I mean geez people haven't you been keeping up with the latest issues of Creationism Quarterly! This stuff is "Peer-reviewed by degreed scientists" it says so right on the website! It has "Scholarly articles representing the major scientific disciplines" scientific disciplines like: biology, chemistry, theology, creationism! Duh! "Emphasis on scientific evidence supporting: intelligent design, a recent creation, and a catastrophic worldwide flood"!
- working hard every day - always obeying superiors - working overtime for standard pay
Favorite Movies: Favorite Books: Favorite Music:
- none I'm always working
- - -
Things NOT to include:
Hobbies and Interests:
- feeding my cocaine addiction - leather and bondage fetish - reading slashdot
- - -
My Facebook profile makes me look extremely plain. It is the bare essentials. A personal email contact, my high school and undergraduate information, and a list of some very safe hobbies like 'sports' or 'cooking'. It took me forever to untag all those pictures of me naked on acid.
"Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization's End"
So many things wrong with this title...first of all, the word Apocalypse derives from Greek 'Apokálypsis' which basically means 'lifting of a veil' or revealing something that was previously hidden to the majority of the population. Currently apocalypse enters into most people's lexicon in the biblical sense referring to the end of days (aka revelation).
2012...well I think we've all seen the movie (trailer). The Mayan calendar puts the end of time at approximately December 21, 2012. But that's not even the Mayan's interpretation of 2012...it just some projected wish that has exploded into popular culture. Many Mayan scholars simply think that the Mayans were simply going to reset the calendar on that day back to zero.
Either way the scientific exploration to the end of our planet or species (which are different things and scenarios) should avoid religious or theological possibilities (because they aren't real).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe Heat death of the universe and the big crunch are the two most likely scenarios (don't worry you won't be around for either of them). Heat death is basically where the universe becomes void of heat and motion and there is nothing left but immobile objects. The other best theory is the big crunch, basically where gravity pulls all objects together from existence into one singularity.
I always though that that singularity would interact with infinite absolute zero and most likely creates another big bang. If this is true then that would mean it could have happened an infinite number of times before, meaning time is an infinite loop and everything has happened before an infinite number of times and will happen again.
I haven't studied hard science in an academic environment for a while (I went to an amazing science oriented public high school) as I did my undergraduate studies in......sports broadcasting...so here's my disclaimer: some things above might be paraphrased or summarized incorrectly (I did my best).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risks_to_civilization,_humans_and_planet_Earth This article covers almost everything. Natural disasters occurring from earth (earthquakes, floods, global warming), to space based (gamma ray bursts, impact events), to human based events (nuclear war), to diseases and pandemics, and even things like an A.I. taking over or a singularity from nanotechnology taking over all life (search wiki for Grey goo), and then of course there is the probability (though unlikely) of aliens obliterating our planet.
I was a casual gamer who didn't buy gold and yet I enjoyed the game immensely. It's not that hard to make money in the game if you do a bit of research. I played no more than 20 hours a week and yet when I quit I had about 4000 gold at level 66.
20 hours a week is a lot of time. Is that really casual? If you said you played a sport for 20 hours a week would you call that casual? "I play baseball casually 20 hours a week". Sounds hardcore to me as it's quite an investment.
April 6, 2009 - Sony's PS3 outsold Nintendo's Wii during the month of March. Sales of the PS3 were reported at 146,948 units as opposed to the 99,335 Wii units sold. In third place, the Xbox 360 is noted to have 43,172 units sold.
Apparently, Ryu Ga Gotoku 3 (or Yakuza 3, here in the U.S.) and Resident Evil 5 helped urge the PS3 sales, as both games were at the top of the software sales charts. This is, comparatively speaking, good news for Sony's current-gen hardware, though analysts predict that the PS3 will not threaten the Wii's global dominance of the market.
TOKYO - Nintendo admitted Thursday that its hit Wii video game console was going through its toughest time yet in the competitive Japanese market, but it said there was no plan to cut the price.
"The Wii is in the most unhealthy condition since it hit the Japanese market," Nintendo Co. president Satoru Iwata said. "The current condition in the Japanese market is not the one we want."
But a price war with rivals was not the answer as Nintendo is already the market leader, he said.
"A price cut in a difficult economy cannot really excite the market and drive up sales. As of now I really don't think that a price cut is a good option for us," he told a news conference.
Industry figures showed this week that the rival Sony PlayStation 3 had outsold the Wii in Japan for the first time in 16 months, with sales of the Nintendo console dropping almost two-thirds from a year earlier.
Maybe the casual gamers have moved on and now only the hardcore gamers remain to purchase new software and peripherals? The Wii is at market saturation nearly everywhere and now it's time for the PS3 and X360 to move ahead at least in month to month sales.
For some anecdotal evidence I own all three consoles, each one since their own launch date, and I never touch my Wii (cue childish sexual jokes). In the last month I've hammered away at Valkyria Chronicles and Metal Gear Online for my PS3 for hours upon hours every day. For my 360 I play Virtua Fighter 5 and Fallout 3 regularly as well. And between both the PS3 and 360 I play Street Fighter II HD Remix and Street Fighter IV daily as well. My Wii? Maybe when Dead Space Wii comes out I'll plug the console back in but my god has that thing been collecting dust for months.
Not to mention what hardcore treats the PC is getting coming up by way of Blizzard. I already told my boss I needed a week of vacation off for both of the releases of Starcraft II and Diablo III...
Is hardcore gaming dead because of the Wii? No. Nintendo can't stroke its ego quite that much.
After the second season, a storyline was planned where Livia would be called to testify against her son in court, giving evidence on stolen airline tickets she had received from him, but [the actress who played her] died in 2000, before it could be filmed. Existing footage and computer-generated imagery was used to create a final scene between Tony and Livia in the episode "Proshai, Livushka" in Season Three before the character too passed on.
Arnold should have acted in this movie and taken as much money as he could and just donated it to his state's budget.
Like usenet, rapidshare, yousendit, IRC, ftp, soulseek, isohunt?
I use Pirate Bay often but if it were to go down for the count there are literally thousands of other places that would become just as excellent at hosting torrents or full files themselves.
I drove 280 miles today (central NY to upstate) and it took me 3.5 hours, meaning I traveled an average speed of 80mph for the journey. Even at an average of 65mph (the proper speed limit) the journey would take 4.3 hours.
4 hours is a far cry from 10 hours traveling.
While gas (and money) is a commodity that I would save by traveling with an automobile than ran on an alternative fuel source, there is a negative cost, an exchange of time. I save money, but I lose time. If you calculate how much I get paid an hour and convert the lost hours to dollars, it's more cost efficient for me to take a gas powered car over 4 hours than an electric car for 10 hours.
Even then, if I didn't want to drive, I could take a train ticket for the same price as a full tank of gas at current prices, and get home in 4 or 5 hours at most anyways.
Even if the electric (or alternative fuel source) cars are cheaper to run and operate, time must also be factored in as a commodity, and weighed accordingly. But if these cars continue to run at considerably slower speeds than gas fueled cars I don't see many people shifting to them.
The time that power goes out most frequently where I live (New York City, Hudson Valley, Syracuse all year round) is during the summer on the hottest days. What is straining the electrical grid so much? Air conditioners. On the hottest days of the summer you will always experience brownouts, and sometimes, the days get to hot that a large section of our part of the country loses power.
Millions of New Yorkers depend on electricity in their daily lives. Prolonged power outages are not only a nuisance -- they are also potentially life-threatening and can cause major economic losses.
Power outages occur most often during the summer months, when residents run air conditioners and power usage is at its peak.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_york_blackout#Cause Lightning can also cause fires, especially on hot days, resulting in damage so great that major areas like NYC lose power for an entire day. For this blackout there were three lightning strikes that took out power lines causing major damage to NYC's power supply. - - - - - The Wall Street Journal should be ashamed for printing such ridiculous and manipulating propaganda. Major power outages happen entirely because of over consumption of electricity during the hottest days of the years. There is no global anti-American electrical conspiracy that is possibly going to be more damaging than mother nature (lightning, fire) and human nature (needing to be cool on hot days aka mass air conditioner use).
Last year, a senior Central Intelligence Agency official, Tom Donohue, told a meeting of utility company representatives in New Orleans that a cyberattack had taken out power equipment in multiple regions outside the U.S. The outage was followed with extortion demands, he said.
In a chilling scenario reminiscent of James Bond and other action spy movies, the CIA has confirmed that Internet attackers have succeeded in compromising power grids outside the US in order to hold entire populations to ransom while make extortion demands. The utilities infrastructure security meeting was organized by information security training, certification and research group the SANS Institute and was held in New Orleans last week.
US Central Intelligence Agency senior analyst Tom Donohue told a gathering of 300 US, UK, Swedish, and Dutch government officials and engineers and security managers from electric, water, oil & gas and other critical industry asset owners from all across North America, that "We have information, from multiple regions outside the United States, of cyber intrusions into utilities, followed by extortion demands." Mr Donohoe was not explicit as to whether the extortionist cyber attackers, which had brought down the power of entire cities, were terrorists with political motives or were criminals attempting to extort financial ransom. He also did not name the regions that had suffered attacks other than to say they were outside the US. "We suspect, but cannot confirm, that some of these attackers had the benefit of inside knowledge," said Mr Donohue. "We have information that cyber attacks have been used to disrupt power equipment in several regions outside the United States.
In at least one case, the disruption caused a power outage affecting multiple cities. We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but all i
A theif could easily take out the hard drive and read it using another device, no? you are locking a theif out of a laptop, not the data within.
You could design a proprietary drive that only functions within that laptop and should anyone remove the drive there would be a fail safe that erases the data or locks the data until it is reattached to the original laptop.
Not sure if the technology is possible for something like this (I'm a comedy writer for a living, no technical experience) but I'm sure you could prevent people from accessing a drive somehow.
Shattered Glass is a film about how an investigative journalist, Adam Peneberg, working for Forbes.com in 1996, exposed journalist Stephen Glass for plagiarizing nearly every article he wrote for The New Republic, a well trusted and highly respected journalistic publication.
This was considered one of the first major breakthroughs for online journalism and it happened in 1996. Online news has been filled with investigative journalism for a while.
Even wikileaks can be seen as legitimate investigative reporting and whistle blowing. http://www.wikileaks.org/
The not-so-good news is that in a "compromise," the board also voted to require that students "in all fields of science, analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations... including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific explanations, so as to encourage critical thinking by the student."
Because they are going to teach the students to think "science is one way of thinking but could any student raise his or her hand and think of another way that life began?"
Then a student will raise his or her hand and say "intelligent design" or "creation" or "god" or something with religious beginnings and the problem will still the exist.
The problem is religion in science classrooms and public school science classrooms to be exact.
Teaching critical thinking, the scientific method, and a critical approach to all subjects is something we need more of in America. But telling teachers to be skeptical of science in the name of religion (oh the irony!) and disguising it as teaching critical thinking is horrible.
Even if you can get it cheaper...this money goes to help The Pirate Bay keep operating costs up. And it's only $7 so it's not breaking the bank for me at least unlike rent in NYC.
Also my DVR box is toast and I've been getting LOST from TPB for the last few weeks. I figure giving them a small donation of money for bandwidth is something I would do anyways and I now I get a VPN feature as well.
Let's say that the Nintendo Wii retails for $250. But you were going to sell them on eBay for $450 a piece and because of retail scarcity people bought them. Then you go through the scam I outlined above. When you make a claim with your insurance company, because people have used PayPal to transfer you $450, you can try to claim a loss of $450 instead of the loss of replacing a $250 machine.
Site policy has zero tolerance for sellers who list counterfeit items, and will also suspend any seller who lists a counterfeit item more than one time. Sharpe reports that...30,000 sellers [were] suspended.
One of the major reasons that eBay has so many fraudulent listings is that scam artists exploit a flaw in eBay's user database. And I'm not even talking about listening bootlegged or forged items. I'm talking about listing items that don't even exist.
The scam artists find eBay accounts and break into them, specifically accounts that have high feedback numbers (or transactions recorded) but have little activity in the last year. They basically dig through the user database for inactive accounts and then try to hijack them, taking over the account, and then changing the billing information before listing the fake items. Because the hijacked account already has positive feedback with it people are far more likely to trust the account and auction, not being critical enough to suspect they are being scammed for money or being sold knockoff items.
Another scam I've seen is where people purchase tons of electronics, like say they purchase dozens of video game consoles. They take pictures of the consoles to prove that they have them in hand. They then sell them to friends, family, or strangers for cash in person, while keeping the receipts for the original product. They then list the consoles on eBay and sell them to people taking the money from PayPal. But, because they've already sold the item off for cash, they tell the person who sent them money over PayPal that they will get a refund. They then call the cops, say that they have been robbed and someone stole several dozen expensive electronic components from them and then they recover whatever homeowners or rental insurance covers stolen property.
I purchase tons of expensive electronics on eBay. Multi-thousand dollar synthesizers, hardware video editing consoles, and vinyl record components. Some items seem to be half scams and half real and eBay doesn't do a damn thing to stop people from listing fake items. They rely on users to constantly scream at eBay to take the fake listings down. I have to persist often to get eBay to take down the endless fake auctions for Pioneer DJ components that are listed day after day and eBay still can't figure out a filter for this problem.
At the end of the day eBay is still great (minus the shipping charges).
This past September they had to evacuate a Philadelphia Phillies game at Citizens Bank Park because someone confused a fucking hot dog wrapper for a bomb.
Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution is a fighting game made by Sega for the Playstation 2 in 2003. What Sega introduced was A.I. that wasn't programmed like typical A.I., Sega instead took raw input data from players who played the game in the arcade, and merely inserted the inputs into the A.I. so when you play against the computer you are playing against actual human inputs.
Here's some quotes from Gamespy and IGN talking about the game's A.I. and how amazing it was (and still is).
The chief single-player innovation of VF4 on PS2 was the Kumite mode, an endless marital arts tournament against extremely advanced A.I. based on recorded data from actual Japanese arcade play. This means that VF4 is the first and only fighting game where fighting the computer is fun. It's also the only one where fighting the CPU can teach you something, as you have to exercise your strategies to match the computer instead of easily figuring out an easy way to exploit it and beat it cheaply.
First and only game like it. Sega did a wonderful job with innovating a new type of A.I. for fighting games.
Of course, matches would be no fun if the AI was anything but killer. Luckily for us, killer might be a bit too accurate. Virtua Fighter 4 Evo's AI is based on the techniques and strategies of the best Virtua Fighter players in Japan. Having witnessed such talent firsthand, all I can say is that if you don't spend some good honest time with the game, you'll get nowhere fast. What's great about the CPU, besides just being smart and acting in a truly realistic fashion, is that the difficulty ramps up perfectly as you work your way from 10th Kyu to 1st Dan and upwards. Again, there's no other fighting game that can boast such quality AI.
Notice that the author mentions that the A.I. is programmed differently depending on what difficulty you are playing at based on rank. Meaning that they chose hundreds of human players of varying skill to base the realistic A.I. behavior off of.
Blu-Ray and the PS3 (and its power) are the future of gaming. The 360 is already at its limit as to what games it can handle. I'll still play Virtua Fighter 5 Online on my 360 until the day they drop the servers, but my PS3 is used for every other game I play on consoles. http://play.tm/news/23623/tekken-6-pushing-360-limits/
Katsuhiro Harada, one of the senior developers behind Namco Bandai's Tekken 6, has said that his new game is pushing the very limits of the Xbox 360 console, and that his game may have an influence over the specifications of the system's eventual successor.
"It is a challenge to fit this game onto one DVD and to make sure the data is read at a fast rate," Harada explained in a new interview.
Harada's title was conceived originally for the PS3, and squeezing the game on to the 360 seems to be quite a task, the designer struggling to ensure the title runs at a smooth 60fps on the new hardware.
When games like Tekken 6, or Killzone 2, or Metal Gear Solid 4, begin being regularly produced for the PS3 it will be only that, for the PS3. No one will be able to make those games for the 360 unless they significantly tone down the visuals and size of the game. Tekken 6 is going to be an inferior port on the 360 because the arcade version of Tekken 6 was designed with a PS3 based arcade board. The 360 can't handle Tekken 6 at full capacity, something MS didn't anticipate when they payed Namco to break the console exclusive strategy they've usually done with the previous Tekken games. Tekken has usually been on Sony consoles and Tekken 6 was made on a PS3 arcade board because Namco wanted the most visuals out of their game and has a long standing relationship with SONY hardware. Now MS is taking a slight hit in the media because when they coerced Namco into porting the game to the 360 they assumed their console could handle the game.
And as for the cost of the PS3 right now? The PSN is free to play games on, XBL is not. I pay $40-$50 a year for XBL, across a few years that adds up to a lot of money in the long run to play online. Factor in that the 360 elite is still $400 and the PS3 with a Blu-Ray drive is $460 the price difference is negligible when you weigh what you get. Factor in that I've lost not one, but three 360 units to the red ring of death since launch, and I own two PS3s that have never had any issues whatsoever that I am aware of, including letting them run for hours and hours upon end running the Folding At Home client without shutting them off for days at a time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home#PlayStation_3
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/
Sounds like the plot to Office Space but in reverse order.
I mean geez people haven't you been keeping up with the latest issues of Creationism Quarterly!
This stuff is "Peer-reviewed by degreed scientists" it says so right on the website!
It has "Scholarly articles representing the major scientific disciplines" scientific disciplines like: biology, chemistry, theology, creationism! Duh!
"Emphasis on scientific evidence supporting: intelligent design, a recent creation, and a catastrophic worldwide flood"!
http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq.html /sarcasmbrainmelting
...the most ridiculously amazing profile ever:
Hobbies and Interests:
- working hard every day
- always obeying superiors
- working overtime for standard pay
Favorite Movies:
Favorite Books:
Favorite Music:
- none I'm always working
- - -
Things NOT to include:
Hobbies and Interests:
- feeding my cocaine addiction
- leather and bondage fetish
- reading slashdot
- - -
My Facebook profile makes me look extremely plain. It is the bare essentials. A personal email contact, my high school and undergraduate information, and a list of some very safe hobbies like 'sports' or 'cooking'. It took me forever to untag all those pictures of me naked on acid.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVmc5ZepdVs
Year of the fighter!
"Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization's End"
So many things wrong with this title...first of all, the word Apocalypse derives from Greek 'Apokálypsis' which basically means 'lifting of a veil' or revealing something that was previously hidden to the majority of the population. Currently apocalypse enters into most people's lexicon in the biblical sense referring to the end of days (aka revelation).
2012...well I think we've all seen the movie (trailer). The Mayan calendar puts the end of time at approximately December 21, 2012. But that's not even the Mayan's interpretation of 2012...it just some projected wish that has exploded into popular culture. Many Mayan scholars simply think that the Mayans were simply going to reset the calendar on that day back to zero.
Either way the scientific exploration to the end of our planet or species (which are different things and scenarios) should avoid religious or theological possibilities (because they aren't real).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe
Heat death of the universe and the big crunch are the two most likely scenarios (don't worry you won't be around for either of them). Heat death is basically where the universe becomes void of heat and motion and there is nothing left but immobile objects. The other best theory is the big crunch, basically where gravity pulls all objects together from existence into one singularity.
I always though that that singularity would interact with infinite absolute zero and most likely creates another big bang. If this is true then that would mean it could have happened an infinite number of times before, meaning time is an infinite loop and everything has happened before an infinite number of times and will happen again.
I haven't studied hard science in an academic environment for a while (I went to an amazing science oriented public high school) as I did my undergraduate studies in......sports broadcasting...so here's my disclaimer: some things above might be paraphrased or summarized incorrectly (I did my best).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risks_to_civilization,_humans_and_planet_Earth
This article covers almost everything. Natural disasters occurring from earth (earthquakes, floods, global warming), to space based (gamma ray bursts, impact events), to human based events (nuclear war), to diseases and pandemics, and even things like an A.I. taking over or a singularity from nanotechnology taking over all life (search wiki for Grey goo), and then of course there is the probability (though unlikely) of aliens obliterating our planet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_of_human_beings
There was a recent poll on Slashdot asking everyone when the last human would be born...
http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1749&aid=-1
http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1751&aid=-1
Oh...here comes my boss time to submit and get back to cutting Mets footage.
I was a casual gamer who didn't buy gold and yet I enjoyed the game immensely. It's not that hard to make money in the game if you do a bit of research. I played no more than 20 hours a week and yet when I quit I had about 4000 gold at level 66.
20 hours a week is a lot of time. Is that really casual? If you said you played a sport for 20 hours a week would you call that casual? "I play baseball casually 20 hours a week". Sounds hardcore to me as it's quite an investment.
April 6, 2009 - Sony's PS3 outsold Nintendo's Wii during the month of March. Sales of the PS3 were reported at 146,948 units as opposed to the 99,335 Wii units sold. In third place, the Xbox 360 is noted to have 43,172 units sold.
Apparently, Ryu Ga Gotoku 3 (or Yakuza 3, here in the U.S.) and Resident Evil 5 helped urge the PS3 sales, as both games were at the top of the software sales charts. This is, comparatively speaking, good news for Sony's current-gen hardware, though analysts predict that the PS3 will not threaten the Wii's global dominance of the market.
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE53511I20090406
TOKYO - Nintendo admitted Thursday that its hit Wii video game console was going through its toughest time yet in the competitive Japanese market, but it said there was no plan to cut the price.
"The Wii is in the most unhealthy condition since it hit the Japanese market," Nintendo Co. president Satoru Iwata said. "The current condition in the Japanese market is not the one we want."
But a price war with rivals was not the answer as Nintendo is already the market leader, he said.
"A price cut in a difficult economy cannot really excite the market and drive up sales. As of now I really don't think that a price cut is a good option for us," he told a news conference.
Industry figures showed this week that the rival Sony PlayStation 3 had outsold the Wii in Japan for the first time in 16 months, with sales of the Nintendo console dropping almost two-thirds from a year earlier.
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/technology/04/09/09/nintendo-says-wii-losing-luster-no-price-cut
- - -
Maybe the casual gamers have moved on and now only the hardcore gamers remain to purchase new software and peripherals? The Wii is at market saturation nearly everywhere and now it's time for the PS3 and X360 to move ahead at least in month to month sales.
For some anecdotal evidence I own all three consoles, each one since their own launch date, and I never touch my Wii (cue childish sexual jokes). In the last month I've hammered away at Valkyria Chronicles and Metal Gear Online for my PS3 for hours upon hours every day. For my 360 I play Virtua Fighter 5 and Fallout 3 regularly as well. And between both the PS3 and 360 I play Street Fighter II HD Remix and Street Fighter IV daily as well. My Wii? Maybe when Dead Space Wii comes out I'll plug the console back in but my god has that thing been collecting dust for months.
Not to mention what hardcore treats the PC is getting coming up by way of Blizzard. I already told my boss I needed a week of vacation off for both of the releases of Starcraft II and Diablo III...
Is hardcore gaming dead because of the Wii? No. Nintendo can't stroke its ego quite that much.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livia_Soprano
After the second season, a storyline was planned where Livia would be called to testify against her son in court, giving evidence on stolen airline tickets she had received from him, but [the actress who played her] died in 2000, before it could be filmed. Existing footage and computer-generated imagery was used to create a final scene between Tony and Livia in the episode "Proshai, Livushka" in Season Three before the character too passed on.
Arnold should have acted in this movie and taken as much money as he could and just donated it to his state's budget.
Like usenet, rapidshare, yousendit, IRC, ftp, soulseek, isohunt?
I use Pirate Bay often but if it were to go down for the count there are literally thousands of other places that would become just as excellent at hosting torrents or full files themselves.
...to complete GTA3, VC, SA, and GTAIV (with DLC) 100%. Story modes, hidden packages, unique jumps, taxi rides, you name it *.
He can't leave the mental institution they place him in until he beats those games.
*Gameshark or other cheats no allowed
I drove 280 miles today (central NY to upstate) and it took me 3.5 hours, meaning I traveled an average speed of 80mph for the journey. Even at an average of 65mph (the proper speed limit) the journey would take 4.3 hours.
4 hours is a far cry from 10 hours traveling.
While gas (and money) is a commodity that I would save by traveling with an automobile than ran on an alternative fuel source, there is a negative cost, an exchange of time. I save money, but I lose time. If you calculate how much I get paid an hour and convert the lost hours to dollars, it's more cost efficient for me to take a gas powered car over 4 hours than an electric car for 10 hours.
Even then, if I didn't want to drive, I could take a train ticket for the same price as a full tank of gas at current prices, and get home in 4 or 5 hours at most anyways.
Even if the electric (or alternative fuel source) cars are cheaper to run and operate, time must also be factored in as a commodity, and weighed accordingly. But if these cars continue to run at considerably slower speeds than gas fueled cars I don't see many people shifting to them.
The time that power goes out most frequently where I live (New York City, Hudson Valley, Syracuse all year round) is during the summer on the hottest days. What is straining the electrical grid so much? Air conditioners. On the hottest days of the summer you will always experience brownouts, and sometimes, the days get to hot that a large section of our part of the country loses power.
Millions of New Yorkers depend on electricity in their daily lives. Prolonged power outages are not only a nuisance -- they are also potentially life-threatening and can cause major economic losses.
Power outages occur most often during the summer months, when residents run air conditioners and power usage is at its peak.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/oem/html/hazards/utilities_power.shtml
- - -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Blackout_of_2003#Causes
The 2003 Northeast blackout was caused by urban sprawl interacting with silvan areas. On hot days, wires can cause fires, especially when tree branches are resting on the electrical wires because we decided running power lines through wooded areas was good decision.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_york_blackout#Cause
Lightning can also cause fires, especially on hot days, resulting in damage so great that major areas like NYC lose power for an entire day. For this blackout there were three lightning strikes that took out power lines causing major damage to NYC's power supply.
- - - - -
The Wall Street Journal should be ashamed for printing such ridiculous and manipulating propaganda. Major power outages happen entirely because of over consumption of electricity during the hottest days of the years. There is no global anti-American electrical conspiracy that is possibly going to be more damaging than mother nature (lightning, fire) and human nature (needing to be cool on hot days aka mass air conditioner use).
Last year, a senior Central Intelligence Agency official, Tom Donohue, told a meeting of utility company representatives in New Orleans that a cyberattack had taken out power equipment in multiple regions outside the U.S. The outage was followed with extortion demands, he said.
In a chilling scenario reminiscent of James Bond and other action spy movies, the CIA has confirmed that Internet attackers have succeeded in compromising power grids outside the US in order to hold entire populations to ransom while make extortion demands. The utilities infrastructure security meeting was organized by information security training, certification and research group the SANS Institute and was held in New Orleans last week.
US Central Intelligence Agency senior analyst Tom Donohue told a gathering of 300 US, UK, Swedish, and Dutch government officials and engineers and security managers from electric, water, oil & gas and other critical industry asset owners from all across North America, that "We have information, from multiple regions outside the United States, of cyber intrusions into utilities, followed by extortion demands." Mr Donohoe was not explicit as to whether the extortionist cyber attackers, which had brought down the power of entire cities, were terrorists with political motives or were criminals attempting to extort financial ransom. He also did not name the regions that had suffered attacks other than to say they were outside the US. "We suspect, but cannot confirm, that some of these attackers had the benefit of inside knowledge," said Mr Donohue. "We have information that cyber attacks have been used to disrupt power equipment in several regions outside the United States.
In at least one case, the disruption caused a power outage affecting multiple cities. We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but all i
I thought April Fool's stories were done with already...
This also marks the five year anniversary of me not using HotMail or Outlook Express.
A theif could easily take out the hard drive and read it using another device, no? you are locking a theif out of a laptop, not the data within.
You could design a proprietary drive that only functions within that laptop and should anyone remove the drive there would be a fail safe that erases the data or locks the data until it is reattached to the original laptop.
Not sure if the technology is possible for something like this (I'm a comedy writer for a living, no technical experience) but I'm sure you could prevent people from accessing a drive somehow.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0323944/
Shattered Glass is a film about how an investigative journalist, Adam Peneberg, working for Forbes.com in 1996, exposed journalist Stephen Glass for plagiarizing nearly every article he wrote for The New Republic, a well trusted and highly respected journalistic publication.
This was considered one of the first major breakthroughs for online journalism and it happened in 1996. Online news has been filled with investigative journalism for a while.
Even wikileaks can be seen as legitimate investigative reporting and whistle blowing. http://www.wikileaks.org/
The not-so-good news is that in a "compromise," the board also voted to require that students "in all fields of science, analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations... including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific explanations, so as to encourage critical thinking by the student."
Because they are going to teach the students to think "science is one way of thinking but could any student raise his or her hand and think of another way that life began?"
Then a student will raise his or her hand and say "intelligent design" or "creation" or "god" or something with religious beginnings and the problem will still the exist.
The problem is religion in science classrooms and public school science classrooms to be exact.
Teaching critical thinking, the scientific method, and a critical approach to all subjects is something we need more of in America. But telling teachers to be skeptical of science in the name of religion (oh the irony!) and disguising it as teaching critical thinking is horrible.
Well hopefully we won't have to worry about typing in a few years if speech to text is improved upon.
The mouse though, don't never see that getting replaced, at least not in the near future.
Even if you can get it cheaper...this money goes to help The Pirate Bay keep operating costs up. And it's only $7 so it's not breaking the bank for me at least unlike rent in NYC.
Also my DVR box is toast and I've been getting LOST from TPB for the last few weeks. I figure giving them a small donation of money for bandwidth is something I would do anyways and I now I get a VPN feature as well.
[This Comment Was Deletey By The Slashdot Censorship Moderation Panel]
Let's say that the Nintendo Wii retails for $250. But you were going to sell them on eBay for $450 a piece and because of retail scarcity people bought them. Then you go through the scam I outlined above. When you make a claim with your insurance company, because people have used PayPal to transfer you $450, you can try to claim a loss of $450 instead of the loss of replacing a $250 machine.
Site policy has zero tolerance for sellers who list counterfeit items, and will also suspend any seller who lists a counterfeit item more than one time. Sharpe reports that...30,000 sellers [were] suspended.
One of the major reasons that eBay has so many fraudulent listings is that scam artists exploit a flaw in eBay's user database. And I'm not even talking about listening bootlegged or forged items. I'm talking about listing items that don't even exist.
The scam artists find eBay accounts and break into them, specifically accounts that have high feedback numbers (or transactions recorded) but have little activity in the last year. They basically dig through the user database for inactive accounts and then try to hijack them, taking over the account, and then changing the billing information before listing the fake items. Because the hijacked account already has positive feedback with it people are far more likely to trust the account and auction, not being critical enough to suspect they are being scammed for money or being sold knockoff items.
Another scam I've seen is where people purchase tons of electronics, like say they purchase dozens of video game consoles. They take pictures of the consoles to prove that they have them in hand. They then sell them to friends, family, or strangers for cash in person, while keeping the receipts for the original product. They then list the consoles on eBay and sell them to people taking the money from PayPal. But, because they've already sold the item off for cash, they tell the person who sent them money over PayPal that they will get a refund. They then call the cops, say that they have been robbed and someone stole several dozen expensive electronic components from them and then they recover whatever homeowners or rental insurance covers stolen property.
I purchase tons of expensive electronics on eBay. Multi-thousand dollar synthesizers, hardware video editing consoles, and vinyl record components. Some items seem to be half scams and half real and eBay doesn't do a damn thing to stop people from listing fake items. They rely on users to constantly scream at eBay to take the fake listings down. I have to persist often to get eBay to take down the endless fake auctions for Pioneer DJ components that are listed day after day and eBay still can't figure out a filter for this problem.
At the end of the day eBay is still great (minus the shipping charges).
This past September they had to evacuate a Philadelphia Phillies game at Citizens Bank Park because someone confused a fucking hot dog wrapper for a bomb.
Our government, schools, media, and society as a whole train us to be paranoid and live in fear, to dumb us down. Not to sound like a conspiracy nut but this is the world that we occupy.
http://cbs3.com/topstories/Philadelphia.Phillies.Citizens.2.824722.html
http://www.nj.com/phillies/index.ssf/2008/09/hot_dogs_create_bomb_scare_at.html
http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/blog/big_league_stew/post/Hot-dogs-cause-a-delicious-bomb-scare-before-Phi?urn=mlb,110486
Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution is a fighting game made by Sega for the Playstation 2 in 2003. What Sega introduced was A.I. that wasn't programmed like typical A.I., Sega instead took raw input data from players who played the game in the arcade, and merely inserted the inputs into the A.I. so when you play against the computer you are playing against actual human inputs.
Here's some quotes from Gamespy and IGN talking about the game's A.I. and how amazing it was (and still is).
The chief single-player innovation of VF4 on PS2 was the Kumite mode, an endless marital arts tournament against extremely advanced A.I. based on recorded data from actual Japanese arcade play. This means that VF4 is the first and only fighting game where fighting the computer is fun. It's also the only one where fighting the CPU can teach you something, as you have to exercise your strategies to match the computer instead of easily figuring out an easy way to exploit it and beat it cheaply.
First and only game like it. Sega did a wonderful job with innovating a new type of A.I. for fighting games.
Of course, matches would be no fun if the AI was anything but killer. Luckily for us, killer might be a bit too accurate. Virtua Fighter 4 Evo's AI is based on the techniques and strategies of the best Virtua Fighter players in Japan. Having witnessed such talent firsthand, all I can say is that if you don't spend some good honest time with the game, you'll get nowhere fast. What's great about the CPU, besides just being smart and acting in a truly realistic fashion, is that the difficulty ramps up perfectly as you work your way from 10th Kyu to 1st Dan and upwards. Again, there's no other fighting game that can boast such quality AI.
Notice that the author mentions that the A.I. is programmed differently depending on what difficulty you are playing at based on rank. Meaning that they chose hundreds of human players of varying skill to base the realistic A.I. behavior off of.
Blu-Ray and the PS3 (and its power) are the future of gaming. The 360 is already at its limit as to what games it can handle. I'll still play Virtua Fighter 5 Online on my 360 until the day they drop the servers, but my PS3 is used for every other game I play on consoles.
http://play.tm/news/23623/tekken-6-pushing-360-limits/
Katsuhiro Harada, one of the senior developers behind Namco Bandai's Tekken 6, has said that his new game is pushing the very limits of the Xbox 360 console, and that his game may have an influence over the specifications of the system's eventual successor.
"It is a challenge to fit this game onto one DVD and to make sure the data is read at a fast rate," Harada explained in a new interview.
Harada's title was conceived originally for the PS3, and squeezing the game on to the 360 seems to be quite a task, the designer struggling to ensure the title runs at a smooth 60fps on the new hardware.
When games like Tekken 6, or Killzone 2, or Metal Gear Solid 4, begin being regularly produced for the PS3 it will be only that, for the PS3. No one will be able to make those games for the 360 unless they significantly tone down the visuals and size of the game. Tekken 6 is going to be an inferior port on the 360 because the arcade version of Tekken 6 was designed with a PS3 based arcade board. The 360 can't handle Tekken 6 at full capacity, something MS didn't anticipate when they payed Namco to break the console exclusive strategy they've usually done with the previous Tekken games. Tekken has usually been on Sony consoles and Tekken 6 was made on a PS3 arcade board because Namco wanted the most visuals out of their game and has a long standing relationship with SONY hardware. Now MS is taking a slight hit in the media because when they coerced Namco into porting the game to the 360 they assumed their console could handle the game.
And as for the cost of the PS3 right now? The PSN is free to play games on, XBL is not. I pay $40-$50 a year for XBL, across a few years that adds up to a lot of money in the long run to play online. Factor in that the 360 elite is still $400 and the PS3 with a Blu-Ray drive is $460 the price difference is negligible when you weigh what you get. Factor in that I've lost not one, but three 360 units to the red ring of death since launch, and I own two PS3s that have never had any issues whatsoever that I am aware of, including letting them run for hours and hours upon end running the Folding At Home client without shutting them off for days at a time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home#PlayStation_3