Ah, the usual fluff without any conclusion from GameSpy, full of common sense advice, blatant truisms, and technical inaccuracies. I liked this gem:
LCD Rear Projection
Pro for Gamers: Reasonably affordable; immune to burn-in.
Con for Gamers: Phosphor burn-in; limited brands.
So, does it burn in or not? (The answer is no) Therefore... the only con you could come up with is that there are limited brands (also not really true)? In other words, this display type is excellent for gaming.
Yet it gets a single paragraph hidden away at the end of the rear projection section where they explicitly avoid saying whether it's good or bad. DLP, on the other hand, gets one and a half sections devoted to it (The DLP section and the rear projection section. uhh...)
Meanwhile, a shitty 800x600 projector with a bottom-of-the-barrel 1200 lumens seems to be their choice for gaming, their primary reasoning apparently being "it was designed by Italians!"
Features: Crafted by Italian design firm Pininfarina, 1200 lumens; digital keystone correction; HDTV support; 800x600 native resolution.
GameSpy continues to live up to their traditional standard of inspid and useless ad-copy disguised as articles. It's odd how people still find them relevant enough to be submitted to and accepted by Slashdot, though.
Do you really believe that George Carlin supports public castration for anyone who waits at an intersection and waves him through? It's comic hyperbole and it's supposed to be funny. Lighten up.
If you don't enjoy it, fine. But that doesn't make the comics bad people.
I've never met an unfriendly Canandian You don't know me very well then;)
I think you guys must send all the crabby people there.
Yeah, I think we do, although I couldn't tell you why. They're bastards even to Canadians, though. A friend from the Netherlands came here on a two-week visa that was almost expired when we took him to the states to show him around. Sure, fine, the American border guards don't mind. On his way back in though, they ask the usual, "What's your nationality?" question, "Canadian", "Dutch" is the response. "Can I see your identification please?" Fine, my friend hands over his Dutch passport. "Why did you tell me you're Canadian?" "I didn't, I said I was Dutch." "No you didn't, I heard you say you were Canadian." The guy was convinced we were lying. Long story short, my friend is denied entry to the country, has to stay in the US without his luggage or money, take a bus to the nearest international airport, sell his laptop to be able to afford a plane ticket home.
I still have his luggage here, I've been too lazy to send it back, and he's never asked for it.
I agree with all the rest of your post, but what the hell? Did you misread this line or something?
Yeah. They're selling very well. Absolutely. Because you all want them.
---
Please don't use "you all" as if you really are born around here.
What? I don't know what nationality you are, or where you mean by "around here". I can see an American perhaps taking credit for "y'all" (although personally I consider it an embarassment). But "you all" is just two arbitrary English words next to each other in a sentence. How can anyone claim it? Is it no longer allowed to say "Wow, you all came to my birthday party! Thanks!"
I'm Canadian, and while we are proud of our "Eh?" we don't claim exclusive rights to it.
Also, I don't think that the cost of ownerhip of humanoid robots has been considered
Until you have robots that fix robots and robots that build robots. Then the economy shifts into an energy-based economy rather than a work- or product-based economy. And the only thing limiting energy infrastructure is those good old earthly resources like oil, gas, uranium, hydrogen, and whatever stuff they'll be using at that time to harvest solar energy. The robotic revolution is on its way. It started happening quite a long time ago, with robotic assembly lines. It still has a long way to go, but when it fully gets there, the shit is really going to hit the fan. When robots eliminate the need for humans to work, what comes next? Plenty of good sci-fi has been written about it. Star Trek (sorta) and the Matrix come to mind.
Re:So, here's the question I find interesting.
on
1984 Comes To Boston
·
· Score: 1
And I take issue with your assumption that cops and federal officials get away with crimes at an unusually high rate.
That's fair, but I believe they do -- and if not, they have the potential and ability to do so. Almost any major city you can name has had problems with police corruption at some point. Some more than others (LA comes to mind). It's not a new thing, and it's not going to go away anytime soon either. In fact, as they get more power given to them, very often with few to no checks or balances (PATRIOT act), I would find it hard to believe that the pace of corruption is doing anything other than accelerating. Power corrupts. Yes, we have to place trust in them to some extent, but the less we have to trust them and the more accountable for their actions they become, the better.
That doesn't mean that the entire group is above the system and unaccountable, it means our justice system is not perfect
You're right. I shouldn't have said unaccountable. They are *less* accountable, though. If they were unaccountable, we would never see busts like the corrupt cops scandal in Toronto just recently. But there is less openness and accountability for the police than there is for Joe Citizen. The police can view anything anyone does on the streets in downtown Boston, even if it's just walking across a street. Fine. But this viewing will take place behind closed doors. Recording of any suspicious activity, behind closed doors. Facial recognition, behind closed doors. Background checks, behind closed doors. There is only one corruption-proof answer I'm aware of to the problem of "Who watches the watchers?" and that is: everyone. Admittedly there are problems with that too, and there are some reasons this has to be done the way it's currently done, but that doesn't make it good, and doesn't mean we shouldn't push for alternatives.
Re:So, here's the question I find interesting.
on
1984 Comes To Boston
·
· Score: 1
By that logic, since Laci Peterson made the national news, murder cases must be rare in this country.
That's exactly what he's trying to say. That there may be hundreds of incidents of police brutality that never get noticed, despite the possibility of there being police videotapes from the police car's camera, etc.
So, will these cameras help with that? Nope. All the authorities will remain above the system, and fully unaccountable: The police and government and three letter agencies and all those other groups that the paranoid nutjobs (who I have the utmost respect for) love to hate.
a nation full of hatred towards Americans and the ultimate goal of killing Americans
There is no such fucking thing. That's baseless hyperbole used to sucker you twits into supporting the war. Everyone does things for a reason. Everyone wants something. Even terrorists have demands. It's very nice to be able to simplify politics down to a children's book level. But it isn't simple. The Iraqi people are people. They have needs and desires. They would like this to happen or that to happen. They would like jobs, and goodies, and reasonable prices, and many of the same things you like. Even Saddam Hussein is a person. You can have whatever opinion you want of him, maybe he's insane, maybe he's been an asshole, maybe he's been murderous tyrant, but I will not grant you that he's a two dimensional caricature of anti-American hatred, because that's just propaganda.
I'm curious, do you apply the same principles in your day to day life when you run into a disagreement? If a restaurant puts the wrong kind of dressing on your salad, do you just not even bother "YAPPING" at the server because he probably won't give you the free salad you deserve? Do you just walk out of the restaurant with your salad and without paying? Is that how you solve disagreements? Selfish doesn't even begin to cover it. Sometimes you have to make some concessions, even if it's really, really distasteful and you don't want to. I can't remember the last time the USA gave favourable concessions to anyone in a negotiating process. You may have the most powerful military in the world, but that doesn't make it right to demand that every disagreement in the world be solved your way.
Oh, and congratulations on your "lasting peace" in both Afghanistan and Iraq, I hear that's working out really well.
And don't forget the people running nitrogen-cooled 5GHz Pentium 4 Xeons with a Radeon 9700 Pro overclocked 3x, complaining because the game is simply unplayable as they only get 150fps when 100 bots are crammed into one room destroying each other.
Seriously, this is nothing new. There will always be people who bitch that the game is "unplayable" regardless of what hardware they have. They will pounce in swarms upon the forums and let it be known that the company are a bunch of assholes and they want their money back from those scam artists. And of course they tried turning on setting XYZ, but for a game they spent SO MUCH MONEY on, they shouldn't have to, damnit!
Anyway, how do you know how Doom 3 is going to run on given hardware? Let me guess, you're using the leaked tech demo. 'nuff said. There have already been so many holes punched through the theory that the tech demo will be indicative of performance that I don't feel the need to repeat them here. Besides, speeds that are completely unacceptable to you may be perfectly fine to many people, whiners not withstanding.
Also being a private pilot, I suggest you stick to what you know.
There are hundreds of thousands of reasons an instrument could give a wrong reading. That's why there are multi-purpose instruments and backup panels. You check one instrument against another, against how the plane feels, and if possible against what you see out the window. If they don't make sense, there are procedures you follow to figure out which to trust. All the instruments use different methods of operation to basically guarantee that you have at least some working instrumentation no matter what fails. Some run on the engine vacuum pump, some run on an electric vacuum pump, some use gyros, some are mechanical, some use atmospheric pressure, some are electric, some are radio. This is all covered in basic ground school training and every half-trained pilot could tell you that.
Electric and radio instrumentation is still, and likely always will be, the least trusted instrumentation on an aircraft not because pilots are luddites (we are, in some ways) but because it's the newest and most complex, and so much can go wrong with it. With something running on pitot static pressure, short of the linkages to the control seizing up, it's absolutely bulletproof. If you have come to trust GPS on cross-country flights to the point that you don't think it can be wrong and don't bother to set in a VOR or use your compass and map, then you're a bad pilot and shouldn't be flying. Those things need to be kept up to date and current so that if your GPS system fails, you can shrug it off and look down at your map and everything is just fine.
Oh, and finally: He's not breaking any regulations. Like most other things, the FAA says that the decision of whether to allow portable electronic devices to be turned on is left up to the operator of the aircraft. It even says this in his article. Cringley is clearly the operator of his own aircraft. He can choose to do whatever he wants. The FAA has some extremely important rules that all pilots MUST follow. But they have nothing to do with electronic devices.
ICQ is made by a stupid company that has decided to purposely misuse the terms 'beta' and 'alpha', because they thought it would be hip marketing.
They have publicly admitted that their 'alpha' versions are what are commonly referred to as 'beta' software, and their 'beta' software is released, official versions.
Now, Google News I can make no apologies for. I've wondered why it's still in beta. I can't think of any reasons. I can think of plenty of features I'd like for them to add, but the basic functionality seems rock solid. Dunno why they list it as beta.
What's wrong with you people?
on
Bobby Fischer Found
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
There are altogether too many people on this story commenting what basically amounts to, "Oh, he's a crackpot anyway, who cares?"
IT IS NOT OKAY TO ARREST PEOPLE FOR BEING CRACKPOTS.
You can be locked up because you're insane, but only if you're a danger to yourself or others. I consider this a valid criteria. Bobby Fischer, despite doing things that you might consider insane, is in no way a danger to himself or to others, unless you consider it dangerous to hear things you don't like. And if you do, too bad, it doesn't make it true.
Leave this man alone. He hasn't done anything substantially criminal. It's not like he was shipping food in violation of sanctions to the poor Yugoslavians or anything.
Re:why is this public knowledge?
on
X43-A on to Mach 10
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That was during the cold war, when the US had an enemy who actually had the capability to destroy them. Now they're at war with terrorism instead, and the the combat strategy seems to run more along the lines of "shock and awe".
Some wedding photographers will offer you non-exclusive copyright on the pictures, which means while you can do whatetver you like to the photos, so can the photographer. You both have the right to make copies, sell them to magazines, get reprints, whatever you want to do.
And other photographers will happily sell you the copyright, no questions asked.
Photographers are as diverse in their copyright views as software developers, some want to retain absolute control over what they consider to be their artwork, others are just taking pictures because they enjoy it and money is just a bonus.
A new wrench has been thrown into the works though under the 'work-for-hire' clause of copyright law. This has bitten musicians and photographers alike. What it says is, that if the deal meets certain qualifications, then under copyright law, the person paying for the service is the owner of the created work. I'm not sure if wedding photos could qualify for this clause (I'm not USian) but it's worth looking into. I don't believe it's the sort of thing that can be waived away by a contract, either.
Perhaps there's a reason for that too. Does it happen because programmers are actually all lazy slobs? Maybe. Or maybe it's just that your mind and body know that 12 hours of programming a day isn't healthy for you, and won't do it unless forced to.
Some pretty substantial information can be gleaned from headers. You may not care that people know you're sending data to your credit card company. But some people do care. Any theoretical thief now knows what bank you use, for one thing. Someone with some amount of authority or social-engineering skills could go to the bank directly and corellate their logs with your traffic and find out exactly who you are. A physical thief could notice that you're visiting porn sites and decide that since you're probably not paying much attention to outside, now would be a good time to steal your car. These are contrived examples I admit, but given time, privacy is eroded greatly by such small loopholes.
To compare it to its non-internet equivalent, it is the difference between allowing everyone to see your phone records (anyone can look at where your packets are headed), and requiring a subpoena to disclose them to a court of law (subpoena the ISP or destination sites' logs). In neither case can they see or hear exactly what you said to the other end, but obviously the latter is much preferable for anyone interested in privacy.
Sound is a manifestation of vibration, or more specificially shockwaves through an aurally conductive medium. It is impossible, therefore, that sound would transmit through a vacuum, since there is no such medium in a vacuum. This is not a theory, by the way.
As it said in the article, the sound was generated by using data from an instrument onboard that measured the impacts of the particles. It's an artificial sound, created by NASA engineers to simulate what you might hear if you were inside the probe (and it were filled with air).
And yes, before you ask, if you were inside a spacecraft and it was filled with air, and you were struck by something from the outside, you would hear it. If the hull of the ship vibrates, that vibration sends a soundwave through the air inside the ship. Works just like a drum.
Oh, weird. It's made by Monster Cable? I *never* would've thought they would stoop to selling overpriced snake-oil. I thought they were a stand-up firm who just wanted to give you optical cables with gold plated connectors.
I can't really garner much respect for those sorts of people. It just doesn't seem that interesting to me. In the same way, someone who finds a place where they can't be hit by anything and then proceeds to kill a million enemies, I don't consider them a skilled player either, really.
People who complete the game as intended, but do it in the quickest time, I might find that a little more impressive, but I guess it's hard to judge what's an "exploit" and what isn't.
I'll note that there are already standard DC plugs. You see them on the opposite end of every wall-wart transformer. Officially I believe the various sizes indicate various voltages, but it's unclear whether the industry actually adheres to that.
Of course, there's no such thing as patch cords to connect from a power source to a device, because there are no power sources. That's a fairly trivial problem, though. More of a problem is the simple fact that you do have multiple voltages to deal with. Unlike everything in the AC world which expects 110VAC (or 240VAC in specific cases) the DC world uses everything from 48V, 12V, 9V, 6V, 5V, 3.5V, and of course the completely arbitrary voltages needed by laptops (19.6V? huh?)
It's not entirely difficult to step down from one voltage to another if the house is wired for 48V DC, but it is wasteful. I am not an electrician, I don't know how to solve this problem, but I don't suspect it would be cost-effective to have to run 15 different voltage cables out to each DC outlet so certainly something has to be done.
If we could get the consumer electronics industry to standardize on, say, 12V and 5V (and if they absolutely need something else, they can deal with it in the device) then we'd be talking. Unfortunately, that process will probably be like pulling teeth. On an alligator.
I have often wished that houses had a single AC-to-DC transformer along with DC power sockets to alleviate the need for all the wall-warts laying around. So I do sympathize with your goal.
However, even if 80% of the devices in your house take AC power it doesn't mean they use 80% of the power. Far, far from it.
Like you said, anything with a motor. That means: Refridgerator, air conditioner, ceiling fans, exhaust fans, furnace, vacuum, washer, dryer, dishwaser, pool/sump/cistern pumps, etc. Add incandescent lighting and electric stoves into the mix, and I bet you can account for 80% of household electricity usage right there.
And, as someone else said, AC-to-DC is a lot easier than DC-to-AC.
Slashdot Mirror
So, does it burn in or not? (The answer is no) Therefore... the only con you could come up with is that there are limited brands (also not really true)? In other words, this display type is excellent for gaming.
Yet it gets a single paragraph hidden away at the end of the rear projection section where they explicitly avoid saying whether it's good or bad. DLP, on the other hand, gets one and a half sections devoted to it (The DLP section and the rear projection section. uhh...)
Meanwhile, a shitty 800x600 projector with a bottom-of-the-barrel 1200 lumens seems to be their choice for gaming, their primary reasoning apparently being "it was designed by Italians!"
GameSpy continues to live up to their traditional standard of inspid and useless ad-copy disguised as articles. It's odd how people still find them relevant enough to be submitted to and accepted by Slashdot, though.
This really shouldn't have to be said, but:
COMICS are not SERIOUS.
Do you really believe that George Carlin supports public castration for anyone who waits at an intersection and waves him through? It's comic hyperbole and it's supposed to be funny. Lighten up.
If you don't enjoy it, fine. But that doesn't make the comics bad people.
Although, I guess in hindsight, that's really them being bastards to a non-Canadian.
;)
But I consider it a personal slight against myself.
I've never met an unfriendly Canandian ;)
You don't know me very well then
I think you guys must send all the crabby people there.
Yeah, I think we do, although I couldn't tell you why. They're bastards even to Canadians, though. A friend from the Netherlands came here on a two-week visa that was almost expired when we took him to the states to show him around. Sure, fine, the American border guards don't mind. On his way back in though, they ask the usual, "What's your nationality?" question, "Canadian", "Dutch" is the response. "Can I see your identification please?" Fine, my friend hands over his Dutch passport. "Why did you tell me you're Canadian?" "I didn't, I said I was Dutch." "No you didn't, I heard you say you were Canadian." The guy was convinced we were lying. Long story short, my friend is denied entry to the country, has to stay in the US without his luggage or money, take a bus to the nearest international airport, sell his laptop to be able to afford a plane ticket home.
I still have his luggage here, I've been too lazy to send it back, and he's never asked for it.
I agree with all the rest of your post, but what the hell? Did you misread this line or something?
Yeah. They're selling very well. Absolutely. Because you all want them.
---
Please don't use "you all" as if you really are born around here.
What? I don't know what nationality you are, or where you mean by "around here". I can see an American perhaps taking credit for "y'all" (although personally I consider it an embarassment). But "you all" is just two arbitrary English words next to each other in a sentence. How can anyone claim it? Is it no longer allowed to say "Wow, you all came to my birthday party! Thanks!"
I'm Canadian, and while we are proud of our "Eh?" we don't claim exclusive rights to it.
Also, I don't think that the cost of ownerhip of humanoid robots has been considered
Until you have robots that fix robots and robots that build robots. Then the economy shifts into an energy-based economy rather than a work- or product-based economy. And the only thing limiting energy infrastructure is those good old earthly resources like oil, gas, uranium, hydrogen, and whatever stuff they'll be using at that time to harvest solar energy. The robotic revolution is on its way. It started happening quite a long time ago, with robotic assembly lines. It still has a long way to go, but when it fully gets there, the shit is really going to hit the fan. When robots eliminate the need for humans to work, what comes next? Plenty of good sci-fi has been written about it. Star Trek (sorta) and the Matrix come to mind.
And I take issue with your assumption that cops and federal officials get away with crimes at an unusually high rate.
That's fair, but I believe they do -- and if not, they have the potential and ability to do so. Almost any major city you can name has had problems with police corruption at some point. Some more than others (LA comes to mind). It's not a new thing, and it's not going to go away anytime soon either. In fact, as they get more power given to them, very often with few to no checks or balances (PATRIOT act), I would find it hard to believe that the pace of corruption is doing anything other than accelerating. Power corrupts. Yes, we have to place trust in them to some extent, but the less we have to trust them and the more accountable for their actions they become, the better.
That doesn't mean that the entire group is above the system and unaccountable, it means our justice system is not perfect
You're right. I shouldn't have said unaccountable. They are *less* accountable, though. If they were unaccountable, we would never see busts like the corrupt cops scandal in Toronto just recently. But there is less openness and accountability for the police than there is for Joe Citizen. The police can view anything anyone does on the streets in downtown Boston, even if it's just walking across a street. Fine. But this viewing will take place behind closed doors. Recording of any suspicious activity, behind closed doors. Facial recognition, behind closed doors. Background checks, behind closed doors. There is only one corruption-proof answer I'm aware of to the problem of "Who watches the watchers?" and that is: everyone. Admittedly there are problems with that too, and there are some reasons this has to be done the way it's currently done, but that doesn't make it good, and doesn't mean we shouldn't push for alternatives.
By that logic, since Laci Peterson made the national news, murder cases must be rare in this country.
That's exactly what he's trying to say. That there may be hundreds of incidents of police brutality that never get noticed, despite the possibility of there being police videotapes from the police car's camera, etc.
So, will these cameras help with that? Nope. All the authorities will remain above the system, and fully unaccountable: The police and government and three letter agencies and all those other groups that the paranoid nutjobs (who I have the utmost respect for) love to hate.
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
a nation full of hatred towards Americans and the ultimate goal of killing Americans
There is no such fucking thing. That's baseless hyperbole used to sucker you twits into supporting the war. Everyone does things for a reason. Everyone wants something. Even terrorists have demands. It's very nice to be able to simplify politics down to a children's book level. But it isn't simple. The Iraqi people are people. They have needs and desires. They would like this to happen or that to happen. They would like jobs, and goodies, and reasonable prices, and many of the same things you like. Even Saddam Hussein is a person. You can have whatever opinion you want of him, maybe he's insane, maybe he's been an asshole, maybe he's been murderous tyrant, but I will not grant you that he's a two dimensional caricature of anti-American hatred, because that's just propaganda.
I'm curious, do you apply the same principles in your day to day life when you run into a disagreement? If a restaurant puts the wrong kind of dressing on your salad, do you just not even bother "YAPPING" at the server because he probably won't give you the free salad you deserve? Do you just walk out of the restaurant with your salad and without paying? Is that how you solve disagreements? Selfish doesn't even begin to cover it. Sometimes you have to make some concessions, even if it's really, really distasteful and you don't want to. I can't remember the last time the USA gave favourable concessions to anyone in a negotiating process. You may have the most powerful military in the world, but that doesn't make it right to demand that every disagreement in the world be solved your way.
Oh, and congratulations on your "lasting peace" in both Afghanistan and Iraq, I hear that's working out really well.
And don't forget the people running nitrogen-cooled 5GHz Pentium 4 Xeons with a Radeon 9700 Pro overclocked 3x, complaining because the game is simply unplayable as they only get 150fps when 100 bots are crammed into one room destroying each other.
Seriously, this is nothing new. There will always be people who bitch that the game is "unplayable" regardless of what hardware they have. They will pounce in swarms upon the forums and let it be known that the company are a bunch of assholes and they want their money back from those scam artists. And of course they tried turning on setting XYZ, but for a game they spent SO MUCH MONEY on, they shouldn't have to, damnit!
Anyway, how do you know how Doom 3 is going to run on given hardware? Let me guess, you're using the leaked tech demo. 'nuff said. There have already been so many holes punched through the theory that the tech demo will be indicative of performance that I don't feel the need to repeat them here. Besides, speeds that are completely unacceptable to you may be perfectly fine to many people, whiners not withstanding.
You must be new here, pudge.
:)
Besides, CowboyNeal rocks.
Also being a private pilot, I suggest you stick to what you know.
There are hundreds of thousands of reasons an instrument could give a wrong reading. That's why there are multi-purpose instruments and backup panels. You check one instrument against another, against how the plane feels, and if possible against what you see out the window. If they don't make sense, there are procedures you follow to figure out which to trust. All the instruments use different methods of operation to basically guarantee that you have at least some working instrumentation no matter what fails. Some run on the engine vacuum pump, some run on an electric vacuum pump, some use gyros, some are mechanical, some use atmospheric pressure, some are electric, some are radio. This is all covered in basic ground school training and every half-trained pilot could tell you that.
Electric and radio instrumentation is still, and likely always will be, the least trusted instrumentation on an aircraft not because pilots are luddites (we are, in some ways) but because it's the newest and most complex, and so much can go wrong with it. With something running on pitot static pressure, short of the linkages to the control seizing up, it's absolutely bulletproof. If you have come to trust GPS on cross-country flights to the point that you don't think it can be wrong and don't bother to set in a VOR or use your compass and map, then you're a bad pilot and shouldn't be flying. Those things need to be kept up to date and current so that if your GPS system fails, you can shrug it off and look down at your map and everything is just fine.
Oh, and finally: He's not breaking any regulations. Like most other things, the FAA says that the decision of whether to allow portable electronic devices to be turned on is left up to the operator of the aircraft. It even says this in his article. Cringley is clearly the operator of his own aircraft. He can choose to do whatever he wants. The FAA has some extremely important rules that all pilots MUST follow. But they have nothing to do with electronic devices.
ICQ is made by a stupid company that has decided to purposely misuse the terms 'beta' and 'alpha', because they thought it would be hip marketing.
They have publicly admitted that their 'alpha' versions are what are commonly referred to as 'beta' software, and their 'beta' software is released, official versions.
Now, Google News I can make no apologies for. I've wondered why it's still in beta. I can't think of any reasons. I can think of plenty of features I'd like for them to add, but the basic functionality seems rock solid. Dunno why they list it as beta.
There are altogether too many people on this story commenting what basically amounts to, "Oh, he's a crackpot anyway, who cares?"
IT IS NOT OKAY TO ARREST PEOPLE FOR BEING CRACKPOTS.
You can be locked up because you're insane, but only if you're a danger to yourself or others. I consider this a valid criteria. Bobby Fischer, despite doing things that you might consider insane, is in no way a danger to himself or to others, unless you consider it dangerous to hear things you don't like. And if you do, too bad, it doesn't make it true.
Leave this man alone. He hasn't done anything substantially criminal. It's not like he was shipping food in violation of sanctions to the poor Yugoslavians or anything.
That was during the cold war, when the US had an enemy who actually had the capability to destroy them. Now they're at war with terrorism instead, and the the combat strategy seems to run more along the lines of "shock and awe".
Some wedding photographers will offer you non-exclusive copyright on the pictures, which means while you can do whatetver you like to the photos, so can the photographer. You both have the right to make copies, sell them to magazines, get reprints, whatever you want to do.
And other photographers will happily sell you the copyright, no questions asked.
Photographers are as diverse in their copyright views as software developers, some want to retain absolute control over what they consider to be their artwork, others are just taking pictures because they enjoy it and money is just a bonus.
A new wrench has been thrown into the works though under the 'work-for-hire' clause of copyright law. This has bitten musicians and photographers alike. What it says is, that if the deal meets certain qualifications, then under copyright law, the person paying for the service is the owner of the created work. I'm not sure if wedding photos could qualify for this clause (I'm not USian) but it's worth looking into. I don't believe it's the sort of thing that can be waived away by a contract, either.
Perhaps there's a reason for that too. Does it happen because programmers are actually all lazy slobs? Maybe. Or maybe it's just that your mind and body know that 12 hours of programming a day isn't healthy for you, and won't do it unless forced to.
Some pretty substantial information can be gleaned from headers. You may not care that people know you're sending data to your credit card company. But some people do care. Any theoretical thief now knows what bank you use, for one thing. Someone with some amount of authority or social-engineering skills could go to the bank directly and corellate their logs with your traffic and find out exactly who you are. A physical thief could notice that you're visiting porn sites and decide that since you're probably not paying much attention to outside, now would be a good time to steal your car. These are contrived examples I admit, but given time, privacy is eroded greatly by such small loopholes.
To compare it to its non-internet equivalent, it is the difference between allowing everyone to see your phone records (anyone can look at where your packets are headed), and requiring a subpoena to disclose them to a court of law (subpoena the ISP or destination sites' logs). In neither case can they see or hear exactly what you said to the other end, but obviously the latter is much preferable for anyone interested in privacy.
Sound is a manifestation of vibration, or more specificially shockwaves through an aurally conductive medium. It is impossible, therefore, that sound would transmit through a vacuum, since there is no such medium in a vacuum. This is not a theory, by the way.
As it said in the article, the sound was generated by using data from an instrument onboard that measured the impacts of the particles. It's an artificial sound, created by NASA engineers to simulate what you might hear if you were inside the probe (and it were filled with air).
And yes, before you ask, if you were inside a spacecraft and it was filled with air, and you were struck by something from the outside, you would hear it. If the hull of the ship vibrates, that vibration sends a soundwave through the air inside the ship. Works just like a drum.
Oh, weird. It's made by Monster Cable? I *never* would've thought they would stoop to selling overpriced snake-oil. I thought they were a stand-up firm who just wanted to give you optical cables with gold plated connectors.
Yeah, I hear the windmills in Denmark chop up world-record numbers of birds.
For the sarcasm impaired: that's the most ridiculous statement I've ever heard.
I can't really garner much respect for those sorts of people. It just doesn't seem that interesting to me. In the same way, someone who finds a place where they can't be hit by anything and then proceeds to kill a million enemies, I don't consider them a skilled player either, really.
People who complete the game as intended, but do it in the quickest time, I might find that a little more impressive, but I guess it's hard to judge what's an "exploit" and what isn't.
I'll note that there are already standard DC plugs. You see them on the opposite end of every wall-wart transformer. Officially I believe the various sizes indicate various voltages, but it's unclear whether the industry actually adheres to that.
Of course, there's no such thing as patch cords to connect from a power source to a device, because there are no power sources. That's a fairly trivial problem, though. More of a problem is the simple fact that you do have multiple voltages to deal with. Unlike everything in the AC world which expects 110VAC (or 240VAC in specific cases) the DC world uses everything from 48V, 12V, 9V, 6V, 5V, 3.5V, and of course the completely arbitrary voltages needed by laptops (19.6V? huh?)
It's not entirely difficult to step down from one voltage to another if the house is wired for 48V DC, but it is wasteful. I am not an electrician, I don't know how to solve this problem, but I don't suspect it would be cost-effective to have to run 15 different voltage cables out to each DC outlet so certainly something has to be done.
If we could get the consumer electronics industry to standardize on, say, 12V and 5V (and if they absolutely need something else, they can deal with it in the device) then we'd be talking. Unfortunately, that process will probably be like pulling teeth. On an alligator.
I have often wished that houses had a single AC-to-DC transformer along with DC power sockets to alleviate the need for all the wall-warts laying around. So I do sympathize with your goal.
However, even if 80% of the devices in your house take AC power it doesn't mean they use 80% of the power. Far, far from it.
Like you said, anything with a motor. That means: Refridgerator, air conditioner, ceiling fans, exhaust fans, furnace, vacuum, washer, dryer, dishwaser, pool/sump/cistern pumps, etc. Add incandescent lighting and electric stoves into the mix, and I bet you can account for 80% of household electricity usage right there.
And, as someone else said, AC-to-DC is a lot easier than DC-to-AC.
So basically, you're a big wuss with no sense of humour and you're interested in passing that trait on to your kids? Bravo.
Kids aren't the stupid impressionable lumps of play-doh everyone makes them out to be. I should know, I was one.