We have a house rule that you cannot get behind the wheel of a real car until at least 30 minutes after playing Burnout. As it's crash mode is a popular party competition, I'm sure we have saved hundreds of lives with the rule.
I'm a PS3 owner, and the new settings are the right ones for my non-1080p HDTV. So, I'm happy with them. The better choice, of course, is to make these choices more user configurable so people can get the mode they prefer for each situation.
I'm a little miffed that when a patch comes out they force me to install it before I can log into the playstation network. This patch had nothing to do with networking. Of course, the 360 works the same way.
XBox Media Center does play the.ts High Def format. With a 100Mbit ethernet connection to the Win2K server these files are very watchable, with a tiny bit of jerkiness that may actually be an encoding issue. They look really nice on my High Def tv (the $700 32" Sanyo 4:3 tube from Walmart)
I'm still surprised that Canon's D10 (and even the new Mark II version of it, I think), has no spot meter.
I think you're mistaken. My DR has a little "*" button on the back that is for spot metering. Now, you need to change the focus mode from it's 7-point mode to single (center) point mode to get what you're expecting, but it then acts "properly" (even when using the flash). My old film SLR was an EOS 650 circa '87 so I got very good at the center the camera on the subject, push the shutter down half way to focus, hit the "*" button to spot meter, recompose shot as desired, and finish pressing the shutter dance.
I've shot 1800 shots in 8 months of owning my DR. Most are of my 7 month old son. It's just priceless to have that many shots of him as he grows up. And very nice that they were at zero additional cost.
The kit lens adds $100 to the retail price of the camera (body alone lists for $900) and you can't come anywhere near as wide a lens as the 18mm-55mm (times 1.6 crop factor = 28-88 effective field of view) for anywhere near that price for either system. It's not available outside of the kit except from scalpers on EBay.
The thing I love most about the DR is that it takes a picture immediately when I press the shutter button. Every other digicam I've used has had a second or longer delay after pressing the button. This makes a huge difference. (I assume that the other DSLRs we're discussing also perform this way and that the alternate non SLRs do not).
With the hacked firmware, the DR is very close featurewise to the Canon 10D. But, most of the added features are pretty esoteric. I wouldn't flash your camera until you need one of the additions (I haven't flashed mine).
One other exercise to try: Compare prices of the various full kits you're considering. Include whatever (if any) extra batteries, extra lenses, a flash, etc that you want. Canon lenses are supposed to be somewhat less expensive than the Nikon versions.
Finally, find and play with each of the camera's you're considering. Find out which one feels best in your hands, which one has the buttons in a logical place, etc.
The motivation is to significantly reduce the amount of oxidizer that has to be carried. LOX is a huge percentage of the launch weight of the shuttle and similar vehicles. If that O2 can be taken from the atmosphere for free - then you might be much better off.
But, at this stage, it's only "might be". The TPS (thermal protection system) and the need for rocket power for higher altitude (and thus multiple or hybrid engines) start to eat substantially into the weight savings. It's not clear that airbreathers make sense for space boosters. But, it's not clear that they don't either, so little experiments like this are very worth while.
Call of Duty from Activision/Infinity Ward has this problem as well. You can see on their support site here their recommendation to shut down both Alchohol and Clone CD's virtual drives. This was indeed the necessary fix to get it to run on my machine.
The book that I always pull off my shelf is the classic "Theory of Wing Sections" by Abbott and von Doenhoff (ISBN: 0486605868). It's a compilation of NACA data (NACA is NASA's predicessor) and the most comprehensive reference on the subject that I know of. Amazon has a new copy for $14.
I'm not sure why modern data would be a must for any non trans/supersonic vehicle (and some supersonic aircraft still use the classic NACA 4-digit airfoils).
I picked one of these up yesterday with next month's office Christmas party in mind. Last year people enjoyed DDR and I think this might be just as much fun (we're NASA contractors, go figure).
My limited experience with it is that it works really well. The motion detection is accurate and its fairly easy to get good results with the gadget. Lighting and any motion in the background can be an issue. I had to play a bit to give it enough contrast to be happy. It also seemed facinated with a ceiling fan that was in the background. Once I reaimed it a little it paid more attention to the player.
Looks like it's being shifted from the spam recipients who don't pay the hosting ISP money and thus have no leverage on them. Why should "we" have to spend all that effort getting "your" ISP to clean up its act.
This tactic also reduces the effectiveness of moving the spammer from IP address to IP address as was commonly done when just the spammer was blocked as you advocate. Again, much less work for the spam recipient.
You, the ISP customer, also can benefit from this. When your ISP eventually catches a clue and removes its spammers, getting out of a few widely used public blocklists is a whole lot easier than getting out of thousands of local private blocklists. (Try sending email from any of AGIS's old IP blocks and see how far it gets.)
There is a lot of hype about the McDonalds' scalding coffee case. No one is in favor of frivolous cases of outlandish results; however, it is important to understand some points that were not reported in most of the stories about the case. McDonalds coffee was not only hot, it was scalding -- capable of almost instantaneous destruction of skin, flesh and muscle. Here's the whole story.
Read the full article for more. Having read it, I think there was enough of a case to make the trial worthwhile.
I don't see how a product liability case has much to do with a trademark case, though.
I think this will help SoE move people from EQ to EQ2 because they'll be more likely to experiment at this price than if they had to have a second subscription. I know I can only justify one $12/month game to myself (and the wife). This is only a slight savings over two $12/mo games, but you're getting access to a lot more than two games.
I think, however, that this will make my trying SW:G less likely since it will be a comparably worse deal.
Sony/Verant has made noises that there might be a discount for EQ players that also subscribe to the new Star Wars MMORPG.
I'd much prefer a flat cable fee scheme, and they'd make more money from me at least that way. I'm a current EQ player, but can't justify to myself (or the wife!) more than one $10/month time and money sink. When SW:G or EQ2 or whatever else comes out, under the current pricing I'd have to switch completely (and they'd still be getting $10/month from me). With a cable scheme they might get, say, $15/month from me with no additional load on their servers (I still would have the same number of available play hours as before).
The point is that there is no point in a spammer sending out an email that does not contain instructions on how to obtain the product/service being advertised.
Mostly true.
One exception I can think of off the top of my head is the pump-and-dump stock scam spam. All they're after is to get a bunch of victims to buy a worthless stock, push up the price, and allow them to sell the shares they've already bought at 1 cent for 20 cents.
Actually, its a front light. Either way its a huge improvement over the original GBA screen (unless, like me, you have installed an Afterburner internal front light).
You'll notice that he listed and then did not address the "Common Arguments and Justifications" for running and/or using a RBL. Just couldn't come up with a reason why privately owned servers have to accept mail from any particular person or group if they don't want to.
I think the two slots were to allow for really big programs, before they figured out bank switching. The only thing I saw that ever used both slots was a cartridge that dumped an image of the cartridge in the other slot to the floppy drive.
In other 800 news, the 800 started shipping with 16K and a Basic cart (this is the config my father started with). A year later the 800 I bought for college use (300bps modem - man was I high tech!) came with 48K and no cart.
Having been to quite a number of amateur film making festivals at sf cons, I can tell you it doesn't necessarily take money to make an enjoyable movie, but it does take time, patience, and some talent. With nearly identical budgets the films vary substantially. About 33% are unwatchable due to technical issues (sound, lighting, editing), 33% are unwatchable due to artistic issues (acting, story, pacing), and 33% are better than any SCI-FI Channel Original production ever aired. (Don't ask about the final 1%, really!)
How much regular stamped mail do you get? Maybe one or two pieces a week? Now do you think that the post office could send the mailmen to your house everyday if they only made 74 cents a week on you?
Try reversing this. What would it cost AOL to fund a postal service whose only job was to deliver their AOL disks? Bet its more than they're paying now! So "obviously" our first class stamps are subsidizing them.
Oh, or is this perhaps too complex an issue for "common sense" to clarify. Do we perhaps need real numbers and a real audit to understand all the different fixed and variable costs?
How many houses could a single delivery person serve if he only had to stop twice a week at each house to deliver a single 37 cent envelope?
I average a bill a day, a magazine a week, a couple professional related newsletters a week, plus monthly statements from my IRA, my 401K, my bank account, etc. My wife gets a similar volume. Much of this may be sent bulk rate, but none of it is junk. I easily get twice as much noise as I do signal. (We've been in our house just over a year... you should see the volumes that my parents get after 30 years in the same house).
The most labor intensive part of postal work is the sorting.
When the driver pulls up at my house he only stops briefly because he has all my mail already in one bundle. That means that he has spent the time to break open that stack of AOL discs and distribute them to everyone's bundles (do they still use large pigeon holes for this level of sorting?) Then he has to do the same with the Earthlink discs, and the MSN discs, and the occasional real mail. I don't see any difference in the processing time for my local delivery person.
Read some of the other posts here for more enlightment.
I've read the rest of the discussion here. Proof through assertion doesn't impress me.
If you didn't get junkmail your postal rate would be along the same lines as priority mail is now.
Documentation please? I've done some google searching and have found no references to real cost analysis numbers regarding this issue.
I've also heard that the DMA's pet senators have forbidden the Post Office from doing this sort of audit. But, I have been unable to find a reference for this claim too.
My gut feeling is that the lack of easily available hard numbers means the general public wouldn't like the current situation.
I've asked this question before in some spam discussions here. Surely someone out there can drive google better than I, or find another resource to get some hard numbers rather than just parroting what they've heard...?
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We have a house rule that you cannot get behind the wheel of a real car until at least 30 minutes after playing Burnout. As it's crash mode is a popular party competition, I'm sure we have saved hundreds of lives with the rule.
I'm a PS3 owner, and the new settings are the right ones for my non-1080p HDTV. So, I'm happy with them. The better choice, of course, is to make these choices more user configurable so people can get the mode they prefer for each situation.
I'm a little miffed that when a patch comes out they force me to install it before I can log into the playstation network. This patch had nothing to do with networking. Of course, the 360 works the same way.
Inq has already corrected the story. NVidia says the PS3 GPU will be slightly more powerful than the 7800.
XBox Media Center does play the .ts High Def format. With a 100Mbit ethernet connection to the Win2K server these files are very watchable, with a tiny bit of jerkiness that may actually be an encoding issue. They look really nice on my High Def tv (the $700 32" Sanyo 4:3 tube from Walmart)
Calvin and Hobbes on W (from a strip 11 years ago this week):
/
http://www.ucomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/09/21
I'm still surprised that Canon's D10 (and even the new Mark II version of it, I think), has no spot meter.
I think you're mistaken. My DR has a little "*" button on the back that is for spot metering. Now, you need to change the focus mode from it's 7-point mode to single (center) point mode to get what you're expecting, but it then acts "properly" (even when using the flash). My old film SLR was an EOS 650 circa '87 so I got very good at the center the camera on the subject, push the shutter down half way to focus, hit the "*" button to spot meter, recompose shot as desired, and finish pressing the shutter dance.
I've shot 1800 shots in 8 months of owning my DR. Most are of my 7 month old son. It's just priceless to have that many shots of him as he grows up. And very nice that they were at zero additional cost.
I have a DR and love it.
The kit lens adds $100 to the retail price of the camera (body alone lists for $900) and you can't come anywhere near as wide a lens as the 18mm-55mm (times 1.6 crop factor = 28-88 effective field of view) for anywhere near that price for either system. It's not available outside of the kit except from scalpers on EBay.
The thing I love most about the DR is that it takes a picture immediately when I press the shutter button. Every other digicam I've used has had a second or longer delay after pressing the button. This makes a huge difference. (I assume that the other DSLRs we're discussing also perform this way and that the alternate non SLRs do not).
With the hacked firmware, the DR is very close featurewise to the Canon 10D. But, most of the added features are pretty esoteric. I wouldn't flash your camera until you need one of the additions (I haven't flashed mine).
One other exercise to try: Compare prices of the various full kits you're considering. Include whatever (if any) extra batteries, extra lenses, a flash, etc that you want. Canon lenses are supposed to be somewhat less expensive than the Nikon versions.
Finally, find and play with each of the camera's you're considering. Find out which one feels best in your hands, which one has the buttons in a logical place, etc.
Right. The original EQ won't run all that well in a machine with those specs either.
The motivation is to significantly reduce the amount of oxidizer that has to be carried. LOX is a huge percentage of the launch weight of the shuttle and similar vehicles. If that O2 can be taken from the atmosphere for free - then you might be much better off.
But, at this stage, it's only "might be". The TPS (thermal protection system) and the need for rocket power for higher altitude (and thus multiple or hybrid engines) start to eat substantially into the weight savings. It's not clear that airbreathers make sense for space boosters. But, it's not clear that they don't either, so little experiments like this are very worth while.
Call of Duty from Activision/Infinity Ward has this problem as well. You can see on their support site here their recommendation to shut down both Alchohol and Clone CD's virtual drives. This was indeed the necessary fix to get it to run on my machine.
The book that I always pull off my shelf is the classic "Theory of Wing Sections" by Abbott and von Doenhoff (ISBN: 0486605868). It's a compilation of NACA data (NACA is NASA's predicessor) and the most comprehensive reference on the subject that I know of. Amazon has a new copy for $14.
I'm not sure why modern data would be a must for any non trans/supersonic vehicle (and some supersonic aircraft still use the classic NACA 4-digit airfoils).
I picked one of these up yesterday with next month's office Christmas party in mind. Last year people enjoyed DDR and I think this might be just as much fun (we're NASA contractors, go figure).
My limited experience with it is that it works really well. The motion detection is accurate and its fairly easy to get good results with the gadget. Lighting and any motion in the background can be an issue. I had to play a bit to give it enough contrast to be happy. It also seemed facinated with a ceiling fan that was in the background. Once I reaimed it a little it paid more attention to the player.
And who is the cost being shifted from????
Looks like it's being shifted from the spam recipients who don't pay the hosting ISP money and thus have no leverage on them. Why should "we" have to spend all that effort getting "your" ISP to clean up its act.
This tactic also reduces the effectiveness of moving the spammer from IP address to IP address as was commonly done when just the spammer was blocked as you advocate. Again, much less work for the spam recipient.
You, the ISP customer, also can benefit from this. When your ISP eventually catches a clue and removes its spammers, getting out of a few widely used public blocklists is a whole lot easier than getting out of thousands of local private blocklists. (Try sending email from any of AGIS's old IP blocks and see how far it gets.)
A quote of the first paragraph:
Read the full article for more. Having read it, I think there was enough of a case to make the trial worthwhile.
I don't see how a product liability case has much to do with a trademark case, though.
I think this will help SoE move people from EQ to EQ2 because they'll be more likely to experiment at this price than if they had to have a second subscription. I know I can only justify one $12/month game to myself (and the wife). This is only a slight savings over two $12/mo games, but you're getting access to a lot more than two games.
I think, however, that this will make my trying SW:G less likely since it will be a comparably worse deal.
Sony/Verant has made noises that there might be a discount for EQ players that also subscribe to the new Star Wars MMORPG.
I'd much prefer a flat cable fee scheme, and they'd make more money from me at least that way. I'm a current EQ player, but can't justify to myself (or the wife!) more than one $10/month time and money sink. When SW:G or EQ2 or whatever else comes out, under the current pricing I'd have to switch completely (and they'd still be getting $10/month from me). With a cable scheme they might get, say, $15/month from me with no additional load on their servers (I still would have the same number of available play hours as before).
The point is that there is no point in a spammer sending out an email that does not contain instructions on how to obtain the product/service being advertised.
Mostly true.
One exception I can think of off the top of my head is the pump-and-dump stock scam spam. All they're after is to get a bunch of victims to buy a worthless stock, push up the price, and allow them to sell the shares they've already bought at 1 cent for 20 cents.
The new Gameboy Advance SP also has a backlight.
Actually, its a front light. Either way its a huge improvement over the original GBA screen (unless, like me, you have installed an Afterburner internal front light).
an unaccountable entity like an ISP.
I can leave my ISP at any time if I don't like what they're doing. Sound pretty accountable to me.
If I had a wideband option that advertised that they used SPEWS, I'd swap TO them in an instant.
You'll notice that he listed and then did not address the "Common Arguments and Justifications" for running and/or using a RBL. Just couldn't come up with a reason why privately owned servers have to accept mail from any particular person or group if they don't want to.
I think the two slots were to allow for really big programs, before they figured out bank switching. The only thing I saw that ever used both slots was a cartridge that dumped an image of the cartridge in the other slot to the floppy drive.
In other 800 news, the 800 started shipping with 16K and a Basic cart (this is the config my father started with). A year later the 800 I bought for college use (300bps modem - man was I high tech!) came with 48K and no cart.
Here's another article on no-budget film making.
Having been to quite a number of amateur film making festivals at sf cons, I can tell you it doesn't necessarily take money to make an enjoyable movie, but it does take time, patience, and some talent. With nearly identical budgets the films vary substantially. About 33% are unwatchable due to technical issues (sound, lighting, editing), 33% are unwatchable due to artistic issues (acting, story, pacing), and 33% are better than any SCI-FI Channel Original production ever aired. (Don't ask about the final 1%, really!)
How much regular stamped mail do you get? Maybe one or two pieces a week? Now do you think that the post office could send the mailmen to your house everyday if they only made 74 cents a week on you?
Try reversing this. What would it cost AOL to fund a postal service whose only job was to deliver their AOL disks? Bet its more than they're paying now! So "obviously" our first class stamps are subsidizing them.
Oh, or is this perhaps too complex an issue for "common sense" to clarify. Do we perhaps need real numbers and a real audit to understand all the different fixed and variable costs?
I average a bill a day, a magazine a week, a couple professional related newsletters a week, plus monthly statements from my IRA, my 401K, my bank account, etc. My wife gets a similar volume. Much of this may be sent bulk rate, but none of it is junk. I easily get twice as much noise as I do signal. (We've been in our house just over a year... you should see the volumes that my parents get after 30 years in the same house).
The most labor intensive part of postal work is the sorting.
When the driver pulls up at my house he only stops briefly because he has all my mail already in one bundle. That means that he has spent the time to break open that stack of AOL discs and distribute them to everyone's bundles (do they still use large pigeon holes for this level of sorting?) Then he has to do the same with the Earthlink discs, and the MSN discs, and the occasional real mail. I don't see any difference in the processing time for my local delivery person.
Read some of the other posts here for more enlightment.
I've read the rest of the discussion here. Proof through assertion doesn't impress me.
Documentation please? I've done some google searching and have found no references to real cost analysis numbers regarding this issue.
I've also heard that the DMA's pet senators have forbidden the Post Office from doing this sort of audit. But, I have been unable to find a reference for this claim too.
My gut feeling is that the lack of easily available hard numbers means the general public wouldn't like the current situation.
I've asked this question before in some spam discussions here. Surely someone out there can drive google better than I, or find another resource to get some hard numbers rather than just parroting what they've heard...?