It could also be that some con-artist somewhere is sending out phishing emails, designed to look like Times cancellation notices, and sent to large numbers of harvested email addresses. Since the set of NYT subscribers with an email address is a proper subset of the set of people with an email address, a lot of NYT subscribers would still be hit.
But "New York Times Hacked" makes for a better headline.
Very informative and useful review. Thanks. One addition/question:
LG Smart TV Upgrader (Sony and several other companies sell identical devices)
Are they really identical? I know when it comes to TVs and disc players embedding network media features, there is quite a bit of variation. Certainly I've discovered that Sony's streaming implementation is subpar on their TVs and disc players. Their Hulu client, in particular, is obnoxiously bad. Each program segment and advertisement is streamed separately, so there's a major pause for buffering at the end of each. You can't fast-forward or rewind across segments. And it doesn't remember where you left off for resuming later. The UI may be polished, but ultimately it's a polished turd.
Given the size of the US government, there have to be documents that no-one alive knows about anymore, because everyone who had access died before they should have been released.... Even if found, since there's nobody left who understands the document, it would remain classified. (Or does the Government automatically declassified information it doesn't understand, or does it just destroy the document?)
Every Original Classification decision includes the date at which the information is to be automatically declassified. Every classified document is supposed to be marked with a reference to the document which made the Original Classification decision, and the date at which it becomes declassified. All classified documents are supposed to be physically inventoried twice a year, and that inventory reported upstream. So for classified documents, the situation you describe would be less likely. Not impossible -- people don't always follow the rules, to be sure -- but less likely.
Most people who haven't worked with this stuff don't understand that classification is as much about accountability as it is about confidentiality. There's a huge paper trail associated with classification.
But not everything secret (lower-case "s") is necessarily classified. There could well be stuff that's locked up and long-forgotten precisely *because* it hasn't been formally classified, and thus isn't subject to all the above.
As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help from that renown scientific journal SPY magazine (January, 1990) - I am pleased to present the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Claus.
1) No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.
3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about.78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.
This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - - - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.
... he photocopied one side of a twenty dollar bill. He showed me both the original and the photocopy. I was completely unable to tell the difference between the two.
The original was the one with printing on both sides.
It's not about getting pissed off at home. It's about players and coaches not interfering with the game to dispute every play.
So don't let the players and coaches dispute anything. Place the technology under the control of the officials.
Football has two non-stop 45 minutes half-times.
Soccer/football is not a non-stop sport. Play stops all the time -- for injuries, throw-ins, corner kicks, etc. It's just the clock doesn't stop. This "play never stops" thing is the biggest dellusion in soccer, and I think it hurts sometimes, such as FIFA's inability to admit it's not 1932 anymore.
if the player wastes too much time "preparing" the play he can get a yellow warning card or a red expulsion card).
Can, but often doesn't. At least, not in the Cup matches I've seen.
Simply because not all football is televised, and you can't have a set of rules for "major leagues" and another for "amateurs".
Why not?
Simple. Because here in Argentina (and many other countries) the system allows any team to play in "major leagues".
That still doesn't explain why technology must be forbidden. I'm not talking about changing game mechanics. Just allowing for things like goal detection or honoring of replay evidence. With modern technology you can replay something in a matter of seconds. If this was under the control of an off-field official they could signal the referee if they saw something. You don't off to stop play unless there's an infraction. Similar to how the linesmen work. Add in two-way hands-free radios to make communication easier.
"I never fully understood [the label of 'escapist'] till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, 'What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?' and gave the obvious answer: Jailers."
I tried one of the Orson Scott Card books (Shadow Puppets) recently because he is so often recommended here on/. Terrible.
Shadow Puppets is a several-deep-sequel to Ender's Game.
I highly recommend Ender's Game. I consider it a science fiction masterpiece, a true must-read for any fan of the genre. Please give it a try.
In contrast, I think the Ender sequels are some of Card's weakest work. I think Card writes them mainly in response to fan demand, and/or just to pay the bills. Some of them are just *barely* okay; the rest are garbage.
They also won't make much sense without the context of previous books, so if you started with Puppets you'll have the additional problem of missing critical background material.
The sequels follow two paths in the story-universe: (1) Events in the distant future, on distant planets. These were written and published first. (2) Events on Earth, immediately after Game. These came later.
Speaker for the Dead was the first published sequel. It was okay. It's set a few thousand years after Game. It had some good concepts, like the "speaker for the dead" custom, exploration of how culture can change over time to view history differently, and some interesting aliens. The story is nowhere near as compelling as Game, though, and the plot is less coherent.
Xenocide follows Speaker. It was frankly bizarre. There's almost no plot, the characters are unsympathetic, and what was formerly a fairly well-grounded-in-plausible-science story got really far out there. I really didn't like this one.
Last in this line is Children of the Mind. Not as crazy Xenocide, but still weird. I found it meh. Indeed, I've forgotten so much of it that I can't give a specific review. Xenocide was so bad it stuck in my memory; this was just meh.
After all the above were published, Card jumped back in the story timeline.
Ender's Shadow is a "same events, told from a different point-of-view" rehash of Game. I rarely like these kinds of stories. They generally read like tired retreads, and this was no exception. Further, it felt like Card was just trying to top everything about Ender (main character of the first book) with Bean (another character). Bean is smarter, quicker, smaller, more vulnerable, more precocious, etc., etc., than Ender in every way. He also knew more, saw more, etc. Those sorts of N*2 stories annoy the piss out of me.
Shadow of the Hegemon was the Ender sequel I liked the most. It still wasn't all that good, but it was okay. It had a lot of fun exploring what happens when you return a bunch of child genius military commanders to Earth, where they are still minors, and thus property of adults.
Shadow Puppets, third in this line after Game, was meh at best. Not compelling for the most part. Weak characterization for the most part. Petra had some good moments. But without the other stories as background, it won't make any sense. It kind of deflated at the end.
I had high expectations for the Ringworld series; bought two of them, and it just wasn't keeping my interest).
Yah, the first book was definitely the clear best there. Great concept, but it only got you so far.
Larry Niven is a Favorite Author(TM) of mine. I like his shorter fiction best. Niven's an idea guy, when he works in full-length novels sometimes things drag a bit. He's got several short-story collections. N-Space is good for that.
Guess again, support and upgrade contracts can surpass construction contracts significantly - it's where most companies look to make the bulk of their profits in this arena.
My employer makes parts for the F-22. (This isn't *that* special. Like most big government programs, the F-22 is carefully designed to spread the work across as many different Congressional funding districts as possible. But I digress.) When the program was cut, the people in that division started to really worry. A year later, it turns out we're actually getting almost as much business as originally planned. Since they didn't buy as many planes, they're having to fly the planes they do have more, which means they're burning through spare parts faster.
One of the problems is that nobody seems to understand the difference between NRE (non-recurring expenses) and RE (recurring expenses). A lot of the budget disasters we see in government are because the NRE is significant. Designing and testing the F-22 was hugely fscking expensive. There's a ton of new technology on the plane. You pay for that if you build one plane or one hundred planes. Every time Congress cut the planned order count to "save money", all they ended up doing was making each plane cost more. And they were surprised each time.
So I've seen at least three Neal Stephenson threads, a Will Gibson, a Phil Dick, and Ender's Game. Some more recommendations on books I think most geeks should read:
Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End. Seriously, every geek should read this book. It's the best fiction on near future augmented reality that I've seen myself. Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is also outstanding, but much more "out there"; it's more entertaining than eye-opening. It does have one of the best alien perspectives I've read. Not just humans with bumpy foreheads, really *alien* aliens.
Charles Stross - Just about anything, really. His "Laundry Files" fantasy read like a cross-between H.P. Lovecraft, Douglas Adams, and Ian Fleming ("James Bond"). I know that sounds really weird, but it works. They're a riot. More serious and sciency are the "Eschaton" books -- Singularity Sky and sequels. Some of his works are available online for free, legally. Scratch Monkey for example.
John Scalzi - Old Man's War. I just finished this myself. The finish was weak but the ideas are a blast. As one reviewer put it, it's like Starship Troopers without the lectures.
Here's a few others I'm suspect will won't appeal as broadly, but I'll throw in 'cause I want to. It's my post.
C.S. Friedman - This Alien Shore. Space SF. Protagonist is a girl with cooperative multiple personalities; this is fascinatingly portrayed. Very good speculation on how direct brain interfaces might be realized. Lots of diverse human cultures. The real winner, though, is a human culture that values emotional differences and has social customs to let people interact across such boundaries. Introverted geeks (INTJ) will love this. Friedman packs a very high density of ideas into her books.
Corey Doctorow - Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Free content. An interesting take on a post-scarcity meritocracy. I think it's kind of nutty, but interesting. For the price, it's decent.
Likewise, throw-ins and free-kicks are often taken quickly to press an attacking advantage - you don't give the defense time to reset particularly if you're counter-attacking. Stopping for a replay would allow defensive players to get back and break an attacking advantage.
Okay, I see your point there.
Certainly, *adding* a reason to stop the action would *change* the existing dynamic. But it wouldn't be the *only* time play stops, which is my point. Faking injuries to stop play is already a well-documented technique, so it wouldn't even be the worst case. Does this mean it's worth the change? That I can't say.
And really, I don't think the game needs replays so much as it needs goal detection, which can be done in real-time nowadays, or so I'm told.
It will only stop working if *your* stuff stops working. And they'll email you telling you your free account is going to expire before it goes.
Not necessarily. I never received an e-mail telling me that my host name was expiring.
Note that "you never received" does not mean they didn't send it. The message prolly ended up in your spam folder. I know that's where the one they sent me ended up, when I lost the name I had been using for a few years. Of course, I only found that out once it was too late and I went and looked in the spam folder.
Come to think of it, I suppose I could have tried contacting them to explain what happened. Maybe they would have forgiven me. But I just shrugged and picked a different parent domain.
That's why in football (or "soccer") all that bullshit is forbidden. You can't even have the stadium's giant screen showing the game. And the referee has the last word. Fair or not, those are the rules. Why? Simply because not all football is televised, and you can't have a set of rules for "major leagues" and another for "amateurs".
Except that people still see the replays at home/after, so they still get all pissed off.
"Fair or not, those are the rules" is a bad reason for anything.
Simply because not all football is televised, and you can't have a set of rules for "major leagues" and another for "amateurs".
Why not?
And you neglect the vision augmentation thing. When people have cameras and displays implanted in their heads, you can't just ban it. Sure, that's decades away, but it's likely to happen. Everybody is already carrying a high-resolution movie camera with them already.
Er, slight self-correction: ASPI is technically not part of the BIOS. It was usually provided by a device driver loaded in CONFIG.SYS. It provides a separate interrupt vector, called by the same mechanism as the BIOS calls, but not implemented by the BIOS. It's been awhile.
Gibson talks out of his ass a lot. Sometimes he just makes stuff up. I don't take what he says at face value.
I have never seen any evidence of SpinRite actually "talking directly to the mass storage system hardware".
Reading between the lines of release history, I think Gibson just added support for the regular standard calls that were there all along, but he didn't know how to use before.
Take "direct hardware register level awareness of IDE and SCSI drives". SCSI drives *don't have hardware registers*. The SCSI spec is quite abstract and hides all that stuff. Further, you don't talk to a SCSI drive, you talk to a host adapter. You literally *cannot* talk directly to the drive.
You can, however, request additional sense data and mode pages, which provide a wealth of useful information about the drive. This is done through the regular BIOS calls (ASPI). It's a useful capability, and I expect it's what SpinRite does, but it isn't the Amazing Scientific Breakthrough!!!1! Gibson claims it is. He just Read The Fucking Manual and learned how to use ASPI.
I do think SpinRite did things other software wasn't doing, at least at the time and in that place. Even something as simple as pattern testing wasn't common in the dark ages of DOS. (Other platforms had it, but the IBM-PC was the ghetto of the computer world.) I acknowledge that. It was valuable at the time, and even today, a nicely-presented, integrated package might still have value.
But that doesn't mean Gibson's bullshit doesn't stink.
This is so true, take last week's GB vs. Oakland: where there was a challenge - but the instant reply gizmo was broken - so the ruling on the field had to stand, even though it was clear from the audience camera that the ruling was wrong. Something has been lost, re: officiating in the electronics age, and adding more gadgets to the mix will only make it worse...
The problem is, you're not going to be able to stuff that genie back into the bottle. With modern televised sports, you're always going to have great instant replay. And camera coverage is only going to increase. (And think ahead a few decades to when people have implanted vision augmentation tech!) If you just ignore the tech, you just piss off everyone, who can clearly see a call was bad.
I look forward to the day when, at the beginning of the match, the coaches will whip out laptops (or is it tablets?), type furiously, then one of them will look up and say, "you win".
There was a gag in The Jetsons a lot like that. Technically the coaches were controlling robots, but otherwise it was as you describe.
The main reasons cited are that replays etc would interrupt the game, and since it's a free-flowing sport... this would change the game fundamentally.
I hate that excuse. Soccer/football is not a non-stop sport. Play stops all the time -- for injuries, throw-ins, corner kicks, etc. It's just the clock doesn't stop. This "play never stops" thing is the biggest dellusion in soccer, and I think it hurts sometimes, such as the World Cup's inability to admit it's not 1932 anymore.
I was going to mod the parent down, but instead I will reply.
What a radical concept!;-)
(For the humor impaired: I am not criticizing zbobet2012. I am commenting ironically on the tendency of people to use the moderation system as a discussion system, which is wrong.)
Earlier versions of Spinrite would talk to drives at a level below how DOS would access them.
Actually, no. SpinRite uses INT13. Plain, old ordinary INT13, that's been in the IBM-PC BIOS since hard drives were introduced on the platform. The docs are quite clear on this: If the drive interface doesn't support INT13, it won't work.
SpinRite mainly appears to just read and write blocks over and over again. If a read fails, it will keep trying until it does, which is useful on a failing drive.
To read a bad block, SpinRite will try tricks like seeking to adjacent cylinders/heads/sectors and back again, in various directions. This is plausible for ancient drives, but everything made in the past 20 years or so had abstracted the real disk geometry away from the host, even when presenting "CHS".
SpinRite claims to use various bit patterns to test/exercise/renew/whatever blocks. While this may have had some relevance in the days of MFM, when hard drives were started by hand-crank, these days it's bunk. It makes as much sense as "revitalizing, vitamin-infused shampoo" (tip: hair is dead matter).
And, of course, SpinRite is from Steve Gibson, who always talks like an infomercial host. Billy Mays could have taken lessons from Gibson.
While SpinRite is not a total scam, it's highly overrated, mostly obsolete, and all of it's useful functionality is available in free programs elsewhere.
I think one key point was SpaceX does a lot of their work in house instead of contracting parts out to companies that gouge.
That's because the shuttle program's primary purpose isn't to get to space, it's to distribute congressional pork. It's a welfare program for aerospace companies, and a way to reward campaign contributors. The shuttle was carefully engineered to spread the work across as many different congressional districts as possible. That's not what NASA was originally designing for, of course, but Congress was the one paying for it. The customer's always right.
And in case anyone thinks I'm some kind of "national military-industrial complex" whiner: I *work* for an aerospace/defense subcontractor. That doesn't mean I like how this stuff gets funded.
Wow, you sure do like to froth at the mouth. *and* *stuff*
Touche. Too many comments from people bitching that free wasn't cheap enough.
He neglected to retain Localgeek with an ongoing service contract for maintenance on his $50 router
Closest to that, actually.
I suppose Joe also buys a car, doesn't read the manual, and is surprised when the engine seizes because he never had the oil changed. After all, his car Kung-Fu is very weak.
Joe is also likely surprised that buying tons of stuff on his credit card, carrying a balance, and being late on payments means he's getting high interest rates on his car loan. Turns out, his money Kung-Fu is very weak.
Joe got hooked up with a cheap crap solution and it performed like cheap crap. This should not be surprising.
There's this concept that you don't get something for nothing. It's actually encoded into the universe as the second law of thermodynamics. It's probably the single most involute rule known to human understanding. Joe might want to learn about it. His life will be a lot less painful.
I don't seem to have that option. Chrome 16.0.912.63 (build 113337), which is the latest google-chrome-beta in Google's APT repository.
its quite nice, but its not completely tree style:(
I bolded, italicized, and double-starred "full" for a reason. People have offered me lots of "kinda sorta not really" solutions -- you saw the list I posted, I presume. I call them "critical features" because they're deal-breakers for me.
bartab is now available as an experimental flag in about:flag.
I don't seem to have this one, either.
Save/restore tabs between browser sessions?? chrome probably invented this!
Um... save/restore tabs was around in Firefox before there *was* a Chrome. Session Manager is just an extension that gives me more control over it. And checking the release notes, it was first released in 2006. Chrome was first released in 2008. So the Session Manager extension is also older than Chrome.
Slashdot Mirror
It could also be that some con-artist somewhere is sending out phishing emails, designed to look like Times cancellation notices, and sent to large numbers of harvested email addresses. Since the set of NYT subscribers with an email address is a proper subset of the set of people with an email address, a lot of NYT subscribers would still be hit.
But "New York Times Hacked" makes for a better headline.
Very informative and useful review. Thanks. One addition/question:
LG Smart TV Upgrader (Sony and several other companies sell identical devices)
Are they really identical? I know when it comes to TVs and disc players embedding network media features, there is quite a bit of variation. Certainly I've discovered that Sony's streaming implementation is subpar on their TVs and disc players. Their Hulu client, in particular, is obnoxiously bad. Each program segment and advertisement is streamed separately, so there's a major pause for buffering at the end of each. You can't fast-forward or rewind across segments. And it doesn't remember where you left off for resuming later. The UI may be polished, but ultimately it's a polished turd.
Given the size of the US government, there have to be documents that no-one alive knows about anymore, because everyone who had access died before they should have been released. ... Even if found, since there's nobody left who understands the document, it would remain classified. (Or does the Government automatically declassified information it doesn't understand, or does it just destroy the document?)
Every Original Classification decision includes the date at which the information is to be automatically declassified. Every classified document is supposed to be marked with a reference to the document which made the Original Classification decision, and the date at which it becomes declassified. All classified documents are supposed to be physically inventoried twice a year, and that inventory reported upstream. So for classified documents, the situation you describe would be less likely. Not impossible -- people don't always follow the rules, to be sure -- but less likely.
Most people who haven't worked with this stuff don't understand that classification is as much about accountability as it is about confidentiality. There's a huge paper trail associated with classification.
But not everything secret (lower-case "s") is necessarily classified. There could well be stuff that's locked up and long-forgotten precisely *because* it hasn't been formally classified, and thus isn't subject to all the above.
Scientific Inquiry into Santa Claus
As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help
from that renown scientific journal SPY magazine (January, 1990) - I am
pleased to present the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Claus.
1) No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of
living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects
and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only
Santa has ever seen.
2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since
Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist
children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million
according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of
3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's
at least one good child in each.
3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2
time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west
(which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is
to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has
1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney,
fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat
whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the
sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8
million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we
know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept),
we are now talking about
million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least
once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.
This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000
times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made
vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per
second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming
that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds),
the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably
described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more
than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could
pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even
nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even
counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison
- - - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as
spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer
will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short,
they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer
behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire
reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa,
meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater
than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be
pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's
dead now.
... he photocopied one side of a twenty dollar bill. He showed me both the original and the photocopy. I was completely unable to tell the difference between the two.
The original was the one with printing on both sides.
(I'll get my coat.)
It's not about getting pissed off at home. It's about players and coaches not interfering with the game to dispute every play.
So don't let the players and coaches dispute anything. Place the technology under the control of the officials.
Football has two non-stop 45 minutes half-times.
Soccer/football is not a non-stop sport. Play stops all the time -- for injuries, throw-ins, corner kicks, etc. It's just the clock doesn't stop. This "play never stops" thing is the biggest dellusion in soccer, and I think it hurts sometimes, such as FIFA's inability to admit it's not 1932 anymore.
if the player wastes too much time "preparing" the play he can get a yellow warning card or a red expulsion card).
Can, but often doesn't. At least, not in the Cup matches I've seen.
Simply because not all football is televised, and you can't have a set of rules for "major leagues" and another for "amateurs".
Why not?
Simple. Because here in Argentina (and many other countries) the system allows any team to play in "major leagues".
That still doesn't explain why technology must be forbidden. I'm not talking about changing game mechanics. Just allowing for things like goal detection or honoring of replay evidence. With modern technology you can replay something in a matter of seconds. If this was under the control of an off-field official they could signal the referee if they saw something. You don't off to stop play unless there's an infraction. Similar to how the linesmen work. Add in two-way hands-free radios to make communication easier.
American football is a completely different game.
I'm not talking about US football here.
"I never fully understood [the label of 'escapist'] till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, 'What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?' and gave the obvious answer: Jailers."
(C. S. Lewis, "On Science Fiction")
I tried one of the Orson Scott Card books (Shadow Puppets) recently because he is so often recommended here on /. Terrible.
Shadow Puppets is a several-deep-sequel to Ender's Game.
I highly recommend Ender's Game. I consider it a science fiction masterpiece, a true must-read for any fan of the genre. Please give it a try.
In contrast, I think the Ender sequels are some of Card's weakest work. I think Card writes them mainly in response to fan demand, and/or just to pay the bills. Some of them are just *barely* okay; the rest are garbage.
They also won't make much sense without the context of previous books, so if you started with Puppets you'll have the additional problem of missing critical background material.
The sequels follow two paths in the story-universe: (1) Events in the distant future, on distant planets. These were written and published first. (2) Events on Earth, immediately after Game. These came later.
Speaker for the Dead was the first published sequel. It was okay. It's set a few thousand years after Game. It had some good concepts, like the "speaker for the dead" custom, exploration of how culture can change over time to view history differently, and some interesting aliens. The story is nowhere near as compelling as Game, though, and the plot is less coherent.
Xenocide follows Speaker. It was frankly bizarre. There's almost no plot, the characters are unsympathetic, and what was formerly a fairly well-grounded-in-plausible-science story got really far out there. I really didn't like this one.
Last in this line is Children of the Mind. Not as crazy Xenocide, but still weird. I found it meh. Indeed, I've forgotten so much of it that I can't give a specific review. Xenocide was so bad it stuck in my memory; this was just meh.
After all the above were published, Card jumped back in the story timeline.
Ender's Shadow is a "same events, told from a different point-of-view" rehash of Game. I rarely like these kinds of stories. They generally read like tired retreads, and this was no exception. Further, it felt like Card was just trying to top everything about Ender (main character of the first book) with Bean (another character). Bean is smarter, quicker, smaller, more vulnerable, more precocious, etc., etc., than Ender in every way. He also knew more, saw more, etc. Those sorts of N*2 stories annoy the piss out of me.
Shadow of the Hegemon was the Ender sequel I liked the most. It still wasn't all that good, but it was okay. It had a lot of fun exploring what happens when you return a bunch of child genius military commanders to Earth, where they are still minors, and thus property of adults.
Shadow Puppets, third in this line after Game, was meh at best. Not compelling for the most part. Weak characterization for the most part. Petra had some good moments. But without the other stories as background, it won't make any sense. It kind of deflated at the end.
I had high expectations for the Ringworld series; bought two of them, and it just wasn't keeping my interest).
Yah, the first book was definitely the clear best there. Great concept, but it only got you so far.
Larry Niven is a Favorite Author(TM) of mine. I like his shorter fiction best. Niven's an idea guy, when he works in full-length novels sometimes things drag a bit. He's got several short-story collections. N-Space is good for that.
Guess again, support and upgrade contracts can surpass construction contracts significantly - it's where most companies look to make the bulk of their profits in this arena.
My employer makes parts for the F-22. (This isn't *that* special. Like most big government programs, the F-22 is carefully designed to spread the work across as many different Congressional funding districts as possible. But I digress.) When the program was cut, the people in that division started to really worry. A year later, it turns out we're actually getting almost as much business as originally planned. Since they didn't buy as many planes, they're having to fly the planes they do have more, which means they're burning through spare parts faster.
The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.
One of the problems is that nobody seems to understand the difference between NRE (non-recurring expenses) and RE (recurring expenses). A lot of the budget disasters we see in government are because the NRE is significant. Designing and testing the F-22 was hugely fscking expensive. There's a ton of new technology on the plane. You pay for that if you build one plane or one hundred planes. Every time Congress cut the planned order count to "save money", all they ended up doing was making each plane cost more. And they were surprised each time.
Morons.
So I've seen at least three Neal Stephenson threads, a Will Gibson, a Phil Dick, and Ender's Game. Some more recommendations on books I think most geeks should read:
Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End. Seriously, every geek should read this book. It's the best fiction on near future augmented reality that I've seen myself. Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is also outstanding, but much more "out there"; it's more entertaining than eye-opening. It does have one of the best alien perspectives I've read. Not just humans with bumpy foreheads, really *alien* aliens.
Charles Stross - Just about anything, really. His "Laundry Files" fantasy read like a cross-between H.P. Lovecraft, Douglas Adams, and Ian Fleming ("James Bond"). I know that sounds really weird, but it works. They're a riot. More serious and sciency are the "Eschaton" books -- Singularity Sky and sequels. Some of his works are available online for free, legally. Scratch Monkey for example.
John Scalzi - Old Man's War. I just finished this myself. The finish was weak but the ideas are a blast. As one reviewer put it, it's like Starship Troopers without the lectures.
Here's a few others I'm suspect will won't appeal as broadly, but I'll throw in 'cause I want to. It's my post.
C.S. Friedman - This Alien Shore. Space SF. Protagonist is a girl with cooperative multiple personalities; this is fascinatingly portrayed. Very good speculation on how direct brain interfaces might be realized. Lots of diverse human cultures. The real winner, though, is a human culture that values emotional differences and has social customs to let people interact across such boundaries. Introverted geeks (INTJ) will love this. Friedman packs a very high density of ideas into her books.
Corey Doctorow - Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom . Free content. An interesting take on a post-scarcity meritocracy. I think it's kind of nutty, but interesting. For the price, it's decent.
Likewise, throw-ins and free-kicks are often taken quickly to press an attacking advantage - you don't give the defense time to reset particularly if you're counter-attacking. Stopping for a replay would allow defensive players to get back and break an attacking advantage.
Okay, I see your point there.
Certainly, *adding* a reason to stop the action would *change* the existing dynamic. But it wouldn't be the *only* time play stops, which is my point. Faking injuries to stop play is already a well-documented technique, so it wouldn't even be the worst case. Does this mean it's worth the change? That I can't say.
And really, I don't think the game needs replays so much as it needs goal detection, which can be done in real-time nowadays, or so I'm told.
It will only stop working if *your* stuff stops working. And they'll email you telling you your free account is going to expire before it goes.
Not necessarily. I never received an e-mail telling me that my host name was expiring.
Note that "you never received" does not mean they didn't send it. The message prolly ended up in your spam folder. I know that's where the one they sent me ended up, when I lost the name I had been using for a few years. Of course, I only found that out once it was too late and I went and looked in the spam folder.
Come to think of it, I suppose I could have tried contacting them to explain what happened. Maybe they would have forgiven me. But I just shrugged and picked a different parent domain.
That's why in football (or "soccer") all that bullshit is forbidden. You can't even have the stadium's giant screen showing the game. And the referee has the last word. Fair or not, those are the rules. Why? Simply because not all football is televised, and you can't have a set of rules for "major leagues" and another for "amateurs".
Except that people still see the replays at home/after, so they still get all pissed off.
"Fair or not, those are the rules" is a bad reason for anything.
Simply because not all football is televised, and you can't have a set of rules for "major leagues" and another for "amateurs".
Why not?
And you neglect the vision augmentation thing. When people have cameras and displays implanted in their heads, you can't just ban it. Sure, that's decades away, but it's likely to happen. Everybody is already carrying a high-resolution movie camera with them already.
Er, slight self-correction: ASPI is technically not part of the BIOS. It was usually provided by a device driver loaded in CONFIG.SYS. It provides a separate interrupt vector, called by the same mechanism as the BIOS calls, but not implemented by the BIOS. It's been awhile.
Gibson talks out of his ass a lot. Sometimes he just makes stuff up. I don't take what he says at face value.
I have never seen any evidence of SpinRite actually "talking directly to the mass storage system hardware".
Reading between the lines of release history, I think Gibson just added support for the regular standard calls that were there all along, but he didn't know how to use before.
Take "direct hardware register level awareness of IDE and SCSI drives". SCSI drives *don't have hardware registers*. The SCSI spec is quite abstract and hides all that stuff. Further, you don't talk to a SCSI drive, you talk to a host adapter. You literally *cannot* talk directly to the drive.
You can, however, request additional sense data and mode pages, which provide a wealth of useful information about the drive. This is done through the regular BIOS calls (ASPI). It's a useful capability, and I expect it's what SpinRite does, but it isn't the Amazing Scientific Breakthrough!!!1! Gibson claims it is. He just Read The Fucking Manual and learned how to use ASPI.
I do think SpinRite did things other software wasn't doing, at least at the time and in that place. Even something as simple as pattern testing wasn't common in the dark ages of DOS. (Other platforms had it, but the IBM-PC was the ghetto of the computer world.) I acknowledge that. It was valuable at the time, and even today, a nicely-presented, integrated package might still have value.
But that doesn't mean Gibson's bullshit doesn't stink.
This is so true, take last week's GB vs. Oakland: where there was a challenge - but the instant reply gizmo was broken - so the ruling on the field had to stand, even though it was clear from the audience camera that the ruling was wrong. Something has been lost, re: officiating in the electronics age, and adding more gadgets to the mix will only make it worse...
The problem is, you're not going to be able to stuff that genie back into the bottle. With modern televised sports, you're always going to have great instant replay. And camera coverage is only going to increase. (And think ahead a few decades to when people have implanted vision augmentation tech!) If you just ignore the tech, you just piss off everyone, who can clearly see a call was bad.
I look forward to the day when, at the beginning of the match, the coaches will whip out laptops (or is it tablets?), type furiously, then one of them will look up and say, "you win".
There was a gag in The Jetsons a lot like that. Technically the coaches were controlling robots, but otherwise it was as you describe.
The main reasons cited are that replays etc would interrupt the game, and since it's a free-flowing sport ... this would change the game fundamentally.
I hate that excuse. Soccer/football is not a non-stop sport. Play stops all the time -- for injuries, throw-ins, corner kicks, etc. It's just the clock doesn't stop. This "play never stops" thing is the biggest dellusion in soccer, and I think it hurts sometimes, such as the World Cup's inability to admit it's not 1932 anymore.
I was going to mod the parent down, but instead I will reply.
What a radical concept! ;-)
(For the humor impaired: I am not criticizing zbobet2012. I am commenting ironically on the tendency of people to use the moderation system as a discussion system, which is wrong.)
Earlier versions of Spinrite would talk to drives at a level below how DOS would access them.
Actually, no. SpinRite uses INT13. Plain, old ordinary INT13, that's been in the IBM-PC BIOS since hard drives were introduced on the platform. The docs are quite clear on this: If the drive interface doesn't support INT13, it won't work.
SpinRite mainly appears to just read and write blocks over and over again. If a read fails, it will keep trying until it does, which is useful on a failing drive.
To read a bad block, SpinRite will try tricks like seeking to adjacent cylinders/heads/sectors and back again, in various directions. This is plausible for ancient drives, but everything made in the past 20 years or so had abstracted the real disk geometry away from the host, even when presenting "CHS".
SpinRite claims to use various bit patterns to test/exercise/renew/whatever blocks. While this may have had some relevance in the days of MFM, when hard drives were started by hand-crank, these days it's bunk. It makes as much sense as "revitalizing, vitamin-infused shampoo" (tip: hair is dead matter).
And, of course, SpinRite is from Steve Gibson, who always talks like an infomercial host. Billy Mays could have taken lessons from Gibson.
While SpinRite is not a total scam, it's highly overrated, mostly obsolete, and all of it's useful functionality is available in free programs elsewhere.
I think one key point was SpaceX does a lot of their work in house instead of contracting parts out to companies that gouge.
That's because the shuttle program's primary purpose isn't to get to space, it's to distribute congressional pork. It's a welfare program for aerospace companies, and a way to reward campaign contributors. The shuttle was carefully engineered to spread the work across as many different congressional districts as possible. That's not what NASA was originally designing for, of course, but Congress was the one paying for it. The customer's always right.
And in case anyone thinks I'm some kind of "national military-industrial complex" whiner: I *work* for an aerospace/defense subcontractor. That doesn't mean I like how this stuff gets funded.
Wow, you sure do like to froth at the mouth. *and* *stuff*
Touche. Too many comments from people bitching that free wasn't cheap enough.
He neglected to retain Localgeek with an ongoing service contract for maintenance on his $50 router
Closest to that, actually.
I suppose Joe also buys a car, doesn't read the manual, and is surprised when the engine seizes because he never had the oil changed. After all, his car Kung-Fu is very weak.
Joe is also likely surprised that buying tons of stuff on his credit card, carrying a balance, and being late on payments means he's getting high interest rates on his car loan. Turns out, his money Kung-Fu is very weak.
Joe got hooked up with a cheap crap solution and it performed like cheap crap. This should not be surprising.
There's this concept that you don't get something for nothing. It's actually encoded into the universe as the second law of thermodynamics. It's probably the single most involute rule known to human understanding. Joe might want to learn about it. His life will be a lot less painful.
I'm gonna bring in your comments from #38415244 so we can have the conversation in one place.
try side tabs in about:flags
I don't seem to have that option. Chrome 16.0.912.63 (build 113337), which is the latest google-chrome-beta in Google's APT repository.
its quite nice, but its not completely tree style :(
I bolded, italicized, and double-starred "full" for a reason. People have offered me lots of "kinda sorta not really" solutions -- you saw the list I posted, I presume. I call them "critical features" because they're deal-breakers for me.
bartab is now available as an experimental flag in about:flag.
I don't seem to have this one, either.
Save/restore tabs between browser sessions?? chrome probably invented this!
Um... save/restore tabs was around in Firefox before there *was* a Chrome. Session Manager is just an extension that gives me more control over it. And checking the release notes, it was first released in 2006. Chrome was first released in 2008. So the Session Manager extension is also older than Chrome.