> I have to admit that my heart sank when I first saw pictures of Karen Gillan, > when she was announced as the Eleventh Doctor's companion to be. The promo > picture reproduced above should show you why: here she has Generic Glamorous > Young Thing stamped all over her.
> With a shooter like L4D, running a 3x2 monitor configuration places the crosshair dead-center, > in the middle of the screen bezels. It's easy to get used to the funky crosshair, > but it's not ideal.
I noticed this problem with games and a 2-monitor configuration. "Center" is right at the split, so half of your crosshair is one side, half the other.
Ironically, it worked a little better when one monitor was smaller (width-wise) than the other. Then the center was on the bigger monitor by just a bit.
In the above, it's the up/down center that's the problem.
In the City of Heroes forum I asked, knowing the answer would be no, if there was a way to force the center to be offset one way or the other a bit.
Hint to game designers: Allow the user to offset "center" vertically and/or horizontally by a desired amount to get around this.
It's too bad many current SW patents are stupid, and/or are used by patent trolls.
Software is a virtual machine, and can require just as much work as any physical device to develop. It's too bad lawmakers cannot figure out a way to protect real intellectual investment while leaving out the chaff.
Probably the greatest invention mankind will make, which has yet to be, will, or could be, essentially pure software: AI
> to encourage automobilists to drive less quickly, reducing the rates > of passenger fatalities
Most accidents derive from differences in speed, not the speed themselves.
> A new study out of the University of Connecticut suggests that minor > reductions in vehicle speed are possible through changes in the street > environment.
Minor reductions = minor reductions in the best case. But to get even that far:
> Through the use of roadside parking, tighter building setbacks, and > more commercial land uses, road designers can make drivers subconsciously > drive more slowly.
So cluttering up the road with parking on both sides and close-in buildings will induce a minor slowdown.
Meanwhile, how many will be killed because of collisions with the parked cars, people who suddenly step out, and the like?
And, most importantly, don't take my word for it! Let's see tests where the net result are fewer deaths than more deaths. Precious few laws take this into account. Vis nutritional signs in fast food joints leading to an average 100 calorie increase per order, in spite of people saying they "took the info into consideration when ordering."
Common sense =/= science, and politics is, at best, only have common sense and half outrage-of-the-moment to begin with.
Corporations are just voluntary associations of citizens at the end of the day, with a few legal wrappers (probably the major is limited liability -- people suing the company cannot go after the deeper pockets of the owners or investors.)
But as a voluntary organization of citizens, they have all the rights of citizens because they are just activities of citizens in earning a living.
Do not confuse the quick-and-dirty hack, if you will, of the concept of creating a "corp"-oration just to give it a quasi-independent status, and to magically make all laws apply to it as if it were a person, with the fact that it's really just a group of freely associating citizens who retain all their individual rights, which includes the right to associate and use their rights together.
Hence the sarcastic argument earlier that the US was trying to reverse-psychology Australia into increased censorship by playing up the "The US can't tell us what to do! Censor us, our government!" card.
As a Lawful Good thief, er, rogue in D&D Online, I'm quite happy with my backstabbing holy pigstickers of pure good.
It does require opportunity, of course. Why, just the other day, we were running through a wild zone to a mission when we came across a broken down caravan trailer. The DM's voice boomed out, "It looks like the orcs attacked this caravan recently and picked it clean."
All I could think was how ripped off I felt, with someone else getting there first to kill them and take their stuff.
Anyone wanna bet they're just shutting down this one, which may have been "leaked" already somehow and that they're really pretending to stop a monitored honeypot when in fact, they terrorists "leaving for other sites" are leaving for the new, improved honeypots?
Kind of like how the US was happy to let people think Area-51 tests were UFOs since the Rooskies, who wouldn't believe it, would nevertheless think the US had built some hot shit?
The sequel won't be too bad. The Red Dragon will have turned out to have cast a dead man's hand spell on himself, and it will yank a soul to re-power his body and return him to life. The soul will be a US Marine from Iraq, and the dragon will add his knowledge to his own, creating massive machine guns and basically flying around machine-gunning "the 5 armies", regardless of their orientation.
Later, the dragon will get ahold of the ring from Bilbo, and his own massive willpower will vie with Sauron for control. Eventually, a group lead by Bilbo, containing Gollum, will recover the ring right as the marine fights back for control of the dragon's mind. It's a hopeless effort, but stuns the dragon just briefly that they can pry the ring off using Sting.
Gollum, of course, then turns on Bilbo and tries to get it back, but the spirit of Thor Oakenshield or whoever croaked in Hobbit 1, I forget, intercedes and Bilbo escapes with the ring.
Epilogue decades later, when an older but not yet old Bilbo is present at the birth of his nephew, who "might be named Dodo, or maybe Frodo, I like that name!" Cut to Sauron's area, where he's starting to build up an orc army, and negotiating with Saruman, while a middle-aged but youngish looking Grand Moff Tarken stands by as the massive tower with the eye is under construction.
How do they determine eligibility? Do they collect a sum from sales, then divide it proportionally based on percent of actual, normal sales?
Say Britney got 57% of all audio sales in Canada, does she (and her company) get 57% of the money?
And is that 57% based on units sold (albums, singles) or on $ sold? If she can charge more for an album than a nobody, does each of her album sales count as more towards that percent than each album for the nobody? Like if she sold 10,000 albums at retail of $20, but the nobody sold 200 albums at $10, is her share 10,000 x 20 vs. 200 x 10 for the other guy? Or 10,000 vs. 200?
Vinge has admitted it was a way to basically get around what he sees as inevitable -- the coming of the Singularity, and probably well before there is any interstellar, much less intergalactic, travel.
Hence he has no real way to write stories set in classic sci-fi space, with alien races and rockets and FTL ships and what-not. It will never be that way.
Zones was a way to get around what he sees as (and I agree with) an inevitable end stage for humanity, and not really too far in the future.
It's also pretty thinned out, often where it takes light years' worth of a "cloud" of it to finally provide enough coverage to 100% block out the stars behind it.
To put it in perspective, you'll need over 5000 years to process all 7 million books in the U-Mich library using one of these, or one year with over 5000 such machines, round the clock.
The fastest are ones where you chop off the binding, run the pages through an industrial scanning machine, and dump the blob off into modern character recognition software.
Slashdot Mirror
From TFB:
> I have to admit that my heart sank when I first saw pictures of Karen Gillan,
> when she was announced as the Eleventh Doctor's companion to be. The promo
> picture reproduced above should show you why: here she has Generic Glamorous
> Young Thing stamped all over her.
I just don't know about some of you nerds.
"Showrunner"? What's that, Simpsons-speak for producer?
Ya know, the dividing line between when Big Bad changed from Big Blue to Microsoft was never clear, and was not evident until it was well over.
We could be in a similar situation now. Microsoft is certainly recognizing Google as a significant player, anyway.
> With a shooter like L4D, running a 3x2 monitor configuration places the crosshair dead-center,
> in the middle of the screen bezels. It's easy to get used to the funky crosshair,
> but it's not ideal.
I noticed this problem with games and a 2-monitor configuration. "Center" is right at the split, so half of your crosshair is one side, half the other.
Ironically, it worked a little better when one monitor was smaller (width-wise) than the other. Then the center was on the bigger monitor by just a bit.
In the above, it's the up/down center that's the problem.
In the City of Heroes forum I asked, knowing the answer would be no, if there was a way to force the center to be offset one way or the other a bit.
Hint to game designers: Allow the user to offset "center" vertically and/or horizontally by a desired amount to get around this.
It's too bad many current SW patents are stupid, and/or are used by patent trolls.
Software is a virtual machine, and can require just as much work as any physical device to develop. It's too bad lawmakers cannot figure out a way to protect real intellectual investment while leaving out the chaff.
Probably the greatest invention mankind will make, which has yet to be, will, or could be, essentially pure software: AI
From TFA:
> to encourage automobilists to drive less quickly, reducing the rates
> of passenger fatalities
Most accidents derive from differences in speed, not the speed themselves.
> A new study out of the University of Connecticut suggests that minor
> reductions in vehicle speed are possible through changes in the street
> environment.
Minor reductions = minor reductions in the best case. But to get even that far:
> Through the use of roadside parking, tighter building setbacks, and
> more commercial land uses, road designers can make drivers subconsciously
> drive more slowly.
So cluttering up the road with parking on both sides and close-in buildings will induce a minor slowdown.
Meanwhile, how many will be killed because of collisions with the parked cars, people who suddenly step out, and the like?
And, most importantly, don't take my word for it! Let's see tests where the net result are fewer deaths than more deaths. Precious few laws take this into account. Vis nutritional signs in fast food joints leading to an average 100 calorie increase per order, in spite of people saying they "took the info into consideration when ordering."
Common sense =/= science, and politics is, at best, only have common sense and half outrage-of-the-moment to begin with.
Corporations are just voluntary associations of citizens at the end of the day, with a few legal wrappers (probably the major is limited liability -- people suing the company cannot go after the deeper pockets of the owners or investors.)
But as a voluntary organization of citizens, they have all the rights of citizens because they are just activities of citizens in earning a living.
Do not confuse the quick-and-dirty hack, if you will, of the concept of creating a "corp"-oration just to give it a quasi-independent status, and to magically make all laws apply to it as if it were a person, with the fact that it's really just a group of freely associating citizens who retain all their individual rights, which includes the right to associate and use their rights together.
Hence the sarcastic argument earlier that the US was trying to reverse-psychology Australia into increased censorship by playing up the "The US can't tell us what to do! Censor us, our government!" card.
> Apparently he guesses the answer to a question related to password recovery
> in order to break into the accounts of famous people
"To confirm it's you, please answer this question you answered when you created the account:
"Where were you born?"
"Hawaii"
"Incorrect. You have 2 more attempts."
"Kenya"
"Correct. Your password has been reset to Password01. Please change it as soon as you log in."
Oh oh, yeesh. How humiliating.
> What the fuck has happened to Slashdot?
"News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters."
Now don't you feel foolish?
As a Lawful Good thief, er, rogue in D&D Online, I'm quite happy with my backstabbing holy pigstickers of pure good.
It does require opportunity, of course. Why, just the other day, we were running through a wild zone to a mission when we came across a broken down caravan trailer. The DM's voice boomed out, "It looks like the orcs attacked this caravan recently and picked it clean."
All I could think was how ripped off I felt, with someone else getting there first to kill them and take their stuff.
Anyone wanna bet they're just shutting down this one, which may have been "leaked" already somehow and that they're really pretending to stop a monitored honeypot when in fact, they terrorists "leaving for other sites" are leaving for the new, improved honeypots?
Kind of like how the US was happy to let people think Area-51 tests were UFOs since the Rooskies, who wouldn't believe it, would nevertheless think the US had built some hot shit?
The sequel won't be too bad. The Red Dragon will have turned out to have cast a dead man's hand spell on himself, and it will yank a soul to re-power his body and return him to life. The soul will be a US Marine from Iraq, and the dragon will add his knowledge to his own, creating massive machine guns and basically flying around machine-gunning "the 5 armies", regardless of their orientation.
Later, the dragon will get ahold of the ring from Bilbo, and his own massive willpower will vie with Sauron for control. Eventually, a group lead by Bilbo, containing Gollum, will recover the ring right as the marine fights back for control of the dragon's mind. It's a hopeless effort, but stuns the dragon just briefly that they can pry the ring off using Sting.
Gollum, of course, then turns on Bilbo and tries to get it back, but the spirit of Thor Oakenshield or whoever croaked in Hobbit 1, I forget, intercedes and Bilbo escapes with the ring.
Epilogue decades later, when an older but not yet old Bilbo is present at the birth of his nephew, who "might be named Dodo, or maybe Frodo, I like that name!" Cut to Sauron's area, where he's starting to build up an orc army, and negotiating with Saruman, while a middle-aged but youngish looking Grand Moff Tarken stands by as the massive tower with the eye is under construction.
:)
Nevertheless:
> are working on solar-powered contact lenses embedded with hundreds of semitransparent LEDs,
DO WANT!!!
It's ironic that getting a Level 80 this way is little different from the real game w.r.t. getting the babes.
> GM Working On Interactive Windshields
We already have windshields people interact with whenever they hit a wall.
Sign me the hell up for Dollhouse. I'll pay a regular fee for that show.
How do they determine eligibility? Do they collect a sum from sales, then divide it proportionally based on percent of actual, normal sales?
Say Britney got 57% of all audio sales in Canada, does she (and her company) get 57% of the money?
And is that 57% based on units sold (albums, singles) or on $ sold? If she can charge more for an album than a nobody, does each of her album sales count as more towards that percent than each album for the nobody? Like if she sold 10,000 albums at retail of $20, but the nobody sold 200 albums at $10, is her share 10,000 x 20 vs. 200 x 10 for the other guy? Or 10,000 vs. 200?
Too bad it doesn't look like the cover of some bad '70s erotica pulp fiction. "Women's Prison", et al.
Vinge has admitted it was a way to basically get around what he sees as inevitable -- the coming of the Singularity, and probably well before there is any interstellar, much less intergalactic, travel.
Hence he has no real way to write stories set in classic sci-fi space, with alien races and rockets and FTL ships and what-not. It will never be that way.
Zones was a way to get around what he sees as (and I agree with) an inevitable end stage for humanity, and not really too far in the future.
They do -- that's prolly why she stopped returning calls.
And back to dust, full circle!
> (Score:2, Troll)
>
> If they wanted pictures of dust, they could have just photographed under my bed!
Troll? If a particularly Angela-esque person wanted to slam a humor post, go ahead, but at least use "off topic".
Unless...unless it hit too close to home? But then the nerds/sex issue should really send this person into a tizzy.
It's also pretty thinned out, often where it takes light years' worth of a "cloud" of it to finally provide enough coverage to 100% block out the stars behind it.
To put it in perspective, you'll need over 5000 years to process all 7 million books in the U-Mich library using one of these, or one year with over 5000 such machines, round the clock.
The fastest non-destructive book scanner.
The fastest are ones where you chop off the binding, run the pages through an industrial scanning machine, and dump the blob off into modern character recognition software.