I know I'm not going to buy a PS3 on launch day. Not unless there is some really killer game out for it (not likely with most launch titles). If it's like the 360 (better graphics, but not really better games), then it's going to be a tough sell.
Of course the PS3 will have the advantage of launching in Japan first and giving the game makers some time to build some quality games before the US launch.
The cops around here crack down on non-carding every couple of years or so. The fines are really stiff too. Most businesses around here card everybody who isn't an AARP member (much to the delight of my mother when she comes by to visit). The movie theatres have to seperate out the screens showing R rated movies and put a velvet rope between the sections with an usher who checks your ID again to make sure you're over 17 or accompanied by a parent. NC17 and X rated films would probably get the same treatment if they were allowed at all.
You could just trash Safari and install Firefox (or leave Safari there and install Firefox). It's not like the browser is integrated into the OS or anything.
As if your 2 Ghz machine is going to be hard pressed to play Starcraft or Diablo anyway. I'd wager a bet that even through Rosetta your machine will have more than enough power to play those games. WC3 might strain it a bit, but I'll probably still be playable too.
Actually, if you don't have a license in the US, you can get a non-drivers license government issued photo ID as a replacement. Lots of old people who can't drive anymore have them.
Of course it's not compulsory, and most places go out of their way to give you alternate means of identification if you don't have one for whatever reason (you'll see wording like: Provide one from column A (which has passport, drivers license, government photo ID, military ID, etc...) or two from column B (bank statements, credit cards, etc...).
That said, there are some things that will stop you dead if you don't have a government issued photo ID. Entering most military bases for one. Buying alcohol or cigarettes or going into an R rated film for another.
Because China has more men able for military service than our entire population.
And no way to get them here. China's military threat mostly comes from its ballistic missiles, and even those are little threat to the US. The real reason we don't shut out China entirely is the cheap labor. Our economies are too intertwined to embargo them without serious repercussions.
Fish are wonderful nutritionally, but they don't provide everything a body needs. Worse, the sub would be spending all of its time fishing instead of actually doing its job.
Yes, it's exactly like WoW except that there are no monsters to kill and no crafting and no levels or xp and no storyline and no quests but with virtually limitless ability to build anything your heart desires from the ground up, including programming it and texturing it however you like. In WoW you can kill monsters to get different wearable items (armor, weapons, etc...), in Second Life you can build your own clothes (in any shape you want) from scratch. I was at a party once and the Kool-Aid man showed up. It wasn't like most games (medium sized fat avatar painted red), but was an actual pitcher with ice cubes and everything.
In other words, it's almost nothing like WoW, except that both games are online. It's not even really a game per say, more like a toy. One of the biggest differences is that Linden Labs (who makes Second Life) actually encourages people to try to make real US dollars from stuff they do in SL. There is a built-in system for converting in-game currency into US$ and everything.
On the other hand, if you want to see numbers fly over the heads of bad guys, then SL is definatly not the game for you. There is a little bit of PvP combat, but given the nature of the game (anybody can build anything) it's horribly unbalanced and basically nobody does it outside of limited events where the rules can be locked down some more. Actually, that is the biggest strength and biggest weakness of SL: It has almost no rules. This makes for a prolifiration of sex clubs and whatnot, but it also means peopel are free to build whatever they feel like.
Hmm, 600x800 is 480,000 pixels. If you're taking 30MB to store the image, that means each pixel is taking about 65 bytes or so to store. Was it stored per-pixel in some XML format or something?
The engineers didn't think so, that's why they quit and formed a company you may have heard of: nVidia. That's also one of the big reasons nVidia cards are optimized more for OpenGL than for DirectX.
Second Life is a surprisingly hardware intensive game. My wifes iMac (1.25Ghz G4 with a Geforce FX 5200) really dogs on SL. It runs, but it's not smooth enough to pilot aircraft or anything. She can look around at the scenery, build, and shop just fine, but anything that requires higher framerates (combat, some games) is right out.
Shoot, even if you upgrade to the Premium account you can sell the weekly stipend on the Lindex and get your money back. Heck, there might even be enough profit in that (if the Lindex doesn't keep sliding like it has) to pay for the power your computer is using.
There is an in-game money market. Players can buy (with real US$) Linden dollars off of each other. The money is pushed back into a paypal account when you sell your in-game money.
Traceable to what? A fake AOL account using a solen credit card? I hope you're not seriously thinking that the scammer is going to use his real name when setting up the fake account?
Re:What the fuck is 'CableCARD'?
on
CableCARD In-Depth
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Yeah, because it would kill you to read the first few lines of the linked article.
Um, as a consumer there isn't much appeal
on
CableCARD In-Depth
·
· Score: 5, Informative
So, the industry has been working on these cards since 1997 or so. The biggest hurdle seems to be how to encrypt the video stream umpteen times because they're dead paranoid about hackers. As a result, 8 years later, the technology is ready but is already outdated because consumers started demanding more from their cable provider (thank you TiVo) and the 1997 designed cards couldn't handle it.
Oh, the industry says, lets fix that in the 2.0 release. So they begin work on it. Unfortunatly, that's still vapor and it looks like the 2.0 release might be ready just about the time it's getting killed off by yet another technology.
Why does it take so long to develop these things? Well, a big reason is that they have to figure out new and exciting places to encrypt the datastream again. Also, there is a requirement to make it as annoying to the end user as possible by denying them the use of their DVRs and making it so you have to buy your computer from an OEM if you want to watch TV on it. At the end of the day, if the technology actually takes off, it will probably be hacked anyway (probably with mod chips/special remote codes for TVs and DVRs that enable the output regardless of state of the no-copy flag).
Basically, this is a technology that the cable companies didn't want to implement in the first place (Congress forced them to), and they've done everything in their power to make it unappealing to the end user to discourage adoption and let them extend the deadline passed by Congress and the FCC for as long as possible. It's also an example of DRM concerns basically killing what would otherwise be a pretty decent product.
I can't wait to see what happens when someone steals a credit card to phish more credit card numbers out of clueless AOL users. "The email came with the little icon that said it was legit, of course I had to verify my account details!"
Heh, I wish I was in charge of that. I only went down to see that trainwreck in progress. Albout half of the people left the room as he slowly veered off into crazytown.
Stallman came out to speak at MITRE a couple of years back. It was right after the paper MITRE published that basically said "yeah, you can use open source software on government probjects, the risks are managable and the cost savings can be great".
So he's in a room with a bunch of mostly older computer engineers in the goverment sector. The first part of his speech goes alright, but then he starts driving off into crazytown. By the end of the speech, he's put on a robe and halo(!!!) and is talking about everyone embracing his ideals. Mind you, this is to a bunch of men mostly wearing suits in a corporate setting. I've never felt so embarrassed to be an open source advocate.
I really appreciate what RMS is trying to do, especially since from his prospective the world is going crazy with the proliferation of DRM technologies and restrictions on what you can and can't do with stuff you own, but nobody is going to take him seriously if he tries to compare himself with Jesus. RMS is his own worst enemy.
Who's going to administer the test to see if you're qualified to have children? As everybody on Slashdot knows, a certification is often just a piece of paper that you can get by spending some bucks and memorizing a book without even really understanding it. How many times have you met a MCSE who can't seem to solve the most basic of problems?
Unless handled very carefully, the certification process does little to insure that the person is fit for the job. For something like parenthood, it's going to be nearly impossible to come up with a good generalist course and certification exam that covers all aspects of parenthood while not overly burdening the system or the applicants.
Oh yeah, everybody would love to just stick it to their local monopoly; be it cable, telephone, or broadband but sadly there are often no competitors for their services. In many places the town's zoning regulations prohibit competitors (it's how you got the service in the first place!) and unless you move you have little choice in the matter. The short range on DSL is the biggest problem. Unlike cable, there are often competitors with better service and/or better prices for DSL service. With Cable or Fiber you're just SOL if you don't like your local provider.
I've often had a suspicion that a lot of the whining about Paypal came from people who were trying to run scams and were caught by them (which is why a common theme is "they locked me out of MY money").
One thing I've learned over the years is that scammers tend to be the one that cry the loudest when they get caught. A lot of them think they can cause enough ruckas to get their money and run, but apparently Paypal doesn't play that game. It doesn't take much time to register paypalreallysucksdonkeyballs.com, put on some sob story about how you're money is locked up because of the evil corporation (BEWARE!!) and get it posted on Digg, Slashdot, and the like.
Now, nobody is perfect, so I wouldn't be surprised if some innocent people were caught up too, but I seriously doubt it's as bad as the Paypal hater sites would make you think.
In a lot of ways, Paypal's general lack of guarentees is not as good for scammers as regular credit cards. With credit cards, as long as they're not trying to scam people for millions, they'll probably get away with it because the credit card companies will reimburse the buyers and won't spend much time hunting you down. With Paypal you can't be sure the guy on the other end isn't some internet detective type that will hunt you down and call your parents and friends trying to get his money back (this has happened).
Finally a word of advice for anybody buying anything off eBay or through Paypal: Caveat Emptor.
Although it's totally a consumer camera, the newer (x50) Elphs from Canon (the ones with the extra large display in the back) shoot pictures incredibly fast. The downtime between shots is less than the average winding speed of most consumer 35mms. The power on time is really fast too. The only major loss is shutter release to actual picture taken time, as the camera still needs 300-500ms to focus the image.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect the PS3 Blu-Ray player will be braindamaged like the PS2's DVD player.
I know I'm not going to buy a PS3 on launch day. Not unless there is some really killer game out for it (not likely with most launch titles). If it's like the 360 (better graphics, but not really better games), then it's going to be a tough sell.
Of course the PS3 will have the advantage of launching in Japan first and giving the game makers some time to build some quality games before the US launch.
The cops around here crack down on non-carding every couple of years or so. The fines are really stiff too. Most businesses around here card everybody who isn't an AARP member (much to the delight of my mother when she comes by to visit). The movie theatres have to seperate out the screens showing R rated movies and put a velvet rope between the sections with an usher who checks your ID again to make sure you're over 17 or accompanied by a parent. NC17 and X rated films would probably get the same treatment if they were allowed at all.
You could just trash Safari and install Firefox (or leave Safari there and install Firefox). It's not like the browser is integrated into the OS or anything.
As if your 2 Ghz machine is going to be hard pressed to play Starcraft or Diablo anyway. I'd wager a bet that even through Rosetta your machine will have more than enough power to play those games. WC3 might strain it a bit, but I'll probably still be playable too.
Actually, if you don't have a license in the US, you can get a non-drivers license government issued photo ID as a replacement. Lots of old people who can't drive anymore have them. Of course it's not compulsory, and most places go out of their way to give you alternate means of identification if you don't have one for whatever reason (you'll see wording like: Provide one from column A (which has passport, drivers license, government photo ID, military ID, etc...) or two from column B (bank statements, credit cards, etc...).
That said, there are some things that will stop you dead if you don't have a government issued photo ID. Entering most military bases for one. Buying alcohol or cigarettes or going into an R rated film for another.
Because China has more men able for military service than our entire population. And no way to get them here. China's military threat mostly comes from its ballistic missiles, and even those are little threat to the US. The real reason we don't shut out China entirely is the cheap labor. Our economies are too intertwined to embargo them without serious repercussions.
Or until all of the sailors die of scruvy.
Fish are wonderful nutritionally, but they don't provide everything a body needs. Worse, the sub would be spending all of its time fishing instead of actually doing its job.
Because caddies are expensive and bulky?
Yes, it's exactly like WoW except that there are no monsters to kill and no crafting and no levels or xp and no storyline and no quests but with virtually limitless ability to build anything your heart desires from the ground up, including programming it and texturing it however you like. In WoW you can kill monsters to get different wearable items (armor, weapons, etc...), in Second Life you can build your own clothes (in any shape you want) from scratch. I was at a party once and the Kool-Aid man showed up. It wasn't like most games (medium sized fat avatar painted red), but was an actual pitcher with ice cubes and everything.
In other words, it's almost nothing like WoW, except that both games are online. It's not even really a game per say, more like a toy. One of the biggest differences is that Linden Labs (who makes Second Life) actually encourages people to try to make real US dollars from stuff they do in SL. There is a built-in system for converting in-game currency into US$ and everything.
On the other hand, if you want to see numbers fly over the heads of bad guys, then SL is definatly not the game for you. There is a little bit of PvP combat, but given the nature of the game (anybody can build anything) it's horribly unbalanced and basically nobody does it outside of limited events where the rules can be locked down some more. Actually, that is the biggest strength and biggest weakness of SL: It has almost no rules. This makes for a prolifiration of sex clubs and whatnot, but it also means peopel are free to build whatever they feel like.
Hmm, 600x800 is 480,000 pixels. If you're taking 30MB to store the image, that means each pixel is taking about 65 bytes or so to store. Was it stored per-pixel in some XML format or something?
The engineers didn't think so, that's why they quit and formed a company you may have heard of: nVidia. That's also one of the big reasons nVidia cards are optimized more for OpenGL than for DirectX.
Second Life is a surprisingly hardware intensive game. My wifes iMac (1.25Ghz G4 with a Geforce FX 5200) really dogs on SL. It runs, but it's not smooth enough to pilot aircraft or anything. She can look around at the scenery, build, and shop just fine, but anything that requires higher framerates (combat, some games) is right out.
Shoot, even if you upgrade to the Premium account you can sell the weekly stipend on the Lindex and get your money back. Heck, there might even be enough profit in that (if the Lindex doesn't keep sliding like it has) to pay for the power your computer is using.
There is an in-game money market. Players can buy (with real US$) Linden dollars off of each other. The money is pushed back into a paypal account when you sell your in-game money.
Traceable to what? A fake AOL account using a solen credit card? I hope you're not seriously thinking that the scammer is going to use his real name when setting up the fake account?
Yeah, because it would kill you to read the first few lines of the linked article.
So, the industry has been working on these cards since 1997 or so. The biggest hurdle seems to be how to encrypt the video stream umpteen times because they're dead paranoid about hackers. As a result, 8 years later, the technology is ready but is already outdated because consumers started demanding more from their cable provider (thank you TiVo) and the 1997 designed cards couldn't handle it.
Oh, the industry says, lets fix that in the 2.0 release. So they begin work on it. Unfortunatly, that's still vapor and it looks like the 2.0 release might be ready just about the time it's getting killed off by yet another technology.
Why does it take so long to develop these things? Well, a big reason is that they have to figure out new and exciting places to encrypt the datastream again. Also, there is a requirement to make it as annoying to the end user as possible by denying them the use of their DVRs and making it so you have to buy your computer from an OEM if you want to watch TV on it. At the end of the day, if the technology actually takes off, it will probably be hacked anyway (probably with mod chips/special remote codes for TVs and DVRs that enable the output regardless of state of the no-copy flag).
Basically, this is a technology that the cable companies didn't want to implement in the first place (Congress forced them to), and they've done everything in their power to make it unappealing to the end user to discourage adoption and let them extend the deadline passed by Congress and the FCC for as long as possible. It's also an example of DRM concerns basically killing what would otherwise be a pretty decent product.
I can't wait to see what happens when someone steals a credit card to phish more credit card numbers out of clueless AOL users. "The email came with the little icon that said it was legit, of course I had to verify my account details!"
Heh, I wish I was in charge of that. I only went down to see that trainwreck in progress. Albout half of the people left the room as he slowly veered off into crazytown.
Stallman came out to speak at MITRE a couple of years back. It was right after the paper MITRE published that basically said "yeah, you can use open source software on government probjects, the risks are managable and the cost savings can be great".
So he's in a room with a bunch of mostly older computer engineers in the goverment sector. The first part of his speech goes alright, but then he starts driving off into crazytown. By the end of the speech, he's put on a robe and halo(!!!) and is talking about everyone embracing his ideals. Mind you, this is to a bunch of men mostly wearing suits in a corporate setting. I've never felt so embarrassed to be an open source advocate.
I really appreciate what RMS is trying to do, especially since from his prospective the world is going crazy with the proliferation of DRM technologies and restrictions on what you can and can't do with stuff you own, but nobody is going to take him seriously if he tries to compare himself with Jesus. RMS is his own worst enemy.
Who's going to administer the test to see if you're qualified to have children? As everybody on Slashdot knows, a certification is often just a piece of paper that you can get by spending some bucks and memorizing a book without even really understanding it. How many times have you met a MCSE who can't seem to solve the most basic of problems?
Unless handled very carefully, the certification process does little to insure that the person is fit for the job. For something like parenthood, it's going to be nearly impossible to come up with a good generalist course and certification exam that covers all aspects of parenthood while not overly burdening the system or the applicants.
Oh yeah, everybody would love to just stick it to their local monopoly; be it cable, telephone, or broadband but sadly there are often no competitors for their services. In many places the town's zoning regulations prohibit competitors (it's how you got the service in the first place!) and unless you move you have little choice in the matter. The short range on DSL is the biggest problem. Unlike cable, there are often competitors with better service and/or better prices for DSL service. With Cable or Fiber you're just SOL if you don't like your local provider.
I've often had a suspicion that a lot of the whining about Paypal came from people who were trying to run scams and were caught by them (which is why a common theme is "they locked me out of MY money").
One thing I've learned over the years is that scammers tend to be the one that cry the loudest when they get caught. A lot of them think they can cause enough ruckas to get their money and run, but apparently Paypal doesn't play that game. It doesn't take much time to register paypalreallysucksdonkeyballs.com, put on some sob story about how you're money is locked up because of the evil corporation (BEWARE!!) and get it posted on Digg, Slashdot, and the like.
Now, nobody is perfect, so I wouldn't be surprised if some innocent people were caught up too, but I seriously doubt it's as bad as the Paypal hater sites would make you think.
In a lot of ways, Paypal's general lack of guarentees is not as good for scammers as regular credit cards. With credit cards, as long as they're not trying to scam people for millions, they'll probably get away with it because the credit card companies will reimburse the buyers and won't spend much time hunting you down. With Paypal you can't be sure the guy on the other end isn't some internet detective type that will hunt you down and call your parents and friends trying to get his money back (this has happened).
Finally a word of advice for anybody buying anything off eBay or through Paypal: Caveat Emptor.
Although it's totally a consumer camera, the newer (x50) Elphs from Canon (the ones with the extra large display in the back) shoot pictures incredibly fast. The downtime between shots is less than the average winding speed of most consumer 35mms. The power on time is really fast too. The only major loss is shutter release to actual picture taken time, as the camera still needs 300-500ms to focus the image.