Well you dont pay for water, and its a renewable resource, so who cares?
Where are you from, then? My house is on a water meter, so we *do* pay. Most of the UK is too.
As for the renewable resource - sure, but it's gone through a lot of processing between collection and delivery to us, and all the energy put into that is wasted.
It works in several ways - preventing ovulation *and* preventing implantation.
I guess the case is more clear-cut for the "morning after" pill, about which there are complaints by pro-lifers. Although I don't believe they also complain about IUDs, which is curious.
Hey, the US has horseshoes too. At least we get to throw something that has an alternative use - how many horseshoe throwers will put the shoes back on their horse?;-)
And no-one who plays baseball is in a position to criticise cricket! Especially with a "World Series" with no teams from outside the US. At least the UK managed to export cricket (although God only knows how or why - you'd think other countries had their own bizarre sports).
For my money, I'd like to see more kabaddi. Great game, like a slightly more sophisticated version of Red Rover (or British Bulldog).
Problem is that they *don't* get implanted in infertile women. Most unused embryos are destroyed (and in the UK, that's actually mandatory). I've yet to see a "right-to-life zealot" complaining about the mass murder committed every day by these infertility clinics in disposing of these unused embryos.
Not that I think they're right, but they should at least be internally consistent. Either destroying embryos is murder or it isn't. And if it is, every infertility clinic in the world "murders" around half-a-dozen embryos per treatment. In fact, if it is, then every woman on the Pill "murders" 13 embryos per year, and most women who aren't on the Pill "murder" a fair number whilst trying for a child.
Actually American flap-operated toilets are over-simplified. It's very easy for the flaps to fail open or to leak, and a shitload of water (or more accurately, many shitload-disposals'-worth of water) gets wasted because of this.
UK toilets use a siphon-operated system instead. Push the lever down, it sucks water round the top of the siphon, and the cistern empties using that siphon effect. The great thing with that is that it simply *can't* leak (unless you manage to get a hole in the pipe, which is majorly unlikely).
Firstly, it's rare to need fancy hardware to run a game at 640x480. A graphics card that costs a half of any console will manage 640x480 on current games. If you update your graphics card as often as you update your console (say, every 3 years) and you would otherwise have bought two consoles, you're better off by 1.5 consoles-worth on a PC. "Ah", you say, "but you need to update the mobo and processor too." Well that'll cost you another half-console. So you're still better off - and you can use the PC for a damn sight more than just gaming as well.
And secondly, TV resolution sucks. Badly. Given a choice between clear, crisp textures on a PC monitor, and the horrible interlaced shite on a TV, guess which one looks better. Hint: it's not the TV. "Oh," you say, "but I've got an LCD TV." Nope - there isn't an LCD TV in existence that doesn't suffer from the "digital fog" caused by interpolating colours on moving images. There simply is not an LCD TV that is as crisp as a CRT.
how many times "science" has thought they knew it all and had it allmost all wrong
How many times would this be, exactly? Especially in the area of physics?
OK, quote me Einstein. But Einstein doesn't invalidate Newton - NASA still use Newtonian physics for mission planning. Electrons/protons/neutrons are indestructable? Works fine for chemistry and pretty much everything else except nuclear reactions. Protons/neutrons/electrons are the basic building blocks? Works fine for nearly everything.
Have they found a new little niche? Well if they have, it's a niche that hasn't been discovered in 150 years of people moving things around in magnetic fields to generate energy from movement.
Fair play to them, they're doing things by the book by getting in some external people to try and validate it. But I'd be prepared to put a lot of money on the result.
You don't need to completely destroy two skyscapers and kill everyone in them, it's much scarier if they just get a little bit dented and a handful of people die. Right...?
Problem with this is getting a 360-degree output in all three axes. LEDs don't cut it for that - too narrow a viewing angle. Old-school incandescent bulbs are much better. Try digging out some of those little bulbs they used to use for school science experiments that used 4.5V - they're actually round too, which is good. Downside is that you need some way of attaching them to your actor, and they get hot to the touch, and the screw fitting means that they're going to be a couple of cm away from the actor which you'd need to take into account.
The first set of Big Brother contestants in Holland apparently did just that. They kicked back, had a good time and hung out with each other. Come voting time, they deliberately rigged it so that they all got the same, and it was just down to the audience to choose who to send off.
I strongly suspect it was better viewing than the current Big Brother lot in the UK, who bring tedium to new levels.
Most places do, but you'd better be going for a entry-level-graduate position. If you say "I've got years of experience working with X" but you've got no industry references to show, your application goes in the cylindrical filing area. Even if you've done tons of coding at home, that doesn't equate to knowing how industry works. Coders are cheap - any teenager can hack out code. *Engineers* are expensive...
Provide a source for that fiction, dude? Cos I'm calling bullshit on it. *EVERYONE* has the right to perform *ANY* music in public. If you didn't write it, you have to pay a fee to the author. And you have to pay that fee whether or not you've bought the author's music book.
This is certainly the case in the UK and the US. I believe it's also the case in all European countries too, although I don't know for sure so I couldn't guarantee the correctness of that. Elsewhere in the world I don't know.
If you're talking the legal system of Outer Mongolia or Kyrgyrstan, then fine - but please make that clear. And since this version of OLGA wasn't hosted in Outer Mongolia or Kyrgyrstan, it ain't all that relevant.
What similar "High Fantasy" existed before Tolkein? OK, there's all the old Norse sagas, but no-one's been writing new ones of those for a while.
Tolkein very explicitly created a world with races of elves, dwarves, trolls, orcs/goblins, halflings and humans. In one case (halflings as food-loving home-makers, for example) he invented the archetype, and he "standardised" the others from various disparate sources in order to make them distinct species. He even invented the elf/dwarf conflict which doesn't exist in Norse sources (although the two are natural opposites). Almost all of these elements have been used as-is by fantasy authors (of books or games) since Tolkein, and Shadowrun is just one of the many.
Firearms is a major screw-up. Basically it was trying to get away from the "suicide-by-cop" thing that's so popular in the US, where you shoot up a place (and as many innocent people as possible) until the cops shoot you. The sad thing is that this law was badly thought out, so it crapped on the target-shooting fans and didn't really help much to prevent criminals getting guns. But for everyone else in the country, it really made no difference. Unlike the US, the UK has never had widespread public ownership of firearms, so "rolling over" wasn't really in it - I'd say that 90+% Brits have never seen a handgun except on the armed policemen in airports.
Pocket knives too. I don't know about the US, but people in the UK don't generally go around armed to the teeth with machetes. And it's a misunderstanding to say that you're not allowed to carry pocket knives - unless you've got the knife out and you're threatening someone with it, there's nothing the police can do about your Swiss Army knife or Leatherman. Except for at airports, of course, and that's a global thing these days.
And video monitoring generally isn't seen as a privacy issue, because the places where the video cameras are are all very public places. It's a technological alternative to having a policeman on every street corner.
I love the line "Imagine that random access memory is accessible immediately". What a prat.
Lesson to all journalists: if you don't know enough to say anything on a subject, don't try to say anything yourself - just report what other people say and you'll be fine. Try to add your own tag-lines, and you'll end up saying something stupid like this.
If you're only on Linux, then fine. If you need cross-platform support, KDE isn't an option, in spite of it being on top of Qt.
I still can't understand why a group of apparently intelligent people decided to take Qt, which provides a cross-platform widget set and significant parts of an OS abstraction layer, and use it to build a single-platform setup. If they just wanted a single-platform widget set for Linux, what was wrong with Lesstif or some other free widget set? But taking something built for cross-platform and nailing its feet to the floor - that takes a special kind of blindness.
Trouble is that these are still well inside the Uncanny Valley. You may not consciously see that all the grasses and trees are clones of each other, but subconsciously you see it's *wrong* because of that. SW Ep1 suffered badly from this, and Ep2 wasn't much better.
Admittedly, we're probably starting on the up-slope of the far side of Uncanny Valley. Trouble is that the down-slope started with games like Kung Fu Master, where there were obvious attempts at realism but things just didn't move right. Assuming equivalent levels of progress, then maybe another 20 years...
If they ain't got USB, a PCI USB card is £15-20. Still well under $300.
As for not having PCI - well that'd be one *old* PC. Before I upgraded this year, my PC was a Duron 800 - I bought all the relevant bits in 2001. I particularly wanted an ISA slot on it. In 2001, that limited my choice to IIRC three mobos. The PC before that was a bottom-of-the-range model for 1997 (P233), and that had a mix of PCI and ISA slots (5 PCI, 3 ISA IIRC). So any PC that's ISA-only will be *well* over 10 years old. Maybe a 486 could be ISA-only, I guess.
Re the fire hazard thing, *any* PC can be a fire hazard. There really isn't much to choose between an old PC and a new one. Old PCs had much lower heat dissipation, so the odd bit of dust here and there wasn't an issue. And for insulation drying out, the only place where that might happen is capacitors, and they last for ages now - we're not still in the 60s.
But anyway, on the "running when you're not around" front, why would that be a problem? If you're doing this at home, flicking a switch to power up/down the printer and server is not a big deal.
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And incredibly dense, sadly.
Well you dont pay for water, and its a renewable resource, so who cares?
Where are you from, then? My house is on a water meter, so we *do* pay. Most of the UK is too.
As for the renewable resource - sure, but it's gone through a lot of processing between collection and delivery to us, and all the energy put into that is wasted.
It works in several ways - preventing ovulation *and* preventing implantation.
I guess the case is more clear-cut for the "morning after" pill, about which there are complaints by pro-lifers. Although I don't believe they also complain about IUDs, which is curious.
Hey, the US has horseshoes too. At least we get to throw something that has an alternative use - how many horseshoe throwers will put the shoes back on their horse? ;-)
And no-one who plays baseball is in a position to criticise cricket! Especially with a "World Series" with no teams from outside the US. At least the UK managed to export cricket (although God only knows how or why - you'd think other countries had their own bizarre sports).
For my money, I'd like to see more kabaddi. Great game, like a slightly more sophisticated version of Red Rover (or British Bulldog).
Grab.
Nah - amateur. I can tell you're not a Brit, an Aussie or a Kiwi! ;-)
For the uninitiated: You wear the wellies. You put the sheep's hind-legs into the wellies. The sheep then can't escape.
Velcro gloves are another useful extra. Allegedly.
And apparently it's better done at the edge of a cliff - the sheep tends to push back more. Again allegedly.
Grab.
Great! Get the SOBs out of our hair for once.
Problem is that they *don't* get implanted in infertile women. Most unused embryos are destroyed (and in the UK, that's actually mandatory). I've yet to see a "right-to-life zealot" complaining about the mass murder committed every day by these infertility clinics in disposing of these unused embryos.
Not that I think they're right, but they should at least be internally consistent. Either destroying embryos is murder or it isn't. And if it is, every infertility clinic in the world "murders" around half-a-dozen embryos per treatment. In fact, if it is, then every woman on the Pill "murders" 13 embryos per year, and most women who aren't on the Pill "murder" a fair number whilst trying for a child.
Grab.
Actually American flap-operated toilets are over-simplified. It's very easy for the flaps to fail open or to leak, and a shitload of water (or more accurately, many shitload-disposals'-worth of water) gets wasted because of this.
UK toilets use a siphon-operated system instead. Push the lever down, it sucks water round the top of the siphon, and the cistern empties using that siphon effect. The great thing with that is that it simply *can't* leak (unless you manage to get a hole in the pipe, which is majorly unlikely).
Grab.
Or it could be that excellent Metallica instrumental.
Two problems with that.
Firstly, it's rare to need fancy hardware to run a game at 640x480. A graphics card that costs a half of any console will manage 640x480 on current games. If you update your graphics card as often as you update your console (say, every 3 years) and you would otherwise have bought two consoles, you're better off by 1.5 consoles-worth on a PC. "Ah", you say, "but you need to update the mobo and processor too." Well that'll cost you another half-console. So you're still better off - and you can use the PC for a damn sight more than just gaming as well.
And secondly, TV resolution sucks. Badly. Given a choice between clear, crisp textures on a PC monitor, and the horrible interlaced shite on a TV, guess which one looks better. Hint: it's not the TV. "Oh," you say, "but I've got an LCD TV." Nope - there isn't an LCD TV in existence that doesn't suffer from the "digital fog" caused by interpolating colours on moving images. There simply is not an LCD TV that is as crisp as a CRT.
Grab.
how many times "science" has thought they knew it all and had it allmost all wrong
How many times would this be, exactly? Especially in the area of physics?
OK, quote me Einstein. But Einstein doesn't invalidate Newton - NASA still use Newtonian physics for mission planning. Electrons/protons/neutrons are indestructable? Works fine for chemistry and pretty much everything else except nuclear reactions. Protons/neutrons/electrons are the basic building blocks? Works fine for nearly everything.
Have they found a new little niche? Well if they have, it's a niche that hasn't been discovered in 150 years of people moving things around in magnetic fields to generate energy from movement.
Fair play to them, they're doing things by the book by getting in some external people to try and validate it. But I'd be prepared to put a lot of money on the result.
Grab.
You don't need to completely destroy two skyscapers and kill everyone in them, it's much scarier if they just get a little bit dented and a handful of people die. Right...?
Problem with this is getting a 360-degree output in all three axes. LEDs don't cut it for that - too narrow a viewing angle. Old-school incandescent bulbs are much better. Try digging out some of those little bulbs they used to use for school science experiments that used 4.5V - they're actually round too, which is good. Downside is that you need some way of attaching them to your actor, and they get hot to the touch, and the screw fitting means that they're going to be a couple of cm away from the actor which you'd need to take into account.
Grab.
Hire hairier actors...
The first set of Big Brother contestants in Holland apparently did just that. They kicked back, had a good time and hung out with each other. Come voting time, they deliberately rigged it so that they all got the same, and it was just down to the audience to choose who to send off.
I strongly suspect it was better viewing than the current Big Brother lot in the UK, who bring tedium to new levels.
Grab.
"Hallo, cleaning. Hey, is all that gold for me...?"
Most places do, but you'd better be going for a entry-level-graduate position. If you say "I've got years of experience working with X" but you've got no industry references to show, your application goes in the cylindrical filing area. Even if you've done tons of coding at home, that doesn't equate to knowing how industry works. Coders are cheap - any teenager can hack out code. *Engineers* are expensive...
Grab.
Provide a source for that fiction, dude? Cos I'm calling bullshit on it. *EVERYONE* has the right to perform *ANY* music in public. If you didn't write it, you have to pay a fee to the author. And you have to pay that fee whether or not you've bought the author's music book.
This is certainly the case in the UK and the US. I believe it's also the case in all European countries too, although I don't know for sure so I couldn't guarantee the correctness of that. Elsewhere in the world I don't know.
If you're talking the legal system of Outer Mongolia or Kyrgyrstan, then fine - but please make that clear. And since this version of OLGA wasn't hosted in Outer Mongolia or Kyrgyrstan, it ain't all that relevant.
Grab.
What similar "High Fantasy" existed before Tolkein? OK, there's all the old Norse sagas, but no-one's been writing new ones of those for a while.
Tolkein very explicitly created a world with races of elves, dwarves, trolls, orcs/goblins, halflings and humans. In one case (halflings as food-loving home-makers, for example) he invented the archetype, and he "standardised" the others from various disparate sources in order to make them distinct species. He even invented the elf/dwarf conflict which doesn't exist in Norse sources (although the two are natural opposites). Almost all of these elements have been used as-is by fantasy authors (of books or games) since Tolkein, and Shadowrun is just one of the many.
Grab.
Firearms is a major screw-up. Basically it was trying to get away from the "suicide-by-cop" thing that's so popular in the US, where you shoot up a place (and as many innocent people as possible) until the cops shoot you. The sad thing is that this law was badly thought out, so it crapped on the target-shooting fans and didn't really help much to prevent criminals getting guns. But for everyone else in the country, it really made no difference. Unlike the US, the UK has never had widespread public ownership of firearms, so "rolling over" wasn't really in it - I'd say that 90+% Brits have never seen a handgun except on the armed policemen in airports.
Pocket knives too. I don't know about the US, but people in the UK don't generally go around armed to the teeth with machetes. And it's a misunderstanding to say that you're not allowed to carry pocket knives - unless you've got the knife out and you're threatening someone with it, there's nothing the police can do about your Swiss Army knife or Leatherman. Except for at airports, of course, and that's a global thing these days.
And video monitoring generally isn't seen as a privacy issue, because the places where the video cameras are are all very public places. It's a technological alternative to having a policeman on every street corner.
Grab.
Wizball will never grow old...
I love the line "Imagine that random access memory is accessible immediately". What a prat.
Lesson to all journalists: if you don't know enough to say anything on a subject, don't try to say anything yourself - just report what other people say and you'll be fine. Try to add your own tag-lines, and you'll end up saying something stupid like this.
Grab.
If you're only on Linux, then fine. If you need cross-platform support, KDE isn't an option, in spite of it being on top of Qt.
I still can't understand why a group of apparently intelligent people decided to take Qt, which provides a cross-platform widget set and significant parts of an OS abstraction layer, and use it to build a single-platform setup. If they just wanted a single-platform widget set for Linux, what was wrong with Lesstif or some other free widget set? But taking something built for cross-platform and nailing its feet to the floor - that takes a special kind of blindness.
Grab.
Trouble is that these are still well inside the Uncanny Valley. You may not consciously see that all the grasses and trees are clones of each other, but subconsciously you see it's *wrong* because of that. SW Ep1 suffered badly from this, and Ep2 wasn't much better.
Admittedly, we're probably starting on the up-slope of the far side of Uncanny Valley. Trouble is that the down-slope started with games like Kung Fu Master, where there were obvious attempts at realism but things just didn't move right. Assuming equivalent levels of progress, then maybe another 20 years...
Grab.
If they ain't got USB, a PCI USB card is £15-20. Still well under $300.
As for not having PCI - well that'd be one *old* PC. Before I upgraded this year, my PC was a Duron 800 - I bought all the relevant bits in 2001. I particularly wanted an ISA slot on it. In 2001, that limited my choice to IIRC three mobos. The PC before that was a bottom-of-the-range model for 1997 (P233), and that had a mix of PCI and ISA slots (5 PCI, 3 ISA IIRC). So any PC that's ISA-only will be *well* over 10 years old. Maybe a 486 could be ISA-only, I guess.
Re the fire hazard thing, *any* PC can be a fire hazard. There really isn't much to choose between an old PC and a new one. Old PCs had much lower heat dissipation, so the odd bit of dust here and there wasn't an issue. And for insulation drying out, the only place where that might happen is capacitors, and they last for ages now - we're not still in the 60s.
But anyway, on the "running when you're not around" front, why would that be a problem? If you're doing this at home, flicking a switch to power up/down the printer and server is not a big deal.
Grab.