Right, but see, we don't live in the UK, so her domestic policies don't really mean much to us.
From our perspective across the pond, Thathcer was the best Prime Minister you've ever had. Mainly because she had values that we admire and her foriegn policy was exceptionally friendly toward the United States, even at times when she didn't need to be -- like during the bombing of Libya, when most other European countries said we couldn't use their airspace to fly over to attack, but Thatcher let us fly from England.
Not saying it's the best prime minister for you, but it does show the folly of letting other countries pick your leaders.
They do. I'm not completely sold on Voom, as I realize I'm paying a lot for a lot of digital content that I don't watch. The problem with HD right now is that most of the channels don't carry much worth watching, and there's a ton of repetition (probably because there's not much HD content out yet).
Voom's lineup:
HDNews: Not a great news channel, but is 1080i.
HDCinema (6 channels): Lots of movies, but mostly either very old (pre 1970) or b-titles.
HD Classics: see above.
HD Epics: more of the same.
Divine HD: again...
Monsters HD: I watch this more than the others, but it's still rare to catch truly great movies here.
Equator HD: Mostly HD flyovers of foriegn countries, kind of like a travel channel. Interesting in small doses.
WorldSport HD: Usually international soccer matches. I hate soccer, so this sucks for me.
Rush HD: Usually X-games type material. Skateboarding, snowboarding, etc.
Rave HD: Concerts in HD. This can be very good, but there's a LOT of repetition.
Ultra HD: Some kind of fashion network. Can't say I've watched it.
Auction HD: High priced auctions that you can't bid on in HD.
Gallery HD: Art. Lots and lots of art. Expect to see a lot of museums.
MOOV HD: This is an odd one. It's a bunch of random HD video with an odd soundtrack. If I still did LSD, I'd love it. As it is, it's pointless to watch -- though Tank (a virtual fishtank) is kinda cool.
Animania HD: Sounds great, and they do show Voltron sometimes, but you'd be hard pressed to indentify much else.
ESPN HD: They've fixed the 'stretch' problem by putting pillar bars on 4:3 content, and this is actually a pretty good channel. I like watching ESPN, and I'd much rather watch their HD feed.
Fox Sports Net Florida HD: This must be new, I don't remember seeing it, but it's in the online guide.
Bravo HD: Not a Bravo fan, but if you like Bravo...
TNT in HD: We all know TNT, right?
Discovery HD Theatre: best of the bunch, usually interesting, always 1080i, great to look at, but again, lots of repeated content.
The following channels cost extra, so I don't subscribe, but here they are:
Playboy HD: HD Porn. I'm told it's great.
HBO HD East
HBO HD West
Cinemax HD East
Cinemax HD West
Showtime HD East
Showtime HD West
Starz! HD East
Starz! HD West
TMC HD
Encore E HD
Plus, I get about 10 more HD channels with the over-the-air antenna and reciever built into the Voom reciever.
There were also lots of unintiutive puzzles, and lots of things that made sense only if you had read the book. Don't forget that the game doesn't exactly follow the book, so reading it will confuse the game for you just as much as if you hadn't read it at all -- just in a different way.
Then there's the problem with puzzles that require grabbing non-evident things (the dust from under the bed) at the beginning of the game and needing them near the end -- with no way to go back and get them of course, because the house and Earth has been destroyed.
After typing all that, I realize it's the perfect Hitchhiker's Guide game.
If you're fond of this, you should give keyhole a try. A two week trial is free, and the satellite photography is remarkably detailed and usually pretty up to date. You'll be able to see as much or as little of the world as you'd like, and in resolutions ranging down to 2 inches (check out the shuttle in front of the VAB at Canavaral, you can count the stars on the flag decal on the wing). You can also turn on terrain and tilt the map to see a relief map with the sat info superimposed.
It's really a remarkable program. I know I spent every day of my two week trial and then every day of another two week trial on another computer just "visiting".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Game Gear was nearly twice the price of the GameBoy. Same with Atari's Lynx. I remember wanting both of the above, but settling with a GameBoy, because as a kid, it was a lot easier to swallow GameBoy's (still high) price.
The games do sell the console, and ultimately I think they are very important to the end game. However, to think they are the most important thing will cause you to lose sight of goal. Nintendo certainly has had the best first party games on the Gamecube and N64, but that didn't stop Sony from handing them their ass.
If Australopithecus found a red bulb that smelled and tasted good, then saw another bulb of the same color and smell, it would eat it. Ergo, racial profiling. Seriously.
There's a better way to explain this. When we were still evolving, it was very difficult to tell what new things and experiences might kill you or otherwise be harmful to your health.
So, if Australopithecus ate a red berry, and it made him sick, he might reason that it would be a good idea to avoid all red berries. In this sense, he might miss out on some really great things, like strawberries and raspberries, but he'd also avoid the really bad berries that would kill him. In an evolutionary sense, avoiding things that kill you mean that your genes get passed on, even if the downside is missing out on some pleasure.
If you want to take it a step further, if Australopithecus meets a member of the Commoniwannalayyou tribe, and that member anally rapes him with a tree limb and very nearly kills him, he may rightfully avoid contact with that group, even though the other members of that tribe may be great guys. Even though he has no proof that the other guys are murderous anal-raping maniacs. It's just easier, and safer, to assume that they are.
This extends to everything. Why do you avoid that dark alley at night? Because your experiences (either real, imagined, or vicarious) tell you that very bad things happen in dark alleys. You don't have to go down that alley to know that it's a fairly risky endeavour. Even though that alley might be safe, it's simply wiser (and safer) to take the long, lighted way around.
Our racist beliefs is simply a holdover of millenia of evolution. We stereotype. It helps save us the mental overhead and risk of having to evaluate each and every situation for danger.
No, we'd probably be hearing about how the game is racist because you're using a white guy to inflict pain on downtrodden black citizens.
And if we changed it so the citizens were white, we'd be racist for not putting black people in the game.
And if we changed it so that it was a black guy killing downtrodden white citizens, we'd be racist because we're propagating the fear that all black people want to do is 'kill whitey'.
Some days, you just can't win. That seems to be especially true when it comes to race.
And this is where Linux fails. It's written by programmers for programmers with almost no other oversight or input.
Many times, Linux zealots will simply not add features because either:
They don't use it
They don't use the product that way and can't comprehend that someone else would want to do it that way. "What do you mean they'd rather use a GUI? Why if you just type '[insert long command string here with ten switches]' you can accomplish the same thing in less time!"
It's not cool to work on.
It's too damn hard.
They aren't listening.
Too few want to give Microsoft (or Adobe or anyone else) credit for the things they do right. Too many are concerned with making their program do "cool" tricks or look flashy rather than make it usable. Or they want to make it stand out from everything else, so it doesn't look like it fits with the rest of the OS interface design. When someone voices a complaint, it's either, "it does this, you just have to do it in this completely unintuitive way that the programmer thinks is better|more logical" or dismissed with, "yeah, but no one uses that anyway!"
If you want to compete with Microsoft on the desktop, you're going to have to stop listening to programmers and system administrators and start listening to your customers.
I know a few, including one who works for a very prestigous IP firm on the west coast. Only one problem. Katie (of Katie.com) is in London, while Katie T (of the book) is in America. That makes this case a bit hard to prosecute, and the potential outcome (and revenue) in doubt.
Didn't Penguin delibertely escew copy protection, assuming that it was too expensive and people would pay for material that was reasonably priced and well-done? I certainly remember the name, though I may be mistaken on the details.
And I also won't be buying any more books from Penguin publishing.
Bob Bondurant teaches a really good school for teenage drivers. It's a bit pricy, but it will more than make up for itself, as it teaches real car control and accident avoidance, not what they teach you in driver's ed. Bondurant will intentionally show your kid where the limits are, so they won't find them accidently, and he'll make them exceed them so they know exactly what to do when they do cross the line -- and every beginning driver crosses the line at some point, some of us were just very lucky.
Alternatively, you could bring him to an autocross. It will cost about $20 for the day and will not harm your vehicle, and your son (and you!) will learn more about vehicle dynamics in one day than he will learn in ten years of driving on the street or playing Gran Turismo on the Playstation.
If you simply must find a video game simulation, find an old arcade version of Race Drivin' or Hard Drivin' made by Atari circa 1990-92. I still have yet to find a video game that so accurately recreates the sensation of driving a vehicle. It lacks the G-forces, but the physics model is very good and force feedback is second to none. My parents wouldn't send me to Bondurant's class, and they weren't aware of autocross, but I played a lot of Hard Drivin' before I got my license, and it definately taught me a few things about car control and recovering from spins.
False positive = condition you are testing for comes up positive, when it should be negative.
False negative = condition you are testing for comes up negative, when it should be positive.
Put in the context of a spam filter, it depends on whether you are testing for spam or for legitimate emails. If you are testing for spam (if spam then...), a false positive would be an email that is not spam getting sent to the spam folder or deleted. A false negative would be spam that lands in your inbox.
All the old R/C cars of the "run forward, press a button and run backward and turn" didn't have a real steering mechanism. Sometimes, you'd get one that was fairly sophisticated, and the front wheels would actually turn, but usually, this was accomplished by a idler wheel located under the chassis between the front wheels. The front wheels didn't actually touch the ground.
When you allowed the car to run forward, the rear wheels spun forward and the front wheel "locked" in the "drive straight" position. When you forced the car to run backward, the rear wheels spun backward, and the idler wheel (or front wheels) was designed in such a way that when the car was run backwards, the directional force would cause the wheel(s) to turn. It's hard to explain without seeing it, but I'll try. If we consider the fancy version, with the steerable front wheels, the wheels would turn, but not in the sense that they would in a normal remote controlled car. The pivot point was much closer to one side than the other, and it only allowed pivoting in one direction -- forward. So, a typical car would have the pivot point somewhere very near the front right tire. If you pushed the front left tire, you'd find that it would travel forward in a large arc, but not rearward. The right tire would barely turn at all. In the case of the idler wheel, it would slide forward and to the right, but there was no way to make it go left or backward. What this did was allow a sort of steering without the added expense of an extra motor and controller.
So, to change one of these into a completely steerable remote control car would not only require the addition of quite a bit of electronics, it would also require the complete rebuilding of the front steering mechanism and the mounting of an extra motor. Since you mention doing this yourself, but don't mention rebuilding the steering rack and mechanism (which would have been a lot harder than soldering in some chips), I have to believe either you started with a better R/C car than you remember, or you simply made the story up.
However, most ISPs would seem to give email addresses with an account, so what stops people using that is beyond me.
Because, when you go away, your email address goes away too. My first email address was one at my university. Due to some snafu, my email account was completely deleted. When it was finally reinstated, they issued me a completely different username because I'd changed my major. As a result, there were people and friends who my only point of contact was through that address -- and I have never been able to make contact with them again.
I encountered the problem again when I entered the workforce. As I switched jobs, the email address I'd been using dropped away into the ether, never to be seen or accessed again. If any important mails went there, I never got them. Ditto with ISPs. I switch ISPs often enough for this to be a real problem.
So, what did I do? I got a hotmail email. No, it's not perfect, and there are many things I hate about it (especially the way it's gotten more 'Microsofty' over the years), but it's free, and I never ever have to worry about it going away or becoming inaccessable.
That would be ideal, but typically when you work for a company, your source code belongs to them, and they may be very adverse to you taking it with you. They will be even more adverse to you taking it with you so that you can show other people.
Can you imagine being a Windows developer and taking some of the code with you to fill your portolio? "Here's some 10,000 lines of random Windows code. No, you can't really be sure that it's the source to Windows. No, it won't really run on its own. No, you can't really look at it too closely. No, I don't really mind taking your very propriatary code and sharing with the whole outside world so that I can possibly get a job at another company...."
Yes, but there's no way to actually prove the company is going to do what it says it's going to do. In fact, the only way to guaruntee the words mentioned in the contract you sign is to quit, and possibly, though unlikely, by recovering damages after the fact. You can't even be 100% positive that you'll be paid -- even though you have it on paper.
Doesn't sound a whole lot different than hiring an employee. Eventually, you have to put your faith in that person or company and assume what they are telling you is true. But if it's not, you really won't know until it's too late.
I've worked for IBM in the recent past, and I'll say they are about as benign as a big company can get. It was really a pleasure to work for them, and there was always cool stuff going on.
One thing I really respected about them is that they throw tons of money into research and development, even if that R&D doesn't seem to have a real financial payoff in the future. They basically just pay people to come up with and develop cool technological toys. Some are successful and make IBM tons of money. Others aren't and are just cool to have around. Still, it's not often you see a large company that dedicates a large portion of time and money to things that don't contribute to the bottom line.
However, woe be unto you if you cross them. As benign as they are, those fuckers hold a serious grudge. And for a very, very long time. They are still pissed about the whole OS/2 Warp debacle and won't use Microsoft products if they can get away with it. That's also a very large reason why they are pumping so much money into Linux. They'd rather the whole OS market be open and free than have Microsoft controlling it.
They are going to literally grind SCO's bones to make their bread. There will be no SCO by the time IBM is done.
There's a good reason we dropped two, and why we dropped those two one right after the other -- it was all we had.
In those days, getting the nuclear material wasn't exactly easy. We had enough fissionable material for three bombs. One we detonated at Los Alamos to prove the bomb actually worked. The other two became Fat Man and Little Boy.
We really didn't know how destructive the two bombs would be, but we did know that producing a third would take quite a bit of time. A fourth or fifth would take even more time after that.
What we were afraid of is that the Japanese wouldn't surrender. This was a very real possibility, as they had never surrendered before, and their culture ecouraged suicide attacks over surrender. We had to make the Japanese believe that we had a near inexhaustable supply of these weapons, that if they didn't surrender that we would keep dropping a new one on their cities every few days until they did -- or simply wiping the whole country clean without ever setting one American foot on Japanese soil. When you can't engage the enemy face to face, suddenly being a martyr isn't so appealing. Dying for nothing is never fun. Making your parents, wives, children, et al die for nothing is even less enjoyable.
However, had we waited to drop the second bomb and not gotten our surrender after it, it could have been months before we could drop a third. And a month after that before we could drop a fourth. Show that you can only carry out these attacks every once in a while and you might steel your enemy's resolve. They might figure that they can wait you out, or they might get used to being blasted, or they (the leaders anyway) might figure out a way to survive. Then you have to go over there and kill them all hand to hand anyway. WE had to show them we had the will and the power to scour their country from the face of the planet.
What we did was one hell of a poker bluff. Thankfully, the Japanese never called us on it. It was horrible thing, dropping those bombs, but it would have been far more horrible and bloody to have marched American troops all the way to Tokyo -- for both sides.
Bob, don't you understand that global warming can also cause cooling in certain parts of the world? Oh yessir. Regardless of what climate conditions change between now and the next hundred years, you can rest assured that it will be because of global warming and the product of human beings.
When I was working in IT, I often said, "give me the names of a given person's children, their pets, their significant others, the kind of car they drive, their job title, and any hobbies, and I'll guess 95% of all passwords."
It's scary how many people think the name of their child makes a great password.
Why the last 1%? Why not the last 5%? Or 20%? Or 0.0001%?
When has this ever happened with any resource? Face it, it's not going to happen this way. Let me explain how things will progress.
Oil Wells will start to run dry. They won't all run dry at the same time. Some will run out first. This will cause prices to go up on the wells that aren't dry yet. We'll know this is close to the end time, as production enters a steady but slow decline because we can't find new reserves to make up for the ones we've emptied.
As the price increases, all the oil we previously knew about, but was too expensive to get to, suddenly becomes profitable. This helps provide an even greater buffer against the price increases. Even if, as you say, this is just the very last 1% we're sucking out, we're still talking about a lot of oil. Probably enough to power the world for at least a couple years on it's own -- and don't forget, all the oil wells haven't run dry yet.
Prices continue to increase. As it becomes more expensive to get oil, people will start to use less of it, lessening demand, prolonging the time we have to come up with a solution.
At some point, it will become cost effective to start pulling oil out of all the shale oil reserves. There's nearly 2000 billion barrels available in Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado alone. Think about that for a minute. We could extract that today, but since oil is so cheap to just pump out of the ground, there's no incentive to do so. Provided we don't develop a more efficient technology to pull this oil out (and we will, it's the nature of the beast), it will still be cheap enough to put in our cars and power around. Not nearly as cheap as it is today, but if driving your car somewhere is important, you'll still be able to do it.
Now, somewhere around here, oil will become too expensive to power our big fucking vehicles around. Long before we reach this point, people will have been clamoring for other ways to get around. This is when you'll see some kind of alternate power really gain traction. Who knows what it will be, it may be public transportation, it may be nuclear, it may be something we haven't seen yet. There will be time to adapt.
Somewhere long before we run out of oil, people will have switched to other means of doing all the things we currently do with oil. The price of it will demand this. If a gallon of gas costs $665.00, you're not going to put it in your 1955 Buick Roadmaster.
By the time we get to the very last drop, if we get that far without completely switching to something else and making oil totally worthless, it will command such a premium that some collector will put it on his shelf rather than use it. We will never completely run out.
By the way, we didn't run out of coal either, despite everyone declaring that we would. In fact, we have rather too much of the stuff.
And all this does not take into account that it makes a lot more sense that oil is some kind of natural byproduct of all the internal mechanisms of the inner earth instead of something created by dead dinosaurs at one time in the earth's history -- and one time only.
Likely that we never will run out of oil. Not in the strictest sense, anyway. We never ran out of coal, did we?
Here's the fact of the matter, and why a lot of us denounce the "let's do something now" crowd. Gasoline is currently very inexpensive. Even in places where it is expensive, it is often only expensive due to taxes and artificial supply control. It really doesn't currently take a lot of money to find, obtain, and refine a lot of crude oil.
That's partially why we like to use it. For all of it's drawbacks, it's really fairly handy to have around. Each unit mass of gasoline contains a very high volume of potential energy. Far more so than many other fuels. That means you don't have to haul a lot of it around. Second, it's easy to haul around. All you basically need is a sealed tank, and it's not even that important that it be sealed. It doesn't have to be pressurized, it's not acidic, and it's not overly harmful to touch. In fact, it's so easy to transport and refill a container, that we often let people do it themselves. Third, unlike many potential fuels, it is not overly explosive. Yes, the vapor is somewhat dangerous, but when was the last time you saw a car explode like you see on television? When was the last time a fuel can (for the lawnmower or weed eater) blew up in your garage? Overall, considering how much available energy is in a tank of gasoline, it's amazing how utterly careless we can be with it's storage -- without seriously putting ourselves in danger. Last, gasoline is cheap, and will continue to be so for the forseable future. There's also a massive infrastructure to support it.
Now, why won't we run out? Or be caught by surprise? Well, I could go into the whole "Deep Hot Earth" theory, where it makes more sense that oil is made by some process under the earth than by dead dinosaurs (and only that one time). Oil may turn out to be a renewable resource. But, since we don't know enough about that, I'll assume that there is a finite amount of oil and no new oil is being created.
When we start really running out of oil, you will find that it won't be an overnight phenomonon. Every well in the world won't run dry overnight. But oil will get progressively more difficult to find and more difficult to obtain. Note, we haven't yet talked about shale oil, where billions of gallons of crude are locked away but it's not financially sound to pull it out -- yet. You will see a slow, gradual increase in the price of crude oil. At some point, it will become prohibitively expensive to use to power around in a large SUV by ourselves on a Monday afternoon. People [i]will[/i] switch to other methods of getting around or will decrease their use of fossil fuels because of the expense. As time goes on, it will get more and more expensive to use oil. At some point, there will be a mass transition to something else, be it propane, hydrogen, or something else we haven't yet figured out. The last drops of crude won't be used to power some 1954 Buick down the highway, it will likely be used for some more noble purpose -- or it may simply never be used at all. That's why I say we'll never run out. Even if we reach that very last drop of oil, that drop will command such a price that actually using it for anything other than collecting becomes foolish.
Here on Slashdot, people like to say that you can't legislate technology. However, every time we get into a global warming debate, the consensus seems to be that in this particular case, we can. Somehow, we'll create the laws that will develop alternate fuels and technology long before the market demands it. And we will do this because we are irrationally afraid (something else Slashdot seems to be against, making laws based on fear) that oil will run out one day, like turning off a spigot, and we will lost, adrift in a world without power.
Slashdot Mirror
From our perspective across the pond, Thathcer was the best Prime Minister you've ever had. Mainly because she had values that we admire and her foriegn policy was exceptionally friendly toward the United States, even at times when she didn't need to be -- like during the bombing of Libya, when most other European countries said we couldn't use their airspace to fly over to attack, but Thatcher let us fly from England.
Not saying it's the best prime minister for you, but it does show the folly of letting other countries pick your leaders.
Typically, they go for about $50 for the trilogy, so there's obviously a demand.
Voom's lineup:
- HDNews: Not a great news channel, but is 1080i.
- HDCinema (6 channels): Lots of movies, but mostly either very old (pre 1970) or b-titles.
- HD Classics: see above.
- HD Epics: more of the same.
- Divine HD: again...
- Monsters HD: I watch this more than the others, but it's still rare to catch truly great movies here.
- Equator HD: Mostly HD flyovers of foriegn countries, kind of like a travel channel. Interesting in small doses.
- WorldSport HD: Usually international soccer matches. I hate soccer, so this sucks for me.
- Rush HD: Usually X-games type material. Skateboarding, snowboarding, etc.
- Rave HD: Concerts in HD. This can be very good, but there's a LOT of repetition.
- Ultra HD: Some kind of fashion network. Can't say I've watched it.
- Auction HD: High priced auctions that you can't bid on in HD.
- Gallery HD: Art. Lots and lots of art. Expect to see a lot of museums.
- MOOV HD: This is an odd one. It's a bunch of random HD video with an odd soundtrack. If I still did LSD, I'd love it. As it is, it's pointless to watch -- though Tank (a virtual fishtank) is kinda cool.
- Animania HD: Sounds great, and they do show Voltron sometimes, but you'd be hard pressed to indentify much else.
- ESPN HD: They've fixed the 'stretch' problem by putting pillar bars on 4:3 content, and this is actually a pretty good channel. I like watching ESPN, and I'd much rather watch their HD feed.
- Fox Sports Net Florida HD: This must be new, I don't remember seeing it, but it's in the online guide.
- Bravo HD: Not a Bravo fan, but if you like Bravo...
- TNT in HD: We all know TNT, right?
- Discovery HD Theatre: best of the bunch, usually interesting, always 1080i, great to look at, but again, lots of repeated content.
The following channels cost extra, so I don't subscribe, but here they are:- Playboy HD: HD Porn. I'm told it's great.
- HBO HD East
- HBO HD West
- Cinemax HD East
- Cinemax HD West
- Showtime HD East
- Showtime HD West
- Starz! HD East
- Starz! HD West
- TMC HD
- Encore E HD
Plus, I get about 10 more HD channels with the over-the-air antenna and reciever built into the Voom reciever.Then there's the problem with puzzles that require grabbing non-evident things (the dust from under the bed) at the beginning of the game and needing them near the end -- with no way to go back and get them of course, because the house and Earth has been destroyed.
After typing all that, I realize it's the perfect Hitchhiker's Guide game.
And many more unknowingly gave their lives.
It's really a remarkable program. I know I spent every day of my two week trial and then every day of another two week trial on another computer just "visiting".
The games do sell the console, and ultimately I think they are very important to the end game. However, to think they are the most important thing will cause you to lose sight of goal. Nintendo certainly has had the best first party games on the Gamecube and N64, but that didn't stop Sony from handing them their ass.
There's a better way to explain this. When we were still evolving, it was very difficult to tell what new things and experiences might kill you or otherwise be harmful to your health.
So, if Australopithecus ate a red berry, and it made him sick, he might reason that it would be a good idea to avoid all red berries. In this sense, he might miss out on some really great things, like strawberries and raspberries, but he'd also avoid the really bad berries that would kill him. In an evolutionary sense, avoiding things that kill you mean that your genes get passed on, even if the downside is missing out on some pleasure.
If you want to take it a step further, if Australopithecus meets a member of the Commoniwannalayyou tribe, and that member anally rapes him with a tree limb and very nearly kills him, he may rightfully avoid contact with that group, even though the other members of that tribe may be great guys. Even though he has no proof that the other guys are murderous anal-raping maniacs. It's just easier, and safer, to assume that they are.
This extends to everything. Why do you avoid that dark alley at night? Because your experiences (either real, imagined, or vicarious) tell you that very bad things happen in dark alleys. You don't have to go down that alley to know that it's a fairly risky endeavour. Even though that alley might be safe, it's simply wiser (and safer) to take the long, lighted way around.
Our racist beliefs is simply a holdover of millenia of evolution. We stereotype. It helps save us the mental overhead and risk of having to evaluate each and every situation for danger.
And if we changed it so the citizens were white, we'd be racist for not putting black people in the game.
And if we changed it so that it was a black guy killing downtrodden white citizens, we'd be racist because we're propagating the fear that all black people want to do is 'kill whitey'.
Some days, you just can't win. That seems to be especially true when it comes to race.
Many times, Linux zealots will simply not add features because either:
- They don't use it
- They don't use the product that way and can't comprehend that someone else would want to do it that way. "What do you mean they'd rather use a GUI? Why if you just type '[insert long command string here with ten switches]' you can accomplish the same thing in less time!"
- It's not cool to work on.
- It's too damn hard.
- They aren't listening.
Too few want to give Microsoft (or Adobe or anyone else) credit for the things they do right. Too many are concerned with making their program do "cool" tricks or look flashy rather than make it usable. Or they want to make it stand out from everything else, so it doesn't look like it fits with the rest of the OS interface design. When someone voices a complaint, it's either, "it does this, you just have to do it in this completely unintuitive way that the programmer thinks is better|more logical" or dismissed with, "yeah, but no one uses that anyway!"If you want to compete with Microsoft on the desktop, you're going to have to stop listening to programmers and system administrators and start listening to your customers.
I know a few, including one who works for a very prestigous IP firm on the west coast. Only one problem. Katie (of Katie.com) is in London, while Katie T (of the book) is in America. That makes this case a bit hard to prosecute, and the potential outcome (and revenue) in doubt.
And I also won't be buying any more books from Penguin publishing.
Alternatively, you could bring him to an autocross. It will cost about $20 for the day and will not harm your vehicle, and your son (and you!) will learn more about vehicle dynamics in one day than he will learn in ten years of driving on the street or playing Gran Turismo on the Playstation.
If you simply must find a video game simulation, find an old arcade version of Race Drivin' or Hard Drivin' made by Atari circa 1990-92. I still have yet to find a video game that so accurately recreates the sensation of driving a vehicle. It lacks the G-forces, but the physics model is very good and force feedback is second to none. My parents wouldn't send me to Bondurant's class, and they weren't aware of autocross, but I played a lot of Hard Drivin' before I got my license, and it definately taught me a few things about car control and recovering from spins.
False negative = condition you are testing for comes up negative, when it should be positive.
Put in the context of a spam filter, it depends on whether you are testing for spam or for legitimate emails. If you are testing for spam (if spam then...), a false positive would be an email that is not spam getting sent to the spam folder or deleted. A false negative would be spam that lands in your inbox.
All the old R/C cars of the "run forward, press a button and run backward and turn" didn't have a real steering mechanism. Sometimes, you'd get one that was fairly sophisticated, and the front wheels would actually turn, but usually, this was accomplished by a idler wheel located under the chassis between the front wheels. The front wheels didn't actually touch the ground.
When you allowed the car to run forward, the rear wheels spun forward and the front wheel "locked" in the "drive straight" position. When you forced the car to run backward, the rear wheels spun backward, and the idler wheel (or front wheels) was designed in such a way that when the car was run backwards, the directional force would cause the wheel(s) to turn. It's hard to explain without seeing it, but I'll try. If we consider the fancy version, with the steerable front wheels, the wheels would turn, but not in the sense that they would in a normal remote controlled car. The pivot point was much closer to one side than the other, and it only allowed pivoting in one direction -- forward. So, a typical car would have the pivot point somewhere very near the front right tire. If you pushed the front left tire, you'd find that it would travel forward in a large arc, but not rearward. The right tire would barely turn at all. In the case of the idler wheel, it would slide forward and to the right, but there was no way to make it go left or backward. What this did was allow a sort of steering without the added expense of an extra motor and controller.
So, to change one of these into a completely steerable remote control car would not only require the addition of quite a bit of electronics, it would also require the complete rebuilding of the front steering mechanism and the mounting of an extra motor. Since you mention doing this yourself, but don't mention rebuilding the steering rack and mechanism (which would have been a lot harder than soldering in some chips), I have to believe either you started with a better R/C car than you remember, or you simply made the story up.
Because, when you go away, your email address goes away too. My first email address was one at my university. Due to some snafu, my email account was completely deleted. When it was finally reinstated, they issued me a completely different username because I'd changed my major. As a result, there were people and friends who my only point of contact was through that address -- and I have never been able to make contact with them again.
I encountered the problem again when I entered the workforce. As I switched jobs, the email address I'd been using dropped away into the ether, never to be seen or accessed again. If any important mails went there, I never got them. Ditto with ISPs. I switch ISPs often enough for this to be a real problem.
So, what did I do? I got a hotmail email. No, it's not perfect, and there are many things I hate about it (especially the way it's gotten more 'Microsofty' over the years), but it's free, and I never ever have to worry about it going away or becoming inaccessable.
Can you imagine being a Windows developer and taking some of the code with you to fill your portolio? "Here's some 10,000 lines of random Windows code. No, you can't really be sure that it's the source to Windows. No, it won't really run on its own. No, you can't really look at it too closely. No, I don't really mind taking your very propriatary code and sharing with the whole outside world so that I can possibly get a job at another company...."
Doesn't sound a whole lot different than hiring an employee. Eventually, you have to put your faith in that person or company and assume what they are telling you is true. But if it's not, you really won't know until it's too late.
For whatever that's worth.
One thing I really respected about them is that they throw tons of money into research and development, even if that R&D doesn't seem to have a real financial payoff in the future. They basically just pay people to come up with and develop cool technological toys. Some are successful and make IBM tons of money. Others aren't and are just cool to have around. Still, it's not often you see a large company that dedicates a large portion of time and money to things that don't contribute to the bottom line.
However, woe be unto you if you cross them. As benign as they are, those fuckers hold a serious grudge. And for a very, very long time. They are still pissed about the whole OS/2 Warp debacle and won't use Microsoft products if they can get away with it. That's also a very large reason why they are pumping so much money into Linux. They'd rather the whole OS market be open and free than have Microsoft controlling it.
They are going to literally grind SCO's bones to make their bread. There will be no SCO by the time IBM is done.
In those days, getting the nuclear material wasn't exactly easy. We had enough fissionable material for three bombs. One we detonated at Los Alamos to prove the bomb actually worked. The other two became Fat Man and Little Boy.
We really didn't know how destructive the two bombs would be, but we did know that producing a third would take quite a bit of time. A fourth or fifth would take even more time after that.
What we were afraid of is that the Japanese wouldn't surrender. This was a very real possibility, as they had never surrendered before, and their culture ecouraged suicide attacks over surrender. We had to make the Japanese believe that we had a near inexhaustable supply of these weapons, that if they didn't surrender that we would keep dropping a new one on their cities every few days until they did -- or simply wiping the whole country clean without ever setting one American foot on Japanese soil. When you can't engage the enemy face to face, suddenly being a martyr isn't so appealing. Dying for nothing is never fun. Making your parents, wives, children, et al die for nothing is even less enjoyable.
However, had we waited to drop the second bomb and not gotten our surrender after it, it could have been months before we could drop a third. And a month after that before we could drop a fourth. Show that you can only carry out these attacks every once in a while and you might steel your enemy's resolve. They might figure that they can wait you out, or they might get used to being blasted, or they (the leaders anyway) might figure out a way to survive. Then you have to go over there and kill them all hand to hand anyway. WE had to show them we had the will and the power to scour their country from the face of the planet.
What we did was one hell of a poker bluff. Thankfully, the Japanese never called us on it. It was horrible thing, dropping those bombs, but it would have been far more horrible and bloody to have marched American troops all the way to Tokyo -- for both sides.
Bob, don't you understand that global warming can also cause cooling in certain parts of the world? Oh yessir. Regardless of what climate conditions change between now and the next hundred years, you can rest assured that it will be because of global warming and the product of human beings.
It's scary how many people think the name of their child makes a great password.
When has this ever happened with any resource? Face it, it's not going to happen this way. Let me explain how things will progress.
Oil Wells will start to run dry. They won't all run dry at the same time. Some will run out first. This will cause prices to go up on the wells that aren't dry yet. We'll know this is close to the end time, as production enters a steady but slow decline because we can't find new reserves to make up for the ones we've emptied.
As the price increases, all the oil we previously knew about, but was too expensive to get to, suddenly becomes profitable. This helps provide an even greater buffer against the price increases. Even if, as you say, this is just the very last 1% we're sucking out, we're still talking about a lot of oil. Probably enough to power the world for at least a couple years on it's own -- and don't forget, all the oil wells haven't run dry yet.
Prices continue to increase. As it becomes more expensive to get oil, people will start to use less of it, lessening demand, prolonging the time we have to come up with a solution.
At some point, it will become cost effective to start pulling oil out of all the shale oil reserves. There's nearly 2000 billion barrels available in Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado alone. Think about that for a minute. We could extract that today, but since oil is so cheap to just pump out of the ground, there's no incentive to do so. Provided we don't develop a more efficient technology to pull this oil out (and we will, it's the nature of the beast), it will still be cheap enough to put in our cars and power around. Not nearly as cheap as it is today, but if driving your car somewhere is important, you'll still be able to do it.
Now, somewhere around here, oil will become too expensive to power our big fucking vehicles around. Long before we reach this point, people will have been clamoring for other ways to get around. This is when you'll see some kind of alternate power really gain traction. Who knows what it will be, it may be public transportation, it may be nuclear, it may be something we haven't seen yet. There will be time to adapt.
Somewhere long before we run out of oil, people will have switched to other means of doing all the things we currently do with oil. The price of it will demand this. If a gallon of gas costs $665.00, you're not going to put it in your 1955 Buick Roadmaster.
By the time we get to the very last drop, if we get that far without completely switching to something else and making oil totally worthless, it will command such a premium that some collector will put it on his shelf rather than use it. We will never completely run out.
By the way, we didn't run out of coal either, despite everyone declaring that we would. In fact, we have rather too much of the stuff.
And all this does not take into account that it makes a lot more sense that oil is some kind of natural byproduct of all the internal mechanisms of the inner earth instead of something created by dead dinosaurs at one time in the earth's history -- and one time only.
Here's the fact of the matter, and why a lot of us denounce the "let's do something now" crowd. Gasoline is currently very inexpensive. Even in places where it is expensive, it is often only expensive due to taxes and artificial supply control. It really doesn't currently take a lot of money to find, obtain, and refine a lot of crude oil.
That's partially why we like to use it. For all of it's drawbacks, it's really fairly handy to have around. Each unit mass of gasoline contains a very high volume of potential energy. Far more so than many other fuels. That means you don't have to haul a lot of it around. Second, it's easy to haul around. All you basically need is a sealed tank, and it's not even that important that it be sealed. It doesn't have to be pressurized, it's not acidic, and it's not overly harmful to touch. In fact, it's so easy to transport and refill a container, that we often let people do it themselves. Third, unlike many potential fuels, it is not overly explosive. Yes, the vapor is somewhat dangerous, but when was the last time you saw a car explode like you see on television? When was the last time a fuel can (for the lawnmower or weed eater) blew up in your garage? Overall, considering how much available energy is in a tank of gasoline, it's amazing how utterly careless we can be with it's storage -- without seriously putting ourselves in danger. Last, gasoline is cheap, and will continue to be so for the forseable future. There's also a massive infrastructure to support it.
Now, why won't we run out? Or be caught by surprise? Well, I could go into the whole "Deep Hot Earth" theory, where it makes more sense that oil is made by some process under the earth than by dead dinosaurs (and only that one time). Oil may turn out to be a renewable resource. But, since we don't know enough about that, I'll assume that there is a finite amount of oil and no new oil is being created.
When we start really running out of oil, you will find that it won't be an overnight phenomonon. Every well in the world won't run dry overnight. But oil will get progressively more difficult to find and more difficult to obtain. Note, we haven't yet talked about shale oil, where billions of gallons of crude are locked away but it's not financially sound to pull it out -- yet. You will see a slow, gradual increase in the price of crude oil. At some point, it will become prohibitively expensive to use to power around in a large SUV by ourselves on a Monday afternoon. People [i]will[/i] switch to other methods of getting around or will decrease their use of fossil fuels because of the expense. As time goes on, it will get more and more expensive to use oil. At some point, there will be a mass transition to something else, be it propane, hydrogen, or something else we haven't yet figured out. The last drops of crude won't be used to power some 1954 Buick down the highway, it will likely be used for some more noble purpose -- or it may simply never be used at all. That's why I say we'll never run out. Even if we reach that very last drop of oil, that drop will command such a price that actually using it for anything other than collecting becomes foolish.
Here on Slashdot, people like to say that you can't legislate technology. However, every time we get into a global warming debate, the consensus seems to be that in this particular case, we can. Somehow, we'll create the laws that will develop alternate fuels and technology long before the market demands it. And we will do this because we are irrationally afraid (something else Slashdot seems to be against, making laws based on fear) that oil will run out one day, like turning off a spigot, and we will lost, adrift in a world without power.