Lets see, first off, the zero emmissions vehicle bills? Where they expect 5-10% of all new cars sold between 1998 and 2008 or so (feel free to correct me, I have a crappy memory for exact numbers) have to be either electric (preferred) or natural gas powered... Considering that most alternatively powered vehicles have to be electric, and that at least 5% of total cars sold in CA have to be such, how do they propose these cars are powered? Additionally, LosAngeles andSan Francicso have ample electric buses/light transit in their locales... How much does this compose the energy drain by the power brokers' well paid bean counters, hmmm?
Of course, I'm a Washingtonian, and not sure if this fact gets out or not, but guess who has to pay California's electric bills in the interum... Regardless though, the power brokers' claims are total BS... Next!
Back around 1990, I had a friend (Charlie Kellner) who demonstrated to me how to build my own THX system to me... In case you can't find relevant credits, he was one of the people who *designed* THX...
How do you build a THX compliant system? Purchase a Hush IIc preamp, you can get these anywhere from $50 to $250 through miscellaneous music amp suppliers... (try Rocktron)... Use that and you have your THX sound system... Several steps cheaper than buying a "true" THX system...
Mind you, I built mine in concurrance with a Carver C-1 (serial number 000009) sonic holography preamp, the resulting effect creating 3D surround with only 2 speakers, jumping when sounds from Blade Runner emanated behind me without the extra speakers...
Hackers, Crackers, Script Kiddies, lend me your optics...
The honest fact is, actions such as this are counterproductive...
European nations are, even now, writing laws out of ignorance, intending to strip away your rights further and further, with a largely ignorant public all too willing to swallow the anti-intellectual propoganda that you see in the media every day... A public that wouldn't care either way, as long as it (momentarily) assuages any of their fears...
This is something that continues to be brought to notice as well in the US government, also known as the home of the rider bill... Where without anyone having knowlege, they can attach ludicrous laws to bills as they are passed, whereas they could easily strip your rights away without a peep from it's similarly ignorant populace...
These are people who are perfectly willing to take bandwidth sucking garbage like script kiddie attacks and their "possible" end results, and turn them into justification for further attempts at removing more of your rights...
When they penned the DMCA, I said nothing, because my software was legal...
When they declared DeCSS illegal, I said nothing, because I ran Windows...
When they closed down IRC, I cannot say anything because (Connection reset by peer.)
If ONLY they could make it like this:
on
Boogie Bass Hacked
·
· Score: 1
Whoops, cancel that, since I upped to 256 megs RAM, 750 Mhz PIII (engineering sample 733), and an Annihilator2 MX, it runs just fine... STILL, it would have been nicer to get the preview in MPEG format, I mean who're we paying to see this film, the folks who produced it? Or Apple?
Back when they released the first couple of trailers in Quicktime format, I tried, OH how I tried, to view it... At the time, I was running a K6-2 300 with a 16 meg Riva TNT based video card, over a cable connection... It was UNVIEWABLE...
I even downloaded the full 26+ meg preview, even then it was unviewable... Now I know a 300 Mhz processor isn't quite the fastest around, even with 64 megs of ram and a fast drive, but YEESH! Why was it so hard for them to release the preview in a more or less universally acceptable format such as MPEG? Hell, I would have taken Realplayer in a pinch, but this was intolerable...
Can anyone provide an alternate link to say, an MPEG encoded copy of the preview, instead of this Quicktime crap?
Well, if you consider the cost of manufacturing a custom plastic shell for it to fit neatly into the box (nobody's gonna buy it if the circuitry and wiring is exposed), and that it IS a proprietary device, AND that the average pricing on a *good* NIC runs from $30-$40, or a USB NIC running anywhere upwards from $50, then tacking on an extra $10 for a device like this isn't that exhorbitant...
Besides, the $60 is more than likely a MSRP, as opposed to the actual retail... When they make enough to justify lowering the wholesale pricing, then the retailers will inevitably drop their prices as well... More than likely too, the wholesale pricing will be considerably lower...
How often do you see on sega.com's online store, pricing that is lower than retail? Never... The DC is running around the average pricing of $149, but does not reflect sales that some stores hold, out of box specials, or pre-owned system sales...
Sorry, maybe I need more sleep, but that's the first thing that came to mind when I saw "Ham Satellite Suffers Failures"...
Either that, or more caffeine...
Bzzzt! Sorry, and wrong... I couldn't even *afford* to be a gaming geek at the time 3Dfx was king, used a Number 9 Vision 2 meg card built in 1995 up til 1999, and I remember finding out about the lawsuits they fired up against Nvidia, AFTER I bought an upgrade...
3Dfx was trying to patent pretty much every single 3D technology out there, and long before all this other IP suit glut appeared in the news... Prior to that, the only people suing on IP infringement, were Sun, Netscape, and a few others... Who were they suing? Microsoft...
Huh, nobody really complained about that either as I recall... So I guess concern about IP cases only apply to 133t linux geeks, and the remainder can screw themselves...
As to answer your question of "How is 3Dfx different from any of the hundreds or thousands of companies that're suing other companies for similar reasons?"... The answer is simple:
People like YOU support them... People like YOU ignore that behavior unless it *gasp* infringes on your particular lifestyle...
Of course, what do I know? You're probably just some poor hapless idiot who just got back from Xmas shopping, after blowing $299 on a 3Dfx Voodoo 4500, when you saw this headline...;)
Odd, that there are as many people out there, including/. who mourn the loss of 3Dfx...
The truth of the matter is, 3Dfx was, for a goodly 2 years, one of the first big name companies to start the IP onslaught... Less than 2 years ago, they attempted to sue Nvidia, claiming patent infringement, when Nvidia was just starting to make a name for itself, for providing low cost 3D accelerators, which at the time, was just a notch above ATI for preferred hardware...
Then Creative Labs came out with a Glide wrapper, custom made for their TNT/TNT2 cards... 3Dfx tried suing them as well...
Then people in the emulation scene started coming out with Glide wrappers as well... 3Dfx threatened them with cease and desist letters...
Meanwhile, while 3Dfx was running around threatening to sue everyone who could possibly compete with them, Nvidia continued to develop their technology...
Are we noticing a trend here?
Nvidia made one error in their PR dept, when they threatened to pull their sponsorship for hardware review websites, if any competing 3D accelerator ads/logos were displayed on said sites... They admitted the mistake, and for the most part, apologised...
So really, the biggest irony here is, with the general uproar regarding big companies stomping on the little guy for IP "infringement", that just such a company got bought out by one of the very little guys they were trying to stomp on...
And yet the majority of responses online (other than Nvidia's, of course) has been negative, attacking Nvidia rather than 3Dfx, making 3Dfx into the martyr, nay, the sacrificial lamb, gobbled up by the slathering wolves of Nvidia...
If you have South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut on DVD, play it... Select "French" from your language menu... This is a PERFECT example of the evils of dubbing... The kids' voices don't even match (sounding instead like nasal Frenchmen trying to sound like kids, instead of pitch modulation being used to alter the voice)...
If you still can't figure it out, just listen to Asses of Fire's Unclefucker song, and get a good giggle...
Okay, here's a good demonstration of WHY we like Japanese soundtracks:
What's your favorite movie? Okay, now then, imaging that movie being completely rewritten... Still with me? Okay, now imagine all the voices being redone with completely different voices, often completely inappropriate for the characters in the film... Every single nuance of the previous acting is lost, certain feelings given by a scene are lost, the original good writing is lost in the editing room rewrites...
What's the difference? Okay, raise your hand if you've seen Akira... Anyone? Good... Ever see the original version, as well as the dubbed version? Most of the dialogue is changed, and in other cases, the voice acting (they should learn to emphasize on the ACTING part) is completely wrong...
How else do movies suffer? Watch any kung fu movie from the 1970s... There's one good example...
Another example: Imagine Darth Vader having his dialogue rewritten by the folks who write Barney, and the voicing performed by Pee Wee Herman...
"Luke, I'm your daddy! I think you need a hug, you have a boo-boo!"
Of course, the irony here is how many people here are into programming, coding, etc etc etc, they'll respect someone who spends months hacking and handwriting the code behind DeCSS, but spit on people who draw anime, or animation for that matter... This shit takes forever to do, people, even when you have a studio with 50 min wage earners drawing cel after cel after cel...
And no, Flash doesn't count...
Guess the trolls here value talent when it benefits them directly, but then again, brains aren't everything...
(and many of us have had access to the tapes traded, which had the original soundtrack with subtitles as well, so we'd know the difference)
In a shocking turn of events, Tiger Electronics recently revealed that their slumping sales on Furby toys, had been bought out by Iraqi officials. Confidential sources have confirmed this, that with a hardware hack made available on the internet recently, that the said Furbies have appeared on the market, modified to deliver Iraqi government doctrine and propaganda.
The toys, described as appearing to have "Black bushy markers scribbled on using Sharpie markers.", have shown up chanting "Death to America!", "God is good!", and "Saddam, our father!" have been confirmed by independant sources as being in regular production. Sanford and Tiger toys have been unavailable for comment.
With their low cost and easily available 8 bit components, CIA and UN officials have been quoted in saying "This has to be the most cost effective form of propaganda we've seen since the printing press was invented.".
Actually, iron oxide combined with powdered aluminum is known as thermite, not rocket fuel at all, but close enough that it would explain the ignition of the hydrogen... Thermite is such that it would take 2000+ F to ignite, so a lightning bolt COULD ignite that... I forget the actual burning temperature of hydrogen, but I have the feeling it burns well cooler than that...
Every computer shy of Amiga in 1984/85 had a maximum of 4/8 bit color at best, the Amiga started with a minimum of 16 bit color... The drawback though, was that Commodore (Emphasis on the Commode) was expecting their market to be much akin to their experiences with the Vic-20/C64, ie: available in Toys'R'Us and Sears...
The main drawback was, their systems were cheap enough to not sell (as most geeks then and now consider a sub $1000 machine as worthy of apprehension), but just pricey enough that nobody would consider (based on early 80's economy) buying one... In those days, $1000 was almost two months' wages for most...
Since high end graphics, sound and video processing was still something only a limited few were actually interested in at the time, their market was limited even more... If you put the three, PC's, Macs, and Amigas, side by side with current tech, the Amiga would win hand over fist... Only problem is, their manufacturer's are dead and buried, and the current Amiga is still vaporware... AmigaDE is one example of their possibly moving to x86 and 68x platforms in the future...
Mir: Former Soviet space station, launched in 1986, and was operational for close to 15 years, designed to be operational at best for 5... It had a fire once and a collision when the Russian space agency forced a cosmonaut to attempt a manual docking of a progress module... Other than that, a flawless history, so to speak...
Prior to that, there were the Salyut space stations, each of which only served 1-2 years before decommission... Of the series, there were 7, Mir being the final Salyut station...
Skylab: The first US space station, launched in 1973, broken from the getgo, lost a solar panel in launch, and tore away it's thermal blanket, was abandoned and deorbited within 5 years of operation.
Of course, there is one bit of truth to the Russian space program; up until the mid 70's, there were a great deal of disasters that were buried until the change of power, including a nasty explosion of their attempt at a competing launch vehicle to the Saturn V booster, the N-1... Lets just say the ground crew that was dissolved in the acetic acid (I believe that was part of the fuel, or at least another form of highly corrosive acid) were the lucky ones...
And of course we have our Challenger and Apollo accidents to our record as well... Oh, and of course lots of fun Delta rockets blowing up with multimillion dollar satellites in them...
Ohyeah, and the recent Mars exploration screwups, because someone forgot to convert imperial to metric measurements for the probe, and used a fubar rocket design in the lander too...
So if anything, Russian and US space programs BOTH have their flaws, reliability wise...
For the last few months, probably due to the leaked e-mail addresses from Digital Convergance, I've been recieving spam from an e-mail forger... Unfortunately, the spammer in question also changes his address, such as akdsjksd@msn.com or what have you, followed with a subject line such as: Get Mortgage Loans Today! [2387sd]
I've attempted to filter for msn and yahoo addresses, as I rarely recieve anything from those, but that didn't work (so sue me, I'm too lazy to learn any other e-mail software other than Outlook Express)...
Other than the universal "use other software", "switch to linux", etc, responses, how does one block against such spam abuses? At least with legitimate spam, I can respond and get them to remove me from their lists... But the spam with forged addresses, of course I cannot simply respond to get it shut down...
Technically you don't even *need* fetal cells, the placenta contains upwards from a pint of stem cells following birth... As much as a quart in some cases...
On a planet that churns out 100,000,000 fresh squalling brats a year, that's a lot of stem cells... Pity doctors don't bother with informing their patients in regards to this information... Some families are informed, however, and put in requests to hold onto the afterbirth for stem cell harvesting (in the event of immunotherapy, unexpected surgery, or transfusions)...
What's really nuts, are those newager parents who waste the placenta, either using it in food (blarg), or bury it in the yard as fertilizer (Mommy? What did Fido dig up in the back yard? BLARG!)... Any of the older hippies remember they used to make shampoo out of placenta as well (weeeeBLARG!!!)?
So far, it's a lot of griping and fuming, what can be done to offset NBC's practices?
You cannot put up a website covering the olympics, but how about websites about the olympics, with a nice big "We'd tell you about the olympics, but NBC decided to buy the olympics, and won't allow anyone else to cover it... In doing this patently anticompetative move, they have ruined any chance of alternative coverage... Please boycott, petition, whatever it takes, to make sure they cannot get away with this!"
C'mon folks, the net can be a tremendous political outlet, and it's users can become a tremendous political power... The olympics can make it even moreso, if a net without boundaries can take on an international games committee...
At the most, only 1/2 of the registered voters actually showed up to vote... In other words, people with either schedules that didn't allow them to put in their vote, or people who believed their vote would be wasted (and if you think about it, 49+ million people HAVE wasted their votes)...
What I consider ironic, is that with all this bickering about who got what votes, chads, dimples, absentee and military votes, is that they simply didn't do one SIMPLE thing: Reopen the elections, so that the people who fell into the 1/2 not voting COULD, and balance, or tip the scales...
How hard could that be? What makes the electoral system so afraid of Americans claiming their right to vote, albeit belatedly? Come on, if they can allow upwards from a week for absentee ballots, or mail in military voting to be recieved, what's keeping them from allowing the elections to continue up until the point of that deadline?
I mean hell, I would have preferred to vote, if anything, to get the media to shut the hell up...
(1) Make damnned sure you hold onto everything that came with your Furby...
(2) Perform the hack...
(3) Reprogram your Furby to randomly spout a wav file of George Carlin's "7 Forbidden Words" routine every 5 minutes or so...
(4) Repackage the Furby in the original packaging, make sure it's as close to it's original appearance as possible, and...
(5) Sneak the repackaged Furby into the nearest toy store where you originally purchased it (use another branch to make sure nobody recognizes you), under your coat... Put the Furby on the shelf with the others, and leave...
(6) Wait for the inevitable news freakouts which will follow...
Does anyone here remember one of the big foulups with early voicechipped dolls, where they had one doll that was programmed for Spanish, and fell into the possession of a WASP housewife? She insisted the doll was saying "Kill Mommy!", as opposed to the doll's actual statement of "Quiero Mami" (sp?), or "I Love Mommy!"...
Considering Tiger Toys' reputation for using Chinese sweatshops to produce their toys (and occasionally prisoner labor), it would be nice to see them take a hit to the pocketbook...;)
Slashdot Mirror
Would you like to come back to my place? Bouncy bouncy! My nipples explode with delight!
Lets see, first off, the zero emmissions vehicle bills? Where they expect 5-10% of all new cars sold between 1998 and 2008 or so (feel free to correct me, I have a crappy memory for exact numbers) have to be either electric (preferred) or natural gas powered... Considering that most alternatively powered vehicles have to be electric, and that at least 5% of total cars sold in CA have to be such, how do they propose these cars are powered? Additionally, LosAngeles andSan Francicso have ample electric buses/light transit in their locales... How much does this compose the energy drain by the power brokers' well paid bean counters, hmmm? Of course, I'm a Washingtonian, and not sure if this fact gets out or not, but guess who has to pay California's electric bills in the interum... Regardless though, the power brokers' claims are total BS... Next!
Back around 1990, I had a friend (Charlie Kellner) who demonstrated to me how to build my own THX system to me... In case you can't find relevant credits, he was one of the people who *designed* THX... How do you build a THX compliant system? Purchase a Hush IIc preamp, you can get these anywhere from $50 to $250 through miscellaneous music amp suppliers... (try Rocktron)... Use that and you have your THX sound system... Several steps cheaper than buying a "true" THX system... Mind you, I built mine in concurrance with a Carver C-1 (serial number 000009) sonic holography preamp, the resulting effect creating 3D surround with only 2 speakers, jumping when sounds from Blade Runner emanated behind me without the extra speakers...
Hackers, Crackers, Script Kiddies, lend me your optics...
The honest fact is, actions such as this are counterproductive...
European nations are, even now, writing laws out of ignorance, intending to strip away your rights further and further, with a largely ignorant public all too willing to swallow the anti-intellectual propoganda that you see in the media every day... A public that wouldn't care either way, as long as it (momentarily) assuages any of their fears...
This is something that continues to be brought to notice as well in the US government, also known as the home of the rider bill... Where without anyone having knowlege, they can attach ludicrous laws to bills as they are passed, whereas they could easily strip your rights away without a peep from it's similarly ignorant populace...
These are people who are perfectly willing to take bandwidth sucking garbage like script kiddie attacks and their "possible" end results, and turn them into justification for further attempts at removing more of your rights...
When they penned the DMCA, I said nothing, because my software was legal...
When they declared DeCSS illegal, I said nothing, because I ran Windows...
When they closed down IRC, I cannot say anything because (Connection reset by peer.)
http://www.killfrog.com/00/dasb.html
and:
http://www.killfrog.com/00/dab.html
Yup, I believe that was the one...
Whoops, cancel that, since I upped to 256 megs RAM, 750 Mhz PIII (engineering sample 733), and an Annihilator2 MX, it runs just fine... STILL, it would have been nicer to get the preview in MPEG format, I mean who're we paying to see this film, the folks who produced it? Or Apple?
Back when they released the first couple of trailers in Quicktime format, I tried, OH how I tried, to view it... At the time, I was running a K6-2 300 with a 16 meg Riva TNT based video card, over a cable connection... It was UNVIEWABLE...
I even downloaded the full 26+ meg preview, even then it was unviewable... Now I know a 300 Mhz processor isn't quite the fastest around, even with 64 megs of ram and a fast drive, but YEESH! Why was it so hard for them to release the preview in a more or less universally acceptable format such as MPEG? Hell, I would have taken Realplayer in a pinch, but this was intolerable...
Can anyone provide an alternate link to say, an MPEG encoded copy of the preview, instead of this Quicktime crap?
Well, if you consider the cost of manufacturing a custom plastic shell for it to fit neatly into the box (nobody's gonna buy it if the circuitry and wiring is exposed), and that it IS a proprietary device, AND that the average pricing on a *good* NIC runs from $30-$40, or a USB NIC running anywhere upwards from $50, then tacking on an extra $10 for a device like this isn't that exhorbitant...
Besides, the $60 is more than likely a MSRP, as opposed to the actual retail... When they make enough to justify lowering the wholesale pricing, then the retailers will inevitably drop their prices as well... More than likely too, the wholesale pricing will be considerably lower...
How often do you see on sega.com's online store, pricing that is lower than retail? Never... The DC is running around the average pricing of $149, but does not reflect sales that some stores hold, out of box specials, or pre-owned system sales...
Sorry, maybe I need more sleep, but that's the first thing that came to mind when I saw "Ham Satellite Suffers Failures"... Either that, or more caffeine...
Bzzzt! Sorry, and wrong... I couldn't even *afford* to be a gaming geek at the time 3Dfx was king, used a Number 9 Vision 2 meg card built in 1995 up til 1999, and I remember finding out about the lawsuits they fired up against Nvidia, AFTER I bought an upgrade...
3Dfx was trying to patent pretty much every single 3D technology out there, and long before all this other IP suit glut appeared in the news... Prior to that, the only people suing on IP infringement, were Sun, Netscape, and a few others... Who were they suing? Microsoft...
Huh, nobody really complained about that either as I recall... So I guess concern about IP cases only apply to 133t linux geeks, and the remainder can screw themselves...
As to answer your question of "How is 3Dfx different from any of the hundreds or thousands of companies that're suing other companies for similar reasons?"... The answer is simple:
People like YOU support them... People like YOU ignore that behavior unless it *gasp* infringes on your particular lifestyle...
Of course, what do I know? You're probably just some poor hapless idiot who just got back from Xmas shopping, after blowing $299 on a 3Dfx Voodoo 4500, when you saw this headline...;)
Odd, that there are as many people out there, including /. who mourn the loss of 3Dfx...
The truth of the matter is, 3Dfx was, for a goodly 2 years, one of the first big name companies to start the IP onslaught... Less than 2 years ago, they attempted to sue Nvidia, claiming patent infringement, when Nvidia was just starting to make a name for itself, for providing low cost 3D accelerators, which at the time, was just a notch above ATI for preferred hardware...
Then Creative Labs came out with a Glide wrapper, custom made for their TNT/TNT2 cards... 3Dfx tried suing them as well...
Then people in the emulation scene started coming out with Glide wrappers as well... 3Dfx threatened them with cease and desist letters...
Meanwhile, while 3Dfx was running around threatening to sue everyone who could possibly compete with them, Nvidia continued to develop their technology...
Are we noticing a trend here?
Nvidia made one error in their PR dept, when they threatened to pull their sponsorship for hardware review websites, if any competing 3D accelerator ads/logos were displayed on said sites... They admitted the mistake, and for the most part, apologised...
So really, the biggest irony here is, with the general uproar regarding big companies stomping on the little guy for IP "infringement", that just such a company got bought out by one of the very little guys they were trying to stomp on...
And yet the majority of responses online (other than Nvidia's, of course) has been negative, attacking Nvidia rather than 3Dfx, making 3Dfx into the martyr, nay, the sacrificial lamb, gobbled up by the slathering wolves of Nvidia...
If you have South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut on DVD, play it... Select "French" from your language menu... This is a PERFECT example of the evils of dubbing... The kids' voices don't even match (sounding instead like nasal Frenchmen trying to sound like kids, instead of pitch modulation being used to alter the voice)...
If you still can't figure it out, just listen to Asses of Fire's Unclefucker song, and get a good giggle...
Okay, here's a good demonstration of WHY we like Japanese soundtracks:
What's your favorite movie? Okay, now then, imaging that movie being completely rewritten... Still with me? Okay, now imagine all the voices being redone with completely different voices, often completely inappropriate for the characters in the film... Every single nuance of the previous acting is lost, certain feelings given by a scene are lost, the original good writing is lost in the editing room rewrites...
What's the difference? Okay, raise your hand if you've seen Akira... Anyone? Good... Ever see the original version, as well as the dubbed version? Most of the dialogue is changed, and in other cases, the voice acting (they should learn to emphasize on the ACTING part) is completely wrong...
How else do movies suffer? Watch any kung fu movie from the 1970s... There's one good example...
Another example: Imagine Darth Vader having his dialogue rewritten by the folks who write Barney, and the voicing performed by Pee Wee Herman...
"Luke, I'm your daddy! I think you need a hug, you have a boo-boo!"
Of course, the irony here is how many people here are into programming, coding, etc etc etc, they'll respect someone who spends months hacking and handwriting the code behind DeCSS, but spit on people who draw anime, or animation for that matter... This shit takes forever to do, people, even when you have a studio with 50 min wage earners drawing cel after cel after cel...
And no, Flash doesn't count...
Guess the trolls here value talent when it benefits them directly, but then again, brains aren't everything...
(and many of us have had access to the tapes traded, which had the original soundtrack with subtitles as well, so we'd know the difference)
They literally have to force astronauts to a sleep schedule as well, due to the fact that one day in orbit is what, around 1-2 hours?
In most cases, they can actually stay awake many hours longer...
If it wasn't for those meddling kids!
In a shocking turn of events, Tiger Electronics recently revealed that their slumping sales on Furby toys, had been bought out by Iraqi officials. Confidential sources have confirmed this, that with a hardware hack made available on the internet recently, that the said Furbies have appeared on the market, modified to deliver Iraqi government doctrine and propaganda.
The toys, described as appearing to have "Black bushy markers scribbled on using Sharpie markers.", have shown up chanting "Death to America!", "God is good!", and "Saddam, our father!" have been confirmed by independant sources as being in regular production. Sanford and Tiger toys have been unavailable for comment.
With their low cost and easily available 8 bit components, CIA and UN officials have been quoted in saying "This has to be the most cost effective form of propaganda we've seen since the printing press was invented.".
Puppet government indeed.
Actually, iron oxide combined with powdered aluminum is known as thermite, not rocket fuel at all, but close enough that it would explain the ignition of the hydrogen... Thermite is such that it would take 2000+ F to ignite, so a lightning bolt COULD ignite that... I forget the actual burning temperature of hydrogen, but I have the feeling it burns well cooler than that...
Every computer shy of Amiga in 1984/85 had a maximum of 4/8 bit color at best, the Amiga started with a minimum of 16 bit color... The drawback though, was that Commodore (Emphasis on the Commode) was expecting their market to be much akin to their experiences with the Vic-20/C64, ie: available in Toys'R'Us and Sears...
The main drawback was, their systems were cheap enough to not sell (as most geeks then and now consider a sub $1000 machine as worthy of apprehension), but just pricey enough that nobody would consider (based on early 80's economy) buying one... In those days, $1000 was almost two months' wages for most...
Since high end graphics, sound and video processing was still something only a limited few were actually interested in at the time, their market was limited even more... If you put the three, PC's, Macs, and Amigas, side by side with current tech, the Amiga would win hand over fist... Only problem is, their manufacturer's are dead and buried, and the current Amiga is still vaporware... AmigaDE is one example of their possibly moving to x86 and 68x platforms in the future...
Hmmm, lets see, here's a little history:
Mir: Former Soviet space station, launched in 1986, and was operational for close to 15 years, designed to be operational at best for 5... It had a fire once and a collision when the Russian space agency forced a cosmonaut to attempt a manual docking of a progress module... Other than that, a flawless history, so to speak...
Prior to that, there were the Salyut space stations, each of which only served 1-2 years before decommission... Of the series, there were 7, Mir being the final Salyut station...
Skylab: The first US space station, launched in 1973, broken from the getgo, lost a solar panel in launch, and tore away it's thermal blanket, was abandoned and deorbited within 5 years of operation.
Of course, there is one bit of truth to the Russian space program; up until the mid 70's, there were a great deal of disasters that were buried until the change of power, including a nasty explosion of their attempt at a competing launch vehicle to the Saturn V booster, the N-1... Lets just say the ground crew that was dissolved in the acetic acid (I believe that was part of the fuel, or at least another form of highly corrosive acid) were the lucky ones...
And of course we have our Challenger and Apollo accidents to our record as well... Oh, and of course lots of fun Delta rockets blowing up with multimillion dollar satellites in them...
Ohyeah, and the recent Mars exploration screwups, because someone forgot to convert imperial to metric measurements for the probe, and used a fubar rocket design in the lander too...
So if anything, Russian and US space programs BOTH have their flaws, reliability wise...
For the last few months, probably due to the leaked e-mail addresses from Digital Convergance, I've been recieving spam from an e-mail forger... Unfortunately, the spammer in question also changes his address, such as akdsjksd@msn.com or what have you, followed with a subject line such as: Get Mortgage Loans Today! [2387sd]
I've attempted to filter for msn and yahoo addresses, as I rarely recieve anything from those, but that didn't work (so sue me, I'm too lazy to learn any other e-mail software other than Outlook Express)...
Other than the universal "use other software", "switch to linux", etc, responses, how does one block against such spam abuses? At least with legitimate spam, I can respond and get them to remove me from their lists... But the spam with forged addresses, of course I cannot simply respond to get it shut down...
Technically you don't even *need* fetal cells, the placenta contains upwards from a pint of stem cells following birth... As much as a quart in some cases...
On a planet that churns out 100,000,000 fresh squalling brats a year, that's a lot of stem cells... Pity doctors don't bother with informing their patients in regards to this information... Some families are informed, however, and put in requests to hold onto the afterbirth for stem cell harvesting (in the event of immunotherapy, unexpected surgery, or transfusions)...
What's really nuts, are those newager parents who waste the placenta, either using it in food (blarg), or bury it in the yard as fertilizer (Mommy? What did Fido dig up in the back yard? BLARG!)... Any of the older hippies remember they used to make shampoo out of placenta as well (weeeeBLARG!!!)?
So far, it's a lot of griping and fuming, what can be done to offset NBC's practices?
You cannot put up a website covering the olympics, but how about websites about the olympics, with a nice big "We'd tell you about the olympics, but NBC decided to buy the olympics, and won't allow anyone else to cover it... In doing this patently anticompetative move, they have ruined any chance of alternative coverage... Please boycott, petition, whatever it takes, to make sure they cannot get away with this!"
C'mon folks, the net can be a tremendous political outlet, and it's users can become a tremendous political power... The olympics can make it even moreso, if a net without boundaries can take on an international games committee...
Actually, one thing comes to mind about this:
At the most, only 1/2 of the registered voters actually showed up to vote... In other words, people with either schedules that didn't allow them to put in their vote, or people who believed their vote would be wasted (and if you think about it, 49+ million people HAVE wasted their votes)...
What I consider ironic, is that with all this bickering about who got what votes, chads, dimples, absentee and military votes, is that they simply didn't do one SIMPLE thing: Reopen the elections, so that the people who fell into the 1/2 not voting COULD, and balance, or tip the scales...
How hard could that be? What makes the electoral system so afraid of Americans claiming their right to vote, albeit belatedly? Come on, if they can allow upwards from a week for absentee ballots, or mail in military voting to be recieved, what's keeping them from allowing the elections to continue up until the point of that deadline?
I mean hell, I would have preferred to vote, if anything, to get the media to shut the hell up...
(1) Make damnned sure you hold onto everything that came with your Furby...
(2) Perform the hack...
(3) Reprogram your Furby to randomly spout a wav file of George Carlin's "7 Forbidden Words" routine every 5 minutes or so...
(4) Repackage the Furby in the original packaging, make sure it's as close to it's original appearance as possible, and...
(5) Sneak the repackaged Furby into the nearest toy store where you originally purchased it (use another branch to make sure nobody recognizes you), under your coat... Put the Furby on the shelf with the others, and leave...
(6) Wait for the inevitable news freakouts which will follow...
Does anyone here remember one of the big foulups with early voicechipped dolls, where they had one doll that was programmed for Spanish, and fell into the possession of a WASP housewife? She insisted the doll was saying "Kill Mommy!", as opposed to the doll's actual statement of "Quiero Mami" (sp?), or "I Love Mommy!"...
Considering Tiger Toys' reputation for using Chinese sweatshops to produce their toys (and occasionally prisoner labor), it would be nice to see them take a hit to the pocketbook...;)