Actually this is more of a case of a murderer being scared off by the angry mob.
Did the murderer cease desiring to murder you? No. So what do you think is going to happen when the murderer returns while the angry mob is no longer around or are distracted?
You should trust Microsoft in the same way that you'd trust a serial-rapist to not violently rape you. In other words, NOT AT ALL. Microsoft has more than distinctly declared it's intent to ILLEGALLY SPY ON YOU (in criminal violation of the Federal Espionage Acts). Microsoft has also declared that they intend for yourself and your children to become their slaves.
And you trust the angry mob to always be around to save your butt? The best lasting answer is to demand that Microsoft's CORPORATE CHARTER is permanently revoked and all executives in Microsoft are legally excluded from ever seeking employment in any similar field of employment.
I read the Starship Troopers book and it wasn't too bad a movie.
Granted it skipped over the political aspects, self-control aspect, and majority of the military function.
I would say that Starship Troopers adapted about 30% of the book, but made about 70% of the stuff up while keeping the spirit of the books. The Starship Troopers military was more along the lines of the traditional marines with additions of Japanese warfare. Granted a straight adaptation would have been plodding in nature, but a much better space-military movie. A better concept would to re-adapt it later as a mini-series of about 20 episodes each an hour long or 10 episodes lasting 2 hours each. On the upside, since Starship Troopers was a fairly workable translation it now has the option of a more faithful adaptation available.
The current HITCHHIKERS adaptation has lots of eye-candy, but little depth.
The hilarious irony of all this is "FIAT MONEY" (the right of a government to issue money at will without having collateral to back up its physical worth).
In the online games, "Money" and items are created at-will by the game itself. Thusly SUPPLY IS INFINITE. Killing monsters or creating items are thusly the FOUNTAIN OF WEALTH in a normal online game economy. Whereas in a real-world economy, people have to grow food, harvest minerals, and process raw materials to gain wealth (services are just wealth redistribution going nowhere).
Therein, the logical limit on this UNLIMITED IN-GAME FOUNTAIN OF WEALTH is to limit the wealth that the monsters hold to what they could grow, harvest, and process raw materials. Anything more would be destructive to the in-game economy. Granted there are MONEY SINKS in the games in the form of consumable potions, food, weapons + armor (if "wear factor" or consumable items like arrows are factored in), spell scrolls, and many other money-suckers in-game.
Of course, I doubt that players want to fight a "Porn Elemental" and find out that the only "loot" they get is a rotting corpse and granite sex toys. Also it should be worth noting that a player could cash in "X number of rotting Giant Porn Rat corpses", but that requires somebody wanting to buy them to process them into resellable items. Also it should be noted that monster spawn would be limited to what can be birthed from available food sources and the baby monsters need time to grow to adulthood. Anything more than that and the in-game economy is SCREWED.
How can any ILLEGAL clause (the "no bad public relations" clause in the Microsoft Crapware Contract) in a contract be enforceable?
Clauses like "you are not allowed to write a BAD review of microsoft products using microsoft Word" tantamount to CREATING A NEW LAW IN AN END-RUN AROUND THE LEGAL SYSTEM. Since an ILLEGAL CLAUSE voids a contract, the "Microsoft Word" contract is basically ILLEGAL and thusly immediately VOID to all purchasers. A product without a contract is therein available to the end-purcharers for usage, distribution, and alteration after purchase. Thusly, "Microsoft Word" is LEGALLY open for recoding and resale by all purchasers of the product that is serviced by an ILLEGAL AND VOID CONTRACT.
There is a trick that works fairly well with our transparent acrylic parts (I work in an injection-molding plastics factory).
We anneal them in an oven for a couple of hours.
Now, how could this be used to produce perfect optical-quality surfaces inexpensively as doing this without softening the plastic to an undesireable quality? Simply anneal the part in the oven at a high pressure. Whatever surface that it rests upon MUST BE OF PERFECT OPTICAL SMOOTHNESS AND QUALITY. Done correctly, it can even allow the perfect final stage of vacuum metallized coatings to be done in the same cooking-pressurizing unit ovens. I would suggest a simpler holographic mirroring, but holograms tend to lose resolution when exposed to variant thermal zones over a long period of time.
(As an aside informative tidbit for the unfamiliar readers, when plastic in injected into the mold, the two mold halves are squeezed together by tons of hydraulic force computer-regulated as the liquified plastic is injected into the mold from a individually controlled 4-band heated barrel and hydraulically computer-regulated screw. The mold halves are also thermally regulated by usually a liquid cooling/heating system circulating softened-water or antifreeze for cooling or hot oil for parts which require a high cooling temp before the mold ejects the parts from the ejector pins.
If the plastic is not melted completely, the side-effect can be unmelted pellets of plastic in the molded part. If the plastic is overheated then outgassing can occur resulting in "gas splay" or "burn marks". If the plastic contains too much moisture for proper molding then "moisture splay" can occur which affects the acceptable appearance of the molded part and the duribility of it --- usually many plastic types are predryed before being melted in the barrel with a computer-controlled "bigass hair dryer" dehumidifyer unit to prevent this issue. Too much pressure injecting the plastic and the result is "flash" which is a thin edge of plastic sprayed out from the seams of the mold halve join. Too little pressure and you get "shorts" or "underfilled shots". Inject the plastic too quickly and you get "stress lines", too slowly and you get visible "knit lines" where the melted goo failed to melt seamlessly into a finished acceptable part. There are other factors, but these are the most common problems with injection-molded parts)./Knowledge is never the enemy
Not just nitpicking here, the dispute is over trademark, not copyright.
EVEN WORSE...
Marvel and the SONY-suck-a-lot corporations want to release an online universe populated with Marvel characters. This is just a legal attack to knock the competition into a dive while their NeverFun (Evercrap) engine drives out another lousy product.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/article_displ ay.jsp?vnu_content_id=1574246
Aug. 02, 2002
Gamers creating own universes
By John Gaudiosi
Sony is getting serious about massively multiplayer online gaming.
MMO, as it's known in the industry, is where thousands of people pay a monthly fee to play one another in a cyber universe.
Flush with the success of its MMO game "EverQuest," Sony Online Entertainment has been in negotiations with Marvel Entertainment, intent on creating an MMO universe filled with some of Marvel's 4,700 superheroes, including Spider-Man, the X-Men, Daredevil, the Hulk and Blade.
Although Korean video game publisher NCSoft is developing "City of Heroes," an unlicensed MMO that will let players create their own superheroes, Sony Online Entertainment VP marketing Scott McDaniel said an MMO coming from a Sony/Marvel partnership would have a broader appeal than the NCSoft game.
[rest of article at website]/I am SO CLOSE TO A 5-YEAR BOYCOTT OF THE ENTIRE MARVEL COMIC PRODUCT LINEUP
My wife, the architect, has been saying for years that they needed to make some of these. Of course, it'll be a while before these come down to a reasonable price, but when they do -- well, I think a hearty w00t is appropriate here!
Ah, to be able to kick back in the den on a summer's evening, watching the sun sink slowly below the horizon, and then *CLICK* Matrix Re-re-re-reloaded, without even having to move my eyeballs!
Haha! Are you seriously considering this as listed in specs?
First of all... it would only be useful for fake scenery. I wouldn't put anything up on the window that I would prefer pedestrians and neighbors seeing like credit card numbers or security keypad pass codes as the reverse image would be visible in reverse to all people passing by. Building the speakers into the frame would be even worse (except for nature fake scenery and holiday displays) for watching movies and most certainly porn viewing because the sound would bounce out to the outside of the house via the frame.
It does have some potential for novelty, but practical matters dictate moving the speakers into the room itself and making the outside part of the display not a mirror image of the interior display.
It sounds good, but sensible folks know that it offers too little for much practical use in the current form offered.
This could mean 256 MB compact flash cards for under around $20, as compared to $70 tday, or mp3 players that cost almost half as much as they do now.
I was thinking of micromechanical RELAY SWITCH type of memory would be many times cheaper and fully layerable in manufacturing. The relay switch uses an electromagnet to move a switch back and forth between two contacts. The most common application is the lowly BUZZER (very fast switching and long lifetime operation capacity). In theory, the only primary parts required is a pivot switch and a loop for the magnetic pullers, and some type of lockdown rod to prevent vulnerability to electromagnetic fields during pure read mode. For the most part, the manufacturing operation could be DVD quality stamping, aluminum coating (DVD)for the trenches, abrasion of the unneeded aluminum, switch layering, and the final top layer which is locked down.
Judging by context, I'm guess you need to know the other language, whatever it may be.
A man walks into a bakery and asks the man at the counter, "Can you make a cake and then have it boxed up and sent someplace?"
[ clipped ] "Excellent," says the man, "can you make me an e-shaped pie?"
"Yeah, I think so. Come back tomorrow."
So the customer leaves the bakery and comes back the next day. The baker shows him the pie.
I guess. The confused man first wants a CAKE then changes his mind instantly to desire a PIE. To my recollection, I wasn't aware that PIES and CAKES were interchangable.
Man, I hope not: those Fisher Price kids are genetic disasters. Most of them are bald, have some type of head enlarging disorder, as well as lack of arms and legs. I've even seen one with a pan on his head.
Now Weebles: there's your evolutionary high road...
Kid takes sample of dad's DNA... Kid takes sample of mom's DNA... Kid takes sample of their own DNA...
Sequences them all one by one...
Goes up to mom and dad, points finger... "YOU'RE NOT MY REAL FATHER!"
Machines shouldn't have a roll of paper in them at all. They should have a feed port like most home printers that accept one sheet of paper at a time. You're given the sheet by an election official when you sign your name, you place the sheet on the input port of the voting machine, make your votes, and then the machine prints out a ballot. Deposit ballot in ballot box.
Now, the machine could run out of ink/toner, but hopefully a fresh set of either can be installed prior to the election.
The obvious hack would be to fake up ballots that get fed in by double-sheeting it or by tampering the software to spit out the occasional phony ballot from imaginary voters when the machine is idle. Remember that the cheapest ballot fraud trick is to bribe the electoral workers in secret. Adding in hidden software virus style would allow fake imaginary voter ballots to be added to the output list to skew the votes in the unwanted candidate's favor. Another trick would be to use a virus to intercept the ballot output, read it, null output the real vote, and fake up a ballot with the desired vote. With all software, the hardware has to be secure in proving that the output matches the actual ballot.
The actual vote counting software should be an unchallenging exercise for even a first year BASIC programmer. The verification codes should be included in the output to checksum the actual ballot with random variances tossed in to confuse any potential hidden viral intercept software that could be loaded later to tamper the actual votes.
The machines themselves should be very open and basic, but the ballot saving and output should be prime cryptography software so that each outputted ballot is unique and entirely verifiable along with each electronic ballot being verifiable. Now here is the kicker. All of the electronic ballot results should be sent to every city in the United States for independent verification as each ballot is cast to prevent delaying the results and to provide a tangible record of any real-time ballot tampering. Granted the feeds could be faked, but if the vote verification software is also open source and available to everyone then every Internet using voter could immediately react and correct any instances of ballot fraud.
Doesn't seem to have been very effective, as I did a straight Google search using "kazaa" and found Download Kazaa Lite K++ 2.4.2 - Improved version of Kazaa LITE !... right on the first page.
Better solution... rename it KAZAA-LIGHT or KAZAAA-LITE or KAZAA LIGHT LITE. Google indexes words and words are alterable. Hits both spellings and changes little.
The posting act begins when the submit button is pressed, and ends when the database updates it's article index.
All "events" have a beginning and an end. Some of them have a known duration so the delta is not noted, but it still exists.
Ah, but you are mistaking RELATIVE TIME (which can be indexed as a series of moments) against ABSOLUTE TIME which has no actual precise moments. Attempting to measure ABSOLUTE TIME is futile. Humans cannot accurately measure ABSOLUTE TIME as their bodies upon the instant of trying to note it will require more time to record it.
Computers cannot record absolute time as they are vulnerable to thermal variations in the quartz crystal altering the timing (stick a digital watch on a warm surface and one set to the same relative time in the freezer). Give them an hour and see if they both retain the same relative time. Now if you synchronize the computer's clock to an Atomic Time center you will have a more accurate relative time value, but variations can occur in the Atomic Clocks as well. If a gravity wave hits or a major seismic event happens (which unleashes a minor gravity wave) then these Atomic Clocks are vulnerable.
Redundancy and active communication polling will help keep the relative time Atomic Clocks in chorus, but all still are vulnerable to other effects in the quantum variables.
The tool argument is interesting : what if I choose to use an uzi as a hammer, does that allow me to possess an uzi ?
The practical use of a tool is not the only thing to consider; we have to think about the purpose of it also. That said, I don't believe that decompilers are purposely made to harm.
And yet some tools ARE naturally dangerous if left in the hands of the irresponsible.
Shall I leave a hand grenade to be used as a baby's teething ring?
What about rat poison as a sandbox filler?
Some tools have an inherently high danger potential for casual misuse and others have a high danger potential even with exceptionally proper usage. Nukes for clearing mountain ranges anyone? The waste would be vast in the result, but this once was proposed as a reasonable civilian use of nuclear bomb tech.
Nobody sane would fear the misuse that a single hammer alone would kill millions or level mountains. The casual misuse COULD accomplish these goals, but the time and energy required would be enormous compared to the casual misuse of a nuclear bomb.
More like you can pay $unknown for the FlexPlay DVD at your local supermarket or Target. Then play it for two days after you break the seal and never have to return it. I'd say that's worth more than $3, probably not more than $4.
The other thing may be that the movie studio might make more money off this deal, since they get paid for each "rental", which I don't think they do right now.
Nope. For me the Destructo-DVD would have to cost less than $1 (75 cents for a good movie - 25 cents for the unpopular ones). Since packaging, distribution, and printing costs will jack the price up they would be charging me $1.50 and that is too much money to waste my time with for something that turns to crap in 48 hours.
Since packaging would have to be dirt cheap I figure the best format is a paper square (like the super cheap music CDs and super incompetent software industry corporations use) with the Destructo-DVD encased within a metal foil poly flat bag with a tear strip on the edge (to keep out the air and to provide easy opening).
Since actual production costs will also be slightly even more expensive than a regular DVD the incentive should be just to make the REAL DVDs that do not destruct at a reasonable price since the profit model is much better for the REAL DVDs by any stretch of the imagination. For example - I have a ZARDOZ DVD and it cost me $10. A Destructo-DVD version of ZARDOZ would have be sold for $0.50 for me to even barely consider buying it. The retailers cannot make a profit on the Destructo-DVD except in massive volumes and buying a truckload of "odd lots" of Destructo-DVD shipments. The storage and inventory model is increased massively for the Destructo-DVDs with little in profit to justify these "turn to crap" time-limited pieces of landfill bloat. On the upside, I can understand GE Plastics wanting this profit model as they can sell more LEXAN plastic with the justification of "a workable profit model". Meanwhile the retailers are going to have to dump their inventory bloat of unprofitable Destructo-DVDs on the Dollar Store retailers (which will probably be the only functional profit model for the mostly useless Destructo-DVDs overspilling the "odd lot" bins in Wally-World's profit model).
I can only see people with very little money and little regard for the value of the time spent earning their money eventually purchasing the Destructo-DVDs for any reason. I cannot see the major retail chains even considering adding the Destructo-DVDs to their shelves (and quickly later to over-flowing "odd lot" bins). I cannot see anyone other than the very wealthy and the very stupid folks buying entertainment that has little in permanence (though people do still pay money to go to a movie theater to view a movie only once for their money) and much in litter value.
You missed the trolling sauce ingredients: 1) First posts 2) goatse.cx and tub girl 3) in soviet russia jokes 4) imagining a beowolf cluster of those 5) beautiful ascii art made by some retards 6) oh yeah and Taco, Hemos and CowboyNeal trolls 7) the infamous "it is official XYZ is dying":-)
Same reason advertisers put billboards on highways and fill magazines with ads. They don't care whether you want it or not, they are just trying to make a buck.
Indeed. Advertising allows us to be informed of valuable new products and services when they are available. When done right it is done well. When done badly it MUST be banned.
If we translate this into the real world, then image a pile of magazines squawking away in a pile in your room corner every minute. Imagine every single shelf in the supermarket screaming about how great their product is over their competitors in pushy political-style ads ("Miss Butterworth will make your ass huge - Buy our low fat farm fresh maple syrup and avoid Miss Butterworth unless you want an ass weight of a anvil! BUY BUY BUY!"). With every single product doing this as you walk by, how long before any rational mind begins to seek out ways to silence the blare in passive or aggressive manners?
This is what we face with pop-ups that NEVER SHUT OFF, NEVER SHUT UP, and SCREW UP YOUR PERSONAL BROWSER SETTINGS.
I have ZERO PROBLEMS with advertisers trying to make an HONEST buck, but if they turn into the obnoxious assholes from telemarketing hell then they should not be surprised if people start tracking the advertisers down to kill them and then destroying everything that promotes their products.
Its other weakness is that, at $5/person/day, it would cut $35/week from my beer fund. Too high a price.
Well unless you were on the hit list you wouldn't have to pay a penny unless you wanted some obnoxious SOB killed. The reason for a maximum daily limit (the minimum limit is to donate nothing for or against) is to prevent any one person from getting more "voice money" than any other person.
The point of the "Save" list is to prevent abuse of the "Kill" list and the daily maximum of $5 toward "Save" or "Kill" is to allow a faster/slower/stopped kill and to prevent the target from rigging the process to save their own butt from the "Kill" list.
Ah, but what the heck... it is just another crazy idea I had one day after a particular frustrating experience with politicians being asshats and having Microsoft's Windows render my computer inoperable for 3 days.
My other crazy idea is to reinforce the whole "genetic" worth idea of the eugenics bastards and put a dollar value on someone's life. Sort of an "extortion as a law" concept. If a person cannot afford to pay $1 per day then they get sent to jail. After 30 days if nobody is willing to pay the $30 "bail" then the person is put to death. Sick and insane, huh? I considered this after getting ticked at some high food prices and decided to play it mentally out to the maximum level of weirdness.
For example, if a person has a kid then the kid has to be paid for by the parents until the kid can pay their own "daily ransom". Good people would pay the way for poor, but also good people. Heck, in some ways (concerning food especially) it already is this way right now (except most people die without food in a few days rather than a month).
The ultimate truth is that although human life CAN be priced to the penny in dollar amounts for the basic chemical worth, it cannot be priced in the value to the world. How would one price the inventor of the telephone during the time when the inventor was a small child? How could a person fairly price the creative potential of any human being without fairly giving them the opportunity to have adequate nutrition, a decent education, tolerable housing, and job opportunities worth pursuing? Without any of this basic fairness most pricing methods are pretty much moot and valueless. Every crazy fuckhead weird-ass concept I can imagine can never achieve any level of moral, much less human fairness than any decent culture that values the ultimate possible potential of human life.
My biggest fear is that one of my nutty concepts will be accepted into the mainstream without any moral questioning about why I might have imagined that nutty concept in the first place. The other reason is that I dearly hope in America that we haven't forgotten the Founding Fathers desire that frustrating and complicating any attempt towards tyranny in America should be our primary goal for survival in this unfair and unjust world.
He could charge something like $.01 for everytime you use it and still make a killing.
Personally I would prefer a Mafia-Hitman public donation killing machine.
The idea is, everytime a public personality pisses you off you donate a buck to 5 bucks to kill them. The restrictions would be a limit of a maximum of 5 dollars per person per day. When the maximum bounty price is reached then whomever wants to claim the prize (with absolute proof of the resulting kill) goes out an kills that public personality. The money & day limit are to prevent the extremely wealthy from rigging a premature execution (as the extremely wealthy folks do not need charity murder events to reach their goals). This fund also would be limited only to those folks that are well known enough to be defined a "public personality".
So if Windows XP crashes, then drop a buck in the "Off Bill Gates Bounty". If Tom Delay makes an ass of himself then $5 to the "Bye Bye Tom Delay Bounty". If someone actually wants Bill Gates or Tom Delay to survive another day then they can donate to the "Save Bill Gates" fund (with the money limit of a maximum of $5 per day per person) and the money they donate will be used to randomly refund a donation from the "Kill Bill Gates" donation list.
Now the real Devil is in who is going to honestly and accurately administrate these funds and how will the public guarantee that the bounty will be paid in its entirety to the bounty hunter that does the job.
Its strength is in its "Power to the People" mindset (keeping loudmouths from staying obnoxious asses for the rest of their lives or at least shortening that period to a tolerable length). Its strength is in the "Behave Nice or Die" mindset. Its strength is that it can afford-ably deal with individuals that have gone beyond the confines of sane human behavior.
Its weaknesses lie in "The referendum of the pissed off". Its weaknesses lie in "Who can be trusted to set fair bounties and not rob the bank of the cash reward" (though another bounty on the crook that robs the first bounty would even things out I think). Its weakness is that every absolute power over life and death without a surefire method to prevent abuse will fail horribly in a very short time. Its weakness is that the wealthy and powerful will behave well at first then push lackeys into notoriety so they will be the fall guys to die for their criminal schemes (as is oddly already the case right now).
Of course, this wild idea is immoral on its face, a complete violation of everything America stands for, and fairly insane. It does seem to be a much more civilized method than having America re-enact the French Underclass slaughtering the monarchs and French Upper-class in the wee days of the civil revolts of the French Revolution. God knows there is nothing keeping the top wealthiest 1% of America from abusing the much less wealthy 99% and the eventual obvious slaughter that will occur if the richest 1% do not remove their collective heads from their collective asses and stop the money siphon and overseas tax-free money sinkholes that they are using now.
For example...I get in the mood to listen to all of a certain type of music, or a specific band...I don't get in the mood to listen to the songs i have listened to 30% of the time before. Although, this is a great idea, I think that it could become more advanced with groupings and selecting either an auto-grouping or a specific group. Maybe some simple folder manipulation or playlist manipulation could work to do this independently of the program</I>
Actually you have a moment of genius inspiration right there. My suggestion to build on that is that the program will have two big buttons of "CURRENT MOOD: UNKNOWN" and the other option will be "MOOD I WANT TO HAVE: UNKNOWN" with a drop-down menu for each button. It will default to these with a settings checkbox remembering last "MOOD I WANT TO HAVE:" and having a smart option to sense mood trends in the music (by tempo beat shifts and the number of high volume pulses tied to the tempo beat shifts along with long volume declination trends in spectrum shifts). A third button should have "HOW FAST:" with the default being whatever the user trends toward most.
The default choose-able moods should be "HAPPY", "MELLOW", "SLEEPY", "STIMULATED", "BORED", "HORNY", "DANCE FEVER", "MEDITATE", "FOCUSED", "SILLY", "DRUNK", "ANGRY", "DRAMATIC", "WALTZING", etc... with user-added options for classifying stuff. This way the user can pick what mood they are in now and change it to a preferred mood by using the music they listen to. This way is the user is "CURRENT MOOD: SLEEPY" they can move it to the preferred mood of "MOOD I WANT TO HAVE: STIMULATED" with the playlist generator moving the mood gradually or rapidly depending on the "HOW FAST: ?" setting. Perhaps I want to wake up rapidly and I only have 10 minutes before I need to get dressed for work. I could set the "HOW FAST: 10 Minutes" and the "CURRENT MOOD: SLEEPY" with "MOOD I WANT TO HAVE: STIMULATED". This would cause the playlist generator to find songs that total or are slightly less than 10 minutes time and then play them out so the slow tempo and slow volume shifts are minimal and then rapidly drive toward high tempo and rapid volume shifts. It could go anywhere from showtunes to thrash metal in 8 minutes with random songs with the most dramatic tempo and volume shifts being delivered at the end with perhaps military drumbeats or a heavy metal orchestra pounding out the beats with cannons.
I love your idea so much this suggestion was irresistible.
The answer is gasification, not robots. A few years ago I looked into the feasibility of gasifying hyperacumulating plants for the purpose of phytoremediation of soil. (grow plants that suck harmful metals out of soil and then gasify the plants) We started looking into gasifying things with a plasma arch torch. The system should break even once everything is built and operation begins. materials are reduced to a fraction of their previous volume and we're left with slag that looks and feels a lot like igneous rock. This slag can be used for the construction of roads and stuff and you don't have to worry about harmful chemicals like lead entering the soil.
Uh, you do realize that vaporizing an elemental metal tends to make it airborne? Worse contamination will come from lead fumes over the lead currently in the soil. Toss in some other nasty metals and I see a community made toxic very quickly. If you could chemically react some of the substances into less harmful compounds then perhaps the payoff would be better, but the best payoff would be reclaiming those elements in pure form for chemical and industrial resale later without dumping them back into asphalt. Just plain vaporization just spreads the contamination further out to everyone very quickly.
Based on this article [slashdot.org] it would seem that Sony does not people modding their robot dog. So is that article the latest word or has Sony wizened up?
At any rate does this mean a whole new propagation of "____ ate my balls websites?"
My Feral AIBO Ate My Balls
BTW - Everyone here has figured out that Tweekie from Buck Rogers is the cheaper and less functional version of a sex droid (just as TOMY's "Poochie" is a cheaper and less functional version of Sony's "AIBO").
Don't go there. You DON'T want the lawyers having to spell out who is and is not your "friend."
(Of course, that wouldn't necessarily be that bad--leave it to the lawyers (Courts), and it'd likely be something like "a relationship that a reasonable person would recognize as a friendship." The bad part would be Congress getting into the picture, which would invariably get hotly contested debates and debacles and numbers...)
It would make one hell of a comedy skit.
"Our lawyers officially have declared that your friends may only consist of:
Detached Family Members Strangers that you have formed a geographical closeness to. Children which you have gained a detached relationship by forced school association. Co-workers and drinking companions. "Fuck buddies" and other folks of a purely sexual relationship. Anonymous strangers which you have exchanged phone numbers with after meeting in darkened park areas or restrooms.
All other relationships are now legally declared invalid in all courts of law. This order is binding in all states, townships, temporal dimensions, and fantasy delusional states. Defiance of this order will be met with infinite TORTURE and enslavement in the perilous sidecar racing (otherwise known as "Sidehacking") tracks."
Slashdot Mirror
Actually this is more of a case of a murderer being scared off by the angry mob.
Did the murderer cease desiring to murder you? No.
So what do you think is going to happen when the murderer returns while the angry mob is no longer around or are distracted?
You should trust Microsoft in the same way that you'd trust a serial-rapist to not violently rape you.
In other words, NOT AT ALL.
Microsoft has more than distinctly declared it's intent to ILLEGALLY SPY ON YOU (in criminal violation of the Federal Espionage Acts).
Microsoft has also declared that they intend for yourself and your children to become their slaves.
And you trust the angry mob to always be around to save your butt?
The best lasting answer is to demand that Microsoft's CORPORATE CHARTER is permanently revoked and all executives in Microsoft are legally excluded from ever seeking employment in any similar field of employment.
I read the Starship Troopers book and it wasn't too bad a movie.
Granted it skipped over the political aspects, self-control aspect, and majority of the military function.
I would say that Starship Troopers adapted about 30% of the book, but made about 70% of the stuff up while keeping the spirit of the books. The Starship Troopers military was more along the lines of the traditional marines with additions of Japanese warfare. Granted a straight adaptation would have been plodding in nature, but a much better space-military movie. A better concept would to re-adapt it later as a mini-series of about 20 episodes each an hour long or 10 episodes lasting 2 hours each. On the upside, since Starship Troopers was a fairly workable translation it now has the option of a more faithful adaptation available.
The current HITCHHIKERS adaptation has lots of eye-candy, but little depth.
The hilarious irony of all this is "FIAT MONEY" (the right of a government to issue money at will without having collateral to back up its physical worth).
In the online games, "Money" and items are created at-will by the game itself. Thusly SUPPLY IS INFINITE. Killing monsters or creating items are thusly the FOUNTAIN OF WEALTH in a normal online game economy. Whereas in a real-world economy, people have to grow food, harvest minerals, and process raw materials to gain wealth (services are just wealth redistribution going nowhere).
Therein, the logical limit on this UNLIMITED IN-GAME FOUNTAIN OF WEALTH is to limit the wealth that the monsters hold to what they could grow, harvest, and process raw materials. Anything more would be destructive to the in-game economy. Granted there are MONEY SINKS in the games in the form of consumable potions, food, weapons + armor (if "wear factor" or consumable items like arrows are factored in), spell scrolls, and many other money-suckers in-game.
Of course, I doubt that players want to fight a "Porn Elemental" and find out that the only "loot" they get is a rotting corpse and granite sex toys. Also it should be worth noting that a player could cash in "X number of rotting Giant Porn Rat corpses", but that requires somebody wanting to buy them to process them into resellable items. Also it should be noted that monster spawn would be limited to what can be birthed from available food sources and the baby monsters need time to grow to adulthood. Anything more than that and the in-game economy is SCREWED.
Somehow I don't think this will catch on though
I am not a diehard legal scholar, but...
How can any ILLEGAL clause (the "no bad public relations" clause in the Microsoft Crapware Contract) in a contract be enforceable?
Clauses like "you are not allowed to write a BAD review of microsoft products using microsoft Word" tantamount to CREATING A NEW LAW IN AN END-RUN AROUND THE LEGAL SYSTEM. Since an ILLEGAL CLAUSE voids a contract, the "Microsoft Word" contract is basically ILLEGAL and thusly immediately VOID to all purchasers. A product without a contract is therein available to the end-purcharers for usage, distribution, and alteration after purchase. Thusly, "Microsoft Word" is LEGALLY open for recoding and resale by all purchasers of the product that is serviced by an ILLEGAL AND VOID CONTRACT.
My two cents...
There is a trick that works fairly well with our transparent acrylic parts (I work in an injection-molding plastics factory).
/Knowledge is never the enemy
We anneal them in an oven for a couple of hours.
Now, how could this be used to produce perfect optical-quality surfaces inexpensively as doing this without softening the plastic to an undesireable quality? Simply anneal the part in the oven at a high pressure. Whatever surface that it rests upon MUST BE OF PERFECT OPTICAL SMOOTHNESS AND QUALITY. Done correctly, it can even allow the perfect final stage of vacuum metallized coatings to be done in the same cooking-pressurizing unit ovens. I would suggest a simpler holographic mirroring, but holograms tend to lose resolution when exposed to variant thermal zones over a long period of time.
(As an aside informative tidbit for the unfamiliar readers, when plastic in injected into the mold, the two mold halves are squeezed together by tons of hydraulic force computer-regulated as the liquified plastic is injected into the mold from a individually controlled 4-band heated barrel and hydraulically computer-regulated screw. The mold halves are also thermally regulated by usually a liquid cooling/heating system circulating softened-water or antifreeze for cooling or hot oil for
parts which require a high cooling temp before the mold ejects the parts from the ejector pins.
If the plastic is not melted completely, the side-effect can be unmelted pellets of plastic in the molded part. If the plastic is overheated then outgassing can occur resulting in "gas splay" or "burn marks". If the plastic contains too much moisture for proper molding then "moisture splay" can occur which affects the acceptable appearance of the molded part and the duribility of it --- usually many plastic types are predryed before being melted in the barrel with a computer-controlled "bigass hair dryer" dehumidifyer unit to prevent this issue. Too much pressure injecting the plastic and the result is "flash" which is a thin edge of plastic sprayed out from the seams of the mold halve join. Too little pressure and you get "shorts" or "underfilled shots". Inject the plastic too quickly and you get "stress lines", too slowly and you get visible "knit lines" where the melted goo failed to melt seamlessly into a finished acceptable part. There are other factors, but these are the most common problems with injection-molded parts).
Not just nitpicking here, the dispute is over trademark, not copyright. EVEN WORSE... Marvel and the SONY-suck-a-lot corporations want to release an online universe populated with Marvel characters. This is just a legal attack to knock the competition into a dive while their NeverFun (Evercrap) engine drives out another lousy product. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/article_displ ay.jsp?vnu_content_id=1574246
Aug. 02, 2002
Gamers creating own universes
By John Gaudiosi
Sony is getting serious about massively multiplayer online gaming.
MMO, as it's known in the industry, is where thousands of people pay a monthly fee to play one another in a cyber universe.
Flush with the success of its MMO game "EverQuest," Sony Online Entertainment has been in negotiations with Marvel Entertainment, intent on creating an MMO universe filled with some of Marvel's 4,700 superheroes, including Spider-Man, the X-Men, Daredevil, the Hulk and Blade.
Although Korean video game publisher NCSoft is developing "City of Heroes," an unlicensed MMO that will let players create their own superheroes, Sony Online Entertainment VP marketing Scott McDaniel said an MMO coming from a Sony/Marvel partnership would have a broader appeal than the NCSoft game.
[rest of article at website] /I am SO CLOSE TO A 5-YEAR BOYCOTT OF THE ENTIRE MARVEL COMIC PRODUCT LINEUP
My wife, the architect, has been saying for years that they needed to make some of these. Of course, it'll be a while before these come down to a reasonable price, but when they do -- well, I think a hearty w00t is appropriate here!
Ah, to be able to kick back in the den on a summer's evening, watching the sun sink slowly below the horizon, and then *CLICK* Matrix Re-re-re-reloaded, without even having to move my eyeballs!
Haha! Are you seriously considering this as listed in specs?
First of all... it would only be useful for fake scenery. I wouldn't put anything up on the window that I would prefer pedestrians and neighbors seeing like credit card numbers or security keypad pass codes as the reverse image would be visible in reverse to all people passing by. Building the speakers into the frame would be even worse (except for nature fake scenery and holiday displays) for watching movies and most certainly porn viewing because the sound would bounce out to the outside of the house via the frame.
It does have some potential for novelty, but practical matters dictate moving the speakers into the room itself and making the outside part of the display not a mirror image of the interior display.
It sounds good, but sensible folks know that it offers too little for much practical use in the current form offered.
This could mean 256 MB compact flash cards for under around $20, as compared to $70 tday, or mp3 players that cost almost half as much as they do now.
I was thinking of micromechanical RELAY SWITCH type of memory would be many times cheaper and fully layerable in manufacturing. The relay switch uses an electromagnet to move a switch back and forth between two contacts. The most common application is the lowly BUZZER (very fast switching and long lifetime operation capacity). In theory, the only primary parts required is a pivot switch and a loop for the magnetic pullers, and some type of lockdown rod to prevent vulnerability to electromagnetic fields during pure read mode. For the most part, the manufacturing operation could be DVD quality stamping, aluminum coating (DVD)for the trenches, abrasion of the unneeded aluminum, switch layering, and the final top layer which is locked down.
Judging by context, I'm guess you need to know the other language, whatever it may be.
A man walks into a bakery and asks the man at the counter, "Can you make a cake and then have it boxed up and sent someplace?"
[ clipped ]
"Excellent," says the man, "can you make me an e-shaped pie?"
"Yeah, I think so. Come back tomorrow."
So the customer leaves the bakery and comes back the next day. The baker shows him the pie.
I guess. The confused man first wants a CAKE then changes his mind instantly to desire a PIE. To my recollection, I wasn't aware that PIES and CAKES were interchangable.
"What's next, the Fisher Price Cloning kit?"
Man, I hope not: those Fisher Price kids are genetic disasters. Most of them are bald, have some type of head enlarging disorder, as well as lack of arms and legs. I've even seen one with a pan on his head.
Now Weebles: there's your evolutionary high road...
Kid takes sample of dad's DNA...
Kid takes sample of mom's DNA...
Kid takes sample of their own DNA...
Sequences them all one by one...
Goes up to mom and dad, points finger...
"YOU'RE NOT MY REAL FATHER!"
Hilarity Ensues...
Machines shouldn't have a roll of paper in them at all. They should have a feed port like most home printers that accept one sheet of paper at a time. You're given the sheet by an election official when you sign your name, you place the sheet on the input port of the voting machine, make your votes, and then the machine prints out a ballot. Deposit ballot in ballot box.
Now, the machine could run out of ink/toner, but hopefully a fresh set of either can be installed prior to the election.
The obvious hack would be to fake up ballots that get fed in by double-sheeting it or by tampering the software to spit out the occasional phony ballot from imaginary voters when the machine is idle. Remember that the cheapest ballot fraud trick is to bribe the electoral workers in secret. Adding in hidden software virus style would allow fake imaginary voter ballots to be added to the output list to skew the votes in the unwanted candidate's favor. Another trick would be to use a virus to intercept the ballot output, read it, null output the real vote, and fake up a ballot with the desired vote. With all software, the hardware has to be secure in proving that the output matches the actual ballot.
The actual vote counting software should be an unchallenging exercise for even a first year BASIC programmer. The verification codes should be included in the output to checksum the actual ballot with random variances tossed in to confuse any potential hidden viral intercept software that could be loaded later to tamper the actual votes.
The machines themselves should be very open and basic, but the ballot saving and output should be prime cryptography software so that each outputted ballot is unique and entirely verifiable along with each electronic ballot being verifiable. Now here is the kicker. All of the electronic ballot results should be sent to every city in the United States for independent verification as each ballot is cast to prevent delaying the results and to provide a tangible record of any real-time ballot tampering. Granted the feeds could be faked, but if the vote verification software is also open source and available to everyone then every Internet using voter could immediately react and correct any instances of ballot fraud.
Doesn't seem to have been very effective, as I did a straight Google search using "kazaa" and found Download Kazaa Lite K++ 2.4.2 - Improved version of Kazaa LITE ! ... right on the first page.
Better solution... rename it KAZAA-LIGHT or KAZAAA-LITE or KAZAA LIGHT LITE. Google indexes words and words are alterable. Hits both spellings and changes little.
The posting act begins when the submit button is pressed, and ends when the database updates it's article index.
All "events" have a beginning and an end. Some of them have a known duration so the delta is not noted, but it still exists.
Ah, but you are mistaking RELATIVE TIME (which can be indexed as a series of moments) against ABSOLUTE TIME which has no actual precise moments. Attempting to measure ABSOLUTE TIME is futile. Humans cannot accurately measure ABSOLUTE TIME as their bodies upon the instant of trying to note it will require more time to record it.
Computers cannot record absolute time as they are vulnerable to thermal variations in the quartz crystal altering the timing (stick a digital watch on a warm surface and one set to the same relative time in the freezer). Give them an hour and see if they both retain the same relative time. Now if you synchronize the computer's clock to an Atomic Time center you will have a more accurate relative time value, but variations can occur in the Atomic Clocks as well. If a gravity wave hits or a major seismic event happens (which unleashes a minor gravity wave) then these Atomic Clocks are vulnerable.
Redundancy and active communication polling will help keep the relative time Atomic Clocks in chorus, but all still are vulnerable to other effects in the quantum variables.
The tool argument is interesting : what if I choose to use an uzi as a hammer, does that allow me to possess an uzi ?
The practical use of a tool is not the only thing to consider; we have to think about the purpose of it also. That said, I don't believe that decompilers are purposely made to harm.
And yet some tools ARE naturally dangerous if left in the hands of the irresponsible.
Shall I leave a hand grenade to be used as a baby's teething ring?
What about rat poison as a sandbox filler?
Some tools have an inherently high danger potential for casual misuse and others have a high danger potential even with exceptionally proper usage. Nukes for clearing mountain ranges anyone? The waste would be vast in the result, but this once was proposed as a reasonable civilian use of nuclear bomb tech.
Nobody sane would fear the misuse that a single hammer alone would kill millions or level mountains. The casual misuse COULD accomplish these goals, but the time and energy required would be enormous compared to the casual misuse of a nuclear bomb.
More like you can pay $unknown for the FlexPlay DVD at your local supermarket or Target. Then play it for two days after you break the seal and never have to return it. I'd say that's worth more than $3, probably not more than $4.
The other thing may be that the movie studio might make more money off this deal, since they get paid for each "rental", which I don't think they do right now.
Nope. For me the Destructo-DVD would have to cost less than $1 (75 cents for a good movie - 25 cents for the unpopular ones). Since packaging, distribution, and printing costs will jack the price up they would be charging me $1.50 and that is too much money to waste my time with for something that turns to crap in 48 hours.
Since packaging would have to be dirt cheap I figure the best format is a paper square (like the super cheap music CDs and super incompetent software industry corporations use) with the Destructo-DVD encased within a metal foil poly flat bag with a tear strip on the edge (to keep out the air and to provide easy opening).
Since actual production costs will also be slightly even more expensive than a regular DVD the incentive should be just to make the REAL DVDs that do not destruct at a reasonable price since the profit model is much better for the REAL DVDs by any stretch of the imagination. For example - I have a ZARDOZ DVD and it cost me $10. A Destructo-DVD version of ZARDOZ would have be sold for $0.50 for me to even barely consider buying it. The retailers cannot make a profit on the Destructo-DVD except in massive volumes and buying a truckload of "odd lots" of Destructo-DVD shipments. The storage and inventory model is increased massively for the Destructo-DVDs with little in profit to justify these "turn to crap" time-limited pieces of landfill bloat. On the upside, I can understand GE Plastics wanting this profit model as they can sell more LEXAN plastic with the justification of "a workable profit model". Meanwhile the retailers are going to have to dump their inventory bloat of unprofitable Destructo-DVDs on the Dollar Store retailers (which will probably be the only functional profit model for the mostly useless Destructo-DVDs overspilling the "odd lot" bins in Wally-World's profit model).
I can only see people with very little money and little regard for the value of the time spent earning their money eventually purchasing the Destructo-DVDs for any reason. I cannot see the major retail chains even considering adding the Destructo-DVDs to their shelves (and quickly later to over-flowing "odd lot" bins). I cannot see anyone other than the very wealthy and the very stupid folks buying entertainment that has little in permanence (though people do still pay money to go to a movie theater to view a movie only once for their money) and much in litter value.
You missed the trolling sauce ingredients : :-)
1) First posts
2) goatse.cx and tub girl
3) in soviet russia jokes
4) imagining a beowolf cluster of those
5) beautiful ascii art made by some retards
6) oh yeah and Taco, Hemos and CowboyNeal trolls
7) the infamous "it is official XYZ is dying"
8) Steal Underpants
9) ???
10) Profit
Boy that meme is spreading like Polio these days.
Same reason advertisers put billboards on highways and fill magazines with ads. They don't care whether you want it or not, they are just trying to make a buck.
Indeed. Advertising allows us to be informed of valuable new products and services when they are available. When done right it is done well. When done badly it MUST be banned.
If we translate this into the real world, then image a pile of magazines squawking away in a pile in your room corner every minute. Imagine every single shelf in the supermarket screaming about how great their product is over their competitors in pushy political-style ads ("Miss Butterworth will make your ass huge - Buy our low fat farm fresh maple syrup and avoid Miss Butterworth unless you want an ass weight of a anvil! BUY BUY BUY!"). With every single product doing this as you walk by, how long before any rational mind begins to seek out ways to silence the blare in passive or aggressive manners?
This is what we face with pop-ups that NEVER SHUT OFF, NEVER SHUT UP, and SCREW UP YOUR PERSONAL BROWSER SETTINGS.
I have ZERO PROBLEMS with advertisers trying to make an HONEST buck, but if they turn into the obnoxious assholes from telemarketing hell then they should not be surprised if people start tracking the advertisers down to kill them and then destroying everything that promotes their products.
Its other weakness is that, at $5/person/day, it would cut $35/week from my beer fund. Too high a price.
Well unless you were on the hit list you wouldn't have to pay a penny unless you wanted some obnoxious SOB killed. The reason for a maximum daily limit (the minimum limit is to donate nothing for or against) is to prevent any one person from getting more "voice money" than any other person.
The point of the "Save" list is to prevent abuse of the "Kill" list and the daily maximum of $5 toward "Save" or "Kill" is to allow a faster/slower/stopped kill and to prevent the target from rigging the process to save their own butt from the "Kill" list.
Ah, but what the heck... it is just another crazy idea I had one day after a particular frustrating experience with politicians being asshats and having Microsoft's Windows render my computer inoperable for 3 days.
My other crazy idea is to reinforce the whole "genetic" worth idea of the eugenics bastards and put a dollar value on someone's life. Sort of an "extortion as a law" concept. If a person cannot afford to pay $1 per day then they get sent to jail. After 30 days if nobody is willing to pay the $30 "bail" then the person is put to death. Sick and insane, huh? I considered this after getting ticked at some high food prices and decided to play it mentally out to the maximum level of weirdness.
For example, if a person has a kid then the kid has to be paid for by the parents until the kid can pay their own "daily ransom". Good people would pay the way for poor, but also good people. Heck, in some ways (concerning food especially) it already is this way right now (except most people die without food in a few days rather than a month).
The ultimate truth is that although human life CAN be priced to the penny in dollar amounts for the basic chemical worth, it cannot be priced in the value to the world. How would one price the inventor of the telephone during the time when the inventor was a small child? How could a person fairly price the creative potential of any human being without fairly giving them the opportunity to have adequate nutrition, a decent education, tolerable housing, and job opportunities worth pursuing? Without any of this basic fairness most pricing methods are pretty much moot and valueless. Every crazy fuckhead weird-ass concept I can imagine can never achieve any level of moral, much less human fairness than any decent culture that values the ultimate possible potential of human life.
My biggest fear is that one of my nutty concepts will be accepted into the mainstream without any moral questioning about why I might have imagined that nutty concept in the first place. The other reason is that I dearly hope in America that we haven't forgotten the Founding Fathers desire that frustrating and complicating any attempt towards tyranny in America should be our primary goal for survival in this unfair and unjust world.
He could charge something like $.01 for everytime you use it and still make a killing.
Personally I would prefer a Mafia-Hitman public donation killing machine.
The idea is, everytime a public personality pisses you off you donate a buck to 5 bucks to kill them. The restrictions would be a limit of a maximum of 5 dollars per person per day. When the maximum bounty price is reached then whomever wants to claim the prize (with absolute proof of the resulting kill) goes out an kills that public personality. The money & day limit are to prevent the extremely wealthy from rigging a premature execution (as the extremely wealthy folks do not need charity murder events to reach their goals). This fund also would be limited only to those folks that are well known enough to be defined a "public personality".
So if Windows XP crashes, then drop a buck in the "Off Bill Gates Bounty". If Tom Delay makes an ass of himself then $5 to the "Bye Bye Tom Delay Bounty". If someone actually wants Bill Gates or Tom Delay to survive another day then they can donate to the "Save Bill Gates" fund (with the money limit of a maximum of $5 per day per person) and the money they donate will be used to randomly refund a donation from the "Kill Bill Gates" donation list.
Now the real Devil is in who is going to honestly and accurately administrate these funds and how will the public guarantee that the bounty will be paid in its entirety to the bounty hunter that does the job.
Its strength is in its "Power to the People" mindset (keeping loudmouths from staying obnoxious asses for the rest of their lives or at least shortening that period to a tolerable length). Its strength is in the "Behave Nice or Die" mindset. Its strength is that it can afford-ably deal with individuals that have gone beyond the confines of sane human behavior.
Its weaknesses lie in "The referendum of the pissed off". Its weaknesses lie in "Who can be trusted to set fair bounties and not rob the bank of the cash reward" (though another bounty on the crook that robs the first bounty would even things out I think). Its weakness is that every absolute power over life and death without a surefire method to prevent abuse will fail horribly in a very short time. Its weakness is that the wealthy and powerful will behave well at first then push lackeys into notoriety so they will be the fall guys to die for their criminal schemes (as is oddly already the case right now).
Of course, this wild idea is immoral on its face, a complete violation of everything America stands for, and fairly insane. It does seem to be a much more civilized method than having America re-enact the French Underclass slaughtering the monarchs and French Upper-class in the wee days of the civil revolts of the French Revolution. God knows there is nothing keeping the top wealthiest 1% of America from abusing the much less wealthy 99% and the eventual obvious slaughter that will occur if the richest 1% do not remove their collective heads from their collective asses and stop the money siphon and overseas tax-free money sinkholes that they are using now.
Unless you count burning Buckyballs.
With that irresistable straight line I have to link to this webpage.
Gonads and Strife
Or if that site is Slashdotted same thing...
Hello Kitty Ate My BuckyBalls!
(Every party needs a jester)
Just wait until this thing has a buffer overflow..
Seriously though...
Would ANYONE in their right mind TRUST Microsoft?
What exactly would be the logic of ever trusting Microsoft given their piss-poor track record.
On the other hand I now know what the perfect tombstone for Bill Gates and Paul Allen's graves should be. Functional and appropriate.
Exactly.
For example...I get in the mood to listen to all of a certain type of music, or a specific band...I don't get in the mood to listen to the songs i have listened to 30% of the time before. Although, this is a great idea, I think that it could become more advanced with groupings and selecting either an auto-grouping or a specific group. Maybe some simple folder manipulation or playlist manipulation could work to do this independently of the program</I>
Actually you have a moment of genius inspiration right there. My suggestion to build on that is that the program will have two big buttons of "CURRENT MOOD: UNKNOWN" and the other option will be "MOOD I WANT TO HAVE: UNKNOWN" with a drop-down menu for each button. It will default to these with a settings checkbox remembering last "MOOD I WANT TO HAVE:" and having a smart option to sense mood trends in the music (by tempo beat shifts and the number of high volume pulses tied to the tempo beat shifts along with long volume declination trends in spectrum shifts). A third button should have "HOW FAST:" with the default being whatever the user trends toward most.
The default choose-able moods should be "HAPPY", "MELLOW", "SLEEPY", "STIMULATED", "BORED", "HORNY", "DANCE FEVER", "MEDITATE", "FOCUSED", "SILLY", "DRUNK", "ANGRY", "DRAMATIC", "WALTZING", etc... with user-added options for classifying stuff. This way the user can pick what mood they are in now and change it to a preferred mood by using the music they listen to. This way is the user is "CURRENT MOOD: SLEEPY" they can move it to the preferred mood of "MOOD I WANT TO HAVE: STIMULATED" with the playlist generator moving the mood gradually or rapidly depending on the "HOW FAST: ?" setting. Perhaps I want to wake up rapidly and I only have 10 minutes before I need to get dressed for work. I could set the "HOW FAST: 10 Minutes" and the "CURRENT MOOD: SLEEPY" with "MOOD I WANT TO HAVE: STIMULATED". This would cause the playlist generator to find songs that total or are slightly less than 10 minutes time and then play them out so the slow tempo and slow volume shifts are minimal and then rapidly drive toward high tempo and rapid volume shifts. It could go anywhere from showtunes to thrash metal in 8 minutes with random songs with the most dramatic tempo and volume shifts being delivered at the end with perhaps military drumbeats or a heavy metal orchestra pounding out the beats with cannons.
I love your idea so much this suggestion was irresistible.
The answer is gasification, not robots. A few years ago I looked into the feasibility of gasifying hyperacumulating plants for the purpose of phytoremediation of soil. (grow plants that suck harmful metals out of soil and then gasify the plants) We started looking into gasifying things with a plasma arch torch. The system should break even once everything is built and operation begins. materials are reduced to a fraction of their previous volume and we're left with slag that looks and feels a lot like igneous rock. This slag can be used for the construction of roads and stuff and you don't have to worry about harmful chemicals like lead entering the soil.
Uh, you do realize that vaporizing an elemental metal tends to make it airborne? Worse contamination will come from lead fumes over the lead currently in the soil. Toss in some other nasty metals and I see a community made toxic very quickly. If you could chemically react some of the substances into less harmful compounds then perhaps the payoff would be better, but the best payoff would be reclaiming those elements in pure form for chemical and industrial resale later without dumping them back into asphalt. Just plain vaporization just spreads the contamination further out to everyone very quickly.
Based on this article [slashdot.org] it would seem that Sony does not people modding their robot dog. So is that article the latest word or has Sony wizened up?
At any rate does this mean a whole new propagation of "____ ate my balls websites?"
My Feral AIBO Ate My Balls
BTW - Everyone here has figured out that Tweekie from Buck Rogers is the cheaper and less functional version of a sex droid (just as TOMY's "Poochie" is a cheaper and less functional version of Sony's "AIBO").
Don't go there. You DON'T want the lawyers having to spell out who is and is not your "friend."
(Of course, that wouldn't necessarily be that bad--leave it to the lawyers (Courts), and it'd likely be something like "a relationship that a reasonable person would recognize as a friendship." The bad part would be Congress getting into the picture, which would invariably get hotly contested debates and debacles and numbers...)
It would make one hell of a comedy skit.
"Our lawyers officially have declared that your friends may only consist of:
Detached Family Members
Strangers that you have formed a geographical closeness to.
Children which you have gained a detached relationship by forced school association.
Co-workers and drinking companions.
"Fuck buddies" and other folks of a purely sexual relationship.
Anonymous strangers which you have exchanged phone numbers with after meeting in darkened park areas or restrooms.
All other relationships are now legally declared invalid in all courts of law. This order is binding in all states, townships, temporal dimensions, and fantasy delusional states. Defiance of this order will be met with infinite TORTURE and enslavement in the perilous sidecar racing (otherwise known as "Sidehacking") tracks."