I'm still pretty happy with my Athlon64 2200 running Windows XP (32Bit), though I may need to do some upgrades to a few components in the near future.
I have a promo copy of Vista that Microsoft sent me. It's never been in a drive. From what I'm hearing it probably never will be. LOL.
I agree - Windows7 appears to be overpriced for the improvements they are offering, at least for my own personal use. I have an older machine (Athlon Tbird 1.33Gz, 512MB RAM, old video card) that is running Linux Mint just fine, and I've recently replaced the last bit of Windows-dependent hardware (my Lexmark printer finally died, so I got a Hewlett-Packard WiFi printer that works fine in Mint). Most of my software is either open source or has a Linux equivalent available that does the same basic job.
If I do a rebuild, I'll either reinstall XP or bite the bullet and put Mint on it. I don't see a compelling need for 7, so it's a choice between what works today and trying something new. If I'm going to try something new, Linux is a lot cheaper.;)
If I were a business, I'd have to be saying "huh? XP is a stable, reliable, established OS that runs all of my applications. Bugger off."
And many of those businesses are stuck with Microsoft's own design flaws (MS toolkits generating code that only runs on IE6) that preclude many of them from even being ABLE to go to 7 without expensive software reengineering.
Heck, some incompatibility in a major third-party package kept my last company from upgrading any workstation that used it from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. In 2005. The package was up to the latest version at the time. This was resolved in 2006 with another paid upgrade, but they were still stuck in IE6 at that time, and when I left two years ago in '07 they were still on XP Service Pack 1 because SP2 and SP3 would break several applications (including this specific one which ran their customer database).
How am I to differentiate this from any salesman saying, "Buy the most expensive one for the best experience."
You can't. This is a complete shill-job by Mike Dell, and while I can't blame him and I'd do precisely the same thing in his place, this article is not news, it's advertising.
Do I detect the delectable odor of some potted meat product in a can? Why yes, yes I do.
In this case, it would have been a good thing if the machine defaults were loaded. If I understand the article correctly, the hospital changed the instructions surrounding a specific test so that test used a lot more radiation than the normal test should.
Trouble is, "dangerous dosage" can easily vary based on the patient and the information you need. If you have a 112-year-old in the machine and are scanning for some sort of blood flow interruption to the brain, you can justify a good bit of radiation - a 112-year-old isn't too worried about radiation effects 20-30 years down the road. Checking a broken bone for fragments in a toddler's leg.. not so much.
The issue is that the machine itself is capable of delivering the doses of radiation that the technician asks for, and comes with a preset grouping of scans that appear to be intended to be modified to suit individual patients and conditions. Sounds like someone turned the dial up to 11 for a specific test, and saved that as the default for that test.
The real question is more complex. Is day trading a BAD thing and, if so, can we stop it?
And if we find a way to stop it, what are the consequences to non-daytraders? Are those consequences worse than tolerating daytraders?
The measure of a good law is:
1. Is it preventing some form of harm? 2. Is it introducing less harm than it is preventing?
All laws should go through this kind of proof. How much harm is being done, how can it be prevented, and how much harm would be done by the prevention. I can think of a number of laws that would simply go away with the slightest application of this test.
Of course, the terms used are extremely subjective, and there are many types of "harm" (physical, emotional, financial, loss of freedom, etc). So it's tough to tally most laws on T-charts.
Someone came up with this idea several years ago. I seem to remember this being a British idea, but my memory may be incorrect.
Without some sort of context as to why I might be having a stressed galvanic response and what constitutes a valid reaction to the stressor, the system could easily turn into something counterproductive.
Maybe I'm stressed because I gotta take a leak. Maybe the crazy driver is behind me and I've accidentally done something to set him off (not noticed him catching up with me when he's onramping or being unable to move over to the left lane and get out of his way), and I'm just scared of him. Maybe a cop's just nailed me for blowing a stop sign, but I see a safe pulloff 100 feet ahead. Maybe my chest suddenly hurts and I'm having trouble breathing, and the hospital's 50 yards up the road. Maybe someone's just tried to carjack me.
Yes, most of these are outside/unlikely cases, but a system like this will have unintended consequences.
I had a car that nannied me by refusing to start unless any seat with more than 20 pounds in it had its seatbelt attached. I'm already a freakazoid about wearing my seatbelt, because I've been in an accident where it clearly saved my life, but I also carry loads in my passenger and back seats occasionally. Net result: In that car, all seatbelts but the drivers remained locked at all times, and most passengers just sat on them. This was the exact opposite of the intended effect of the technology.
Urban legend speaks of people being unable to start their cars when under extreme time pressure (imminent danger) because they didn't think to put on their seat belts before turning the key. I doubt those stories, but still, they are an example of why the technology might go horribly wrong and/or be rejected as a concept without some form of smarts behind the decision.
My favorite was the cars that had the seatbelt permanently attached to the doors, so when you got in and shut the door, the belt was ON. Brilliant concept, except that, should a door somehow come open during an accident (or should someone catch their sleeve on the door handle while the car was moving, for example) that seatbelt was now an active participant in passenger ejection. Not to mention the simple fact that the doorframe has less heft than the car's frame, so you've already lost some of the strength in the system right there.
This idea could certainly be useful, but it would have to be tempered with a healthy dose of information. If my galvanic response goes up AND my driving suddenly gets really aggressive AND there are other cars beside me or immediately in front of me, then that's almost certainly something I'm doing that I need a little break from.
I have no doubt it does. Unfortunately the symbol # in the US was chosen to indicate pounds (as in weight) which unfortunately is the same term the British chose to indicate your currency.
Now, I won't go off on how silly it is to refer to your standard unit of weight and your standard unit of currency with the EXACT SAME WORD.:)
"How much per pound?" "Three pounds." "So it's three pounds for a pound, or I can get a pound for three pounds?" "What?"
But it is unfortunate that the # symbol looks a little like lb - enough that it became a standard "shorthand" for lb in trading circles in the US. And that the term also happens to coincide with a word that has a totally different meaning and symbol across the pound, err, pond.
Between our two respective countries, we sure did make a hash of it, didn't we?;)
I've heard people pronounce WWW as trip-dub (phonetic spelling, I'm sure there's some official spelling somewhere, or more likely several of them - grin).
Thinking about it, I may be confusing ! and * in terms of "bang". I was sure, somewhere in my IBM days, there was some group or other that referred to * as "bang" but maybe my synapses are just too whacked.
.. and therein lies the fun. "pound" refers to an octothorp/numbersign in parts of the US, and an indication of currency (squiggly "L") in Britain. "Bang" is most commonly used to refer to an exclamation point, but I've also seen it used (more rarely) to indicate an asterisk.
"Octothorp" is annoying, but at least unambiguous, since it's a term made up specifically to refer to something and is not subject to regional whimsy.:)
I use the term "forwardslash" fairly frequently, because a good number of times when I say "slash" people ask "which one?" While "slash" and "backslash" are technically correct, "forwardslash" is a descriptive synonym for "slash". Yes, it adds unnecessary syllables, but it's not nearly as bad as the myriad (and sometimes very ambiguous) names for "*" (asterisk, star, splat, bang, etc) and "#" (number, pound, hash, octothorp, etc).
I do not use "full colon" except when I've had too much curry and am waiting in line at a restroom asking the person in the stall to please hurry up lest they exit the stall into a sudden Superfund Site.
I agree that rubberbanding isn't a really great solution.
An AI should also learn your tactics over time and react to them with some level of intelligence if possible (if you always left flank, then they claymore the crap out of their left side and right-flank you).
It'd also be nice in single-player to have some adjustments. When the game reacts, what portions of it get adjusted? Maybe the enemy gets reinforcements instead of getting the ability to fire a 22 pistol 3000 yards and make a consistent first-time-kill shot every time.
Power can also rarely be generated where it is used. Solar/wind/tidal sources can only be used where you have strong sunlight, reliable winds, or access to the ocean. And land useful for renewable sources is at a severe premium in a lot of areas. Microgeneration is great, don't get me wrong, but it's not going to be an optimal solution in a lot of cases. Putting a solar panel on the roof of my house in Maine isn't terribly useful. First, I live at a fairly high latitude, and second, I live in a pine forest and maybe get 6 hours of sunlight per day (maximum, in the height of summer) on my roof. That solar cell could arguably generate twice or three times the amount of power in an open field somewhere significantly south of me, so there's little point in wasting solar panels by putting one on my roof.
Energy, and especially renewable energy, will by its nature have to cover some distance, and with the distance comes loss (through resistance). Superconductors change some of that, by offering a way to move electricity significant distances with lower losses.
So in addition to the sporadic generation of almost all renewable sources (even tidal forces have slack periods several times a day) you also have the geographic diversity of generation technologies forcing us to think about moving power around more efficiently. Renewables need the freedom to be used at 100% of their capacity when they are available, but to have some sort of backup plan when they are not. The larger the combined grid, the more we can play the averages and ensure that someone is using all the renewables we can generate and not wasting their capacity.
Either that or crank up the difficulty by simply denying them ammo for their favorite weapon, forcing them to adapt to a different weapon and changing their tactics.
Don't make the enemies any harder, just make the player choose weapons they need to learn to use properly in order to continue defeating the enemies.
I can also see this as being a playing-field leveler for online games - take a lower-skill player and a higher-skill player and allow them to compete head-to-head and have both of them engaged and interested in the game. Give the lower-skill player better weapons, more health points, and more ammo, and force the higher-skill player to use their skills to overcome their technical disadvantage.
I've gone to a number of LAN parties and it's both uninteresting and frustrating when you don't have enough players to make teams that challenge everyone - the experienced players bore quickly of mowing down the clueless because it just gets old after a while, and the inexperienced players get tired of getting fragged every 4 seconds and regenerating somewhere way the hell in the middle of nowhere with a crowbar as their only weapon, and having to rebuild an arsenal and get back to the action only to be head-shotted again as soon as an experienced player with an established kill zone and a sniper rifle sees them.
But if you had an adaptive game that took someone who was playing with less skill (low fire/hit ratio, low kill/die ratio) and ups their ammo, health, and weapons quality until they are playing roughly on par with more experienced players, you'd probably have a game that is more interesting for everyone playing, and the less experienced players slowly lose their technical advantage as they get better at the game.
I know this sounds like some sort of squishy-gooey politically correct Romper Room madness, but I've played against both superior and inferior players in a number of online games, and both are uninteresting. A game that is too easy is just as uninteresting as one that's too hard. Fragging newbies doesn't help you develop your skills or present an interesting challenge, but fragging a newbie who has a self-reloading MegaWeapon and a few thousand health points when all you have is a pistol, now THAT'S a challenge. Especially knowing that, once you defeat him, he'll come back a little stronger each time.:)
And, yes, you'll get players who will intentionally play poorly then suddenly reveal skills AND have the ammo to use them at critical moments. That could actually be part of the gameplay, and compensated for by losing technical advantage very rapidly if your kill ratio suddenly skyrockets.
"Head Shot! Double Kill! Triple Kill! Rampage! RAIL GUN JAMMED!" "Hey, where'd all the ammo go for the weapons I have left that aren't jammed?"
I'm in Vegas, I have $40 in my pocket with no intention of spending any more, and want to be entertained for four hours, preferably with some good food and a little booze involved. I can do one of two basic things:
1. Walk around Vegas, watch the floor shows and other people gambling, and buy a nice meal and maybe a drink or three sometime during the process. (this is what I would do).
2. Take my $40 and stick at one casino, visibly gambling and losing slowly, and wait for someone to offer me a meal card to the buffet and a drink or two. Get probably about the same meal I could have bought at one of the Vegas restaurants, and be entertained by the flashing lights and the people walking by.
Overall, I've spent the same $40 and received the same basic entertainment value.
Yes, there are people who would bring all their money and gamble it all, then cash in their return ticket and hock their undies for a couple more bucks for "one more hit at the one-armed monster". Gambling, as an industry, does not exist primarily to serve such people. Most of them will self-destruct and/or go into some form of GamblersAnon program. A good casino sees the signs and sends the person back to their room with a comped meal before they ruin themselves. They generate bad press while simultaneously not really making the casino a steady income.
The steady, reliable money comes from people who rent hotel rooms, gamble well within their means, and buy or are comped meals. And there's really little difference whether you buy the meal and watch the gambling for free, or participate in the gambling and get the meal for free. The house always gets your money, and you always get fed.
True, but I think you'll find that just about any job could cause issues later with someone. And given that people who have a choice tend to want to work for firms that match their own social/moral code, this may be worth thinking about.
You could work for a mail-order company and have someone from a brick-and-mortar company dislike mail order firms, see one, and shred your resume without reading any further. You could work for Family Planning and find it impossible to find employment for religious organizations. Volunteering for the Young Conservative Movement could hurt your chances of working on a wind project as much as volunteer work for a liberal organization could cost you a possible office job in a logging company or defense contractor.
There will always be people who disqualify your resume because they have personal (or professional) objections to something in your history. If you have core issues working in an industry, consider the fact that your career choices will naturally bias you toward similar-minded employers. This is only human - we want to work for someone or a company we respect, and one aspect of respect is (unfortunately) agreement on certain issues.
So if you are personally uncomfortable enough about gambling to be concerned about accepting a job in the field, you may find that it's not the right choice for your long-term career, because it will remain a "skeleton in the closet" to you. If you want to work in the future for people who are more closely aligned to your own moral compass, then you may find it's a detriment to your career.
On the other hand, if you're avoiding the job because you think others might have objections to gambling (but you don't), then it would stand a relatively low chance of affecting your career, because you're not tending to seek employment by people who dislike gambling. It still might, but then again you also might come out ahead on the slot machines too. Neither is very likely.:)
If you want to be entertained for a couple of hours, I suppose playing the slots in Vegas is about as cheap as, say, renting a movie, and a hell of a lot cheaper than seeing a show.
Of course, watching other people gamble and checking out the casinos is even more entertaining and generally costs nothing. But gambling with real money doesn't appeal to me. I guess I was too good at math.:)
But the Buffalo and Linksys routers that are supported by DD/Hyper/OpenWRT and Tomato, as far as I know, contain Broadcom radios and require the Broadcom binaries.
I'm no expert, but I did make a few modifications to HyperWRT Thibor. After loading up Busybox to do the compile on my Linux box, I found out that the source package included Broadcom binaries to support the radio. Most of my changes were UI-related so I didn't delve too deeply into the actual radio API, but the Broadcom binary was compiled into the eventual package.
Maybe Jon rewrote the driver for the Broadcom radio in Tomato, but (genius that he is) I sincerely doubt that. That's a massive undertaking, and since Broadcom has a stable and well-established binary for their "G" radios, there's little point in trying to rewrite it. Hopefully their binarly (or Netgear's implementation of it, more likely) will improve.
So, by that definition, I'm not sure if you can honestly consider any current consumer-grade router to be "Open Source" (from a purist perspective). The most popular "modder routers" are all Broadcom units, and all require the same binary to access the radio. All of them appear to contain restricted drivers.
Skinny is one thing, but there's not enough room in her lower torso to hold a spinal column, much less a stomach, liver, kidneys and other assorted gizzards. If someone really looked like that, they'd be long dead...
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against skinny (although heroin chic is kinda spooky), but this picture takes spooky to a whole other level. This is less of a "Schindlers List" and more of a "someone cut my belly open, removed all of the contents, wrapped my spinal column in pressure tape, then covered the whole thing with a tight shirt".
Well, it all depends on your definition of "threat". The physical threat posed by an Aibo or Roomba is pretty low, unless it manages to somehow trip me up or expose wiring in my house or something. I suppose it could be used to start a fire if the materials were somewhat accessible to it, or something like that. However, physical threat is not the only issue.
If I buy a toy robot with WiFi and a webcam so it can patrol my house when I'm gone based on my remote controls, that's all well and good, but if someone took control of that same robot remotely and managed to watch me type in a banking password or caught me doing something embarrassing and put the video on my company's intranet site, that could be considered a "threat". Or if they simply had the robot park its shiny hiney in front of my shred pile and start "reading" everything in it while I was away, or walk through the house making note of motion detectors and alarm system controls for a possible future "personal visit" to deprive me of a few goods.
Web-controlled devices have a number of threat/interception vectors. Someone could intercept the WiFi signal used for local control. Someone could intercept the HTTP request or simply log into the control page from the Internet if they can get the password. Once someone has control over that device, they are basically an intruder in my house (albeit with limited physical mobility, poor vision, etc).
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I'm still pretty happy with my Athlon64 2200 running Windows XP (32Bit), though I may need to do some upgrades to a few components in the near future.
I have a promo copy of Vista that Microsoft sent me. It's never been in a drive. From what I'm hearing it probably never will be. LOL.
I agree - Windows7 appears to be overpriced for the improvements they are offering, at least for my own personal use. I have an older machine (Athlon Tbird 1.33Gz, 512MB RAM, old video card) that is running Linux Mint just fine, and I've recently replaced the last bit of Windows-dependent hardware (my Lexmark printer finally died, so I got a Hewlett-Packard WiFi printer that works fine in Mint). Most of my software is either open source or has a Linux equivalent available that does the same basic job.
If I do a rebuild, I'll either reinstall XP or bite the bullet and put Mint on it. I don't see a compelling need for 7, so it's a choice between what works today and trying something new. If I'm going to try something new, Linux is a lot cheaper. ;)
If I were a business, I'd have to be saying "huh? XP is a stable, reliable, established OS that runs all of my applications. Bugger off."
And many of those businesses are stuck with Microsoft's own design flaws (MS toolkits generating code that only runs on IE6) that preclude many of them from even being ABLE to go to 7 without expensive software reengineering.
Heck, some incompatibility in a major third-party package kept my last company from upgrading any workstation that used it from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. In 2005. The package was up to the latest version at the time. This was resolved in 2006 with another paid upgrade, but they were still stuck in IE6 at that time, and when I left two years ago in '07 they were still on XP Service Pack 1 because SP2 and SP3 would break several applications (including this specific one which ran their customer database).
How am I to differentiate this from any salesman saying, "Buy the most expensive one for the best experience."
You can't. This is a complete shill-job by Mike Dell, and while I can't blame him and I'd do precisely the same thing in his place, this article is not news, it's advertising.
Do I detect the delectable odor of some potted meat product in a can? Why yes, yes I do.
In this case, it would have been a good thing if the machine defaults were loaded. If I understand the article correctly, the hospital changed the instructions surrounding a specific test so that test used a lot more radiation than the normal test should.
Trouble is, "dangerous dosage" can easily vary based on the patient and the information you need. If you have a 112-year-old in the machine and are scanning for some sort of blood flow interruption to the brain, you can justify a good bit of radiation - a 112-year-old isn't too worried about radiation effects 20-30 years down the road. Checking a broken bone for fragments in a toddler's leg.. not so much.
The issue is that the machine itself is capable of delivering the doses of radiation that the technician asks for, and comes with a preset grouping of scans that appear to be intended to be modified to suit individual patients and conditions. Sounds like someone turned the dial up to 11 for a specific test, and saved that as the default for that test.
The real question is more complex. Is day trading a BAD thing and, if so, can we stop it?
And if we find a way to stop it, what are the consequences to non-daytraders? Are those consequences worse than tolerating daytraders?
The measure of a good law is:
1. Is it preventing some form of harm?
2. Is it introducing less harm than it is preventing?
All laws should go through this kind of proof. How much harm is being done, how can it be prevented, and how much harm would be done by the prevention. I can think of a number of laws that would simply go away with the slightest application of this test.
Of course, the terms used are extremely subjective, and there are many types of "harm" (physical, emotional, financial, loss of freedom, etc). So it's tough to tally most laws on T-charts.
...but that just makes me even more irritated.
ERROR: Post Rejected. Galvanic Response indicates irritation. You have been logged out of /.
Please wait 1 minute and retry.
Have a marvelously wonderful day.
Signed,
- GalvaNanny.
Someone came up with this idea several years ago. I seem to remember this being a British idea, but my memory may be incorrect.
Without some sort of context as to why I might be having a stressed galvanic response and what constitutes a valid reaction to the stressor, the system could easily turn into something counterproductive.
Maybe I'm stressed because I gotta take a leak. Maybe the crazy driver is behind me and I've accidentally done something to set him off (not noticed him catching up with me when he's onramping or being unable to move over to the left lane and get out of his way), and I'm just scared of him. Maybe a cop's just nailed me for blowing a stop sign, but I see a safe pulloff 100 feet ahead. Maybe my chest suddenly hurts and I'm having trouble breathing, and the hospital's 50 yards up the road. Maybe someone's just tried to carjack me.
Yes, most of these are outside/unlikely cases, but a system like this will have unintended consequences.
I had a car that nannied me by refusing to start unless any seat with more than 20 pounds in it had its seatbelt attached. I'm already a freakazoid about wearing my seatbelt, because I've been in an accident where it clearly saved my life, but I also carry loads in my passenger and back seats occasionally. Net result: In that car, all seatbelts but the drivers remained locked at all times, and most passengers just sat on them. This was the exact opposite of the intended effect of the technology.
Urban legend speaks of people being unable to start their cars when under extreme time pressure (imminent danger) because they didn't think to put on their seat belts before turning the key. I doubt those stories, but still, they are an example of why the technology might go horribly wrong and/or be rejected as a concept without some form of smarts behind the decision.
My favorite was the cars that had the seatbelt permanently attached to the doors, so when you got in and shut the door, the belt was ON. Brilliant concept, except that, should a door somehow come open during an accident (or should someone catch their sleeve on the door handle while the car was moving, for example) that seatbelt was now an active participant in passenger ejection. Not to mention the simple fact that the doorframe has less heft than the car's frame, so you've already lost some of the strength in the system right there.
This idea could certainly be useful, but it would have to be tempered with a healthy dose of information. If my galvanic response goes up AND my driving suddenly gets really aggressive AND there are other cars beside me or immediately in front of me, then that's almost certainly something I'm doing that I need a little break from.
I do that too. I like to start on the top and finish on the bottom. Maybe I've said too much.
"Open the trade portal!"
I was stressed out about how I needed to make this trade RFN so I could retire to a small island nation - MY OWN!
Stupid galvanic response thingie made me wait until after the bubble burst.
I have no doubt it does. Unfortunately the symbol # in the US was chosen to indicate pounds (as in weight) which unfortunately is the same term the British chose to indicate your currency.
Now, I won't go off on how silly it is to refer to your standard unit of weight and your standard unit of currency with the EXACT SAME WORD. :)
"How much per pound?"
"Three pounds."
"So it's three pounds for a pound, or I can get a pound for three pounds?"
"What?"
But it is unfortunate that the # symbol looks a little like lb - enough that it became a standard "shorthand" for lb in trading circles in the US. And that the term also happens to coincide with a word that has a totally different meaning and symbol across the pound, err, pond.
Between our two respective countries, we sure did make a hash of it, didn't we? ;)
Whack whack. I like it.
I've heard people pronounce WWW as trip-dub (phonetic spelling, I'm sure there's some official spelling somewhere, or more likely several of them - grin).
Thinking about it, I may be confusing ! and * in terms of "bang". I was sure, somewhere in my IBM days, there was some group or other that referred to * as "bang" but maybe my synapses are just too whacked.
.. and therein lies the fun. "pound" refers to an octothorp/numbersign in parts of the US, and an indication of currency (squiggly "L") in Britain. "Bang" is most commonly used to refer to an exclamation point, but I've also seen it used (more rarely) to indicate an asterisk.
"Octothorp" is annoying, but at least unambiguous, since it's a term made up specifically to refer to something and is not subject to regional whimsy. :)
I use the term "forwardslash" fairly frequently, because a good number of times when I say "slash" people ask "which one?" While "slash" and "backslash" are technically correct, "forwardslash" is a descriptive synonym for "slash". Yes, it adds unnecessary syllables, but it's not nearly as bad as the myriad (and sometimes very ambiguous) names for "*" (asterisk, star, splat, bang, etc) and "#" (number, pound, hash, octothorp, etc).
I do not use "full colon" except when I've had too much curry and am waiting in line at a restroom asking the person in the stall to please hurry up lest they exit the stall into a sudden Superfund Site.
Actually, I was referring to both.
I agree that rubberbanding isn't a really great solution.
An AI should also learn your tactics over time and react to them with some level of intelligence if possible (if you always left flank, then they claymore the crap out of their left side and right-flank you).
It'd also be nice in single-player to have some adjustments. When the game reacts, what portions of it get adjusted? Maybe the enemy gets reinforcements instead of getting the ability to fire a 22 pistol 3000 yards and make a consistent first-time-kill shot every time.
To add to the previous postings...
Power can also rarely be generated where it is used. Solar/wind/tidal sources can only be used where you have strong sunlight, reliable winds, or access to the ocean. And land useful for renewable sources is at a severe premium in a lot of areas. Microgeneration is great, don't get me wrong, but it's not going to be an optimal solution in a lot of cases. Putting a solar panel on the roof of my house in Maine isn't terribly useful. First, I live at a fairly high latitude, and second, I live in a pine forest and maybe get 6 hours of sunlight per day (maximum, in the height of summer) on my roof. That solar cell could arguably generate twice or three times the amount of power in an open field somewhere significantly south of me, so there's little point in wasting solar panels by putting one on my roof.
Energy, and especially renewable energy, will by its nature have to cover some distance, and with the distance comes loss (through resistance). Superconductors change some of that, by offering a way to move electricity significant distances with lower losses.
So in addition to the sporadic generation of almost all renewable sources (even tidal forces have slack periods several times a day) you also have the geographic diversity of generation technologies forcing us to think about moving power around more efficiently. Renewables need the freedom to be used at 100% of their capacity when they are available, but to have some sort of backup plan when they are not. The larger the combined grid, the more we can play the averages and ensure that someone is using all the renewables we can generate and not wasting their capacity.
Either that or crank up the difficulty by simply denying them ammo for their favorite weapon, forcing them to adapt to a different weapon and changing their tactics.
Don't make the enemies any harder, just make the player choose weapons they need to learn to use properly in order to continue defeating the enemies.
I can also see this as being a playing-field leveler for online games - take a lower-skill player and a higher-skill player and allow them to compete head-to-head and have both of them engaged and interested in the game. Give the lower-skill player better weapons, more health points, and more ammo, and force the higher-skill player to use their skills to overcome their technical disadvantage.
I've gone to a number of LAN parties and it's both uninteresting and frustrating when you don't have enough players to make teams that challenge everyone - the experienced players bore quickly of mowing down the clueless because it just gets old after a while, and the inexperienced players get tired of getting fragged every 4 seconds and regenerating somewhere way the hell in the middle of nowhere with a crowbar as their only weapon, and having to rebuild an arsenal and get back to the action only to be head-shotted again as soon as an experienced player with an established kill zone and a sniper rifle sees them.
But if you had an adaptive game that took someone who was playing with less skill (low fire/hit ratio, low kill/die ratio) and ups their ammo, health, and weapons quality until they are playing roughly on par with more experienced players, you'd probably have a game that is more interesting for everyone playing, and the less experienced players slowly lose their technical advantage as they get better at the game.
I know this sounds like some sort of squishy-gooey politically correct Romper Room madness, but I've played against both superior and inferior players in a number of online games, and both are uninteresting. A game that is too easy is just as uninteresting as one that's too hard. Fragging newbies doesn't help you develop your skills or present an interesting challenge, but fragging a newbie who has a self-reloading MegaWeapon and a few thousand health points when all you have is a pistol, now THAT'S a challenge. Especially knowing that, once you defeat him, he'll come back a little stronger each time. :)
And, yes, you'll get players who will intentionally play poorly then suddenly reveal skills AND have the ammo to use them at critical moments. That could actually be part of the gameplay, and compensated for by losing technical advantage very rapidly if your kill ratio suddenly skyrockets.
"Head Shot! Double Kill! Triple Kill! Rampage! RAIL GUN JAMMED!"
"Hey, where'd all the ammo go for the weapons I have left that aren't jammed?"
Tax benefits AND the right to discriminate openly?
Hell, if I start a business, it's going to be a religion.
It's simple enough.
I'm in Vegas, I have $40 in my pocket with no intention of spending any more, and want to be entertained for four hours, preferably with some good food and a little booze involved. I can do one of two basic things:
1. Walk around Vegas, watch the floor shows and other people gambling, and buy a nice meal and maybe a drink or three sometime during the process. (this is what I would do).
2. Take my $40 and stick at one casino, visibly gambling and losing slowly, and wait for someone to offer me a meal card to the buffet and a drink or two. Get probably about the same meal I could have bought at one of the Vegas restaurants, and be entertained by the flashing lights and the people walking by.
Overall, I've spent the same $40 and received the same basic entertainment value.
Yes, there are people who would bring all their money and gamble it all, then cash in their return ticket and hock their undies for a couple more bucks for "one more hit at the one-armed monster". Gambling, as an industry, does not exist primarily to serve such people. Most of them will self-destruct and/or go into some form of GamblersAnon program. A good casino sees the signs and sends the person back to their room with a comped meal before they ruin themselves. They generate bad press while simultaneously not really making the casino a steady income.
The steady, reliable money comes from people who rent hotel rooms, gamble well within their means, and buy or are comped meals. And there's really little difference whether you buy the meal and watch the gambling for free, or participate in the gambling and get the meal for free. The house always gets your money, and you always get fed.
True, but I think you'll find that just about any job could cause issues later with someone. And given that people who have a choice tend to want to work for firms that match their own social/moral code, this may be worth thinking about.
You could work for a mail-order company and have someone from a brick-and-mortar company dislike mail order firms, see one, and shred your resume without reading any further. You could work for Family Planning and find it impossible to find employment for religious organizations. Volunteering for the Young Conservative Movement could hurt your chances of working on a wind project as much as volunteer work for a liberal organization could cost you a possible office job in a logging company or defense contractor.
There will always be people who disqualify your resume because they have personal (or professional) objections to something in your history. If you have core issues working in an industry, consider the fact that your career choices will naturally bias you toward similar-minded employers. This is only human - we want to work for someone or a company we respect, and one aspect of respect is (unfortunately) agreement on certain issues.
So if you are personally uncomfortable enough about gambling to be concerned about accepting a job in the field, you may find that it's not the right choice for your long-term career, because it will remain a "skeleton in the closet" to you. If you want to work in the future for people who are more closely aligned to your own moral compass, then you may find it's a detriment to your career.
On the other hand, if you're avoiding the job because you think others might have objections to gambling (but you don't), then it would stand a relatively low chance of affecting your career, because you're not tending to seek employment by people who dislike gambling. It still might, but then again you also might come out ahead on the slot machines too. Neither is very likely. :)
If you want to be entertained for a couple of hours, I suppose playing the slots in Vegas is about as cheap as, say, renting a movie, and a hell of a lot cheaper than seeing a show.
Of course, watching other people gamble and checking out the casinos is even more entertaining and generally costs nothing. But gambling with real money doesn't appeal to me. I guess I was too good at math. :)
But the Buffalo and Linksys routers that are supported by DD/Hyper/OpenWRT and Tomato, as far as I know, contain Broadcom radios and require the Broadcom binaries.
I'm no expert, but I did make a few modifications to HyperWRT Thibor. After loading up Busybox to do the compile on my Linux box, I found out that the source package included Broadcom binaries to support the radio. Most of my changes were UI-related so I didn't delve too deeply into the actual radio API, but the Broadcom binary was compiled into the eventual package.
Maybe Jon rewrote the driver for the Broadcom radio in Tomato, but (genius that he is) I sincerely doubt that. That's a massive undertaking, and since Broadcom has a stable and well-established binary for their "G" radios, there's little point in trying to rewrite it. Hopefully their binarly (or Netgear's implementation of it, more likely) will improve.
So, by that definition, I'm not sure if you can honestly consider any current consumer-grade router to be "Open Source" (from a purist perspective). The most popular "modder routers" are all Broadcom units, and all require the same binary to access the radio. All of them appear to contain restricted drivers.
Skinny is one thing, but there's not enough room in her lower torso to hold a spinal column, much less a stomach, liver, kidneys and other assorted gizzards. If someone really looked like that, they'd be long dead...
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against skinny (although heroin chic is kinda spooky), but this picture takes spooky to a whole other level. This is less of a "Schindlers List" and more of a "someone cut my belly open, removed all of the contents, wrapped my spinal column in pressure tape, then covered the whole thing with a tight shirt".
Well, it all depends on your definition of "threat". The physical threat posed by an Aibo or Roomba is pretty low, unless it manages to somehow trip me up or expose wiring in my house or something. I suppose it could be used to start a fire if the materials were somewhat accessible to it, or something like that. However, physical threat is not the only issue.
If I buy a toy robot with WiFi and a webcam so it can patrol my house when I'm gone based on my remote controls, that's all well and good, but if someone took control of that same robot remotely and managed to watch me type in a banking password or caught me doing something embarrassing and put the video on my company's intranet site, that could be considered a "threat". Or if they simply had the robot park its shiny hiney in front of my shred pile and start "reading" everything in it while I was away, or walk through the house making note of motion detectors and alarm system controls for a possible future "personal visit" to deprive me of a few goods.
Web-controlled devices have a number of threat/interception vectors. Someone could intercept the WiFi signal used for local control. Someone could intercept the HTTP request or simply log into the control page from the Internet if they can get the password. Once someone has control over that device, they are basically an intruder in my house (albeit with limited physical mobility, poor vision, etc).
Ah, yes, the "Zeroth Law".
Hmm, good point. Steel-jacketed bullets are a must for criminals, because it'll mess up the autopsy...