Oh, for crying into your soft boiled eggs, what's your point? I didn't claim to have invented anterograde amnesia,
I think he was using the specific types of memory loss those two movies dealt with as a short, amusing way of saying:
"We're not talking about stopping new memories from forming, we're talking about erasing ones that have already formed."
A point which, I think, is fairly important. Anterograde amnesia is an unrelated issue: it's like turning off the faucet. We're looking at ways to empty the tub. No amount of faucet-fiddling is going to get any of that water out of the tub.
The other thing that separates PC games from console games is that game designers generally feel that console games have to be super-easy to use and play, which often translates into dumbed-down titles with little depth.
This is the thing that will forever keep me from buying a console. A friend and I were playing some dumb console FPS/adventure type game on my PSX, and there were these 5 levers on the walls scattered around the maze-- lever up, green light; lever down, red light. We looked everywhere for something that would tell us what positions these levers should be set in to open the door going to the next level. We tried "all up", "all down", and a bunch of semi-random combinations: nothing. Then, after nearly an hour, we found a tiny side-passage that they'd taken great pains to conceal. At the end of it, we found a sixth lever. After setting all six levers up to "green", the door opened. We were pretty disgusted with ourselves. Since then we have a saying when it comes to console games: "green means go"-- the implication being that console games are consistently dumbed down to the point where no puzzle is ever any more complex than making all the red lights green.
In the pre-sept 2001 CIA world factbook, the USA had, if one were to run the numbers, less than 1% of its total gross population classified as 'fit for military service'.
Current figures show 73 million plus "available" for service, with an unknow subset of that classified as "fit" for service. There's no number on that anymore because there's no draft (nor any plan for one) so examining people for "fitness" isn't even done. Previous numbers were based on wild-ass guesses at projected volunteerism anyway, so they're not really meaningful. But even assuming the "1% of total" number is correct, 3 million+ people makes one hell of an army. Couple that with the fact that US military tech is orders of magnitude better than anyone else's and the straight numerical comparison is unrealistic. Furthermore, since there is no nation on earth that could field an army that the US would need to raise a huge army to fight, the point is quite moot. "Force multipliers" are, in this day and age, much more important than sheer numbers. The days of massive waves of foot soldiers armed with rifles are over. Modern communications allow smaller, faster moving units to concentrate on single-point objectives instead of the old-fashioned "take ground and hold it" strategy. Multi-front WW2-style war isn't going to happen again, so NATO, the aAustralians, or whomever doesn't have to worry about it.
If it's yellow or orange (color is depending on make/model - they're the same meaning), the car is telling you that there's a problem, but it's not a serious one (yet).
Mine comes on to tell me my oxygen sensor hiccupped, but then stays on till I get it checked. Stupid Isuzu junk...
The only other level is if it turns red and starts BLINKING. Then you're seriously fucked because that usually means a pretty serious misfire and you're on the verge of blowing your cats, manifold or something else to pieces.
Heh. That's like the TEMP idiot light on my '82 Oldsmobile. It should have been labelled "thar she blows!" instead. It would generally come on when the engine was already overheated.
Hmmm...so they do. But they're the only ones (not even Israel uses it anymore). And even if they were guarding an airport, you'd never see an uzi, as only the stone-faced "unmarked" guys carry them, and they carry them concealed (see picture and read text here. I suspect he saw an AF Nat'l Guard SP with an M-16 (or MAYBE a cop with an MP5) and only knows the word "uzi" to describe anything that's not a pistol or a wooden-stocked hunting rifle.
ONSTAR(tm) system onboard... is there something special about it's gps reciever that would make it worthy to find one at a junk yard and purchace one?
Not really. The Motorola Oncore GPS unit has slightly more informative proprietary software to talk to than your average NMEA serial GPS unit, but it's no better than a decent stand alone Garmin GPS unit.
State troopers, Boston cops, National Guard. Get up in the air - not a one. Undercover agents with hidden Glocks? Maybe, but I would have felt a lot better if they had just lent me one of those Uzis they were flashing around on the ground
Uzis? Which of those guys were carrying uzis? Nasty guard carries M-16's and cops usually go for the H&K MP5... Never heard of a US law enforcement agency issuing an uzi.
For a government that has passed insane laws like the DMCA and the Patriot Act, a constitutional amendment to let Arnie become president shouldn't be all that difficult.
I know you're just making a humorous point, but constitutional amendments are pretty difficult to pass. I mean, nobody ever voted in an amendment in the middle of the night.
Face it, that "10%" thig is never going away...I just hope we can get people to stop thinking that going outside without a jacket will give you the flu!
My latest project is to convince people that a flashing turn signal on their car only works about 50% of the time. I can prove it! working...not working...working...not working...working...not working...
I think there's some murpheys law that says just that. The more complex a machine, the more that can go wrong with it.
Yeah, the old rule about complexity and redundancy. A twin engine plane will statistically have twice as many engine problems as a single engine plane, but the redundancy makes any single failure less dangerous. I suspect with space probe budgets being (ahem) less generous than they used to be, the amount of redundancy isn't what it used to be.
I got a full length coat from my mom. Now I can go out in public without wearing anything underneath it.
Be sure to cut off a pair of trouser legs at about knee height and tie the cut off pieces in place with string on your lower legs just above the calves. That way it looks like you're wearing pants as long as the coat is closed.
You plugged it into AC power at one end and DC came out the other.
Gimme four appropriate diodes and a power cord and I'll build you one. Unless, that is, you're expecting something other than dirty 110VDC....
Getting to DC it the easy part-- it's the voltage conversion that thakes up all the space.
I know that DC power transmission went out with Westinghouse's AC transmission, mostly because DC doesn't really work over significant distances.
Actually, DC is more efficient than AC over long distances. The problems with loss have more to do with the voltage. The reason DC lost to AC early on was that AC is easily stepped up to high voltages for transmission, then dropped to "safe" voltages for local distribution. 100+ years ago, all they had were regular copper-wound inductive transformers, and they only work with AC.The problem we have now is that all our DC devices are slaves to their wall-warts, most of which are copper-wound inductive transformers and require AC power. Being that they all had their own power supplies anyway, all those DC devices have different voltage requirements, usually dictated by the "power-hungriest" component in the device. Thus we have no standard for low voltage devices, and no real hope of seeing a standard anytime soon. The closest we have is 12VDC, but only for devices you could conceivably use in a car! You could set up your own home DC power system, but how much will you end up paying for all the DC-DC converters to match the voltage to the device?
The real problem is that there is no standard connector for low DC voltage. Why isn't there one? When I travel I have to bring 9 power supplies (2 laptops, mp3 player, still camera, video camera, 2 cellphones, razor, toothbrush).
Because there's no standard for low voltage. How many of those items use the same voltage? How many of them are even DC? Some devices are sensitive to as little as 2 volts difference plus or minus, and "low voltage" will generally be anything from 3 to 24 volts, plus they can be AC or DC. The connector isn't your problem-- it's the power your devices require.
Christmas just wouldn't be Christmas without some Star Wars trivia to spice things up now would it!
My mom bought star wars trivial pursuit for the family to play some years back. We only played it the once because the only ones who could answer the questions were me and my brother. It was an odd feeling winning that game-- a 50/50 mixture of proud and pathetic.
Both functions fail to initialize the integer i before performing an operation on it:)
Yeah, I couldn't decide initially whether to fix those or use the uninitialized int's as the example errors, so I chose the third (and worst) option: forgetting to do anything with them at all. Good thing I don't program for a living.
If you didn't notice, the hovercraft lost all powered systems when it went through the electrical storms. What good would it serve the machines to build a helium balloon if all the equipment they floated through the clouds was destroyed?
I don't think it was clear whether it was squid-damage or lightning that led to the craft losing power, but anyway electrical storms aren't magic barriers. Planes get struck by lightining all the time. A tethered helium balloon with a well grounded tether isn't going to be stopped by lightining. I was willing to overlook all the sham physics in the "real world" parts so long as there was a possibility that the "real world" was only and "outer matrix". When it became clear that we were expected to swallow the "people as batteries" premise as plausible, that's where I drew the line.
they quantified it by dividing verified defects by lines of code.
Problem with that is that it assumes the same "code density". Granted, it's probably not going to differ by a factor of six, but remember the old question about programmer productivity:
who's more productive: the coder who solves a given problem with 100 lines of code written in one hour, or the coder who solves it with 10 lines in two hours?
...will give you a threefold difference in line count (specifically counting lines in the main() function). Throw in an identical line using malloc in each, both forgetting to free it later, and you've got a "bug density" of.33 for the former, and.14 for the latter. Heck, you could have two un-freed malloc's in the latter an it'd still only be at.25! I'm not saying the study is wrong-- I'd rather have the code out where I can see it, no matter WHAT the "bug density"-- I'm just saying that I wouldn't take any statistic that is derived using "lines of code" as a variable as a serious, hard number.
The fact that you're not sure whether the kids went bowling that day or not is part of the point: that this has just as much to do with them killing their classmates as goth music.
While I agree that the bowling issue is irrelevant, Moore is clearly a nutcase. His "counterargument" page is mostly confused sputtering that mostly fails to bolster his original claims. As hardylaw.net points out in rebuttal to Moore's backpedalling:
[Moore states]"Far from deliberately editing the film to make Heston look worse, I chose to leave most of this out and not make Heston look as evil as he actually was." Sure. That's why he left out: "As you know, we've cancelled the festivities, the fellowship we normally enjoy at our annual gatherings."
I liked Roger & Me a lot, but he's gotten a little too smugly self-righteous of late.
Haven't most of us given up on the Matrix by now? What did it for me was the part with the squid-firing mechs and "we go over them". So the machines can build levitating/hovering squid machines but they can't figure out how to put a solar panel on a helium balloon? Bah!
Re:Judging from the pictures....
on
USB Menorah
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· Score: 1
The key word is candles, though, or preferably olive oil. LED's don't count as fire even for prohibitions against lighting fires on the sabbath or similar things and are certainly subotimal for candles.
Are you sure? Orthodox jews will not turn on electric lights on the sabbath, and surely you've seen the menorahs with the little light bulbs that you screw in? Why wouldn't LED's count?
The obvious answer to "why wouldn't LEDs count" is "because light bulbs don't really count either". An electric menorah is about as true to judaism as a glow in the dark plastic virgin mary is true to catholicism.
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I think he was using the specific types of memory loss those two movies dealt with as a short, amusing way of saying:
"We're not talking about stopping new memories from forming, we're talking about erasing ones that have already formed."
A point which, I think, is fairly important. Anterograde amnesia is an unrelated issue: it's like turning off the faucet. We're looking at ways to empty the tub. No amount of faucet-fiddling is going to get any of that water out of the tub.
That, and all the damn hippies!
This is the thing that will forever keep me from buying a console. A friend and I were playing some dumb console FPS/adventure type game on my PSX, and there were these 5 levers on the walls scattered around the maze-- lever up, green light; lever down, red light. We looked everywhere for something that would tell us what positions these levers should be set in to open the door going to the next level. We tried "all up", "all down", and a bunch of semi-random combinations: nothing. Then, after nearly an hour, we found a tiny side-passage that they'd taken great pains to conceal. At the end of it, we found a sixth lever. After setting all six levers up to "green", the door opened. We were pretty disgusted with ourselves. Since then we have a saying when it comes to console games: "green means go"-- the implication being that console games are consistently dumbed down to the point where no puzzle is ever any more complex than making all the red lights green.
Current figures show 73 million plus "available" for service, with an unknow subset of that classified as "fit" for service. There's no number on that anymore because there's no draft (nor any plan for one) so examining people for "fitness" isn't even done. Previous numbers were based on wild-ass guesses at projected volunteerism anyway, so they're not really meaningful. But even assuming the "1% of total" number is correct, 3 million+ people makes one hell of an army. Couple that with the fact that US military tech is orders of magnitude better than anyone else's and the straight numerical comparison is unrealistic. Furthermore, since there is no nation on earth that could field an army that the US would need to raise a huge army to fight, the point is quite moot. "Force multipliers" are, in this day and age, much more important than sheer numbers. The days of massive waves of foot soldiers armed with rifles are over. Modern communications allow smaller, faster moving units to concentrate on single-point objectives instead of the old-fashioned "take ground and hold it" strategy. Multi-front WW2-style war isn't going to happen again, so NATO, the aAustralians, or whomever doesn't have to worry about it.
Mine comes on to tell me my oxygen sensor hiccupped, but then stays on till I get it checked. Stupid Isuzu junk...
The only other level is if it turns red and starts BLINKING. Then you're seriously fucked because that usually means a pretty serious misfire and you're on the verge of blowing your cats, manifold or something else to pieces.
Heh. That's like the TEMP idiot light on my '82 Oldsmobile. It should have been labelled "thar she blows!" instead. It would generally come on when the engine was already overheated.
Hmmm...so they do. But they're the only ones (not even Israel uses it anymore). And even if they were guarding an airport, you'd never see an uzi, as only the stone-faced "unmarked" guys carry them, and they carry them concealed (see picture and read text here. I suspect he saw an AF Nat'l Guard SP with an M-16 (or MAYBE a cop with an MP5) and only knows the word "uzi" to describe anything that's not a pistol or a wooden-stocked hunting rifle.
Not really. The Motorola Oncore GPS unit has slightly more informative proprietary software to talk to than your average NMEA serial GPS unit, but it's no better than a decent stand alone Garmin GPS unit.
Uzis? Which of those guys were carrying uzis? Nasty guard carries M-16's and cops usually go for the H&K MP5... Never heard of a US law enforcement agency issuing an uzi.
No it doesn't. Vodka is generally only 40% alcohol. The remaining 60% is non-flammable. Vodka makes a piss-poor molotov.
I know you're just making a humorous point, but constitutional amendments are pretty difficult to pass. I mean, nobody ever voted in an amendment in the middle of the night.
My latest project is to convince people that a flashing turn signal on their car only works about 50% of the time. I can prove it! working...not working...working...not working...working...not working...
Yeah, the old rule about complexity and redundancy. A twin engine plane will statistically have twice as many engine problems as a single engine plane, but the redundancy makes any single failure less dangerous. I suspect with space probe budgets being (ahem) less generous than they used to be, the amount of redundancy isn't what it used to be.
Be sure to cut off a pair of trouser legs at about knee height and tie the cut off pieces in place with string on your lower legs just above the calves. That way it looks like you're wearing pants as long as the coat is closed.
Gimme four appropriate diodes and a power cord and I'll build you one. Unless, that is, you're expecting something other than dirty 110VDC....
Getting to DC it the easy part-- it's the voltage conversion that thakes up all the space.
Actually, DC is more efficient than AC over long distances. The problems with loss have more to do with the voltage. The reason DC lost to AC early on was that AC is easily stepped up to high voltages for transmission, then dropped to "safe" voltages for local distribution. 100+ years ago, all they had were regular copper-wound inductive transformers, and they only work with AC.The problem we have now is that all our DC devices are slaves to their wall-warts, most of which are copper-wound inductive transformers and require AC power. Being that they all had their own power supplies anyway, all those DC devices have different voltage requirements, usually dictated by the "power-hungriest" component in the device. Thus we have no standard for low voltage devices, and no real hope of seeing a standard anytime soon. The closest we have is 12VDC, but only for devices you could conceivably use in a car! You could set up your own home DC power system, but how much will you end up paying for all the DC-DC converters to match the voltage to the device?
Because there's no standard for low voltage. How many of those items use the same voltage? How many of them are even DC? Some devices are sensitive to as little as 2 volts difference plus or minus, and "low voltage" will generally be anything from 3 to 24 volts, plus they can be AC or DC. The connector isn't your problem-- it's the power your devices require.
if((I.lazy == true) && (Length("[BLOCKQUOTE]") > I.laziness))
{
}
I "forgot" to mention that part. ;)
My mom bought star wars trivial pursuit for the family to play some years back. We only played it the once because the only ones who could answer the questions were me and my brother. It was an odd feeling winning that game-- a 50/50 mixture of proud and pathetic.
Yeah, I couldn't decide initially whether to fix those or use the uninitialized int's as the example errors, so I chose the third (and worst) option: forgetting to do anything with them at all. Good thing I don't program for a living.
Heh, yeah, that's /.'s fault. I had it nicely indented, but /. stripped off my leading spaces. Bastards.
I don't think it was clear whether it was squid-damage or lightning that led to the craft losing power, but anyway electrical storms aren't magic barriers. Planes get struck by lightining all the time. A tethered helium balloon with a well grounded tether isn't going to be stopped by lightining. I was willing to overlook all the sham physics in the "real world" parts so long as there was a possibility that the "real world" was only and "outer matrix". When it became clear that we were expected to swallow the "people as batteries" premise as plausible, that's where I drew the line.
Problem with that is that it assumes the same "code density". Granted, it's probably not going to differ by a factor of six, but remember the old question about programmer productivity:
who's more productive: the coder who solves a given problem with 100 lines of code written in one hour, or the coder who solves it with 10 lines in two hours?
I mean, simple stuff like doing this:
The fact that you're not sure whether the kids went bowling that day or not is part of the point: that this has just as much to do with them killing their classmates as goth music.
While I agree that the bowling issue is irrelevant, Moore is clearly a nutcase. His "counterargument" page is mostly confused sputtering that mostly fails to bolster his original claims. As hardylaw.net points out in rebuttal to Moore's backpedalling:
[Moore states]"Far from deliberately editing the film to make Heston look worse, I chose to leave most of this out and not make Heston look as evil as he actually was." Sure. That's why he left out: "As you know, we've cancelled the festivities, the fellowship we normally enjoy at our annual gatherings."
I liked Roger & Me a lot, but he's gotten a little too smugly self-righteous of late.
Haven't most of us given up on the Matrix by now? What did it for me was the part with the squid-firing mechs and "we go over them". So the machines can build levitating/hovering squid machines but they can't figure out how to put a solar panel on a helium balloon? Bah!
Are you sure? Orthodox jews will not turn on electric lights on the sabbath, and surely you've seen the menorahs with the little light bulbs that you screw in? Why wouldn't LED's count?
The obvious answer to "why wouldn't LEDs count" is "because light bulbs don't really count either". An electric menorah is about as true to judaism as a glow in the dark plastic virgin mary is true to catholicism.