Haha. Interesting theory, but try again. I was in Massachusetts to go to law school (at the only law school in the state that would make it worth it to live there).
I personally know people without even US citizenship who head DARPA projects. Thus, your post and the source of this excerpt are both bullshit.
This is correct. The best and brightest US citizens are not US born, and not eligible to work for these groups. The first example I could think of off the top of my head is the story of the student who builds rail guns and laser guns for fun and for his doctorate, the DOD approached him with 2 jobs and then found out he was not a born US citizen.
Excerpted from his site, powerlabs.org:
From its conception, the original PowerLabs Linear Magnetic Accelerator ("Rail Gun", or "Railgun") was conceived for the primary goal of simply proving that it could be done; on a low budget, with common materials and powered by a never tried before electrolytic capacitor bank.
In that, it was extremely successful: Not only did the gun fire flawlessly over 30 times (it is not uncommon for research rail guns to break down in the first shot), but it also attracted vastly more attention than I could ever have hoped for: After its page generated hundreds of thousands of hits, the gun was featured on Discovery Channel, TV6, numerous newspaper and magazine articles, and earned me several job offers from the private sector, research institutes, and industry. The highlight of the popularity of this project came in the form of two separate offers from laboratories associated with the department of defense (DoD), which, apparently can't hire me because I was not born in the USA (someone must have forgotten that the majority of the best scientists and engineers in the world weren't born here)...
Can't you bootcamp to Windows? Considering that a Windows license would cost him as much as or more than the latest version of OS X, the appropriate answer is: yes, but why would he want to? I was episodes of the Weeds last night and noticed something strange. Every character in the show seems to have a Macbook, but that's fairly normal in television. On the other hand, every Macbook in the Weeds is always running XP. Maybe it's also normal, but I've never noticed it before.
Also, you can legally buy XP for a lot less than $150, and I assume most people with Macs and an interest in gaming already have a copy installed so they can play the majority of games that don't work on a Mac, and play the ones that do work on a Mac with higher framerate...or be on the Weeds.
While my Mac mini is more than powerful enough on the hardware end, now I have to shell out $139 to buy a new version of OS X... just to run this thing.
You don't have SLI... I do, and micro stutter is barely noticeable at worst. And I can play at resolutions and anti-aliasing that no sigle card could've made playable. I've had three SLI setups (an ancient 3dfx X2 and two nVidia pairs). I liked my first SLI rig but I felt not to satisfied with the feel of the last two when compared to a single card, and now that I've learned about this issue I know why. Lots of people say that microstutter is barely noticeable, but lots of people also insist that a $300 HDMI cable gives "crisper" video over a 6 foot connection than a $10 HDMI cable. The micro-stutter effect that you can barely notice is the inconsistency in frame delay, which I mentioned ("For instance, the jitter is very distracting to some people."), but beyond that, there's the problem I described with the bulk of my comment. It's not just a question of whether you can tell that frames are coming in in clumps. It's a question of whether you can tell the difference between 60 fps delays, which is what you paid for, and 40 fps delays, which is what you get. SLI definitely improves performance and for those of us who don't mind the jitter (I never did, actually), it is an upgrade over a single card, but even with 100% scaling of fps, the benefit is more like a 33% increase in effective fps.
It almost seems like micro stutter is some kind of viral ATI anti-marketing bs. Definitely not, and definitely not BS, but speaking of ATI, rumor has it that the 4870x2 may adapt the delay on the second frame based on the framerate, eliminating this problem. If it's true, then it will be the best dual-GPU card relative to its own generation of single card ever, by a very large margin. But of course, the rumor may just be some kind of viral ATI marketing bs.;-) I hope it's true.
Why would Vista make the performance gains so much less? I could see XP running say 20% better with both cards, but why does Vista penalize the new card so much?
Digital Restrictions Management strikes again, I guess...
Vista: where do we want you to go today?
TFA has some very weird numbers compared to Anandtech and Tomshardware and all the other real review sites that actually tell you all the details of their testing. The 280 looks more like it's 50-75% faster than the 9800GTX in most reviews, and most of those are done in Vista. Framerate in XP vs. Vista is completely even on a 9800 GTX with current drivers (the Vista slowdown went away a long time ago), except on Oblivion where Vista is about 20% faster for no apparent reason, but maybe the drivers Maximum PC used weren't the same as those used by the serious review sites, or maybe they have something wrong with their Vista install.
In most reviews, the 9800GX2 is faster, and it's also $200 cheaper. As a multi-GPU card it has some problems with scaling, and micro-stutter makes it very jumpy like all existing SLI setups.
I'm not well versed in the cause of micro-stutter, but the results are that frames aren't spaced evenly from each other. In a 30 fps situation, a single card will give you a frame at 0 ms, 33 ms, 67 ms, 100 ms, etc. Add a new SLI card and let's say you have 100% scaling, which is overly optimistic. Frames now render at 0 ms, 8 ms, 33 ms, 41 ms, 67 ms, 75 ms, 100ms, and 108ms. You get twice the frames per second, but they're not evenly spaced. In this case, which uses realistic numbers, you're getting 60 fps might say that the output looks about the same as 40 fps, since the delay between every other frame is 25 ms.
It would probably look a bit better than 40 fps, since between each 25 ms delay you get an 8 ms delay, but beyond the reduced effective fps there are other complications as well. For instance, the jitter is very distracting to some people. Also, most LCD monitors, even those rated at 2-5 ms response times, will have issues showing the 33 ms frame completely free of ghosting from the 8 ms frame before the 41 ms frame shows up.
Most people only look at fps, though, which makes the 9800 GX2 a very attractive choice. Because I'm aware of micro-stutter, I won't buy a multi-GPU card or SLI setup unless it's more than 50% faster than a single-GPU card, and that's still ignoring price. That said, I'm sort of surprised to find myself now looking mostly to AMD's 4870 release next week instead of going to Newegg for a GTX280, since the 280 results, while not bad, weren't quite what I was hoping for in a $650 card.
I largely agree, except that it isn't just blogs who are guilty of this regurgitation. All the regular newspapers repost the same AP wire story, too, cluttering up google search results just as much as blogs.
Use a Yahoo news search and that shouldn't be a problem for you.
Unfortunately, all of the pvp in UO, including all of the things you describe, was done through boring mechanics. Combat was extremely simple and not very interesting. Getting killed in UO was like having someone come to your office and delete a spreadsheet you've been working on for a few days. Yes, you really really don't want it deleted, but no, it's not an engaging experience, pressing the delete key.
I played UO from literally day one, and it taught me that consequences don't matter nearly as much as game mechanics.
A 5-4 decision means that the somewhat-sane members of the court outnumbered the completely-crazy members of the court by One Single Vote. We've got ourselves a Supreme Court that's divided on the meaning of some of the most fundamental aspects American law. This doesn't bode well for the next 30 years.
I'm not sure I agree with you. The court throughout its history has had 5-4 (or otherwise decided by 1 vote) cases because they seldom accept cases which aren't close. That is, if it isn't a legal point on which there's substantial disagreement, the Court won't grant cert. Moreover, members may concur in the result of the case, but not the legal reasoning, so they end up joining only certain sections of the majority (or plurality) opinion.
Close cases will always be a part of the Supreme Court. I would say that is the way we want it, most of the time.
In this instant case, I think more of the justices should have agreed with the majority, but they didn't ask me... He wasn't complaining that the SCOTUS had a 5-4 ruling. He was complaining that the SCOTUS had a 5-4 ruling on this particular issue, which shows that something which should have had a 9-0 majority didn't get nearly the kind of agreement that would indicate the SCOTUS is filled with intelligent and reasonable justices. He was pointing out that the loss of a single SCOTUS member during the wrong presidential term could result in SCOTUS regularly approving things that are outrageous violations of the constitution and human decency.
Nice. My parents insisted I wasn't human. In fact, they never stopped insisting. I knew by the age of two not to trust them. Well, I suppose I was eighteen in my people's years...
Of course this makes me a very negative and paranoid person. Sometimes it's hard to evaluate something correctly if you start looking at all the ways it can go wrong. And most people don't like it when your response to everything is "yeah, but *actually*..."--I've gotten the reputation for being a big kill-joy.
Which is probably one of the reasons no one wants to teach kids a healthy dose of skepticism--it's sort of depressing. This is a problem a lot of "skeptics" have, and I believe it comes from having good analytical skills but not having the judgment to know that they are a tool to be applied shared when appropriate, and not all the time. You have to remember that not everything is an objective matter - sometimes subjectivity is called for, and in those cases, you need to be able to express yourself in those terms, as well. In social situations, it's rarely appropriate to dump negativity on something a peer presents positively.
I'm certainly a skeptic in the sense described in this story, but skepticism is a tool, not my identity.
is to buy/sell used computer parts, which I can do elsewhere without the risk or hassle. You wouldn't happen to know of a site where I can do that from the UK?
In the last two months I have bought almost $200 worth of used computer parts off Ebay, none of them have worked as described and getting refunds and returns are proving such a massive headache that I'm thinking of giving up and swallowing the losses.
Needless to say, I have come to hate doing any business on Ebay/Paypal, and would love to have an alternative. I'm lucky, I guess, in that I'm used to living in Silicon Valley, where Craigslist is larely populated with tech stuff.
If it allowed Flikr integration with the rest of Google, hell yeah.
That's about the only Yahoo! service that I still consider superior to Google's offerings. Yahoo news, sports, and search are all still a few steps ahead of Google.
This story feels like a dupe (may or may not be, I haven't checked) but that's probably only because there's a story like this every few months. Microsoft (or someone else) sues a bunch of people who should be sued. I mean, is it news because Microsoft is using the courts as they should be used? I posted a comment yesterday saying that the Google founder's upcoming trip to space wasn't news and didn't matter, and I got modded Troll because Slashdot loves to suck Googlecock. You get (as of now) +4 Interesting for saying that something closer to the spirit of the site doesn't matter. Okay.
The reason european countries pay so much for gas is because there is about a 300% tax on the stuff... Oil costs the same amount everywhere. It's all traded on the same markets. Exxon Mobile sells a barrel of oil for $137 whether it was pumped out of the ground in Texas, Alaska, Venezuela, or Iran. It doesn't matter where the oil came from.
The only thing that effects the price besides the market price of oil is local taxation/subsidies. In China and India for example, the government buys that $137 barrel of oil, and then sells it to consumers for like $10/barrel. Sure the government loses money on this but they figure they'll make it up in economic growth. In Europe, they take that $137 barrel of oil and add a 2-300% tax so now the oil costs $270-400. hence the $8-9 price for a gallon of gas. That 300% tax on gas in Europe has driven the development of mass transit and reduced demand for gasoline. Europe's comparatively low demand for gasoline is a big reason that oil is $135/barrel today instead of $160. Thanks to them, OPEC makes $25/barrel less profit.
Is this done to the detriment of the residents of European countries? No. Tax revenue from gasoline allows those countries to have lower taxes on other things, so the government and citizens end up breaking even, but they prevent a lot of money from heading to OPEC and they develop their infrastructure as nice side effects.
Piston aero engines have a much easier life than car engines so theirs absolutely no reason they can't have a minor redesign to use unleaded fuel. At the end of the day all they do is turn a prop usually at a constant RPM. This quite literally is not rocket science. My plane runs on unleaded. A lot of prop planes will do so, but only some have been thoroughly safety tested and approved for it by the FAA.
I sort of enjoyed bidding for things on eBay back when it was new and there were deals to be had, but now nearly everything is at a fixed price and the only purpose it has for someone like me is to buy/sell used computer parts, which I can do elsewhere without the risk or hassle. I feel like the new eBay is mostly for soccer moms who don't know of alternatives, or for people who have very specialized interests with no other options (usually there are other, cheaper, safer options).
On the other hand, I never liked Paypal. As far as I could tell its sole purpose was to make it easier for sellers to scam buyers, since the only protection given to buyers is something on the order of $100. I know some people who bought Apple laptops on eBay, never received them, but were unable to get all of their ~$2000 back. If it happened to me, I'd do what another poster said today and stop the payment to Paypal from my credit card, but if it were me I wouldn't have made the purchase in the first place.
to have bloggers write about you. It just happens. It's like trying to be cool. You either are, or you aren't. No amount of effort can change the fact your a nerd (or in this case, not a nerd).
He'll just end up coming across as creepy and forceful. ...blogs are the most easily manipulated form of media. They don't check facts and they don't have standards for their evidence, so anonymous assertions can lead them in any direction.
Yet, he wouldnt sign on to legislation limiting interrogation techniques to those found in the Army field manual. Limiting the interrogation techniques was McCain's own amendment to the 2006 Defense Authorization Act. It was amendment #1557. It's in the Congressional Record, a transcript of which you can read here: http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2005_cr/s072505.html What you're not understanding is that you're agreeing with the original anti-McCain statement. The post said that McCain used to have values and now he doesn't. You're saying that in 2006 (and also 2007) he fought against torture, but ignoring the factual statements of other posters showing that by late 2007/early 2008, McCain voted against the same thing he had previously championed. McCain now supports torture, but that's a very new position he took up during the primary, because he doesn't care at all about human rights when they might stand in the way of his nomination. McCain is the least principled man to run for president from either major party since Nixon.
RTFA. Actually, it looks like this is a windows problem. Safari automatically downloads a file to the desktop. Then when you start Internet Explorer it runs the file on your desktop and there is the problem. So the real issue is that Safari can be told to automatically download a file while internet explorer will automatically run a malicious dll from the desktop. actual post and proof-of-concept code here. seems like a misleading summary to me. IE won't run anything "automatically." It sounds like the problem is that Safari both autodownloads to the desktop and then tells IE to open that file on its next load.
Slashdot Mirror
Haha. Interesting theory, but try again. I was in Massachusetts to go to law school (at the only law school in the state that would make it worth it to live there).
Sorry you didn't get into Yale.Excerpted from his site, powerlabs.org:
From its conception, the original PowerLabs Linear Magnetic Accelerator ("Rail Gun", or "Railgun") was conceived for the primary goal of simply proving that it could be done; on a low budget, with common materials and powered by a never tried before electrolytic capacitor bank.
In that, it was extremely successful: Not only did the gun fire flawlessly over 30 times (it is not uncommon for research rail guns to break down in the first shot), but it also attracted vastly more attention than I could ever have hoped for:
After its page generated hundreds of thousands of hits, the gun was featured on Discovery Channel, TV6, numerous newspaper and magazine articles, and earned me several job offers from the private sector, research institutes, and industry. The highlight of the popularity of this project came in the form of two separate offers from laboratories associated with the department of defense (DoD), which, apparently can't hire me because I was not born in the USA (someone must have forgotten that the majority of the best scientists and engineers in the world weren't born here)...
A colleague of mine got $50 million from DARPA to do something...less than feasible. His institution put up a new building with it, which is the norm.
Also, you can legally buy XP for a lot less than $150, and I assume most people with Macs and an interest in gaming already have a copy installed so they can play the majority of games that don't work on a Mac, and play the ones that do work on a Mac with higher framerate...or be on the Weeds.
Three or more, it's research.
Legitimate research differs from your implication in that sources are given credit through citations.Sigh. Can't you bootcamp to Windows?
This isn't the case on my XP SP3 or Vista SP1 machines, both of which were upgrades from RCs.
In most reviews, the 9800GX2 is faster, and it's also $200 cheaper. As a multi-GPU card it has some problems with scaling, and micro-stutter makes it very jumpy like all existing SLI setups.
I'm not well versed in the cause of micro-stutter, but the results are that frames aren't spaced evenly from each other. In a 30 fps situation, a single card will give you a frame at 0 ms, 33 ms, 67 ms, 100 ms, etc. Add a new SLI card and let's say you have 100% scaling, which is overly optimistic. Frames now render at 0 ms, 8 ms, 33 ms, 41 ms, 67 ms, 75 ms, 100ms, and 108ms. You get twice the frames per second, but they're not evenly spaced. In this case, which uses realistic numbers, you're getting 60 fps might say that the output looks about the same as 40 fps, since the delay between every other frame is 25 ms.
It would probably look a bit better than 40 fps, since between each 25 ms delay you get an 8 ms delay, but beyond the reduced effective fps there are other complications as well. For instance, the jitter is very distracting to some people. Also, most LCD monitors, even those rated at 2-5 ms response times, will have issues showing the 33 ms frame completely free of ghosting from the 8 ms frame before the 41 ms frame shows up.
Most people only look at fps, though, which makes the 9800 GX2 a very attractive choice. Because I'm aware of micro-stutter, I won't buy a multi-GPU card or SLI setup unless it's more than 50% faster than a single-GPU card, and that's still ignoring price. That said, I'm sort of surprised to find myself now looking mostly to AMD's 4870 release next week instead of going to Newegg for a GTX280, since the 280 results, while not bad, weren't quite what I was hoping for in a $650 card.
I largely agree, except that it isn't just blogs who are guilty of this regurgitation. All the regular newspapers repost the same AP wire story, too, cluttering up google search results just as much as blogs.
Use a Yahoo news search and that shouldn't be a problem for you.Unfortunately, all of the pvp in UO, including all of the things you describe, was done through boring mechanics. Combat was extremely simple and not very interesting. Getting killed in UO was like having someone come to your office and delete a spreadsheet you've been working on for a few days. Yes, you really really don't want it deleted, but no, it's not an engaging experience, pressing the delete key.
I played UO from literally day one, and it taught me that consequences don't matter nearly as much as game mechanics.
I'm not sure I agree with you. The court throughout its history has had 5-4 (or otherwise decided by 1 vote) cases because they seldom accept cases which aren't close. That is, if it isn't a legal point on which there's substantial disagreement, the Court won't grant cert. Moreover, members may concur in the result of the case, but not the legal reasoning, so they end up joining only certain sections of the majority (or plurality) opinion.Close cases will always be a part of the Supreme Court. I would say that is the way we want it, most of the time.
In this instant case, I think more of the justices should have agreed with the majority, but they didn't ask me... He wasn't complaining that the SCOTUS had a 5-4 ruling. He was complaining that the SCOTUS had a 5-4 ruling on this particular issue, which shows that something which should have had a 9-0 majority didn't get nearly the kind of agreement that would indicate the SCOTUS is filled with intelligent and reasonable justices. He was pointing out that the loss of a single SCOTUS member during the wrong presidential term could result in SCOTUS regularly approving things that are outrageous violations of the constitution and human decency.
Nice. My parents insisted I wasn't human. In fact, they never stopped insisting. I knew by the age of two not to trust them. Well, I suppose I was eighteen in my people's years...
Which is probably one of the reasons no one wants to teach kids a healthy dose of skepticism--it's sort of depressing. This is a problem a lot of "skeptics" have, and I believe it comes from having good analytical skills but not having the judgment to know that they are a tool to be applied shared when appropriate, and not all the time. You have to remember that not everything is an objective matter - sometimes subjectivity is called for, and in those cases, you need to be able to express yourself in those terms, as well. In social situations, it's rarely appropriate to dump negativity on something a peer presents positively.
I'm certainly a skeptic in the sense described in this story, but skepticism is a tool, not my identity.
In the last two months I have bought almost $200 worth of used computer parts off Ebay, none of them have worked as described and getting refunds and returns are proving such a massive headache that I'm thinking of giving up and swallowing the losses.
Needless to say, I have come to hate doing any business on Ebay/Paypal, and would love to have an alternative. I'm lucky, I guess, in that I'm used to living in Silicon Valley, where Craigslist is larely populated with tech stuff.
That's about the only Yahoo! service that I still consider superior to Google's offerings. Yahoo news, sports, and search are all still a few steps ahead of Google.
The only thing that effects the price besides the market price of oil is local taxation/subsidies. In China and India for example, the government buys that $137 barrel of oil, and then sells it to consumers for like $10/barrel. Sure the government loses money on this but they figure they'll make it up in economic growth. In Europe, they take that $137 barrel of oil and add a 2-300% tax so now the oil costs $270-400. hence the $8-9 price for a gallon of gas. That 300% tax on gas in Europe has driven the development of mass transit and reduced demand for gasoline. Europe's comparatively low demand for gasoline is a big reason that oil is $135/barrel today instead of $160. Thanks to them, OPEC makes $25/barrel less profit.
Is this done to the detriment of the residents of European countries? No. Tax revenue from gasoline allows those countries to have lower taxes on other things, so the government and citizens end up breaking even, but they prevent a lot of money from heading to OPEC and they develop their infrastructure as nice side effects.
I sort of enjoyed bidding for things on eBay back when it was new and there were deals to be had, but now nearly everything is at a fixed price and the only purpose it has for someone like me is to buy/sell used computer parts, which I can do elsewhere without the risk or hassle. I feel like the new eBay is mostly for soccer moms who don't know of alternatives, or for people who have very specialized interests with no other options (usually there are other, cheaper, safer options).
On the other hand, I never liked Paypal. As far as I could tell its sole purpose was to make it easier for sellers to scam buyers, since the only protection given to buyers is something on the order of $100. I know some people who bought Apple laptops on eBay, never received them, but were unable to get all of their ~$2000 back. If it happened to me, I'd do what another poster said today and stop the payment to Paypal from my credit card, but if it were me I wouldn't have made the purchase in the first place.
He'll just end up coming across as creepy and forceful. ...blogs are the most easily manipulated form of media. They don't check facts and they don't have standards for their evidence, so anonymous assertions can lead them in any direction.
So the real issue is that Safari can be told to automatically download a file while internet explorer will automatically run a malicious dll from the desktop. actual post and proof-of-concept code here.
seems like a misleading summary to me. IE won't run anything "automatically." It sounds like the problem is that Safari both autodownloads to the desktop and then tells IE to open that file on its next load.
This story desperately needed to be rejected before it got this far. Just because it says Google doesn't mean it should be posted.