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User: MikeFM

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  1. Re:Non-layable on Blending Mice and Men · · Score: 1

    Never seen Teen Wolf? What you look like doesn't really matter as to getting laid I think. If you are outgoing and confident then you'll get it. It's more in your personality. Lots of money and a nice car help too.

    I think part-humans would do just fine. They could mate other part humans and I think a lot of people would be attracted to them because they would be different. How many interracial marriages happen? How many such romances existed even when it was socially frowned upon. A lot I'm sure. If they were geneticlly different enough that they couldn't produce offspring with humans it'd definately make them perfect for casual sex partners.

    Personally I'm all for finding a part-human girl straight out of an anime show. Big round eyes, pointy ears, and a tail. Six breasts could be a nice touch too.

  2. Re:It's destininy on An Interplanetary Laser Communications System · · Score: 1

    I seem to remember some girls in Total Recall being from Mars and having three breasts. I think that soon they'll rule the porn industry. Buy two, get one free. And what woman isn't going to want a guy with two huge ..

  3. Re:Erm.. maybe you just answered your question.... on DIY LED-Illuminated Sleep Chamber · · Score: 1

    Personally I love geek girls. I love to be able to talk about my interests with someone that actually has some idea what I'm talking about. Many of my interests are technical (building stuff, programming) and others are just plain geeky (anime) and I don't want to date someone that I can't share those with. The girl I'm dating right now wasn't a geek when I found her but was, and is, smart so I'm gradually geeking her out. I wouldn't be happy dating someone who wasn't smart or didn't want to be geeked out though.

    I have no problem with being a geek. There is absolutely nothing wrong with me. I'm all for making other people more like me. Being a geek doesn't have the same stigma it used to but it does still carry a stigma especially before adulthood.

    I walk and ride a bicycle mostly. Cars are for lazy people that want to kill the enviroment. I'd love to customize an old GTO convertible with a more powerful and effecient engine though. Mmmm. Someday I'll get to that project.

  4. Re:It sounds like an oxymoron... on DIY LED-Illuminated Sleep Chamber · · Score: 1

    You put sexysciencegirl as your name and then you're so cruel as to not put any pics of yourself on your website?! It's hard enough finding science girls (all of which are sexy) without those that exist teasing us!

    Reminds me. I have toyed with the idea of putting together a magazine or webzine dedicated to smart/geeky people being shown as sexy. Take system admins, geologists, and all those types and put out some pics of them and some sort of bios and let them write about whatever they're interested in and would like to share with the world. I'd profile both men and women and would try to make the pictures somewhat sexy but I don't know if I'd go as far as nudity (maybe make it optional to the person being profiled?). I think us geeks need some publicity that says here we are, we're sexy, we're smart, and we're not going to hide in our cubicles and labs anymore. No reason to be shy right? It'd be fun and I think it could really have a major effect on how the public feels about science, math, and technology. We could have more respect and teenagers wouldn't have to hide that they're smart to avoid being teased. It might even produce more sexy science girls for future generations if so many girls didn't feel the need to hide the fact that they're smart.

  5. Re:HTTPS? on DIY LED-Illuminated Sleep Chamber · · Score: 1

    Exactly what I thought. A great way to keep from gaining any benefit from caching proxy servers.

  6. Re:Take me with you on Downhillbattle.org Bounty For P2P Gaim Plug-in · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't think this method will catch on is all. I had a program I wrote that worked with ICQ that did essentially all of this long before Napster and the P2P craze hit. It worked well but it required you to know the people you were trading with in some way and if they didn't have what you needed then you were just out of luck. That is evidently to much work for most people.

    I still think personal web servers is the way to go. Use something like XML-RPC for exchanging data about the files on your machine and use the standard method for downloading a file from a machine. SSL wrap it. Require authentication if the user wants. Make it look just like any other webserver until the user is logged in properly. Then the only way to block filesharing is to block web servers. That means blocking pretty much every port or anything that is SSL wrapped. To verify that a server is file trading illegal files they'd have to hack the server which would be illegal in itself. What are they going to do - sue the Apache Foundation?

  7. Re:uses... on A Projection Display For Your Pocket · · Score: 1

    Naw. Direct neural links will be what replaces laptops. Everything else is just a fad. ;)

    I can see this feature being an add-on to a laptop but not replacing the normal laptop screen. It's more likely to create a new market that kills the slow tablet PC market. This would be a possible improvement to the technology that lets devices like cellphones project a virtual keyboard. It could project a virtual touchscreen too and be really small. :)

  8. My hungry car. on Combined Gasoline/Hydrogen Fuel Station Opens · · Score: 1

    Personally I'm just planning on making a car that can harvest grass and weeds as it travels and use that for fuel. It works for the horse so why not for the car. ;)

    This is partly a joke but I do think there is something to the idea. I've already experimented somewhat successfully with a lawnmower that is ran off the energy of digesting grass clippings. Even as just a lawnmower it's pretty cool to only need to add a biological agent to the tank once a season rather than buying fuel. I wonder if there is anything on the market of a similar nature. Could this be adapted to a car?

  9. Re:I love the letter that announced that change on Best Buy: 20% Of Customers Are Wrong · · Score: 1

    What, saving money isn't working so you have to belittle others for not helping in your gamble that the stock market will be profitable for you? I'm certainly not for lower prices at any costs but I don't feel sorry at all for people who gamble in stocks and don't make a huge profit off of it. You may as well invest you money in playing Vegas slot machines.

    Now, what I would agree with is paying more for products so that they are better made, made locally (in my country at least, in my city even better), and made by better paid employees. If everything wasn't made in a third world country for a nickle then maybe you wouldn't have to get mad at people if you're not making lots of money from stocks.

  10. Re:spirit vrs body on Bartle to MMOG Players - Newbs! · · Score: 1

    If you've ever seen the movie Fallen then you have an idea of what I'm thinking. So if your spirit strength is stronger than the one already in the body, if it has one at all, you can take it over. Some portion of your intelligence would come from your spirit too so certain spell casting powers would move with you from body to body. Inhabiting strong minded bodies could permanantly enhance your spirit's abilities even after you'd left the body. While in a body you should be able to see it's thoughts. So maybe the NPC AI could be 'thinking' about what it wants to do but it can't unless you give it permission. If you give it permission you can piggy back to see what it does.

    Strength, stamina, speed, etc should be mostly traits of the body. Maybe give them a small influence from the spirit the same as the body can effect the spirits intelligence and will power.

    Armon, weapons, etc would obviously be bound completely to the body. If you had the stronger spirit you could take the body of your enemy complete with everything they had even if they were physically stronger than you.

    How would that change parties? The warriors keep the enemy busy so that they can't focus their spirit and one party member literally leaps to the body and takes it over. Of course that leaves their old body free to fend for itself so it could turn around and start attacking your party.

    Possibly it'd be cool if your spirit could inhabit an object. Maybe you could be a sword and use your spirit powers to give the sword mystical powers while someone else weilds it. Or you could curse the item while in it so that an enemy claiming it would unwittingly be opening themselves to you and carrying you back into their strongholds.

    It'd open up a wide range of PvP options because you could literally be any object or NPC in the game. Quests could be both on the physical level and on the spirit level. On the physical level it'd be much like most such games and you'd have to take your body and complete a task and win some benefit to the body itself. Quests could be completed by more than one spirit inhabiting the body at different times. Spirit quests would be more complex in that you might need to move between several bodies to complete the quest.

    Possibly you could have some sort of holy person as a job trait that'd resist having their body stolen with much more strength than most bodies. So that when you created a new character you could choose that job trait but otherwise it'd be hard to become one of those characters. Resistance being a trait that could be built up just like any other trait.

  11. spirit vrs body on Bartle to MMOG Players - Newbs! · · Score: 1

    I think most people would dislike PD and that's why save games and cheat codes in single-player games have existed since the beginning of time. However it's bad for game play for players never to die. A middle ground does exist though.

    I'd like to see something where you have a non-killable persona that you play that can build up certain skills. However to do anything you should have to take a body which has it's own skills that can be lost when the body is killed. I think it'd be even better if it were possible to take bodies from each other or even take over NPCs in some instances. Make it so your character is some sort of spirit that can take over bodies but that will continue to live even if driven out of it's body or if the body is killed.

    You could keep some of your skills you'd build up and of course keep your network of friends but you'd not be able to die and restart without consequence.

  12. Re:Gotta love MMOGs on Bartle to MMOG Players - Newbs! · · Score: 1

    Why couldn't most MMORPG's be text-based? As far as I can tell the major ones could be ran with a text-client or 2D overhead client. Why don't they have alternative clients? I'm sure an overhead (Zelda-like) client that could work on cellphones to allow someone to play Everquest when mobile would be a killer app. Everquest fans would rush out to buy a phone that'd allow that. Why do you need a kickass system to play Final Fantasy Online or Everquest 2? They could at least have the clients degrade nicely so everyone could play. Does having pixel shading really effect game play that much?

  13. Revolution on Bartle to MMOG Players - Newbs! · · Score: 1

    Be warned, I want to make a MMORPG game that auguments reality. To play you'd have to actually go places and do things in the real world. That could include forms of exercise and even education. *chills*

    To go on a quest you'd have to physically go to the right spot and accomplish some goal that can be verified (finding an item there and reporting the code on that item). To turn item one into item two you might have to take a class in woodworking or pass some sort of test that proves you have some knowledge of woodworking.

    Take reality and add a little fantasy to it - much more fun than sitting in some fictional world and doing the same meaningless repetitive tasks over and over. Of course actually leaving the comfort of our chair might be to much for most of us.

  14. Re:My Website's Stats on Firefox Shooting For 10 Percent · · Score: 1

    What really sucks is when people who have been programming websites since the days when we accessed it with a 2400 baud modem can't get a web programming job because they code everything by hand instead of using tools of Frontpage and Dreamweaver. The majority of job postings for web developers and programmers are looking for Windows-oriented developers because the manageement and HR people think Microsoft is swell. Which is why we get crappy ActiveX, Flash, and various other crap thrown at us that doesn't work well. I remember dealing with these companies, while looking for work, as being very frustrating.

    Now I get the fun of consulting with many of these businesses and explaining to them why their overblown Microsoft solution is harming their business. Sometimes I switch them to LAMPPP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Python) and sometimes I just educate them into how to decide which features their website really needs and how to implement them. Either way I get them to a sensible cross-platform friendly solution that saves them money while bringing in more customers. I advise everyone take that approach to converting your employers. Nothing a manager likes to hear more than increasing revenue while decreasing spending. ;)

    I think 30% is all Microsoft needs to lose to ALL competitiors combined to really put them in their place. 30% marketshare is a lot of money for most businesses and they won't overlook it near as easily as they might 5%. At that level companies will be making an effort to be cross-platform friendly.

  15. social issues on Proposal: Put Library of Congress' Contents Online · · Score: 1

    Ever been an artist? The fact of the matter is that most artists don't get paid, or are very poorly paid, now. It sucks but IP laws haven't made many artists rich and haven't even made very many a decent living. The system is already disfunctional before you even start considering what technology is going to do with it.

    The only thing we can do to make it better is convince people that if they like an artist and want them to keep producing then they need to make an effort to support that artist. It's a social issue and not a technical issue and not something that can easily be forced by passing laws. If you're an average person then pick out those artists you like and donate money to them. If your rich then sponsor artists to create new works of art. Possibly a not-for-profit organization that takes donations for artist in general and uses that to fund young artists would be a good idea. Both consumers and well off artists could donate towards sponsoring new generations of artists.

    The same issue exists for programmers, whom I consider a type of artist, in that we often are not well paid for our work. Especially those of us that give away our code for the public good could use more support from our users. If you use an opensource program you should consider donating to the developers. If you see a developer that looks promising you should consider donating to them. Pick one project a month and donate $10 to them. If even a fraction of the users of opensource sftware did this then there would be much more, and higher quality, opensource code available.

    I imagine the same idea works for supporting the providers of any free service. Websites, etc.

    It's the honor system. You can copy anything you want but if you continue to use it then you should make a donation. Yes, you can be cheap and not make your donation but by doing so you're hurting yourself too. Give what you can afford and convince others to do likewise.

  16. Re:Wait.... on Open Source And Legal Xbox SDK Compiles Doom · · Score: 1

    Don't be silly. If it can run Doom then it can run just about anything. The real question isn't if the audio and networking is working yet but if the code produced will run at a comparable speed and stability as games compiled with Microsoft's tools. Audio and network drivers will be added in a matter of time as long as people can see something worth building on.

  17. Re:Smarts? on German Teen Charged with Creating Sasser · · Score: 1

    I guess it'd have to do with why he wrote the worm. It could have just been an experiment. Stupid kids experiment with drugs, fast cars, and unprotected sex. Smart kids design computer viruses and similar things. It's the same thing.. just the smart kids can cause a lot more damage in their experimenting. It's not unfair to punish people for this experimenting but you have to keep in mind the true intent behind that experimenting. Most likely there was no criminal intent.. and he was under age.. so at most he deserves a slap on the wrists.

    Now the real people who should be punished are people who write the software that is full of so many holes. Software will have holes.. that's life.. but to have so many that exist for so long is being negligent. End-users share part of this blame for not learning to properly use their tools and for not making an effort to keep them in safe condition. We don't let people drive unsafe vehicles so why do we let them use unsafe computers?

  18. Re:Why? on Faster Updates for DNS Root Servers Arrive · · Score: 1

    It certainly will make my life easier. It'll save me a lot of hassle waiting for a new domain to come up so my clients can be happy. I register a lot of domain names and overall people like to see their domain as soon as they've registered it. Registering and waiting is annoying and a hassle when you're trying to jump right in. It's especially important in cases where an existing website needs to change, or add, a domain name. It might seem a moot issue but I see it as a frequent annoyance.

    For the average user it'll be reflected by fewer 'domain not found' errors. It's annoying to go to a site and try to follow a link only to find out that the domain name isn't valid for you yet. That seems to happen to me fairly often. I guess web designers get in a hurry to use their new domains.

    Now.. if only I could keep people from setting their TTL to stupid values. I had one employer that had all their thousands of domains set to something like a week and then someone hacked into the domain register and changed all the IP addresses to point to a hacker site. That was lovely fun trying to explain why it took more than a week to fix. Good thing I didn't register all those domains and set their TTL. Likewise, you always have the nitwits that set their TTL for like 2 minutes. I generally set mine for like 15 minutes when I first register the domain and then after I work out any wrinkles I bump it up to something more reasonable. Usually 3 or 6 hours depending on the case.

  19. Agnostic != Atheist on Wikipedia != Authoritative? · · Score: 1

    I'm agnostic because I have no opinion on if there is a God. It just really makes no difference to me whatsoever. I admit there could be a God but I've seen no evidence to convince me of such. Likewise I've seen no evidence to convince me that there is no God. Therefore I take a detached wait and see stance until some facts come to me that will push me one way or the other. For that matter I'm not even sure what the definition of 'God' would be. Lacking a definitive definition for 'God' I see no way I can really prove if 'God' exists or not. My cat thinks it's a god fit to be worshipped. Does that mean God exists? Beats me. :)

    An atheist is convinced that there is no God. Clearly the two are not the same thing.

  20. Re:Your sig on Wikipedia != Authoritative? · · Score: 1

    I believe I'm hungry.

  21. Re:INteresting fact on Disney Goes Boom! · · Score: 1

    I'd hate to have seen it in the 70's then. LA and Houston rate as the world's biggest shitholes I've had the misfortune to be around. LA wins the contest hands down on the smog issue. I see the damn smog from LA from 100's of miles away on a fairly frequent basis. Nasty.

  22. Re:Two Uses of Flash on Presenting APNG: Like MNG, Only Better · · Score: 1

    What I'd like to have is a text editable definition language for all the images of a website. Obviously you might have source images that were photographic of nature but all the line drawing, photo editing, filters, etc should be done as text that could be edited easily. I hate trying to edit clients' sites that make use of graphics and they don't have any of the original artwork. Working with something like Photoshop to slice up images is such a dumb methodology anyway. It's much easier to define everything in code that can be manipulated or changed at will. SVG takes care of at least part of that but I'd love to see something that had all the capabilities of Photoshop but as a programming language. Obviously it'd have to be opensourced to be really useful too. THAT'd be a great addition to Mozilla.

  23. Re:Only out of politeness... on JibJab Wins - 'This Land' is Public Domain · · Score: 1

    I've seen Amish people using cellphones and laptops. Pretty interesting really. Also they have something like homemade ceiling fans that they use for cooling that are pretty nifty. They seemed to be solar paneled and did a pretty good job at keeping their buildings cool even in the summer.

  24. Amish have the right idea.. on JibJab Wins - 'This Land' is Public Domain · · Score: 1

    I'll agree that the Amish are intelligent and hard workers. I don't agree with their religion but much of their lifestyle I would agree with. I have lived near Amish towns and have been exposed to them in many ways and it's really not true that they are primative. They do things differently but they aren't really backwards.

    I especially like their ideas of independance from big government and from big business. I also like the idea of hands on work and hands on education. Certainly freedom from being brainwashed by the media and our own laziness would be a welcome social change. Also I like to live a life as free of mass produced goods as possible. I'm a geek so obviously I like technology but there are very good reasons to keep your life simple when possible.

    I'd rather work harder and live simpler than sit on my ass and struggle with the complexity of modern life.

  25. Re:MySQL for filesystem? on Is MySQL Planning a Change of Tune? · · Score: 1

    I have had my little system for years so I'm less interested in copying what others are claiming to be offering someday than in having someone improve and standardize that which I've already found useful for myself.

    I think the ideal solution would be to make a backend module, that works on any OS, that ties into MySQL. Obviously there'd still be some OS-centric work that'd have to be done on a per OS basis but I think the majority of it could be in a shared code base. Then Linux, *BSD, MacOS, etc could easily add support. MySQL could provide the de facto standard for anyone willing to use it.

    I can really see this as a major area for db usage in the near future. The great thing about using MySQL as the backend is that it'd be extremely easy for so many of us programmers to write third-party tools for collecting the data and doing interesting things with it. An example being that for my system I had it so files could be marked public (or private). Public files could be browsed by anyone on my web server and they could attach comments and additional meta information from that web interface. I've also been toying with an XML-RPC based interface that'd allow machines to poll each other's file information db's.

    Maybe you could offer the basic backend for free and talk to the right people to get Linux and FreeBSD support added. Then you could sell improvements, such as support for proprietary file types and support for business-centric data, to make a profit off of the whole thing? I think many businesses would find it useful to have this kind of feature especially on something like a file server. User's could do powerful file searches using a normal file manager and no special skills. The speed and reliability of MySQL could really be useful here as it'd probably be a lot better than SQL Server based solutions.

    Maybe it'd be a good project to work on with a Linux (or your OS of choice) vendor? MySQL could provide the db-oriented logic and the Linux vendor could write the kernel code needed to produce a working virtual filesystem. Surely this could be packaged as an enterprise feature.