> It's not a great leap to hypothesize that some types of life can survive, perhaps in hibernation, > in outer space. Our solar system is not first generation. It's made up of the remnants of exploded > stars and perhaps planets that contained life.
Particularly this part....
>> We've found bacteria that can survive in a vacuum (quite by accident... somebody sneezed on a >> sattelite's lens at NASA), but we have yet to find a higher life form that can survive in a vacuum.
Not only is it not a great leap to assume that there's bacteria that can survive in outer space, we already know of at least one type of bacteria that can survive the radiation and vacuum. As a correction, it wasn't a sattelite lens, it was a lens on a camera that went to the moon.
Also, points for losing sight of the topic of discussion. We're talking about evolution, and more particularly, about "intelligent design", and the idea that teachers should be required to point out that some people claim that evolution is fallacious when they present it in class. You come forward railing against a post that specifically says:
>>>> No abiogenesis researcher is going to say "That's how it happened". Billions of years have >>>> passed, and we may very likely never know how it occured. But we can come up with potential >>>> pathways, test those against our knowledge of chemistry and against our growing knowledge of >>>> the Earth from about 3.9 to 3.5 billion years ago and provide potential explanations.
And now you're telling me that I'm lacking critical thought? I'm the one with the problem, and I'm the moron? Right. Keep telling yourself that, because I don't give a flying fuck. And incidentally, the oldest fossils we've found are about 3.5 billion years old, the oldest traces of waste products (carbon) from life forms is about 3.8 billion years old, but our geology suggests that the planet itself is about 4.5 billion years old. That doesn't mean that there wasn't life here 4.5 billion years ago, but it does mean that we haven't found anything to suggest there was. Part of critical thinking also means not obsessing over a belief for which over a century of inquiry has failed to find any evidence.
Ah yes. Because we all know that the Earth was created at 9:00am on September 27, 4004 BCE, right? And that the universe rotates around the Earth, aye? That the stars all occupy a shell that surrounds the Earth at a radius of twice the size of the Earth, and that the Earth is, itself, a flat disc floating in the aether?
Actually... you know what? fuck it. Let's take a completely literalist view on the question at hand.... Genesis 1:9... The big guy in the sky created the seas, then created the land, and *THEN* created the plants. By definition, there was an interim period, no matter how short, while he was busy creating the plants. Oh yeah, and there was no separation between night/day at this point, so no way to really tell how long that time was. It's not until the 4th day, verse 14, that the deified one chose to create the separation between light/dark.
Now, our science suggests that there was a time before life appeared on the planet when it was an atmosphere-less hulk of rock floating in the void. Before that, there was a time when it was just dust in the (solar) wind. Rock forms differently when there's an atmosphere, and our geological history suggests that there's layers of the Earth's crust which formed before there was an atmosphere on the planet.
Assuming you buy into this sciency-type thingie that has become so popular recently, the Earth has been around for a lot longer than 6,002 years, and some of that time was without an atmosphere. We've found bacteria that can survive in a vacuum (quite by accident... somebody sneezed on a sattelite's lens at NASA), but we have yet to find a higher life form that can survive in a vacuum.
And if you don't buy into science, I'm going to have to confiscate your computer.
There were school shootings long before video games started to take off, and long before the advent of the kind of graphic ultraviolence that this bill targets....
>Maybe not, but the question is, why would this destroy the hardware business instead of just enlarging the market? Why would the same Apple customers who now are buying premium hardware not simply carry on doing so? And more people who are now not Apple customers would in future buy other, non-premium hardware.
Because of basic economics. My new laptop is an Athlon64 3500+, 1GB of RAM, 15.4" WXGA, 128MB Radeon XPress 200M, 80GB HDD. Not *that* top of the line, but good enough that I haven't found a game that doesn't run on it. Now... I paid $1500 CAD for it (taxes incl.). A comparable MacBook Pro would have been $2200 (plus tax). Why on earth would I buy the MacBook Pro when I could spend $1500 on my laptop, and (pessimistically) $200 on a copy of OS/X, for a net savings of over $500 to me (and $2000 less for Apple)?
Mac users aren't dumb, and most certainly aren't averse to saving a little money. Offer them this option, and enough of them will take it to make a serious dent in Apple's bottom line.
> Parents who claim they can't prevent their kids from seeing these curse words are simply irresponsible.
Parents who even try to prevent their kids from seeing these curse words are equally irresponsible, IMO. Basically, no matter what you do, the kids are going to hear those words. They're part of popular culture and are so pervasive that it's downright naive to believe that you can shield your kids from being exposed to that kind of language. Sure, you can take steps to limit their exposure, you can restrict their movies, TV, and even Internet use, but there's nothing you can do to prevent them from getting it from their friends. The tighter you clamp down, the more they're going to rebel.
It's like exposure to drugs/alcohol, really. I'm a firm believer that no matter what I do with my kids, when I eventually have them, there's fuck all I can do to prevent their friends from exposing them to this kind of culture. Even trying to shield them from it is going to have a detrimental effect, because when their friends do finally expose them (and it's a question of when, not if), they won't have been taught to use them responsibly.
Now, the consequences of irresponsible use of recreational drugs/alcohol are a great deal more serious than the consequences from abusing coarse language, but the logic is basically the same: teach kids that there's a time and a place, and a way to use them properly, and there won't be a problem down the road when their friends expose them to it. They'll already know how to use it properly, and it'll be a lot harder for their friends to teach them the wrong way.
And there is a time and a place for swearing. The more colourful anglo-saxon words in English are very good for driving home the strength of your emotional situation. But as my grandfather told me, when I was 7, if you keep using those words, eventually they lose meaning. Use them sparingly, so that when you do finally drop an f-bomb, it actually has an impact.
With the right drivers, any system can be rock solid in terms of stability. I have Windows XP Home on my laptop, and XP Professional on my desktop (dualbooting with Slackware), and they're both perfect examples of this: I have *never* had a crash on either. I've never had a program die unexpectedly, I've never seen a blue screen, and I've never had any of the "oh shit" moments that people complain about.
Why? Because I have the right drivers installed, and I'm running with sane security settings. (As I type this from my linguistics class at university, I'm logged in as a limited user. I have to log in as administrator to install anything). The problems with stability in Windows, and any system for that matter, is when you start running it with oddball drivers, and on oddball hardware configurations that don't play friendly together. Anybody ever use Zoltrix hardware back in the day? It worked great, with other Zoltrix hardware. The moment you started mixing a Zoltrix modem with a Gravis soundcard, things went in the toilet. No more stability, no more performance.
Apple, quite understandably, doesn't want to open up the support nightmare that running on *any* hardware configuration would create. They sell the *hardware*, not the software. The software comes with the computer, but at its core, you're still running an Apple computer, no matter what's under the hood. They don't have a support nightmare, because they know exactly what hardware you have running in your system, and don't have to worry about supporting anything other than what they sell. And they know everything's gonna work well together, because not only did they bundle the hardware configuration together, they wrote all of the drivers, and they also wrote the kernel and all of the user-interface layers.
I shouldn't have to remind you that this wouldn't be feasible or even possible if they unlocked it to run on anything. They probably aren't trying very hard to prevent it from being cracked, but by not actually releasing it themselves, they save themselves a mother of a headache.
Funny. As I type this, I'm listening to.977 on iTunes, at 128kbit. While it's not the same quality as, say, live music, I would hardly call it low-bitrate, over-compressed garbage that is difficult in the extreme to listen to. Point of fact, I'm not really noticing a significant difference in quality to the stuff that is in my MP3 collection, and most of that is VBR up to 320kbit.
Maybe your problem is that you have crappy speakers.
I doubt that Internet Radio will disappear, for one very simple reason: it's cheap. You pay the same fees as a normal radio station to actually play the songs, but you don't have to worry about buying a broadcast license. You can reach a much larger audience, and probably won't have too much trouble increasing advertising revenue if you actually produce a product that people listen to. Probably the biggest difference between Internet radio and broadcast radio is that with Internet radio, you actually know exactly how many people are listening in, so you have to actually produce a decent product in order to rake in advertising bucks.
There are times when stalling the car would cause more damage than good. On a crowded street, it could very easily cause an accident, and get people killed.
Quite aside from that... what about manual transmissions? And what happens when somebody figures out how to do it? No. Way too dangerous an idea. Far and above, the safest thing to do in a "high speed" chase is tag the car and break off the chase. Let them think they've gotten away, so they can slow down to a more sane speed, and then pick them up when they stop for gas, food, or some other kind of rest.
Might as well take your post to reply to, since there's a barrage of them with basically the same message...
There's something you're missing: MMOGs are full of retards. I only play Guild Wars now, but I remember from playing Everquest and every other MMOG I played that the games are completely and utterly full of retards. Dimwits. Morons. Your typical adolescent 13-year old twat who doesn't know his arse from a hole in the ground, and who insists on making life hell for anybody he doesn't like/understand.
And I realize that it's a rash generalization, but it's to the point that I have to turn the Auction and Local channels off when I'm playing the game, because of the sheer stupidity of conversation that goes on.
Now. I'm not railing against the idea of a GLBT guild. I'm not exactly well placed to do it, considering that exactly 2 members of my guild in Guild Wars are heterosexual. I'm just saying there's a right and a wrong way to recruit for a guild that's GLBT-friendly. The wrong way is to show up and start shouting to the world that you're recruiting queers and people who are queer-friendly. Bad idea. Because sooner or later, the wrong person's gonna notice, and they're gonna spread the word to other wrong people, and those wrong people are gonna harrass you. It's a sad state of affairs, but you know it's true: people are dumb, and arrogant, and intolerant of what they don't understand. We're only now seeing the start of real tolerance and understanding in the real world, and it's going to be a long time before that spreads onto the Internet, where people don't have any inhibitions thanks to their perceived anonymity.
The right way to recruit for an organization like that is to treat it on a case-by-case basis. Don't shout out that you're recruiting, recruit based on experience with players. Invite people to join you based on the fact that they're cool to be around, not because they're queer. Don't deny who you are, but for the love of Bob, be smart enough to keep the knowledge from people who'd use it against you.
Simple answer. They can't actually force you to work overtime. It's a myth that a lot of corporate types are all too happy to let continue... but legally, they can't force you to work overtime, and you can sue for wrongful dismissal if they fire you for not doing it. And they know it.
So just stop working overtime. Or cut back on it. It won't take you too long to update your resume, and then maybe an hour a day to check the job sources and send out 2 or 3 resumes a day. And when you get an interview, take a sick or vacation day.
Ehh, I guess I'm a girl, then. After all, I like games which are customizable, and I like games with a lot of social interaction. There's a reason I pretty much only play RPGs, most being MMORPG.
It's a bad idea to say you're marketing a game at girls. Make different types of games, and market them because they're good, not because they're appealing to a specific niche. You might find that the niche you're aiming for hates the product, and you might just as easily find that there's a completely unexpected niche. Lumping all girls together is about as dumb as lumping all guys together. After all... not all guys like games like XIII, so why would all girls like these peoples' idea of the perfect "girl" game?
For the record, my other half routinely kicks my ass at Quake 4, btw. She's *way* more into FPS games than I am....
There's two things that are very important to qualify your tables there....
First, the person who compiled them isn't actually using *real* typing tests. He's basing it solely on frequency of letters appearing on the home row, and he's making the assumption that everybody's fingers rest on the home row. When my thumbs are resting on the spacebar, my pinky fingers are on the homerow... everything else is on the row above the home row.
Second, the person is talking about English-language typing. Dvorak simply isn't optimized for languages other than English, and neither is the one mentionned in TFA. I type in 4 languages, 5 if you count Japanese. If I were to switch between keyboards every time I switch languages, it would eat up *way* too much of my time, let alone learning a different layout for each language. Qwerty may not be the best-optimized for any single language, but it *is* very good for people who have to switch between languages.
I realize that I'm not even close to representing a majority there. But it is a very good reason that I won't be switching away from Qwerty. Until you can show me a keyboard that's better optimized for multilingual use, I'm not going to switch. I'll even make it easy for you: you can restrict yourself to European languages, but I won't consider it if you don't cover more than one family of languages....
There's nothing in the Charter of Rights & Freedoms, or any of the other documents that basically amount to our bill of rights and constitution that bans this kind of power. There's only one clause in the document that's even remotely applicable:
8. Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.
That's it. That's the entire clause. No subsections, no footnotes, no need to define terms, no need to qualify it with a 4-page essay pontificating exactly what constitutes "unreasonable". You'd do well to read the document: http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/charter/, especially since it's the legal grounding for the gay marriage issue... clause 15, if you're wondering.
See... there's not really any definition of "unreasonable" in the document, and as a result, the government can pretty well do whatever they want without violating our rights, as long as it can be justified as a reasonable measure being taken. What really gets me here, however, is that the powers TFA is talking about are already within their capabilities. They have been for a very long time. Remember Echelon? Take a look at what the CSE is responsible for within that organization.:)
Can someone *please* put Microsoft out of our misery?
After some of their more recent statements about products like Long^H^H^H^H Vista, I have to wonder if maybe, just maybe, Microsoft is trying to do that for us....
What does all this tell you ? Precisely nothing because it all boils down to what frequency this chip will run at once the design is turned into transistors, how much current it will draw, etc.
You're a product of Intel's marketing. AMD has been able to consistently produce systems that meet or beat Intel's performance with half the clock speed, because they have better instruction pipelining. (if only they could fix their manufacturing problems....)
Frequency amounts to squat in the final evaluation. Sure, it makes a small difference, but what makes a significantly bigger difference is how well the instructions are optimized, how much of the really fast RAM there is (L1, L2, and L3 cache are basically just RAM that's *way* faster than your system memory). Of course, even with a perfectly optimized CPU, you could still encounter performance issues if you have a crappy system bus and chipset. It's the combonation of all of these things together that makes for a faster system.
Oh, and the power draw has very little direct effect on the performance of your system. It affects the heat buildup, which affects how often and how fast your fan needs to run, which in turn affects the noise your system generates. In some cases, it can also affect the EM interference within the computer itself, though admittedly nowhere near as much as the PSU itself and any moving components like floppy, HDD, and CDROM do. As for the actual performance of a system, having a lower power draw means that with the same cooling setup, you can run at a higher clock speed, but as we've established, there's other ways to improve the system performance than increasing the clock speed, and they have a much bigger impact.
Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more. I don't want to give anyone the impression that $0.99 is a thing of the past... We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don't have a share of iPod's revenue
So yeah. It will never be cheaper than 99 cents. We don't want to give people that 99 cents is a thing of the past, but we want a piece of the pie, and 99 cents isn't doing it.
Real bright there guy. You suck.
Tell you what. Let's go variable then. Songs older than 5 yrs are 50 cents. More recent non-top 100 tunes are 99 cents, and top 100 are $1.50.
He seems to be forgetting that there used to be variable pricing with movies. Used to be that movie A would cost you $4, but movie B would cost $6. They went with standard pricing nation-wide when they noticed that nobody was going to the more expensive movies, probably because they were more expensive.... (bear in mind that this is Hollywood, which utterly refuses to admit that maybe the reason they're losing money is because they overpay mediocre actors to produce crappy movies)
So they decided that variable pricing on an entertainment commodity, particularly one as generic as movies or music, is a bad idea, because it just means that a significant proportion of people just don't really care that much what entertains them, as long as it's entertaining, and will quite happily buy whatever's cheapest.
Of course, that all hinges on it being a commodity that actually entertains. Personally, I think that given the dreck that gets passed off by the RIAA and its counterparts these days as "entertainment", $0.99 is overpriced. $0.09 would be overpriced. Hell, they couldn't pay me enough to download the latest crap from Britney Spears and her ilk.
Considering that 90% of the news in print comes from either Reuters or Associated Press, are you meaning to imply that 50% of the news out there shouldn't be taken seriously?
Don't answer that... Reuters is usually a reputable news source. One of my personal little joys is seeing an article on Reuters, submitting it to/. and being rejected, then seeing the same story on/. with a link to some other news site a week later. It gives me a little kick and makes me smirk inwardly.
It's unimportant. What is important is that I don't think I'll understand why people seem to think that Reuters is inherently a bad news agency, even though half of the news they read in "trusted" sources comes from Reuters originally.
What they're describing *is* possible. Unlikely, but it is possible. It's entirely possible to have a static charge that strong without killing yourself, for two reasons: one, it's the combonation of voltage and amperage that determines how much energy is actually flowing through you. You could have a million volts in your system, but if it's only at 0.000001 amps, it's not going to kill you. The second reason is that static electricity tends to the outside. The laws of polar attraction stand, and all the negatively-charged ions (that's what static electricity is) are going to repel each other, and form a shell around the outside of you, meaning that the level of charge inside your body core is going to be a whole lot smaller than that outside your body. Same thing happens when a car gets hit by lightening... passengers probably wouldn't know it'd happened, except for the loud noise and bright flash.
That said, my regular "tech bench" consists of a known-good CDROM, a *big* hard drive, a copy of BootIt NG which I use to make images of the "client"'s hard drives on said big hard drive before I go changing anything (yes, I could do it with Linux, but BootItNG is a lot easier in that respect, particularly if the host system doesn't support bootable CDs), a known-good PCI NIC and an Internet connection to use it with, a known-good modem, and a phone jack.
On the software side, I keep a copy of System Rescue CD (http://www.sysresccd.org/), which has MemTest+, Aida, FreeDOS, and a whole bunch of other bootdisks in its boot menu, as well as a bunch of really useful Linux tools such as gparted, QtParted, ClamAV, PartImage, etc..
Oh, and all the stuff that should be obvious: wrist straps, grounding strips (make sure they actually connect to a ground and aren't just a long strip of metal), etc..
Now you run into a problem regarding the sleep() function under Windows. There is a very good chance it just does not exist. And suppose you have written your own, or are using the Cygwin port, then the meaning of the value passed may vary significantly. Is that 1 ms, or 1 second, or 1 hour, or 1 day?
Well... considering the video cards that're in most desktops, and Vista demanding at least 256mb, 1fph (hour) sounds about right when you're playing EQ.:)
-1 for not RTFA... This still requires a *fertilized* egg. They aren't talking about fertilizing an egg with genetic material taken from another egg (though that was what I first thought on reading the headline), they're talking about making a clone of an already-fertilized egg, using only the DNA (but leaving behind RNA and Mitochondrial DNA, which presumably cause the diseases they're talking about).
So yeah, the religious right are gonna love it. Witness the post just above yours where some guy has gone off on a rant about how it's wrong to commit evil even if good comes from it. But they aren't gonna love it because it can allow gays/lesbians to procreate (they *can* procreate, just not with their own sex)... they're gonna love it because it's basically a human clone.
Oh, and gays/lesbians can already get married in Canada, and there's a US-Canada treaty to recognize marriages performed on either side of the border.:) Of course, given Bush's stance on NAFTA, there's no reason to assume that he's planning on honouring that treaty, but still....
And if you play EverQuest 2, you'll be happy with about 20gb, but it will still skip in places and you can't use the ultra-high resolution.
Dude... discover Guild Wars. You don't have to pay a monthly tithing to be able to log in, and it was very playable (at 1024x768) on my mom's computer last week (my old computer), which has 512MB of RAM and a 64MB GeForce3 Ti500. You probably don't want to know what resolution I run at home, with 1024MB of RAM and a 256MB Radeon 9600Ultra.:)
Oh, and so it doesn't get modded off topic, that new hardware resolution downmixing thing can bite me. I have a 21" trinitron monitor that does 1920x1440@75Hz, 0.20dp, and it wasn't cheap. No way in hell am I going to buy another monitor and video card just so I can watch a DVD. I'll wait until some geek posts instructions for how to make a dongle that'll trick it into running on my existing hardware, thanks.
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Points for not reading the whole post...
> It's not a great leap to hypothesize that some types of life can survive, perhaps in hibernation,
> in outer space. Our solar system is not first generation. It's made up of the remnants of exploded
> stars and perhaps planets that contained life.
Particularly this part....
>> We've found bacteria that can survive in a vacuum (quite by accident... somebody sneezed on a
>> sattelite's lens at NASA), but we have yet to find a higher life form that can survive in a vacuum.
Not only is it not a great leap to assume that there's bacteria that can survive in outer space, we already know of at least one type of bacteria that can survive the radiation and vacuum. As a correction, it wasn't a sattelite lens, it was a lens on a camera that went to the moon.
Also, points for losing sight of the topic of discussion. We're talking about evolution, and more particularly, about "intelligent design", and the idea that teachers should be required to point out that some people claim that evolution is fallacious when they present it in class. You come forward railing against a post that specifically says:
>>>> No abiogenesis researcher is going to say "That's how it happened". Billions of years have
>>>> passed, and we may very likely never know how it occured. But we can come up with potential
>>>> pathways, test those against our knowledge of chemistry and against our growing knowledge of
>>>> the Earth from about 3.9 to 3.5 billion years ago and provide potential explanations.
And now you're telling me that I'm lacking critical thought? I'm the one with the problem, and I'm the moron? Right. Keep telling yourself that, because I don't give a flying fuck. And incidentally, the oldest fossils we've found are about 3.5 billion years old, the oldest traces of waste products (carbon) from life forms is about 3.8 billion years old, but our geology suggests that the planet itself is about 4.5 billion years old. That doesn't mean that there wasn't life here 4.5 billion years ago, but it does mean that we haven't found anything to suggest there was. Part of critical thinking also means not obsessing over a belief for which over a century of inquiry has failed to find any evidence.
Ah yes. Because we all know that the Earth was created at 9:00am on September 27, 4004 BCE, right? And that the universe rotates around the Earth, aye? That the stars all occupy a shell that surrounds the Earth at a radius of twice the size of the Earth, and that the Earth is, itself, a flat disc floating in the aether?
Actually... you know what? fuck it. Let's take a completely literalist view on the question at hand.... Genesis 1:9... The big guy in the sky created the seas, then created the land, and *THEN* created the plants. By definition, there was an interim period, no matter how short, while he was busy creating the plants. Oh yeah, and there was no separation between night/day at this point, so no way to really tell how long that time was. It's not until the 4th day, verse 14, that the deified one chose to create the separation between light/dark.
Now, our science suggests that there was a time before life appeared on the planet when it was an atmosphere-less hulk of rock floating in the void. Before that, there was a time when it was just dust in the (solar) wind. Rock forms differently when there's an atmosphere, and our geological history suggests that there's layers of the Earth's crust which formed before there was an atmosphere on the planet.
Assuming you buy into this sciency-type thingie that has become so popular recently, the Earth has been around for a lot longer than 6,002 years, and some of that time was without an atmosphere. We've found bacteria that can survive in a vacuum (quite by accident... somebody sneezed on a sattelite's lens at NASA), but we have yet to find a higher life form that can survive in a vacuum.
And if you don't buy into science, I'm going to have to confiscate your computer.
http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/mondays.asp
There were school shootings long before video games started to take off, and long before the advent of the kind of graphic ultraviolence that this bill targets....
>Maybe not, but the question is, why would this destroy the hardware business instead of just enlarging the market? Why would the same Apple customers who now are buying premium hardware not simply carry on doing so? And more people who are now not Apple customers would in future buy other, non-premium hardware.
Because of basic economics. My new laptop is an Athlon64 3500+, 1GB of RAM, 15.4" WXGA, 128MB Radeon XPress 200M, 80GB HDD. Not *that* top of the line, but good enough that I haven't found a game that doesn't run on it. Now... I paid $1500 CAD for it (taxes incl.). A comparable MacBook Pro would have been $2200 (plus tax). Why on earth would I buy the MacBook Pro when I could spend $1500 on my laptop, and (pessimistically) $200 on a copy of OS/X, for a net savings of over $500 to me (and $2000 less for Apple)?
Mac users aren't dumb, and most certainly aren't averse to saving a little money. Offer them this option, and enough of them will take it to make a serious dent in Apple's bottom line.
> Parents who claim they can't prevent their kids from seeing these curse words are simply irresponsible.
Parents who even try to prevent their kids from seeing these curse words are equally irresponsible, IMO. Basically, no matter what you do, the kids are going to hear those words. They're part of popular culture and are so pervasive that it's downright naive to believe that you can shield your kids from being exposed to that kind of language. Sure, you can take steps to limit their exposure, you can restrict their movies, TV, and even Internet use, but there's nothing you can do to prevent them from getting it from their friends. The tighter you clamp down, the more they're going to rebel.
It's like exposure to drugs/alcohol, really. I'm a firm believer that no matter what I do with my kids, when I eventually have them, there's fuck all I can do to prevent their friends from exposing them to this kind of culture. Even trying to shield them from it is going to have a detrimental effect, because when their friends do finally expose them (and it's a question of when, not if), they won't have been taught to use them responsibly.
Now, the consequences of irresponsible use of recreational drugs/alcohol are a great deal more serious than the consequences from abusing coarse language, but the logic is basically the same: teach kids that there's a time and a place, and a way to use them properly, and there won't be a problem down the road when their friends expose them to it. They'll already know how to use it properly, and it'll be a lot harder for their friends to teach them the wrong way.
And there is a time and a place for swearing. The more colourful anglo-saxon words in English are very good for driving home the strength of your emotional situation. But as my grandfather told me, when I was 7, if you keep using those words, eventually they lose meaning. Use them sparingly, so that when you do finally drop an f-bomb, it actually has an impact.
With the right drivers, any system can be rock solid in terms of stability. I have Windows XP Home on my laptop, and XP Professional on my desktop (dualbooting with Slackware), and they're both perfect examples of this: I have *never* had a crash on either. I've never had a program die unexpectedly, I've never seen a blue screen, and I've never had any of the "oh shit" moments that people complain about.
Why? Because I have the right drivers installed, and I'm running with sane security settings. (As I type this from my linguistics class at university, I'm logged in as a limited user. I have to log in as administrator to install anything). The problems with stability in Windows, and any system for that matter, is when you start running it with oddball drivers, and on oddball hardware configurations that don't play friendly together. Anybody ever use Zoltrix hardware back in the day? It worked great, with other Zoltrix hardware. The moment you started mixing a Zoltrix modem with a Gravis soundcard, things went in the toilet. No more stability, no more performance.
Apple, quite understandably, doesn't want to open up the support nightmare that running on *any* hardware configuration would create. They sell the *hardware*, not the software. The software comes with the computer, but at its core, you're still running an Apple computer, no matter what's under the hood. They don't have a support nightmare, because they know exactly what hardware you have running in your system, and don't have to worry about supporting anything other than what they sell. And they know everything's gonna work well together, because not only did they bundle the hardware configuration together, they wrote all of the drivers, and they also wrote the kernel and all of the user-interface layers.
I shouldn't have to remind you that this wouldn't be feasible or even possible if they unlocked it to run on anything. They probably aren't trying very hard to prevent it from being cracked, but by not actually releasing it themselves, they save themselves a mother of a headache.
Funny. As I type this, I'm listening to .977 on iTunes, at 128kbit. While it's not the same quality as, say, live music, I would hardly call it low-bitrate, over-compressed garbage that is difficult in the extreme to listen to. Point of fact, I'm not really noticing a significant difference in quality to the stuff that is in my MP3 collection, and most of that is VBR up to 320kbit.
Maybe your problem is that you have crappy speakers.
I doubt that Internet Radio will disappear, for one very simple reason: it's cheap. You pay the same fees as a normal radio station to actually play the songs, but you don't have to worry about buying a broadcast license. You can reach a much larger audience, and probably won't have too much trouble increasing advertising revenue if you actually produce a product that people listen to. Probably the biggest difference between Internet radio and broadcast radio is that with Internet radio, you actually know exactly how many people are listening in, so you have to actually produce a decent product in order to rake in advertising bucks.
There are times when stalling the car would cause more damage than good. On a crowded street, it could very easily cause an accident, and get people killed.
Quite aside from that... what about manual transmissions? And what happens when somebody figures out how to do it? No. Way too dangerous an idea. Far and above, the safest thing to do in a "high speed" chase is tag the car and break off the chase. Let them think they've gotten away, so they can slow down to a more sane speed, and then pick them up when they stop for gas, food, or some other kind of rest.
Might as well take your post to reply to, since there's a barrage of them with basically the same message...
There's something you're missing: MMOGs are full of retards. I only play Guild Wars now, but I remember from playing Everquest and every other MMOG I played that the games are completely and utterly full of retards. Dimwits. Morons. Your typical adolescent 13-year old twat who doesn't know his arse from a hole in the ground, and who insists on making life hell for anybody he doesn't like/understand.
And I realize that it's a rash generalization, but it's to the point that I have to turn the Auction and Local channels off when I'm playing the game, because of the sheer stupidity of conversation that goes on.
Now. I'm not railing against the idea of a GLBT guild. I'm not exactly well placed to do it, considering that exactly 2 members of my guild in Guild Wars are heterosexual. I'm just saying there's a right and a wrong way to recruit for a guild that's GLBT-friendly. The wrong way is to show up and start shouting to the world that you're recruiting queers and people who are queer-friendly. Bad idea. Because sooner or later, the wrong person's gonna notice, and they're gonna spread the word to other wrong people, and those wrong people are gonna harrass you. It's a sad state of affairs, but you know it's true: people are dumb, and arrogant, and intolerant of what they don't understand. We're only now seeing the start of real tolerance and understanding in the real world, and it's going to be a long time before that spreads onto the Internet, where people don't have any inhibitions thanks to their perceived anonymity.
The right way to recruit for an organization like that is to treat it on a case-by-case basis. Don't shout out that you're recruiting, recruit based on experience with players. Invite people to join you based on the fact that they're cool to be around, not because they're queer. Don't deny who you are, but for the love of Bob, be smart enough to keep the knowledge from people who'd use it against you.
Simple answer. They can't actually force you to work overtime. It's a myth that a lot of corporate types are all too happy to let continue... but legally, they can't force you to work overtime, and you can sue for wrongful dismissal if they fire you for not doing it. And they know it.
So just stop working overtime. Or cut back on it. It won't take you too long to update your resume, and then maybe an hour a day to check the job sources and send out 2 or 3 resumes a day. And when you get an interview, take a sick or vacation day.
Ehh, I guess I'm a girl, then. After all, I like games which are customizable, and I like games with a lot of social interaction. There's a reason I pretty much only play RPGs, most being MMORPG.
It's a bad idea to say you're marketing a game at girls. Make different types of games, and market them because they're good, not because they're appealing to a specific niche. You might find that the niche you're aiming for hates the product, and you might just as easily find that there's a completely unexpected niche. Lumping all girls together is about as dumb as lumping all guys together. After all... not all guys like games like XIII, so why would all girls like these peoples' idea of the perfect "girl" game?
For the record, my other half routinely kicks my ass at Quake 4, btw. She's *way* more into FPS games than I am....
There's two things that are very important to qualify your tables there....
First, the person who compiled them isn't actually using *real* typing tests. He's basing it solely on frequency of letters appearing on the home row, and he's making the assumption that everybody's fingers rest on the home row. When my thumbs are resting on the spacebar, my pinky fingers are on the homerow... everything else is on the row above the home row.
Second, the person is talking about English-language typing. Dvorak simply isn't optimized for languages other than English, and neither is the one mentionned in TFA. I type in 4 languages, 5 if you count Japanese. If I were to switch between keyboards every time I switch languages, it would eat up *way* too much of my time, let alone learning a different layout for each language. Qwerty may not be the best-optimized for any single language, but it *is* very good for people who have to switch between languages.
I realize that I'm not even close to representing a majority there. But it is a very good reason that I won't be switching away from Qwerty. Until you can show me a keyboard that's better optimized for multilingual use, I'm not going to switch. I'll even make it easy for you: you can restrict yourself to European languages, but I won't consider it if you don't cover more than one family of languages....
how does one pontificate *and* moderate in the same thread?
:)
By checking "post anonymously" and submitting before clicking "moderate"...
But I didn't tell you that.
There's nothing in the Charter of Rights & Freedoms, or any of the other documents that basically amount to our bill of rights and constitution that bans this kind of power. There's only one clause in the document that's even remotely applicable:
:)
8. Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.
That's it. That's the entire clause. No subsections, no footnotes, no need to define terms, no need to qualify it with a 4-page essay pontificating exactly what constitutes "unreasonable". You'd do well to read the document: http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/charter/, especially since it's the legal grounding for the gay marriage issue... clause 15, if you're wondering.
See... there's not really any definition of "unreasonable" in the document, and as a result, the government can pretty well do whatever they want without violating our rights, as long as it can be justified as a reasonable measure being taken. What really gets me here, however, is that the powers TFA is talking about are already within their capabilities. They have been for a very long time. Remember Echelon? Take a look at what the CSE is responsible for within that organization.
Can someone *please* put Microsoft out of our misery?
After some of their more recent statements about products like Long^H^H^H^H Vista, I have to wonder if maybe, just maybe, Microsoft is trying to do that for us....
What does all this tell you ? Precisely nothing because it all boils down to what frequency this chip will run at once the design is turned into transistors, how much current it will draw, etc.
You're a product of Intel's marketing. AMD has been able to consistently produce systems that meet or beat Intel's performance with half the clock speed, because they have better instruction pipelining. (if only they could fix their manufacturing problems....)
Frequency amounts to squat in the final evaluation. Sure, it makes a small difference, but what makes a significantly bigger difference is how well the instructions are optimized, how much of the really fast RAM there is (L1, L2, and L3 cache are basically just RAM that's *way* faster than your system memory). Of course, even with a perfectly optimized CPU, you could still encounter performance issues if you have a crappy system bus and chipset. It's the combonation of all of these things together that makes for a faster system.
Oh, and the power draw has very little direct effect on the performance of your system. It affects the heat buildup, which affects how often and how fast your fan needs to run, which in turn affects the noise your system generates. In some cases, it can also affect the EM interference within the computer itself, though admittedly nowhere near as much as the PSU itself and any moving components like floppy, HDD, and CDROM do. As for the actual performance of a system, having a lower power draw means that with the same cooling setup, you can run at a higher clock speed, but as we've established, there's other ways to improve the system performance than increasing the clock speed, and they have a much bigger impact.
Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more. I don't want to give anyone the impression that $0.99 is a thing of the past ... We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don't have a share of iPod's revenue
So yeah. It will never be cheaper than 99 cents. We don't want to give people that 99 cents is a thing of the past, but we want a piece of the pie, and 99 cents isn't doing it.
Real bright there guy. You suck.
Tell you what. Let's go variable then. Songs older than 5 yrs are 50 cents. More recent non-top 100 tunes are 99 cents, and top 100 are $1.50.
He seems to be forgetting that there used to be variable pricing with movies. Used to be that movie A would cost you $4, but movie B would cost $6. They went with standard pricing nation-wide when they noticed that nobody was going to the more expensive movies, probably because they were more expensive.... (bear in mind that this is Hollywood, which utterly refuses to admit that maybe the reason they're losing money is because they overpay mediocre actors to produce crappy movies)
So they decided that variable pricing on an entertainment commodity, particularly one as generic as movies or music, is a bad idea, because it just means that a significant proportion of people just don't really care that much what entertains them, as long as it's entertaining, and will quite happily buy whatever's cheapest.
Of course, that all hinges on it being a commodity that actually entertains. Personally, I think that given the dreck that gets passed off by the RIAA and its counterparts these days as "entertainment", $0.99 is overpriced. $0.09 would be overpriced. Hell, they couldn't pay me enough to download the latest crap from Britney Spears and her ilk.
It is anit-innovation to the max.
Radical insight, dude....
Considering that 90% of the news in print comes from either Reuters or Associated Press, are you meaning to imply that 50% of the news out there shouldn't be taken seriously?
/. and being rejected, then seeing the same story on /. with a link to some other news site a week later. It gives me a little kick and makes me smirk inwardly.
Don't answer that... Reuters is usually a reputable news source. One of my personal little joys is seeing an article on Reuters, submitting it to
It's unimportant. What is important is that I don't think I'll understand why people seem to think that Reuters is inherently a bad news agency, even though half of the news they read in "trusted" sources comes from Reuters originally.
What they're describing *is* possible. Unlikely, but it is possible. It's entirely possible to have a static charge that strong without killing yourself, for two reasons: one, it's the combonation of voltage and amperage that determines how much energy is actually flowing through you. You could have a million volts in your system, but if it's only at 0.000001 amps, it's not going to kill you. The second reason is that static electricity tends to the outside. The laws of polar attraction stand, and all the negatively-charged ions (that's what static electricity is) are going to repel each other, and form a shell around the outside of you, meaning that the level of charge inside your body core is going to be a whole lot smaller than that outside your body. Same thing happens when a car gets hit by lightening... passengers probably wouldn't know it'd happened, except for the loud noise and bright flash.
And we have both Slush Puppie and Slurpee here in Canada, which would seem to indicate that they're not one and the same....
Slush Puppie is better, IMO. Matter of personal preference, though.
Seriously, it does.
That said, my regular "tech bench" consists of a known-good CDROM, a *big* hard drive, a copy of BootIt NG which I use to make images of the "client"'s hard drives on said big hard drive before I go changing anything (yes, I could do it with Linux, but BootItNG is a lot easier in that respect, particularly if the host system doesn't support bootable CDs), a known-good PCI NIC and an Internet connection to use it with, a known-good modem, and a phone jack.
On the software side, I keep a copy of System Rescue CD (http://www.sysresccd.org/), which has MemTest+, Aida, FreeDOS, and a whole bunch of other bootdisks in its boot menu, as well as a bunch of really useful Linux tools such as gparted, QtParted, ClamAV, PartImage, etc..
Oh, and all the stuff that should be obvious: wrist straps, grounding strips (make sure they actually connect to a ground and aren't just a long strip of metal), etc..
Now you run into a problem regarding the sleep() function under Windows. There is a very good chance it just does not exist. And suppose you have written your own, or are using the Cygwin port, then the meaning of the value passed may vary significantly. Is that 1 ms, or 1 second, or 1 hour, or 1 day?
:)
Well... considering the video cards that're in most desktops, and Vista demanding at least 256mb, 1fph (hour) sounds about right when you're playing EQ.
-1 for not RTFA... This still requires a *fertilized* egg. They aren't talking about fertilizing an egg with genetic material taken from another egg (though that was what I first thought on reading the headline), they're talking about making a clone of an already-fertilized egg, using only the DNA (but leaving behind RNA and Mitochondrial DNA, which presumably cause the diseases they're talking about).
:) Of course, given Bush's stance on NAFTA, there's no reason to assume that he's planning on honouring that treaty, but still....
So yeah, the religious right are gonna love it. Witness the post just above yours where some guy has gone off on a rant about how it's wrong to commit evil even if good comes from it. But they aren't gonna love it because it can allow gays/lesbians to procreate (they *can* procreate, just not with their own sex)... they're gonna love it because it's basically a human clone.
Oh, and gays/lesbians can already get married in Canada, and there's a US-Canada treaty to recognize marriages performed on either side of the border.
And if you play EverQuest 2, you'll be happy with about 20gb, but it will still skip in places and you can't use the ultra-high resolution.
:)
Dude... discover Guild Wars. You don't have to pay a monthly tithing to be able to log in, and it was very playable (at 1024x768) on my mom's computer last week (my old computer), which has 512MB of RAM and a 64MB GeForce3 Ti500. You probably don't want to know what resolution I run at home, with 1024MB of RAM and a 256MB Radeon 9600Ultra.
Oh, and so it doesn't get modded off topic, that new hardware resolution downmixing thing can bite me. I have a 21" trinitron monitor that does 1920x1440@75Hz, 0.20dp, and it wasn't cheap. No way in hell am I going to buy another monitor and video card just so I can watch a DVD. I'll wait until some geek posts instructions for how to make a dongle that'll trick it into running on my existing hardware, thanks.
http://happypenguin.org/
I have a feeling they'd beg to differ. There's other sites that may interest you, too, but that's the one where I get most of my Linux games.