That's what did it for me. I mean, seriously. If Vader had been lying, that would have been one thing. Or even if Vader was a clone of Luke's father, things would have been ok.
But that made liars out of both Yoda and Obi-Wan. "Yeah, we knew he was your dad, but we decided to bullshit you."
There was a story on BoingBoing a few months back about a guy that does this. The picture is cool.
"Al Jessup of Beckley, West Virginia, has 12 cheap satellite dishes stuck to his house, which pull in over 5,000 free-to-air channels from satellites all over the sky. He is retired, and delights in odd and foreign programming."
It is a bad order. The job of the NASA public affairs office is not to edit or rewrite what the actual scientists produce, but to disseminate that information to any interested parties.
The process of scientific discovery is almost never about absolute facts. Instead, it's a series of more and more refined best guesses. The Big Bang is the current best guess about how things got started. It explains things like the cosmic background radiation and why everything seems to be moving away from us. In the future, if someone comes up with a better guess which can explain everything the Big Bang does, plus things that it doesn't, and makes testable and falsifiable predictions that, if true, contradict the Big Bang, then it may replace the Big Bang as the dominant paradigm.
This is not true just for the Big Bang, but for everything. Aristotle gave way to Newton, who gave way to Einstein, who will probably give way to whoever resolves the incompatibilty between quantum mechanics and relativity.
This is why the scientists make such good punching bags for the creationist/ID crowd. They rarely make definitive statements because their entire scientific training has conditioned them to put all sorts of qualifiers on the statemets they make. The qualifiers make them sound like they're trying to avoid being pinned down (which is actually what they're doing), but it also makes them sound less confident in comparison to someone that just says "The FSM did it!"
Has anyone done any studies on the lifetime of flash memory?
They have a limited number of times they can be rewritten, and it'd be interesting if someone has ever hooked one up and had a PC repeatedly rewrite a sector until it failed.
Any such player-run system would be too easy to abuse. If you put restrictions in place to prevent the abuse, people will game their way around them.
For example, a guild could have all of its members give each other high ratings. Or they could band together to give poor ratings to someone that pisses them off.
With hardcoded SQL, you run the risk of SQL injection exploits, unless you're very careful to escape each and every user-written field that makes its way into a SQL statement.
Most people run Windows as Administrator. Why is that?
Because a lot of applications WON'T WORK if they're run as normal users. Why is that?
Because the Windows mindset comes from DOS, where there were no restrictions on what an application could do. Anything could put something anywhere it wanted to. So the developers got used to being able to do that.
Suddenly here comes Windows, and suddenly your application can't save settings to the INI file in C:\WINDOWS anymore, because it doesn't have write access to that directory.
The correct thing is to get an upgrade for the app. But you can make it work by just running as an administrator. So they do. And Microsoft is complicit in this by not putting enough pressure on the application developers to fix their apps to not require administrator access.
Does the closed-source nature prevent people from defending against this? Not really. If everyone ran as root in their Linux systems all the time, there would be just as many exploits for Linux.
Write down what you want to have in each room. Go wild, put down everything. Touch screen, ethernet, remote control, whatever.
Then see what's out on the market that will do what you want. What kind of remote control options are there? Is there an alternative?
Then start trimming back. Do you REALLY need to control the thermostat from EVERY room? Do you REALLY need remote-controlled lighting in EVERY room? Chances are, you can cut back quite a bit.
If I had to pick one thing to do, I'd say to lay some conduit to every room, and put Cat5 (or 6 even) and a string in each one. No speaker wire, though. If you want to listen to music, put a stereo in that room and grab the music via the Cat5.
Do that, and you'll be relatively future-proofed without getting stuck on some technology that may be obsolete in 5 or 10 years.
How are the air vents run? If possible, see if you can follow the same route. If not, then run the cable inside the air vents, but if you do this, make sure the cable is rated for that. The vents can get quite warm in the winter when the heater's running, and condensation can collect on it in the summer from the AC.
If a dev were to post to one of the WoW forums and say something like "I'm a dev", that forum would quickly become an unusable morass of whining, flaming, trolling, and general bitching. Yes, yes, they're already that way, but it would get even worse, as hard as that may be to believe. I've seen it.
Way back when, Brad McQuaid used to post to alt.games.everquest, and actually participate in the official Everquest forums. This was actually kind of cool, you could talk, and he'd answer.
But then something changed. More and more people kept expecting him to read their posts. Posts started getting made with titles like "BRAD PLZ READ!" or "ATTN VERANT!". Of course, nobody could keep up with the number of messages posted per day, but people would still get really pissed if he didn't respond to their burning issues IMMEDIATELY DAMMIT BECAUSE I PAY $10 A MONTH!!!1!1!
Eventually, the bulk of new messages were nothing but rants and bitchfests about how they were being ignored and why didn't he respond to that message they posted three days ago.
So he stopped posting. Eventually, over the next few months, as people realized that he wasn't answering, the problem subsided.
And one other point. Just because the devs don't POST to the forums doesn't mean that they don't READ the forums.
Polyploid organisms are bigger because their cells are bigger, not because their energy is transferred.
They also say that because the triploid trout can't reproduce, there is no danger to existing stocks, but they seem to have forgotten the fertile tetraploid trout used to produce them.
Interesting factiod: the same technique used to produce the triploid trout is used to produce the triploid seedless watermelons in your supermarket.
The thing is that after awhile, there's nothing left to do BUT abuse the guy.
I had a copy of LCP for the Amiga. At first, I played it straight, keeping him fed, playing games, etc. It was kinda neat.
But that got boring, especially since it really wasn't all that complicated a program. So I decided to see how far I could push it. You deliver food and water to him, and you also deliver food to his dog.
I decided to see if I could get him to eat dog food. After all, if you're REALLY hungry, and that was all that was available...
So that's all I gave him - dog food. He turned green and got really sick and spent all his time in bed. I'd do the pat-on-the-head thing, and he'd smile his sickly green smile. I'd deliver more and more dog food, but all he'd do is put it in the cabinet.
As though idiots on cell phones weren't bad enough on the ground...
Re:don't have TiVo... Yet
on
Can TiVo be Saved?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
But here's the question... how the hell does a Tivo box that's sitting on a shelf above the satellite reciever change the channel as needed? What kind of weird wiring hack did you have to do to get that to work?
The same way a Tivo sitting on the shelf above the cable box changes channels - there's a little IR emitter that you position in front of the box, and the Tivo sends the appropriate commands to change the channel.
With some model satellite receivers (DirecTV only, I think), the serial port on the back of the Tivo hooks up to the serial port on the back of the receiver and changes channels that way.
"But I do know, however, that some of the game manufacturers do require their game developers to have degrees in psychology to make them even more addictive."
They REQUIRE their developers to have psychology degrees? I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to call bullshit on that, unless she can tell me exactly which developers those are.
No, this is basic marketing. It works on anyone, regardless of intelligence level. You see it in just about every form of advertising on the planet.
Mention a brand name, and then mention qualities you'd like to have associated with that brand name. Lather, rinse, repeat. That's all it takes. Eventually, people will think of those qualities when asked to think of the brand name.
It doesn't matter whether Microsoft is really interoperable or not. Nor does it matter how secure the OS is, or how stable it is, or anything like that.
How can this be? Because 99% of the population either doesn't know or doesn't care. All they hear is Bill Gates saying "We are focusing on security" or "We are focusing on interoperability", and that's what sticks.
Whether or not the security or interoperability are actually addressed is irrelevant - the terms have been associated with Microsoft in peoples' minds. All it takes is some repetition and maybe an ad campaign or two to drive it home. Then in six months, some poll will come out saying that people associate Microsoft with interoperable products.
My first suggestion would be to stop publishing the referrer links.
But if you have to, then put "rel=nofollow" in the link itself. This makes Google (and other search engines) discard the link when calculating search rankings.
All you'd need to do is drive across some of the southern states in question, and when you see some overgrown trees/fields/towns/whatever (and you will), pull over and grab a cutting or two.
Just don't get caught bringing it home. I believe it's a felony to transport it.
I like jade plants. They're very long-lived, and don't require much care beyond watering every couple of weeks. When they get older, they start to look like miniature trees.
Slashdot Mirror
There was something else that happened during the filming of "Empire": Lucas got divorced.
This meant that he lost the only person who could tell him "No George, that's a stupid idea" and get listened to.
"I am your father, Luke!"
That's what did it for me. I mean, seriously. If Vader had been lying, that would have been one thing. Or even if Vader was a clone of Luke's father, things would have been ok.
But that made liars out of both Yoda and Obi-Wan. "Yeah, we knew he was your dad, but we decided to bullshit you."
After that, things went downhill: Ewoks.
There was a story on BoingBoing a few months back about a guy that does this. The picture is cool.
"Al Jessup of Beckley, West Virginia, has 12 cheap satellite dishes stuck to his house, which pull in over 5,000 free-to-air channels from satellites all over the sky. He is retired, and delights in odd and foreign programming."
It is a bad order. The job of the NASA public affairs office is not to edit or rewrite what the actual scientists produce, but to disseminate that information to any interested parties.
The process of scientific discovery is almost never about absolute facts. Instead, it's a series of more and more refined best guesses. The Big Bang is the current best guess about how things got started. It explains things like the cosmic background radiation and why everything seems to be moving away from us. In the future, if someone comes up with a better guess which can explain everything the Big Bang does, plus things that it doesn't, and makes testable and falsifiable predictions that, if true, contradict the Big Bang, then it may replace the Big Bang as the dominant paradigm.
This is not true just for the Big Bang, but for everything. Aristotle gave way to Newton, who gave way to Einstein, who will probably give way to whoever resolves the incompatibilty between quantum mechanics and relativity.
This is why the scientists make such good punching bags for the creationist/ID crowd. They rarely make definitive statements because their entire scientific training has conditioned them to put all sorts of qualifiers on the statemets they make. The qualifiers make them sound like they're trying to avoid being pinned down (which is actually what they're doing), but it also makes them sound less confident in comparison to someone that just says "The FSM did it!"
Has anyone done any studies on the lifetime of flash memory?
They have a limited number of times they can be rewritten, and it'd be interesting if someone has ever hooked one up and had a PC repeatedly rewrite a sector until it failed.
Any such player-run system would be too easy to abuse. If you put restrictions in place to prevent the abuse, people will game their way around them.
For example, a guild could have all of its members give each other high ratings. Or they could band together to give poor ratings to someone that pisses them off.
Does this mean we can expect "Grand Theft Auto: Get Off My Lawn" to be out soon?
No no no.
It's the Windows ME of databases.
With hardcoded SQL, you run the risk of SQL injection exploits, unless you're very careful to escape each and every user-written field that makes its way into a SQL statement.
Most people run Windows as Administrator. Why is that?
Because a lot of applications WON'T WORK if they're run as normal users. Why is that?
Because the Windows mindset comes from DOS, where there were no restrictions on what an application could do. Anything could put something anywhere it wanted to. So the developers got used to being able to do that.
Suddenly here comes Windows, and suddenly your application can't save settings to the INI file in C:\WINDOWS anymore, because it doesn't have write access to that directory.
The correct thing is to get an upgrade for the app. But you can make it work by just running as an administrator. So they do. And Microsoft is complicit in this by not putting enough pressure on the application developers to fix their apps to not require administrator access.
Does the closed-source nature prevent people from defending against this? Not really. If everyone ran as root in their Linux systems all the time, there would be just as many exploits for Linux.
And by research, I don't mean asking Slashdot.
Write down what you want to have in each room. Go wild, put down everything. Touch screen, ethernet, remote control, whatever.
Then see what's out on the market that will do what you want. What kind of remote control options are there? Is there an alternative?
Then start trimming back. Do you REALLY need to control the thermostat from EVERY room? Do you REALLY need remote-controlled lighting in EVERY room? Chances are, you can cut back quite a bit.
If I had to pick one thing to do, I'd say to lay some conduit to every room, and put Cat5 (or 6 even) and a string in each one. No speaker wire, though. If you want to listen to music, put a stereo in that room and grab the music via the Cat5.
Do that, and you'll be relatively future-proofed without getting stuck on some technology that may be obsolete in 5 or 10 years.
How are the air vents run? If possible, see if you can follow the same route. If not, then run the cable inside the air vents, but if you do this, make sure the cable is rated for that. The vents can get quite warm in the winter when the heater's running, and condensation can collect on it in the summer from the AC.
Here's why.
If a dev were to post to one of the WoW forums and say something like "I'm a dev", that forum would quickly become an unusable morass of whining, flaming, trolling, and general bitching. Yes, yes, they're already that way, but it would get even worse, as hard as that may be to believe. I've seen it.
Way back when, Brad McQuaid used to post to alt.games.everquest, and actually participate in the official Everquest forums. This was actually kind of cool, you could talk, and he'd answer.
But then something changed. More and more people kept expecting him to read their posts. Posts started getting made with titles like "BRAD PLZ READ!" or "ATTN VERANT!". Of course, nobody could keep up with the number of messages posted per day, but people would still get really pissed if he didn't respond to their burning issues IMMEDIATELY DAMMIT BECAUSE I PAY $10 A MONTH!!!1!1!
Eventually, the bulk of new messages were nothing but rants and bitchfests about how they were being ignored and why didn't he respond to that message they posted three days ago.
So he stopped posting. Eventually, over the next few months, as people realized that he wasn't answering, the problem subsided.
And one other point. Just because the devs don't POST to the forums doesn't mean that they don't READ the forums.
Energy is shifted from reproduction to growth?
Polyploid organisms are bigger because their cells are bigger, not because their energy is transferred.
They also say that because the triploid trout can't reproduce, there is no danger to existing stocks, but they seem to have forgotten the fertile tetraploid trout used to produce them.
Interesting factiod: the same technique used to produce the triploid trout is used to produce the triploid seedless watermelons in your supermarket.
You could even use it as an actual monitor, sorta.
Just do the same thing as those giant multi-monitor TV walls. There'd be gaps in the picture, but it'd look cool.
The thing is that after awhile, there's nothing left to do BUT abuse the guy.
I had a copy of LCP for the Amiga. At first, I played it straight, keeping him fed, playing games, etc. It was kinda neat.
But that got boring, especially since it really wasn't all that complicated a program. So I decided to see how far I could push it. You deliver food and water to him, and you also deliver food to his dog.
I decided to see if I could get him to eat dog food. After all, if you're REALLY hungry, and that was all that was available...
So that's all I gave him - dog food. He turned green and got really sick and spent all his time in bed. I'd do the pat-on-the-head thing, and he'd smile his sickly green smile. I'd deliver more and more dog food, but all he'd do is put it in the cabinet.
He never did eat the dog food.
As though idiots on cell phones weren't bad enough on the ground...
But here's the question... how the hell does a Tivo box that's sitting on a shelf above the satellite reciever change the channel as needed? What kind of weird wiring hack did you have to do to get that to work?
The same way a Tivo sitting on the shelf above the cable box changes channels - there's a little IR emitter that you position in front of the box, and the Tivo sends the appropriate commands to change the channel.
With some model satellite receivers (DirecTV only, I think), the serial port on the back of the Tivo hooks up to the serial port on the back of the receiver and changes channels that way.
The exact quote is even worse:
"But I do know, however, that some of the game manufacturers do require their game developers to have degrees in psychology to make them even more addictive."
They REQUIRE their developers to have psychology degrees? I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to call bullshit on that, unless she can tell me exactly which developers those are.
No, this is basic marketing. It works on anyone, regardless of intelligence level. You see it in just about every form of advertising on the planet.
Mention a brand name, and then mention qualities you'd like to have associated with that brand name. Lather, rinse, repeat. That's all it takes. Eventually, people will think of those qualities when asked to think of the brand name.
It doesn't matter whether Microsoft is really interoperable or not. Nor does it matter how secure the OS is, or how stable it is, or anything like that.
How can this be? Because 99% of the population either doesn't know or doesn't care. All they hear is Bill Gates saying "We are focusing on security" or "We are focusing on interoperability", and that's what sticks.
Whether or not the security or interoperability are actually addressed is irrelevant - the terms have been associated with Microsoft in peoples' minds. All it takes is some repetition and maybe an ad campaign or two to drive it home. Then in six months, some poll will come out saying that people associate Microsoft with interoperable products.
And that's what it's all about, boys and girls.
My first suggestion would be to stop publishing the referrer links.
But if you have to, then put "rel=nofollow" in the link itself. This makes Google (and other search engines) discard the link when calculating search rankings.
Go here for more info.
All you'd need to do is drive across some of the southern states in question, and when you see some overgrown trees/fields/towns/whatever (and you will), pull over and grab a cutting or two.
Just don't get caught bringing it home. I believe it's a felony to transport it.
Find something that can thrive on neglect.
I like jade plants. They're very long-lived, and don't require much care beyond watering every couple of weeks. When they get older, they start to look like miniature trees.