And that's why I argue against this stupidity, because you seriously think violently raping someone with a deadly weapon falls into the same category
Don't give me that BS, I've been raped; it doesn't matter how it happens, you've still been sexually violated against your will. Would you honestly use your line of argument for anything else? "Well, yeah, he burned down my home, but he was really polite and apologetic about it, so it's not REAL arson...."?
You know what the worst part of it is, IMHO? How you can't talk about it afterwards. Oh, sure, you can talk with close friends, or anonyously on the net or whatnot. But normally when a person goes through something traumatic, they can talk about it. You're in work and suddenly nearly start crying, or have to get up and leave a meeting or whatnot.... what do you say to people? If I'd been in a car accident, "Oh, sorry, I was in a car accident this weekend, I'm still a bit shaken up by it". Fine, people understand right away. But you can't just say "I was raped". Not only because of how personal it is and not "workplace conversation", but because assholes like you would begin to question whether it was "real" rape or whether I brought it on myself by dressing too seductively or did enough to fight off the attacker.
as consentual fun between adults that all parties involved enjoy, it just falls outside the too-narrow scope of the law.
Given the fact that you're having a problem with people saying that you raped them (according to your first post), perhaps YOU'RE just thrilled with your behavior, but the women you're raping are not.
and that men are robots that don't understand that what's totally fine in situation A is not so in situation B.
Wait a minute, so you *are* getting some form of consent before the sexual activity, checking to see if she's into it? You're not just assuming unending consent, as you described previously?
Being opposed to jailing innocent people is not the same as being pro-criminal.
Where are these supposed massive numbers of innocent people being jailed? No, seriously, where are they? One in three women are raped. One in ten men confess to rape in anonymous sexual surveys. One in 33 men confess to serial rape in said surveys.Are this many people jailed for rape? Of course not. Only the tiniest percentage of rapes ever get prosecuted. There's a huge imbalance, all right, but it's towards people getting away with rape scott-free.
For example, a nine-year study of a small metropolitan area in the Midwestern United States found that 41% of rape accusations were false.
Or, I could cite Hursch and Selkin, also 2%; Kelley et al (3%); Theilade and Thomsen (1.5%); etc. OR we could stop bullshitting and not deliberately pick outliers for our arguments, but I know that's too much to ask of you.
There've been tons of studies, and all together, the median rate of false rape report rates in them is about 13%. That's not 13% fraudulent reports, 13% false reports (I hope you know the difference). Which is lower than (but similar to) the rates of other false reporting of crimes - insurance fraud, fraudulent robbery reports, fraudulent kidnapping reports, etc. But of course you're not railing against them because you don't care about them, you just want to be able to F*** girls without their permission.
Another report found that DNA evidence excluded the primary suspect in 26% of rape cases (https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/dnaevid.pdf).
You can start by actually citing your references correctly. The number is 25% and it's not "of rape cases", it's "of rape cases referred to the FBI" for DNA testing, which is something only done if there is a degree of uncertainty in the identification of the perpetrator. Compare the number of tests per y
You're foaming at the mouth. You should stop doing that.
Oh, no, you don't get off that easily. I'm not going to respond to any more of your post until you respond to my very simple scenario above:
Glad to know that you'd think you'd simply "made a mistake" if you got drunk (or worse, if someone had slipped something in your drink) and woke up to some guy f***ing you without your consent. Hey, where do you usually party and when, I'd like to send a few guys your way who would be very interested in your "if I'm drunk to the point of incoherence / unconsciousness, I'm fine with whatever sexual activity occurs, and if I regret it it's my fault" approach.
Hey, let's take it even further. I'm *thrilled* to know that if you get drunk to the point that you're incoherent or unconscious, then that counts as consent to take your wallet. And if you get drunk, I'm sure I'm going to love getting to take your car. And burn down your house. I appreciate the fact that to you, being incapacitated is consent to whatever the people around you want to do. This is going to be lots of fun!
What's your response? I'm not going to accept a dodge here. If you black out while partying and a group of guys have their way with you while you're incoherent or unconscious, you're just jim dandy with that situation, and that's your own fault? If you're incoherent or conconscious and I get you to give me your wallet, you're just fine with that? You're *really* fine with incoherence and unconsciousness being consent?
Again, I'm not just going to let you dodge this. Call me "foaming at the mouth" if you want, but answer the question.
then you have a curious case of a crime where both parties are equally victim and perpetrator, because by the same definition, the man was just as much raped as the woman.
What's "curious" about that? It's the exact same as with any other crime. If you attack an innocent person, you're charged with battery. If two people are fighting, however, and there's no "primary aggressor", you're "mutual combattants", and unless you're violating some other statute (for example, disorderly intoxication), the case is generally declared nolle prosequi.
Of course, your proposed scenario where two people are drunk to the point of unconsciousness is physically impossible, and if they're both drunk merely to the point of incoherence, you're going to have a lot of trouble having sex. As to what level of intoxication determines one's inability to grant legal consent (to sex, to signing a contract, to whatever) varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but let's not play dumb - if you see a person who's slurring their speech, can hardly stand up, and doesn't seem to understand where they are, don't act all dumb and say, "Oh, I thought she was perfectly cogent to make informed decisions!"
If you happen to find a jurisdiction where a 0,05 BAC is declared to be incapacitated, hey, you've got my support, that'd be an overly strict declaration. But that's not the general case, the case that all those evil Feminazis that you hate are complaining about.
What I'm saying is backed up by the law. What you're saying is backed up by "I want to fuck sleeping and drunk girls without their permission, and anyone who says that's wrong is a feminazi".
The hard part (no pun intended) is that very few human beings begin a sexual activity by signing a clearly spelled-out contract
As I just headed you off, no court in the world asks for a written contract. They simply look for anything that a reasonable person would consider explicit, affirmative consent before the activity by a party legally capable of consenting. It doesn't even have to be spoken. But you don't even want to have to get a damned smile from your "partner" before sticking it in.
In addition, in some jurisdictions it is legally rape even if the women explicitly consented to sex and then changed her mind during or even after intercourse.
Once again, [[Citation needed]]. There is no such jurisdiction on Earth.
Your primitive try at statistics is laughable
That's how one compounds an annualized probability over a number of years, it's a very simple formula. And there are tons and tons of studies out there which have total accumulated likelyhood of rape over a woman's lifetime (about 30%), but you just keep hand-waving them away.
, you find gems like some studies classifying things as rape that even the women interviewed did not consider such.
The very study YOU cited, which I quoted, ASKED the subjects (men and women) whether they had been raped in the past year. Why are you complaining about me quoting YOUR preferred study?
And if you really think that being physically attacked and penetrated against your will falls even into the same category of things as having a beer too many and regretting going home with that guy the next day, then you need to have your head examined.
Glad to know that you'd think you'd simply "made a mistake" if you got drunk (or worse, if someone had slipped something in your drink) and woke up to some guy f***ing you without your consent. Hey, where do you usually party and when, I'd like to send a few guys your way who would be very interested in your "if I'm drunk to the point of incoherence / unconsciousness, I'm fine with whatever sexual activity occurs, and if I regret it it's my fault" approach.
Hey, let's take it even further. I'm *thrilled* to know that if you get drunk to the point that you're incoherent or unconscious, then that counts as consent to take your wallet. And if you get drunk, I'm sure I'm going to love getting to take your car. And burn down your house. I appreciate the fact that to you, being incapacitated is consent to whatever the people around you want to do. This is going to be lots of fun!
In general, having sex with a sleeping person is illegal**, almost everywhere in the world. The fact that you weren't charged because she happened to be into it doesn't make it not rape, any more than it wouldn't be rape if you happened to jump out of the bushes with a knife and rape a girl who happened to have a rape fantasy. If one night your girlfriend had gone to bed angry with you and woken up to you F*ing her without her consent, she would have had, and should have, every damned right in the world to charge you for it. You can never assume an unending right to F*** someone, even your girlfriend or spouse, and that's a damned good thing.
** In some jurisdictions, there are exceptions made for if consent was given shortly before the person went to sleep (considering that to be consent immediately before the sexual activity), while in others, there's a flat ban. In one noteworthy case in Canada for the extreme end of the spectrum, in R. v. J.A., the Canadian Supreme Court took on a case where a woman consented to be strangled during sex, she passed out, and while she was out her partier tied her up and shoved a dildo up her anus, she came to, he stopped, she recovered, and then they did other consensual sexual activities. The Supreme Court ruled that the activities that occurred during the three minutes that she was unconscious were rape. It doesn't matter that she was consenting to sexual activities before and after - you cannot assume consent from an unconscious person.
You claim there's blurry lines. There are no blurry lines. You want there to be blurry lines, holes carved out in the definition of rape so that you have the right to f*** girls without having to get their permission. It's a damned good reason that they're not. Because rape is enough of a problem as it is with people like you who think you have a right to F*** girls without getting their consent.
Thanks to feminist lobbying gone wild, we now have some jurisdictions where she can consent 100% to sex, and as soon as she says "no" during intercourse, the whole thing is rape, even if you stop immediately.
[[Citation needed]]. Point me to a single jurisdiction where it's considered rape if you stop immediately. However, if you don't stop immediately, YES, it's rape, and you better damned well believe it's rape..
Or where she can change her mind the next day and turn a fully consentual sex act into rape
If consent was given, it's not rape. If consent was not given, it's rape. If you're having a problem with women accusing you of rape, stop F*ing them without their consent.
And oh, that evil feminist lobby, wanting women to have a right to say no before sex - clearly they're just a bunch of Nazis!
they make it harder to fight the real problem.
You don't get it, do you? The real problem is you, and everyone like you who thinks they have a right to F* girls without getting their consent. That's RAPE.
And to head it off... no, consent does not have to be some sort of written contracts like MRAs try to play it out to be. It doesn't even have to be spoken. If she smiles, kisses you back, pulls you closer, etc, that's consent. But you CANNOT take silence as consent, you CANNOT take a previous yes as consent to a different event, you CANNOT take incapacitation as consent, and you CANNOT make consent irrevocable. You have to get affirmative, withdrawable consent, from someone who can legally consent, every time. I don't know why this is so hard for so many people.
Oh, please, cut it with the rape-apologism BS. "Rape is not clearly defined?" If you don't get an affirmative, withdrawable yes from someone who can legally consent, it's rape. What is so damned hard about that?
The only reason there's wikipedia fights is that all of the MRAs like you who want to be able to F*** girls so drunk they can't even walk or say it's not rape because "she didn't physically fight me", or "She came into my apartment, that's consent and she can't change her mind" want to try to dilute the very simple definition of rape. And FYI, using your own perferred source of statistics: 0,5% of women per year, average lifespan of 81 years, that's 1-(0.995^81) = 33% of women, using your "narrower definitions" survey. So here's a tip: the next time you want to cite statistics to support your MRA BS, try to find ones that don't argue precisely for the opposite of what you're trying to claim. And even that supposedly less "0,2%"? I'm sitting here looking at the 2010 National Crime Victimization Survey right here, and it says, "One percent, or approximately 1.3 million women, reported being raped by any perpetrator in the 12 months prior to taking the survey". The number "0.2%" does not exist in the document. And that 1% is only for rape - the number for "sexual violence victimization other than rape" is 5.6% of women in a 12 month period. And oh hey, you know your "statutory" excuse? "Complete interviews were obtained from 16,507 adults"
I'm sorry, go back to spewing your MRA rape-apologism BS, because god knows, the world needs more of THAT. Clearly you're the victim here - poor you having to listen to all those damned lying women saying they were raped, when you know so much better than them.
All these people complaiing about how "horribly corrupt" the US government are are just playing a huge round of "First World Problems". The US is #19 on the Transparency International list. That's not superb, but it's out of 177 countries... I mean, for crying out loud, Yanukovych in Ukraine had a personal zoo at his house - tens of billions of dolllars stolen from a country whose per-capita income is less than that of Mongolia's. And that sort of stuff is hardly unusual in the world. Have any of you complaining about evil "US corruption" ever lived in a country with *real* corruption, at all levels?
Actually, for most rapes, there are no consequences - the rates of reporting of rape are very low, and the rate of conviction on reported rapes is extremely low. And as a consequence, rape is extremely common. About 30% are raped at least once during their lives, and in anonymous surveys of men asking what sexual activities they've done (some of which are rape), about 10% of young men confess to having raped at least once and about 3% confess to serial rape.
Fine, if you're afraid of the government in your lawyer's jurisdiction. What if you're afraid of a foreign intelligence service, or simply a local thug who's not above manhandling lawyer?
I was thinking about this task a few weeks ago from the point of view of a real-world application: you're travelling in a war zone and want to ensure that your files are safe *even from yourself, your friends, your employer, and everyone who cares about you*. Because if you're taken prisoner, they're not going to use a 30 million dollar supercomputing cluster to crack the encryption on your laptop; they're going to work you over with a pair of pliers, perhaps taking off a few body parts, until you tell them. And if you don't have the key, they'll just threaten harm to you to people you care about who do - assuming they can't outright capture said people as well. Nobody you now can be responsible for the key. The key has to be held by someone who by nature of their contract doesn't give a rat's arse about you and won't change their terms even to save your life.
But of course, what if they were compromised - legally (subpoena), or extrajudicially (someone with a pair of pliers)? So we get into the sitution where a server for a service that controls giving out of keys needs to be safe even from its owners. While terms for key storage involving personal judgement calls (such as "did the person contracting with us successfully make it out of the country and is no longer under coersion?") can't be automated, simple time locks can, so the issue simply comes down to, "Can you keep reliable running key storage system that can't be compromised even by physical access"? A potential solution to reliability (since any system tht locked will be immune to maintenance as well!) would be to store the every key on multiple running systems in different locations in hopes that at least one of them lives long enough to yield the key at the correct time. As for security, for example, even with full memory encryption, ram is vulnerable to cold boot attacks and the key to decrypting memory has to be stored somewhere, but one solution to that is storing critical portions of data only in CPU cache. But that's only one possible attack vector among many. At least you could respond to a subpoena, "Hey, maybe you have a way to get at this data, but I sure don't. If you'd like to fund a multi-million dollar research project on how to get ahold of it, I won't stand in your way, I'll be fully cooperative..." You could also make it harder by having a multi-part key, with each part held by different entities in different jurisdictions. Though that could increase reliability challenges.
In short, at the very least you can make it very, very difficult to get keys. Maybe you can't stop a secret NSA raid on all physical servers taking part the world over, but you could stop pretty much anything else.
It's not a list order of influence. I mean, by your logic, Socrates's dad and everyone else who influenced Socrates should be more influential than Socrates himself, and the most influential people on the list should be cave men.
I think a better description of it is, "Of people who use the internet today, evenly-weighted by country, who had the most direct influence on things and events that they care about today?" And yeah, there are a few biasing factors, like the Linnaeus taxobox thing, but in general I think that it's a fair analysis from that basis.
I've been proposing this for ages - it's just VAT for carbon ("CAT"), or even pollution in general ("PAT"). People inside the "PAT" zone pay taxes based on the added embodied polluition at each step of the manufacturing process. Goods leaving the PAT zone get a PAT rebate. Goods entering the PAT zone get their estimated embodied pollution charged to them at the point of entry. As a consequences, countries can't cheat and get a competitive advantage by gutting their environmental regulations (including carbon) - the world competes on a level playing field.
Hahaha, I had been wondering about that! Most of the PageRank list I found reasonable, but that one really confused me. Here's his What Links Here list. If you follow them, you see that most are from the Taxobox - there's a field called "type_species_authority", and the answer is often Linnaeus.
I do think that Linnaeus is a bit of an exception there, tough. Who else gets regularly linked in a template? It's not like there's an infobox for people with a field "personal_savior" or "favorite_roman_emperor";)
It's only the 2dRank list that's screwed up, the PageRank list is a lot more reasonable. I don't know why they even included that 2dRank list, it ruins their credibility. The methodology doesn't even make sense. PageRank works based on determining how influential you are based on how much things link to you. Makes sense, right? Well, 2dRank uses that *plus* how much you link to other people. Why should how much you link to other people have any significance on how influential you are? Perhaps how influenced you are, but certainly not how influential you are.
Making stupid claims makes people stop listening to what you have to say. It's like you're sitting on a bus and you see the following sign: "1. This is a space ship. 2. No smoking". The demonstrable falsity of the first part undermines the credibility of the second part.
Annoying isn't it? Why do people link to (or write in the first place) an article about a list, and then not include the list? Where's the logic in that? Anyway, I dug through the supporting data fo the paper and found it, then ran it through a simple bash script to strip extraneous information. I'm only including the PageRank version because the methodology is more logical and the results more reasonable (the 2D rank version is mostly pop-culture).
1. Carl Linnaeus 2. Jesus 3. Aristotle 4. Napoleon 5. Adolf Hitler 6. Julius Caesar 7. Plato 8. William Shakespeare 9. Albert Einstein 10. Elizabeth II 11. Alexander the Great 12. Isaac Newton 13. Muhammad 14. Karl Marx 15. Joseph Stalin 16. Augustus 17. Christopher Columbus 18. Charlemagne 19. Louis XIV of France 20. George W. Bush 21. Immanuel Kant 22. Barack Obama 23. Mary (mother of Jesus) 24. Vladimir Lenin 25. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 26. Paul the Apostle 27. Charles Darwin 28. Martin Luther 29. Herodotus 30. Franklin D. Roosevelt 31. Galileo Galilei 32. Pope John Paul II 33. Constantine the Great 34. Benito Mussolini 35. Cicero 36. Ren Descartes 37. Saint Peter 38. Ludwig van Beethoven 39. George Washington 40. Moses 41. Johann Sebastian Bach 42. Bill Clinton 43. Leonardo da Vinci 44. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 45. Gautama Buddha 46. Winston Churchill 47. John F. Kennedy 48. Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 49. Pope Benedict XVI 50. Richard Nixon 51. Sigmund Freud 52. Ronald Reagan 53. Abraham Lincoln 54. Saddam Hussein 55. Ptolemy 56. Richard Wagner 57. Diocletian 58. Queen Victoria 59. Napoleon III 60. Charles de Gaulle 61. Mao Zedong 62. William Herschel 63. Michael Jackson 64. Justinian I 65. Augustine of Hippo 66. Ali 67. Jean-Jacques Rousseau 68. Ernst Haeckel 69. Pliny the Elder 70. Pope Gregory XIII 71. Confucius 72. Henry VIII of England 73. Thomas Jefferson 74. Francisco Franco 75. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 76. Pierre Andr Latreille 77. Pope Paul VI 78. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 79. Chiang Kai-shek 80. John Herschel 81. Elizabeth I of England 82. J. R. R. Tolkien 83. Socrates 84. Genghis Khan 85. Qin Shi Huang 86. Umar 87. Philip II of Spain 88. Frederick the Great 89. Johannes Kepler 90. Emperor Wu of Han 91. Friedrich Nietzsche 92. Plutarch 93. Thomas Edison 94. Max Weber 95. Dante Alighieri 96. Ashoka 97. Tacitus 98. Ernst Mayr 99. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck 100. Elvis Presley
Not a bad list, honestly. Still not sure why Linnaeus is *that* high, but most of the rest is quite reasonable, methinks.
Oh, and because Slashdot is complaining, "Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 19.0)": Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisici elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisici elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisici elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat c
What? Coded for an LP mud and didn't get into shenanigans? What's wrong with you?;)
Let's see... there was the time I unintentionally turned the chat system into a profanity-shouting system I inlined it to record word frequency and added a user command to list the most common words said... which led to people spamming it with profanity (sometimes with automated tools) to try to fill up the top-10 list with cursing.
It was always fun to impersonate inanimate objects. After all, you could patch the long and short descriptions on your player object to look like whatever you wanted. I found it less fun when another wizard wrote a tool to swap around who controlled what player objects, as it meant I lost all of my aliases, tools, etc.;)
I was often accused of going a bit over-elaborate with my coding. For example, instead of a mere hitpoints system, I once coded a system designed to mimic real life, with a character suffering blood loss and varying levels of damage (up to and including complete amputation) of limbs ("limbs" being a loose term including things like the head, torso, etc). Different types of armor would protect different types of limbs, and you could let attacks and defense be random or to focus on particular limbs (which of course affected your likelihood of success). The number, stats, and usage of limbs was variable (aka, it supported radically different species). Males in the game were given an added limb, the "fozzle"; it was left to the users' imagination as to what this might be.;)
So this is more of an "unusual way to patch a system" story...
Back in the day, I used to code for an LP mud, and I accidentally locked myself - and everyone else who wasn't already logged in - out of the mud. The guy who could reboot the thing was often inaccessible, and there was only one person - another wizard (coder) - still logged in, coding away and oblivious to what had just transpired. I managed to get him to resolve the problem by inserting a file in his working directory called "(His name)_PLEASE_DO_NOT_LOG_OUT,_READ_THIS_IMMEDIATELY!!!.txt", which explained the problem and how to fix it. Half an hour later, he noticed the file and undid my mess;)
The problem was the consequence of a coding arms race (oh, coding for LP muds was so dang fun.... every instantiated class object is treated as a physical object, its functions can be bound to user commands, and you can override the default interaction functions). Wizards (coders) often made "dest" tools - tools designed to destruct player objects, aka, kick them (temporarily) off the mud and make them have to log back in. Often they were done with artistic fluorishes, such as a long leadup sequence.
My friend at the time - oh, let's just pick a name nobody would realistically have and call him "Elim" - created this elaborate dest, wherein the target sees him pick up a flower and play "she loves me / she loves me not" with it, and when the last petal is plucked ("she loves me not"), the target would get kicked off. After he used it on me once, I wrote a counter tool which would detect when he was using his dest, and instead kick him off instead with my parody of his dest**. So he wrote an alternative dest tool, which would instantly kick me off without any leadup to detect, and do the flourishes afterward. So I wrote a tool which would be invisible and hop into his inventory and detect when he tried to use his dest tool, take precedence, and kick him off instead; plus a tool that would sit in my inventory and look for any unexpected objects and instantly destruct them. And on and on the code war went. The problem that one night, however, was when a bug led to my inventory-protector desting me and thus dropping to the floor, where it would wait to destruct any objects it could see in the same room (thinking the room was my inventory). And stupid me was coding in the login room at that time (which led to a new policy, never code in the login room!;) )
** My parody of his dest involved sticking a paralyzation object into his inventory (one that would intercept and ignore all of his commands) and had a giant ogre run into the room, pick him as the flower, and play "She loves me, she loves me not" with his limbs making him randomly scream out for help.
I did the calculations and don't care to repeat them again, but depending on your use case, it might help... or it might be totally imperceptible. A medium-large on the other side of a good-sized living room, your eyes shouldn't be able to see the difference. On the other hand, a large computer monitor right in front of you, in many situations you will be able to see the difference. Note that human eyesight isn't a simple matter of resolution comparisons, it gets kind of complicated... there's basic measures of how far apart you can see two black dots or lines separated by white before they merge into one, but the less the contrast, the greater the distance they have to be separated (absolute brightness matters too, as does distance from the center of your field of vision and all sorts of other stuff), and of course your ability to perceive fine detail drops tremendously when viewing moving objects. But in relatively static, high contrast images, on a large screen near the viewer (say, a nice computer monitor), most people shouldn't have trouble seeing the difference in a side-by-side comparison.
The only problem with this gimmick is that we're basically running into a resolution dead-end here, there's only so far you can go before the improved detail becomes meaningless. I hope for their sake that they come up with true (non-stereoscopic) 3d or something of that nature, or they're going to be running out of TV-sales gimmicks.
Hmm, I just thought of something that I heard about a good while back but haven't seen any movement on - "peripheral vision" TVs. I seem to recall reading years ago about a type of TV that used lights around the edges to dimly shine the peripheral colors on the TV image around the room parallel to the TV, giving the illusion to your peripheral vision of an expansive screen. I could envision improving that with a video format that includes a lower-resolution peripheral video stream and side projectors instead of simple side lights. Maybe that could be the next gimmick.;)
That's the key here. EU mileage figures are rated based on the NEDC cycle, which gives about 15% better mileage figures than the EPA combined cycle. Given that this guy is saying real world is 19% worse than the NEDC, then that's a pretty good testament to the EPA combined cycle.
At least the NEDC is better than the laughable Japanese 10-15 cycle, which gives figures about 10-15% even better than the NEDC.
It's one thing that drives me crazy when Americans point out to cars overseas and say, "Look, how come they get cars that are so much better mileage than ours?" The truth is, there's not actually all that much difference. UK car figures are often even worse because they're usually reported in miles per imperial gallon, which gives an extra 20% boost to mpg figures. On top of that, a large percent of European cars are diesels. While it's fair to compare diesels to gasoline cars when comparing what ou have to pay for fuel, it's not so for an environmental comparison. Diesel is 10-15% denser than gasoline; a gallon of diesel represents 10-15% more oil consumption and emits roughly correspondingly more CO2 than a gallon of gasoline. If one cares about CO2, the best approach is to ignore MPG and look at g/100km figures, which are almost always based on the same cycle (NEDC) and take into account differences in the fuel.
That's often said, but I really have trouble believing that. Really, what is a person doing that you can't make a machine to do? If it's that you have to adapt your pattern for some reason (for example, due to variations in wire thickness), why exactly can't a machine do that?
Maybe a hand winding is better than some dumb linear back and forth winding, but I have trouble believing that you can't make a machine do a particular winding that a person can do.
What was the last thing you printed with a modern 3d printer or acquired from a modern 3d printing service? You're here talking about how crappy they are - Have You Actually Used Them? Because I have, and they most distinctly are not.
Exactly. So how is proposing a more complex, long, expensive and crappy way a revolution?
Way then what? Than no way? Since when does ebay make custom things for you, from whatever you see and/or design?
Lets just look around this room right now. Right in front of me there's a large parrot cage. Its missing one of its latches on its feeder doors. I have no clue who made the cage (it's something from China) or how to get another. But I can tell you it'd be awfully nice to take a picture of one of the existing latches, push a few buttons, and have a replacement dispatched to my house.
To the right there's windows. All of them have latches. They're old, so they're undoubtably no longer made. One of the latches is broken, so I have to have the window bound shut with a bit of wire. I'd love to replace that part, but of course, it doesn't exist on the market, at least not in any readily available fashion. Sure would be nice to be able to take a picture of one of the other latch pieces, press a few buttons, and have a replacement shipped to me.
Back to the bird cage. I recently had to replace his sandpaper perch. A plastic piece that helps secure it to his play stand broke, making it unstable and sometimes plunging the bird with no warning off the edge. Sure would have been nice to be able to take a picture of the piece, press a few buttons, and have another one shipped to me.
Left of the bird cage is a very old accordian my fiance just was given from his mother. He's been trying to fix it, but all of his solutions are jury-rigged; there's not a chance in the world of finding parts for the thing. But gee, it sure would be nice to be able to snap a picture, press a few buttons, and get replacement parts.
The fiance has also been working on fixing his pickup. He's been boggling for days on how to reattach a piece of the exhaust system without having to buy a replacement part - the fastener has all but rusted away, it's too cracked to bolt back on. You can't just buy a replacement fastener, you have to buy a whole new meter-long component, they come with the fastener. Sure would be nice to be able to take a picture of the existing one and print out a replacement.
Back inside the house. Not far from the accordion and the bird cage is my telescope. It's a Meade scope, which once was (and usually still is) a good brand, but the quality of the parts is really mixed on this lower-end model. The big problem right now (among others that such easy fabrication could solve) is that there's a lot of play in the eyepiece holding system. A millimeter of wiggle throws your collimation totally out of whack. It'd be *awesome* to be able to take a picture of one of the pieces, scale it up just a millimeter or so, and print it out. I'd also love to be able to readily tweak the secondary mirror holder, it's not well designed. Sure would be great to be able to get a model of it to tweak just by taking a picture.
So far I've only described things in about five square meters of my house in which this sort of capability would be greatly useful to me.
Oh, I'm sorry, but EBAY, right? BAUBLES, everyone!
Hahaha, car makers, standardize? And then they could give everyone a free unicorn which they can race to the moon!;)
It's sort of a sore subject for me right now as my fiance (who grew up helping his father, who runs a garage, with car repair) and I together have three cars right now and all of them decided to have major problems at the same time, so he decided to do the work on them, we just needed to buy the parts and tools. So I went into this thinking, gee, how much could a minimal set of tools cost? For god's sake, it's absurd how many tools you need to take them apart, it's just one tool after the next after the next. I mean, how many bolt sizes and shapes could you possibly need to build a car? Why can nobody agree on part sizes, on threadings, on bloody anything? He's been working on the drive shaft for the pickup recently, and there's different types of bolts on the different ends of the shaft. And they're not regular bolts, oh no, they're these special bolts, which if they weren't rusted you could probably use a regular ratchet head to remove, but since they're rusted, you need this special head for them to get enough grip.... Ugh.
Agree 100% with everything you wrote. Good 3d printing absolutely is here today. But to offer a full range of manufacturing possibilities - some of which require skilled labor in prep and postprocessing, and all of which involve real capital investment - it's quite fair to say that home 3d printing is not here except for a very tiny subset of users.
The day where every town has at least one convenient place you can go that will 3d print stuff for you with a wide range of options and excellent quality may not be far off. Snap a 3d picture of your friend's earrings, send to the store's printing app, and pop on down to pick them up or have them mailed to you - that day may well be coming. The day where your average person can "star trek replicator" whip up whatever they want in their own home, unfortunately, is nowhere close at hand.
I truly think there's potential for whoever leads the way on this to make absurd amounts of money. Imagine that Google releases free smartphone/tablet-integrated 3d scanning with a nice set of 3d editing tools (from simple filters/tweaks to full-featured modeling - Google already has an excellent starting point) and built-in functionality to print using a Google-run service (using an expansive definition of "print"; it could involve any number of manufacturing techniques). Lets say that this service automatically sets up mass production for anything ordered in bulk and lets you pay to pre-setup mass production, even mass delivery, if you want. The key is that Google wouldn't need to actually do any of the physical work themselves. They can contract out every stage, they just need to make the software/hardware stack for the user. If you have a single, simple process pipeline for scanning in existing objects, tweaking them in 3d as desired to meet your specs, ordering and assembling (if necessary) prototypes, and then getting them mass produced and delivered at whatever scale you need, and it's all preinstalled for free on your consumer-level smartphone or tablet... I mean, that's a *really* tempting target for small businesses.
If a company like Google could earn even a fraction of a percent of the sales value for providing that level of integration, it could be a gold mine. If you're Bob's Bargain-Basement Bikes and you need a bracket for a new design that bends like this, but you can only find brackets available that bend like that, that, or that, and all you need to do to get your desired bracket for your prototype is take a picture of the not-quite-right thing, bend the model in the app, order it, and they send it right to your shop... and you can tweak it as needed and get new ones shipped as needed until it's right, then order ten thousand of them produced from some factory in a city in China you've never heard of for the same sort of pricing any other part you'd get in bulk would cost... I mean, that's huge. If you're running the gift shop at a reptile park and want 100 brass alligator-shaped candle holders, if you're running a cake decorating service and want frosting tips shaped like Icelandic letters, if you're in charge of maintaining a unit on an old chemical plant and the failing cooling riffles haven't been manufactured in over 30 years, whatever the case may be... and all you need to do is pull out your phone, snap a 3d pic of something similar, possibly make a few tweaks in a user friendly app, and whatever you want will be shipped to your doorstep in whatever quantity you want at competitive prices... I mean, that's huge.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, no, you don't get off that easily. I'm not going to respond to any more of your post until you respond to my very simple scenario above:
What's your response? I'm not going to accept a dodge here. If you black out while partying and a group of guys have their way with you while you're incoherent or unconscious, you're just jim dandy with that situation, and that's your own fault? If you're incoherent or conconscious and I get you to give me your wallet, you're just fine with that? You're *really* fine with incoherence and unconsciousness being consent?
Again, I'm not just going to let you dodge this. Call me "foaming at the mouth" if you want, but answer the question.
Just realized I missed a part:
What's "curious" about that? It's the exact same as with any other crime. If you attack an innocent person, you're charged with battery. If two people are fighting, however, and there's no "primary aggressor", you're "mutual combattants", and unless you're violating some other statute (for example, disorderly intoxication), the case is generally declared nolle prosequi.
Of course, your proposed scenario where two people are drunk to the point of unconsciousness is physically impossible, and if they're both drunk merely to the point of incoherence, you're going to have a lot of trouble having sex. As to what level of intoxication determines one's inability to grant legal consent (to sex, to signing a contract, to whatever) varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but let's not play dumb - if you see a person who's slurring their speech, can hardly stand up, and doesn't seem to understand where they are, don't act all dumb and say, "Oh, I thought she was perfectly cogent to make informed decisions!"
If you happen to find a jurisdiction where a 0,05 BAC is declared to be incapacitated, hey, you've got my support, that'd be an overly strict declaration. But that's not the general case, the case that all those evil Feminazis that you hate are complaining about.
What I'm saying is backed up by the law. What you're saying is backed up by "I want to fuck sleeping and drunk girls without their permission, and anyone who says that's wrong is a feminazi".
As I just headed you off, no court in the world asks for a written contract. They simply look for anything that a reasonable person would consider explicit, affirmative consent before the activity by a party legally capable of consenting. It doesn't even have to be spoken. But you don't even want to have to get a damned smile from your "partner" before sticking it in.
Once again, [[Citation needed]]. There is no such jurisdiction on Earth.
That's how one compounds an annualized probability over a number of years, it's a very simple formula. And there are tons and tons of studies out there which have total accumulated likelyhood of rape over a woman's lifetime (about 30%), but you just keep hand-waving them away.
The very study YOU cited, which I quoted, ASKED the subjects (men and women) whether they had been raped in the past year. Why are you complaining about me quoting YOUR preferred study?
Glad to know that you'd think you'd simply "made a mistake" if you got drunk (or worse, if someone had slipped something in your drink) and woke up to some guy f***ing you without your consent. Hey, where do you usually party and when, I'd like to send a few guys your way who would be very interested in your "if I'm drunk to the point of incoherence / unconsciousness, I'm fine with whatever sexual activity occurs, and if I regret it it's my fault" approach.
Hey, let's take it even further. I'm *thrilled* to know that if you get drunk to the point that you're incoherent or unconscious, then that counts as consent to take your wallet. And if you get drunk, I'm sure I'm going to love getting to take your car. And burn down your house. I appreciate the fact that to you, being incapacitated is consent to whatever the people around you want to do. This is going to be lots of fun!
In general, having sex with a sleeping person is illegal**, almost everywhere in the world. The fact that you weren't charged because she happened to be into it doesn't make it not rape, any more than it wouldn't be rape if you happened to jump out of the bushes with a knife and rape a girl who happened to have a rape fantasy. If one night your girlfriend had gone to bed angry with you and woken up to you F*ing her without her consent, she would have had, and should have, every damned right in the world to charge you for it. You can never assume an unending right to F*** someone, even your girlfriend or spouse, and that's a damned good thing.
** In some jurisdictions, there are exceptions made for if consent was given shortly before the person went to sleep (considering that to be consent immediately before the sexual activity), while in others, there's a flat ban. In one noteworthy case in Canada for the extreme end of the spectrum, in R. v. J.A., the Canadian Supreme Court took on a case where a woman consented to be strangled during sex, she passed out, and while she was out her partier tied her up and shoved a dildo up her anus, she came to, he stopped, she recovered, and then they did other consensual sexual activities. The Supreme Court ruled that the activities that occurred during the three minutes that she was unconscious were rape. It doesn't matter that she was consenting to sexual activities before and after - you cannot assume consent from an unconscious person.
You claim there's blurry lines. There are no blurry lines. You want there to be blurry lines, holes carved out in the definition of rape so that you have the right to f*** girls without having to get their permission. It's a damned good reason that they're not. Because rape is enough of a problem as it is with people like you who think you have a right to F*** girls without getting their consent.
[[Citation needed]]. Point me to a single jurisdiction where it's considered rape if you stop immediately. However, if you don't stop immediately, YES, it's rape, and you better damned well believe it's rape..
If consent was given, it's not rape. If consent was not given, it's rape. If you're having a problem with women accusing you of rape, stop F*ing them without their consent.
And oh, that evil feminist lobby, wanting women to have a right to say no before sex - clearly they're just a bunch of Nazis!
they make it harder to fight the real problem.
You don't get it, do you? The real problem is you, and everyone like you who thinks they have a right to F* girls without getting their consent. That's RAPE.
And to head it off... no, consent does not have to be some sort of written contracts like MRAs try to play it out to be. It doesn't even have to be spoken. If she smiles, kisses you back, pulls you closer, etc, that's consent. But you CANNOT take silence as consent, you CANNOT take a previous yes as consent to a different event, you CANNOT take incapacitation as consent, and you CANNOT make consent irrevocable. You have to get affirmative, withdrawable consent, from someone who can legally consent, every time. I don't know why this is so hard for so many people.
Oh, please, cut it with the rape-apologism BS. "Rape is not clearly defined?" If you don't get an affirmative, withdrawable yes from someone who can legally consent, it's rape. What is so damned hard about that?
The only reason there's wikipedia fights is that all of the MRAs like you who want to be able to F*** girls so drunk they can't even walk or say it's not rape because "she didn't physically fight me", or "She came into my apartment, that's consent and she can't change her mind" want to try to dilute the very simple definition of rape. And FYI, using your own perferred source of statistics: 0,5% of women per year, average lifespan of 81 years, that's 1-(0.995^81) = 33% of women, using your "narrower definitions" survey. So here's a tip: the next time you want to cite statistics to support your MRA BS, try to find ones that don't argue precisely for the opposite of what you're trying to claim. And even that supposedly less "0,2%"? I'm sitting here looking at the 2010 National Crime Victimization Survey right here, and it says, "One percent, or approximately 1.3 million women, reported being raped by any perpetrator in the 12 months prior to taking the survey". The number "0.2%" does not exist in the document. And that 1% is only for rape - the number for "sexual violence victimization other than rape" is 5.6% of women in a 12 month period. And oh hey, you know your "statutory" excuse? "Complete interviews were obtained from 16,507 adults"
I'm sorry, go back to spewing your MRA rape-apologism BS, because god knows, the world needs more of THAT. Clearly you're the victim here - poor you having to listen to all those damned lying women saying they were raped, when you know so much better than them.
All these people complaiing about how "horribly corrupt" the US government are are just playing a huge round of "First World Problems". The US is #19 on the Transparency International list. That's not superb, but it's out of 177 countries... I mean, for crying out loud, Yanukovych in Ukraine had a personal zoo at his house - tens of billions of dolllars stolen from a country whose per-capita income is less than that of Mongolia's. And that sort of stuff is hardly unusual in the world. Have any of you complaining about evil "US corruption" ever lived in a country with *real* corruption, at all levels?
#FirstWorldProblems
Actually, for most rapes, there are no consequences - the rates of reporting of rape are very low, and the rate of conviction on reported rapes is extremely low. And as a consequence, rape is extremely common. About 30% are raped at least once during their lives, and in anonymous surveys of men asking what sexual activities they've done (some of which are rape), about 10% of young men confess to having raped at least once and about 3% confess to serial rape.
Fine, if you're afraid of the government in your lawyer's jurisdiction. What if you're afraid of a foreign intelligence service, or simply a local thug who's not above manhandling lawyer?
Governments willing to spend billions of dollars to get your data aren't the general use case for such a time lock service.
I was thinking about this task a few weeks ago from the point of view of a real-world application: you're travelling in a war zone and want to ensure that your files are safe *even from yourself, your friends, your employer, and everyone who cares about you*. Because if you're taken prisoner, they're not going to use a 30 million dollar supercomputing cluster to crack the encryption on your laptop; they're going to work you over with a pair of pliers, perhaps taking off a few body parts, until you tell them. And if you don't have the key, they'll just threaten harm to you to people you care about who do - assuming they can't outright capture said people as well. Nobody you now can be responsible for the key. The key has to be held by someone who by nature of their contract doesn't give a rat's arse about you and won't change their terms even to save your life.
But of course, what if they were compromised - legally (subpoena), or extrajudicially (someone with a pair of pliers)? So we get into the sitution where a server for a service that controls giving out of keys needs to be safe even from its owners. While terms for key storage involving personal judgement calls (such as "did the person contracting with us successfully make it out of the country and is no longer under coersion?") can't be automated, simple time locks can, so the issue simply comes down to, "Can you keep reliable running key storage system that can't be compromised even by physical access"? A potential solution to reliability (since any system tht locked will be immune to maintenance as well!) would be to store the every key on multiple running systems in different locations in hopes that at least one of them lives long enough to yield the key at the correct time. As for security, for example, even with full memory encryption, ram is vulnerable to cold boot attacks and the key to decrypting memory has to be stored somewhere, but one solution to that is storing critical portions of data only in CPU cache. But that's only one possible attack vector among many. At least you could respond to a subpoena, "Hey, maybe you have a way to get at this data, but I sure don't. If you'd like to fund a multi-million dollar research project on how to get ahold of it, I won't stand in your way, I'll be fully cooperative..." You could also make it harder by having a multi-part key, with each part held by different entities in different jurisdictions. Though that could increase reliability challenges.
In short, at the very least you can make it very, very difficult to get keys. Maybe you can't stop a secret NSA raid on all physical servers taking part the world over, but you could stop pretty much anything else.
It's not a list order of influence. I mean, by your logic, Socrates's dad and everyone else who influenced Socrates should be more influential than Socrates himself, and the most influential people on the list should be cave men.
I think a better description of it is, "Of people who use the internet today, evenly-weighted by country, who had the most direct influence on things and events that they care about today?" And yeah, there are a few biasing factors, like the Linnaeus taxobox thing, but in general I think that it's a fair analysis from that basis.
I've been proposing this for ages - it's just VAT for carbon ("CAT"), or even pollution in general ("PAT"). People inside the "PAT" zone pay taxes based on the added embodied polluition at each step of the manufacturing process. Goods leaving the PAT zone get a PAT rebate. Goods entering the PAT zone get their estimated embodied pollution charged to them at the point of entry. As a consequences, countries can't cheat and get a competitive advantage by gutting their environmental regulations (including carbon) - the world competes on a level playing field.
Hahaha, I had been wondering about that! Most of the PageRank list I found reasonable, but that one really confused me. Here's his What Links Here list. If you follow them, you see that most are from the Taxobox - there's a field called "type_species_authority", and the answer is often Linnaeus.
I do think that Linnaeus is a bit of an exception there, tough. Who else gets regularly linked in a template? It's not like there's an infobox for people with a field "personal_savior" or "favorite_roman_emperor" ;)
It's only the 2dRank list that's screwed up, the PageRank list is a lot more reasonable. I don't know why they even included that 2dRank list, it ruins their credibility. The methodology doesn't even make sense. PageRank works based on determining how influential you are based on how much things link to you. Makes sense, right? Well, 2dRank uses that *plus* how much you link to other people. Why should how much you link to other people have any significance on how influential you are? Perhaps how influenced you are, but certainly not how influential you are.
Making stupid claims makes people stop listening to what you have to say. It's like you're sitting on a bus and you see the following sign: "1. This is a space ship. 2. No smoking". The demonstrable falsity of the first part undermines the credibility of the second part.
Annoying isn't it? Why do people link to (or write in the first place) an article about a list, and then not include the list? Where's the logic in that? Anyway, I dug through the supporting data fo the paper and found it, then ran it through a simple bash script to strip extraneous information. I'm only including the PageRank version because the methodology is more logical and the results more reasonable (the 2D rank version is mostly pop-culture).
1. Carl Linnaeus
2. Jesus
3. Aristotle
4. Napoleon
5. Adolf Hitler
6. Julius Caesar
7. Plato
8. William Shakespeare
9. Albert Einstein
10. Elizabeth II
11. Alexander the Great
12. Isaac Newton
13. Muhammad
14. Karl Marx
15. Joseph Stalin
16. Augustus
17. Christopher Columbus
18. Charlemagne
19. Louis XIV of France
20. George W. Bush
21. Immanuel Kant
22. Barack Obama
23. Mary (mother of Jesus)
24. Vladimir Lenin
25. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
26. Paul the Apostle
27. Charles Darwin
28. Martin Luther
29. Herodotus
30. Franklin D. Roosevelt
31. Galileo Galilei
32. Pope John Paul II
33. Constantine the Great
34. Benito Mussolini
35. Cicero
36. Ren Descartes
37. Saint Peter
38. Ludwig van Beethoven
39. George Washington
40. Moses
41. Johann Sebastian Bach
42. Bill Clinton
43. Leonardo da Vinci
44. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
45. Gautama Buddha
46. Winston Churchill
47. John F. Kennedy
48. Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor
49. Pope Benedict XVI
50. Richard Nixon
51. Sigmund Freud
52. Ronald Reagan
53. Abraham Lincoln
54. Saddam Hussein
55. Ptolemy
56. Richard Wagner
57. Diocletian
58. Queen Victoria
59. Napoleon III
60. Charles de Gaulle
61. Mao Zedong
62. William Herschel
63. Michael Jackson
64. Justinian I
65. Augustine of Hippo
66. Ali
67. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
68. Ernst Haeckel
69. Pliny the Elder
70. Pope Gregory XIII
71. Confucius
72. Henry VIII of England
73. Thomas Jefferson 74. Francisco Franco 75. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 76. Pierre Andr Latreille 77. Pope Paul VI 78. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 79. Chiang Kai-shek 80. John Herschel 81. Elizabeth I of England 82. J. R. R. Tolkien 83. Socrates 84. Genghis Khan 85. Qin Shi Huang 86. Umar 87. Philip II of Spain 88. Frederick the Great 89. Johannes Kepler 90. Emperor Wu of Han 91. Friedrich Nietzsche 92. Plutarch 93. Thomas Edison 94. Max Weber 95. Dante Alighieri 96. Ashoka 97. Tacitus 98. Ernst Mayr 99. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck 100. Elvis Presley
Not a bad list, honestly. Still not sure why Linnaeus is *that* high, but most of the rest is quite reasonable, methinks.
Oh, and because Slashdot is complaining, "Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 19.0)": Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisici elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisici elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisici elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat c
What? Coded for an LP mud and didn't get into shenanigans? What's wrong with you? ;)
Let's see... there was the time I unintentionally turned the chat system into a profanity-shouting system I inlined it to record word frequency and added a user command to list the most common words said... which led to people spamming it with profanity (sometimes with automated tools) to try to fill up the top-10 list with cursing.
It was always fun to impersonate inanimate objects. After all, you could patch the long and short descriptions on your player object to look like whatever you wanted. I found it less fun when another wizard wrote a tool to swap around who controlled what player objects, as it meant I lost all of my aliases, tools, etc. ;)
I was often accused of going a bit over-elaborate with my coding. For example, instead of a mere hitpoints system, I once coded a system designed to mimic real life, with a character suffering blood loss and varying levels of damage (up to and including complete amputation) of limbs ("limbs" being a loose term including things like the head, torso, etc). Different types of armor would protect different types of limbs, and you could let attacks and defense be random or to focus on particular limbs (which of course affected your likelihood of success). The number, stats, and usage of limbs was variable (aka, it supported radically different species). Males in the game were given an added limb, the "fozzle"; it was left to the users' imagination as to what this might be. ;)
So this is more of an "unusual way to patch a system" story...
Back in the day, I used to code for an LP mud, and I accidentally locked myself - and everyone else who wasn't already logged in - out of the mud. The guy who could reboot the thing was often inaccessible, and there was only one person - another wizard (coder) - still logged in, coding away and oblivious to what had just transpired. I managed to get him to resolve the problem by inserting a file in his working directory called "(His name)_PLEASE_DO_NOT_LOG_OUT,_READ_THIS_IMMEDIATELY!!!.txt", which explained the problem and how to fix it. Half an hour later, he noticed the file and undid my mess ;)
The problem was the consequence of a coding arms race (oh, coding for LP muds was so dang fun.... every instantiated class object is treated as a physical object, its functions can be bound to user commands, and you can override the default interaction functions). Wizards (coders) often made "dest" tools - tools designed to destruct player objects, aka, kick them (temporarily) off the mud and make them have to log back in. Often they were done with artistic fluorishes, such as a long leadup sequence.
My friend at the time - oh, let's just pick a name nobody would realistically have and call him "Elim" - created this elaborate dest, wherein the target sees him pick up a flower and play "she loves me / she loves me not" with it, and when the last petal is plucked ("she loves me not"), the target would get kicked off. After he used it on me once, I wrote a counter tool which would detect when he was using his dest, and instead kick him off instead with my parody of his dest**. So he wrote an alternative dest tool, which would instantly kick me off without any leadup to detect, and do the flourishes afterward. So I wrote a tool which would be invisible and hop into his inventory and detect when he tried to use his dest tool, take precedence, and kick him off instead; plus a tool that would sit in my inventory and look for any unexpected objects and instantly destruct them. And on and on the code war went. The problem that one night, however, was when a bug led to my inventory-protector desting me and thus dropping to the floor, where it would wait to destruct any objects it could see in the same room (thinking the room was my inventory). And stupid me was coding in the login room at that time (which led to a new policy, never code in the login room! ;) )
** My parody of his dest involved sticking a paralyzation object into his inventory (one that would intercept and ignore all of his commands) and had a giant ogre run into the room, pick him as the flower, and play "She loves me, she loves me not" with his limbs making him randomly scream out for help.
I did the calculations and don't care to repeat them again, but depending on your use case, it might help... or it might be totally imperceptible. A medium-large on the other side of a good-sized living room, your eyes shouldn't be able to see the difference. On the other hand, a large computer monitor right in front of you, in many situations you will be able to see the difference. Note that human eyesight isn't a simple matter of resolution comparisons, it gets kind of complicated... there's basic measures of how far apart you can see two black dots or lines separated by white before they merge into one, but the less the contrast, the greater the distance they have to be separated (absolute brightness matters too, as does distance from the center of your field of vision and all sorts of other stuff), and of course your ability to perceive fine detail drops tremendously when viewing moving objects. But in relatively static, high contrast images, on a large screen near the viewer (say, a nice computer monitor), most people shouldn't have trouble seeing the difference in a side-by-side comparison.
The only problem with this gimmick is that we're basically running into a resolution dead-end here, there's only so far you can go before the improved detail becomes meaningless. I hope for their sake that they come up with true (non-stereoscopic) 3d or something of that nature, or they're going to be running out of TV-sales gimmicks.
Hmm, I just thought of something that I heard about a good while back but haven't seen any movement on - "peripheral vision" TVs. I seem to recall reading years ago about a type of TV that used lights around the edges to dimly shine the peripheral colors on the TV image around the room parallel to the TV, giving the illusion to your peripheral vision of an expansive screen. I could envision improving that with a video format that includes a lower-resolution peripheral video stream and side projectors instead of simple side lights. Maybe that could be the next gimmick. ;)
That's the key here. EU mileage figures are rated based on the NEDC cycle, which gives about 15% better mileage figures than the EPA combined cycle. Given that this guy is saying real world is 19% worse than the NEDC, then that's a pretty good testament to the EPA combined cycle.
At least the NEDC is better than the laughable Japanese 10-15 cycle, which gives figures about 10-15% even better than the NEDC.
It's one thing that drives me crazy when Americans point out to cars overseas and say, "Look, how come they get cars that are so much better mileage than ours?" The truth is, there's not actually all that much difference. UK car figures are often even worse because they're usually reported in miles per imperial gallon, which gives an extra 20% boost to mpg figures. On top of that, a large percent of European cars are diesels. While it's fair to compare diesels to gasoline cars when comparing what ou have to pay for fuel, it's not so for an environmental comparison. Diesel is 10-15% denser than gasoline; a gallon of diesel represents 10-15% more oil consumption and emits roughly correspondingly more CO2 than a gallon of gasoline. If one cares about CO2, the best approach is to ignore MPG and look at g/100km figures, which are almost always based on the same cycle (NEDC) and take into account differences in the fuel.
That's often said, but I really have trouble believing that. Really, what is a person doing that you can't make a machine to do? If it's that you have to adapt your pattern for some reason (for example, due to variations in wire thickness), why exactly can't a machine do that?
Maybe a hand winding is better than some dumb linear back and forth winding, but I have trouble believing that you can't make a machine do a particular winding that a person can do.
What was the last thing you printed with a modern 3d printer or acquired from a modern 3d printing service? You're here talking about how crappy they are - Have You Actually Used Them? Because I have, and they most distinctly are not.
Way then what? Than no way? Since when does ebay make custom things for you, from whatever you see and/or design?
Lets just look around this room right now. Right in front of me there's a large parrot cage. Its missing one of its latches on its feeder doors. I have no clue who made the cage (it's something from China) or how to get another. But I can tell you it'd be awfully nice to take a picture of one of the existing latches, push a few buttons, and have a replacement dispatched to my house.
To the right there's windows. All of them have latches. They're old, so they're undoubtably no longer made. One of the latches is broken, so I have to have the window bound shut with a bit of wire. I'd love to replace that part, but of course, it doesn't exist on the market, at least not in any readily available fashion. Sure would be nice to be able to take a picture of one of the other latch pieces, press a few buttons, and have a replacement shipped to me.
Back to the bird cage. I recently had to replace his sandpaper perch. A plastic piece that helps secure it to his play stand broke, making it unstable and sometimes plunging the bird with no warning off the edge. Sure would have been nice to be able to take a picture of the piece, press a few buttons, and have another one shipped to me.
Left of the bird cage is a very old accordian my fiance just was given from his mother. He's been trying to fix it, but all of his solutions are jury-rigged; there's not a chance in the world of finding parts for the thing. But gee, it sure would be nice to be able to snap a picture, press a few buttons, and get replacement parts.
The fiance has also been working on fixing his pickup. He's been boggling for days on how to reattach a piece of the exhaust system without having to buy a replacement part - the fastener has all but rusted away, it's too cracked to bolt back on. You can't just buy a replacement fastener, you have to buy a whole new meter-long component, they come with the fastener. Sure would be nice to be able to take a picture of the existing one and print out a replacement.
Back inside the house. Not far from the accordion and the bird cage is my telescope. It's a Meade scope, which once was (and usually still is) a good brand, but the quality of the parts is really mixed on this lower-end model. The big problem right now (among others that such easy fabrication could solve) is that there's a lot of play in the eyepiece holding system. A millimeter of wiggle throws your collimation totally out of whack. It'd be *awesome* to be able to take a picture of one of the pieces, scale it up just a millimeter or so, and print it out. I'd also love to be able to readily tweak the secondary mirror holder, it's not well designed. Sure would be great to be able to get a model of it to tweak just by taking a picture.
So far I've only described things in about five square meters of my house in which this sort of capability would be greatly useful to me.
Oh, I'm sorry, but EBAY, right? BAUBLES, everyone!
Hahaha, car makers, standardize? And then they could give everyone a free unicorn which they can race to the moon! ;)
It's sort of a sore subject for me right now as my fiance (who grew up helping his father, who runs a garage, with car repair) and I together have three cars right now and all of them decided to have major problems at the same time, so he decided to do the work on them, we just needed to buy the parts and tools. So I went into this thinking, gee, how much could a minimal set of tools cost? For god's sake, it's absurd how many tools you need to take them apart, it's just one tool after the next after the next. I mean, how many bolt sizes and shapes could you possibly need to build a car? Why can nobody agree on part sizes, on threadings, on bloody anything? He's been working on the drive shaft for the pickup recently, and there's different types of bolts on the different ends of the shaft. And they're not regular bolts, oh no, they're these special bolts, which if they weren't rusted you could probably use a regular ratchet head to remove, but since they're rusted, you need this special head for them to get enough grip.... Ugh.
Agree 100% with everything you wrote. Good 3d printing absolutely is here today. But to offer a full range of manufacturing possibilities - some of which require skilled labor in prep and postprocessing, and all of which involve real capital investment - it's quite fair to say that home 3d printing is not here except for a very tiny subset of users.
The day where every town has at least one convenient place you can go that will 3d print stuff for you with a wide range of options and excellent quality may not be far off. Snap a 3d picture of your friend's earrings, send to the store's printing app, and pop on down to pick them up or have them mailed to you - that day may well be coming. The day where your average person can "star trek replicator" whip up whatever they want in their own home, unfortunately, is nowhere close at hand.
I truly think there's potential for whoever leads the way on this to make absurd amounts of money. Imagine that Google releases free smartphone/tablet-integrated 3d scanning with a nice set of 3d editing tools (from simple filters/tweaks to full-featured modeling - Google already has an excellent starting point) and built-in functionality to print using a Google-run service (using an expansive definition of "print"; it could involve any number of manufacturing techniques). Lets say that this service automatically sets up mass production for anything ordered in bulk and lets you pay to pre-setup mass production, even mass delivery, if you want. The key is that Google wouldn't need to actually do any of the physical work themselves. They can contract out every stage, they just need to make the software/hardware stack for the user. If you have a single, simple process pipeline for scanning in existing objects, tweaking them in 3d as desired to meet your specs, ordering and assembling (if necessary) prototypes, and then getting them mass produced and delivered at whatever scale you need, and it's all preinstalled for free on your consumer-level smartphone or tablet... I mean, that's a *really* tempting target for small businesses.
If a company like Google could earn even a fraction of a percent of the sales value for providing that level of integration, it could be a gold mine. If you're Bob's Bargain-Basement Bikes and you need a bracket for a new design that bends like this, but you can only find brackets available that bend like that, that, or that, and all you need to do to get your desired bracket for your prototype is take a picture of the not-quite-right thing, bend the model in the app, order it, and they send it right to your shop... and you can tweak it as needed and get new ones shipped as needed until it's right, then order ten thousand of them produced from some factory in a city in China you've never heard of for the same sort of pricing any other part you'd get in bulk would cost... I mean, that's huge. If you're running the gift shop at a reptile park and want 100 brass alligator-shaped candle holders, if you're running a cake decorating service and want frosting tips shaped like Icelandic letters, if you're in charge of maintaining a unit on an old chemical plant and the failing cooling riffles haven't been manufactured in over 30 years, whatever the case may be... and all you need to do is pull out your phone, snap a 3d pic of something similar, possibly make a few tweaks in a user friendly app, and whatever you want will be shipped to your doorstep in whatever quantity you want at competitive prices... I mean, that's huge.