After playing Zelda, Ocarina of Time, I still have this desire to hit the large stones on the lawns in our campus with a large sledgehammer, just to see if there are any secret tunnels leading to quest characters.
When my little cousins played Super Mario 64 first came out, they later visited an art museum, and wer tempted to try taking running jumps at large paintings to see if there were any secret entrances.
Anyway, it's when you start having dreams about gaming that it maybe too much. But then again when you're dreaming, maybe you just haven't played enough?
When you're dreaming about a video game, you're seeing your mind self-optimising to play that game more effectively.
Where I once worked we had to manage some phone lines to call centre in the Highlands of Scotland somewhere so for 'redundancy' we bought lines off both BT and C&W.
Strangely enough, the bridge mentioned was the rail bridge that ran over the River Ness to Inverness, and was washed away on the 7th February 1989 - all the fibre optic cabling to Inverness ran over the one bridge. I happened to be in the Network Management Centre at the time, and saw both links go down simultaneously.
Despite demands from management to fix this problem immediately, there wasn't much anyone could do, unless someone could provide us with a spare diving suit and oxygen tank, and an emergency underwater fibre optic repair kit.
That would be "iceburger". which is what you get when you leave a box of regular hamburgers at the back of the deep freeze, and forget about them until you are relocating and have to clean everything out.
... when you lease multiple outside lines for redundancy, that the carriers actually do use separate paths all the way through, and don't go through a single point any way along the line.
I once worked for a company who had multiple fiber-optic links for their WAN. For redundancy, we had two ISDN links to a remote site. Unfortunately, both links went down because they were both piggy-backed over 'virtual ISDN circuits' on a fibre-optic cable which happened to run over a bridge.
Due to a flash floods the bridge collapsed, along with both ISDN circuits.
I'm puzzled as to why Legos hold such fascination for slashdotters, in light of that.
Maybe because the most advanced lego models (for anyone who was a teenager back in the 1980's at least) consisted of one or more moving systems (the 8860 car consisted of a rack and pinion steering mechanism, gear box, differential gear and suspension system. If you managed to get a copy of the 8888 advanced model guide, you could also build a Lego robot dog, Lego printer, and the most advanced purely mechanical (ie. no electronics) Lego model, the Programmable Crane"
Once you learnt the basics of how various things worked, you started combining these to make even more complex models (eg. robot arms).
The patience and creative thinking required to make these models naturally extended itself to home computer programming, and eventually to a career in the computer industry.
I wondered how long we would have to wait for this to happen. I always imagined it would be university students or black-hats. I never imagined it would be spammers/spyware authors trying to kill each other's programs.
Back in the 1980's,a research project was funded to determine the best way for rescue helicopters to find survivors wearing orange life-belts floating in the North Sea. Several proposals for advanced optical systems were proposed; these included infra-red cameras and laser scanning. The other system was based on bio-technology: A handful of pigeons were kept in enclosed containers on each side of the helicopter. The containers were warmed by an electrical heater, and had a window kept clean by a windscreen wiper. Each pigeon was trained to peck an alarm button whenever they saw any red or orange dots; The maintenance costs were simple; grain and water.
A better solution would be for all the companies to list the chemicals they release into the environment, and also to list the chemicals they need to purchase. Whenever the two lists match, there's the opportunity to reduce costs at the same time as helping to protect the environment.
One example is the carbon dioxide scrubbers on coal power stations in the UK. Collecting all the soot and ash led to the recycling of tin, which could be sold onto other companies. The downside was that this led to the closure of tin mines in Cornwall.
Oh yes, I remember those days... In our Computer Science department, all the most referred to papers were the least accessible. There was only one copy of each paper in the reference section of the library, and students would sabotage each other's attempt to learn (if not the professors attempt to detect plagiarism) by putting them back anywhere but in the section they were supposed to be. Nobody had heard of microfilm let alone online databases. But did that stop attempts by students to knock up a paper quickly? Nope, just copy a couple of paragraphs from each paper to make up the required number of thousands of words.
With information in electronic format, nearly if not all of the above problems can be resolved.
I can't see the problem. The 24 hour membership requirement is just a nanny state restriction on people being allowed to enjoy their leisure.
The fear was that somebody would get drunk, wander past a casino, go in and make a reckless gamble. Although most casinos are so far out of the way, and discretely signed, that nobody would really notice.
As for regeneration, that all depends on where it is. There is a damn good regeneration case to be made for building resort casinos at Blackpool and other declining British resorts.
I personally have no objections to the regeneration of places like Blackpool through the use of gambling. I seriously doubt that it would make any difference; If someone wants a gamble of a lifetime, they would probably take a package tour to Las Vegas anyway.
Your last assertion makes no sense at all. Why would the government prefer gamblers to workers?
I don't believe it's the government, it's more the banks/financial investors. I've attended conferences from directors who are advising others on setting up their own companies. Many were advised to set up their own companies by taking out loans and remortgaging their homes. Their problems start when their growth figures don't match investors expectations, and the investors want to liquidate the company and seize the assets (ie. their homes). Their advice - avoid debt, start with small goals, then expand once you've made a profit (Two examples to back this up; Rare Ltd and Spider Systems).
Oops. By cyclists, I meant bicycles. Rather difficult to switch the engine on and off again; maybe if you tried to do wheelies on one of the strips it might trigger the lights.
Yes, I remember seeing the blade mark cuts on the roads. Unfortunately, these magnetic sensors weren't sensitive enough to detect cyclists. The worse case scenerio was when the traffic lights were programmed to remain at green for the main road unless traffic was detected on either of the side roads. So any hapless cyclist had to get off his/her bicycle, walk over to the pedestrian crossing, press the button, wait, then cross, and get back on his/her bicycle.
[Fred tries to digitize the pig-lizard with disastrous results] Jason Nesmith: What? What was that? Alexander Dane: Uh, nothing. Jason Nesmith: I heard some squealing or something. Gwen DeMarco: Oh, no. Everything's fine. Teb: But the animal is inside out. Jason Nesmith: I heard that! It turned inside out? [the pig-lizard explodes] Teb: And it exploded. Jason Nesmith: Did I just hear that the animal turned inside out, and then it EXPLODED?
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Except that the Internet was already growing at this time with many Mom and Pop ISP's, and that Al Gore's legislation seemed only to be designed to give control of the Internet to four major national companies.
Can somebody tell me what this means? Why would Labour (which I assume to mean the UK Labour Party) want to get people excited about cheating at mega casinos?
Gambling in casino's in the UK is restricted to private casinos, where you have to register as a member 24 hours before being allowed to make any bets. There are betting shops (bookies) which allow people to make bets on races, but they have to keep the inside of the shop obscured (usually by posters) to avoid anyone falling to temptation. Many pubs and nightclubs have the odd slot machine (fruit machine) with the spinning reels, but they don't really rake in more than maybe 300 pounds a week, and have to have the theme changed every 4-5 weeks, otherwise the punters lose interest. There's also the traditional beach arcades, where you could play various skill games for a pound coin.
The Labour party was caught out with some dodgy visits to and from the Los Vegas casino owners, over the "tightening of gambling laws". The argument goes that since the Internet is allowing people to gamble from home or work, they need new legislation to ban the slot machines from pubs/night clubs, and that these should be replaced by dozens of new super-casinos able to set up all across the UK, especially in deprived areas. The Labour party spin is that this would allow the average UK member of the public to share in the glamour of high society gambling (image of men in tuxedo's and women in elegant evening gowns), although in reality the casinos would simply have hundreds of electronic slot machines linked up for national prizes.
Given the land shortage in the UK, there are far more practical uses for regenerated industrial sites. These include health and fitness centres, shopping malls, conference centres, office blocks, mixed-income housing, with casinos right at the bottom of the list. Especially since there is no real public demand for more casinos.
And there is also a growing public suspicion that New Labour seems to disregard anyone or any business who atttempts to earn a basic living (let alone make a fortune) from honest hard work, but is only interested in people who are prepared to recklessly gamble their own money eg. the obsession with getting "young people" to become entrepeneurs, or getting experienced senior managers to remortgage their homes in order to set up their own companies, or having multi-millionaires buy out companies with declining sales, and simply rebrand everyone and everything with uniforms and company logos.
The parent really needs to read National Enquirer more often:)
It's a scientific fact that Phobos, the innermost moon of Mars is on a slow death spiral towards Mars; the orbital radius is declining by about one metre per year. In around 150 million years, it's either going to disintegrate into a ring or crash onto Mars (maybe both).
If there was any intelligent life on Mars, they would either have left, or have gone deep underground.
(I like reading these wacky ideas - not because I believe them, but they often have interesting ideas relating to architecture, user interface and ergonomics).
They can actually do that already. I was watching "Impact" tonight, and there was this story of a teenage girl who was in a car-crash, in which an accident cut all the nerves in her upper arm. The only solution was for the doctors to use nerve tissue grafts from a dead donor. This didn't give her immediate nerve cell regeneration, but it did provide a support for the existing nerves to regrow. Eventually, she regained most of the control of her hand.
Oh man, I remember those. The worst case was when I was trying to fix a SLIP (the model protocol) bug in an Ethernet probe. You could step through the code and everything worked correctly. The Token Ring network version worked correctly without failing. But run the system normally, and it failed to connect. The quickest solution was to compare the two code segments of each system; the only difference. was a 15 millisecond wait. Once replaced the system worked correctly (This was a requirement specified in the back page appendix of the modem chip specification).
You can buy a single VGA projector for something like 500 pounds. For just 3000 pounds, you can build your own virtuality cave. That is assuming you can modify your application to display all six views (six sides of a cube = 2400x 1200 framebuffer). For me that is the ultimate game system with full 360 x 180 visual field.
2. Men and Women have different numbers of ribs (count them... same number)
Actually, people can have different numbers of ribs. Some people actually have genetic mutations that give then extra rib bones at the shoulders.
"But Leroi wants to know about those differences; and his book is a celebration of the intrinsic interest of human diversity. After all, it turns out that on average each of us contains 300 potentially harmful mutations - and one in 10 of us has an extra rib. As he says, we are all mutants, but some of us are more mutant than others."
Unfortunately, these "I'm being stolen" devices also get set off whenever there is a major fireworks show like the Edinburgh Festival. Which of course is exactly at the same time as there are large numbers of visitors and their cars in the area.
Slashdot Mirror
After playing Zelda, Ocarina of Time, I still have this desire to hit the large stones on the lawns in our campus with a large sledgehammer, just to see if there are any secret tunnels leading to quest characters.
When my little cousins played Super Mario 64 first came out, they later visited an art museum, and wer tempted to try taking running jumps at large paintings to see if there were any secret entrances.
Anyway, it's when you start having dreams about gaming that it maybe too much. But then again when you're dreaming, maybe you just haven't played enough?
When you're dreaming about a video game, you're seeing your mind self-optimising to play that game more effectively.
Where I once worked we had to manage some phone lines to call centre in the Highlands of Scotland somewhere so for 'redundancy' we bought lines off both BT and C&W.
Strangely enough, the bridge mentioned was the rail bridge that ran over the River Ness to Inverness, and was washed away on the 7th February 1989 - all the fibre optic cabling to Inverness ran over the one bridge. I happened to be in the Network Management Centre at the time, and saw both links go down simultaneously. Despite demands from management to fix this problem immediately, there wasn't much anyone could do, unless someone could provide us with a spare diving suit and oxygen tank, and an emergency underwater fibre optic repair kit.
That would be "iceburger". which is what you get when you leave a box of regular hamburgers at the back of the deep freeze, and forget about them until you are relocating and have to clean everything out.
... when you lease multiple outside lines for redundancy, that the carriers actually do use separate paths all the way through, and don't go through a single point any way along the line.
I once worked for a company who had multiple fiber-optic links for their WAN. For redundancy, we had two ISDN links to a remote site. Unfortunately, both links went down because they were both piggy-backed over 'virtual ISDN circuits' on a fibre-optic cable which happened to
run over a bridge.
Due to a flash floods the bridge collapsed, along with both ISDN circuits.
I thought IP meant Internet Protocol... ... the Chinese are going to lock up every programmer who writes a dodgy protocol driver?
It was assembled - the two halves must join somewhere...
I'm puzzled as to why Legos hold such fascination for slashdotters, in light of that.
Maybe because the most advanced lego models (for anyone who was a teenager back in the 1980's at least) consisted of one or more moving systems (the 8860 car consisted of a rack and pinion steering mechanism, gear box, differential gear and suspension system. If you managed to get a copy of the 8888 advanced model guide, you could also build a Lego robot dog, Lego printer, and the most advanced purely mechanical (ie. no electronics) Lego model, the Programmable Crane"
Once you learnt the basics of how various things worked, you started combining these to make even more complex models (eg. robot arms).
The patience and creative thinking required to make these models naturally extended itself to home computer programming, and eventually to a career in the computer industry.
I wondered how long we would have to wait for this to happen. I always imagined it would be university students or black-hats. I never imagined it would be spammers/spyware authors trying to kill each other's programs.
Back in the 1980's,a research project was funded to determine the best way for rescue helicopters to find survivors wearing orange life-belts floating in the North Sea. Several proposals for advanced optical systems were proposed; these included infra-red cameras and laser scanning. The other system was based on bio-technology: A handful of pigeons were kept in enclosed containers on each side of the helicopter. The containers were warmed by an electrical heater, and had a window kept clean by a windscreen wiper. Each pigeon was trained to peck an alarm button whenever they saw any red or orange dots; The maintenance costs were simple; grain and water.
... it's newspaper articles or stories which catch my interest, are well balanced and cover the story in detail, but never
A better solution would be for all the companies to list the chemicals they release into the environment, and also to list the chemicals they need to purchase. Whenever the two lists match, there's the opportunity to reduce costs at the same time as helping to protect the environment.
One example is the carbon dioxide scrubbers on coal power stations in the UK. Collecting all the soot and ash led to the recycling of tin, which could be sold onto other companies. The downside was that this led to the closure of tin mines in Cornwall.
Oh yes, I remember those days ... In our Computer Science department, all the most referred to papers were the least accessible. There was only one copy of each paper in the reference section of the library, and students would sabotage each other's attempt to learn (if not the professors attempt to detect plagiarism) by putting them back anywhere but in the section they were supposed to be. Nobody had heard of microfilm let alone online databases. But did that stop attempts by students to knock up a paper quickly? Nope, just copy a couple of paragraphs from each paper to make up the required number of thousands of words.
With information in electronic format, nearly if not all of the above problems can be resolved.
I can't see the problem. The 24 hour membership requirement is just a nanny state restriction on people being allowed to enjoy their leisure.
The fear was that somebody would get drunk, wander past a casino, go in and make a reckless gamble. Although most casinos are so far out of the way, and discretely signed, that nobody would really notice.
As for regeneration, that all depends on where it is. There is a damn good regeneration case to be made for building resort casinos at Blackpool and other declining British resorts.
I personally have no objections to the regeneration of places like Blackpool through the use of gambling. I seriously doubt that it would make any difference; If someone wants a gamble of a lifetime, they would probably take a package tour to Las Vegas anyway.
Your last assertion makes no sense at all. Why would the government prefer gamblers to workers?
I don't believe it's the government, it's more the banks/financial investors. I've attended conferences from directors who are advising others on setting up their own companies. Many were advised to set up their own companies by taking out loans and remortgaging their homes. Their problems start when their growth figures don't match investors expectations, and the investors want to liquidate the company and seize the assets (ie. their homes). Their advice - avoid debt, start with small goals, then expand once you've made a profit (Two examples to back this up; Rare Ltd and Spider Systems).
Oops. By cyclists, I meant bicycles. Rather difficult to switch the engine on and off again; maybe if you tried to do wheelies on one of the strips it might trigger the lights.
Yes, I remember seeing the blade mark cuts on the roads. Unfortunately, these magnetic sensors weren't sensitive enough to detect cyclists. The worse case scenerio was when the traffic lights were programmed to remain at green for the main road unless traffic was detected on either of the side roads. So any hapless cyclist had to get off his/her bicycle, walk over to the pedestrian crossing, press the button, wait, then cross, and get back on his/her bicycle.
Or from one of the quotes of Galaxy Quest:
[Fred tries to digitize the pig-lizard with disastrous results]
Jason Nesmith: What? What was that?
Alexander Dane: Uh, nothing.
Jason Nesmith: I heard some squealing or something.
Gwen DeMarco: Oh, no. Everything's fine.
Teb: But the animal is inside out.
Jason Nesmith: I heard that! It turned inside out?
[the pig-lizard explodes]
Teb: And it exploded.
Jason Nesmith: Did I just hear that the animal turned inside out, and then it EXPLODED?
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Except that the Internet was already growing at this time with many Mom and Pop ISP's, and that Al Gore's legislation seemed only to be designed to give control of the Internet to four major national companies.
Can somebody tell me what this means? Why would Labour (which I assume to mean the UK Labour Party) want to get people excited about cheating at mega casinos?
Gambling in casino's in the UK is restricted to private casinos, where you have to register as a member 24 hours before being allowed to make any bets. There are betting shops (bookies) which allow people to make bets on races, but they have to keep the inside of the shop obscured (usually by posters) to avoid anyone falling to temptation. Many pubs and nightclubs have the odd slot machine (fruit machine) with the spinning reels, but they don't really rake in more than maybe 300 pounds a week, and have to have the theme changed every 4-5 weeks, otherwise the punters lose interest. There's also the traditional beach arcades, where you could play various skill games for a pound coin.
The Labour party was caught out with some dodgy visits to and from the Los Vegas casino owners, over the "tightening of gambling laws". The argument goes that since the Internet is allowing people to gamble from home or work, they need new legislation to ban the slot machines from pubs/night clubs, and that these should be replaced by dozens of new super-casinos able to set up all across the UK, especially in deprived areas. The Labour party spin is that this would allow the average UK member of the public to share in the glamour of high society gambling (image of men in tuxedo's and women in elegant evening gowns), although in reality the casinos would simply have hundreds of electronic slot machines linked up for national prizes.
Given the land shortage in the UK, there are far more practical uses for regenerated industrial sites. These include health and fitness centres, shopping malls, conference centres, office blocks, mixed-income housing, with casinos right at the bottom of the list. Especially since there is no real public demand for more casinos.
And there is also a growing public suspicion that New Labour seems to disregard anyone or any business who atttempts to earn a basic living (let alone make a fortune) from honest hard work, but is only interested in people who are prepared to recklessly gamble their own money eg. the obsession with getting "young people" to become entrepeneurs, or getting experienced senior managers to remortgage their homes in order to set up their own companies, or having multi-millionaires buy out companies with declining sales, and simply rebrand everyone and everything with uniforms and company logos.
The parent really needs to read National Enquirer more often :)
It's a scientific fact that Phobos, the innermost moon of Mars is on a slow death spiral towards Mars; the orbital radius is declining by about one metre per year. In around 150 million years, it's either going to disintegrate into a ring or crash onto Mars (maybe both).
If there was any intelligent life on Mars, they would either have left, or have gone deep underground.
(I like reading these wacky ideas - not because I believe them, but they often have interesting ideas relating to architecture, user interface and ergonomics).
They can actually do that already. I was watching "Impact" tonight, and there was this story of a teenage girl who was in a car-crash, in which an accident cut all the nerves in her upper arm. The only solution was for the doctors to use nerve tissue grafts from a dead donor. This didn't give her immediate nerve cell regeneration, but it did provide a support for the existing nerves to regrow. Eventually, she regained most of the control of her hand.
Oh man, I remember those. The worst case was when I was trying to fix a SLIP (the model protocol) bug in an Ethernet probe. You could step through the code and everything worked correctly. The Token Ring network version worked correctly without failing. But run the system normally, and it failed to connect. The quickest solution was to compare the two code segments of each system; the only difference. was a 15 millisecond wait. Once replaced the system worked correctly (This was a requirement specified in the back page appendix of the modem chip specification).
You can buy a single VGA projector for something like 500 pounds. For just 3000 pounds, you can build your own virtuality cave. That is assuming you can modify your application to display all six views (six sides of a cube = 2400x 1200 framebuffer). For me that is the ultimate game system with full 360 x 180 visual field.
2. Men and Women have different numbers of ribs (count them... same number)
Actually, people can have different numbers of ribs. Some people actually have genetic mutations that give then extra rib bones at the shoulders.
"But Leroi wants to know about those differences; and his book is a celebration of the intrinsic interest of human diversity. After all, it turns out that on average each of us contains 300 potentially harmful mutations - and one in 10 of us has an extra rib. As he says, we are all mutants, but some of us are more mutant than others."
Source: Sunday Times review
Unfortunately, these "I'm being stolen" devices also get set off whenever there is a major fireworks show like the Edinburgh Festival. Which of course is exactly at the same time as there are large numbers of visitors and their cars in the area.