actually _talking_, to say "say what are you doing tonight?"
Been there, done that. Getting a job certainly kills most of the enjoyable college passtimes like MUDding though. Whether this is a good thing or not I'm still undecided...:)
You're missing the whole point of the ion drive. Yes, it's slow and not really very effective at this point, but that's not so much a problem with the drive itself as it is with their fuel source: crappy, marginally effective solar panels.
The ion drive, as it stands, is the only way we have of converting energy directly into propulsion. It's our first step to being self-sufficient beyond Earth. Sci-fi writers love to envision massive ships powered by tremendous reactors, and even you talk about anti-matter reactors. But short of some future advance like warp drive, an ion drive is the only way we have of converting that electricty into movement.
It may seem useless as long as we're still puttering around our Solar system in one-shot, one-mission probes. But give it a few decades, and the flexibility and reusability of ion drives will blow everything else away.
First of all: False and misleading information? Unless you have some magical insider information on what exactly happened, who are you to claim that it's false and misleading? To dismiss it as false without having any facts is no better than accepting it as true without having any of the facts. Different sides of the same coin.
And second, it looks like a pretty tongue-in-cheek comment. You said it yourself:
Those sorts of things happen on their own more than enough as is; encouraging it is just unecessary.
Do you really believe that the editors don't also know this? Contrary to popular opinion they do actually read the site, sometimes. It's pretty clear to me that it's a jab at all the 'perfectly good conspiracy theories' that abound whenever a Microsoft story rolls around. Would you really call them 'perfectly good conspiracy theories' if you weren't against them? Sounds like a pretty sarcastic phrase to me.
But hey, don't let little old me get in the way of Slashdot's readers bashing Slashdot...
Just because someone is not imporant enough to warrant surveillance, does that mean that person should ignore the fact that someone, somewhere may be spied upon by the system? Just because they're not doing it specifically to me, does that mean we should not bother to cry out when they do it to someone other than ourselves?
I am not a conspiracy theorist, and I don't really believe this particular system will really be used to track people in any meaningful manner. However, I disagree completely with your attempt to discount out-of-hand the fact that it could be used that way. It is always valid to question the government's actions, and it is required to maintain a properly working democracy.
Widespread surveillance is a very dangerous technology, because once it is broadly enough deployed it gets to a point where all it takes is one person willing and able to abuse the system and suddenly it's pretty much unstoppable. See George Orwell's 1984 for a demonstration of this technique. Being such a dangerous technology, I think it's completely fair that we question it at every step.
And I just found "so nanaki's name is nanaki" really funny.
I did that too on my second time around, but I didn't even think about what would happen later in the game when they discover his real name -- I just thought that Nanaki was a much cooler name than Red XIII. When I unexpectedly saw that line however, I just burst out laughing. Great stuff.
Another fun thing to do is name all of your characters in FF2(j) to violent exclamations like "DEATH", "SMASH", etc. First thing that happens in the game is that the four of you get seperated, so the main character runs around shouting, "DEATH!!!!" "SMASH!!!!". It's quite amusing, at least if you're twisted like I am.
But he probably got snookered into signing a contract that prohibits him from doing anything like that until the record company finally gets tired of shafting him.
Prevents him from ever doing that, you mean. It's extremely rare that a musician gets any rights to their music back, ever. Usually the copyright is reassigned to the label, and that's the end of the story. The label owns the music, and all recordings of your performance of it. Basically the only thing you *can* do if you grow disillusioned with your contract is tour and sell merchandise (not CDs). Most of the time there isn't even any benefit to creating new songs, as long as the contract is in effect those don't belong to you either.
It's a brutal business. I don't know why anyone would sign with the RIAA if they really thought it completely and realistically through, but I'm sure they make it seem like a fantastic opportunity to the struggling musician, and apparently that works.
Gimme gimme gimme. I am a Square fanboi damnit, and FF7 was damn-near perfect as far as their line of games goes. (And contrary to GameSpy's FF7 bashing, no, it was not my first FF game. My username should be sufficient evidence of that.)
I loved that game. The characters, the airship, the story, the minigames (yay snowboarding!) I pretty much liked everything except the silly Materia system, but then I've never been a fan of "equip-to-learn!" systems. It irritated me in FF6 too.
FF4 is how learning magic should work. Mages learn magic. Fighters swing swords. That's how it should be.
Anyway, getting back on topic: I worry that this is simply a concept that Square had which never took off, so I'm not going to get my hopes up. If it's not, though, it would be a sweet sweet thing. Maybe they'll bring Aeris back to life. *grin*
This is simply more evidence that the RIAA has no problems with kicking the shit out of the artists for the RIAA's own benefit.
If you can convince them that you're sexy/charismatic enough to make them millions then poof, they pull out their insta-superstar marketing machine and you're a "made man" (well, in the same sort of way that mafia henchmen are "made men", you still owe eternal servitude) and you get to satiate us all with crappy pop music.
Otherwise, you are perhaps useful for career-destroying experiments like this one so they don't have to worry about destroying the career of someone they care about (read: have invested significant sums of money into).
I'm just surprised that it's taking so long for viable alternatives to the RIAA to really take flight. There are a few, but they're still picking up speed. It's really hard to get out of the post-RIAA catch-22 situation of no money, so no artists, so no customers, so no money, repeat.
This has unfortunately not yet happened, since too many programmers stubbornly stick to C and its likes.
No, this is because computers are not fast enough to justify a leap to slower, more robust languages yet. We're just barely breaching the barrier of "My current computer is so fast that there is no need for a faster processor".
It's very easy, however to add enough sluggishness into a system to drag it down below that magic threshhold, and suddenly it is noticable that it's not so fast enough anymore. People won't want to play your game/use your program because it's slower than your competitor's. Basically, you can't pull off a massive slowdown without the average computer speed being significantly faster than it needs to be, so that the speed difference when you slow it down with all the memory management and run-time error checking isn't noticable.
It is possible to get to that speed, and this whole 'spintronics' concept may be able to pull it off if it's not vaporware. But until then, all we can do is incrementally move towards better managed languages. Which is what we're doing with Java, C#, Python, etc. We'll get there, it just isn't nearly as immediate a thing as everyone would like it to be. (including the programmers, I might add. No one really enjoys smashing their head against a virtual function pointer table when they're trying to meet a deadline)
Speaking of game sounds being used in TV, I've always been amazed at the number of times you can hear DOOM's hydraulic "Door opening" sound if you know what to listen for. It's very popular.
I kept expecting to see Imps coming at me after any intro screen on CityTV (Toronto, ON) but I think they've stopped using it since one of their recent makeovers (I don't watch TV much anymore)
I learned it spelled as Cesium, and everything I've ever seen spells it that way. Is this just some over-spelling, or is it something like the Aluminum vs. Aluminium spelling/pronunciation conflict?
A lot of people seem to be under the impression that everyone's opinion is just as valid as anyone elses. This is patently false. Some people are smart, some people are dumb. Some people are well versed in a subject, some people are dilettantes.
When determining the quality of any work of art, the opinion of an expert is worth more than the opinions of a million Joe Sixpacks.
That's an embarassingly silly remark.
There is no such thing as an objective measurement of the quality of a work of art, or a game, or a movie. It is entirely subjective, any "expert" who claims to have the "one true opinion even if the vast majority disagrees has my contempt.
The universal "quality" of art is an entirely artifical concept and a very stupid concept in my opinion. It's a myth perpetuated by people like you. "Well, these experts say that three colored lines on a canvas is a revolutionary work of art, I guess the rest of us just don't see it." Bullshit, it's three colored lines on a canvas. It's stupid. A 3-year-old could've drawn it with finger paints. Overrated? Yup, that's exactly what it is.
"Experts" of the variety you describe are elitist and out-of-touch with the real world, which is exactly what people are accusing GameSpy's reviewers of being. And in my opinion, they're right.
Incorrect. Domain change propagation still takes up to 48 hours, even when it's Verisign doing it.
This change is on the root servers. They serve the.com/net/org subdomains, period. Whether you're in Canada or Antarctica, it doesn't matter. Some ISPs will have the new wildcard record, some will not. Give it a day or two, and everyone's caches will have expired and will have the latest info. Then you'll get to see it.
I'm not sure why debian doesn't use postfix by default. Is the license too free for them?
In all my experience, qmail is the most featureful (but tremendously frustrating, and the license sucks), postfix is almost as featureful, very simple to configure, use, and maintain, and has a great license. exim is last place. Well, unless you consider sendmail which I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.
I have trouble believing that people can actually watch some contentless logos and pictures and find that it somehow entices them to buy a product in any way shape or form. I know it's supposedly true, but I simply can't fathom it.
It does admittedly make people realize that this product exists, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to buy it on anything other than it's merits. I don't see how having a sexy woman or a hilarious concept in your ad will help. But then I guess that's why I'm not in marketing.
Personally, I've given up on the "push" style of advertising, and gone with "pull" instead, especially for things like video games. Check out companies I like to see if they've released anything new, check review sites (admittedly a form of advertising, but with a lot more content and a lot less biased, although that's not neccesarily saying much.) It's kind of the Internet way of doing things; Go out and do it yourself, rather than waiting for someone to shove things in your face until you see one you like, which may not be for a very long time.
I dunno. I just don't see how video game commercials, of all things, have any effect on a largely intellegent and information-enabled group of gamers. There are just so many better ways to do it.
you're assuming that encrypted hard disks exist that don't have master keys in escrow with large governmental agencies.
And don't you think that if the hard disk manufacturers have gotten onboard the conspiracy bandwagon, the banks were already there to greet them?
Really. If the Three-Letter-Agencies are anywhere near as malicious as the conspiracy people suggest them to be, they have a little thing called priorities, and already have things very well in hand.
Not that I really believe any of that crap. I've seen far too much governmental stupidity, sloth, disorganization and bureaucracy to believe that any government agency could ever-- much less for decades-long span --have worked so deftly and efficiently to put themselves in such a position.
Yeah. Sorry. Obviously it is impossible to expect anyone to support a family with a low-wage and/or no job. No one in the history of the universe has ever done it. Except for my mother, a single parent with 4 children.
It's too bad I had to suffer because my mom couldn't get a job. I'll hate her always for what she did to me. Oh wait, that's not true at all. I am fanatically proud of her. She is an inspiration to me. She supported us all, and although we couldn't afford things like cable or anything other than an old used Commodore 64, and we bought our clothes at the local discounted clothes warehouse for a long time, you know what? YOU DON'T NEED ALL THAT EXPENSIVE SHIT YOU BUY, we lived just fine and we were god-damned happy.
You may think that it's impossible to live without Tropicana orange juice, but you know what that tells me? You are disgustingly spoiled. I would contend that it is in fact you who has no concept of sacrifice, humility, or honor. You would take a job ripping people off-- excuse me, let me use your euphemism: filing "frivolous lawsuits" --so that you can afford your Tropicana, eh? Sounds pretty honorable to me...
Hybrid cars generally use the gas part of the engine in tandem with the electric motor during acceleration. However, electric motors have tremendous torque at low speeds, whereas gas engines are very anemic. Once you get to highway speed, the situation is reversed, and the gas engine is doing most of the work.
So yes, the electric motor is doing almost all the work at very low speeds. If I recall correctly some hybrids don't even bother starting the gas engine until you are above 20km/h or so.
You also suggest that the electric motor is used for cruising, which I don't think is the case, particularly at highway speeds; the electric motor needs to keep its batteries charged. It does this in two ways, by regenerative braking (when you stop) and by running the gas engine as a generator. Since you're not going to be braking on the highway much, and the much more powerful (at high speeds) gas engine is going to have to be running *anyway*, it doesn't make sense to use the electric motor in this context. The electric is much better suited for low speed city driving, where you're constantly stopping for lights, waiting, pulling away from a stop, etc, and that is where you get your primary gains in fuel economy.
There are thousands of job candidates out there who whould use their Grandmothers' careworn old face as a stepping stone up to any (relevant) job whatsoever!
Yes, that sounds like the sort of person I want in my company, working next to me.
Fuck them. I wouldn't hire them. I'd like moral, human beings, thanks, not materialistic shitheads.
Many *FAMILIES* can live on social assistance and as laborers. If these 'poor IT folk' are unwilling to give up their 4 bedroom 2 bathroom house with fireplace and pool, then too bad for them. Fuck 'em.
If they really need money so badly that they feel a need to sell their morals in addition to their time and effort, perhaps they should look into a career in law or politics.
"Diablo", "Master of Magic", and to some extent "Age Of Wonders: Shadow Magic" are some other games that stand out in mind as having an excellent, enjoyable random level design. And they are a lot more dependent on having a good map than Populous was (In Populous, a major part of the game involved flattening the map to build up your castles anyway. So who really cares how it's laid out to begin with?)
Master of Magic is in my mind the holy grail of randomized level design. Mind you, it only had to deal with a smallish, square-tile based map. I never ran into a map that wasn't enjoyable in that game. They were usually decently well balanced for all players, but not artifically so the way Age of Empires does. Sometimes they weren't completely balanced, but all that meant was a more challenging game or an enjoyable festival of destruction. They were never so unbalanced that one of the players was DOA.
Age of Wonders seems to be heavily, heavily based upon Master of Magic, but up until the latest version was lacking any random map support at all. Now random terrain can be generated in the map editor, but only the aboveground, and the mapmaker must still add all the cities, dungeons and resources onto the map.
Anyway, it's not one of those features that only marketing loves. I know a number of people who outright refused to buy Age of Wonders until they got random map support in. It's a big feature for me too, and I love games that do it well (and it can be done well, but it's not easy.)
Uh. Not in Diablo. I don't know about Diablo II, as I tried it briefly and considered it a boring rehash of Diablo and promptly abandoned it in favour of more interesting games.
Diablo was quite random. With the exception of "quest objectives" which were merely prefabs placed randomly within a dungeon, the entire dungeon, layout, entrances, exits, doors, rooms were randomly generated for each floor. (Which is why the savegame files could get up to about 15MB if I recall correctly.. hey, it was a big deal when we only had a 1 gig harddrive)
The only thing it lacked was random quests. It had a okay number of pre-built quests, though, and gave you a random selection of them each time you played. Definitely got stale after awhile though.
Nice try, Troll, but nowhere did I say that I download music (I don't.) Not that I don't have the opportunity. I've got a big internet connection for hosting websites. However, I prefer independent electronica, and you can't find that through P2P. And even if you could, I actually listen to ARTISTS that I like, not just songs that I like. I support the artists I listen to, and am proud of it. I buy their CDs, and would go to their concerts if any of them ever happen to drop by my neck of the woods.
I support those who do download music, though, because copyright for eternity is wrong. Copyright was intended to provide people with incentive to release creative works without the fear of someone else immediately stealing them. How many people do you know that were refraining from releasing their creative works because if they did they would have to give them up into the public domain 80 years AFTER THEY DIED, and would instead prefer to lodge them with a corporation who can keep them indefinitely now?
Nevermind the fact that only a tiny minority of people actually own copyrights on their own stuff anymore. Did you sign an agreement when you started working for your current employer? If yes, chances are you don't own any of your own copyrights either. I've heard of agreements where they ask you to *retroactively* assign all your copyrights to the company in addition to future ones.
Copyright is broken, whether you choose to see it or not. It was supposed to be for the good of everyone. Now it's a tool for backstabbing, anal-retentive corporate control freaks. 20 years ago, copyright was generous. Today it's absolute lunacy.
Slashdot Mirror
actually _talking_, to say "say what are you doing tonight?"
:)
Been there, done that. Getting a job certainly kills most of the enjoyable college passtimes like MUDding though. Whether this is a good thing or not I'm still undecided...
Same here. Freeloading girls suck (and even then only if you're lucky)
Working at McDonalds? Hey, at least she's not too lazy to get a job...
You're missing the whole point of the ion drive. Yes, it's slow and not really very effective at this point, but that's not so much a problem with the drive itself as it is with their fuel source: crappy, marginally effective solar panels.
The ion drive, as it stands, is the only way we have of converting energy directly into propulsion. It's our first step to being self-sufficient beyond Earth. Sci-fi writers love to envision massive ships powered by tremendous reactors, and even you talk about anti-matter reactors. But short of some future advance like warp drive, an ion drive is the only way we have of converting that electricty into movement.
It may seem useless as long as we're still puttering around our Solar system in one-shot, one-mission probes. But give it a few decades, and the flexibility and reusability of ion drives will blow everything else away.
What the hell?
First of all: False and misleading information? Unless you have some magical insider information on what exactly happened, who are you to claim that it's false and misleading? To dismiss it as false without having any facts is no better than accepting it as true without having any of the facts. Different sides of the same coin.
And second, it looks like a pretty tongue-in-cheek comment. You said it yourself:
Those sorts of things happen on their own more than enough as is; encouraging it is just unecessary.
Do you really believe that the editors don't also know this? Contrary to popular opinion they do actually read the site, sometimes. It's pretty clear to me that it's a jab at all the 'perfectly good conspiracy theories' that abound whenever a Microsoft story rolls around. Would you really call them 'perfectly good conspiracy theories' if you weren't against them? Sounds like a pretty sarcastic phrase to me.
But hey, don't let little old me get in the way of Slashdot's readers bashing Slashdot...
Just because someone is not imporant enough to warrant surveillance, does that mean that person should ignore the fact that someone, somewhere may be spied upon by the system? Just because they're not doing it specifically to me, does that mean we should not bother to cry out when they do it to someone other than ourselves?
I am not a conspiracy theorist, and I don't really believe this particular system will really be used to track people in any meaningful manner. However, I disagree completely with your attempt to discount out-of-hand the fact that it could be used that way. It is always valid to question the government's actions, and it is required to maintain a properly working democracy.
Widespread surveillance is a very dangerous technology, because once it is broadly enough deployed it gets to a point where all it takes is one person willing and able to abuse the system and suddenly it's pretty much unstoppable. See George Orwell's 1984 for a demonstration of this technique. Being such a dangerous technology, I think it's completely fair that we question it at every step.
And I just found "so nanaki's name is nanaki" really funny.
I did that too on my second time around, but I didn't even think about what would happen later in the game when they discover his real name -- I just thought that Nanaki was a much cooler name than Red XIII. When I unexpectedly saw that line however, I just burst out laughing. Great stuff.
Another fun thing to do is name all of your characters in FF2(j) to violent exclamations like "DEATH", "SMASH", etc. First thing that happens in the game is that the four of you get seperated, so the main character runs around shouting, "DEATH!!!!" "SMASH!!!!". It's quite amusing, at least if you're twisted like I am.
But he probably got snookered into signing a contract that prohibits him from doing anything like that until the record company finally gets tired of shafting him.
Prevents him from ever doing that, you mean. It's extremely rare that a musician gets any rights to their music back, ever. Usually the copyright is reassigned to the label, and that's the end of the story. The label owns the music, and all recordings of your performance of it. Basically the only thing you *can* do if you grow disillusioned with your contract is tour and sell merchandise (not CDs). Most of the time there isn't even any benefit to creating new songs, as long as the contract is in effect those don't belong to you either.
It's a brutal business. I don't know why anyone would sign with the RIAA if they really thought it completely and realistically through, but I'm sure they make it seem like a fantastic opportunity to the struggling musician, and apparently that works.
Gimme gimme gimme. I am a Square fanboi damnit, and FF7 was damn-near perfect as far as their line of games goes. (And contrary to GameSpy's FF7 bashing, no, it was not my first FF game. My username should be sufficient evidence of that.)
I loved that game. The characters, the airship, the story, the minigames (yay snowboarding!) I pretty much liked everything except the silly Materia system, but then I've never been a fan of "equip-to-learn!" systems. It irritated me in FF6 too.
FF4 is how learning magic should work. Mages learn magic. Fighters swing swords. That's how it should be.
Anyway, getting back on topic: I worry that this is simply a concept that Square had which never took off, so I'm not going to get my hopes up. If it's not, though, it would be a sweet sweet thing. Maybe they'll bring Aeris back to life. *grin*
This is simply more evidence that the RIAA has no problems with kicking the shit out of the artists for the RIAA's own benefit.
If you can convince them that you're sexy/charismatic enough to make them millions then poof, they pull out their insta-superstar marketing machine and you're a "made man" (well, in the same sort of way that mafia henchmen are "made men", you still owe eternal servitude) and you get to satiate us all with crappy pop music.
Otherwise, you are perhaps useful for career-destroying experiments like this one so they don't have to worry about destroying the career of someone they care about (read: have invested significant sums of money into).
I'm just surprised that it's taking so long for viable alternatives to the RIAA to really take flight. There are a few, but they're still picking up speed. It's really hard to get out of the post-RIAA catch-22 situation of no money, so no artists, so no customers, so no money, repeat.
Congratulations on that new sarcasm detector you have! It seems to work really well!
I agree with your post, except for this part:
This has unfortunately not yet happened, since too many programmers stubbornly stick to C and its likes.
No, this is because computers are not fast enough to justify a leap to slower, more robust languages yet. We're just barely breaching the barrier of "My current computer is so fast that there is no need for a faster processor".
It's very easy, however to add enough sluggishness into a system to drag it down below that magic threshhold, and suddenly it is noticable that it's not so fast enough anymore. People won't want to play your game/use your program because it's slower than your competitor's. Basically, you can't pull off a massive slowdown without the average computer speed being significantly faster than it needs to be, so that the speed difference when you slow it down with all the memory management and run-time error checking isn't noticable.
It is possible to get to that speed, and this whole 'spintronics' concept may be able to pull it off if it's not vaporware. But until then, all we can do is incrementally move towards better managed languages. Which is what we're doing with Java, C#, Python, etc. We'll get there, it just isn't nearly as immediate a thing as everyone would like it to be. (including the programmers, I might add. No one really enjoys smashing their head against a virtual function pointer table when they're trying to meet a deadline)
Speaking of game sounds being used in TV, I've always been amazed at the number of times you can hear DOOM's hydraulic "Door opening" sound if you know what to listen for. It's very popular.
I kept expecting to see Imps coming at me after any intro screen on CityTV (Toronto, ON) but I think they've stopped using it since one of their recent makeovers (I don't watch TV much anymore)
I learned it spelled as Cesium, and everything I've ever seen spells it that way. Is this just some over-spelling, or is it something like the Aluminum vs. Aluminium spelling/pronunciation conflict?
That is a pretty elitist attitude, in my opinion.
A lot of people seem to be under the impression that everyone's opinion is just as valid as anyone elses. This is patently false. Some people are smart, some people are dumb. Some people are well versed in a subject, some people are dilettantes.
When determining the quality of any work of art, the opinion of an expert is worth more than the opinions of a million Joe Sixpacks.
That's an embarassingly silly remark.
There is no such thing as an objective measurement of the quality of a work of art, or a game, or a movie. It is entirely subjective, any "expert" who claims to have the "one true opinion even if the vast majority disagrees has my contempt.
The universal "quality" of art is an entirely artifical concept and a very stupid concept in my opinion. It's a myth perpetuated by people like you. "Well, these experts say that three colored lines on a canvas is a revolutionary work of art, I guess the rest of us just don't see it." Bullshit, it's three colored lines on a canvas. It's stupid. A 3-year-old could've drawn it with finger paints. Overrated? Yup, that's exactly what it is.
"Experts" of the variety you describe are elitist and out-of-touch with the real world, which is exactly what people are accusing GameSpy's reviewers of being. And in my opinion, they're right.
Incorrect. Domain change propagation still takes up to 48 hours, even when it's Verisign doing it.
.com/net/org subdomains, period. Whether you're in Canada or Antarctica, it doesn't matter. Some ISPs will have the new wildcard record, some will not. Give it a day or two, and everyone's caches will have expired and will have the latest info. Then you'll get to see it.
This change is on the root servers. They serve the
I'm not sure why debian doesn't use postfix by default. Is the license too free for them?
In all my experience, qmail is the most featureful (but tremendously frustrating, and the license sucks), postfix is almost as featureful, very simple to configure, use, and maintain, and has a great license. exim is last place. Well, unless you consider sendmail which I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.
I have trouble believing that people can actually watch some contentless logos and pictures and find that it somehow entices them to buy a product in any way shape or form. I know it's supposedly true, but I simply can't fathom it.
It does admittedly make people realize that this product exists, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to buy it on anything other than it's merits. I don't see how having a sexy woman or a hilarious concept in your ad will help. But then I guess that's why I'm not in marketing.
Personally, I've given up on the "push" style of advertising, and gone with "pull" instead, especially for things like video games. Check out companies I like to see if they've released anything new, check review sites (admittedly a form of advertising, but with a lot more content and a lot less biased, although that's not neccesarily saying much.) It's kind of the Internet way of doing things; Go out and do it yourself, rather than waiting for someone to shove things in your face until you see one you like, which may not be for a very long time.
I dunno. I just don't see how video game commercials, of all things, have any effect on a largely intellegent and information-enabled group of gamers. There are just so many better ways to do it.
you're assuming that encrypted hard disks exist that don't have master keys in escrow with large governmental agencies.
And don't you think that if the hard disk manufacturers have gotten onboard the conspiracy bandwagon, the banks were already there to greet them?
Really. If the Three-Letter-Agencies are anywhere near as malicious as the conspiracy people suggest them to be, they have a little thing called priorities, and already have things very well in hand.
Not that I really believe any of that crap. I've seen far too much governmental stupidity, sloth, disorganization and bureaucracy to believe that any government agency could ever-- much less for decades-long span --have worked so deftly and efficiently to put themselves in such a position.
Yeah. Sorry. Obviously it is impossible to expect anyone to support a family with a low-wage and/or no job. No one in the history of the universe has ever done it. Except for my mother, a single parent with 4 children.
It's too bad I had to suffer because my mom couldn't get a job. I'll hate her always for what she did to me. Oh wait, that's not true at all. I am fanatically proud of her. She is an inspiration to me. She supported us all, and although we couldn't afford things like cable or anything other than an old used Commodore 64, and we bought our clothes at the local discounted clothes warehouse for a long time, you know what? YOU DON'T NEED ALL THAT EXPENSIVE SHIT YOU BUY, we lived just fine and we were god-damned happy.
You may think that it's impossible to live without Tropicana orange juice, but you know what that tells me? You are disgustingly spoiled. I would contend that it is in fact you who has no concept of sacrifice, humility, or honor. You would take a job ripping people off-- excuse me, let me use your euphemism: filing "frivolous lawsuits" --so that you can afford your Tropicana, eh? Sounds pretty honorable to me...
I don't think these more traditional sites can compete with the timeliness standards achieved by the blogging approach invented by /.
Sorry, are you talking about the same "News from a week ago. Stuff that used to matter." site that I read?
They seem to have improved slightly recently, but a few months ago it was getting pretty bad.
That's an oversimplification.
Hybrid cars generally use the gas part of the engine in tandem with the electric motor during acceleration. However, electric motors have tremendous torque at low speeds, whereas gas engines are very anemic. Once you get to highway speed, the situation is reversed, and the gas engine is doing most of the work.
So yes, the electric motor is doing almost all the work at very low speeds. If I recall correctly some hybrids don't even bother starting the gas engine until you are above 20km/h or so.
You also suggest that the electric motor is used for cruising, which I don't think is the case, particularly at highway speeds; the electric motor needs to keep its batteries charged. It does this in two ways, by regenerative braking (when you stop) and by running the gas engine as a generator. Since you're not going to be braking on the highway much, and the much more powerful (at high speeds) gas engine is going to have to be running *anyway*, it doesn't make sense to use the electric motor in this context. The electric is much better suited for low speed city driving, where you're constantly stopping for lights, waiting, pulling away from a stop, etc, and that is where you get your primary gains in fuel economy.
There are thousands of job candidates out there who whould use their Grandmothers' careworn old face as a stepping stone up to any (relevant) job whatsoever!
Yes, that sounds like the sort of person I want in my company, working next to me.
Fuck them. I wouldn't hire them. I'd like moral, human beings, thanks, not materialistic shitheads.
Many *FAMILIES* can live on social assistance and as laborers. If these 'poor IT folk' are unwilling to give up their 4 bedroom 2 bathroom house with fireplace and pool, then too bad for them. Fuck 'em.
If they really need money so badly that they feel a need to sell their morals in addition to their time and effort, perhaps they should look into a career in law or politics.
"Diablo", "Master of Magic", and to some extent "Age Of Wonders: Shadow Magic" are some other games that stand out in mind as having an excellent, enjoyable random level design. And they are a lot more dependent on having a good map than Populous was (In Populous, a major part of the game involved flattening the map to build up your castles anyway. So who really cares how it's laid out to begin with?)
Master of Magic is in my mind the holy grail of randomized level design. Mind you, it only had to deal with a smallish, square-tile based map. I never ran into a map that wasn't enjoyable in that game. They were usually decently well balanced for all players, but not artifically so the way Age of Empires does. Sometimes they weren't completely balanced, but all that meant was a more challenging game or an enjoyable festival of destruction. They were never so unbalanced that one of the players was DOA.
Age of Wonders seems to be heavily, heavily based upon Master of Magic, but up until the latest version was lacking any random map support at all. Now random terrain can be generated in the map editor, but only the aboveground, and the mapmaker must still add all the cities, dungeons and resources onto the map.
Anyway, it's not one of those features that only marketing loves. I know a number of people who outright refused to buy Age of Wonders until they got random map support in. It's a big feature for me too, and I love games that do it well (and it can be done well, but it's not easy.)
Uh. Not in Diablo. I don't know about Diablo II, as I tried it briefly and considered it a boring rehash of Diablo and promptly abandoned it in favour of more interesting games.
Diablo was quite random. With the exception of "quest objectives" which were merely prefabs placed randomly within a dungeon, the entire dungeon, layout, entrances, exits, doors, rooms were randomly generated for each floor. (Which is why the savegame files could get up to about 15MB if I recall correctly.. hey, it was a big deal when we only had a 1 gig harddrive)
The only thing it lacked was random quests. It had a okay number of pre-built quests, though, and gave you a random selection of them each time you played. Definitely got stale after awhile though.
Nice try, Troll, but nowhere did I say that I download music (I don't.) Not that I don't have the opportunity. I've got a big internet connection for hosting websites. However, I prefer independent electronica, and you can't find that through P2P. And even if you could, I actually listen to ARTISTS that I like, not just songs that I like. I support the artists I listen to, and am proud of it. I buy their CDs, and would go to their concerts if any of them ever happen to drop by my neck of the woods.
I support those who do download music, though, because copyright for eternity is wrong. Copyright was intended to provide people with incentive to release creative works without the fear of someone else immediately stealing them. How many people do you know that were refraining from releasing their creative works because if they did they would have to give them up into the public domain 80 years AFTER THEY DIED, and would instead prefer to lodge them with a corporation who can keep them indefinitely now?
Nevermind the fact that only a tiny minority of people actually own copyrights on their own stuff anymore. Did you sign an agreement when you started working for your current employer? If yes, chances are you don't own any of your own copyrights either. I've heard of agreements where they ask you to *retroactively* assign all your copyrights to the company in addition to future ones.
Copyright is broken, whether you choose to see it or not. It was supposed to be for the good of everyone. Now it's a tool for backstabbing, anal-retentive corporate control freaks. 20 years ago, copyright was generous. Today it's absolute lunacy.