Yes, there are worse books than the "classics". But there are also better books.
Thomas Hardy, for instance. Please, please, please, give me Barbara Cartland instead - it's better quality writing and more believable. Who the fuck thought this guy was worth publishing, never mind putting in the EngLit "classics" list?
Conan Doyle's work is trash too, but fun trash. It's about as serious as a cheap paperback, and thank goodness no-one tries to pretend it's great art, at least. Ditto Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, but sadly people *do* insist on calling them great art. Luckily Frankenstein mostly gets left out of the "great art" category, bcos it's fantasy and you can't have fantasy books being considered art, can you? (Which is just as well, bcos it's very badly written.)
Charles Dickens was writing the 19th century equivalent of a soap opera (stories about real people in recognisable present-day situations, delivered in installments). He even went round reading his stuff to audiences, and it was common for families to read it aloud. So why not watch a decent soap opera instead? If it has to be English, try EastEnders instead of his depressing ones, or Coronation Street instead of the more lighthearted ones. Or listen to The Archers on the radio, if you're of the school (like I am) that says the pictures are better in books and radio. Read Dickens if you want - some of it's fun, so long as you avoid Pickwick Papers - but don't pretend it's any more sophisticated than a soap opera.
But there definitely *are* good classics. Practically everything by H G Wells is worth reading. Jerome K Jerome's writing is nearly a century old, and his stuff still beats the crap out of any other travelogues since then (Bill Bryson tries his best, but he can't match it). Harper Lee's one book is close to perfect (when asked why she didn't write anything after Mockingbird, she's supposed to have said, "but I've said everything I wanted to say"). Kipling is also worth it.
And for God's sake, go and *WATCH* Shakespeare on stage, don't make anyone sit down and read the damn things! You wouldn't try to read the script of Terminator, would you? Then please, English teachers, approach plays the same way.
Great. Go on a scavenger hunt round the solar system for some, will you?;-)
On a universe scale, hydrogen and helium are the most common elements. But being so light, most planets don't have enough gravity to retain significant quantities of either of them in pure form (and those that do, like Jupiter, aren't ideal for us to live on). Hydrogen is reactive though, so it forms compounds (eg. water), and those compounds are heavy enough to be retained. But helium is unreactive (that's the *definition* of a noble gas), so it just wanders off.
So if you could analyse the chemical composition of the entire solar system and about 10 light years in any direction around it, you'd find that hydrogen and helium are the most common elements, and stuff like iron, water and silicates are vanishingly rare in comparison. But the iron, water and silicates are clumped together into planets/moons/asteroids/comets, whereas the pure hydrogen and helium are distributed almost uniformly. So from the point of view of someone living on a large clump of iron, water and silicates, pure hydrogen and helium are *not* going to be in very high proportions compared to everything else around.
Per Bruce Schneier, it's safer to have one password that you can remember than a dozen different passwords which you need to record somewhere, bcos then no-one can steal your written-down version. And if you only have one, it can be reasonably complex, which gives you better security again.
You are a tard. "up to" means "at this point under definable conditions".
Oh really? Check a dictionary, or even use simple logic. "Up to N" == "not greater than N" == "less than or equals to N". Assuming values can't go negative, "less than or equals to N" == "between 0 and N".
The only reason EPA ratings on cars are reasonably accurate is bcos it's legally required - they are forced to demonstrate that the mileage figure they give can be achieved under "perfect" conditions. Without that, there would be literally nothing preventing an advertiser from saying "up to 1000mpg", because 20mpg is within the range 0-1000mpg. It'd be literally correct, even though it's meaningless weasel-speak. You'll find numerous ads using this meaning - reduce your cholesterol level by up to 50%, reduce limescale by 200%, enlarge your penis by up to 3", etc.. Any complaints about these ads simply cannot be upheld, bcos they *are* literally correct.
BTW, "retard" as an insult sucks, since mental handicap is not the person's fault. "Fuckwit" is valid, however, since being a fuckwit merely requires failure to engage brain. Fuckwit.
Not being completely divorced from reality, I do recognize that there are people that are legitimately mentally incompetent (I intend only the most literal meaning of the term, with no pejorative connotations), such as those suffering from severe mental handicaps. As long as they are also denied all the other rights that people of sufficient responsibility enjoy, I'm fine with them being denied the right to own guns.
This is basically the problem. You're not allowed to drive a car until you've spent several months learning how to drive it safely and you've demonstrated (in front of an unbiased examiner) that you've mastered those skills well enough that you're not a danger to anyone else. In addition, your doctor can (and will) take you off the road immediately if he thinks that you're no longer safe to be driving.
But guns? Can you honestly tell me that every gun owner has had several months of formal training *and* a practical examination with an unbiased examiner in real situations, before they're allowed to use a gun? And if you're having some kind of psychological problems, can your doctor immediately force you to hand over your gun for the duration, until you've proved yourself fit to use it again? And are there police patrolling hunting areas to check that people are following the rules and using their guns safely? I don't think so, somehow.
I don't know of any drunk drivers who are banned from buying a car, do you? Hell, most of the time, they're not even banned from driving a car.
This is a flaw in the US penalty system then - a ban on driving is pretty much automatic in the UK. Sadly no-one checks you for buying a car either. Although when you buy a car, you do have to show your insurance before you can drive it off, and that would likely prevent a banned person from buying another one. Not to mention the cost - a $100 shotgun and a $10,000 car are a bit different in terms of accessibility!
Insurance would be a good idea though. There's compulsory insurance on car owners, so why not have compulsory insurance for gun owners too? They shoot someone, the insurance company has to pay out. It's still not ideal, but it'd work.
The real cost is the batteries, the electronics, and the car itself.
OK so far...
Exxon-Mobil holds the patents to the nickel-metal hydride battery, so there's why the price for NMH for cars is so damned high....but now it starts falling down.
You want to know why pure-electric cars are incredibly unlikely to become popular? Answer: it's not possible to get a full battery charge in 2 minutes. When you run out of gas, you can fill up again in 2 minutes. Travelling cross-country, it simply is *not* acceptable to have to sit around for 3 hours at the gas station waiting for your car to get enough juice to continue. Nor is it likely to be possible to improve on this, until someone invents some radically new battery technology - no existing battery technology will allow charging at this kind of speed without the batteries exploding.
So we need a new battery technology which will, at which point Exxon-Mobil and their battery won't matter a damn. The world and their brother is working on that, bcos everyone knows that whoever gets better tech is going to be in the money big-time. Trouble is that nothing's coming along - the best bet so far is fuel cells, and we're back to fossil fuels again (or hydrogen, which will be produced and distributed by the same folks anyway).
Controlling guns to restrict crime is based on precisely the same rationale as controlling video games to restrict crime.
*sigh*
You do realise the irony in selling guns to anyone, no matter whether they have 20/20 mental health or are a whacked-out drooling psychopath, and then saying "we're going to have a war on terror", don't you?
I'm personally in favour of gun ownership, and fishing-rod ownership. If that's your hobby, then fine - I don't want to stop anyone going down the local range to fire off a few rounds, or going hunting, or going fishing. But the difference is that it's difficult (although not impossible;-) to kill someone with a fishing rod. If any psycho can walk into a gun shop and walk out again with a rifle, then man, you and your whole town are screwed. Hence controlling who you sell the guns to is essential, to ensure that you only sell to people who are stable enough to not be a danger to the community with a gun in their hands. And laws on how you store the guns too, so that J Random Thief can't just break a window and take that 44 Magnum from your unlocked desk drawer.
Yes, it's possible to buy black-market guns illegally. I don't see that as an argument for failing to regulate legitimate sales though. It's possible to buy prescription drugs illegally too, but that's not a reason for your local pharmacy to dish out methadone on demand over the counter like it was cough candy, and the criminal (or just plain psychopathic) use of guns does a damn sight more damage than any prescription medicine.
Nope - Bethesda shipped CDs which included this "nude" texture. You'd have to be some kind of nut to do that in the US and expect *not* to get into some kind of trouble.
I agree with you - the real question is why the US is so uptight about flesh when (a) all the RnB acts sing about nothing else and (b) the cinemas, TV and games are full of blood and guts. But this isn't something that Bethesda can control, any more than RockStar can control whether some nutjob goes out with a gun goes out to shoot Haitians - in that case the problem is the lack of restriction of nutjobs to guns. Yes, these questions need to be asked, and they are being asked. But until the conservative US gets its collective underwear from between its collective ass-cheeks, we're fucked.
Yes, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If even the devs don't want to work on it, you're screwed. Which is why those people who thought up (and approved) the name deserve firing for utter stupidity - why hamstring yourself before it's even got started?
On a similar theme, the film "Free Willy" didn't do too well in the UK, again for pretty damn obvious reasons. (There's an urban legend that when the first trailer came on for "Free Willy" in some premier, a very camp voice called out "that's not a film, that's an invitation".) You can find similar stories around the world - the Vauxhall "No Va" not selling in Spain, for example. So these days, all competent marketing people should be checking for unintentional meanings in all the major world languages. That's why most names these days are meaningless - if there's no meaning in any language, then you're not landing yourself in trouble.
Sure. But when the car designer comes up with a design where changing the oil requires removal of the engine block, what then...?
You can learn how to take the engine out yourself, devoting days to learning how to do it and the task itself. Or you can take it to the local mechanic, who has the necessary skills and an ultra-fast engine hoist, for whom it takes 10 minutes. This betrays the fact that the hypothetical car designer had the necessary skills and an ultra-fast engine hoist, and didn't consider that the rest of the world wouldn't be able to do it. And his mates say "it's easy, buy an engine hoist and learn to do it yourself - you'll learn so much by doing it".
None of which solves the basic issue - that having to do something fundamental like removing the engine block to accomplish something trivial and frequently-required like changing the oil is a crap bit of design. And in fact, that by using this crap bit of design as a "challenge" so that only the truly dedicated will buy an engine hoist and learn the skills, you're actually putting up higher barriers to entry than non-free engineering - unlike, say, ChevroSoft who charge big money for their car but you can change the oil by yourself with a wrench...
Replace "remove the engine block" with "recompile the kernel", and "change the oil" with "add new hardware"...
Oh man - blast from the past, big time! We used Transputers at GEC Alsthom for ages. Occam2 was actually my first industrial-level language, rather than C (which I learnt at uni but then didn't use for a couple of years). Eventually Inmos tanked, the supply dried up (GEC bought practically all the remaining stock to keep them in spares) and we had to start again with a new platform and RTOS.
Shame really. Transputers were a great bit of kit, just underfunded, over-expensive and too far ahead of their time.
They do, plenty of them. The difference is that usually they're specially built for the European market.
You go to Europe, you'll see plenty of Ford Focuses and similar size cars. But you'd *never* see a Crown Victoria or a Ford Taurus. For starters, they look horrible to European eyes - too damn big and too damn ugly. Then there's fuel consumption. And then there's the fact that they're all automatic (most, like 90+% of, Europeans drive manual and prefer it; the exceptions are those who either prefer the convenience, like taxi drivers, or those who can't handle the complexity of running a manual box). And then there's the engine tuning - American cars are mostly undertuned, so that your typical 2.0l Euro-car will outperform many 3.0l US equivalents. And then there's the fact that their road-holding is bad to the point of unsafeness, which is a problem on twisty roads (which is to say all European roads).
Some of the Euro-specific cars get sold in the US too - Ford Focus is an example. They're usually sold as low-end cars though, and they're often reworked to suit American tastes. Again, the Focus is a good example. To make the Focus into an American car, they took a car with arguably the best handling of its time and a reasonable engine, stuck an automatic gearbox in it, detuned the engine, detuned the suspension so it wallows round corners, and hey presto! instant American low-end car, which sucks to drive.
You will see some Jeeps and other SUVs around - sadly Europeans are picking those up too as fashion statements. (In Britain they're known as "Chelsea Tractors", Chelsea being an area of inner London.) But you won't find anything as overblown as an F-550 or other stuff like that, or if you do then it's owned by some Yank-Tank enthusiast who's paid extra to import it.
Good call. And you won't find any ill effects, because every study has shown that it's 100% safe. Even the guy who raised the original concern says it's safe.
He was right to raise the concern - if you don't flag up that something looks dodgy, no-one will never know to look closer. The problem came with the tabloids (Sun/Star/Mirror/Mail) jumping on an easy scare story. The media equivalent of a zero-day exploit, basically. People naturally panicked, and the media naturally said nothing when their scare stories turned out to be pure bullshit.
The Brits have succumbed to a bunch of media hype. One guy released one study saying there might possibly be a connection between MMR and autism - more info needed. The media went ballistic. Further studies were done - no link found. The guy who did the first study says categorically that there is NO link. The media says fuck all. Yes, the government's "in denial" - bcos the media were WRONG! If someone stands up and said "The Earth is flat", could he just say "well you're in denial" when you call bullshit on him and still expect people to believe him?
Meantime a bunch of parents who didn't understand what that guy was saying but could understand a tabloid editorial in the Sun/Mirror/Mail saying "Keep your children safe - don't give them MMR", didn't get their kids vaccinated. Result? There's a serious risk in Britain of epidemics of mumps, measles and rubella (German measles) from unvaccinated kids.
Kids' temperatures - well a child is about the most robust thing you're going to find, immunity-wise. They have to be, to transition from a totally sterile environment (the womb) to an outside world full of diseases. For a kid's immune system, mumps, measles, rubella, chickenpox, smallpox, they're just are an irritation - 2 weeks off school and that's it. (High temperature spikes for a day or so are *incredibly* common, and if you haven't seen it yet with your kid then don't worry, you will.;-) The danger comes when an adult gets the same disease - entire tribes of American Indians (North and South America) were wiped out by those diseases. Rubella doesn't often kill, but usually leaves female survivors infertile. Great idea for all those Brits skipping those shots, huh? If their kids are lucky enough to survive these diseases, they'll be left sterile, and what are they going to say to Mummy and Daddy then? "Hey, thanks for saving me from having a temperature of 105?"
Humidity is certainly a big factor. As a Brit, I had no problems with Detroit in summer - hot, yes, but it's a dry heat. I never felt the need to use the air-con in my apartment or car - I'd just open the windows and I was fine. Much of Europe, being near the sea in many places, gets high humidity along with the heat though. Temperatures over 30 in Britain really can be debilitating.
"Wii" pronounced "why" has to be the question for this.
I mean, despite the crap name, what fucktard thought that custom optical discs would be a good idea? "Innovative" = "it's going to cost a shitload more to make than buying some commodity CD/DVD player, individual discs are going to cost a shitload more to make than commodity CDs/DVDs, and as a consumer you'll need to pay extra to play CDs and DVDs which other consoles can do as standard". So that's a *really* good marketing move, right...?
Whilst it's kind of fun to watch companies imploding following a succession of *really* stupid decisions, it's still a bit of a shame. Trying and failing is a worthy accomplishment, like crashing in F1 bcos you're pushing too hard. Fucking up by doing something that anyone can see is stupid, like trying to overtake on a chicane with walls on either side, that's just a sign of incompetence. Sadly there's a long list of tech companies who've done just that in the past (most notably Commodore), and Nintendo are just continuing the trend.
I know that if I had stock in Nintendo, I'd be busy selling it as fast as possible. In fact, hell, I'd have sold it at least 3 years back now, when they showed they had nothing to offer in the console market. The Nintendo car crash has been coming for ages now, and it doesn't look like there's anyone at the wheel to do anything about it.
Sure, avoiding having to do it in the first place is best.:-) But otherwise it's something to bear in mind (and let's face it, most home-recording bands are just doing demos or £5-after-the-gig-in-the-local-pub CD-Rs).
Depends on whether you have enough headroom to capture the snare in full and still get reasonable resolution. If not, compressing externally is a reasonable solution. 24-bit sampling should avoid you having to do external compression, but YMMV.
I'd second that. I've got the predecessor of the C-Port, and it works fine. Only 2 mic preamps built-in, so I need to make my own for the other 6 channels (but no probs there, cos I'm an elec eng and have full PCB-making gear at home:-) The boxes allow daisy-chaining too, so if you want to add another 8 channels of input then you can just buy a new ADC box and connect the cables without needing the PC-side stuff upgrading. IIRC two boxes plugged into the one PC is the max though, so your max is 16 channels.
Recording quality seems fine, including the quality of the built-in mic preamps. I'm not a "golden ear" audiophile or pro sound engineer, but I can run a desk pretty competently for performance, so I think I've got a reasonably good idea of what works. At 24-bit and with decent mic preamps, your mic characteristics are more likely to be the limiting factor.
I had problems getting Win98 (on a Duron 800MHz) to record all 8 tracks, which basically looked like driver problems. On WinXP, more recent drivers and upgraded mobo/processor, it has no problems at all - Audacity will happily record 8 tracks at a time to your heart's content. Linux support is unknown.
You will need one spare PCI slot, but that's not usually a problem. And a shitload of hard drive space is pretty much a given for any recording to PC.
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Hint: there's a reason why it's called a lapTOP and not a lapBOTTOM...
Yes, there are worse books than the "classics". But there are also better books.
Thomas Hardy, for instance. Please, please, please, give me Barbara Cartland instead - it's better quality writing and more believable. Who the fuck thought this guy was worth publishing, never mind putting in the EngLit "classics" list?
Conan Doyle's work is trash too, but fun trash. It's about as serious as a cheap paperback, and thank goodness no-one tries to pretend it's great art, at least. Ditto Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, but sadly people *do* insist on calling them great art. Luckily Frankenstein mostly gets left out of the "great art" category, bcos it's fantasy and you can't have fantasy books being considered art, can you? (Which is just as well, bcos it's very badly written.)
Charles Dickens was writing the 19th century equivalent of a soap opera (stories about real people in recognisable present-day situations, delivered in installments). He even went round reading his stuff to audiences, and it was common for families to read it aloud. So why not watch a decent soap opera instead? If it has to be English, try EastEnders instead of his depressing ones, or Coronation Street instead of the more lighthearted ones. Or listen to The Archers on the radio, if you're of the school (like I am) that says the pictures are better in books and radio. Read Dickens if you want - some of it's fun, so long as you avoid Pickwick Papers - but don't pretend it's any more sophisticated than a soap opera.
But there definitely *are* good classics. Practically everything by H G Wells is worth reading. Jerome K Jerome's writing is nearly a century old, and his stuff still beats the crap out of any other travelogues since then (Bill Bryson tries his best, but he can't match it). Harper Lee's one book is close to perfect (when asked why she didn't write anything after Mockingbird, she's supposed to have said, "but I've said everything I wanted to say"). Kipling is also worth it.
And for God's sake, go and *WATCH* Shakespeare on stage, don't make anyone sit down and read the damn things! You wouldn't try to read the script of Terminator, would you? Then please, English teachers, approach plays the same way.
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You clearly don't go to enough beer festivals (or not in the UK anyway).
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http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=espresso+b
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Great. Go on a scavenger hunt round the solar system for some, will you? ;-)
On a universe scale, hydrogen and helium are the most common elements. But being so light, most planets don't have enough gravity to retain significant quantities of either of them in pure form (and those that do, like Jupiter, aren't ideal for us to live on). Hydrogen is reactive though, so it forms compounds (eg. water), and those compounds are heavy enough to be retained. But helium is unreactive (that's the *definition* of a noble gas), so it just wanders off.
So if you could analyse the chemical composition of the entire solar system and about 10 light years in any direction around it, you'd find that hydrogen and helium are the most common elements, and stuff like iron, water and silicates are vanishingly rare in comparison. But the iron, water and silicates are clumped together into planets/moons/asteroids/comets, whereas the pure hydrogen and helium are distributed almost uniformly. So from the point of view of someone living on a large clump of iron, water and silicates, pure hydrogen and helium are *not* going to be in very high proportions compared to everything else around.
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Per Bruce Schneier, it's safer to have one password that you can remember than a dozen different passwords which you need to record somewhere, bcos then no-one can steal your written-down version. And if you only have one, it can be reasonably complex, which gives you better security again.
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You are a tard. "up to" means "at this point under definable conditions".
Oh really? Check a dictionary, or even use simple logic. "Up to N" == "not greater than N" == "less than or equals to N". Assuming values can't go negative, "less than or equals to N" == "between 0 and N".
The only reason EPA ratings on cars are reasonably accurate is bcos it's legally required - they are forced to demonstrate that the mileage figure they give can be achieved under "perfect" conditions. Without that, there would be literally nothing preventing an advertiser from saying "up to 1000mpg", because 20mpg is within the range 0-1000mpg. It'd be literally correct, even though it's meaningless weasel-speak. You'll find numerous ads using this meaning - reduce your cholesterol level by up to 50%, reduce limescale by 200%, enlarge your penis by up to 3", etc.. Any complaints about these ads simply cannot be upheld, bcos they *are* literally correct.
BTW, "retard" as an insult sucks, since mental handicap is not the person's fault. "Fuckwit" is valid, however, since being a fuckwit merely requires failure to engage brain. Fuckwit.
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Not being completely divorced from reality, I do recognize that there are people that are legitimately mentally incompetent (I intend only the most literal meaning of the term, with no pejorative connotations), such as those suffering from severe mental handicaps. As long as they are also denied all the other rights that people of sufficient responsibility enjoy, I'm fine with them being denied the right to own guns.
This is basically the problem. You're not allowed to drive a car until you've spent several months learning how to drive it safely and you've demonstrated (in front of an unbiased examiner) that you've mastered those skills well enough that you're not a danger to anyone else. In addition, your doctor can (and will) take you off the road immediately if he thinks that you're no longer safe to be driving.
But guns? Can you honestly tell me that every gun owner has had several months of formal training *and* a practical examination with an unbiased examiner in real situations, before they're allowed to use a gun? And if you're having some kind of psychological problems, can your doctor immediately force you to hand over your gun for the duration, until you've proved yourself fit to use it again? And are there police patrolling hunting areas to check that people are following the rules and using their guns safely? I don't think so, somehow.
I don't know of any drunk drivers who are banned from buying a car, do you? Hell, most of the time, they're not even banned from driving a car.
This is a flaw in the US penalty system then - a ban on driving is pretty much automatic in the UK. Sadly no-one checks you for buying a car either. Although when you buy a car, you do have to show your insurance before you can drive it off, and that would likely prevent a banned person from buying another one. Not to mention the cost - a $100 shotgun and a $10,000 car are a bit different in terms of accessibility!
Insurance would be a good idea though. There's compulsory insurance on car owners, so why not have compulsory insurance for gun owners too? They shoot someone, the insurance company has to pay out. It's still not ideal, but it'd work.
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The real cost is the batteries, the electronics, and the car itself.
...but now it starts falling down.
OK so far...
Exxon-Mobil holds the patents to the nickel-metal hydride battery, so there's why the price for NMH for cars is so damned high.
You want to know why pure-electric cars are incredibly unlikely to become popular? Answer: it's not possible to get a full battery charge in 2 minutes. When you run out of gas, you can fill up again in 2 minutes. Travelling cross-country, it simply is *not* acceptable to have to sit around for 3 hours at the gas station waiting for your car to get enough juice to continue. Nor is it likely to be possible to improve on this, until someone invents some radically new battery technology - no existing battery technology will allow charging at this kind of speed without the batteries exploding.
So we need a new battery technology which will, at which point Exxon-Mobil and their battery won't matter a damn. The world and their brother is working on that, bcos everyone knows that whoever gets better tech is going to be in the money big-time. Trouble is that nothing's coming along - the best bet so far is fuel cells, and we're back to fossil fuels again (or hydrogen, which will be produced and distributed by the same folks anyway).
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Controlling guns to restrict crime is based on precisely the same rationale as controlling video games to restrict crime.
;-) to kill someone with a fishing rod. If any psycho can walk into a gun shop and walk out again with a rifle, then man, you and your whole town are screwed. Hence controlling who you sell the guns to is essential, to ensure that you only sell to people who are stable enough to not be a danger to the community with a gun in their hands. And laws on how you store the guns too, so that J Random Thief can't just break a window and take that 44 Magnum from your unlocked desk drawer.
*sigh*
You do realise the irony in selling guns to anyone, no matter whether they have 20/20 mental health or are a whacked-out drooling psychopath, and then saying "we're going to have a war on terror", don't you?
I'm personally in favour of gun ownership, and fishing-rod ownership. If that's your hobby, then fine - I don't want to stop anyone going down the local range to fire off a few rounds, or going hunting, or going fishing. But the difference is that it's difficult (although not impossible
Yes, it's possible to buy black-market guns illegally. I don't see that as an argument for failing to regulate legitimate sales though. It's possible to buy prescription drugs illegally too, but that's not a reason for your local pharmacy to dish out methadone on demand over the counter like it was cough candy, and the criminal (or just plain psychopathic) use of guns does a damn sight more damage than any prescription medicine.
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Nope - Bethesda shipped CDs which included this "nude" texture. You'd have to be some kind of nut to do that in the US and expect *not* to get into some kind of trouble.
I agree with you - the real question is why the US is so uptight about flesh when (a) all the RnB acts sing about nothing else and (b) the cinemas, TV and games are full of blood and guts. But this isn't something that Bethesda can control, any more than RockStar can control whether some nutjob goes out with a gun goes out to shoot Haitians - in that case the problem is the lack of restriction of nutjobs to guns. Yes, these questions need to be asked, and they are being asked. But until the conservative US gets its collective underwear from between its collective ass-cheeks, we're fucked.
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Spelling Nazi alert: Two "M"s...
"Inflammable" is British English usage (although these days they're interchangeable). It means that you can "inflame" it.
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Yes, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If even the devs don't want to work on it, you're screwed. Which is why those people who thought up (and approved) the name deserve firing for utter stupidity - why hamstring yourself before it's even got started?
On a similar theme, the film "Free Willy" didn't do too well in the UK, again for pretty damn obvious reasons. (There's an urban legend that when the first trailer came on for "Free Willy" in some premier, a very camp voice called out "that's not a film, that's an invitation".) You can find similar stories around the world - the Vauxhall "No Va" not selling in Spain, for example. So these days, all competent marketing people should be checking for unintentional meanings in all the major world languages. That's why most names these days are meaningless - if there's no meaning in any language, then you're not landing yourself in trouble.
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Normally I'm not a spelling Nazi, but "pubic healthcare" is too good to pass up... ;-)
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PS. Having said that, you've written "naive" with a diacritic, which I'd never bother with, so bonus points there.
Sure. But when the car designer comes up with a design where changing the oil requires removal of the engine block, what then...?
You can learn how to take the engine out yourself, devoting days to learning how to do it and the task itself. Or you can take it to the local mechanic, who has the necessary skills and an ultra-fast engine hoist, for whom it takes 10 minutes. This betrays the fact that the hypothetical car designer had the necessary skills and an ultra-fast engine hoist, and didn't consider that the rest of the world wouldn't be able to do it. And his mates say "it's easy, buy an engine hoist and learn to do it yourself - you'll learn so much by doing it".
None of which solves the basic issue - that having to do something fundamental like removing the engine block to accomplish something trivial and frequently-required like changing the oil is a crap bit of design. And in fact, that by using this crap bit of design as a "challenge" so that only the truly dedicated will buy an engine hoist and learn the skills, you're actually putting up higher barriers to entry than non-free engineering - unlike, say, ChevroSoft who charge big money for their car but you can change the oil by yourself with a wrench...
Replace "remove the engine block" with "recompile the kernel", and "change the oil" with "add new hardware"...
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Oh man - blast from the past, big time! We used Transputers at GEC Alsthom for ages. Occam2 was actually my first industrial-level language, rather than C (which I learnt at uni but then didn't use for a couple of years). Eventually Inmos tanked, the supply dried up (GEC bought practically all the remaining stock to keep them in spares) and we had to start again with a new platform and RTOS.
Shame really. Transputers were a great bit of kit, just underfunded, over-expensive and too far ahead of their time.
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They do, plenty of them. The difference is that usually they're specially built for the European market.
You go to Europe, you'll see plenty of Ford Focuses and similar size cars. But you'd *never* see a Crown Victoria or a Ford Taurus. For starters, they look horrible to European eyes - too damn big and too damn ugly. Then there's fuel consumption. And then there's the fact that they're all automatic (most, like 90+% of, Europeans drive manual and prefer it; the exceptions are those who either prefer the convenience, like taxi drivers, or those who can't handle the complexity of running a manual box). And then there's the engine tuning - American cars are mostly undertuned, so that your typical 2.0l Euro-car will outperform many 3.0l US equivalents. And then there's the fact that their road-holding is bad to the point of unsafeness, which is a problem on twisty roads (which is to say all European roads).
Some of the Euro-specific cars get sold in the US too - Ford Focus is an example. They're usually sold as low-end cars though, and they're often reworked to suit American tastes. Again, the Focus is a good example. To make the Focus into an American car, they took a car with arguably the best handling of its time and a reasonable engine, stuck an automatic gearbox in it, detuned the engine, detuned the suspension so it wallows round corners, and hey presto! instant American low-end car, which sucks to drive.
You will see some Jeeps and other SUVs around - sadly Europeans are picking those up too as fashion statements. (In Britain they're known as "Chelsea Tractors", Chelsea being an area of inner London.) But you won't find anything as overblown as an F-550 or other stuff like that, or if you do then it's owned by some Yank-Tank enthusiast who's paid extra to import it.
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Good call. And you won't find any ill effects, because every study has shown that it's 100% safe. Even the guy who raised the original concern says it's safe.
He was right to raise the concern - if you don't flag up that something looks dodgy, no-one will never know to look closer. The problem came with the tabloids (Sun/Star/Mirror/Mail) jumping on an easy scare story. The media equivalent of a zero-day exploit, basically. People naturally panicked, and the media naturally said nothing when their scare stories turned out to be pure bullshit.
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The Brits have succumbed to a bunch of media hype. One guy released one study saying there might possibly be a connection between MMR and autism - more info needed. The media went ballistic. Further studies were done - no link found. The guy who did the first study says categorically that there is NO link. The media says fuck all. Yes, the government's "in denial" - bcos the media were WRONG! If someone stands up and said "The Earth is flat", could he just say "well you're in denial" when you call bullshit on him and still expect people to believe him?
;-) The danger comes when an adult gets the same disease - entire tribes of American Indians (North and South America) were wiped out by those diseases. Rubella doesn't often kill, but usually leaves female survivors infertile. Great idea for all those Brits skipping those shots, huh? If their kids are lucky enough to survive these diseases, they'll be left sterile, and what are they going to say to Mummy and Daddy then? "Hey, thanks for saving me from having a temperature of 105?"
Meantime a bunch of parents who didn't understand what that guy was saying but could understand a tabloid editorial in the Sun/Mirror/Mail saying "Keep your children safe - don't give them MMR", didn't get their kids vaccinated. Result? There's a serious risk in Britain of epidemics of mumps, measles and rubella (German measles) from unvaccinated kids.
Kids' temperatures - well a child is about the most robust thing you're going to find, immunity-wise. They have to be, to transition from a totally sterile environment (the womb) to an outside world full of diseases. For a kid's immune system, mumps, measles, rubella, chickenpox, smallpox, they're just are an irritation - 2 weeks off school and that's it. (High temperature spikes for a day or so are *incredibly* common, and if you haven't seen it yet with your kid then don't worry, you will.
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Humidity is certainly a big factor. As a Brit, I had no problems with Detroit in summer - hot, yes, but it's a dry heat. I never felt the need to use the air-con in my apartment or car - I'd just open the windows and I was fine. Much of Europe, being near the sea in many places, gets high humidity along with the heat though. Temperatures over 30 in Britain really can be debilitating.
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Fault Tree Analysis...?
;-)
Mind you, it could be worse. I was wondering what the Fleet Air Arm were using it for...
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[ ] If you were competent at your job then you'd know the answer already.
[ ] If your company needs someone who knows this, hire someone. Don't settle for a half-assed guess from someone on Slashdot.
[ ] If you'd checked on Google first, you wouldn't have needed to ask this.
The number of "Ask Slashdot" topics that fall into these three categories is frankly amazing.
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"Wii" pronounced "why" has to be the question for this.
I mean, despite the crap name, what fucktard thought that custom optical discs would be a good idea? "Innovative" = "it's going to cost a shitload more to make than buying some commodity CD/DVD player, individual discs are going to cost a shitload more to make than commodity CDs/DVDs, and as a consumer you'll need to pay extra to play CDs and DVDs which other consoles can do as standard". So that's a *really* good marketing move, right...?
Whilst it's kind of fun to watch companies imploding following a succession of *really* stupid decisions, it's still a bit of a shame. Trying and failing is a worthy accomplishment, like crashing in F1 bcos you're pushing too hard. Fucking up by doing something that anyone can see is stupid, like trying to overtake on a chicane with walls on either side, that's just a sign of incompetence. Sadly there's a long list of tech companies who've done just that in the past (most notably Commodore), and Nintendo are just continuing the trend.
I know that if I had stock in Nintendo, I'd be busy selling it as fast as possible. In fact, hell, I'd have sold it at least 3 years back now, when they showed they had nothing to offer in the console market. The Nintendo car crash has been coming for ages now, and it doesn't look like there's anyone at the wheel to do anything about it.
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Sure, avoiding having to do it in the first place is best. :-) But otherwise it's something to bear in mind (and let's face it, most home-recording bands are just doing demos or £5-after-the-gig-in-the-local-pub CD-Rs).
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Depends on whether you have enough headroom to capture the snare in full and still get reasonable resolution. If not, compressing externally is a reasonable solution. 24-bit sampling should avoid you having to do external compression, but YMMV.
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I'd second that. I've got the predecessor of the C-Port, and it works fine. Only 2 mic preamps built-in, so I need to make my own for the other 6 channels (but no probs there, cos I'm an elec eng and have full PCB-making gear at home :-) The boxes allow daisy-chaining too, so if you want to add another 8 channels of input then you can just buy a new ADC box and connect the cables without needing the PC-side stuff upgrading. IIRC two boxes plugged into the one PC is the max though, so your max is 16 channels.
Recording quality seems fine, including the quality of the built-in mic preamps. I'm not a "golden ear" audiophile or pro sound engineer, but I can run a desk pretty competently for performance, so I think I've got a reasonably good idea of what works. At 24-bit and with decent mic preamps, your mic characteristics are more likely to be the limiting factor.
I had problems getting Win98 (on a Duron 800MHz) to record all 8 tracks, which basically looked like driver problems. On WinXP, more recent drivers and upgraded mobo/processor, it has no problems at all - Audacity will happily record 8 tracks at a time to your heart's content. Linux support is unknown.
You will need one spare PCI slot, but that's not usually a problem. And a shitload of hard drive space is pretty much a given for any recording to PC.
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