Just as an FYI, the stuff in that movie was a room-temperature superconductor. That's why it floated in the presence of a magnetic field at, uh, room temperature.
Exceedingly valuable, but I don't know why they didn't just pick up all the mountains that were floating / use orbital bombardment.
I had the HDMI and component out hooked up at the same time. There's a marginal, but noticable, improvement in the HDMI. The signal is only 1080i or 480i, depending on HD vs. SD. I don't think I've ever seen a 720 picture on my TV. The TV will tell me what the input signal is, and I am getting 1080i via component.
I don't consider it "problem solved" for a few reasons:
1. The Wii and DVD player are on component and that uses them up. The TV has 2 component and 3 HDMI inputs. (Plus 3 composite and 1 S-video.)
2. I bought the HDMI cables. (I got them for $5 each, but still...) It's a lot cleaner to use one cable instead of 5.
3. If I'm paying $500 for the PVR, I want the fucking thing to work flawlessly. If it was $100, or used, or something I built myself, or if I was pirating the content, I'd be okay with a little bit of flakey performance. If I'm actually *buying* the content, on a fully legit, ACTA / MPAA / CCRA / Interpol approved system, then it shouldn't give me any problems.
The HDMI handshaking makes the audio drop intermittently on my new TV when combined with my new HD PVR from my cable company. Pirated content plays flawlessly over the same HDMI connections.
On the upside, it is going to save me a ton of cash, since all I'll have to buy is a bigger HDD for my Linux box and a media player.
Hey, if it's fun, go right ahead. I've played a lot of Scrabble. However, I don't play it very much anymore. I've got about 3 dozen various board games, from easier multiplayer ones like Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride, to day-long war games like Axis and Allies and Risk. I've also got some "mainstream party" games like Pictionary, Scrabble, and UNO.
Perfect is subjective, and depends on what you want to play at the time and how much time you have on hand. If you don't want to dig on the forums, you can look at the ratings for the games. Agricola, Power Grid, Puerto Rico are all very good games.
For someone to say that they're an expert on board games and bring up Scrabble shows that they don't know what they're talking about. What if, for example, they said "This is the perfect Sci-Fi tablet -- you can get the complete works of L. Ron Hubbard." you'd wonder what, if any, credibility they had.
By the way, EA will be the ones writing Scrabble (just ask Scrabulous how it worked out), so Have Fun.
If they did that, you could report them and they would be heavily fined. If they fired you, you could sue them and you'd be quite likely to win. Odds are you'd get ~2 years pay.
They'd have to cover your court costs if you won, since we have a loser-pay system up here. Any lawyer in the country would salivate over getting a case like that dropped in their laps.
Hi there, I'm from Canada. You might remember us from previous political threads such as "Canada's healthcare isn't that bad." and "Dude, 1812 was almost 200 years ago. We have nukes now."
We have national funding for our political parties. In order to prevent, let's say, the "BSTFF (Beardo Should Totally get Federal Funding)" party from forming and pocketing a whack o' cash, you get a certain amount from every vote that's cast your way. I'm not going to bother looking it up, but it's about $1.50 per vote. So if you get a million votes, you'd get $1.5M. We had 13.8 million voters last election. 37%, or just over 5 million, voted for the Conservative party. (So that's about $7.5 million from Elections Canada.)
We also have campaign contributions and you can claim those on your income taxes. However, there are limits and those are enforced via jail time. Rather than cut-and-paste, here they are. In short, you can only contribute $1,100 per year and companies / corporations / trade unions / etc cannot make them.
Now, this is where it gets interesting, is that we have spending limits on campaigns. Third-party limits are just under $200k total, across all electoral districts. It's just under $4k for each district. The parties themselves can spend a total of about $20 million for the bigger parties. http://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/elections/laws.html
That's not all. Each party has a certain amount of media time alloted to it. It works out to 396 minutes per broadcaster in total, with allocations given out based on some formula locked in Ottawa somewhere. http://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/elections/laws.html
All in all, our system works out reasonably well as long as you've got people in Parliament who are willing to work together. We don't right now, so government shut itself down for 2 months.
Why, you ask, is an Electrical Engineer -- one who reads/., has acted as a sys admin for two start-ups, uses Linux at home (and Puppy for the kids, that's right, my 6-year-old uses Linux) and has over 25 years of programming and networking experience)-- using IE6, a browser that MS itself has said, "oh god, please ditch it"?
Because I'm at work and some of the legacy applications here require it.
Have you got a solution? I'd love to hear it because I'd get a big fat bonus for a process improvement.
What you can do is get a 12 conductor cable and run that from your amp to the wall. Then inside the walls, run the cables to near each speaker, ideally behind where you're going to mount them. Get some speaker plates and wire them up. Voila, no more wires running over the floor.
You can also get ceiling-mounted speakers that blend in nicely, although they don't have the same sound as bookshelf-style.
There are also wireless sound bars that use wall reflection to mimic surround sound.
I just got out of the shower after biking to work, so I'm getting a kick out of this reply. Oh, wait. Wrong website.
Anyway, back to your points: 1. Road maintenance and cycling.
Yes, it is expensive to maintain the roads. Notwithstanding that bikes wear out the roads slower, I own a house and pay property taxes. That's what pays for the roads here. I don't bike on the highway (illegal (you have to maintain 60km/h) and stupid). A dedicated cycling path put in 10+ years ago has yet to be repaved.
2. Bikes being dicks.
You don't think *I* want to punch Douchebag McSpandex in the mouth? Come on, he could be the next Lance Armstrong and you should be honoured to ride on the same roads as He. The rules are pretty clear -- bikes are to ride as close to the right as practical. That doesn't mean I should be wearing out the right side of my tire on the curb. It means that you should, whenever possible, let cars pass without letting them know that you're letting them pass. (i.e. get out of the way!) Bikes are 1% of traffic and 2% of fatalities. In a contest between skintanium and steel, steel has yet to lose.
If you're breaking the rules of the road, yes, you should get a ticket. I think bicycles should require a licence and insurance, same as a car. I have seen a cop pull over a bike once. "What part of a red light do you not understand?" came over the bullhorn. It was nice to see.
The reason these guys are biking in a pack is twofold:
1. Increased visibility. Every time a car hits a bike, the first words are, "I didn't see him!" I have more lights than a police cruiser carrying a christmas tree in a parade*, but I've still had people say that after cutting me off. (I have close to $500 worth of lights on my bike.)
2. Socializing. Apparently when you're working out and puffing, you can hold a conversation. I have trouble talking to people while diving, but hey, everyone has to have a hobby and hang out with friends.
So while it is still illegal, it's a minor infraction and the police here turn a blind eye. On the flip side, if there's an accident they continue to turn a blind eye. A group got hit due to a car passing on the left, which was hit by a car turning right, which pinpalled the passing car into the pack. No serious injuries; property damage aplenty. No charges were laid.
There's no shortage of stupid people, and some of those people are on bikes. Some of us are fairly intelligent, have jobs and houses, and contribute quite a bit to the local economies.
*I ride with: 1. 150 lumen front light (13W equivalent, max street legal) 2. 1W helmet-mounted flasher 3. front white cluster flasher 4. BLT light vest with turn signals (front and back lighting) 5. red flashing wristbands 6. three spoke-lit side lights (two green, one red) 7. blue rim light 8. two 1/2W rear flashing lights
Ah, very interesting. I'm going to be buying a player in the next week or so (possibly even today), and that's going to save me WEEKS of transcoding time.
They learned their lesson. The new models load as a USB mass storage drive, and they dropped the proprietary cable for the 2009 line. (I can't figure out how to get movies to play on it.)
I won one at a contest at work; I bought my wife one for Xmas. It's pretty much a flawless player for less than $100.
If you think that I, Robot got shafted, go read The Postman. That book is one of the finest SF books I've read, up there with Childhood's End and The Last Question. Yes, it's that good.
You probably didn't think it was Science Fiction until just now, did you?
I don't know what the hell happened between the book and the movie. I'd seen the movie years ago as a teen. I read the book more recently, got my wife to read it, then we rented the movie (Believe it or not, it's available on DVD, and it has no ads or FBI warning. You put it in and it starts playing. This says something profound about the chances of someone pirating the movie, although I half expected it to be just the crest and the text "Really?")
Slashdot Mirror
Just as an FYI, the stuff in that movie was a room-temperature superconductor. That's why it floated in the presence of a magnetic field at, uh, room temperature.
Exceedingly valuable, but I don't know why they didn't just pick up all the mountains that were floating / use orbital bombardment.
Really?
I'd use a plasma torch and save the labour.
I had the HDMI and component out hooked up at the same time. There's a marginal, but noticable, improvement in the HDMI. The signal is only 1080i or 480i, depending on HD vs. SD. I don't think I've ever seen a 720 picture on my TV. The TV will tell me what the input signal is, and I am getting 1080i via component.
I don't consider it "problem solved" for a few reasons:
1. The Wii and DVD player are on component and that uses them up. The TV has 2 component and 3 HDMI inputs. (Plus 3 composite and 1 S-video.)
2. I bought the HDMI cables. (I got them for $5 each, but still...) It's a lot cleaner to use one cable instead of 5.
3. If I'm paying $500 for the PVR, I want the fucking thing to work flawlessly. If it was $100, or used, or something I built myself, or if I was pirating the content, I'd be okay with a little bit of flakey performance. If I'm actually *buying* the content, on a fully legit, ACTA / MPAA / CCRA / Interpol approved system, then it shouldn't give me any problems.
I hope so.
The HDMI handshaking makes the audio drop intermittently on my new TV when combined with my new HD PVR from my cable company. Pirated content plays flawlessly over the same HDMI connections.
On the upside, it is going to save me a ton of cash, since all I'll have to buy is a bigger HDD for my Linux box and a media player.
Hey, if it's fun, go right ahead. I've played a lot of Scrabble. However, I don't play it very much anymore. I've got about 3 dozen various board games, from easier multiplayer ones like Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride, to day-long war games like Axis and Allies and Risk. I've also got some "mainstream party" games like Pictionary, Scrabble, and UNO.
Perfect is subjective, and depends on what you want to play at the time and how much time you have on hand. If you don't want to dig on the forums, you can look at the ratings for the games. Agricola, Power Grid, Puerto Rico are all very good games.
For someone to say that they're an expert on board games and bring up Scrabble shows that they don't know what they're talking about. What if, for example, they said "This is the perfect Sci-Fi tablet -- you can get the complete works of L. Ron Hubbard." you'd wonder what, if any, credibility they had.
By the way, EA will be the ones writing Scrabble (just ask Scrabulous how it worked out), so Have Fun.
If they talk about "perfect board games" and then mention Scrabble, then
THEY DO NOT KNOW A FUCKING THING ABOUT BOARD GAMES.
Think that's bad?
My wife is a support specialist...
specialist...
specialist.
If they did that, you could report them and they would be heavily fined. If they fired you, you could sue them and you'd be quite likely to win. Odds are you'd get ~2 years pay.
They'd have to cover your court costs if you won, since we have a loser-pay system up here. Any lawyer in the country would salivate over getting a case like that dropped in their laps.
Hey, I didn't say proroguing was all bad.
I work for a military contractor, and if they aren't working, they aren't cancelling helicopter contracts.
I enjoy music and movies, and if they aren't working, they aren't passing copyright laws like C-60 and C-61.
I like torturing Afganis, so if they aren't working, they aren't looking into who was doing it. Oh wait, I didn't mean to say that out loud.
Hi there, I'm from Canada. You might remember us from previous political threads such as "Canada's healthcare isn't that bad." and "Dude, 1812 was almost 200 years ago. We have nukes now."
We have national funding for our political parties. In order to prevent, let's say, the "BSTFF (Beardo Should Totally get Federal Funding)" party from forming and pocketing a whack o' cash, you get a certain amount from every vote that's cast your way. I'm not going to bother looking it up, but it's about $1.50 per vote. So if you get a million votes, you'd get $1.5M. We had 13.8 million voters last election. 37%, or just over 5 million, voted for the Conservative party. (So that's about $7.5 million from Elections Canada.)
We also have campaign contributions and you can claim those on your income taxes. However, there are limits and those are enforced via jail time. Rather than cut-and-paste, here they are. In short, you can only contribute $1,100 per year and companies / corporations / trade unions / etc cannot make them.
Now, this is where it gets interesting, is that we have spending limits on campaigns. Third-party limits are just under $200k total, across all electoral districts. It's just under $4k for each district. The parties themselves can spend a total of about $20 million for the bigger parties. http://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/elections/laws.html
That's not all. Each party has a certain amount of media time alloted to it. It works out to 396 minutes per broadcaster in total, with allocations given out based on some formula locked in Ottawa somewhere.
http://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/elections/laws.html
All in all, our system works out reasonably well as long as you've got people in Parliament who are willing to work together. We don't right now, so government shut itself down for 2 months.
I don't have admin rights and USB devices are restricted.
I had to get permission to plug in a USB-charged bike light.
Meh, I haven't had a call in 12 years.
I'm using IE6 right now, you insensitve clod.
Why, you ask, is an Electrical Engineer -- one who reads /., has acted as a sys admin for two start-ups, uses Linux at home (and Puppy for the kids, that's right, my 6-year-old uses Linux) and has over 25 years of programming and networking experience)-- using IE6, a browser that MS itself has said, "oh god, please ditch it"?
Because I'm at work and some of the legacy applications here require it.
Have you got a solution? I'd love to hear it because I'd get a big fat bonus for a process improvement.
What you can do is get a 12 conductor cable and run that from your amp to the wall. Then inside the walls, run the cables to near each speaker, ideally behind where you're going to mount them. Get some speaker plates and wire them up. Voila, no more wires running over the floor.
You can also get ceiling-mounted speakers that blend in nicely, although they don't have the same sound as bookshelf-style.
There are also wireless sound bars that use wall reflection to mimic surround sound.
You've never tried to get an ATI card working under Ubuntu, have you?
"lol get a different card"
I can vouch for this. I've been angry enough to get 65km/h on a mountain bike on a level stretch.
Once the adrenaline wore off I had to throw up, but the timing was, shall we say, excellent.
I just got out of the shower after biking to work, so I'm getting a kick out of this reply. Oh, wait. Wrong website.
Anyway, back to your points:
1. Road maintenance and cycling.
Yes, it is expensive to maintain the roads. Notwithstanding that bikes wear out the roads slower, I own a house and pay property taxes. That's what pays for the roads here. I don't bike on the highway (illegal (you have to maintain 60km/h) and stupid). A dedicated cycling path put in 10+ years ago has yet to be repaved.
2. Bikes being dicks.
You don't think *I* want to punch Douchebag McSpandex in the mouth? Come on, he could be the next Lance Armstrong and you should be honoured to ride on the same roads as He. The rules are pretty clear -- bikes are to ride as close to the right as practical. That doesn't mean I should be wearing out the right side of my tire on the curb. It means that you should, whenever possible, let cars pass without letting them know that you're letting them pass. (i.e. get out of the way!) Bikes are 1% of traffic and 2% of fatalities. In a contest between skintanium and steel, steel has yet to lose.
If you're breaking the rules of the road, yes, you should get a ticket. I think bicycles should require a licence and insurance, same as a car. I have seen a cop pull over a bike once. "What part of a red light do you not understand?" came over the bullhorn. It was nice to see.
The reason these guys are biking in a pack is twofold:
1. Increased visibility. Every time a car hits a bike, the first words are, "I didn't see him!" I have more lights than a police cruiser carrying a christmas tree in a parade*, but I've still had people say that after cutting me off. (I have close to $500 worth of lights on my bike.)
2. Socializing. Apparently when you're working out and puffing, you can hold a conversation. I have trouble talking to people while diving, but hey, everyone has to have a hobby and hang out with friends.
So while it is still illegal, it's a minor infraction and the police here turn a blind eye. On the flip side, if there's an accident they continue to turn a blind eye. A group got hit due to a car passing on the left, which was hit by a car turning right, which pinpalled the passing car into the pack. No serious injuries; property damage aplenty. No charges were laid.
There's no shortage of stupid people, and some of those people are on bikes. Some of us are fairly intelligent, have jobs and houses, and contribute quite a bit to the local economies.
*I ride with:
1. 150 lumen front light (13W equivalent, max street legal)
2. 1W helmet-mounted flasher
3. front white cluster flasher
4. BLT light vest with turn signals (front and back lighting)
5. red flashing wristbands
6. three spoke-lit side lights (two green, one red)
7. blue rim light
8. two 1/2W rear flashing lights
This doesn't include all my refelctive striping.
My thoughts exactly.Oh boy, it'll be great to drop the one format my COTS player has. It's the equivalent of a digital audio player not playing MP3s.
Typical OSS developer mindset: "If you buy $500 worth of hardware, then you can run the newest version of our software, which is FREE!!"
As a Canadian, I have to ask if you've ever heard of Flanders Fields...
Ah, very interesting. I'm going to be buying a player in the next week or so (possibly even today), and that's going to save me WEEKS of transcoding time.
They learned their lesson. The new models load as a USB mass storage drive, and they dropped the proprietary cable for the 2009 line. (I can't figure out how to get movies to play on it.)
I won one at a contest at work; I bought my wife one for Xmas. It's pretty much a flawless player for less than $100.
I thought that II would have ended way better with Yoda walking in and yelling "Dooku!" a la Voice, and having him snap out of it.
"Yoda? What? Where... where am I?"
But I would have put that somewhere in Episode I.
Come on, the book was about two things:
1. The politics
2. The powered armour
Just because both those things were missing from the movie... oh, wait, I see your point now.
If you think that I, Robot got shafted, go read The Postman. That book is one of the finest SF books I've read, up there with Childhood's End and The Last Question. Yes, it's that good.
You probably didn't think it was Science Fiction until just now, did you?
I don't know what the hell happened between the book and the movie. I'd seen the movie years ago as a teen. I read the book more recently, got my wife to read it, then we rented the movie (Believe it or not, it's available on DVD, and it has no ads or FBI warning. You put it in and it starts playing. This says something profound about the chances of someone pirating the movie, although I half expected it to be just the crest and the text "Really?")
It sure would be nice if COTS players played MKV. They don't, and it means that MKV can never be as useful as AVI, even with the 4G limit.