Does that me we, yet again, have a completely lame need of roll and pitch to turn the space ship left or right?
I've seen that on way too many space games, and I think it sucks. You're in space, there's no air to make you turn using aerodynamic methods, and conversely there's no air to stop you from making a 90 deg turn across the normal axis nor smash your craft to pieces if you tilt it 90 deg across its lateral axis.
Frontier: Elite II had a really good physics simulation wrt flight though, and I'm constantly flummuxed when I see space games not even offer that option. Hell Frontier offered the option of flight simulation control.
That quote becomes a lot more sinister, when you write it the way John Hurt says it in the movie: "I want everyone to remember why they need us". He's not emphasising the "need" part - he's emphasising that they need "us" i.e. THAT particular regime.
It's not that we need a government - it's that we need THAT particular government.
The comments leading up to the final chapter, are just as sinister: "The security of this nation depends on complete and total compliance. Tonight any protester, any instigator or agitator will be made example of." - Sounds vaguely familiar. Maybe not while coupled together, but I've certainly heard these two sentences, or very similar ones, from prominant politicians.
Of course the full rant by John Hurt leading up to your quote is very scary and familiar in its whole: "What we need right now is a clear message to the people of this country. This message must be read in every newspaper, heard on every radio, seen on every television. This message must resound through the entire interlink. I want this country to realise that we stand on the brink of oblivion. I want every man, woman and child to understand how close we are to chaos. I want everyone to remember, why they need us!"
Again, sounds vaguely familiar. Even sounded rather familiar the first time I heard it in the movie. Yet, I can't for the life of me figure out quite why that is.
Bulk mail isn't spam. Spam is unsolicited, and bulk doesn't mean unsolicited.
When I built an smtp-server as a personal project, I ran into an interesting conundrum revolving around this.
To reduce the amount of sending my server would do in regards to mailing lists, it would figure out exactly which servers an email would be sent to, connect to it and use SMTPs function of sending one mail to multiple people in 1 (one) connection, saving a lot of bandwith along the way.
Guess what - that gets tagged as "spam" by 95% of all mail servers out there. When I talked to the technicians behind two of the large ISP mail servers in Denmark, they nodded their head at this. See, at some point people decided, outside of RFC, that telling a mail server that this message should be given to more than one of their clients is only done by spammers. So they'd rather have them do a huge amount of redundant connections and sending, than do it the smart way. And no, they didn't say that "bulk mail is spam". They said blocking spam is more important than allowing legitimate bulk emails - even more important than saving bandwidth and processing time.
Well, I think you can cook eggs at around 60 deg C (140 deg F), which isn't that much, considering that you're trying to convey the image of a hotplate (mine can hit around 200 deg C).
While it has been a while since I read the GPL from end to end, I do believe you've made a mistake in this statement:
including whatever bandwith costs that would encumber you with.
There is no requirement that they can download the code, only that you provide it to them, and I think you are allowed to charge a reasonable amount to cover the cost, if your chosen delivery system is the mail. I.e. cost of the cd/dvd and postage.
^^ not to mention the brand name shares a name with a low explosive often found in artillery shells.
Well, just imagine the horror of someone trying to bring an nVidia TNT card through the country. How about a TNT employee wearing a corporate logo baseball cap? Carrying a Semtex Magazine in his carry-on to read about indie music? Anthrax fan?
Some people (especially in security) should really really really take a fucking chill pill.
Btw - I have a distinct feeling that noone is transporting bull semen on regular flights anymore.
I can do better than that. Most channels here (Denmark) have texted programs for translations. The worst wrong-lation I've seen was from Discovery Channel.
They were talking about some kind of ID numbering scheme, and the speaker was explaining what each bit meant while the screen showed the parts with a big fat ring around them. Imagine something like this:
XD25-789-I-575 being translated (in text) as XD52-798-I-528
And then of course there's the constant idiotic wronglations from US to Metric, like PSI to Kg/2.54 cm. Not even 2.54^2 cm^2 or 6.45 cm^2.
I have an HP dv9571eo with an nVidia geforce 8400 in it, but the list I've seen with affected HP laptops (can't find the link now) doesn't include the dv9500 series.
Personally I found that with a bit of creativity and patience, I found that you place a large mountain in one corner and fill it with waterfalls and hydro dams to fulfill your power needs.
Aditionally, though I doubt it has an actual effect on anything, I liked having industry on one side of a small ridge, a small bit of light commercial zones on top of the ridge and then a nice mix of commercial and residential zones on the other side of the ridge. Again, I doubt it had an effect on the game, but it was kinda fun thinking that if you had heavy smog conditions it'd remain on the industry side of the city, and in great weather it would still keep out of the city.
I'm sure it will greatly enhance their careers in the fast food industry.
Well, I'm sure the day will come that even fast food joints will check up on their applicants. Just how many places do you think will want to hire someone to work alongside women and serve food to women, when they have repeatedly not only shown themselves to be womenhaters, but actively threatened to rape them repeatedly in the ass?
On the other hand, if we assume the situation is analogous, the implication is that, should someone say to me in the middle of an online game, "I'm going to rape you," I should be able to compel their identity from Microsoft or whoever if I "feel threatened."
I'm not sure those two are analogous. Without having reread the case, I seem to recall that the women in question did not seek out the forums in question. Their pictures were put on the board, and then the comments started flying. When they then joined the board, (again, afair) seeking to have the pictures removed, they were then subject to even harsher comments, including the rape ones.
You, on the other hand, have joined the game yourself, and aditionally you have joined the chat, which is an optional extra, of your own volition. Aditionally, while "I'm going to rape you" might be a breach of conduct on Xbox Live (I don't know if this is the case), in most fps' this is the 'norm' where you attempt to psyche out your opponent. No adult of a reasonable mind will expect the speaker to seek out your address (is this even possible through Xbox Live?) and hunt you down.
However, on this board, not only were the women's pictures posted, their names and addresses were posted, and considering the vitriol spewed forth on the boards, even I, being a VERY common sense kind of guy, would not put it beyond the assholes and idiots* on the boards to actually following through on their threats**
Of course, I'm not in any way, shape or form a lawyer or had any law training. Hell, I'm not even from the US.
* In my humble and non-medical/-psychological opinion, since I am not refering to mental retardation ** Considering the writing, the constant agitation by the other posters etc, I do not consider the comments "innocent", "joking", "ironic", "sarcastic" or even "humourous"
Just as important - the court found in favour of the plaintiffs, so obviously the judge (jury?) found the threats to be credible and the derogatory comments to be libel. If you do not like that ruling, you need to write your congressmen and tell them why. Don't email, don't fax. Send them a physical letter, preferably handwritten. At least that's what the usual comments on the subject around here advices.
I wasn't arguing against the $10 laptop, I was arguing against his idea that the only cheap cpu would be a 386 costing $30, which is provably wrong.
And I'm just using Denmark because it's the only place I know of that has a decent website for comparing hardware prices across a multitude of vendors. That way I'm not forced to advertice for say NewEgg for a product that could possibly be cheaper with a lot of other vendors
Just in case Intel decided to release 386 again they wouldn't be much cheaper than $30.
Bull. In Denmark I'm able to get a 1.6 GHz AMD Sempron for 29 US$ INCLUDING a 25% sales tax. And that thing will blow your 80386 out of the water on any kind of computing power. And this is retail pricing buying one cpu at a time from a store.
Cheapest 256 MB RAM block is DDR2 at 7 dollars (again, including 25% sales tax).
This brings us to a total cost of 36 US dollars for the CPU and memory - at retail prices.
But you know, I remember running my Pentium 2 with 128 MB RAM just fine, which would only set us back 5.23 US$ for a Kingston DDR memory block. 4US$ if you are willing to settle for a no-name brand.
Seriously, if we had OS' that worked fine back when we had Pentium 2s with 128 MB RAM, we should be able to manage with a 1.6 GHz Sempron with 128 MB RAM today.
My biggest dissapointment with VIA cpus is the cost. Here in Denmark I can get a motherboard with a 1.6 GHz Atom CPU for roughly 77 US$ but the cheapest motherboard with a VIA cpu is an EPIA ML8000AG costing 160 US$. The cheapest C7 cpu I can find is 190US$, and we don't have any local dealers selling the Nano.
Not really, I'm just used to seeing the amount of time my collegues spend fiddeling with stuff that's inconsequential (oh, why doesn't this line up properly, why this, why that) instead of on writing.
Some of the stuff they spend so much time on that I could probably write it out by hand faster than they manage, simply because they're idiots.
At least with LaTeX they wouldn't be spending their time playing with stuff, 'cause they'd be too scared of breaking stuff.
I understand your qualms with LaTeX as a long time user, but given the alternatives I find it better (though word processors are easier to use, LaTeX makes things much prettier).
A word processor front end (let's pick Open Office Writer as an example) with a LaTeX backend would be a good mix, but also give you the downside of WPs, namely constant layout fiddling instead of focussing on content.
I don't quite understand your complaint about the way LaTeX is structured wrt packages. It's pretty much the same thing you see with Firefox where you have a core program with lots of useful plug-ins for added functionality, and as such it's the same argument as it has.
Since the US seems to be in a constant grip of government granted monopolies when it comes to broadband access (you can aparently choose between one cable company or one phone company), there is already regulations - monopoly.
You can't have an unregulated monopoly (maybe duopoly) situation and expect free market competition to solve all problems, since you can't just vote with your wallet.
To me it's rather obvious what must be done to avoid regulations: Remove the forced monopoly. If you can't do that, then regulate the damn thing so your citizens (not consumers) get an actual reasonable product.
Even then, if you do the math on how much of the fragments will be radioactive (and how much) and how much of this will become embedded in bed rock (or deep in the oceans), I really doubt the radioactivity caused by the nuclear blast will have much effect. And depending on where the unfragmented asteroid hits, there's also a chance that the ejecta from that impact will include massive stores of radioative waste from the nuclear power industry.
The problems with nuking asteroids are (apparently) the inherent danger of radioactive fragments falling to earth
I remember that show (not hard, as it's being rerun every two weeks or so), and one thing that they seemed to just skirt across was the alternative:
* Get hit by one huge asteroid that will get through the atmosphere with no problem
* Get bombarbed by thousands of much smaller pieces that will be heavily affected by the atmosphere and spread the now reduct impact over a much larger area
Hell, even if you just break it up into say 1,000 even sized pieces and don't manage a reduction in total mass, you could go from a civilization ruining even to something that is easier to recover from. If we did it to a ~5 km diameter asteroid heading for us, each impact meteor would be reduced from 83 km^3 to 83,000,000 m^3 or 500 m across.
But sure, if it's headed for some random country in Africa I suspect most politicians in the countries able to do something would just shrug their shoulders and prepare for after effects like ejecta and minor earthquakes.
That sounds very much like an urban myth - just look at the circumstances. Why on earth would they be spending their time listening to the same performance on a multitude of CDs? If that isn't what happened, then how could you compare the signal spectrums between the CDs? Even more revealing, the story claims it comes down to the master CDs that the two batches were made from.
HDMI is a nice step, but how does it handle h.264 decoding? Does it have hardware decoding in the GPUs or simply work by CPU decoding? And in either case, what kind of performance does it deliver? 1080p easily? Choppy? 720p?
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Does that me we, yet again, have a completely lame need of roll and pitch to turn the space ship left or right?
I've seen that on way too many space games, and I think it sucks. You're in space, there's no air to make you turn using aerodynamic methods, and conversely there's no air to stop you from making a 90 deg turn across the normal axis nor smash your craft to pieces if you tilt it 90 deg across its lateral axis.
Frontier: Elite II had a really good physics simulation wrt flight though, and I'm constantly flummuxed when I see space games not even offer that option. Hell Frontier offered the option of flight simulation control.
That quote becomes a lot more sinister, when you write it the way John Hurt says it in the movie: "I want everyone to remember why they need us". He's not emphasising the "need" part - he's emphasising that they need "us" i.e. THAT particular regime.
It's not that we need a government - it's that we need THAT particular government.
The comments leading up to the final chapter, are just as sinister:
"The security of this nation depends on complete and total compliance. Tonight any protester, any instigator or agitator will be made example of." - Sounds vaguely familiar. Maybe not while coupled together, but I've certainly heard these two sentences, or very similar ones, from prominant politicians.
Of course the full rant by John Hurt leading up to your quote is very scary and familiar in its whole:
"What we need right now is a clear message to the people of this country. This message must be read in every newspaper, heard on every radio, seen on every television. This message must resound through the entire interlink. I want this country to realise that we stand on the brink of oblivion. I want every man, woman and child to understand how close we are to chaos. I want everyone to remember, why they need us!"
Again, sounds vaguely familiar. Even sounded rather familiar the first time I heard it in the movie. Yet, I can't for the life of me figure out quite why that is.
Bulk mail isn't spam. Spam is unsolicited, and bulk doesn't mean unsolicited.
When I built an smtp-server as a personal project, I ran into an interesting conundrum revolving around this.
To reduce the amount of sending my server would do in regards to mailing lists, it would figure out exactly which servers an email would be sent to, connect to it and use SMTPs function of sending one mail to multiple people in 1 (one) connection, saving a lot of bandwith along the way.
Guess what - that gets tagged as "spam" by 95% of all mail servers out there. When I talked to the technicians behind two of the large ISP mail servers in Denmark, they nodded their head at this. See, at some point people decided, outside of RFC, that telling a mail server that this message should be given to more than one of their clients is only done by spammers. So they'd rather have them do a huge amount of redundant connections and sending, than do it the smart way. And no, they didn't say that "bulk mail is spam". They said blocking spam is more important than allowing legitimate bulk emails - even more important than saving bandwidth and processing time.
Well, I think you can cook eggs at around 60 deg C (140 deg F), which isn't that much, considering that you're trying to convey the image of a hotplate (mine can hit around 200 deg C).
While it has been a while since I read the GPL from end to end, I do believe you've made a mistake in this statement:
There is no requirement that they can download the code, only that you provide it to them, and I think you are allowed to charge a reasonable amount to cover the cost, if your chosen delivery system is the mail. I.e. cost of the cd/dvd and postage.
Well, just imagine the horror of someone trying to bring an nVidia TNT card through the country. How about a TNT employee wearing a corporate logo baseball cap? Carrying a Semtex Magazine in his carry-on to read about indie music? Anthrax fan?
Some people (especially in security) should really really really take a fucking chill pill.
Btw - I have a distinct feeling that noone is transporting bull semen on regular flights anymore.
I can do better than that. Most channels here (Denmark) have texted programs for translations. The worst wrong-lation I've seen was from Discovery Channel.
They were talking about some kind of ID numbering scheme, and the speaker was explaining what each bit meant while the screen showed the parts with a big fat ring around them. Imagine something like this:
XD25-789-I-575 being translated (in text) as
XD52-798-I-528
And then of course there's the constant idiotic wronglations from US to Metric, like PSI to Kg/2.54 cm. Not even 2.54^2 cm^2 or 6.45 cm^2.
I have an HP dv9571eo with an nVidia geforce 8400 in it, but the list I've seen with affected HP laptops (can't find the link now) doesn't include the dv9500 series.
Personally I found that with a bit of creativity and patience, I found that you place a large mountain in one corner and fill it with waterfalls and hydro dams to fulfill your power needs.
Aditionally, though I doubt it has an actual effect on anything, I liked having industry on one side of a small ridge, a small bit of light commercial zones on top of the ridge and then a nice mix of commercial and residential zones on the other side of the ridge. Again, I doubt it had an effect on the game, but it was kinda fun thinking that if you had heavy smog conditions it'd remain on the industry side of the city, and in great weather it would still keep out of the city.
I never use that abreviation myself. Me, I'm more of a "I3Anal" kind of guy (mostly as a giver, but I don't mind a finger).
Well, I'm sure the day will come that even fast food joints will check up on their applicants. Just how many places do you think will want to hire someone to work alongside women and serve food to women, when they have repeatedly not only shown themselves to be womenhaters, but actively threatened to rape them repeatedly in the ass?
My guess is "not many".
I'm not sure those two are analogous. Without having reread the case, I seem to recall that the women in question did not seek out the forums in question. Their pictures were put on the board, and then the comments started flying. When they then joined the board, (again, afair) seeking to have the pictures removed, they were then subject to even harsher comments, including the rape ones.
You, on the other hand, have joined the game yourself, and aditionally you have joined the chat, which is an optional extra, of your own volition. Aditionally, while "I'm going to rape you" might be a breach of conduct on Xbox Live (I don't know if this is the case), in most fps' this is the 'norm' where you attempt to psyche out your opponent. No adult of a reasonable mind will expect the speaker to seek out your address (is this even possible through Xbox Live?) and hunt you down.
However, on this board, not only were the women's pictures posted, their names and addresses were posted, and considering the vitriol spewed forth on the boards, even I, being a VERY common sense kind of guy, would not put it beyond the assholes and idiots* on the boards to actually following through on their threats**
Of course, I'm not in any way, shape or form a lawyer or had any law training. Hell, I'm not even from the US.
* In my humble and non-medical/-psychological opinion, since I am not refering to mental retardation
** Considering the writing, the constant agitation by the other posters etc, I do not consider the comments "innocent", "joking", "ironic", "sarcastic" or even "humourous"
Just as important - the court found in favour of the plaintiffs, so obviously the judge (jury?) found the threats to be credible and the derogatory comments to be libel. If you do not like that ruling, you need to write your congressmen and tell them why. Don't email, don't fax. Send them a physical letter, preferably handwritten. At least that's what the usual comments on the subject around here advices.
Really? Let's see. He got his ass handed to him (no clue if he had been violent prior to what the video showed) and it was caught on tape.
The officers were charged with this and what, exactly, was the lesson that the cops in question learned?
Beat someone up on camera, walk away free (if you're a cop).
Just too bad that L.A. got burned to a crisp as a response, but hey - I'll bet the cops got overtime pay during the riots. That'll teach'em!
I wasn't arguing against the $10 laptop, I was arguing against his idea that the only cheap cpu would be a 386 costing $30, which is provably wrong.
And I'm just using Denmark because it's the only place I know of that has a decent website for comparing hardware prices across a multitude of vendors. That way I'm not forced to advertice for say NewEgg for a product that could possibly be cheaper with a lot of other vendors
Bull. In Denmark I'm able to get a 1.6 GHz AMD Sempron for 29 US$ INCLUDING a 25% sales tax. And that thing will blow your 80386 out of the water on any kind of computing power. And this is retail pricing buying one cpu at a time from a store.
Cheapest 256 MB RAM block is DDR2 at 7 dollars (again, including 25% sales tax).
This brings us to a total cost of 36 US dollars for the CPU and memory - at retail prices.
But you know, I remember running my Pentium 2 with 128 MB RAM just fine, which would only set us back 5.23 US$ for a Kingston DDR memory block. 4US$ if you are willing to settle for a no-name brand.
Seriously, if we had OS' that worked fine back when we had Pentium 2s with 128 MB RAM, we should be able to manage with a 1.6 GHz Sempron with 128 MB RAM today.
He grew up speaking a dead language? What was it - Norwegian Blue?
My biggest dissapointment with VIA cpus is the cost. Here in Denmark I can get a motherboard with a 1.6 GHz Atom CPU for roughly 77 US$ but the cheapest motherboard with a VIA cpu is an EPIA ML8000AG costing 160 US$. The cheapest C7 cpu I can find is 190US$, and we don't have any local dealers selling the Nano.
It's rather dissapointing to be honest.
Not really, I'm just used to seeing the amount of time my collegues spend fiddeling with stuff that's inconsequential (oh, why doesn't this line up properly, why this, why that) instead of on writing.
Some of the stuff they spend so much time on that I could probably write it out by hand faster than they manage, simply because they're idiots.
At least with LaTeX they wouldn't be spending their time playing with stuff, 'cause they'd be too scared of breaking stuff.
I understand your qualms with LaTeX as a long time user, but given the alternatives I find it better (though word processors are easier to use, LaTeX makes things much prettier).
A word processor front end (let's pick Open Office Writer as an example) with a LaTeX backend would be a good mix, but also give you the downside of WPs, namely constant layout fiddling instead of focussing on content.
I don't quite understand your complaint about the way LaTeX is structured wrt packages. It's pretty much the same thing you see with Firefox where you have a core program with lots of useful plug-ins for added functionality, and as such it's the same argument as it has.
Since the US seems to be in a constant grip of government granted monopolies when it comes to broadband access (you can aparently choose between one cable company or one phone company), there is already regulations - monopoly.
You can't have an unregulated monopoly (maybe duopoly) situation and expect free market competition to solve all problems, since you can't just vote with your wallet.
To me it's rather obvious what must be done to avoid regulations: Remove the forced monopoly. If you can't do that, then regulate the damn thing so your citizens (not consumers) get an actual reasonable product.
Even then, if you do the math on how much of the fragments will be radioactive (and how much) and how much of this will become embedded in bed rock (or deep in the oceans), I really doubt the radioactivity caused by the nuclear blast will have much effect. And depending on where the unfragmented asteroid hits, there's also a chance that the ejecta from that impact will include massive stores of radioative waste from the nuclear power industry.
I remember that show (not hard, as it's being rerun every two weeks or so), and one thing that they seemed to just skirt across was the alternative:
* Get hit by one huge asteroid that will get through the atmosphere with no problem
* Get bombarbed by thousands of much smaller pieces that will be heavily affected by the atmosphere and spread the now reduct impact over a much larger area
Hell, even if you just break it up into say 1,000 even sized pieces and don't manage a reduction in total mass, you could go from a civilization ruining even to something that is easier to recover from. If we did it to a ~5 km diameter asteroid heading for us, each impact meteor would be reduced from 83 km^3 to 83,000,000 m^3 or 500 m across.
But sure, if it's headed for some random country in Africa I suspect most politicians in the countries able to do something would just shrug their shoulders and prepare for after effects like ejecta and minor earthquakes.
That sounds very much like an urban myth - just look at the circumstances. Why on earth would they be spending their time listening to the same performance on a multitude of CDs? If that isn't what happened, then how could you compare the signal spectrums between the CDs? Even more revealing, the story claims it comes down to the master CDs that the two batches were made from.
I call hoax.
An Atom CPU is a modern CPU ... and I sincerely doubt that it could hand'e 1080p h.264 even at full speed.
HDMI is a nice step, but how does it handle h.264 decoding? Does it have hardware decoding in the GPUs or simply work by CPU decoding? And in either case, what kind of performance does it deliver? 1080p easily? Choppy? 720p?