> What Microsoft gains out of it though is the ability to walk into a game shop, and tell them to build exclusivly for the xbox, because they know that there are exactly $Xboxes out there that can run their game.
Which would make it cool if the game shop could say "but lots of those boxes have been hacked to sit in Linux clusters by people who couldn't care less about our game, the real number is smaller". In reality the numbers that aren't used for gaming are probably negligable, but when has that mattered to a Slashdot Microsoft bashing post?
> I wouldn't expect a bike chained up near a train station in the UK to last a whole day without being stolen or vandalized into unusability.
I work near a station (Cambridge) with hundreds[1] of bikes locked up outside. Theft and vandalism does happen, but most days most bikes are OK.
Going up a couple of posts, a Brompton isn't a toy, and plenty of people do use them for those sort of distances.
[1] See for example http://www.camcycle.org.uk/newsletters/32 /article6.html "Bike racks at the station are already full to capacity again. The 1,050 spaces proposed are clearly insufficient."
So what else were you planning to do with it, except possibly thermal solar panels, or windows (whih also provide solar heat and decrease electric lighting requirements)?
There are people working on solar cells that are strong enough to be usable as roof tiles, rather than having to be in a protecting structure supported on top of the roof. At the moment the big issue _is_ cost.
> Can someone Loan me the $295,000 dollars to buy it?
You might want to look at http://www.timdutton.com/
Much cheaper, and they have years of experience.
Downside - being a displacement boat, not planing, it's a lot slower (6mph, not 30). (And being based on a small Suzuki Jeep, it's slower on land too, but if the roads are congested you are going to be slow anyway).
Ok, it doesn't look as cool, but it has a price list to buy one now, not a projected price to buy one if they ever go into production. (And their website doesn't just tell me I need to download a new version of Flash.)
> should have a look at SafeSpeed. Lots of interesting information
More like the ranting of one loon (Paul Smith). You should have seen the twisted use of statistics he went through to "prove" that everybody driving at 12mph would be just as dangerous before he finally gave up and removed that page.
The Sun is almost certainly completely misrepresenting the situation, but they are a model of journalistic integrity compared with Paul Smith.
No, you don't need a working implementation. And if the writer describes the thing "in such away that it CAN Be engineered from my description" then clearly he _does_ have an idea how it could be implemented in practice.
> But still, in lower-limit games, people are loose enough that bluffing doesn't really help
I recently heard a serious poker player on the radio explaining why it's worth bluffing sometimes. If you don't bluff and lose sometimes, then when you _do_ have a good hand, you won't win much with it. You need your opponents to think "he could be just bluffing again, it's worth raising".
> It may be something like "statistically there should be about 4 people in California that match this profile."
Which means that if you are the only match in the database, there is a 3/4 chance that it wasn't actually your DNA, but the prosecution will still be telling the jury the chance of a random match is only 1 in 10^7. It's an extremely valuable tool for checking on someone who is suspected because of other evidence. As a tool for finding an initial suspect to try and pin a crime on, it's extremely dangerous.
> WD-40 was never to be used as a sexual lubricant unless we really really wanted to court chemical burns
I think your teacher may have been exaggerating.
http://www.wd40.co.uk/media/adobe/WD40%20aerosol %2 0datasheet.pdf just says "May cause drying of skin and/or irritation".
I've washed my hands with it often enough with no problems (to get tar/oil/grease off, followed immediately by soap and water). I wouldn't use it anywhere more sensitive, but I doubt you would be rushing to ER with burns.
Dissolving condoms could be a serious problem though.
(And I don't know about your partner(s), but there's no way my wife would let me use a condom patched with duct tape.)
If a bunch of you actually quit, and they need to get this done right away, they may simply not have time to hire new contractors who know the project well enough to contribute immediately, and aren't you. So you can come back as contractors. Downside, as always with being a contractor, is when the project finishes, you'll be looking for another contract.
> this article probably explains to me why the Segway hasn't been a great success
I think Jobs' quote explains to me why it hasn't been a great success. It sucks.
It's like a bike, only slower, heavier, and more expensive. The self balancing mechanism is very clever, but so what? His wheelchair is brilliant, but as a mass market transport device it's irrelevent.
> If no one exploited the vulnerability then folks like MS might never get around to fixing it
If _no one_ exploited it, it wouldn't matter if it wasn't fixed. That it gets used in a widespread exploit does reduce the risk of it being exploited in a few carefully chosen attacks that aren't noticed until much later though.
> > particularly if the driver of the car is killed in the crash.
>...or if the driver simply doesn't remember, as often happens to people involved in collisions.
Yes - someone I knew was in a crash where he was knocked unconcious and couldn't remember what happened when he came round, the other driver died, and there were no other witnesses.
> Even now where we have home theatre setups which
can rival movie theatres in sound and picture quality, people flock to the theatres because of the (largely) social experience.
People still go to live concerts and live theatre, in part because of the social experience. But a lot more people listen to music and watch TV dramas in their own homes.
Even people without big widescreen TVs and surround systems will watch DVDs and videos more often than they go out to watch a film. And "straight to video" releases already exist. In the future making something for "straight to video on demand" will be cheaper than actually shipping physical tapes to Blockbusters.
(And most of it will be crap, just as most webpages are crap, but there will also be "good but only interesting to a niche market" stuff, if you can find it, which might well mean paying money to an editor/reviewer whose judgement you can trust.)
> Action/Special Effects splits for second as they are both heavily intertwined. It is worthy of note however that the special effects in this case aren't for the sake of, "Hey, lookit me, I'm a special effect!"
The crumbling arches bit on the way to the bridge in Moria fell into that category for me. To some extent so did the "wizard-fu" fight between Gandalf and Saruman. (But showing us Gandalf's fight with the Balrog did make better cinema than just showing Gandalf describing it would have).
And some bleach and some small value notes, probably.
http://money.cnn.com/2003/05/12/news/economy/twe nt y/index.htm
Any sensible person would make the larger notes larger - stops that working, makes life easier for blind and partially sighted people, easier for sorting notes, but no, that would be un-American.
> If the Matrix takes anything from philosophy, it's the Cartesian method - how do you know that what you perceive is real, and not just put there to trick you? Descarte's answer was that you can't, and the only thing you can ever know for sure is that you, the individual doing the questioning, exists.
No, Descartes' answer was that you can be sure that you exist and think, and that you can use that as a _starting_ point to deduce other things. In particular, he went on to deduce the existence of God. You might not agree with his arguments for that, but it is part of his answer.
> I'd say the problem was that it was marketed as high speed broadband.
So would I, but only if I was just working from the Slashdot summary and hadn't actually read the Register story where it's made clear the argument _is_ about the meaning of "broadband".
> "while the weapon is in a storage mode, in essence the system produces 104KW of heat energy." Imagine a bin of these replacement cartridges [...] > Currently Polonium-210 is only produced in microgram quantities
And it has a half life of 138 days, so your stored cartridges need replacing with new stock pretty often.
Slashdot Mirror
> What Microsoft gains out of it though is the ability to walk into a game shop, and tell them to build exclusivly for the xbox, because they know that there are exactly $Xboxes out there that can run their game.
Which would make it cool if the game shop could say "but lots of those boxes have been hacked to sit in Linux clusters by people who couldn't care less about our game, the real number is smaller". In reality the numbers that aren't used for gaming are probably negligable, but when has that mattered to a Slashdot Microsoft bashing post?
> I wouldn't expect a bike chained up near a train station in the UK to last a whole day without being stolen or vandalized into unusability.
2 /article6 .html
I work near a station (Cambridge) with hundreds[1] of bikes locked up outside. Theft and vandalism does happen, but most days most bikes are OK.
Going up a couple of posts, a Brompton isn't a toy, and plenty of people do use them for those sort of distances.
[1] See for example
http://www.camcycle.org.uk/newsletters/3
"Bike racks at the station are already full to capacity again. The 1,050 spaces proposed are clearly insufficient."
> That's going to eat up a lot of roof space...
So what else were you planning to do with it, except possibly thermal solar panels, or windows (whih also provide solar heat and decrease electric lighting requirements)?
There are people working on solar cells that are strong enough to be usable as roof tiles, rather than having to be in a protecting structure supported on top of the roof. At the moment the big issue _is_ cost.
> author of the linked article perhaps is paranoid to the irrational.
David Icke paranoid? You're just saying that because you're part of the Giant Lizard Conspiracy, aren't you?
> Can someone Loan me the $295,000 dollars to buy it?
You might want to look at http://www.timdutton.com/
Much cheaper, and they have years of experience.
Downside - being a displacement boat, not planing, it's a lot slower (6mph, not 30). (And being based on a small Suzuki Jeep, it's slower on land too, but if the roads are congested you are going to be slow anyway).
Ok, it doesn't look as cool, but it has a price list to buy one now, not a projected price to buy one if they ever go into production. (And their website doesn't just tell me I need to download a new version of Flash.)
> should have a look at SafeSpeed. Lots of interesting information
More like the ranting of one loon (Paul Smith). You should have seen the twisted use of statistics he went through to "prove" that everybody driving at 12mph would be just as dangerous before he finally gave up and removed that page.
The Sun is almost certainly completely misrepresenting the situation, but they are a model of journalistic integrity compared with Paul Smith.
No, you don't need a working implementation. And if the writer describes the thing "in such away that it CAN Be engineered from my description" then clearly he _does_ have an idea how it could be implemented in practice.
> But still, in lower-limit games, people are loose enough that bluffing doesn't really help
I recently heard a serious poker player on the radio explaining why it's worth bluffing sometimes.
If you don't bluff and lose sometimes, then when you _do_ have a good hand, you won't win much with it. You need your opponents to think "he could be just bluffing again, it's worth raising".
He was playing in high-stakes games though.
> Lets face it, you throw enough voltage into something, and you can make almost anything flip.
Anything except a dead parrot - 'Mate, this bird wouldn't "voom" if you put four million volts through it!'
> It may be something like "statistically there should be about 4 people in California that match this profile."
Which means that if you are the only match in the database, there is a 3/4 chance that it wasn't actually your DNA, but the prosecution will still be telling the jury the chance of a random match is only 1 in 10^7.
It's an extremely valuable tool for checking on someone who is suspected because of other evidence. As a tool for finding an initial suspect to try and pin a crime on, it's extremely dangerous.
Christmas lights rated for outdoor use tend to be 12V with a transformer. Not having seen the movie, I have no idea whether this is relevent.
> WD-40 was never to be used as a sexual lubricant unless we really really wanted to court chemical burns
l %2 0datasheet.pdf just says "May cause drying of skin and/or irritation".
I think your teacher may have been exaggerating.
http://www.wd40.co.uk/media/adobe/WD40%20aeroso
I've washed my hands with it often enough with no problems (to get tar/oil/grease off, followed immediately by soap and water). I wouldn't use it anywhere more sensitive, but I doubt you would be rushing to ER with burns.
Dissolving condoms could be a serious problem though.
(And I don't know about your partner(s), but there's no way my wife would let me use a condom patched with duct tape.)
I want their testicles deep fried, stuffed down their thoat, and cut off.
In that order.
> What is the real purpose for a patent?
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"
To encourage people to make public things which otherwise would remain trade secrets.
If a bunch of you actually quit, and they need to get this done right away, they may simply not have time to hire new contractors who know the project well enough to contribute immediately, and aren't you. So you can come back as contractors.
Downside, as always with being a contractor, is when the project finishes, you'll be looking for another contract.
> this article probably explains to me why the Segway hasn't been a great success
I think Jobs' quote explains to me why it hasn't been a great success. It sucks.
It's like a bike, only slower, heavier, and more expensive. The self balancing mechanism is very clever, but so what? His wheelchair is brilliant, but as a mass market transport device it's irrelevent.
> If no one exploited the vulnerability then folks like MS might never get around to fixing it
If _no one_ exploited it, it wouldn't matter if it wasn't fixed. That it gets used in a widespread exploit does reduce the risk of it being exploited in a few carefully chosen attacks that aren't noticed until much later though.
> > particularly if the driver of the car is killed in the crash.
...or if the driver simply doesn't remember, as often happens to people involved in collisions.
>
Yes - someone I knew was in a crash where he was knocked unconcious and couldn't remember what happened when he came round, the other driver died, and there were no other witnesses.
> Even now where we have home theatre setups which
can rival movie theatres in sound and picture quality, people flock to the theatres because of the (largely) social experience.
People still go to live concerts and live theatre, in part because of the social experience. But a lot more people listen to music and watch TV dramas in their own homes.
Even people without big widescreen TVs and surround systems will watch DVDs and videos more often than they go out to watch a film.
And "straight to video" releases already exist. In the future making something for "straight to video on demand" will be cheaper than actually shipping physical tapes to Blockbusters.
(And most of it will be crap, just as most webpages are crap, but there will also be
"good but only interesting to a niche market" stuff, if you can find it, which might well mean paying money to an editor/reviewer whose judgement you can trust.)
> Action/Special Effects splits for second as they are both heavily intertwined. It is worthy of note however that the special effects in this case aren't for the sake of, "Hey, lookit me, I'm a special effect!"
The crumbling arches bit on the way to the bridge in Moria fell into that category for me. To some extent so did the "wizard-fu" fight between Gandalf and Saruman. (But showing us Gandalf's fight with the Balrog did make better cinema than just showing Gandalf describing it would have).
And some bleach and some small value notes, probably.
e nt y/index.htm
http://money.cnn.com/2003/05/12/news/economy/tw
Any sensible person would make the larger notes larger - stops that working, makes life easier for blind and partially sighted people, easier for sorting notes, but no, that would be un-American.
At least the colours will start being different.
> If the Matrix takes anything from philosophy, it's the Cartesian method - how do you know that what you perceive is real, and not just put there to trick you? Descarte's answer was that you can't, and the only thing you can ever know for sure is that you, the individual doing the questioning, exists.
p hy /Philosophers/Descartes,_Ren%C3%A9/?tc=1
No, Descartes' answer was that you can be sure that you exist and think, and that you can use that as a _starting_ point to deduce other things.
In particular, he went on to deduce the existence of God. You might not agree with his arguments for that, but it is part of his answer.
http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/Philoso
> I'd say the problem was that it was marketed as high speed broadband.
So would I, but only if I was just working from the Slashdot summary and hadn't actually read the Register story where it's made clear the argument _is_ about the meaning of "broadband".
though if you follow the link what it actually says is "resembles a converted cement mixer", it's not actually made from one.
> "while the weapon is in a storage mode, in essence the system produces 104KW of heat energy." Imagine a bin of these replacement cartridges
[...]
> Currently Polonium-210 is only produced in microgram quantities
And it has a half life of 138 days, so your stored cartridges need replacing with new stock pretty often.