Dude, did it enter your mind for a minute that maybe the maps were based on an existing training facility?
MILES gear depicted in this game is used at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin [www.irwin.army.mil], in California. Which is, by the way, in the desert.
Okay. We can now take the "E-True Hollywood Story" genre of humor, and flush it down the toilet. You comic writers out there, hey, understand what on earth you are making fun of! What made the "Jack-in-the-Box" documentary funny was the fact that is was a send-up of all the ego stroking that goes on in hollywood.
Making fun of a Video game character (who few under the age of 30 can remember) and putting together an obit column is just not funny. You need to pick characters that everyone can relate to, and still relates to. Even better yet, tie it into current events. Good subject matters include: Recognizable Corporate Mascots, Fad products that everyone bought and now no one will admit to owning one, characters from public service announcements.
And drug humor isn't all the funny anymore. It's like jokes in sitcoms about gays and casual sex. Sure the subject was shocking in the 70's, spoofed in the 80's, but by the 90's all of them were old hat.
Now, you want a subject matter that will make your average american's skin crawl, talk about race, the stock market, or political correctness.
I'll start. What's the difference between your 401K and a baseball card collection? Baseball cards at least came with gum at some point.
I think Houdini was on to something when he said: "Children expect nothing, and therefore see everything."
If I recall from Star Wars, Luke's biggest problem learning the force was having to unlearn all of the rules about the world he had grown up with.
You run into the same issues with any sufficiently complex system. Unless you have a very flexible framework, it becomes increasingly difficult to design in new features at late stages of implementation. Every decision we make throws out entire dimensions of movement. Every little trick we learn has to be unlearned if the rules change.
5 Million action figures wholesale: $50 million
Markup on the action figures: $100 million
Tarif on the action figures: $6 Million
Money "saved" by redefining them as "toys": $2.5 Million
Hey, I still use my
Zappy scooter[zapworld.com]. Nice part about that boy is that I travel at 10mph, don't have to site down, and can fold the thing up and take it with me inside. Hell, I've worn a suit while riding this thing. (Gotta watch the puddles.)
The unit is about 35 pounds, so it is just on this side of weildable. My complaints are the belt between the motor and the drive wheel snaps whenever my wife uses it, and it is to heavy for her to lug around.
She has her eyes on something called the "Zooter" board that is apparently much lighter.
One of these days I'm going to dust the puppy off, replace the 12V lead acid battery with a NIHM, and then see about replacing the belt with something that will last more than 3 weeks.
On second thought, I think personality may play a larger role in problem solving than age. I was a very verbal kid at a very early age.
I started toying with computers back in 1982. I was (lets see 1982-1974...) 8. Really 7, I was born in December.
My first computer was a PCjr running IBM-DOS, and BASIC. I learned to navigate around BASIC because, well, there weren't many games for the damn thing.
Beyond the rudimentary ASCII art games for the PCjr, there were the Text adventure games ala Infocom. I loved them, but my brother (a year younger) never did like them.
He was always better than me at the hand-eye coordination games. That and he could site read music for the violin at 6, but despite years of music classes, but I still can't even sing from sheet music. (I match pitch with the orchestra, or I memorize the tune. It's cheating, but I have managed to fake it well enough to be a lead in the school musical a few times.)
Then again, when I was 4 or 5 I sat down and read my family's set of Encylopedias cover to cover. I would sit an follow the links between articles for days at a time. After a while I would just systematically skim the index and follow the topics in order. God only knows what information I actually retained, but man did I pick up how to classify information.
Regardless, there seems to be a difference in wiring between 2 people who have the same genetic backgrounds, intelligence, and sex. (Granted, birth order does have a profound impact on personality.)
Have you ever noticed that Kids pick right up on the Graphical User Interface, but adults need to be taught. The reason has less to do slower grown ups, than it does to the fact the GUI was designed for 4 year olds!
Yes folks, they used research on children to determine that people process information visually. I dare say, having been one of those kids that picked everything up immediately, I approach problems very differently as an adult.
By the way, voting is a constitutional right, no a privilage. (Granted you do have to register, but you get to fill out your draft card at the same time!) The right to vote is take away for certain felons, but that's it.
Considering that the elderly are the most consistent voters, I would think they would welcome NOT having to stand out in the cold.
And damn, why is an election always on Tuesday, and why November? November is damn cold in most parts of the US. I happen to live within walking distance to work, so I can pop out on my coffee break. But think of all those folks who commute for hours a day to NY. When do they find time to get back to NJ or CT to vote? They would have to take time off from work, or vote when they get home. And those lines get VERY long.
If they could vote at the office, or the local starbucks, I think they would appreciate that. Besides, there is nothing as comical as trying to figure out where they stuffed the voting machines THIS year.
Oh wait, its the Domestic Naturalization Service. The evil twin of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. We are all getting lobotomies!
Actually, if we focused lobotomies on Lawyers we may end up with a better country after all. Of course some would argue that process has been ongoing for quite some time...
Whose to say that can't be done with absentee ballots?
The joy of the internet is how you can access it from everywhere. If you felt the need, you could vote from a mobile phone in a public restroom 2 states away. (Just make sure you have your voter ID.)
You will always have the option to vote in the traditional manner for at least the next 50 years or so, because a lot of folks (young and old) don't have internet access. You will also have those tech savvy paranoid people who wear tinfoil over their heads too.
Well heck, even with the voting machines, they tell you you are voter #x, and only go to machine #y. The polling folks periodically check the counters on the machine.
Take that system, bottle it, and you have just what you need for a network based voting system. You need a counter Y, and a head count of how many people cast the vote X. If X > Y you have a problem. Y can be less than X because some folks don't vote for every slot in the election.
Now the problem is such: you need to compartmentalize the counts into managable chunks. What is great about the present system is how you can only physically screw up a few thousand votes at a time. My idea: keep the present voting districts that we have presently, and keep the counters an logs seperate for each district.
Such a system, with a sufficient enough airgap between the finally tally and the auditing logs, could be done rather cheaply.
There is nothing to be done. This area is prone to fire, and fire combusts everything in its path. Your options are:
Live with it.
Leave it.
I have to give the emergency services folks in Caberra credit. It sounds like they have worked out a way to get most of the people out of harm's way. Property can be rebuilt, and historical buildings are destroyed all the time. (That's what makes the surviving ones so special after all.) But people cannot be.
Technology can't prevent fires, or floods. It has done a pretty good job mitigating the damage of Earthquakes, and to a lesser extent hurricanes. But look carefully at the specs and you will see that all technology has a point beyond which it will break. After this point more "technology" will only delay the damage, not prevent it.
That's like giving tax incentives to build vacation community in Antarctica. It sounds like it will work until you realize that except that your average joe sees Antarctica as a giant snowball. Add to that the fact that beyond penguins, all other food sources would have to be imported. And did I mention the weather?
At some point some guy is going to discover that some product that people want can only be found/produced in space. They will set up a trillion dollar mining/factory facility and in the process develop all of the infrastructure to get there and back quickly an cheaply.
Americans went west originally in search of Gold in California. Along the way they noticed a rather large land mass in between. (And I wouldn't exactly call Alaska a popular place to live these days.)
Conversely look at the war on drugs, and the prohibition. In both cases the government put its foot down, and got it run over.
I will sum it up as follows: There has to be some intrinsic value for something to be done. Government can either get in the way or profit from it.
I work at a Science Museum and I see a lot of the same factors for failure at work here as I see at NASA.
In both organizations the actual working staff has been reduced sharply over the years. Large projects are farmed out to contractors at great expense, and the in house folks are just supposed to keep it running until the next big project.
What management doesn't realize is that if the spent the same amount of money on staff and materials that they spent farming it out, they would have a sustainable environment instead of an underfunded mess.
As always in these discussion groups, you learn a lot by being mistaken.
That said, there are still many issues that concern your average denizen of the third world. Internet access does not exactly rank up there with food and running water (no matter how important we yankee scum may think it is.)
Auto insurance is like that. My liability insurance covers whoever is harmed by my car, because ultimately I am the one who will be sued because my name is on the registration. At least in Pennsylvania, that also includes if some numbnuts steals my car.
A friend of mine was relating to me how government bodies get around competitive bidding in cases like that. They don't order the product directly from the manufacturer, instead they call a couple of resellers and get the best price from them. (Naturally marked up from the prices they would have paid purchasing directly.)
Slashdot Mirror
MILES gear depicted in this game is used at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin [www.irwin.army.mil], in California. Which is, by the way, in the desert.
Making fun of a Video game character (who few under the age of 30 can remember) and putting together an obit column is just not funny. You need to pick characters that everyone can relate to, and still relates to. Even better yet, tie it into current events. Good subject matters include: Recognizable Corporate Mascots, Fad products that everyone bought and now no one will admit to owning one, characters from public service announcements.
And drug humor isn't all the funny anymore. It's like jokes in sitcoms about gays and casual sex. Sure the subject was shocking in the 70's, spoofed in the 80's, but by the 90's all of them were old hat.
Now, you want a subject matter that will make your average american's skin crawl, talk about race, the stock market, or political correctness.
I'll start. What's the difference between your 401K and a baseball card collection? Baseball cards at least came with gum at some point.
I think Houdini was on to something when he said: "Children expect nothing, and therefore see everything."
If I recall from Star Wars, Luke's biggest problem learning the force was having to unlearn all of the rules about the world he had grown up with.
You run into the same issues with any sufficiently complex system. Unless you have a very flexible framework, it becomes increasingly difficult to design in new features at late stages of implementation. Every decision we make throws out entire dimensions of movement. Every little trick we learn has to be unlearned if the rules change.
5 Million action figures wholesale: $50 million
Markup on the action figures: $100 million
Tarif on the action figures: $6 Million
Money "saved" by redefining them as "toys": $2.5 Million
Money spent on lawyers, and PR: Countless
The unit is about 35 pounds, so it is just on this side of weildable. My complaints are the belt between the motor and the drive wheel snaps whenever my wife uses it, and it is to heavy for her to lug around.
She has her eyes on something called the "Zooter" board that is apparently much lighter.
One of these days I'm going to dust the puppy off, replace the 12V lead acid battery with a NIHM, and then see about replacing the belt with something that will last more than 3 weeks.
I started toying with computers back in 1982. I was (lets see 1982-1974...) 8. Really 7, I was born in December.
My first computer was a PCjr running IBM-DOS, and BASIC. I learned to navigate around BASIC because, well, there weren't many games for the damn thing. Beyond the rudimentary ASCII art games for the PCjr, there were the Text adventure games ala Infocom. I loved them, but my brother (a year younger) never did like them.
He was always better than me at the hand-eye coordination games. That and he could site read music for the violin at 6, but despite years of music classes, but I still can't even sing from sheet music. (I match pitch with the orchestra, or I memorize the tune. It's cheating, but I have managed to fake it well enough to be a lead in the school musical a few times.)
Then again, when I was 4 or 5 I sat down and read my family's set of Encylopedias cover to cover. I would sit an follow the links between articles for days at a time. After a while I would just systematically skim the index and follow the topics in order. God only knows what information I actually retained, but man did I pick up how to classify information.
Regardless, there seems to be a difference in wiring between 2 people who have the same genetic backgrounds, intelligence, and sex. (Granted, birth order does have a profound impact on personality.)
Yes folks, they used research on children to determine that people process information visually. I dare say, having been one of those kids that picked everything up immediately, I approach problems very differently as an adult.
Considering that the elderly are the most consistent voters, I would think they would welcome NOT having to stand out in the cold.
And damn, why is an election always on Tuesday, and why November? November is damn cold in most parts of the US. I happen to live within walking distance to work, so I can pop out on my coffee break. But think of all those folks who commute for hours a day to NY. When do they find time to get back to NJ or CT to vote? They would have to take time off from work, or vote when they get home. And those lines get VERY long.
If they could vote at the office, or the local starbucks, I think they would appreciate that. Besides, there is nothing as comical as trying to figure out where they stuffed the voting machines THIS year.
You used to walk to school uphill both ways, Didn't you?
Actually, if we focused lobotomies on Lawyers we may end up with a better country after all. Of course some would argue that process has been ongoing for quite some time...
What the hell is DNS? (Beyond the Domain Name Service)
I seem to recall a prominant woman in Louisiana wished to be buried in a particular county, so she could remain politically active.
The joy of the internet is how you can access it from everywhere. If you felt the need, you could vote from a mobile phone in a public restroom 2 states away. (Just make sure you have your voter ID.)
You will always have the option to vote in the traditional manner for at least the next 50 years or so, because a lot of folks (young and old) don't have internet access. You will also have those tech savvy paranoid people who wear tinfoil over their heads too.
Take that system, bottle it, and you have just what you need for a network based voting system. You need a counter Y, and a head count of how many people cast the vote X. If X > Y you have a problem. Y can be less than X because some folks don't vote for every slot in the election.
Now the problem is such: you need to compartmentalize the counts into managable chunks. What is great about the present system is how you can only physically screw up a few thousand votes at a time. My idea: keep the present voting districts that we have presently, and keep the counters an logs seperate for each district.
Such a system, with a sufficient enough airgap between the finally tally and the auditing logs, could be done rather cheaply.
Now pregnant Chads... that I leave to science.
- Live with it.
- Leave it.
I have to give the emergency services folks in Caberra credit. It sounds like they have worked out a way to get most of the people out of harm's way. Property can be rebuilt, and historical buildings are destroyed all the time. (That's what makes the surviving ones so special after all.) But people cannot be.Technology can't prevent fires, or floods. It has done a pretty good job mitigating the damage of Earthquakes, and to a lesser extent hurricanes. But look carefully at the specs and you will see that all technology has a point beyond which it will break. After this point more "technology" will only delay the damage, not prevent it.
At some point some guy is going to discover that some product that people want can only be found/produced in space. They will set up a trillion dollar mining/factory facility and in the process develop all of the infrastructure to get there and back quickly an cheaply.
Americans went west originally in search of Gold in California. Along the way they noticed a rather large land mass in between. (And I wouldn't exactly call Alaska a popular place to live these days.)
Conversely look at the war on drugs, and the prohibition. In both cases the government put its foot down, and got it run over.
I will sum it up as follows: There has to be some intrinsic value for something to be done. Government can either get in the way or profit from it.
In both organizations the actual working staff has been reduced sharply over the years. Large projects are farmed out to contractors at great expense, and the in house folks are just supposed to keep it running until the next big project.
What management doesn't realize is that if the spent the same amount of money on staff and materials that they spent farming it out, they would have a sustainable environment instead of an underfunded mess.
Well you had C which was written for Unix which was written for C. You can't understand one without the other.
That said, there are still many issues that concern your average denizen of the third world. Internet access does not exactly rank up there with food and running water (no matter how important we yankee scum may think it is.)
Auto insurance is like that. My liability insurance covers whoever is harmed by my car, because ultimately I am the one who will be sued because my name is on the registration. At least in Pennsylvania, that also includes if some numbnuts steals my car.
Next you will be telling us that it's ok for government A to overthrow government B if it thinks B is destabilizing to it.
HHOS
When did you ever get a manual for windows? The last manual I ever got with the computer was for Dos 3.2 and GWBASIC on my IBM PCjr, back in 1981.
A friend of mine was relating to me how government bodies get around competitive bidding in cases like that. They don't order the product directly from the manufacturer, instead they call a couple of resellers and get the best price from them. (Naturally marked up from the prices they would have paid purchasing directly.)
These aren't the libraries we are looking for.
Sign the check...