It took me a while to figure out but then I realized: CALTRANS only actually employes three guys.
Driving the 15 in San Diego, I wondered why there were all these construction sites with absolutely no one working. Eventually I pieced it together... CALTRANS only employs three guys and one of those has to hold the sign.
Sure, they could just do one tiny little roadwork at a time. But that'd completely give away the hundreds of millions CALTRANS budget is being spent on three construction workers with the rest going to hookers and blow. Instead, they dump cones everywhere, dig holes everywhere, then quickly move on to the next site. Sure, you'll never actually see a CALTRANS guy working but it sure as hell looks like they must have a lot of people doing the work if they can dig up that much crap and have roadworks every couple of hundred yards.
So, when judging the bridge collapse, try not to blame the three overworked guys. They're doing the best they can. Their job was to put up some cones, slap on some duct tape in the two minutes they had assigned, then get on to making somewhere else look busy. If you want to blame someone, figure out who spends the other 99.9% on those hookers and that blow. Imagine how much could be achieved if his habit went to pay for actual workers instead.
And were the engineer a hacker, he'd pick up the scientist, carry him half way across the room, set him down and say, "Your turn."
The game changing hackers are the ones who don't listen to the conventional logic of the time and figure out how to wander along a totally different axis that the "experts" hadn't thought of yet.
Look at Wolfenstein/Doom. 3D graphics "weren't possible" on home computers at the time. John Carmack turned it in to a 2D solution and solved it anyway. Perhaps not perfect in every regard but still a hell of a lot better than what anyone else were managing.
Nick's law: at least every 18 months, someone else will declare a limit to Moore's law [and turn out to be wrong].
With our current understanding of transistor science, I'm sure their point is a wonderful one. Problem is, with enough money behind finding the solution, someone'll come up with another axis to wander along that'll continue the advances. But don't feel bad, I'm sure plenty of people thought cart science had reached its theoretical peak and man would never move faster than horses were capable of, too.
As a great man [allegedly] once said, 640kb should be enough for anyone.
Modern users with their demands for eight, sixteen and thirty two megabyte options are just needlessly draining the world's silicon supply so they can listen to a few songs. Traditional phone users who don't have all of those cutesy multimedia options can get by with a fraction of that.
Alternatively, time moves on. Just because 640kb was once enough for anyone, doing what they did with the limitations of that era, just because 40-80mb/month was once enough for anyone... That doesn't mean time doesn't move on and it doesn't mean it's appropriate to only support what once was the norm.
AT&T have made a metric assload of money from people who bought the iPhone for, well, being an iPhone and not "some other" smartphone. AT&T's network sucks, just about everyone seems to gripe about it. They suck it up, when they'd never have gone with AT&T in the first place, because it does come with a more able phone, because it does come with unlimited data access, because it does come with an interface that makes using 5-10x as much bandwidth as before a practical reality.
To play bait and switch, to get users to buy $600 phones (yes, I'll claim full price in a world where you either pay inflated monthly rates or a fee to cancel), to get them to sign up for those contracts, to get them to leave companies with more reliable service, all with the promise of an unlimited phone and then to say... yeah, we don't feel like paying to support that so, instead, surprise! we're capping the unlimited service we sold you and charging overage fees is obscene.
If AT&T can't really roll out coverage to support iPhone users using an iPhone as an iPhone... perhaps the real answer is for Apple to say, "OK, you can't meet your end of the agreement - we'll sell it to Sprint/Verizon/whoever instead."
AT&T entered in to an agreement with Apple to provide a network that supported Apple's product. AT&T entered into an agreement with the customers to provide a network to support that product in a certain way, too. If they'd like to acknowledge they can't honor that, I'm sure another company would like the opportunity.
Once you've bought the car, it's too late. If an error code pops up, all you're often left with is the choice to pay it or leave it and hope it's not an important one.
Instead, perhaps it's time to be an equal dick on the forecourt?
"How do you like the car, sir?"
"176!"
"Excuse me?"
"I like it 176!"
"I'm sorry, I don't understand."
"No, of course not. That'll be $500 to have one of my service engineers diagnose and address code 176."
"I'm just asking you if you like the car. Can I show some of the options?"
"Oooh. Two-seventeen."
"Excuse me?"
"Two-seventeen."
"That's another diagnostic code, isn't it?"
"Yeah, but I'll tell you what it means if you pay my engineer $500."
"Sir, that's ridiculous."
"Absolutely. But any more ridiculous than you asking me $1,500 for four standard tires?"
"But that's a very complex task you're talking about there. I'm asking you if you want to see options for the car you're looking at."
"No. It's $160 per tire elsewhere. Plus a 150% markup for your resetting the tire pressure sensor that you won't share the codes with any other mechanic."
"Sir, it's really..."
"I'll tell you what, I'll share my complete list of codes with you if you'll share your complete list of codes with me. Or, alternatively, I figure it's going to cost me about $5,000 extra over the life of the vehicle to deal with your code secrecy and your jacked up prices. So, for $5,000, I'll just translate all of my buyer codes in to plain English, buy the car, and deal with paying you that $5,000 back over the next few years. Sound fair? Or, as a third option, I can go across the street to that guy whose company doesn't use obfuscated codes, stop obfuscating my speech and give him the commission."
One person pulling that just gets a sense of evil satisfaction although, most likely, no car. If thousands of buyers did it, how long do you think the manufactures could ignore their pissed off dealerships for?
Much like charging your bank the same outrageous fees they charge you will never happen, nor will this. But it's a fun one to speculate on.
You don't feature enough ethnic groups, you're racially insensitive.
You set your zombie game (Resident Evil 5) in Africa and have huge numbers of black people in it, you're racially insensitive.
The majority of characters in games are "bad guys" to kill. If you make them [group X] then you're bad for implying [group X] are evil/should be killed. If you don't make them [group X] then you're bad for pushing [group X] in to a disproportionately small grouping.
Unfortunately, those who're determined to take offense will manage to take it no matter what you do.
MobileMe: $99/year/customer for Apple. The main selling point for a great many prospective users isn't any of the other junk they don't care about, it's being able to essentially LoJack their phones - something all the more critical as there aren't the usual insurance plans for the expensive piece of hardware that you have to pay $600 to replace.
Latitude: $0/year/customer for Apple. In many ways would provide the same service.
I'd suggest that, whilst you may see the app as pretty worthless, Apple sees it as worth, ooh, about $99/year/customer. Which, just possibly, might be why they're hamstringing their competition... uh... "reducing confusion".
E.g. the ROHS program, which forced manufacturers to remove lead (and other things) from their products
How many companies changed their product, midcycle, to comply before they were legally compelled to?
My guess is new product cycles may have been changed in anticipation and those that were midcycle when forced by law did so - but that no one suddenly tossed out a working design simply because they felt it was the nice thing to do.
Microsoft had their reputation trashed with the red ring of death issue. The last thing they need for the 360 is to tweak some design component that doesn't save them money, doesn't allow them to put out a cheaper product and introduce a new flaw that hammers an extra nail in their coffin of perceived reliability.
That being the case, every change to their design needs to be tested and not just tested in a few cases. They need to be absolutely certain that their new design won't warp more easily, won't overheat more easily, won't damage discs over time and thousands of other risks.
At that point, each change is hardly a cheap one for them to explore. That change is merited if they can knock more off in manufacturing costs than the new testing cost on average per unit sold (a cheaper chipset for example). That change is not merited if they save nothing but incur a huge expense in terms of either risk or testing.
So, whilst new designs, when broadscale testing is happening anyway, make financial sense to introduce changes and whilst laws will ultimately force anyone that wishes to remain in the market to make changes, my guess is very few companies ever simply risk an estabilished product line, mid cycle, simply because it's a nice thing to do*.
I was previously in favor of Greenpeace until the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985. Once it became obvious that they hated rainbows and fought with them, it led me to some serious questions about their real love for the environment. When even the French secret services have step in to stop you killing rainbows, it's time to accept you hate nature.
The console industry works on five year cycles with a ten year lifespan for each product, a new version turning up halfway through its lifespan.
We're currently about two and a half years in to the current cycle for the PS3, a little more for the XBox360.
So, amazingly enough, the manufacturers didn't dump their hundreds of millions of dollars of investments, six months in to their ten year lives, just because Greenpeace told them to? Why that's just crazy.
Or, alternatively, it would've been blatantly obvious to anyone with even a cursory understanding of the console industry to know there couldn't be any significant change by this point (with the exception of the PS3 slim on the horrizon) and Greenpeace are simply showboating, picking something they know can't be changed but is mainstream culture enough to draw them column inches if they attack it.
It's cheap politics like that that lead me to ask, getting daily acosted by them to save the whales, "Why? Do they make good sushi?" When they can treat me with respect and stop trying cheap manipulation, I'll return the favor.
1) Set up two accounts. Your actual one behind a password and an unprotected one. 2) In the unprotected one's startup, set it to delete all of your personal data.
You'll never log on via the unprotected account. Therefore you'll never accidentally delete everything. Even if you do manage to, as soon as you're next near a net connection it sounds like you can pull it back anyway.
Most casual thieves (sorry, your life isn't actually important enough that crack teams of ninja espionage winged monkeys will track you down and deliberately steal your data) will be perfectly happy to log on via the one account they can get on via and won't notice a suitably disguised process quietly cleaning everything sensitive off the machine.
It's not perfect, it's not infallible but, honestly, your data really isn't worth the hassle of defeating it for the average opportunistic thief.
You want to have more fun with them...
Set a scheduled task on that account to open Firefox 3.5 every 15 minutes and go to an address on your own server where it promptly gives its geolocation info before more obviously redirecting itself to some apparent malware site. They'll assume your machine's just infected with malware while you and the cops are given constant updates on their location.
Again, it's not perfect and most of/. could easily defeat it... But the average thief isn't a/. reader, they're just an opportunist who thinks they're getting something for free.
Who knows, developers could learn from this and say "hmm, maybe the average gamer can't afford $60 for our generic crap-of-the-month we're churning out, maybe if it was $30 in the first place, there wouldn't be a need for a Used market"
You've not been to a Gamestop recently, have you...
New game: $60. 2nd hand: $55.
Platinum game new: $20 Platinum 2nd hand: $18
You're lucky if you get anything more than a 10% savings. They just know people would still rather have $5 in their pocket than $0. Many people, myself included, still pay the $5 to know they're getting an unscratched disc (warranties are useless when the pain in the ass of going back in to claim is worth more than the $5 I saved) but more than enough are happy with any perceived saving.
Whilst we can argue about whether $60 is too much... The simple reality that customers still pay over the last generation's $50, even for second hand, implies this particular situation has nothing whatsoever to do with games being overpriced. If you sold them for $1 and people had an option to get them for $0.90, most kids would still choose to keep that dime and the second hand market still wouldn't disappear.
Bridgeman v Corel establishes firmly in US law that...
Geography establishes firmly in atlases that the entire world isn't in the US.
They're an English organization with English photographs of English owned paintings. Nationality of the person violating English laws is unclear (though likely also English if he cares that much about a specifically English issue).
Please, please show the world that Americans aren't quite so embarrassingly pig ignorant as they were in the 60s/70s when most couldn't find the country they were fighting in on a map. England's clearly a city in U-rope, near Belgiumsville. Google Maps will help you find it. They have different laws over there, still answering to the Pope who's their king. US case law really doesn't apply.
Any biologist will tell you: the digestive tract is external (there's never any form of membrane that has to be passed to get from one end to the other). I'd suggest that makes cows a torus.
Mmmm.... Having gone from cows' rectums to a torus, who's up for donuts this morning?
Your old CRT was a 17 inch. Understandable... 17s/19s were affordable, 21s and larger got expensive.
If your issue's price - volumes of sale mean you'll likely get a 20ish widescreen that they sell huge numbers of for the same price or less than a quirkly 17 inch with high res that's only for very, very niche user groups.
If your issue's desktop width - A 20ish inch LCD with a thin bezel is likely to be smaller than a the 17 inch CRT you're replacing.
If your issue's desktop depth - That 17 inch CRT you're replacing probably needed a good 18 inches of space between its screen and the wall for the tube. An LCD needs all of about 2 inches. If you're convinced you can't go larger than 17 because you're in a broom closet and sit crazily close, the LCD will move back further and you can have a bigger screen for the same angle of view.
There may be other reasons you specifically want to stay small. If you let us know what they are, we can suggest possible solutions that would work for you, thinking outside the box. It would be a shame for you to miss out on a far higher quality, much cheaper, better option simply because you're running with an assumption that maybe held true with CRTs but is no longer the case for LCDs.
Doesn't a robot traditionally have to have some form of self controlled motion? From the description, this is just a human etch-a-sketch.
For what it's worth, I've also created the robotic sport of the future. It consists of a round, air filled bladder. This robot has no motor control of its own but it can be moved by applying forces with your foot. I intend to patent this and make a fortune. No one will play regular soccer once they can play robo-soccer.
"RCS testing showed that an Ho-229 approaching the English Coast from France flying at 550 mph at 50 to 100 feet above the water would not have been visible to Chain Home radar."
The flying wing was a hugely unstable design. The sole Ho IX V2 crashed on 18 February 1945, after only two hours of flight time. On 5 June 1948, Northrop's YB-49 (their second attempt to build a flying wing after the B-35 was cancelled due to insurmountable technical issues) crashed, killing its pilot and co-pilot Daniel Forbes and Glen Edwards, for whom Forbes and Edwards airforce bases are named. It took until the 80s for them to figure it out and make a success of the B2.
So, so long as a pilot could buzz the waves at an altitude that would make most pilots of conventional fighters of the era nervous, at the high end of speeds for the era (a good 100mph faster than a P-51 Mustang), before flitting up over the cliffs of southern England (the famed white cliffs of Dover reaching up to 106m, a good 70m over the 100 feet the plane was flying across the channel at), then it could have been invisible to British radar of the time.
One can only imagine, if production had worked out, the teenagers Germany was strapping in to planes at the time (having lost most of its experienced pilots by that point in the war) would have been doing this on a daily basis.
So please tell me: how, and more importantly, where do you meet fellow geeks â" preferably including some of the opposite gender
Geeks tend to be a massively gender skewed grouping.
If you're female, this is awesome. Turn up. Done.
If you're not female, minus infinity nerd points for having no concept of statistics... plus infinity nerd points for being so socially retarded as to think you only stand a chance with others exactly like you.
Seriously, assuming you're male, think about those statistics. You're sabotaging yourself before you even start. For every one person with compatible plumbing (politics joke), ten other people are competing with you and are likely just as good, if not better than you, at the geeky area you're figuring is what you have going for you. Female geeks get pretty much their pick of the many male geeks there are for each one of them. You know you're already behind the curve at dating and you want to jump in to that pool?
Outside the world of geekery, a combination of nerd bands like Weezer plus the great money we became associated with around Y2K/the dot com boom means nerds actually carry some cachet now. Simply being a geek isn't the social impediment it was twenty years ago. Back in the real world, away from the gender bias of the geek world, there's a pretty even gender ratio. As one of the first posters pointed out, go to somewhere like salsa lessons and it'll skew ten to one the other way. (Yes, you'll suck at your first dance classes but everyone at an intro class will suck - keep going and paying attention and, no matter how uncoordinated you are, you'll move better than 95% of guys in six months of weekly lessons).
Back, pre web, I remember hearing pick up artists talk about their technique. Turns out they were playing the numbers too. You, or I, or most geeks, will be terrified of approaching someone. We get maybe a 1 in 10, 1 in 20 chance of success so we only try when we're totally certain. We get rejected then and it kills us. We maybe try again six months to a year later. If we're lucky, we find someone in a few years. Those guys would go to a club, approach twenty to fifty people a night and let rejection slide off them. Even with the same 1:20 odds you or I might have, that's still 1 to 3 interest people every night. By ratio, they may be no more successful than you or I but, because they're not scared to keep trying, they swing that ratio in their favor. Spammers do the same thing too - they spam a million people, get 0.01% interest and still come out with 100 sales vs. the people who target 500 carefully screened leads, get a mightily better 10% hit rate, and still only come out with 50 sales. It may miss out on noble ideals but the people who have more success than you may not be any more successful in terms of percentages... but they know how to turn those percentages in their favor.
Pulling numbers from my anatomical/dev/null:
Trying to meet other geeks: 10 men for every 1 woman. Trying to meet other people: 1 man for every 1 woman. Going to salsa lessons (or similary: 1 man for every 10 women.
Just picking somewhere the hell outside of the geek pool shifts your odds by a factor of 100. Not a bad start. From there, just relax, be yourself and let statistics do the rest. Just don't pull out your Texas Instruments calculator to confirm it. I know it's totally sweet but you'll be back to square one.;)
"If a gun fires or a bomb is detonated, the airships can detect the noise and focus the camera."
Note to self: if ever wanting to defeat the system, remotely or have a friend, set off a string of fire crackers somewhere else while I carry on unwatched.
"Though the technology is expensive, Raytheon is..." hoping customers won't be put off by a system that falls for the equivalent of "Look! Elvis!"?
Slashdot Mirror
It took me a while to figure out but then I realized: CALTRANS only actually employes three guys.
Driving the 15 in San Diego, I wondered why there were all these construction sites with absolutely no one working. Eventually I pieced it together... CALTRANS only employs three guys and one of those has to hold the sign.
Sure, they could just do one tiny little roadwork at a time. But that'd completely give away the hundreds of millions CALTRANS budget is being spent on three construction workers with the rest going to hookers and blow. Instead, they dump cones everywhere, dig holes everywhere, then quickly move on to the next site. Sure, you'll never actually see a CALTRANS guy working but it sure as hell looks like they must have a lot of people doing the work if they can dig up that much crap and have roadworks every couple of hundred yards.
So, when judging the bridge collapse, try not to blame the three overworked guys. They're doing the best they can. Their job was to put up some cones, slap on some duct tape in the two minutes they had assigned, then get on to making somewhere else look busy. If you want to blame someone, figure out who spends the other 99.9% on those hookers and that blow. Imagine how much could be achieved if his habit went to pay for actual workers instead.
And were the engineer a hacker, he'd pick up the scientist, carry him half way across the room, set him down and say, "Your turn."
The game changing hackers are the ones who don't listen to the conventional logic of the time and figure out how to wander along a totally different axis that the "experts" hadn't thought of yet.
Look at Wolfenstein/Doom. 3D graphics "weren't possible" on home computers at the time. John Carmack turned it in to a 2D solution and solved it anyway. Perhaps not perfect in every regard but still a hell of a lot better than what anyone else were managing.
Nick's law: at least every 18 months, someone else will declare a limit to Moore's law [and turn out to be wrong].
With our current understanding of transistor science, I'm sure their point is a wonderful one. Problem is, with enough money behind finding the solution, someone'll come up with another axis to wander along that'll continue the advances. But don't feel bad, I'm sure plenty of people thought cart science had reached its theoretical peak and man would never move faster than horses were capable of, too.
As a great man [allegedly] once said, 640kb should be enough for anyone.
Modern users with their demands for eight, sixteen and thirty two megabyte options are just needlessly draining the world's silicon supply so they can listen to a few songs. Traditional phone users who don't have all of those cutesy multimedia options can get by with a fraction of that.
Alternatively, time moves on. Just because 640kb was once enough for anyone, doing what they did with the limitations of that era, just because 40-80mb/month was once enough for anyone... That doesn't mean time doesn't move on and it doesn't mean it's appropriate to only support what once was the norm.
AT&T have made a metric assload of money from people who bought the iPhone for, well, being an iPhone and not "some other" smartphone. AT&T's network sucks, just about everyone seems to gripe about it. They suck it up, when they'd never have gone with AT&T in the first place, because it does come with a more able phone, because it does come with unlimited data access, because it does come with an interface that makes using 5-10x as much bandwidth as before a practical reality.
To play bait and switch, to get users to buy $600 phones (yes, I'll claim full price in a world where you either pay inflated monthly rates or a fee to cancel), to get them to sign up for those contracts, to get them to leave companies with more reliable service, all with the promise of an unlimited phone and then to say... yeah, we don't feel like paying to support that so, instead, surprise! we're capping the unlimited service we sold you and charging overage fees is obscene.
If AT&T can't really roll out coverage to support iPhone users using an iPhone as an iPhone... perhaps the real answer is for Apple to say, "OK, you can't meet your end of the agreement - we'll sell it to Sprint/Verizon/whoever instead."
AT&T entered in to an agreement with Apple to provide a network that supported Apple's product. AT&T entered into an agreement with the customers to provide a network to support that product in a certain way, too. If they'd like to acknowledge they can't honor that, I'm sure another company would like the opportunity.
"or are people going to have to learn an especially bland form of English to pass exams?"
Forget bland. I'm waiting for the first student to figure out how to write an exploit that hacks the software from within their essay.
Whether:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times \'$grade=100;"
or
"Johnny, why did your essay contain slightly over thirty two thousand spaces followed by some weird looking codes?"
Oh right, so conveniently the 1940s don't count as "modern" , but the 1950s do?
No, no, silly. Modern isn't determined by a decade. It's determined by whenever the Americans got involved.
"According to his employer at the time, Bell Labs"
Hmm. What could be less biased than a company writing a press release about its own achievements?
Next you'll be telling us that the press releases about Segways reinventing personal transportation might not be entirely accurate.
Once you've bought the car, it's too late. If an error code pops up, all you're often left with is the choice to pay it or leave it and hope it's not an important one.
Instead, perhaps it's time to be an equal dick on the forecourt?
"How do you like the car, sir?"
"176!"
"Excuse me?"
"I like it 176!"
"I'm sorry, I don't understand."
"No, of course not. That'll be $500 to have one of my service engineers diagnose and address code 176."
"I'm just asking you if you like the car. Can I show some of the options?"
"Oooh. Two-seventeen."
"Excuse me?"
"Two-seventeen."
"That's another diagnostic code, isn't it?"
"Yeah, but I'll tell you what it means if you pay my engineer $500."
"Sir, that's ridiculous."
"Absolutely. But any more ridiculous than you asking me $1,500 for four standard tires?"
"But that's a very complex task you're talking about there. I'm asking you if you want to see options for the car you're looking at."
"No. It's $160 per tire elsewhere. Plus a 150% markup for your resetting the tire pressure sensor that you won't share the codes with any other mechanic."
"Sir, it's really..."
"I'll tell you what, I'll share my complete list of codes with you if you'll share your complete list of codes with me. Or, alternatively, I figure it's going to cost me about $5,000 extra over the life of the vehicle to deal with your code secrecy and your jacked up prices. So, for $5,000, I'll just translate all of my buyer codes in to plain English, buy the car, and deal with paying you that $5,000 back over the next few years. Sound fair? Or, as a third option, I can go across the street to that guy whose company doesn't use obfuscated codes, stop obfuscating my speech and give him the commission."
One person pulling that just gets a sense of evil satisfaction although, most likely, no car. If thousands of buyers did it, how long do you think the manufactures could ignore their pissed off dealerships for?
Much like charging your bank the same outrageous fees they charge you will never happen, nor will this. But it's a fun one to speculate on.
Specifically, female video game players tended towards depression, while males tended towards large BMIs.
Are the women depressed because their dating pool is made up of fat guys?
Or do we eat because our women are so depressing and food is our only solace?
So where did the .02 come from?
The only other person in the story's your brother.
We've established that you weren't drinking yet.
Ergo he must be the one drinking.
How did alcohol get from his mouth to yours?
Ergo... I'm picturing a more rural life, somewhere in a Southern state. It gets lonely, doesn't it. It's OK buddy. Nothing to be ashamed of. ;)
You don't feature enough ethnic groups, you're racially insensitive.
You set your zombie game (Resident Evil 5) in Africa and have huge numbers of black people in it, you're racially insensitive.
The majority of characters in games are "bad guys" to kill. If you make them [group X] then you're bad for implying [group X] are evil/should be killed. If you don't make them [group X] then you're bad for pushing [group X] in to a disproportionately small grouping.
Unfortunately, those who're determined to take offense will manage to take it no matter what you do.
MobileMe: $99/year/customer for Apple. The main selling point for a great many prospective users isn't any of the other junk they don't care about, it's being able to essentially LoJack their phones - something all the more critical as there aren't the usual insurance plans for the expensive piece of hardware that you have to pay $600 to replace.
Latitude: $0/year/customer for Apple. In many ways would provide the same service.
I'd suggest that, whilst you may see the app as pretty worthless, Apple sees it as worth, ooh, about $99/year/customer. Which, just possibly, might be why they're hamstringing their competition... uh... "reducing confusion".
E.g. the ROHS program, which forced manufacturers to remove lead (and other things) from their products
How many companies changed their product, midcycle, to comply before they were legally compelled to?
My guess is new product cycles may have been changed in anticipation and those that were midcycle when forced by law did so - but that no one suddenly tossed out a working design simply because they felt it was the nice thing to do.
Microsoft had their reputation trashed with the red ring of death issue. The last thing they need for the 360 is to tweak some design component that doesn't save them money, doesn't allow them to put out a cheaper product and introduce a new flaw that hammers an extra nail in their coffin of perceived reliability.
That being the case, every change to their design needs to be tested and not just tested in a few cases. They need to be absolutely certain that their new design won't warp more easily, won't overheat more easily, won't damage discs over time and thousands of other risks.
At that point, each change is hardly a cheap one for them to explore. That change is merited if they can knock more off in manufacturing costs than the new testing cost on average per unit sold (a cheaper chipset for example). That change is not merited if they save nothing but incur a huge expense in terms of either risk or testing.
So, whilst new designs, when broadscale testing is happening anyway, make financial sense to introduce changes and whilst laws will ultimately force anyone that wishes to remain in the market to make changes, my guess is very few companies ever simply risk an estabilished product line, mid cycle, simply because it's a nice thing to do*.
*unless there's a heavy marketing angle in it.
I was previously in favor of Greenpeace until the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985. Once it became obvious that they hated rainbows and fought with them, it led me to some serious questions about their real love for the environment. When even the French secret services have step in to stop you killing rainbows, it's time to accept you hate nature.
The console industry works on five year cycles with a ten year lifespan for each product, a new version turning up halfway through its lifespan.
We're currently about two and a half years in to the current cycle for the PS3, a little more for the XBox360.
So, amazingly enough, the manufacturers didn't dump their hundreds of millions of dollars of investments, six months in to their ten year lives, just because Greenpeace told them to? Why that's just crazy.
Or, alternatively, it would've been blatantly obvious to anyone with even a cursory understanding of the console industry to know there couldn't be any significant change by this point (with the exception of the PS3 slim on the horrizon) and Greenpeace are simply showboating, picking something they know can't be changed but is mainstream culture enough to draw them column inches if they attack it.
It's cheap politics like that that lead me to ask, getting daily acosted by them to save the whales, "Why? Do they make good sushi?" When they can treat me with respect and stop trying cheap manipulation, I'll return the favor.
1) Set up two accounts. Your actual one behind a password and an unprotected one.
2) In the unprotected one's startup, set it to delete all of your personal data.
You'll never log on via the unprotected account. Therefore you'll never accidentally delete everything. Even if you do manage to, as soon as you're next near a net connection it sounds like you can pull it back anyway.
Most casual thieves (sorry, your life isn't actually important enough that crack teams of ninja espionage winged monkeys will track you down and deliberately steal your data) will be perfectly happy to log on via the one account they can get on via and won't notice a suitably disguised process quietly cleaning everything sensitive off the machine.
It's not perfect, it's not infallible but, honestly, your data really isn't worth the hassle of defeating it for the average opportunistic thief.
You want to have more fun with them...
Set a scheduled task on that account to open Firefox 3.5 every 15 minutes and go to an address on your own server where it promptly gives its geolocation info before more obviously redirecting itself to some apparent malware site. They'll assume your machine's just infected with malware while you and the cops are given constant updates on their location.
Again, it's not perfect and most of /. could easily defeat it... But the average thief isn't a /. reader, they're just an opportunist who thinks they're getting something for free.
Who knows, developers could learn from this and say "hmm, maybe the average gamer can't afford $60 for our generic crap-of-the-month we're churning out, maybe if it was $30 in the first place, there wouldn't be a need for a Used market"
You've not been to a Gamestop recently, have you...
New game: $60.
2nd hand: $55.
Platinum game new: $20
Platinum 2nd hand: $18
You're lucky if you get anything more than a 10% savings. They just know people would still rather have $5 in their pocket than $0. Many people, myself included, still pay the $5 to know they're getting an unscratched disc (warranties are useless when the pain in the ass of going back in to claim is worth more than the $5 I saved) but more than enough are happy with any perceived saving.
Whilst we can argue about whether $60 is too much... The simple reality that customers still pay over the last generation's $50, even for second hand, implies this particular situation has nothing whatsoever to do with games being overpriced. If you sold them for $1 and people had an option to get them for $0.90, most kids would still choose to keep that dime and the second hand market still wouldn't disappear.
Bridgeman v Corel establishes firmly in US law that...
Geography establishes firmly in atlases that the entire world isn't in the US.
They're an English organization with English photographs of English owned paintings. Nationality of the person violating English laws is unclear (though likely also English if he cares that much about a specifically English issue).
Please, please show the world that Americans aren't quite so embarrassingly pig ignorant as they were in the 60s/70s when most couldn't find the country they were fighting in on a map. England's clearly a city in U-rope, near Belgiumsville. Google Maps will help you find it. They have different laws over there, still answering to the Pope who's their king. US case law really doesn't apply.
Any biologist will tell you: the digestive tract is external (there's never any form of membrane that has to be passed to get from one end to the other). I'd suggest that makes cows a torus.
Mmmm.... Having gone from cows' rectums to a torus, who's up for donuts this morning?
Your old CRT was a 17 inch. Understandable... 17s/19s were affordable, 21s and larger got expensive.
If your issue's price - volumes of sale mean you'll likely get a 20ish widescreen that they sell huge numbers of for the same price or less than a quirkly 17 inch with high res that's only for very, very niche user groups.
If your issue's desktop width - A 20ish inch LCD with a thin bezel is likely to be smaller than a the 17 inch CRT you're replacing.
If your issue's desktop depth - That 17 inch CRT you're replacing probably needed a good 18 inches of space between its screen and the wall for the tube. An LCD needs all of about 2 inches. If you're convinced you can't go larger than 17 because you're in a broom closet and sit crazily close, the LCD will move back further and you can have a bigger screen for the same angle of view.
There may be other reasons you specifically want to stay small. If you let us know what they are, we can suggest possible solutions that would work for you, thinking outside the box. It would be a shame for you to miss out on a far higher quality, much cheaper, better option simply because you're running with an assumption that maybe held true with CRTs but is no longer the case for LCDs.
has neither engine nor onboard controls
Doesn't a robot traditionally have to have some form of self controlled motion? From the description, this is just a human etch-a-sketch.
For what it's worth, I've also created the robotic sport of the future. It consists of a round, air filled bladder. This robot has no motor control of its own but it can be moved by applying forces with your foot. I intend to patent this and make a fortune. No one will play regular soccer once they can play robo-soccer.
"RCS testing showed that an Ho-229 approaching the English Coast from France flying at 550 mph at 50 to 100 feet above the water would not have been visible to Chain Home radar."
The flying wing was a hugely unstable design. The sole Ho IX V2 crashed on 18 February 1945, after only two hours of flight time. On 5 June 1948, Northrop's YB-49 (their second attempt to build a flying wing after the B-35 was cancelled due to insurmountable technical issues) crashed, killing its pilot and co-pilot Daniel Forbes and Glen Edwards, for whom Forbes and Edwards airforce bases are named. It took until the 80s for them to figure it out and make a success of the B2.
So, so long as a pilot could buzz the waves at an altitude that would make most pilots of conventional fighters of the era nervous, at the high end of speeds for the era (a good 100mph faster than a P-51 Mustang), before flitting up over the cliffs of southern England (the famed white cliffs of Dover reaching up to 106m, a good 70m over the 100 feet the plane was flying across the channel at), then it could have been invisible to British radar of the time.
One can only imagine, if production had worked out, the teenagers Germany was strapping in to planes at the time (having lost most of its experienced pilots by that point in the war) would have been doing this on a daily basis.
So please tell me: how, and more importantly, where do you meet fellow geeks â" preferably including some of the opposite gender
Geeks tend to be a massively gender skewed grouping.
If you're female, this is awesome. Turn up. Done.
If you're not female, minus infinity nerd points for having no concept of statistics... plus infinity nerd points for being so socially retarded as to think you only stand a chance with others exactly like you.
Seriously, assuming you're male, think about those statistics. You're sabotaging yourself before you even start. For every one person with compatible plumbing (politics joke), ten other people are competing with you and are likely just as good, if not better than you, at the geeky area you're figuring is what you have going for you. Female geeks get pretty much their pick of the many male geeks there are for each one of them. You know you're already behind the curve at dating and you want to jump in to that pool?
Outside the world of geekery, a combination of nerd bands like Weezer plus the great money we became associated with around Y2K/the dot com boom means nerds actually carry some cachet now. Simply being a geek isn't the social impediment it was twenty years ago. Back in the real world, away from the gender bias of the geek world, there's a pretty even gender ratio. As one of the first posters pointed out, go to somewhere like salsa lessons and it'll skew ten to one the other way. (Yes, you'll suck at your first dance classes but everyone at an intro class will suck - keep going and paying attention and, no matter how uncoordinated you are, you'll move better than 95% of guys in six months of weekly lessons).
Back, pre web, I remember hearing pick up artists talk about their technique. Turns out they were playing the numbers too. You, or I, or most geeks, will be terrified of approaching someone. We get maybe a 1 in 10, 1 in 20 chance of success so we only try when we're totally certain. We get rejected then and it kills us. We maybe try again six months to a year later. If we're lucky, we find someone in a few years. Those guys would go to a club, approach twenty to fifty people a night and let rejection slide off them. Even with the same 1:20 odds you or I might have, that's still 1 to 3 interest people every night. By ratio, they may be no more successful than you or I but, because they're not scared to keep trying, they swing that ratio in their favor. Spammers do the same thing too - they spam a million people, get 0.01% interest and still come out with 100 sales vs. the people who target 500 carefully screened leads, get a mightily better 10% hit rate, and still only come out with 50 sales. It may miss out on noble ideals but the people who have more success than you may not be any more successful in terms of percentages... but they know how to turn those percentages in their favor.
Pulling numbers from my anatomical /dev/null:
Trying to meet other geeks: 10 men for every 1 woman.
Trying to meet other people: 1 man for every 1 woman.
Going to salsa lessons (or similary: 1 man for every 10 women.
Just picking somewhere the hell outside of the geek pool shifts your odds by a factor of 100. Not a bad start. From there, just relax, be yourself and let statistics do the rest. Just don't pull out your Texas Instruments calculator to confirm it. I know it's totally sweet but you'll be back to square one. ;)
"If a gun fires or a bomb is detonated, the airships can detect the noise and focus the camera."
Note to self: if ever wanting to defeat the system, remotely or have a friend, set off a string of fire crackers somewhere else while I carry on unwatched.
"Though the technology is expensive, Raytheon is..." hoping customers won't be put off by a system that falls for the equivalent of "Look! Elvis!"?
Forget about fingering, they won't even let me sniff their ports.
some guy named Buddha appears before you, smacks you on the forehead to open up your third eye
Try following Sid Arthur, not Sid Vicious. Whole different Sid.