>... we all want cars that go off the line like a rocket...
Uh, have you ever seen a rocket take off? Majestic, to be sure, and overpoweringly loud... very impressive. But "quick" is not a word I would use to describe their take-off.
> Um... nearly all of Asimov's robot stories were about situations where following these laws got in the way of doing the Right Thing.
That's because those are the interesting stories. How would you like to read something like "Robot, clean the house." "Yes, sir." "Aah! Woah, nice catch, robot." "You should be more careful around the stairs. <goes back to cleaning the house>"
>Some examples [of AI]...: >... >Pathfinding: Mapquest uses it. Your cable-modem-router uses it too.
I suspect you're right about Mapquest, but I don't really know. However, the net isn't nearly so self-adaptive as we're lead to believe. First off, your cable modem is a two-way link, like a modem connection. Second, it's set up with a default gateway, which is configured by a human (on the ISP side): everything that wants to go outside goes through that. As for the major backbones, I've heard (but I have no proof... sorry) that they don't adapt so much as have the head tech guy come in and fix them ("hmm, border router X seems to be down... fine, comment out that line for now and we'll just route stuff to/through Y").
> While the age of consent in many states is 18, it isn't uniform for all 50 states. It's 16 for several states, and some have conditions, such as 17, but 14 if you're less than 5 years apart.
The site you mentioned (ageofconsent.com) didn't mention the 5 years apart bit, so I'll try and explain it. In some states it is an exception, in others it is a defense (NOT an exception).
In Oregon, ORS 163.345 says that if the only reason consent could not be obtained was because of age, then "it is a defense the actor was less than three years older than the victim at the time of the alleged offense." (Also note that this does not apply to rape in the first degree (ORS 163.375), where the victim is under 12.)
In states such as Oregon, statutory rape is statutory rape regardless of the age of the other actor (and both actors can be charged if they're both under the legal age of consent). What you're talking about is age as a defense. According to my criminal law teacher, this means that the burden of proof is on the defendant to prove the age difference.
Maryland's law surprised me (since everything is a crime in Maryland). While actually getting to the text is a challenge, you can try this. Anyway, article 27, section 463 defines second degree rape. Subsection three (3) says "a person is guilty of rape if the person engages in vaginal intercourse with another person who is under 14 years of age and the person performing the act is at least four years older than the victim." So, I guess, it *is* an exception in Maryland.
Hope that clears this up a little...
(disclaimer: IANAL. I took a criminal law class in high school... oh, and I was in mock trial)
Frankly I don't see why companies like supernews and other usenet providers aren't held accountable......why should they be allowed to carry groups like alt.binaries.kiddy-porn?
My ISP uses Supernews for our news service. A quick search shows that, even if there is such a group as "alt.binaries.kiddy-porn", they don't carry it. A slightly more in-depth search shows no overtly pornagraphic groups using the strings "kid" or "child". Don't believe me? Search for yourself.
Again, I don't know if these groups do exist elsewhere and are just not carried, but before you go slandering an honest company providing a valuable service, check your facts.
Re:Almost all Apples SILENT (Apple 2,Mac+,IIfx,iMa
on
PC Fan of the Future?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
> Did you know the Apple 2 had NO FAN at all?
Neither does the Tandy 1000 RL I've got sitting over here. So what? They're both old and slow, and neither has the processor power to justify a fan.
>...thereby convincing the rest of the population to raze hell.
Heh heh, sweet... I wanna raze Hell. How many buildings does it have? Indeed, how would one go about razing Hell? Maybe bring a few fire trucks down? Maybe find explosives that'll tolerate that kind of heat? In any event, it would be quite interesting....
(and btw, not trying to rag on you for a typo, just thought it was funny)
I would have modded this up, q-soe, because it's pretty rich content-wise, but the spelling and grammar errors were just too much. Seriously, run this through a spellchecker and, if you have one, a grammar checker. The resulting content will be much easier to parse, and far more likely to be modded up.
> Anybody else use those promotion CDs that you get in the mail to put under coffee cups? I usually get 1 AOL CD a month.
Back in the day, they would send out floppy disks... thumb the tab over, pop it in the drive, and after a quick format, you've got yourself a perfectly usable disk (I've still got a few of those...).
Now, they send out the CDs. But, all is not lost... often they send them in the DVD-style-cases. Toss the CD, the insert, and either tear off the sleave or peel off the stickers, and you've got a great CD case. Very generous of them....
>> Only Diablo II and LOD have support for direct TCP/IP games. >> Starcraft and Diablo I (I can't speak for Warcraft 2 BNE or for the forthcoming Warcraft 3) only have IPX networking support, modem and serial cable.
> Starcraft has UDP now also.
But only for the local network... there's still no direct-connect option.
> However, would it be possible to somehow make it a body-powered device?
The whole point to this is to supplement or supplant body power. We're not naturally strong enough to do the things we want to do, so we build something like this to aid us. Using body power would pretty much wreck the whole thing. From the article:
The key to success, he thinks, is to find a way to emulate the efficiency of muscle tissue
So, in other words, what they currently have is not as efficient as human muscle tissue is. Any user->machine energy transformation would be terribly inefficient and wasteful. While there might be some muscles that aren't being used much, and so could provide some power, they would tire after a bit. From what little I know about warfare, a tired soldier is not nearly as good, efficient, useful, error-proof, whatever, as a rested soldier.
> There could also be generators built in; the more you walk or move, the more power you supply to the suit.
I'm not as sure about this, but I don't think that would work either, for the same reason you can't have a perpetual motion machine. Attaching a generator to a leg, say, means that more energy is spent in moving that leg. Some of that energy is reclaimed, but even assuming 100% efficiency (that is, that (work sub leg + work sub generator = work sub leg + generator_reclaimed)), you would do just as well to not have it, since it doesn't actually accomplish anything. (like I said, I'm not as sure about this; if anyone knows what they're talking about, please correct or confirm)
Fools! They're only using 0.4% of the inbound bandwidth on NNTP? Either someone needs to subscribe to some of the good newsgroups (alt.binaries.*), or you need to do some edu-ma-cating. If you're in power, maybe you need to do something like "We're shutting down Kazaa/Morpheus for a week, but come look at our impressive selection of newsgroups! Might we recommend news downloader x?"
I was having a similiar problem... my router, a linux box, was fine, but the computers it was routing for lost DNS periodicly. The fix I found was to renew the DHCP lease... I don't know why that works, but there it is.
> I downloaded it, extracted it, went to run it, and it promtly crashed.
> if they certify it for "Win95 and up", and it crashes on my Win2000 gaming rig, I'm a little dubious.
Works fine on mine. PII 400MHz, Voodoo3. The fault, I think, lies not with them.
>> Show me software that has never had a bug.
> SOL.EXE
Actually, it does have a bug. I discovered an undocumented feature some time ago: if you right-click inside the solitare window, it'll put up all the cards that can be put up. And now the bug: doing so doesn't start the timer. In other words, if there's an ace sitting on top of one of the stacks when you reshuffle, and you right-click, the ace goes up, you get ten points... and the timer stays at zero.
Just a little useless information for you to have fun with...
-Jason-
I tend to agree downloading roms is a logical way for most of us to get our old games off of that hard medium onto our current machines. After all, fair use, right?
According to Nintendo, wrong. I was at their website yesterday, and it turns out that fair use doesn't apply to Nintendo games... no backups, no "archival" copies, no nothing. http://www.nintendo.com/corp/faqs/legal.html
I don't agree with everything they say there... there are perfectly legal ROMs: the ones people write themselves. I've been thinking a while about how cool it would be to write my own and put it on a cartridge (there's a HOWTO abou tit somewhere). Complete API set for you to develop on...
> I often wonder how much more pleasant the world would be if shooting inconsiderate, intentionally ignorant people was legal.
So what do we do when it gets down to the one remaining inconsiderate person -- the one that shot all the other inconsiderate people because they didn't give him what he wanted and they had a "you owe me" attitude, dang it!...and that's assuming that everyone eventually comes into contact with everyone else, and that inconsiderate people shoot each other when they come into contact.
> I've often had the desire for something like this as an instant messenger helper.... It would be nice to see IMs pop-up on the helper.
For three hundred bucks, you could go out and pick up a not-too-bad PCI graphics card and not-too-small monitor. Or, for even less, you can go pick up a cheap graphics card and use an old 14"... for this purpose, it works just as well, since you're not going to be sending messages using it.
> what about button sensitivity? In certain games, like Madden football, you control the trajectory of a pass by how hard or soft you press the button, so how would a flat touchscreen do that with any sort of feel?
I imagine that they'd do something similair to B&W's guestrues. Maybe the speed you move your finger up or the length of the arc you describe determines how far it goes (btw, I'm assuming that the touch-part (as opposed to the display-part) would work like those little laptop pads, the square mouse thingies).
Slashdot Mirror
> I have a Gravis gamepad. ... came with ... a copy of Commander Keen (can't remember which one)
That would be Keen 4, part one of the "Goodbye, Galaxy!" triology: Episode Four, Secret of the Oracle. I've got the Gravis disk right here...
Remember, 12 inches make a foot, and the time to commit forbidden acts is when the moon is shining....
> please mode this as "typo"
This too.
> Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. it's the only thing that ever has.
.sig is particularly relevent here.
Heh, your
It's not a bug! It's a feature!
> ... we all want cars that go off the line like a rocket ...
Uh, have you ever seen a rocket take off? Majestic, to be sure, and overpoweringly loud... very impressive. But "quick" is not a word I would use to describe their take-off.
> Um... nearly all of Asimov's robot stories were about situations where following these laws got in the way of doing the Right Thing.
That's because those are the interesting stories. How would you like to read something like
"Robot, clean the house." "Yes, sir." "Aah! Woah, nice catch, robot." "You should be more careful around the stairs. <goes back to cleaning the house>"
Conflict is always more interesting...
-Jason-
>Some examples [of AI]...:
>...
>Pathfinding: Mapquest uses it. Your cable-modem-router uses it too.
I suspect you're right about Mapquest, but I don't really know. However, the net isn't nearly so self-adaptive as we're lead to believe. First off, your cable modem is a two-way link, like a modem connection. Second, it's set up with a default gateway, which is configured by a human (on the ISP side): everything that wants to go outside goes through that. As for the major backbones, I've heard (but I have no proof... sorry) that they don't adapt so much as have the head tech guy come in and fix them ("hmm, border router X seems to be down... fine, comment out that line for now and we'll just route stuff to/through Y").
-Jason-
> You forgot the twelve dozen rolls of TP you are going to need.
Ok, that amount of TP is gross...
> While the age of consent in many states is 18, it isn't uniform for all 50 states. It's 16 for several states, and some have conditions, such as 17, but 14 if you're less than 5 years apart.
The site you mentioned (ageofconsent.com) didn't mention the 5 years apart bit, so I'll try and explain it. In some states it is an exception, in others it is a defense (NOT an exception).
In Oregon, ORS 163.345 says that if the only reason consent could not be obtained was because of age, then "it is a defense the actor was less than three years older than the victim at the time of the alleged offense." (Also note that this does not apply to rape in the first degree (ORS 163.375), where the victim is under 12.)
In states such as Oregon, statutory rape is statutory rape regardless of the age of the other actor (and both actors can be charged if they're both under the legal age of consent). What you're talking about is age as a defense. According to my criminal law teacher, this means that the burden of proof is on the defendant to prove the age difference.
Maryland's law surprised me (since everything is a crime in Maryland). While actually getting to the text is a challenge, you can try this. Anyway, article 27, section 463 defines second degree rape. Subsection three (3) says "a person is guilty of rape if the person engages in vaginal intercourse with another person who is under 14 years of age and the person performing the act is at least four years older than the victim." So, I guess, it *is* an exception in Maryland.
Hope that clears this up a little...
(disclaimer: IANAL. I took a criminal law class in high school... oh, and I was in mock trial)
My ISP uses Supernews for our news service. A quick search shows that, even if there is such a group as "alt.binaries.kiddy-porn", they don't carry it. A slightly more in-depth search shows no overtly pornagraphic groups using the strings "kid" or "child". Don't believe me? Search for yourself.
Again, I don't know if these groups do exist elsewhere and are just not carried, but before you go slandering an honest company providing a valuable service, check your facts.
> Did you know the Apple 2 had NO FAN at all?
Neither does the Tandy 1000 RL I've got sitting over here. So what? They're both old and slow, and neither has the processor power to justify a fan.
> ...thereby convincing the rest of the population to raze hell.
Heh heh, sweet... I wanna raze Hell. How many buildings does it have? Indeed, how would one go about razing Hell? Maybe bring a few fire trucks down? Maybe find explosives that'll tolerate that kind of heat? In any event, it would be quite interesting....
(and btw, not trying to rag on you for a typo, just thought it was funny)
I would have modded this up, q-soe, because it's pretty rich content-wise, but the spelling and grammar errors were just too much. Seriously, run this through a spellchecker and, if you have one, a grammar checker. The resulting content will be much easier to parse, and far more likely to be modded up.
> Anybody else use those promotion CDs that you get in the mail to put under coffee cups? I usually get 1 AOL CD a month.
Back in the day, they would send out floppy disks... thumb the tab over, pop it in the drive, and after a quick format, you've got yourself a perfectly usable disk (I've still got a few of those...).
Now, they send out the CDs. But, all is not lost... often they send them in the DVD-style-cases. Toss the CD, the insert, and either tear off the sleave or peel off the stickers, and you've got a great CD case. Very generous of them....
>> Only Diablo II and LOD have support for direct TCP/IP games.
>> Starcraft and Diablo I (I can't speak for Warcraft 2 BNE or for the forthcoming Warcraft 3) only have IPX networking support, modem and serial cable.
> Starcraft has UDP now also.
But only for the local network... there's still no direct-connect option.
> However, would it be possible to somehow make it a body-powered device?
The whole point to this is to supplement or supplant body power. We're not naturally strong enough to do the things we want to do, so we build something like this to aid us. Using body power would pretty much wreck the whole thing. From the article:
The key to success, he thinks, is to find a way to emulate the efficiency of muscle tissue
So, in other words, what they currently have is not as efficient as human muscle tissue is. Any user->machine energy transformation would be terribly inefficient and wasteful. While there might be some muscles that aren't being used much, and so could provide some power, they would tire after a bit. From what little I know about warfare, a tired soldier is not nearly as good, efficient, useful, error-proof, whatever, as a rested soldier.
> There could also be generators built in; the more you walk or move, the more power you supply to the suit.
I'm not as sure about this, but I don't think that would work either, for the same reason you can't have a perpetual motion machine. Attaching a generator to a leg, say, means that more energy is spent in moving that leg. Some of that energy is reclaimed, but even assuming 100% efficiency (that is, that (work sub leg + work sub generator = work sub leg + generator_reclaimed)), you would do just as well to not have it, since it doesn't actually accomplish anything. (like I said, I'm not as sure about this; if anyone knows what they're talking about, please correct or confirm)
-Jason-
Fools! They're only using 0.4% of the inbound bandwidth on NNTP? Either someone needs to subscribe to some of the good newsgroups (alt.binaries.*), or you need to do some edu-ma-cating. If you're in power, maybe you need to do something like "We're shutting down Kazaa/Morpheus for a week, but come look at our impressive selection of newsgroups! Might we recommend news downloader x?"
-Jason-
> it's Perl, or perl, but not PERL.
No, not PERL, but the first two aren't interchangeable... Perl is the language, perl is the compiler. Intro to the Camel book, v5, IIRC.
-Jason-
I was having a similiar problem... my router, a linux box, was fine, but the computers it was routing for lost DNS periodicly. The fix I found was to renew the DHCP lease... I don't know why that works, but there it is.
-Jason-
> I downloaded it, extracted it, went to run it, and it promtly crashed.
> if they certify it for "Win95 and up", and it crashes on my Win2000 gaming rig, I'm a little dubious.
Works fine on mine. PII 400MHz, Voodoo3. The fault, I think, lies not with them.
-Jason-
>> Show me software that has never had a bug.
> SOL.EXE
Actually, it does have a bug. I discovered an undocumented feature some time ago: if you right-click inside the solitare window, it'll put up all the cards that can be put up. And now the bug: doing so doesn't start the timer. In other words, if there's an ace sitting on top of one of the stacks when you reshuffle, and you right-click, the ace goes up, you get ten points... and the timer stays at zero.
Just a little useless information for you to have fun with...
-Jason-
According to Nintendo, wrong. I was at their website yesterday, and it turns out that fair use doesn't apply to Nintendo games... no backups, no "archival" copies, no nothing. http://www.nintendo.com/corp/faqs/legal.html
I don't agree with everything they say there... there are perfectly legal ROMs: the ones people write themselves. I've been thinking a while about how cool it would be to write my own and put it on a cartridge (there's a HOWTO abou tit somewhere). Complete API set for you to develop on...
-Jason-
> I often wonder how much more pleasant the world would be if shooting inconsiderate, intentionally ignorant people was legal.
...and that's assuming that everyone eventually comes into contact with everyone else, and that inconsiderate people shoot each other when they come into contact.
So what do we do when it gets down to the one remaining inconsiderate person -- the one that shot all the other inconsiderate people because they didn't give him what he wanted and they had a "you owe me" attitude, dang it!
-Jason-
> I've often had the desire for something like this as an instant messenger helper .... It would be nice to see IMs pop-up on the helper.
For three hundred bucks, you could go out and pick up a not-too-bad PCI graphics card and not-too-small monitor. Or, for even less, you can go pick up a cheap graphics card and use an old 14"... for this purpose, it works just as well, since you're not going to be sending messages using it.
> what about button sensitivity? In certain games, like Madden football, you control the trajectory of a pass by how hard or soft you press the button, so how would a flat touchscreen do that with any sort of feel?
I imagine that they'd do something similair to B&W's guestrues. Maybe the speed you move your finger up or the length of the arc you describe determines how far it goes (btw, I'm assuming that the touch-part (as opposed to the display-part) would work like those little laptop pads, the square mouse thingies).
-Jason-