Oh, my, god. Becky, look at that planet. It is so big.
Yeah, it looks like one of those yellow-sun's satelite's...
But, ugh, you know, who understands those yellow suns?
Ugh, they only illuminate it because it looks like a total black hole, okay?
I mean its size, it's just so big, ugh, I can't believe it's just so round, it's like, out there, I mean, ugh, gross!
Look! It's just so... Black!
In other news, Enzyte doesn't actually make your dick bigger. Story at 11.
Seriously, who is surprised by this? Having no legal repercussions for false advertising sure makes for a lot of fucked over consumers. Vote with your wallet my ass, the pricks already took my money by lying to me, they'll just lie to someone else to keep their business afloat. It's high time these companies start getting dissolved, with their top execs getting federal PMITA prison time for pulling shit like this.
So, how many followers does a religion need before it's okay to join them? And what about the people who joined before it reached that tipping point? Were they doing something wrong before, but it retroactively became okay afterwards?
I think the term you are looking for is 'Socially acceptable', not wrong/okay.
This site has rankings for various religions which is a little out of date, but probably not terribly far off. The two at the very bottom, Rastafarianism and Scientology are tentatively 'Socially acceptable' depending on your location, but on average are probably at least tolerated. Rastafarianism more-so than Scientology, mostly because of the age of the religion. So 600 million and 500 million compared to an estimated 5.8 Billion people (in 1997) comes out to 10.3% and 8.6%. I seem to recall there being a post on/. a time back about 7% being the magic number for acceptance of a religion. A little searching tells me my memory sucks and it was about the spread of ideas (close to religion) and the number was in fact 10% (read for yourself.)
So, given what I perceive personally to be the social acceptability of those two religions currently, 10% seems about right. Rastafarians aren't particularly shunned, but don't seem to be gaining much "market share", while Scientologists are currently generally regarded as loons.
But you're right, the counterfeiting laws are a lot stronger and a lot more enforced.
Which really just makes sense. If the government allowed just anyone to spend $5 worth of material and effort to produce a $100 bill then inflation would run out of control and wreck the economy. That and the government gets extremely jealous of anyone doing something better than them; they prefer to retain their monopoly on printing money (literally.) Actually, come to think of it, it's probably a lot more the latter than the former...
But most people either do, or don't care. Arseholes with paranoid delusions about the real world bein out to get them, and an inflated sense of self importance, are in the minority.
Your argument is invalid. People that do want people to be able to find them are the people that will willingly use their real names for such services. Allowing those that don't want 'Arseholes' from highschool looking them up to use pseudonyms does not force everyone to use pseudonyms. That would be silly in the case of social networks. Hell, even places like slashdot, which allow pseudonyms, have plenty of people who have screennames that look an aweful lot like real names (whether they are or not is anyone's guess.)
Our fourth amendment is supposed to guarantee our right to be secure in our persons from unreasonable searches and seizures. Now, normally this is applied against the government and their agents. But I would argue that this should also be applicable against other persons and entities/corporations. What right does another person or corporation have to invade my privacy and demand that I suppy a real name? Under certain pretenses this makes sense, such as with banking, and the sale of merchandise. They want to make sure that if you defraud them, they have a real person to come after. That is reasonable. Where does a social network get off on telling me I need to supply a real name, unless they are afraid of me defrauding them? And there-in we come to the crux of the problem. If the social network's database is filled with fake people, then they don't have shit to sell to marketers, and feel' defrauded'.
But the social networks clearly have their heads in the sand if they think they need that marketing database in order to make money. Users under pseudonyms can be served ads just like everyone else. And with a little bit of heuristics, looking at what ads they click, and parsing wall posts etc for keywords, you can still tailor those ads to the user, all without ever knowing who the person is. But social networks view this loss of identity as value lost on their product, and that is, you. And anything that hurts their bottom line must go. User rights, privacy, and good ol' common decency be damned.
And to pre-empt any who may say you have the choice to not use the social network if you don't agree with their practices... Well, I agree, and I don't use social networking sites for that exact reason. I don't agree with all their bullshit. It's just sad that I should even have to make that decision, because they are too fucking greedy to respect their users.
3. Vinyl record. There is some music that you can only get on vinyl because it was never released on CD. CDs are every bit as accurate "more actually" as vinyl but some people feel the defects in the vinyl record add warmth. A good DSP could do the same thing. The problem with most CDs today is that they lack dynamic range. That is a mixing issue. Again Hipster toy.
Sound, as it exists naturally, is analog. So are the way our ears work in receiving sound. CDs are a digital facsimile of those analog signals. For any music that was created from analog instruments (read: 95% of all instruments, and 99.9% of mainstream music) analog technologies such as vinyl records will reproduce that sound far more accurately than digital will. Vinyl is quite literally the sound transcribed onto a physical medium. That is why you can stick a straight-pin into a paper cone, touch it to a turning record, and hear the sound. Zero electricity required. This isn't to say that digital doesn't do a damn fine job of replicating the analog sound. Technology has advanced so far now that we can produce digital copies of analog recordings that sound exactly the same. We can even produce digitals that sound even cleaner than the originals. But the fact remains that the vinyl record, by virtue of design will be far more accurate than digital. The method was designed to quite literally capture the exact waveform that was being produced. So long as that vinyl record stays in mint condition, the sound it produces will be as accurate as the day it was first produced from those instruments.
The inverse is also true. If you use a midi keyboard to record digital music, then CDs will be more able to reproduce that sound accurately than analog would. It's all about sticking with the same format that originally produced the sound. If you want to get truly technical however, digitally produced music, stored to CD, and then played back, is not an accurate reproduction of the sound. This is because it must be converted to analog through speakers in order for our ears to even be capable of hearing it. The conversion from digital to analog, while very accurate thanks to technology today, is not perfect. Analog produced music, stored to vinyl records, and reproduced with analog technology is not perfect either, due to numerous factors that I am underqualified to explain.
Bottom line though is that each format has its strengths and weaknesses. Saying that digital can reproduce analog as well as analog does is simply a perception issue, and technically is not true. Though really, when all we really care about is what we hear, the technicality of it isn't terribly important, is it? I guess I'm just feeling pedantic this morning.:-)
My point being, there are legit gameplay and user experience reasons to require an always on connection.
I halfway agree with you. But it really needs to be a toggle switch. If you require a persistent connection in order to allow people to take their single player toons online at any point they wish, and want to prevent cheater toons from entering the mix, okay, I get that. But I also want the option to turn it the fuck off too. I want that little checkbox to click that says "I accept that this toon will permanently remain offline" and from that point not require a persistent connection. Don't force me to play the way you want me to play simply because you didn't want to write some additional code for the client. It's fucking lazy, and it fucking pisses me off.
So if Blizzard releases this game with the persistent connection as a "locked on" feature, they can lick my hairy nutsack. I won't spend one red cent on it.
Also a very good idea. Thank you for taking my idea and running with it. I was more under the mindset that anyone running an @Home program probably already has a decent grasp on what it's costing them, and giving them a tool to manage that as they wish. Adding another layer above that would certainly help more people make an informed decision on what they're doing, while helping save some of the legwork for those that already are informed.
Maybe some of this will make it back to an @Home dev team and make a difference.:-)
But still, there's safety in numbers, with a 100 point sources sending out jamming signals, it's much harder to triangulate on any single one.
This is only true if you attempt to search for one inside of a field of many. You can't triangulate to a single source when you're in range of multiple transmitters all broadcasting the same source. But nothing says you can't start your search from beyond the edge of the coverage zone where you can easily be in range of one and only one transmitter at any given time. Following the method of outside-in, you could rather easily chip away at the coverage zone. Generally speaking though, yes, it would be harder to triangulate their locations simply because you have to modify your tactics to guarantee success.
And this magic drug being quite strong... on a sy fy network movie special, this drug could liquify your entire digestive system if you ate a virus infested plant or animal. That could be a problem, yeah.
That would just be irresponsible. Such a problem would only occur with an overdose of the medication. The point of having dosages on medications is to limit the duration of their effect on the body before the renal system filters them out. If you gave a person a dose of this medicine with literally hundereds of grams of active ingredient, and the person just so happened to have every cell of their digestive tract infected with the virus, then sure, you might liquify their organs. Of course if that many cells are infected they're probably already too far gone to live anyway.
Exactly, I can take a decongestant and couple Ibuprofin a couple times a day for the week it takes my body to realize the cold is gone. I'd pay $5-$10 a pill if I could take it on day three to tell my body to stop producing phlegm, the battle is over.
How is a sheet of PLASTIC covered in liquid crystals ever more environmentally friendly than paper???
Ask, and ye shall recieve.
1) Creation of paper uses trees, a renewable relatively clean energy source.
Renewable, sure. But how quickly? It takes a long time for a tree to grow to a respectable size. We use paper a good bit faster than we can regrow it through natural recycling.
2) Plasic requires Petroleum.
Actually it doesn't. Ever heard of bioplastics? They use oils and fats from plants such as corn and wheat rather than petroleum.
Degradation of paper is simple quick and clean. Plastic does not degrade so quickly or clean.
Actually some bioplastics are designed to be bio-degradable. They are already in use to make bio-degradable garbage bags.
Just imagine either a landfill with 200 million sheets of paper or a landfill with1 million e-Sheets.. come back in 6 months. Most of the paper has decomposed. 1 million e-sheets are still there showing how environmentally friendly they are.
Using the proper components, none of what you claim as issues in your post will actually be issues. So either you are spreading FUD or you are truthfully ignorant of the subject matter. If it is the former, knock it off. If it is the latter, then I hope you and others have learned something new today.
but outside of a few wackos who is going to fall for this?
I dunno, maybe people that like the environment, and don't take pride in fucking mother nature up her ass just to save a couple pennies on a sheet of paper? But then you'd probably call those people wackos too wouldn't you?
Using this as changable wallpaper is a really awesome idea. If nothing else you could simply change the color of your walls to/from white/black in summer/winter and help augment your heating and cooling bills. Me? I'd design my own wallpaper and change it every month or so. Plus you could print family photos and artwork directly onto your walls! No more frames to square up every time your fat buddy comes over.
That's actually a really fucking dumb idea, when you consider humans use paper at a faster rate than it can be naturally recycled. Recycling it ourselves helps the situation some, but have you ever seen 100% recycled paper? It's not something you'd want to run through your photocopier or laser printer. Recycled paper of any significant quality needs fresh wood pulp to be added to it.
So the solution is not to simply go with one or the other, it is to use a combination of both. If you're printing something that is going to be kept and not reused, then print it on conventional paper. If you're printing something (like say, a newspaper) that is going to get blanked and reused after a short period of time, then use the new shit. Do you honestly think the people inventing this stuff sat down and said "Well there's like no market for this shit, let's waste a bunch of money developing it anyway"? Of course there is a market, and of course this invention will be relevant to us as humans. Any invention that that can help reduce our reliance on natural resources should be welcomed with open arms, not shunned like Quasimodo bearing the black plague...
Well, actually, paper is far more ancient history than buggy whips, being that it was invented nearly 2000 years ago. The buggy whip can only be credited with about one-tenth of that./Pedantic
I get your analogy, but I'd say that paper is still far more relevant to humanity these days than buggy whips. Granted that relevancy is diminishing year by year as computers become more and more commonplace world-wide.
Of course if you really want to split hairs, this shit shouldn't even be called paper. There isn't an ounce of wood pulp in it. Calling it paper only describes its intended usage. With its reusability to cost ratio however, I can actually see this forming an effective replacement for conventional paper. And anything that reduces our reliance on wood is a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, my, god. Becky, look at that planet. It is so big.
Yeah, it looks like one of those yellow-sun's satelite's...
But, ugh, you know, who understands those yellow suns?
Ugh, they only illuminate it because it looks like a total black hole, okay?
I mean its size, it's just so big, ugh, I can't believe it's just so round, it's like, out there, I mean, ugh, gross!
Look! It's just so... Black!
In other news, Enzyte doesn't actually make your dick bigger. Story at 11.
Seriously, who is surprised by this? Having no legal repercussions for false advertising sure makes for a lot of fucked over consumers. Vote with your wallet my ass, the pricks already took my money by lying to me, they'll just lie to someone else to keep their business afloat. It's high time these companies start getting dissolved, with their top execs getting federal PMITA prison time for pulling shit like this.
So, how many followers does a religion need before it's okay to join them? And what about the people who joined before it reached that tipping point? Were they doing something wrong before, but it retroactively became okay afterwards?
I think the term you are looking for is 'Socially acceptable', not wrong/okay.
/. a time back about 7% being the magic number for acceptance of a religion. A little searching tells me my memory sucks and it was about the spread of ideas (close to religion) and the number was in fact 10% (read for yourself.)
This site has rankings for various religions which is a little out of date, but probably not terribly far off. The two at the very bottom, Rastafarianism and Scientology are tentatively 'Socially acceptable' depending on your location, but on average are probably at least tolerated. Rastafarianism more-so than Scientology, mostly because of the age of the religion. So 600 million and 500 million compared to an estimated 5.8 Billion people (in 1997) comes out to 10.3% and 8.6%. I seem to recall there being a post on
So, given what I perceive personally to be the social acceptability of those two religions currently, 10% seems about right. Rastafarians aren't particularly shunned, but don't seem to be gaining much "market share", while Scientologists are currently generally regarded as loons.
But you're right, the counterfeiting laws are a lot stronger and a lot more enforced.
Which really just makes sense. If the government allowed just anyone to spend $5 worth of material and effort to produce a $100 bill then inflation would run out of control and wreck the economy. That and the government gets extremely jealous of anyone doing something better than them; they prefer to retain their monopoly on printing money (literally.) Actually, come to think of it, it's probably a lot more the latter than the former...
Of course. Trashcans are great external storage devices.~
I don't want YOU to find me.
But most people either do, or don't care. Arseholes with paranoid delusions about the real world bein out to get them, and an inflated sense of self importance, are in the minority.
Your argument is invalid. People that do want people to be able to find them are the people that will willingly use their real names for such services. Allowing those that don't want 'Arseholes' from highschool looking them up to use pseudonyms does not force everyone to use pseudonyms. That would be silly in the case of social networks. Hell, even places like slashdot, which allow pseudonyms, have plenty of people who have screennames that look an aweful lot like real names (whether they are or not is anyone's guess.)
Our fourth amendment is supposed to guarantee our right to be secure in our persons from unreasonable searches and seizures. Now, normally this is applied against the government and their agents. But I would argue that this should also be applicable against other persons and entities/corporations. What right does another person or corporation have to invade my privacy and demand that I suppy a real name? Under certain pretenses this makes sense, such as with banking, and the sale of merchandise. They want to make sure that if you defraud them, they have a real person to come after. That is reasonable. Where does a social network get off on telling me I need to supply a real name, unless they are afraid of me defrauding them? And there-in we come to the crux of the problem. If the social network's database is filled with fake people, then they don't have shit to sell to marketers, and feel' defrauded'.
But the social networks clearly have their heads in the sand if they think they need that marketing database in order to make money. Users under pseudonyms can be served ads just like everyone else. And with a little bit of heuristics, looking at what ads they click, and parsing wall posts etc for keywords, you can still tailor those ads to the user, all without ever knowing who the person is. But social networks view this loss of identity as value lost on their product, and that is, you. And anything that hurts their bottom line must go. User rights, privacy, and good ol' common decency be damned.
And to pre-empt any who may say you have the choice to not use the social network if you don't agree with their practices... Well, I agree, and I don't use social networking sites for that exact reason. I don't agree with all their bullshit. It's just sad that I should even have to make that decision, because they are too fucking greedy to respect their users.
[...]one shake of your arm you might rub it out.
Look, I realize this is /., but I'm certain all of us here can last longer than one shake!
What is to stop them from selling future PCs with a few features locked down, then more and then charge you to enable them?
I'm guessing all the refunds they'd be giving to pissed off consumers would be a pretty decent incentive.
3. Vinyl record. There is some music that you can only get on vinyl because it was never released on CD. CDs are every bit as accurate "more actually" as vinyl but some people feel the defects in the vinyl record add warmth. A good DSP could do the same thing. The problem with most CDs today is that they lack dynamic range. That is a mixing issue. Again Hipster toy.
Sound, as it exists naturally, is analog. So are the way our ears work in receiving sound. CDs are a digital facsimile of those analog signals. For any music that was created from analog instruments (read: 95% of all instruments, and 99.9% of mainstream music) analog technologies such as vinyl records will reproduce that sound far more accurately than digital will. Vinyl is quite literally the sound transcribed onto a physical medium. That is why you can stick a straight-pin into a paper cone, touch it to a turning record, and hear the sound. Zero electricity required. This isn't to say that digital doesn't do a damn fine job of replicating the analog sound. Technology has advanced so far now that we can produce digital copies of analog recordings that sound exactly the same. We can even produce digitals that sound even cleaner than the originals. But the fact remains that the vinyl record, by virtue of design will be far more accurate than digital. The method was designed to quite literally capture the exact waveform that was being produced. So long as that vinyl record stays in mint condition, the sound it produces will be as accurate as the day it was first produced from those instruments.
:-)
The inverse is also true. If you use a midi keyboard to record digital music, then CDs will be more able to reproduce that sound accurately than analog would. It's all about sticking with the same format that originally produced the sound. If you want to get truly technical however, digitally produced music, stored to CD, and then played back, is not an accurate reproduction of the sound. This is because it must be converted to analog through speakers in order for our ears to even be capable of hearing it. The conversion from digital to analog, while very accurate thanks to technology today, is not perfect. Analog produced music, stored to vinyl records, and reproduced with analog technology is not perfect either, due to numerous factors that I am underqualified to explain.
Bottom line though is that each format has its strengths and weaknesses. Saying that digital can reproduce analog as well as analog does is simply a perception issue, and technically is not true. Though really, when all we really care about is what we hear, the technicality of it isn't terribly important, is it? I guess I'm just feeling pedantic this morning.
I saw Children's TVs at Toys R Us the other day that were CRTs. Consider yourself informed.
My point being, there are legit gameplay and user experience reasons to require an always on connection.
I halfway agree with you. But it really needs to be a toggle switch. If you require a persistent connection in order to allow people to take their single player toons online at any point they wish, and want to prevent cheater toons from entering the mix, okay, I get that. But I also want the option to turn it the fuck off too. I want that little checkbox to click that says "I accept that this toon will permanently remain offline" and from that point not require a persistent connection. Don't force me to play the way you want me to play simply because you didn't want to write some additional code for the client. It's fucking lazy, and it fucking pisses me off.
So if Blizzard releases this game with the persistent connection as a "locked on" feature, they can lick my hairy nutsack. I won't spend one red cent on it.
Also a very good idea. Thank you for taking my idea and running with it. I was more under the mindset that anyone running an @Home program probably already has a decent grasp on what it's costing them, and giving them a tool to manage that as they wish. Adding another layer above that would certainly help more people make an informed decision on what they're doing, while helping save some of the legwork for those that already are informed.
:-)
Maybe some of this will make it back to an @Home dev team and make a difference.
O.O
Holy run-on hyperlink Batman!
plus 1000 6 cell maglites.
As long as I can get two to dual wield while cracking a perp's skull I'm in!
No but a WEP one should be.
But still, there's safety in numbers, with a 100 point sources sending out jamming signals, it's much harder to triangulate on any single one.
This is only true if you attempt to search for one inside of a field of many. You can't triangulate to a single source when you're in range of multiple transmitters all broadcasting the same source. But nothing says you can't start your search from beyond the edge of the coverage zone where you can easily be in range of one and only one transmitter at any given time. Following the method of outside-in, you could rather easily chip away at the coverage zone. Generally speaking though, yes, it would be harder to triangulate their locations simply because you have to modify your tactics to guarantee success.
To be fair, most of the disappointment comes from the comments. ;-)
And this magic drug being quite strong... on a sy fy network movie special, this drug could liquify your entire digestive system if you ate a virus infested plant or animal. That could be a problem, yeah.
That would just be irresponsible. Such a problem would only occur with an overdose of the medication. The point of having dosages on medications is to limit the duration of their effect on the body before the renal system filters them out. If you gave a person a dose of this medicine with literally hundereds of grams of active ingredient, and the person just so happened to have every cell of their digestive tract infected with the virus, then sure, you might liquify their organs. Of course if that many cells are infected they're probably already too far gone to live anyway.
Exactly, I can take a decongestant and couple Ibuprofin a couple times a day for the week it takes my body to realize the cold is gone. I'd pay $5-$10 a pill if I could take it on day three to tell my body to stop producing phlegm, the battle is over.
How is a sheet of PLASTIC covered in liquid crystals ever more environmentally friendly than paper???
Ask, and ye shall recieve.
1) Creation of paper uses trees, a renewable relatively clean energy source.
Renewable, sure. But how quickly? It takes a long time for a tree to grow to a respectable size. We use paper a good bit faster than we can regrow it through natural recycling.
2) Plasic requires Petroleum.
Actually it doesn't. Ever heard of bioplastics? They use oils and fats from plants such as corn and wheat rather than petroleum.
Degradation of paper is simple quick and clean. Plastic does not degrade so quickly or clean.
Actually some bioplastics are designed to be bio-degradable. They are already in use to make bio-degradable garbage bags.
Just imagine either a landfill with 200 million sheets of paper or a landfill with1 million e-Sheets.. come back in 6 months. Most of the paper has decomposed. 1 million e-sheets are still there showing how environmentally friendly they are.
Using the proper components, none of what you claim as issues in your post will actually be issues. So either you are spreading FUD or you are truthfully ignorant of the subject matter. If it is the former, knock it off. If it is the latter, then I hope you and others have learned something new today.
but outside of a few wackos who is going to fall for this?
I dunno, maybe people that like the environment, and don't take pride in fucking mother nature up her ass just to save a couple pennies on a sheet of paper? But then you'd probably call those people wackos too wouldn't you?
Using this as changable wallpaper is a really awesome idea. If nothing else you could simply change the color of your walls to/from white/black in summer/winter and help augment your heating and cooling bills. Me? I'd design my own wallpaper and change it every month or so. Plus you could print family photos and artwork directly onto your walls! No more frames to square up every time your fat buddy comes over.
That's actually a really fucking dumb idea, when you consider humans use paper at a faster rate than it can be naturally recycled. Recycling it ourselves helps the situation some, but have you ever seen 100% recycled paper? It's not something you'd want to run through your photocopier or laser printer. Recycled paper of any significant quality needs fresh wood pulp to be added to it.
So the solution is not to simply go with one or the other, it is to use a combination of both. If you're printing something that is going to be kept and not reused, then print it on conventional paper. If you're printing something (like say, a newspaper) that is going to get blanked and reused after a short period of time, then use the new shit. Do you honestly think the people inventing this stuff sat down and said "Well there's like no market for this shit, let's waste a bunch of money developing it anyway"? Of course there is a market, and of course this invention will be relevant to us as humans. Any invention that that can help reduce our reliance on natural resources should be welcomed with open arms, not shunned like Quasimodo bearing the black plague...
Paper isn't ancient history like buggy whips
Well, actually, paper is far more ancient history than buggy whips, being that it was invented nearly 2000 years ago. The buggy whip can only be credited with about one-tenth of that. /Pedantic
I get your analogy, but I'd say that paper is still far more relevant to humanity these days than buggy whips. Granted that relevancy is diminishing year by year as computers become more and more commonplace world-wide.
Of course if you really want to split hairs, this shit shouldn't even be called paper. There isn't an ounce of wood pulp in it. Calling it paper only describes its intended usage. With its reusability to cost ratio however, I can actually see this forming an effective replacement for conventional paper. And anything that reduces our reliance on wood is a good thing.
First we have to put the chicky in the basket!
Two points!