Now with pages and pages of rants that this is obviously impossible, from someone who has a couple of times edited the page to remove the claims that it's possible on the grounds that he's quite sure it isn't. Funny!
eReader: I'm loving the nook. I dunno if it's flexible enough for whatever you want, but:
* I plug it into a Mac or Linux or anything, and it shows up as disk space I can copy files to. * The files are in a standard format that does not require or suggest any kind of DRM. * All the Baen free library books and their for-pay ebooks work with it. * It reads books real good.
Seriously, I don't care about anything else it could potentially do; what it does is fine.
Right. Just like the blades on a propeller, which are effectively "tacking" on a helical path. (Actually, I think they're "moving downwind on a broad reach", because tacking is supposed to be upwind, maybe? Memory's not great.)
Okay, think about iceboats. Iceboats can go downwind -- but not directly downwind -- very fast. With me so far?
Okay, imagine a featureless plane of ice, with a wind blowing over it constantly. Iceboats could go downwind, at an angle, such that the downwind component of their velocity is faster than the wind's speed. This is not hard to do -- they can easily get to twice the speed of the wind. But they're not moving directly downwind, they're moving at an angle.
Now, take this featureless plane, and wrap it around until it's a featureless cylinder, with iceboats on its surface. They can still go downwind, faster than the wind, on their path that's not directly-down-wind at all, but rather going at an angle to the wind. Their paths describe a sort of helix.
Okay, now. Get several of these boats, all doing this helix, and all starting at the same point. And tie them together. And look... While each individual boat is clearly moving sideways with respect to the wind, the collection of boats, as a whole, is moving directly downwind, while rotating.
Now imagine that you make the cylinder thinner and thinner, and eventually you'll recognize that what you have here is nothing but a fancy way of describing a propeller. Essentially, a propeller that is in some way forced to turn by its motion... And that's what the wheels-geared-to-prop do. They force the prop to turn, and so the prop is doing exactly what all those ice boats were doing on the featureless cylinder.
They've published multiple sets of blueprints for various devices illustrating this, and many of the people now arguing for it are people who argued against it until they built one.
So, congrads! Your suggestion was so good they adopted it a year or two ago.
Uh, yes, it did. Steady state, directly down-wind (as in, the cart's movement with respect to ground and the air's movement with respect to ground are in the exact same direction), faster than the wind. MUCH faster.
Your attempt to wave this away with the two sets of wheels fails, because the two sets of wheels aren't touching two media moving at different speeds.
If you do two sets of wheels, geared similarly, and you put your gizmo on a flat surface, and roll a ruler over it, it can in fact move in the same direction that the ruler is moving, faster than the ruler.
Easiest example: Take a spool of wire or thread. Unroll some of it, so the thread/wire is coming off the bottom. Pull it gently. It will climb up the wire -- it will wind itself up, which is to say, it will move down-thread faster than the thread.
Yes, but it doesn't have any non-RealID way to do cross-game chat, cross-server chat, or to automatically pick up all of someone's alts when you friend them.
And since all of those are really awesome features that people would love to use with their online friends, it sorta sucks that the only way you're allowed to access them is by sending people your login name and showing them (plus all of their friends) your real name.
I have spent some time on some of those games, and yes, they're definitely exercise. More than I get playing with other stuff. (And if I don't want to exercise, well, there's other games for the Wii.)
I think there should be more exercise available in console gaming than hurling controllers and yelling "fuck".
Facebook and Blizzard recently announced a cooperative effort.
In prior days, Blizzard had publicized plans to include cross-game chat and the ability to mark people as friends (rather than individual characters), so you could see when your friends were on. Much was made about the importance of the privacy features that would make this secure, safe, and usable.
Then they announced that:
1. It would be done in conjunction with Facebook. 2. The only way to invite someone would be to send an invitation to the email address which is used as that person's login name for the battle.net service. (Blizzard has in the past told people to use a special email address just for that, and not to share it with anyone.) 3. Your real name, as on your billing info, will be shown to all your friends. 4. Also, your real name, as on your billing info, will be shown to all your friends-of-friends.
The service is "optional", but the only option available is to not use it at all -- even though these are features which would be EXTREMELY desireable to many users, if they didn't come with the privacy problems. Furthermore, a recent glitch during the Starcraft 2 beta allowed ANY user to see ANY user's full name -- whether or not they were friends.
So I'm pretty sure Facebook is doing the wrong thing thus far, and if they don't change that, I suspect they will start losing popularity faster than they're gaining it. I'm certainly starting to think seriously about deleting my account there over this crap.
The chances are that at least one slashdot poster is qualified to comment. Lots and lots of users, topic is a field that many people are employed in, and many of them engineers or techies of some variety.
Basically, the jet's internals are hot enough to melt rock back into glass... So after a couple of passes through ash clouds, you have a thin layer of glass covering all the internal turbine blades. Which completely destroys the engine, and is extremely hard to repair without completely replacing the blades.
So, basically, what I've been told is that, yes, flying a jet through a volcanic ash cloud is a good recipe for completely destroying the engines, such that they need to be rebuilt, within two or three passes through the ash. It sounds plausible, and I've not yet heard anyone who actually does aircraft maintenance or anything like that suggest that it's harmless.
Quotes aren't nearly enough to deal with filenames with spaces in them in the general case. Try xargs... You need the "-0" option, which isn't all that portable, to handle names with spaces in them. (Or backslash escapes, but you can't do those for newlines in the general case because you can't tell whether a newline is a legitimate new entry or part of a file's name...)
That said, rc and es are both good examples of languages recognizably related to the shell (and in particular, where the primitives are "any command you want", rather than the subset built into the language or loaded as libraries), but which have the quoting stuff better.
Honestly, a big part of what I rely on is just writing things that will stay functional even when I swap between pure BSD, OS X, and Linux. (And "Linux" these days means "Everything from RHEL4 to Ubuntu 9.10" at $dayjob).
There's a lot of fancy utilities I'd love to use if they were a little more portable. The one thing I'll say is: I wish everyone had implemented pax and installed it by default, it is a complete and sufficient replacement for tar and cpio.
It's useful in cases where it's impractical or not worth it for individuals to sue. For instance, say a company sends one junk fax each to a hundred thousand people. Most of those people will not be able to justify the time and effort it would take to sue for $500 -- it's not remotely worth the hassle. But a class case could allow them to, for filling out a form, claim some money.
So when I sued Allied Telesyn, it was run as a class case, and people who were part of the class could get $250 for filling out a postcard, instead of $500 for spending days or weeks fighting something in court.
Actually, that is pretty much what we've been doing, but we haven't had great luck with refills. Still, they extend the life of the cartridges quite a bit.
I figure this is pretty good compared to actual cigs. And eventually maybe it'll go away, but it's better than smoking.
Less harmful and healthier do in fact mean the same thing, in the context of harm to human bodies.
You're more likely to survive a gunshot wound than a landmine, in general. That's pretty much what "healthier" means. It doesn't mean "overall makes you live longer than you would without it", it means "overall makes you live longer than you would with the specific alternative being compared".
So they shouldn't be banned unless cigarettes are banned too.
It's ridiculous to say that a less-harmful thing can't be allowed while the more-harmful thing is allowed. These things exist only to let cigarette smokers stop inhaling smoke. They're a step forwards.
Beloved Spouse has been using these. They smell less bad, they're not as bad for you, and they make it a lot easier to taper down nicotine to get rid of it -- without taking away the fidget. Seems like a great idea, and I am pretty sure the only reason to ban them is that they could result in many people ceasing to use the pure-cancer form of nicotine delivery.
One caveat, though, the cartridges don't seem to last NEARLY as long as advertised. Still cheaper that traditional cigs.
Most of us are unqualified to give legal advice. If you think the lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client, you should hear stories from the lawyer who represents some idiot who relied on slashdot.
I am not a lawyer, I am not qualified to give legal advice, and so on. When I have asked lawyers about things like this, they have told me that, in general, you cannot copyright a game, only the source code and art assets and other "creative works". Ideas themselves cannot be copyrighted. The obvious famous case is Allen v. Academic Games (think I got the name right, too lazy to check).
But start by figuring out what you want, what your risks are, what you're willing to do if confronted, and so on. And then... TALK TO A LAWYER. Or do something that isn't related enough to be conceivably affected.
The PS2 emulation was not a bit flipped in software.
The first PS3 models had both of the PS2's main chips (I think in the single-combined-package form they'd switched to) physically present. Later PS3 models had only one of them, using Cell to emulate the other. Still later PS3 models (the first US "40 gig") have neither.
There was never any PS2 emulation for that last hardware revision, and last I heard, the first two still have PS2 emulation, although the second one has sorta crappy PS2 emulation. (Yes, you can get a splash screen on nearly everything, but dont' assume that all your games can be played through without glitches.)
That said, the rest of this is crap. I guess I now have a $600 paperweight. On the other hand, it paid for itself in articles I wrote about Cell development.
I'd really like to see how the computer in the car manages to consistently only enter this mysterious state when the driver is 60 or older (or maybe in the late 50s). Because normally, if you have a ton of examples of something failing, all of which involve people of an age famed for acquired inattentiveness or confusion, and which look just like many other reported and documented cases of elderly folks getting confused and hitting the gas pedal thinking it's the brakes, you'd not assume it was the computer.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Sailing_faster_than_the_wind
Now with pages and pages of rants that this is obviously impossible, from someone who has a couple of times edited the page to remove the claims that it's possible on the grounds that he's quite sure it isn't. Funny!
Relative speed actually matters more in many cases. If someone rear-ends you, this typically does less damage if you're going faster.
eReader: I'm loving the nook. I dunno if it's flexible enough for whatever you want, but:
* I plug it into a Mac or Linux or anything, and it shows up as disk space I can copy files to.
* The files are in a standard format that does not require or suggest any kind of DRM.
* All the Baen free library books and their for-pay ebooks work with it.
* It reads books real good.
Seriously, I don't care about anything else it could potentially do; what it does is fine.
Right. Just like the blades on a propeller, which are effectively "tacking" on a helical path. (Actually, I think they're "moving downwind on a broad reach", because tacking is supposed to be upwind, maybe? Memory's not great.)
Okay, think about iceboats. Iceboats can go downwind -- but not directly downwind -- very fast. With me so far?
Okay, imagine a featureless plane of ice, with a wind blowing over it constantly. Iceboats could go downwind, at an angle, such that the downwind component of their velocity is faster than the wind's speed. This is not hard to do -- they can easily get to twice the speed of the wind. But they're not moving directly downwind, they're moving at an angle.
Now, take this featureless plane, and wrap it around until it's a featureless cylinder, with iceboats on its surface. They can still go downwind, faster than the wind, on their path that's not directly-down-wind at all, but rather going at an angle to the wind. Their paths describe a sort of helix.
Okay, now. Get several of these boats, all doing this helix, and all starting at the same point. And tie them together. And look... While each individual boat is clearly moving sideways with respect to the wind, the collection of boats, as a whole, is moving directly downwind, while rotating.
Now imagine that you make the cylinder thinner and thinner, and eventually you'll recognize that what you have here is nothing but a fancy way of describing a propeller. Essentially, a propeller that is in some way forced to turn by its motion... And that's what the wheels-geared-to-prop do. They force the prop to turn, and so the prop is doing exactly what all those ice boats were doing on the featureless cylinder.
From the ground, which is moving past the vehicle quite quickly in this reference frame.
And your assumption about relative forces is incorrect, because you're not taking into account the relative velocities of the air and the ground.
They've published multiple sets of blueprints for various devices illustrating this, and many of the people now arguing for it are people who argued against it until they built one.
So, congrads! Your suggestion was so good they adopted it a year or two ago.
Uh, yes, it did. Steady state, directly down-wind (as in, the cart's movement with respect to ground and the air's movement with respect to ground are in the exact same direction), faster than the wind. MUCH faster.
Your attempt to wave this away with the two sets of wheels fails, because the two sets of wheels aren't touching two media moving at different speeds.
If you do two sets of wheels, geared similarly, and you put your gizmo on a flat surface, and roll a ruler over it, it can in fact move in the same direction that the ruler is moving, faster than the ruler.
Easiest example: Take a spool of wire or thread. Unroll some of it, so the thread/wire is coming off the bottom. Pull it gently. It will climb up the wire -- it will wind itself up, which is to say, it will move down-thread faster than the thread.
Yes, but it doesn't have any non-RealID way to do cross-game chat, cross-server chat, or to automatically pick up all of someone's alts when you friend them.
And since all of those are really awesome features that people would love to use with their online friends, it sorta sucks that the only way you're allowed to access them is by sending people your login name and showing them (plus all of their friends) your real name.
I have spent some time on some of those games, and yes, they're definitely exercise. More than I get playing with other stuff. (And if I don't want to exercise, well, there's other games for the Wii.)
I think there should be more exercise available in console gaming than hurling controllers and yelling "fuck".
Facebook and Blizzard recently announced a cooperative effort.
In prior days, Blizzard had publicized plans to include cross-game chat and the ability to mark people as friends (rather than individual characters), so you could see when your friends were on. Much was made about the importance of the privacy features that would make this secure, safe, and usable.
Then they announced that:
1. It would be done in conjunction with Facebook.
2. The only way to invite someone would be to send an invitation to the email address which is used as that person's login name for the battle.net service. (Blizzard has in the past told people to use a special email address just for that, and not to share it with anyone.)
3. Your real name, as on your billing info, will be shown to all your friends.
4. Also, your real name, as on your billing info, will be shown to all your friends-of-friends.
The service is "optional", but the only option available is to not use it at all -- even though these are features which would be EXTREMELY desireable to many users, if they didn't come with the privacy problems. Furthermore, a recent glitch during the Starcraft 2 beta allowed ANY user to see ANY user's full name -- whether or not they were friends.
So I'm pretty sure Facebook is doing the wrong thing thus far, and if they don't change that, I suspect they will start losing popularity faster than they're gaining it. I'm certainly starting to think seriously about deleting my account there over this crap.
The chances are that at least one slashdot poster is qualified to comment. Lots and lots of users, topic is a field that many people are employed in, and many of them engineers or techies of some variety.
Basically, the jet's internals are hot enough to melt rock back into glass... So after a couple of passes through ash clouds, you have a thin layer of glass covering all the internal turbine blades. Which completely destroys the engine, and is extremely hard to repair without completely replacing the blades.
So, basically, what I've been told is that, yes, flying a jet through a volcanic ash cloud is a good recipe for completely destroying the engines, such that they need to be rebuilt, within two or three passes through the ash. It sounds plausible, and I've not yet heard anyone who actually does aircraft maintenance or anything like that suggest that it's harmless.
I've been buying Usenet from a provider for ages (megabitz.net). It's better than my experience with ISP-provided news was anyway.
Quotes aren't nearly enough to deal with filenames with spaces in them in the general case. Try xargs... You need the "-0" option, which isn't all that portable, to handle names with spaces in them. (Or backslash escapes, but you can't do those for newlines in the general case because you can't tell whether a newline is a legitimate new entry or part of a file's name...)
That said, rc and es are both good examples of languages recognizably related to the shell (and in particular, where the primitives are "any command you want", rather than the subset built into the language or loaded as libraries), but which have the quoting stuff better.
Shameless plug:
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/11/1355243&from=rss
Honestly, a big part of what I rely on is just writing things that will stay functional even when I swap between pure BSD, OS X, and Linux. (And "Linux" these days means "Everything from RHEL4 to Ubuntu 9.10" at $dayjob).
There's a lot of fancy utilities I'd love to use if they were a little more portable. The one thing I'll say is: I wish everyone had implemented pax and installed it by default, it is a complete and sufficient replacement for tar and cpio.
It's useful in cases where it's impractical or not worth it for individuals to sue. For instance, say a company sends one junk fax each to a hundred thousand people. Most of those people will not be able to justify the time and effort it would take to sue for $500 -- it's not remotely worth the hassle. But a class case could allow them to, for filling out a form, claim some money.
So when I sued Allied Telesyn, it was run as a class case, and people who were part of the class could get $250 for filling out a postcard, instead of $500 for spending days or weeks fighting something in court.
I thought that sounded like a pretty good deal.
Actually, that is pretty much what we've been doing, but we haven't had great luck with refills. Still, they extend the life of the cartridges quite a bit.
I figure this is pretty good compared to actual cigs. And eventually maybe it'll go away, but it's better than smoking.
Uh, yeah, yeah it is.
Less harmful and healthier do in fact mean the same thing, in the context of harm to human bodies.
You're more likely to survive a gunshot wound than a landmine, in general. That's pretty much what "healthier" means. It doesn't mean "overall makes you live longer than you would without it", it means "overall makes you live longer than you would with the specific alternative being compared".
So they shouldn't be banned unless cigarettes are banned too.
It's ridiculous to say that a less-harmful thing can't be allowed while the more-harmful thing is allowed. These things exist only to let cigarette smokers stop inhaling smoke. They're a step forwards.
Beloved Spouse has been using these. They smell less bad, they're not as bad for you, and they make it a lot easier to taper down nicotine to get rid of it -- without taking away the fidget. Seems like a great idea, and I am pretty sure the only reason to ban them is that they could result in many people ceasing to use the pure-cancer form of nicotine delivery.
One caveat, though, the cartridges don't seem to last NEARLY as long as advertised. Still cheaper that traditional cigs.
Ask your lawyer.
Seriously.
Most of us are unqualified to give legal advice. If you think the lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client, you should hear stories from the lawyer who represents some idiot who relied on slashdot.
I am not a lawyer, I am not qualified to give legal advice, and so on. When I have asked lawyers about things like this, they have told me that, in general, you cannot copyright a game, only the source code and art assets and other "creative works". Ideas themselves cannot be copyrighted. The obvious famous case is Allen v. Academic Games (think I got the name right, too lazy to check).
But start by figuring out what you want, what your risks are, what you're willing to do if confronted, and so on. And then... TALK TO A LAWYER. Or do something that isn't related enough to be conceivably affected.
The PS2 emulation was not a bit flipped in software.
The first PS3 models had both of the PS2's main chips (I think in the single-combined-package form they'd switched to) physically present.
Later PS3 models had only one of them, using Cell to emulate the other.
Still later PS3 models (the first US "40 gig") have neither.
There was never any PS2 emulation for that last hardware revision, and last I heard, the first two still have PS2 emulation, although the second one has sorta crappy PS2 emulation. (Yes, you can get a splash screen on nearly everything, but dont' assume that all your games can be played through without glitches.)
That said, the rest of this is crap. I guess I now have a $600 paperweight. On the other hand, it paid for itself in articles I wrote about Cell development.
I'd really like to see how the computer in the car manages to consistently only enter this mysterious state when the driver is 60 or older (or maybe in the late 50s). Because normally, if you have a ton of examples of something failing, all of which involve people of an age famed for acquired inattentiveness or confusion, and which look just like many other reported and documented cases of elderly folks getting confused and hitting the gas pedal thinking it's the brakes, you'd not assume it was the computer.
Yeah. sqlite is AMAZING.
pseudo (my project for a thing like fakeroot, only more bulletproofed) uses sqlite as its backend, and it's been a dream to work with.