I've often wondered myself how people can go about making drug transactions in very public places. I suppose the dealers are using techniques that complicate the evidence-gathering process for the cops. For instance, one popular technique is to have the dealer stand next to a trash can. The crack rocks are in the trash can. Patrons pay the dealer $5 and are then allowed to reach into the can and extract a rock. If the police arrest the dealer, he is not in posession of the crack. He was simply accepting $5 bills given to him.
This is not some Orwellian Big-Brother program. This is an effort by a local police agency to apply pressure to street-level drug dealers to push them out of the area. It's a desperate move that will unlikely halt drug use or sales, but may shuffle it off the regular corners for a short time. The article says police have been temporarily detaining loiterers and photographing them, then releasing them and posting their pictures on the interweb. This reminds me of how people in one community who were bothered by men cruising a particular public restroom in a park for anonymous sex started shooting video of the outside of the restroom and showed the video on public access TV. The slight difference here it that the TV show never said, "These guys are having gay sex or will have gay sex." It left it up to the viewers to infer. In the wilmington police operation, they're saying these people are likely to commit a crime, which is really hard to back up.
Perhaps drawing attention to these loiterers will get their parents involved and maybe they won't prove the cops right.
This post was obvious sarcasm. It's mocking the tendency of detestable companies (tobacco companies, et. al) to wrap themselves in some
public relations charade of helping kids or senior citezens to make it less palatable to punish those companies. Oh, don't sue the RJ Reynolds out of existence! I depend on them for my warm dinner at the old-folks home!
This is an absurd question. The person asking this question knows the answer and even nearly admits it in the question.
The restriction against high-gain antennae is prohibiting typical aesthetic eyesores from being attached to the building. Wireless networking antennaes are nothing like digital sattelite dishes, or big tv aerials. Wireless networking antennaes are essentially invisible and wouldn't violate the restrictions mentioned. The could even be obscured from sight within faux lamposts, etc.
Therefore, when the government interferes with free enterprise, it's interfering with the rights of its citizens.
By providing a free operating system, the US govt. is NOT 'interfering with the rights of its citizens any more than:
1. The public libraries interfere with the private bookstores' rights. 2. Police officers interfere with private security firms' rights. 3. Public water fountains interfere with bottled water vendors' rights. 4. Free public skateparks threaten private Van's-owned parks.
I think it's high-time the US govt. supported an open-source OS project. Though backwards in its perspective on human rights, China is lightyears ahead in its thinking on this subject. If we had a national open-source OS that was used in every government office and available to citizens for free, it would be a dozen times more powerful of a punishment than any wrist-slapping the DOJ is going to give to MS for it's anti-trust crimes.
I am at quakecon... OK?!? There is some seriously cool shit going on here. I got like all the girls gone wild videos transferred over the network. I also just grabbed this cool ammo crate thing from the awards ceremony. On top of that, the mister sinus theater guys just ripped Britney Spears to shreds in a way that no one has fragged her before. So, yeah. John Carmack spoke. He gave those dumasses who bought an xBOx a reason to keep their POS hardware. Shit. Doom III is going to set new standards. We saw it in the doom III demo. Let me finish by saying I wish I had more beer.
This is perhaps the most insightful comment I've read on slashdot in a week or more. Don't get me wrong. I love video games. But I think Reductionist's experience should be considered by anyone who is heavily wrapped up in online gaming. The big question is, "How much is 'heavily' wrapped up?" Each person needs to figure that out for themselves. I guess the mature solution would be to ask oneself, "Do I have other things I need to really do instead of play this game?"
Try caching your content on the docroot. It's absurd that every page request on your site talks to the DB. After the page is built for the first visitor, it doesn't need to get rebuilt for every subsequent request. Sheesh.
Re:Not the analogy I would've used
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Penguin Airlines
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Quantas uses a sluggish marsupial as it's mascot, but that hasn't discouraged passengers from flying on the safest airline around.
I agree with you that it seems a little unlikely that the 250mb value is accurate. I think your argument is well-though-out, but I am not so sure about your comparison of programming a robot to perform physical motion and the data a human must retain to perform similar motions and how it would be a lot of data.
I suspect that we store the information necessary to do physical motions in a very lightweight format. I'm imagining something like how postscript works to describe curves, lines, and shading to a laser printer. If you send a picture of a page of printed text to a printer pixel-by-pixel, that's going to be several megs of data. If you send the printer the instructions of how the page is drawn in postscript, it is likely to be a couple hundred kb. Once a printer has the description of what a letter 'A' looks like in a given font, it can easily draw that letter 'A' in whatever size is desired without having to completely re-explain the drawing of a letter 'A'.
As we develop, perhaps we don't learn to do each thing as a seperate movement, but we learn basic movements and then can plug different parameters into the formulas for those movements in order to achieve things like dancing or throwing a ball across a field.
I am not sure, but I think what I'm saying touches on the the theory of Stephen Wolfram that he's got in that big book he's published.
To answer your question, I'd say that you are observing a Microsoft marketing tactic. Halo has been
pretty darn finished for the Windows and Mac platforms for some time now. It was closer to completion for those platforms before they even began to port it to xBOx. Microsoft needed a killer app for their console, so they bought the whole company that had made Halo... Bungie. Then they made the Halo -> xBOx port priority one. They are intentionally delaying the release of it on other platforms because they want its exclusivity on xBOx to drive sales of their console. Microsoft certainly didn't buy Bungie to make a profit off Halo. Any revenue generated from sales of the game on other platforms will be used to defray the original cash outlay to buy Bungie.
Doesn't it just seem like American Movie Execs have had it in for the Australian filmmakers forever? Shessh. They dubbed Mel Gibson's and everyone else's voices with American actors' voices in Mad Max before it played at the theaters here or was sold on VHS, LD, or DVD in the US. I refused to buy the American DVD of Mad Max because of this reason and was sort of hoping to find a british copy which has the original voices. Well, last night I was thrilled to find that MGM has just released
an EXCELLENT Mad Max DVD that includes the Australian voices by default. I was also relieved to find that in fact the original voices ARE way better than the dubbed voices. The overall sound is better, too.
If I were Mel Gibson, I'd have sued the American movie execs a long time ago for hacking my best work in film to date.
If you liked LOTR, be sure to also buy the DVD of the director's (Peter Jackson) earlier work, "Bad Taste". I am certain this film was what convinced producers to back him on the LOTR project.
Everything you were saying is on target. The part where you go a little off the tracks is with the bounty hunters. These are civil suits. Not criminal. Bounty Hunters only go after felons. The government won't incarcerate you for not paying these fines. They will just put the kaybosh on your credit.
I would agree with you that bounty hunters should round up spammers, though.
Do you think even with all those miles you could get $18k for it? I'd be surprised if someone would pay that much for any car with 80k + miles on it. If this car hasn't been much of a maintenance whore, I'd keep it till I wrecked it at this point. Especially if it's a convertible!
Please direct me to some valid published criticism of the 4WD 911s. I haven't seen any motorsports writer poo-poo the 911 C4.
I will admit, though, that just because something isn't published doesn't mean the criticism isn't valid. Take for example the BMW F650 motorcycle. It's an abomination compared to all previous BMW bikes, but magazine writers will laude its maneuverability offroad, etc while totally ignoring the fact that it's a chick bike made by an Itallian company with the BMW emblem glued on.
I have two reasons to recommend the C4. First is my own experience of having survived a 720 spin at 60 mph where the rear tires of my (2WD) 993 hydroplaned and spun the rear end of the car around while I was driving straight on a rainslicked highway. Second, and possibly the most laughable reason, is that in the video game Gran Turismo, when you are driving all the really powerful cars like the Viper, etc. rear-wheel spin becomes a big issue when starting from a stop or accelerating through a turn.
Of course, the M5 is a fun car. It's comfy inside, too. Do you or anyone else have a real familiarity with how this car lasts? If it's like past BMWs, it's going to need major overhaulling after a few years. Perhaps not, though.
I don't mean to flame you or get into a pissing match, but I thought I might lend some of my own performance automobile knowledge to this discussion.
BMWs are not a good purchase if you are looking for a performance automobile. They can be an exciting car to drive, but do not hold their value and are pretty high in maintenance costs. You can see this reflected in their rate of depreciation. I am making this statement relative to another famous german performance car, the 911 Porsche.
As an example, take a look at the 1990 BMW 3 Series 2 Dr 325iX AWD Coupe. You're gonna want 4-wheel-drive if you are going to mash on that gas pedal and don't just want to sit at the traffic light with the back wheels spinning. This car probably cost $40k new. Now it sells for less than $8k.
On the upper side of expense and performance, you've got the 1990 Porsche 911 2 Dr Carrera 4 Cabrio AWD Convertible which probably sold for around $80k (twice the BMW), but it now sells for just shy of $30k.
So the convertible 4wd BMW after 10 years sells for 1/5th the original sticker price, while the Porsche is more than a third of what the original owner paid. Of course, the BMW affords one the comfort of more realistic back seats and perhaps some cup holders up front.
As for the BMW motorcycles, they're an incredible machine. Relatively cheap, easy to work on and find parts for, extremely reliable, and fun to ride. I know of no other brand of motorcycles that match the BMW bikes on all these points. Remember near the end of Men In Black where Tommy Lee Jones dives into the mouth of that big alien to retrieve the gun which he describes as his 'favorite'? That's how I feel about my 1976 R90/6 BMW.
This is not what they are trying to stop. The legislation is intended to open the door to this practice (DOS attacks) being used to thwart the public distribution of copyrighted material, so the RIAA would not even begin to say 'they' are trying to prevent what happened to their site. Although it is currently illegal to launch a DOS attack, this appears to be a sound demonstration of the problem with this bill. I would say the culprits here have effectively drawn attention to the problem of passing this legislation.
That is, if DOS is legalized in order for copyright holders to suppress illegal distribution of their content, then large corporations can suddenly find themselves the target of these attacks. All it takes is for someone behind an IP-masquerading firewall at Microsoft to fire up a P2P client configured to serve a couple hundred gigs of copyrighted mp3 files. Even though the requests for the material will stop at the firewall, the RIAA hired-thugs will note the available material from microsoft.com and launch a DOS attack.
I honestly doubt this law will get passed, so this is really much ado about nothing.If you're going to get your panties in a twist over something and write to your representatives in Washington, do it over something like Global Climate Change and ask that the US sign onto the Kyoto Agreement.
I noticed that if I don't keep a cd in my cdrom drive, then I see that spinning ball a lot less. For some wierd reason (I'm sure others on slashdot can explain) a bunch of user interface actions require the computer to check the cdrom drive. Really annoying because it takes a while for the cd to spin up, etc.
This is a great discussion topic. I'm glad to find out about some of these new games.
Music Construction Set is replaced in modern time with the MTV Music Generator game for PSX (and PS2).
Remember Robot Wars? That was a wonderful Apple ][ game with rudimentary 2d graphics (overhead) that let you program virtual robots using assembler-type scripting. You could save your robots, then put them in arena matches against other robots. After a given number of battles, you would have statistics on which was the best robot design. You could mail your floppy disk with your robots in to the maker and each year they'd have a big tournament to see who had the best robot. Me and my Dad never competed in that, but we certainly had a rivalry going between ourselves.
I've been wondering for the past year or so if there was a modern equivalent to Robot Wars. As a lot of people are commenting, FPS mods and bots seem to have filled this space. It would be neat, though, if there were an FPS IDE that would output complete, standalone FPS games, in the same way that Music Construction Set or Pinball Construction Set do.
Slashdot Mirror
Seth
This is an absurd question. The person asking this question knows the answer and even nearly admits it in the question.
The restriction against high-gain antennae is prohibiting typical aesthetic eyesores from being attached to the building. Wireless networking antennaes are nothing like digital sattelite dishes, or big tv aerials. Wireless networking antennaes are essentially invisible and wouldn't violate the restrictions mentioned. The could even be obscured from sight within faux lamposts, etc.
seth
Therefore, when the government interferes with free enterprise, it's interfering with the rights of its citizens.
By providing a free operating system, the US govt. is NOT 'interfering with the rights of its citizens any more than:
1. The public libraries interfere with the private bookstores' rights.
2. Police officers interfere with private security firms' rights.
3. Public water fountains interfere with bottled water vendors' rights.
4. Free public skateparks threaten private Van's-owned parks.
I think it's high-time the US govt. supported an open-source OS project. Though backwards in its perspective on human rights, China is lightyears ahead in its thinking on this subject. If we had a national open-source OS that was used in every government office and available to citizens for free, it would be a dozen times more powerful of a punishment than any wrist-slapping the DOJ is going to give to MS for it's anti-trust crimes.
Seth
That's one way to look at it.
Of course, the M5 is a fun car. It's comfy inside, too. Do you or anyone else have a real familiarity with how this car lasts? If it's like past BMWs, it's going to need major overhaulling after a few years. Perhaps not, though.
This is what we are trying to stop!