It's not actually illegal. It is, however, apparently against the Mozilla Addon ToU (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/pages/policy) - that was the original terms under which the ABP author asked the NS author to remove the code in NS that intentionally harmed ABP's operation.
A few holiday achievements would be interesting - Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentines Day, etc. Just to let everyone know about all those days you could/should have been spending with family, that you got to spend posting on Slashdot instead:)
... the idea is to blacklist kiddie porn, by expecting people to tell the government "HEY LOOK AT ME, I'M LOOKING AT KIDDIE PORN AND THIS IS THE SITE I'M AT!!!"? I mean, really, do they actually expect people to admit they have knowledge of these sites?
I'm not arguing that the KE is what makes it interesting. I'm arguing that the KE makes it a far, far more difficult engineering problem than most people seen to anticipate. Comparing trying to make a Battlebot autonomous to making a robot soccer robot is an apples and oranges comparison - it's a whole different level of engineering and sophistication.
There's a rather significant difference between the two. Robo Soccer contestants don't have to deal with levels of kinetic energy that would make a large rifle blush from sheer inadequacy (I'm not joking here - some of the KE numbers on the big spinners are absurd). The sport is already hideously expensive - top contestants can be over $100/lb in just construction, and flying teams and shipping robots isn't cheap, not to mention the possibility (probability?) that a significant percentage of that investment might end up as scrap. I couldn't imagine how expensive things would be when you suddenly have to start factoring in military grade sensor technology just to get electronics gear capable of surviving a fight or two... yeah, that would pretty easily price out anyone without major corporate sponsorship.
Part of the reason for things being banned is a simple matter of safety. I've competed at several robot combat events with a middleweight, and even with the extremely strict safety rules and the high tech arenas, some of them are freaking dangerous. I've been within a few feet of an arena breach at one point, where some of the heavier robots hit a wall hard enough to come up over the safety stop and almost go through the bulletproof Lexan arena wall (fortunately neither robot managed to come clear out of the arena, but they knocked a wall section out and very nearly did). There have also been incidents of robots with cutting weapons putting holes clear through the wall (and at least one incident I know of where a robot put a hole in a 1/2" thick steel plate that was part of the arena safety system). The safety crew at the events takes these things very seriously - the fight IMMEDIATELY stops if there's any threat of the arena being breached, and the robots are disabled until the situation can be evaluated, but that's with the limited scope of the current rules - many of the things people would love to see in the robots would be damn near impossible to do safely around an audience.
Even if there isn't an audience, there's still the crews to think about. People have to work around the robots to repair them (many of the rules involve safeguarding the robot when it's around people), and to load them into and out of the arena. Also, some of these robots get torn up pretty badly, hence rules relating to making sure the robots aren't hazardous to clean up after they've gotten heavily damaged.
>> Anyhow, my question is if you miss a flight because of these TSA guys, does your airline put you on the next available flight at no extra cost?
My guess would be, not voluntarily. There's a reason they say to get to the airport a couple of hours early, after all, and he very likely didn't if he was cutting it this close.
That 'Somewhere' can be a total stop 100 miles short of the station when it's remotely shut down - it's a bit easier to arbitrarily stop a train then it is a plane at 30k feet.
As an avid WoW player (help me, I'm trapped in a purple pixel factory >.), a brief comment on inflation in the game.
WoW prevents inflation through NPC cash sinks - when you buy items from NPCs, cash goes in, and never goes out, hence limiting the total rate of growth of gold in the system. Several of these cash sinks can consume a significant amount of money. One would be purchasing mounts - the highest category flying mount requires a total investment of over 7000 gold to get through all the steps before it. Another is through repairs - whenever a character dies, their armor degrades, and it costs gold to a repair vendor to fix it (and for raiders, the people most likely to have a lot of gold, deaths come frequently on a night of learning new bosses - it's possible for someone with good gear to spend 100g in an evening on repairs, though that's somewhat on the high side in general; 40-50g would be more common). Another gold sink that's a bit more invisible would be the auction house, the primary means of trading items between players. Every item has a listing fee; if the items sells, there's also a percentage taken out. This probably accounts for a huge amount of gold, although I can't easily estimate it due to the way it's handled.
One good example is the Apple Macbook power connectors. They're palindromic, so even though they're a plain rectangle, they plug in either way (and have a power LED on both top and bottom to accommodate such). They need either that, or a nub to indicate alignment - I HATE fumbling around with USB cables to get them plugged in.
Of course, this would require abandoning backwards compatibility... but seriously, by the time that there are only USB3 ports on a device, I'm pretty sure we'll be past needing to plug 2.0 devices into it, and if we need to use an old device that badly, it would be easy enough to make them electrically compatible such that a simple dumb cable adapter can fit it. Old device standards are passed by for new ones all the time, and clinging to backwards compatibility at the costs of advancement can be a serious mistake - clinging to backwards compatibility at all costs is a significant amount of what's hampering Windows right now, for example.
Also, assuming you actually find a suitable power supply for it, how long can you keep it on your lap before it starts causing 3rd degree burns, and/or sterilization?
See that 3 in the title? That's just a number. Ignore it. Look only to Deus Ex for inspiration. There never was a Deus Ex 2 - that was all just a figment of the darkest parts of your imagination.
(fwiw, for those who haven't played, Deus Ex 2 wasn't a horrible game, so much as it didn't nearly live up to the first game of the series. It suffered from a massive case of being dumbed down for simultaneous console/PC release, from the original's PC-only origin.)
>>...when was the last time you even saw a laptop 1995???? Laptop hard drives are 7200, guess what desktop hard drives are? 7200.
Most laptop hard drives are NOT 7200rpm. There are 7200rpm drives available, but they have considerably higher failure rates than the standard 5400rpm drives (they tend to get much hotter), so your standard off the shelf laptop will come with 5400rpm drives.
Reminds me of a wonderful Canadian Pirate song - The Last Saskatchewan Pirate (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G_L9tXEwmc). There's even a verse with a mounty!
Even capsule design isn't a necessity to safeguard the heat shield from debris from the boosters. Mounting the reentry vehicle on top, rather than to the side, of the boosters would also have made the entire issue moot. It would still leave it vulnerable to bird strikes, but I don't believe the shuttle is moving fast enough to be significantly damaged by birds until it is well above the altitude you would find them. Of course, it's not a matter of "Just Stick It On Top", there'd be more redesign issues than that, but it's an example of another design paradigm that could have potentially proven superior to the one chosen.
While the abuse potential is high, it would seem quite possible that this is not intended as a means for Microsoft to create adware... but rather, it's an offensive patent meant to give them a weapon to fight adware. The fact that such is even possible speaks so highly of the flaws in our patent system that it seems almost absurd... but if the patent goes through, such would seem a possibility.
Given the standard quality of driving shown by drivers when only having to deal with 2d, I don't think you want to have to have them deal with 3d. A collision is bad enough when it doesn't also result in the two vehicles falling out of the sky and smooshing whatever happens to be directly below >.
"I'm surprised they aren't soing "World of Warcraft""
Actually, they are. It's scheduled to come out in 2008 (though given Blizzard's track record, I'd put my money on 2009 over 2008).
Not sure it's a good move though - I have my doubts as to whether they'll be able to pry most of the people playing WoW away from their computers long enough to watch a movie. Maybe they'll need to have wireless in the theater so they can all play from their seats. Or give out cards to each person that attends that gives them a % chance of getting an item for their character - you'd probably have people who'd keep buying tickets till they finally got the one item they wanted, even if they didn't bother going to the movie itself afterward:)
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Which really seems to be the sort of thing that belongs in the configuration menu, if the addon author was actually being sincere.
It's not actually illegal. It is, however, apparently against the Mozilla Addon ToU (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/pages/policy) - that was the original terms under which the ABP author asked the NS author to remove the code in NS that intentionally harmed ABP's operation.
A few holiday achievements would be interesting - Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentines Day, etc. Just to let everyone know about all those days you could/should have been spending with family, that you got to spend posting on Slashdot instead :)
... the idea is to blacklist kiddie porn, by expecting people to tell the government "HEY LOOK AT ME, I'M LOOKING AT KIDDIE PORN AND THIS IS THE SITE I'M AT!!!"? I mean, really, do they actually expect people to admit they have knowledge of these sites?
I'm not arguing that the KE is what makes it interesting. I'm arguing that the KE makes it a far, far more difficult engineering problem than most people seen to anticipate. Comparing trying to make a Battlebot autonomous to making a robot soccer robot is an apples and oranges comparison - it's a whole different level of engineering and sophistication.
There's a rather significant difference between the two. Robo Soccer contestants don't have to deal with levels of kinetic energy that would make a large rifle blush from sheer inadequacy (I'm not joking here - some of the KE numbers on the big spinners are absurd). The sport is already hideously expensive - top contestants can be over $100/lb in just construction, and flying teams and shipping robots isn't cheap, not to mention the possibility (probability?) that a significant percentage of that investment might end up as scrap. I couldn't imagine how expensive things would be when you suddenly have to start factoring in military grade sensor technology just to get electronics gear capable of surviving a fight or two... yeah, that would pretty easily price out anyone without major corporate sponsorship.
Part of the reason for things being banned is a simple matter of safety. I've competed at several robot combat events with a middleweight, and even with the extremely strict safety rules and the high tech arenas, some of them are freaking dangerous. I've been within a few feet of an arena breach at one point, where some of the heavier robots hit a wall hard enough to come up over the safety stop and almost go through the bulletproof Lexan arena wall (fortunately neither robot managed to come clear out of the arena, but they knocked a wall section out and very nearly did). There have also been incidents of robots with cutting weapons putting holes clear through the wall (and at least one incident I know of where a robot put a hole in a 1/2" thick steel plate that was part of the arena safety system). The safety crew at the events takes these things very seriously - the fight IMMEDIATELY stops if there's any threat of the arena being breached, and the robots are disabled until the situation can be evaluated, but that's with the limited scope of the current rules - many of the things people would love to see in the robots would be damn near impossible to do safely around an audience.
Even if there isn't an audience, there's still the crews to think about. People have to work around the robots to repair them (many of the rules involve safeguarding the robot when it's around people), and to load them into and out of the arena. Also, some of these robots get torn up pretty badly, hence rules relating to making sure the robots aren't hazardous to clean up after they've gotten heavily damaged.
>> Anyhow, my question is if you miss a flight because of these TSA guys, does your airline put you on the next available flight at no extra cost?
My guess would be, not voluntarily. There's a reason they say to get to the airport a couple of hours early, after all, and he very likely didn't if he was cutting it this close.
That 'Somewhere' can be a total stop 100 miles short of the station when it's remotely shut down - it's a bit easier to arbitrarily stop a train then it is a plane at 30k feet.
As an avid WoW player (help me, I'm trapped in a purple pixel factory >.), a brief comment on inflation in the game.
WoW prevents inflation through NPC cash sinks - when you buy items from NPCs, cash goes in, and never goes out, hence limiting the total rate of growth of gold in the system. Several of these cash sinks can consume a significant amount of money. One would be purchasing mounts - the highest category flying mount requires a total investment of over 7000 gold to get through all the steps before it. Another is through repairs - whenever a character dies, their armor degrades, and it costs gold to a repair vendor to fix it (and for raiders, the people most likely to have a lot of gold, deaths come frequently on a night of learning new bosses - it's possible for someone with good gear to spend 100g in an evening on repairs, though that's somewhat on the high side in general; 40-50g would be more common). Another gold sink that's a bit more invisible would be the auction house, the primary means of trading items between players. Every item has a listing fee; if the items sells, there's also a percentage taken out. This probably accounts for a huge amount of gold, although I can't easily estimate it due to the way it's handled.
One good example is the Apple Macbook power connectors. They're palindromic, so even though they're a plain rectangle, they plug in either way (and have a power LED on both top and bottom to accommodate such). They need either that, or a nub to indicate alignment - I HATE fumbling around with USB cables to get them plugged in.
Of course, this would require abandoning backwards compatibility... but seriously, by the time that there are only USB3 ports on a device, I'm pretty sure we'll be past needing to plug 2.0 devices into it, and if we need to use an old device that badly, it would be easy enough to make them electrically compatible such that a simple dumb cable adapter can fit it. Old device standards are passed by for new ones all the time, and clinging to backwards compatibility at the costs of advancement can be a serious mistake - clinging to backwards compatibility at all costs is a significant amount of what's hampering Windows right now, for example.
On the plus side, they were able to save a FORTUNE on the hardware by implementing the entire thing in Write-Only Memory
Also, assuming you actually find a suitable power supply for it, how long can you keep it on your lap before it starts causing 3rd degree burns, and/or sterilization?
I have a few words for the developers.
See that 3 in the title? That's just a number. Ignore it. Look only to Deus Ex for inspiration. There never was a Deus Ex 2 - that was all just a figment of the darkest parts of your imagination.
(fwiw, for those who haven't played, Deus Ex 2 wasn't a horrible game, so much as it didn't nearly live up to the first game of the series. It suffered from a massive case of being dumbed down for simultaneous console/PC release, from the original's PC-only origin.)
>> ...when was the last time you even saw a laptop 1995???? Laptop hard drives are 7200, guess what desktop hard drives are? 7200.
Most laptop hard drives are NOT 7200rpm. There are 7200rpm drives available, but they have considerably higher failure rates than the standard 5400rpm drives (they tend to get much hotter), so your standard off the shelf laptop will come with 5400rpm drives.
Reminds me of a wonderful Canadian Pirate song - The Last Saskatchewan Pirate (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G_L9tXEwmc). There's even a verse with a mounty!
The company that sells DesignCAD used to be known as ViaGrafix. Which takes a vastly different meaning if you capitalize the F instead of the G...
:)
Not much of a surprise they go by a different name now
Even capsule design isn't a necessity to safeguard the heat shield from debris from the boosters. Mounting the reentry vehicle on top, rather than to the side, of the boosters would also have made the entire issue moot. It would still leave it vulnerable to bird strikes, but I don't believe the shuttle is moving fast enough to be significantly damaged by birds until it is well above the altitude you would find them. Of course, it's not a matter of "Just Stick It On Top", there'd be more redesign issues than that, but it's an example of another design paradigm that could have potentially proven superior to the one chosen.
While the abuse potential is high, it would seem quite possible that this is not intended as a means for Microsoft to create adware... but rather, it's an offensive patent meant to give them a weapon to fight adware. The fact that such is even possible speaks so highly of the flaws in our patent system that it seems almost absurd... but if the patent goes through, such would seem a possibility.
Said video is found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Uo0C01Fwb8
Shows a final 777 wing test where the wing was deflected until it suffered structural failure.
I figured it would be his daughter, rather then son - one miss Ann L. Probst
World of Warcraft Expansion comes online tonight at Midnight EST. 8 million people worldwide disagree with you on the most important time zone ATM :)
Given the standard quality of driving shown by drivers when only having to deal with 2d, I don't think you want to have to have them deal with 3d. A collision is bad enough when it doesn't also result in the two vehicles falling out of the sky and smooshing whatever happens to be directly below >.
Hmm, that scanner that I put my scan-tron paper ballot into after I finished filling it out did look rather like a shredder and large wastebasket...
- Ohio voter who went with the paper ballot
"I'm surprised they aren't soing "World of Warcraft""
:)
Actually, they are. It's scheduled to come out in 2008 (though given Blizzard's track record, I'd put my money on 2009 over 2008).
Not sure it's a good move though - I have my doubts as to whether they'll be able to pry most of the people playing WoW away from their computers long enough to watch a movie. Maybe they'll need to have wireless in the theater so they can all play from their seats. Or give out cards to each person that attends that gives them a % chance of getting an item for their character - you'd probably have people who'd keep buying tickets till they finally got the one item they wanted, even if they didn't bother going to the movie itself afterward