Stop, you're scaring me. It always gives me a bit of a shock when I'm talking to someone and ask them "Remember when the first Star Wars movie came out" and they say "dude, I was born in 1980".
It's about time somebody realized the true way to keep information safe. Don't store it [in buildings] where there is a path to [an outside telephone line or mailbox]!
The information is useless if it can't be accessed, bonehead.
Re:Speaking of retards.
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 1
Geez, doesn't anybody read the articles anymore? The thing has an automatic follow mode, so you don't have to "lug" it anywhere.
Until you run the batteries down.
I have friends that spend well over $1000 on mountain bikes in places where there are no mountains. This thing is a bargain by comparison.
At a price of $8000 now and $3000 a YEAR from now, even the most ridiculous carbon-fiber-shock-absorbing-gps-enabled mountain bike can be had for less. Hardly a bargain no matter how you compare it. And lack of mountains does not degrade the utility of a mountain bike. It just makes you look a bit silly.
your right except the USPS isn't run by the federal goverment... it is actually a private company.
Nonsense! Can you buy stock in the USPS? Does the USPS have a "CEO"? Hmmm? I don't THINK so! The Postal Service is a federal agency that was created by vote of the Continental Congress in 1775 under the direction of Benjamin Franklin, the first Postmaster General. Article IX of The Articles of Confederation codified the Postal Service as the only official mail delivery service in 1781. The USPS was officially codified as a part of our CURRENT federal government in 1789, and permanently made an executive department by Andrew Jackson. The USPS never has been a "private company". You're mis-interpretting the "self-funded" status of the USPS to mean that it's not part of the federal government. In reality, self-funded only means that they aren't subsidized by the general fund. If they need more money, they need to raise the price of delivery.
Next time, do a little simple research and you won't sound like such a fool.
The driver is just software. When Quake3 asks it to do something for the first time, it simply checks the filename attached to the process handle and sets a flag accordingly.
What?!? Do you know what a malfunctioning engine does? It stops running and becomes an inert mass of metal. It doesn't blow up, it doesn't go hogwild and shoot fragments at random intervals, it just stops. The worst it can do is catch fire, and if that happens there are multiple redundant fire suppression systems to put it out. The only time a malfunctioning engine could cause structural damage is when it throws a turbine blade, and I daresay there isn't time to "jettison" the engine when that happens. It's far more dangerous to drop several thousand pounds off one side of a balanced aircraft- it makes it a lot nigh impossible to fly. It's safer to leave the engine on the wing and keep the plane under control. Besides the obvious reason for not having ejectable engines (i.e. the laws of physics), there is also the small matter of FAA regulations which prohibit such things. Civil aircraft aren't allowed to have ejection seats either, for the same reason. Do you really think it's a good idea for a pilot to be able to pop loose an engine if he gets a fire warning light and panics? What if he's flying over, say, New York at the time and drops that chunk of hot metal into someone's house? No, they want the pilot to make every effort to get that plane down safely without dropping ANYTHING off it.
Ejectable engines. Good God where do you people get these ludicrous notions...
at a decent resolution without compression figure 50MB per shot x 24 exposures on a roll = 1.2GB per *roll*.
There's absolutely no reason why digital photos can't be saved using lossless compression. Saying you need 50MB to store a digital image is like saying you need a 36"x36" folder to store un-folded road maps: it begs the question "why the fuck would you do that?"
"Super high Quality" pics aren't going to make it for a John Shaw or anyone else who wants to be able to generate large, high-quality prints. Case in point: The stock agency I shoot for wants nothing less than 4000 DPI scans, in TIFF format. That means about 50 MB per picture.
TIFF is an uncompressed format. They want TIFFs because they're guaranteed not to have any loss from compression. Those "Super High Quality" pics you deride likely have the same resolution as the TIFF images you laud, only they're stored as lossless JPEGs. The reason the stock agency you shoot for wants TIFFs and not lossless JPEGS is that they can't trust techno-illiterate photographers not to inadvertently submit JPEGs with the "lossy" compression set to 50% or some such. TIFF isn't necessarily better quality, it's just a foolproof safeguard against stupidity.
"Digital "film", regardless of media type, is SO cheap"
Its extremely expensive, compared to film, if you are comparing one roll of film with the cost of the ram to store the equivalent number of pics
But one doesn't leave digital photos in RAM, silly. I have a pair of 256MB CompactFlash cards for my camera and they hold ~90 frames each at SuperHighResolution- cost: ~$200. How much does one pay for eight 24-shot rolls of 35mm? With decent film you could get 'em for $40. The important distinction is, when I shoot my 180 frames digital, I can dump them into my laptop and take 180 more. Not so with film. Shoot your 180 frames of 35mm and it's time to buy film. After your sixth time buying $40 worth of film, you've spent more than I did. 35mm Film is more costly than flash ram because it's NOT REUSABLE!
There are lots of standards that were at one time mass-used, but which are now difficult or impossible to find working "readers" for.
Examples off the top of my head:
Records
8-track tapes
5.25 floppies
There's an important distiction between, say, 8-Track and GIF87: The former requires a physical device, while the latter requires only software. Given a written description of the format, I could whip up a GIF decoder in no time. Building an 8-Track player from scratch is a slightly trickier proposition.
but the kill-at-a-click mentality is not something I would want to see in the military
Do you think the current real-life training teaches soldiers to reflect deeply upon what they're doing before they pull the trigger? Morality of War arguments don't come up in a firefight. It's kill or be killed. Recruits spend the first few months learning to aim for the center of mass (middle of the torso) and squeeze the trigger until they can do it without hesitation. Sounds like "robot school", but a soldier who can't shoot without thinking first is dead meat.
Far from desensitizing me, I found that my army training actually made me think about the reality of violent conflict. That's because we were also trained to give combat first aid, which dealt a lot with how to treat gunshot wounds, burns, and fractures. Even the dry, by-the-numbers methods we learned were pretty horrifying. Checking for exit wounds, sucking chest wounds, etc. It made me want to do whatever was necessary to avoid getting shot and gave me the utmost respect for the power of weaponry. I haven't been in so much as a fistfight since then. How much does a gang-banger think about what it means to shoot someone? TV and movies are the biggest problem. Not that they desensitize so much, but that they portray gunfighting so unrealistically. I worry less about the army turning out mindless killing machines than I do about getting shot by some wiener kid who thinks a gun will get him respect, 'cause he can shoot anyone who "disses" him.
I don't read gaming magazines anymore. Most writers for these publications are self important idiots who think they know more than they do, and think that because they play games, they are fit to design them and even talk about hardware.
I found it somewhat amusing that the HardOCP fellow who wrote the article was impressed by readers' ability to load a DLL into a hex editor and search for a string. quote:
"We immediately started getting feedback from programmers with skills far beyond mine, looking deeper into the drivers."
Yeah, programmers. That's what they were. They have WinHex. Sheesh.
Sorry, but this is one of my pet peeves. Irradiated != radioactive
It's ignorant comments about "radioactive food" that have kept radiation-sterilized foods with indefinite shelf lives from being available. If it wasn't for morons like you thinking an/or saying that freakin' X-rays (are your teeth radioactive from your dental visits?) made your coffee radioactive, I'd be able to eat steak every night of a two week backcountry hiking trip. I blame YOUR KIND for all those crappy freeze dried dinners I've had to eat.
I will repeat myself.
900MHz does *not* require line of sight. My company has been deploying 900Mhz Wi-Lan [wi-lan.com] Hopper radios for a year now in NON-line of site situations. We are getting 1M of throughput. They work like a champ.
Err... radio waves travel in STRAIGHT LINES, barring some fancy reflector work. How are these Wi-Lan units communicating if they're not within LOS of one another? Look, just because YOU cant see the radio hub doesn't mean the antenna can't. Radios "see" using (duh) radio waves which go THROUGH solid objects. True, UHF can be received via reflection, but usually it doesn't work very well.
Don't worry. Take a look at the images of Jesus you find in the various christian religions. Doesn't exactly look like a person of semitic descent, does he. When Luke is worshipped in the future, he will be a comfortably idealized Luke. Religions work best when their prophet doesn't make worshippers uncomfortable by being "foreign-looking", or even "bad-actor resembling".
How many minutes does it take to decide if you are going to destroy the world or not, based solely on a preliminary evaluation of missile trajectories?
About five minutes, and that's only if you know nothing about the launch vehicle. As soon as the rocket engines shut off it's a simple matter of BALLISTICS. Anyone with enough physics knowledge can figure it out. So the answer to your question is "five minutes or so". Given a flight time of ~30min, that leaves ~20min to hem and haw about the morality of war before you decide that "them pinkos gotta go" and launch a retaliatory strike.
Besides, it's pretty obvious that World War III has started when NORAD picks up 500+ separate launches in the space of a few minutes.
And didn't they recently release the more detailed gps signal to public use anyway..
They quit inducing errors in the "public" signal. The military signal is still encrypted and is still slightly more accurate. The public signal can be returned to "random error mode" at any time. The error can even be activated over specific geographic locations only.
Heh. Not much of a coincidence. Nearly everyone who plays with FS2 tries putting an airliner into the WTC, just to see how it looks. I spent an hour doing it once.
Nobody seemed interested in explaining just why someone who has had US Intelligence Russian language and interragation training happened to coincidentally win a scholarship to Russia.
None of that training is particularly unusual. If the military trains you as a linguist, there are really only three jobs you'll end up in as an enlisted schmoe: 98G-Voice Intercept Operator, 98C-Intelligence Analyst, and 97E-Interrogator. I myself was trained as a Russian linguist by the US Army. I initially was going to be an "interrogator", but that job title is quite misleading. A military "interrogator" is actually little more than a translator with some extra training in interviewing people. Interrogation only happens if POWs are captured in wartime. I chose to become an "analyst", which is far more spy-like but still not really noteworthy. Most people in Military Intelligence don't go on to become CIA agents. Most of us decided that the military is a crock and left after our enlistments were up. I don't find it at all surprising that this guy decided to pursue the one interesting/useful thing the military taught him (the Russian language) and earned a scholarship to go to a country where he could expand that knowledge.
In short, don't assume that just because someone was once in the military that they are forever a slavish toady of the US intelligence machine bent on spying for their country to thwart the "red menace".
The precedent the tax man is using is "the Ice Capades had to pay taxes on their costumes"? This is nothing like that. Those costumes, when not in use, "live" in L.A. County. This satellite is ALWAYS in use, and even when they're done with it, it stays in orbit. It's no more a piece of "moveable property" than a pre-fab house which is trucked on site and assembled. Even if it weren't in geo-sync orbit and was doing once around the earth every hour, it wouldn't be any more "moveable" than a freakin' merry-go-round. Sleazy government weasels...
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Stop, you're scaring me. It always gives me a bit of a shock when I'm talking to someone and ask them "Remember when the first Star Wars movie came out" and they say "dude, I was born in 1980".
It's about time somebody realized the true way to keep information safe. Don't store it [in buildings] where there is a path to [an outside telephone line or mailbox]!
The information is useless if it can't be accessed, bonehead.
Geez, doesn't anybody read the articles anymore? The thing has an automatic follow mode, so you don't have to "lug" it anywhere.
Until you run the batteries down.
I have friends that spend well over $1000 on mountain bikes in places where there are no mountains. This thing is a bargain by comparison.
At a price of $8000 now and $3000 a YEAR from now, even the most ridiculous carbon-fiber-shock-absorbing-gps-enabled mountain bike can be had for less. Hardly a bargain no matter how you compare it. And lack of mountains does not degrade the utility of a mountain bike. It just makes you look a bit silly.
your right except the USPS isn't run by the federal goverment... it is actually a private company.
Nonsense! Can you buy stock in the USPS? Does the USPS have a "CEO"? Hmmm? I don't THINK so! The Postal Service is a federal agency that was created by vote of the Continental Congress in 1775 under the direction of Benjamin Franklin, the first Postmaster General. Article IX of The Articles of Confederation codified the Postal Service as the only official mail delivery service in 1781. The USPS was officially codified as a part of our CURRENT federal government in 1789, and permanently made an executive department by Andrew Jackson. The USPS never has been a "private company". You're mis-interpretting the "self-funded" status of the USPS to mean that it's not part of the federal government. In reality, self-funded only means that they aren't subsidized by the general fund. If they need more money, they need to raise the price of delivery.
Next time, do a little simple research and you won't sound like such a fool.
The driver is just software. When Quake3 asks it to do something for the first time, it simply checks the filename attached to the process handle and sets a flag accordingly.
What?!? Do you know what a malfunctioning engine does? It stops running and becomes an inert mass of metal. It doesn't blow up, it doesn't go hogwild and shoot fragments at random intervals, it just stops. The worst it can do is catch fire, and if that happens there are multiple redundant fire suppression systems to put it out. The only time a malfunctioning engine could cause structural damage is when it throws a turbine blade, and I daresay there isn't time to "jettison" the engine when that happens. It's far more dangerous to drop several thousand pounds off one side of a balanced aircraft- it makes it a lot nigh impossible to fly. It's safer to leave the engine on the wing and keep the plane under control. Besides the obvious reason for not having ejectable engines (i.e. the laws of physics), there is also the small matter of FAA regulations which prohibit such things. Civil aircraft aren't allowed to have ejection seats either, for the same reason. Do you really think it's a good idea for a pilot to be able to pop loose an engine if he gets a fire warning light and panics? What if he's flying over, say, New York at the time and drops that chunk of hot metal into someone's house? No, they want the pilot to make every effort to get that plane down safely without dropping ANYTHING off it. Ejectable engines. Good God where do you people get these ludicrous notions...
Because lossless compression will get you, at most, a factor of two.
Even by your argument, my point is still valid.
at a decent resolution without compression figure 50MB per shot x 24 exposures on a roll = 1.2GB per *roll*.
There's absolutely no reason why digital photos can't be saved using lossless compression. Saying you need 50MB to store a digital image is like saying you need a 36"x36" folder to store un-folded road maps: it begs the question "why the fuck would you do that?"
"Super high Quality" pics aren't going to make it for a John Shaw or anyone else who wants to be able to generate large, high-quality prints. Case in point: The stock agency I shoot for wants nothing less than 4000 DPI scans, in TIFF format. That means about 50 MB per picture.
TIFF is an uncompressed format. They want TIFFs because they're guaranteed not to have any loss from compression. Those "Super High Quality" pics you deride likely have the same resolution as the TIFF images you laud, only they're stored as lossless JPEGs. The reason the stock agency you shoot for wants TIFFs and not lossless JPEGS is that they can't trust techno-illiterate photographers not to inadvertently submit JPEGs with the "lossy" compression set to 50% or some such. TIFF isn't necessarily better quality, it's just a foolproof safeguard against stupidity.
"Digital "film", regardless of media type, is SO cheap"
Its extremely expensive, compared to film, if you are comparing one roll of film with the cost of the ram to store the equivalent number of pics
But one doesn't leave digital photos in RAM, silly. I have a pair of 256MB CompactFlash cards for my camera and they hold ~90 frames each at SuperHighResolution- cost: ~$200. How much does one pay for eight 24-shot rolls of 35mm? With decent film you could get 'em for $40. The important distinction is, when I shoot my 180 frames digital, I can dump them into my laptop and take 180 more. Not so with film. Shoot your 180 frames of 35mm and it's time to buy film. After your sixth time buying $40 worth of film, you've spent more than I did. 35mm Film is more costly than flash ram because it's NOT REUSABLE!
There are lots of standards that were at one time mass-used, but which are now difficult or impossible to find working "readers" for.
Examples off the top of my head:
Records
8-track tapes
5.25 floppies
There's an important distiction between, say, 8-Track and GIF87: The former requires a physical device, while the latter requires only software. Given a written description of the format, I could whip up a GIF decoder in no time. Building an 8-Track player from scratch is a slightly trickier proposition.
Navy. Airplanes that live on AIRCRAFT CARRIERS belong to the NAVY. Sheesh!
but the kill-at-a-click mentality is not something I would want to see in the military
Do you think the current real-life training teaches soldiers to reflect deeply upon what they're doing before they pull the trigger? Morality of War arguments don't come up in a firefight. It's kill or be killed. Recruits spend the first few months learning to aim for the center of mass (middle of the torso) and squeeze the trigger until they can do it without hesitation. Sounds like "robot school", but a soldier who can't shoot without thinking first is dead meat.
Far from desensitizing me, I found that my army training actually made me think about the reality of violent conflict. That's because we were also trained to give combat first aid, which dealt a lot with how to treat gunshot wounds, burns, and fractures. Even the dry, by-the-numbers methods we learned were pretty horrifying. Checking for exit wounds, sucking chest wounds, etc. It made me want to do whatever was necessary to avoid getting shot and gave me the utmost respect for the power of weaponry. I haven't been in so much as a fistfight since then. How much does a gang-banger think about what it means to shoot someone? TV and movies are the biggest problem. Not that they desensitize so much, but that they portray gunfighting so unrealistically. I worry less about the army turning out mindless killing machines than I do about getting shot by some wiener kid who thinks a gun will get him respect, 'cause he can shoot anyone who "disses" him.
Why don't you learn that using "gay" as a pejorative makes you sound like a queer-hatin' cracker moron.
I don't read gaming magazines anymore. Most writers for these publications are self important idiots who think they know more than they do, and think that because they play games, they are fit to design them and even talk about hardware.
I found it somewhat amusing that the HardOCP fellow who wrote the article was impressed by readers' ability to load a DLL into a hex editor and search for a string. quote:
"We immediately started getting feedback from programmers with skills far beyond mine, looking deeper into the drivers."
Yeah, programmers. That's what they were. They have WinHex. Sheesh.
I just love that radioactive coffee.
Sorry, but this is one of my pet peeves.
Irradiated != radioactive
It's ignorant comments about "radioactive food" that have kept radiation-sterilized foods with indefinite shelf lives from being available. If it wasn't for morons like you thinking an/or saying that freakin' X-rays (are your teeth radioactive from your dental visits?) made your coffee radioactive, I'd be able to eat steak every night of a two week backcountry hiking trip. I blame YOUR KIND for all those crappy freeze dried dinners I've had to eat.
I will repeat myself.
900MHz does *not* require line of sight. My company has been deploying 900Mhz Wi-Lan [wi-lan.com] Hopper radios for a year now in NON-line of site situations. We are getting 1M of throughput. They work like a champ.
Err... radio waves travel in STRAIGHT LINES, barring some fancy reflector work. How are these Wi-Lan units communicating if they're not within LOS of one another? Look, just because YOU cant see the radio hub doesn't mean the antenna can't. Radios "see" using (duh) radio waves which go THROUGH solid objects. True, UHF can be received via reflection, but usually it doesn't work very well.
Don't worry. Take a look at the images of Jesus you find in the various christian religions. Doesn't exactly look like a person of semitic descent, does he. When Luke is worshipped in the future, he will be a comfortably idealized Luke. Religions work best when their prophet doesn't make worshippers uncomfortable by being "foreign-looking", or even "bad-actor resembling".
How many minutes does it take to decide if you are going to destroy the world or not, based solely on a preliminary evaluation of missile trajectories?
About five minutes, and that's only if you know nothing about the launch vehicle. As soon as the rocket engines shut off it's a simple matter of BALLISTICS. Anyone with enough physics knowledge can figure it out. So the answer to your question is "five minutes or so". Given a flight time of ~30min, that leaves ~20min to hem and haw about the morality of war before you decide that "them pinkos gotta go" and launch a retaliatory strike.
Besides, it's pretty obvious that World War III has started when NORAD picks up 500+ separate launches in the space of a few minutes.
And didn't they recently release the more detailed gps signal to public use anyway..
They quit inducing errors in the "public" signal. The military signal is still encrypted and is still slightly more accurate. The public signal can be returned to "random error mode" at any time. The error can even be activated over specific geographic locations only.
Heh. Not much of a coincidence. Nearly everyone who plays with FS2 tries putting an airliner into the WTC, just to see how it looks. I spent an hour doing it once.
Are you aware of what YOUR government does behind your back? Or do you live in some imaginary country without hidden agendas?
and here i thought ! was the generally accepted 'splat'.
Nah, that one's called "bang".
Nobody seemed interested in explaining just why someone who has had US Intelligence Russian language and interragation training happened to coincidentally win a scholarship to Russia.
None of that training is particularly unusual. If the military trains you as a linguist, there are really only three jobs you'll end up in as an enlisted schmoe: 98G-Voice Intercept Operator, 98C-Intelligence Analyst, and 97E-Interrogator. I myself was trained as a Russian linguist by the US Army. I initially was going to be an "interrogator", but that job title is quite misleading. A military "interrogator" is actually little more than a translator with some extra training in interviewing people. Interrogation only happens if POWs are captured in wartime. I chose to become an "analyst", which is far more spy-like but still not really noteworthy. Most people in Military Intelligence don't go on to become CIA agents. Most of us decided that the military is a crock and left after our enlistments were up. I don't find it at all surprising that this guy decided to pursue the one interesting/useful thing the military taught him (the Russian language) and earned a scholarship to go to a country where he could expand that knowledge.
In short, don't assume that just because someone was once in the military that they are forever a slavish toady of the US intelligence machine bent on spying for their country to thwart the "red menace".
The precedent the tax man is using is "the Ice Capades had to pay taxes on their costumes"? This is nothing like that. Those costumes, when not in use, "live" in L.A. County. This satellite is ALWAYS in use, and even when they're done with it, it stays in orbit. It's no more a piece of "moveable property" than a pre-fab house which is trucked on site and assembled. Even if it weren't in geo-sync orbit and was doing once around the earth every hour, it wouldn't be any more "moveable" than a freakin' merry-go-round. Sleazy government weasels...