You bastard. Now George Lucas is going to change Boba Fett's title to "Bond Enforcement Agent". You just caused the re-release of the Original Trilogy on HD-DVD.
Actually, you probably wouldn't want this guy's brain. I have no idea what this individual is like, but generally people with some sort of hyper-intelligent gift lack in other places. Sometimes they can't remember their names, how to dress themselves, when they last ate a meal, etc. I can't remember the names of the "disorders", but I remember reading about it in an introductory college Psychology text.
Autism and Asperger's Syndrome tend to exhibit these types of behaviours, I know that much.
I don't think it was RFID (this is almost 3 years ago), but when my daughter was born, the umbilical cord clamp was actually a device much like what department stores use on clothing items. At the exits to the maternity ward were sensors that would trigger an alarm if you took your baby past the checkpoint. They warned people over and over that taking your child out to see everyone in the waiting room would cause chaos -- the doors to the floor would be automatically locked, the elevators disabled, etc. Something like this is a great use of medical industry RFID.
The father of my step-children is in the Army, and is about to head off for his second 12 month tour in Iraq. He's been to Germany, Kosovo and Afghanistan over the last several years. While he has some great skills from being in networking and satellite communications, his marriage fell apart and his kids call me 'dad' because they've never really seen him. Everytime he's moved post, they've messed up his pay, messed up his insurance for the kids, or botched something else up. He often has little to no choice in where he is stationed because the technical field skills are not needed at every military base in the US (or abroad). Luckily he is near his kids this time (until he leave for Iraq next week), but who knows what happens when he comes back. If he's needed at Fort Middle-Of-Nowhere in South Dakota, then that's where he goes. All of this in exchange for being deployed in areas where you are surrounded by people that want you dead.
The military is good for some people I suppose, but after knowing someone this closely I can't believe anyone with a family would opt for that kind of life. I've heard it's better if you can go the route of a CO, but the majority of the armed forces aren't that high level. It's definitely not like the commercials on TV with soldiers jet skiing and playing golf -- at least not in my personal opinion formed by observing from afar.
The problem is that the math doesn't add up on the $20 price drop. The theory that price drop equal increased sales only works to a point, and I seriously doubt that point covers a $20 range for AAA video game titles.
Let's say that Valve sells 2,000,000 copies of HL2 (I'm sure they'll do way more than that in reality). At $50 per, you're looking at $100,000,000 in sales. Drop the price by $20 and you'll need to sell c. 3,333,000 copies of the game to make the same figure. I don't think that an extra 1.3 million buyers will show up just because the game is cheaper.
I only had 2 basic economics classes in college, but I bet there's some extrapolation of the Law of Diminishing Returns that would explain price point versus sales volume, viewable via a simple supply and demand graph.
I was talking to one of the guys that was installing some orange fiber tubing in my backyard about the deployment. He sounded like he had a Boston accent, so maybe that's part of the problem.
In America, medical school is a very rigorous process. You must first get a Bachelor's degree from an accredited institution. Traditionally this would be something like a B.S. in Biology or Chemistry, but lately medical schools are accepting students with more varied educational backgrounds. After acceptance to medical school, you're looking at 4 years of hard work. This is a combination of classroom and "on-the-job" training. After graduating, you are offically an M.D., but you can only practice medicine after completing a residency. I believe that Family Practice is the shortest residency at 3 years. If you want to be something more specialized (Surgery, Obstetrics, Urology, etc), you're in for potentially several years of residency before you're allowed to actually practice on your own without the guidance of an attending physician.
All of that being said, it still doesn't prevent misdiagnosis. Medicine is still a practice that involves educated guesses, especially in Patrick's case when symptoms don't really add up to anything that's commonly known.
I was thinking the same thing. My tonsils were removed in February of 2002, and one of the driving reasons was excessive tonsil stones. I had to use a Water Pik on a regular basis to keep the crypts cleared out. Eventually they just permanently swelled virtually shut, so my ENT agreeded to remove them.
I am definitely not a doctor, but the symptoms he describes sounds familiar. The tonsilloliths are easily rectified, and I don't know of any other medical condition that would mimick this. The chest pains sound like pleruisy to me. I had this once in college -- freaked the living daylights out of me. My roommates took me to the ER where I was on oxygen and an EKG machine for a while. The doctor said that the symptoms are similar to a heart attack from the perspective of an untrained patient. Since the infection of the pleura is viral, there's really nothing that they can do other than prescribe pain killers and a heating pad.
The big thing that he needs to stop doing is suggesting to doctors what he has. Walking into the ER and telling them that you think you are suffering from an infection acquired from "lung plaque", while potentially correct, will just brand you a loon. Anytime I go to the doctor I do research into my symptoms, but I always tell the truth and let the expert decide. While you may have symptoms for months or years, you are still far from knowledgeable about medical conditions. There is a reason that doctors are in their 30s before they're allowed to practice medicine on the unsuspecting population.
I agree that it's both a joke and a stunt:) But I DID finally get my 250meg a few days ago.
You know, I should have looked before I posted. I haven't checked my mail in several days (as it is now mostly spam), but lo and behold I have 250 MB. Hotmail just got more tolerable.
They also block Experts-exchange.com, a site that I interact with frequently. I stopped using Yahoo a while ago for my message board postings because of this reason.
Like the parent, I find that Gmail works just fine.
Not only is Hotmail a joke, but they are full of idle promises. How long ago did they promise 250 MB for each account? And I'm still running on 2 MB? The new credit cards they hand out have almost as much memory as a Hotmail account, which is just sad. But hey, we all knew it was a Microsoft marketing stunt.
Remember floppies? Must we go through the same thing again? Please insert Disc 6 to continue!
I remember hefting a game at the store and having it weigh 16 pounds because of all the floppy disks inside. I think the last huge game that I bought on a floppy was a Star Trek 25th Anniversary game, and I remember that coming on 20-some disks.
We are certainly heading down that path now with CDs, though they weigh far less. CD drives were outlandishly expensive and scarce when games like 7th Guest and Myst came out and both of them managed to break sales records. If companies were to ship games on DVD only then it would drive the technological stragglers to catch up with the times.
What really blows my mind is when games that require huge machines (like HL2) come out only on CD with the premise that not everyone has a DVD drive. If you can go out and purchase a P4 with a Radeon 9800 but can't go to Fry's to get a $20 BTC DVD drive on special, then there is something seriously wrong with your purchasing priorities.:^)
I was mentioning the steep price of the big Lego kits to my mother the other day. She commented that Lego sets were equally expensive when I was a child. The main catch is that sets now come with a high number of specialized parts that are only good for the set they come with. Where else will you use the battlements from the Harry Potter castle unless you want to make a freaky-looking brown Tie Fighter?
My favorites were always the space sets, and I remember getting a handful of specialized parts (like the doors, the windows, the engines, etc). For the most part, though, you got a crap load of generic bricks that you could use to build your own stuff.
Download the demo and try it out. I'm not really big into racing games, but I've had some fun with this one. It royally sucks with a keyboard only, is much more fun with a PS2 controller hooked through the USB port, and totally rocks with a steering wheel/pedal setup. Just even driving around and listening to Paul Van Dyk or Chingy while trying to hit the AI cars is fun!
Which blows my mind because if you look at job postings for a lot of companies, they all say that they are looking for extreme hardcore gamers that always play tons of games, etc. How in the world are you going to be a hardcore gamer if the company that hired you partly BECAUSE you are a hardcore gamer works you to the point that you can no longer game.
This spouse talked about Madden, which made me think her husband works for Tiburon in Orlando, FL. The headquarter references imply California, but who knows. Does it maybe depend on what type of product you're working on? Madden HAS to be on an annual schedule by nature of the game. You'll massively loose out if you don't ship a football game until the week before the Super Bowl. The NBA, FIFA, AFL, Rugby, Cricket and other sports series probably suffer from the same fate. Maybe the crunch would be different if working on a game that didn't have to coincide with a real-world component.
I happen to think that my time is kinda valuable and if by using a mac I can surf the web and not have to spend lots of my time cleaning off spyware etc every week/month then I say, its absolutely fucking 'superior'
I run Windows XP just about everywhere (home, work, etc.)
I took about two minutes of my time to download and install a spyware cleaner. It runs in the background and does the work for me. I don't spend lots of my time cleaning off spyware -- a program that someone gives away for free takes care of that for me.
Same arguement can also be made here..oh wait, when was my Mac infected with an email borne virus.....oh thats right, it hasn't So again, the lack of downtime, is a huge plus, thereby gaining my approval of the 'superior' tag..
I don't use mail programs that are susceptible to e-mail virus programs. When I do use Outlook at a client site, I'm not a dumbass that clicks on foreign e-mails and unknown attachments. I waste no time with this problem, and to date I've never had a virus on a machine of my own that evaded detection by my anti-virus program.
I've used Windows, Mac and Linux machines extensively. I've developed for Windows and Mac extensively. All three have their pros and cons, and since I am relatively proficient in all of them, I see no reason to choose one over the other except for software availability and cost of ownership. Macs have always had the software that I needed, but the hardware is priced much higher than what I feel I should pay for a machine. So I use Windows XP for my desktop needs, Linux for my server needs, and I sleep just fine at night and don't lose 3/4 of my time chasing crashes and bugs.
This is my personal account of Windows XP usage; YMMV.
If you live overseas, then the deadline for absentee voting has passed, I believe. Maybe that's a driving reason for waiting until now to shut the site down.
Besides, if you live overseas and still have no clue on who you want to vote for and you MUST have access to George Bush's site to determine if you should for for him, then something is wrong.
Nintendo would have a problem with from the perspective of precedent. If you let this one project continue, then you're sending the message that it's OK to use Nintendo IP without permission or license as long as you stay within a certain context. So while a majority of the people at Nintendo may feel flattered and find this project rather cool, their legal department will not want to establish any sort of precedent that ripping of the Big N is OK.
While meant as a joke, there is too much truth to this statement (the giving up SUVs part, that is). Especially in larger cities that have a widespread suburban sprawl (like Dallas, Houston, LA, Seattle, Atlanta) that makes owning a bigger car easier, if not something of a status symbol. In cities where parking space is a premium or driving to work doesn't regularly involve an hour+ commute, people may jump on these cars, but we Yanks like big cars to cart our big families around in.
Then again, I figured that only teenage girls would buy the MINI, and I see those things all over the place.
The analogy that I read was : think Matt Damon in "Saving Private Ryan" where you sit around for 2 hours wondering where the hell Matt Damon is and why he was given first billing.
You know, the pressure is much easier to handle when you take Xanax and Lexapro together. Oxycontin works well, too, as does Hydrocodone. If your doctor won't prescribe any of these, just make a few posts with a legitimate e-mail address on Usenet and you'll have several offers for acquiring these handy "pressure pills" delivered to your inbox within days.
Slashdot Mirror
Bond Enforcement Agents (read: Bounty Hunters)
You bastard. Now George Lucas is going to change Boba Fett's title to "Bond Enforcement Agent". You just caused the re-release of the Original Trilogy on HD-DVD.
Actually, you probably wouldn't want this guy's brain. I have no idea what this individual is like, but generally people with some sort of hyper-intelligent gift lack in other places. Sometimes they can't remember their names, how to dress themselves, when they last ate a meal, etc. I can't remember the names of the "disorders", but I remember reading about it in an introductory college Psychology text.
Autism and Asperger's Syndrome tend to exhibit these types of behaviours, I know that much.
The price of the game at launch covers the costs to develop them game over the last n years.
The monthly subscription covers the cost of maintaining the game and adding content as time goes on.
EverQuest breaks these laws by charging for expansions every y months.
I don't think it was RFID (this is almost 3 years ago), but when my daughter was born, the umbilical cord clamp was actually a device much like what department stores use on clothing items. At the exits to the maternity ward were sensors that would trigger an alarm if you took your baby past the checkpoint. They warned people over and over that taking your child out to see everyone in the waiting room would cause chaos -- the doors to the floor would be automatically locked, the elevators disabled, etc. Something like this is a great use of medical industry RFID.
The father of my step-children is in the Army, and is about to head off for his second 12 month tour in Iraq. He's been to Germany, Kosovo and Afghanistan over the last several years. While he has some great skills from being in networking and satellite communications, his marriage fell apart and his kids call me 'dad' because they've never really seen him. Everytime he's moved post, they've messed up his pay, messed up his insurance for the kids, or botched something else up. He often has little to no choice in where he is stationed because the technical field skills are not needed at every military base in the US (or abroad). Luckily he is near his kids this time (until he leave for Iraq next week), but who knows what happens when he comes back. If he's needed at Fort Middle-Of-Nowhere in South Dakota, then that's where he goes. All of this in exchange for being deployed in areas where you are surrounded by people that want you dead.
The military is good for some people I suppose, but after knowing someone this closely I can't believe anyone with a family would opt for that kind of life. I've heard it's better if you can go the route of a CO, but the majority of the armed forces aren't that high level. It's definitely not like the commercials on TV with soldiers jet skiing and playing golf -- at least not in my personal opinion formed by observing from afar.
The problem is that the math doesn't add up on the $20 price drop. The theory that price drop equal increased sales only works to a point, and I seriously doubt that point covers a $20 range for AAA video game titles.
Let's say that Valve sells 2,000,000 copies of HL2 (I'm sure they'll do way more than that in reality). At $50 per, you're looking at $100,000,000 in sales. Drop the price by $20 and you'll need to sell c. 3,333,000 copies of the game to make the same figure. I don't think that an extra 1.3 million buyers will show up just because the game is cheaper.
I only had 2 basic economics classes in college, but I bet there's some extrapolation of the Law of Diminishing Returns that would explain price point versus sales volume, viewable via a simple supply and demand graph.
I was talking to one of the guys that was installing some orange fiber tubing in my backyard about the deployment. He sounded like he had a Boston accent, so maybe that's part of the problem.
In America, medical school is a very rigorous process. You must first get a Bachelor's degree from an accredited institution. Traditionally this would be something like a B.S. in Biology or Chemistry, but lately medical schools are accepting students with more varied educational backgrounds. After acceptance to medical school, you're looking at 4 years of hard work. This is a combination of classroom and "on-the-job" training. After graduating, you are offically an M.D., but you can only practice medicine after completing a residency. I believe that Family Practice is the shortest residency at 3 years. If you want to be something more specialized (Surgery, Obstetrics, Urology, etc), you're in for potentially several years of residency before you're allowed to actually practice on your own without the guidance of an attending physician.
All of that being said, it still doesn't prevent misdiagnosis. Medicine is still a practice that involves educated guesses, especially in Patrick's case when symptoms don't really add up to anything that's commonly known.
I was thinking the same thing. My tonsils were removed in February of 2002, and one of the driving reasons was excessive tonsil stones. I had to use a Water Pik on a regular basis to keep the crypts cleared out. Eventually they just permanently swelled virtually shut, so my ENT agreeded to remove them.
I am definitely not a doctor, but the symptoms he describes sounds familiar. The tonsilloliths are easily rectified, and I don't know of any other medical condition that would mimick this. The chest pains sound like pleruisy to me. I had this once in college -- freaked the living daylights out of me. My roommates took me to the ER where I was on oxygen and an EKG machine for a while. The doctor said that the symptoms are similar to a heart attack from the perspective of an untrained patient. Since the infection of the pleura is viral, there's really nothing that they can do other than prescribe pain killers and a heating pad.
The big thing that he needs to stop doing is suggesting to doctors what he has. Walking into the ER and telling them that you think you are suffering from an infection acquired from "lung plaque", while potentially correct, will just brand you a loon. Anytime I go to the doctor I do research into my symptoms, but I always tell the truth and let the expert decide. While you may have symptoms for months or years, you are still far from knowledgeable about medical conditions. There is a reason that doctors are in their 30s before they're allowed to practice medicine on the unsuspecting population.
I agree that it's both a joke and a stunt :) But I DID finally get my 250meg a few days ago.
You know, I should have looked before I posted. I haven't checked my mail in several days (as it is now mostly spam), but lo and behold I have 250 MB. Hotmail just got more tolerable.
They also block Experts-exchange.com, a site that I interact with frequently. I stopped using Yahoo a while ago for my message board postings because of this reason.
Like the parent, I find that Gmail works just fine.
Not only is Hotmail a joke, but they are full of idle promises. How long ago did they promise 250 MB for each account? And I'm still running on 2 MB? The new credit cards they hand out have almost as much memory as a Hotmail account, which is just sad. But hey, we all knew it was a Microsoft marketing stunt.
Remember floppies? Must we go through the same thing again? Please insert Disc 6 to continue!
:^)
I remember hefting a game at the store and having it weigh 16 pounds because of all the floppy disks inside. I think the last huge game that I bought on a floppy was a Star Trek 25th Anniversary game, and I remember that coming on 20-some disks.
We are certainly heading down that path now with CDs, though they weigh far less. CD drives were outlandishly expensive and scarce when games like 7th Guest and Myst came out and both of them managed to break sales records. If companies were to ship games on DVD only then it would drive the technological stragglers to catch up with the times.
What really blows my mind is when games that require huge machines (like HL2) come out only on CD with the premise that not everyone has a DVD drive. If you can go out and purchase a P4 with a Radeon 9800 but can't go to Fry's to get a $20 BTC DVD drive on special, then there is something seriously wrong with your purchasing priorities.
I was mentioning the steep price of the big Lego kits to my mother the other day. She commented that Lego sets were equally expensive when I was a child. The main catch is that sets now come with a high number of specialized parts that are only good for the set they come with. Where else will you use the battlements from the Harry Potter castle unless you want to make a freaky-looking brown Tie Fighter?
My favorites were always the space sets, and I remember getting a handful of specialized parts (like the doors, the windows, the engines, etc). For the most part, though, you got a crap load of generic bricks that you could use to build your own stuff.
Download the demo and try it out. I'm not really big into racing games, but I've had some fun with this one. It royally sucks with a keyboard only, is much more fun with a PS2 controller hooked through the USB port, and totally rocks with a steering wheel/pedal setup. Just even driving around and listening to Paul Van Dyk or Chingy while trying to hit the AI cars is fun!
Which blows my mind because if you look at job postings for a lot of companies, they all say that they are looking for extreme hardcore gamers that always play tons of games, etc. How in the world are you going to be a hardcore gamer if the company that hired you partly BECAUSE you are a hardcore gamer works you to the point that you can no longer game.
This spouse talked about Madden, which made me think her husband works for Tiburon in Orlando, FL. The headquarter references imply California, but who knows. Does it maybe depend on what type of product you're working on? Madden HAS to be on an annual schedule by nature of the game. You'll massively loose out if you don't ship a football game until the week before the Super Bowl. The NBA, FIFA, AFL, Rugby, Cricket and other sports series probably suffer from the same fate. Maybe the crunch would be different if working on a game that didn't have to coincide with a real-world component.
For a minute there I couldn't tell if you were talking about Star Wars or Java.
"Come to the moon and smell our dairy air!"
Doesn't quite have the same ring...
US penal system's standards
You just HAD to use that word when referring to these pictures, didn't you?
I happen to think that my time is kinda valuable and if by using a mac I can surf the web and not have to spend lots of my time cleaning off spyware etc every week/month then I say, its absolutely fucking 'superior'
I run Windows XP just about everywhere (home, work, etc.)
I took about two minutes of my time to download and install a spyware cleaner. It runs in the background and does the work for me. I don't spend lots of my time cleaning off spyware -- a program that someone gives away for free takes care of that for me.
Same arguement can also be made here..oh wait, when was my Mac infected with an email borne virus.....oh thats right, it hasn't So again, the lack of downtime, is a huge plus, thereby gaining my approval of the 'superior' tag..
I don't use mail programs that are susceptible to e-mail virus programs. When I do use Outlook at a client site, I'm not a dumbass that clicks on foreign e-mails and unknown attachments. I waste no time with this problem, and to date I've never had a virus on a machine of my own that evaded detection by my anti-virus program.
I've used Windows, Mac and Linux machines extensively. I've developed for Windows and Mac extensively. All three have their pros and cons, and since I am relatively proficient in all of them, I see no reason to choose one over the other except for software availability and cost of ownership. Macs have always had the software that I needed, but the hardware is priced much higher than what I feel I should pay for a machine. So I use Windows XP for my desktop needs, Linux for my server needs, and I sleep just fine at night and don't lose 3/4 of my time chasing crashes and bugs.
This is my personal account of Windows XP usage; YMMV.
If you live overseas, then the deadline for absentee voting has passed, I believe. Maybe that's a driving reason for waiting until now to shut the site down.
Besides, if you live overseas and still have no clue on who you want to vote for and you MUST have access to George Bush's site to determine if you should for for him, then something is wrong.
Nintendo would have a problem with from the perspective of precedent. If you let this one project continue, then you're sending the message that it's OK to use Nintendo IP without permission or license as long as you stay within a certain context. So while a majority of the people at Nintendo may feel flattered and find this project rather cool, their legal department will not want to establish any sort of precedent that ripping of the Big N is OK.
While meant as a joke, there is too much truth to this statement (the giving up SUVs part, that is). Especially in larger cities that have a widespread suburban sprawl (like Dallas, Houston, LA, Seattle, Atlanta) that makes owning a bigger car easier, if not something of a status symbol. In cities where parking space is a premium or driving to work doesn't regularly involve an hour+ commute, people may jump on these cars, but we Yanks like big cars to cart our big families around in.
Then again, I figured that only teenage girls would buy the MINI, and I see those things all over the place.
The analogy that I read was : think Matt Damon in "Saving Private Ryan" where you sit around for 2 hours wondering where the hell Matt Damon is and why he was given first billing.
You know, the pressure is much easier to handle when you take Xanax and Lexapro together. Oxycontin works well, too, as does Hydrocodone. If your doctor won't prescribe any of these, just make a few posts with a legitimate e-mail address on Usenet and you'll have several offers for acquiring these handy "pressure pills" delivered to your inbox within days.
I've only recently started doing heaving Java programming
:^)
I hear ya, man. I did Java programming once and it made me heave.