Are you sure it wasn't the defective nVidia chipset blowing out again after being sent in twice already for repair?
Ugh. That happened to mine too.
The sad thing is it was a defect across entire models. It doesn't matter how many times you had it repaired, it'll blow out again, because it's impossible to fix the heat issues.
What sucks is that they offered refunds for one laptop model, but not for my model, despite a 92-page thread on their forums from owners of that model saying "yeah.. mine has this problem too. Video chip burned itself out."
Or the Highlander sequels. My god, did they really try to sell us that the immortals were aliens from space? No, sorry. There can be only one (Highlander movie), and it doesn't explain them at all. To so much better effect.
I even felt this about a sequel to a sequel. At the end of Matrix: Reloaded, my mind was a little blown. Neo had just shut machines off in the real world? Does that mean the "real world" was another Matrix simulation? That maybe a there were simulations in simulations like the layers of an onion. Oh, there were all sorts of interesting possibilities! And then, in the first exceptionally shitty 45 minutes of the Matrix: Revolutions it's hand-waved away saying "no, he can just do this shit in the real world now too." Oh. Well that was far less interesting than the possibilities most fans thought of.
Whenever I see the question "Why?" in a scientific context I like to replace it with "What is the mechanism by which..." So the initial question of "Why does mass warp space-time?" becomes "What is the mechanism by which mass warps space-time?" That is legitimate scientific question and I'm certain it is being researched. If the reformulation doesn't make sense, as in your example of "Why is the Universe the way it is?" then the question is silly.
I think it's because we have a limited understanding of the nature of the universe that works for most understandings, just like Newton had a limited understanding of gravity that works for most things. I'm still trying to work my way through Stephen Hawking's definition of spacetime (as opposed to space and time being different) and his explanations of how reality has an actual curvature. It could just be that the way we think about and observe the universe are too limited and incomplete for an understanding of how these work. It could be that there is no such thing as, say, gravitons which some believe carry gravitational force and this attractive force really is just a warping of our physical space-time in the same way that the bowling ball/marble demonstration the grandparent poster illustrates.
Not to mention all the five/six/seven/eight dimensions that are supposed to explain reality as well.
I believe that the LHC is intended to provide conditions of high enough energy to observe the interactions between gravity and electromagnetism that will let us put together that ever elusive "theory of everything."
If you really are interested in diving into all this, Hawking's semi-layman books "A Brief History of Time" and "The Universe in a Nutshell" are a fantastic read.
I'm not heavy into the whole Star Wars fanbase but I'm curious about this argument. What is it about Midi-chlorians that fans dislike as opposed to something they embrace like lightsabers?
This is a problem you often have when you leave something that's cool unexplained for a long time, then give it a rather shitty explanation two decades later -- all the mythology that had built up around it over that time is more interesting, but has to be discarded in favor of the new continuity. The first series of Star Wars was full of mythology and mysticism that leads to a sense of wonder that is retroactively broken by the later changes.
Compare Yoda's explanation of the Force to Qui-Gon and Anakin's Q&A about midichlorians in the Phantom Menace.
However as the autism rate drops by a fraction of a percent. There seems to be a 20% increase in deaths due to children dying of viruses. The greater good be damn! I don't care how many kids die from preventable virus I don't want the shame of my child being autistic.
Hey, a lot of these diseases we vaccinate against also gave kids life-long crippling injuries instead of killing them outright.
I'll take the vaccination with the dubious and totally unproven claim of autism over the very real danger of infection.
"Further evidence of the scientific consensus includes the rejection of a causal link between thiomersal and autism by multiple national and international scientific and medical bodies including the American Medical Association,[45] the American Academy of Pediatrics,[46] the American College of Medical Toxicology,[47] the Canadian Paediatric Society,[48] the U.S. National Academy of Sciences,[2] the Food and Drug Administration,[4] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,[8] the World Health Organization,[7] the Public Health Agency of Canada,[49] and the European Medicines Agency.[50]"
Referenced and everything. You skip over that and reference the editor of a Wikipedia page as a source proving your point?
Yes yes, all those journals are very nice, as are the opinions of all those scientists who are either paid off by the medical and chemical industries or have a stake in it, but if I know, you know, in my gut that mercury in vaccines cause autism, isn't that what really matters?
A new expac announcement inside a year of the last being brought out.
No surprise there, Cataclysm was announced (with playable goblin/wargen starter zones) two years at that Blizzcon, so this expansion announcement is actually right on schedule. Too bad, WoW needs another expansion bad now.
They have mentioned they want to release more, smaller expansions on a faster pace.
They actually had him on the local morning radio last week (or was it the week before?) plugging his new album, and they asked him about it.
He basically said that he's aware of the trope, but that he doesn't feel like he talks like that. Whether that was a canned response for the radio, the honest truth, or something in between is open for debate =)
Shatner has given different reasons over the years. At one point I remember him saying he sometimes had trouble remembering his lines (not a lot of prep time) and he would pause to pull everything together.
I'm lower-class, and I pay about 3k/year on 20k income. I have no loopholes or deductions available
Yes you do, the Standard Deduction. It's just the case for most people that their itemized deductions are small enough that the standard deduction covers them.
RMS is just hated by many people for stating the truth (or, at least pretty convincing arguments) without being diplomatic about it -- he's very similar to Socrates in that respect
Actually he's like a lot of geeks who don't understand human behavior and emotion and the importance of the nuances of communication. I swear the man has Asperger's Syndrome sometimes.
No, they are preventing people from going to the store, looking at the comic and buying it from Amazon for less if they like it. They don't want to advertise products for Amazon for free and while I might not like that, I can understand that.
They will have to pull a LOT of products from their shelves if they want to avoid products that people can get on Amazon for less if they like it.
What about key hacking though? This has been a big problem for game manufacturers for as long as games have had product keys. User downloads a game, downloads a pirate key to play it on. What if that pirate uses a key that is already in active use? The key would either be transferred to the pirate, making it impossible for the real user to play, or else you'd get the situation where someone could sell the game but not release the key, making that sale useless.
Instead, if a key is non-transferable, then key is activated on first use and can't ever be used by anyone else.
Ugh, quoting fail. The same comment, but properly quoted:
There was a time when all of those multiplayer games were hosted by the gamers themselves, in some form or other.
And for the most part, that sucked. Poor network syncing mode made a number of games (especially Starcraft) bad to play if one person had a modem while everyone else was on DSL. Router issues, the challenge of firewalls on the router and the computer, network address translation, and so forth made hosting Internet games past the mid-90s a pain in the ass for technically-savvy users, let alone tech neophytes.
Granted, I miss hosting Diablo II on my PC, but overall online gaming is far more reliable now than it was back when everyone hosted games on their computers.
There was a time when all of those multiplayer games were hosted by the gamers themselves, in some form or other.
And for the most part, that sucked. Poor network syncing mode made a number of games (especially Starcraft) bad to play if one person had a modem while everyone else was on DSL. Router issues, the challenge of firewalls on the router and the computer, network address translation, and so forth made hosting Internet games past the mid-90s a pain in the ass for technically-savvy users, let alone tech neophytes.
Granted, I miss hosting Diablo II on my PC, but overall online gaming is far more reliable now than it was back when everyone hosted games on their computers.
Games are like movies and books, people like to browse and grab what looks interesting to them.
I learned my lesson when it came to that in the 80s and early 90s when I played some crappy games because I thought the box looked cool (or in one case "I reaaaaally want to play an RPG but this is the only RPG the store has on hand"). $50 ($60 in that one case) was a lot for a teenager to lay down for a game (interesting how game prices have lagged compared to inflation) and I quickly learned that the opinions of friends and reviews in Nintendo Power of Family Computing were pretty important (I like putting things in parentheses).
One of the prime rules in investing is that as your tolerance for risk gets lower (i.e., you get closer and closer to retirement), you shift your investments to more and more conservative investments - money markets, and high quality bonds. THAT is disciplined investing. "I want to retire in 2010, but I can leave my entire portfolio in high-risk derivatives, international growth stocks, and complex unregulated hedge funds right up until the day I retire" is pretty much the *definition* of undisciplined investing.
Well one of the problems with the financial meltdowns of 2008 was that these poisoned mortgage-backed securities were given the highest/safest rating available. That's why I scoffed a bit at the credit agency's downgrade a little while back, since they had blown all their credibility already.
The premises are right, but it is Adobe's fault. How could it by anyone else's? Flash is their 100% proprietary platform. They and only they are responsible.
You're trying to respond seriously to a troll who likes to post strawmans. No one wins in that circumstance!
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure it wasn't the defective nVidia chipset blowing out again after being sent in twice already for repair?
Ugh. That happened to mine too.
The sad thing is it was a defect across entire models. It doesn't matter how many times you had it repaired, it'll blow out again, because it's impossible to fix the heat issues.
What sucks is that they offered refunds for one laptop model, but not for my model, despite a 92-page thread on their forums from owners of that model saying "yeah.. mine has this problem too. Video chip burned itself out."
Or the Highlander sequels. My god, did they really try to sell us that the immortals were aliens from space?
No, sorry. There can be only one (Highlander movie), and it doesn't explain them at all. To so much better effect.
I even felt this about a sequel to a sequel.
At the end of Matrix: Reloaded, my mind was a little blown. Neo had just shut machines off in the real world? Does that mean the "real world" was another Matrix simulation? That maybe a there were simulations in simulations like the layers of an onion. Oh, there were all sorts of interesting possibilities! And then, in the first exceptionally shitty 45 minutes of the Matrix: Revolutions it's hand-waved away saying "no, he can just do this shit in the real world now too." Oh. Well that was far less interesting than the possibilities most fans thought of.
Whenever I see the question "Why?" in a scientific context I like to replace it with "What is the mechanism by which..." So the initial question of "Why does mass warp space-time?" becomes "What is the mechanism by which mass warps space-time?" That is legitimate scientific question and I'm certain it is being researched. If the reformulation doesn't make sense, as in your example of "Why is the Universe the way it is?" then the question is silly.
I think it's because we have a limited understanding of the nature of the universe that works for most understandings, just like Newton had a limited understanding of gravity that works for most things. I'm still trying to work my way through Stephen Hawking's definition of spacetime (as opposed to space and time being different) and his explanations of how reality has an actual curvature. It could just be that the way we think about and observe the universe are too limited and incomplete for an understanding of how these work. It could be that there is no such thing as, say, gravitons which some believe carry gravitational force and this attractive force really is just a warping of our physical space-time in the same way that the bowling ball/marble demonstration the grandparent poster illustrates.
Not to mention all the five/six/seven/eight dimensions that are supposed to explain reality as well.
I believe that the LHC is intended to provide conditions of high enough energy to observe the interactions between gravity and electromagnetism that will let us put together that ever elusive "theory of everything."
If you really are interested in diving into all this, Hawking's semi-layman books "A Brief History of Time" and "The Universe in a Nutshell" are a fantastic read.
I'm not heavy into the whole Star Wars fanbase but I'm curious about this argument. What is it about Midi-chlorians that fans dislike as opposed to something they embrace like lightsabers?
This is a problem you often have when you leave something that's cool unexplained for a long time, then give it a rather shitty explanation two decades later -- all the mythology that had built up around it over that time is more interesting, but has to be discarded in favor of the new continuity. The first series of Star Wars was full of mythology and mysticism that leads to a sense of wonder that is retroactively broken by the later changes.
Compare Yoda's explanation of the Force to Qui-Gon and Anakin's Q&A about midichlorians in the Phantom Menace.
and by the way, why is that show on so often? I swear, every other week they play it.
Maybe they're trying to shake off the "Hitler Channel" stereotype.
Now it has "The Hysterical Channel" stereotype instead.
I'd much prefer "The Hitler Channel."
However as the autism rate drops by a fraction of a percent. There seems to be a 20% increase in deaths due to children dying of viruses.
The greater good be damn! I don't care how many kids die from preventable virus I don't want the shame of my child being autistic.
Hey, a lot of these diseases we vaccinate against also gave kids life-long crippling injuries instead of killing them outright.
I'll take the vaccination with the dubious and totally unproven claim of autism over the very real danger of infection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal_controversy#Scientific_consensus
"Further evidence of the scientific consensus includes the rejection of a causal link between thiomersal and autism by multiple national and international scientific and medical bodies including the American Medical Association,[45] the American Academy of Pediatrics,[46] the American College of Medical Toxicology,[47] the Canadian Paediatric Society,[48] the U.S. National Academy of Sciences,[2] the Food and Drug Administration,[4] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,[8] the World Health Organization,[7] the Public Health Agency of Canada,[49] and the European Medicines Agency.[50]"
Referenced and everything. You skip over that and reference the editor of a Wikipedia page as a source proving your point?
Yes yes, all those journals are very nice, as are the opinions of all those scientists who are either paid off by the medical and chemical industries or have a stake in it, but if I know, you know, in my gut that mercury in vaccines cause autism, isn't that what really matters?
A new expac announcement inside a year of the last being brought out.
No surprise there, Cataclysm was announced (with playable goblin/wargen starter zones) two years at that Blizzcon, so this expansion announcement is actually right on schedule. Too bad, WoW needs another expansion bad now.
They have mentioned they want to release more, smaller expansions on a faster pace.
They actually had him on the local morning radio last week (or was it the week before?) plugging his new album, and they asked him about it.
He basically said that he's aware of the trope, but that he doesn't feel like he talks like that. Whether that was a canned response for the radio, the honest truth, or something in between is open for debate =)
Shatner has given different reasons over the years. At one point I remember him saying he sometimes had trouble remembering his lines (not a lot of prep time) and he would pause to pull everything together.
Acting is all about feeling, which is pretty much the polar opposite of thinking
Clearly someone who has never done any serious acting, or at least good acting.
I'm lower-class, and I pay about 3k/year on 20k income. I have no loopholes or deductions available
Yes you do, the Standard Deduction. It's just the case for most people that their itemized deductions are small enough that the standard deduction covers them.
RMS is just hated by many people for stating the truth (or, at least pretty convincing arguments) without being diplomatic about it -- he's very similar to Socrates in that respect
Actually he's like a lot of geeks who don't understand human behavior and emotion and the importance of the nuances of communication. I swear the man has Asperger's Syndrome sometimes.
Seriously? He said he was not glad Jobs is dead.
Still, it's like saying "I don't mean to sound insulting" right before saying something that couldn't be taken any other way than an insult.
No, they are preventing people from going to the store, looking at the comic and buying it from Amazon for less if they like it. They don't want to advertise products for Amazon for free and while I might not like that, I can understand that.
They will have to pull a LOT of products from their shelves if they want to avoid products that people can get on Amazon for less if they like it.
The Westboro Baptist Church is not Catholic, or Christian.
They are, in fact, extremely anti-Catholic.
Then why not make the original game 10$ cheaper, but disable the MP until the player pays an extra fee?
Isn't this the Microsoft model essentially? except for the part where the original game isn't $10 cheaper..
It's the printer manufacturer model. Make printers stupidly cheap so you can hit people with fees later on.
What about key hacking though? This has been a big problem for game manufacturers for as long as games have had product keys. User downloads a game, downloads a pirate key to play it on. What if that pirate uses a key that is already in active use? The key would either be transferred to the pirate, making it impossible for the real user to play, or else you'd get the situation where someone could sell the game but not release the key, making that sale useless.
Instead, if a key is non-transferable, then key is activated on first use and can't ever be used by anyone else.
Sony doesn't make money from second hand game sales. This is very bad for GameStop. Why doesn't slashdot make up their mind who they hate more?
There's nothing wrong with hating everyone equally.
...Another reason to switch to PC gaming
Can you resell the game you bought through... say, Steam?
Ugh, quoting fail. The same comment, but properly quoted:
There was a time when all of those multiplayer games were hosted by the gamers themselves, in some form or other.
And for the most part, that sucked. Poor network syncing mode made a number of games (especially Starcraft) bad to play if one person had a modem while everyone else was on DSL. Router issues, the challenge of firewalls on the router and the computer, network address translation, and so forth made hosting Internet games past the mid-90s a pain in the ass for technically-savvy users, let alone tech neophytes.
Granted, I miss hosting Diablo II on my PC, but overall online gaming is far more reliable now than it was back when everyone hosted games on their computers.
There was a time when all of those multiplayer games were hosted by the gamers themselves, in some form or other.
And for the most part, that sucked. Poor network syncing mode made a number of games (especially Starcraft) bad to play if one person had a modem while everyone else was on DSL. Router issues, the challenge of firewalls on the router and the computer, network address translation, and so forth made hosting Internet games past the mid-90s a pain in the ass for technically-savvy users, let alone tech neophytes.
Granted, I miss hosting Diablo II on my PC, but overall online gaming is far more reliable now than it was back when everyone hosted games on their computers.
Games are like movies and books, people like to browse and grab what looks interesting to them.
I learned my lesson when it came to that in the 80s and early 90s when I played some crappy games because I thought the box looked cool (or in one case "I reaaaaally want to play an RPG but this is the only RPG the store has on hand"). $50 ($60 in that one case) was a lot for a teenager to lay down for a game (interesting how game prices have lagged compared to inflation) and I quickly learned that the opinions of friends and reviews in Nintendo Power of Family Computing were pretty important (I like putting things in parentheses).
One of the prime rules in investing is that as your tolerance for risk gets lower (i.e., you get closer and closer to retirement), you shift your investments to more and more conservative investments - money markets, and high quality bonds. THAT is disciplined investing. "I want to retire in 2010, but I can leave my entire portfolio in high-risk derivatives, international growth stocks, and complex unregulated hedge funds right up until the day I retire" is pretty much the *definition* of undisciplined investing.
Well one of the problems with the financial meltdowns of 2008 was that these poisoned mortgage-backed securities were given the highest/safest rating available. That's why I scoffed a bit at the credit agency's downgrade a little while back, since they had blown all their credibility already.
The premises are right, but it is Adobe's fault. How could it by anyone else's? Flash is their 100% proprietary platform. They and only they are responsible.
You're trying to respond seriously to a troll who likes to post strawmans. No one wins in that circumstance!
It's called Java
At this point I think Oracle has damaged the Java brand so badly I'm not sure that it could be considered an open platform anymore.