In an ideal world, I'd like to believe that officers would call out their buddies who engage in unethical behavior. But I do realize that is, indeed, just human nature.
However, I also know that when I see my coworker running a server on the side, watching youtube videos, or whatever else might get him fired, I'm probably going to give him the heads up that what he's doing probably isn't the best thing if he wants to stay employed. When the manager finally catches him, I'm not going to stand up and say "but you don't understand our jobs" and try to actively cover for him so he doesn't get fired. If someone from another department starts talking about it, I'm not going to try to defend the behavior.
This is where I have a problem with the argument about how I can't judge all officers by the acts of a few. Ordinarily, I'd say that's so. However, when they do such a piss poor job of policing themselves and such a good job of backing your buddies even when they're caught on tape egregiously violating their code of ethics or someone's civil rights, then I am going to lump everyone in the same group.
Basically, there's a difference between "ratting out your work buddies" and "covering up for and backing your buddies even after they've been caught and the manager is threatening to fire them". The former is unfortunate, but expected. The latter is unacceptable and makes you complicit.
If this automatically redirects the iPhone to the wikipedia mobile site, I hope that there will be an easy link to click back to the "real" fully enabled site.
I am extremely tired of websites suddenly realizing that the iPhone is a cell phone and immediately redirecting me to the "useful" mobile site, which is usually optimized for WAP devices. Even worse, the majority of them do not allow you to access the fully enabled site in any way, shape, or form. Look, I can understand that some iPhone users would prefer to see the WAP site. However, one of the selling points of the iPhone for me is that it has a web browser that allows me to navigate and read any site. Please allow me to keep using the full functionality of the iPhone and your website and quit trying to dumb it down for me.
Compression ratio isn't a product of valve timing. It's a product of how far the piston travels. You take the volume of the cylinder when the piston is at bottom dead center and then divide that by the volume of the cylinder when the piston is at top dead center. The number you get is the compression ratio -- x:1.
Usually the only way to alter this in a normally aspirated engine is by doing something extreme like replacing the pistons, rods, and/or crankshaft or by milling down the head slightly. With a turbo or supercharged engine, you can use the boost to effectly raise the compression as high as you'd like.
People bought into DVD technology for exactly the same reason they bought into CDs -- They offered compelling advantages over the previous formats.
They do not degrade over multiple viewings. Yes, you can damage a CD or DVD beyond repair. However, both tape and VHS slowly deteriorate every time you view them. The average person does notice this, because their favorite movies slowly look worse over time.
They never have to be rewound. This is perhaps the biggest advantage. Don't you remember renting a movie from the video store, only to find out it hadn't been rewound? Or having to remember to rewind your own tapes? Cassette tapes didn't have quite the same problem, but finding the song you wanted to listen to was always hard -- it seemed to always been on the wrong end of the tape and finding the break exactly where that song picked up was difficult. Which leads me into my next advantage:
Chapter stops. Less important for DVDs, more important for CDs. Finding the song you wanted was not only easy, but nearly instantaneous. Got a favorite part of Pulp Fiction you want to watch, or maybe you want to play the lobby scene of The Matrix to show off your new sound system -- you can have it loaded up and ready to go within a minute. Try doing that with a VHS tape.
You can easily listen to them on your computer. Not an early reason for adoption, but it certainly drove adoption the middle part of the cycle. Being able to listen to/watch your music/movies in different ways adds value.
This is why CDs and DVDs were adopted. The added sound fidelity was slightly important, but the majority moved to them for those reasons. It is hard to get people to move from them, because the format is nearly perfect. There are few advantages that other formats can offer -- greater quality, which most can't really appreciate and better durability, which most formats don't do without compromising other things and durability isn't much of an issue anyway.
Yes. People forget why these community standards were originally put into place. At one point in time, in a non-wired, non-global world, they made perfect sense.
Back when our parents were children, there was very little mail order shipping. There was no wired transmission of digital media. Basically, if you wanted obscene content, you had to walk down to your neighborhood adult store and buy it. Of course, no one wants a porno shop next to their children's daycare, and some rightfully saw these establishments as blights on their community. While no one should have a problem with you consuming hardcore BDSM material in your home, some understandably had a problem with the stores you had to buy it from setting up shop right down the road. NIMBY, basically, just with porn and not waste.
Not that I nessessarily agree with it, but this is why community standards were put into law. Basically, you couldn't sell anything in a community where the "average person" disapproved. That wasn't supposed to mean that you couldn't buy it in the next town over and then bring it back to your home -- they just couldn't distribute it in your city limits.
We all know that these kinds of things mean nothing in today's world. But, many politicians and many judges are older and have not grown up with this worldview, and do not completely understand it. Others just hate porn and realize they can control it this way. Some are just power hungry. Whatever the reason, the old "community standards" no longer apply. If I buy a dildo from goodvibes.com, did they sell it to me in the community they're based in? Or the community I'm based in? The online community? The community where the billing took place? All of them? If I download a video from bangbros, isn't it technically "delivered" in any jurisdiction those bits happen to pass through?
Besides, who cares what you bought or where you bought it from, or how offensive it is when it comes to your house in a plain brown box -- or if it comes to your house through digital wires, completely hidden from anyone who might have seen it? The problem is, these laws started as a way to keep people from inadvertantly seeing obscene content they didn't wish to see and have changed into a way of keeping anyone from seeing obscene content.
Hopefully, the courts will eventually get this right, but one thing about our government is that it does nothing quickly.
The article is flawed. Most of the cars in the test don't have any real electronic aids other than ABS. An LSD is a nice thing to have in a car, especially in a performance car or in less than optimal conditions, but it doesn't "automatically reduce torque if it senses the car is about to skid."
(long explaination follows) A limited slip differential is nothing more than a way to make sure that whichever drive wheel has the most traction gets the most power. In a perfect world, you'd have a locked rear differential, which would tie both wheels together -- while going straight, it would be impossible for one tire to slip without having ALL tires slipping. In fact, many hard-core off-road vehicles have locking differentials for exactly this reason. The problem with locking the differential is that when a car turns, different tires turn at different rates. This isn't a big deal when you're off roading, as the limited traction of the terrain allows the tires to slip enough to overcome this. On high-friction tarmac, it really stresses the drivetrain components, and the vehicle often pops and lurches as the tires loose and gain traction. An open differential solves this problem, but if one wheel loses traction, then all the power goes to that wheel because it is now easier to move. A limited slip differential is a compromise, it allows a little bit of slip for turning corners, but it makes sure that power is routed to the wheels that can best use it. It's really great if you need to accelerate in low traction conditions, particularly out of a corner, but it won't actually help you corner or correct a skid. Of course, it takes a lot longer to explain that than the paragraph the article uses.
And that's just the most obvious error. Is it any surprise that modern cars handle better than their decades-old counterparts? Handling is still somewhat of a black art today, though we've gotten better at predicting how and why a car will handle the way it does. I've driven modern sports cars on an actual race track that were supposedly "comparible" where one car was an absolute handful to keep on the track and the other was a docile as a kitten.
It would not surprise me in the least that the BMW is more difficult to drive, but not because drivers have gotten too used to "active handling". I wonder how this experiment would have gone if the drivers were in a car they didn't drive every day, and forced to drive it once without any active aids (pull the fuses) and then again with them in place. That would have been a more accurate experiment.
Yes. I bought my first burner in 1997. It was expensive (~$300), but one of the first that an average home user could justify. CD-Rs were about $1/each. However, I had been using the one at college for years before that. Judging by the data on the first disc I ever burned (and it still works!), it was around 1995 that I started using the one at school. It was a 1x SCSI burner, created as many coasters as it did good copies, and a CD-R was about $15. I specifically remember not copying audio discs at that time because for the cost of the CD-R you could just buy the real thing.
As do I. Well, I have discs that date back at least 10 years. I bought my first burner in 1997, and I was using them years before that. I still have the first disc I burned -- a backup of my hard drive, which judging by the data should have been done around 1995. It still works fine, though it hasn't been subjected to such an extreme environment.
Of all the discs I've burned, literally thousands over the years, the only ones I've had stop working are the audio ones I carry in the car. Because they are essentially disposable, I treat them like dirt -- and after about a year, they get too many scratches to be used.
I've had less success with magnetic media. There are a few 3.5" floppies in my collection that are simply unreadable -- despite the fact that they have lived their life in a little plastic box that has usually sat on a shelf in my closet.
I thought of that, and I also thought that might be part of the problem.
But really, if we're sending hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of charity, is it too much to ask the hospitals to take a few photos of the trucks and trucks of stuff that roll in over the course of the charity?
One of the things that made the first Child's Play so great was watching the amazement as the stuff rolled in. Everyone thought it'd be just a little bit of something, then it just started getting ridiculous. I was checking the site every single day for new photos, just to see how much stuff people were sending. And to be honest, I sent more that first year than I have ever since, simply because I wanted, no, I needed, to see my stuff in that stack.
Since then, it's just been a number. Sure, $250,000 is a lot of money, but I can imagine it. What I can't imagine are stacks and stack and stacks of PS2's and XBoxes and so many GameBoys I can't see over the top of them! I desperately need to see that visual confirmation. I need to see just how amazed the hospital staff is going to be. Letters help, but again, it's when I look at the photos from the first year that I grasp the enormity of what Child's Play does.
If I feel this way, I have to imagine others feel this way as well. I think adding extra hospitals was a good thing, because people will contribute more if they know they can contribute some place close, but I think even more would contribute if they could just see what other gamers are doing. I know guys who didn't have much to spare but sent a pack of batteries just because they wanted to be a part of that giant stack of stuff. "Did you see what all the other gamers are doing? I had to do something" was a common refrain. I haven't heard that since the first year, and I think photos have something to do with it.
A better analogy would be the bloodletting in the 18th and 19th centuries. We don't understand this "medicine" thing, but by God, we're going to do something! Something, of course, in this case meant almost always doing more harm than good. The bloodletting might have been appreciated, but it didn't really help.
We really don't know enough about climate change to know why it's changing (is it us? Is it the sun?), what we might do to change that, or even if what's happening is a bad thing. We're a five year old kid looking at the thermostat, thinking we're hot, and not even knowing for certain why that is -- or how we're going to feel in a few hours. By fucking with the thermostat, we just might make things a lot worse than they already are.
I thought doing something for the sake of not doing anything was anathema to science and Slashdot.
I think the reason people choose one IM over the other is similar to why kids choose one console over the other -- what do your friends have?
Sounds dumb, and it also sounds like a self-fullfilling prophecy, but I think that's it. I didn't originally choose ICQ for its feature set, I chose it because that's what my friends had. Same goes for every other client I've installed, including the godawful Lotus IM client and MSN's messenger. The last two I installed because that's what work mandated we use.
As anecdotal evidence, I ask you if you've ever tried getting someone to switch over to whatever client you use? No matter what arguments you use for your client being better, it always boils down to, "yeah, but everyone else I know is on ICQ|MSN|Whatever." So, eventually, we all end up installing every known client just to be able to intercommunicate.
Of course, this begs the question, what made the original adopters choose Yahoo! over ICQ over whatever else? I don't have an answer for that one, but I think it was whichever one they happened to find first. I don't think its the kind of thing many people research.
For the record, I now use Trillian. Works with everything, I don't have 5 clients running at once, and it more or less makes everything seem like one big network rather than 5 discrete ones.
Not only that, I think not being able to play DVDs hurt them in sales early on. Everyone on Slashdot likes to talk about how you could have a Gamecube and stand-alone player for the same price as the PS2 or Xbox. That's true, but people don't think rationally like those of us on Slashdot.
When I was a kid, I got one big present every Christmas. A Gamecube or PS2 would certainly fit this scenario. As a kid, I could have gotten either one, but I would never be able to convince my parents that I ought to get a GC and a DVD player -- even if they cost the same. Having my own DVD player at a time when they were still somewhat rare would have been a HUGE selling point. It would be like getting two gifts for the price of one. I'm also sure that some families saw that they could also get two things (a console and a DVD player) for the price of one. Even if $50 DVD players existed then, most people weren't aware of them and thought they were much more expensive than that. Hell, my own brother still uses his PS2 as a DVD player.
Also, fair or unfair, Nintendo has gotten the label as being a kid's machine. Adults will buy what's marketed to them (PS2/Xbox) and kids will always want the system that's "cool". For kids older than grade school, that's the system that's seen as "the older kid's console". Again, that's PS2 or Xbox.
Intervideo's WinDVD does a great job of doing at 2x. I typically watch anything that's not worth fully savoring (say, like Stealth) at 1.5-2x, depending on the pacing. Having done that, I can't imagine doing it much faster. At 1.5x, converstaion can get difficult to understand, and at 2x, subtitles become almost nessessary to understand everything being said. Even then, you have to be able to read pretty fast.
Maybe, in time, I could get used to 2.5x, but 8x? No way. My brain just can't stream data that fast.
Well, technically, if you can solve aging, all of this goes right out the window. People won't die of old age, they'll die of some freak accident when they are 900 years old. There'll be no need for social security, because there will be no need to truly get 'old'.
If you think that not everyone can afford it, think again. The second it becomes cheaper to roll the clock back to 18 years old than to pay for the health care of someone 50-death, insurance companies and governments (Medicare, Medicaid, etc) are going to start mandating that people get the proceedure. Or, of course, not be eligible for coverage.
In the article, he also found a mix that didn't stain, but it needed to be washed out. It worked well, but in testing, parents FREAKED at all the blotches of color left behind. It didn't matter that it washed out, the fact that it looked like a bomb went off in a paint factory killed it prematurely.
So, they had to come up with this dye -- one that would color bubbles but nothing else. That's pretty trick.
They do care about how many times each song is copied. If you upload the same MP3 file 10,000 times, that's not one violation, that's 10,000 of them. If you download two copies of the same file, that's two violations. If you move the file from your computer to your mp3 player, that doesn't add any additional violations, but if you leave the file on your computer (thus, making a copy), it does.
It's just easiest for the record companies to track how much you're uploading to them, and then once they bust you, to count how many files you've downloaded and do a little math on your potential copyright infringement. In fact, I'd be surprised if the same mp3 file in two different locations wasn't counted twice.
I don't know about that. 15-25 year olds are remarkably healthy. It's when you start hitting 50 or so that age really starts to take its toll. If the cost of rolling someone back to 15 is less than the expected cost of their health care from 50 to 75, you can bet that insurance companies are going to start mandating that their insured undergo this proceedure.
Of course, that doesn't cover anyone without health care or the truly poor, but if this comes in at any kind of reasonable price, you'll see it become a lot more popular than you think. Plus, what's another 50 years worth to you? You can earn a whole bunch of money over that time period, especially if you're in the real 'meat' of your career.
... of course, no one on the right will even consider what he has to say.
"Science is facts; just as houses are made of stone, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house, and a collection of facts is not necessarily science."
Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) French mathematician.
I used to think everything was crackable. And, to a certain extent, I still believe that, though I realize now that not everything will be hacked.
DirecTV had their orginal F cards hacked, then their H cards, then their HU cards. And that's as far as it went. The new P4 and P5 cards are still encrypted and secure. In my mind, it shouldn't be all that hard to intercept calls through the box and figure out how to write to the card -- but then again, more talented hackers than me have tried and failed, so what do I know?
The second generation of secure big-dish satellite recievers is yet to be hacked as well, despite the fact that it's been over a decade and the first generation boxes were hacked nine ways to Sunday.
I don't think you've lived in a hurricane prone area. Your comment just doesn't hold water.
I grew up on the Texas side of the Louisiana-Texas border, right on the Gulf Coast. When I say I lived right on the Gulf Coast, I mean it was a ten minute trip for me to get to the beach. I can distinctly remember plotting every single hurricane that even looked like it was coming into the Gulf, and I even fled from a couple. There's a road along the beach not far from my house that was rebuilt a half dozen times before a hurricane tore the fuck out of it in the mid-80's and they elected to just let it rot rather than rebuild it. I say these things because I want people to understand two things: hurricanes are not unknown to me and I understand the mentality of the people who stayed behind.
No one knew this hurricane was coming or that it would be that bad. Normally, you have a couple weeks of tracking the hurricane out of the Atlantic and into the Gulf, and usually a good solid week to think about where it's going to hit and how strong its going to be. Katrina was named on Wedensday the 24th. On the 25th, it made landfall in Florida as a category one storm. Category one storms are not something you worry about -- you'll get some wind and rain, and if you live right on the beach, you might want to board up your house, but we're not talking evacuation. Over the next three days, it went from a Category 1 to a Category 5. So, Saturday is about when everyone realized the shit was going to hit the fan. Katrina made landfall early Monday morning. That's about 48 hours tops to evacuate. I don't supposed you've ever tried to evacuate during a hurricane, but I can tell you from experience that it can take you 48 hours stuck in traffic just to reach relative safety. I have turned around during an evacuation just because I was convinced I wouldn't get out of town in time.
Which brings us to another problem: living on the coast makes you complacent. Every single year there is at least one hurricane that "threatens" to come ashore in your area. Sometimes two or three. It had been 35 years since New Orleans experienced a real blow from a hurricane. My home town has had a number of close calls over the past 50 years -- but not one direct hit. After you evacuate from a couple and return to clear skys and no property damage, you start wondering why you took the time and spent the money to flee. Worse, you might run from the hurricane and end up right in its path. It's just a huge gamble, and after a while, you get a fairly large group of people who are convinced that all they'll see, if anything, is a lot of wind and rain, and they're better off protecting their property from looters anyway. Besides, if the "big one" does come through, they know that death tolls are usually fairly low among the population that elects to stay. Even as large as the tolls are from Katrina, when you consider that hundreds of thousands stayed behind, it's really not all that bad.
And really, the hit on New Orleans wasn't all that bad either -- there were people on Bourbon Street drinking in bars the next day, congratulating each other on surviving another close call. And then the levees broke. That's when things really went to shit.
So, there wasn't ample prepareness time, and we're still trying to figure out how to fix a problem of this magnitude. I'm sure you've seen the destruction, so where do we begin?
Most people don't keep any more groceries on the Gulf Coast than people anywhere else. Sure, it's a good idea, but that doesn't mean that everyone follows it -- and even if they had, all of that food is ruined anyway.
I'm not excusing the lawlessness, but I am saying that I understand why so many chose to stay and put themselves in such a precarious situation. It happens. I should have run from Hurricane Andrew in 1992, but I stayed home. Had we suffered a direct hit from Andrew as was predicted, I would be in the same position as the residents of New Orleans are today -- but instead of wind and rain, I got sunny skys and a deserted town and a lot of time to play video games.
It's a little late for this comment, but I wanted to reply.
Going around a corner with the tail out (using the handbrake or using power on oversteer) looks really slick and really fast, but it's the slowest way to go around a corner. Yes, I know rally drivers use oversteer to get around corners quicker, but you're talking about a traction-limited environment that doesn't exist on a road course.
I have played the Ferrari simulator, and that's why I said "I don't know many" instead of "I don't know any" arcade games with a clutch. The three windows are very helpful, because when I'm actually racing (yes, I race in real life, not just the arcades) I'm very seldom looking directly out the front glass. No, I'm not swinging the tail out, but what you learn in racing is "look where you want to go". Often, to see your apex, which is what you're trying to hit, you'll find yourself looking out the side of the car. In this case, the extra monitors on the Ferrari simulator are very welcome, as you can almost always look where you want to go, not where you're heading.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time to play arcade games much anymore, so it's one I've had limited exposure to, but it does seem to be an incredible simulation.
Evidently, you didn't play it at the arcade. Hard Drivin' (and its sequel Race Drivin') were some of the most accurate driving simulations of their time. Even today, I don't know many arcade games that allow you to use a clutch pedal, and Gran Turismo 4 with the 900 degree steering wheel is now approaching the realism this console had in the late 80's. I even remember a discussion of using the engine to build simulators for driver's education classes -- it would have worked a lot better than what we used, I'll tell you that.
Now, if you only played this game as an emulator, or the awful compact version, then I can understand your hatred. Without the full force feedback wheel and improved sound of the full sized version, it is difficult to tell what your car is doing. It's also pretty difficult if you're used to arcade racing and not simulation racing.
I actually learned quite a bit about car control just from playing this game.
People forget just how groundbreaking Doom really was. When Doom came out, people were still wowing over the graphics in Wolfenstein 3D. True, real time, 3D graphics were not common, usually confined to racing games or flight simulators. Even then, they tended to be flat, colored polygons (see StarFox) and not actual textured surfaces.
SoundBlaster sound cards were not something everyone had, and virtually no PCs came with them pre-installed.
Although Wolfenstein preceeded it, both were made by the same company, and these were the very first first person shooters -- between the two of them, they virtually created the genre that dominates to this day.
Last, Doom was the first true networked multiplayer graphical game. It's hard to remember how exceptional this was, but at the time, we snuck up to the computer labs and secretly installed Doom just so that we could play multiplayer -- because NO ONE had network card in their personal computers. Not even in the dorms. We actually compromised our gaming experience just to be able to play against (or with) each other. I still remember my jaw dropping the first time I saw another space marine and realizing that not only was he on my side, he was the character that my friend was controlling from across the room -- and that on his screen, he was seeing me much as I was seeing him.
I can't think of a game that was more innovative than Doom. It absolutely deserves to be ranked number 1.
Slashdot Mirror
However, I also know that when I see my coworker running a server on the side, watching youtube videos, or whatever else might get him fired, I'm probably going to give him the heads up that what he's doing probably isn't the best thing if he wants to stay employed. When the manager finally catches him, I'm not going to stand up and say "but you don't understand our jobs" and try to actively cover for him so he doesn't get fired. If someone from another department starts talking about it, I'm not going to try to defend the behavior.
This is where I have a problem with the argument about how I can't judge all officers by the acts of a few. Ordinarily, I'd say that's so. However, when they do such a piss poor job of policing themselves and such a good job of backing your buddies even when they're caught on tape egregiously violating their code of ethics or someone's civil rights, then I am going to lump everyone in the same group.
Basically, there's a difference between "ratting out your work buddies" and "covering up for and backing your buddies even after they've been caught and the manager is threatening to fire them". The former is unfortunate, but expected. The latter is unacceptable and makes you complicit.
I am extremely tired of websites suddenly realizing that the iPhone is a cell phone and immediately redirecting me to the "useful" mobile site, which is usually optimized for WAP devices. Even worse, the majority of them do not allow you to access the fully enabled site in any way, shape, or form. Look, I can understand that some iPhone users would prefer to see the WAP site. However, one of the selling points of the iPhone for me is that it has a web browser that allows me to navigate and read any site. Please allow me to keep using the full functionality of the iPhone and your website and quit trying to dumb it down for me.
Usually the only way to alter this in a normally aspirated engine is by doing something extreme like replacing the pistons, rods, and/or crankshaft or by milling down the head slightly. With a turbo or supercharged engine, you can use the boost to effectly raise the compression as high as you'd like.
They do not degrade over multiple viewings. Yes, you can damage a CD or DVD beyond repair. However, both tape and VHS slowly deteriorate every time you view them. The average person does notice this, because their favorite movies slowly look worse over time.
They never have to be rewound. This is perhaps the biggest advantage. Don't you remember renting a movie from the video store, only to find out it hadn't been rewound? Or having to remember to rewind your own tapes? Cassette tapes didn't have quite the same problem, but finding the song you wanted to listen to was always hard -- it seemed to always been on the wrong end of the tape and finding the break exactly where that song picked up was difficult. Which leads me into my next advantage:
Chapter stops. Less important for DVDs, more important for CDs. Finding the song you wanted was not only easy, but nearly instantaneous. Got a favorite part of Pulp Fiction you want to watch, or maybe you want to play the lobby scene of The Matrix to show off your new sound system -- you can have it loaded up and ready to go within a minute. Try doing that with a VHS tape.
You can easily listen to them on your computer. Not an early reason for adoption, but it certainly drove adoption the middle part of the cycle. Being able to listen to/watch your music/movies in different ways adds value. This is why CDs and DVDs were adopted. The added sound fidelity was slightly important, but the majority moved to them for those reasons. It is hard to get people to move from them, because the format is nearly perfect. There are few advantages that other formats can offer -- greater quality, which most can't really appreciate and better durability, which most formats don't do without compromising other things and durability isn't much of an issue anyway.
Back when our parents were children, there was very little mail order shipping. There was no wired transmission of digital media. Basically, if you wanted obscene content, you had to walk down to your neighborhood adult store and buy it. Of course, no one wants a porno shop next to their children's daycare, and some rightfully saw these establishments as blights on their community. While no one should have a problem with you consuming hardcore BDSM material in your home, some understandably had a problem with the stores you had to buy it from setting up shop right down the road. NIMBY, basically, just with porn and not waste.
Not that I nessessarily agree with it, but this is why community standards were put into law. Basically, you couldn't sell anything in a community where the "average person" disapproved. That wasn't supposed to mean that you couldn't buy it in the next town over and then bring it back to your home -- they just couldn't distribute it in your city limits.
We all know that these kinds of things mean nothing in today's world. But, many politicians and many judges are older and have not grown up with this worldview, and do not completely understand it. Others just hate porn and realize they can control it this way. Some are just power hungry. Whatever the reason, the old "community standards" no longer apply. If I buy a dildo from goodvibes.com, did they sell it to me in the community they're based in? Or the community I'm based in? The online community? The community where the billing took place? All of them? If I download a video from bangbros, isn't it technically "delivered" in any jurisdiction those bits happen to pass through?
Besides, who cares what you bought or where you bought it from, or how offensive it is when it comes to your house in a plain brown box -- or if it comes to your house through digital wires, completely hidden from anyone who might have seen it? The problem is, these laws started as a way to keep people from inadvertantly seeing obscene content they didn't wish to see and have changed into a way of keeping anyone from seeing obscene content.
Hopefully, the courts will eventually get this right, but one thing about our government is that it does nothing quickly.
(long explaination follows) A limited slip differential is nothing more than a way to make sure that whichever drive wheel has the most traction gets the most power. In a perfect world, you'd have a locked rear differential, which would tie both wheels together -- while going straight, it would be impossible for one tire to slip without having ALL tires slipping. In fact, many hard-core off-road vehicles have locking differentials for exactly this reason. The problem with locking the differential is that when a car turns, different tires turn at different rates. This isn't a big deal when you're off roading, as the limited traction of the terrain allows the tires to slip enough to overcome this. On high-friction tarmac, it really stresses the drivetrain components, and the vehicle often pops and lurches as the tires loose and gain traction. An open differential solves this problem, but if one wheel loses traction, then all the power goes to that wheel because it is now easier to move. A limited slip differential is a compromise, it allows a little bit of slip for turning corners, but it makes sure that power is routed to the wheels that can best use it. It's really great if you need to accelerate in low traction conditions, particularly out of a corner, but it won't actually help you corner or correct a skid. Of course, it takes a lot longer to explain that than the paragraph the article uses.
And that's just the most obvious error. Is it any surprise that modern cars handle better than their decades-old counterparts? Handling is still somewhat of a black art today, though we've gotten better at predicting how and why a car will handle the way it does. I've driven modern sports cars on an actual race track that were supposedly "comparible" where one car was an absolute handful to keep on the track and the other was a docile as a kitten.
It would not surprise me in the least that the BMW is more difficult to drive, but not because drivers have gotten too used to "active handling". I wonder how this experiment would have gone if the drivers were in a car they didn't drive every day, and forced to drive it once without any active aids (pull the fuses) and then again with them in place. That would have been a more accurate experiment.
Yes. I bought my first burner in 1997. It was expensive (~$300), but one of the first that an average home user could justify. CD-Rs were about $1/each. However, I had been using the one at college for years before that. Judging by the data on the first disc I ever burned (and it still works!), it was around 1995 that I started using the one at school. It was a 1x SCSI burner, created as many coasters as it did good copies, and a CD-R was about $15. I specifically remember not copying audio discs at that time because for the cost of the CD-R you could just buy the real thing.
Of all the discs I've burned, literally thousands over the years, the only ones I've had stop working are the audio ones I carry in the car. Because they are essentially disposable, I treat them like dirt -- and after about a year, they get too many scratches to be used.
I've had less success with magnetic media. There are a few 3.5" floppies in my collection that are simply unreadable -- despite the fact that they have lived their life in a little plastic box that has usually sat on a shelf in my closet.
But really, if we're sending hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of charity, is it too much to ask the hospitals to take a few photos of the trucks and trucks of stuff that roll in over the course of the charity?
One of the things that made the first Child's Play so great was watching the amazement as the stuff rolled in. Everyone thought it'd be just a little bit of something, then it just started getting ridiculous. I was checking the site every single day for new photos, just to see how much stuff people were sending. And to be honest, I sent more that first year than I have ever since, simply because I wanted, no, I needed, to see my stuff in that stack.
Since then, it's just been a number. Sure, $250,000 is a lot of money, but I can imagine it. What I can't imagine are stacks and stack and stacks of PS2's and XBoxes and so many GameBoys I can't see over the top of them! I desperately need to see that visual confirmation. I need to see just how amazed the hospital staff is going to be. Letters help, but again, it's when I look at the photos from the first year that I grasp the enormity of what Child's Play does.
If I feel this way, I have to imagine others feel this way as well. I think adding extra hospitals was a good thing, because people will contribute more if they know they can contribute some place close, but I think even more would contribute if they could just see what other gamers are doing. I know guys who didn't have much to spare but sent a pack of batteries just because they wanted to be a part of that giant stack of stuff. "Did you see what all the other gamers are doing? I had to do something" was a common refrain. I haven't heard that since the first year, and I think photos have something to do with it.
We really don't know enough about climate change to know why it's changing (is it us? Is it the sun?), what we might do to change that, or even if what's happening is a bad thing. We're a five year old kid looking at the thermostat, thinking we're hot, and not even knowing for certain why that is -- or how we're going to feel in a few hours. By fucking with the thermostat, we just might make things a lot worse than they already are.
I thought doing something for the sake of not doing anything was anathema to science and Slashdot.
Sounds dumb, and it also sounds like a self-fullfilling prophecy, but I think that's it. I didn't originally choose ICQ for its feature set, I chose it because that's what my friends had. Same goes for every other client I've installed, including the godawful Lotus IM client and MSN's messenger. The last two I installed because that's what work mandated we use.
As anecdotal evidence, I ask you if you've ever tried getting someone to switch over to whatever client you use? No matter what arguments you use for your client being better, it always boils down to, "yeah, but everyone else I know is on ICQ|MSN|Whatever." So, eventually, we all end up installing every known client just to be able to intercommunicate.
Of course, this begs the question, what made the original adopters choose Yahoo! over ICQ over whatever else? I don't have an answer for that one, but I think it was whichever one they happened to find first. I don't think its the kind of thing many people research.
For the record, I now use Trillian. Works with everything, I don't have 5 clients running at once, and it more or less makes everything seem like one big network rather than 5 discrete ones.
When I was a kid, I got one big present every Christmas. A Gamecube or PS2 would certainly fit this scenario. As a kid, I could have gotten either one, but I would never be able to convince my parents that I ought to get a GC and a DVD player -- even if they cost the same. Having my own DVD player at a time when they were still somewhat rare would have been a HUGE selling point. It would be like getting two gifts for the price of one. I'm also sure that some families saw that they could also get two things (a console and a DVD player) for the price of one. Even if $50 DVD players existed then, most people weren't aware of them and thought they were much more expensive than that. Hell, my own brother still uses his PS2 as a DVD player.
Also, fair or unfair, Nintendo has gotten the label as being a kid's machine. Adults will buy what's marketed to them (PS2/Xbox) and kids will always want the system that's "cool". For kids older than grade school, that's the system that's seen as "the older kid's console". Again, that's PS2 or Xbox.
Maybe, in time, I could get used to 2.5x, but 8x? No way. My brain just can't stream data that fast.
If you think that not everyone can afford it, think again. The second it becomes cheaper to roll the clock back to 18 years old than to pay for the health care of someone 50-death, insurance companies and governments (Medicare, Medicaid, etc) are going to start mandating that people get the proceedure. Or, of course, not be eligible for coverage.
So, they had to come up with this dye -- one that would color bubbles but nothing else. That's pretty trick.
It's just easiest for the record companies to track how much you're uploading to them, and then once they bust you, to count how many files you've downloaded and do a little math on your potential copyright infringement. In fact, I'd be surprised if the same mp3 file in two different locations wasn't counted twice.
Of course, that doesn't cover anyone without health care or the truly poor, but if this comes in at any kind of reasonable price, you'll see it become a lot more popular than you think. Plus, what's another 50 years worth to you? You can earn a whole bunch of money over that time period, especially if you're in the real 'meat' of your career.
"Science is facts; just as houses are made of stone, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house, and a collection of facts is not necessarily science."
Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) French mathematician.
I wonder if we could get a Slashdot interview with this guy. He seems to be amused by the amount of love that geeks still have for his game.
DirecTV had their orginal F cards hacked, then their H cards, then their HU cards. And that's as far as it went. The new P4 and P5 cards are still encrypted and secure. In my mind, it shouldn't be all that hard to intercept calls through the box and figure out how to write to the card -- but then again, more talented hackers than me have tried and failed, so what do I know?
The second generation of secure big-dish satellite recievers is yet to be hacked as well, despite the fact that it's been over a decade and the first generation boxes were hacked nine ways to Sunday.
I grew up on the Texas side of the Louisiana-Texas border, right on the Gulf Coast. When I say I lived right on the Gulf Coast, I mean it was a ten minute trip for me to get to the beach. I can distinctly remember plotting every single hurricane that even looked like it was coming into the Gulf, and I even fled from a couple. There's a road along the beach not far from my house that was rebuilt a half dozen times before a hurricane tore the fuck out of it in the mid-80's and they elected to just let it rot rather than rebuild it. I say these things because I want people to understand two things: hurricanes are not unknown to me and I understand the mentality of the people who stayed behind.
No one knew this hurricane was coming or that it would be that bad. Normally, you have a couple weeks of tracking the hurricane out of the Atlantic and into the Gulf, and usually a good solid week to think about where it's going to hit and how strong its going to be. Katrina was named on Wedensday the 24th. On the 25th, it made landfall in Florida as a category one storm. Category one storms are not something you worry about -- you'll get some wind and rain, and if you live right on the beach, you might want to board up your house, but we're not talking evacuation. Over the next three days, it went from a Category 1 to a Category 5. So, Saturday is about when everyone realized the shit was going to hit the fan. Katrina made landfall early Monday morning. That's about 48 hours tops to evacuate. I don't supposed you've ever tried to evacuate during a hurricane, but I can tell you from experience that it can take you 48 hours stuck in traffic just to reach relative safety. I have turned around during an evacuation just because I was convinced I wouldn't get out of town in time.
Which brings us to another problem: living on the coast makes you complacent. Every single year there is at least one hurricane that "threatens" to come ashore in your area. Sometimes two or three. It had been 35 years since New Orleans experienced a real blow from a hurricane. My home town has had a number of close calls over the past 50 years -- but not one direct hit. After you evacuate from a couple and return to clear skys and no property damage, you start wondering why you took the time and spent the money to flee. Worse, you might run from the hurricane and end up right in its path. It's just a huge gamble, and after a while, you get a fairly large group of people who are convinced that all they'll see, if anything, is a lot of wind and rain, and they're better off protecting their property from looters anyway. Besides, if the "big one" does come through, they know that death tolls are usually fairly low among the population that elects to stay. Even as large as the tolls are from Katrina, when you consider that hundreds of thousands stayed behind, it's really not all that bad.
And really, the hit on New Orleans wasn't all that bad either -- there were people on Bourbon Street drinking in bars the next day, congratulating each other on surviving another close call. And then the levees broke. That's when things really went to shit.
So, there wasn't ample prepareness time, and we're still trying to figure out how to fix a problem of this magnitude. I'm sure you've seen the destruction, so where do we begin?
Most people don't keep any more groceries on the Gulf Coast than people anywhere else. Sure, it's a good idea, but that doesn't mean that everyone follows it -- and even if they had, all of that food is ruined anyway.
I'm not excusing the lawlessness, but I am saying that I understand why so many chose to stay and put themselves in such a precarious situation. It happens. I should have run from Hurricane Andrew in 1992, but I stayed home. Had we suffered a direct hit from Andrew as was predicted, I would be in the same position as the residents of New Orleans are today -- but instead of wind and rain, I got sunny skys and a deserted town and a lot of time to play video games.
Going around a corner with the tail out (using the handbrake or using power on oversteer) looks really slick and really fast, but it's the slowest way to go around a corner. Yes, I know rally drivers use oversteer to get around corners quicker, but you're talking about a traction-limited environment that doesn't exist on a road course.
I have played the Ferrari simulator, and that's why I said "I don't know many" instead of "I don't know any" arcade games with a clutch. The three windows are very helpful, because when I'm actually racing (yes, I race in real life, not just the arcades) I'm very seldom looking directly out the front glass. No, I'm not swinging the tail out, but what you learn in racing is "look where you want to go". Often, to see your apex, which is what you're trying to hit, you'll find yourself looking out the side of the car. In this case, the extra monitors on the Ferrari simulator are very welcome, as you can almost always look where you want to go, not where you're heading.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time to play arcade games much anymore, so it's one I've had limited exposure to, but it does seem to be an incredible simulation.
Now, if you only played this game as an emulator, or the awful compact version, then I can understand your hatred. Without the full force feedback wheel and improved sound of the full sized version, it is difficult to tell what your car is doing. It's also pretty difficult if you're used to arcade racing and not simulation racing.
I actually learned quite a bit about car control just from playing this game.
SoundBlaster sound cards were not something everyone had, and virtually no PCs came with them pre-installed.
Although Wolfenstein preceeded it, both were made by the same company, and these were the very first first person shooters -- between the two of them, they virtually created the genre that dominates to this day.
Last, Doom was the first true networked multiplayer graphical game. It's hard to remember how exceptional this was, but at the time, we snuck up to the computer labs and secretly installed Doom just so that we could play multiplayer -- because NO ONE had network card in their personal computers. Not even in the dorms. We actually compromised our gaming experience just to be able to play against (or with) each other. I still remember my jaw dropping the first time I saw another space marine and realizing that not only was he on my side, he was the character that my friend was controlling from across the room -- and that on his screen, he was seeing me much as I was seeing him.
I can't think of a game that was more innovative than Doom. It absolutely deserves to be ranked number 1.