Well, of the ISPs implementing this, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon are all either directly or owned by content creators.
Only AT&T wireless (Previously called Cingular Communications) was/is a pure data network. Note that it was Cingular that purchased the AT&T Wireless name from AT&T, so AT&T (which is also a content creator) is not involved there.
However you are correct in both of your first points. It is a huge conflict of interest, and they have all stated they are losing more money to piracy than they make in total on their ISP division. Granted, this is not anywhere close to true, but they all firmly believe so, and more importantly they have made that statement to our government and so now must stick by it.
Think about it, their ISP divisions pull in what, 1-2 digit billions of dollars a year? Maybe 3 digit billions? That is nothing compared to the 2-4 digit trillions they state they are losing due to piracy.
It's only the fact they are convinced 20% or less of their customer base are pirates, that keeps them from closing down the entire ISP side all together.
There is also the bonus of no lost customers. Firstly, they will not be disconnecting anyone. Fines yes, many more fines sure, even apparently slowing down service and even blocking some things. But not disconnection. I mean they "earn" $50-$100 each time they accuse you of piracy, with no evidence required! Who would want to disconnect someone and get rid of all that extra money?
Secondly, very few of the people hit by these strikes are willing to go without Internet service at all (Which is the only other option) There is no competition, quite literally. Any "resellers" you would switch to are both A) under this same system due to being the same network, and B) still funnel money back to the network owner itself. They still get paid no matter which reseller you go with. It's all the same network and thus the same rules apply.
I believe you are also quite on mark with the future of file sharing. I've been saying the same for some time now, and in fact if anything am only amazed things are taking so long to get there.
The ultimate end game will be two-fold: - High speed, anonymous, fully encrypted and functional darknets for file sharing. - ISPs seeing encryption + high speeds as automatically assumed piracy unless vouched for by a business on the safe-list (aka VPN users, which will need to be registered and vouched for) Anyone pulling encrypted data faster than your average webpage will have their traffic mucked about with, be it slowing down to 1kbps or less, or RST packets stormed to each end, to live-updated firewall blocks.
The EFF will complain that users of their HTTPS anywhere plugin no longer can browse the Internet at all, and no one in charge will care. The content creators will of course exclude their own https servers, since they want you to buy their stuff, but anyone else - it's not like we have legal network neutrality so there's no reason what so ever to even allow https to the Internet, let alone at high speeds. There is a huge percent of our population too stupid to understand what network neutrality even means, and are strongly opposed to it. Even after these people can't shop at ebay any longer, they will still claim the benefits outweigh the risks, just so they don't have to admit to being wrong or making a mistake.
It's going to get much messier before things get better I'm afraid.
... assuming you can still legally buy caffeine pills OTC (or maybe over the net) like Vivaran (sp?)...
One of my favorite health food stores sells pure powdered caffeine in bulk. $13 for a half ounce (smallest increment) up to $300 for a kilogram (Largest increment as far as price breaks go)
That same health food store also sells empty gellotin capsules with which pure caffeine pills can be made, without all the stomach churning effects from the rest of the commercial "energy blends"
There is a huge market for caffeine, and anything the FDA could end up doing is only going to make matters worse, just like every other time they've put their fingers into things in the past decade and ended up costing lives:/ I really hope they find enough sense to leave this one alone.
The Mac Pro has a power supply. The power supply has a fan. This fan is close to the outer housing of the Mac Pro and accessible through some gills of some sort... Do you now see where the potential risk lies?
I don't really see the potential risk there. However I should admit I've been doing this sort of work for the past 20 odd years, so perhaps that experience is why I don't see it.
It seems one would need to take a long and narrow wire, heat the end up so it glows, then put it in the grill and push it to melt through the plastic in order to touch the fan.
Are people known for doing this? I admit it wouldn't surprise me, but for those types of people I generally wouldn't trust them holding a screwdriver, and would expect great personal injury from wielding nothing more than a sheet of paper;P
To really get at the fans one needs to open the case. Not many current generation systems are designed to run with the case open. Airflow is too important to prevent component damage. I always leave the system plugged in so I can discharge static by touching the PSU, but rarely ever powered on.
And fuck, if I can't escape this piece software at work. I've got client applications, and web applications that we rely on that absolutely require the full fat oracle JVM. I'd love to disable the plugin or do away with it all together but I can't.
What I did was disable the java plugin in IE's "Internet" zone only, leaving it enabled on the "Trusted" zone and set to custom on the "Intranet" zone with a whitelist of URLs (For those app boxes that are not on the windows domain but still need java, like our HVAC controller and door access controller, etc)
I agree with all your other complaints however, it is still a massive pain in the ass for no good reason.
I too rebuild the MSI to remove the auto-updater and yahoo toolbar and mcafee trial and all that shit that shouldn't be in there in the first place (I'll grant them exception on the updater for normal users, but the rest is just pure profit seeking bullshit)
It can be turned on in joypad mode, keyboard mode, iCade mode, or a few others. There are detachable side pieces made to fit certain models of smart phone, as well as a generic back bar piece to hopefully fit others, as well as smaller side pieces to snap on and use as a stand alone controller with nothing else attached to it (IE for PC use)
I mean, if those chicks were that stupid....well, didn't they deserve a bit of what they got?
No, no they do not. Stupid is not a crime, and stupid is not justification for others to commit crimes, nor does stupid some how disable a law against a crime.
Stop being so fucking prejudice.
A person can't help being stupid, any more than they can help the color of their skin or their age or their race. It's how they were born and completely out of their control.
And yet you're going to give him more jail time than he'd get for MURDER?
Why do you believe that 105 years is longer than 3000 years?
Murder is 100 years per count, so compared to the same number of counts (30 total) that is 3000 years or 30 back-to-back life sentences. Most certainly longer than 105 years, despite the fact both are longer than the average human life time.
If you are looking at microcontrollers, I would suggest the Parallax Propeller It's an 8 core 32 bit micro that lets you add peripherals in software.
Wire a bluetooth or wifi module to some IO pins and toss a BT/wifi object into a core to let it poll for commands. Or you can wire a nintendo or super nintendo controller directly to it, and load a shift register object into a core to poll the game pad. On the low end, a TSOP IR receiver module and object can be setup to take commands from any old remote you have laying in the junk drawer.
An IR reciever and an IR led both wired up on multiple robots would allow for some interesting inter-robot communications and swarm behavior.
Another core can be driving the stepper motors and watching for new commands to change what it's currently doing.
Wire some IO to a GPS module and have a core polling that to update the current location in ram.
Since all 8 cores run independently from each other, you won't need to muck around with things like interrupts or try to squeeze a bunch of autonomous modules into one monolithic program.
The propeller is 3.3v (but 5v tolerant) which makes it electrically compatible with Adriano shields, and there are a number of shields already supported by existing objects. Parallax runs an object exchange site where the community shares these objects, and you can find one to drive pretty much any common (or not so common) hardware.
It has a native interpreted language called Spin that makes multi-core programming pretty simple, and also can be coded in assembly for time sensitive operations. There are a number of compilers made by 3rd parties to let you code in C (in fact there is a gcc project going on in the forums) as well as basic, pbasic, forth, and a few other languages.
I even just recently learned of an IDE called 12 blocks that uses a form of Scratch, where you build up a program by dragging blocks onto the work space, and it can output Spin.
As each of the 8 cores has its own video generation hardware and two high precision counters, there have been a number of home brew video game consoles made using the propeller. By just wiring up an IO line to an RCA jack, you can output NTSC or PAL. A couple more IO lines and it can do VGA too.
It's quite the powerful little micro, might be worth checking it out.
It's also really weird when you grew up interested in astronomy being taught and passing tests in school of the "nine planets" and all of a sudden there's eight. Poor little Pluto.:(
It wasn't all that sudden really. I too grew up learning about the nine planets. But as our telescope technology improved, suddenly there was a 10th planet even larger than pluto, aka Eris or 2003 UB313. Then an 11th, Ceres. Then a 12th, Vesta. Then Haumea, Astraea, Quaoar, and Makemake... and more that all changed names and classifications so frequently that it's hard to keep things straight. Even the list above can't be considered in the correct order due to planets being discovered, then demoted, then promoted, all at different times.
We accomplished launching a telescope into space - avoiding all the issues looking through the atmosphere can cause, and can see even further out than ever before. We discovered essentially a second asteroid belt but containing much larger rocky bodies, and find hundreds, then thousands of rocks all roughly the same size range as pluto. A few bigger, most smaller,, some closer, most quite far out there.
Who wants to remember the names of thousands of planets and hundreds of thousands of moons all within our little solar system?
A line needed to be drawn. A lot of people did not want another "arbitrary line on a map" that so plagues borders here at home.
Yes it might be annoying that poor pluto was caught on the other side of that definition, but even if you want to still say it is a planet, why do you still discount a larger than pluto planets like Eris, or the other planets even closer to us than pluto?
If 8 is not the correct answer, then 9 most certainly is not either.
If you draw a line a certain distance out, right at the orbit of pluto, then there are 12 planets. If you draw that line just within the orbit of pluto, then there are 8. If you include the whole solar system, there are hundreds of thousands of planets. I predict many replies to this post with even more definitions and planet counts, each perfectly valid within that definition. That is the scale of the problem, and not a trivial one at that.
The only condition where 9 is the correct number of planets is a point in time in our past when we were ignorant of the others. With that definition, again, why 9? Why not 11, as was the case in the mid 1800's? Or 6, as was the case a thousand years ago? They are all equal, in that is all that could be seen at the time.
Some people, perhaps even a lot of people, disagree with the definition as currently drawn, and there is nothing wrong with that. There is even nothing wrong with making and using your own definition. But just realize that, just like when pluto was demoted, in the future new discoveries will need to fit within that definition, and we can't keep changing it willy nilly as to keep the planet count from ever changing again. All that we ask is that the definition is consistent.
Science is all about changing what we thought we knew as new discoveries are made and new evidence is found. If anything is certain, there is still plenty out there we still don't know about and our knowledge will continue to change.
In terms of graphics, it wouldn't be so hard to make surfaces a little bit more varied. Why the blockiness in Minecraft? Why not give people roundish and triangular things to play around with too?
If you don't want to play the game, that's perfectly OK. Not every game is everyone's cup of tea. But you could at least look at it before passing judgement.
There are far more shapes in Minecraft than just blocks. In fact of all the items, blocks are a minority.
Slimeballs and snowballs are spheres, tools look roughly the shape of the tool they represent, food is pretty much all irregular shaped except for the cake, which is not only a lie but a circle!
Only the world itself is subdivided into a grid of blocks, and even then it's far from "one grid square, one item/block"
In fact it's not that much different from any other game, except where in most games each voxel is a single pixel and you are limited in the total number of pixels allowed in the game world, a Minecraft voxel represents 1 meter cubed of world space and uses a stacking addressing scheme so as to be infinite yet your save files do not grow insanely huge.
I swipe the card while they are ringing up my purchases
Off topic, but you swipe your card before there is even a total shown? I admit I don't use credit cards anymore, but I wasn't aware any credit terminal would even be paying attention to the reader until after a total was added up and a payment method selected.
But as an always-pay-in-cash person, I too have to agree it is ridiculous to claim cash is faster or even easier. Speed is not one of the benefits, and as with anything there are plenty of other downsides as well. But while for me personally the benefits outweigh the downsides, I realize I am in the minority for who that is true.
Personally I always have a mental running total before I even get to the register, and have what I'll need in hand before fully rung up. But there have been times I've mis-estimated and had to swap a bill for another denomination or something. Then there is the occasional teller who can't do math to make change despite the fact the register tells them what to hand back, yet they have to spend time subtracting on top of the time re-counting the change.
Yes but with only two PWM outputs all you get is two pixels. In a way I'm glad this stuff isn't too popular... womens sweatpants flashing out morse code "juicy" isn't all that appealing.
With PWM support, I've bit-banged composite video with only a single IO pin. Also a lot of the new LCD/oLED controllers are a serial interface like i2c or SPI, which would be an option here too.
Just combine this not-yet-available chip with one of those not-yet-available flexible/wearable oLED strips sewn into the ass of said sweatpants, and the juice is on.
Alterslash, the unofficial Slashdot digest alterslash.org/ 12 hours ago - An anonymous reader writes "Australian surgeon Guy Hingston is suing... Google for "Guy Hingston pumpkin fucker" until the association...
To be fair, while I agree Google should make a request system available so people can ask for changes to the end-stage filters for things like this, but some of your comparisons are quite a bit off. (And I don't believe they have no end stage filters setup already, but even on the off chance that's the case, this can fairly easily be added so there's little reason not to, and a bunch of reasons by now to add it)
Yes, it is an issue Google doesn't act on these requests to change the results after the fact, one that should be addressed so peoples requests don't get forwarded around to a department that basically doesn't seem to exist. At least for most of these stories of the same complaints, most people try asking first. Only a tiny few bitch first and ask later. Most seem to ask for weeks to months before actually being pissed off enough to go to the news in the first place. A timely response - of any sort - would likely stop 90-some percent of these problems from becoming problems.
But still, no one person at Google decided to put those words there initially, the autocomplete term only shows up because a large percentages of searches using his name included the word bankrupt. People were already searching for those words first, so at least on that aspect it's not fair to blame Google.
They don't really have control over the word getting/put on/ autocomplete, they can only control the filters to ignore words after the fact, so only those aspects they are capable of controlling can they be held responsible for.
Again, I'm not saying that part isn't a problem, and agree they should act on the parts they DO have control over, but this is far from the same as actively purchasing a billboard to put up insults you choose to have printed.
Google would save themselves a ton of bad press at the measily cost of a tiny department of a couple employees whos job it would be to do nothing but handle these types of requests all day. The same request ticket system can be used across every service they have ended up in the news for having these kinds of problems, so it wouldn't be used just for search.
The job could even be made as easy as a moderator, approving or selecting a decline message out of a list of approved to say rejection reasons, and have the software do all the hard work when 'accept' is clicked. I can't believe it would take too much up front resources in programming a system to let some employees do this, and that any financial cost of the department could easily be justified under some public relations account. What with all the beta apps in wildly different directions they have, they should already have the infrastructure there to quickly whip that up.
What if it's something you, as the artist, decide shouldn't see the light of day?
Well in that case, the artist would probably try to keep that something from seeing the light of day, I would imagine.
Unlike WotC, who not only Wanted it to see the light of day, but wanted the ass load of money they made from those books by publishing them.
On one hand, copyright is there to ensure the work belongs to the public, so the artist really can't make that call now that copyright is forced upon everything.
On the other hand not long ago it was a choice, a deal in fact. You could purchase a monopoly period where you were the only one able to sell that work, and all it cost you was that the public owned it at the end of that period.
It sure was nice back then when we had that choice and the government didn't force it upon us like they do now. However the reality of it is, today, it is forced on every work of art the moment it is created, thus the public nor the artist have any say so in the matter. The artist gets a monopoly period by force, and the public owns that work afterwards by force.
Even WotC feels that monopoly period is over, as they took the books off the market. Clearly downloading a copy of the books is not going to change the $0 that WotC expected, nay demanded they now sell for.
1. What number of in & out dials have you? 7 / 1 (8 chans of a frac pri)
2. What is the land area coverage of an unladen local call? About half of the area code, guessing 100 square miles?
I never understood why some parts of 614 were local but others were long distance, while at the same time a small part of 740 was local to me yet a different area code. I had to route mail to another board across town in 614, where he could reach the other half of 614 locally, just to avoid minutely charges.
My 8 PRI channels were to my home (well, to my parents home at the time) and mostly for dialin. I rocked Oblivion/X by the time I was on fido. One line floated for scheduled callouts, but none dedicated to that. Once I discovered the Internet in '89, first one then later two channels were dedicated to PPP. By '92 I was getting less than 5 calls a day to the board, and shortly converted my whole frac PRI to be dedicated Internet, and I pretty much gave up the sysop role for good in exchange for EFnet as things turned out. Even ran an efnet server for a short time back in '95 i think it was.
While I can say for certain that communications have only changed for the better as far as the Internet goes, there is still a lot I miss from those days, even though I wouldn't want to go back to that for anything.
Are you really implying that low-grade radiation from bananas is the same as inhaling hot particles from a power station that blew up?
That is EXACTLY what gordona (121157) stated (not implied, but out right stated as fact)
BlackThorne_DK pointed out there is a difference between bananas and a nuclear plant.
Then here you are, calling BlackThorne_DK a moron for stating that fact.
I have to call into question why you are on one hand claiming those levels of radiation are different, while at the same time calling someone else a moron for stating the same thing, implying those levels of radiation are the same.
What exactly are you trying to imply here? Why are you saying both cases are true, when in fact each is the exact opposite of each other? What kind of game are you playing?
This shows that everyone against the Walmart can easily have the store chain banned. They sell everything needed for mass destruction, and guns aren't even needed!
Gasoline, Vaseline jelly, and Tupperware = napalm
Plastic jar, nails and screws, fertilizer, newspaper, and matches = shrapnel bomb
Bleach and ammonia = mustard gas
Any one of these (let alone all of them together) would bring as much destruction, pain, and misery as a gun. With this, our government has shown it cares not about the actual cause of the destruction, only the device that caused it and the people/places that sell it.
Time to pressure them to ban the Walmart and arrest anyone who shops there!
OK let me try to explain in this rather silly way.
Say we were standing here together. I state out loud "I am going to punch you in the face!", and a moment later take a swing at you. You then dodge that swing, partly due to the warning I gave...
I am claiming I tried to punch you, and you acted to avoid being punched.
You are claiming I never even tried to punch you, despite all of the actions of swinging and missing. You also claim that dodging a punch, and not being punched in the first place, are the same thing.
What I said was that all of the predictions of the end have been wrong.
Except you just said it again!
All of those predictions have NOT been wrong. Some have been a perfect and exactly correct prediction of not acting, and provably would have been exactly the case had no one acted.
No, not all, not even most, but some. You claim ALL are wrong, when a larger than zero number have shown to be perfectly 100% correct. It was ONLY due to action to change the outcome that you are even here to claim anything at all, let alone that they are wrong.
He was playing at a 3000 level, and suspected of cheating. So they disabled the live internet broadcast of the game, and suddenly he was playing at barely above a 2000 level.
If you wish to claim he was not cheating, you still need to explain away how he was playing so well when and only when the game was being broadcast live over the internet, and was playing so poorly once the feed was disabled.
The fact he was cheating is clear by that alone. Disabling a live internet feed that you yourself are not watching should have exactly zero effect on your game performance. In his case it had a major effect on his game performance.
What if they are not cheating? Some possibilities:
But they pretty much know he was by the evidence, it's only _how_ that is unknown.
He was playing much much higher than his ranking should normally permit. They suspected the internet broadcast of the game was being analyzed and moves sent back to him somehow. So, they disabled the internet broadcast. From that point forward, he made mistakes over and over, much more in line with his ranking.
It wasn't just his unexpected high performance, but also the expected drop in performance once the internet broadcast of the game was disabled.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, of the ISPs implementing this, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon are all either directly or owned by content creators.
Only AT&T wireless (Previously called Cingular Communications) was/is a pure data network.
Note that it was Cingular that purchased the AT&T Wireless name from AT&T, so AT&T (which is also a content creator) is not involved there.
However you are correct in both of your first points. It is a huge conflict of interest, and they have all stated they are losing more money to piracy than they make in total on their ISP division.
Granted, this is not anywhere close to true, but they all firmly believe so, and more importantly they have made that statement to our government and so now must stick by it.
Think about it, their ISP divisions pull in what, 1-2 digit billions of dollars a year? Maybe 3 digit billions?
That is nothing compared to the 2-4 digit trillions they state they are losing due to piracy.
It's only the fact they are convinced 20% or less of their customer base are pirates, that keeps them from closing down the entire ISP side all together.
There is also the bonus of no lost customers.
Firstly, they will not be disconnecting anyone. Fines yes, many more fines sure, even apparently slowing down service and even blocking some things. But not disconnection.
I mean they "earn" $50-$100 each time they accuse you of piracy, with no evidence required! Who would want to disconnect someone and get rid of all that extra money?
Secondly, very few of the people hit by these strikes are willing to go without Internet service at all (Which is the only other option)
There is no competition, quite literally. Any "resellers" you would switch to are both A) under this same system due to being the same network, and B) still funnel money back to the network owner itself. They still get paid no matter which reseller you go with. It's all the same network and thus the same rules apply.
I believe you are also quite on mark with the future of file sharing. I've been saying the same for some time now, and in fact if anything am only amazed things are taking so long to get there.
The ultimate end game will be two-fold:
- High speed, anonymous, fully encrypted and functional darknets for file sharing.
- ISPs seeing encryption + high speeds as automatically assumed piracy unless vouched for by a business on the safe-list (aka VPN users, which will need to be registered and vouched for)
Anyone pulling encrypted data faster than your average webpage will have their traffic mucked about with, be it slowing down to 1kbps or less, or RST packets stormed to each end, to live-updated firewall blocks.
The EFF will complain that users of their HTTPS anywhere plugin no longer can browse the Internet at all, and no one in charge will care. The content creators will of course exclude their own https servers, since they want you to buy their stuff, but anyone else - it's not like we have legal network neutrality so there's no reason what so ever to even allow https to the Internet, let alone at high speeds.
There is a huge percent of our population too stupid to understand what network neutrality even means, and are strongly opposed to it. Even after these people can't shop at ebay any longer, they will still claim the benefits outweigh the risks, just so they don't have to admit to being wrong or making a mistake.
It's going to get much messier before things get better I'm afraid.
I think it's fair to assume that a substance is toxic well below the lethal dose.
Careful, there's a lot of stuff like water *snip*
Careful now, we shouldn't underestimate the lethal dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide!
After all, it's shown to "mutate DNA, denature proteins, disrupt cell membranes, and chemically alter critical neurotransmitters"
We should all be very concerned about this dangerous substance!
-- dhmo.org forever
... assuming you can still legally buy caffeine pills OTC (or maybe over the net) like Vivaran (sp?) ...
One of my favorite health food stores sells pure powdered caffeine in bulk.
$13 for a half ounce (smallest increment) up to $300 for a kilogram (Largest increment as far as price breaks go)
That same health food store also sells empty gellotin capsules with which pure caffeine pills can be made, without all the stomach churning effects from the rest of the commercial "energy blends"
There is a huge market for caffeine, and anything the FDA could end up doing is only going to make matters worse, just like every other time they've put their fingers into things in the past decade and ended up costing lives :/ I really hope they find enough sense to leave this one alone.
The Mac Pro has a power supply. The power supply has a fan. This fan is close to the outer housing of the Mac Pro and accessible through some gills of some sort ... Do you now see where the potential risk lies?
http://i46.tinypic.com/2gvvq61.jpg
I don't really see the potential risk there.
However I should admit I've been doing this sort of work for the past 20 odd years, so perhaps that experience is why I don't see it.
It seems one would need to take a long and narrow wire, heat the end up so it glows, then put it in the grill and push it to melt through the plastic in order to touch the fan.
Are people known for doing this? ;P
I admit it wouldn't surprise me, but for those types of people I generally wouldn't trust them holding a screwdriver, and would expect great personal injury from wielding nothing more than a sheet of paper
Compared to many other generic power supplies out there [ https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=psu+fan ] Apple looks to be up with the safer designs out there.
To really get at the fans one needs to open the case. Not many current generation systems are designed to run with the case open. Airflow is too important to prevent component damage.
I always leave the system plugged in so I can discharge static by touching the PSU, but rarely ever powered on.
And fuck, if I can't escape this piece software at work. I've got client applications, and web applications that we rely on that absolutely require the full fat oracle JVM. I'd love to disable the plugin or do away with it all together but I can't.
What I did was disable the java plugin in IE's "Internet" zone only, leaving it enabled on the "Trusted" zone and set to custom on the "Intranet" zone with a whitelist of URLs (For those app boxes that are not on the windows domain but still need java, like our HVAC controller and door access controller, etc)
I agree with all your other complaints however, it is still a massive pain in the ass for no good reason.
I too rebuild the MSI to remove the auto-updater and yahoo toolbar and mcafee trial and all that shit that shouldn't be in there in the first place (I'll grant them exception on the updater for normal users, but the rest is just pure profit seeking bullshit)
I think a bluetooth game pad with a built in holder for a 4-7" phone/tablet would be nice...
You describe http://www.icontrolpad.com/
It can be turned on in joypad mode, keyboard mode, iCade mode, or a few others.
There are detachable side pieces made to fit certain models of smart phone, as well as a generic back bar piece to hopefully fit others, as well as smaller side pieces to snap on and use as a stand alone controller with nothing else attached to it (IE for PC use)
I mean, if those chicks were that stupid....well, didn't they deserve a bit of what they got?
No, no they do not. Stupid is not a crime, and stupid is not justification for others to commit crimes, nor does stupid some how disable a law against a crime.
Stop being so fucking prejudice.
A person can't help being stupid, any more than they can help the color of their skin or their age or their race. It's how they were born and completely out of their control.
And yet you're going to give him more jail time than he'd get for MURDER?
Why do you believe that 105 years is longer than 3000 years?
Murder is 100 years per count, so compared to the same number of counts (30 total) that is 3000 years or 30 back-to-back life sentences. Most certainly longer than 105 years, despite the fact both are longer than the average human life time.
If you are looking at microcontrollers, I would suggest the Parallax Propeller
It's an 8 core 32 bit micro that lets you add peripherals in software.
Wire a bluetooth or wifi module to some IO pins and toss a BT/wifi object into a core to let it poll for commands.
Or you can wire a nintendo or super nintendo controller directly to it, and load a shift register object into a core to poll the game pad.
On the low end, a TSOP IR receiver module and object can be setup to take commands from any old remote you have laying in the junk drawer.
An IR reciever and an IR led both wired up on multiple robots would allow for some interesting inter-robot communications and swarm behavior.
Another core can be driving the stepper motors and watching for new commands to change what it's currently doing.
Wire some IO to a GPS module and have a core polling that to update the current location in ram.
Since all 8 cores run independently from each other, you won't need to muck around with things like interrupts or try to squeeze a bunch of autonomous modules into one monolithic program.
The propeller is 3.3v (but 5v tolerant) which makes it electrically compatible with Adriano shields, and there are a number of shields already supported by existing objects. Parallax runs an object exchange site where the community shares these objects, and you can find one to drive pretty much any common (or not so common) hardware.
It has a native interpreted language called Spin that makes multi-core programming pretty simple, and also can be coded in assembly for time sensitive operations.
There are a number of compilers made by 3rd parties to let you code in C (in fact there is a gcc project going on in the forums) as well as basic, pbasic, forth, and a few other languages.
I even just recently learned of an IDE called 12 blocks that uses a form of Scratch, where you build up a program by dragging blocks onto the work space, and it can output Spin.
As each of the 8 cores has its own video generation hardware and two high precision counters, there have been a number of home brew video game consoles made using the propeller. By just wiring up an IO line to an RCA jack, you can output NTSC or PAL. A couple more IO lines and it can do VGA too.
It's quite the powerful little micro, might be worth checking it out.
It's also really weird when you grew up interested in astronomy being taught and passing tests in school of the "nine planets" and all of a sudden there's eight. Poor little Pluto. :(
It wasn't all that sudden really. I too grew up learning about the nine planets.
But as our telescope technology improved, suddenly there was a 10th planet even larger than pluto, aka Eris or 2003 UB313.
Then an 11th, Ceres.
Then a 12th, Vesta.
Then Haumea, Astraea, Quaoar, and Makemake... and more that all changed names and classifications so frequently that it's hard to keep things straight.
Even the list above can't be considered in the correct order due to planets being discovered, then demoted, then promoted, all at different times.
We accomplished launching a telescope into space - avoiding all the issues looking through the atmosphere can cause, and can see even further out than ever before.
We discovered essentially a second asteroid belt but containing much larger rocky bodies, and find hundreds, then thousands of rocks all roughly the same size range as pluto. A few bigger, most smaller,, some closer, most quite far out there.
Who wants to remember the names of thousands of planets and hundreds of thousands of moons all within our little solar system?
A line needed to be drawn. A lot of people did not want another "arbitrary line on a map" that so plagues borders here at home.
Yes it might be annoying that poor pluto was caught on the other side of that definition, but even if you want to still say it is a planet, why do you still discount a larger than pluto planets like Eris, or the other planets even closer to us than pluto?
If 8 is not the correct answer, then 9 most certainly is not either.
If you draw a line a certain distance out, right at the orbit of pluto, then there are 12 planets.
If you draw that line just within the orbit of pluto, then there are 8.
If you include the whole solar system, there are hundreds of thousands of planets.
I predict many replies to this post with even more definitions and planet counts, each perfectly valid within that definition. That is the scale of the problem, and not a trivial one at that.
The only condition where 9 is the correct number of planets is a point in time in our past when we were ignorant of the others. With that definition, again, why 9?
Why not 11, as was the case in the mid 1800's? Or 6, as was the case a thousand years ago?
They are all equal, in that is all that could be seen at the time.
Some people, perhaps even a lot of people, disagree with the definition as currently drawn, and there is nothing wrong with that. There is even nothing wrong with making and using your own definition. But just realize that, just like when pluto was demoted, in the future new discoveries will need to fit within that definition, and we can't keep changing it willy nilly as to keep the planet count from ever changing again.
All that we ask is that the definition is consistent.
Science is all about changing what we thought we knew as new discoveries are made and new evidence is found. If anything is certain, there is still plenty out there we still don't know about and our knowledge will continue to change.
In terms of graphics, it wouldn't be so hard to make surfaces a little bit more varied. Why the blockiness in Minecraft? Why not give people roundish and triangular things to play around with too?
If you don't want to play the game, that's perfectly OK. Not every game is everyone's cup of tea.
But you could at least look at it before passing judgement.
There are far more shapes in Minecraft than just blocks. In fact of all the items, blocks are a minority.
Look at the bottom of this wiki page: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Items
Each and every one of those things is a non-block shape!
Or here for larger icons of items (including blocks):
http://www.alymma.com/minecraft_icons/
Slimeballs and snowballs are spheres, tools look roughly the shape of the tool they represent, food is pretty much all irregular shaped except for the cake, which is not only a lie but a circle!
Only the world itself is subdivided into a grid of blocks, and even then it's far from "one grid square, one item/block"
In fact it's not that much different from any other game, except where in most games each voxel is a single pixel and you are limited in the total number of pixels allowed in the game world, a Minecraft voxel represents 1 meter cubed of world space and uses a stacking addressing scheme so as to be infinite yet your save files do not grow insanely huge.
I swipe the card while they are ringing up my purchases
Off topic, but you swipe your card before there is even a total shown?
I admit I don't use credit cards anymore, but I wasn't aware any credit terminal would even be paying attention to the reader until after a total was added up and a payment method selected.
But as an always-pay-in-cash person, I too have to agree it is ridiculous to claim cash is faster or even easier.
Speed is not one of the benefits, and as with anything there are plenty of other downsides as well. But while for me personally the benefits outweigh the downsides, I realize I am in the minority for who that is true.
Personally I always have a mental running total before I even get to the register, and have what I'll need in hand before fully rung up. But there have been times I've mis-estimated and had to swap a bill for another denomination or something.
Then there is the occasional teller who can't do math to make change despite the fact the register tells them what to hand back, yet they have to spend time subtracting on top of the time re-counting the change.
Yes but with only two PWM outputs all you get is two pixels.
In a way I'm glad this stuff isn't too popular... womens sweatpants flashing out morse code "juicy" isn't all that appealing.
With PWM support, I've bit-banged composite video with only a single IO pin.
Also a lot of the new LCD/oLED controllers are a serial interface like i2c or SPI, which would be an option here too.
Just combine this not-yet-available chip with one of those not-yet-available flexible/wearable oLED strips sewn into the ass of said sweatpants, and the juice is on.
This is too funny. I decided to help out too.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Guy+Hingston+pumpkin+fucker
First result is now:
Alterslash, the unofficial Slashdot digest ... Google for "Guy Hingston pumpkin fucker" until the association ...
alterslash.org/
12 hours ago - An anonymous reader writes "Australian surgeon Guy Hingston is suing
To be fair, while I agree Google should make a request system available so people can ask for changes to the end-stage filters for things like this, but some of your comparisons are quite a bit off.
(And I don't believe they have no end stage filters setup already, but even on the off chance that's the case, this can fairly easily be added so there's little reason not to, and a bunch of reasons by now to add it)
Yes, it is an issue Google doesn't act on these requests to change the results after the fact, one that should be addressed so peoples requests don't get forwarded around to a department that basically doesn't seem to exist. At least for most of these stories of the same complaints, most people try asking first. Only a tiny few bitch first and ask later. Most seem to ask for weeks to months before actually being pissed off enough to go to the news in the first place.
A timely response - of any sort - would likely stop 90-some percent of these problems from becoming problems.
But still, no one person at Google decided to put those words there initially, the autocomplete term only shows up because a large percentages of searches using his name included the word bankrupt. People were already searching for those words first, so at least on that aspect it's not fair to blame Google.
They don't really have control over the word getting /put on/ autocomplete, they can only control the filters to ignore words after the fact, so only those aspects they are capable of controlling can they be held responsible for.
Again, I'm not saying that part isn't a problem, and agree they should act on the parts they DO have control over, but this is far from the same as actively purchasing a billboard to put up insults you choose to have printed.
Google would save themselves a ton of bad press at the measily cost of a tiny department of a couple employees whos job it would be to do nothing but handle these types of requests all day. The same request ticket system can be used across every service they have ended up in the news for having these kinds of problems, so it wouldn't be used just for search.
The job could even be made as easy as a moderator, approving or selecting a decline message out of a list of approved to say rejection reasons, and have the software do all the hard work when 'accept' is clicked.
I can't believe it would take too much up front resources in programming a system to let some employees do this, and that any financial cost of the department could easily be justified under some public relations account.
What with all the beta apps in wildly different directions they have, they should already have the infrastructure there to quickly whip that up.
What if it's something you, as the artist, decide shouldn't see the light of day?
Well in that case, the artist would probably try to keep that something from seeing the light of day, I would imagine.
Unlike WotC, who not only Wanted it to see the light of day, but wanted the ass load of money they made from those books by publishing them.
On one hand, copyright is there to ensure the work belongs to the public, so the artist really can't make that call now that copyright is forced upon everything.
On the other hand not long ago it was a choice, a deal in fact. You could purchase a monopoly period where you were the only one able to sell that work, and all it cost you was that the public owned it at the end of that period.
It sure was nice back then when we had that choice and the government didn't force it upon us like they do now. However the reality of it is, today, it is forced on every work of art the moment it is created, thus the public nor the artist have any say so in the matter. The artist gets a monopoly period by force, and the public owns that work afterwards by force.
Even WotC feels that monopoly period is over, as they took the books off the market.
Clearly downloading a copy of the books is not going to change the $0 that WotC expected, nay demanded they now sell for.
I have yet to personally meet any 14 year olds NOT living with their parents.
Let me guess, your parents gave up on you before you became a teen and you've been living under a bridge in the park ever since?
Would you like to play a game?
0. What is your FidoNet node address?
1:226/201
1. What number of in & out dials have you?
7 / 1 (8 chans of a frac pri)
2. What is the land area coverage of an unladen local call?
About half of the area code, guessing 100 square miles?
I never understood why some parts of 614 were local but others were long distance, while at the same time a small part of 740 was local to me yet a different area code.
I had to route mail to another board across town in 614, where he could reach the other half of 614 locally, just to avoid minutely charges.
My 8 PRI channels were to my home (well, to my parents home at the time) and mostly for dialin. I rocked Oblivion/X by the time I was on fido. One line floated for scheduled callouts, but none dedicated to that.
Once I discovered the Internet in '89, first one then later two channels were dedicated to PPP.
By '92 I was getting less than 5 calls a day to the board, and shortly converted my whole frac PRI to be dedicated Internet, and I pretty much gave up the sysop role for good in exchange for EFnet as things turned out. Even ran an efnet server for a short time back in '95 i think it was.
While I can say for certain that communications have only changed for the better as far as the Internet goes, there is still a lot I miss from those days, even though I wouldn't want to go back to that for anything.
Great, another person who thinks bananas will radiate you to death. Try going back to high school, you missed some science classes.
Are you really implying that low-grade radiation from bananas is the same as inhaling hot particles from a power station that blew up?
That is EXACTLY what gordona (121157) stated (not implied, but out right stated as fact)
BlackThorne_DK pointed out there is a difference between bananas and a nuclear plant.
Then here you are, calling BlackThorne_DK a moron for stating that fact.
I have to call into question why you are on one hand claiming those levels of radiation are different, while at the same time calling someone else a moron for stating the same thing, implying those levels of radiation are the same.
What exactly are you trying to imply here? Why are you saying both cases are true, when in fact each is the exact opposite of each other? What kind of game are you playing?
This shows that everyone against the Walmart can easily have the store chain banned.
They sell everything needed for mass destruction, and guns aren't even needed!
Gasoline, Vaseline jelly, and Tupperware = napalm
Plastic jar, nails and screws, fertilizer, newspaper, and matches = shrapnel bomb
Bleach and ammonia = mustard gas
Any one of these (let alone all of them together) would bring as much destruction, pain, and misery as a gun.
With this, our government has shown it cares not about the actual cause of the destruction, only the device that caused it and the people/places that sell it.
Time to pressure them to ban the Walmart and arrest anyone who shops there!
OK let me try to explain in this rather silly way.
Say we were standing here together. I state out loud "I am going to punch you in the face!", and a moment later take a swing at you. You then dodge that swing, partly due to the warning I gave...
I am claiming I tried to punch you, and you acted to avoid being punched.
You are claiming I never even tried to punch you, despite all of the actions of swinging and missing.
You also claim that dodging a punch, and not being punched in the first place, are the same thing.
See the difference?
What I said was that all of the predictions of the end have been wrong.
Except you just said it again!
All of those predictions have NOT been wrong. Some have been a perfect and exactly correct prediction of not acting, and provably would have been exactly the case had no one acted.
No, not all, not even most, but some. You claim ALL are wrong, when a larger than zero number have shown to be perfectly 100% correct. It was ONLY due to action to change the outcome that you are even here to claim anything at all, let alone that they are wrong.
He was playing at a 3000 level, and suspected of cheating. So they disabled the live internet broadcast of the game, and suddenly he was playing at barely above a 2000 level.
If you wish to claim he was not cheating, you still need to explain away how he was playing so well when and only when the game was being broadcast live over the internet, and was playing so poorly once the feed was disabled.
The fact he was cheating is clear by that alone. Disabling a live internet feed that you yourself are not watching should have exactly zero effect on your game performance. In his case it had a major effect on his game performance.
The question isn't IF he was cheating, but how.
What if they are not cheating? Some possibilities:
But they pretty much know he was by the evidence, it's only _how_ that is unknown.
He was playing much much higher than his ranking should normally permit. They suspected the internet broadcast of the game was being analyzed and moves sent back to him somehow.
So, they disabled the internet broadcast. From that point forward, he made mistakes over and over, much more in line with his ranking.
It wasn't just his unexpected high performance, but also the expected drop in performance once the internet broadcast of the game was disabled.