The ones I mentioned were fixed earlier this week after the Chinese authorities took google.cn offline. It is mentioned in this Time article (see the last paragraph): http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1 156598-2,00.html. There are still a myriad of ways around the Chinese filters, for the same reason there are myriad ways around all filters; those that don't rely on an approved whitelist simple cannot keep up with the vocabulary and inventiveness of the masses. Even with 30,000 full-time Internet censors, the Chinese can't keep up with their current 4 million bloggers, much less then 20 million they'll have by 2010.[1] China can censor all the big keywords -- falun gung, freedom, democracy, tiananmen, etc. I'm of the firm belief, however, that those aren't the words that will kill the last vestiages of Chinese central control, but rather the movements that the Chinese make up themselves, which will be marketing in nature, rather then violent or freedom-loving. The Chinese realize this, and have been slowly transitioning to a market economy for the last 10 years. In 10 more, their economy will be indistinguishable from ours.
[1] As of December 2004, China has about 34.6 million ISP accounts, making it one of the world's biggest Internet markets... Gartner estimates that the number of ISP accounts will increase to 40.7 million by the end of 2005, which is expected to further grow to 67.3 million accounts by the end of 2009. -- Gartner, Network and Internet Services and Service Providers in China, 4 November 2005
I am a junior at Vanderbilt University, majoring in computer science. I have no relationship with Google at all, other then wanting an internship there (and Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, etc.)
Google doesn't do anything of the sort. Google.com is provided completely uncensored to Chinese audiences. However, the government disables cached pages, translation, and a few other services. It's also very slow, because it has to go through the firewall. All Google did was provide a point-of-presence inside China for google.cn. They would be shut down for this point of presence if they didn't at least pay lip service to Chinese Internet law. As the silly ways to break the Google filter show (searching in UPPERCASE, adding a period,...) it's obvious Google is doing as little as possible to ensure the government doesn't shut them down. But people are protesting their so-called human rights violations. It's rediculous, and the only reason people do it is because Google has become big enough that it's cool to bash them.
Google philosophy is that they can make more money, long-term, by doing no evil. I've yet to see anything from them that shows they've abandoned that philosophy.
I guess the milllions of us laptop users who use S3 on a regular basis must be dreaming then. Linux's support for S3 blows. I don't think I've had it fail for me on Windows XP once. I do IT support, and I've only had two or three cases of a computer not being able to wake from S3 suspend on Windows XP. This is the ONLY REASON why I don't use Linux on my laptop, and it's a damn shame.
On most elevators I've seen, the call cancel button only works when in "Firefighter's Mode" or what-have-you. I keep meaning to get one of those keys, but I never get around to it.
'Course, I hardly have the world's largest experience set with elevators -- Tennessee doesn't have many tall buildings -- so YMMV.
Look around. It's been a while since I've seen a bank that didn't limit the debit card liability to $50 at most or none at best. Any Visa-logo card gets automatic protection for all credit card purchases, and I think they'd start denying the card if they start guessing my 4-digit PIN on a non-Visa machine.
Federalism: A form of political organization in which governmental power is divided between a central government and territorial subdivisions--in the United States, among the national, state, and local governments.
People who say Federalism lost in the civil war claim that the state and local governments now have no power; that the Federal government controls all. This is, of course false, but Federalism == State's Rights.
In my school (Vanderbilt University), we teach both C++ and Java as part of the CS curriculum, and programs have to be written in LISP and ML as well. We have an entire class dedicated to the basics you mention as part of the required curriculum, and almost all the advanced courses have references to those things. We also have a class specifically about what happens on the CPU level (including writting both bytecode and assembly using -- ha! -- iJVM), and a class specifically about what happens on the OS level (both courses have optional follow-ups that go more in-depth). I don't get the impression our CS curriculum is that unusual. (If you care, the exact requirements are in this PDF under "Computer Science.")
You do understand that a large portion of Spike's programming is Star Trek: TNG and Star Trek: DS9, don't you? I don't know a *ton* of drunken jocks who adhere to that particular type of programming.
Ah, but enjoyment is relative, isn't it? I average about 30 minutes per day of Battlefield 2, and occasionally will play through another game (I'm on interval 2 of FEAR right now). My previous system was an Athlon XP 2500+ w/ a gig of RAM and a 6600GT AGP. While it ran the game at 1280 (my LCD's native resolution), when involved in firefights my minimum framerate typically dropped to below 10 frames per second. It just got too frustrating for me to be continually killed, not because I lacked the skills (trust me, that happens often enough), but because my system couldn't handle it. Along with many other things (a flash website I'm forced to use maxing my CPU and causing winamp to skip, Eclipse taking 20+ seconds to start for my development work, etc.), I upgraded to a Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 2 gigs of fast RAM, and a X800XT All-in-Wonder AGP. Let's assume I'll use this computer for 3 years, and upgrade the video card once during that time:
Amount I spent on the computer: $1061 + $257, including shipping. New video card in 1.5 years: $250 A total cost over 3 years of $1568.
That means, to increase my minimum framerates to 60fps now and 30fps over the entire duriation, I spending an average of $1.43 per day on my computer (this is assuming that the computer becomes completely worthless to me after 3 years, which is absurd, but let's go with it). Let's further assume that my developer time is worth $25 per hour (actually considerably more), and that I start Eclipse 5 times per day, 5 days per week (probably an underestimate). The new computer (it comes with a faster hard drive, too) starts Eclipse in about 4 seconds. I save an average of $0.55 per day from that enhancement alone. Assume that my total productivity is in Eclipse, and that's the only benefit I get from the new computer besides gaming (it's much quieter, it comes with far better warranties, it's less then a third of the weight of my previous computer, is smaller, and comes with a TV tuner allowing me to save desk space). I'm still paying only $0.88 per day on gaming (not including the price of games). You may have done this analysis on your own and determined that it wasn't worth $0.88 per day for your enjoyment. Personally, I find that an emminently resonable amount to spend on entertainment. It's less then I would spend on cable; less then I would spend on seeing a movie a week at the local cineplex.
Intel uses an inclusive cache archetecture, so you actually don't get the 640K you were looking for, and even so it'd have to be backed by DRAM (AFAIK, that cache isn't programmer or even OS accessible). AMD uses an exclusive-cache, so the L1 and L2 (and any L3) would all be additive in which data they could store.
JOC, why don't you specify Athlon X2 4400+ or 4800+s? They all have 1MB L2 per core, as well.
Perhaps the fault with that observation is you have a very small sample space. I attend a top 20 university, and such speech is certainly not uncommon among those who attend here, even those with excellent grades and hard schedules. Nor does Vanderbilt draw upon a large "Valley Girl" population, with a geographically diverse set of attendees. Here, as with most college students that I personally know, the focus on communication is efficiency, not obeying some unfortunate set of rules spawned more by history then clarity. The few professors remaining who focus more on grammatical correctness then on the strength of a student's arguments find themselves with lighter schedules.
My original assertion, though, remains valid. The language of my grandmother (who was a teen in the '30s) is quite different from even the language of my mother (a teen in the '70s), and it certainly bears even less in common with the language of my generation (teens in the '90s). That social pressure evolves the language we all speak is a view with plenty of historical precedent. Have you attempted to read Beowulf in the original Old English recently? If this evolution is understood and accepted, why should we cast doubt on the notion that language would evolve at a much more rapid pace today, as the rate of technological and social change is many times greater then that of the dark ages? Those who resist these changes are often stereotyped as conservatives, and I will shamelessly do the same here: isn't the conservative ideal a laissez-faire free market? If so, why should the evolution of language not be subjected to an intellectual market -- those ideas that survive will obviously have merit, and the contraposition must also hold: those ideas without merit will surely not survive.
So, you are saying that the formal grammar of today is the same as that of Churchill? There are several classes of new gramatical constructs that are in use today. Perhaps not in scientific papers, but in the vast majority of written communication, the language has most definitely evolved. For a good (and humorous!) look at some of the new classes of words in use, I recommend this short essay, which is a amature linguist's view on modern slang. The biggest drive for language today that I see is the need to communicate larger and larger volumes of information more quickly. The use of acronyms and abbreviations shorten the language. Unforunately, most of our brains haven't yet caught up with our newfound ability to say so much so quickly, so occasionally a pause is required. This is where the "APMs" that our friend was talking about come into play -- a person may say "like", or "um", or any number of other things to fill the gaps while his or her brain turns over the next thought.
A number of people decry language no longer being an 'artform', something to be molded for great beauty. There will always be the wordsmiths who produce language akin to art. But since language is no longer a province of the elite, since (in the first world) the people are finally participiating in matters of import, the language will evolve for utility, and not beauty. I, for one, am fine with that.
Woah there kid. You honestly have such a piss-poor network that you can't stream DVDs of 100Mbit Ethernet? That's sad. Considering that I've done fine streaming some DVDs (namely, the Firefly DVD9s) over 802.11b (not a dropped frame, though utilization of the connection was the mid-80s), something tells me you have issues going on there. (Before you yell: The Firefly DVDs have a video track that's only encoded at about 4.5Mbps as opposed to the normal higher bitrate. Many normal DVDs need 802.11g or a to work for me).
Now, 1080i over 100Mbits may be pushing it a bit. I recently watched Fight Club in a guy's room, and we're were streaming the transport off of an FTP server which, due to a piss-poor implimentation of software RAID-5 (thanks Microsoft!), could only download at about 8MB/s. That wasn't quite enough for full enjoyment. We ended up having to let the whole thing download anyway, because an Athlon 64 3200+ can play HD content and can download at 10MB/s, but not both at once, evidentally. A 20GB file is a lot for an OS to handle, too.
Evidentally, some. In my state (Tennessee), there is a curfew law for minors under 17. There are a few specific exceptions to the law, but the most broad and sweeping is the "First Amendment Exception", which is one of the few without a time at which the exception expires:
Tenn. Code Ann. 39-17-1702 (2004)
(d) The following are valid exceptions to the operation of the curfew:
(8) When exercising First Amendment rights protected by the United States Constitution, such as the free exercise of religion, freedom of speech and the right of assembly. A minor shall show evidence of the good faith of such exercise and provide notice to the city officials by first delivering to the appropriate law enforcement authority a written communication, signed by such minor, with the minor's home address and telephone number, addressed to the mayor of the county specifying when, where and in what manner the minor will be on the streets at night during hours when the curfew is still otherwise applicable to the minor in the exercise of a First Amendment right specified in such communication
IANAL, but when they taught you in school that you had no rights, it was indoctrination, not based in fact.
A large amount of the heat an average PC produces today is made by the power supply. The power supply is a tough nut to crack -- the best are only 80% efficient, and they're so small that it's hard to get airflow through them. Even the new models with a 90mm and 120mm fan don't actually blow that many CFMs because all the equipment inside. And when you realize that in a 350W computer, at least 70W of pure heat have to be disipated, every little bit (conduction or convection) helps.
And why is aluminum lighter? Well, you're right, the material itself is not that much lighter. But usually cases need to be made out of 1cm thick steel, while aluminum can be much thinner (0.7cm) while maintaining structural integrity. Why do you think all those soda cans are made out of aluminum? I know that aluminum cases are lighter, because I have two Antec SX1000 cases beside me. They have equivilant components, except one has a heftier video card and 5 hard drives, while the other has 2 hard drives and a light, passively-cooled card. Guess which one is lighter?
The 5 drive computer with the heftier video card is about half the weight -- perhaps more, I haven't weighed it. It's *quite* obvious when lifting the computers, however.
Two words: Complete Care. Or whatever it's equivilant is at your manufacturer of choice. You can sit on it, toss it out a window, whatever, and get a replacement, sometimes next-day.
No, it's weight, not mass. You're trying to lift mass out of a gravity well, where it has weight (by definition). If there was no gravity well, semi-infinite mass wouldn't matter[1]. Just because it's has the word space in it doesn't mean it implies the word mass should be used.
[1] Keeping in mind that you couldn't be so massive that the ship's own gravity caused problems with structural integrity, of course.
You can do lots of things to cool those PCs down though. Sleep (Suspend to RAM) or Hiberation (Suspend to Disk) are always good options if you aren't using the computer when it's not around. Personally, I use my computer 24/7 to do something, but you can still negate a lot of heat:
- If you are using an Athlon 64, use the Cool'n'Quiet tech to dynamically clock your system down to as little as 800Mhz -- it sips power at that speed. To be fair, Pentium 4 Prescott owners also have a similar feature, but it can only clock the system down to 2800Mhz (or whatever the 14x multiplier would net you, if you are overclocking or underclocking your bus). - Take advantage of the automatic turning off of disks and displays available on any modern ACPI PC. - You can always underclock parts of your system, even dynamically. For instance, any modern nVidia GPU can be dynamically clocked down when running in 2D mode and then throttle back up when 3D apps need the power. I'm sure there are similar features for ATI GPUs. - For the more adventurous, you can buy water cooling kits, and place the radiator outside, or in a window blowing exhaust air out. Make sure your pump can move the water over the delta in height, though!
My system has six disks in it (1x80GB system, 1x200GB "misc", and 4x300GB in a RAID-5), as well as 2 19" LCDs, so the hard disk and monitor features really help me out. I unforunately don't have a processor capable of dynamic clocking yet (I'm still on an Athlon XP), but I do dynamically adjust the bus down 25Mhz or so when I'm not using the computer heavily. For my laptop though, you can't beat suspend-to-disk: it takes about 14 seconds to boot in to Windows, exactly the same way as I left it. I've also offloaded all my critical services to an old, passively cooled PII/266 so that the desktop can be shut off as often as possible (e.g. when Remote Desktop and FTP aren't required).
Which is exactly why I'm glad you aren't commanding a real military force. The way to protect a tank from enemy pop-up anti-tank weapons is infantry at an appropriate radius from your tank. These guys are probably trying to protect you, and you repay them by running them over? I punish any time someone runs me over and I didn't not look both ways. I hope people do the same to you -- it's not hard, just pay attention.
2. The punish system just plain sucks. You kill someone by accident..like in a tank and you can't see behind you and you're not totally paying attention to the mini-map to see anyone near you and WHAM you run over your team mate cause they decided to just jump out in front of you. Do they forgive? Not a chance. Always get punished. Very rare do you not get punished. This just needs to totally go away.
It's for people like you that the punish system exists. If your too damned lazy to check to see if you are running over other people, and thus ruining other people's game experience, you deserve what you get.
Most of the servers I've played on (and I've played on a lot, nearly every 48p+ server out there) requires 2-3 punishes before you are kicked anyway. And I only get punished about once every other time -- I forgive about 75% of the time. Again, I have to say, if you're bumping into it -- be more careful. Or don't play, which seems like a good solution for both of us.
Re:Philsophy for high schoolers
on
Improving Education?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
At my (public, non-magnet) high school, we had a class called "Contemporary Issues" which dealt specifically with such topics. The class split into groups and was given 4 days out of each week (90 minute classes) to form a cohesive argument, and a fifth day to debate it. We tackled issues such as abortion, the role of religion in modern society, libertarianism in a post-9/11 world, etc. It was easily the most enlightening class I had in school.
I wasn't exactly in the most enlightened school district in the country -- Northeast Tennessee isn't typically considered a bastion of liberal thought -- and the enrollment was fairly small (25 kids was a small class for my school, and it was the only section). Still, a good class.
Slashdot Mirror
The ones I mentioned were fixed earlier this week after the Chinese authorities took google.cn offline. It is mentioned in this Time article (see the last paragraph): http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1 156598-2,00.html. There are still a myriad of ways around the Chinese filters, for the same reason there are myriad ways around all filters; those that don't rely on an approved whitelist simple cannot keep up with the vocabulary and inventiveness of the masses. Even with 30,000 full-time Internet censors, the Chinese can't keep up with their current 4 million bloggers, much less then 20 million they'll have by 2010.[1] China can censor all the big keywords -- falun gung, freedom, democracy, tiananmen, etc. I'm of the firm belief, however, that those aren't the words that will kill the last vestiages of Chinese central control, but rather the movements that the Chinese make up themselves, which will be marketing in nature, rather then violent or freedom-loving. The Chinese realize this, and have been slowly transitioning to a market economy for the last 10 years. In 10 more, their economy will be indistinguishable from ours.
[1] As of December 2004, China has about 34.6 million ISP accounts, making it one of the world's biggest Internet markets... Gartner estimates that the number of ISP accounts will increase to 40.7 million by the end of 2005, which is expected to further grow to 67.3 million accounts by the end of 2009. -- Gartner, Network and Internet Services and Service Providers in China, 4 November 2005
I am a junior at Vanderbilt University, majoring in computer science. I have no relationship with Google at all, other then wanting an internship there (and Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, etc.)
Google doesn't do anything of the sort. Google.com is provided completely uncensored to Chinese audiences. However, the government disables cached pages, translation, and a few other services. It's also very slow, because it has to go through the firewall. All Google did was provide a point-of-presence inside China for google.cn. They would be shut down for this point of presence if they didn't at least pay lip service to Chinese Internet law. As the silly ways to break the Google filter show (searching in UPPERCASE, adding a period, ...) it's obvious Google is doing as little as possible to ensure the government doesn't shut them down. But people are protesting their so-called human rights violations. It's rediculous, and the only reason people do it is because Google has become big enough that it's cool to bash them.
Google philosophy is that they can make more money, long-term, by doing no evil. I've yet to see anything from them that shows they've abandoned that philosophy.
I guess the milllions of us laptop users who use S3 on a regular basis must be dreaming then. Linux's support for S3 blows. I don't think I've had it fail for me on Windows XP once. I do IT support, and I've only had two or three cases of a computer not being able to wake from S3 suspend on Windows XP. This is the ONLY REASON why I don't use Linux on my laptop, and it's a damn shame.
This isn't a story about math errors, but... I'm going to go out on a limb here and say there are more than 400 words in the English language.
On most elevators I've seen, the call cancel button only works when in "Firefighter's Mode" or what-have-you. I keep meaning to get one of those keys, but I never get around to it.
'Course, I hardly have the world's largest experience set with elevators -- Tennessee doesn't have many tall buildings -- so YMMV.
Look around. It's been a while since I've seen a bank that didn't limit the debit card liability to $50 at most or none at best. Any Visa-logo card gets automatic protection for all credit card purchases, and I think they'd start denying the card if they start guessing my 4-digit PIN on a non-Visa machine.
Federalism: A form of political organization in which governmental power is divided between a central government and territorial subdivisions--in the United States, among the national, state, and local governments.
People who say Federalism lost in the civil war claim that the state and local governments now have no power; that the Federal government controls all. This is, of course false, but Federalism == State's Rights.
In my school (Vanderbilt University), we teach both C++ and Java as part of the CS curriculum, and programs have to be written in LISP and ML as well. We have an entire class dedicated to the basics you mention as part of the required curriculum, and almost all the advanced courses have references to those things. We also have a class specifically about what happens on the CPU level (including writting both bytecode and assembly using -- ha! -- iJVM), and a class specifically about what happens on the OS level (both courses have optional follow-ups that go more in-depth). I don't get the impression our CS curriculum is that unusual. (If you care, the exact requirements are in this PDF under "Computer Science.")
You do understand that a large portion of Spike's programming is Star Trek: TNG and Star Trek: DS9, don't you? I don't know a *ton* of drunken jocks who adhere to that particular type of programming.
Ah, but enjoyment is relative, isn't it? I average about 30 minutes per day of Battlefield 2, and occasionally will play through another game (I'm on interval 2 of FEAR right now). My previous system was an Athlon XP 2500+ w/ a gig of RAM and a 6600GT AGP. While it ran the game at 1280 (my LCD's native resolution), when involved in firefights my minimum framerate typically dropped to below 10 frames per second. It just got too frustrating for me to be continually killed, not because I lacked the skills (trust me, that happens often enough), but because my system couldn't handle it. Along with many other things (a flash website I'm forced to use maxing my CPU and causing winamp to skip, Eclipse taking 20+ seconds to start for my development work, etc.), I upgraded to a Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 2 gigs of fast RAM, and a X800XT All-in-Wonder AGP. Let's assume I'll use this computer for 3 years, and upgrade the video card once during that time:
Amount I spent on the computer: $1061 + $257, including shipping.
New video card in 1.5 years: $250
A total cost over 3 years of $1568.
That means, to increase my minimum framerates to 60fps now and 30fps over the entire duriation, I spending an average of $1.43 per day on my computer (this is assuming that the computer becomes completely worthless to me after 3 years, which is absurd, but let's go with it). Let's further assume that my developer time is worth $25 per hour (actually considerably more), and that I start Eclipse 5 times per day, 5 days per week (probably an underestimate). The new computer (it comes with a faster hard drive, too) starts Eclipse in about 4 seconds. I save an average of $0.55 per day from that enhancement alone. Assume that my total productivity is in Eclipse, and that's the only benefit I get from the new computer besides gaming (it's much quieter, it comes with far better warranties, it's less then a third of the weight of my previous computer, is smaller, and comes with a TV tuner allowing me to save desk space). I'm still paying only $0.88 per day on gaming (not including the price of games). You may have done this analysis on your own and determined that it wasn't worth $0.88 per day for your enjoyment. Personally, I find that an emminently resonable amount to spend on entertainment. It's less then I would spend on cable; less then I would spend on seeing a movie a week at the local cineplex.
Intel uses an inclusive cache archetecture, so you actually don't get the 640K you were looking for, and even so it'd have to be backed by DRAM (AFAIK, that cache isn't programmer or even OS accessible). AMD uses an exclusive-cache, so the L1 and L2 (and any L3) would all be additive in which data they could store.
JOC, why don't you specify Athlon X2 4400+ or 4800+s? They all have 1MB L2 per core, as well.
High Dynamic Range lighting is a technique. Valve's implementation of that technique in the Source engine is a technology.
Perhaps the fault with that observation is you have a very small sample space. I attend a top 20 university, and such speech is certainly not uncommon among those who attend here, even those with excellent grades and hard schedules. Nor does Vanderbilt draw upon a large "Valley Girl" population, with a geographically diverse set of attendees. Here, as with most college students that I personally know, the focus on communication is efficiency, not obeying some unfortunate set of rules spawned more by history then clarity. The few professors remaining who focus more on grammatical correctness then on the strength of a student's arguments find themselves with lighter schedules.
My original assertion, though, remains valid. The language of my grandmother (who was a teen in the '30s) is quite different from even the language of my mother (a teen in the '70s), and it certainly bears even less in common with the language of my generation (teens in the '90s). That social pressure evolves the language we all speak is a view with plenty of historical precedent. Have you attempted to read Beowulf in the original Old English recently? If this evolution is understood and accepted, why should we cast doubt on the notion that language would evolve at a much more rapid pace today, as the rate of technological and social change is many times greater then that of the dark ages? Those who resist these changes are often stereotyped as conservatives, and I will shamelessly do the same here: isn't the conservative ideal a laissez-faire free market? If so, why should the evolution of language not be subjected to an intellectual market -- those ideas that survive will obviously have merit, and the contraposition must also hold: those ideas without merit will surely not survive.
So, you are saying that the formal grammar of today is the same as that of Churchill? There are several classes of new gramatical constructs that are in use today. Perhaps not in scientific papers, but in the vast majority of written communication, the language has most definitely evolved. For a good (and humorous!) look at some of the new classes of words in use, I recommend this short essay, which is a amature linguist's view on modern slang. The biggest drive for language today that I see is the need to communicate larger and larger volumes of information more quickly. The use of acronyms and abbreviations shorten the language. Unforunately, most of our brains haven't yet caught up with our newfound ability to say so much so quickly, so occasionally a pause is required. This is where the "APMs" that our friend was talking about come into play -- a person may say "like", or "um", or any number of other things to fill the gaps while his or her brain turns over the next thought.
A number of people decry language no longer being an 'artform', something to be molded for great beauty. There will always be the wordsmiths who produce language akin to art. But since language is no longer a province of the elite, since (in the first world) the people are finally participiating in matters of import, the language will evolve for utility, and not beauty. I, for one, am fine with that.
Woah there kid. You honestly have such a piss-poor network that you can't stream DVDs of 100Mbit Ethernet? That's sad. Considering that I've done fine streaming some DVDs (namely, the Firefly DVD9s) over 802.11b (not a dropped frame, though utilization of the connection was the mid-80s), something tells me you have issues going on there. (Before you yell: The Firefly DVDs have a video track that's only encoded at about 4.5Mbps as opposed to the normal higher bitrate. Many normal DVDs need 802.11g or a to work for me).
Now, 1080i over 100Mbits may be pushing it a bit. I recently watched Fight Club in a guy's room, and we're were streaming the transport off of an FTP server which, due to a piss-poor implimentation of software RAID-5 (thanks Microsoft!), could only download at about 8MB/s. That wasn't quite enough for full enjoyment. We ended up having to let the whole thing download anyway, because an Athlon 64 3200+ can play HD content and can download at 10MB/s, but not both at once, evidentally. A 20GB file is a lot for an OS to handle, too.
Evidentally, some. In my state (Tennessee), there is a curfew law for minors under 17. There are a few specific exceptions to the law, but the most broad and sweeping is the "First Amendment Exception", which is one of the few without a time at which the exception expires:
Tenn. Code Ann. 39-17-1702 (2004)
(d) The following are valid exceptions to the operation of the curfew:
(8) When exercising First Amendment rights protected by the United States Constitution, such as the free exercise of religion, freedom of speech and the right of assembly. A minor shall show evidence of the good faith of such exercise and provide notice to the city officials by first delivering to the appropriate law enforcement authority a written communication, signed by such minor, with the minor's home address and telephone number, addressed to the mayor of the county specifying when, where and in what manner the minor will be on the streets at night during hours when the curfew is still otherwise applicable to the minor in the exercise of a First Amendment right specified in such communication
IANAL, but when they taught you in school that you had no rights, it was indoctrination, not based in fact.
Wrong on both counts.
A large amount of the heat an average PC produces today is made by the power supply. The power supply is a tough nut to crack -- the best are only 80% efficient, and they're so small that it's hard to get airflow through them. Even the new models with a 90mm and 120mm fan don't actually blow that many CFMs because all the equipment inside. And when you realize that in a 350W computer, at least 70W of pure heat have to be disipated, every little bit (conduction or convection) helps.
And why is aluminum lighter? Well, you're right, the material itself is not that much lighter. But usually cases need to be made out of 1cm thick steel, while aluminum can be much thinner (0.7cm) while maintaining structural integrity. Why do you think all those soda cans are made out of aluminum? I know that aluminum cases are lighter, because I have two Antec SX1000 cases beside me. They have equivilant components, except one has a heftier video card and 5 hard drives, while the other has 2 hard drives and a light, passively-cooled card. Guess which one is lighter?
The 5 drive computer with the heftier video card is about half the weight -- perhaps more, I haven't weighed it. It's *quite* obvious when lifting the computers, however.
Two words: Complete Care. Or whatever it's equivilant is at your manufacturer of choice. You can sit on it, toss it out a window, whatever, and get a replacement, sometimes next-day.
It's well worth the $120.
No, it's weight, not mass. You're trying to lift mass out of a gravity well, where it has weight (by definition). If there was no gravity well, semi-infinite mass wouldn't matter[1]. Just because it's has the word space in it doesn't mean it implies the word mass should be used.
[1] Keeping in mind that you couldn't be so massive that the ship's own gravity caused problems with structural integrity, of course.
You can do lots of things to cool those PCs down though. Sleep (Suspend to RAM) or Hiberation (Suspend to Disk) are always good options if you aren't using the computer when it's not around. Personally, I use my computer 24/7 to do something, but you can still negate a lot of heat:
- If you are using an Athlon 64, use the Cool'n'Quiet tech to dynamically clock your system down to as little as 800Mhz -- it sips power at that speed. To be fair, Pentium 4 Prescott owners also have a similar feature, but it can only clock the system down to 2800Mhz (or whatever the 14x multiplier would net you, if you are overclocking or underclocking your bus).
- Take advantage of the automatic turning off of disks and displays available on any modern ACPI PC.
- You can always underclock parts of your system, even dynamically. For instance, any modern nVidia GPU can be dynamically clocked down when running in 2D mode and then throttle back up when 3D apps need the power. I'm sure there are similar features for ATI GPUs.
- For the more adventurous, you can buy water cooling kits, and place the radiator outside, or in a window blowing exhaust air out. Make sure your pump can move the water over the delta in height, though!
My system has six disks in it (1x80GB system, 1x200GB "misc", and 4x300GB in a RAID-5), as well as 2 19" LCDs, so the hard disk and monitor features really help me out. I unforunately don't have a processor capable of dynamic clocking yet (I'm still on an Athlon XP), but I do dynamically adjust the bus down 25Mhz or so when I'm not using the computer heavily. For my laptop though, you can't beat suspend-to-disk: it takes about 14 seconds to boot in to Windows, exactly the same way as I left it. I've also offloaded all my critical services to an old, passively cooled PII/266 so that the desktop can be shut off as often as possible (e.g. when Remote Desktop and FTP aren't required).
That f11 key sure is hard to hit, isn't it? Read the manual, learn how to play, then maybe I'll have some sympathy.
But probably not.
Which is exactly why I'm glad you aren't commanding a real military force. The way to protect a tank from enemy pop-up anti-tank weapons is infantry at an appropriate radius from your tank. These guys are probably trying to protect you, and you repay them by running them over? I punish any time someone runs me over and I didn't not look both ways. I hope people do the same to you -- it's not hard, just pay attention.
It's for people like you that the punish system exists. If your too damned lazy to check to see if you are running over other people, and thus ruining other people's game experience, you deserve what you get.
Most of the servers I've played on (and I've played on a lot, nearly every 48p+ server out there) requires 2-3 punishes before you are kicked anyway. And I only get punished about once every other time -- I forgive about 75% of the time. Again, I have to say, if you're bumping into it -- be more careful. Or don't play, which seems like a good solution for both of us.
At my (public, non-magnet) high school, we had a class called "Contemporary Issues" which dealt specifically with such topics. The class split into groups and was given 4 days out of each week (90 minute classes) to form a cohesive argument, and a fifth day to debate it. We tackled issues such as abortion, the role of religion in modern society, libertarianism in a post-9/11 world, etc. It was easily the most enlightening class I had in school.
I wasn't exactly in the most enlightened school district in the country -- Northeast Tennessee isn't typically considered a bastion of liberal thought -- and the enrollment was fairly small (25 kids was a small class for my school, and it was the only section). Still, a good class.