My god... I could get 200 bucks for my atari? I know it's fun to play and all, but that's a decent amount of cash there. You'd think with 30mil of these sold they wouldn't go for as much. Couldn't you go to GoodWill and find one?
1 of my 2 2600's is still kicking, so longevity isn't too much of a problem.
My spam from that guy in Planet of the Apes
on
Spammer Gets Spammed
·
· Score: 1
I recently got a letter from the NRA claiming that I had been "specially selected" from among the fellow gunowners of my community to fill out a survey intended to be sent to Congress to fight for MY second amendment rights.
Now, this is all well and good, but as a 17-year-old, non-gunowning, green party supporter I found it a little awkward that I had been deemed fit to carry the tremendous burden of this responsibility. I filled out the survey and also included a carefully worded letter to Mr. Wayne LaPierre. I requested that, though I did not register as a member as requested in the letter, that I still be sent the same black/gold hat that membership entitles. I thought it'd go well with my 16-inch Chartlon Heston Planet of the Apes figure (complete with ANSA space suit). Though I don't know if I was able to aid the NRA as they requested, I do think that this junk mail enabled me to vastly improve upon my Chuck H. shrine.
Somehow I think MS's barrel-o-lawyers probably concocted a more legally-sound non-compete agreement than the paper-thin ones you speak of. Then again, due to the same massive legal force, one can only assume that they would be quick to settle a dispute of such a nature given:
A: The large expense of waging such a battle and...
B: The small chance that their contract gets ruled null/void and they have to stop their overbearing practice, thus injuring their ability to retain current staff.
Basically, I bet the contract is OK legally (unless you were to go to a federal court / state supreme court or something and question the constitutionality of someone claiming ownership of your skillset within a certain field), but these folks (the fired ones) could still make a nice dollar or two off of the kind folks at Microsoft for their part in the employees' dismissal.
That CIA site is one of the more informative things I've come across in a while. Thanks. I don't think we need India invading anyone though. Let's give them time to learn about nuclear weapons before they enter into nuclear war eh?
Actually, it would be cool to have a babelfish-esque command "french" or "spanish" or "pig-latin" or whatever. You could pipe a message that is run through that program into an e-mail program or the like and, assuming you improve the translation capability beyond that of babelfish, have seamless interlingual communication - dynamically translated into the reciever's language. It would be relatively simple to program the main part of it, but the individual translation engines would be really difficult (for example, what's the best way to translate? Language 1 -> English -> Language 2, Language 1 -> Esperanto -> Language 2, etc). It would seem easiest to make a common intermediate language since then you'd only have to make a single translation logic for each included language. I wish I had a clue about language beyond introductory Spanish because I'd be all over this. Something like this that is open source (can be included in other applications) would have serious implications in the global business/education community.
Well, it does answer the question. My post was a bit different I think:) - every time someone talks about the laser they add a new tidbit to the discussion. I don't really get this post in the first place though. I mean, it's a pretty easy question to answer. I guess it raised the red flag for MPAA conspiracy, but really anyone who knows anything about DVD knows that this isn't the case in this situation. There are plenty of DVD players (most actually) that'll play CD-R's of some sort. Mine can play CD-R audio/DVD formatted discs because it came out before the dual media laser. The real question is why I continue to post in a thread that I already questioned the usefullness of:)
Some DVD players have 2 lasers, some have 1. A laser capable of reading both CD's and DVD's was developed and first distributed last year or so. It works pretty well for the most part, but seems to have trouble with CD-R's. Perhaps it's all a big conspiracy because Sony uses this laser on PS2's and fears piracy:) - anyway, I think someone linked to vcdhelp.com or the like earlier. Some types of media work better than others. Most DVD players can play at least one type of CD-R media fairly regularly. The real question is whether your DVD player has VCD support (mine doesn't... boooo). Without it, CD-R support is relatively worthless (well, you can burn DVD encoded files to CD-R, but programs to do that are basically nonexistent or way to expensive... plus you can't fit much mpeg-2 video on a cd).
Isn't rotting dead wood necessary for helping the ecosystem? It may improve the look, but if you are really going for "environmentally sound" you should capture the heat from the fermenting bacteria on the rotting trees:)
I'm not against lawsuits in theory either. It is just way out of hand. When you get in an accident, odds are that a lawyer will show up before the ambulence. It's to the point where you're guaranteed to lose money if you don't sue or capitolize on class action when you get the chance. Good point on wealth distribution - but I don't want my wealth being redistributed to pay for a lawyer's yacht. With every step of wealth distribution until the benefits return to you, valuable natural resources are wasted (building the yacht, power for the computer, dew for the nerds). To say that I'm somehow aiding the development of a socialist state by getting sued into oblivion is going a bit far:)
Good point, but from a consumer standpoint, I noticed little effort on the part of Toshiba to seek class members. I imagine they payed out quite a bit, but it was probably dwarfed by the payment to the lawyers. Personally, I don't see how Toshiba could even be held accountable for this if it WAS a quasi-major issue. They released a software fix, what else do you want? On the other hand, this could have set a major precedent for buggy software/hardware had it gone to court and succeeded (which would have had a good chance in Beaumont, TX). I hate incomplete software as much as the next guy, but Monolith shouldn't be sued because Blood II has more bugs than any game ever:)
I only got a $200 toshiba card (good for overpriced items at their store) because the laptop was aging (486 sattelite or the like). I did refer the case to someone else who had a new laptop and was eligable for the full 435 dollar settlement though. Come to think of it, I should've asked for a finder's fee.
And this is why we need a constitutional amendment against frivilous lawsuits. Don't come yelling to me about how you can't define frivilous (I sure won't try to draw that line), but this is way out of control. Everyone gets hurt accept the lawyers. You see, the lawyers get 30% of the cash, but the defendents pay out all that they lose. Therefore, assuming everyone sues and gets sued one time, the lawyers' pocket books collectively increase by 30% of the total determined fine while those of the US citizens decrease by the same amount. Don't you see it? A conspiracy!
Hmmm... you mean unlike every single other IPO in the history of the stock market? Insiders always get inside deals - thus the name. If you join this class, you are just trying to get rich off the sure-to-follow settlement from Credit Suisse. Was your decision on the price point at which you bought and sold affected by this? Nope. The only thing that happenned was that a couple folks on the inside got to buy a little lower. The stock market isn't a fair place so go stick your money in a savings account if you can't handle it. Or, alternatively, become a trading insider and hop on the next similar deal:) - of course that requires tons and tons of cash, which could be problamatic (for me at least).
I think it's funnier when:
1. Idiot suffers no measurable damage what-so-ever
2. Idiot calls up other idiots who all own some product
3. Idiots call lawyer
4. Lawyer gets 100 million, idiots get 400 bucks, primary idiot gets 25,000 bucks
This is the Toshiba lawsuit settlement for you. The wierd thing is that given the fact that Toshiba probably wrote off $9 billion in taxes yet only a fraction of that was ever claimed, they most likely made money on the deal as well. Otherwise, why would they settle such a blatently frivilous lawsuit (over an error in a laptop floppy disk controller occurring 1 in 500k saves and not even repeatable in a labratory setting). Hell, who doesn't know floppies are unreliable?
And it is not a hoax. That is from a real patent from Kamen that you can get here: http://164.195.100.11/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO 1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm& r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='5,971,091'.WKU.&OS=PN/5,971,091&R S=PN/5,971,091
That said, this type of device is used on his iBOT wheelchair and it is probably just a coincidance that the mobile unit they attached it to looks like a razor scooter:) - if Kamen is so smart, and so convinced that someone will steal his design if it gets leaked at all, he would not slip up and put it in a 6 year old patent. I'd expect something a bit more novel than this (though this alone would be cool). A hovering device sounds neat, but when you think about it, it's tricky to implement. Someone suggested magnetic rails which would agree with the whole "cities will be built around IT" idea, but this could really be done for any type of transportation. Personally, I think this is all a brilliant play on words designed to put us off the trail. The final product will definitely match all of the descriptions in the book proposal, but it a way that no one can predict right now.
Interesting, I always thought that good looking women were a "real man's screw":)
Thanks for the info. The waste of including one with every single product still annoys me though. I suppose there is a definite advantage to the torque provided from the driver design and the depth of the insertion location.
The off-road wheel chair discussed in the article is very real, and very cool. Imagine being a parapalegic and being able to reach the top shelf in a grocery eisle - with perfect balance on two wheels. Then you can bomb on home, climb the stairs to your room, lift the chair again to get on your bed, then hop off. I'm not too familiar with his work other than this, but if IT is as useful of a device, but for the entire population, IT will make loads of cash and probably be pretty cool. From the article (especially the end) it looks to be some type of transportation device. If they are talking about redesigning cities for IT though, I'd imagine IT would have to have some sort of resistance to weather trouble, so it wouldn't be as simple as the hover boards in Back to the Future II:) - interesting how many bttf references in this thread btw.
I imagine by using a hex wrench to attach the "razor-esque-handle" to the body... I've put together roller skates, bicycles, and who knows what else using those bloody things. I imagine there is a hex-wrench factory somewhere that puts out billions of these suckers annually, because every single device that requires minor assembly uses them. What's wrong with a phillips head screw? Are you afraid someone is going to dismantle IT when you aren't looking? Then you probably shouldn't use a hex head because, like I said - they are everywhere!
In photoshop. Yes, clock is hardly everything, but a p4 1500 will undoubtedly whip a 733 g4 in post everything with the exception of a photoshop tuned specifically for an operating system/processor that is made almost entirely for that type of application. No one ever said that wintel machines were better for Photoshop. Hell, even though the g4 is great at it, compare a seti run on the 733 and the p4 1500. Guess who'll win. At equal clocks the g4 would blow the competition away (so yes, clock isn't everything), but at less than half the rate, it just isn't going to match up in most areas.
And how long until some enterprising player in the blank industry decides not to pre-burn that section of the disc? Can you say instant 1000% jump in sales:)... that is unless pioneer or someone patented and licensed out the process to make blanks.
I'd look heavily into driver support before picking up that Radeon. I don't even think they have quality Windows 2k drivers out yet, much less any attempt at a fully functional Linux implementation. The card runs great in windows 9x/me from what I hear though.
Hmmm... I guess you'll just have to haul some feed around in your muscle car to get around the law eh? Everything has a loophole. I used to be a conservative. George (W) Bush changed all that (with a little help from Ralph Nader). By the way, I imagine my manner of death will be by way of gun eh? Wouldn't want anyone taking those away either.
/me notices glaring similarities between AP article at yahoo! (http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010102/us/monol ith_mystery_1.html) and Seattle Times article (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/WebObjec ts/SeattleTimes.woa/wa/gotoArticle?zsection_id=268 466359&text_only=0&slug=mono02m&document_id=134257 598). Now, why again did they bother to teach us the evils of plaigarism in middle school when it is clearly practiced in the real world? Of course, I could be wrong and Mr. Higgins is just an AP writer in addition to his job in Seattle and he chose to hack apart his story and take a second cut at it to make a more terse version better suited to the AP's qualities. Then again... who knows?
Actually, children have been put to trials where the punishment could be death at ages under 14 (I believe one kid was 11. The courts, however, tend to give quadruple life sentences or the like rather than the death penalty though.
BTW, the age of consent (sex) varies between 14 and 18 and the laws regarding it are hellishly confusing. You can also join the army when you are 17 (the army reserve anyway). You can't be drafted till you are 18 though.
Slashdot Mirror
My god... I could get 200 bucks for my atari? I know it's fun to play and all, but that's a decent amount of cash there. You'd think with 30mil of these sold they wouldn't go for as much. Couldn't you go to GoodWill and find one?
1 of my 2 2600's is still kicking, so longevity isn't too much of a problem.
I recently got a letter from the NRA claiming that I had been "specially selected" from among the fellow gunowners of my community to fill out a survey intended to be sent to Congress to fight for MY second amendment rights.
Now, this is all well and good, but as a 17-year-old, non-gunowning, green party supporter I found it a little awkward that I had been deemed fit to carry the tremendous burden of this responsibility. I filled out the survey and also included a carefully worded letter to Mr. Wayne LaPierre. I requested that, though I did not register as a member as requested in the letter, that I still be sent the same black/gold hat that membership entitles. I thought it'd go well with my 16-inch Chartlon Heston Planet of the Apes figure (complete with ANSA space suit). Though I don't know if I was able to aid the NRA as they requested, I do think that this junk mail enabled me to vastly improve upon my Chuck H. shrine.
Somehow I think MS's barrel-o-lawyers probably concocted a more legally-sound non-compete agreement than the paper-thin ones you speak of. Then again, due to the same massive legal force, one can only assume that they would be quick to settle a dispute of such a nature given:
A: The large expense of waging such a battle and...
B: The small chance that their contract gets ruled null/void and they have to stop their overbearing practice, thus injuring their ability to retain current staff.
Basically, I bet the contract is OK legally (unless you were to go to a federal court / state supreme court or something and question the constitutionality of someone claiming ownership of your skillset within a certain field), but these folks (the fired ones) could still make a nice dollar or two off of the kind folks at Microsoft for their part in the employees' dismissal.
Actually, he could say that the police kill small children. It just has to be obviously satirical.
That CIA site is one of the more informative things I've come across in a while. Thanks. I don't think we need India invading anyone though. Let's give them time to learn about nuclear weapons before they enter into nuclear war eh?
Actually, it would be cool to have a babelfish-esque command "french" or "spanish" or "pig-latin" or whatever. You could pipe a message that is run through that program into an e-mail program or the like and, assuming you improve the translation capability beyond that of babelfish, have seamless interlingual communication - dynamically translated into the reciever's language. It would be relatively simple to program the main part of it, but the individual translation engines would be really difficult (for example, what's the best way to translate? Language 1 -> English -> Language 2, Language 1 -> Esperanto -> Language 2, etc). It would seem easiest to make a common intermediate language since then you'd only have to make a single translation logic for each included language. I wish I had a clue about language beyond introductory Spanish because I'd be all over this. Something like this that is open source (can be included in other applications) would have serious implications in the global business/education community.
Well, it does answer the question. My post was a bit different I think :) - every time someone talks about the laser they add a new tidbit to the discussion. I don't really get this post in the first place though. I mean, it's a pretty easy question to answer. I guess it raised the red flag for MPAA conspiracy, but really anyone who knows anything about DVD knows that this isn't the case in this situation. There are plenty of DVD players (most actually) that'll play CD-R's of some sort. Mine can play CD-R audio/DVD formatted discs because it came out before the dual media laser. The real question is why I continue to post in a thread that I already questioned the usefullness of :)
Some DVD players have 2 lasers, some have 1. A laser capable of reading both CD's and DVD's was developed and first distributed last year or so. It works pretty well for the most part, but seems to have trouble with CD-R's. Perhaps it's all a big conspiracy because Sony uses this laser on PS2's and fears piracy :) - anyway, I think someone linked to vcdhelp.com or the like earlier. Some types of media work better than others. Most DVD players can play at least one type of CD-R media fairly regularly. The real question is whether your DVD player has VCD support (mine doesn't... boooo). Without it, CD-R support is relatively worthless (well, you can burn DVD encoded files to CD-R, but programs to do that are basically nonexistent or way to expensive... plus you can't fit much mpeg-2 video on a cd).
Isn't rotting dead wood necessary for helping the ecosystem? It may improve the look, but if you are really going for "environmentally sound" you should capture the heat from the fermenting bacteria on the rotting trees :)
I'm not against lawsuits in theory either. It is just way out of hand. When you get in an accident, odds are that a lawyer will show up before the ambulence. It's to the point where you're guaranteed to lose money if you don't sue or capitolize on class action when you get the chance. Good point on wealth distribution - but I don't want my wealth being redistributed to pay for a lawyer's yacht. With every step of wealth distribution until the benefits return to you, valuable natural resources are wasted (building the yacht, power for the computer, dew for the nerds). To say that I'm somehow aiding the development of a socialist state by getting sued into oblivion is going a bit far :)
Good point, but from a consumer standpoint, I noticed little effort on the part of Toshiba to seek class members. I imagine they payed out quite a bit, but it was probably dwarfed by the payment to the lawyers. Personally, I don't see how Toshiba could even be held accountable for this if it WAS a quasi-major issue. They released a software fix, what else do you want? On the other hand, this could have set a major precedent for buggy software/hardware had it gone to court and succeeded (which would have had a good chance in Beaumont, TX). I hate incomplete software as much as the next guy, but Monolith shouldn't be sued because Blood II has more bugs than any game ever :)
I only got a $200 toshiba card (good for overpriced items at their store) because the laptop was aging (486 sattelite or the like). I did refer the case to someone else who had a new laptop and was eligable for the full 435 dollar settlement though. Come to think of it, I should've asked for a finder's fee.
And this is why we need a constitutional amendment against frivilous lawsuits. Don't come yelling to me about how you can't define frivilous (I sure won't try to draw that line), but this is way out of control. Everyone gets hurt accept the lawyers. You see, the lawyers get 30% of the cash, but the defendents pay out all that they lose. Therefore, assuming everyone sues and gets sued one time, the lawyers' pocket books collectively increase by 30% of the total determined fine while those of the US citizens decrease by the same amount. Don't you see it? A conspiracy!
Hmmm... you mean unlike every single other IPO in the history of the stock market? Insiders always get inside deals - thus the name. If you join this class, you are just trying to get rich off the sure-to-follow settlement from Credit Suisse. Was your decision on the price point at which you bought and sold affected by this? Nope. The only thing that happenned was that a couple folks on the inside got to buy a little lower. The stock market isn't a fair place so go stick your money in a savings account if you can't handle it. Or, alternatively, become a trading insider and hop on the next similar deal :) - of course that requires tons and tons of cash, which could be problamatic (for me at least).
I think it's funnier when: 1. Idiot suffers no measurable damage what-so-ever 2. Idiot calls up other idiots who all own some product 3. Idiots call lawyer 4. Lawyer gets 100 million, idiots get 400 bucks, primary idiot gets 25,000 bucks This is the Toshiba lawsuit settlement for you. The wierd thing is that given the fact that Toshiba probably wrote off $9 billion in taxes yet only a fraction of that was ever claimed, they most likely made money on the deal as well. Otherwise, why would they settle such a blatently frivilous lawsuit (over an error in a laptop floppy disk controller occurring 1 in 500k saves and not even repeatable in a labratory setting). Hell, who doesn't know floppies are unreliable?
And it is not a hoax. That is from a real patent from Kamen that you can get here: http://164.195.100.11/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO 1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm& r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='5,971,091'.WKU.&OS=PN/5,971,091&R S=PN/5,971,091
That said, this type of device is used on his iBOT wheelchair and it is probably just a coincidance that the mobile unit they attached it to looks like a razor scooter :) - if Kamen is so smart, and so convinced that someone will steal his design if it gets leaked at all, he would not slip up and put it in a 6 year old patent. I'd expect something a bit more novel than this (though this alone would be cool). A hovering device sounds neat, but when you think about it, it's tricky to implement. Someone suggested magnetic rails which would agree with the whole "cities will be built around IT" idea, but this could really be done for any type of transportation. Personally, I think this is all a brilliant play on words designed to put us off the trail. The final product will definitely match all of the descriptions in the book proposal, but it a way that no one can predict right now.
Interesting, I always thought that good looking women were a "real man's screw" :)
Thanks for the info. The waste of including one with every single product still annoys me though. I suppose there is a definite advantage to the torque provided from the driver design and the depth of the insertion location.
The off-road wheel chair discussed in the article is very real, and very cool. Imagine being a parapalegic and being able to reach the top shelf in a grocery eisle - with perfect balance on two wheels. Then you can bomb on home, climb the stairs to your room, lift the chair again to get on your bed, then hop off. I'm not too familiar with his work other than this, but if IT is as useful of a device, but for the entire population, IT will make loads of cash and probably be pretty cool. From the article (especially the end) it looks to be some type of transportation device. If they are talking about redesigning cities for IT though, I'd imagine IT would have to have some sort of resistance to weather trouble, so it wouldn't be as simple as the hover boards in Back to the Future II :) - interesting how many bttf references in this thread btw.
I imagine by using a hex wrench to attach the "razor-esque-handle" to the body... I've put together roller skates, bicycles, and who knows what else using those bloody things. I imagine there is a hex-wrench factory somewhere that puts out billions of these suckers annually, because every single device that requires minor assembly uses them. What's wrong with a phillips head screw? Are you afraid someone is going to dismantle IT when you aren't looking? Then you probably shouldn't use a hex head because, like I said - they are everywhere!
In photoshop. Yes, clock is hardly everything, but a p4 1500 will undoubtedly whip a 733 g4 in post everything with the exception of a photoshop tuned specifically for an operating system/processor that is made almost entirely for that type of application. No one ever said that wintel machines were better for Photoshop. Hell, even though the g4 is great at it, compare a seti run on the 733 and the p4 1500. Guess who'll win. At equal clocks the g4 would blow the competition away (so yes, clock isn't everything), but at less than half the rate, it just isn't going to match up in most areas.
And how long until some enterprising player in the blank industry decides not to pre-burn that section of the disc? Can you say instant 1000% jump in sales :) ... that is unless pioneer or someone patented and licensed out the process to make blanks.
I'd look heavily into driver support before picking up that Radeon. I don't even think they have quality Windows 2k drivers out yet, much less any attempt at a fully functional Linux implementation. The card runs great in windows 9x/me from what I hear though.
Hmmm... I guess you'll just have to haul some feed around in your muscle car to get around the law eh? Everything has a loophole. I used to be a conservative. George (W) Bush changed all that (with a little help from Ralph Nader). By the way, I imagine my manner of death will be by way of gun eh? Wouldn't want anyone taking those away either.
/me notices glaring similarities between AP article at yahoo! (http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010102/us/monol ith_mystery_1.html) and Seattle Times article (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/WebObjec ts/SeattleTimes.woa/wa/gotoArticle?zsection_id=268 466359&text_only=0&slug=mono02m&document_id=134257 598). Now, why again did they bother to teach us the evils of plaigarism in middle school when it is clearly practiced in the real world? Of course, I could be wrong and Mr. Higgins is just an AP writer in addition to his job in Seattle and he chose to hack apart his story and take a second cut at it to make a more terse version better suited to the AP's qualities. Then again... who knows?
Actually, children have been put to trials where the punishment could be death at ages under 14 (I believe one kid was 11. The courts, however, tend to give quadruple life sentences or the like rather than the death penalty though. BTW, the age of consent (sex) varies between 14 and 18 and the laws regarding it are hellishly confusing. You can also join the army when you are 17 (the army reserve anyway). You can't be drafted till you are 18 though.