I can think of many tools that if used wrong can kill.
3d printers just get bad press because manufacturing is afraid of losing out on money.
Anything that is new will get bad press if people will lose money.
Examples: MPAA/RIAA hated the Internet for sharing songs. So they sued grandmothers for millions and won.
Cable companies are afraid they'll give you too much bandwith and never pay for TV again. So they restrict usages like jerks.
Newspaper is worried that free online newspaper will put them out of buisness. So Murdoc makes threatening claims.
Petroleum giants are afraid of the electric car, so anything something slightly goes wrong with a Tesla, it makes press.
Energy Utilities are afraid of solar, so solar gets all sorts of negative press that it will never fly or be a solution.
It just goes on and on. People with money are afraid of losing their cash cows, so instead of doing what's good for society, they do whats best for themselves. And part of the equation today is,"You can only get away with so much in USA politics. If you can't make a bull shit propoganda story why something is bad for society, people won't elect the crook next cycle." And really, that is about the only thing that keeps the USA from going from suck to blow. So any time someone paints a bullshit propoganda story to you, be a good citizen and dismantle it.
The salt will build up in the evaporation chamber. So if you use your saltwater input to flush it out each loading cycle, some would come out.
I'm not familiar with how salt changes with temperature and if it'd cake on to the inside in such a manner that flushing it would be insufficient. Even if this is the case, what is the rate of crusting up? Could it be solved by a human coming on site once a day or once a week and scrubbing it?
I'm an ace software guy who just got together with some hardware dudes. They say if I catch up with all my tasks at work that they'll let me work on some stepper motors. So there's an off chance I can get around with making mirrors that track the sun and aim it at a focal point manually. So someday I might get around to creating this system, but I'm in no rush to get it done.
Design a robotic software to keep mirrors aimed at a focal point.
At the focal point, have sea water pumped into a concrete basin.
Have a steam engine that takes sea water input, and makes electricity and desalinated water output
Mirrors or silvery material is relatively inexpensive. Once you developed robotic sun tracking/aiming software, that isn't too expensive either. The electricity generated by the system can go towards pumping sea water into it.
It is like Microsoft Windows doesn't even try to be secure. It isn't too incredibly hard for executables to be unable to hammer system files if a modicum of sandboxing was involved. An example would be if applications couldn't touch things outside their installed directory. There would be a specific protocol for communication between different installed aps. This should have been done back in the win98 era. Because applications are not secure, everyone is paranoid about downloading an untrusted.exe. If Windows was made for the Internet, you should be able to download any application and it be harmless.
Just like how Google attracts a bunch of eyes and then feeds them advertisements, Twitter does the same thing. I'm surprised Twitter doesn't do more sponsored links than it does. I rarely even see one, but they could probably get away with three constantly.
I bought DDO when it first came out because I love Turbine as a company(In my book Asheron's Call 1 was way more fun than WOW). What I found is the same as in PNP D&D, clerics are just superior to fighters. They can do everything a fighter can, minus a few damage ticks per swing, but also have heals. I haven't picked it up lately, but I max leveled in well under a week and beat everything they have. D&D is good for Pencil and Paper, but doesn't make a hot MMORPG system. This is because you advance too rapidly in D&D. In PNP, advancing rapidly is balanced by permadeath, but I've even heard stories of where people "beat PNP D&D" because they had max level characters with so many magic items than no monsters or situation could pose a challenge.
When Nintendo did their world championships, I tried a bunch of the games set up for display. I actually dodged SMB3 because the line was so long. Some of the games were fun, but I was blown away with River City Ransom. Wow that game was really good.
I think there is something magical about games with good action mechanics with a little hackney RPG thrown on top. Another good example is Zelda. The reason these games are fun is that it typically rides you in a perfect difficulty. If the game is too easy, you push far without grinding your guy for levels until it is tough. If the game is too hard, you keep trying over and over, and your guy levels up in the process. Eventually you get strong enough to beat the levels and bosses even if you don't have a great deal of skill.
I shudder to think what a MMORPG would be like if it was quality action oriented combat first and RPG stats second. Instead of coming into fights and pressing 1,2,3,4,5 over and over again, you'd be actually engaging your brain.
I'm thinking the exact same thought. Here in Comcastlevania it is 60$/month for bottom of the barrel subscription. They've stopped upgrading their service. Instead of passing upgrades to their subscribers, they've simply added higher and higher tiers. If you want to pay Comcast 200$+ per month for faster Internet, they'll do you the favor.
Right now even the cheapest hybrid cars tend to cost double what a cheap gas powered economical car costs. This means you can go through like 100,000 miles of gasoline before you break even.
Some company should try and make a bare bones economical car with electromagnetic return braking. Aim for a short range if you have to 20-40 miles, and have a or a hybrid gas/electric drive. Basically you'd charge at home, so most of your commute is near-free.
A car like this would empower a lot of low income families who spend a noticeable portion of their income on gas to get to their minimum wage job. Also it would give low income families the chance to shop around more at stores since often you don't go to stores for discounts when the gas money eats up the savings.
The downsides are that the highways would get a lot more crowded, and the power grid would be hammered and need upgrading. A hammered power grid can be offset temporarily by people getting solar installs at their houses. When your car is using lots of electricity, the investment is worth it. Whether you're going to be driving a hybrid now or even a hydrogen later, solar panels help with both.
I bought/sold items in games before. People did it with baseball cards. People did it with magic the gathering cards. Buy/sell/trading of virtual items makes sense.
What sickens me is the hackers who steal people's accounts. This is really not much different than people scamming people's bank accounts, but there is less enforcement. I just don't like hackers stealing peoples video game assets. These people who phish for passwords and steal credentials should have to go to jail if caught. And people should be trying to catch these guys.
You can't write it off as the account being worth nothing, so there is nothing of value lost. The fact that they sell your lewt shows that there is stuff of value there. They're nothing different than common thieves. I just don't know why law enforcement doesn't target them.
It says once the bottle is tapped, you have 1 ms to put your thumb over the mouth of the beer bottle. Of course even gamers know its hard to react sub 33ms, so 1 ms looks bleak... But look at it from another angle: If you see some jerk coming to tap your bottle, there is some reaction time there! So thumbs over the opening folks.
In the not too distant future, education will interface with the Internet earlier and earlier. And education online will become more and more robust and spoon fed. But now in the wild wild west era of education online, you need to be proactive in how you learn online. You absolutely need to be an active learner, but for many disciplines, the content is out there to get you a secondary education without a piece of paper.
I think if I ever make enough money to support myself, I'll move into the whole spoon feed Internet education realm. The easy money just isn't there for small players, but a small player can help a bunch.
I'm reminded of a clip of Futurama where Fry is playing a video game in the year 3000. He is just laying on the couch, staring into the ceiling and pressing the same button over and over.
I was one the first successful macro/botter in Asheron's Call. I invented the drain health bot, auto melee combat bot and the cracked shard bot. I told Turbine,"Fix your game and it wouldn't be bottable." I used the exact same argument as you,"If you can beat the game by repeatedly hitting the same buttons over and over, your game is fundamentally boring."
Actually a lot of wealthy people love the government as to way to get wealthy themselves.
They pay some greedy(as opposed to one who's interested in serving the people) politician a little money. Then the greedy politician borrows from the national debt and pays back his campaign contributors. The fact that the non-greedy politicians can't get campaign contributors furthers the problem and there is probably no solution to it.
I love the USA, don't get me wrong. I just don't think the way it runs now is sustainable financially. The USA was strongest when everyone owed us money after WW2(surplus). Now jobs are scarce and the debt keeps getting bigger.
What I hated about when I had Verizon was that a good 50% of my calls would be dropped, and most of my calls were shorter than 5 minutes long.
I asked to get out of contract because they weren't holding up their end of the service and they wouldn't let me go. Apparently Verizon gives one sided contracts where they don't have to provide a service on their end, but you need to still pay them.
PS: A Faraday's cage isn't impressive technology, they teach undergrads and possibly highschoolers how to make em. As other people have said, this reeks of advertising. Is this because DICE owns Slashdot now? Is Slashdot on its way to becoming Digg 2.0 2.0?
Sir, you're the type of person I'd like to work with(and hey I'm looking). I typically pick up languages in about 2 weeks to be able to crank out reasonable code then move towards mastery over time. I agree that having a general idea on how to code is better than any specific language. However HR doesn't see that today. They demand you know all sorts of specific technologies as if you couldn't pick them up on the job.
I have 10+ years in C/C++, but haven't touched it much in 4 years so I'm rusty for tests, but I can code in it. I applied to EA, and they had a multiple choice test on arcane syntax. It was pretty horrible. I'm reminded of the time where Einstein couldn't remember how many feet were in a mile. Einstein's reply was "I don't know, why should I fill my brain with facts I can find in two minutes in any standard reference book?” We're still in an era where the hiring practices can reject competent people, but yet still can hire inept people often. At least Google finally realized those "put you on the spot brain teasers" aren't good for interviewing.
Hey, if anyone is looking to hire a solid programmer who's been programming steadily for 24 years, send me an email Jimjobseek AT yahoo.com
I'm a very strong programmer, with a specialization in rapidly prototyping(speed development).
If you're not sure if you want to use a pointer driven data structure or an array, favor the array. In languages like C++, when you use pointers, you can deference it and your code will work perfectly for the time being. So when you're doing your standard debug cycles of checking your code for errors, these can pass by, and not be seen again for days or weeks. A dereferenced pointer can end up causing your code to crash abruptly over completely arbitrary things. The only way to debug this is to read through your entire code base. I also suggest prayer. I find prayer works.
Anyway, if you favor arrays over pointer driven data structures, you simply won't blow your leg off as they say in C++. Your errors will be easier to track down. You have a lot less chance of encountering a bug that you can't easily debug which also crashes your entire program randomly. And finally, you'll become an array master(since you use them so much) so your code will come out faster.
Now some people might disagree with this, but this works for me. Sure there's some times you absolutely need to use a creatively designed linked list, but if you can do it with an array and an unnoticeable slowdown, go for!
PS: I tried applying to Blizzard, and almost got a WOW game designer interview, but HR got switched and they never even gave me a phone interview.
I have a lot of Blizzard props as a gamer, got #1 on ladder in SC/BW, Diablo2(hardcore), and Warcraft3 1v1,2v2,3v3 and first to 1500 wins in Warcraft3.
I never picked up Starcraft2 seriously because I'm busy writing flash games now.
Slashdot Mirror
Shhhh. Now you're just trying to invent a new sport!
The oldest animal on Earth that we know of was killed. I'm sure there's lots of older stuff out there that we just aren't aware of.
I can think of many tools that if used wrong can kill.
3d printers just get bad press because manufacturing is afraid of losing out on money.
Anything that is new will get bad press if people will lose money.
Examples: MPAA/RIAA hated the Internet for sharing songs. So they sued grandmothers for millions and won.
Cable companies are afraid they'll give you too much bandwith and never pay for TV again. So they restrict usages like jerks.
Newspaper is worried that free online newspaper will put them out of buisness. So Murdoc makes threatening claims.
Petroleum giants are afraid of the electric car, so anything something slightly goes wrong with a Tesla, it makes press.
Energy Utilities are afraid of solar, so solar gets all sorts of negative press that it will never fly or be a solution.
It just goes on and on. People with money are afraid of losing their cash cows, so instead of doing what's good for society, they do whats best for themselves. And part of the equation today is,"You can only get away with so much in USA politics. If you can't make a bull shit propoganda story why something is bad for society, people won't elect the crook next cycle." And really, that is about the only thing that keeps the USA from going from suck to blow. So any time someone paints a bullshit propoganda story to you, be a good citizen and dismantle it.
The salt will build up in the evaporation chamber. So if you use your saltwater input to flush it out each loading cycle, some would come out.
I'm not familiar with how salt changes with temperature and if it'd cake on to the inside in such a manner that flushing it would be insufficient. Even if this is the case, what is the rate of crusting up? Could it be solved by a human coming on site once a day or once a week and scrubbing it?
I'm an ace software guy who just got together with some hardware dudes. They say if I catch up with all my tasks at work that they'll let me work on some stepper motors. So there's an off chance I can get around with making mirrors that track the sun and aim it at a focal point manually. So someday I might get around to creating this system, but I'm in no rush to get it done.
There's a few engineering ways to handle that, but the final answer is back to the ocean.
Design a robotic software to keep mirrors aimed at a focal point.
At the focal point, have sea water pumped into a concrete basin.
Have a steam engine that takes sea water input, and makes electricity and desalinated water output
Mirrors or silvery material is relatively inexpensive. Once you developed robotic sun tracking/aiming software, that isn't too expensive either. The electricity generated by the system can go towards pumping sea water into it.
It is like Microsoft Windows doesn't even try to be secure. It isn't too incredibly hard for executables to be unable to hammer system files if a modicum of sandboxing was involved. An example would be if applications couldn't touch things outside their installed directory. There would be a specific protocol for communication between different installed aps. This should have been done back in the win98 era. Because applications are not secure, everyone is paranoid about downloading an untrusted .exe. If Windows was made for the Internet, you should be able to download any application and it be harmless.
Just like how Google attracts a bunch of eyes and then feeds them advertisements, Twitter does the same thing. I'm surprised Twitter doesn't do more sponsored links than it does. I rarely even see one, but they could probably get away with three constantly.
I bought DDO when it first came out because I love Turbine as a company(In my book Asheron's Call 1 was way more fun than WOW). What I found is the same as in PNP D&D, clerics are just superior to fighters. They can do everything a fighter can, minus a few damage ticks per swing, but also have heals. I haven't picked it up lately, but I max leveled in well under a week and beat everything they have. D&D is good for Pencil and Paper, but doesn't make a hot MMORPG system. This is because you advance too rapidly in D&D. In PNP, advancing rapidly is balanced by permadeath, but I've even heard stories of where people "beat PNP D&D" because they had max level characters with so many magic items than no monsters or situation could pose a challenge.
When Nintendo did their world championships, I tried a bunch of the games set up for display. I actually dodged SMB3 because the line was so long. Some of the games were fun, but I was blown away with River City Ransom. Wow that game was really good.
I think there is something magical about games with good action mechanics with a little hackney RPG thrown on top. Another good example is Zelda. The reason these games are fun is that it typically rides you in a perfect difficulty. If the game is too easy, you push far without grinding your guy for levels until it is tough. If the game is too hard, you keep trying over and over, and your guy levels up in the process. Eventually you get strong enough to beat the levels and bosses even if you don't have a great deal of skill.
I shudder to think what a MMORPG would be like if it was quality action oriented combat first and RPG stats second. Instead of coming into fights and pressing 1,2,3,4,5 over and over again, you'd be actually engaging your brain.
I'm thinking the exact same thought. Here in Comcastlevania it is 60$/month for bottom of the barrel subscription. They've stopped upgrading their service. Instead of passing upgrades to their subscribers, they've simply added higher and higher tiers. If you want to pay Comcast 200$+ per month for faster Internet, they'll do you the favor.
Right now even the cheapest hybrid cars tend to cost double what a cheap gas powered economical car costs. This means you can go through like 100,000 miles of gasoline before you break even.
Some company should try and make a bare bones economical car with electromagnetic return braking. Aim for a short range if you have to 20-40 miles, and have a or a hybrid gas/electric drive. Basically you'd charge at home, so most of your commute is near-free.
A car like this would empower a lot of low income families who spend a noticeable portion of their income on gas to get to their minimum wage job. Also it would give low income families the chance to shop around more at stores since often you don't go to stores for discounts when the gas money eats up the savings.
The downsides are that the highways would get a lot more crowded, and the power grid would be hammered and need upgrading. A hammered power grid can be offset temporarily by people getting solar installs at their houses. When your car is using lots of electricity, the investment is worth it. Whether you're going to be driving a hybrid now or even a hydrogen later, solar panels help with both.
I bought/sold items in games before. People did it with baseball cards. People did it with magic the gathering cards. Buy/sell/trading of virtual items makes sense.
What sickens me is the hackers who steal people's accounts. This is really not much different than people scamming people's bank accounts, but there is less enforcement. I just don't like hackers stealing peoples video game assets. These people who phish for passwords and steal credentials should have to go to jail if caught. And people should be trying to catch these guys.
You can't write it off as the account being worth nothing, so there is nothing of value lost. The fact that they sell your lewt shows that there is stuff of value there. They're nothing different than common thieves. I just don't know why law enforcement doesn't target them.
It says once the bottle is tapped, you have 1 ms to put your thumb over the mouth of the beer bottle. Of course even gamers know its hard to react sub 33ms, so 1 ms looks bleak... But look at it from another angle: If you see some jerk coming to tap your bottle, there is some reaction time there! So thumbs over the opening folks.
When gaining the maximum amount of experience is literally press the number 1 every 5 seconds, there's a problem with the game design.
Also I don't think botting is cheating/exploiting. It is more like getting your friend to play your account. It just happens your friend is a robot.
In the not too distant future, education will interface with the Internet earlier and earlier. And education online will become more and more robust and spoon fed. But now in the wild wild west era of education online, you need to be proactive in how you learn online. You absolutely need to be an active learner, but for many disciplines, the content is out there to get you a secondary education without a piece of paper.
I think if I ever make enough money to support myself, I'll move into the whole spoon feed Internet education realm. The easy money just isn't there for small players, but a small player can help a bunch.
I'm reminded of a clip of Futurama where Fry is playing a video game in the year 3000. He is just laying on the couch, staring into the ceiling and pressing the same button over and over.
I was one the first successful macro/botter in Asheron's Call. I invented the drain health bot, auto melee combat bot and the cracked shard bot. I told Turbine,"Fix your game and it wouldn't be bottable." I used the exact same argument as you,"If you can beat the game by repeatedly hitting the same buttons over and over, your game is fundamentally boring."
Actually a lot of wealthy people love the government as to way to get wealthy themselves.
They pay some greedy(as opposed to one who's interested in serving the people) politician a little money. Then the greedy politician borrows from the national debt and pays back his campaign contributors. The fact that the non-greedy politicians can't get campaign contributors furthers the problem and there is probably no solution to it.
I love the USA, don't get me wrong. I just don't think the way it runs now is sustainable financially. The USA was strongest when everyone owed us money after WW2(surplus). Now jobs are scarce and the debt keeps getting bigger.
I'd pass on having my money increase by 1% each day. I have major student loan debt problems.
What I hated about when I had Verizon was that a good 50% of my calls would be dropped, and most of my calls were shorter than 5 minutes long.
I asked to get out of contract because they weren't holding up their end of the service and they wouldn't let me go. Apparently Verizon gives one sided contracts where they don't have to provide a service on their end, but you need to still pay them. PS: A Faraday's cage isn't impressive technology, they teach undergrads and possibly highschoolers how to make em. As other people have said, this reeks of advertising. Is this because DICE owns Slashdot now? Is Slashdot on its way to becoming Digg 2.0 2.0?
Sir, you're the type of person I'd like to work with(and hey I'm looking). I typically pick up languages in about 2 weeks to be able to crank out reasonable code then move towards mastery over time. I agree that having a general idea on how to code is better than any specific language. However HR doesn't see that today. They demand you know all sorts of specific technologies as if you couldn't pick them up on the job.
I have 10+ years in C/C++, but haven't touched it much in 4 years so I'm rusty for tests, but I can code in it. I applied to EA, and they had a multiple choice test on arcane syntax. It was pretty horrible. I'm reminded of the time where Einstein couldn't remember how many feet were in a mile. Einstein's reply was "I don't know, why should I fill my brain with facts I can find in two minutes in any standard reference book?” We're still in an era where the hiring practices can reject competent people, but yet still can hire inept people often. At least Google finally realized those "put you on the spot brain teasers" aren't good for interviewing.
Hey, if anyone is looking to hire a solid programmer who's been programming steadily for 24 years, send me an email Jimjobseek AT yahoo.com
I'm a very strong programmer, with a specialization in rapidly prototyping(speed development).
If you're not sure if you want to use a pointer driven data structure or an array, favor the array. In languages like C++, when you use pointers, you can deference it and your code will work perfectly for the time being. So when you're doing your standard debug cycles of checking your code for errors, these can pass by, and not be seen again for days or weeks. A dereferenced pointer can end up causing your code to crash abruptly over completely arbitrary things. The only way to debug this is to read through your entire code base. I also suggest prayer. I find prayer works.
Anyway, if you favor arrays over pointer driven data structures, you simply won't blow your leg off as they say in C++. Your errors will be easier to track down. You have a lot less chance of encountering a bug that you can't easily debug which also crashes your entire program randomly. And finally, you'll become an array master(since you use them so much) so your code will come out faster.
Now some people might disagree with this, but this works for me. Sure there's some times you absolutely need to use a creatively designed linked list, but if you can do it with an array and an unnoticeable slowdown, go for!
PS: I tried applying to Blizzard, and almost got a WOW game designer interview, but HR got switched and they never even gave me a phone interview.
I have a lot of Blizzard props as a gamer, got #1 on ladder in SC/BW, Diablo2(hardcore), and Warcraft3 1v1,2v2,3v3 and first to 1500 wins in Warcraft3.
I never picked up Starcraft2 seriously because I'm busy writing flash games now.
Speaking of Gauntlet, try out my tribute to Gauntlet Flash Game: Dungeon Run