Taiwanese knock off or no, that leatherman HURTS when I crank on the pliers. The newer designs with the rolled edges are better, but the Mk1 Mod0 Leatherman was painful in my hand. That's why I bought a Gerber. Loaned it to a lady friend working in a christmas tree lot, and she hasn't bothered to give it back yet. Looks like I've got an excuse to get a new one.
Boy, I do like the look of dat dere Spyderco. I LIKE all the extra bits, and I'm clever enough to figure out how it works. : )
Simple. The cost of goods for a video is a small fraction of the purchase price, and an irrelevant fraction of the rate that the video store pays. What the video store paid $90 for is the license to rent a given videotape, including the cost of producing and distributing that individual hunk of plastic. When you lost the tape, the license didn't go down the toilet. The video store simply was out the plastic box full of magnetic tape that the movie is stored on. When you replaced that box (which you are NOT licensed to rent out, but the video store IS), they were happy. They could have probably gotten a replacement tape from the mfr for a relatively nominal sum, but rest assured that they'd have put the screws to you (and pocketed the difference) if you hadn't replaced the box yourself. Think about it...do you have to buy another copy of a game CD if yours is scratched or damaged? Most software companies will supply you with replacement media for a nominal fee and proof of purchase. You're not buying just software media (be they computer code or movies or CD's or whatever), you're buying the license to use them under certain specific circumstances. Why do you think you can get CD's from CheapBytes for two bucks?
Don't worry, God told me that he told George to leave out the subliminal messages. You'll be safe. Mostly.
*deactivates sarcasm mode*
Me, I don't allow movies, books, demagogues, web sites, or other information outlets to modify my preconceptions and beliefs. That way, I can tell the difference between shooting somebody in the head with a rocket launcher in Quake and pulling a Glock on my coworkers. While we're on the subject, aiming a Glock in real life is NOTHING like it is in Half Life. I've yet to find the mouse controller on the back of the gun. : )
There is no engineering reason why Chernobyl couldn't have been made safe. There are many financial and political reasons why Chernobyl wasn't made safe. Just like there can be bad engineering, there can be good engineering. Is your contention "Because there have been two widely publicized nuclear disasters in the history of the modern world, all new technology should be assumed to be dangerous and horrific, and we really ought to go back to tents in the woods with no sanitation and chasing our dinner with spears"? Don't be ridiculous.
Human: Doctor, it hurts when I go like this! Doctor: Well, don't go like this.
I don't think that there's any reason to fear having a laser rasterize on your retina. It's no different from the photons that you encounter all day, the difference being that these photons happen to all be oriented the same way. Of course you wouldn't want high power outputs, but fuses are easy to design. This is cool technology, and there's no engineering reason that it couldn't be made perfectly safe.
I can't imagine why. It'd probably be a matter of inputting your prescription into the software that drives the display, so it can modulate the signal accordingly. It's going to be so close to your eye that it might not even be an issue.
I dunno, photons is photons. You're exposed to photons all the time...I can't think of a reason that getting your retina bombarded with coherent light would be any worse than getting them bombarded with regular light. Of course the power output would be VERY VERY VERY low. 100 watts is a lot of laser, but it's not a lot of lightbulb.
My uneducated guess would be that coherent photons (again, of very low power) hitting your eye would be a lot less bad than having stray cathode rays hitting your eye (like from this CRT we're all sitting in front of).
Easy. What's supposed to happen is that sentient beings should understand the difference between what happens in a computer-generated fantasy world and what happens in real life.
The graphics are not the issue. The CONSEQUENCES are the issue. When I shoot somebody in Quake, I know that that is different from shooting somebody in real life. Anybody who can not make that distinction has no place in society unsupervised.
What's the point of these games? They're fun. You might note that not everything in life MUST have any literary or scholastic justification. Sometimes, I just want to eat a burger. Sometimes, I just want to play Quake. If you don't want to eat burgers, that's fine with me. If you don't want to play Quake, that's fine with me too. You do NOT get to tell me what I can or cannot do, unless you can demonstrate that my taking a certain action (like shooting somebody in the head) deprives them of their legal rights (specifically, that "life" one).
Violent games/books/songs/fairy tales/whatever have NO deleterious effects on well adjusted children. If the children are not well adjusted, let's place the blame squarely where it belongs...on those people who were derelict in their duty to MAKE the children well adjusted. That is, the parents.
If you area parent, and you don't want your child to play Quake, that's certainly your prerogative. I can think of several books and games that I've enjoyed that I wouldn't want a young child exposed to. However, this is NOT the purview of the government to decide. That is my responsibility as a parent.
Since one of the restrictions prevents theatres from showing those insipid Coke/Sprite/US Marine Corps ads at the beginning of the film, I'm all for 'em. Do you REALLY think that the theatres are going to lose money by complying with these rules? What's wrong with LucasFilm making more money? If you don't want them to make more money, don't go see the movie.
Lucas payed for the movie out of his pocket. That doesn't sound like behaviour I'd normally associate with a person who's concerned about nothing but profit, but I could certainly be wrong.
I was given to understand that it was a lot more than that. There's more to MacOS X than BSD with a cool desktop. Now, I can't take this argument much further, because I probably wouldn't recognize the source code for their Carbon API from a hole in the ground. : )
You're right, though, if all it is is BSD, that's kinda stinky. I know BSD is a significant chunk of the stuff they released, but not all of it.
How about Sicilian Graphics Inc...as in "Never go in against a Sicilian when DEATH is on the line! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha....*THUD*"
I agree with you on most points, but let me offer you this as a devil's advocate.
Apple should not have the same rights as Joe Hacker, as the Apple paid its internal developers umpty bajillion dollars in development expenses to develop MacOS X. They are a corporation, which means that they borrowed their umpty bajillion dollars from stockholders. They have a responsibility to those stockholders to safeguard those dollars (IE they can't just give the code away under GPL), but they are trying to find a way that they can protect their investors' dollars and also do open source.
How's the view from that high horse? I'd argue that real men not only pursue technical excellence, but share it with others. From the tone of your post, I guess we're all supposed to bow down in awe of your technical prowess. You know what I think I'm going to do instead? Write you off as a pompous windbag.
Could he? Probably. Did he? No. And I'm glad he didn't. George Lucas is not (according to the things I read about him) a particularly materialistic person. He seems to have a singular knack for making the best possible use of resources for maximum artistic impact (see Star Wars as a marvelous example). I'm SURE that whatever money he spent on costumes was precisely what needed to be spent to achieve the desired aim. It would be uncharacteristic (of course, never having met the man, this is a hard conclusion to defend) for him to just piss away money. Of course, the other side of it is that the first two movies had to be made on a shoestring, and now he's independently wealthy enough to spend however damn much he wants to on his movie to make it PERFECT. Wow, I'd love to be in that position some day!
It's a hard question to answer. Could Queen Padme have been dressed in simpler attire? Sure, I guess. It's possible that it wouldn't even have a noticeable negative effect on the plot/story. But from what I've seen in the trailer, the Queen's attire is baroque, even ostentatious. I'm SURE there's a thematic element that's being served by that costuming decision. Ask me about it again in a month after I've seen the movie a few dozen times. : )
NO! I want to emigrate to Mars. I'd like it to be a haven for Smart People. I don't want all the morons I'm trying to get away from to be waiting for me when I get there.
What does "need" mean in your last sentence? He was an artist, trying to capture his vision of what the queen ought to have looked like. It was his money to spend (he wrote a check for the whole damn movie). What other justification is necessary?
Interesting. One could assume that since the left edge of an LCD can be a different color than the right edge, one could make the left edge of that speaker sound different from the right edge. However, the fact that the thing's a continuous membrane might make that, well, challenging to say the least. It's hard to figure that it'd give you better quality than two individually addressable membranes. Of course, I am talking out of my ass here. I have zero applicable knowledge in this field.
That 1 foot tall curved speaker would look cool above the enormous flat panel HDTV of my dreams. : )
I have zero knowledge about directional audio. However, since we humans have two ears, and we can still locate sound sources in 3 dimensions around us, isn't it theoretically possible to have a 3D audio environment provided by only 2 speakers?
Subwoofer is good for 70Hz-300Hz, fwiw. Looks like a fairly nice set of computer speakers, but probably audiophile grognards will hate 'em. Unwashed heathens (like me) probably couldn't tell the difference.
Maybe I'm crazy, but if I were a serious audiophile, I'd probably be the only person in any given room who could tell the difference between $300-500 speakers and $3000-5000 speakers. Wouldn't I be better off with a very nice (and radically less expensive) pair of headphones?
You're absolutely right. However, note that the compatibility problems are absolutely engineered in BY MICROSOFT. If the data's stuck in XLS format, and there's no way to reliably use XLS format without using Excel, well then we're stuck with Excel. Nice position for MS to be in, huh? They DID promise that the Office2000 file formats are going to be open and static.
Care to have a breath holding contest? I'll let you win.
I'm not sure I understand your objections. MS DOES write raunchy code, and I think it's a good idea to tell them so in no uncertain terms. They are a company who wants to join a community (so they say), so what does that community owe THEM? The community didn't go say "Hey, Microsoft, we think it'd be really cool if you joined us". I'd bet my bottom dollar that if MS's legal Sword of Damocles was affixed more firmly to the ceiling, they wouldn't even CONSIDER this move.
"Magic pixie dust" is a direct quote from somebody who had a front row seat for the still-birth of a major corporation's foray into the open source community. It's very appropriate to include it here.
MS deserves no respect. For one, they're a corporation. THEY owe US respect (that is, if they want our money). For another, they've never done anything WORTHY of respect. They've been poor citizens of the software community since their inception. I don't know if it's a smart move for MS to attempt Open Source licensing...it's a path fraught with peril. However, if executed correctly, it could be the first decent thing that MS has EVER done.
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Taiwanese knock off or no, that leatherman HURTS when I crank on the pliers. The newer designs with the rolled edges are better, but the Mk1 Mod0 Leatherman was painful in my hand. That's why I bought a Gerber. Loaned it to a lady friend working in a christmas tree lot, and she hasn't bothered to give it back yet. Looks like I've got an excuse to get a new one.
Boy, I do like the look of dat dere Spyderco. I LIKE all the extra bits, and I'm clever enough to figure out how it works. : )
Simple. The cost of goods for a video is a small fraction of the purchase price, and an irrelevant fraction of the rate that the video store pays. What the video store paid $90 for is the license to rent a given videotape, including the cost of producing and distributing that individual hunk of plastic. When you lost the tape, the license didn't go down the toilet. The video store simply was out the plastic box full of magnetic tape that the movie is stored on. When you replaced that box (which you are NOT licensed to rent out, but the video store IS), they were happy. They could have probably gotten a replacement tape from the mfr for a relatively nominal sum, but rest assured that they'd have put the screws to you (and pocketed the difference) if you hadn't replaced the box yourself. Think about it...do you have to buy another copy of a game CD if yours is scratched or damaged? Most software companies will supply you with replacement media for a nominal fee and proof of purchase. You're not buying just software media (be they computer code or movies or CD's or whatever), you're buying the license to use them under certain specific circumstances. Why do you think you can get CD's from CheapBytes for two bucks?
Don't worry, God told me that he told George to leave out the subliminal messages. You'll be safe. Mostly.
*deactivates sarcasm mode*
Me, I don't allow movies, books, demagogues, web sites, or other information outlets to modify my preconceptions and beliefs. That way, I can tell the difference between shooting somebody in the head with a rocket launcher in Quake and pulling a Glock on my coworkers. While we're on the subject, aiming a Glock in real life is NOTHING like it is in Half Life. I've yet to find the mouse controller on the back of the gun. : )
Yeah, screw the fact that I can make it with a toy that I can buy for $200. It's not ready for me to use it to cure cancer, so it's a piece of shit.
How's the view from that high horse?
Apple and Be publish pretty darn comprehensive API specifications. What is the parallel?
Do you get the ones for the US Marine Corps? Wouldn't that be ironic! : )
There is no engineering reason why Chernobyl couldn't have been made safe. There are many financial and political reasons why Chernobyl wasn't made safe. Just like there can be bad engineering, there can be good engineering. Is your contention "Because there have been two widely publicized nuclear disasters in the history of the modern world, all new technology should be assumed to be dangerous and horrific, and we really ought to go back to tents in the woods with no sanitation and chasing our dinner with spears"? Don't be ridiculous.
Human: Doctor, it hurts when I go like this!
Doctor: Well, don't go like this.
I don't think that there's any reason to fear having a laser rasterize on your retina. It's no different from the photons that you encounter all day, the difference being that these photons happen to all be oriented the same way. Of course you wouldn't want high power outputs, but fuses are easy to design. This is cool technology, and there's no engineering reason that it couldn't be made perfectly safe.
I can't imagine why. It'd probably be a matter of inputting your prescription into the software that drives the display, so it can modulate the signal accordingly. It's going to be so close to your eye that it might not even be an issue.
I dunno, photons is photons. You're exposed to photons all the time...I can't think of a reason that getting your retina bombarded with coherent light would be any worse than getting them bombarded with regular light. Of course the power output would be VERY VERY VERY low. 100 watts is a lot of laser, but it's not a lot of lightbulb.
My uneducated guess would be that coherent photons (again, of very low power) hitting your eye would be a lot less bad than having stray cathode rays hitting your eye (like from this CRT we're all sitting in front of).
Easy. What's supposed to happen is that sentient beings should understand the difference between what happens in a computer-generated fantasy world and what happens in real life.
The graphics are not the issue. The CONSEQUENCES are the issue. When I shoot somebody in Quake, I know that that is different from shooting somebody in real life. Anybody who can not make that distinction has no place in society unsupervised.
What's the point of these games? They're fun. You might note that not everything in life MUST have any literary or scholastic justification. Sometimes, I just want to eat a burger. Sometimes, I just want to play Quake. If you don't want to eat burgers, that's fine with me. If you don't want to play Quake, that's fine with me too. You do NOT get to tell me what I can or cannot do, unless you can demonstrate that my taking a certain action (like shooting somebody in the head) deprives them of their legal rights (specifically, that "life" one).
Violent games/books/songs/fairy tales/whatever have NO deleterious effects on well adjusted children. If the children are not well adjusted, let's place the blame squarely where it belongs...on those people who were derelict in their duty to MAKE the children well adjusted. That is, the parents.
If you area parent, and you don't want your child to play Quake, that's certainly your prerogative. I can think of several books and games that I've enjoyed that I wouldn't want a young child exposed to. However, this is NOT the purview of the government to decide. That is my responsibility as a parent.
Why is this so hard to understand?
Since one of the restrictions prevents theatres from showing those insipid Coke/Sprite/US Marine Corps ads at the beginning of the film, I'm all for 'em. Do you REALLY think that the theatres are going to lose money by complying with these rules? What's wrong with LucasFilm making more money? If you don't want them to make more money, don't go see the movie.
Lucas payed for the movie out of his pocket. That doesn't sound like behaviour I'd normally associate with a person who's concerned about nothing but profit, but I could certainly be wrong.
Three centuries ago it did. The frontier moves...you have to be quick to keep up with it. : )
I was given to understand that it was a lot more than that. There's more to MacOS X than BSD with a cool desktop. Now, I can't take this argument much further, because I probably wouldn't recognize the source code for their Carbon API from a hole in the ground. : )
You're right, though, if all it is is BSD, that's kinda stinky. I know BSD is a significant chunk of the stuff they released, but not all of it.
How about Sicilian Graphics Inc...as in "Never go in against a Sicilian when DEATH is on the line! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha....*THUD*"
I agree with you on most points, but let me offer you this as a devil's advocate.
Apple should not have the same rights as Joe Hacker, as the Apple paid its internal developers umpty bajillion dollars in development expenses to develop MacOS X. They are a corporation, which means that they borrowed their umpty bajillion dollars from stockholders. They have a responsibility to those stockholders to safeguard those dollars (IE they can't just give the code away under GPL), but they are trying to find a way that they can protect their investors' dollars and also do open source.
How's the view from that high horse? I'd argue that real men not only pursue technical excellence, but share it with others. From the tone of your post, I guess we're all supposed to bow down in awe of your technical prowess. You know what I think I'm going to do instead? Write you off as a pompous windbag.
Have a nice day!
Could he? Probably. Did he? No. And I'm glad he didn't. George Lucas is not (according to the things I read about him) a particularly materialistic person. He seems to have a singular knack for making the best possible use of resources for maximum artistic impact (see Star Wars as a marvelous example). I'm SURE that whatever money he spent on costumes was precisely what needed to be spent to achieve the desired aim. It would be uncharacteristic (of course, never having met the man, this is a hard conclusion to defend) for him to just piss away money. Of course, the other side of it is that the first two movies had to be made on a shoestring, and now he's independently wealthy enough to spend however damn much he wants to on his movie to make it PERFECT. Wow, I'd love to be in that position some day!
It's a hard question to answer. Could Queen Padme have been dressed in simpler attire? Sure, I guess. It's possible that it wouldn't even have a noticeable negative effect on the plot/story. But from what I've seen in the trailer, the Queen's attire is baroque, even ostentatious. I'm SURE there's a thematic element that's being served by that costuming decision. Ask me about it again in a month after I've seen the movie a few dozen times. : )
NO! I want to emigrate to Mars. I'd like it to be a haven for Smart People. I don't want all the morons I'm trying to get away from to be waiting for me when I get there.
What does "need" mean in your last sentence? He was an artist, trying to capture his vision of what the queen ought to have looked like. It was his money to spend (he wrote a check for the whole damn movie). What other justification is necessary?
Interesting. One could assume that since the left edge of an LCD can be a different color than the right edge, one could make the left edge of that speaker sound different from the right edge. However, the fact that the thing's a continuous membrane might make that, well, challenging to say the least. It's hard to figure that it'd give you better quality than two individually addressable membranes. Of course, I am talking out of my ass here. I have zero applicable knowledge in this field.
That 1 foot tall curved speaker would look cool above the enormous flat panel HDTV of my dreams. : )
For how much money, though? DVDRAM drive costs, what, $400-600 bucks? Castlewood's ORB is $200 and much faster.
Who cares? People without trust funds. If you don't like it, don't buy it.
I have zero knowledge about directional audio. However, since we humans have two ears, and we can still locate sound sources in 3 dimensions around us, isn't it theoretically possible to have a 3D audio environment provided by only 2 speakers?
Subwoofer is good for 70Hz-300Hz, fwiw. Looks like a fairly nice set of computer speakers, but probably audiophile grognards will hate 'em. Unwashed heathens (like me) probably couldn't tell the difference.
Maybe I'm crazy, but if I were a serious audiophile, I'd probably be the only person in any given room who could tell the difference between $300-500 speakers and $3000-5000 speakers. Wouldn't I be better off with a very nice (and radically less expensive) pair of headphones?
You're absolutely right. However, note that the compatibility problems are absolutely engineered in BY MICROSOFT. If the data's stuck in XLS format, and there's no way to reliably use XLS format without using Excel, well then we're stuck with Excel. Nice position for MS to be in, huh? They DID promise that the Office2000 file formats are going to be open and static.
Care to have a breath holding contest? I'll let you win.
I'm not sure I understand your objections. MS DOES write raunchy code, and I think it's a good idea to tell them so in no uncertain terms. They are a company who wants to join a community (so they say), so what does that community owe THEM? The community didn't go say "Hey, Microsoft, we think it'd be really cool if you joined us". I'd bet my bottom dollar that if MS's legal Sword of Damocles was affixed more firmly to the ceiling, they wouldn't even CONSIDER this move.
"Magic pixie dust" is a direct quote from somebody who had a front row seat for the still-birth of a major corporation's foray into the open source community. It's very appropriate to include it here.
MS deserves no respect. For one, they're a corporation. THEY owe US respect (that is, if they want our money). For another, they've never done anything WORTHY of respect. They've been poor citizens of the software community since their inception. I don't know if it's a smart move for MS to attempt Open Source licensing...it's a path fraught with peril. However, if executed correctly, it could be the first decent thing that MS has EVER done.