaks (take 1M and 5M mil respectively to build, used to sell for 20M and 80M). Someone will sell the T2 parts for cost+5% always.
C.) Because of B, T2 parts are far more accessible.
D.) The invention-produced blueprint copies are not very efficient (Material efficiency of -4, and there's the cost of doing the invention), allowing the old timers who have T2 BPOs from the lottery to produce at a decent (but not obscene) profit with their researched BPO's.
~W
Right; the player levels in eve are handled in such a way that being a vet does give you an advantage, but it's greatly diminishing returns.
(In eve, skills are learned in real time, not by play time or experience points gained by in game actions)
For example, for a given skill X that has a rank of "1", the first level of the skill will take several minutes, the 2nd level perhaps an hour, the 3rd level maybe 6-8 hours, the 4th level 1.5 days, and the 5th (and final) level, 5 days. For each level, this skill X may grant you a 5% bonus to some stat or item or whatever. A common example is a 5% damage bonus to $weapon, for instance.
The difference between the new players and the old farts is that the old farts all have it trained up to level V. But most of the new players will have it trained to III - IV anyway. So, old players get the bonuses associated with that extra few percent, but at the expense of much more time.
The other main advantages of "older" characters is that as your skills increase, you can use additional ships / modules. This allows older players to have a greater variety of the ships they can pilot, though you can only pilot one at a time - so this is mainly for variety to the older player. It also allows for players who are vets to use "better" equipment, i.e. so-called "tech-2" modules. To be honest, though, most of the fitting skill requirements for T2 mods (other than guns) are "Skill X, level IV", so even that's not out of a new players' reach.
The only major advantage of being an older player is access to cash; a lot of older players (much older than me, I'm thinking 2003 - early 2004 character creation dates) have access to things that don't exist anymore, like Tech 2 blueprints that can build infinite numbers of their corresponding modules. These essentially are a license to print money, which is why their random lottery-system giveaway was removed from the game. Honestly, though, it's not that big a deal. So you'll never be able to afford 140 billion for a Titan + fittings - meh. Fly cruisers and be happy.
~W
i've heard that in Eve one spends most of their time gathering and flying through empty space with bugger all to do.
In a way, that's true; in a way it's not. Usually you end up calling a certain part of eve "home". I.e. a few systems, or part of a region. It does take a good bit of time in eve to move assets, but this is one of the realism aspects of the game. Unlike other games where you can check something into a "Vault" or "bank", and pull it out halfway across the world, in eve, assets are *some place*, and to get them from A to B, they have to be moved. So, then it becomes "Do I want to spend more money and buy X item here, or do I want to fly 10 solar systems over and buy it for X-30%?". Lots of people make money buying things low, moving them to the fringes, and selling them high.
When you've built your bad ass ship that took you weeks, someone can destroy it in a matter of minutes. Is that the case?
Yes. Death in eve has meaning. Don't fly it unless you can afford to lose it. There's a trade off between expensive items and their added benefit, and the cost of replacing them if they are lost.
Case in point: Estamel's Modified Invulnerability Field - most expensive and rarest module in the game. Adds a 50% resistance bonus to all damage types for shields. The last one that sold I think sold for 11 billion isk. You can almost buy a Mothership for that. So the question is how much will this increase your survivability versus the 6 million isk Tech 2 invulnerability field, or even the 300,000 isk tech 1 invulnerability field (30% and 25% resistance, respectively). Cost vs. Benefit.
i've mostly heard about it from people who disliked it. Can't recall talking to anyone who did like it.
I can't speak for everyone, but I like it. I've been playing for 2.5 years now, and have 2 characters. It's not for everyone, but it's really got some heart-pounding PVP if you go look for it. There's anywhere from 20,000 to 40,000 people logged in (to the same world, eve is not sharded) at any given time.
~Wx
In EvE, if you add this:
http://www.eve-iss.com/external/maps/territoryanimated.gif (1.7MB animated gif)
with this:
http://eve-files.com/media/corp/CRII/ (map jpegs have dates)
You can get a relatively accurate look at what's happened in player controlled territory since 2003 in New Eden.
For the un-initiated, eve has it's NPC-controlled sandbox, it's all the space in the middle of these maps. In this space, you can do your mining, crafting, running NPC missions / quests, invention, market trading, etc etc. Space in EvE is given a security rating 0.0 ~ 1.0, with 1.0 being tightly controlled by NPCs and 0.0 being lawless. For the adventurous, 0.0 space has different rules. There's no penalty for shooting someone else's ship, there are stations that can be captured, sovereignty to be gained, bountiful assets to take advantage of, and all the PVP you can shake a stick at - from the small 5 man roaming gangs to the laggy 300v300 fleet battles (these are usually over territorial control).
Anyway, in a nutshell, there's the history of eve. At odds with each other for years in EvE are the Band of Brothers alliance (mostly UK, Euro, and US), and the Red Alliance (Russian speaking players, mostly).
~Wx