Then Rise of the Robots, by an absolute mile. Robot one-on-one fighting game. Banging on about their clever new AI system that responded fantastically well to player input, absolutely gorgeous pre-rendered graphics.
Except that you could get several levels in by taping the koystick in the top right corner and the fire button down. Very, very, poor.
How many people have actually listened to what the Tories are saying at the moment, though? It's terrifying. They're frankly even keener than Blair on the whole war thing but are determined to find some extremely opportunist lines of attack to try and win votes. They're proposing that schools and hospitals both go into a competitive market with the private sector, guaranteeing a brain and resources drain from state schools and by very definition reducing the amount of money in the NHS for a sector with no proven improvement in the value-for-money record. Their tax policy has major cuts and so would either lead to huge public service cuts or a massive budget defecit (methinks the latter, bearing in mind their record), their European policy would lead to our ultimate withdrawl from a free trade alliance with our major trading partners. The idea that this lot could get elected because they're not Labour and very few people actually listen to policy announcements is very, very scary. Especially seeing how poor an opposition they've been - this bunch barely ever actually tie the government down in the commons or ask decent questions. I'm not sure I'd trust them to run a sweet shop.
Vote LibDem to keep the Tories out by forcing Labour to be honest in coalition. That's my plan, anyway:-)
(And the Transport Secretary's Alastair Darling, isn't it? Seems to be shutting up which, after the foot-in-mouth tendencies of his predecessors, is probably for the best.)
I agree. A situation where a party can get approximately 20% of the vote, a little under 10% of the seats and consider that a roaring success is a little suspect.
Or, for that matter, a party can get a little over 40% and get an overall majority of what, 170-odd in a 650ish seat house?
FPTP is a terrible system and should be taken out and shot, quickly. Labour should be ashamed on going back on their 1997 manifesto committment to hold a referendum on alternatives.
Tories and Labour aren't the only parties though. By pretending they are when we vote we remove any strong incentive for either to behave as if they can be taken out of office and shouldn't do this sort of thing.
It _stinks_ that these proposals are appearing, but if we vote for Labour we implicitly support it and if we vote for the Tories, well, we saw what they came up with last time. Always makes me chuckle that the name is a corruption of an old Irish word meaning 'bandit'.
Personally, I'll be voting for the LibDems next time. Centre-left but they don't take money from the unions or business and don't have any great desire for authoritarian rubbish like this, or for daft military games in the sand and various silly measures to prop up the arms trade.
Maybe you'd rather be further left? OK, look at the SSP if you're north of the border, Plaid Cymru if you're west of a different border, SWP, Greens et al in other areas. Or further right? How about UKIP? No, with the exception of SSP and PC none are likely to win seats but who'd have said 5 years ago that SSP would have got anywhere? If you don't vote for these groups then they're never going to get anywhere. If they're not perceived as a threat on any level then the mainstream parties have no motivation whatsoever to examine their positions and take sections onboard. Voting for the present clowns only serves to legitimise their positions.
Or perhaps you won't vote at all, claiming they're all as bad as each other? Big mistake and demonstrably false. Look at what LibDems have achieved already in coalitions, look at what the SSP are doing in Holyrood so far. They're _not_ like the mainstream parties and pretending they are is just daft. By removing yourself from the process you ensure that your views have no input whatsoever. Hardly an effective way to ensure change!
If you want the major parties to take onboard your opinions and take them into government, you need to find candidates with similar opinions and vote for them or the democratic process simply doesn't take your views as input.
No, they won't win the next election. But look at significantly less evil governments in Scotland and Wales as a result of coalitions between the LibDems and Labour - wouldn't it be nice to have that for the UK as a whole? Labour probably aren't going at the next election and we don't want the Tories so the best we can hope for is coalition government, surely?
Plus, remembering we're not a country where it's possible to bribe politicians in the same way, they actually care about the ballot box. Make it clear that you've voted for someone else because of rubbish like this and they're going to be a lot less inclined to produce it again. This government isn't trusted at the moment and is mostly popular because people don't claim to see an alternative. If you don't offer a possibility of voting against them, why should they change?
I find that implausible. Over here most cars have had visible VINs for years, so I really can't believe that a garage would supply me a new key from just a VIN.
However, more fundamental problem. If they're nicking the car for parts, they're going to take the doors and you're very unlikely to get anything recognisable back. So how did the insurance company judge whether there'd been a forced entry or not?
No, about 20% (from memory - check the link for corroboration, I'm a little busy to check) of the data stored on a CD is error correction data. Otherwise, data CDs would be absolutely useless in very short order.
A quick Google has just turned up http://www.disctronics.co.uk/technology/cdbasics/c d_frames.htm if you want more information. Hope that helps!
It would take me a while to fish out but it came up after a reader enquiry in either Autocar or Evo - instinct says Autocar. I suspect it wouldn't be a harsh throttle lift, though - I can't see it closing _instantly_ for this or yes, it would be dangerous.
Pretty easy to verify safely in a straight line, though, so may be worth a try.
It's sufficiently serious a risk that all VAG and Porsche road cars have modified their electronics so that, in the event that you try and press the brake pedal while it thinks you're pressing the throttle, the throttle is reset to zero for the duration of pressure being applied to the brake. The reasoning for this is safety - if a manual throttle jams you can pull it back up. If an electronic throttle jams, you're rather stuck.
Of course, this also stops left foot and heel and toe braking, both fairly routine advanced driving techniques and so rather surprising that Porsche, of all companies, have managed this one.
1. A lot of people would then just put their foot down and drive on the limiter. Speed's what kills, right, but you can't speed now so you're safe right? Concentration levels would go through the floor. Plus, not all cars are going to be automagically slowed by the same amount in the same place. Just wait for accidents where the limiter behind tries to run the brakes a bit later and tail ends the front car.
2. Speedos aren't precise. Trucks are already frequently speed limited, and as a result they tend to fight over that last 1MPH on their limiters on motorways and so on. Do we really want the whole road doing that, everywhere?
3. Do we really think the ricers / max power lads aren't going to try and hack this out? Which means they're hacking ino the fuel / ignition / braking system etc - and do we trust them not to mess something up and see it cause problems, even if they're only that it starts pumping out nasty emissions?
4. For this to work, it has to interrupt all sorts of critical systems that keep the car moving. Believe it or not, computer systems on modern cars crash periodically. You want that to happen with all those systems? Maybe it'll cut out on the motorway, maybe it just won't start for no good reason and leave you stranded.
5. Ever tried executing a pass on a slow-moving vehicle without crossing the speed limit, however briefly? Not very likely unless that vehicle is a very slow tractor and not very safe either because it increases the time you spend in the oncoming carriageway.
Mandatory speed limiters are a very silly idea designed to appeal to people who haven't thought them through, but sadly we've got a history in the UK of pandering to that element of the population. Hopefully, though, the Sun is being its usual sensationalist self and its opposition will stop the idea dead in the water.
Rigidly enforced speed limits, especially on motorways, would be a silly idea. Precise speedos are really expensive to make, so MOT rules only require them to be accurate within 10%. Plus, if you know you could get done every time you floated over it while passing someone downhill, you'd end up caring more about the limit than generally safe driving.
There's a very good, safety reason why we have reasonably loose speed limit enforcement on motorways.
Whatever object that floats does it be repelling water of the same mass as itself, thus melting a piece of ice floating on a water body will result in the water level being exactly the same as before, not "less space" or "end up a wash". Seriously.
It completely fails to account for either the idea that ice and water are different densities, or that some of the ice that would melt might be above the waterline, both of which would affect the displacement of water.
1. Liquid water and ice are not the same density. Therefore, if you melt ice you will end up with a greater volume of water than you had of ice, assuming zero evaporation.
2. Since when has the sea ice at the North Pole been flat and level with the sea? Anything that's floating above the waterline is merely serving to displace water by pushing what it's floating on down. Its only effect on water displacement is by weight, not volume.
The first will reduce the volume produced, the second increase it. It has been hypothesised earlier that the two effects would approximately cancel each other out.
I do pretty much the same, except that I've only just got the keyboard so I've not got the MIDI cable hooked up to the PC yet.
Sheet music doesn't have to mean it was drawn out by hand, it just has to mean that it's written down using the most common notation for this sort of thing that's sufficiently verbose.
I also read music. Maybe some people found it hard work - I never did. I've been reading music since I was 6-7 and can read it pretty much as fluently as English.
Sure, you'll get some who can play superbly by ear alone. Jools Holland springs to mind. It makes it significantly harder to accurately replicate a complex performance, though, when you can merely replicate what you think you heard. When you have complex rhythms, chord structures and so on, even the best musician is going to be hard pushed to pick it all up by hearing. It's really far easier for them to have learnt to read the dots on the paper at some point in their lives and just play from that. No, it doesn't stifle creativity anywhere near as much as some people might think because if you're any good then by the time you've progressed beyond learning the music into actually performing it, you're really just using the sheet music as an aide de memoire - you then put your own shape on the performance, rather than playing it mechanically off the page.
Some people are unfortunate enough never to have been taught to read sheet music at a young enough age that they could just absorb it. Some people are so fabulously gifted that they could play a Beethoven piano concerto by ear, and do it well. For everyone else, it's probably a good idea if they've got at least some idea how to read music. Heck, we learn to program easily enough and there's an awful lot less rules to sheet music.
Half the cast have different names, entirely sensibly, because the names are pseudo-latin puns in their own right.
Obleix Dogmatix Getafix Cacofonix
just to name the first 4 that spring to mind - all puns that would be lost if you kept the names.
I have to say, though, having read French and English editions back-to-back I found the English significantly funnier. OK, my French isn't great so I'm going to miss some of the jokes but I wasn't impressed overall.
A mobile sound system that draws more power than the running car can supply and which puts out more volume than you can safely use in the vehicle seems to fit several definitions of useless to me, I'm afraid.
Isn't 170 enough to set off a fatal pressure wave in the brain, though?
They're already waaaaaaay past permanent instant hearing loss, though, so it all seems rather trivial TBH. What's the point in a car sound system you can't get within 10m of?
I've just had an Epson 440 gum up so I sympathise.
I was thinking the same about B&W lasers until I realised one thing: I can't feed card through them. I do some kids work in my spare time and it can be quite useful when you're doing some modelling with them to be able to print the worksheet / templates direct onto card. HPs won't do this because of that U-shaped paper path but Epsons definitely do and I'm pretty sure Canons would. Lexmark should be taken out and shot;-)
Annoyingly, inkjets just have that extra flexibility over lasers. Pity, or I'd have a laser sitting next to me right now and lovely crisp text.
But how much is becuase they've never _had_ to adapt?
Give them a pile of different computers to work on, set up differently, different packages and so on, and they'll normally pick it up quickly enough. It's just that they scare themselves early and then don't trust themselves to go off the tracks. Force them off the tracks regularly and they'll learn to look for the little patterns that we intuitively search for.
Slashdot Mirror
Then Rise of the Robots, by an absolute mile. Robot one-on-one fighting game. Banging on about their clever new AI system that responded fantastically well to player input, absolutely gorgeous pre-rendered graphics.
Except that you could get several levels in by taping the koystick in the top right corner and the fire button down. Very, very, poor.
Absolutely.
:-)
How many people have actually listened to what the Tories are saying at the moment, though? It's terrifying. They're frankly even keener than Blair on the whole war thing but are determined to find some extremely opportunist lines of attack to try and win votes. They're proposing that schools and hospitals both go into a competitive market with the private sector, guaranteeing a brain and resources drain from state schools and by very definition reducing the amount of money in the NHS for a sector with no proven improvement in the value-for-money record. Their tax policy has major cuts and so would either lead to huge public service cuts or a massive budget defecit (methinks the latter, bearing in mind their record), their European policy would lead to our ultimate withdrawl from a free trade alliance with our major trading partners. The idea that this lot could get elected because they're not Labour and very few people actually listen to policy announcements is very, very scary. Especially seeing how poor an opposition they've been - this bunch barely ever actually tie the government down in the commons or ask decent questions. I'm not sure I'd trust them to run a sweet shop.
Vote LibDem to keep the Tories out by forcing Labour to be honest in coalition. That's my plan, anyway
(And the Transport Secretary's Alastair Darling, isn't it? Seems to be shutting up which, after the foot-in-mouth tendencies of his predecessors, is probably for the best.)
I agree. A situation where a party can get approximately 20% of the vote, a little under 10% of the seats and consider that a roaring success is a little suspect.
Or, for that matter, a party can get a little over 40% and get an overall majority of what, 170-odd in a 650ish seat house?
FPTP is a terrible system and should be taken out and shot, quickly. Labour should be ashamed on going back on their 1997 manifesto committment to hold a referendum on alternatives.
No point in throwing away the important ones, after all. Some protections are too fundamental to be discarded willy-nilly. :-)
Prime example of a liberal, forward-looking society...
I'm straight so this really doesn't affect me but tell me, is homosexuality still illegal and punishable by birching?
Tories and Labour aren't the only parties though. By pretending they are when we vote we remove any strong incentive for either to behave as if they can be taken out of office and shouldn't do this sort of thing.
It _stinks_ that these proposals are appearing, but if we vote for Labour we implicitly support it and if we vote for the Tories, well, we saw what they came up with last time. Always makes me chuckle that the name is a corruption of an old Irish word meaning 'bandit'.
Personally, I'll be voting for the LibDems next time. Centre-left but they don't take money from the unions or business and don't have any great desire for authoritarian rubbish like this, or for daft military games in the sand and various silly measures to prop up the arms trade.
Maybe you'd rather be further left? OK, look at the SSP if you're north of the border, Plaid Cymru if you're west of a different border, SWP, Greens et al in other areas. Or further right? How about UKIP? No, with the exception of SSP and PC none are likely to win seats but who'd have said 5 years ago that SSP would have got anywhere? If you don't vote for these groups then they're never going to get anywhere. If they're not perceived as a threat on any level then the mainstream parties have no motivation whatsoever to examine their positions and take sections onboard. Voting for the present clowns only serves to legitimise their positions.
Or perhaps you won't vote at all, claiming they're all as bad as each other? Big mistake and demonstrably false. Look at what LibDems have achieved already in coalitions, look at what the SSP are doing in Holyrood so far. They're _not_ like the mainstream parties and pretending they are is just daft. By removing yourself from the process you ensure that your views have no input whatsoever. Hardly an effective way to ensure change!
If you want the major parties to take onboard your opinions and take them into government, you need to find candidates with similar opinions and vote for them or the democratic process simply doesn't take your views as input.
OK, so vote for the LibDems.
No, they won't win the next election. But look at significantly less evil governments in Scotland and Wales as a result of coalitions between the LibDems and Labour - wouldn't it be nice to have that for the UK as a whole? Labour probably aren't going at the next election and we don't want the Tories so the best we can hope for is coalition government, surely?
Plus, remembering we're not a country where it's possible to bribe politicians in the same way, they actually care about the ballot box. Make it clear that you've voted for someone else because of rubbish like this and they're going to be a lot less inclined to produce it again. This government isn't trusted at the moment and is mostly popular because people don't claim to see an alternative. If you don't offer a possibility of voting against them, why should they change?
I find that implausible. Over here most cars have had visible VINs for years, so I really can't believe that a garage would supply me a new key from just a VIN.
However, more fundamental problem. If they're nicking the car for parts, they're going to take the doors and you're very unlikely to get anything recognisable back. So how did the insurance company judge whether there'd been a forced entry or not?
No, about 20% (from memory - check the link for corroboration, I'm a little busy to check) of the data stored on a CD is error correction data. Otherwise, data CDs would be absolutely useless in very short order.
c d_frames.htm if you want more information. Hope that helps!
A quick Google has just turned up http://www.disctronics.co.uk/technology/cdbasics/
CDs have inbuilt error correction data so no, scratches would have to be pretty severe for them to affect this.
I still think it's implausible, but not quite that implauisble.
It would take me a while to fish out but it came up after a reader enquiry in either Autocar or Evo - instinct says Autocar. I suspect it wouldn't be a harsh throttle lift, though - I can't see it closing _instantly_ for this or yes, it would be dangerous.
Pretty easy to verify safely in a straight line, though, so may be worth a try.
It's sufficiently serious a risk that all VAG and Porsche road cars have modified their electronics so that, in the event that you try and press the brake pedal while it thinks you're pressing the throttle, the throttle is reset to zero for the duration of pressure being applied to the brake. The reasoning for this is safety - if a manual throttle jams you can pull it back up. If an electronic throttle jams, you're rather stuck.
Of course, this also stops left foot and heel and toe braking, both fairly routine advanced driving techniques and so rather surprising that Porsche, of all companies, have managed this one.
Please, no mandatory speed limiters...
1. A lot of people would then just put their foot down and drive on the limiter. Speed's what kills, right, but you can't speed now so you're safe right? Concentration levels would go through the floor. Plus, not all cars are going to be automagically slowed by the same amount in the same place. Just wait for accidents where the limiter behind tries to run the brakes a bit later and tail ends the front car.
2. Speedos aren't precise. Trucks are already frequently speed limited, and as a result they tend to fight over that last 1MPH on their limiters on motorways and so on. Do we really want the whole road doing that, everywhere?
3. Do we really think the ricers / max power lads aren't going to try and hack this out? Which means they're hacking ino the fuel / ignition / braking system etc - and do we trust them not to mess something up and see it cause problems, even if they're only that it starts pumping out nasty emissions?
4. For this to work, it has to interrupt all sorts of critical systems that keep the car moving. Believe it or not, computer systems on modern cars crash periodically. You want that to happen with all those systems? Maybe it'll cut out on the motorway, maybe it just won't start for no good reason and leave you stranded.
5. Ever tried executing a pass on a slow-moving vehicle without crossing the speed limit, however briefly? Not very likely unless that vehicle is a very slow tractor and not very safe either because it increases the time you spend in the oncoming carriageway.
Mandatory speed limiters are a very silly idea designed to appeal to people who haven't thought them through, but sadly we've got a history in the UK of pandering to that element of the population. Hopefully, though, the Sun is being its usual sensationalist self and its opposition will stop the idea dead in the water.
No.
Rigidly enforced speed limits, especially on motorways, would be a silly idea. Precise speedos are really expensive to make, so MOT rules only require them to be accurate within 10%. Plus, if you know you could get done every time you floated over it while passing someone downhill, you'd end up caring more about the limit than generally safe driving.
There's a very good, safety reason why we have reasonably loose speed limit enforcement on motorways.
Nonetheless, if we look back to the parent post:
It completely fails to account for either the idea that ice and water are different densities, or that some of the ice that would melt might be above the waterline, both of which would affect the displacement of water.
Oh, for crying out loud...
No, and on two counts.
1. Liquid water and ice are not the same density. Therefore, if you melt ice you will end up with a greater volume of water than you had of ice, assuming zero evaporation.
2. Since when has the sea ice at the North Pole been flat and level with the sea? Anything that's floating above the waterline is merely serving to displace water by pushing what it's floating on down. Its only effect on water displacement is by weight, not volume.
The first will reduce the volume produced, the second increase it. It has been hypothesised earlier that the two effects would approximately cancel each other out.
I do pretty much the same, except that I've only just got the keyboard so I've not got the MIDI cable hooked up to the PC yet.
Sheet music doesn't have to mean it was drawn out by hand, it just has to mean that it's written down using the most common notation for this sort of thing that's sufficiently verbose.
OK, I play by ear rather frequently.
I also read music. Maybe some people found it hard work - I never did. I've been reading music since I was 6-7 and can read it pretty much as fluently as English.
Sure, you'll get some who can play superbly by ear alone. Jools Holland springs to mind. It makes it significantly harder to accurately replicate a complex performance, though, when you can merely replicate what you think you heard. When you have complex rhythms, chord structures and so on, even the best musician is going to be hard pushed to pick it all up by hearing. It's really far easier for them to have learnt to read the dots on the paper at some point in their lives and just play from that. No, it doesn't stifle creativity anywhere near as much as some people might think because if you're any good then by the time you've progressed beyond learning the music into actually performing it, you're really just using the sheet music as an aide de memoire - you then put your own shape on the performance, rather than playing it mechanically off the page.
Some people are unfortunate enough never to have been taught to read sheet music at a young enough age that they could just absorb it. Some people are so fabulously gifted that they could play a Beethoven piano concerto by ear, and do it well. For everyone else, it's probably a good idea if they've got at least some idea how to read music. Heck, we learn to program easily enough and there's an awful lot less rules to sheet music.
Half the cast have different names, entirely sensibly, because the names are pseudo-latin puns in their own right.
Obleix
Dogmatix
Getafix
Cacofonix
just to name the first 4 that spring to mind - all puns that would be lost if you kept the names.
I have to say, though, having read French and English editions back-to-back I found the English significantly funnier. OK, my French isn't great so I'm going to miss some of the jokes but I wasn't impressed overall.
A mobile sound system that draws more power than the running car can supply and which puts out more volume than you can safely use in the vehicle seems to fit several definitions of useless to me, I'm afraid.
Some larger pipe organs can get down to 12Hz or so, though.
Isn't 170 enough to set off a fatal pressure wave in the brain, though?
They're already waaaaaaay past permanent instant hearing loss, though, so it all seems rather trivial TBH. What's the point in a car sound system you can't get within 10m of?
Yup. Same as the biggest selling beer in Ireland is Budweiser...
I've just had an Epson 440 gum up so I sympathise.
;-)
I was thinking the same about B&W lasers until I realised one thing: I can't feed card through them. I do some kids work in my spare time and it can be quite useful when you're doing some modelling with them to be able to print the worksheet / templates direct onto card. HPs won't do this because of that U-shaped paper path but Epsons definitely do and I'm pretty sure Canons would. Lexmark should be taken out and shot
Annoyingly, inkjets just have that extra flexibility over lasers. Pity, or I'd have a laser sitting next to me right now and lovely crisp text.
But how much is becuase they've never _had_ to adapt?
Give them a pile of different computers to work on, set up differently, different packages and so on, and they'll normally pick it up quickly enough. It's just that they scare themselves early and then don't trust themselves to go off the tracks. Force them off the tracks regularly and they'll learn to look for the little patterns that we intuitively search for.