Yes, I noticed the Ads in SSX3...and just like smelling an open bowel, I was revolted. I HATE the way the HONDA ELEMENT looks. And to have to 'board through the fugly bugger to get points--felt dirty...like that kid on "A Christmas Story" when he used his decoder ring only to find his heroes secret message was just an ad.
However, as I made it further up the mountain I noticed there was less ad placement. After that, I stayed off the first peak entirely, or just focused on Kaori. She's the next best thing to sunshine when you earn a medal with her. It's like having a cuteness nail driven right into your brain. Ahhhh...
All this lofty talk of WTO and trade restrictions doesn't mean much to the Chinese. They have MFN, and they swamp us with products every year that greedy businesses in the US love to sell. The Chinese will never have to do much more than nod and laugh as business interests and political interests in the US duke it out.
All the monopolist whining isn't going to matter. All the consumer speculation won't matter. In the end profit will be made by the fat cats and consumers might get lucky.
When I'm running Linux on a kick-ass xGHZ cpu which costs only a fraction of a pigopolist wafer and having a great time it's not going to hurt Intel or Microsoft.
Why?
Because I don't like their business practices I don't buy their products, and since I would have never spent money on them in the first place I don't exist for them. It's when the city of "n" fills a landfil with old Microsoft/Intel kit and buys all Chinese hardware and uses free software that Microsoft/Intel will feel it.
Just the thought of large numbers of Microsoft/Intel managers and shareholders taking Xanax gives me smile-cramps.
The politicians and PAC's are looking forward to these developments. Industrial/commercials interests have a lot of money to throw at politicians and the worms that influence them. It's going to be a profitable year for some.
I believe they want us all to shut up and keep buying their crap. However, unless working at fast-food becomes a job synonymous with durable-goods manufacturer and fast-food employees unionize to get a better wage there's a good chance that only upper-middle-class and above families/single people are going to be buying their crap.
Of course, for every complainer to the phone-support techs in Bangelore with suspicously Caucasian names and Hindi accents, there's a legion of silent, passive sheeple graciously accepting of the violence visited upon them in an orgiastic fleecing frenzy.
The only thing you're supposed to do when a heavenly object is about to obliterate you is to pray. PRAY! What? Don't you believe in the tennets of your fairy tales? You're supposed to welcome the end of all the unbelievers with the faith and understanding that only the devout will make it to paradise. You're devout and you will be saved. Riiiight? That asteroid is nothing short of the HAND OF THE ALMIGHTY/STARK FIST OF REMOVAL. You should accept it willingly, lovingingly. Even before it becomes a visible-eye object there should be enough songs and stories about it that the armies of the anointed will leave no dry-earth unshadowed as the seas surge and the sky darkens with its approach.
This whole "playing god" thing will just interfere with the destiny issue. What happens when humanity does avert a disaster which is supposed to render all human life null-o-void-o?! Why, would anyone want to interfere with that!? Virgins for everyone? Constant bliss that makes orgasm seem like a hangnail? If anything you'd think humanity would just use a laser to sky-write "SO LONG AND THANKS FOR THE TEMPTATION" moments before impact. My guess is, a Sky-writing laser is much less expensive than a bunch of godless toys. Whoops, there goes my common sense again...if there's a buck to be made the more expensive option will be selected.
Stupid meat monkeys, you were put here to suffer, to suffer tempation and vice, shucks, you're all tainted...ahahahah! I've got your original sin RIGHT HERE and I'm wearing a fashionable red bow on it.
Maybe what many people who are critical of segregating or creating seperate leagues along gender-lines are ignorant of the kind of behaviors you describe. Many critics of segregation think the bias either makes the game more exciting by adding the emphasis on gender, or think that seemingly mature guys are no longer influenced by women/psuedonyms. The truth is that it will always make a difference in behavior without regard to the skill level of the individuals.
Pair-bonding/survival behaviors are hard-wired and compulsive in males and there's an underlying expectation of them from females. It's the reason why a female can abuse a male in a public setting and know that a reprisal will trigger a retailitory response from every nearby anonymous male. These behaviors and the anticipation of them exist at such a low level that individuals exhibiting them are not always concious of them. In a social/survival context, these behaviors influence/introduce potential mates and create/reinforce relationships. This kind of deferential/sacrifical behavior has done our species a great service in meatspace (breeders must survive!!) but in a video game it's unnecessary social noise.
If gamers are serious about creating a competitive environment for large communities where real-world swag is up for grabs, then the planet has a nearly infinite variety of non-gender handles any player could be proud to use. It's not about androgeny, it's about neutralizing the social noise between genders in a competition. What would really rock would be to generate in-game random handles for the players and only let the audience know who they are until the match is completed and the actual player-handles are revealed on the leader-board.
As for luck, skill, and technical prowess in a game...I eagerly await the birthright lotteries and the kind of online gamers that will produce.
As a poor poor news-junkie I do what's traditionally fashionable for junkies...I let my affluent friends with buttloads of disposable income turn me on to news. Just like someone who was notorious for saying it,
"I could never buy drugs, I get them for free."
To the infotainment moguls I say, "Bring it on, gentrify your publications and hold them out of reach, lock them up behind SSL and demographics siphons and penalize those who don't want FLASH ads or irritating popups by locking those users out too. Make it so your crap is only viewable on the most exploited browser/os in the land. There will always be free blogs, IRC, and for at least the near future, dead-tree and television/cable news. My productivity will immediately improve if the only time I can access infotainment is in front of the television.
You're spot-on. As someone who dumped more money than I should have in the arcades during the 80's I now have a couple of consoles (picked up the cube over the holiday) and a small home LAN and there's nothing the arcades or even the commercial gaming lans have to offer me.
Now, when you can "jack-in" and fly-around/run-around with a team of other people from anywhere on the planet with a full-sensorium and 360deg-freedom of movement and the ability to take non-human form, with hardware/software beyond anything the home-user can even touch, I'll be back. Until then, I'll be tooling around on the LAN with the family attacking capital ships, fighting the (zerg/terrans/protoss), exploring with Lara Croft on the console, and getting all "Norrath" with the whole family, or any number of other distractions which backs up my assertion to the kids that, "No, we just saw a movie and spent nearly $40, we play video games at home because they're better and they don't cost $1 for less than a minute. All these things are too complicated and expensive now."
They think about it for less than a second and start suggesting activites, not all of them involving video games. Been getting more than the normal amount of requests for the library. It's enough to make a geek get all misty and stuff.
Ah, you can (ask,beg,plead,..., whatever) but unless you're big business the FBI is obligated, nay, required to look you and your company up in their "Total Idiot Awareness" Files and post your hairy ass, complete with a photo-shopped company logo prominently displayed over your junk on their "Dumbass-Wall". Remember sheeple, if it doesn't clearly state "kill-chute" or "bolt-gun" or "shears" in the text of the write-up, they are shining you on.
Your government is not for you, by you, or even wants to hear from you (yeah you!) unless your request has passed through some mamal's innards associated with either the "Ministry of Representatives" or the "Ministry of Law"...in either case the final result will have been thoroughly digested and just the corn (kernels) will have survied to be lovingly removed from the dross to validate your affiliation in order for one of the "alpha-sheeple" to get on the case.
We should all remember that the President of the United States kissed Bill Gate's ring during his election campaign and the handlers in government want to show that it was a genuine kiss. A Christian kiss! The kind of kiss that is only shared between a man and a woman.
As for the subject, I think we'd all like to hear less HD noise and have to deal with spin-up/spin-down lag for sleeping machines and stupid power-saving schemes devised to work around having to spin analog media to recover and use digital information.
If there's any one component which should be as "solid-state" as possible it's the secondary storage. It would be great to have a unit the same size as the current ide drives which would allow you run a cluster of cards as a large drive or combination of virtual drives with any kind of file-system driver. We could abstract any kind of "bus", scsi, serial-ide, ide, anything is possible. And with fail-over and redundancy there shouldn't be any reason to lose data. It could be platform neutral and the backplane on the controller should be spec'd to scale depending on the capacities of the cards used.
Wait..this is too much like right..too enabling. This will never be permitted until Microsoft and the hardware companies have locked arms and are merrily goosestepping down main-street, saluting Herr Gates and big government. My bad.
Hopefully this will help clear up the whole radiation issue. Can't say enough cool things about the magnetosphere.
And as for NASA and whatever we suppose its mission or goals or even what its strategy is...we should probably remember it's a political strap-on. Sure it sees lots of time outside the government's underwear drawer, but regardless of whatever new "Mission" (think of various colored condoms being rolled onto it) NASA is given it's still the same inflexible hard-rubber willie. When talking about its budget we should think in terms of length and circumference. And when we consider how it's being used on/for/by the public, consider the media lubricant...schweet schweet lubricant. I'm still surprised that after so many years the public still feels anything when it comes to NASA.
1) Chanching the orbit to that of the ISS will take a LOT of fuel.
Maybe, but then we've done some pretty amazing things with solar golf before. Stage the changes correctly and Hubble will slide into an orbit which will co-incide with the ISS and still provide a envelope of saftey which will permit another opportunity to properly manuver the Hubble close enough to the station to permit it to be grappled by the robotic arm and be serviced by personel on the ISS. It is possible for patience and common sense to carry the day on this one and make everyone look good.
2) Even if you could work around the fuel-problem-thingy, it might be even more risky than a servicing mission; the hubble was not designed to perform a docking, so you would risk crashing it into the ISS. It wouldn't be pretty. addressed this with the first rebut.
3) The thrusters of the ISS and leaks create a sort of gas bubble around the ISS. Not ideal for oservations.
Although there is a particle field surrounding the ISS, the Hubble would only be there long enough to see the hardware replaced and another orbital solution projected. It might also be a nice idea to retrofit the hubble with a bootser harness which could provide it with some nifty ion propulsion capabilities. It would rock to have that telescope be able to shoot-n-scoot.
4a) if you were to attach it to the ISS, the vibrations from the space station would make observations a problem. The telescope wouldn't actualy be in anything but self-test and maint-mode.
4b) If it were to be floating around the ISS, you'd have a constant risk (see problem 2). Actually, any two large bodies in micro-gravity influence each other, creating a new orbital solution. That's probably the more intense concern as the ISS-Hubble will have to be reboosted more frequently until the maint. is completed or Hubble is released.
Nothing personal, just riffing on the 1080 reference.
1080 Avalanche is a title that I wish they wouldn't have released, it needed about another six months to a year of effort. Compared to SSX3 it's a sad, painfully cheerless imitation of what EA is publishing. When I pilot a snow-boarder down the slope they shouldn't auto-magically knock down everyone around them. Every time they do it I want to smack someone in the head. There's also something terribly wrong with trying to pull tricks. At SSX-Tricky, on the Playstation2, I'm able to pull a million points out of a showoff, and when I unlocked all the courses on 1080 Avalanche it was underwhelming with thankless cluttered-courses and paths across dirt,water,mud,grass,snow--somehow my friction co-efficient magically stayed the same. From the box-art/screenshots you'd swear they were using the same engine as SSX3, but when you play it there's a very big, painful difference. 1080 just doesn't sport a good trick system. And there's only 5 characters, none of which really stand out. SSX3 has character development down to an art-form. If you have a chance to rent a game for the Gamecube, try SSX3--even if you hate snowboarding games or think you wouldn't like it, when Kaori wins a race the sheer technical merit and "cute" factor will have you grinning like a Dentrassi answering a sub-sensa-etho-matic. While winning anything in 1080 Avalanche is a rather cheerless experience filled with "so what"-ness. If it's a "first-love" situation, then please, do yourself a favor and try SSX3, you'll never go back.
And does anybody else thing they blew the art-direction on the "Windwalker"...makes me shudder with revulsion just looking at the box.
Of course the biggest draw in the known universe for the gamecube should be the Gameboy Player. Nobody's mentioned that yet. There's a buttload of modified gameboy carts which should work in the player, and through the player it should be possible to touch some of the interfaces for the gamecube itself (they didn't abstract it too much if the bottom line rule of "just make it go" holds true). Given the extensible nature of the cube (3 interface ports,4 joystick ports) it's a boxen just looking for add-ons.
A game controller is not supposed to fight you. It's supposed to extend your skills into a game/sim environment. Force-feedback is useful and allows the environment to affect your efficiency, and controllers that "rumble" aren't too bad either, but when they market this kind of controller as a replacement for general purpose controllers I feel like spitting and running up the black flag.
What this controller needs to do is support a physical game, like dance-mats support DDR. If there's some kind of Arm-Wrestling game it would make sense, but when I'm flying down the slope with Kaori (SSXTricky) and the controller causes me problems I start channeling Nordic Stormgod rage. That controller dies to make room for the next one. Any gamer who values their time will not waste their time deluding themselves that a controller that exhausts them is a good idea. It's a recipie for frustration.
I'm certain that if the people who came up with device surveyed DDR gamers they would find that less than 10% actually use the mats because by the time you've even made an attempt to memorize the moves for one simple song all you want to do is just sit down and do something less strenuous in less than twenty minutes. The less time you can effectively spend with a game, the less you want to play it. DDR and other "physically" challenging video games require a "Buddy" system, much like going out and jogging.
Knowing our luck, some markettroid took a "pie-in-the-sky" number of purchased Playstation2/Xbox consoles and came up with a "$100(N *.1)= $PROFIT" battle cry which was further taken up by some venture capitalists and decided to spring for it. Who knows, maybe version 2 will have a grip-pressure sensor and be able model other stimulating friction-based activites...imagine what Vice-City (n) "Bad Girls Go Everywhere" could do with something like that, featuring Christy Trysty in situations featuring Arm-Wresting, the odd dominitrix job, and the occasional "under the table" money-maker manuver before applying a killer-grip and demanding the entire wallet while trying to put the grip on some king-pin figure who framed her because she wouldn't put out for him. Sell it as a bundle for a bundle, $$$$. It would be serious wicked to hear the wife/girlfriend say, "Yeah, I gave him one of these," makes an OK gesture," and lead him outside where I killed his petrified naked ass with a pipe-wrench," and with a devious grin says, "now it's your turn, gimme that!"...and much shrieking ensued.
Human history is awash in blood, not ink. We see ink now, but it's all rather boring, and when the crap-pile of human endeavor topples over, the characteristics that lead medical profiteers and educators diagnose people as having a condition which keeps them from focusing on CRAP when they would be normally foraging, hunting, or working at surviving.
We live in a world where the intersection of relevance and effectiveness in k-12 education is twenty years behind us. The middle-class is in decline, and with perscription-happy insurance plans it's easier than ever to reconcile our children and ourselves to medicated bliss.
In the United States (can't speak for any other place) there's this sense of a risk-free world, a magical place where someone is responsible for anything and everything that could possibly happen to us or our children. Modern medicine is supposed to keep us alive, even if it means being butchered, or drugged into oblivion. We swallow (lovingly) the notion that if someone tells us our child can't function in an institution that the instituion is fine so the child must be broken. We're lock-step babies, passived before a system designed to socialize us into factory workers. That social contract has been tore-down by globalization. We no longer need to persue the goal of making good citizens to build appliances and cars. Other countries have taken that up. Our job, as good citizens of the United States, should be to make busloads of babies and train them all up to be soldiers (or as Bush-Lightyear once mentioned, "Crusaders") so our glorious leaders than play their enemies against each other and call upon our kids to unseat regimes that don't play. And if you act fast, you can have enough kids to still afford top-Ramen and diet-soda come tax-time. Once the sheeple wise up and you feel like you're walking through a PX while you stroll the mall, you can bet that whole child-tax-credit vibe will pop like a soap-bubble.
So here's a thought. If your kids have no interest in school it doesn't mean your child is broken. Human nature predates artifical constructs like school and "rule-of-law". Maybe they just need some quality hunter-gatherer time before commiting to a life of endless trivia and control. You know, before being mentally gelded to be useful to business and serve as good shoppers, consumers, and prisoners.
When you're riding a bicycle you don't want to carry a ruck.
When you're marching for twenty miles, you really don't want to carry a ruck.
They need to shitcan the "dog" anthropomorhpic and look into the spider format, then supersize that puppy, so you can get some utility out of it. Spiders are a much better model, and imagine the terror they would invoke (mmmmmm, sweet terror).
The spider morphic is a great design, tested by nature, it can be accessorized to work in different terrain. Water wouldn't get it down, just give it some "water-skipper" booties. Swamp? Not an issue, just give it a floatie around it's midsection and it will move through any deep spots by flicking along. Wooded terrain? It could easily amble along a game trail by making it's "working footprint" narrower, just like a real spider. If I'm in the desert or tundra/snow-pack, just put some booties on the bugger and it will amble along just fine, could even "self-right" when necessary and it would be able to hold my baggage on a spine-framework where the abdomen would be. And it would be able to roll and remain static by dropping power to the the elastomer muscles, allowing the mechanical resistive force of the legs to retract into that familiar "ARGH! Something just touched me" posture spiders can assume.
Another nice aspect of the spider design is that it could also support a winch, survive a fall using that "touched spider" config, and if you drape it in camo net or a poncho it would give you shade (depending on the scale). This would be a serious asset for squad missions, and you would only need one, maybe two of these to support a squad. With the proper leg configuration and a solar-cell "net", it could recharge itself during breaks, hold radio gear (bluetooth squad commo through the puppy on crypt/fm), and a mess of other things that make sense. But really, unload the soldier so "light-fighter" makes sense. They want soldiers that weight 150lbs and then they put a 100lbs on their back and act like this is some kind of good idea. Ha!
A dog-bot...sheesh, typical DARPA lack of vision. You'd think Dr. Evil and his friends at DARPA would at least demand a "LASER".
Where I live, there are at least 3 Walmarts. Of course there were people who made noise about them, but then the right palms were greased, promises were exchanged, and "POINK", there they were.
Something about Walmart that most people never hear about is the burden they place on the local economy, especially when it comes to health care. Essentially, Walmart relies on the community to take care of employee medical costs by simply not providing a competetive health-care plan and paying their employees significanlty lower wages, which makes getting health insurance prohibitive. So whenever a Walmart employee has a problem the community pays. So, in short, Walmart moves in, Food stores and mom-and-pop businesses are throttled and die, and then there's less middle-class income to fill the coffers and support the medical costs of the community.
At this point, as someone who has not come from money and was unable to network my way into a profitable career (community college doesn't land you a white-collar job in the fortune 500 or even the fortune 1000), I feel lucky I'm making mortgage for now. If my luck doesn't hold, I'll probably be at the forefront of people who go from living in a house to living in a one-room apartment with ever-increasing rent until I have no choice but to join the welfare rolls. As for my kids, I'm going to push them towards things which can never be outsourced, like Plumbing and Electrical and mechanics jobs, you know, trades. The fluffy info-economy jobs are ultimately transportable, but like local government, a job in the trades will never go away, even when large chunks of the US are annexed by other countries to pay for our debt.
Hey, we're like one terrorist incident from Martial Law, right? When that happens doesn't the incumbent save a buttload of campaign money?
I agree, alone would be better than having a spacefaring species with even the same or better tech being aware of us. At best it would be a completely ambivalent (a package of information exchanged between species every century or so and nothing more interesting than just math) relationship, but knowing how humanity works, if the other speices cannot destroy humanity outright, some human dumbass is going to build a ship/probe and try to be the first one to show up there and sell them porn/cheeseburgers/goddist pap/amway. It's in the nature of the species. After that, the lot will all die from (mastrubation, heart-attack,too much worship at that altar site, who-knows, might just view another sentient life-form in the flesh as their new god and have a genocidal holy war to prove otherwise?) and three generations of offspring later dumbass will be coming back at near ftl speeds, and the great grandkids of the aforementioned dumbass will have a bestseller about how their great grandfather hosed an entire species, complete with photos and movie-deals and page after page of alien gay-porn nobody will understand so some other dumbass will make a religion out of that complete with a full line of inflatables/wearables/insertables, and deals with IKEA for easily assembled altars. If we're lucky the current fundamentalists of that age could implode as they try to snuff it all out, taking both the new and old goddist sucktards down the same toilet at the same time. One flush please, but two is still considered ok.
I guess I'm just trying to say that as an intergalactic species goes, we're a complete loss, and it's probably in our good fortune that any species that already exists which would understand the messages and entertainment we've broadcast would simply be hoping that humanity does itself in quickly or think we already have, knowing that we're too much trouble and not tasty enough to bother with. We won't be interesting until we no longer live and die by fairy-tales, and still advance the species without living in our own mental/physical detrius like the bread-and-circuses of politics and dumb-monkey ideologies that permit humanity to stay timelessly simple and screwed because it's so much easier than actually becoming something more.
maybe the buggers can press a DVD that actually plays without interruption once the movie is going. Every DVD movie I've ever played has at least one pause in the main feature. WTF?! Is it to keep us from being able to...uh, value what we paid money for? Maybe it was put in there to ensure that anyone who attempted to act like a theatre would be embarrased? Or maybe our DVD players are just crap designed to play crap dvd's and make our corporate overlords fat and happy.
ARGH! After re-reading the parent to this parent I _finally_ understood the issue. (therin I post, guilty of reading, yet not understanding, gad...)
So there I was, handing out "How to upgrade/install packages from a HD repository" when the original issue deals with the borked/broken "UPGRADE MANDRAKE LINUX" problem. (application of palm to forehead...completed)
Yes, upgrading the entire distro is a broken mess using the Mandrake "upgrade" option from the install menus during boot/install to upgrade Mandrake Linux. I've never had that work, ever. The sad thing is, that I know I'm not alone. It's probably some kind of never-ending issue like the KPPPD/dialer problems. It's always been easier to just setup a "/home" partition and know that anything short of being brain-dead and formatting that partition everything should come back up, post-install.
If there's some way to do an upgrade from one version of Mandrake Linux to another version of Mandrake Linux (maybe using a combined media-source on a Windows FAT partion and have the install automagically generate a heuristics file) aside from the CD's that would be an interesting tip because it's hard to be at the machine 9 or 10 hours before it starts failing to install RPMS' and then fails the upgrade, leaving you wondering why you even bothered.
(BING! Just had an idea!) Maybe this is what the DVD-ROM of Mandrake Linux is for. Being able to just put that puppy in the drive, click a few buttons, and then walk away...I dunno. At this point it's the caffiene talking, that or...
Chooks-sama, urpmi is your mdk friend. Your very best mdk friend.
Spend an hour with this, and if you have the hard-drive to do so, create a folder in rootspace, say/mandrake/9.2/ blow all the RPMS from the disks into it
Then urpmi.addmedia -f mrpms file://mandrake/9.2
Then you can use the GUI to look through your media sources, and all the installs can come from that media source.
Be sure to add an "update source" using the GUI interface because that's not very friendly yet, but after that a quick trip to
man urpmi
will always steer you in the right direction.
There's other tools similar to this which stomp on "anti-RPM" sentiments like a grape. I once hated RPM distros but Mandrake has done an incredible job.
I like games that play as a good movie (that involve you, not like Final-Fantasy X..whatever), and "Primal" did a good job. They used music from 16-Volt's "Super-Cool-Nothing", which was really fitting. The developers even worked some of the lyrics into very nice commercials and promo-edits. The game rocked, the music fit, and I recommend both the game and the music.
Recently I've played SSX3, and I IMMEDIATELY took the "dj" factor out. I hate radio. I'm the kind of rotten bastard that absolutely hates "talk" when it's nothing more than PAP, and the first time the radio "looped" on me, it was outta there. Maybe this is why "surveyors" for radio hate guys. After playing SSX-Tricky for over a year (I'm pathetic, forgive me) my skills quickly enabled me to enjoy a full playlist and to max out all of Kaori's skills. BTW, she's the most up-beat, least idiotic of the characters in the game. And she's so damn cute she makes me want to hug my monitor whenever I win with her. I'll go so far as to say they made her loveable. Sappy but true. I haven't gone looking for them, but I imagine there's a "Love Kaori" webring out there somewhere.
I concur. However, if you're less interested in outright brutality and disfigurement it's an interesting development. Since electricity has become so ubiquitous, cheap and effective electro-convulsive torture methods have flourished. But it's crude. This would be a sophisticated means of producing a very pronounced disorientation that affects the body and mind. Using drugs can be dangerous and there's so much miscibility with allergies and side-effects, and of course what happens when the staff starts enjoying the good-stuff too?
If a government wanted to still look good in the eyes of the world while perfoming interrogations, this would be a nice way to do it. Much better than a
talk-man , or being shaken until you go into a coma and die.
Every First-person-shooter I've played since 1996 seems to produce "sim-sickness" quite effectively without horking the inner-ear. I've found the newest "console" FPS games are even more effective at it. There's been several (Time-Splitters3,Warhammer40k,Quake3,etc...) that become so intolerable so fast that I can't even get through a level without wanting to just lay down and die. Unless this piece of kit can reduce or eliminate sim-sickness (where your inner ear wants a piece of the action your eyes/motor cortext are having fun with) by giving us another input it's not going to catch on.
Of course, it would be a blast for modders to create a program which would specifically be used to "torture", like a centerfuge. Keep that puppy around for when someone has been drinking too much, wrap them up in a blanket and clear the area. This could also see use in interrogation. It's one thing to wear people down from the outside (physical exertion, exposure, witholding food/water) but hook them up to something like this and you have a low-tech device that produces severe discomfort and disorientation. We'll know the real-deal when 3rd world countries start buying them by the pallet.
I could go on, but this is about as clean as it gets, because...
We need self-healing technologies. They don't come from space. We need to make them here. We can test them in a variety of environments, cheaply.
If we, the collective humanity, can stop wasting money making faltering attempts at greatness and just set reasonable goals (sustainable deep-ocean habitats,sustainable polar habitats, better/safer/reliable energy) and create the technologies necessary to make them happen _here_ we will flourish anywhere.
Until then, it's all hand-waving and one-upmanship nationalistic stupidity.
I'd rather see a handful of "Burt Rutans" than a hundred NASA's.
Not only would it be more efficient, but with the lack of red-tape/buckpassing/budget-crap something like "progress" might actually take place.
Personally, I think the governments of the world are scared to death of people getting out of their reach. Governments, like any entity, don't like to lose their source of wealth and power and they absolutely hate competition.
I'm probably repeating myself here. That's ok. Everyone who frequents slashdot understands the value of repetition (esp. the editors).
What's to be taken from this is that in many countries the predetermined guilt of an individual isn't always pronounced because its often hard to find something worth talking about more than once. That it's going back to trial means the necessary politics and petting which make a successful conviction have been properly secured this time. The defendant is older too.
In this case, there's actually a useful piece of code, the potential for exploits and the need for a good example to be made that makes the smart sheeple think twice before sassing their international corporate overlords. After all, cheap self-destructing media that's secure enough for people to sell that only works for the people it's supposed to work for is a great business plan that pays attorneys. Anything that possibly imperils that model must be flayed to the bone and hung before the public in order to stop such transgressions from happening again.
In these "civilized" times public hanging, torture, mutilation, and prolonged display won't sell many commercials, but going through the hand-waving and sound-bytes will keep media's talking heads babbling for weeks, or even months. In the end, Jon will probably get some kind of sentence--public service or if they drag it out enough, actual prison.
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Yes, I noticed the Ads in SSX3...and just like smelling an open bowel, I was revolted. I HATE the way the HONDA ELEMENT looks. And to have to 'board through the fugly bugger to get points--felt dirty...like that kid on "A Christmas Story" when he used his decoder ring only to find his heroes secret message was just an ad.
However, as I made it further up the mountain I noticed there was less ad placement. After that, I stayed off the first peak entirely, or just focused on Kaori. She's the next best thing to sunshine when you earn a medal with her. It's like having a cuteness nail driven right into your brain. Ahhhh...
The enemy of my enemy is a friend.
All this lofty talk of WTO and trade restrictions doesn't mean much to the Chinese. They have MFN, and they swamp us with products every year that greedy businesses in the US love to sell. The Chinese will never have to do much more than nod and laugh as business interests and political interests in the US duke it out.
All the monopolist whining isn't going to matter.
All the consumer speculation won't matter.
In the end profit will be made by the fat cats and consumers might get lucky.
When I'm running Linux on a kick-ass xGHZ cpu which costs only a fraction of a pigopolist wafer and having a great time it's not going to hurt Intel or Microsoft.
Why?
Because I don't like their business practices I don't buy their products, and since I would have never spent money on them in the first place I don't exist for them. It's when the city of "n" fills a landfil with old Microsoft/Intel kit and buys all Chinese hardware and uses free software that Microsoft/Intel will feel it.
Just the thought of large numbers of Microsoft/Intel managers and shareholders taking Xanax gives me smile-cramps.
The politicians and PAC's are looking forward to these developments. Industrial/commercials interests have a lot of money to throw at politicians and the worms that influence them. It's going to be a profitable year for some.
As for the rest of us...
I believe they want us all to shut up and keep buying their crap. However, unless working at fast-food becomes a job synonymous with durable-goods manufacturer and fast-food employees unionize to get a better wage there's a good chance that only upper-middle-class and above families/single people are going to be buying their crap.
Of course, for every complainer to the phone-support techs in Bangelore with suspicously Caucasian names and Hindi accents, there's a legion of silent, passive sheeple graciously accepting of the violence visited upon them in an orgiastic fleecing frenzy.
Sounds like business as usual. Nothing new here.
Hey, goddist filth!
The only thing you're supposed to do when a heavenly object is about to obliterate you is to pray. PRAY!
What?
Don't you believe in the tennets of your fairy tales? You're supposed to welcome the end of all the unbelievers with the faith and understanding that only the devout will make it to paradise. You're devout and you will be saved.
Riiiight?
That asteroid is nothing short of the HAND OF THE ALMIGHTY/STARK FIST OF REMOVAL.
You should accept it willingly, lovingingly. Even before it becomes a visible-eye object there should be enough songs and stories about it that the armies of the anointed will leave no dry-earth unshadowed as the seas surge and the sky darkens with its approach.
This whole "playing god" thing will just interfere with the destiny issue.
What happens when humanity does avert a disaster which is supposed to render all human life null-o-void-o?!
Why, would anyone want to interfere with that!?
Virgins for everyone?
Constant bliss that makes orgasm seem like a hangnail?
If anything you'd think humanity would just use a laser to sky-write
"SO LONG AND THANKS FOR THE TEMPTATION" moments before impact.
My guess is, a Sky-writing laser is much less expensive than a bunch of godless toys. Whoops, there goes my common sense again...if there's a buck to be made the more expensive option will be selected.
Stupid meat monkeys, you were put here to suffer, to suffer tempation and vice, shucks, you're all tainted...ahahahah! I've got your original sin RIGHT HERE and I'm wearing a fashionable red bow on it.
Maybe what many people who are critical of segregating or creating seperate leagues along gender-lines are ignorant of the kind of behaviors you describe. Many critics of segregation think the bias either makes the game more exciting by adding the emphasis on gender, or think that seemingly mature guys are no longer influenced by women/psuedonyms. The truth is that it will always make a difference in behavior without regard to the skill level of the individuals.
Pair-bonding/survival behaviors are hard-wired and compulsive in males and there's an underlying expectation of them from females. It's the reason why a female can abuse a male in a public setting and know that a reprisal will trigger a retailitory response from every nearby anonymous male. These behaviors and the anticipation of them exist at such a low level that individuals exhibiting them are not always concious of them. In a social/survival context, these behaviors influence/introduce potential mates and create/reinforce relationships. This kind of deferential/sacrifical behavior has done our species a great service in meatspace (breeders must survive!!) but in a video game it's unnecessary social noise.
If gamers are serious about creating a competitive environment for large communities where real-world swag is up for grabs, then the planet has a nearly infinite variety of non-gender handles any player could be proud to use. It's not about androgeny, it's about neutralizing the social noise between genders in a competition. What would really rock would be to generate in-game random handles for the players and only let the audience know who they are until the match is completed and the actual player-handles are revealed on the leader-board.
As for luck, skill, and technical prowess in a game...I eagerly await the birthright lotteries and the kind of online gamers that will produce.
As a poor poor news-junkie I do what's traditionally fashionable for junkies...I let my affluent friends with buttloads of disposable income turn me on to news. Just like someone who was notorious for saying it,
"I could never buy drugs, I get them for free."
To the infotainment moguls I say, "Bring it on, gentrify your publications and hold them out of reach, lock them up behind SSL and demographics siphons and penalize those who don't want FLASH ads or irritating popups by locking those users out too. Make it so your crap is only viewable on the most exploited browser/os in the land. There will always be free blogs, IRC, and for at least the near future, dead-tree and television/cable news. My productivity will immediately improve if the only time I can access infotainment is in front of the television.
You're spot-on. As someone who dumped more money than I should have in the arcades during the 80's I now have a couple of consoles (picked up the cube over the holiday) and a small home LAN and there's nothing the arcades or even the commercial gaming lans have to offer me.
Now, when you can "jack-in" and fly-around/run-around with a team of other people from anywhere on the planet with a full-sensorium and 360deg-freedom of movement and the ability to take non-human form, with hardware/software beyond anything the home-user can even touch, I'll be back. Until then, I'll be tooling around on the LAN with the family attacking capital ships, fighting the (zerg/terrans/protoss), exploring with Lara Croft on the console, and getting all "Norrath" with the whole family, or any number of other distractions which backs up my assertion to the kids that,
"No, we just saw a movie and spent nearly $40, we play video games at home because they're better and they don't cost $1 for less than a minute. All these things are too complicated and expensive now."
They think about it for less than a second and start suggesting activites, not all of them involving video games. Been getting more than the normal amount of requests for the library. It's enough to make a geek get all misty and stuff.
Ah, you can (ask,beg,plead,..., whatever) but unless you're big business the FBI is obligated, nay, required to look you and your company up in their "Total Idiot Awareness" Files and post your hairy ass, complete with a photo-shopped company logo prominently displayed over your junk on their "Dumbass-Wall". Remember sheeple, if it doesn't clearly state "kill-chute" or "bolt-gun" or "shears" in the text of the write-up, they are shining you on.
Your government is not for you, by you, or even wants to hear from you (yeah you!) unless your request has passed through some mamal's innards associated with either the "Ministry of Representatives" or the "Ministry of Law"...in either case the final result will have been thoroughly digested and just the corn (kernels) will have survied to be lovingly removed from the dross to validate your affiliation in order for one of the "alpha-sheeple" to get on the case.
We should all remember that the President of the United States kissed Bill Gate's ring during his election campaign and the handlers in government want to show that it was a genuine kiss. A Christian kiss! The kind of kiss that is only shared between a man and a woman.
Hey, why go anonymous on this kind of comment?
As for the subject, I think we'd all like to hear less HD noise and have to deal with spin-up/spin-down lag for sleeping machines and stupid power-saving schemes devised to work around having to spin analog media to recover and use digital information.
If there's any one component which should be as "solid-state" as possible it's the secondary storage. It would be great to have a unit the same size as the current ide drives which would allow you run a cluster of cards as a large drive or combination of virtual drives with any kind of file-system driver. We could abstract any kind of "bus", scsi, serial-ide, ide, anything is possible. And with fail-over and redundancy there shouldn't be any reason to lose data. It could be platform neutral and the backplane on the controller should be spec'd to scale depending on the capacities of the cards used.
Wait..this is too much like right..too enabling.
This will never be permitted until Microsoft and the hardware companies have locked arms and are merrily goosestepping down main-street, saluting Herr Gates and big government.
My bad.
Link to some information culled from a debunking site RE: Van Allen Belts
Hopefully this will help clear up the whole radiation issue. Can't say enough cool things about the magnetosphere.
And as for NASA and whatever we suppose its mission or goals or even what its strategy is...we should probably remember it's a political strap-on. Sure it sees lots of time outside the government's underwear drawer, but regardless of whatever new "Mission" (think of various colored condoms being rolled onto it) NASA is given it's still the same inflexible hard-rubber willie. When talking about its budget we should think in terms of length and circumference. And when we consider how it's being used on/for/by the public, consider the media lubricant...schweet schweet lubricant. I'm still surprised that after so many years the public still feels anything when it comes to NASA.
Maybe, but then we've done some pretty amazing things with solar golf before. Stage the changes correctly and Hubble will slide into an orbit which will co-incide with the ISS and still provide a envelope of saftey which will permit another opportunity to properly manuver the Hubble close enough to the station to permit it to be grappled by the robotic arm and be serviced by personel on the ISS. It is possible for patience and common sense to carry the day on this one and make everyone look good. 2) Even if you could work around the fuel-problem-thingy, it might be even more risky than a servicing mission; the hubble was not designed to perform a docking, so you would risk crashing it into the ISS. It wouldn't be pretty.
addressed this with the first rebut.
3) The thrusters of the ISS and leaks create a sort of gas bubble around the ISS. Not ideal for oservations. Although there is a particle field surrounding the ISS, the Hubble would only be there long enough to see the hardware replaced and another orbital solution projected. It might also be a nice idea to retrofit the hubble with a bootser harness which could provide it with some nifty ion propulsion capabilities. It would rock to have that telescope be able to shoot-n-scoot.
4a) if you were to attach it to the ISS, the vibrations from the space station would make observations a problem.
The telescope wouldn't actualy be in anything but self-test and maint-mode.
4b) If it were to be floating around the ISS, you'd have a constant risk (see problem 2).
Actually, any two large bodies in micro-gravity influence each other, creating a new orbital solution. That's probably the more intense concern as the ISS-Hubble will have to be reboosted more frequently until the maint. is completed or Hubble is released.
Nothing personal, just riffing on the 1080 reference.
1080 Avalanche is a title that I wish they wouldn't have released, it needed about another six months to a year of effort. Compared to SSX3 it's a sad, painfully cheerless imitation of what EA is publishing. When I pilot a snow-boarder down the slope they shouldn't auto-magically knock down everyone around them. Every time they do it I want to smack someone in the head. There's also something terribly wrong with trying to pull tricks. At SSX-Tricky, on the Playstation2, I'm able to pull a million points out of a showoff, and when I unlocked all the courses on 1080 Avalanche it was underwhelming with thankless cluttered-courses and paths across dirt,water,mud,grass,snow--somehow my friction co-efficient magically stayed the same. From the box-art/screenshots you'd swear they were using the same engine as SSX3, but when you play it there's a very big, painful difference. 1080 just doesn't sport a good trick system. And there's only 5 characters, none of which really stand out. SSX3 has character development down to an art-form. If you have a chance to rent a game for the Gamecube, try SSX3--even if you hate snowboarding games or think you wouldn't like it, when Kaori wins a race the sheer technical merit and "cute" factor will have you grinning like a Dentrassi answering a sub-sensa-etho-matic. While winning anything in 1080 Avalanche is a rather cheerless experience filled with "so what"-ness. If it's a "first-love" situation, then please, do yourself a favor and try SSX3, you'll never go back.
And does anybody else thing they blew the art-direction on the "Windwalker"...makes me shudder with revulsion just looking at the box.
Of course the biggest draw in the known universe for the gamecube should be the Gameboy Player. Nobody's mentioned that yet. There's a buttload of modified gameboy carts which should work in the player, and through the player it should be possible to touch some of the interfaces for the gamecube itself (they didn't abstract it too much if the bottom line rule of "just make it go" holds true). Given the extensible nature of the cube (3 interface ports,4 joystick ports) it's a boxen just looking for add-ons.
A game controller is not supposed to fight you. It's supposed to extend your skills into a game/sim environment. Force-feedback is useful and allows the environment to affect your efficiency, and controllers that "rumble" aren't too bad either, but when they market this kind of controller as a replacement for general purpose controllers I feel like spitting and running up the black flag.
.1)= $PROFIT" battle cry which was further taken up by some venture capitalists and decided to spring for it. Who knows, maybe version 2 will have a grip-pressure sensor and be able model other stimulating friction-based activites...imagine what Vice-City (n) "Bad Girls Go Everywhere" could do with something like that, featuring Christy Trysty in situations featuring Arm-Wresting, the odd dominitrix job, and the occasional "under the table" money-maker manuver before applying a killer-grip and demanding the entire wallet while trying to put the grip on some king-pin figure who framed her because she wouldn't put out for him. Sell it as a bundle for a bundle, $$$$. It would be serious wicked to hear the wife/girlfriend say, ...and much shrieking ensued.
What this controller needs to do is support a physical game, like dance-mats support DDR. If there's some kind of Arm-Wrestling game it would make sense, but when I'm flying down the slope with Kaori (SSXTricky) and the controller causes me problems I start channeling Nordic Stormgod rage. That controller dies to make room for the next one. Any gamer who values their time will not waste their time deluding themselves that a controller that exhausts them is a good idea. It's a recipie for frustration.
I'm certain that if the people who came up with device surveyed DDR gamers they would find that less than 10% actually use the mats because by the time you've even made an attempt to memorize the moves for one simple song all you want to do is just sit down and do something less strenuous in less than twenty minutes. The less time you can effectively spend with a game, the less you want to play it. DDR and other "physically" challenging video games require a "Buddy" system, much like going out and jogging.
Knowing our luck, some markettroid took a "pie-in-the-sky" number of purchased Playstation2/Xbox consoles and came up with a "$100(N *
"Yeah, I gave him one of these," makes an OK gesture," and lead him outside where I killed his petrified naked ass with a pipe-wrench," and with a devious grin says, "now it's your turn, gimme that!"
Human history is awash in blood, not ink.
We see ink now, but it's all rather boring, and when the crap-pile of human endeavor topples over, the characteristics that lead medical profiteers and educators diagnose people as having a condition which keeps them from focusing on CRAP when they would be normally foraging, hunting, or working at surviving.
We live in a world where the intersection of relevance and effectiveness in k-12 education is twenty years behind us. The middle-class is in decline, and with perscription-happy insurance plans it's easier than ever to reconcile our children and ourselves to medicated bliss.
In the United States (can't speak for any other place) there's this sense of a risk-free world, a magical place where someone is responsible for anything and everything that could possibly happen to us or our children. Modern medicine is supposed to keep us alive, even if it means being butchered, or drugged into oblivion. We swallow (lovingly) the notion that if someone tells us our child can't function in an institution that the instituion is fine so the child must be broken. We're lock-step babies, passived before a system designed to socialize us into factory workers. That social contract has been tore-down by globalization. We no longer need to persue the goal of making good citizens to build appliances and cars. Other countries have taken that up. Our job, as good citizens of the United States, should be to make busloads of babies and train them all up to be soldiers (or as Bush-Lightyear once mentioned, "Crusaders") so our glorious leaders than play their enemies against each other and call upon our kids to unseat regimes that don't play. And if you act fast, you can have enough kids to still afford top-Ramen and diet-soda come tax-time. Once the sheeple wise up and you feel like you're walking through a PX while you stroll the mall, you can bet that whole child-tax-credit vibe will pop like a soap-bubble.
So here's a thought. If your kids have no interest in school it doesn't mean your child is broken. Human nature predates artifical constructs like school and "rule-of-law". Maybe they just need some quality hunter-gatherer time before commiting to a life of endless trivia and control. You know, before being mentally gelded to be useful to business and serve as good shoppers, consumers, and prisoners.
I saw the designs, and they suck. Bigtime.
When you're riding a bicycle you don't want to carry a ruck.
When you're marching for twenty miles, you really don't want to carry a ruck.
They need to shitcan the "dog" anthropomorhpic and look into the spider format, then supersize that puppy, so you can get some utility out of it. Spiders are a much better model, and imagine the terror they would invoke (mmmmmm, sweet terror).
The spider morphic is a great design, tested by nature, it can be accessorized to work in different terrain. Water wouldn't get it down, just give it some "water-skipper" booties.
Swamp? Not an issue, just give it a floatie around it's midsection and it will move through any deep spots by flicking along.
Wooded terrain? It could easily amble along a game trail by making it's "working footprint" narrower, just like a real spider.
If I'm in the desert or tundra/snow-pack, just put some booties on the bugger and it will amble along just fine, could even "self-right" when necessary and it would be able to hold my baggage on a spine-framework where the abdomen would be. And it would be able to roll and remain static by dropping power to the the elastomer muscles, allowing the mechanical resistive force of the legs to retract into that familiar "ARGH! Something just touched me" posture spiders can assume.
Another nice aspect of the spider design is that it could also support a winch, survive a fall using that "touched spider" config, and if you drape it in camo net or a poncho it would give you shade (depending on the scale). This would be a serious asset for squad missions, and you would only need one, maybe two of these to support a squad. With the proper leg configuration and a solar-cell "net", it could recharge itself during breaks, hold radio gear (bluetooth squad commo through the puppy on crypt/fm), and a mess of other things that make sense. But really, unload the soldier so "light-fighter" makes sense. They want soldiers that weight 150lbs and then they put a 100lbs on their back and act like this is some kind of good idea. Ha!
A dog-bot...sheesh, typical DARPA lack of vision.
You'd think Dr. Evil and his friends at DARPA would at least demand a
"LASER".
Where I live, there are at least 3 Walmarts. Of course there were people who made noise about them, but then the right palms were greased, promises were exchanged, and "POINK", there they were.
Something about Walmart that most people never hear about is the burden they place on the local economy, especially when it comes to health care. Essentially, Walmart relies on the community to take care of employee medical costs by simply not providing a competetive health-care plan and paying their employees significanlty lower wages, which makes getting health insurance prohibitive. So whenever a Walmart employee has a problem the community pays. So, in short, Walmart moves in, Food stores and mom-and-pop businesses are throttled and die, and then there's less middle-class income to fill the coffers and support the medical costs of the community.
At this point, as someone who has not come from money and was unable to network my way into a profitable career (community college doesn't land you a white-collar job in the fortune 500 or even the fortune 1000), I feel lucky I'm making mortgage for now. If my luck doesn't hold, I'll probably be at the forefront of people who go from living in a house to living in a one-room apartment with ever-increasing rent until I have no choice but to join the welfare rolls. As for my kids, I'm going to push them towards things which can never be outsourced, like Plumbing and Electrical and mechanics jobs, you know, trades. The fluffy info-economy jobs are ultimately transportable, but like local government, a job in the trades will never go away, even when large chunks of the US are annexed by other countries to pay for our debt.
Hey, we're like one terrorist incident from Martial Law, right?
When that happens doesn't the incumbent save a buttload of campaign money?
I agree, alone would be better than having a spacefaring species with even the same or better tech being aware of us. At best it would be a completely ambivalent (a package of information exchanged between species every century or so and nothing more interesting than just math) relationship, but knowing how humanity works, if the other speices cannot destroy humanity outright, some human dumbass is going to build a ship/probe and try to be the first one to show up there and sell them porn/cheeseburgers/goddist pap/amway. It's in the nature of the species. After that, the lot will all die from (mastrubation, heart-attack,too much worship at that altar site, who-knows, might just view another sentient life-form in the flesh as their new god and have a genocidal holy war to prove otherwise?) and three generations of offspring later dumbass will be coming back at near ftl speeds, and the great grandkids of the aforementioned dumbass will have a bestseller about how their great grandfather hosed an entire species, complete with photos and movie-deals and page after page of alien gay-porn nobody will understand so some other dumbass will make a religion out of that complete with a full line of inflatables/wearables/insertables, and deals with IKEA for easily assembled altars. If we're lucky the current fundamentalists of that age could implode as they try to snuff it all out, taking both the new and old goddist sucktards down the same toilet at the same time. One flush please, but two is still considered ok.
I guess I'm just trying to say that as an intergalactic species goes, we're a complete loss, and it's probably in our good fortune that any species that already exists which would understand the messages and entertainment we've broadcast would simply be hoping that humanity does itself in quickly or think we already have, knowing that we're too much trouble and not tasty enough to bother with. We won't be interesting until we no longer live and die by fairy-tales, and still advance the species without living in our own mental/physical detrius like the bread-and-circuses of politics and dumb-monkey ideologies that permit humanity to stay timelessly simple and screwed because it's so much easier than actually becoming something more.
See you down by Arizona Bay, because...
maybe the buggers can press a DVD that actually plays without interruption once the movie is going. Every DVD movie I've ever played has at least one pause in the main feature. WTF?! Is it to keep us from being able to...uh, value what we paid money for? Maybe it was put in there to ensure that anyone who attempted to act like a theatre would be embarrased? Or maybe our DVD players are just crap designed to play crap dvd's and make our corporate overlords fat and happy.
I'd ask you to pass the ultra-glide but,
ARGH!
After re-reading the parent to this parent I _finally_ understood the issue.
(therin I post, guilty of reading, yet not understanding, gad...)
So there I was, handing out "How to upgrade/install packages from a HD repository" when the original issue deals with the borked/broken "UPGRADE MANDRAKE LINUX" problem. (application of palm to forehead...completed)
Yes, upgrading the entire distro is a broken mess using the Mandrake "upgrade" option from the install menus during boot/install to upgrade Mandrake Linux.
I've never had that work, ever. The sad thing is, that I know I'm not alone. It's probably some kind of never-ending issue like the KPPPD/dialer problems.
It's always been easier to just setup a "/home" partition and know that anything short of being brain-dead and formatting that partition everything should come back up, post-install.
If there's some way to do an upgrade from one version of Mandrake Linux to another version of Mandrake Linux (maybe using a combined media-source on a Windows FAT partion and have the install automagically generate a heuristics file) aside from the CD's that would be an interesting tip because it's hard to be at the machine 9 or 10 hours before it starts failing to install RPMS' and then fails the upgrade, leaving you wondering why you even bothered.
(BING! Just had an idea!)
Maybe this is what the DVD-ROM of Mandrake Linux is for. Being able to just put that puppy in the drive, click a few buttons, and then walk away...I dunno. At this point it's the caffiene talking, that or...
Chooks-sama,
/mandrake/9.2/
urpmi is your mdk friend.
Your very best mdk friend.
Spend an hour with this, and if you have the hard-drive to do so, create a folder in rootspace, say
blow all the RPMS from the disks into it
Then
urpmi.addmedia -f mrpms file://mandrake/9.2
Then you can use the GUI to look through your media sources, and all the installs can come from that media source.
Be sure to add an "update source" using the GUI interface because that's not very friendly yet, but after that a quick trip to
man urpmi
will always steer you in the right direction.
There's other tools similar to this which stomp on "anti-RPM" sentiments like a grape. I once hated RPM distros but Mandrake has done an incredible job.
I like games that play as a good movie (that involve you, not like Final-Fantasy X..whatever), and "Primal" did a good job. They used music from 16-Volt's "Super-Cool-Nothing", which was really fitting. The developers even worked some of the lyrics into very nice commercials and promo-edits. The game rocked, the music fit, and I recommend both the game and the music.
Recently I've played SSX3, and I IMMEDIATELY took the "dj" factor out. I hate radio. I'm the kind of rotten bastard that absolutely hates "talk" when it's nothing more than PAP, and the first time the radio "looped" on me, it was outta there. Maybe this is why "surveyors" for radio hate guys. After playing SSX-Tricky for over a year (I'm pathetic, forgive me) my skills quickly enabled me to enjoy a full playlist and to max out all of Kaori's skills. BTW, she's the most up-beat, least idiotic of the characters in the game. And she's so damn cute she makes me want to hug my monitor whenever I win with her. I'll go so far as to say they made her loveable. Sappy but true. I haven't gone looking for them, but I imagine there's a "Love Kaori" webring out there somewhere.
I concur. However, if you're less interested in outright brutality and disfigurement it's an interesting development. Since electricity has become so ubiquitous, cheap and effective electro-convulsive torture methods have flourished. But it's crude. This would be a sophisticated means of producing a very pronounced disorientation that affects the body and mind. Using drugs can be dangerous and there's so much miscibility with allergies and side-effects, and of course what happens when the staff starts enjoying the good-stuff too?
If a government wanted to still look good in the eyes of the world while perfoming interrogations, this would be a nice way to do it. Much better than a talk-man , or being shaken until you go into a coma and die.
Every First-person-shooter I've played since 1996 seems to produce "sim-sickness" quite effectively without horking the inner-ear. I've found the newest "console" FPS games are even more effective at it. There's been several (Time-Splitters3,Warhammer40k,Quake3,etc...) that become so intolerable so fast that I can't even get through a level without wanting to just lay down and die. Unless this piece of kit can reduce or eliminate sim-sickness (where your inner ear wants a piece of the action your eyes/motor cortext are having fun with) by giving us another input it's not going to catch on.
Of course, it would be a blast for modders to create a program which would specifically be used to "torture", like a centerfuge. Keep that puppy around for when someone has been drinking too much, wrap them up in a blanket and clear the area. This could also see use in interrogation. It's one thing to wear people down from the outside (physical exertion, exposure, witholding food/water) but hook them up to something like this and you have a low-tech device that produces severe discomfort and disorientation. We'll know the real-deal when 3rd world countries start buying them by the pallet.
I could go on, but this is about as clean as it gets, because...
We need self-healing technologies.
They don't come from space. We need to make them here.
We can test them in a variety of environments, cheaply.
If we, the collective humanity, can stop wasting money making faltering attempts at greatness and just set reasonable goals (sustainable deep-ocean habitats,sustainable polar habitats, better/safer/reliable energy) and create the technologies necessary to make them happen _here_ we will flourish anywhere.
Until then, it's all hand-waving and one-upmanship nationalistic stupidity.
I'd rather see a handful of "Burt Rutans" than a hundred NASA's.
Not only would it be more efficient, but with the lack of red-tape/buckpassing/budget-crap something like "progress" might actually take place.
Personally, I think the governments of the world are scared to death of people getting out of their reach. Governments, like any entity, don't like to lose their source of wealth and power and they absolutely hate competition.
I'm probably repeating myself here. That's ok. Everyone who frequents slashdot understands the value of repetition (esp. the editors).
What's to be taken from this is that in many countries the predetermined guilt of an individual isn't always pronounced because its often hard to find something worth talking about more than once. That it's going back to trial means the necessary politics and petting which make a successful conviction have been properly secured this time. The defendant is older too.
In this case, there's actually a useful piece of code, the potential for exploits and the need for a good example to be made that makes the smart sheeple think twice before sassing their international corporate overlords. After all, cheap self-destructing media that's secure enough for people to sell that only works for the people it's supposed to work for is a great business plan that pays attorneys. Anything that possibly imperils that model must be flayed to the bone and hung before the public in order to stop such transgressions from happening again.
In these "civilized" times public hanging, torture, mutilation, and prolonged display won't sell many commercials, but going through the hand-waving and sound-bytes will keep media's talking heads babbling for weeks, or even months. In the end, Jon will probably get some kind of sentence--public service or if they drag it out enough, actual prison.