I just read that Macy's story based on your posting, and WOW, can you say "lawsuit"?
That is about the most moronic thing I've heard of recently and violates all sorts of laws. I've never been to N.Y.C. and have never even heard of Macy's outside of the Thanksgiving day pararde, but I can assure you that if I ever go to N.Y.C. for any reason, I will not shop in that store or any of it's affiliates. Ever. Unless I really need some money and want to be able to sue Macy's to get the money...
I would have sworn that I just saw a news article in the past couple of weeks stating that the launch of these had been delayed until late this year...
I've posted this story before, but I never get tired of it...
I used to work at a plant that recycled car batteries. We had a machine that that would crush the batteries and dump everything - plastic, sulfuric acid, lead - into a large vat for separation. The plastic would mostly float to the top and be scraped away, the sulfuric acid was drained off into barrels for filtering and recycling and the lead was then rinsed off and placed into a rotating kiln to dry it before being dumped into a huge furnace (dumping wet items into molten lead isn't a really brainy idea).
So anyways, this meant that we had one big room (airplane hanger kind of big) that always had a layer of diluted sulfuric acid on the floor that was leaking from the vat or dripping from the lead as it was moved into the kiln. We also had huge supplies of all sorts of dangerous chemicals that were used to treat the molten lead and turn it into specific alloys (including Red Phosphorous, Sulfur, Potassium Nitrate, a wonderful alloy from Phizer that contained Calcium, Aluminum and Magnesium (made great Thermite powder!) and everybody's favorite reactive reagent - metallic sodium).
One day one of the crazy guys who worked on the plant floor invited a couple of us pyro-maniacs from the lab out to see something funny. He opened a 50 gallon drum filled with chunks of sodium and used a knife to cut off a chunk about the size of his fist. We then walked over to the battery crusher room, made sure noone was in blast range and then he threw the sodium overhand right into the center of that giant puddle of dilute sulfuric acid.
Sodium reacts with water and releases Hydrogen gas and heat. Hydrogen gas is highly flammable and since there is all that excess heat just laying around it tends to ignite and create an instantenous explosion. Sulfuric Acid is even more reactive than water so the reaction occurs even faster and with more heat, so it guarantees an instantaneous loud boom. It performed exactly as expected, and gallons of dilute sulfuric acid were thrown in all directions (now before anyone complains, this was a very safe plant where everyone wore flame retardent clothing, asbestos gloves, respirators, safety glasses, full headphone style hearing protection and hard hats with full face shields, there was no immediate danger to anyone nearby and there was noone nearby), plus there was the loudest explosion I've ever heard.
One of my favorite memories of working at that place... Well that and the idiot who managed to get red phosphorous, sulfur and potassium nitrate dust all over his gloves and then tried to wipe the dust off on his shirt. He apparently didn't pay attention in chemistry class the day they discussed how 'strike-anywhere' match heads are made.
terÂaÂtoÂgenÂic - adj. Of, relating to, or causing malformations of an embryo or fetus.
I'd say that fearsome doesn't even begin to cover it.
We have a lab in the building I work in - all the windows are blacked out and the door has a sign reading "No Carcinogenic or Teratogenic Agents Allowed" and I've always wondered what goes on in there, but noone seems to know or is willing to admit they know...
I played UT2K3 on a 1GHz Athlon with an ATI Radeon 8500DV card and it played fine. Sure, I couldn't play at uber-high resolutions or with all the features maxed out, but it played just fine.
I just recently upgraded to an XP 2500+ with a ATI 9700 Pro and now I *can* play at uber-high resolutions with all the settings maxed out.
The problem is there simply isn't room inside most handhelds. You can make an external device that connects via an expansion port, but most new PDAs use the SecureDigital or MMC cards that are wafer thin and would snap off with the slightest amount of pressure.
It is possible however to use infrared to transmit data from a device to most current handhelds, which appears to be the direction the industry is heading.
The first time I took my AK-47 (a ChinaSport brand with a stamped steel receiver and 20" barrel) to the range, after a couple hundred rounds of ammo I left it laying open in a hard shell rifle case with a foam rubber lining. It started to drizzle while we were firing small arms, so we closed everything up and went home. Everything was under cover, so no rain actually fell on our weapons.
I left the AK-47 in the back of my SUV and took everything else in the house, cleaned it and returned it to my gun safe. The AK-47 remained in the back of the truck for about 2 weeks of varying cool - hot temperatures (spring time in the midwest) before I got around to taking it in the house.
I opened the case and discovered to my dismay that the foam rubber had soaked up a lot of moisture from the air and basically acted as a wet sponge that had remained in contact with the rifle for the past two weeks, and the entire thing was covered in rust from end to the other.
I took it out the case, pulled the bolt back, made sure the chamber was clear and racked the bolt slide a few times. I then broke down the rifle as much as necessary, got out some fine wet/dry sandpaper, cleaned off all the rust, re-blued the metal where necessary and put it back together.
Worked like a champ the next time I took it out. I threw out that rifle case as the foam rubber was rust stained and would have been embarassing to open up in front of my friends.:-)
I can't say much except to say it might possibly have been a medical device for people who can't eat a lot of sugar and who might be interested in keeping tabs on their health. They never received official government approval (we withdrew our application after the word was out) so I couldn't give one away even if I had any to give away.
The human body is 50 - 65% water depending on age and weight. Children's bodies can be as much as 75%. 2/3 = 66.6666666%, so this statistic is incorrect.
Regular dice have six sides with one through six spots. That means that each regular die (singular for dice) has one side with 2 spots, which is 1 out of 6, or 1/6 or 16.66666666% - not 17% - you were close, but incorrect.
That's two of the four statistics which works out to 50%, which means your final statistic is also incorrect (it's not 25% of your 'factual' statistics are incorrect) which means that in reality 75% of your statistics are incorrect.
Thanks for playing, we have some lovely parting gifts for you.
Almost all Handspring products now are Treos which don't include Springboard slots.
My employer was spending a butt-load of money developing a new Handspring/Springboard based product when the rumor was spread about Handspring ceasing the production of the Visor model line. We sent representatives to their headquarters and we were reassured that the reported comment had been taken out of context and that sometime in the future they *might* go that route, but for now Visors and Springboards were still alive and kicking.
We went back to work and about 30 days prior to the launch of a product that has now had a million+ dollars spent developing it, Handspring came out and announced that the rumors were true, they were getting out of the PDA business and focusing on the 'Communicator' business and would be selling primarily Treos without Springboards.
Needless to say, we were not happy, especially since we had already purchased over a thousand various Visor models we had planned to use as a give away promotion on top of the million+ dollars already spent on R&D.
I think it's nuts that people exchange money for this sort of thing
But there are those of us who have limited gaming time for whom it's worth spending $20 (less than 1 hours wage) to buy a zillion golden kumquats (or whatever the in-game currency is) to let us spend our limited gaming time doing the fun things rather than running back and forth between 2 locations over and over again to make money.
yet a gun which allows people to kill other people is a "right"?
So a gun is "bad", but knives, baseball bats, tire irons and all the numerous other things that are commonly used to kill people are "good"?
Re:I'm American, and I'm a Proud one.
on
A Tour of Pixar
·
· Score: 4, Funny
That reminds me of an incident many years ago... I worked part time at a computer store in Alexandria, VA. One of my co-workers was a U.S. Navy Master Chief who worked at the Navy Research Labs. One of his lab coworkers asked him to buy a copy of a computer game with his employee discount and bring it to him at work. Pretty harmless, right?
The name of the game (IIRC) was The Haley's Project, or something else spacey - you flew from planet to planet within the solar system and at each stop you would receive a trivia clue to guide you to the next planet. Anyways, the manual was made up to look like a NASA guide and all the pages were printed with fake 'TOP SECRET' stamps all over everything.
Last I heard, the guy was still smuggling the manual out one page at a time - stuffed in his underwear - since the security checkpoint wouldn't let him take home anything marked TOP SECRET...:-)
Any word yet on whether or not they'll have representatives aboard the probe to setup an appropriate IP embargo and become the sole distribution channel of Earth's music and movies to a whole new captive audience?
Hint: I know it's an unmanned probe - it's a joke...
But imagine you're an aspiring artist who's spent several hours a day for the past two months on a painting and someone breaks into your studio and splatters paint all over it. Hey, It's just a piece of canvas after all. It's just your spare time and money down the drain, it's not like it's your job or anything.
Or, you're writing the great American novel and someone sits down at your laptop while you've stepped away to use the bathroom and someone does a search and replace and strips out all the vowels. Hey, it's just bits on a hard drive, right? It's just your time and effort wasted, it's not like it was *worth* anything.
A lot of people really get into these games and put a lot of time, effort (and money!) into building up their characters, and it absolutely sucks when through no fault of your own, all that hard work and effort (and money!) suddenly goes poof.
For those who have never played, it takes a lot of work to build up a character, collect the best equipment - usually by in-game trading which can take hours or days per item, etc.
I've played MMORPGs for years and usually when I quit playing a game it's because of something like this, I get killed by another player who steals all of my hard earned equipment, I suffer lag at the wrong moment and drop into a pit of acid causing me to die and lose all my best armor, etc. When stuff like that happens, I log out and usually never go back. I play for fun, and that stuff is not fun for me.
I really, really, really wish that one of the game companies would grow a pair and write code to search through all the 'official' discussion boards for their games and look for the words 'subscription' and 'cancel' and then trace the posters name and actually CANCEL THEIR SUBSCRIPTION.
It seems like every time every game posts every patch there is some subset of the population who feels that the changes in the patch were designed to solely screw them out of whatever their favorite way of playing is and in response they are going to cancel their subscription. Then a week later you seem them bitching about something else because they haven't actually cancelled their subscription and they've found something else they don't like.
The problem with this idea is that some people suffer from a delusional existence known as 'real life syndrome' where for whatever reason, their brain is confused and they can only find a couple hours per week to play their favorite online game.
Imagine how many times you would have to log in during those few brief hours to find that "oops, it's 'fake' time, nothing you can do know will matter" before you would move on and look for a different game.
This was tried in one of the first graphical 3D MORPGs (only one M because it wasn't Massive), Meridian 59, and it sucked... pretty much made me quit playing it.
It will have to go down one of two paths, neither of which will sell:
1) The materials and resulting bomb are completely unbelivable to anyone with a 5th grade education and people won't play it because it's 'too fake'.
2) The materials and resulting bomb are completely realistic and the game developers will be arrested as terrorists under the Patriot Act and probably be executed.
Come to think of it, I might buy a copy of option #2...
Slashdot Mirror
Do you think you can just call up Dell or HP and order a bare motherboard?
Yes. You can call up most major PC manufacturers and order a replacement motherboard without actually owning the original PC. Been there, done that.
I'm sure they would be happy to sell you one, but only as part of a complete system
Nope. See previous answer.
I just read that Macy's story based on your posting, and WOW, can you say "lawsuit"?
That is about the most moronic thing I've heard of recently and violates all sorts of laws. I've never been to N.Y.C. and have never even heard of Macy's outside of the Thanksgiving day pararde, but I can assure you that if I ever go to N.Y.C. for any reason, I will not shop in that store or any of it's affiliates. Ever. Unless I really need some money and want to be able to sue Macy's to get the money...
Ah, here it is.
Of course there is a follow up story a few days later that cancelled out the original story, but I knew I had seen that...
I would have sworn that I just saw a news article in the past couple of weeks stating that the launch of these had been delayed until late this year...
Now where did I see that article?
I've posted this story before, but I never get tired of it...
I used to work at a plant that recycled car batteries. We had a machine that that would crush the batteries and dump everything - plastic, sulfuric acid, lead - into a large vat for separation. The plastic would mostly float to the top and be scraped away, the sulfuric acid was drained off into barrels for filtering and recycling and the lead was then rinsed off and placed into a rotating kiln to dry it before being dumped into a huge furnace (dumping wet items into molten lead isn't a really brainy idea).
So anyways, this meant that we had one big room (airplane hanger kind of big) that always had a layer of diluted sulfuric acid on the floor that was leaking from the vat or dripping from the lead as it was moved into the kiln. We also had huge supplies of all sorts of dangerous chemicals that were used to treat the molten lead and turn it into specific alloys (including Red Phosphorous, Sulfur, Potassium Nitrate, a wonderful alloy from Phizer that contained Calcium, Aluminum and Magnesium (made great Thermite powder!) and everybody's favorite reactive reagent - metallic sodium).
One day one of the crazy guys who worked on the plant floor invited a couple of us pyro-maniacs from the lab out to see something funny. He opened a 50 gallon drum filled with chunks of sodium and used a knife to cut off a chunk about the size of his fist. We then walked over to the battery crusher room, made sure noone was in blast range and then he threw the sodium overhand right into the center of that giant puddle of dilute sulfuric acid.
Sodium reacts with water and releases Hydrogen gas and heat. Hydrogen gas is highly flammable and since there is all that excess heat just laying around it tends to ignite and create an instantenous explosion. Sulfuric Acid is even more reactive than water so the reaction occurs even faster and with more heat, so it guarantees an instantaneous loud boom. It performed exactly as expected, and gallons of dilute sulfuric acid were thrown in all directions (now before anyone complains, this was a very safe plant where everyone wore flame retardent clothing, asbestos gloves, respirators, safety glasses, full headphone style hearing protection and hard hats with full face shields, there was no immediate danger to anyone nearby and there was noone nearby), plus there was the loudest explosion I've ever heard.
One of my favorite memories of working at that place... Well that and the idiot who managed to get red phosphorous, sulfur and potassium nitrate dust all over his gloves and then tried to wipe the dust off on his shirt. He apparently didn't pay attention in chemistry class the day they discussed how 'strike-anywhere' match heads are made.
terÂaÂtoÂgenÂic - adj. Of, relating to, or causing malformations of an embryo or fetus.
I'd say that fearsome doesn't even begin to cover it.
We have a lab in the building I work in - all the windows are blacked out and the door has a sign reading "No Carcinogenic or Teratogenic Agents Allowed" and I've always wondered what goes on in there, but noone seems to know or is willing to admit they know...
I played UT2K3 on a 1GHz Athlon with an ATI Radeon 8500DV card and it played fine. Sure, I couldn't play at uber-high resolutions or with all the features maxed out, but it played just fine.
I just recently upgraded to an XP 2500+ with a ATI 9700 Pro and now I *can* play at uber-high resolutions with all the settings maxed out.
The problem is there simply isn't room inside most handhelds. You can make an external device that connects via an expansion port, but most new PDAs use the SecureDigital or MMC cards that are wafer thin and would snap off with the slightest amount of pressure.
It is possible however to use infrared to transmit data from a device to most current handhelds, which appears to be the direction the industry is heading.
The first time I took my AK-47 (a ChinaSport brand with a stamped steel receiver and 20" barrel) to the range, after a couple hundred rounds of ammo I left it laying open in a hard shell rifle case with a foam rubber lining. It started to drizzle while we were firing small arms, so we closed everything up and went home. Everything was under cover, so no rain actually fell on our weapons.
:-)
I left the AK-47 in the back of my SUV and took everything else in the house, cleaned it and returned it to my gun safe. The AK-47 remained in the back of the truck for about 2 weeks of varying cool - hot temperatures (spring time in the midwest) before I got around to taking it in the house.
I opened the case and discovered to my dismay that the foam rubber had soaked up a lot of moisture from the air and basically acted as a wet sponge that had remained in contact with the rifle for the past two weeks, and the entire thing was covered in rust from end to the other.
I took it out the case, pulled the bolt back, made sure the chamber was clear and racked the bolt slide a few times. I then broke down the rifle as much as necessary, got out some fine wet/dry sandpaper, cleaned off all the rust, re-blued the metal where necessary and put it back together.
Worked like a champ the next time I took it out. I threw out that rifle case as the foam rubber was rust stained and would have been embarassing to open up in front of my friends.
I can't say much except to say it might possibly have been a medical device for people who can't eat a lot of sugar and who might be interested in keeping tabs on their health. They never received official government approval (we withdrew our application after the word was out) so I couldn't give one away even if I had any to give away.
They handed them out to employees, so now just about everybody has a Visor with the company or product name silk-screened on it...
Since you have nothing to say, do everybody a favor and shut the hell up
Hello, Mr. Pot? You have a call from a Mr. Kettle, something about your being black...
The human body is 50 - 65% water depending on age and weight. Children's bodies can be as much as 75%. 2/3 = 66.6666666%, so this statistic is incorrect.
Regular dice have six sides with one through six spots. That means that each regular die (singular for dice) has one side with 2 spots, which is 1 out of 6, or 1/6 or 16.66666666% - not 17% - you were close, but incorrect.
That's two of the four statistics which works out to 50%, which means your final statistic is also incorrect (it's not 25% of your 'factual' statistics are incorrect) which means that in reality 75% of your statistics are incorrect.
Thanks for playing, we have some lovely parting gifts for you.
I've always heard there are three kinds of un-truths, Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics.
Springboard is dead.
Almost all Handspring products now are Treos which don't include Springboard slots.
My employer was spending a butt-load of money developing a new Handspring/Springboard based product when the rumor was spread about Handspring ceasing the production of the Visor model line. We sent representatives to their headquarters and we were reassured that the reported comment had been taken out of context and that sometime in the future they *might* go that route, but for now Visors and Springboards were still alive and kicking.
We went back to work and about 30 days prior to the launch of a product that has now had a million+ dollars spent developing it, Handspring came out and announced that the rumors were true, they were getting out of the PDA business and focusing on the 'Communicator' business and would be selling primarily Treos without Springboards.
Needless to say, we were not happy, especially since we had already purchased over a thousand various Visor models we had planned to use as a give away promotion on top of the million+ dollars already spent on R&D.
I think it's nuts that people exchange money for this sort of thing
But there are those of us who have limited gaming time for whom it's worth spending $20 (less than 1 hours wage) to buy a zillion golden kumquats (or whatever the in-game currency is) to let us spend our limited gaming time doing the fun things rather than running back and forth between 2 locations over and over again to make money.
yet a gun which allows people to kill other people is a "right"?
So a gun is "bad", but knives, baseball bats, tire irons and all the numerous other things that are commonly used to kill people are "good"?
That reminds me of an incident many years ago... I worked part time at a computer store in Alexandria, VA. One of my co-workers was a U.S. Navy Master Chief who worked at the Navy Research Labs. One of his lab coworkers asked him to buy a copy of a computer game with his employee discount and bring it to him at work. Pretty harmless, right?
:-)
The name of the game (IIRC) was The Haley's Project, or something else spacey - you flew from planet to planet within the solar system and at each stop you would receive a trivia clue to guide you to the next planet. Anyways, the manual was made up to look like a NASA guide and all the pages were printed with fake 'TOP SECRET' stamps all over everything.
Last I heard, the guy was still smuggling the manual out one page at a time - stuffed in his underwear - since the security checkpoint wouldn't let him take home anything marked TOP SECRET...
Woohoo! I've been moderated as 'over rated'!
That's like over-achiever, right?
Any word yet on whether or not they'll have representatives aboard the probe to setup an appropriate IP embargo and become the sole distribution channel of Earth's music and movies to a whole new captive audience?
Hint: I know it's an unmanned probe - it's a joke...
Ya know, there are people who can take a Linux distro out of the box, install it and be good to go. I actually know people like that.
it's just a game
But imagine you're an aspiring artist who's spent several hours a day for the past two months on a painting and someone breaks into your studio and splatters paint all over it. Hey, It's just a piece of canvas after all. It's just your spare time and money down the drain, it's not like it's your job or anything.
Or, you're writing the great American novel and someone sits down at your laptop while you've stepped away to use the bathroom and someone does a search and replace and strips out all the vowels. Hey, it's just bits on a hard drive, right? It's just your time and effort wasted, it's not like it was *worth* anything.
A lot of people really get into these games and put a lot of time, effort (and money!) into building up their characters, and it absolutely sucks when through no fault of your own, all that hard work and effort (and money!) suddenly goes poof.
For those who have never played, it takes a lot of work to build up a character, collect the best equipment - usually by in-game trading which can take hours or days per item, etc.
I've played MMORPGs for years and usually when I quit playing a game it's because of something like this, I get killed by another player who steals all of my hard earned equipment, I suffer lag at the wrong moment and drop into a pit of acid causing me to die and lose all my best armor, etc. When stuff like that happens, I log out and usually never go back. I play for fun, and that stuff is not fun for me.
I really, really, really wish that one of the game companies would grow a pair and write code to search through all the 'official' discussion boards for their games and look for the words 'subscription' and 'cancel' and then trace the posters name and actually CANCEL THEIR SUBSCRIPTION.
It seems like every time every game posts every patch there is some subset of the population who feels that the changes in the patch were designed to solely screw them out of whatever their favorite way of playing is and in response they are going to cancel their subscription. Then a week later you seem them bitching about something else because they haven't actually cancelled their subscription and they've found something else they don't like.
The problem with this idea is that some people suffer from a delusional existence known as 'real life syndrome' where for whatever reason, their brain is confused and they can only find a couple hours per week to play their favorite online game.
Imagine how many times you would have to log in during those few brief hours to find that "oops, it's 'fake' time, nothing you can do know will matter" before you would move on and look for a different game.
This was tried in one of the first graphical 3D MORPGs (only one M because it wasn't Massive), Meridian 59, and it sucked... pretty much made me quit playing it.
It will have to go down one of two paths, neither of which will sell:
1) The materials and resulting bomb are completely unbelivable to anyone with a 5th grade education and people won't play it because it's 'too fake'.
2) The materials and resulting bomb are completely realistic and the game developers will be arrested as terrorists under the Patriot Act and probably be executed.
Come to think of it, I might buy a copy of option #2...