What I was picturing was more an orbital based acceleration, pre-slingshot. The probe would be in solar orbit using solar powered ion drives to continue accelerating (perhaps for more than a decade) until it eventually reached a target speed and then broke orbit and headed out of the system.
I am not a rocket scientist or physicist so may be completely off-base, but why not use solar powered ion drives to build up speed in the solar system and then slingshot out of the system? It might take several years to build up significant speed but as long as the craft is orbiting the sun it has all the energy it needs to maintain acceleration. It would need to spend energy maintaining orbit and eventually to break orbit, but as long as it can do that and still have enough energy to kick in for acceleration it seems like it should be able to just keep building speed.
A 419 finally made it thru my spam filters, I wasted about an hour of my life tricking the scammer into believing that the CIA was after him. It was totally hilarious, he's probably still camping out in some village somewhere hiding from a CIA counterterrorism squad that is trying kidnap him. It was suprisingly easy - just act really naive and they seem to buy it. I started off by acting like I actually did have a relative with the name of the "dead" person mentioned but then a few emails into it I said that I managed to get in touch with them and that because they were working for the CIA when they were in Africa (I pretended they had left Africa before their alleged death) they were worried a terrorist had stolen their identity - from there it was a few more emails to convince the scammer that the CIA believed the scammer himself was involved and would be coming for him shortly, I just stayed friendly and acted really naive and like I couldn't believe this was happening. Once I had him convinced he never wrote me again. I was laughing so hard as I wrote the final email saying how nice he seemed and how bad I felt for him and that he shouldn't resist when they snatched him because it would only make it worse. The bastard probably crapped himself when he read it.
I've yet to see this happen and I've tried with my cable modem. I saturated my connection with torrents and then tried making and receiving a vonage call. I didn't notice any difference except my torrents slowed down a little and web pages loaded very slowly. Actual phone service had no noticeable difference.
I looked at the two photographs and they are near identical, the modified one has a little big of extra smoke (which is so obviously the product of manipulation I can't believe they published it). I don't understand what political agenda is served by adding in extra smoke? There is not a significant difference between the two photos, the one with extra smoke doesn't look "worse" (i.e. it doesn't make those responsible for the bombings appear any differently as far as I can tell). How does a little more smoke in a picture reflect a political agenda? To me the photographers excuse is plausible, I've tried using photoshop displayed on an LCD in a bad lighting situation and can understand how someone could quickly make a complete mess of things and not be able to really tell. Reuters has no excuse though, the fact that they didn't catch this is amazing.
Have you guys seen the dailykos comments? They are by far the slickest comments I have ever seen and one of the best implementations of AJAX methods outside of Google.
Re:Hire a professional (or become one)
on
Managing Site Growth?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If it is OmniNerd he is talking about he should definitely look at something like Scoop, Drupal, or Slash. Any of them should meet the needs of that site easily and he will probably have a much easier time of finding assistance (paid or volunteer). I've played around with Drupal a fair amount, it's easy to install and configure, it has a lot of modules and themes, I'd definitely recommend he try it out first.
That argument is fundamentally flawed. If I let a friend borrow my car and he gets a speeding ticket I don't have to pay for it - he is the one accused of speeding, he got the ticket and he has to pay for it. My insurance company might take issue with me but that's another matter. It's the same situation, the RIAA/MPAA/whoever can't "fine" me for something I didn't do, but if my ISP wants to get mad at me for violating my agreement with them that is something else entirely. My AP is wide open, it came that way and I like it that way because it is convenient and my neighbors/community occasionally find it useful. I am not legally responsible for any traffic that goes over my internet connection unless I am the one who generated that traffic just as I'm not legally responsible for my car speeding unless I'm the one behind the wheel.
You can say that about nearly anything. For example, your phone company could decide you haven't paid them in order to extract late fees from you. It's happened to me and it took hours of my time to fight them (I got the money back). I got pulled over for speeding once when I wasn't because some cop was bored or in a bad mood, it took hours of my time to fight the ticket (idiot judge still made me pay). None of these things are really common occurances, but life isn't fair and shit happens. Considering how many open APs there are in the world and the fact that very few people ever use mine and the few people who do tend to be my neighbors I'm not that concerned about the RIAA/MPAA ever coming after me, it's not very likely. They've gone after people who don't even own computers before so even locking my AP down doesn't really change the odds that much. If they ever do come after me I'll send in an "Ask Slashdot" with a link back to this comment:
Hi Slashdot, the RIAA or MPAA is trying to sue me because someone downloaded copyrighted files using my open WiFi network - I don't have $50K to hire lawyers, what is the best course of action?
Except I'm not doing any content filtering and have no awareness of what data is going over the network - you can't hold me liable for the actions of someone else. If a murder happens in a park the owner of the park isn't liable for it, it's an open space that anyone can use.
Same here - I've run an open AP for a few years now. I've never had anyone abuse it to the point that I have noticed. If that ever happens I will take the time to config it so they can't leech too much bandwidth but I really dont care what they do with it - I've got plenty of bandwidth for my purposes so why not share? My former neighbor used to use it fairly regularly, particularly after a truck crashed through his house and took out his connection (along with every computer he had, minus his laptop).
If that is true it didn't happen until later. When I visited Ion Storm Romero introduced me to every single person who worked there, he knew each of them by name and knew exactly what they were working on. This was before the big remodel was done so they were still on the temp floor, perhaps things changed when they moved. I spent severl hours there hanging out with Romero and he seemed like a genuinely nice guy, not at all like the egomaniac he is portrayed as. What I saw of Daikatana looked badass, but remember this was before Quake2 was even out - they were still using the the 256 color palette Q1 was originally limited to, each section of the game had it's own palette (3 or 4 total). I don't remember who the programmer I met was but as I recall he had just hacked 16-bit color into the engine the day before I got there. The good old days! After Ion Storm I got the id tour courtesy of American McGee - I still have the q1 expansion pack he gave me from their goodie room, I wish I had the forsight to one of their classics and get them to all sign it:(
Try out CivicSpace if you want a simple install process. It's a Drupal distribution designed for the NGO/Activist world so it does a lot of handholding and is very automated. It's basically regular Drupal plus a custom set of modules and themes and the fancy installer. Here they explain the differences between CivicSpace and vanilla Drupal:
I've tried to figure it out. I just don't fucking get it, I can't get it. MySpace is like Geocities circa '97 with some really simple social networking functions glued onto it, that's really about it. It's slow, it's full of some of the worst webpages in the history of the internet and yet somehow it keeps growing. I don't think it is the "modern young hipster" who is responsible for it though, in my experience most of them have a halfway decent understanding of how the internet works having grown up with it (which isn't to say they haven't ended up on MySpace) - the MySpace crowd is something else entirely, ignorance of how the internet works (including how it works in the sociological sense) is definitely their defining feature. I used to think age was part of it too but it's not, there are a lot of older people (older than the stereotype of teenagers & 20somethings I mean). I'm certain MySpace will die just as quickly as its risen eventually, it's success is a social phenomenon and not a result of the technological infrastructure it controls - some other social networking site will reach critical mass and begin leeching MySpace until it's the new Friendster.
Tables are out of fashion but are still very useful in a lot of circumstances. For a lot of layouts there is no reason not to use tables, they are simple and straightforward and tend to behave fairly consistently unless you try to do something funky in which case you probably shouldn't be using tables anymore. The same goes for using CSS - it definitely has it's place but for a lot of sites using CSS is needless complication. It's overkill and a waste of time. Too many designers are chasing fads and complicating what should be simple tasks. AJAX too - it's cool and all but a lot of the time the benefits aren't worth the effort.
I'm the same way. Sometimes I won't feel like watching a particular movie and it will sit for awhile, but generally if I haven't watched a movie within about three weeks it goes back - I can always get it again later. For those rare cases when you really MUST see a specific movie I run to the video rental store. As much as I hate those bastards I've still had to go in there a half dozen or so times in the past year. You can't beat Netflix for TV series either - there is nothing worse than going to the damn video rental place and finding they are missing a part of the series (either because it's rented out or they don't carry it or whatever).
I try to stagger my movies - I try to always have at least 2 of them on hand. I actually just received some yesterday so this weekend I'll probably sit down and watch a few.
I broadly agree, however something that does absolutely suck is running a fresh default steam install. Even if you want to play single player HL2 you can't until it's done downloading and authenticating everything. It was about 3 hours before it was done doing everything. The download speeds have improved a lot fortunately but Steam does still crap out every once in awhile making it so you can't play any multiplayer games. Steam has come a long ways but it still has a long ways to go. I'd really like to see Valve finish up their bitorrentification of it and add mod distribution into the system.
I gave up on game magazines a long time ago. I don't trust their content at all - I'd believe the word of some random anonymous coward on Slashdot over any of the gaming magazines. Sometimes I'll open one up to read things like interviews with developers if I'm in a bookstore or if a friend has a copy, but anything like a game review or even worse, a preview - it's a waste of time to even bother reading them.
So if the President wanted to say, lock up all the evil libruls who hate America, all he he has to do is claim he is exercising his powers under Article 2? Where is the line here? Can the President destroy the Constitution in order to "save" it? It amazes me to see what the Republicans have become that they now justify this sort of behavior! Imagine if it were Clinton...
At work we found an ancient "portable computer" built by Compaq - we couldn't find any installer disks old enough to work with it so we installed FreeDOS. It wasn't really useful for anything, but it was fun - especially since most of us are young enough that if we have used DOS it was when we were children. Everyone was amazed that we got the old beast working. I'm sure somewhere out there is someone who needs DOS for something, if only an hours entertainment...
Note that it says "in a private place". It is not clear from the article where the camera was recording - if it was the front entrance or in an entryway the public has access to then it may not be covered by this law.
I fragged John Carmack
on
Quake is 10
·
· Score: 1
I was in the original quakeworld beta test and used to pwn on the id guys with my 300+ ping times on a cludged together Pentium 100 vs. their sub-50 pings on high-end dev boxes - Quakeworld was amazing. Tokay was the only one who could really give me a run for my money, although toddh could tear it up too. I can't imagine trying to play any modern multiplayer FPS with a ping over 150, which is pretty sad. I guess there is a lot more data being transmitted between the client and server these days though...
I don't get why people still think VOIP has no 911 service - it's been debunked over and over again. I have Vonage, it took a minute to set up 911 service.
Slashdot Mirror
What I was picturing was more an orbital based acceleration, pre-slingshot. The probe would be in solar orbit using solar powered ion drives to continue accelerating (perhaps for more than a decade) until it eventually reached a target speed and then broke orbit and headed out of the system.
I am not a rocket scientist or physicist so may be completely off-base, but why not use solar powered ion drives to build up speed in the solar system and then slingshot out of the system? It might take several years to build up significant speed but as long as the craft is orbiting the sun it has all the energy it needs to maintain acceleration. It would need to spend energy maintaining orbit and eventually to break orbit, but as long as it can do that and still have enough energy to kick in for acceleration it seems like it should be able to just keep building speed.
A 419 finally made it thru my spam filters, I wasted about an hour of my life tricking the scammer into believing that the CIA was after him. It was totally hilarious, he's probably still camping out in some village somewhere hiding from a CIA counterterrorism squad that is trying kidnap him. It was suprisingly easy - just act really naive and they seem to buy it. I started off by acting like I actually did have a relative with the name of the "dead" person mentioned but then a few emails into it I said that I managed to get in touch with them and that because they were working for the CIA when they were in Africa (I pretended they had left Africa before their alleged death) they were worried a terrorist had stolen their identity - from there it was a few more emails to convince the scammer that the CIA believed the scammer himself was involved and would be coming for him shortly, I just stayed friendly and acted really naive and like I couldn't believe this was happening. Once I had him convinced he never wrote me again. I was laughing so hard as I wrote the final email saying how nice he seemed and how bad I felt for him and that he shouldn't resist when they snatched him because it would only make it worse. The bastard probably crapped himself when he read it.
that was the point of my story.
I've yet to see this happen and I've tried with my cable modem. I saturated my connection with torrents and then tried making and receiving a vonage call. I didn't notice any difference except my torrents slowed down a little and web pages loaded very slowly. Actual phone service had no noticeable difference.
I looked at the two photographs and they are near identical, the modified one has a little big of extra smoke (which is so obviously the product of manipulation I can't believe they published it). I don't understand what political agenda is served by adding in extra smoke? There is not a significant difference between the two photos, the one with extra smoke doesn't look "worse" (i.e. it doesn't make those responsible for the bombings appear any differently as far as I can tell). How does a little more smoke in a picture reflect a political agenda? To me the photographers excuse is plausible, I've tried using photoshop displayed on an LCD in a bad lighting situation and can understand how someone could quickly make a complete mess of things and not be able to really tell. Reuters has no excuse though, the fact that they didn't catch this is amazing.
Have you guys seen the dailykos comments? They are by far the slickest comments I have ever seen and one of the best implementations of AJAX methods outside of Google.
If it is OmniNerd he is talking about he should definitely look at something like Scoop, Drupal, or Slash. Any of them should meet the needs of that site easily and he will probably have a much easier time of finding assistance (paid or volunteer). I've played around with Drupal a fair amount, it's easy to install and configure, it has a lot of modules and themes, I'd definitely recommend he try it out first.
That argument is fundamentally flawed. If I let a friend borrow my car and he gets a speeding ticket I don't have to pay for it - he is the one accused of speeding, he got the ticket and he has to pay for it. My insurance company might take issue with me but that's another matter. It's the same situation, the RIAA/MPAA/whoever can't "fine" me for something I didn't do, but if my ISP wants to get mad at me for violating my agreement with them that is something else entirely. My AP is wide open, it came that way and I like it that way because it is convenient and my neighbors/community occasionally find it useful. I am not legally responsible for any traffic that goes over my internet connection unless I am the one who generated that traffic just as I'm not legally responsible for my car speeding unless I'm the one behind the wheel.
You can say that about nearly anything. For example, your phone company could decide you haven't paid them in order to extract late fees from you. It's happened to me and it took hours of my time to fight them (I got the money back). I got pulled over for speeding once when I wasn't because some cop was bored or in a bad mood, it took hours of my time to fight the ticket (idiot judge still made me pay). None of these things are really common occurances, but life isn't fair and shit happens. Considering how many open APs there are in the world and the fact that very few people ever use mine and the few people who do tend to be my neighbors I'm not that concerned about the RIAA/MPAA ever coming after me, it's not very likely. They've gone after people who don't even own computers before so even locking my AP down doesn't really change the odds that much. If they ever do come after me I'll send in an "Ask Slashdot" with a link back to this comment:
Hi Slashdot, the RIAA or MPAA is trying to sue me because someone downloaded copyrighted files using my open WiFi network - I don't have $50K to hire lawyers, what is the best course of action?
Except I'm not doing any content filtering and have no awareness of what data is going over the network - you can't hold me liable for the actions of someone else. If a murder happens in a park the owner of the park isn't liable for it, it's an open space that anyone can use.
Same here - I've run an open AP for a few years now. I've never had anyone abuse it to the point that I have noticed. If that ever happens I will take the time to config it so they can't leech too much bandwidth but I really dont care what they do with it - I've got plenty of bandwidth for my purposes so why not share? My former neighbor used to use it fairly regularly, particularly after a truck crashed through his house and took out his connection (along with every computer he had, minus his laptop).
1) It seemed like he did - no one he talked to corrected him anyways.
2) None at all, but I'm not sure if designing and giving a tour at the same time is really possible.
If that is true it didn't happen until later. When I visited Ion Storm Romero introduced me to every single person who worked there, he knew each of them by name and knew exactly what they were working on. This was before the big remodel was done so they were still on the temp floor, perhaps things changed when they moved. I spent severl hours there hanging out with Romero and he seemed like a genuinely nice guy, not at all like the egomaniac he is portrayed as. What I saw of Daikatana looked badass, but remember this was before Quake2 was even out - they were still using the the 256 color palette Q1 was originally limited to, each section of the game had it's own palette (3 or 4 total). I don't remember who the programmer I met was but as I recall he had just hacked 16-bit color into the engine the day before I got there. The good old days! After Ion Storm I got the id tour courtesy of American McGee - I still have the q1 expansion pack he gave me from their goodie room, I wish I had the forsight to one of their classics and get them to all sign it :(
Try out CivicSpace if you want a simple install process. It's a Drupal distribution designed for the NGO/Activist world so it does a lot of handholding and is very automated. It's basically regular Drupal plus a custom set of modules and themes and the fancy installer. Here they explain the differences between CivicSpace and vanilla Drupal:
http://civicspacelabs.org/home/differences
I've tried to figure it out. I just don't fucking get it, I can't get it. MySpace is like Geocities circa '97 with some really simple social networking functions glued onto it, that's really about it. It's slow, it's full of some of the worst webpages in the history of the internet and yet somehow it keeps growing. I don't think it is the "modern young hipster" who is responsible for it though, in my experience most of them have a halfway decent understanding of how the internet works having grown up with it (which isn't to say they haven't ended up on MySpace) - the MySpace crowd is something else entirely, ignorance of how the internet works (including how it works in the sociological sense) is definitely their defining feature. I used to think age was part of it too but it's not, there are a lot of older people (older than the stereotype of teenagers & 20somethings I mean). I'm certain MySpace will die just as quickly as its risen eventually, it's success is a social phenomenon and not a result of the technological infrastructure it controls - some other social networking site will reach critical mass and begin leeching MySpace until it's the new Friendster.
Tables are out of fashion but are still very useful in a lot of circumstances. For a lot of layouts there is no reason not to use tables, they are simple and straightforward and tend to behave fairly consistently unless you try to do something funky in which case you probably shouldn't be using tables anymore. The same goes for using CSS - it definitely has it's place but for a lot of sites using CSS is needless complication. It's overkill and a waste of time. Too many designers are chasing fads and complicating what should be simple tasks. AJAX too - it's cool and all but a lot of the time the benefits aren't worth the effort.
I'm the same way. Sometimes I won't feel like watching a particular movie and it will sit for awhile, but generally if I haven't watched a movie within about three weeks it goes back - I can always get it again later. For those rare cases when you really MUST see a specific movie I run to the video rental store. As much as I hate those bastards I've still had to go in there a half dozen or so times in the past year. You can't beat Netflix for TV series either - there is nothing worse than going to the damn video rental place and finding they are missing a part of the series (either because it's rented out or they don't carry it or whatever).
I try to stagger my movies - I try to always have at least 2 of them on hand. I actually just received some yesterday so this weekend I'll probably sit down and watch a few.
I broadly agree, however something that does absolutely suck is running a fresh default steam install. Even if you want to play single player HL2 you can't until it's done downloading and authenticating everything. It was about 3 hours before it was done doing everything. The download speeds have improved a lot fortunately but Steam does still crap out every once in awhile making it so you can't play any multiplayer games. Steam has come a long ways but it still has a long ways to go. I'd really like to see Valve finish up their bitorrentification of it and add mod distribution into the system.
I gave up on game magazines a long time ago. I don't trust their content at all - I'd believe the word of some random anonymous coward on Slashdot over any of the gaming magazines. Sometimes I'll open one up to read things like interviews with developers if I'm in a bookstore or if a friend has a copy, but anything like a game review or even worse, a preview - it's a waste of time to even bother reading them.
So if the President wanted to say, lock up all the evil libruls who hate America, all he he has to do is claim he is exercising his powers under Article 2? Where is the line here? Can the President destroy the Constitution in order to "save" it? It amazes me to see what the Republicans have become that they now justify this sort of behavior! Imagine if it were Clinton...
At work we found an ancient "portable computer" built by Compaq - we couldn't find any installer disks old enough to work with it so we installed FreeDOS. It wasn't really useful for anything, but it was fun - especially since most of us are young enough that if we have used DOS it was when we were children. Everyone was amazed that we got the old beast working. I'm sure somewhere out there is someone who needs DOS for something, if only an hours entertainment...
Note that it says "in a private place". It is not clear from the article where the camera was recording - if it was the front entrance or in an entryway the public has access to then it may not be covered by this law.
I was in the original quakeworld beta test and used to pwn on the id guys with my 300+ ping times on a cludged together Pentium 100 vs. their sub-50 pings on high-end dev boxes - Quakeworld was amazing. Tokay was the only one who could really give me a run for my money, although toddh could tear it up too. I can't imagine trying to play any modern multiplayer FPS with a ping over 150, which is pretty sad. I guess there is a lot more data being transmitted between the client and server these days though...
I don't get why people still think VOIP has no 911 service - it's been debunked over and over again. I have Vonage, it took a minute to set up 911 service.