If you ever visit Seattle let me know and I'll take you to a shooting range.:)
Guns ARE scary if you are ignorant about them. I clearly remember my first time shooting, as a young teenager. It was intimidating, and a little frightening. Guns are potent symbols, and when you handle one in person you realize it is heavy, complicated, loud, and really, really dangerous.
However, with practice all of that is overcome. Except the dangerous part; never forget that. Respect your arms or they will teach you a lesson the second you get careless.
I recently moved into a @Home area. I called in advance to set up an install date -- but the system saw the phone number I was calling from, realized that I couldn't have @Home in that area, played a message and hung up on me! I eventually had to call Excite @Home's toll number and have them connect me. (And repeat this over and over while I had tech problems with them.)
That'll teach me to have a mobile phone with an LA area code while living in Seattle. I had to use a friend's land line with the proper area code/prefix when I tired of the toll charges.
I wrote a nasty letter to ATT @Home, and mentioned this insanity to everyone I talked to over there, but no one could help.
Corporations are kind of like black holes. Once you attain a certain mass, no customer service can escape.
It's true, there are too many losers in online games. I stopped playing EQ partially for that reason. The other reason is that the game is boring hack-n-slash.
I play Diablo II, but I only play with people I know. I have several friends who play, and my wife plays. I have never played a game with Joe Blow, and I never will, because Joe is usually an idiot or a cheater.
I still play Q3 and UT online sometimes, but I have probably deluded myself into thinking that no one is cheating.:)
I am pretty much a story purist, but there are some things that can never make the jump to live-action. I think most of the LOTR qualifies, but Tom Bombadil is at the top of the list. I don't think there is a director or a technology that could present those scenes in a way that wouldn't just come off hokey. So I am OK with that cut.
It's other MEDDLING with the story that has me angry. Word is there is some big Elven army at the battle of Helm's Deep. That wasn't in the books. If true, it's infuriating. Cut what you have to -- but don't alter what's left for the sake of a better action sequence!
I fully expect these movies to suck like a bucket of ticks.
If you are planning on constructing a Flash site, please DON'T.
Call me old-fashioned, but even with my cable modem I have no patience for goofy animations to download. It slows things down and contributes to Web Bloat.
I've never seen a Flash site that wasn't an abomination. I prefer web sites that are text and static images. Give me the ability to download animations -- don't attack me with them.
I know my crusade is a futile one. I work in the web biz, enterprise level software, and it's sick how many of our clients insist on larding up their sites with useless crap. Especially when you consider how few people have fast connections. The analog modem is still the way of the world...
I ordered 3x of the Firecracker kits, using friends & family to help. It was a great deal, and I am still using the gear today.
X-10 has some pretty crummy service, though. I ordered something else from them later on, and I got it -- along with someone ELSE'S "DVD Anywhere" wireless A/V gear.
These days, I prefer to use Smarthome for X-10 stuff, though I am always tempted by the cameras they plug at x10.com.
You are right, I never thought about it that way -- Jar Jar IS the one unique character in Episode 1.
That makes it even MORE sad.
Offtopic rant: The worst, the absolute worst part of Episode 1 was when Darth Maul showed up on Tatooine. He was flying around in that little scooter, with his cape fluttering out behind him... it made me think of Witchy Poo from HR Puff'n'Stuff for some reason. It was totally silly looking. So much for the fearsome Darth Maul.
I'm going to voice a very unpopular sentiment: I am OK with region encoding.
I'm not saying you all have to roll over and take it. I am not saying that it should be the law that players are region encoded. I am not saying that as a consumer I LIKE it. I AM saying that a publisher has the right to protect their deals by restricting where the content can be viewed, as long as that restriction is done in accordance with the law.
If I publish a movie, and I cut lucrative distribution deals in other nations, why shouldn't I use the region coding mechanism to protect that? That's what it's all about, you know; "They" don't want foreign DVDs from wrecking a theatrical release in yet another country. It is all about control. Yes, it sucks for the consumer. I know that, and I fully expect clever, motivated people to circumvent the region coding, and I think that should be allowed. But if the content publishers and the hardware makers want to work together to make playing foriegn media harder, that is their right. At least in the US.
I know that in other countries region restrictions are illegal in the hardware. Good for them. If US citizens want that as well, they need to start using the political process to make it happen.
I used to be on the other side of the fence, ranting about how region coding shold be illegal. Then I started a publishing company, and we are approaching a foriegn licensing deal. Now I understand why region codes exist in a very personal way.
OK, mod me down. My karma can take it. C'mon, HIT ME! DO IT!;)
I can actually answer some of this. I used to work at JPL on spacecraft computers, back when I was a EE student. I did stuff like writing bootstrap code in assembler that was particular to the custom chips that comprised the computer. I also designed PCBs for the test platform.
Space is a brutal environment. Even out in the deep black between the outer planets, there are a lot of gamma rays and charged particles that would play hell with a conventional computer. Spacecraft computers are built of relatively old-fashioned components, and they are made with a special radiation hardening process. There are no 1GHz CPUs in space. We don't really need them, either; the tasks performed by robotic spacecraft are pretty simple, compared to say running Windows.
Shielding isn't the answer. Imagine a metal box around a computer. Now imagine a proton or some other relatively heavy charged particle is fired into the metal. The particle can hit an atomic nucleus and shatter it, flinging MORE particles into the hapless computer. Bad news. And shielding thick enough to protect against this is heavy, and that's bad for spacecraft too.
So they use simple, rugged components, that can usually resist a proton zipping through them. And for the times when a bit gets flipped by a particle -- this is called a Single Event Upset or SEU -- there is a TON of error correction & detection bits allocated in these computers. The system I worked on, which is the computer in the Cassini craft, used a modified Hamming code. I think that almost 1/2 the bits in every 16-bit word were allocated to EDAC.
Unfortunately I do not remember the details of how you fab a chip to be radiation resistant. Some special substrate, special transistors... I'm sure you can Google for it.
My wife and I cut out the land line about 6 months ago. We each have a cell phone. More convenient, more features, and only a tad more money for 2 separate numbers. It's great.
We ended up putting a land line back in for our small business, and now a ReplayTV uses it too. But if not for the small biz we'd be land line free.
Screw the phone company! Oh, er, wait... Screw the land line division!
(If I have misremembered any of this I welcome corrections...)
In CA, you can't shoot someone unless they are outright attacking you, even if they break into your home. You can't shoot at all in defense of a 3rd party. Wife getting stabbed? Tough. Try wrestling with the guy. If he stabs you, you can shoot him.
In TX and AZ you can blow someone away if they present an immediate threat. In TX you can kill in defense of property, so if you catch someone stealing your car stereo you can waste him. I don't know if that is the case in AZ. In both states you can employ lethal force in defense of a 3rd party.
In DE you can't use lethal force except as a last resort. If someone breaks into your home and threatens you, or even attacks you, you must FALL BACK, flee your home. You can't shoot unless there is no other alternative, even bad alternatives like running and getting shot in the back, or leaving your family in the house with the bad guy. (That's crazy, IMHO.)
In WA, where I just moved, I don't know what the law is. I better find out!
Would I shoot someone for jiggling my door handle? No. But I would be waiting there with a weapon in case he came in. Then, he'd have exactly 1 second to comply with my commands before I issued him a severe case of kinetic energy poisoning.
If he had a ranged weapon, I'd drop him, laws be damned. Better judged by 12 than carried by 6, as they say.
(If you are one of those people who wants to go on and on about how I am more unsafe with a gun at home, blah blah blah, please save the effort. You're not converting me.)
>Is there any cheap alternative for a linux router? A small low power EPROM-able device that could run a Linux router at low power? Something without a fan and a hard drive?
There are critters that live on our ocean floors subsisting purely on the chemicals spewed out of volcanic vents. Bacteria at the base of the food chain subsist on the crud that pours out, and other critters eat them, and so on up to crabs, worms and other kinds of life.
The sun powers ALMOST all life on earth by "feeding" autotrophs -- but life can exist without solar energy.
Personally, I believe that anywhere you find liquid water and light (OR a renewable source of high-enegry chemicals), you'll find life. I bet that the ocean floors of Europa and Ganymede will have colonies of life much like what we see around the subsea volcanic vents here on Earth.
As a biochemist I can hardly wait to see what alien life will look like at the molecular level.
I dunno, I have enough work-related angst that I fancy I can smell another authentic sob story.;) I'll give the AC the benefit of the doubt, I like the story.
Besides, it fits very well with what we know about how Apple works. Product development there has always seemed to be "ego-driven." Avie certainly has the POWER to do what was attributed to him, and he and Steve are obviously big NeXT fans. It could be true.
>You speak of the GM food scare and the BSE crisis like these are actual problems...
BSE IS a problem for the dozen or whatever people that have caught new type CJD in recent years.
Do some reading on BSE and the prions that are thought to cause it. It's pretty scary stuff, worthy of the radical containment measures that are being taken.
Thanks for that, I have been using FreeBSD for over a year and I haven't seen an explanation that good yet. I never got the hang of startup scripts, I have been manually turning some services on when I have to reboot.
If I had to reboot more often I would have taken the time to figure this out earlier.;)
>Anti government paranoia is downright unamerican.
Saying that, you must not BE an American, or perhaps you are a troll.
Anti-government paranoia is one of the MOST American things. The US was founded by people who were pissed off at ol' King George, and afraid of the future he would create for the Colonies.
The Founding Fathers even put some really, really radical stuff in the Constitution to protect us from the government -- this is the reason for the 2nd Amendment (that's the guns one, for you non-Americans).
One of the FFs, I think it was Jefferson, said something like, "Government is like fire -- a wonderful servant but a fearful master." I have probably misquoted it, but the essence is there, and it is an incredibly insightful statement.
We SHOULD keep an eye on the government. It is the nature of such institutions to aggregate power, to exert always more control -- and citizens need to be ever vigilant to keep that in check. When the citizens get lazy, or complacent, they start to lose freedoms for "the greater good."
Slashdot Mirror
If you ever visit Seattle let me know and I'll take you to a shooting range.
Guns ARE scary if you are ignorant about them. I clearly remember my first time shooting, as a young teenager. It was intimidating, and a little frightening. Guns are potent symbols, and when you handle one in person you realize it is heavy, complicated, loud, and really, really dangerous.
However, with practice all of that is overcome. Except the dangerous part; never forget that. Respect your arms or they will teach you a lesson the second you get careless.
Someone moderate this ex-Limey up!
It's @Home, or spend 2x as much for DSL, or go back to dialup. Lesser of the evils.
Not all porn is "obscene." Obscene has a specific legal definition, and obscene works have less (no?) legal protection.
Playboy, for example, is not "obscene."
AT&T @Home is the same way.
I recently moved into a @Home area. I called in advance to set up an install date -- but the system saw the phone number I was calling from, realized that I couldn't have @Home in that area, played a message and hung up on me! I eventually had to call Excite @Home's toll number and have them connect me. (And repeat this over and over while I had tech problems with them.)
That'll teach me to have a mobile phone with an LA area code while living in Seattle. I had to use a friend's land line with the proper area code/prefix when I tired of the toll charges.
I wrote a nasty letter to ATT @Home, and mentioned this insanity to everyone I talked to over there, but no one could help.
Corporations are kind of like black holes. Once you attain a certain mass, no customer service can escape.
It's true, there are too many losers in online games. I stopped playing EQ partially for that reason. The other reason is that the game is boring hack-n-slash.
I play Diablo II, but I only play with people I know. I have several friends who play, and my wife plays. I have never played a game with Joe Blow, and I never will, because Joe is usually an idiot or a cheater.
I still play Q3 and UT online sometimes, but I have probably deluded myself into thinking that no one is cheating.
I am pretty much a story purist, but there are some things that can never make the jump to live-action. I think most of the LOTR qualifies, but Tom Bombadil is at the top of the list. I don't think there is a director or a technology that could present those scenes in a way that wouldn't just come off hokey. So I am OK with that cut.
It's other MEDDLING with the story that has me angry. Word is there is some big Elven army at the battle of Helm's Deep. That wasn't in the books. If true, it's infuriating. Cut what you have to -- but don't alter what's left for the sake of a better action sequence!
I fully expect these movies to suck like a bucket of ticks.
If you are planning on constructing a Flash site, please DON'T.
Call me old-fashioned, but even with my cable modem I have no patience for goofy animations to download. It slows things down and contributes to Web Bloat.
I've never seen a Flash site that wasn't an abomination. I prefer web sites that are text and static images. Give me the ability to download animations -- don't attack me with them.
I know my crusade is a futile one. I work in the web biz, enterprise level software, and it's sick how many of our clients insist on larding up their sites with useless crap. Especially when you consider how few people have fast connections. The analog modem is still the way of the world...
When was The Gernsback Continuum released? Can't find it at IMDB.
I ordered 3x of the Firecracker kits, using friends & family to help. It was a great deal, and I am still using the gear today.
X-10 has some pretty crummy service, though. I ordered something else from them later on, and I got it -- along with someone ELSE'S "DVD Anywhere" wireless A/V gear.
These days, I prefer to use Smarthome for X-10 stuff, though I am always tempted by the cameras they plug at x10.com.
Holy cow! That camera is down to $35 now. Thanks for the link, I got me some SHOPPIN' to do!
>Why did everyone ignore it?
Because it was boring.
You are right, I never thought about it that way -- Jar Jar IS the one unique character in Episode 1.
That makes it even MORE sad.
Offtopic rant: The worst, the absolute worst part of Episode 1 was when Darth Maul showed up on Tatooine. He was flying around in that little scooter, with his cape fluttering out behind him... it made me think of Witchy Poo from HR Puff'n'Stuff for some reason. It was totally silly looking. So much for the fearsome Darth Maul.
I'm going to voice a very unpopular sentiment: I am OK with region encoding.
I'm not saying you all have to roll over and take it. I am not saying that it should be the law that players are region encoded. I am not saying that as a consumer I LIKE it. I AM saying that a publisher has the right to protect their deals by restricting where the content can be viewed, as long as that restriction is done in accordance with the law.
If I publish a movie, and I cut lucrative distribution deals in other nations, why shouldn't I use the region coding mechanism to protect that? That's what it's all about, you know; "They" don't want foreign DVDs from wrecking a theatrical release in yet another country. It is all about control. Yes, it sucks for the consumer. I know that, and I fully expect clever, motivated people to circumvent the region coding, and I think that should be allowed. But if the content publishers and the hardware makers want to work together to make playing foriegn media harder, that is their right. At least in the US.
I know that in other countries region restrictions are illegal in the hardware. Good for them. If US citizens want that as well, they need to start using the political process to make it happen.
I used to be on the other side of the fence, ranting about how region coding shold be illegal. Then I started a publishing company, and we are approaching a foriegn licensing deal. Now I understand why region codes exist in a very personal way.
OK, mod me down. My karma can take it. C'mon, HIT ME! DO IT!
Neat. Anyone know how to do this for a ReplayTV?
BTW, why do you need 3 Tivos? Man, I thought *I* liked TV!
I can actually answer some of this. I used to work at JPL on spacecraft computers, back when I was a EE student. I did stuff like writing bootstrap code in assembler that was particular to the custom chips that comprised the computer. I also designed PCBs for the test platform.
Space is a brutal environment. Even out in the deep black between the outer planets, there are a lot of gamma rays and charged particles that would play hell with a conventional computer. Spacecraft computers are built of relatively old-fashioned components, and they are made with a special radiation hardening process. There are no 1GHz CPUs in space. We don't really need them, either; the tasks performed by robotic spacecraft are pretty simple, compared to say running Windows.
Shielding isn't the answer. Imagine a metal box around a computer. Now imagine a proton or some other relatively heavy charged particle is fired into the metal. The particle can hit an atomic nucleus and shatter it, flinging MORE particles into the hapless computer. Bad news. And shielding thick enough to protect against this is heavy, and that's bad for spacecraft too.
So they use simple, rugged components, that can usually resist a proton zipping through them. And for the times when a bit gets flipped by a particle -- this is called a Single Event Upset or SEU -- there is a TON of error correction & detection bits allocated in these computers. The system I worked on, which is the computer in the Cassini craft, used a modified Hamming code. I think that almost 1/2 the bits in every 16-bit word were allocated to EDAC.
Unfortunately I do not remember the details of how you fab a chip to be radiation resistant. Some special substrate, special transistors... I'm sure you can Google for it.
My wife and I cut out the land line about 6 months ago. We each have a cell phone. More convenient, more features, and only a tad more money for 2 separate numbers. It's great.
We ended up putting a land line back in for our small business, and now a ReplayTV uses it too. But if not for the small biz we'd be land line free.
Screw the phone company! Oh, er, wait... Screw the land line division!
Depends on what state you shoot in.
(If I have misremembered any of this I welcome corrections...)
In CA, you can't shoot someone unless they are outright attacking you, even if they break into your home. You can't shoot at all in defense of a 3rd party. Wife getting stabbed? Tough. Try wrestling with the guy. If he stabs you, you can shoot him.
In TX and AZ you can blow someone away if they present an immediate threat. In TX you can kill in defense of property, so if you catch someone stealing your car stereo you can waste him. I don't know if that is the case in AZ. In both states you can employ lethal force in defense of a 3rd party.
In DE you can't use lethal force except as a last resort. If someone breaks into your home and threatens you, or even attacks you, you must FALL BACK, flee your home. You can't shoot unless there is no other alternative, even bad alternatives like running and getting shot in the back, or leaving your family in the house with the bad guy. (That's crazy, IMHO.)
In WA, where I just moved, I don't know what the law is. I better find out!
Would I shoot someone for jiggling my door handle? No. But I would be waiting there with a weapon in case he came in. Then, he'd have exactly 1 second to comply with my commands before I issued him a severe case of kinetic energy poisoning.
If he had a ranged weapon, I'd drop him, laws be damned. Better judged by 12 than carried by 6, as they say.
(If you are one of those people who wants to go on and on about how I am more unsafe with a gun at home, blah blah blah, please save the effort. You're not converting me.)
>Is there any cheap alternative for a linux router? A small low power EPROM-able device that could run a Linux router at low power? Something without a fan and a hard drive?
q u= cable+router
http://www.us.buy.com/retail/searchresults.asp?
OK, so it's not Linux, but these things are cheap and have no moving parts.
There are critters that live on our ocean floors subsisting purely on the chemicals spewed out of volcanic vents. Bacteria at the base of the food chain subsist on the crud that pours out, and other critters eat them, and so on up to crabs, worms and other kinds of life.
The sun powers ALMOST all life on earth by "feeding" autotrophs -- but life can exist without solar energy.
Personally, I believe that anywhere you find liquid water and light (OR a renewable source of high-enegry chemicals), you'll find life. I bet that the ocean floors of Europa and Ganymede will have colonies of life much like what we see around the subsea volcanic vents here on Earth.
As a biochemist I can hardly wait to see what alien life will look like at the molecular level.
I dunno, I have enough work-related angst that I fancy I can smell another authentic sob story.
Besides, it fits very well with what we know about how Apple works. Product development there has always seemed to be "ego-driven." Avie certainly has the POWER to do what was attributed to him, and he and Steve are obviously big NeXT fans. It could be true.
>You speak of the GM food scare and the BSE crisis like these are actual problems...
BSE IS a problem for the dozen or whatever people that have caught new type CJD in recent years.
Do some reading on BSE and the prions that are thought to cause it. It's pretty scary stuff, worthy of the radical containment measures that are being taken.
Thanks for that, I have been using FreeBSD for over a year and I haven't seen an explanation that good yet. I never got the hang of startup scripts, I have been manually turning some services on when I have to reboot.
If I had to reboot more often I would have taken the time to figure this out earlier.
I wish the BSD section was more active. Maybe I should drop FreeBSD for Linux so I can feel like I have a bigger community.
>Anti government paranoia is downright unamerican.
Saying that, you must not BE an American, or perhaps you are a troll.
Anti-government paranoia is one of the MOST American things. The US was founded by people who were pissed off at ol' King George, and afraid of the future he would create for the Colonies.
The Founding Fathers even put some really, really radical stuff in the Constitution to protect us from the government -- this is the reason for the 2nd Amendment (that's the guns one, for you non-Americans).
One of the FFs, I think it was Jefferson, said something like, "Government is like fire -- a wonderful servant but a fearful master." I have probably misquoted it, but the essence is there, and it is an incredibly insightful statement.
We SHOULD keep an eye on the government. It is the nature of such institutions to aggregate power, to exert always more control -- and citizens need to be ever vigilant to keep that in check. When the citizens get lazy, or complacent, they start to lose freedoms for "the greater good."