Watch some old TV shows sometime. Shows that had a story or otherwise actually had some entertainment value. HD would not add to the experience one iota.
Precisely the reason I still watch DVD instead of Blu-Ray. I have a Blu-Ray player, but I don't see the point in buying my movies over again, and around here, DVD releases are still cheaper than Blu-Ray. If it's worth owning, to me, then the content will be good enough that it won't matter if it's a lower resolution image. Besides which, they all get ripped to my hard drive and transcoded to a 1GB h.264 anyway, so there's literally no benefit to getting a Blu-Ray.
You're seeing it because it successfully passes through the artificial lens where previously it was either reflected, diffused, or absorbed by your body's natural lens.
Some people are reportedly born with the ability to see into the UV, just as some women are reportedly tetrachromatic (with dozens of explanations for why). Personally, my vision is uncorrected and I have never had any kind of surgery to replace the lenses, but I also know that I've never seen a "black" light that doesn't give off a bright violet glow, and that I am much more susceptible to snow blindness than just about everybody I know. And it's not like I spend my days in a dank basement... actually, I spend a lot of time outside, and my office has windows to the outside on 3 sides, less than 15 feet from my desk in all of those directions, so you'd think that I'd be more exposed to light than average, not less. And yet, sometimes in the winter I cannot function without mirrored sunglasses, because there is just too much light, and there's even times in the summer where I'm either squinting or wearing sunglasses and can't function otherwise. As the GP, nightclubs are a wash for me, but that's largely due to sensory overload.
I don't think I have any kind of superpower, nor do I consider the possibility that I'm seeing into spectrum other people can't. As I understand it, most black lights give off a faint violet glow, and it's by design so that folks know they're on. I just think that my eyes are much more sensitive to light than most people, and that because of this, the "faint" violet glow from black lights becomes a "bright" violet glow for me.
That being said, I am not the GP, nor am I the original submitter. I can't speak for them. They could very well be seeing into the ultraviolet. Weirder things have happened.
And I do understand that your point is about increased risk for cancer of the optical nerve, due to increased exposure to ultraviolet light. I suppose that's a possibility... I don't know enough about medicine to comment. But I'm reasonably sure that it's an exceedingly low possibility to begin with, in part because that kind of cancer is fairly rare, and in part because the number of people who reportedly see into the UV are a very small portion of the population. In the end, it's a question of whether the risk outweighs the inconvenience, and were it me, I don't think I would bother changing my habits.
What happened is that the voters are so apathetic that turnout was sufficiently low that 25% of eligible voters voted for the Cons, and that was enough to give the fuckers a majority.
Sadly, they're going to get away with a hell of a lot of damage before their term runs out, because the people were stupid enough to give them a majority.
Either that, or somebody's going to take up arms. I'm not particularly in favour of that option, but I know people who are taking a long hard look at the oath they took on joining the military... you know, the one to protect this country from threats both domestic and foreign?
There are some things you simply cannot do. It isn't to say that Samsung couldn't do certain other things that would hurt Apple's bottom line. But jacking up the prices of LCD just for Apple, irrespective of LG's involvement, is not going to fly with existing trade regulations.
Who said anything about jacking up the prices? Next time Apple places an order, they simply have to reject the order, saying Samsung chooses not to do business with Apple any more. It wouldn't really hurt their bottom line all that much, as they have plenty of market from vendors like Dell, HP, Lenovo, BenQ, etc., not to mention their own direct to consumer sales. How do you suppose it would look if Apple couldn't get their high pixel density screens for the iphone and ipad any more? LG doesn't have anything that approaches the quality of the AMOLED yet, and Apple's "retina display" is simply a super AMOLED manufactured by Samsung. There's nothing in international trade laws or anti-cartel laws that dictate that you *have* to do business with them, only that if you're going to do business, you need to do it fairly.
first of all, almost all potential narratives that can be told have been told in almost all of the genres. really, how many times you can save a fantasy medieval land from dragons. or, what kind of different world-shattering dangers can a fantasy medieval world can have. they all started repetition.
Never played The Longest Journey, or its sequel, Dreamfall, have you? Those games do a pretty good job of proving that you can have a fantasy setting, and still tell a story that's original and enjoyable. The story from TLJ is so good that even 13 years later, I still enjoy playing the game, despite the fact that its engine was embarrasingly dated even in 1999 when it came out, let alone in 2012.
now we come to the sad part. pirates accomplished SO much depth and replay value with the limitations of 64 kb memory and a tape recorder. imagine how huge it would be, if it was done today, with the excessive power our current gaming setups have. (pc and console - even if pc is stronger, console still could do wonders for a game like a proper pirates remake).
Also, apparently never played Sid Meier's Pirates!. That version came out in 2004, and has been released for other systems since then... it was released for the Wii in 2010, and a version was released for the iPad last year.
Then why don't you just go to the movies. If the point of the game is to slug thru levels just so you can advance the plot, you are just putting yourself under stress just to watch the next chapter, you are not enjoying the game, you are using the stress of the game so you can enjoy the next cut scene.
Because a really good RPG can give you 40+ hours of gameplay, or more, for about the same cost as a trip to the movies. And you get to take it at your own pace, and you don't have to pay 15 bucks for a popcorn, and you don't have some idiot yakking on their cellphone or kicking the back of your seat.
And because a *really* really good RPG can do that multiple times, with different stories and endings depending on how you play it.
Even a not-good RPG can still give you 10-15 hours of enjoyment for a fraction of the cost of going to the movies for that amount of time.
You are correct. For the most part gamers don't give a shit about cut scenes or story -- they just want to play the dam game.
You, however, are absolutely wrong. *some* gamers just want gameplay. Some gamers want story. Some gamers want a combination of the two. My game collection, for example, has a few arcade games (Wii Sports Resort, Wii Sports, Mario Kart, and a couple of things on the VC), it has a few strategy games (every version of Civilization that's ever come out for the PC, and a few ancient versions of SimCity), and everything else is story-driven RPG's. The closest thing to a shooter you'll find in my house is American McGee's Alice, and the sequel, Alice: Madness Returns. While those both do have shooter elements, they're both mainly story-driven platformer puzzle games, with the occasional fight to break up the gameplay.
The problem is, you can't generalize gamers like that. You've got the folks who like games like Halo, and Call of Duty, and you've got folks like me, who won't actually buy a game that doesn't have a story, and you have everything in between. Studios make story-driven games that are essentially interactive movies specifically because people buy them. If they didn't find them enjoyable, they wouldn't buy them. And there is replay value in these games, if you want to enjoy the story again, or if you want to see if there's different ways to solve the puzzles. Heck, I still play through The Longest Journey, even though that game came out in 1999 and had an embarrassingly dated engine even back then. How many shooters do people still pick up 13 years later to play? Isn't the fact that I can look beyond the flaws, many of which have not aged well, and still enjoy the game a testimony to the quality of the product?
The alternative is that they and similar companies silently cooperate with each other with practices like price fixing, cross licensing of patents and behaviour befitting a cartel.
Cross-licensing of patents is actually a good thing, and something everybody in the cell phone market (except Qualcomm) was already doing for decades before Apple decided to enter the market. Price fixing, bad. But using ridiculous patents like "sliding an image to unlock the screen" is worse. They want to drive the competition out of business, and when they realized that they can't do that on the actual merit of their product, they have decided to resort to litigation. When they finally do establish the monopoly they seem to want, gods help us all.
The amusing part of it is that Samsung has a very large number of patents they can bring to bear against Apple, if they really wanted to go for a full on trade war. Samsung is trying to cooperate with them, but when they finally do realize what Apple's game is... how long do you suppose Apple could last if Samsung and LG decided to stop selling them LCD's? For anything, including their desktop and laptop computers. You do realize there's only two companies producing anything approaching a significant number of LCD panels in the world today, and that everybody else is just reselling either a Samsung or an LG panel?
*smirks* Matthew 7:15: "Beware false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves". Don't the Christians say that Christ was the "lamb of god"?
(and no, I'm most emphatically not a Christian, nor a monotheist, actually...)
You're the one that threw the phrase "liberal, moral relativist" like it was an insult.:) Personally, I don't take it as an insult: I take it as a compliment, because I am a "moral relativist", in that I recognize that morality is relative to the beholder. But when I encounter somebody who seems to believe that it's an insult, I feel an obligation to point out that we're all relativists, whether we recognize it or not.
Personally, no, I don't think that those issues you mention is worth killing somebody. I thought I had made myself abundantly clear that I'm against the death penalty for any sort of crime, because I don't believe that *punishment* serves the purposes of *justice*, and that a criminal justice system should be focused on preventing crime from happening, and not on punishing the wicked.
But that morality is relative. It is based in my own upbringing, my own education, and the beliefs of those I held as role models when I was developing my own ideas on how the world works. Such violence is absolutely abhorrent to my own view of the world, but I also have no doubt that to the people making the laws in Saudi Arabia, it is just, and the will of god. And as absolutely cold and heartless as it makes me seem, the journalist in question should have known not to insult the prophet on a day dedicated to his memory, in a country where apostasy is a crime. Somebody who wasn't Muslim could probably have gotten away with it (after all, it isn't apostasy if you're not Muslim to begin with, though there would have still been consequences), but it was unwise, at best, and fleeing through another country that follows the same laws was similarly unwise (why on earth didn't he flee to Europe to claim asylum? there's a large number of European countries you can fly to direct from Riyadh, and no risk of extradition on a stopover). If you want to change the system, you need to work within the confines of that system. If you push too far, too soon, you risk galvanizing your opposition in such a way that you'll never convince them to see things your way.
There are no moral absolutes, even for something like taking a human life. How is executing an accused murderer morally better than the murder in the first place? You're still taking a human life, no matter how you sugar coat it, and most of the time, there is still a chance you will be proven wrong about their guilt. (that's actually why most developed nations got rid of capital crime decades ago)
The more amusing, and confusing, side to the debate is that an awful lot of people who have no problem with the moral implications of accidentally executing the wrong person are also adamantly against something like abortion, even when it may be medically necessary for the mental or physical health of the mother. How is it that you can be for the taking of one life, on the grounds that it's necessary to protect society, and against the taking of another life even when that act will demonstrably save a life? Where does the line get drawn? And what happens when we start throwing other monkey wrenches into the equation, like if the mother was raped? By her father? and so on.
I'm not trying to start an argument, though I have little doubt that the above example will start one. For that, I apologize: I'm just trying to point out that morality *is* relative by its very definition. Everybody has their own limits on what they will and will not accept. While we mostly agree on certain points, like that murder is wrong, there are always going to be contexts where some people believe that killing isn't wrong, or where they redefine it as "justice" so that they can sleep at night.
And no, I'm not trying to say that I'm perfect in my liberalism. There's just as much hypocrisy on the liberal side of the debate: I'm completely 100% against the death penalty. I believe that the justice system should be focused on preventing crime from reocurring, and not on punishment. To me, that means looking at the underlying social causes for crime, and addressing those. And yes, I am also a pacifist and a tree-hugger. But I am also pro-choice. I believe that at the end of the day, there's nothing we can do to stop a mother from aborting her fetus if that is what she really wants to do, and we would be much better off as a society if she can do that safely and legally. And there's a certain hypocrisy to that: I abhor the idea of taking a life as punishment, but I am ok with taking something that could be considered a life in order to protect another (and no, I am not going to get into a debate on when a fetus is considered alive). For me, the line gets drawn where there is a clear and present danger, and as long as that danger is removed (through incarceration for example), I don't believe we should be taking a life.
The fact that people disagree on this kind of thing should make it absolutely clear to you that morality is relative. If it was absolute, there would be no debate.
On a side note, Saudi Arabia executed someone for witchcraft last year, so one can only assume the burden of proof isn't exactly high. Or they actually have real live witches casting spells of course...
Real live "witchcraft" doesn't involve the casting of magic spells, depending on which version of it you're reading into. People have this image of folks dancing naked around a fire, chanting to Hecate so that they can smite their evil neighbour or something, but mostly, contemporary witchcraft is a naturalistic approach to the environment and our place in it, and a search for knowledge of how to effect certain changes... usually that last part involves making traditional herbal medicines from things like dandelion (the leaves and petals make a tea that's very good for bladder infections and anything else you'd need a diuretic for, and the roots can be boiled to make a pretty good coffee substitute that's also good for kidney and liver troubles). Some practitioners of witchcraft do believe in gods/goddesses, some don't, and some don't really care whether gods/goddesses exist, as long as they leave you alone. There is real science behind the medicines found in witchcraft, and many of those medicines have found their way into western medicine (you don't seriously think that Charles Frederic Gerhardt was the first person to boil willow bark, do you?). Sometimes "witchcraft" can entail directed prayer, which some practitioners do call a "spell", but that's mostly a question of perception, and some practitioners of witchcraft prefer to think of it as the subconscious mind performing the act in question... you would be surprised what the human mind is capable of, if you set your scepticism aside and let it happen.
That being said, when you read about somebody being stoned by a village full of fanatics for witchcraft, it's usually because those fanatics believe the "hocus pocus, you're now a newt" type of witchcraft, and not the traditional "wise woman" or "wise man" type of witchcraft.
Yeah, it can't be by fracking or nuclear power. No, we have to rely on green energy.
Fracking pollutes the ground water, and stirs up and softens clay... certain types of clay, such as leda clay, are particularly vulnerable to these seismic disturbances, and can lead to landslides and sinkholes. I have yet to hear a story about how Fracking is good for the environment.
Nuclear energy, while it can be done safely if you're in the right part of the world, still leaves the chance for disaster. And I'm not just talking about Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, or Fukushima-type disaster, I'm also talking about the dozens of other partial meltdowns that have happened. While on the whole, nuclear power does have a very good safety record, it also produces waste matter that has to be stored for decades before it can be recycled safely, and while I don't like pulling terrorism into a discussion like this, can you imagine the kind of fallout (literally) that could happen if somebody hijacked a shipment of untreated nuclear waste?
Nobody who's sane is saying that we should be stopping all fossil fuel use and go 100% solar/wind as of tomorrow, and damn the consequences. But I don't think it's unreasonable to try to shift our use to energy production methods that don't cause damage to the environment, and that will still be around for our grandchildren. It'll be a gradual shift, of course, but it's naive to think we can continue with our current patterns for another hundred years. Switching to renewable sources can be done, though: Iceland is already running 80% of their grid from renewable sources (mainly hydro and geothermal). And if you'd like a larger area/population to compare with, Quebec is mostly Hydro, too, with renewable energy sources outnumbering non-renewable generators by 60:1. Mostly, it's just a question of deciding which types of renewable energy are most appropriate for the area, and building that type of generator, but industry doesn't have the will for it yet.
Except, of course, countries like Spain and Denmark, where the government has taken an active role in the development of these technologies. There is no reason that the US demand for electricity can't be served by 100% renewable sources, if you're smart about where you put them, and what kinds you use.
You'd be surprised how much on TV these days counts as CanCon.... pretty much everything I watch these days is CanCon. Actually, *everything* I watch these days is CanCon, except for Dr. Who, and even that counts for the CanCon rules, because it's co-produced by the CBC and the BBC (despite mostly being filmed in Wales). Most of the best sci fi on North American TV is produced in Vancouver, and some of the best dramas on TV are produced in Vancouver or Toronto, with one notable exception which is produced in St. John's, NF. (and also one of my favourite shows)
there's actually quite a community for these old systems, and a lot of people who don't enjoy playing on emulators, or who want to recapture the original experience.
it's pretty cool that they've managed to do this, though I might prefer a different connection type... my current TV does have a VGA input, but I doubt my next one will.
I go paperless by realizing that "paperless" doesn't mean I expunge all of the paper in my home, only that I don't print anything, and try to get all of my correspondence electronically. In other words, "paperless" means "consume no paper", not "have no paper".
I still have old tax returns, etc. at home as well. I am still paperless, because all of new bills come electronically, I pay them through online banking, I no longer have print news or magazine delivery, and since I put a red dot in my mailbox the only "mail" I get are parcel deliveries and seasonal cards. I have tried to convince family to stop spending money sending xmas cards (especially since I'm not an xian and don't celebrate xmas), but good luck convincing your 90-year old grandmother that she shouldn't be sending you cards, when she's only just wrapped her head around your being a lesbian, and is still having trouble with the tree-hugging dirt-worshipper thing.
I've had very good experience with them, and *very* good customer service. They got me out of a serious bind with a previous registrar who closed shop on a Saturday, without notice, and stopped returning calls. They helped me to expedite the transfer of my domain to them on a Sunday morning. I did have a major advantage in that I still had all of the original registration paperwork and passwords from CIRA (.ca domain), and their head office is across the street from where I work, but I don't know a lot of registrars that would take an emergency call at 2am on a Sunday, and make arrangements for me to go in to the office at 8am to sign the paperwork and transfer a domain.
And for most domain types, they're either cheaper than GoDaddy, or the same price.
It's BS because of the two sentences that immediately followed the one you copied/pasted. It's bad form to quote yourself, but in this case, I think it's worthy:
Somebody could be looking 5 feet in front of their car and navigate their turns perfectly, and they're significantly more dangerous than somebody who takes their turns more vigorously, but actually looks to see what everybody else on the road is doing. You simply can't use GPS to determine whether somebody's a good driver, because the GPS doesn't record where their eyes are looking, nor what everybody else is doing.
To clarify, because apparently that's necessary, how vigorously somebody starts/stops, or navigates their turns, depends on a myriad of other conditions that the GPS is simply incapable of recording. Road temperature, ice/snow/rain, other drivers, pedestrians with a desire to tempt fate, wildlife running out into traffic, etc.. The fact that you stop suddenly is not an indication of your inability to drive safely, and could actually be an indication that you're a *good* driver (a bad driver might not react at all and end up hitting the dog that ran out into the road). To use a GPS in that way is bad science at best, and negligent at worst, because it has the potential to reward bad driving habits (such as driving too slow or not paying proper attention to the road) while penalising good habits (such as reacting to sudden changes in driving conditions).
In real world driving, random stuff happens. Since a GPS can't record that random stuff happening, nor can it record your reaction time relative to how much time you could possibly have had (which is the real measure of how good a driver you are, as that is dependent on reflexes, judgement, and your ability to scan the road for hazards), GPS is a really bad tool to be using to judge somebody's ability to drive safely. There is a reason that the ministry of transport uses ridealong tests to measure whether somebody should have a license to drive, rather than simply loading the information from your car's data recorder.
That's hardly scientific. Maybe the temperature changed, or the wind, or the driver's style, or whatever. One TV experiment does not good science make.
Nope, but before they did the "full scale" experiment, they did a small scale with a model car in a flow tank, with controlled temperature, and "wind" speed/direction. When they added dye to the flow, they saw that the "golf ball" car had a smaller eddy behind the car, which translates to less drag.
I agree that the Mythbusters aren't exactly a definitive scientific resource, but sometimes they actually do their due diligence and it gets cut because it doesn't make for good TV entertainment.
That being said, a divot is not the same as a bump, and the aerodynamics may be different. They do use a shark skin-like covering on some airplanes and boats to reduce drag, though, so there could still be some merit.
You're forgetting the most important part. Insurance companies don't have to tell you how much of a risk you are calculated to be. So as long as they can convince some customers to pay more, the companies can afford to let some customers pay less.
They already do that. If you have gone 6 years without any accidents, 6 years without any tickets, and 6 years without any insurance claims, your rate will be significantly lower than if you wrote off a car last year, and had a careless driving charge the year before. They also use statistical analysis for where you live (if you're in a high crime part of the city, your rate will be higher than if you live in the suburbs). They're already using a large number of statistics to determine your rate, but these are statistics that actually have some basis in fact, and a provable meaning based on broader trends.
Using GPS data to determine "how well you make a turn" is BS, and a dangerous route to go. Somebody could be looking 5 feet in front of their car and navigate their turns perfectly, and they're significantly more dangerous than somebody who takes their turns more vigorously, but actually looks to see what everybody else on the road is doing. You simply can't use GPS to determine whether somebody's a good driver, because the GPS doesn't record where their eyes are looking, nor what everybody else is doing. At least going on your accident history, they can have an idea of how often you have gotten in accidents n the past.
To elaborate, the Intel graphics chip in your laptop is integrated into the CPU die, so it's powered from the same source as the CPU rather then being a seperate chip with a seperate power supply, do you honestly think you'll be getting the same battery life if you had a discrete graphics card?
Depends on how the video card in the laptop is designed, not to mention how the laptop itself is designed.
I get about 3 hours of gameplay out of my gaming laptop on battery. I get about 5-6 hours of life when not gaming. The laptop in question is a Core i7 quad 940QM, 4GB of RAM, and a 1GB Radeon HD 4850 video card, driving a 1920x1080 display (2-year old Dell Studio XPS 16). It also has a 9-cell extended battery. I have no doubt that I could get better life out of the laptop with more power-efficient hardware, but I am also doubtful that I would see significantly better performance out of it with an integrated graphics chipset, because the CPU already underclocks itself when the power isn't needed, and the Arrandale integrated graphics does exactly the same thing as the Radeon to save power: it powers down to 166MHz single core when not needed, and boosts to 500MHz dual core (or single core in lower end processors like the Celeron I have in my other laptop) when the processing power is needed. While it would use a little less power, the difference wouldn't really be that much when the idle draw on the discrete graphics card is already down to 2-3W, and 20W under load.
By the way, the same really apply to 4G vs. 3G vs. 2G (I thought I might touch about this too, as it's the topic of the thread;). Each new generation is MORE power efficient in term of energy per bit transferred. No contest there. But people tend to use the network much more, and more than over compensate for the efficiency gain.
I had always been under the impression that 4G radio does actually use more energy to transmit on a per-second basis. While it's true that per-bit it uses a *lot* less, simply because it's a lot faster than 3G or 2G radio, when you're streaming something like a Youtube video, that becomes moot, because the radio is on for 5 minutes whether you're watching at 3G speeds or at 4G speeds, simply because of how that service sends you the video. As a result, 4G devices will have lower battery life when you're using it for data intensive applications (like streaming media). In other words, that, too, depends on your usage pattern.
Other than that, I agree with everything you say, though.
UMTS has more in common with CDMA than it does with GSM at the radio level... actually, the most common form of UMTS in use these days is WCDMA, which is being used basically everywhere (though on different frequencies in different parts of the world), and is for all intents and purposes the same as CDMA at the radio level except that it uses 5MHz bands instead of 1.25MHz bands. (there's a few other differences, but that's the big one)
Oh, I'm quite familiar with Wind/Mobilicity and their famous rates. I'm also familiar with how the town I live in is *just* outside their coverage areas for Ottawa, and have been on the 'planned expansion' list for both carriers for almost 2 years. I'm aware that they're having some issues getting licensing from the CRTC and building towers, but there's only so long I'm willing to wait without any kind of update from them. Even if I won't get it for another couple of years, they could at least tell me *when* they plan on expanding their network in my area, so that I could make plans. They're great if you live in a big city, and utterly useless if you don't.
I'm using very little data at the moment... according to Koodo, I used 12mb in the last 30 days, chiefly because I use my phone's data for e-mail, calendar, and contact sync, and that's it... everything else (apps/etc) gets done over wifi, and when I want to consume media that I don't have on my SD card, my phone has an FM radio (and I'm considering buying a phone from southeast asia that has all of the above and also an ATSC decoder). I pay $40/mo for 150 anytime mins, 5pm unlimited evenings/weekends (and let's be realistic, I'm not on the phone when I'm at work), unlimited domestic long distance, all of the calling features, and unlimited global texting, including the small amount of data I use. I realize I could get a better deal from Wind or Mobilicity, but considering that I'd be on roaming most of the time (at $0.20/min), it would end up costing a *lot* more than I currently pay Koodo. It's still money in Telus' pocket in the end, which I'm not overly happy about, but it's a heck of a lot better than I could get from Telus directly, let alone Bell or Rogers, all of whom would cost me more than $100/mo and saddle me with a lot of extra data I have no use for. (500mb for all 3 of them... even if I bumped my data usage to the same relative tier with Koodo, it would cost half that... $50/mo if I used 300mb, or $55/mo for 1gb).
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Watch some old TV shows sometime. Shows that had a story or otherwise actually had some entertainment value. HD would not add to the experience one iota.
Precisely the reason I still watch DVD instead of Blu-Ray. I have a Blu-Ray player, but I don't see the point in buying my movies over again, and around here, DVD releases are still cheaper than Blu-Ray. If it's worth owning, to me, then the content will be good enough that it won't matter if it's a lower resolution image. Besides which, they all get ripped to my hard drive and transcoded to a 1GB h.264 anyway, so there's literally no benefit to getting a Blu-Ray.
You're seeing it because it successfully passes through the artificial lens where previously it was either reflected, diffused, or absorbed by your body's natural lens.
Some people are reportedly born with the ability to see into the UV, just as some women are reportedly tetrachromatic (with dozens of explanations for why). Personally, my vision is uncorrected and I have never had any kind of surgery to replace the lenses, but I also know that I've never seen a "black" light that doesn't give off a bright violet glow, and that I am much more susceptible to snow blindness than just about everybody I know. And it's not like I spend my days in a dank basement... actually, I spend a lot of time outside, and my office has windows to the outside on 3 sides, less than 15 feet from my desk in all of those directions, so you'd think that I'd be more exposed to light than average, not less. And yet, sometimes in the winter I cannot function without mirrored sunglasses, because there is just too much light, and there's even times in the summer where I'm either squinting or wearing sunglasses and can't function otherwise. As the GP, nightclubs are a wash for me, but that's largely due to sensory overload.
I don't think I have any kind of superpower, nor do I consider the possibility that I'm seeing into spectrum other people can't. As I understand it, most black lights give off a faint violet glow, and it's by design so that folks know they're on. I just think that my eyes are much more sensitive to light than most people, and that because of this, the "faint" violet glow from black lights becomes a "bright" violet glow for me.
That being said, I am not the GP, nor am I the original submitter. I can't speak for them. They could very well be seeing into the ultraviolet. Weirder things have happened.
And I do understand that your point is about increased risk for cancer of the optical nerve, due to increased exposure to ultraviolet light. I suppose that's a possibility... I don't know enough about medicine to comment. But I'm reasonably sure that it's an exceedingly low possibility to begin with, in part because that kind of cancer is fairly rare, and in part because the number of people who reportedly see into the UV are a very small portion of the population. In the end, it's a question of whether the risk outweighs the inconvenience, and were it me, I don't think I would bother changing my habits.
What happened is that the voters are so apathetic that turnout was sufficiently low that 25% of eligible voters voted for the Cons, and that was enough to give the fuckers a majority.
Sadly, they're going to get away with a hell of a lot of damage before their term runs out, because the people were stupid enough to give them a majority.
Either that, or somebody's going to take up arms. I'm not particularly in favour of that option, but I know people who are taking a long hard look at the oath they took on joining the military... you know, the one to protect this country from threats both domestic and foreign?
There are some things you simply cannot do. It isn't to say that Samsung couldn't do certain other things that would hurt Apple's bottom line. But jacking up the prices of LCD just for Apple, irrespective of LG's involvement, is not going to fly with existing trade regulations.
Who said anything about jacking up the prices? Next time Apple places an order, they simply have to reject the order, saying Samsung chooses not to do business with Apple any more. It wouldn't really hurt their bottom line all that much, as they have plenty of market from vendors like Dell, HP, Lenovo, BenQ, etc., not to mention their own direct to consumer sales. How do you suppose it would look if Apple couldn't get their high pixel density screens for the iphone and ipad any more? LG doesn't have anything that approaches the quality of the AMOLED yet, and Apple's "retina display" is simply a super AMOLED manufactured by Samsung. There's nothing in international trade laws or anti-cartel laws that dictate that you *have* to do business with them, only that if you're going to do business, you need to do it fairly.
first of all, almost all potential narratives that can be told have been told in almost all of the genres. really, how many times you can save a fantasy medieval land from dragons. or, what kind of different world-shattering dangers can a fantasy medieval world can have. they all started repetition.
Never played The Longest Journey, or its sequel, Dreamfall, have you? Those games do a pretty good job of proving that you can have a fantasy setting, and still tell a story that's original and enjoyable. The story from TLJ is so good that even 13 years later, I still enjoy playing the game, despite the fact that its engine was embarrasingly dated even in 1999 when it came out, let alone in 2012.
now we come to the sad part. pirates accomplished SO much depth and replay value with the limitations of 64 kb memory and a tape recorder. imagine how huge it would be, if it was done today, with the excessive power our current gaming setups have. (pc and console - even if pc is stronger, console still could do wonders for a game like a proper pirates remake).
Also, apparently never played Sid Meier's Pirates!. That version came out in 2004, and has been released for other systems since then... it was released for the Wii in 2010, and a version was released for the iPad last year.
Then why don't you just go to the movies. If the point of the game is to slug thru levels just so you can advance the plot, you are just putting yourself under stress just to watch the next chapter, you are not enjoying the game, you are using the stress of the game so you can enjoy the next cut scene.
Because a really good RPG can give you 40+ hours of gameplay, or more, for about the same cost as a trip to the movies. And you get to take it at your own pace, and you don't have to pay 15 bucks for a popcorn, and you don't have some idiot yakking on their cellphone or kicking the back of your seat.
And because a *really* really good RPG can do that multiple times, with different stories and endings depending on how you play it.
Even a not-good RPG can still give you 10-15 hours of enjoyment for a fraction of the cost of going to the movies for that amount of time.
You are correct. For the most part gamers don't give a shit about cut scenes or story -- they just want to play the dam game.
You, however, are absolutely wrong. *some* gamers just want gameplay. Some gamers want story. Some gamers want a combination of the two. My game collection, for example, has a few arcade games (Wii Sports Resort, Wii Sports, Mario Kart, and a couple of things on the VC), it has a few strategy games (every version of Civilization that's ever come out for the PC, and a few ancient versions of SimCity), and everything else is story-driven RPG's. The closest thing to a shooter you'll find in my house is American McGee's Alice, and the sequel, Alice: Madness Returns. While those both do have shooter elements, they're both mainly story-driven platformer puzzle games, with the occasional fight to break up the gameplay.
The problem is, you can't generalize gamers like that. You've got the folks who like games like Halo, and Call of Duty, and you've got folks like me, who won't actually buy a game that doesn't have a story, and you have everything in between. Studios make story-driven games that are essentially interactive movies specifically because people buy them. If they didn't find them enjoyable, they wouldn't buy them. And there is replay value in these games, if you want to enjoy the story again, or if you want to see if there's different ways to solve the puzzles. Heck, I still play through The Longest Journey, even though that game came out in 1999 and had an embarrassingly dated engine even back then. How many shooters do people still pick up 13 years later to play? Isn't the fact that I can look beyond the flaws, many of which have not aged well, and still enjoy the game a testimony to the quality of the product?
The alternative is that they and similar companies silently cooperate with each other with practices like price fixing, cross licensing of patents and behaviour befitting a cartel.
Cross-licensing of patents is actually a good thing, and something everybody in the cell phone market (except Qualcomm) was already doing for decades before Apple decided to enter the market. Price fixing, bad. But using ridiculous patents like "sliding an image to unlock the screen" is worse. They want to drive the competition out of business, and when they realized that they can't do that on the actual merit of their product, they have decided to resort to litigation. When they finally do establish the monopoly they seem to want, gods help us all.
The amusing part of it is that Samsung has a very large number of patents they can bring to bear against Apple, if they really wanted to go for a full on trade war. Samsung is trying to cooperate with them, but when they finally do realize what Apple's game is... how long do you suppose Apple could last if Samsung and LG decided to stop selling them LCD's? For anything, including their desktop and laptop computers. You do realize there's only two companies producing anything approaching a significant number of LCD panels in the world today, and that everybody else is just reselling either a Samsung or an LG panel?
Monotheism is Evil, wearing a friendly smile.
*smirks* Matthew 7:15: "Beware false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves". Don't the Christians say that Christ was the "lamb of god"?
(and no, I'm most emphatically not a Christian, nor a monotheist, actually...)
You're the one that threw the phrase "liberal, moral relativist" like it was an insult. :) Personally, I don't take it as an insult: I take it as a compliment, because I am a "moral relativist", in that I recognize that morality is relative to the beholder. But when I encounter somebody who seems to believe that it's an insult, I feel an obligation to point out that we're all relativists, whether we recognize it or not.
Personally, no, I don't think that those issues you mention is worth killing somebody. I thought I had made myself abundantly clear that I'm against the death penalty for any sort of crime, because I don't believe that *punishment* serves the purposes of *justice*, and that a criminal justice system should be focused on preventing crime from happening, and not on punishing the wicked.
But that morality is relative. It is based in my own upbringing, my own education, and the beliefs of those I held as role models when I was developing my own ideas on how the world works. Such violence is absolutely abhorrent to my own view of the world, but I also have no doubt that to the people making the laws in Saudi Arabia, it is just, and the will of god. And as absolutely cold and heartless as it makes me seem, the journalist in question should have known not to insult the prophet on a day dedicated to his memory, in a country where apostasy is a crime. Somebody who wasn't Muslim could probably have gotten away with it (after all, it isn't apostasy if you're not Muslim to begin with, though there would have still been consequences), but it was unwise, at best, and fleeing through another country that follows the same laws was similarly unwise (why on earth didn't he flee to Europe to claim asylum? there's a large number of European countries you can fly to direct from Riyadh, and no risk of extradition on a stopover). If you want to change the system, you need to work within the confines of that system. If you push too far, too soon, you risk galvanizing your opposition in such a way that you'll never convince them to see things your way.
There are no moral absolutes, even for something like taking a human life. How is executing an accused murderer morally better than the murder in the first place? You're still taking a human life, no matter how you sugar coat it, and most of the time, there is still a chance you will be proven wrong about their guilt. (that's actually why most developed nations got rid of capital crime decades ago)
The more amusing, and confusing, side to the debate is that an awful lot of people who have no problem with the moral implications of accidentally executing the wrong person are also adamantly against something like abortion, even when it may be medically necessary for the mental or physical health of the mother. How is it that you can be for the taking of one life, on the grounds that it's necessary to protect society, and against the taking of another life even when that act will demonstrably save a life? Where does the line get drawn? And what happens when we start throwing other monkey wrenches into the equation, like if the mother was raped? By her father? and so on.
I'm not trying to start an argument, though I have little doubt that the above example will start one. For that, I apologize: I'm just trying to point out that morality *is* relative by its very definition. Everybody has their own limits on what they will and will not accept. While we mostly agree on certain points, like that murder is wrong, there are always going to be contexts where some people believe that killing isn't wrong, or where they redefine it as "justice" so that they can sleep at night.
And no, I'm not trying to say that I'm perfect in my liberalism. There's just as much hypocrisy on the liberal side of the debate: I'm completely 100% against the death penalty. I believe that the justice system should be focused on preventing crime from reocurring, and not on punishment. To me, that means looking at the underlying social causes for crime, and addressing those. And yes, I am also a pacifist and a tree-hugger. But I am also pro-choice. I believe that at the end of the day, there's nothing we can do to stop a mother from aborting her fetus if that is what she really wants to do, and we would be much better off as a society if she can do that safely and legally. And there's a certain hypocrisy to that: I abhor the idea of taking a life as punishment, but I am ok with taking something that could be considered a life in order to protect another (and no, I am not going to get into a debate on when a fetus is considered alive). For me, the line gets drawn where there is a clear and present danger, and as long as that danger is removed (through incarceration for example), I don't believe we should be taking a life.
The fact that people disagree on this kind of thing should make it absolutely clear to you that morality is relative. If it was absolute, there would be no debate.
On a side note, Saudi Arabia executed someone for witchcraft last year, so one can only assume the burden of proof isn't exactly high. Or they actually have real live witches casting spells of course...
Real live "witchcraft" doesn't involve the casting of magic spells, depending on which version of it you're reading into. People have this image of folks dancing naked around a fire, chanting to Hecate so that they can smite their evil neighbour or something, but mostly, contemporary witchcraft is a naturalistic approach to the environment and our place in it, and a search for knowledge of how to effect certain changes... usually that last part involves making traditional herbal medicines from things like dandelion (the leaves and petals make a tea that's very good for bladder infections and anything else you'd need a diuretic for, and the roots can be boiled to make a pretty good coffee substitute that's also good for kidney and liver troubles). Some practitioners of witchcraft do believe in gods/goddesses, some don't, and some don't really care whether gods/goddesses exist, as long as they leave you alone. There is real science behind the medicines found in witchcraft, and many of those medicines have found their way into western medicine (you don't seriously think that Charles Frederic Gerhardt was the first person to boil willow bark, do you?). Sometimes "witchcraft" can entail directed prayer, which some practitioners do call a "spell", but that's mostly a question of perception, and some practitioners of witchcraft prefer to think of it as the subconscious mind performing the act in question... you would be surprised what the human mind is capable of, if you set your scepticism aside and let it happen.
That being said, when you read about somebody being stoned by a village full of fanatics for witchcraft, it's usually because those fanatics believe the "hocus pocus, you're now a newt" type of witchcraft, and not the traditional "wise woman" or "wise man" type of witchcraft.
Yeah, it can't be by fracking or nuclear power. No, we have to rely on green energy.
Fracking pollutes the ground water, and stirs up and softens clay... certain types of clay, such as leda clay, are particularly vulnerable to these seismic disturbances, and can lead to landslides and sinkholes. I have yet to hear a story about how Fracking is good for the environment.
Nuclear energy, while it can be done safely if you're in the right part of the world, still leaves the chance for disaster. And I'm not just talking about Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, or Fukushima-type disaster, I'm also talking about the dozens of other partial meltdowns that have happened. While on the whole, nuclear power does have a very good safety record, it also produces waste matter that has to be stored for decades before it can be recycled safely, and while I don't like pulling terrorism into a discussion like this, can you imagine the kind of fallout (literally) that could happen if somebody hijacked a shipment of untreated nuclear waste?
Nobody who's sane is saying that we should be stopping all fossil fuel use and go 100% solar/wind as of tomorrow, and damn the consequences. But I don't think it's unreasonable to try to shift our use to energy production methods that don't cause damage to the environment, and that will still be around for our grandchildren. It'll be a gradual shift, of course, but it's naive to think we can continue with our current patterns for another hundred years. Switching to renewable sources can be done, though: Iceland is already running 80% of their grid from renewable sources (mainly hydro and geothermal). And if you'd like a larger area/population to compare with, Quebec is mostly Hydro, too, with renewable energy sources outnumbering non-renewable generators by 60:1. Mostly, it's just a question of deciding which types of renewable energy are most appropriate for the area, and building that type of generator, but industry doesn't have the will for it yet.
Except, of course, countries like Spain and Denmark, where the government has taken an active role in the development of these technologies. There is no reason that the US demand for electricity can't be served by 100% renewable sources, if you're smart about where you put them, and what kinds you use.
You'd be surprised how much on TV these days counts as CanCon.... pretty much everything I watch these days is CanCon. Actually, *everything* I watch these days is CanCon, except for Dr. Who, and even that counts for the CanCon rules, because it's co-produced by the CBC and the BBC (despite mostly being filmed in Wales). Most of the best sci fi on North American TV is produced in Vancouver, and some of the best dramas on TV are produced in Vancouver or Toronto, with one notable exception which is produced in St. John's, NF. (and also one of my favourite shows)
there's actually quite a community for these old systems, and a lot of people who don't enjoy playing on emulators, or who want to recapture the original experience.
it's pretty cool that they've managed to do this, though I might prefer a different connection type... my current TV does have a VGA input, but I doubt my next one will.
I go paperless by realizing that "paperless" doesn't mean I expunge all of the paper in my home, only that I don't print anything, and try to get all of my correspondence electronically. In other words, "paperless" means "consume no paper", not "have no paper".
I still have old tax returns, etc. at home as well. I am still paperless, because all of new bills come electronically, I pay them through online banking, I no longer have print news or magazine delivery, and since I put a red dot in my mailbox the only "mail" I get are parcel deliveries and seasonal cards. I have tried to convince family to stop spending money sending xmas cards (especially since I'm not an xian and don't celebrate xmas), but good luck convincing your 90-year old grandmother that she shouldn't be sending you cards, when she's only just wrapped her head around your being a lesbian, and is still having trouble with the tree-hugging dirt-worshipper thing.
http://sibername.com/
I've had very good experience with them, and *very* good customer service. They got me out of a serious bind with a previous registrar who closed shop on a Saturday, without notice, and stopped returning calls. They helped me to expedite the transfer of my domain to them on a Sunday morning. I did have a major advantage in that I still had all of the original registration paperwork and passwords from CIRA (.ca domain), and their head office is across the street from where I work, but I don't know a lot of registrars that would take an emergency call at 2am on a Sunday, and make arrangements for me to go in to the office at 8am to sign the paperwork and transfer a domain.
And for most domain types, they're either cheaper than GoDaddy, or the same price.
It's BS because of the two sentences that immediately followed the one you copied/pasted. It's bad form to quote yourself, but in this case, I think it's worthy:
Somebody could be looking 5 feet in front of their car and navigate their turns perfectly, and they're significantly more dangerous than somebody who takes their turns more vigorously, but actually looks to see what everybody else on the road is doing. You simply can't use GPS to determine whether somebody's a good driver, because the GPS doesn't record where their eyes are looking, nor what everybody else is doing.
To clarify, because apparently that's necessary, how vigorously somebody starts/stops, or navigates their turns, depends on a myriad of other conditions that the GPS is simply incapable of recording. Road temperature, ice/snow/rain, other drivers, pedestrians with a desire to tempt fate, wildlife running out into traffic, etc.. The fact that you stop suddenly is not an indication of your inability to drive safely, and could actually be an indication that you're a *good* driver (a bad driver might not react at all and end up hitting the dog that ran out into the road). To use a GPS in that way is bad science at best, and negligent at worst, because it has the potential to reward bad driving habits (such as driving too slow or not paying proper attention to the road) while penalising good habits (such as reacting to sudden changes in driving conditions).
In real world driving, random stuff happens. Since a GPS can't record that random stuff happening, nor can it record your reaction time relative to how much time you could possibly have had (which is the real measure of how good a driver you are, as that is dependent on reflexes, judgement, and your ability to scan the road for hazards), GPS is a really bad tool to be using to judge somebody's ability to drive safely. There is a reason that the ministry of transport uses ridealong tests to measure whether somebody should have a license to drive, rather than simply loading the information from your car's data recorder.
That's hardly scientific. Maybe the temperature changed, or the wind, or the driver's style, or whatever. One TV experiment does not good science make.
Nope, but before they did the "full scale" experiment, they did a small scale with a model car in a flow tank, with controlled temperature, and "wind" speed/direction. When they added dye to the flow, they saw that the "golf ball" car had a smaller eddy behind the car, which translates to less drag.
I agree that the Mythbusters aren't exactly a definitive scientific resource, but sometimes they actually do their due diligence and it gets cut because it doesn't make for good TV entertainment.
That being said, a divot is not the same as a bump, and the aerodynamics may be different. They do use a shark skin-like covering on some airplanes and boats to reduce drag, though, so there could still be some merit.
You're forgetting the most important part. Insurance companies don't have to tell you how much of a risk you are calculated to be. So as long as they can convince some customers to pay more, the companies can afford to let some customers pay less.
They already do that. If you have gone 6 years without any accidents, 6 years without any tickets, and 6 years without any insurance claims, your rate will be significantly lower than if you wrote off a car last year, and had a careless driving charge the year before. They also use statistical analysis for where you live (if you're in a high crime part of the city, your rate will be higher than if you live in the suburbs). They're already using a large number of statistics to determine your rate, but these are statistics that actually have some basis in fact, and a provable meaning based on broader trends.
Using GPS data to determine "how well you make a turn" is BS, and a dangerous route to go. Somebody could be looking 5 feet in front of their car and navigate their turns perfectly, and they're significantly more dangerous than somebody who takes their turns more vigorously, but actually looks to see what everybody else on the road is doing. You simply can't use GPS to determine whether somebody's a good driver, because the GPS doesn't record where their eyes are looking, nor what everybody else is doing. At least going on your accident history, they can have an idea of how often you have gotten in accidents n the past.
To elaborate, the Intel graphics chip in your laptop is integrated into the CPU die, so it's powered from the same source as the CPU rather then being a seperate chip with a seperate power supply, do you honestly think you'll be getting the same battery life if you had a discrete graphics card?
Depends on how the video card in the laptop is designed, not to mention how the laptop itself is designed.
I get about 3 hours of gameplay out of my gaming laptop on battery. I get about 5-6 hours of life when not gaming. The laptop in question is a Core i7 quad 940QM, 4GB of RAM, and a 1GB Radeon HD 4850 video card, driving a 1920x1080 display (2-year old Dell Studio XPS 16). It also has a 9-cell extended battery. I have no doubt that I could get better life out of the laptop with more power-efficient hardware, but I am also doubtful that I would see significantly better performance out of it with an integrated graphics chipset, because the CPU already underclocks itself when the power isn't needed, and the Arrandale integrated graphics does exactly the same thing as the Radeon to save power: it powers down to 166MHz single core when not needed, and boosts to 500MHz dual core (or single core in lower end processors like the Celeron I have in my other laptop) when the processing power is needed. While it would use a little less power, the difference wouldn't really be that much when the idle draw on the discrete graphics card is already down to 2-3W, and 20W under load.
By the way, the same really apply to 4G vs. 3G vs. 2G (I thought I might touch about this too, as it's the topic of the thread ;). Each new generation is MORE power efficient in term of energy per bit transferred. No contest there. But people tend to use the network much more, and more than over compensate for the efficiency gain.
I had always been under the impression that 4G radio does actually use more energy to transmit on a per-second basis. While it's true that per-bit it uses a *lot* less, simply because it's a lot faster than 3G or 2G radio, when you're streaming something like a Youtube video, that becomes moot, because the radio is on for 5 minutes whether you're watching at 3G speeds or at 4G speeds, simply because of how that service sends you the video. As a result, 4G devices will have lower battery life when you're using it for data intensive applications (like streaming media). In other words, that, too, depends on your usage pattern.
Other than that, I agree with everything you say, though.
UMTS has more in common with CDMA than it does with GSM at the radio level... actually, the most common form of UMTS in use these days is WCDMA, which is being used basically everywhere (though on different frequencies in different parts of the world), and is for all intents and purposes the same as CDMA at the radio level except that it uses 5MHz bands instead of 1.25MHz bands. (there's a few other differences, but that's the big one)
Oh, I'm quite familiar with Wind/Mobilicity and their famous rates. I'm also familiar with how the town I live in is *just* outside their coverage areas for Ottawa, and have been on the 'planned expansion' list for both carriers for almost 2 years. I'm aware that they're having some issues getting licensing from the CRTC and building towers, but there's only so long I'm willing to wait without any kind of update from them. Even if I won't get it for another couple of years, they could at least tell me *when* they plan on expanding their network in my area, so that I could make plans. They're great if you live in a big city, and utterly useless if you don't.
I'm using very little data at the moment... according to Koodo, I used 12mb in the last 30 days, chiefly because I use my phone's data for e-mail, calendar, and contact sync, and that's it... everything else (apps/etc) gets done over wifi, and when I want to consume media that I don't have on my SD card, my phone has an FM radio (and I'm considering buying a phone from southeast asia that has all of the above and also an ATSC decoder). I pay $40/mo for 150 anytime mins, 5pm unlimited evenings/weekends (and let's be realistic, I'm not on the phone when I'm at work), unlimited domestic long distance, all of the calling features, and unlimited global texting, including the small amount of data I use. I realize I could get a better deal from Wind or Mobilicity, but considering that I'd be on roaming most of the time (at $0.20/min), it would end up costing a *lot* more than I currently pay Koodo. It's still money in Telus' pocket in the end, which I'm not overly happy about, but it's a heck of a lot better than I could get from Telus directly, let alone Bell or Rogers, all of whom would cost me more than $100/mo and saddle me with a lot of extra data I have no use for. (500mb for all 3 of them... even if I bumped my data usage to the same relative tier with Koodo, it would cost half that... $50/mo if I used 300mb, or $55/mo for 1gb).