What's the difference between abuse and use...my point is that the Gerber can take whatever you dish out, while the Leatherman can't. I'm sure the Leatherman has uses in other niche markets, but for me, it would be useless. The Gerber is essentially idiot-proof, like a wrench: I can hand it to someone and know I'll get it back in one piece. Multi-Plier == tool. Leatherman == gadget.
I've used someone else's Leatherman before, it was an actual Leatherman, the regular Super Tool. The screwdrivers were nowhere near as strong, and were twisted or dinged up around the edges. He also cut himself pretty badly right when he was trying to get a screwdriver out, too. I have seen other genuine Leathermans with pliers tips and screwdrivers simply broken off.
I've used my Multi-Plier to open paint lids and then hammer them back on, cut carpet, pull out large nails by twisting them in the pliers, cut coathanger wire, remove lawnmower blades and then sharpen them with the file, remove and replace screws in furniture, assemble bikes, strip wire, prune shrubs, trim radiator hoses, swap out computer parts, open cans, sharpen sticks, open boxes, trim photos, and cut food. After 12 years of that, the only signs of wear are some shiny spots where the beadblasting has worn off, and some nicks in the wire cutter. The drop point blade has been sharpened a few times. The only drawback is that the tools are non-locking, but current versions do have locking tools.
No, you don't understand. The Multi-Plier does not unfold at all. The pliers slide out axially. When the pliers are retracted, the tool is locked closed. To open, you hold the tool in your palm with your thumb, and with a quick flick, the pliers snap out due to inertia and lock into place. There are no fancy gymnastics or butterfly-knife tricks. You maintain full control of the tool at all times, you aren't going to fling it away from you by doing the butterfly-flip-open thing.
Leatherman? Bah. They try to fit too much into it, and all the tools end up being too flimsy.
I, on the other hand, have been using the same Gerber Multi-plier for about 12 years (yes, I was 12 when I got it). It has blunt nose pliers instead of needle-nose, and all the tools are heavy-duty. For example, the Philips head isn't just a flat sliver, it's the real deal. The pliers actually work well for tighening bolts and nuts, you know, real bolts and nuts like on cars and bikes. And the real feature is the one-handed snap opening. You just fish it out of your pocket, flick your wrist and *snap* you've got pliers. Every Leatherman I've seen requires you to sit down with it and unfold some complicated metal origami, using two hands and paying very close attention because more often than not, the knives will fold out and you'll cut yourself.
Mine is bead-blasted stainless, and has never rusted...I don't know about the more recent versions. I wouldn't buy a cheap version. If I ever replace it, I might have to go with this: Gerber Multi-Plier 600 DET. I mean, it doesn't have blunt pliers, but how cool is it to have a non-reflective black oxide pocket battlefield tool with such items as "C-4 explosives punch" and "blasting cap crimper"?
How, exactly, is a Mac cheaper than anything else? It doesn't come with office software, either. You want schools to pay $150 for x.x.x+1 updates? Macintoshes are great and all, but they should be purchased for ease of use and integrated function, with the understanding that you are paying for it.
I was using a bit of hyperbole, but look at it this way: the bully from third grade might rule the first grade during recess, but what is he to the rest of the world?
My handwriting sucks too. I really do intend to improve it though...and I have been.
You can't do it by willing yourself to write better. You've transferred your letter-forming skills into your cerebellum already...you aren't even a conscious part of the letter-forming process anymore. You had to go back to the basics: back to penmanship. There is no way around this other than to practice and unlearn your poor penmanship.
Remember to scroll down that page to the manuscript pages with guides. Print those out and go to town. Fill up a set of those pages every day, and your handwriting WILL improve.
Oh yeah, gotta slip in the anti-America jab. Well, Canada, why don't you go off and play with your mad cows, inability to pronounce "about" correctly, red flannel shirts and hats with ear flaps, stupid coins that never work in out vending machines, perpetually drunken 18-year-olds, horrid comedy personalities, automatic tax on blank media, invisible and powerless prime minister, and hissy fits over French VS. English?
I'm sure all the companies in YOUR country would prefer server software that responds to DDoS attacks by letting out a high-pitched girly scream and running away on tiptoe while apologizing profusely in English and French?
All in good fun, just trying to point out your stereotype is pretty absurd in this situation.
Yeah, I knew that.;-) But you didn't include the disclaimer about transferring information in other ways.
I'm reasoning this out myself right now, though I probably saw the answer some time ago.
The first guy looks out over the 99 prisoners and sees three groups of colors. He counts two of the colors together, so there is one group with an odd number, and one group with an even number. He says the color that is odd. The next guy looks out across the 98 prisoners. If there is an even number of the color that the preceding prisoner just said, then he knows that is his color. Now, if his color is in the second group, he knows that there will be two even numbers of the remaining colors. His color is the one that there is an odd number of in front of him. He says his color.
The next guy now knows that there are two even groups of numbers including him. If the previous guy was in the first group that was odd, it's now even. If he sees an odd number of that color, then that is his color. If the previous guy was in the other group, then the group of the previous guy's color is odd including the current prisoner. If he sees an even number of that color, that is his color; if he sees an odd number of that color, then he is the other color.
The same logic applies all down the line. Unfortunately someone will crack and lose track of everything, and blow it for everyone else.
The prisoners all agree that the guy who ends up in the back of the line will have a 1 in 3 chance of living. But everyone else will live.
Here's how it works: In one statement, the prisoners must encode two pieces of information. First, they must convey to the examiner the color that is on the back of their own head. Second, they must convey to the person in front of them what color is on the back of that person's head.
The unlucky sap in the back just randomly chooses a color, he has a 1 in 3 chance of living. But the color for the person in front of him is encoded in the way he answers. The code is Red=answer with a high angry tone, Green=answer in a low monotone, Blue=answer in a questioning tone. Thus every prisoner listens to the tone of the answer behind him, and says his own color in the emotional tone corresponding to the dot in front of him. Assuming everyone is intelligent enough to not mix up the colors and tones, and no one holds grudges, 99 prisoners will live and the first prisoner has a 1 in 3 chance of living.
This system is also resistant to tampering, because even if one person throws off his answer intentionally, the next answer does not depend on it. Each prisoner has to be careful though; choose the tone they will answer in first, don't think about the color in front of you...you might say that color instead of your own. But with reasonably intelligent people this is the best solution I can come up with.
Why did that car pull out from a side street right when the sun hit my eyes?
Why did the power go out right while I was about to save my work for the last hour?
Why did Benz and Daimler invent practical gasoline-powered cars simultaneously without ever hearing of each other?
"That a particular specified event or coincidence will occur is very unlikely. That some astonishing unspecified events will occur is certain. That is why remarkable coincidences are noted in hindsight, not predicted with foresight."--David G. Myers
You're an idiot, of course the chance of fires starting on the same day in remote locations is MUCH greater than the odds of an astronomical object even hitting earth, much less in that particular region of the planet. You really need to take a look at the astronomical distances involved as well as take a refresher course in statistics.
Never mind though, you want to believe it was a comet, go ahead and mislead yourself. Say hi to E.T. for me.
As I said before...the place was a tinderbox. It is NOT a fantastic coincidence at all. We aren't talking about strange monoliths appearing, or volcanic eruptions, or mass disappearances. This is fire. It only takes one doofus to let a spark get away from them, and fire happened to be the only way for people to cook food, work metal, boil water...fire was more common, there's doofuses everywhere, and the area was in a drought.
Still don't believe me? Here is the final, killer argument: why does every town have a fire department? Because there are fires all the time. Every day, all across the nation. There were dozens or hundreds of small fires accidentally started across the Midwest on that night, and because of the dry conditions, a few of them got away before anyone could put them out. A lot of places didn't even have any way to fight fires.
You don't need to come up with some oddball theory for this. This is so NOT a fantastic coincidence. Tragic, yes.
I had pretty much all of the symptoms, and you know what? I was just a nervous inexperienced kid, all knees and elbows. I have seen few kids in the 12 to 18 year-old age range who don't act exactly the same way.
If you aren't whisked off to special treatment and convinced there's something wrong with you, you eventually find your footing and gain confidence with experience. Coincedentally, this course of action also does not line the pockets of one or more shrinks and pharmacists over the course of your lifetime. So naturally, my attitude is "dangerous" and "backwards" and could "permanently damage some poor young sufferers of this syndrome."
A large fire will suck massive amounts of air into it from combustion and updrafts from the superheated air. Naturally, these winds would rush right into the teeth of the blaze
I think this is an overly-complicated explanation for a tragic event. The fires were surrounded by wild-eyed accounts from people who were in mortal panic. Sensational journalism often "enhanced" the facts, and there really wasn't any way to check up on the factual basis of the stories.
There was a very long, bone-dry period before the fires. The whole area was a tinderbox, heavily wooded at the time, with lots of underbrush; houses weren't built to fire codes, communication was slow so people didn't have the chance to evacuate. The physics of forest fires have to be seen to be believed; the fire will follow the fuel, not the wind. The fire creates its own wind and becomes a temporary blast furnace. The sheer heat from such rapid burning will easily cause objects to burst into flame when not in contact with the fire. The oxygen is also rapidly consumed, and suffocating gases produced, without the need for chunks of methane.
There is also no real way to prove that many fires started simultaneously. Communication, again, was patchy and slow at best. The fire could spread along dozens of unpopulated paths and appear to pop up everywhere at once.
Accidentally starting a fire is easy, and it's not so absurd to think that fires might have broken out in a few separate locations, given the tinder-dry conditions at the time. The times could have been separated by hours and still appear simultaneous. Things like lightning, static electricity, spontaneous combustion...they're all possible, but that's looking for an over-glamorous cause to a massive tragedy.
The odds are very good that the fires were started accidentally by very mundane means. Someone's cooking fire might have wafted a spark into some dry grass, or someone might have dropped their pipe and not noticed until it was too late. The conditions were just so dry, the whole place was a firebomb on a hair trigger.
Sometimes people want to take a tragic accidental event and attach some absurd, freak cause to it. It helps distance the event from them; if it can't happen normally, they don't have to worry about the risk, right? Many people prefer the "Navy missile" theory of TWA 800, instead of the "frayed wire" theory. It makes the tragedy the stuff of legends, and it doesn't hit quite so close to home anymore.
I'm pretty sure that Babelfish is just a toy compared to the stuff you pay for.
However, I'd be impressed by the developers if they resisted the temptation to throw in "easter eggs" at one-in-a-million intervals. "please designate 8 of your troops for west bunker guard tonight" --> "your mother is as ugly as five camels and weighs more"
And the attitude that the publishers are working for the developers...well, if any developers start taking that attitude, they need to be prepared to tighten the belt.
Publishers are the ones that bring in money. There are thousands of fantastic games out there, you can find hundreds of websites where small groups are publishing their own games. They are virtually unheard of except for an in-crowd cult that can probably trace word-of-mouth back all the way to the developers showing their friends this new game they made. This model used to work OK back in the heyday of shareware, but now with the amount of advertising you pretty much need a publisher to make any money.
And while many gamers would probably appreciate the quality of some of these independently-published games, remember that the multiplayer experience is now an important part of many games. If a gamer want to have a good time on online, there need to be lots of other players out there...and publishers do a good job of bringing those in too, beacuse of the sheer mass of promotion.
Maybe the relationship of publishers and developers needs to change somewhat, but they are symbiotic. The publisher has most of the power though; because there are many developers out there who would like to get a major contract, and not as many publishers out there who want to take on the cast-offs of another publisher.
Newsgroups. There are groups dedicated to recipe trading (rec.food.recipes), and on EVERY group the regulars will occasionally post their favorite recipe for something, especially if they just hacked together some good food. Just do a Google Groups search for whatever you want...it's there. Maybe it's not really organized, but who organizes things anymore? The thought these days is to throw everything in a pile with some rudimentary crosslinking, and use a search engine to ferret out whatever you're looking for.
If you were trapped total darkness with no flashlight, the blind person is who you'd want to lead you out...when you're surrounded by utter stupidity, you want whoever is the most familiar with it to lead you out.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the difference between abuse and use...my point is that the Gerber can take whatever you dish out, while the Leatherman can't. I'm sure the Leatherman has uses in other niche markets, but for me, it would be useless. The Gerber is essentially idiot-proof, like a wrench: I can hand it to someone and know I'll get it back in one piece. Multi-Plier == tool. Leatherman == gadget.
I've used someone else's Leatherman before, it was an actual Leatherman, the regular Super Tool. The screwdrivers were nowhere near as strong, and were twisted or dinged up around the edges. He also cut himself pretty badly right when he was trying to get a screwdriver out, too. I have seen other genuine Leathermans with pliers tips and screwdrivers simply broken off.
I've used my Multi-Plier to open paint lids and then hammer them back on, cut carpet, pull out large nails by twisting them in the pliers, cut coathanger wire, remove lawnmower blades and then sharpen them with the file, remove and replace screws in furniture, assemble bikes, strip wire, prune shrubs, trim radiator hoses, swap out computer parts, open cans, sharpen sticks, open boxes, trim photos, and cut food. After 12 years of that, the only signs of wear are some shiny spots where the beadblasting has worn off, and some nicks in the wire cutter. The drop point blade has been sharpened a few times. The only drawback is that the tools are non-locking, but current versions do have locking tools.
No, you don't understand. The Multi-Plier does not unfold at all. The pliers slide out axially. When the pliers are retracted, the tool is locked closed. To open, you hold the tool in your palm with your thumb, and with a quick flick, the pliers snap out due to inertia and lock into place. There are no fancy gymnastics or butterfly-knife tricks. You maintain full control of the tool at all times, you aren't going to fling it away from you by doing the butterfly-flip-open thing.
Leatherman? Bah. They try to fit too much into it, and all the tools end up being too flimsy.
I, on the other hand, have been using the same Gerber Multi-plier for about 12 years (yes, I was 12 when I got it). It has blunt nose pliers instead of needle-nose, and all the tools are heavy-duty. For example, the Philips head isn't just a flat sliver, it's the real deal. The pliers actually work well for tighening bolts and nuts, you know, real bolts and nuts like on cars and bikes. And the real feature is the one-handed snap opening. You just fish it out of your pocket, flick your wrist and *snap* you've got pliers. Every Leatherman I've seen requires you to sit down with it and unfold some complicated metal origami, using two hands and paying very close attention because more often than not, the knives will fold out and you'll cut yourself.
Mine is bead-blasted stainless, and has never rusted...I don't know about the more recent versions. I wouldn't buy a cheap version. If I ever replace it, I might have to go with this: Gerber Multi-Plier 600 DET. I mean, it doesn't have blunt pliers, but how cool is it to have a non-reflective black oxide pocket battlefield tool with such items as "C-4 explosives punch" and "blasting cap crimper"?
How, exactly, is a Mac cheaper than anything else? It doesn't come with office software, either. You want schools to pay $150 for x.x.x+1 updates? Macintoshes are great and all, but they should be purchased for ease of use and integrated function, with the understanding that you are paying for it.
I was using a bit of hyperbole, but look at it this way: the bully from third grade might rule the first grade during recess, but what is he to the rest of the world?
Yeah...cop pulls Microsoft over, pats it down..."Sir, do you have a license for that paper clip?"
I half expected the headline to continue, as in:
U.S. Army Warns Microsoft To Back Off; Microsoft Masses Troops on Border, Threatens Missile Strikes
My handwriting sucks too. I really do intend to improve it though...and I have been.
You can't do it by willing yourself to write better. You've transferred your letter-forming skills into your cerebellum already...you aren't even a conscious part of the letter-forming process anymore. You had to go back to the basics: back to penmanship. There is no way around this other than to practice and unlearn your poor penmanship.
Roll back the clock to first grade. Now, here's some good material:
D'Nealian Practice Pages
Remember to scroll down that page to the manuscript pages with guides. Print those out and go to town. Fill up a set of those pages every day, and your handwriting WILL improve.
Oh yeah, gotta slip in the anti-America jab. Well, Canada, why don't you go off and play with your mad cows, inability to pronounce "about" correctly, red flannel shirts and hats with ear flaps, stupid coins that never work in out vending machines, perpetually drunken 18-year-olds, horrid comedy personalities, automatic tax on blank media, invisible and powerless prime minister, and hissy fits over French VS. English?
I'm sure all the companies in YOUR country would prefer server software that responds to DDoS attacks by letting out a high-pitched girly scream and running away on tiptoe while apologizing profusely in English and French?
All in good fun, just trying to point out your stereotype is pretty absurd in this situation.
Yeah, I knew that. ;-) But you didn't include the disclaimer about transferring information in other ways.
I'm reasoning this out myself right now, though I probably saw the answer some time ago.
The first guy looks out over the 99 prisoners and sees three groups of colors. He counts two of the colors together, so there is one group with an odd number, and one group with an even number. He says the color that is odd. The next guy looks out across the 98 prisoners. If there is an even number of the color that the preceding prisoner just said, then he knows that is his color. Now, if his color is in the second group, he knows that there will be two even numbers of the remaining colors. His color is the one that there is an odd number of in front of him. He says his color.
The next guy now knows that there are two even groups of numbers including him. If the previous guy was in the first group that was odd, it's now even. If he sees an odd number of that color, then that is his color. If the previous guy was in the other group, then the group of the previous guy's color is odd including the current prisoner. If he sees an even number of that color, that is his color; if he sees an odd number of that color, then he is the other color.
The same logic applies all down the line. Unfortunately someone will crack and lose track of everything, and blow it for everyone else.
The prisoners all agree that the guy who ends up in the back of the line will have a 1 in 3 chance of living. But everyone else will live.
Here's how it works: In one statement, the prisoners must encode two pieces of information. First, they must convey to the examiner the color that is on the back of their own head. Second, they must convey to the person in front of them what color is on the back of that person's head.
The unlucky sap in the back just randomly chooses a color, he has a 1 in 3 chance of living. But the color for the person in front of him is encoded in the way he answers. The code is Red=answer with a high angry tone, Green=answer in a low monotone, Blue=answer in a questioning tone. Thus every prisoner listens to the tone of the answer behind him, and says his own color in the emotional tone corresponding to the dot in front of him. Assuming everyone is intelligent enough to not mix up the colors and tones, and no one holds grudges, 99 prisoners will live and the first prisoner has a 1 in 3 chance of living.
This system is also resistant to tampering, because even if one person throws off his answer intentionally, the next answer does not depend on it. Each prisoner has to be careful though; choose the tone they will answer in first, don't think about the color in front of you...you might say that color instead of your own. But with reasonably intelligent people this is the best solution I can come up with.
The answer is...BECAUSE THEY DID.
Why did that car pull out from a side street right when the sun hit my eyes?
Why did the power go out right while I was about to save my work for the last hour?
Why did Benz and Daimler invent practical gasoline-powered cars simultaneously without ever hearing of each other?
"That a particular specified event or coincidence will occur is very unlikely. That some astonishing unspecified events will occur is certain. That is why remarkable coincidences are noted in hindsight, not predicted with foresight."--David G. Myers
Look, it was a joke. You killed it, backed up, and ran over it again.
You're an idiot, of course the chance of fires starting on the same day in remote locations is MUCH greater than the odds of an astronomical object even hitting earth, much less in that particular region of the planet. You really need to take a look at the astronomical distances involved as well as take a refresher course in statistics.
Never mind though, you want to believe it was a comet, go ahead and mislead yourself. Say hi to E.T. for me.
Your opinion of your own abilities is way too high.
As I said before...the place was a tinderbox. It is NOT a fantastic coincidence at all. We aren't talking about strange monoliths appearing, or volcanic eruptions, or mass disappearances. This is fire. It only takes one doofus to let a spark get away from them, and fire happened to be the only way for people to cook food, work metal, boil water...fire was more common, there's doofuses everywhere, and the area was in a drought.
Still don't believe me? Here is the final, killer argument: why does every town have a fire department? Because there are fires all the time. Every day, all across the nation. There were dozens or hundreds of small fires accidentally started across the Midwest on that night, and because of the dry conditions, a few of them got away before anyone could put them out. A lot of places didn't even have any way to fight fires.
You don't need to come up with some oddball theory for this. This is so NOT a fantastic coincidence. Tragic, yes.
And thus the psychologists' mission is complete.
I had pretty much all of the symptoms, and you know what? I was just a nervous inexperienced kid, all knees and elbows. I have seen few kids in the 12 to 18 year-old age range who don't act exactly the same way.
If you aren't whisked off to special treatment and convinced there's something wrong with you, you eventually find your footing and gain confidence with experience. Coincedentally, this course of action also does not line the pockets of one or more shrinks and pharmacists over the course of your lifetime. So naturally, my attitude is "dangerous" and "backwards" and could "permanently damage some poor young sufferers of this syndrome."
A large fire will suck massive amounts of air into it from combustion and updrafts from the superheated air. Naturally, these winds would rush right into the teeth of the blaze
I think this is an overly-complicated explanation for a tragic event. The fires were surrounded by wild-eyed accounts from people who were in mortal panic. Sensational journalism often "enhanced" the facts, and there really wasn't any way to check up on the factual basis of the stories.
There was a very long, bone-dry period before the fires. The whole area was a tinderbox, heavily wooded at the time, with lots of underbrush; houses weren't built to fire codes, communication was slow so people didn't have the chance to evacuate. The physics of forest fires have to be seen to be believed; the fire will follow the fuel, not the wind. The fire creates its own wind and becomes a temporary blast furnace. The sheer heat from such rapid burning will easily cause objects to burst into flame when not in contact with the fire. The oxygen is also rapidly consumed, and suffocating gases produced, without the need for chunks of methane.
There is also no real way to prove that many fires started simultaneously. Communication, again, was patchy and slow at best. The fire could spread along dozens of unpopulated paths and appear to pop up everywhere at once.
Accidentally starting a fire is easy, and it's not so absurd to think that fires might have broken out in a few separate locations, given the tinder-dry conditions at the time. The times could have been separated by hours and still appear simultaneous. Things like lightning, static electricity, spontaneous combustion...they're all possible, but that's looking for an over-glamorous cause to a massive tragedy.
The odds are very good that the fires were started accidentally by very mundane means. Someone's cooking fire might have wafted a spark into some dry grass, or someone might have dropped their pipe and not noticed until it was too late. The conditions were just so dry, the whole place was a firebomb on a hair trigger.
Sometimes people want to take a tragic accidental event and attach some absurd, freak cause to it. It helps distance the event from them; if it can't happen normally, they don't have to worry about the risk, right? Many people prefer the "Navy missile" theory of TWA 800, instead of the "frayed wire" theory. It makes the tragedy the stuff of legends, and it doesn't hit quite so close to home anymore.
I'm pretty sure that Babelfish is just a toy compared to the stuff you pay for.
However, I'd be impressed by the developers if they resisted the temptation to throw in "easter eggs" at one-in-a-million intervals. "please designate 8 of your troops for west bunker guard tonight" --> "your mother is as ugly as five camels and weighs more"
Developers aren't marketable.
And the attitude that the publishers are working for the developers...well, if any developers start taking that attitude, they need to be prepared to tighten the belt.
Publishers are the ones that bring in money. There are thousands of fantastic games out there, you can find hundreds of websites where small groups are publishing their own games. They are virtually unheard of except for an in-crowd cult that can probably trace word-of-mouth back all the way to the developers showing their friends this new game they made. This model used to work OK back in the heyday of shareware, but now with the amount of advertising you pretty much need a publisher to make any money.
And while many gamers would probably appreciate the quality of some of these independently-published games, remember that the multiplayer experience is now an important part of many games. If a gamer want to have a good time on online, there need to be lots of other players out there...and publishers do a good job of bringing those in too, beacuse of the sheer mass of promotion.
Maybe the relationship of publishers and developers needs to change somewhat, but they are symbiotic. The publisher has most of the power though; because there are many developers out there who would like to get a major contract, and not as many publishers out there who want to take on the cast-offs of another publisher.
Correct, this shield is never mentioned, but behind it things such as "intertial dampeners" can exist.
Another suggestion:
Newsgroups. There are groups dedicated to recipe trading (rec.food.recipes), and on EVERY group the regulars will occasionally post their favorite recipe for something, especially if they just hacked together some good food. Just do a Google Groups search for whatever you want...it's there. Maybe it's not really organized, but who organizes things anymore? The thought these days is to throw everything in a pile with some rudimentary crosslinking, and use a search engine to ferret out whatever you're looking for.
If you were trapped total darkness with no flashlight, the blind person is who you'd want to lead you out...when you're surrounded by utter stupidity, you want whoever is the most familiar with it to lead you out.