Code up something nifty on your spare time. Time is probably the only thing you have plenty of, if you are unemployed, and the open source community will be grateful:)
Sounds like you need to try second life In Second Life, only your RL skills matter. If you're a coder, you can become a scripter, if you're a photoshop wizard, you can build a clothing empire. In SL, instead of advancing the skills of a virtual character, it is YOUR skills that advance. Bear in mind that it's not exactly a game, so you may well end up deeming it a glorified chat room:P
Thank god patents are so expensive. I wouldn't want a new class of average joes filing for thousands of stupid patents. We have had enough of that with cybersquatters and spammers.
I must have played every single Dune related game ever made, I am quite the Dune fan. But no game has even begun to capture the slightest glimpse of the amazing work of Frank Herbert. I would really like to see Black Isle (makers of Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment) make a Dune RPG, and at least try to decently cover the story of the first book instead of making up idiotic deviations. If not them, then someone with the slightest bit of a clue. I still think the best Dune game so far was the first, made by Cryo back in 1991. The CD version was particularly nice, but now Cryo is dead so I guess it's about time someone gave it another shot. The new Sci-Fi channel mini-series have been drawing attention to the "Duniverse" so it seems like a good time to get something like this off the ground.
Desalination doesn't necessarily need to consume any power at all. If you can use the sun to evaporate water from a container, and then let it condense and drip into another one, you can effectively produce both salt and water for "free". These solar desalination devices are present in many survival kits, and in fact I've seen people improvising them with mere plastic bags. I don't know if anyone's tried scaling it. I imagine that for densely populated places that demand very large amounts of drinkable water on a daily basis, it would require impossible amounts of evaporation surface.
Those results are hardly user-friendly. If you're not a physics genius, there's a better simulator here. In addition to the scientific number-spam, it briefly explains the results and even presents a picture of a real crater that is thought to have been caused by a meteor similar to the one you specified. It doesn't seem to have the same degree of flexibility as the one in the article, however, but at least it's fun!:)
That's not a solution, that's an inefficient kludge. The only reason why people commit crimes is that they believe they won't be caught, so the severity of the punishment is mostly irrelevant. The evidence for this is very strong. Many countries have tried, at times, to apply the death penalty to an excessively wide range of crimes, but have always failed miserably at preventing their ocurrence. Even if you could magically disintegrate all the criminals in the world, there would be more to take their place tomorrow morning.
Are you sure its the disk? What are the specs on your lappy? You may be running low on memory, so the system will use a part of your disk as virtual memory. This results in bits of data being swapped from disk to memory and back, which of course will increase disk access and slow everything to a crawl. If you have an old computer, and are unwilling to upgrade its hardware, try "downgrading" your software to older versions. I can browse the web fairly decently on my 10yr old 486, but it's running windows 3.11 with opera 3.62:)
Uh, we already do surgery on a cellular level. We have the ability to remove a nucleus from one cell and insert it into another. It's called cloning. The thing with cells is that there's one heck of a shitload of them. You can't go, say, picking off each individual tumor cell with a microscopic laser. You would die of old age first.
Uh, I dont get spam. Any spam. At all. I have been spam-free for nearly two years without any sort of filter. It's not hard, just dont give out your email in public. You dont give your home adress and phone number to everyone and their mother do you? I also dont get any popups, I use Mozilla though its more for the tabbed browsing than the ad blocking. There is no negative side to my internet experience, and even if there was, I would rather rely on myself to fix my own problems than trust Billy G and his buffoons.
Thing is, its easier to code up a quick ATM script in Flash or something, than it is to design a whole "lean and mean" super customized secure embedded system from scratch, then code up some basic OS and development tools for it, and THEN do the interface in some obscure language with crappy libs. People are lazy, and costs have to be kept down. What's usually important in a company, is to make their business process "lean and mean", not their software or PCs.
Ever heard of TUCOWS? You can search for software there, and order by license. AudioGrabber 1.83 is freeware, and is rated 5 stars. I used to use it to rip CDs, but the description claims it can do exactly what you need.
Shhhh! Look, you're new here, so let me give you some pointers. This is slashdot. We love AMD here. Everything from AMD is Holy. There are no negative reviews regarding AMD, because there is nothing bad to say about AMD. It's all a bunch of Intel-sponsored FUD. AMD is winning this war: Intel employees are committing suicide by the hundreds at the gates of AMD's HQ.
You need to go and play some more games. Most modern games run fine on my 3 year old computer... if I play at 640*480 with all the bloated eye candy turned off. OTOH, really ancient games such as the first Unreal, which I've only recently played through, looked as good as new! I could turn on all the eye candy available in the game and then some more in my graphics card settings. Modern games have amazing scalability even if they arent programmed in a special way. Simple graphics options like resolution, anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing can be turned on and off according to how well your PC's horsepower matches the resources demanded by the game, and that doesnt even require any programming effort. Having said that, a number of modern games automatically adjust LOD as needed. Sacrifice, Black & White, Second Life... dynamic LOD is not exactly rocket science and it can bring dramatic improvements to how much stuff you can cram into a scene.
Uh, let me think for a while... Yes! Of course. Most obviously. I dont know if you're aware that a lot of other countries still have these evil, gigantic phone monopolies. And we do have 1 Mbit internet acess:)
I once made a floppy that reported its size as 4 gigs, back when hard drives couldnt even reach 1. It's pretty easy to set your hard drive to whatever "size" you want it to be... just dont expect it to work properly:P Having said that, there were a few proggies floating around back then that could make your floppies slightly larger by formatting them with a weird, non-standard configuration. You could do wonderful things with them, from 1.7-1.8 meg floppies, that were a bit slower and less reliable, to some magic 1.22 meg format that mysteriously made my floppies faster. Ahh, those were the days;) I have very *ahem* fond memories of spending the whole day formatting and copying Civ2 to 96 floppies... ouch!
Well I gave you what you asked for... and obviously credit card numbers are an entirely different matter, but here's the thing. Around here we have these things called personal ID cards with our photo, fingerprint etc, and you can basically do absolutely nothing legally binding without presenting it, and if its anything to do with banking like a loan, you're gonna need a lot more than that, like proof that you live at your stated adress, your fiscal ID card, and two reliable witnesses (or whatever you call it) that will be responsible for paying your loan if you magically disappear, proof that you work for the stated company with the stated salary, and all of your signatures would have to be authenticated by a governmental notary. On top of that our ID cards are very hard to counterfit, they're full of little security systems like bank notes, plus some electronic stuff, and we need them to do as little as taking a college exam, sending or picking up a parcel from the post office or even going to a club or a certain theme park. I certainly wish I could have had someone smart "steal" my identity and pass those math exams I failed back in 1997 but its not exactly trivial - they would need to look exactly like me and sign exactly like me. Also, no one uses credit cards here. We use debit cards. If you had my PIN number, you would still need a matching card. Even checks have some security built into them, you cant exchange a check for real money, ever, at all, you need to deposit it into a bank account, and the bank withholds the check for 5 days before the money is put into your account. So if I report the check as stolen, you'll be getting your hands on some tasty jail time instead of my money. It all sounds like you americans have a horribly insecure system in place, at least compared to us. Numbers won't get you anywhere, you need the physical cards, and very often you need physical presence to confirm your ID, and they all have cameras so if you try anything funny, it's all on tape. Having said all of that, my point was never about stealing money. It's about people with an excessive love of privacy, and that scares me. It has always been frustrating and annoying to me that some people won't tell me their age, real name or the general area where they live, even after I've known them online for several years. Has the world all gone anti-social or something? WTF are you doing in a chat room if you dont want people to get to know you? I dont have any secrets, and I probably never will. If there's anything about your life that embarasses you, then you probably shouldn't be doing it in the first place. I dont smoke, I dont drink, I do watch porn but heck, everyone does and even my mom knows I do, I dont have a religion or political party or even a favorite sports team, and I sure as heck dont cheat on my fiancee.
I'm not the AC above, but the man has a point. You americans are traditionally known here in Europe as an immature people, always seeking someone to sue instead of acknowledging that you should be held accountable for your actions. If you want my data, by all means, take it. Name: Jorge Lima Bank account number: I have no idea, and no significant amount of money in it either:P SSAN: I dont know what this thing is, I probably dont have one. Birthdate: Jan 4 1980 Address: Rua Arco do Carvalhao, 21, 3E Salary: None
So what ya gonna do, send me a postcard? Pay me a visit? Bomb the fuck out of my entire building? Set it on fire? Get real. You are once again ignoring a simple fact that all privacy zealots ignore: You Are Not Special. No one gives a fuck about your data. No one is out to get you. If you give your adress to 100 people you meet on the web, not a single one will pay you a visit. Heck, not even my RL friends ever pay me a visit:( If any of you peeps are ever in Lisbon, Portugal, feel free to stop by and I will show you around town and buy you a cup of coffee. Heck, if any of you slashbots are FROM Lisbon I would absolutely love to meet you:D
Uh, no, but close. "Four" means "furnace" or "oven". The correct translation of "fuck all" as in "fuck everyone" would be "foutre tous". If you mean "fuck all" as in "fuck everything" it would be "foutre tout". If you really mean "fuck-all" as in "nothing" then well, you can't directly translate idioms... FWIW, "nothing" in French is "rien".
Well, why would you need to keep the egg warm in a "hothouse climate"? Or at all? Is it totally impossible that dinosaurs could very well develop and hatch at room temperature? Besides, body heat isnt required to warm something up. Mere insulation will do it. As in, let the egg catch some rays during the day, and insulate it with your body after dark.
Uh, dude, this isnt Star Trek, our propulsion technology is horribly primitive and so our spaceships kinda have to "sail" instead of going directly from one place to another. You see, it would take a fuel tank the size of a small asteroid to get anywhere, and dont forget that the fuel itself has to be pushed by something, requiring even more fuel, which also has to be pushed by something... Our current way of sending things anywhere is more like throwing a rock with your arm, after solving a bunch of really complicated equations to calculate the best way of throwing it so the wind (gravity) will give you the best free ride. Of course they may very well want to take advantage of this opportunity to study the sun or something... I'm not a rocket scientist.
Well yes, good point about the radiation. But how far does it penetrate ice and soil in general? Mars has polar caps, and while I dont know for sure, I always assumed they were like ours: huge layers of ice several miles thick. I'm not a physicist:)
Re:May have? May have?!?!
on
Brine on Mars?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Look, it's just the way science works. People form a hypothesis, do a lot of testing to confirm it, submit it to peer-reviewed journals where other scientists attempt to reproduce their results. It takes more than a 5-minute experiment to get any degree of certainty in science. Would you rather that they announced fantastically overhyped results before doing any testing? Frankly I don't know what the big deal is about liquid water and mars. We know that there's plenty of frozen water, and also that the martian atmosphere contains trace amounts of moisture. Is it 0.3% or 0.03%? It's been a while. If we know that there's solid and gaseous water, liquid water just seems like something obvious and not a major discovery. The really big deal would be quantifying that liquid water, which is almost impossible. We have no idea if there are gigantic oceans hidden underground, or even a few smaller pools, or anything at all. Inside our planet there are literally tons of water, and in many cities that's what you drink, purified underground water. I'm not an expert, but why aren't they doing more seismographic tests, or even looking at sending a ground penetrating radar to mars? I dont know about the radar but seismographs are small and cheap...
Around 1995 scientists extracted bacteria from an insect's stomach, that had been trapped in amber for 125 million years, and they lived. A few years later, scientists revived bacteria that had been dormant inside a crystal of common table salt for 250 million years! Even so, Mars has been geologically dead for 1.5 billion years, so I don't know how how these paltry 8 million years are suddenly so significant.
I was expecting someone to post something like this. Mandrake the distro was indeed based on Mandrake the character. Their earlier logo was a penguin dressed as a magician
Slashdot Mirror
Code up something nifty on your spare time. Time is probably the only thing you have plenty of, if you are unemployed, and the open source community will be grateful :)
Sounds like you need to try second life :P
In Second Life, only your RL skills matter. If you're a coder, you can become a scripter, if you're a photoshop wizard, you can build a clothing empire.
In SL, instead of advancing the skills of a virtual character, it is YOUR skills that advance.
Bear in mind that it's not exactly a game, so you may well end up deeming it a glorified chat room
Thank god patents are so expensive. I wouldn't want a new class of average joes filing for thousands of stupid patents. We have had enough of that with cybersquatters and spammers.
I must have played every single Dune related game ever made, I am quite the Dune fan. But no game has even begun to capture the slightest glimpse of the amazing work of Frank Herbert. I would really like to see Black Isle (makers of Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment) make a Dune RPG, and at least try to decently cover the story of the first book instead of making up idiotic deviations. If not them, then someone with the slightest bit of a clue.
I still think the best Dune game so far was the first, made by Cryo back in 1991. The CD version was particularly nice, but now Cryo is dead so I guess it's about time someone gave it another shot. The new Sci-Fi channel mini-series have been drawing attention to the "Duniverse" so it seems like a good time to get something like this off the ground.
Desalination doesn't necessarily need to consume any power at all. If you can use the sun to evaporate water from a container, and then let it condense and drip into another one, you can effectively produce both salt and water for "free".
These solar desalination devices are present in many survival kits, and in fact I've seen people improvising them with mere plastic bags.
I don't know if anyone's tried scaling it. I imagine that for densely populated places that demand very large amounts of drinkable water on a daily basis, it would require impossible amounts of evaporation surface.
Those results are hardly user-friendly. If you're not a physics genius, there's a better simulator here. :)
In addition to the scientific number-spam, it briefly explains the results and even presents a picture of a real crater that is thought to have been caused by a meteor similar to the one you specified.
It doesn't seem to have the same degree of flexibility as the one in the article, however, but at least it's fun!
That's not a solution, that's an inefficient kludge.
The only reason why people commit crimes is that they believe they won't be caught, so the severity of the punishment is mostly irrelevant.
The evidence for this is very strong. Many countries have tried, at times, to apply the death penalty to an excessively wide range of crimes, but have always failed miserably at preventing their ocurrence.
Even if you could magically disintegrate all the criminals in the world, there would be more to take their place tomorrow morning.
Are you sure its the disk? What are the specs on your lappy? You may be running low on memory, so the system will use a part of your disk as virtual memory. This results in bits of data being swapped from disk to memory and back, which of course will increase disk access and slow everything to a crawl. :)
If you have an old computer, and are unwilling to upgrade its hardware, try "downgrading" your software to older versions.
I can browse the web fairly decently on my 10yr old 486, but it's running windows 3.11 with opera 3.62
Uh, we already do surgery on a cellular level. We have the ability to remove a nucleus from one cell and insert it into another. It's called cloning.
The thing with cells is that there's one heck of a shitload of them. You can't go, say, picking off each individual tumor cell with a microscopic laser. You would die of old age first.
Uh, I dont get spam. Any spam. At all. I have been spam-free for nearly two years without any sort of filter. It's not hard, just dont give out your email in public. You dont give your home adress and phone number to everyone and their mother do you?
I also dont get any popups, I use Mozilla though its more for the tabbed browsing than the ad blocking.
There is no negative side to my internet experience, and even if there was, I would rather rely on myself to fix my own problems than trust Billy G and his buffoons.
Thing is, its easier to code up a quick ATM script in Flash or something, than it is to design a whole "lean and mean" super customized secure embedded system from scratch, then code up some basic OS and development tools for it, and THEN do the interface in some obscure language with crappy libs.
People are lazy, and costs have to be kept down. What's usually important in a company, is to make their business process "lean and mean", not their software or PCs.
Ever heard of TUCOWS? You can search for software there, and order by license.
AudioGrabber 1.83 is freeware, and is rated 5 stars. I used to use it to rip CDs, but the description claims it can do exactly what you need.
Shhhh! Look, you're new here, so let me give you some pointers. This is slashdot. We love AMD here. Everything from AMD is Holy. There are no negative reviews regarding AMD, because there is nothing bad to say about AMD. It's all a bunch of Intel-sponsored FUD.
AMD is winning this war: Intel employees are committing suicide by the hundreds at the gates of AMD's HQ.
You need to go and play some more games. Most modern games run fine on my 3 year old computer... if I play at 640*480 with all the bloated eye candy turned off. OTOH, really ancient games such as the first Unreal, which I've only recently played through, looked as good as new! I could turn on all the eye candy available in the game and then some more in my graphics card settings.
Modern games have amazing scalability even if they arent programmed in a special way. Simple graphics options like resolution, anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing can be turned on and off according to how well your PC's horsepower matches the resources demanded by the game, and that doesnt even require any programming effort.
Having said that, a number of modern games automatically adjust LOD as needed. Sacrifice, Black & White, Second Life... dynamic LOD is not exactly rocket science and it can bring dramatic improvements to how much stuff you can cram into a scene.
Uh, let me think for a while... Yes! Of course. Most obviously. :)
I dont know if you're aware that a lot of other countries still have these evil, gigantic phone monopolies. And we do have 1 Mbit internet acess
I once made a floppy that reported its size as 4 gigs, back when hard drives couldnt even reach 1. :P ;)
It's pretty easy to set your hard drive to whatever "size" you want it to be... just dont expect it to work properly
Having said that, there were a few proggies floating around back then that could make your floppies slightly larger by formatting them with a weird, non-standard configuration.
You could do wonderful things with them, from 1.7-1.8 meg floppies, that were a bit slower and less reliable, to some magic 1.22 meg format that mysteriously made my floppies faster.
Ahh, those were the days
I have very *ahem* fond memories of spending the whole day formatting and copying Civ2 to 96 floppies... ouch!
Well I gave you what you asked for... and obviously credit card numbers are an entirely different matter, but here's the thing. Around here we have these things called personal ID cards with our photo, fingerprint etc, and you can basically do absolutely nothing legally binding without presenting it, and if its anything to do with banking like a loan, you're gonna need a lot more than that, like proof that you live at your stated adress, your fiscal ID card, and two reliable witnesses (or whatever you call it) that will be responsible for paying your loan if you magically disappear, proof that you work for the stated company with the stated salary, and all of your signatures would have to be authenticated by a governmental notary.
On top of that our ID cards are very hard to counterfit, they're full of little security systems like bank notes, plus some electronic stuff, and we need them to do as little as taking a college exam, sending or picking up a parcel from the post office or even going to a club or a certain theme park. I certainly wish I could have had someone smart "steal" my identity and pass those math exams I failed back in 1997 but its not exactly trivial - they would need to look exactly like me and sign exactly like me.
Also, no one uses credit cards here. We use debit cards. If you had my PIN number, you would still need a matching card. Even checks have some security built into them, you cant exchange a check for real money, ever, at all, you need to deposit it into a bank account, and the bank withholds the check for 5 days before the money is put into your account. So if I report the check as stolen, you'll be getting your hands on some tasty jail time instead of my money.
It all sounds like you americans have a horribly insecure system in place, at least compared to us. Numbers won't get you anywhere, you need the physical cards, and very often you need physical presence to confirm your ID, and they all have cameras so if you try anything funny, it's all on tape.
Having said all of that, my point was never about stealing money. It's about people with an excessive love of privacy, and that scares me. It has always been frustrating and annoying to me that some people won't tell me their age, real name or the general area where they live, even after I've known them online for several years. Has the world all gone anti-social or something? WTF are you doing in a chat room if you dont want people to get to know you? I dont have any secrets, and I probably never will. If there's anything about your life that embarasses you, then you probably shouldn't be doing it in the first place. I dont smoke, I dont drink, I do watch porn but heck, everyone does and even my mom knows I do, I dont have a religion or political party or even a favorite sports team, and I sure as heck dont cheat on my fiancee.
I'm not the AC above, but the man has a point. You americans are traditionally known here in Europe as an immature people, always seeking someone to sue instead of acknowledging that you should be held accountable for your actions. :P
:( :D
If you want my data, by all means, take it.
Name: Jorge Lima
Bank account number: I have no idea, and no significant amount of money in it either
SSAN: I dont know what this thing is, I probably dont have one.
Birthdate: Jan 4 1980
Address: Rua Arco do Carvalhao, 21, 3E
Salary: None
So what ya gonna do, send me a postcard? Pay me a visit? Bomb the fuck out of my entire building? Set it on fire? Get real. You are once again ignoring a simple fact that all privacy zealots ignore: You Are Not Special.
No one gives a fuck about your data. No one is out to get you. If you give your adress to 100 people you meet on the web, not a single one will pay you a visit. Heck, not even my RL friends ever pay me a visit
If any of you peeps are ever in Lisbon, Portugal, feel free to stop by and I will show you around town and buy you a cup of coffee.
Heck, if any of you slashbots are FROM Lisbon I would absolutely love to meet you
Uh, no, but close. "Four" means "furnace" or "oven".
The correct translation of "fuck all" as in "fuck everyone" would be "foutre tous". If you mean "fuck all" as in "fuck everything" it would be "foutre tout".
If you really mean "fuck-all" as in "nothing" then well, you can't directly translate idioms... FWIW, "nothing" in French is "rien".
Well, why would you need to keep the egg warm in a "hothouse climate"? Or at all? Is it totally impossible that dinosaurs could very well develop and hatch at room temperature?
Besides, body heat isnt required to warm something up. Mere insulation will do it. As in, let the egg catch some rays during the day, and insulate it with your body after dark.
Uh, dude, this isnt Star Trek, our propulsion technology is horribly primitive and so our spaceships kinda have to "sail" instead of going directly from one place to another. You see, it would take a fuel tank the size of a small asteroid to get anywhere, and dont forget that the fuel itself has to be pushed by something, requiring even more fuel, which also has to be pushed by something...
Our current way of sending things anywhere is more like throwing a rock with your arm, after solving a bunch of really complicated equations to calculate the best way of throwing it so the wind (gravity) will give you the best free ride.
Of course they may very well want to take advantage of this opportunity to study the sun or something... I'm not a rocket scientist.
Well yes, good point about the radiation. :)
But how far does it penetrate ice and soil in general? Mars has polar caps, and while I dont know for sure, I always assumed they were like ours: huge layers of ice several miles thick.
I'm not a physicist
Look, it's just the way science works. People form a hypothesis, do a lot of testing to confirm it, submit it to peer-reviewed journals where other scientists attempt to reproduce their results.
It takes more than a 5-minute experiment to get any degree of certainty in science.
Would you rather that they announced fantastically overhyped results before doing any testing?
Frankly I don't know what the big deal is about liquid water and mars. We know that there's plenty of frozen water, and also that the martian atmosphere contains trace amounts of moisture. Is it 0.3% or 0.03%? It's been a while.
If we know that there's solid and gaseous water, liquid water just seems like something obvious and not a major discovery.
The really big deal would be quantifying that liquid water, which is almost impossible. We have no idea if there are gigantic oceans hidden underground, or even a few smaller pools, or anything at all.
Inside our planet there are literally tons of water, and in many cities that's what you drink, purified underground water.
I'm not an expert, but why aren't they doing more seismographic tests, or even looking at sending a ground penetrating radar to mars?
I dont know about the radar but seismographs are small and cheap...
Around 1995 scientists extracted bacteria from an insect's stomach, that had been trapped in amber for 125 million years, and they lived.
A few years later, scientists revived bacteria that had been dormant inside a crystal of common table salt for 250 million years!
Even so, Mars has been geologically dead for 1.5 billion years, so I don't know how how these paltry 8 million years are suddenly so significant.
I was expecting someone to post something like this.
Mandrake the distro was indeed based on Mandrake the character. Their earlier logo was a penguin dressed as a magician