Re:Back in the day at the commune
on
A Requiem For Saab
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· Score: 4, Interesting
What trounced both of them was an old Model A Ford one of the guys had that still cranked and ran. I thought that was funny.
If you actually consider what the vast majority of road were like back when the Model A was produced, you'd think nothing of it. Cars from those days were >all essentially off-road vehicles, because if you lived anywhere but the center of a big city, you were going to be driving down muddy, rutted cart tracks. Seriously, look at the designs: low gearing and high clearance, the lot of them.
Re:Near-Death Experience of Saab
on
A Requiem For Saab
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Ford rebranded an F-150 truck chassis as a "Lincoln", and it didn't seem to hurt them.
That's because "Lincoln = Ford + extra shiny bits" has been in effect for at least 40 years.
Reduction in the infant mortality rate had more to do with improvements in nutrition and hygiene (germ theory). The early-mid 19th Century is when the modern hospital concept really spread, but there wasn't a significant improvement in infant mortality until the turn of the century. Having a baby is not a medical procedure. More good was done for the IMR (and the expectant mother MR) by getting whoever it was delivering the baby to wash their damn hands than anything else.
As far as I can tell, SMB1 was the first game to use scrolling instead of a Donkey Kong-style single screen or Pitfall!-style page flipping.
Side-scrolling isn't particularly novel. It's an evolution of the Pitfall model that only became possible with the advancement of hardware capabilities. The coin-op game Defender was actually the first, predating SMB by some five years. The only reason you didn't see side scrollers before SMB was that the NES was the first home console powerful enough to do side scrolling.
Additionally, the GP poster's point is still valid, because Super Mario Brothers wasn't the first Mario game, Mario Brothers was--- and it was a non-scrolling, one screen at a time platform game.
What the fuck are you talking about? No one is suggesting we deprive people of the "right to stand up and take credit" for their ideas. Stand up, take credit, nobody is stopping you. What's objectionable is the notion that no one else can say "hey this is a good idea" and use it without your permission--- even if they arrived at the same idea independently.
Where do people get the idea that all you need to do to conquer a country is to have air superiority*? Warfare happens on the ground. Getting infantry into Switzerland in sufficient numbers to take it over has always been more costly than the country is worth.
* mostly it comes from the US Air Force, which to this day still believes the daylight bombing campaign turned the tide of WW2. One of the major citations by the proponents of separating the Army Air Corps from the Army was that without autonomy, they'd be stuck doing close air support for the Army, when what won WW2 was the bombing of Germany's industry, primarily her ball bearing factories. Many years later, a retired Air Force general asked Albert Speer about how they dealt with the bombing of their ball bearing production. His answer (paraphrased): "You were trying to bomb the ball bearing factories? We didn't notice. None of them were ever damaged much." Basically, the fantasy that strategic bombing works is just that--- a fantasy. Men with guns standing on the ground win wars, not planes blowing up random stuff from 20,000 feet.
You are incorrect. A "corporation" is a legal entity. Law comes from government. "Gangbands" can form without being a corporation. If there were no government, there would be no legal structure under which a "gangband" could be recognized as an entity with a subset of the legal rights of a person.
Who the f*k used cells 30 years ago?! Also, there is no constant mass to measure as the amount of cell owners 10 years ago is far from the one now, so this is pure faked corporatism support,
OK, try to wrap your little brain around this: there is no statistically significant increase in brain cancer from 1974 (when there were no cell phones) to 2003 (when there were a shitload). If brain cancer didn't change, but cell phone usage went from 0 to "a whole bunch", the conclusion is that cell phones don't cause brain cancer.
Lots of things changed between 1974 and 2003. It could be that cell phones do increase the chance of brain cancer, but these other factors counteract it.
Not bloody likely. Not only would these mysterious "other factors" have had to coincidentally lowered brain cancer rate to the same degree cell phone usage presumably increased it, but it would have had to do it at the exact same time. This theory gets cut away by Occam's Razor pretty early.
Misread GP comment. Since we're talking about the watts you pay for, the power factor is indeed costing you more money at the meter than the wattage of the CPU indicates... and most cheap supplies have a PF of maybe.85
Eh. That's not special to Apple. It's standard software industry boilerplate. Remember the Win XP install agreement that says you can't use XP to control nuclear reactors? SAme shit.
The logic behind it is that it's your hardware, but their software. Verizon has always considered the functionality of its phones to be wholly and completely theirs to modify and restrict as suits their fancy. It's part of the reason why Verizon has far and away the best coverage, but hasn't completely eviscerated the competition. AT&T coverage may be mediocre, but I can buy a Canadian Google G2 on eBay, hack the OS six ways from sunday, plug in my SIM card, and it works.
some of them piss the hell out of me. No folders in Gmail? I can't get used to it. Sure, there are labels. But I want folders.
Wow. Is it really that hard to pretend they're folders? The only difference is (1) you can't nest labels, and (2) an email can have more than one label. What is wrong with you?
Market cap is a pretty good yardstick of a company's financial resources. There are almost no non-monetary advantages that can't be overcome by an opponent with enough money. And no, Market cap doesn't tell the whole story either. Debt is an important factor. A company may be worth 100 million, but if it owes 200 million, it's not so good. Oh, but look.... Comcast has a Debt/Equity ratio of 67... so in theory 67% of their value is not theirs to spend, as creditors are going to want their money back. Now looking at Google's Debt/Equity ratio.... huh. It looks like Google doesn't owe anyone any money.
Market cap may not tell the whole story, but in this case, it shows what most people already know: Comcast is a crappy, badly run company that makes money only by virtue of its municipal franchise monopolies, and like most cable companies it'll probably eventually end up getting bought by someone else when it eats too many even worse cable companies.
Well, in the immortal words of one of my friends in IT, "it must be something wrong with your setup, because it works fine on mine." Perhaps it depends on where you call internationally. I call Austria, Germany, and Belgium regularly without trouble. Also never had a domestic call not work unless I was out of 3G range (Google Voice is integrated with my G2 cell phone). Maybe it's just localized sunspots in your area, or swamp gas, or a weather balloon, or the phase of the moon.
I have a Google G2 made for Rogers Wireless Canada. Rogers uses the correct 3G data freq like AT&T does, so it works with AT&T, unlike the T-Mobile stuff. There are some barriers to getting at the OS, but the hacking community is very active and has pretty much cracked it wide open. The Google OS is pretty thickly entangled with the OS, but that's to be expected. Still, after many infuriating years trying to get Windows Mobile phones to do anything right, I'm fairly impressed with the G2. You can even download an app from Google that allows you to choose whether to route calls the normal way, using your plan minutes, or via Google Voice, which runs the call over your 3G data connection.... for free (domestically). Basically, the G2 is 95% the phone you describe. It doesn't sync over bluetooth, really, but neither does it via USB, as such--- it's designed to sync over the data network with your Google (voice/gmail/etc) data. There are apps to sync with Outlook (ptui!), but they're a little dodgy. Personally, I find bluetooth to be pretty worthless by its very nature, no matter what platform anyway; but it's no worse on the G2 than it is on any other platform. Definitely better than on Windows Mobile.
They're right only for a limited subset of microbes that people in hospitals are susceptible to. Your body is FULL of "microbes" already. What makes things like staph dangerous is open wounds and weakened immune systems... the sort of thing you generally only see in hospitals. Washing your hands at home because you touched a stick in the back yard is obsessive, not sensible.
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I drive a Volkswagen T3/Vanagon. I'll eat your "safe" Volvo for breakfast.
What trounced both of them was an old Model A Ford one of the guys had that still cranked and ran. I thought that was funny.
If you actually consider what the vast majority of road were like back when the Model A was produced, you'd think nothing of it. Cars from those days were >all essentially off-road vehicles, because if you lived anywhere but the center of a big city, you were going to be driving down muddy, rutted cart tracks. Seriously, look at the designs: low gearing and high clearance, the lot of them.
Ford rebranded an F-150 truck chassis as a "Lincoln", and it didn't seem to hurt them.
That's because "Lincoln = Ford + extra shiny bits" has been in effect for at least 40 years.
Reduction in the infant mortality rate had more to do with improvements in nutrition and hygiene (germ theory). The early-mid 19th Century is when the modern hospital concept really spread, but there wasn't a significant improvement in infant mortality until the turn of the century. Having a baby is not a medical procedure. More good was done for the IMR (and the expectant mother MR) by getting whoever it was delivering the baby to wash their damn hands than anything else.
Assault is anything that makes them think you might batter them, such as shaking your fist or raising your voice.
Don't forget fending off punches, baton strikes, or kicks. That's definitely assault.
As far as I can tell, SMB1 was the first game to use scrolling instead of a Donkey Kong-style single screen or Pitfall!-style page flipping.
Side-scrolling isn't particularly novel. It's an evolution of the Pitfall model that only became possible with the advancement of hardware capabilities. The coin-op game Defender was actually the first, predating SMB by some five years. The only reason you didn't see side scrollers before SMB was that the NES was the first home console powerful enough to do side scrolling.
Additionally, the GP poster's point is still valid, because Super Mario Brothers wasn't the first Mario game, Mario Brothers was--- and it was a non-scrolling, one screen at a time platform game.
What the fuck are you talking about? No one is suggesting we deprive people of the "right to stand up and take credit" for their ideas. Stand up, take credit, nobody is stopping you. What's objectionable is the notion that no one else can say "hey this is a good idea" and use it without your permission--- even if they arrived at the same idea independently.
Do you really need a lesson in elementary cost/benefit analysis?
Where do people get the idea that all you need to do to conquer a country is to have air superiority*? Warfare happens on the ground. Getting infantry into Switzerland in sufficient numbers to take it over has always been more costly than the country is worth.
* mostly it comes from the US Air Force, which to this day still believes the daylight bombing campaign turned the tide of WW2. One of the major citations by the proponents of separating the Army Air Corps from the Army was that without autonomy, they'd be stuck doing close air support for the Army, when what won WW2 was the bombing of Germany's industry, primarily her ball bearing factories. Many years later, a retired Air Force general asked Albert Speer about how they dealt with the bombing of their ball bearing production. His answer (paraphrased): "You were trying to bomb the ball bearing factories? We didn't notice. None of them were ever damaged much." Basically, the fantasy that strategic bombing works is just that--- a fantasy. Men with guns standing on the ground win wars, not planes blowing up random stuff from 20,000 feet.
You are incorrect. A "corporation" is a legal entity. Law comes from government. "Gangbands" can form without being a corporation. If there were no government, there would be no legal structure under which a "gangband" could be recognized as an entity with a subset of the legal rights of a person.
Dumbass.
"More likely"? Do you have something to base this opinion on other than your own idle speculation?
Who the f*k used cells 30 years ago?! Also, there is no constant mass to measure as the amount of cell owners 10 years ago is far from the one now, so this is pure faked corporatism support,
OK, try to wrap your little brain around this: there is no statistically significant increase in brain cancer from 1974 (when there were no cell phones) to 2003 (when there were a shitload). If brain cancer didn't change, but cell phone usage went from 0 to "a whole bunch", the conclusion is that cell phones don't cause brain cancer.
Lots of things changed between 1974 and 2003. It could be that cell phones do increase the chance of brain cancer, but these other factors counteract it.
Not bloody likely. Not only would these mysterious "other factors" have had to coincidentally lowered brain cancer rate to the same degree cell phone usage presumably increased it, but it would have had to do it at the exact same time. This theory gets cut away by Occam's Razor pretty early.
How is the word "good think" as a typo of "good thing" even remotely ironic?
Misread GP comment. Since we're talking about the watts you pay for, the power factor is indeed costing you more money at the meter than the wattage of the CPU indicates... and most cheap supplies have a PF of maybe .85
Power factor is a characteristic of AC circuits. CPUs run on DC.
The fatal email came through a few days before that.
I'm pretty sure nobody died. Did you perhaps mean "fateful"?
...and he loses her privacy to an advertisement company
I was particularly moved by how the despair of realizing that Google isn't a hippy friend drove the basement nerd to suddenly get a sex change.
Eh. That's not special to Apple. It's standard software industry boilerplate. Remember the Win XP install agreement that says you can't use XP to control nuclear reactors? SAme shit.
The logic behind it is that it's your hardware, but their software. Verizon has always considered the functionality of its phones to be wholly and completely theirs to modify and restrict as suits their fancy. It's part of the reason why Verizon has far and away the best coverage, but hasn't completely eviscerated the competition. AT&T coverage may be mediocre, but I can buy a Canadian Google G2 on eBay, hack the OS six ways from sunday, plug in my SIM card, and it works.
some of them piss the hell out of me. No folders in Gmail? I can't get used to it. Sure, there are labels. But I want folders.
Wow. Is it really that hard to pretend they're folders? The only difference is (1) you can't nest labels, and (2) an email can have more than one label. What is wrong with you?
Market cap is a pretty good yardstick of a company's financial resources. There are almost no non-monetary advantages that can't be overcome by an opponent with enough money. And no, Market cap doesn't tell the whole story either. Debt is an important factor. A company may be worth 100 million, but if it owes 200 million, it's not so good. Oh, but look.... Comcast has a Debt/Equity ratio of 67... so in theory 67% of their value is not theirs to spend, as creditors are going to want their money back. Now looking at Google's Debt/Equity ratio.... huh. It looks like Google doesn't owe anyone any money.
Market cap may not tell the whole story, but in this case, it shows what most people already know: Comcast is a crappy, badly run company that makes money only by virtue of its municipal franchise monopolies, and like most cable companies it'll probably eventually end up getting bought by someone else when it eats too many even worse cable companies.
Well, in the immortal words of one of my friends in IT, "it must be something wrong with your setup, because it works fine on mine." Perhaps it depends on where you call internationally. I call Austria, Germany, and Belgium regularly without trouble. Also never had a domestic call not work unless I was out of 3G range (Google Voice is integrated with my G2 cell phone). Maybe it's just localized sunspots in your area, or swamp gas, or a weather balloon, or the phase of the moon.
I have a Google G2 made for Rogers Wireless Canada. Rogers uses the correct 3G data freq like AT&T does, so it works with AT&T, unlike the T-Mobile stuff. There are some barriers to getting at the OS, but the hacking community is very active and has pretty much cracked it wide open. The Google OS is pretty thickly entangled with the OS, but that's to be expected. Still, after many infuriating years trying to get Windows Mobile phones to do anything right, I'm fairly impressed with the G2. You can even download an app from Google that allows you to choose whether to route calls the normal way, using your plan minutes, or via Google Voice, which runs the call over your 3G data connection.... for free (domestically). Basically, the G2 is 95% the phone you describe. It doesn't sync over bluetooth, really, but neither does it via USB, as such--- it's designed to sync over the data network with your Google (voice/gmail/etc) data. There are apps to sync with Outlook (ptui!), but they're a little dodgy. Personally, I find bluetooth to be pretty worthless by its very nature, no matter what platform anyway; but it's no worse on the G2 than it is on any other platform. Definitely better than on Windows Mobile.
They're right only for a limited subset of microbes that people in hospitals are susceptible to. Your body is FULL of "microbes" already. What makes things like staph dangerous is open wounds and weakened immune systems... the sort of thing you generally only see in hospitals. Washing your hands at home because you touched a stick in the back yard is obsessive, not sensible.